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March 30, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

55:38

How The West Turned Kids Suicidal

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	So, new facts are still emerging about the horrors that happened in this Nashville shooting, but one thing is perfectly clear.
	The transgender school shooter, who the media are now claiming is a victim of society, and that, of course, is why a trans person would go and shoot a bunch of school children, this person was, in fact, suicidal.
	There are texts between the trans school shooter and a friend, those texts came out yesterday, and the texts make very clear that this person wanted death by cop.
	She wrote, quote, Basically, that post I made on here about you, that was a suicide note.
	I'm planning to die today. This is not a joke.
	You'll probably hear about me on the news after I die.
	This is my last goodbye. I love you. See you again in another life.
	I don't want to live. I'm so sorry. I'm not trying to upset you or get attention.
	I just need to die. I wanted to tell you first.
	My family doesn't know what I'm about to do.
	One day this will make more sense.
	I've left more than enough evidence behind, but something bad is about to happen.
	So we've been discussing this particular school shooting in the context of trans ideology, in the context of a radicalized notion that American society is to blame if you don't feel validated in your belief that you are a member of the opposite sex and all the rest.
	But There's something else that is happening here.
	And it's not just the the homicidal intent of the shooter, which obviously is a major factor, it's the suicidal intent of the shooter.
	Because this wasn't just a homicide, it wasn't just a murderous shooting spree, it was one where the shooter very clearly intended to die.
	And I think it's impossible to ignore that factor here, considering the fact that we have more and more reports of young people across the West who are being hospitalized for self-harm and suicidal ideation.
	So the New York Times has a piece today and it is titled, Hospitals are increasingly crowded with kids who try to harm themselves, study finds.
	The portion of American hospital beds occupied by children with suicidal or self-harming behavior has soared over the course of a decade.
	A large study of admissions to acute care hospital shows an analysis of 4.7 million pediatric hospitalizations by researchers at Dartmouth published on Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA, found that between 2009 and 2019, mental health hospitalizations increased by 25.8%.
	It cost $1.37 billion.
	That study did not include psych hospitals.
	So, the number at psych hospitals must be absolutely overwhelming.
	This is just at regular hospitals, where people essentially bring a suicidal kid into the ER.
	Especially striking was the rise in suicidal behavior as a cause.
	The portion of pediatric mental health hospitalizations involving suicidal or self-harming behavior rose to 64.2% in 2019, from 30.7% in 2009.
	So, again, that is shocking.
	These are shocking statistics.
	As a proportion of overall pediatric hospitalizations, suicidal behavior rose to 12.7% in 2019 from 3.5% in 2009.
	0.7% in 2019 from 3.5% in 2009.
	So in other words, of all the times a kid went to the hospital in 2019, more than one in 10 was because the kid was attempting some form of suicidal behavior.
	There's been a massive rise in suicidal behavior among American youth, but it is not just among American youth.
	It's actually happening across the West.
	Over at Jonathan Heights at Substack, he has an entire piece discussing the teen mental illness epidemic, and he says that it has now gone international.
	You can see in this particular chart, for example, that percentage of U.S.
	teens with major depression In 2004, about 13% of girls reported major depression.
	In 2021, almost 30% of teen girls were reporting major depression.
	That is a 145% increase since 2010.
	For boys, they are now experiencing major depression at a rate of about 12%.
	girls were reporting major depression. That is 145% increase since 2010. For boys, they are now experiencing major depression at a rate of about 12%. That is a 161% increase since 2010. When it When it comes to U.S.
	teens admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-harm aged 10 to 14, there's been a 188% increase among American girls from 2010 to now, all the way up to 500 teens per 100,000 in the population for girls.
	There's been a 48% increase for boys since 2010.
	to now all the way up to 500 teens per 100,000 in the population for girls.
	There's been a 48% increase for boys since 2010.
	Massive spikes in anxiety.
	That by the way does not apply to people who are age 50.
	For people age 50+, absolutely flat.
	For people age 35 to 49, slight increase.
	And then as you go lower down on the youth spectrum, you see more and more anxiety.
	92% increase in anxiety reported for kids aged 18 to 25, young people aged 18 to 25, since 2010.
	young people aged 18 to 25 since 2010. In Canada, by the way, we are seeing a decline in mental health as well. For example, there's been a 15% decrease in mental health. Canadian men reporting mental health between the ages of 15 and 30 since 2009. For Canadian women, there's been a 29% decrease in Canadian women reporting health mentally.
	Age 15 to 30 since 2009.
	Massive spike in emergency department visits for Ontarian teens 13 to 17.
	138% increase since 2010.
	Same thing is mirrored in the United Kingdom.
	We've seen a 61.7% increase among British girls aged 11 to 15 since 2004.
	Same thing is mirrored in the United Kingdom.
	We've seen a 61.7% increase among British girls aged 11 to 15 since 2004.
	We've seen 137.5% increase in depression in girls aged 11 to 15 in Great Britain since 2004.
	You see this in Australia.
	You see it in basically every English-speaking country.
	What you are seeing is a massive spike in depression and suicidal ideation.
	And this raises a serious question.
	What exactly is driving all of this?
	Well, the going theory right now is that the major problem here is being drawn into social media, the world of social media, the world of cell phones, because that really started to rise among young teens in 2010, 2011, 2012.
	But that doesn't really answer the question, because what is it about social media?
	What is it about the social media world that is driving kids to mental illness, suicidal ideation?
	Social contagions.
	What exactly is happening here?
	We'll get into some rationales for this in just one second.
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	All right, so let's talk about some of the causes of suicidal ideation and depression.
	So the going theory is that it's people being mean to one another.
	That it's bullying.
	It's people who are just unkind.
	Now, there's a problem with that theory, which is, do you think there's more bullying in schools now than there was, say, 50 years ago?
	I'd be hard-pressed to imagine that that's the case, considering how hard schools have cracked down on bullying.
	Is it really that people are less tolerant than they were 50 years ago?
	Because, again, suicidal ideation rates are at extraordinary levels.
