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Sept. 5, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

55:18

The Great Flood Hits Burning Man

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	So, it's rare to see actual biblical-level events taking place in, you know, normal, everyday life, but that is exactly, apparently, what is happening over at Burning Man.
	Now, I've ignored Burning Man, successfully, for several decades at this point because, frankly, it seemed like a bunch of weirdos out in the desert being weird with each other.
	And that's pretty much what it is.
	Apparently, for those who haven't been following, Burning Man was founded back in 1986.
	This is according to therichest.com, when a small group of friends gathered to burn a nine-foot tall statue on the beach in San Francisco.
	So, as you might imagine...
	You know, weird people.
	Each year, more and more people attended the bonfire and then they actually moved it over to the Nevada desert.
	And so now it's held in Black Rock City, a temporary community erected by the thousands of attendees who construct the gathering's infrastructure using nothing but their own tools and equipment.
	Nothing apparently is sold at Burning Man.
	This is one of the sort of communistic properties of it.
	Instead, they sell like coffee and water and everything else.
	They barter or gift.
	So first of all, you have to ask why they're selling the coffee or water, and the answer is because you can't provide supply unless there is actual monetary demand.
	It turns out capitalism is great at getting things from place A to place B for an affordable price, and communism sucks at pretty much everything.
	For many attendees, known as burners, the event is about providing a space for countercultural expression.
	As we're going to examine, however, one of the weird elements of the United States is that the counterculture is no longer a counterculture.
	It's just the culture.
	The counterculture in the 1960s, the weirdos from the 1980s who are gathering on beaches and building giant burning men and all the rest of this, those people who we all used to consider strange, now if you say that they are weirdos who are participating in weird paganistic behavior, You are considered strange.
	You are considered part of the problem.
	You are intolerant.
	The counterculture is no longer the counterculture.
	It is, in fact, just the culture.
	Which is why, for example, you see so many rich and famous people now going to Burning Man.
	It used to be that if you were a rich, famous person, you took yourself seriously enough that you didn't show up in the middle of the desert with nothing but a hammer and then expect to basically just go to the orgy dome all day.
	It used to be that the serious people in our culture were, you know, actual serious people in our culture.
	You go way back to the age of the tycoons, when you were looking at John Rockefeller and you were looking at Vanderbilt.
	These were people who were at least pretty serious about their own lives.
	But the reality is the counterculture has now become the culture and the way that you win cultural cachet is by participating in a paganistic set of values that actually is in complete contradistinction to the actual values you live out.
	There's a point that Charles Murray made in his great book, Coming Apart, which is that all of the tech billionaires who show up at Burning Man and then
	proclaim they have allegiance to these sorts of principles actually in their own lives reject these
	sorts of principles. It's just everybody else who picks up the principles and then it becomes the
	culture in which they swim. And it's really, really bad. It's true whether you're talking about
	sort of paganistic versions of communism that you're seeing at Burning Man or whether you're
	talking about single motherhood, which is practiced by nearly no one in the Tech Bay area,
	but given the moral green light by everyone in the Tech Bay area. Right. There is something
	weird about the fact that these weird hippies burning crap on the beach suddenly turned into
	billionaires arriving entourage in tows participate in building a garbage city in the middle of
	nowhere and then having sex with randos.
	Which is effectively what Burning Man is.
	According to therichest.com, in recent years, many longtime Burners have resented how the festival's growing popularity has changed the experience.
	They say it on Reddit, posts about the new class of Burner consisting of celebrities, internet influencers, billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
	It is true, by the way, that again, unlike in the past, when everyone who was poor aspired to be rich.
	And what that meant is that if you were poor, you aspired to also imitate the lifestyles of the rich and famous, which meant that if you go back to the photos of the Great Depression, people are standing in line for Their tickets for their food, and they are dressed in suits.
	Now you have the richest people in our society who are attempting to dress like homeless people to prove to everybody else, while they're earning billions of dollars, that they actually despise the billions of dollars they're earning.
	A culture that hates itself cannot long survive, by the way.
	What you see, in terms of the actual stats from Burning Man, is that in 2006, 14% of surveyed Burners listed their personal income as $100,000 or more.
	By 2016, that number had almost doubled to 28%.
