Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 3, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:30

Welcome To 2023! | Ep. 1638

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Pope Benedict XVI dies.
	60 Minutes features the worst environmentalist doomsayer ever.
	Andrew Tate is arrested in Romania.
	Joe Biden preps his re-election run.
	And Republicans battle each other over whether Kevin McCarthy ought to become Speaker of the House.
	Happy New Year, everybody.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	It is indeed 2023 and we are back with you.
	I hope you had a wonderful and meaningful Christmas vacation, as well as a wonderful and happy New Year.
	And we begin the year on a sort of brief note of overview.
	So 2023, I believe, is going to be a time of shifting political winds.
	I think that the wind is about to shift pretty dramatically across Western civilization because the weaknesses that have been brought upon Western civilization by liberalism, by the left, I think that those weaknesses are going to start to come home to roost.
	It looks like a moment of strength for the left.
	It looks as though the left is on the march.
	It looks as though President Joe Biden is doing pretty well.
	He's had a pretty successful run thus far in terms of legislation.
	He's got the backing of the media.
	His approval rating seems to be bumped back into the mid 40s.
	And it seems as though the left is riding high.
	After all, it looks as though the stock market may make some sort of reappearance this year.
	Had a really bad year last year.
	It looks as though Democrats sort of escaped the blade of the guillotine during the last election cycle.
	And so if you're on the left, you're feeling pretty good about yourself going into 2023.
	I do not think 2023 is going to be a good year for the left.
	I think that a lot of the secular trends, I don't mean secular as in godless, I mean sort of the broad societal trends that have been happening across the West are about to reverse themselves.
	Because the consequences of those trends are about to be felt in a pretty dramatic way across the West.
	The truth is, when we do politics here on this show, what we're very often doing is we are telescoping big, broad issues into the news of the day.
	Because the news of the day is just representative of events at the top of the iceberg.
	What we like to do here on the show is we like to talk about the broad ideologies, the broad historical movements that underpin what's happening on the very tip of the iceberg.
	And I think that what we've been doing is essentially rearranging the deck chairs on the top of the Titanic, to mix the metaphor.
	The iceberg underneath us has been shifting.
	And I think people are beginning to notice that.
	And as they begin to notice that, as they begin to feel unstable at the top of the iceberg, people are going to look for solidity again.
	People are going to look for a restoration of some sort of eternal values.
	All this came to mind because over the course of the last couple of weeks while we were off the air, The former Pope Benedict XVI passed away, and I think that the reason why it is important for people to note this is because what Pope Benedict actually was, was he was supposed to be, and I think he was in his career as Pope, a repository of the idea that ancient wisdom actually mattered.
	And we in modern society, we tend to think that tradition and wisdom, these things don't matter at all.
	We can basically reason ourselves to the proper view on life.
	Tabula rasa.
	We're born into the world.
	And then if you just leave us alone, we can figure out the best way to live.
	And that's not true.
	And we tend to discount ancient wisdom.
	There's a new study from Berkeley.
	We have to pay attention to this study from Berkeley.
	There's a brand new study out of Harvard.
	It's that study that matters.
	We can dispense with all of the ancient and accumulated wisdom of the human species.
	We can just ignore all of that.
	We can ignore all of the rules that have been cultivated over time and the rules that have been cultivated in order to protect those rules.
	We can just dispense with all of that and we can build a brand new universe on the basis of our own tabula rasa reasoning or on the basis of our emotional feelings or our subjective self-assessment as to what we are.
	And Pope Benedict, his life and his work were really an answer to that.
	Because what all good religions, all religions that are worth their salt do, is they act as repositories of traditional wisdom in the face of change.
	This does not mean that they oppose all change.
	Sometimes they integrate change.
	Sometimes they're very progressive in terms of integrating change.
	All major universities in the West were founded by Christians.
	That does not mean that Christianity is not a system of thought that believes that it is bringing eternal values to the table.
	It means that those eternal values allow for the capacity to move and change, just as the Constitution of the United States allows for the capacity to move and change within the boundaries of the Constitution.
	The problem becomes, When the change eats the Constitution, when the change eats the eternal rules and values of these institutions.
	And this is something that Pope Benedict stood against.
	I want to take a moment and talk about Pope Benedict because I think that what we are about to witness in 2023 and over the course of the next few years is going to be a titanic clash between ancient wisdom, traditional wisdom, wisdom that has worked in the world, which is a form of data.
	If you're a science-driven person, you don't have to believe in the Bible in order to recognize that the traditional wisdom embodied in codes of conduct that have been carried across civilization over the course of thousands of years, this may bear some sort of actual data value.
	And something Thomas Sowell has pointed out, that if you have a tradition, you have a rule that's been inherited from your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, going back thousands of years, Maybe the reason that people follow that rule is because that rule has worked.
	And maybe if that rule stopped working, people would stop following that rule.
	But we've decided to dispense with all of those rules.
	And so what we're about to see is we've now become a society that says that all those rules are random, they're useless, we can just get rid of them.
	Which is very foolish.
	It is the equivalent of... I've been rereading a book about the reason why Western people are sort of different than other people, and some of the failings of the West.
	The book is titled The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich.
	And the basic idea of the weirdest people in the world is that Western people are kind of made different by the way that they think.
	Hey, but one of the things that has been true forever is that every civilization, every society has these pieces of inherited wisdom that they pass along.
	And when individualism destroys the inherited wisdom, you end up with chaos.
	If you were in a, if you, if you stumbled upon an African tribe and that African tribe had a very bizarre way of fighting, say a snake bite.
	And what they did is they put together some sort of weird formula that you'd never seen before.
	This weird formula where they took some berries and they took some animal fats and they burned them and then they buried them and they uncovered them and they gave them to you.
	And it helped to stop the actual snake bite.
	As a Westerner, your first thought might be, well, I don't know how they did that, so I'm not going to even do that.
	I'm not going to take any of this.
	Or you could think, wait, maybe this has been working for them for a very long time, so before I don't take the thing, maybe I ought to take the thing, and then I can figure out which ingredients are wrong, and which ingredients need to go, and which ingredients are useless, and how much of this is ritual, and how much of this is actual science.
	We are foolish in Western civilization to simply throw out the baby with the bathwater and take all these traditions and throw them away.
	And this is what Pope Benedict stood for.
	We'll get to more on all of this in just one moment.
	First, the current administration's New Year's goals.
	Tax spend.
	Turn a blind eye to inflation.
	This is their thing.
	Well, if this is at odds with your investment strategy, if you're tired of the government playing games with your savings and your retirement plan, well, you should probably get in touch with the experts over at Birchgold today.
	For over 5,000 years, gold has withstood inflation, geopolitical turmoil, even stock market crashes.
	Now you can own gold in a tax-sheltered retirement account.
	Birch Gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401k into an IRA in precious metals.
	Text Ben to 989898, claim your free info kit on gold, and then talk to one of their precious metals specialists.
	Plus, when you purchase from Birch Gold by January 31st, you get a signed copy of my book, How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps.
	Which seems more and more like the Biden administration playbook, actually.
	It's like they read the book and now they're using it in their own favor.
	With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers, countless five-star reviews, you can trust Birchgold to help protect your savings today.
	Now, I am an owner of Birchgold.
	I've been working with Birchgold for years.
	You can do the same.
	Text Ben to 989898.
	Protect yourself with gold today.
	Again, text Ben to 989898 and get started with my friends over at Birchgold today.
	Also, it's the beginning of a brand new year.
	You need to live a healthier lifestyle, right?
	This is one of your big New Year's resolutions to get healthier.
	But, you know, it's really tough getting all those veggies and fruits.
	And it's hard to do that in your daily diet.
	Well, I can make it a lot easier for you.
	You should use what I'm using.
	That is Balance of Nature.
	Balance of Nature fruits and veggies are the best way to make sure you're getting essential nutritional ingredients every single day.
	Their products are 100% whole food.
	Balance of Nature uses a cold vacuum process that preserves the natural phytonutrients in whole fruits and vegetables and encapsulates them for easy consumption.