	Is it really that marginalized people, Black, Hispanic, Jewish, Asian, marginalized populations, historically marginalized populations, those are the ones who are experiencing suicidal ideation at these radically elevated rates?
	Well, it's true for some of these populations, but certainly not for all of these populations.
	So, what exactly is driving all this?
	Well, back in 1897, A man who's very often considered the father of sociology, named Emil Durkheim, wrote a book called On Suicide, in which he talked about why exactly suicide was happening.
	He was writing in Germany at the time, and he wrote about the German suicide statistics, and he went into very granular detail about what causes suicide.
	And essentially what he said is that when social institutions start to break down, when people feel a loss of meaning, that's when suicide starts to jump.
	When people feel unmoored from the society and institutions around them, They feel what he called enemy and a feeling of malaise.
	And this malaise tipped over into oppression and then very often into suicidal ideation.
	He talks in On Suicide is Durkheim about ritual.
	And what he says is that ritual mediates essentially how society works and what people understand about themselves.
	Because rituals are a form of values, right?
	We act on our values in rituals that we perform with one another.
	If the idea is that we're supposed to be civil to one another, what does that mean?
	That means that we shake hands or we open doors for one another.
	It means that we greet each other and look each other in the eyes.
	There are certain social cohesion rituals that we all perform really without thinking about it because we've been civilized according to those lines and socialized by our parents and by the society around us.
	Well, when modern society attacks rituals, when it attacks things like, say, going to church as a ritual, when it discards that stuff, it's, oh, it's unreasonable.
	Why does it matter if a man opens the door for a woman?
	Why does it matter if you shake hands?
	Why does it matter if you see faces or if you see masks instead?
	Why does any of that matter?
	Rationalize it to me.
	Well, you're not just attacking meaningless rituals.
	Rituals very often have stood the test of time because, again, they are reflective of an underlying value system.
	When you attack the rituals of everyday life, when you attack language itself, what you are doing is removing the elementary form of social cohesion.
	And here's what Durkheim said, this is all the way back in 1897, quote, suicide is eminently contagious. This contagion is chiefly observable among individuals whose constitution makes them more easily accessible in general to all kinds of suggestion, and in particular to ideas of suicide, because they're not only led to reproduce everything that impresses them, but they are particularly liable to repeat an act for which they already have some inclination. So think of people who are emotionally vulnerable. Now, one of the things that you may have noticed in the statistics that I was reading before about the contagion of of suicidal ideation and oppression is that it is very heavily centered in girls.
	Teenage girls have it way worse than boys.
	Boys have it some, girls have it way worse.
	Why?
	Well, because teenage girls are more emotionally vulnerable than teenage boys.
	Teenage boys, sociologically, tend to externalize their problems.
	They act out against the world, they get violent with others.
	Teenage girls tend to internalize their problems.
	And they are also very susceptible to social contagions, which is why the fashion industry targets teenage girls.
	The idea is that if you can make something trendy among teenage girls, then pretty soon all of them pick that up.
	So if you see an increase in suicidal ideation and anxiety, that starts to become a social contagion, particularly when you're talking about a vulnerable subgroup.
	And Durkheim continues, he says, the facts are far from confirming the popular idea that suicide is chiefly caused by the burdens of life.
	We find on the contrary, it decreases when those burdens become heavier.
	And he looked at different subgroups within German society at the time.
	What he found is that there was actually no correlation between subgroups that had been subjugated or victimized and suicidal ideation.
	In fact, what he found in Germany at the time is that Jewish suicidal ideation was extremely low, even though Jews were very put upon in Germany at the time.
	The basic idea, again, that life difficulties are what cause suicidal ideation, that is not borne out by nearly any of the data.
	There's actually not a significant link between, say, poverty and suicidal ideation in the United States.
	In fact, some of the highest level income groups have disproportionately high levels of suicidal ideation.
	There are certain situations, say, the Holocaust, in which you see people committing suicide because they literally have no reason to live.
	But that is rare, historically speaking.
	Typically speaking, again, the burdens of life, the fact that people are experiencing hardship, that does not mean they've lost meaning.
	And it's the loss of meaning that Durkheim is really talking about.
	So here's what he establishes.
	He says he has established three propositions, says Durkheim.
	One, suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society.
	In other words, if you're part of a religious community, you are less likely to commit suicide.
	Two, suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of domestic society.
	In other words, if you have a family and you are integrated into a family structure or a kinship structure, you are significantly less likely to commit suicide or suffer from suicidal ideation.
	And three, Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of political society.
	In other words, if you feel that you have a place in your political society, you are less likely to commit suicide, you're less likely to feel unmoored.
	Instead, suicide rates vary inversely, in general, with the degree of integration of the social groups to which the individual belongs.
	Right, the more you are involved in the intermediate groups of society, you know, the communities of society, the less you are marginalized and self-marginalizing from those groups, the less likely you are to suffer from suicidal ideation.
	Now, the West has decided that there are essentially two paths to go down in fighting this sort of marginalization.
	One is that we require of people who are feeling marginalized that they actually attempt some level of conformity with the community.
	Because after all, if you explode the standards of the community, it's no longer a community and everybody loses the social cohesion.
	But then, essentially, the left has argued that the only way that we can have true social cohesion is to have no standards.
	This has been wildly unsuccessful because, again, the social fabric, if you fray it too much, it just doesn't exist anymore.
	If you keep pulling the threads of the social fabric apart by saying it needs to be expanded to include everybody, then eventually you just have a series of threads and you don't actually have any sort of fabric anymore.
	The quilt comes apart.
	And that's essentially what's happened in our society.
	We've tugged so hard at the threads of our social fabric that it's fallen apart all in the name of the individual and preventing the marginalization of the individual, instead of recognizing that there actually is, if you want to be a cohesive person, a duty for you to integrate into the society around you and to, yes, abide by some of its rules and some of its roles and some of its restrictions, and that people find meaning in those rules, roles, and restrictions.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so...
	Back to the causes of increases in suicidal levels, societal levels of suicidal ideation.