	The surveyors added a $300,000 plus personal income category, and that now represented 3.4% of all the people who are showing up at Burning Man.
	And by the way, they're cheating.
	So it used to be that if you showed up at Burning Man, you basically showed up with like a bunch of plywood and a hammer.
	And now, if you are a rich person, you show up at a turnkey camp.
	According to Mashable, these offer luxury amenities, cleaning staff and chefs, while reportedly wrecking havoc on the environment by chartered flights to get there.
	So the entire thing was supposed to be this hippie gathering where you bring what you have and you give what you want and you receive from others who are generous.
	And now it's turned into a bunch of rich people who want to pretend that this is what they are while actively just paying people to set up basically glamping in the desert, which is amazing.
	It is totally amazing.
	In 2019, Burning Man CEO Marion Goodall wrote she was stunned by the growing commodification and exploitation of Black Rock City and Burning Man culture.
	So on the one hand, you can say capitalism always wins.
	Like no matter what, everything ends up commodified because human beings are driven toward doing less work and being able to compensate people for the work that they are doing.
	The other way to view this is that, again, you have an entire elite strata of our society that hates itself, and that is constantly seeking to signal to everybody else how much it hates itself by doing things like going to Burning Man.
	They're not seeking to exemplify the behavior that everybody else should engage in.
	And if they do, they believe that behavior should apparently be this hippie-esque garbage, and we should all basically just laugh and giggle along with them as they go to the pleasure dome that has been set up in full Sodom and Gomorrah style.
	According to Burning Man CEO Marion Goodall, she said, whether it's commercial photoshoots, product placements, or Instagram posts thanking friends for a useful item, attendees, including fashion models and social media influencers, are wearing and tagging brands in their Playa photos.
	This means they are using Black Rock City to increase their popularity, to appeal to customers, and to sell more stuff.
	Black Rock City requires significant investments of time, energy, and resourcefulness, she said.
	Part of what makes Burning Man unique and powerful is that everyone has to work to be there.
	So I do love, again, the fact that all of these rich, famous people are showing up and doing, like, Instagram photos for Popeyes, right?
	DJ Diplo descended into Burning Man in 2019 on a Popeyes-branded plane and came out with two plastic bags filled with dozens of chicken sandwiches.
	And then he remarked on social media, Wendy's, your move.
	Some celebrities are different, right?
	These would be like Susan Sarandon, who famously drank the ashes of psychologist and LSD advocate, Timothy Leary, when she showed up in 2015, which by the way, gross, unsanitary, don't drink other people's ashes, by the way.
	It's a great way to get your ash kicked.
	Terrible, terrible way to go.
	But, again, the idea here is that the elites mirror the worst morality that they don't actually practice in their real lives.
	We'll get into more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so just to fill out what Burning Man is before we explain what God did to it, apparently.
	And I get to say that because the left does this all the time.
	Right, the left acts as though when a hurricane hits Florida it's because of the great sin that we have all committed in driving cars and, you know, running our air conditioners.
	So I also get to make a joke about how, um, if a bunch of morons decide that they are going to jet set into the desert in the middle of nowhere where it's 115 degrees to screw each other and then there's a giant rainstorm, biblical style, that floods them and no one bothered to bring enough wood to build an ark.
	Sorry, I get to joke about you guys.
	Your own fault.
	Okay, so.
	Here are the principles of Burning Man.
	They were written in 2004 by co-founder Larry Harvey.
	This is a religion.
	It's a religion.
	And it just goes to show you that in an era where actual religion declines, traditional Judeo-Christian religion declines, other forms of religion supplant it, whether that is political polarization, and following of the great leader,
	or whether it is this sort of paganistic hippie crap that you're seeing over at Burning Man.
	Radical inclusion is one of the principles.
	Anyone may be part of Burning Man.
	We welcome and respect the stranger.
	No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
	So first of all, not true.
	If you show up and you're a Bible thumper, I guarantee you, you're not gonna be welcome
	over at Burning Man where they have a giant dome where no one has showered,
	but they're all having sex with one another.
	That is an actual, I keep mentioning this because this obviously is the most famous part
	of Burning Man, is the orgy dome which according to Cosmopolitan
	is visited by 5,000 people every year.
	You just show up with a bunch of randos, and then you screw them.
