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Jan. 9, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:05
The Institutional Collapse Of The West | Ep. 1642
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Right-wing rioters storm several government buildings in Brazil, Joe Biden heads to the southern border, and Kevin McCarthy finally becomes Speaker of the House.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The big story internationally is the storming of several government buildings, including the presidential palace, as well as Congress and the Supreme Court over in Brazil.
The media in the United States are bizarrely blaming Donald Trump for that.
I'm not sure exactly how Donald Trump has to do with any of that.
But the idea apparently is that when people storm government buildings all over the world, that must be January 6th.
Government buildings have not been stormed at any time in Brazil's history.
In any case, the story from the Washington Post is that thousands of radical backers of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, and that's the way that anyone who is of the right internationally is described, right?
Bolsonaro is far-right.
Victor Orban is far-right.
Benjamin Netanyahu is far-right.
There's never just a normal right-wing leader In a foreign country, everybody is far right.
In any case, Washington Post says thousands of radical backers of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro breached and vandalized Brazil's presidential office building, Congress, and Supreme Court on Sunday in scenes that hauntingly evoked the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S.
Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump.
Yes, indeed, it turns out that the only buildings that have ever been stormed in human history You know, aside from, like, the Bastille, the Reichstag, or, like, pretty much all the government buildings in unstable democracies.
You know, aside from that, the only precedent for this is obviously January 6th.
The bizarre, myopic incompetence of our media is really something to behold the attack.
The most significant threat to democracy in Latin America's largest nation since a 1964 military coup came a week after the inauguration of President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva to succeed Bolsonaro.
It suggested a spreading plague of far-right disruptors in Western democracies as hardliners, radicalized by incendiary political rhetoric, refused to accept election losses, cling to unfounded claims of fraud, and undermine the rule of law.
Again, this is part of a broader narrative that is now being driven by the media on one side and by election deniers on the other.
The democracy is in peril.
That the Brazilian democracy will not outlast people storming some government buildings and a couple hundred of them being arrested.
The idea all over the world is anytime somebody doesn't wing on the left, then the right winger must be some sort of proto-fascist.
And if supporters of that person go and do something illegal, it must be the fault of that person.
If, however, people on the left go and do illegal things, well, that's either an exception or something that ought to be cheered on.
And this is just true across the spectrum.
Bolsonaro occupied the National Congress building, many of them sitting or lying on the ground.
A flag placed in front of the building read, Intervention, a reference to calls for the military to depose Lula, who defeated Bolsonaro in October.
Most wrapped themselves in the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag.
Some shouted at police officers, this is just the beginning and may God bless you and prevent you from acting against us patriots.
Images broadcast by Globo TV showed smashed glass and protesters roaming the halls of the Pinalto Palace, the office of the president, in an echo of the behavior of U.S.
insurrectionists.
Videos shared on social media showed Bolsonaro supporters taking trophies.
Again, the fact that the Washington Post has to keep saying over and over and over that this is January 6th when this is a completely different country.
...is really an astonishing act of complete journalistic failure.
Protesters set off fireworks from the roof of Congress.
Others waved the yellow and green jersey of the national soccer team, now a symbol of the far right, in the main chamber of the Supreme Federal Court.
Bolsonaroistas see the powerful court as an adversary.
Thousands more milled about a massive square similar to Washington's National Mall, waving Brazilian flags and chanting, God, Fatherland, Family, and Liberty, which is the slogan for Bolsonaro's party in the last election cycle.
Bolsonaro did condemn the invasions on Sunday evening, hours after they began.
He said public protests by law are part of democracy.
However, depredations and invasions of public buildings, as has occurred today, as well as those that were carried out by the left in 2013 and 2017, were outside the law.
And this is a point that, of course, the media are completely ignoring, and it happens to be true.
The notion that government buildings being attacked is unprecedented in Brazilian history is obviously not true.
In May of 2017, for example, the New York Times reported, quote, besieged by protest.
Brazil's president on Wednesday deployed federal troops to restore order in the capital, Brasilia, after demonstrators calling for his ouster clashed with security forces.
This is back in 2017.
So again, one of the city's iconic modernist buildings, the Agriculture Ministry, was set on fire during that unrest.
Other government buildings were vandalized during the mayhem.
Regional officials in Brasilia, this is in 2017, put the number of protesters around 35,000.
And the armed forces had to be called in in order to quell those protests and riots.
And professors of political science at various universities actually said that the move to call in the armed forces was a mistake.
They said that actually calling in the armed forces to break it up, that was a sign of weakness.
Now when you call in the armed forces to break up what was going on in Brazil, that of course is a sign of governmental strength.
This is why whenever the media compared this sort of stuff to January 6th, the world started turning when Donald Trump became president and stopped turning when Donald Trump left office.