	Balance of Nature sent a bunch of their product down to the studio for my team to try.
	We all love them.
	I was very excited to find out that they are kosher, which means that I can have them as well, and I'm feeling more energy, which I need because I have a brand new puppy this new year.
	It's keeping me up all night, so I need the energy.
	When you're disciplined enough to take care of your health, you reap all those benefits.
	More energy, less fatigue, better focus.
	Consuming the right balance of fruits and veggies every day is an important first step.
	Head on over to balanceofnature.com.
	Use promo code SHAPIRO for 25 bucks off your first order as a preferred customer, plus a free fiber and spice.
	That is balanceofnature.com, promo code Shapiro, for 25 bucks off your first preferred order.
	Again, balanceofnature.com, promo code Shapiro.
	Get 25 bucks off your first preferred order and start living a healthier lifestyle right now.
	It's a brand new year, make it a brand new you.
	balanceofnature.com.
	So Pope Benedict, obviously, as the Wall Street Journal points out, his death has left conservative Catholics without their figurehead amid deep divisions over how much the church should adapt to the times or reaffirm its traditional teachings against the challenge of secularism.
	The retired pope was for more than three decades a leader in the culture wars that have shaken the Catholic Church and wider society since the late 1960s.
	He was a living symbol, depending on one's point of view, of an intolerant and punitive religiosity or of stalwart fidelity amid disorienting change.
	So again, the people who believe that Pope Benedict XVI was an emissary of intolerant and punitive religiosity believe that religion generally has no value.
	That that body of inherited wisdom basically has no value.
	And I wanted to read a few quotes from Pope Benedict on the occasion of his death to remind people What exactly he stood for and why what he says is important.
	And this is coming from an Orthodox Jew.
	I don't have a dog in the Catholic Church fight other than this is a very, very important repository of fundamental truths for Western civilization that has obviously affected the outgrowth of Western civilization.
	I think that people of conservative bent, people of traditionalist bent, people who actually believe in God, all of us should take the words of Pope Benedict XVI to heart.
	Here is a quote from Pope Benedict a few years back.
	His truth means more than knowledge.
	Knowing the truth leads us to discover the good.
	Truth speaks to the individual in his or her the entirety, inviting us to respond with our whole being.
	The profound responsibility to lead the young to truth is nothing less than an act of love.
	In other words, he's not a moral relativist.
	There is such a thing as truth.
	That truth is worth pursuing.
	And one of the ways that people pursue truth is they accept the things that they have heard from their fathers.
	And then they ask questions of their fathers to determine just how true those things they have heard are.
	But it is a responsibility of a civilization to teach truth to its young.
	And as we'll discuss in a moment, when I talk about the shifting political winds, we are a civilization that is now actively teaching lies to our young.
	When we teach lies to our young, you fundamentally undermine the civilization and it starts to fall apart and the blowback is coming.
	Here's something that the Pope, Pope Benedict XVI, is what he said when he was talking to the bishops of the United States.
	States, he said the church in the United States is called in season and out of season to proclaim a gospel, which not only proposes unchanging moral truths, but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering. To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that will curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being an ultimate vocation, our relationship to God.
	What he is saying there is that there are fundamental truths, and when those are attacked by either a majoritarian mob, as you've seen over and over in elections around the world, or whether they are attacked by scientific rationalists who pretend that they are the repositories of all knowledge, much of which they've already inherited, or whether it is a bunch of people who simply don't want to follow the rules.
	The simple fact is that the path to human happiness lies in truth.
	And a lot of those truths are things that we have to inherit.
	Here is a flashback to a speech that Pope Benedict XVI gave in 2008.
	I believe this is Georgetown.
	Here he was.
	Freedom is not an opting out.
	It is an opting in, a participation in being itself.
	Hence, authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God.
	Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.
	Notice the focus that he is putting on the word truth.
	Because truth is going to be where happiness lies.
	If you are living your life in opposition to the truth, you're going to end up in a very unhappy world.
	And this is exactly what's happening to Generation Z. So Jonathan Haidt had a fascinating interview, the social psychologist, he had a fascinating interview over the weekend with the Wall Street Journal in which he talked about the falsehood that is being taught to Generation Z and how Generation Z is in serious trouble.
	He says his research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise all of a sudden around 2013, especially for teen girls.
	But it's only Generation Z, not the older generations.
	If you'd stopped collecting data in 2011, says Haidt, you'd see little change from previous years.
	By 2015, it's an epidemic.
	What happened in 2012, when the oldest generation's e-babies were in their middle teens?
	That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site.
	It was also the beginning of the selfie era.
	Apple's iPhone 4, released in 2010, had the first front-facing camera, which was much improved in the iPhone 5, reintroduced two years later.
	Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 to 8, to between 10 and 12.
	That meant, according to Haidt, that first social media generation was one of weakened kids who hadn't practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment with other children.
	They were deprived of the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
	Before 2010, teenagers had flip phones.
	They'd text each other and say, let's meet down at the mall.
	Now their childhood is largely just through the phone.
	They no longer even hang out together.
	Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
	Height worries especially about girls.
	By 2020, more than 25% of female teenagers had a major depression.
	The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
	The comparable number for millennials of the same age registered at half the Generation Z rate, about 13% for girls and 5% for boys.
	He said kids are on their devices all the time.
	It says boys play video games, often in groups, but girls are drawn to visual platforms, Instagram and TikTok.
	About display and performance, you post your perfect life, then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
	What is he really talking about?
	He's talking about the narcissist effect.
	The legend of the narcissist is that the narcissist sees himself in a reflection, in a pool, and he's so taken with his own visage that he can't look away.
	This is what we have become as a civilization, and this is what we are doing to our young.
	We have robbed them of eternal values that make them answerable to people outside themselves, and instead, they are now answerable to the subjective feeling within.
	And once you're answerable only to the subjective feeling within, you are destined for unhappiness.
	Because there's no external action in the world that can make you feel good.
	There's nothing that can fill that gap that you've now created.
	You've cut yourself off from the world.
	You've cut yourself off from the possibility of eternal truth, with a capital T, by embracing, quote unquote, my truth, which is what we now have an entire generation doing.
	This is why we have an entire generation that identifies as whatever it feels inside.
	You wonder where this whole insane movement has come from that boys can be girls and girls can be boys and we must teach girls that they can be boys and boys that they can be girls.
	This is where it's coming from.
	It's coming from people who believe that subjectivity is the realm of real truth.
	Not any sort of eternal accepted truth over the course of millennia, but the truth that lies inside you.
	The truth of your own feelings.
	And it's absolutely crippling an entire generation of people.
	Social media is making all of this worse.
	It's creating social contagions that are spreading across the country unchecked.
	And those social contagions are absolutely making kids more depressed.
	They feel like they are chaotic.
	They feel like they're living in a world without rules or rules where they have no responsibilities, where they're not taught what to do, and where adults are abandoning them and then patting themselves on the back, proclaiming that they are doing something good for the kids.
	That they're liberating them.
	You wouldn't liberate a five-year-old.
	The reason you wouldn't liberate a five-year-old is because that'd be an idiotic thing to do.
	As a parent of eight, six, two, one on the way.
	And even a puppy.
	K. Something we did over the New Year.
	Rules are really, really important.
	You have to have rules, and you have to teach those rules.
	And if you don't teach those rules, if you don't teach those truths, the realities of life, what you end up with is an entire generation adrift.
	And that's what we are facing.
	And so our civilization has decided to discard a lot of the eternal truths that Pope Benedict talked about in favor of subjectivity.
	And also in favor of a sort of bizarre paganism.
	This bizarre paganism most obviously takes on an environmental affect.
	When you get rid of God, it's not that people lose the need for God.
	They just fill it with something else.
	So one of the things they have filled that with is, of course, that subjective sense of self-assessment, the constant search within for your own sexual identity, your own gender, and the rest of this.
	But they fill the role of God with something else.
	And the role of God is now filled by many in the United States and in the West generally with the environment.
	There's this great cosmic force out there that will revenge itself upon you because you're living too well.
