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Jan. 12, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:53
Prince Harry’s Big Tell-All: The Full Breakdown | Ep. 1645
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Prince Harry releases his new memoir, and we explore all the sordid details and what it says about the next generation of Western leadership.
House Republicans pass a bill preserving the lives of those born in botched abortions, but Democrats scream about it.
And another batch of Biden-classified documents is uncovered.
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Well, there is a lot of news going on, but it is rare when you have a piece of cultural news that is so big, it sort of eats everything else.
And that is what is happening with the release of Prince Harry's new book, Spare.
Now, as I've said before, I'm not big into the Royals.
I don't really follow the Royals all that much.
I haven't followed their various scandals because frankly, we fought an entire revolution, so we don't have to care about the Royals.
There is something deeper going on with the battle over whether Prince Harry is a good guy or a bad guy, whether the royal family are villains or heroes and all the rest.
And something obviously is happening here because Prince Harry's book sold 1.4 million copies in the US, UK and Canada on its very first day, which means this is going to be one of the biggest bestsellers of all time, according to the Wall Street Journal.
This is a performance the publisher Penguin Random House said was the largest first day sales total for any non-fiction book it has ever published.
The first day sales totals for Spare included pre-orders as well as the sales of print books, digital books, and audiobooks.
Penguin Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann S.E., said Wednesday.
The publisher said it printed 2 million hardcover copies of Spare for the United States and has already gone back to press.
So this book was officially released Tuesday.
It was mistakenly leaked a little bit last week, but the demand for spare has been so strong that Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the United States, said on Tuesday the memoir looks certain to set record-breaking day one sales at the bookseller is expected to be one of the biggest books of 2023.
That is an understatement.
It will end up being one of the biggest books of all time.
The reason I say this is because some of the other big books that have been sold recently sold 725,000 copies in the in the first day.
That would be Michelle Obama's Becoming, for example, or Mary Trump's ridiculous tell-all book about Donald Trump.
That thing sold a little bit less than a million.
So this thing is selling 40 to 50% higher and sometimes 100% higher than the biggest bestsellers of our time, which says something about what this book is really about now.
Some of this is just pure furience, right?
People want to know what's going on behind the walls of an institution that is historically incredibly tight-lipped about what is happening.
People are very hungry for this sort of news.
This is why, of course, Princess Di was always big press in the UK, but also in the United States.
But there's something else going on here, and that is the cultural battle that has broken out around Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the royal family.
And in order to understand that cultural battle, I'm going to play you two clips.
One is a clip from Prince Harry's new book, and the other is a clip from Queen Elizabeth back in 1947, aged 21, when she assumed the monarchy.
And what we are watching right now in real time, because what I really think is that Prince Harry is a metaphor for the new generation of Western leadership.
And a new generation in the West that believes that the institutions that bore it are fundamentally evil, and that the way you demonstrate that you are good is by breaking with those institutions without any other sense of morality or decency, and that everything you do is justified by your need for quote-unquote freedom, your need for liberty, your need to be free and fly, little bird.
Literally, this book ends, as we will see, with a bird flying away.
I'm not kidding you.
So, we begin with not Prince Harry, but his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, who recently passed away, obviously.
Here she was at age 21, dedicating herself to the realm in her birthday address.
I could make my solemn act of dedication with a whole empire listening.
I should like to make that dedication now.
It is very simple.
I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.
But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me as I now invite you to do.
I know that your support will be unfailingly given.
God help me to make good my vow And God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.
Okay, so this is how leadership used to work.
The way that leadership worked is you were a member of the royal family, and you assumed that role, and the role was to be the leader of the British Empire, at least in name and in face.
And you were supposed to live for that institution.
You had been handed down a heritage of generations, a thousand-year heritage, and it was your job now to fit yourself into that role, to mold yourself to that role, to abide by that role.
This is what made you an important and worthwhile human being.
was conformity to that role.
And yes, of course, changing the role and shaping the role.
But most of all, respecting the role that you had been given.
That is one form of leadership.
That's the leadership of the West for generations.
And in most other cultures, this is the way that leadership works as well.
We have a new brand of leadership in the West.
And unfortunately, it is characterized by people like Prince Harry.
His brand of leadership is, the system is bad.
I must break with the system.
And this amounts to an extraordinary self-censored narcissism.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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This book is incredibly narcissistic.
Now, it's tragic because obviously this is a person.
He is about my age.
I think we were born in the same year.
He's 38.
I'm also 38.