It's an absurdity.
By the way, you don't even have to go back to 2017, go back to 2013.
Brazil had protests in 2013 that expanded to over a million people in massive anti-government demonstrations in which there were violent clashes that broke out in several cities as people demanded improved public services and an end to corruption facing tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets.
Riot police battled protesters in at least five cities.
An estimated 300,000 demonstrators swarmed into Rio de Janeiro's seaside central area.
So, this is the point that Bolsonaro is making.
Yeah, this is really bad and it's illegal and people should be arrested.
Also, this kind of bizarrely myopic and self-centered notion on the part of the Western press that when something bad happens in another country, it's because of something that happened in the United States.
It's really, really strange.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Now again, the footage is really stunning.
Whenever you see a government building overtaken by rioters, that is a stunning piece of footage.
You can see people on the roof of Brazil's presidential palace in Congress yesterday.
You can see the video.
People wandering around up top.
Thousands of people protesting outside.
Apparently the authorities did seize the buses that were used by the rioters.
Governors of other Brazilian states were dispatching security reinforcements to the capital.
And of course, all the various democracies around the world condemned this.
The United States put out a statement via National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan saying the United States condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brazil.
President Biden is following the situation closely.
Our support for Brazil's democratic institutions is unwavering.
Brazil's democracy will not be shaken by violence.
There's been a lot of instability and uncertainty in Latin and South America as of late, specifically because of what is called the Pink Wave, which has happened over the course of the last few years.
A bunch of countries that were historically not left-wing countries have had elections of left-wing figures.
This ranges from Chile to Peru to Colombia to now Brazil.
Bolsonaro said he repudiated any accusations attributed to me by the current head of the executive of Brazil.
Lula, the new president, immediately blamed Bolsonaro for all of this.
Now, Bolsonaro did accept the election results.
And Bolsonaro did not say that he had won the election in the same way that, for example, Donald Trump, between November 6th and January 6th, said that he had won the election.
Lula came out and just said that he was genocidal, Bolsonaro.
He said this genocidal person provoked this.
He encouraged the invasion of the three branches of government.
It's an amazing attempt to link what happened on January 6th to what happened here and also to blame Bolsonaro for what happened in Brasilia without, again, the actual evidence demonstrating that he helped organize all of this.
One of the questions here is whether those connections are actually going to be made.
Apparently there were protest camps outside military headquarters in Brasilia and across the country on Friday.
There were no significant operations that were launched that day.
There was almost no indication that authorities were prepared for the insurrection on Sunday.
There was no evidence of increased security presence at the buildings targeted.
In fact, the government right now is talking about arresting the security chief under Bolsonaro, who's also the head of the regional governor of Brasilia.
So things could get very repressive very quickly.
It'll be fascinating to see how the press covers that.
If Louis decides that he's going to crack down on civil liberties in Brazil, is that going to be considered some sort of real violation of civil rights or is it just going to be preservation of democracy?
This is the thing you fear.
You fear Far-right people storming buildings and then you fear governments repressing the actual civil rights of citizens in response to all of that.
And that is how democracies cave in and collapse in on themselves.
Again, the American press is dedicated to the idea that Bolsonaro, who by the way still holds, I believe, the largest party in the Brazilian legislature, his followers still constitute the largest contingent in the Brazilian legislature.
This is why I suggested after he lost the last election cycle that the idea that he was going to go away permanently, I thought was foolish.
He's probably going to be back.
But the press is attempting to sort of throw dirt on his political grave by suggesting that he's responsible for all of this.
This is why the Washington Post has an entire piece today titled, For more than four years, the most fundamental of questions has loomed over Brazil.
But its young democracy survived the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.
They never ask these questions when the left is in charge.
And when, for example, Lula, who is the current president, was actually arrested and was in jail, and then they changed the law to allow him to run again.
Or António Rousseff, who is also of a left-wing party and had to be impeached because of her corruption.
She left.
Her party continued on.
Brazil has been having some serious democratic troubles for Really?
Decades?
It's been a wild ride for Brazil since the military dictatorship ended in 1985 or so.
So this kind of notion that this is a new found problem because of the Arab Bolsonaro is a wild overstatement.
I mean, you have to be completely ignorant of Brazilian history to suggest that unrest in Brazil is something brand new because of Bolsonaro.
But according to the Washington Post columnist, Latin America's largest country embarked on what amounted to a test of its democratic strength in 2018, when it elected the former army captain who openly lamented the collapse of the country's military dictatorship, once threatened to reinstall its rule on the first day of his presidency, and sought at every turn to sow doubt in elections.
During his time in office, he did little to soften his bellicosity.
He warned of a government rupture, like the military coup of 1964, if he were to lose his re-election bid, he said.