	And because the West is too rich, Because the West has done too much, materially, and so the West must be punished.
	This is why you see people like Greta Thunberg, who are held up as though they are sort of icons of religious leadership.
	Almost like members of a children's crusade.
	They don't know anything, but the children will lead us from Europe into the Holy Land.
	That's not going to work, but we'll follow them.
	It's like a religious figure.
	And you have your prophets, your doomsaying prophets.
	The latest doomsaying prophet is actually an old doomsaying prophet.
	So 60 Minutes, I couldn't help it, but notice the insanity of this.
	60 Minutes decided that they were going to do another special with a person named Paul Ehrlich.
	For those who are not familiar with Paul Ehrlich, Paul Ehrlich became famous as a professor at UC Berkeley.
	He wrote a book called The Population Bomb.
	It was complete lies.
	It was complete trash.
	What he said was completely and utterly debunked.
	So 60 Minutes featured him last night to talk about how we are about to reach the end of civilization.
	This is the equivalent of ESPN having on a sports handicapper who's gotten wrong every, not some games, every single game he has ever picked on the air.
	Paul Ehrlich has been wrong about every single thing, but that's not why 60 Minutes is having him on.
	They are having him on because you need the wizened old visage of a pseudoscientist to tell you that doom is coming unless you engage in the socialistic redistribution programs that the left would love.
	So, what exactly are the policy recommendations that Ehrlich is recommending?
	Obviously, socialist redistribution programs, zero growth programs.
	Here he is.
	Ehrlich's views on how to bring that birth rate down were concrete.
	Compulsion if voluntary methods fail.
	Creating a blacklist of people, companies, and organizations impeding population control in the United States.
	Responsibility prizes for childless marriages.
	A tax on children.
	And a luxury tax on diapers and cribs.
	The concerns about population became misanthropic.
	And it was taken with so much seriousness that Paul Ehrlich would recommend things like putting stuff in public water that would make people not as fertile.
	This is what he was actually advocating back in the 70s.
	Now he advocates redistribution of all sorts of resources.
	He advocates in favor of zero growth programs.
	He advocates in favor of dismantling full industries.
	And he says, we don't do that, then doom is coming.
	And here's the thing, Paul Ehrlich's been wrong about all of this.
	So if you assume that the wisdom of Pope Benedict is wisdom that has been time tested over the course of generations, and so maybe we should take it seriously, the wisdom of Paul Ehrlich has been disproved over the course of a single generation.
	Over and over and over again.
	And here's Paul Ehrlich promoting his book, The Population Bomb.
	This book sold three million copies, The Population Bomb.
	And in The Population Bomb, which was written in 1968, he said that there would be billions of people that would die in the 1970s and 1980s of starvation.
	Here is Paul Ehrlich promoting The Population Bomb back in 68.
	If we continue to let population Bro, and if we continue to exploit the underdeveloped countries, if we continue to pollute the seas with a wide variety of compounds and so on, it's very difficult for me to picture things holding together for more than another decade or so.
	Hey, that's just him young.
	He's saying the same thing now.
	He was really, really wrong then.
	And he did it over and over.
	I mean, he was invited onto Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in order to promote this is the single biggest environmental doomsday book ever written.
	And it was totally wrong in every aspect.
	Here is.
	Here's Paul Ehrlich back on Johnny Carson again, this is back in the 70s.
	Would you welcome Dr. Paul Ehrlich.
	You have to get the death rate and birth rate in balance, and there's only two ways to do it.
	One is to bring the birth rate down, the other is to push the death rate up.
	Okay, and if you don't push the birth rate down through forcible sterilization, then you will end up with massive death rate because Malthusian trap, because there just won't be enough resources.
	Now, he was totally wrong about all of this.
	He was absolutely wrong about all of this.
	But that did not stop the media from parroting every aspect of this.
	Major media figures.
	We'll get to more on all of this in just one moment.
	First, the situation in Ukraine continues to be extremely bad.
	That war apparently is just going to go on for the foreseeable future.
	Well, whatever you think politically about the war, there are a lot of people on the ground in Ukraine right now who are suffering.
	My friends over at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews have been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.
	They've never seen hunger and suffering like they are seeing right now.
	This is why I'm asking for your help.
	Norman is an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor.
	He's been blind since birth and he lives in a Jewish old age home in Odessa, Ukraine.
	With so much of the infrastructure destroyed over the recent month, including the power grid, Norman has been without heat or clean water for a long time.
	The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has supplied blankets, food, and other essentials to help Norman survive through the winter.
	They urgently need your help to continue getting Norman supplies.
	Please consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
	Just 45 bucks can ensure warmth, food, and clean water to Jewish kids and the elderly in need.
	Right now, the fellowship has a special matching challenge where your donation will double in impact.
	Your tax deductible gift will be multiplied two times to help provide twice the winter necessities and save lives.
	So head online right now to benforthefellowship.org or text Shapiro to 41444.
	That's benforthefellowship.org, text Shapiro to 41444.
	Again, you need to help people who are suffering.
	One great way to help people who are suffering this brand new year, head on over to benforthefellowship.org or text Shapiro to 41444 and give generously.
	Also, it is that time of year When you're starting to look at those holiday bills and you go, Oh no, you spent way too much money.
	But here's the thing.
	If you're falling behind on that credit card bill, it can absolutely bankrupt you, which is one reason why you should check out Lightstream.
	A credit card consolidation loan from Lightstream can help you pay off your credit cards and lock in that low fixed interest rate.
	Rates start at 7.99% APR with auto pay and excellent credit.
	Plus the rate is fixed, so it'll never increase over the life of the loan.
	You can get a loan from five grand to $100,000 without any fees.
	You can even get your money as soon as the day you apply.
	Lightstream believes people with good credit deserve a better loan experience.
	That's exactly what they deliver.
	So just for my listeners, right now you can apply to get a special interest rate discount and save even more.
	The only way to get that discount, head on over to lightstream.com slash Shapiro.
	That's L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M.com slash Shapiro.
	Subject to credit approval, rates range from 7.99% APR to 23.99% APR.
	They include 0.50% auto pay discount.
	Lowest rate requires excellent credit.
	Terms and conditions apply.
	Offers are subject to change without notice.
	Visit lightstream.com slash Shapiro for more information.
	Again, that's lightstream.com slash Shapiro.
	If you fall behind on that credit card, you can really just toast your credit these days.
	Instead, you need to get that credit card consolidation loan going and save yourself this year.
	Go to lightstream.com slash Shapiro.
	L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M dot com slash Shapiro.
	Apply now.
	Get a special interest rate discount.
	Save even more.
	The president of the United States, Richard Nixon, was promoting this sort of stuff.
	This is what the loss of traditional Western values began really in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
	So what we are seeing now is just a replay of that and exacerbation of that.
	That's why you see lying doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich back on the air.
	But this is true back in the 90s.
	I mean, here's Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, promoting the population bomb way back when.
	That world population is increasing by 23 people every 10 seconds.
	It's clear that world population growth remains completely out of control.
	Hey, populations, entire groups of people, media, your politicians who are promoting this stuff, and it turned out not to be true.
	There's an economist named Julian Simon who challenged Paul Ehrlich.
	He actually made him a challenge.
	And the challenge was, you pick a basket of resources, any basket of resources, and I promise you they will get cheaper over time.
	Now, Paul Ehrlich's entire worldview was that resources would get more expensive because population would outstrip the capacity of the earth to provide for those populations.
	Simon's view was people are innately creative and innovative, and therefore people will be able to innovate their way out of these problems.
	And so they made a bet.
	It was a $1,000 bet in which Paul Simon, in which rather Paul Ehrlich picked five resources.
	And if they became more expensive over time, then Julian Simon would give $1,000 to Paul Ehrlich.
	And if they became less expensive over time, then Ehrlich would give $1,000 to Julian Simon.
	And Simon won.
	And here was Simon's case.
	Here's the case that Simon was making, denying the sort of paganistic wisdom of Paul Ehrlich.
	And it was paganistic.
	This is why it became popular.