And Prince Harry obviously experienced tremendous tragedy when he was young.
And because he blames that tragedy on the press and the British royal family simultaneously, really his own father, he sort of blames it on.
Because he blames the tragedy of Princess Di's death on these institutions.
The institutions are bad and he is a hero for breaking free from those institutions.
And so what results is not a heroic portrait of a person doing a heroic thing.
Well, result is a man in search of his authenticity.
And so the book reads incredibly small.
The book reads unbelievably narcissistic and self-serving, which is why it also has some very bizarre moments.
And one of the so the clip that I actually want to play here is going to be clip 30.
So this is Harry explaining.
Why it is.
That Harry sees himself as inferior.
What is important about Harry?
Right, he's insulted by the fact that he has a role in the family and that that role isn't the primary role in the family.
So here he is explaining in his own words why exactly he's so upset.
Wooly was the heir, whereas I was the spare.
This was shorthand often used by Pa and Mummy and Grandpa, and even Granny.
The heir and the spare, there was no judgement about it, but also no ambiguity.
I was the shadow, the support, the plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy.
I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion, and, if necessary, a spare pot.
Kidney, perhaps.
Blood transfusion.
Speck of bone marrow.
This is how he sees himself.
The role that he has been given, which is to be essentially backup for his brother, who is going to be the king, or to be a member of the broader royal family.
That's not enough for him.
What he needs is to feel free.
What he needs is to find himself, to search for his authenticity.
He has to break out of being the spare.
Now, does it seem kind of brutal that people are calling him the spare in front of him?
He admits, by the way, that that is a joke.
That people were saying that sort of joke in front of him.
And yeah, that's cruel and it's not a nice thing to say.
Also, he's an adult.
And the reality is that in any system, you have a role.
At your job, are you the boss?
Sometimes you're the boss.
But very often, you're not the boss.
Does this mean that you are not a relevant piece of the system?
Does it mean you're not important?
Are you always the primary?
In other words, So what this as listen, I mean, you listen to what Queen Elizabeth says right upon her 21st birthday that she's dedicating herself to the realm.
And then you hear Harry complain about a role that does not actually require all that much of him.
He's given tremendous freedom within that role to go and do whatever humanitarian work he wants to do as he makes clear in the book is a pretty solid budget.
This is a person who is not poor.
And yet, it's not enough because, again, what this comes down to is personal peek at his own life and the status of his own life.
And he's going to dump on his family and the institutions that make him an important person in the first place.
And in doing so, he's going to make himself more important, which, by the way, is why, as others have observed, there will be no second act for Prince Harry.
Once you already dumped the dirt on your family, there's nothing more you have to offer to the public.
Once you've ripped on the institution, you're no longer of relevance.
You have actually destroyed the thing that you were standing on.
Okay, so to understand what exactly Harry is doing in this book, you have to understand that he's ripping down these institutions and he's tearing away at his own family and at the crown and he's doing all of this stuff.
Specifically, because he feels personally hurt.
And the theme running throughout the book, and of course he's an unreliable narrator because everybody's an unreliable narrator.
He's a particularly unreliable narrator because he has a ghostwriter.
And the ghost in this book, the ghostwriter in this book, is the same guy apparently who wrote Andre Agassi's Open and wrote Film Night's Shoe Dog.
So he's a very good writer, the ghostwriter.
The ghostwriter, I won't say, captures Harry particularly well in many places.
So my favorite personal example of this is that Harry is consistently saying throughout the book, I never read books.
I don't know.
I don't read.
I'm not a good student.
I don't like poetry.
And yet the the ghostwriter can't seem to stop himself because he feels like I'm writing for a prince.
So I have to I have to make literary allusions.
So he will make literary allusions and buy them.
It's really funny.
So he'll say so.
So Harry literally says about his own father, what troubled him most was how I went out of my way to avoid books.
And then randomly you'll have clip, you'll have sections of the book where he says stuff like, ours is not to reason why, as Flea's great granddad said, or Tennyson, whoever.
The ghostwriter will insert a literary illusion and then have to buy it back because you recognize that Harry would never make that literary illusion.
He does this over and over.
He invokes Wordsworth, and then he's like, that old guy.
He says, Wordsworth, for one, I'd managed to avoid reading that old gent's stuff in school, but now I thought he must be pretty damn good if he spent time around these parts.
He hadn't thought about Wordsworth.
That's not a thing.
But put aside the gap between the ghostwriter and the actual narrator of the book, Prince Harry.