It could only be through fraud.
Brazil would have worse problems than the United States did on January 6th.
His son Eduardo, a federal congressperson, once warned, there will arrive a moment when the situation will be the same as it was in the 1960s.
So this has prompted all of the usual suspects in Brazil on the left wing to blame the right for this sort of unrest.
Again, these are the same exact people who back in 2017, when there was mass unrest, including the storming of government buildings, including the agriculture ministry, were saying, you definitely don't call in the military because it's going to undermine the Legitimacy of the government.
Because those are left-wing protesters.
When it is right-wing rioters, then, of course, we got to quash this thing too sweet.
And we have to make sure that Bolsonaro is thrown into change.
There is actually a member of American Congress over the weekend who's calling for Bolsonaro to be extradited to Brazil.
Now, there haven't even been any criminal charges that have been filed against Bolsonaro in Brazil.
So how could he be extradited?
For what?
That didn't stop Democratic Congressman Representative Joaquin Castro from Texas to call for the extradition of Bolsonaro.
Well, Bolsonaro was an authoritarian leader, and I stand with the democratically elected leadership in Brazil.
And he basically used the Trump playbook to inspire domestic terrorists to try to take over the government.
And you're right, it looks a lot like January 6th in the United States.
And right now, Bolsonaro is in Florida, and he's actually very close to Donald Trump.
He should be extradited to Brazil.
In fact, it was reported that he was under investigation for corruption and fled Brazil to the United States.
Okay, so again, the insanity of suggesting that we have to extradite a person who has not yet even been indicted for a crime in Brazil is pretty incredible.
Meanwhile, CNN, doing the usual routine from the reporters, the reporters in the United States, again, being completely ignorant about most of the things that they report on, they simply suggest that this is about January 6th, which again, is an amazing stretch.
So what do we know about the situation?
Yeah, Fred, it's looking more and more like what happened here in the United States on January 6, two years ago.
And what happened was that earlier, a group of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro managed to breach the barriers established by authorities at the Congressional Building in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.
Again, it's just like January 6.
This is a big takeaway.
This is why whenever you read the newspaper, it's an amazing thing.
When you read the newspaper and they're writing about something that you know about, And you read an article written by one of these reporters, you say, wait, they don't know what they're talking about.
Then you move three pages later in the newspaper and they're talking about another topic you don't know about.
And they assume they know what they're talking about.
Nope.
They generally are operating through whatever is the political lens through which they're operating.
Well, this does raise some broader questions about what has been termed the crisis of democracy in westernized countries.
And it really is a problem, because as we are seeing, the stakes of politics seem so high, the passions are so high right now.
And what we are seeing in Brazil is the same thing in some ways that we have seen in a wide variety of countries, where people are more and more agitated over politics, whether you're talking about widespread rioting in France, or whether you're talking about January 6th, where you're talking about the BLM riots.
There's a generalized feeling in a lot of westernized countries right now that civil society is in a state of complete breakdown.
And this is a question I've been thinking about for a long time is how do you actually establish legitimacy of a government to the point where people actually accept elections?
How do you establish the legitimacy of a government to the point where people don't care so much about who wins and loses?
I mean, they care, obviously, but not to the point where they feel like every election loss is the end of society as a whole.
And the answer is society has to be more than government.
If society is only government, then that means that anytime you lose control of the government, you've lost control of all of society itself.
This is why it was so dangerous in 2012 during the Democratic National Convention, when Barack Obama's in Charlotte, North Carolina.
There is a big slogan that was emblazoned on the giant sort of scoreboard.
It was at a basketball stadium.
And it said democracy is the only thing we all share, or government is the only thing we all share, rather.
It says government is the only thing we all share.
And we don't share much of anything, because what exactly do we share?
What, the form of government?
Again, government is supposed to be a repository of certain trust.
If that trust dissolves, then we're just battling each other over control of the government gun.
Because the government is a giant compulsion machine in the end.
And so if the government makes you a lot of promises, and the only way it can guarantee those promises is by pointing a gun at you, and you don't like the promises it's making, things are going to get really heated really, really quickly.
And this is really the great failure of the West in terms of what's happened since the end of the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the West, because it was put up against communist Russia, because it posited itself in opposition to a centrally planned state and a centrally planned economy, The West banked on the idea that civil society and community had to thrive.
This is exactly what, it was this point that separated us from the USSR.
The USSR completely did away with civil society and community and replaced them with a giant overarching centralized government that made a bunch of promises and then guaranteed the fulfillments of those promises at point of gun.
And if the promises never materialized, well, the gun was still there anyway to compel you to pretend that the promises had materialized.
So the West said, that's a terrible system.
And what makes that a terrible system is in fact the compulsion.
What we have in the West is a thriving civil society.