	So, Emil Durkheim writing in On Suicide, he says, however individualized a person may be, there's always something collective that remains, which is the feeling of depression and melancholy that arises from this exaggerated individualism.
	When one has nothing else to share, one participates through sadness.
	In other words, you think of yourself as an individual and that you have moved beyond the boundaries of society, but you still need to share something.
	And so, ironically, by separating off from the society that you say marginalizes you, you still need a new society.
	So what do you do?
	You find other people who are miserable, and you hang out with those other people who are miserable.
	The onlines make this super easy.
	You find like-minded people who are equally miserable, and then you share a social contagion with them.
	Again, amazing that Durkheim was predicting this back in 1897.
	He suggests that a generalized unmooring through a belief in the unfairness of the system also leads to depression and suicidal ideation.
	So instead of you looking within yourself and deciding, you know, I'm doing my best and whatever my best is is essentially good enough, you decide that you deserve more.
	You decide that society is unfair and therefore you're constantly desiring a higher level of success and you're blaming society when you fail.
	Well, if you feel like you're constantly running up against reality, that is, in fact, depressing.
	He says, under this pressure, everyone in his particular sphere has a vague idea of the limit toward which his ambition may reach and does not aspire to anything beyond. This is in a well-integrated society. If at least he respects the rules and submits to the collective authority, that is to say, if he has a healthy moral constitution, he feels it is not right to demand any more than this.
	A goal and a limit are thus set for desires.
	But, when there are no goals and there are no limits to desires, and you demand everything from a system that can't provide it to you, you end up depressed, you end up with the enemy, you end up with suicidal ideation.
	Again, the notion of the individual as integrated into society and civilizing into society was well known in the psychiatric community, including all the way up to Freud.
	It's really in the post-Freudian era, in the 1960s, that people start to argue that the individual ought to fight the social fabric itself and liberate himself in order to be free.
	Now, there's nothing more depressing.
	I just want you to think for a moment on your own level.
	Think for a second about being alone on a desert island.
	Does that constitute freedom to you?
	Would you be free?
	You're just alone the rest of your life.
	You'd be alone on a desert island.
	No rules.
	No rules.
	No restrictions.
	You're able to do whatever you want on this desert island.
	No other people.
	Nothing.
	No societal institutions.
	Are you free or are you basically in prison?
	For the vast majority of people, they would say that that is essentially hell.
	Hell is, they say, the joke, of course, is hell is other people.
	That is absolutely wrong.
	Hell is being absolutely alone.
	There's a reason why in prison, solitary confinement is a punishment.
	Human beings are social creatures.
	We seek institutions that make us feel embedded.
	And when you destroy all of those institutions, what you're going to end up with is a lot of free radicals.
	And that's exactly what we are seeing.
	We have decided, as a society, that we are going to unmoor ourselves.
	We're going to destroy all of the everyday rituals.
	Because why do those rituals need to exist in the first place?
	You can't explain why the ritual exists?
	Doesn't matter that it's worked for thousands of years.
	Let's get rid of the ritual.
	And if it hits the underlying values, so be it.
	Let's get rid of those intermediate social groups.
	Those ones have been repressive.
	They've been making you feel bad.
	And as we all know, bullying is the real cause of suicide.
	So if a social group makes demands of you that you don't particularly like, instead of attempting to conform to the social group or attempting to adjust to the social group, attempting to find your place or tolerance within the social group while acknowledging that the social group isn't necessarily wrong, instead of doing that, why don't we just explode the social groups?
	And then we can build new social groups in the online space of miserable people finding one another.
	And let's add on to that a creation of an unrealistic expectation which is equality of outcome no matter your activity.
	You can blame society for all of your failures and then you can have outsized expectations of life.
	Expectations that will be repeatedly disappointed because it turns out not everybody is capable of doing everything.
	You feel non-embedded in the economy, non-embedded in your community, non-embedded in your church, non-embedded in your family.
	All the restrictive apparatuses have melted away and you're left alone.
	Atomized.
	As a consolation, we'll give you this AirSats thing called a cell phone, and this AirSats community on the cell phone will allow you to reach out to other miserable people via Facebook, and then you can have Reddit groups with these people, and you can talk about how miserable you are and how terrible society is, and then, when a social contagion begins to spread, you will be prime availability for that social contagion.
	If you're a teenage girl and you feel alienated from mom and dad, instead of saying, maybe you ought to listen to the wisdom of mom and dad, we say, no, no, no.
	You need to be freed of mom and dad.
	Mom and dad are the repressive force.
	In fact, we will set up surrogate parents for you in the online space on the TikToks, who will tell you that perhaps you're not a member of your own gender.
	If you're feeling alienated from your religious community, maybe it's not that you should go talk with a priest or a pastor or a rabbi about how you can become more integrated and feel more solidarity with your community.
	Don't go do charity work or something.
	Don't go to church.
	Stop going to church and instead start sounding off about how oppressive that community has been to you with other free radicals who are also miserable in the online space.
	The online space has basically allowed for the false notion that there can be a community of people who are entirely separated from all social institutions, but they've created their own social institution.
	But it's not a social institution.
	It's just a group of people who are very, very unhappy.
	Again, Durkheim predicted exactly this.
	And we are seeing this in virtually every arena of American life.
	This is not a hypothetical.
	This is just how the West now works.
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	Okay, so.
	The breakdown of these intermediate social institutions, the breakdown of ritual, the breakdown of a society in which we expect that our hard work will be rewarded, but that we are not going to be able to succeed beyond our actual abilities.
	The breakdown of all those things leads to the exactly the sort of anime that you would expect.
	Exactly the sort of depression and malaise that you would expect.
	And we talked a little bit about this poll from the Wall Street Journal N.O.R.C., which showed America, quote, pulling back from all of the values that we traditionally think of as American.
	And you can see it right here.
	Again, the percentage of people who say in America that patriotism is important to them has dropped from 70% in 1998 to south of 40% in 2023.
	Patriotism is the way that you find solidarity with your fellow citizens.
	It's going on July 4th to a picnic and watching fireworks and recognizing that America is a great country that you share with a bunch of other Americans and feeling a sense of solidarity with those people.