	And this is the height of human experience, apparently.
	So radical inclusion apparently would not really tolerate anybody who has, you know, like, baseline moral standards in a traditional way.
	Gifting.
	Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift-giving.
	The value of a gift is unconditional.
	Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
	So, first of all, again, back to the radical inclusion point, if you just include everybody who is a leech, and they are living off gifts, with no expectation of any sort of return, it's not going to work.
	Because, again, this stuff doesn't exist at scale.
	The actual real rule of Burning Man, I would assume, is that if somebody gives you something, you give them something in return, which is what we used to call trade.
	We used to call that thing capitalism, but instead we're going to pretend that when I give you something and you give me something, and the real reason we're doing it is because, of course, if I just take something from you and I never give you anything, no one will ever give something to me again.
	We're going to pretend that that's communism.
	Now, decommodification.
	In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising.
	Oops!
	Well, that didn't work.
	It turns out that people saw a giant group of people there, and it is now... It's old-fashioned, cool, Burning Man.
	I'm in a group chat with a bunch of folks who are kind of, like, tail-end of millennial age, and they're like, yeah, I remember when this used to be the cool thing, and now it's a bunch of people who are 42 years old who are showing up.
	The average age of Burning Man has been rising in recent years.
	It used to be the thing for, you know, dumbass 21-year-olds to do, and now it's a thing for people trying to recapture the feeling of being a dumbass 21-year-old, but they're actually 42, divorced, and have a kid.
	That is what Burning Man has become.
	Radical self-reliance.
	Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on their inner resources.
	Well, we saw how that went.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
	How they went when they relied on their inner resources to, you know, be stuck in the mud for days at a time, complaining because they were located, you know, a few miles away from a freeway.
	Radical self-expression.
	Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual.
	No one other than the individual or collaborating group can determine its content.
	It is offered as a gift to others.
	In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
	Isn't that nice?
	Radical self-expression.
	Now, what I like is the proviso there.
	The proviso there is that your radical self-expression makes no demands on others.
	It makes no demands on others.
	Well, yeah, except for the fact that radical self-expression as a core value system requires the acceptance, approval, and tolerance of others, clearly.
	There are limits to radical self-expression.
	Communal effort.
	Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration.
	We strive to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
	Have you seen all the amazing works of art that have come out of Burning Man?
	You know, I mean, other than the STDs.
	We value civil society.
	This is civic responsibility.
	Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants.
	They also must assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state, and federal laws.
	Oh, so there is legal liability that attaches.
	Also, leaving no trace.
	So it turns out this one, they just don't do.
	I say, our community respects the environment.
	We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather.
	We clean up after ourselves and endeavor whenever possible to leave such places in a better state than when we found them, which of course is wildly untrue.
	It turns out that Burning Man has had a bad history over the past few years of just leaving garbage strewn along the highways as people careen out of there as fast as possible.
	This, of course, is no shock.
	Go back to the Occupy Wall Street days.
	We had all the socialist lefties who were camping out in the parks in New York City.
	And it was just a wilderness of criminality, drug abuse, and trash.
	And then you went to the Tea Party, right?
	All these people who supposedly hate the environment.
	Everybody at the Tea Party picked up after themselves.
	No one at Occupy picked up after themselves because, again, it turns out that only respect for the communal values that you actually share would require you to do this thing.
	And any community founded on radical self-expression, you're gonna get a lot of freeloaders and people who free ride.
	Participation.
	These are the final two principles, right?
	Not Ten Commandments.
	Not like, Thou shalt not kill.
	Thou shalt not kidnap.
	Thou shalt not commit sexual sins.
	Thou shalt not commit adultery.
	Right?
	None of those things.
	Right?
	Those...
	None of that matters.
	The things that actually matter here are things like participation.
	Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic.
	We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society,
	can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation.
	We achieve being through doing.
	Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play.
	Aww.
	And finally, immediacy.
	Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture.
	Which, of course, is something that has been completely done away with.
	Because if you look at Burning Man, it's just a bunch of selfies.
	Just an endless series of selfies.
	Forever.
	Stamping on the human face.
	Forever.
	So in just a second, we'll talk about what God wrought.
	Because it turns out, it didn't end well this year.
	It was like the Fyre Festival.