We have all those little platoons of family.
We have thriving churches and social institutions and all this exists outside of government.
We have localism where people can make decisions for their own communities.
But we don't have this giant centrally planned monster with its tentacles in all of the areas of our lives.
And then the Soviet Union fell.
And instead of the West saying, what allowed us to win was our recognition that government can't be the be all end all.
The West decided, you know what we can really do?
Now we have the freedom to expand government.
Now we have the, we have the resources and the power to pay for both guns and butter.
And this is the argument that LBJ made in the 1960s.
He said, why, why can't we pay for both guns and butter?
And as it turns out, we could not, right?
Which is why we had to bankrupt in 1970s leading to the Reagan revolution of the eighties.
The West did the same thing in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union.
The West got greedy.
The West said, okay, we don't have to pay for military spending anymore.
We don't have to worry about the future of the planet.
We don't have to worry about the directionality of history.
Instead, what we should do is we should just maximize the promises that we make via government.
And gradually and slowly, that became a sort of bipartisan consensus.
Not just for members of government, but for enormous numbers of people on the ground.
They started to believe that government could be the guarantor of all that they needed.
And this is why we've seen repeated shocks to the economy, because as it turns out, when the government gets too involved, when the government skews all the incentive structures, you get massive bubbles and they burst.
Whether it is the dot-com bubble in 2000, whether it's the real estate bubble in 2007, 2008, or whether it is the recession that we're about to see coming in 2023 globally.
And centralized government control undermines legitimacy.
This is the thing that I think people need to understand because the tendency is when you start to see dissolution that people in government and people who believe in government tend to think grip harder.
Grip harder.
Exert more control.
Create ersatz social solidarity through government compulsion.
And what you end up doing is driving more opposition and more rage and more anger.
The answer to crisis of legitimacy in government is not government.
It's everything else.
It's rebuilding that community.
It's rebuilding that civil society.
And this is precisely the problem that you're seeing in Brazil right now.
Brazil has a lot of regional identities.
Brazil is an extraordinarily diverse place.
Over the course of the last 20 years or so, there's been a promise that Brazil really bragged about and talked a lot about.
And that was the idea of this sort of rainbow of people.
Brazil was famously tolerant because it was extraordinarily racially diverse.
You had indigenous people, and you had people who were Afro-Latino, and you had Latinos, and you had a huge variety of people of different ethnicities, and they all lived together.
And the idea was that there weren't going to be these tribal divisions.
And then multiculturalism sort of became the order of the day, and government attempted to start propping up particular cultures at the expense of other cultures.
It's been widely remarked upon in the academic press.
And Brazilian identity, which had been sort of forging toward a common point, started to sort of break apart again, and regionalism began to rise again.
And when you have very strong regional identity and central identity becomes weaker, and not only that, the central government starts to exert more and more power through left-wing figures like Lula da Silva, through left-wing figures like Dilma Rousseff.
What you end up with is more and more anger.
And again, this is not just a Brazilian problem.
It's a problem everywhere.
If you do not have a thriving community, and community has to be based in the end on family.
If you don't have thriving families, and that doesn't build into thriving local communities, and that doesn't build into thriving civil society at the local level, and then at the city level, and then at the state level, and then finally at the top level, what you end up with is an inverted pyramid.
Where the social solidarity required to actually support a giant governmental structure is too thin.
Everything starts to wobble.
And that's exactly what you are seeing right now.
Now, I've been thinking about this an awful lot lately in relation to the United States, obviously in relation to other countries as well.
Countries that seem to be thriving are the ones that actually have a certain level of social solidarity.
They're the countries that actually do have a vision of what they are as a country.
They do have something that binds them, whether it is national identity or religious identity, something that binds them beyond local community and beyond government.
And if they lack that, they start to fall apart.
One of the little remarked upon aspects of Brazil's changing culture, for example, is its lack of religiosity.
Brazil has been losing religious adherence for a very, very long time.
Brazil, over the course of the last 20 years, went from about 90% Catholic to about 65% Catholic.
It is a fast secularizing society, and in coordination with that, what you've seen is a dramatic drop in the Brazilian birth rate.
Birth rates are a really good way of telling when a culture has lost its way.
When a culture begins to lose its way to the point where it drops below replacement birth rates, you start to see a culture that is in decline.
Brazil has had an extraordinarily fast decline in its birth rate.
In 1960, for example, Brazil had six kids per family.
Today, Brazil is at 1.65 kids per family.
That is a huge decline.
As recently as 2000, Brazil was above replacement rates.
And it's been in steep decline.
The same thing is held true in a wide variety of countries in Latin and South America.
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As the family falls apart, as religious adherence falls apart, as all those structures fall apart, and as government dependence grows, what you start to see is less solidarity.