	Because when you are a doomsayer, when you're doing Jeremiah ads on national television about how the world's about to collapse unless you do the socialistic and anti-tradition things that we want you to do, you become very popular with the group that really is kind of socialistic and doesn't like tradition all that much.
	Here's Julian Simon challenging Paul Ehrlich way back when.
	The newspaper stories you customarily read would tell you that we should be worrying about running out of natural resources, copper, wheat, what have you.
	But the history of the past 200 years, in fact the whole history of humanity, has shown us the extraordinary event, contrary to all common sense, That the more that we use of natural resources, the more we have of them.
	That is, rather than natural resources becoming more scarce as we use them, they have been becoming more available.
	Okay, and Julian Simon happened to be right about that, but the doomsaying is what takes over in a period in which you've lost all moorings to reality.
	When the truth no longer matters, but an agenda matters, well then you end up with elites like Paul Ehrlich back on 60 Minutes, whether you're talking about the 1970s or whether you're talking about now.
	Okay, so I think that what we are having right now, what the 1960s were, were a move away from tradition.
	In some ways, there were changes to tradition that happened within the line of tradition, right?
	That's why Martin Luther King is citing the Bible when he's talking about civil rights.
	But there were also moves that were just dramatically anti-tradition.
	The sexual revolution, the environmentalist revolution.
	These were things that were just tremendously anti-tradition.
	And they were well accepted in the 1960s.
	And then there was massive blowback in the United States in the 70s and 80s.
	That's precisely what you're about to see in the United States because we're being lied to.
	And when the lies become clear, people don't like it very much.
	When the lies become clear, people react very, very strongly to being lied to.
	Whether they are being lied to about how every single person on earth is going to die of COVID, or whether they are being lied to about the possibilities of socialist redistribution radically increasing the economy, or they're being lied to about how we have to crimp our own lifestyles in dramatic fashion in order to achieve the avoidance of global catastrophe.
	People do not like being lied to.
	Paul Ehrlich happens to be a liar, but the media are lying along with him.
	They know he's been wrong this whole time.
	They're bringing him back out in order to promote these lies.
	Now the question is going to become, what does the reaction look like?
	I've said that there's a reaction coming.
	What does the reaction look like?
	Well, there are a couple of possible reactions.
	One is the reaction that says we have to go back to time-tested tradition.
	We have to go back and we have to look not at we are going to become 1950 again.
	We have to understand change has happened in the United States.
	Some of that change good, much of that change bad.
	We're going to have to look back at tradition and find the best of tradition and bring it forward into the current day and say it still applies.
	That's the kind of Reaction that would be good for the world.
	My fear is that the reaction that we are going to see, the shifting winds that we are going to see, will go too far.
	And this is what we are seeing in the world of, say, Andrew Tate, for example.
	So I have a lot of younger listeners who are big fans of Andrew Tate, who really enjoy Andrew Tate.
	Now, the big news over the course of the last couple of weeks is that Andrew Tate, for those who don't know, Andrew Tate is a very online guy who was a lightweight kickboxing champion, I believe, and he's become big in the so-called manosphere.
	He was banned from YouTube, I believe, he was banned from Twitter, and he was banned from these things because he was a self-described misogynist, right?
	Somebody who believes that men are superior to women in pretty much every possible way.
	Well, over the last couple of weeks, He got in an online fight with Greta Thunberg in which he was tweeting at her about how he had Bugattis and lots of gas guzzlers and he was heating up the climate.
	And then she tweeted back at him that he had a small d***.
	It was all very silly.
	And then, one day later, he ended up being arrested by Romanian authorities.
	And the allegations against Andrew Tate is that he was engaging in sex trafficking.
	According to the New York Post, police in tactical gear descended on a villa where Andrew Tate and brother Tristan were staying Thursday to detain the British brothers on kidnapping and rape charges, judicial sources told Romanian outlet Libertadia.
	Video shows the officers with battering rams and guns sweeping through the dark villa before escorting Tate into a car.
	The brothers in April had allegedly detained two young women, one with American citizenship and one Romanian, inside the villa against their will where they were subjected to physical violence and mental coercion, according to the authorities.
	Police said the Tates allegedly formed an organized crime group and sexually exploited women by forcing them to perform pornographic demonstrations for the purpose of producing and disseminating through social media platforms.
	The brothers had been questioned for five hours by the police back in April, but were released at the time.
	And then they're currently still being held in Romania right now.
	Now, Tate had predicted for a long time this would happen to him.
	He had predicted that people were going to come after him, that they were going to arrest him.
	Does that mean that he's not guilty of something?
	I have no idea.
	I have no idea whether he's guilty of these crimes.
	It could be trumped up.
	It could be the Romanian authorities who are embarrassed by Tate.
	It could be anything.
	I don't place a lot of stake in the law-abiding nature of the Romanian authorities.
	I literally know nothing about how the law... I mean, Andrew Tate literally said he moved to Romania in order to avoid law enforcement.
	So, I don't know whether that's true or whether that's not.
	I assume all of that will come out in the wash.
	The thing I want to focus on is the popularity of Andrew Tate for a moment.
	And it's fascinating because, again, I have a lot of young listeners who are interested in the stuff that Andrew Tate says.
	The reason they're interested in the stuff that Andrew Tate says is because he's transgressive.
	He's transgressive in that he says things that no one else will say.
	Some of the stuff that he says is, frankly, terrible.
	And some of the stuff that he says is not terrible.
	Some of the stuff that he says is actually a version of truth.
	I mean, when he says that promiscuity is generally a bad thing, he says it only among women.
	When he says promiscuity for women is a bad thing, that used to be a relatively uncontroversial thought, but it's been considered bad to say that now.
	It's wrong.
	It's banned.
	Now, we live in a moment because we are so censorious online and sort of in the political world.
	We're so censorious.
	The Overton window has shrunk so much.
	That there are two concepts that have been crimped.
	One is truth, as in like Pope Benedict XVI truth.
	Right?
	Things, eternal things of value that you're not supposed to say anymore.
	A man is not a woman.
	Men should marry women.
	They should have kids.
	Right?
	These are things that are now considered very controversial in the elite circles of the West.
	You're not supposed to say any of those things.
	So truth, like capital T, long-standing truths, these things have been denied.
	And then there's also been stuff that's been denied.
	That's just kind of garbage, like stuff that's not nasty to say or yucky.
	And so what's been crimped is courage, right?
	People are afraid to say the truth, and they're also afraid to say their opinion because they lack courage because the social sanctions are so strong.
	And so because the social sanctions are so strong and because they go beyond just crimping the truth, they go to crimping pretty much everybody's feeling that they can even say anything, their opinion, jokes.
	Because of all of that, courage is now held in higher value than truth itself.
	Being willing to transgress lines is considered a highest value because in a time where courage is under attack, courage is a very, very high value.
	Courage is always the first value.
	I mean, C.S.
	Lewis says, courage is the first value.
	Christian.
	Courage is the first value in order to speak the truth.
	A courage is instrumental.
	Courage is useful so that you can speak the truth.
	What's happened in our society because we have decided to shut down so many modes of speech, because we've decided to ban people from social media, and unperson them, and destroy their lives and their livelihoods.
	Because we've done all of that, people who speak loudly are considered the best and the bravest.
	And it's particularly appealing to young people.
	And so when you draw a lot of fire, the way that Andrew Tate does, a lot of people see that as more courageous than if you say something that is, say, a little bit better calibrated.
	And mourn consonance with eternal truth.
	Whoever draws most fire, in other words, is the person who's considered the most courageous.
	And this sort of pithy saying that is mostly true, but kind of not, right?
	That you must be over the target if you're drawing flack.
	A large percentage of the time, that's true.
	But sometimes, the person who's drawing the most flack is drawing the most flack, because what they're saying is actually kind of bad, right?
	So, the problem for Andrew Tate, and the reason why he's become so popular, is because he's very transgressive.
	He says the thing that no one else will say.
	Sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's really not good.
	And so, we're gonna look at some of the things Andrew Tate says because, again, he's a very popular figure, particularly with young men.