	Religion, the importance of religion, has declined in the American mind from above 60% in 1998 to well below 40% in 2023.
	Having kids, this is like the basis of how most people historically have felt a sense of meaning.
	That orients you toward the future.
	It innately orients you toward values because you then have to decide what are the values that you want to pass on to the next generation.
	But fewer and fewer Americans are having kids.
	In fact, by polling data, the percentage of Americans who say that having children is an important value to them has dropped from about 60% in 1998 to about 30% in 2023.
	By the way, any society in which only 30% of people say that having children is an important value to them is a society that is basically doomed.
	When it comes to community involvement itself, that has dropped off a cliff.
	From just 2019 to 2023, it has dropped from about 60% all the way down close to 20%.
	Meanwhile, the only arena in which Americans have increased their feeling of value importance is money.
	More Americans believe that making money is very important to them now than believe that in 1998.
	Which is precisely as Durkheim would suggest.
	Because most Americans are now believers that they are owed a particular amount of money.
	They are owed a living.
	They are owed a certain level of success by the world.
	And if the world doesn't provide it, it's because the world is broken.
	And by polling data, a growing share of childless adults in the United States don't ever expect to have children.
	In 2021, the percentage of non-parents aged 18 to 49 saying that they are not too likely or not at all likely to have children.
	Again, this is adults aged 18 to 49 who don't have kids yet.
	44% of those people say that they are unlikely to have children someday.
	That is a shocking statistic.
	I mean, The majority of childless adults, by the way, say the reason that they're not going to have kids is they just don't want to.
	It's not because of medical reasons or financial reasons.
	56% say they just don't want to have kids.
	That is a lack of future orientation.
	That is a lack of goals.
	That is a lack of values.
	And by the way, you lose that, you're not going to have much of a family, are you?
	And again, the kinship family was built not just around mom and dad, it was built around mom, dad, kids, grandparents, cousins, and everybody else.
	And inside my own personal life, the sources of meaning to me that I gained in my own personal life, my wife, my children, my extended family, both my parents and my in-laws live near us.
	That is a deliberate decision that we made.
	Two of my sisters and their kids live near us.
	We live in a very socially rich religious community in which everybody knows one another.
	We know all of our neighbors.
	Now, I can tell you that it's made a huge difference in our life.
	When we moved from California to Florida, we were in a community that I think was a lot colder.
	We didn't have nearly as many friends in California as we do in Florida.
	And the community was not as safe.
	So you couldn't just walk around the community knowing that, you know, the next door neighbor was right there.
	There's crime on the streets in LA.
	And that also lent a sense of isolation.
	Moving to Florida means that I share a lot of values with people who live very close to me.
	And then, we had a lot of my siblings move nearby, we had my in-laws move nearby, and suddenly we had this enormous kinship network.
	It makes my kids' life a lot better.
	It makes them feel a lot more grounded.
	It gives them a lot of sources of guidance and wisdom.
	And especially when it's reinforcing wisdom.
	Well, when you have a bunch of people who are giving the same lecture over and over that values matter, it turns out that kids learn that values matter.
	And when you isolate kids from all of those values, well, then they're going to learn, presumably, that those values are not particularly important.
	And the problem is that when they lack values, and they learn that from mom and dad, Or maybe, you know, they're kids who aren't born now because we're just having fewer kids.
	But the kids who are born, they're lacking these values for mom and dad.
	And then we're surprised when they feel lost and adrift and when they seek online communities of toxic people to lie to them about the happiness that lies on the other end of the hormonal rainbow.
	Right now as a society, we're fragmenting again.
	Societies that hold together don't hold together because of their diversity.
	The lie that diversity is our strength is in fact a lie.
	Unless you're talking about a diverse community oriented toward a higher goal.
	Diverse communities oriented toward higher goals.
	Playing within the rules of the game.
	Those are communities that are durable and that grow healthy children.
	But those are increasingly rare.
	Robert Nisbet, another sociologist, wrote in a book called The Twilight of Authority about this.
	He said, It's actually not sexual immorality, he says, that weakens the family.
	It's a weakening of the family that generates what we call sexual immorality.
	and industrial have loosened the economic and political ties of the family. In the process, they've blurred accustomed roles, separating the sexes and also the generations. It's actually not sexual immorality, he says, that weakens the family. It's a weakening of the family that generates what we call sexual immorality. In other words, when we got rid of the economic incentives for families to stay together, that was a massive problem.
	When the economy started treating families not as the key units, but individuals as the key units, and that happened largely as a result of industrialization and the decline of religious community. Well, the predictable result is the fragmentation of families and you get as a result of that sexual immorality and sexual promiscuity.
	Robert Nisbet suggested, this is again way back in the 50s, that we were living in a twilight period.
	And he was ahead of his time, because the 50s were not quite a twilight time, but now it's pretty clear that we may be in a twilight time.
	He says, in the twilight periods, casting aside becomes its own justification.
	In such ages, there is commonly a turning to the child, to the noble savage, to the barbarian, to the demented, to all those for whom language in any rich sense is yet to be achieved, or to whom it is in some manner denied.
	An emphasis grows even in literature and philosophy upon these special kinds of wisdom which are thought to lie in the preliterate or semi-literate.
	I mean, if you don't see this in American society today, the attempt to get guidance from the Greta Thunbergs of which she had access to a higher knowledge.
	Well, how about traditional wisdom which used to provide access to the higher knowledge?
	And also tied you into a community, a community of elders and a wider community of people who agree with those values.
	When you start turning to the quote-unquote outsiders for wisdom that has never been tried or tested or true.
	That is a result of tearing down.
	The casting aside of the rules and the roles leads to precisely what we are seeing right now, that societal breakdown.
	And this is why, when you see members of the media, and they've been going on in recent days about, you know, all these Republicans, all these conservatives, they're focusing on things like, you know, the transgender movement, or they're focusing in on CRT or drag queens or all this kind of stuff.
	Why aren't they focusing in on guns?
	Because guns are not inherently the problem.
	Guns are a tool.