And you get to the underlying seething discontent that Harry has at his own role and at the royal family itself.
And his baseline justification for his seething discontent is the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997 in a car crash in which the driver had a blood alcohol level that was like three times the legal limit and spun out of control and ended up killing Princess Di and others in the car.
So Prince Harry blames this on pretty much everybody.
He blames this on the press.
He blames this on his family in some ways, kind of his father and Camilla.
But most of all, what he basically says is this is the original sin.
Now, the problem is that if you say that the original sin of the royal family is Princess Di's death, this leads to a pretty stark contrast because there's another brother, right?
And that older brother, William, is going to be the king.
And William does not blame the institution for his mother's death.
William is not a person who's trying to undermine the institution.
He's going to be the king.
And so what that means is that Harry has to somehow draw some sort of excuse as to why he is not taking the role that he is given in stride the same way that William is.
And that is one of the themes running throughout the book.
So as we say, this whole thing begins with Princess Di, and it gets very weird because the ghostwriter is a fan of Jung and Freud.
He starts inserting very odd allusions throughout the book that are somewhat creepy.
Harry sort of makes himself out to be the only legitimate heir of Diana in the book.
He says stuff like this, I'd inherited this from her, I thought, along with her nose, her blue eyes, her love of people, her hatred of smugness and fakery and all things posh.
That's what he inherited from Diana.
He's the true sort of Diana in the family.
And as it'll turn out later, Meghan Markle is the real Diana figure in the family.
And listen, the beginning of the book, the first 120 pages, really, really sad because about a kid losing his mom.
And telling himself the lie that his mom isn't actually dead, she just ran away.
And it's very sad and very upsetting.
Obviously.
It also leads to some obviously deep-seated psychological issues for Harry.
I mean, here is a clip.
This is the most probably well-publicized clip of the book so far.
Of Prince Harry talking about a point in his life where he went to the North Pole and proceeded to get frostbite on his penis.
And that led him to try to take measures to alleviate the symptoms of this frostbite and leads to this extraordinarily weird clip.
My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.
The last place I wanted to be was Frostnippistan.
I'd been trying some home remedies, including one recommended by a friend.
She urged me to apply Elizabeth Arden cream.
My mom used that on her lips.
You want me to put that on my Todger?
It works, Harry.
Trust me.
I found a tube, and the minute I opened it, the smell transported me through time.
I felt as if my mother was right there in the room.
Then I took a smidge and applied it down there.
Yeah.
This is a troubled human.
That is not good.
We learned some things, aside from the word Todger, in that particular clip.
So, if the original sin of the royal family is the death and treatment of Princess Di, a sin for which Prince Harry never forgives anybody, and again, there's some of this stuff that does seem Fairly, I wouldn't say unforgivable, very difficult.
I mean, the fact that you had a 12-year-old walking behind his mother's coffin at a state funeral in front of millions of people watching, that's brutal.
I mean, that's brutal stuff, no question.
However, does that provide the excuse for your new moral system being dissociation from your family and yelling at your family publicly and going on television and essentially saying that they are racist and then buying it back?
Because your wife, who seems like somewhat of a harpy, as we'll get to in just a moment, has taken advantage of you, which is really the story of the book as well.
It's about a young man who is very troubled in search of some sort of safe haven, and he finds it in a woman who is pretty clearly seeking to take advantage of his position.
So much of the book is wrapped up in this sort of narcissistic, small-minded, petty sort of grievance.
If Queen Elizabeth had written a memoir, it wouldn't read anything like this.
We can point out.
And it's all the sense of victimization.
Quote, centuries ago, royal men and women were considered divine.
Now they were insects.
What fun to pluck their wings.
He's a super giant victim.
Now, here's the thing.
All the other members of the royal family are in the same boat.
All the other members of the royal family are under a microscope, but they're not reacting the same way that Prince Harry is.
And herein lies the problem for Prince Harry.
So he has to blame everybody else for his own bad decision making.
So he blames the press, for example, for covering his teenage drug use.
Now, again, should we cover minors the same way that the press covers the royals?
I think not.
It is also true that Prince Harry was fairly regularly lying to the press about his drug use, right?
Quote, of course, I had been doing cocaine around this time is when he was 17 years old, I believe.
And then you had the controversy surrounding Prince Harry about when he wore that Nazi uniform.
Remember, there's a big controversy.
He went to a Halloween party and he wore a Nazi uniform because Prince Harry, as is very clear in the book, is not a high IQ person.