	And when people ask me about Tate, one of the things that I've said, I've said this to some teenage boys who are friends of the family, they asked me about him like, I don't know, a week ago, what I said is, some of the diagnoses that Andrew Tate has of secular society are correct.
	His prescriptions are largely incorrect.
	And the things that he puts, he has a rule, a list of rules.
	And many of the rules that he puts online are actually pretty good.
	And then the way that he acts, right?
	His version of masculinity, which is have a bunch of kids by a bunch of different women, live in a castle with 30 Bugattis, right?
	Put pictures online and muscle, like this kind of stuff.
	That's not the traditional mark of masculinity.
	What Pope Benedict XVI would say, what I would say, what sort of members of the traditional wisdom cadre would say, is that the ultimate in manliness is get married, protect your family, provide for your kids and your family, provide a space for them to grow in safety and security, provide them roles and responsibilities.
	This is the role of a man.
	This is what a man does.
	What Andrew Tate focuses mainly on is the critique of how society has undermined a lot of this stuff.
	And then his prescription is, I'm gonna put a picture of myself online with like 30 cars and it makes me look cool, makes me look masculine.
	Hey, I also like cool cars.
	Cool cars are amazing.
	But, because we have lost eternal truth, because we have decided as a society the eternal truth has to go, the backlash is not coming in the form of a restoration of eternal truth.
	Very often the backlash is coming in the form of punch the people in the face who destroyed the eternal truth.
	That's the society in which we're living in, and I'm afraid that that could get worse unless what we actually have is a return to some eternal truth.
	So here's a couple of clips of Andrew Tate, and it kind of shows you what I'm talking about, that some of what he's saying is kind of half correct, but he's saying it in such a way that is meant to draw fire.
	So here is Andrew Tate talking about women belonging to men.
	I don't know, because I think the women belong to the man.
	I think the woman's given over to the man.
	Yeah, that's inherently where you get called sexist.
	No, it's not.
	Well, you can call me sexist if you want, but if you look at marriage, it's the bride's father who gives her away.
	It's not the groom's father, is it?
	In old tradition.
	The woman is always given over to the man.
	Read the Bible, read the Koran, you can go to... Walking down the aisle, no chance.
	There's definitely, there's like African cultures where they don't do that.
	I'm sure there are some obscure tribes somewhere.
	I mean, I can't say I'm not a professional.
	You get it.
	You seem like a very smart guy.
	You seem like a smart guy.
	You're saying a woman is the property of a man if they're dating.
	I'm not saying they're appropriate.
	I'm saying they're given to the man and they belong to the man.
	It doesn't mean they're a pure property without emotion.
	OK, so notice the contrast here.
	So Portnoy is so afraid of saying that a woman and a man belong together and that a woman When she gets married, now belongs to the man sexually in the same way that the man ought to belong to the woman sexually.
	This is literally Genesis 2.24.
	For this reason, a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh.
	Genesis 2.24.
	So that would be the eternal truth.
	That is the truth according to every mainstream religion.
	That would be the thing that you would say.
	And the reason for that from an evolutionary biology perspective is because when a woman joins with a man and they create a baby, the woman is sure of her parentage, but the man is not sure of his parentage.
	And so we as a society tend to prefer monogamy, right?
	This is the evolutionary biological reason why humanity embraced monogamy is because it is the best distribution of sexual resources.
	It's from an evolutionary biological perspective, not a moral perspective.
	That's just evolutionary biology.
	Bret Weinstein, Heather Heyer talk about it.
	Heather Hying talk about it.
	All of this is very well established.
	When it comes to morality, morality is that a woman should not be promiscuous and a man should also not be promiscuous.
	Now, this is the part where Andrew Tate gets the diagnosis right, but he gets the solution wrong.
	So here is Andrew Tate talking about how women should not be promiscuous.
	It's bad for them.
	Well, a woman could say that same thing if she decided.
	She could say, I can sleep with multiple men, but my men can't sleep with multiple women if she so choose.
	We're all free individuals, right?
	Yeah, but you don't, you wouldn't agree if a woman said that.
	I don't think I, I would personally find that revolting.
	Correct.
	But there are women who find what I say revolting.
	So you're not telling other people what to think.
	You're just saying how you think.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I think that I think of a man is, uh, Sexual is not sexually exclusive.
	It's not the same as if a woman is.
	Because with a woman, you have the paternity issue.
	With a man, you don't have a paternity issue.
	Look, read the Bible.
	Every single man had multiple wives.
	Not a single woman had multiple husbands.
	It's against the will of God.
	It's disgusting.
	In the eyes of God himself.
	Okay, so again, historically speaking, what Andrew Tate is saying is not wrong.
	Morally, the reason why church, where we talked about the capacity for change within eternal rules, moves towards monogamy as opposed to polygyny, right, where a man has multiple wives, the reason for that is because the sophisticated arrangement of one man and one woman is the best arrangement.
	And so it is not good when a woman is promiscuous.
	It also happens not to be good when a man is promiscuous.
	Those may not be equivalent in evolutionary biological terms, but that is why eternal morality suggests one man, one woman.
	So the point that I'm making here is that when the moorings of a society come loose, when the society starts to sort of float, when the iceberg is floating, is no longer moored to anything that keeps it stable, once that happens, the reactions tend to be extremely chaotic.
	You get an entire movement on the left that is incredibly destructive, and you get a reactive movement that gets a lot of the diagnosis right, but a lot of the diagnosis wrong, right?
	Gets a lot of diagnosis right and a lot of prescription wrong, right?
	We have many problems in our society.
	Those problems continue into the realm of male and female.
	It encourages bad behavior by women, but then the answer to that is not bad behavior by men.
	The answer to that is better behavior by women and better behavior by men.
	This is... So if we're going to have a restoration, we need to have an actual restoration.
	Now the reason I think the backlash is coming, however, is because the forces of the left are not going to stop.
	They're going to continue marching.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
	Well folks, the holiday season is coming to a close.
	Many of you have already taken advantage of our 30% off holiday membership sale.
	If you didn't get a chance to, have no fear.
	You can get 30% off new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships and gift memberships when you go to dailywire.com slash ben.
	But this is your last chance.
	Today is the final day.
	We had so much happening in 2022.
	The launch of What is a Woman?
	The launch of Jordan Peterson with Daily Wire Plus.
	All sorts of great new series from me.
	We have so much coming in 2023.
	Can't wait to announce all of it for you.
	Including kids programming coming sometime a little bit later this year.
	Today is your last chance to get 30% off annual memberships and gift memberships by using code HOLIDAY at checkout.
	So head on over to dailywire.com slash ben right now.
	So as I say, the backlash to a society coming on board from eternal values is going to be People who diagnose that unmooring correctly, but very often who speak sort of the most brash, loud, and sometimes half-wrong version of that.
	So this is why I think Andrew Tate has become quite popular.
	And for people who are sort of dismissing him out of hand, you have to acknowledge why he has become popular.
	It's because some of his diagnosis is correct.
	So here is Andrew Tate recently on Piers Morgan talking about marriage in the traditional sense.
	I'm reserving judgment on his guilt or innocence in a criminal case.
	I have no information on the criminal case at this point.
	I just want to, this brought Andrew Tate into the news, the fact that he's been arrested in Romania.
	And so I think the more important cultural phenomenon is the fact that this guy has a lot of followers.
	And so we should try to figure out why.
	But you believe in the concept of marriage?
	Completely.
	That's what we were talking about the whole time.
	What do you think- We talked about a man giving a woman away.
	I believe in marriage more than anybody.
	In fact, I believe in marriage and- No, please.
	I believe in marriage in the traditional sense.
	I believe a man has a duty to stand up and be a real man.
	I believe that the problem with the world today that we are facing is that not enough men are sticking to the age-old ways of masculinity.
	Okay, so this part is exactly correct.
	Right?
	What he's saying right now is exactly that.
	And so when you accompany that correctness with some incorrectness, people will take the correctness.
	And that is the point that I think is worth thriving home.
	What that means is that we ought to have a real conversation about the eternal values that are important and not lose them.