	There were a lot of guns in American society in 1950.
	There are a lot of guns in American society today.
	There is a wide difference in terms of the mental health hospitalizations that are happening for children today.
	There's a wide difference in the amount of depression, anxiety in our society today.
	That's what we are looking at.
	Every time we look at a truly tragic situation involving mental health, we are looking at a symptom of the mental health breakdown.
	The guns just exacerbate the mental health breakdown.
	And this is why it's so off-kilter for so many of our commentators to be like, why are you focusing it on the societal forces tearing apart the social fabric instead of focusing it on the gun?
	Because again, I would like to get at the root of the problem.
	The root of the problem is break all of these societal vessels, break all the institutions, rip apart that fabric, and what you end up with is atomized individuals who seek each other out on the internet and make each other progressively more insane.
	Here's some examples.
	John Heilemann, terrible commentator over at MSNBC.
	He, again, is trying to suggest that Republicans, Conservatives, you know, they're spending all this time on critical race theory, but why aren't they just banning guns?
	So, once again, let me point out that there are massive gun laws in California that have seen a series of school shootings.
	Banning the gun's just ineffective social policy.
	But the real question I have to ask for these folks is why are you so hell-bent on defending Critical Race Theory and Drag Queen Story Hour?
	Why are you so hell-bent on defending the principle that boys can become girls and girls can become boys and that small children should be taught all of this?
	Why are you pretending?
	That it's religious bigotry that is causing alienation and thus suicidal ideation when religion is at a low ebb in the United States, like literally in American history.
	Why are you pretending all of these things?
	The answer is many of you are trying to exacerbate exactly the societal falling apart that makes this problem happen in the first place.
	Get to more on this in just one moment.
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	Also, a lot of people say that science and religion aren't linked.
	Well, that's stupid.
	Science and religion are inherently linked.
	The very premises of science, an understandable universe the human mind is capable of reflecting, That is a religious premise.
	Watch Jordan Peterson explain how the pursuit of science began in religious institutions in his special Logos and Literacy.
	One thing that's quite striking about modern rational culture is this insistence that the religious tradition of the West and the scientific tradition are somehow at fundamental odds.
	I mean, I used to believe that, I think, when I was young, at least to some degree.
	Although now I'm very curious about where that idea came from, because it's absolutely clear, first of all, that the universities themselves emerged out of the monasteries.
	That's just completely unquestionable.
	Oxford and Cambridge are monasteries for all intents and purposes, and so...
	It's tremendously insightful.
	the idea emerged out of the church, and then the notion that the universe is in fact intelligible and that the pursuit of truth would be redemptive, that's a fundamentally religious idea, and then the scientific endeavor itself, given figures like Newton for example, was embedded inside that religious tradition.
	It's tremendously insightful, it's harsh truths that many people do not understand.
	This is the part where I'd normally tell you Logos and Literacy is only available for Daily Wire Plus members, but that's not true.
	We're making it available for everyone for free at dailywireplus.com, but only for a limited amount of time.
	You need to go to Logos and Literacy today.
	Go watch it at dailywireplus.com.
	Again, that's dailywireplus.com.
	Okay, as I say, many in the media seem almost dedicated to the proposition that the social fabric is just not important, and therefore preservation of the social fabric is a waste of time.
	What we have to focus in on is technocratic, governmental, tyrannical cram-downs.
	If we just focus in on the overarching state and its ability to give you all the small pleasures of life and protect you from all the vicissitudes of life, everything will be fixed.
	All evil will go away if we ban all the guns, for example, and we have to stop focusing on societal issues like why drag queens insist on performing in front of children and critical race theory perverting the minds of our kids into the idea that the social systems are all corrupt.
	We have to stop focusing on that stuff.
	It's just not important.
	It's all a distraction.
	To some of us, it's not just a distraction.
	It is the key issue.
	If you wish to fray the fabric of the social community, attack its institutions and claim they are fundamentally illegitimate, and then try to teach kids that basic truths are false.
	These are very key issues.
	And when you're talking about mental health and the breakdown of it, the rise in chaotic mental illness in western society.
	Again, destroy the institutions and see what happens next. Destroy all the barriers between human beings and the chaos that surrounds them in the world and you end up with absolute confusion.
	Here's Joe Scarborough though, suggesting that it's all phony concern. They're aggressively going after drag queen shows.
	They are aggressively going after all of these phony issues, like calling things that aren't CRT, CRT.
	That's freaking librarians out and teachers out because they don't want to get fired.
	They can't afford to be fired.
	So they're pulling Roberto Clemente books from the shelf and Hank Aaron books from the shelf.
	They'll go after that because they see that as a great threat to children.
	But as John Hyland asked, what's the body count?
	For so-called wokeness, which by the way, a word that's used so much, it literally means nothing anymore.
	And what's the body count on social falling apart?
	Well, I mean, I think there's a pretty high body count, as it turns out, on dispossessed youths doing damage to themselves and others.
	And those dispossessed youths are dispossessed for a reason.
	It is not because of poverty.
	It is not because of quote-unquote societal bullying.
	It's not because the institutions of Christian conservatism are so damned mean.
	That's not why any of this is happening.
	You have abandoned children.
	You have left them adrift.
	You wouldn't do this in any other area of kids' life, but you've decided to do it with all the most crucial, meaningful institutions in their lives.
	You wouldn't let your kid free in a candy store literally every meal, every day, and then be shocked when they end up with type 2 diabetes.
	And yet we basically do that with the internet.
	We basically do that with taking them out of churches, taking them out of religious schools, taking them out of social institutions and communities.
	This is what we do by destroying families, by suggesting that all forms of family are equally meritorious, and that a single mom is just as healthy for a kid as a mom and a dad, or two men or two women are exactly the same as a mom and a dad.
	All of this nonsense that we have done for presumably our own Sense of liberty, freedom, and happiness.
	All this stuff has left kids unmoored.
	Yes, there's a body count to this sort of stuff.
	That body count doesn't necessarily come in the form of school shootings, thank God.
	It doesn't come necessarily in the form of actual death.