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Okay, so, I've created a bit of a formula here, and it's applicable to American government, it's applicable to government in Brazil, it's applicable pretty much everywhere.
Because the truth is, that legitimacy of any institution, which is what we're talking about here, the legitimacy of Brazil's governmental institutions, or the United States' governmental institutions, rests on simple fundamental premises.
And that is, A social fabric.
If there's no social fabric, you can't have a solid government.
It really is that simple.
So here's the formula for legitimacy.
And now it's a bunch of symbols here.
I'm going to explain them.
And it is a formula that I've been working through myself.
I'm not getting this from anywhere else.
So take it with whatever grain of salt you wish to apply.
Legitimacy.
L equals.
And then here is the equation.
It has a numerator and a denominator for folks who are listening to this.
The numerator essentially represents consent, and the denominator represents levels of control.
The more consent you have to any authority, the more legitimate it is, and the more control is exercised, the less legitimacy you have if you don't have enough consent.
So when control is really high and you don't have a lot of consent, when the denominator in this equation is really high and you don't have a lot of consent, the numerator is very, very low, you end up with fractional legitimacy, loss of legitimacy.
That's what you're seeing in large swaths of the West right now.
However, when you have high levels of consent, when people live in social solidarity with one another, and when the government is good at its job, people are willing to give up a certain level of control to the government.
The problem is that governments have a real tendency, when the numerator declines, when social solidarity declines, when the efficacy of the government declines, they have a tendency to try to ramp up the levels of control In order to jack up the adherence to the government, and it ends up becoming a spiral that fails, what you really have to do is loosen your grip and allow everything to be rebuilt at the local level.
So here is the equation.
L equals, and the numerator is S plus, and then it's R times A plus I. Okay, so S in this particular equation represents social solidarity.
So if you have an area that has a lot of social solidarity, that's going to help the government because obviously social solidarity means you're all going to vote in ways that you're not going to offend your neighbor because you like your neighbor and you're not there to use the government to crack down on your neighbor.
Plus, responsiveness of the authority to input, that's R, times the avoidability of the authority.
So if you know that the government is both responsive to you and also if You're unable to get a response from the government.
You're able to avoid the government where I can move out of the area.
And this also contributes to the legitimacy of the government.
I don't have to.
If I'm in California and I don't like California, I can leave.
That means that the government has a high level of legitimacy.
One of the reasons being, even though I disagree with the way that California is governed, I can always take off, which means the people who are left there are consenting to being there.
Plus I, which is the ability of any authority to advance the interests of its population.
So in other words, if government has the following aspects, it is going to have a lot of legitimacy at any level.
This, by the way, doesn't just apply to governments.
It actually applies to families as well.
If there's a lot of social solidarity within the area governed by the government, if that government is responsive to input from people, if you can avoid the government, if the government Doesn't rule the way you want to, you can leave.
And if the government is very effective at implementing the needs and wants of its citizens, it's going to have a high level of consent.
Okay, the denominator.
These are the things the government can do to undermine its own authority, essentially.
V is violation of fundamental or pragmatic rights by the authority or destruction of rules and rules by the authority.
So the government decides it's going to wipe away civil society.
It's going to wipe away your rights.
It is now jacked up the levels of control it is using against you.
It undermines the legitimacy of the government.
R, right?
This is R prime.
It's the regulatory strictness of the authority.
So the authority passes very, very strong regulations to move against you.
This undermines the legitimacy of the government, unless you've consented at a very high level to that government.
And finally, the aggressiveness of the enforcement by the authority.
So the factors that militate in favor of the delegitimacy of the government are if the government violates your rights, if it's very, very strict in its regulations, and if it aggressively enforces those restrictions.
And at the same time, if the numerator is really low, meaning your consent to that government is really, really low.
This is what we are increasingly seeing at the top level of Western societies right now.
Very low levels of social solidarity within the polity governed by the authority.
Multiculturalism rips apart social solidarity.
Decline of religion, which is a great combined factor in preventing tribalism, is falling away.
As social fabric fades, that numerator starts to decline.
It declines still further when the authorities are less responsive to input.
This is one of the facets of bureaucratic government.
When you have in the United States or in Brazil or anywhere else, a regulatory state that basically has no input from the public and you feel completely disassociated from that government, You have no input.
That's a real problem.
Avoidability.
When you're talking at the federal level, avoidability basically disappears, unlike California, where if I don't like California, I can just move to Florida.
It's a lot harder to leave the United States.
So if the federal government decides that it is going to undermine my rights, it's going to.
Increase regulation and then aggressively enforce that regulation?
It means it's very difficult for me to avoid.
It's very difficult for me to leave.
And this prompts, presumably, bad action against the government.
And finally, is the government actually good at doing the things the population wants it to do?