	Because if we do lose them, things are likely to get much worse.
	And people right now are reacting in the strongest possible ways because they feel like they're getting gas lit.
	They feel like they can't have any of those conversations.
	And correctly so.
	Wouldn't it be a major story, for example, if a quote-unquote white supremacist had driven into Times Square and then attacked a couple of police officers in the middle of the New Year's Eve festivities?
	That would, of course, be a national story.
	We'd get the president of the United States on national television talking about this.
	We'd have talks about trends in the United States toward white nationalism.
	We'd talk about Donald Trump.
	We'd talk about all this stuff for weeks on end, right?
	Well, over the course of New Year's, there was a person who actually went to Times Square and attacked two police officers, three police officers, rather, with a machete near Times Square.
	He had traveled to New York from his home in Maine to injure the police.
	And it turns out that the reason this is not getting broad spectrum media coverage is because he's an Islamic extremist.
	This man is 19.
	He's now been charged with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of attempted assault.
	I don't mention the names of attempted mass killers on the air because I don't wish to glorify them.
	Shortly after 10 p.m.
	on Saturday, the police said, the suspect began swinging the knife without provocation at three officers who are at 8th Avenue and 52nd Street, just outside the security cordon for the Times Square celebration.
	One of the officers then shot the suspect in the shoulder.
	One of the officers who had just graduated from the police academy suffered a fractured skull in the attack.
	He's now been released from the hospital as has one other officer and another one as well.
	Sometime on Saturday before the attack, the suspect wrote a farewell letter to his family in a diary that was found on him afterward.
	In it, he wrote to his mother, quote, I fear greatly.
	You will not repent to Allah.
	And therefore, I hold hope in my heart that a piece of you believes so that you may be taken out of the hellfire.
	He also referred in his diary to his brother, who's in the US military, as having assumed the uniform of the enemy, the law enforcement official said.
	Now, the reason why people feel...
	Increasingly, as though you can't say the truth is because this sort of stuff does not get the same sort of attention that it would get based on the ideological motivation of the person who committed this act of terrorism.
	This is a terror assault in the middle of New Year's Eve in Times Square.
	And apparently it is it is just not worthy of the sort of national news attention based on the motivation of the person who committed the crime.
	And so you end up with is reaction from the general public.
	Reaction against the media.
	Correct.
	Reaction against trends to shut down conversations.
	Correct.
	Reaction in favor of some people who are sort of half true, half false, because they have the courage to cross the lines that other people won't cross.
	And herein lies the problem.
	Meanwhile, as the left pushes further and further, and as they close that censorship window closer and closer, and as they just continue on pace to change the world and unmoor the iceberg.
	That is now floating around freely and starting to break up.
	As they do this, the backlash is going to get stronger and stronger.
	Joe Biden has no intentions of letting up in his world changing ambitions.
	According to Politico, Biden begins 2023 with a stronger hand to play in an inclination to play it.
	Quote, a year makes a difference after all.
	President Joe Biden begins at 2023 politically stronger than 12 months ago, bolstered by his party's surprise midterm success, a robust set of legislative accomplishments, and the resilience of the alliance he rallied to support Ukraine after Russia's invasion.
	Indeed, as he vacations on St.
	Croix, the biggest decision he faces is whether to seek re-election to the office he holds.
	Biden is not yet fully committed to another term, according to three people with knowledge of the deliberations, but not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
	On his island vacation, Biden continued his running conversation with family and a select few friends and allies about a re-election bid.
	There are still challenges on the horizon, from an economy threatening to slow down, to the war in Europe, to an incoming Republican House majority threatening gridlock and investigations.
	But those in the president's circle believe there is a strong and growing likelihood he will run again, and that an announcement could potentially come earlier than had been expected, possibly as soon as mid-February, around the expected date of the State of the Union, according to those people.
	That potentially accelerated time is owed in part to a sense inside the White House and among Biden allies that the New Year dawns on a note of revival, when marked by an unlikely comeback that has reassured fellow Democrats.
	So Joe Biden is going to push forward his ambitions unabated.
	He feels as though he has not been chastised by the American public, and so he's going to continue to take the moorings out of that iceberg.
	We're going to continue to break up as a society.
	And meanwhile, the American public is looking at the consequences of Joe Biden's rule and what they see is not good.
	They see social dissolution.
	They see an increasingly bad economy.
	It turns out that this was, in fact, the worst year in modern American history for the stock market.
	This was its worst year since 2008.
	The S&P 500 finished 2022 down 19.4%.
	There is no excuse for that, given the fact that we are out of the pandemic and have been out of the pandemic for quite a while right here.
	And all he had to do was sit by and shut up, and he didn't do any of that.
	And yet he's going to continue forward with his big ambitions.
	The backlash is going to be extreme.
	Economists are predicting a recession.
	We are going to see some new tax events taking place because of Democratic legislation in the last Congress.
	As the Wall Street Journal points out, happy new year, or if you're in business, unhappy new tax year, American employers are getting hit in 2023 with a variety of tax increases, even as the risk of recession rises along with interest rates.
	The tax hikes arrive for two reasons, provisions of the 2017 GOP tax reform that are phasing out and big tax increases that passed as part of the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act.
	The Biden administration doesn't want to tell you this, so we thought we'd list the unmentionables.
	Capital expensing.
	The biggest business tax hit is the end of full immediate expensing for equipment.
	The 2017 tax reform spurred investment by letting businesses immediately deduct the full cost of hardware, like trucks and machines.
	But that policy is set to phase out.
	The maximum early deduction drops this year to 80%.
	It's going to continue to decrease now each year until it disappears in 2026.
	R&D Expensing That hit has already arrived.
	January 2022 marked the end of full expensing for corporate research and development, a benefit that began in 1954.
	Companies could previously deduct R&D spending from their next tax bill.
	Now they have to spread the deduction over several years.
	Interest expensing.
	The cap on the business interest deduction dropped last year when the formula changed to exclude amortization.
	This is justifiable as part of tax reform because the tax code shouldn't have a subsidy for debt over equity, but the timing now is really bad.
	In other words, all of these taxes, including a new corporate minimum tax, a stock buyback tax, all of this is going to impact the economy in really, really negative ways.
	One of the reasons why big banks are now predicting a recession, and they're also expecting the Fed is going to have to pivot, According to the Wall Street Journal, more than two-thirds of the economists at 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve are betting the United States will have a recession in 2023.
	Two others are predicting a recession in 2024.
	The firms, known as primary dealers, are a collection of trading firms and investment banks that include companies like Barclays Bank of America, TD Securities, and UBF.
	They cited a number of red flags.
	Americans are spending down their pandemic savings.
	The housing market is now in decline.
	Banks are tightening their lending standards.
	We expect a downturn in global GDP growth in 2022, led by recessions in both the U.S.
	and the Eurozone, according to PNB Paribas.
	The main culprit is the Federal Reserve, which has been raising rates for months to try to slow the economy and curb inflation.
	So the economy is likely to get worse.
	This is not going to stop the spending binge that our Congress is currently on, according to a brand new study out of the Out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, American fiscal policy is, quote, in permanent imbalance as current debt plus projected future spending outstrips future tax revenue, which means that the federal government budget is going to have to require, if we were to balance the books, a 30% spending cut or a 40% increase in taxes, according to DailyWire.com.
	So things are likely to get worse, and Joe Biden, again, is not slowing down.
	He's going to continue to push this, and he's going to continue to enjoy his life.
	You'll notice that in the middle of the worst cold snap in decades in the United States resulting in some actual deaths, Joe Biden was vacationing off in the U.S.
	Virgin Islands, and no one seemed to matter.
	It didn't seem to matter to the media.
	The media didn't care.
	Like one iota.
	So when Ted Cruz, in the middle of a cold snap in Texas, goes down to Cancun with his family, this is a national scandal.
	How dare he leave his state?
	By the way, he's a federal senator who has Virtually no impact on the running of the state when it comes to energy policy.
	But Ted Cruz is a really, really bad guy.