	Sometimes it comes in the form of broken lives.
	Sometimes it comes in the form of anxious, depressed kids by the millions out there.
	And those rates skyrocketing generation after generation.
	We gotta pretend social institutions don't matter, it's key.
	Because again, key to the left-wing program is the notion that subjective individualism is the only thing that matters.
	That the only value that matters is that you feel subjectively good about yourself only in the moment.
	And that anything that robs you of that feeling in the moment is bad for you.
	Well, that's a lie, it's a lie.
	Many of the things that make you feel good in the long run make you feel terrible in the moment.
	School, as a good example, for my kids, every morning, my six-year-old gets up, literally every morning he says, I don't wanna go to school.
	He says, why do I have to go to school?
	I hate school.
	I don't want to go to school, my six-year-old son.
	And I say to him, because I would like for you to be successful and not stupid.
	Because as it turns out, school is quite good for you.
	Not only does it socialize you to the other kids, not only do you learn lessons if you send your kids to a proper school that parents want you to be taught, but also you learn how to think.
	You learn how to do things.
	It makes you more productive.
	But somehow we've decided that when it comes to things that are much more crucial than even math or reading or writing, you know, like social values and morality and how we treat other people and what are the important, meaningful things in life that we ought to spend our lives pursuing, we just throw our hands up and say, well, you know what?
	Our value system is be nice.
	That's our value system.
	Our value system is just, I'll tell you, be nice.
	Be nice is not a value system.
	It does not discriminate between that which is good and that which is bad.
	It does not give you anything to shoot for.
	It does not give you a sense of meaning.
	It doesn't give you a program.
	It doesn't give you a playbook.
	It doesn't give you anything.
	It doesn't give you a mission.
	You know what kids need?
	A sense of mission.
	They need a sense of boundaries.
	We've deprived them of all of these things because we wish to not be seen as authoritarian and judgmental by our own kids.
	That's the worst form of parenting.
	And yet that's precisely the direction the media would love to take us, because again, that principle of atomistic individualism must be upheld at all costs, including the price of our children, who require boundaries.
	Kids need boundaries.
	So here we go, an NBC anchor trying to shame the Republicans, suggesting that it's their anti-trans rhetoric that's the real problem here.
	The conversation is pivoting, too, when it comes to some more conservative lawmakers from changing gun laws to something like mental health, for example.
	Other Republicans to anti-trans rhetoric or to calling this a hate crime against Christians.
	It seems like that's where the conversation is, at least in the House of Representatives.
	Yeah, there's been a long list that's evolved over the years where, you know, a lot of pro-gun lawmakers have been, you know, pointing the blame.
	It's gone from video games.
	There's a lot of talk about mental health, alienation.
	Now there's some focus on the fact that the shooter was apparently transgender.
	But the bottom line is Republicans don't want to, you know, tighten gun laws.
	And as a result, a number of these other explanations are coming up.
	Yeah, that's always it.
	We can't talk about the social breakdown.
	Irrelevant.
	The question is the guns that have been present in American society literally the whole time.
	Well, in other news, at least this is a piece of somewhat welcome news.
	Apparently, the press secretary to the governor of Arizona has now resigned her job.
	She had resigned her job because she tweeted out yesterday a picture suggesting that transphobes should be shot.
	According to the Daily Wire, Jocelyn Barry, press secretary for Democratic Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, has now resigned.
	After posting an inflammatory tweet suggesting transphobes should be gunned down in the wake of a woman who identified as transgender killing six people at a Christian school in Nashville.
	Local Arizona media reported that Berry's resignation came after she faced pressure from those close to her and from other lawmakers.
	A statement from Hobbs's office said the governor does not condone violence in any form.
	This administration holds mutual respect at the forefront of how we engage with one another.
	The GIF, which was taken from the 1980 film Gloria, tweeted by Barry, showed actress Gina Rollins wielding two pistols and was captioned, us when we see transphobes.
	It was posted Monday in the middle of the nation reacting to a trans man, meaning a woman, shooting up a bunch of school kids.
	So she was forced to resign.
	That may be the worst Self-goal, an own goal by a press secretary I've ever seen in my life.
	That is pretty astonishing stuff.
	Well, in other news, if we're talking about societal breakdowns due to technology, there's a lot of talk these days about how AI, chat GPT, how this is going to impact lives.
	Well, it's going to cause, if we're talking about social dislocations, chat GPT could certainly cause, AI could certainly cause serious social dislocations, obviously.
	It's coming.
	The question is how we adjust to it.
	According to a new study conducted by OpenAI, ChatGPT systems like AI will now impact 80% of all U.S.
	jobs with personal financial advisors and brokers, insurers, and data processors at the very top of the list.
	Essentially, people who do analysis are going to be the people who take the hit.
	The warning comes from an official study by OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, and the University of Pennsylvania.
	The team found that about 15% of all worker tasks could be completed significantly faster by AI and with the same level of quality.
	When it comes to various jobs, some of them are just going to go away.
	So interpreters and translators, poets, lyricists and creative writers, 68% exposure according to this study to the AI systems outdoing them.
	Public relations is going to be able to be outsourced.
	Meanwhile, the people with the highest variance, meaning the people who are least likely to be endangered by the new AI systems, are people like graphic designers, investment fund managers, financial managers, insurance appraisers for auto damage, search marketing strategists...
	So OpenAI researcher Pamela Mishkin, who's involved in the study, tweeted, today's GPTs can do a lot.
	Apparently, the study analyzed over a thousand occupations and their 20,000 tasks and obtained employment and wage data from the 2020 and 2021 occupational employment series provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
	So when they look at, again, jobs that are fully at risk, there are some, like legal secretaries, clinical data managers, web designers, and journalists who might be 100% at risk because they can literally create things right now where you type in the prompt and the article comes right up.
	This is prompting people like Elon Musk to call for regulations on AI, or at least a pause on AI until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, several tech executives and top artificial intelligence researchers, including Elon Musk and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, are calling for a pause in the breakneck development of powerful new AI tools.
	They're calling for a moratorium of six months or more to give the industry time to set safety standards for AI design.