	He has that momentarily first.
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	Okay, so once again, you have an ethos that is based on radical individualism
	and in which people aren't expected to do anything for anybody else, but at the same time,
	you're expected to do everything for everybody else.
	Contrast the Ten Commandments of Burning Man with, you know, the actual Ten Commandments.
	Things like, Respect thy father and mother.
	Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
	Don't commit murder.
	Don't commit adultery.
	Don't commit idolatry.
	Don't commit... One of these sets of rules has built a civilization that has lasted and been successful for literally thousands of years.
	The other set of rules lasted a heavy rainstorm.
	So maybe the story of Noah's Ark is that maybe the rain wasn't all that heavy.
	Here's the radical heretical view today.
	The rain wasn't all that heavy.
	It's just the society was not all that durable.
	Maybe that's really what we are finding out right now.
	So here's what happened over at Burning Man.
	According to the EAP, An unusual late summer storm turned a week-long counterculture fest into a sloppy mess, with tens of thousands of partygoers stuck in foot-deep mud, with no working toilets in the northern Nevada desert.
	Some Burning Man revelers said Sunday their spirits remain unbroken.
	Unfortunately, their toilets do remain broken.
	And so they're just sitting there.
	We're sitting there in their own poop, screwing each other.
	Sounds like the most, the height of human experience.
	Somebody did die, but apparently that's happened before.
	Like there was a guy a few years ago who burned himself to death because he threw himself onto the Burning Man or something.
	So in any case, it wasn't because of the bad weather.
	So, organizers closed the festival to vehicles after one death was reported.
	Officials provided no details of the fatality.
	The guy didn't drown or anything.
	The annual gathering in the Black Rock Desert, about 110 miles north of Reno, attracts nearly 80,000 artists, musicians, and activists for a mix of wilderness camping and avant-garde performances.
	Disruptions are part of the festival's recent history.
	Organizers had to temporarily close entrances in 2018 due to dust storms.
	The event was twice canceled altogether during the pandemic.
	I love this.
	More than half an inch of rain fell at the festival site on Friday, disrupting this year's fest- Wait.
	Half an inch?
	Half an- Wait, not half a foot.
	Not, not like, half a meter.
	Half an inch.
	This much rain fell.
	This much, right here.
	And, uh, oops!
	Everything fell apart.
	More than half inch of rain, possibly closer to one inch, fell this weekend in parts of northwest Nevada.
	That includes the area where the Burning Man Festival was being held.
	Road closures came just before a large wooden effigy was supposed to have been burned on Saturday night.
	So basically this is the story of Elijah, right?
	Elijah's theory is like, okay guys, take your giant wooden sacrifice and see if it will burn.
	God, will you touch it?
	Nope, rain.
	So yeah, good times.
	President Joe Biden told reporters in Delaware he's aware of the situation at Burning Man.
	The White House is in touch with local officials.
	Again, the thing I'm making fun of here is that the people who are most interested in this, it has become a glitz and glamour festival.
	This is the part that's truly fascinating.
	Again, making fun of hippies in the desert, that's easy pickings.
	But when those hippies involve, like, the most famous people in our society, and these most famous people in our society are suggesting that there is something to this value system, that is worth noting.
	That is something worth noting.
	That a value system that thinks that orgy domes, and not showering, and building crap in the desert that you just then leave there, that this is somehow a form of higher living.
	And in the absence of God, paganism rules.
	It is not that there is no God, it's that many gods rule, and those gods typically involve self-worship.
	Which is really where things currently stand.
	Good news, Diplo was there again.
	I don't know if he had his Popeye's plane until apparently not.
	Chris Rock was also there.
	And they escaped.
	They escaped from Black Rock.
	A fan offered Chris Rock and I a ride out of the burnt after walking six miles through the mud.
	All Chris could think about was an effing cold brew.
	Wow.
	That is some heavy stuff there.
	The other part of this that's hilarious is that obviously it wasn't biblical flooding.
	Obviously, thank God, tens of thousands of people did not die.
	And yet, every person who's there, this is why I say the idolatry is actually just idolatry of the self, everybody there is treating this as though they escaped the beaches at Normandy or something.
	Like, this is what they're treating it like.
	It's truly an amazing, amazing thing.