And so in the book, he blames William and Kate.
Quote, I phoned Willie and Kate, asked what they thought.
Nazi uniform, they said.
Off we went to the party where no one looked twice at my costume.
All the natives and colonials were more focused on getting drunk and groping each other.
But this reporter spotted something else.
Hello, what's this?
Despair?
As a Nazi?
Again, this sense of peculiar victimization when you make a pretty obviously terrible decision to wear a Nazi uniform to a Halloween party.
Pretty, pretty amazing stuff.
And again, one of the running themes here is that it's not that Harry makes bad decisions, which he does throughout the book.
The theme is that people notice that he makes bad decisions and cover him making the bad decisions.
And he blames presumably Camilla specifically for his own press coverage.
So in this book, the evil stepmother is the one who is leaking to the press nearly the entire time.
That is the story that he is trotting out there.
So he doesn't just go after After the press.
I mean, he goes after the press really hard.
In fact, his language about the press is really kind of shocking.
He actually compares the press to Islamic terrorists, which is quite a statement considering that in the book he brags about killing 25 members of the Taliban.
He says, the Paps, the paparazzi, had always been grotesque people.
But as I reached maturity, they were worse.
You could see it in their eyes, their body language.
They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized.
Their mullahs were editors, the same ones you'd vowed to do better after mummy died.
And of course, he also characterized Rupert Murdoch personally as a Taliban-like person.
Quote, I was around this time I began to think Rupert Murdoch was evil.
No, strike that.
I began to know that he was.
Of course, I didn't care for Murdoch's politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban.
Again, this is him woke signaling.
OK, so he hates the press and he blames the press for his mother's death, obviously.
But really, what a lot of this is about is his despise, his deep sense of anger at his own family.
Which is what makes the book particularly ugly.
When you air dirty laundry like this, particularly when your family seems to have gone out of its way to publicly avoid criticizing you despite you making a series of bad decisions, them warning you over and over and over.
In the book, they warn Harry over and over and over that Meghan Markle is bad news and just ignores them completely.
Despite the fact that they were very much on board with him getting psychiatric help after his military service, apparently he had PTSD.
Despite the fact that they seem to facilitate a lot of his events.
that he wanted to do, including very praiseworthy things like Olympic Games for people who'd been wounded in action.
But his language with regard to his family is really quite ugly.
And he says, at the very beginning of the book, he's talking about a confrontation that he has with his father, the king, who he treats really poorly in the book.
And his brother, William, who he also treats really poorly in the book.
He says, at last I saw them, shoulder to shoulder, striding towards me.
They looked grim, almost menacing.
More, they looked tightly aligned.
A thought occurred, hang on, are we meeting for a walk or a duel?
And again, the idea here is that Willie is the bad one, right?
William is the true villain of the book.
Charles is a villain.
William is a villain.
Kate is a villain.
The press is a villain.
The institution is a villain.
The Queen is a villain.
Meghan Markle is an angel.
And Harry, of course, is just an innocent abroad, essentially.
He says, quote, my family had declared me a nullity.
The spare.
I didn't complain about it, but I didn't need to dwell on it either.
Far better in my mind not to think about certain facts, such as the cardinal rule for royal travel.
Pa and William could never be on the same flight together because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out.
But no one gave a damn whom I traveled with.
The spare could always be spared.
So you're now angry that you get to travel with your father?
So you get to travel.
He wants it both ways.
On the one hand, he says, I wish people would leave me alone.
And then on the other hand, he's like, why won't they?
Why won't they pay attention to me?
Why am I less important than my brother?
There's a lot of Cain and Abel in this particular book, for sure.
It says, no matter how much you might love someone, you could never cross the chasm between, say, monarch or child, or heir and spare, physically, but also emotionally.
And this carries forward into the way that he talks about the members of his family.
That's what makes the book pretty despicable.
When you dump on your family this way publicly, specifically for lots and lots of money, and Harry is making a boatload of money off of ripping on his family.
He's making a boatload of money off of that.
He's got a huge Netflix deal.
He did this ridiculous miniseries with Meghan Markle.
He's got a Spotify deal.
He's got deals from some major networks.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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The way that he talks about every member of his family is pretty gross.
So, for example, his father, This hasn't really struck any of the reviewers yet, but it really is a betrayal.
He talks about his father and how his father was victimized in school.
The king.
Charles.
And he says this, quote, So you're talking about your father, the king, and you're talking about how he drags around a teddy bear from his childhood.