And the answer here is more and more no.
Now, the great irony of this is that in Western societies, as this numerator decreases and as the denominator increases, We have not gotten a set of rulers who have decided, hey, we better ease back on the amount of control we're trying to exert over our citizens because we don't have their consent.
We're not providing them the things that they want us to provide.
We don't have social solidarity within the polity.
We haven't spent any time rebuilding that social solidarity.
We're not responsive to input from the outside.
Now what the founders understood, what the founding fathers of the United States understood, is that the best way to preserve the numerator was to lower the denominator.
And what you want to do here is lower the amount of control that is available, right?
You don't want heavy regulation.
You don't want aggressive enforcement.
You don't want regulatory strictness.
You don't want violation of fundamental rights.
And so we'll create checks and balances in order to prevent all this.
But because people, citizens, were made promises by governmental actors, by politicians, because they were told By both a neoliberal consensus and by people who believe that if they centralized power in their own hands and then used a sort of state-sponsored mercantilism, that they would be able to promise the world.
Because of this, people got used to the idea the government was going to provide everything.
And so they're very, very disappointed.
And that disappointment leads them to believe that if they don't control the government, because the government, after all, has very high levels of control and not a lot of consent, which means if I don't control it, it's going to control me.
And this is what we are seeing across Western societies right now.
And it's really, really dangerous.
It's one of the reasons why there's a disconnect between what people call the elites and everybody else.
It's why the common citizens of countries ranging the West right now feel so disconnected from the people at the top.
The people at the top are seeking to increase the amount of control they leverage down on the population.
And the people at the bottom are saying, we don't have the social solidarity to do this.
We can't avoid your authority and you're not serving our interests.
And you don't listen to us.
And so, this disconnect means that the population is seeking to increase the numerator.
And meanwhile, the government is undermining the numerator by increasing the denominator.
I know this sounds complicated.
It really is not.
If you were to sum this up, what the people want is to consent to those who rule them, and they want to consent to the rules by which they live.
And what the government wants, more and more often, is to control.
Because they feel like they are losing control.
And they are losing control because they made promises they can't fulfill.
And this is true of nearly every institution in Western life right now.
They have made promises they cannot fulfill, and instead of saying, perhaps we should make more humble promises, perhaps we should make fewer promises, perhaps we should stick to the job that we are supposed to do.
Instead, they say, we will increase the number of promises we make, and then we will use more and more compulsion in order to ensure a rebuilding of a false social solidarity in which government is the only thing that we share.
And this is why you're ending up with tremendous levels of social instability and governmental instability across the Western world right now.
Democracy is going to respond this way.
This is what's going to happen.
And it's also why people feel that the government that does not serve their interests, they feel dissatisfied with that.
Again, none of this is an excuse for actual violent action in Brazil, which has a democracy.
You do have the responsive ability to actually go and vote and to change your government in Brazil.
You've seen it just a few years ago.
Bolsonaro became the head of Brazil.
In the United States, there's no excuse for going and rioting on January 6th and taking over Capitol buildings for no apparent reason.
It's not going to accomplish anything.
And beyond that, you can actually win elections.
The Republicans just took back the House of Representatives, for example.
Donald Trump may still be president again.
What this is to say is that we are going to get into hotter and hotter and more volatile water as time goes on.
If people in politics don't recognize a basic truth, the numerator matters more than the denominator.
That consent matters an awful lot more than control.
Social solidarity matters a lot more than control.
And this is why so many people are deeply upset about the fact that it seems as though, for example, in American government, there are a lot of people who are invested in the idea that we can continue to undermine the numerator in favor of the denominator.
So this is particularly true on the issue of immigration.
This continues to be a hot issue in the United States.
Joe Biden visited the southern border over the weekend.
And again, if you take a look at that equation, what you're doing when you vastly increase the amount of illegal immigration into the country is you're undermining social solidarity.
You're getting rid of perceived responsiveness of the authority to input because again, those people are not citizens, which means they have no input and we are citizens and they're not listening to us.
We can't avoid it because it's literally happening in the country in which we live and people are entering without our permission.
And it obviously is not in the interest of the American population.
It's in the interest of a foreign population.
This is why people are so upset about what's happening at the southern border.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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So if we're talking about the elites that are undermining trust in the government, there is no question that undermining America's border security is a big issue here because this one is easy.
You know what's in the interest of American citizens?
To know who's coming through our border.
You know what's not in the interest of American citizens?
An open border.
This is a real simple one.
And yet Joe Biden is still out there futzing around on the border.
He's trying to pretend a centrist policy now after letting 5 million people through the border in his first couple of years as president, the single greatest migrant wave illegally in the history of the United States.
Well now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Joe Biden made his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office, visiting a port of entry and a center for migrants as his immigration policy faces criticism from both parties.