	Like, for example, Neil Catyell, who you'll remember as a supposedly serious legal analyst, he put up a picture of himself talking about the incredibly harrowing journey out of the Burning Man Festival.
	So apparently people said that they could walk about five miles from the festival site to the nearest town of Gerlach where shuttle buses would take them to Reno.
	First of all, can I just point out that five miles is not a lot of territory?
	It's a flat desert.
	Take a little water and go like five miles?
	These are our most serious people.
	He said, quote, it was an incredibly harrowing six mile hike at midnight through heavy and
	slippery mud, but I got safely out of Burning Man.
	Never been before and it was fantastic with brilliant art and fabulous music, except for
	the ending.
	Ah, these are our most serious people.
	That guy was the acting solicitor general under Barack Obama.
	The acting solicitor general, the guy who they have on MSNBC every day talking about
	the legal threats to Donald Trump and how the rule of law must be upheld was at Burning
	Man whining about how he had to walk five miles.
	In mud.
	Because he put himself there.
	Because they have an orgy dome or something.
	How old is Neil Cottrell, by the way?
	Neil Cottrell is 53 years old.
	To put it politely, grow the f*** up, dude.
	Wow.
	Okay, we'll get some more on this insanity in just one second because I find this endlessly fascinating.
	I don't know about you, but tough.
	It's my show.
	We'll get to it in one second first.
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	OK, so the pictures that have emerged from Burning Man are truly horrifying.
	People standing in mud.
	People are worried about Trenchfoot because they have to walk around in the mud over there.
	Again, I'm going to point out the people who have attended include not only Elon Musk, but Jeff Bezos and Will Smith.
	This is the part that's totally crazy to me.
	We need a better class of elite.
	We do.
	You wonder why people don't trust the elite?
	You wonder why there's a giant cultural gap between, say, the left coast and the east coast and everybody in the middle of the country?
	Because people who still go to church look at this stuff and they're like, so you morons went out in the middle of the desert to worship your pagan selves and then got stuck in the mud.
	Rough ride for you.
	Really, really, truly feel bad.
	But this is the point.
	The cultural arbiters are not on the side of the so-called culture.
	They are on the side of the counterculture, and this is the important point.
	Burning Man's values, or its pseudo-values, represent the actual prevailing mindset for many of the powerful in our society.
	When people try to boil down the Trump phenomenon to, well, the guy really liked tariffs, or Donald Trump, he wanted to build a wall on the border, or Donald Trump, it's really about subsidies to industrial towns in Ohio.
	That's not what Donald Trump is about.
	What Donald Trump is about is about a cultural system that used to be called the traditional culture of the United States.
	He is not personally representative of that, but that's what the Trump movement represents.
	And those people have been dispossessed of the Judeo-Christian architecture that used to undergird the United States of America.
	And they've been dispossessed by a bunch of pagan morons who believe that the actual value system is a radical self-expression and individualism.
	Now, this does unite some of the great capitalists of our era, because there are many of the great capitalists of our era.
	It used to be.
	That everyone sort of understood, particularly the great capitalists, that undergirding capitalism was a Judeo-Christian value system.
	You know who actually understood this fairly well?
	Adam Smith.
	And his theory of moral sentiments came before his wealth of nations.
	But the great early tycoons, these were people who went to church on a regular basis.
	These were people who actually were interested in what happened around them, who took their responsibilities as human beings seriously.
	I mentioned John D. Rockefeller, but John D. Rockefeller is a great example.
	This is a guy who went to a church and he sat in the pews next to people who were a fraction of his wealth.
	What used to unify the country was a belief system that the elites held in common with the common man.
	It was the same belief system overall.
	It was the radicals who were proclaiming the creed of radical self-expression.
	But now it's not the radicals.
	Now it's the most powerful people in the society who have basically decided the reason they became powerful is because they followed their star.
	But that's not really true.
	Again, if you look at the people who are most successful in our society, they didn't follow their star to the tune of, I will ignore basic values like educating myself or living a sexually responsible lifestyle in the main.
	Mark Zuckerberg is a married guy with multiple kids.
	And that's true for most of the people who are actually high earners in American society.
	They're actually more likely to be married with kids than people who are not high earners in American society.
	But they promulgate the values of the low.