Isn't that kind of private?
Isn't that kind of victimizing your father by revealing that to public view?
better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.
So you're talking about your father, the king, and you're talking about how he drags around a teddy bear from his childhood.
Isn't that kind of private?
Isn't that kind of victimizing your father by revealing it to public view?
His father, by the way, throughout the book is very considerate of the fact that Harry makes a bunch of dumb mistakes, ranging from drug use to dating quote-unquote page three girls.
I mean, this is a book where Harry admits to going to like Courtney Cox's house and eating mushrooms out of the fridge, like magic mushrooms out of the fridge.
I mean, this is not a book where Harry's behavior is particularly worthwhile.
And as it turns out, even his actual worthwhile behavior, his service in the military, he then talks down, which makes no sense to me.
He sort of undercuts his own military service in a couple of different ways, which truly is heroic when you serve in the military on behalf of your country.
But the sort of veil through which Harry sees his dad, again, is indicative of how he sees the institution of the monarchy in general.
He is standing on top of the monarchy to be rich and famous, and he is ripping on that institution.
And this is what makes him rich and famous in the modern world of young leadership.
And so he's talking about his dad at one point in the book, and how he had been caught Naked, at a party, on camera, which again, this stuff just keeps happening to Harry.
It's very weird.
It just keeps happening randomly.
So he's talking about his dad's response.
He didn't gloss over the facts.
Darling boy, how could you be so foolish?
My cheeks burned.
I know, I know.
But he quickly went on to say it was the foolishness of youth that he remembered being publicly vilified for youthful sins.
It wasn't fair, because youth is the time when you are by definition unfinished.
And that, by the way, is the picture of Charles throughout the book, is him being very conciliatory and solicitous of his ne'er-do-well son.
Like his dad going out of his way for his son, but he's still the bad guy.
Now, the true villain here is, of course, Camilla.
He suggests that Camilla, because obviously Charles was having an affair with Camilla, had known Camilla before he knew Diana.
Diana emerges from this book completely unscathed, as you would imagine.
I mean, Harry is, in fact, the son of Princess Di, but let's just say the Princess Di's own history was somewhat unwonderful in terms of her Marital activities or extra marital activities or whatever.
He blames Camilla for going to the press and suggests that all the bad press coverage is coming from inside the house, essentially.
Again, this is all really about the victimization of Harry.
Thershey began to play the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown with Paz blessing, we presumed again, this is all really about the victimization of Harry.
Now there's only one problem.
As I say, all of this opposition to the family, to the royalty, to the institution, to the role, to the monarchy, all of this is given the lie by the fact that his brother, his older brother, who's actually the heir is acting well within the boundaries of the role that he's expected to perform.
And so Harry has to come up with some excuse.
And the excuse is that William is mean.
The excuse is that William is cruel and malevolent and uncaring and nasty.
And therefore, William, the reason he buys into all of this is not because Harry has it wrong and Harry really ought to be somewhat grateful for the position that he's been put in.
Not with regard to the press, obviously, no one likes the paparazzi, but with regard to having the opportunity to do all the things that you, I mean, how many people would like to be born a prince of England?
And so he has to come up with some reason why William is wrong and Harry is right.
And the answer is because William is a bad, malevolent person.
So, he reads this back into history.
He basically says, throughout our entire childhood, William was very mean and cruel to me.
Now, that neglects the fact that, as he admits in the book, William actually spent an awful lot of time with him, that William roomed with him at a certain point, that William boarded with him, that William went out of his way to back him on multiple occasions.
Now, William is bad.
So, he says about William, the future king, Quote, I took it all in.
This is about the later confrontation that they have, not in their childhood.
Quote, I took it all in.
His familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me.
His alarming baldness, more advanced than my own.
I mean, this is going out of his way to slap at his brother, right?
His famous resemblance to mummy, which was aging with time.
Which was fading with time, rather.
Again, remember, Harry is the true heir to Diana.
It is William who's not the true heir to Diana because his resemblance to mummy is fading with time.
With age.
In some ways, he was my mirror.
In some ways, he was my opposite.
My beloved brother.
My arch nemesis.
How had that happened?
And then he goes back through their history.
He says that William pretended not to know him at boarding school, which again, you know, siblings treating each other not amazing when they're kids.
Generally, that doesn't become the topic of memoirs.
He talks about how they would go out and they would shoot fireworks at each other.
And one time he got Harry real good.
He says, behind us, I could just make out the future King of England plotting his revenge.