	Bengio says, we've reached the point where these systems are smart enough, they can be used in ways that are dangerous for society, and we don't yet understand them.
	Well, this has been happening, as we suggest, when it comes to, for example, all the social media systems that were supposed to be a value-add, but have actually been corrupting the minds of children, particularly, and turning them into social media and phone addicts.
	We'll get to how we should react to AI.
	It's coming.
	It's only a question of how we deal with it.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	So how exactly ought we to deal with the rise of AI?
	Well, there are certain moral questions, like what are the parameters on AI?
	One of the things that you can see about ChatGPT, we've done a couple of videos using open AI systems and asking it prompts.
	The issue with the AI systems is that to a certain extent, they're going to be self-referential.
	And what you're going to end up with is in Ouroboros. The reason I say this is because they're now using predictive text mechanisms.
	So they basically search the internet and then they see sort of the most common responses in how to finish sentences. And this is how they come up with these great essays and poems and all of the rest of this sort of stuff. They're using predictive text, but they're using the entirety of the internet in order to search that sort of stuff. What happens when AI starts feeding on What I mean by that is it's relying on human knowledge, inputting all that data right now.
	What if we all stop inputting data tomorrow?
	Well, it freezes the internet.
	You can actually see that.
	It freezes how the AI operates.
	You can see that from the open AI systems that have stopped inputting data after 2021, right?
	You ask them about what's happening 2022, 2023, it just has no updates for any of that sort of stuff.
	So as we all become more dependent on AI, ironically, AI becomes less effective because there's less new data that's being input into the AI system.
	So that is problem number one.
	But there is another issue here, and that's going to be what sort of activity does AI incentivize from human beings?
	So a lot of people are calling this the AI revolution, which would make it, effectively speaking, the third major revolution.
	In human history, you can say that the agricultural revolution was really the first revolution because it meant that we were no longer hunter-gatherers.
	And it really was about the harnessing of animal power and making animal power more freely available and easily distributable.
	Because instead of you having to hunt down an animal and then you eat it and then it's gone, instead of that, you're able to harness animal power and you're able to broadly distribute the results of that animal power because of set agriculture.
	What human advantages did that incentivize?
	Well, it incentivized physical power, like the ability to actually aggregate land, protect that land, right?
	Physical power.
	It incentivized community, right?
	Settled communities were able to more easily defend themselves, so the creation of small communities, eventually city-states, are built off the back of that.
	It incentivizes reproductive power, having a lot of kids and having kinship networks.
	And the agricultural revolution also incentivizes organizational power, because organizational power allows you to, again, create hierarchies that allow you to control more and more land.
	And that's exactly what you see in the ancient world.
	These are the aspects that are maximized, right?
	Physical power, reproductive power, organizational power.
	These are all the things that are incentivized.
	And then you have the Industrial Revolution.
	The Industrial Revolution makes energy more freely available.
	So if animal power is just restricted by the number of animals you have, now energy has become more widely available for pretty much anyone, for pretty much everyone.
	And the Industrial Revolution, which really begins with steam and then moves on to coal and then finally moves on to oil and natural gas, What does that incentivize?
	Well, that incentivizes really administrative power, right?
	It incentivizes your ability to administer systems and then ensure that the systems run on time.
	So what you see is the rise of bureaucrats.
	What you see is the rise of administrative types, organizational types, and financial types, because people have to be able to borrow money and move money around in order to effectuate the results of the Industrial Revolution.
	And you have the third revolution.
	That's the information revolution.
	And that really begins 1950s, 1960s, and moves on to today.
	And that is making data more freely available.
	So if the first revolution was you make animal power more freely available, and the second revolution was make energy more freely available, the third revolution is about making data more freely available.
	And this allows for the transformation of entire cultures in extraordinarily short periods of time.
	And you see societies that are oppressive dictatorships in 1960, and now they're thriving economic democracies like South Korea, Some of the stuff that was happening over the course of a century for countries now takes 20 years, in some cases 10 years.
	Everything speeds up.
	So what exactly is incentivized by that?
	Networking brainpower, the ability to network, the ability to see the links between various modes of data and how exactly you find efficiencies there.
	Well now, because that's been incentivized, the next human invention is making networking data, networking brainpower, more freely available.
	That is what AI does.
	It makes intelligence more freely available.
	Now everybody's able to network everything by the click of a button.
	So what does that incentivize?
	Where's the hole in the system?
	The answer is the hole in the system is kind of creation, creative brainpower.
	That's the hole in the system.
	Because again, AI is limited by its inputs.
	But the problem is, as I've suggested before, that once we are all linked into the AI and reliant on the AI, how do we generate new ideas?
	And this is why I feel like a lot of Western history is coming down to the question of whether disconnecting is actually going to be the future of civilization.
	Whether us becoming more disconnected from the systems that we have wired into our brain is going to be short-term pain for long-term gain.
	Well, the innovators of the future are going to be people who are not heavily invested, especially in their youth, in being linked to a phone or to a computer.
	Actually learn to think because the computer doesn't do the thinking for them.
	I mean, you see this with your own kids, right?
	You were forced to look stuff up in encyclopedia, and this is how you learn to process information.
	You're forced to actually do the reading.
	What do you think happens when your kids are able to just type in a prompt, an essay prompt, and all the answers come out?
	They won't know anything.
	They won't know how to do those things.
	In the same way that people used to know how to do sort of basic things because they were forced to do the basic things, and we no longer know how to do that because we've been able to outsource it to a hundred different sources.
	Our lives may be better, but if breakdown comes, we are all screwed, right?
	You don't know how to fix a toilet.
	With all that happening, what happens when the things that we are now unable to do It's like literally everything because we've been innervated by the technology that we've created as a shortcut for ourselves.
	So what this suggests to me is that a lot of what we do with our kids is going to be reliant on a couple of things.
	One, tie them into social networks.
	And two, disconnect them from media networks.
	Disconnect them from the internet.
	Disconnect them from AI.
	Make them less dependent on all the tools around them.