Biden arrived Sunday afternoon in El Paso, Texas, which in December saw a surge of mostly Nicaraguan migrants.
He stopped there on his way to Mexico City, where he will meet Monday and Tuesday with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the North American Leaders Summit.
By the way, why are people leaving Nicaragua?
Specifically, for many of the reasons we've been talking about.
Nicaragua is a left-wing dictatorship.
His first stop was at the bridge of the Americas Port of Entry, where the president toured the facility with border officials.
He then stopped along the border fence that separates El Paso from Juarez.
He also visited the El Paso County Migrant Services Support Center.
He said, we're going to get a lot of resources to these migrants.
Again, this, of course, comes amid an attempt to spin toward the center for Joe Biden in an incoherent fashion.
He announced an aggressive effort to bring down illegal crossings at the border by basically saying that he was going to increase the number of legal crossings at the border.
Also, you could apply online.
But if you showed up at the border and you were from these specific countries that were largely affected by humanitarian concerns, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, well, then he was going to turn you away if you were beyond those numbers.
Biden was greeted at the airport by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Republicans have been calling on Biden to travel to the region for two years, saying he wasn't focused enough on the issues.
And Abbott told reporters that Biden was two years and $20 billion too late.
And then he gave the president a letter asking him to take a series of enforcement steps, including detaining people who entered the country illegally and resuming construction of a border wall.
Biden said he had not read the letter, nor will he, I am sure.
So just amazing stuff here from the Biden administration.
You wonder, these are the issues that get people mad.
And the reason they get people mad is again, because of the belief that these elites in government institutions do not care about the interests of their own people.
This, by the way, is why presumably Joe Biden was attempting to essentially lie by proxy by having El Paso cleaned up before he arrived.
This is one of these schticks that you see from presidential candidates and presidents is that if the area is really bad and you know the cameras are coming, you just have it cleaned up overnight beforehand.
It's why the Biden administration has historically been so angry.
Reporters like Bill Malugan for actually reporting what's going on at the border.
According to the UK Daily Mail, when Biden made his first visit to the border with Mexico on Sunday, he'll hear from aid workers helping to manage the immigration crisis and local officials desperate for more support.
What he won't see are the miserable makeshift camps dotted around El Paso that triggered headlines last month about migrants taking over the streets.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, law enforcement teams moved through the downtown area, picking up migrants who had entered the country illegally.
As a result, Biden would get a view of the border, but not of the crisis.
Border agents wanted him to see the scale of the chaos.
And it is.
It's like complete tent cities.
It's a dog and pony show.
Instead of volunteer helping dozens of migrants seeking shelter at the Sacred Heart Church, they've cleaned it all up for him.
Officials say they're just enforcing the rules and any timing is a coincidence, but everybody knows that that is a bunch of crap.
Everybody understands that that is not true.
The reality is that unfortunately we have an elite set in the U.S.
government that is fundamentally unconcerned with illegal immigration because they believe that all of those people are going to change the constituency of the voting base if they eventually legalize everybody.
That is the only rational reason why you would import a bunch of very low education labor into the United States who are not culturally assimilated to the philosophy of the United States without vetting them.
It makes no sense on any pragmatic level.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be angry anytime he's asked about this.
Apparently, Biden officials were very angry over the weekend.
A New York Times reporter had the temerity to point out that treatment of migrants coming into the country is actually worse under Biden than it is under Trump, and they got very mad about this.
You're never allowed to say the T-word, Trump, without saying that Trump was Hitler.
And so when you say worse than Trump, what you really mean is worse than Hitler, according to the Biden administration.
What do you all, what does the administration say to the overwhelming consensus from people who advocate on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees and migrants that what the president did yesterday was Well obviously we take a different view.
I'll say this.
On his first day in office, he put before Congress an immigration reform bill that has yet to be acted on.
We are dealing with immigration laws and processes that are decades old, Michael.
Decades old.
So the answer to the critics is, first of all, we obviously take a different view in terms of the president's priorities.
And if you take a look at the package, you'll see that it is very humane in its structure.
But we've got to have the help from members of Congress.
I'm sorry, this is absurd.
You guys were in charge of Congress for the last two years and you got nothing done.
Meanwhile, you have the greatest migrant search in human history on our southern border.
Meanwhile, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the new House Minority Leader, he says Joe Biden is making sure there's a strong border, which comes as a surprise to literally everyone with eyes and ears.
Title 42 will still be there and the transit ban will still be there.
How do you feel about these decisions?
Well, I look forward to hearing what President Biden has to say later after his communications.
I do think that the Biden administration is trying to tackle a tough issue in a way that is consistent with both the principle that America is a nation of immigrants, that gorgeous mosaic of people from across the world who come here to pursue the American dream, has been a part of American excellence, but also, of course, making sure there's a safe and a secure and a strong border.