Yes, this isn't Harry's revenge against William.
Really, it's all about William's revenge against Harry.
And he takes glory, there's a certain point where he serves in the military, and Harry is allowed to serve, and William's been prevented in some ways.
He says, for one brief moment, spare outranked heir.
And near the end of the book, he basically just says it right out.
He says, William is a bad person, I'm a very good person, and William doesn't care about me.
Quote, Willie wasn't quite ready to accept defeat.
I felt properly sick and ill after everything that's happened, and I swear to you now on mummy's life that I just want you to be happy.
My voice broke as I told him softly, I really don't think you do.
So again, it's William who's the problem.
Now, remember, William isn't the one who's tattletaling to the press.
It's not William who's going on Oprah Winfrey and calling his brother a ne'er-do-well idiot.
It's not William who's going on national television and explaining that Meghan Markle is kind of a harpy.
He's been quiet this whole time.
It is Harry who's doing all of those things.
And he's doing so, presumably, in the bizarre apprehension that the family that has supported him his entire life is really nasty and mean to him.
Again, the reason that I'm spending so much time on this, folks, is because it is indicative of an entire worldview of at least two generations in the West right now.
Gen X and the Millennials.
This belief that the people who brought you into the world and who take care of you and the roles that you are given are actually bad and they hem you in and the best way for you to be a hero is to fight those roles and break free of them and then to tattletale about them and talk about how terrible they are.
He spends some time ripping on Kate.
He spends a lot of time, as I say, ripping on the press.
He even rips on the Army, which makes no sense to me.
The Army is, again, sort of the bright spot of his resume.
And yet, he still has lines like this.
He's talking about how they psychologically screened him.
What's that you say, young man?
Parents divorced?
Mom's dead?
Unresolved grief or psychological trauma?
Step this way.
He was victimized by the military.
You see, now, what's weird about that is, again, the way that he portrays the military as something he wants to keep going back to because it gives him a sense of belonging.
But then he has to rip on the military because, again, the people who he's appealing to, the sort of Meghan Markle crowd, those people don't like the military very much.
And they think that the military is a repository of colonialist bigotry.
OK, so finally, this brings us to Meghan Markle.
And this is really where sort of Harry's break happens with the royal family.
And it happens pretty obviously because Harry, throughout the entire book, is searching for someone to love him.
He is searching for someone to take care of him.
He is searching for someone to make him feel better about himself.
Here he is, one of the most famous, rich people on earth.
And he's going around, gallivanting around, staying with Hollywood friends, and dating starlets, and dating models, and going out to places in Africa to watch the beautiful animals and all the rest of this sort of stuff.
And yet he is unhappy.
And so somebody has to provide him with a sense of meaning.
And that person, as it turns out, is Meghan Markle.
And the way he portrays Meghan Markle is so cult-like and weird.
I mean, it really is.
And as someone who's been married for 15 years, I love my wife very much.
Also, the way that he talks about his wife in this book is very, very, very strange.
I mean, there is a section near the end of the book, because he keeps conflating her with Diana.
Near the end of the book, he literally brings her to Princess Di's grave.
And here is Meg's behavior at Princess Di's grave.
Quote, he leaves her at the grave of his mother, who she's never met.
Quote, when I came back, Meg was kneeling, eyes shut, palms against the stone.
I asked as we walked back to the boat what she'd prayed for.
Clarity, she said, and guidance.
Now, I'm just going to say that Harry is unbelievably gullible.
He's really, really gullible.
He's gullible because, again, she makes him feel very special, which you get.
I mean, this is presumably what people who are in love do for one another is they make each other feel special, but his gullibility is very extreme.
When I say that, I mean, this is a person who says in this book no less than twice that he believes that Meghan Markle never Googled him.
Uh, no.
No.
She literally had a lifestyle blog in which she wrote, in the lifestyle blog, about Princess Kate's wedding.
So, yeah, that's not true.
And he seems to be under the odd misapprehension, Prince Harry, that Meghan Markle simply picked him out of a lineup, that if he'd been walking through the supermarket, they would have ended up together.
Which, you know, that's a very romantic notion and all, but I do not think that it is borne out by any of the available evidence.
And so his behavior, like the way that he writes about this, is so Frankly, thick.
It's pretty amazing.
Quote, I felt pretty sure she hadn't Googled me because she was always asking questions.
She seemed to know about nothing.
So refreshing.
It showed that she wasn't impressed by royalty, which I thought the first step to surviving it.