	And then later, when they are able to think in creative ways, then you can provide them those resources.
	And it's a cosmic leap forward for them.
	In the same way that the best chess players today are not computers and not humans, but humans using computers.
	But here's the thing.
	That doesn't mean like a human who doesn't know anything about chess using a computer.
	Typically, it's a pretty good chess player using a computer who's the best chess player.
	Human society is going to be reliant on a societal level on us disconnecting from these networks and creating true social cohesion.
	And two, on an intellectual level, disconnecting from those networks long enough for us to actually train our brains to do the things that machines cannot.
	So when we are finally hooked back in with machines, we are capable of using those machines in the most useful possible way.
	Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So obviously we're in Rome, and when in Rome, you start thinking about, you know, literature about Rome.
	So there's tons of stuff that I could recommend here.
	I could recommend Edward Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
	I could recommend SPQR, which I've done before by the historian Mary Beard.
	There are a lot of things to recommend here, but I've decided to recommend instead a novel about Roman history.
	We're not getting into Vatican history.
	There are plenty of great novels about that.
	Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy is a great novel about the Sistine Chapel that's worthwhile.
	So I've just given you a bunch of recommendations about Rome.
	But here is the big one today.
	The big one today is Robert Graves' I, Claudius, which is still the single best novel written about the Roman Empire.
	It was turned into a BBC series starring A bunch of major stars would be like John Hurt was in it.
	Patrick Stewart is in it.
	A lot of different folks who are quite famous in iClaudius.
	But the book itself by Robert Graves is really tremendous.
	There's a sequel called Claudius the God that is also a really good read.
	iClaudius tells the story of the Emperor Augustus and his family and it's really Labyrinthine in terms of its plot and the characterizations are just excellent.
	So if you're looking for a great book to read, iClaudius is a great book to read.
	Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
	Alrighty, thing that I hate number one.
	This is an amazing article from the New York Post.
	So apparently, The Army has a new boot camp prep course.
	And this new boot camp prep course is basic training without the yelling.
	Yes, we have to make our military kinder and gentler.
	Quote, it's a dress rehearsal for boot camp.
	A new Army program gives lower performing recruits 90 days of fitness and academic instruction before boot camp and has been whipping soldiers into shape and shoring up the military's ranks.
	More than 5,400 soldiers have graduated from the program since being implemented in August at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, boosting the Army's recruitment goals.
	Basically, one of the big problems with the Army is that They were unable to find people who were not obese.
	They were having real trouble finding people who were healthy and didn't have criminal records.
	And so they lowered their standards, and now they're basically doing remedial fitness for people.
	Private Second Class Deja Holiday described the program as basic training without the yelling.
	Before taking the course, Holiday had tried in vain for two years to pass the Army's academic test.
	After 90 days of instruction, she raised her score by 20 points.
	I gotta tell you, the Army academic test, it's not a test to get into Phi Beta Kappa, guys.
	I mean, to get into the Army does not require you to be a genius-level MIT grad.
	So we're just lowering the standards, and then we are basically training kids, training young people to the test.
	And again, all points for patriotic duty and amazing service to the country that I'm not doing.
	All points for that.
	But that's not, it's not a criticism of the people who are trying to get in the program.
	It's a criticism of a military that is unable to meet recruitment goals because it's basically undermined the cause for which it recruits.
	The program involves classroom fitness and discipline training, and instructions on everything from how to make a bed to wearing a uniform correctly.
	It's helped graduates get a leg up in boot camp, according to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth.
	During basic training, certain young individuals who show a little bit more leadership skills than others get selected to have leadership positions.
	What we're seeing is kids coming out of the prep courses are the ones who are being chosen for that.
	About 8,400 recruits have been admitted to the program as of March 17th.
	You know where they're not doing remedial training like this without the yelling and with the kind and fuzzies is China and also Russia.
	So, you know, we have massive military advantages, but as it turns out, massive military advantages can wear away over the course of time.
	Okay, one more thing that I hate.
	So, Joe Biden is just a senile adult, and he was asked on the tarmac yesterday about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
	So, if you've been following the saga, which you've been listening to the show, so you have, you'll understand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pulled back a proposed judicial reform that he had coalition votes for in order to negotiate with the opposition.
	He did that because the opposition got a ton of people out in the streets, they shut down the economy and all the rest.
	And so now negotiations are currently taking place.
	So Joe Biden was asked about that, and his first move was to then insult Netanyahu in sort of the most ridiculous possible way.
	Like many strong supporters of Israel, I'm very concerned.
	And I'm concerned that they get this straight.
	They cannot continue down this road.
	And I've sort of made that clear.
	Hopefully, the Prime Minister will act in a way that he can try to work out some genuine compromise.
	But that remains to be seen.
	No.
	Not in the near term.
	Now, Tom Nides, who is the ambassador to Israel, had previously stated that he thought that Bibi would be invited to the White House fairly soon.
	And so now Biden is walking that back because, again, he is a senile old dog.
	This is after Netanyahu has already walked back the judicial reform and said that he's going to negotiate.
	Over the judicial reform.
	Now, imagine how you feel when leaders of foreign countries decide to intervene in domestic American political affairs.
	Does it piss you off?
	Pisses me off.
	I don't like it very much.
	When the President of the United States decides that he is going to sound off an internal judicial reform that is approved, by the way, like everyone knows there have to be judicial reforms.
	It's just a question of negotiation.
	When Biden is sounding off this way, and he's like, I'm not inviting anyone, it's obnoxious and stupid.
	And, but, you know, that is our current president of the United States.
	Netanyahu, for his part, said, I've known President Biden for over 40 years.
	I appreciate his longstanding commitment to Israel, but Israel is a sovereign country, which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends, which seems like an appropriate response.
	This is just silliness.
	And again, it is part and parcel of Joe Biden's broader Middle Eastern policy, which apparently is to abandon the entire structure and leave it open to Chinese predation.
	And that's exactly what's happening.
	So things are going to get a lot spicier over in the Middle East because Joe Biden is very bad at the presidenting.
	Alrighty, folks, we've reached the end of the show.
	We'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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