Everybody knows this is just pure pap.
It's a nothing burger from this administration and that people are trying to happy talk their way through it.
One of my favorite aspects of our legacy media, which spend their time defending Democrats full time, is that any issue where Democrats are just wrong, it's because the issue itself is just too tough.
It's just too complex.
There's no way to handle it.
Normal Americans, they look at this and like, no, there is a way to handle it.
The way that you handle it is you close the border, you staff up border patrol, you tell them to reject everybody except for those who are legally applying, you make them wait in line, and then they get to come in once they've been processed.
Everyone understands this with an ounce of common sense.
But apparently it's just too complex.
There's no way to handle it.
According to the Washington Post, quote, immigration pivots shows Biden facing a hard reality of border po- It's a hard reality, is it?
I thought it wasn't a crisis until literally five seconds ago.
You guys were saying it wasn't a crisis.
It was a situation.
It wasn't even a situation.
It was just a thing that was happening.
It wasn't even a thing that was happening.
It was all in your imagination.
According to the Washington Post, President Biden's Irish ancestors escaped the famine on coffin ships, Vice President Harris's parents were scholars from India and Jamaica, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas came to the United States as a baby when his family fled Cuba.
All three leaders stood before the TV cameras in Washington this week to announce that some migrants would get new opportunities to pursue similar dreams in the United States, and others would face swift removal to border cities in Mexico.
It was a deflating and lonely moment for a president who had promised to leave Donald Trump's harsh immigration policies in the dustbin of history.
Oh, it was deflating and lonely for him, was it?
Oh, my heart goes out to the most powerful man in the world.
Who asked for this job?
Deflating and lonely, was it?
Instead, Biden's administration will continue to expel people who cross the border illegally amid record numbers of apprehensions, a move to the center that could threaten support from liberal groups if he seeks a second term, a plan to remediate outrage from Republicans and Democrats who themselves have failed for decades to create a functioning immigration system.
It's not his fault, guys.
Everyone has failed to create the immigration system.
I mean, that's true.
Also, he's the president right now.
So it is his job, is it not?
Alejandro Mayorkas, who has done an absolutely garbage job on the border, who has completely shortchanged the ability of border agents to even do their job.
This administration has spent its time yelling at border patrol agents for making sure that migrants don't illegally cross the border and lying about them, up to and including putting out investigations about using whips on Haitian immigrants, which is just not even true.
Alejandro Mayorkas, he says, yeah, I figured there'll be investigations into me, but I'm prepared.
He suggested that you might be impeached if you don't resign.
Here's what he said.
If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate every order, every action, and every failure.
We'll determine whether we can begin impeachment inquiry.
What's your response to the Speaker?
I've got a lot of work to do, and we're going to do it.
Are you prepared for the investigations?
I am.
I will be, and I'll continue to do my work throughout them.
Oh, well, um, you know, you have a job to do and you're going to do it.
That would be a change from from what is normally happening.
Again, the legitimacy of the government is radically undermined when you have people who are declaring that they control everything in your life.
How you pay your taxes, how you raise your children, whether they're trans, the kids, how much water you can use in a regulation flush toilet, but they cannot control the border.
That's just beyond them.
And it does raise questions as to what their motivations are when the biggest and simplest of tasks that a government is designed to do, namely to protect the citizenry of its own country, when it refuses to do that, but it regulates every aspect of your life, and then promises you that it can take care of you cradle to grave, it starts to undermine all of the legitimacy of the government itself.
Well, meanwhile, this has led again to a massive sort of disconnect in the minds of Americans.
This has been an ongoing problem, particularly for Republicans.
A massive disconnect in the mind of Americans has been that on the one hand, they want to go back to rebuilding social fabric.
Americans wish to rebuild social solidarity.
Americans wish for functioning government institutions, which means that the government makes promises it can keep, which means more limited promises and better keeping of those promises.
At the same time, people still have it in their head that all the promises that they have been sold are real.
That the pony still exists somewhere in that giant pile of horse crap.
This is the famous Reagan joke.
It says the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist walks into a room full of horse manure and sees the horse manure, and the optimist walks into the room and sees a giant pile of horse manure and says, there must be a pony in here somewhere.
Well, when it comes to the government making you promises, generally there's no pony.
It's just horse crap.
But the problem is that a huge number of Americans have bought into that horse crap, and this leads to a rather unworkable situation for Republicans when it comes to things like spending.
This is going to be the big battle that is facing incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Kevin McCarthy finally becoming Speaker of the House.
What does that mean for Republicans going forward?
Plus, a college professor is fired for showing a picture of the Prophet Muhammad.
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