He says this no less than twice that she had not Googled him.
I guarantee you that is not the case.
And there are other instances in the book where he talks about Meghan Markle and her behavior.
So, for example, there is one event where he brings her a present.
The present is cupcakes.
Now, I like cupcakes as much as the next dude.
My wife enjoys a good cupcake every once in a while.
Again, for seven bucks down at the local Winn-Dixie.
Meghan Markle literally went with him to Africa for like a two-week jaunt on their third date, according to Prince Harry.
And apparently this should not Google him.
Now I have a question, ladies.
Do you randomly go with men for two weeks to Africa or a week to Africa on your third date without finding out who they are?
Or is that like a serial killer move?
That's in any case.
Because he's so taken with her and because she fills all these longings that he has and because she provides him with a sense of mission, which is, of course, that the monarchy is bad and must be torn down.
Because of all that, he refuses to hear from all of the blaring red warnings that his family is providing about what Meghan Markle is.
So at one point, William warns her and he says, Meg's difficult.
And he says, oh, really?
She's rude.
She's abrasive.
She's alienated half the staff.
Not the first time he'd parroted the press narrative.
Apparently, there's all sorts of accurate reporting from inside the house, except for the stuff about Meghan Markle.
So, again, so much of this is built around the press's mean to Meghan Markle, and then he says that he wants to defend her.
And obviously, there's some Freudian aspects to this.
He wants to defend her in the same way that he feels like he wish he could have defended his mom, Princess Di, from the press.
Princess Di, by the way, used the press herself pretty aptly.
But all of this led to the break with the family.
And so the conclusion here is the one that really matters.
The conclusion here.
So at the very end of the book, Prince Harry has now left Britain.
He's left behind his family.
He's left behind the royalty.
He's left behind the monarchy.
And he sees a hummingbird.
Such a metaphor.
There are many animal metaphors in this particular book.
At the very end, there's a hummingbird that gets into their palatial estate in Los Angeles.
That is paid for by selling out his family, presumably.
And he says, quote, You're free.
Fly away.
And then against all odds and all expectations, that wonderful, magical little creature bestirred itself and did just that.
The hummingbird.
But he means him.
Right?
That's him.
You're free.
Fly away.
So this is why this book is important.
The reason this book is important, again, is because what we have in Western civilization is a true battle.
And this is true for pretty much all historic cultures.
A battle over whether you as a human being ought to respect and conform to roles and rules that have been established over generations, acknowledging the benefit of those institutions, or whether what makes you a hero is rebelling against those rules, flying away, violating all of those rules, ripping on your family, ripping on these institutions, while living off their benefits, by the way, because if it had not been for those benefits, there wouldn't be a single human reading Prince Harry's memoir.
He certainly couldn't have afforded to pay this ghostwriter to write the memoir, and I highly doubt that Prince Harry is nearly as articulate or Be stirring, as this particular memoir is.
What do we wish our leadership class to look like?
This is why the whole Prince Harry, Meghan Markle thing crosses the water and has become so political.
It's why you see so many conservatives in the United States who are angry with Prince Harry, even though they have really no stake in the monarchy.
And why you see so many people on the left who are very, very happy with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and see them as real fighters.
Now, one of the things that is notable about this book is that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle went on Oprah and basically said that members of the royal family were racists.
That does not appear anywhere in the book.
All of the allegations of racism are attributed to the press.
With that said, I think that if you see Prince Harry as sort of a sad human who has made for himself a sad life and now feels a mission in destroying that which made him sad, that is a better read on this.
And if you see that as heroic, then that says something about what you think of institutions and whether they are worthy of preserving, generally speaking.
There's a lot here to be sad about, obviously.
Prince Harry's a sad person.
Princess Di's death is tragic.
The monarchy seems like a very hard way to live, particularly for young people.
Prince Harry is now 38 years old.
And the fact that he has decided to essentially rip down an institution that provided him with all of his fame and all of his fortune, and yes, his wife, because if you were not a prince, you would not have given him a second look.
He would have been a non-college graduate who served in the military, dating the Star of Suits.
I will let you wonder whether that is a thing that normally happens.
You know, all of that is worthy of consideration as we move forward and decide which institutions are worth preserving and which people we ought to treat as heroes.
Okay, we'll get to more news in just one second.
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Okay, so meanwhile, a second batch of classified documents has now been found by Biden aides at a new location associated with Joe Biden.