	The president of the United States takes off in the middle of the worst cold snap in decades in the United States, where people are dying, to go to a warm place for a week and sleep in the sun because he's grandpa.
	And that's totally fine.
	Eric Adams, by the way, did the exact same thing.
	Hey, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, He actually left New York in the middle of this cold snap.
	The mayor is the executive of the city, right?
	He's not a senator.
	He's the mayor.
	He left also for the U.S.
	Virgin Islands.
	His excuse was he missed his mom, who died a couple of years ago, is my understanding.
	So if I miss my grandfather, do I just get to go on random vacations and abdicate my duties now?
	Is that the way this works?
	His excuse was, again, the sense of entitlement from Democrats who feel that the winds of history are at their back is really, really strong.
	Here's Eric Adams over the course of the break saying that he deserves his vacation.
	So after 365 days of commitment to the city, I decided to take two days to reflect on Mommy.
	And to watch how you responded to my two days out of the city was really alarming.
	I deserve good work-life balance like you do.
	I bet you went on a vacation.
	I bet you have not worked 365 days in the city.
	Unbelievable.
	I mean, truly, the level of self-absorption of the public officials is really an amazing, amazing thing.
	OK, so as I've been saying the whole show, if this is the year of the backlash, if the backlash is coming, then that would require some sort of cohesiveness on the Republican side of the aisle.
	And here is where we run into a bit of trouble for the backlash theory.
	And that is that the Republicans are really bad at this.
	Republicans are, in fact, quite capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
	And so they're now having an idiotic fight today.
	over whether or not Kevin McCarthy ought to be Speaker of the House.
	This is a fight with no consequences for the American people.
	I'm just going to put it out there, the American people don't care.
	They do not care one iota.
	The reason they don't care one iota is because with the Republicans holding a majority in the House, Joe Biden's legislative agenda ought to be DOA.
	Ought to be dead on arrival.
	There's not going to be a lot of legislation that gets done over the course of the next couple of years.
	All the Republicans have to do is plant their feet and say no.
	It does not matter who the Speaker is in order to do any of that.
	And so the people who are holding out, shouting at Kevin McCarthy, he can't be the speaker because he's not committed enough.
	Then who else?
	And meanwhile, the people who are like, oh, I love Kevin McCarthy.
	It's got to be him.
	Kevin McCarthy's a nice guy, but why?
	The answer is the American people don't care.
	They don't care.
	So the answer is whoever has the votes should become the speaker.
	Kevin McCarthy has the most votes, so he should probably become the speaker.
	Right now we have an idiot fest in which we have five or six congresspeople who are basically holding up the works for no gain.
	What exactly is the gain here?
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy worked on Monday to lock down support to become House Speaker.
	His bid remained up in the air as some conservative lawmakers threatened to turn Tuesday's leadership vote into the most unpredictable in a century.
	Man, totally useless.
	There is no reason for this.
	Whether you like McCarthy, whether you don't like McCarthy, it does not matter.
	As the Speaker of the House, his entire job is to just say no to Joe Biden.
	You could put a dog in that seat.
	A dog with a sign that says no.
	And it would essentially do the same thing as what the Speaker of the House is going to do.
	The Speaker vote is set for midday.
	It comes after McCarthy spent the weekend scrambling to get the votes necessary from House Republicans to win the gavel.
	He acquiesced on a requested rules change that gives rank-and-file members more power, including making it easier to oust the Speaker.
	But a significant number of GOP lawmakers said they still remain opposed to the Californians' bid.
	One of those people is Representative Bob Goode.
	He tried to explain why McCarthy was not going to get his vote.
	Is there any scenario under which you could support and vote for Kevin McCarthy?
	No, I won't be voting for Kevin McCarthy tomorrow.
	He's part of the problem.
	He's not part of the solution.
	I'll be following the will of my constituents, the voters of Virginia's 5th District, who hundreds of which have told me over the past couple of years not to support Kevin McCarthy.
	But why?
	Like, who's the alternative?
	If there's a great alternative waiting in the wings, I'm waiting to hear it.
	Who has the support of the majority caucus?
	Because here are the alternatives right now.
	Either the Republicans just spend the next month voting over and over and over not for Kevin McCarthy and then probably for Kevin McCarthy because you have a bunch of Republicans in the House, some of whom I've talked to, who have said they're only voting for Kevin McCarthy just to stop this stuff.
	Or you're going to end up with five or six Republicans who are weak-kneed joining with the Democrats to pick the Speaker.
	The way that the Speaker of the House gets picked is a majority of the membership of the House picks who the Speaker is.
	Democrats right now have 212 votes.
	All they need is 218.
	So all they have to do is peel off five or six Republicans and suddenly they control who the Speaker is.
	That doesn't mean that they're going to get to make a Democrat Speaker.
	You're not going to get Republicans voting in favor of that, but they could certainly pick somebody who is a quote unquote moderate.
	So what exactly is the point of any of this?
	There is no point of any of this, except presumably to embarrass McCarthy in some way.
	It's just, why?
	Again, I just ask why?
	Why are Republicans so incompetent at this?
	All you have to do is sit there and shut up.
	That's all you have to do.
	Because again, Democrats are running hard to the left.
	Listen, would I love if Kevin McCarthy were a better speaker on behalf of values I care about?
	Sure.
	That's true of nearly everybody in elected office in the United States.
	Do I think that Republicans can afford a fight like this right now?
	I do not, not with a very slim majority in the House and Joe Biden thinking that he is riding high.
	If ever you are in doubt as to whether your party is doing the right thing, all you should do if you're a Republican is look at Yamiche Alcindor on NBC.
	Yamiche Alcindor hates the Republicans, she's a partisan hat, and she is gleeful about what's happening inside the Republican caucus right now.
	Right now, the incoming House Republican majority is in a state of disarray ahead of tomorrow's opening session, which could mean a level of Capitol Hill drama this town hasn't seen in 100 years as a floor fight over who will be Speaker of the House.
	At the center of the drama is House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy.
	He needs nearly everyone in the GOP's razor-thin five-seat majority to vote for him in order to become Speaker.
	But he has a serious math problem on his hands, and he knows it.
	Over the weekend, McCarthy held a call with rank-and-file Republicans in an attempt to sure up support, but it doesn't appear to have worked.
	Well, again, the glee in the media over all of this is like, the Republicans win the House, they finally get to stop Joe Biden's agenda, and now we're having a large-scale conversation about who should fill a seat that basically all it represents is who gets committee assignments.
	Because every arrangement is going to come down to the same thing.
	And by the way, anyone who thinks that whoever is elected Speaker is now going to have a full-scale debt ceiling fight with Joe Biden, they're lying to you.
	It's not going to happen.
	They're not going to have a full-scale debt ceiling fight with Joe Biden, because Republicans haven't won a debt ceiling fight my entire career following this stuff.
	Not in public opinion, not inside their own caucus, which is not going to happen.
	So, you know, this is, it's absolute foolishness.
	Only Republicans could be this stupid, especially given the fact that it is quite possible that their majority is going to shrink.
	Remember that there is still one Republican out there who may have to resign.
	That would be Representative-elect George Santos.
	Santos is now, apparently, under federal investigation.
	He has falsified a number of attributes of his background.
	He falsely claimed a degree from Baruch College and jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
	And now, apparently, federal prosecutors, state prosecutors, and the New York AG are looking into Santos' deception.
	Now, that's not something I'm not sure that's justified.
	Joe Biden has lied about every aspect of his past, his entire career.
	Like, every single aspect of it, he has lied about.
	And there's been no federal investigation into what, did he plagiarize his speeches in 1988?
	Did he go to college?
	Was, was somebody actually drunk when his, when his wife and child were killed in a car accident?
	A story he's told many times.
	Did he actually fight corn?
	Like the guy, the guy routinely lies all the time.
	Joe Biden.
	Nobody follows up with a federal investigation.
	Santos, there may be some tax ramifications.
	I'm very uncomfortable with the idea.
	Federal investigators look into a person who's caught publicly lying and look to see immediately whether he's committed a crime.