According to NBC News, aides to President Joe Biden have discovered at least one additional batch of classified documents in a location separate from the Washington office he used after leaving the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Since November, after the discovery of documents with classified markings in his former office, Biden aides have been searching for any additional classified materials that might be in other locations he used, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details about the ongoing inquiry.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The Justice Department similarly had no comment.
The initial discovery of classified documents in an office used by Biden after his vice presidency was first reported on Monday by CBS News.
It is not clear exactly what the classification level was or what these classified documents were.
The first batch apparently included documents related to both Ukraine and Iran.
And, um, Joe Biden continues to maintain he has no idea what exactly is happening, which is maybe the most plausible thing that he's ever said because he never knows what exactly is happening.
But it is worth noting that back in 2018, Joe Biden said he did not have access to classified information anymore, which is weird since we found all of these documents that, you know, places he controlled.
Look, here's my understanding, and I don't know, I don't have access to classified information anymore.
I don't get briefed every morning by the agency.
Oh, oops.
So, Peter Doocy of Fox News questioned World War Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about all of this yesterday, saying, you know, the president said that it was irresponsible to keep classified documents outside of classified places.
Do you have any comments on that?
And KJP's got nothing.
On these documents, how could anyone be that irresponsible?
Isn't that what this president says about mishandling classified documents?
The president spoke to this personally.
He spoke to this personally and he, again, he believes that classified documents and information should be taken seriously.
He takes them seriously and he was surprised to learn by any records.
I disagree.
Again, this is under review by the Department of Justice and we're going to let that process continue.
How can President Biden be trusted moving forward with America's secrets?
Because his lawyers, his team, did the right thing.
But he had a closet with classified information in it that they found.
Again, again, again.
He was surprised that the records were there.
He spoke to this.
He spoke to this.
No, he didn't.
He said he didn't know why they were there or what exactly was going on.
Meanwhile, she had no comment on why exactly it took the White House and the DOJ two months to announce this.
Remember that the classified documents held by Joe Biden, this was revealed in early November, like just before the election.
And then it took two months for that to be revealed.
Amazing how unleaky the system was when it came to Joe Biden just before an election.
These documents were discovered in November 2nd.
This didn't become public until my colleagues at CBS News reported this on Monday.
That's more than two months later.
Why was the public not informed while the White House prepared a PR response for two months?
Again, this was under review.
This is under review by the Department of Justice.
I'm not going to go beyond what the President shared yesterday.
I'm not going to go beyond what my colleagues at the White House Council shared with all of you as well.
You're not going to go beyond, are you?
Well, I'm glad you are so disciplined.
Meanwhile, in other news, the U.S.
inflation rate has now eased to 6.5% in December compared with one year earlier.
That is the 6th straight month of deceleration since a mid 2022 peak.
Deceleration meaning that last month the year over year inflation rate was at like 7% and now it's at like 6.5% which is still way too high.
The year over year annual inflation rate is supposed to be at 2%.
Now, it has been declining over the past 6 months.
On an absolute level, the inflation rate is lower over the past six months than it was over the prior six months before that.
On a monthly basis, the CPI fell 0.1% in December due to sharply falling energy prices, food prices increased, and those also slowed last month.
That compared with a gain of 0.1% in November and 0.4% in October.
The Federal Reserve increased interest rates aggressively in 2022 to combat inflation.
Officials indicated in December they expected to raise rates further in 2023.
CEOs are expecting a sort of short recession at this point.
I would not be surprised if it goes a little bit further than that.
Still, with all of this said, The peak rate that the Federal Reserve is likely to raise the interest rate to is not going to be 5%.
It'll probably be higher than 5.5% in order to really tame inflation.
So you're seeing a lot of preemptive celebration, I think, at this point.
But wage gains, hiring gains suggest That it is going to be very difficult for the Fed to achieve a full soft landing where we don't hit any recession at all.
We just bring down that inflation and tame it.
We're starting to feel the pain already.
You've seen major tech companies laying off large numbers of people.
So while the Biden administration celebrates at the moment, because those unemployment numbers are quite solid.
And the inflation rate is in fact coming down.
What we are going to end up with on the other end is going to be recession and stagnation.
And then it's just a question of how much of Biden's agenda actually gets implemented as to how long that stagnation is in fact going to last.
All righty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We will be getting into just how Pete Buttigieg screwed up the FAA.
And yeah, he kind of did.
Plus, we'll be getting into House Republicans trying to protect the unborn after they are actually born, botched abortions, and Democrats screaming and shouting about it.
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