	That's not typically how you prosecute crime.
	You try to identify the crime and then you try to prosecute the culprit for the crime.
	You don't identify the culprit and then try to find the crime.
	If we did that with other normal human beings across American society would be really bad.
	You can find anybody committing some sort of breach of the rules as long as you look deeply enough into them probably.
	So, but with that said, is there going to be severe pressure for Santos to step down?
	There absolutely will be.
	And Republicans right now hold an incredibly narrow majority, which means McCarthy has to somehow pull together that majority.
	Can Republicans afford this fight right now?
	Is this a smart fight for Republicans to have?
	I have a very hard time seeing how this is a smart fight for Republicans to have.
	So where does this mean that we stand going into 2023?
	I was reading some history over the weekend, and I believe that if we are going to look for historical precedent as to where we are in time, The best place to look would probably be the year 1967.
	I say 1967 because it immediately came on the heels of a bunch of world-breaking legislation from Lyndon Baines Johnson, who of course had assumed the office in the aftermath of JFK's murder in 1963.
	He assumed the office, he ran for his actual first full election in 1964, and he won overwhelmingly over Barry Goldwater.
	And then he was the frontrunner going into the 1968 election.
	And by the middle of 1968, he was out of the race.
	By March 1968, he said, I'm not going to run for president anymore.
	What happened?
	The consequences of his own bad policy came back to haunt him.
	He's had offensive in Vietnam.
	The decay of the American economy under Lyndon Baines Johnson because he'd spent too much money.
	The social dissolution that had been brought about by the LBJ administration and his changes to things like welfare.
	All of that had started to come home to roost.
	I think that 2023 is going to look a lot like 1967.
	You have another president who is quite likely to be a one-term president in Joe Biden.
	Remember, LBJ's approval ratings in 1967, before he decided that he was still running at this point, were somewhere between 45 and 47 percent.
	Right now, Joe Biden's are somewhere between 43 and 45 percent.
	The Democrats at the time had wide, overwhelming control of Congress and the Senate in 1967.
	They just passed world-breaking legislation.
	They were about to do some more.
	Everything was looking up for them until it wasn't.
	There's just too much change, too quickly in the United States.
	And that is what you're looking at with Joe Biden.
	He's not going to stop.
	And what that means is that Republicans have the opportunity for pushback.
	It means that the right, generally, forget about Democrats, Republicans, again, that's the stuff at the top of the iceberg, but culturally speaking, a pendulum is beginning to swing back to the other side because the left has moved too far.
	They've broken apart the common ground upon which we are standing.
	It is collapsing under our feet.
	Like Littlefoot in The Land Before Time, you can see the gaps appearing.
	And now the question is going to be, who is capable of bringing that back together if anybody?
	And it's not going to be Joe Biden.
	It's going to be somebody else.
	And the person who it's going to be is going to have to have a very strong, cohesive, pragmatic agenda.
	I think that this is why it is very important who the Republicans nominate in 2023.
	That nomination process is going to begin in earnest this year.
	If the Republicans decide to nominate somebody who continues to widen those cultural gaps because they are more focused on self than on actual pragmatic problems that people face, it's going to be a real problem for them.
	If Republicans nominate somebody with a history of pragmatic solution making, there are a bunch of candidates out there who are like this.
	And they have a chance to really seize back control of the political high ground and maybe the cultural high ground.
	Again, the left has undermined and unmoored so many things in American life, ranging from the economic arrangements that underpin our lives, to spiritual arrangements that allow us to live more fulfilled lives, the rules, roles, and responsibilities that we teach our children.
	That the backlash could come, and it could come quickly.
	So the question is going to be how the backlash should happen.
	We've talked about how it shouldn't happen, which is a sort of reactionary politics where transgressivism is the norm and where how loudly you say a thing is more important than what you actually say.
	But one of the other ways that Republicans can fail here is by falling back on sort of the old truisms and tropes of, I would say, traditional John Stuart Mill liberalism.
	This idea that a pluralism of voices is the thing that matters most.
	Now, that does not mean that free speech doesn't matter.
	It does.
	Free speech is, in fact, an ultimate value.
	It allows for the possibility of the debates that are necessary in order to achieve the truth.
	However, many conservatives and Republicans have become very shy about speaking the kinds of truths that Pope Benedict XVI would say.
	And what they'll do instead is they'll speak to your right to say the truth, but they won't say the actual truth.
	And this is not enough.
	It's not enough to say you should have the right to practice your religion in public.
	You should have the right to be a Catholic.
	You should have the right to say that marriage is between a man and a woman.
	You should actually make the case why marriage is between a man and a woman.
	You should actively make the case why it is wrong to trans the children.
	You should actively make the case why capitalism is the best system of economic distribution.
	Why it goes to the heart of creativity and innovation.
	You should make that case.
	It's not enough to me.
	A lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives have spent the last 20 years trying to find a middle ground with people on the left saying, OK, well, we're not going to aggressively make the case for our own positions.
	Instead, we're going to make the case that we should have a safe space for us to discuss these positions.
	The problem is that, again, that Overton window keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
	And so, yes, you have to fight for a broader Overton window, and that means defending the rights of people with whom you disagree to speak, while maintaining that they are dead wrong and then making an aggressive case as to why they are dead wrong.
	So Ben Sasse has a really interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal today called America's True Divide, Pluralists vs. Zealots.
	Since the most important divide in American politics isn't red versus blue, it's civic pluralists versus political zealots.
	This is the truth no one in Washington acknowledges, but Americans must realize if we're going to recover.
	Civic pluralists understand that ideas move the world more than power does, which is why pluralists value debate and persuasion.
	We believe America is great because it is good, and America is good because the country is committed to human dignity, even for those with whom we disagree.
	A continental nation of 330 million souls couldn't possibly agree on everything, but we can hash out our disagreements in the communities where we live and the institutions we build.
	The small but important role of government for the civic pluralist is a framework for ordered liberty.
	Government doesn't give us rights or meaning or purpose or permission.
	It exists to protect us from the whims of mobs and majorities.
	Okay, so this is absolutely true on the federal level.
	On the federal level, the thing we should be fighting for the most is that space to have the discussion.
	We should be voting and pressing for a light footprint at the federal level.
	And then at the local level, where we raise our kids, we need to be pushing for solid communities grounded in eternal truth.
	I keep saying eternal truth because the real battle of our time is not between pluralists and zealous.
	It's between people who believe there are, in fact, eternal transmitted truths and people who do not believe that.
	I don't mean you have to believe everything the Catholic Church believes.
	I don't.
	What I mean is there are people who believe that the traditional wisdom of the past is worthy of upholding until you have a really, really good reason for changing things.
	And then there are people who believe that you should rip everything up.
	The entire bargain with the past and with the future ought to be ripped up in the name of whatever you think today.
	That's the real battle.
	Now, part of that battle is that we have to have the discussion.
	Part of that battle is that we have to maintain the ability to have that discussion, not get banned from the public square, of course.
	But that is not the heart of the battle.
	The heart of the battle is what is the truth?
	Can you teach the truth?
	Will you teach the truth to your children?
	Those are two separate questions.
	Can you and will you?
	Yes, we have to fight for you can, but then we really, really have to fight for we will.
	And it's not enough to say we can.
	It's not enough to say pluralism wins the day.
	Pluralism does not always win the day.
	Pluralism plus the ability to defend your position, the willingness to defend your position, the balls to defend your position, right?
	This is what real truth is about.
	It's why the world is going to miss people like Pope Benedict XVI.
	It's why a new generation is going to have to step forward, pick up that torch, and move forward with those eternal truths.
	Because otherwise, the country is going to fall into the hands of people ranging from the Paul Ehrlichs, to the people who trans the kids, to the President Joe Biden's on economics.
	That's the real battle.
	It's way under the surface of the iceberg.
	So, let's focus on the battle at the top of the iceberg, and then let's focus way more on making sure that that iceberg regains its moorings.
	Otherwise, we are going to be adrift in a world of hurt.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it because we will be taking your calls on the very first broadcast day of the brand new year.

▲