	And when I say the low, I mean like the hippies and the commune who are burning giant nine foot statues.
	And that says something.
	And the kickback to that is a bunch of people who are angry at the fact that they have had their value system supplanted and insulted and derided by people whose main focus seems to just be tearing things down.
	I mean, burning man is actually an excellent metaphor.
	You build a man and then you burn him.
	That is, you build radical individualism, represented by a giant nine-foot-tall idol, and then you burn it.
	Because what does humanity matter if all humanity is is a piece of meat wandering through the universe with hedonistic impulses?
	It is only when human beings are connected to a higher value system, when they're connected with a divine value system of some sort, that they become worth more than a block of wood that you burn, or an orgy dome, Disconnect human beings from a telos.
	Disconnect them from a purpose, a higher purpose, and what you end up with is Burning Man.
	Live in the moment, immediacy of experience, radical individual self-expression, and then half an inch of mud and you're done.
	You're toast.
	So, there is something to be said here.
	It is amazing that the way the organizers here decided to tell people to handle this thing is to get themselves wood blocks and poop buckets.
	According to CNN.com, the first time Masha Maltseva attended Burning Man, the annual ephemeral city that attracts thousands of free-spirited revelers in the Nevada desert, she overpacked.
	I prepared for maybe three months, she recalled.
	I read all the packing lists, all the Reddit threads, all the WhatsApp chats preparing for Burning Man.
	But this year, when heavy rain transformed the remote venue into a muddy mess that forced attendees to shelter in place and conserve precious resources, Maltseva wasn't as prepared.
	She became one of about 70,000 people stuck at the event when Black Rock Desert received over two months worth of rain in just 24 hours.
	The storms turned the desert sand into sloppy, slippery clay that made it impossible for drivers to exit or enter.
	Self-reliance is one of the event's core principles, with organizers emphasizing that participants are ultimately responsible for their own health and safety.
	So that meant that they had to wear trash bags on their feet.
	It meant also that they were told to bring poop buckets.
	In case the rain made the porta-potties inoperable, the website recommended a five-gallon utility bucket with a lid and garbage bag liners.
	This sounds like a great civilization to you.
	It sounds like a great civilization to me.
	Here's festival attendee David Date describing the absolute carnage in the desert.
	What's been the most difficult aspect of this weather and being trapped there?
	I would say the most difficult aspect, uh, you know, fundamental to this, uh, problem we have is, uh, the concept of a Wook.
	Someone who shows up to this event with nothing other than their RV and, you know, their selfish indulgence and they offer nothing.
	They offer nothing to this community.
	They don't add anything to this city.
	These are the people that are fleeing the city, leaving their trash and creating a crisis from which Burning Man might not survive.
	I have to say a sad story.
	I cannot believe the sadness.
	Wait, you mean that a city that's built on freeloading actually has freeloaders who arrive?
	One other note here.
	No children in Burning Man.
	It turns out that we are now a civilization that is completely focused on the adults.
	The reason that there are no kids in Burning Man, aside from the fact that it's radically inappropriate and apparently bears some risk, is the fact that if you live immediately in the moment, you're not building for the future.
	That's the whole point of Burning Man, is not building for the future.
	There are times in every culture where you take off and you focus in on just the moment, right?
	That's true in every culture.
	But when you build an entire value system around that, around whatever happens tomorrow is not my business, around why build intergenerationally?
	After all, it's all ephemera.
	Build it in the desert, it'll be gone tomorrow.
	Unless that's connected with a higher value system, it means nothing.
	It means nothing.
	It actually is nihilistic.
	So we celebrate a holiday in Judaism that's coming up in the very near future called Sukkot.
	In Sukkot, you basically do kind of Burning Man.
	What you do is you build a hut outside your house and you actually are supposed to live in it for seven or eight days.
	The purpose of it is to remind you that you're at the mercy of God, right?
	You're supposed to actually build the hut such that you can see the stars and so it's open to the rain.
	But the whole purpose of it is to remind you that you are a physical creature, but that there is something more spiritual to you.
	That's not supposed to represent the entirety of human experience.
	It's one of the best holidays because the idea is that when you decorate all the physical surroundings around you, that's not the essential you.
	But what is the essential you?
	It's unity with God.
	The essential you is the divine you.
	That's the part that matters.
	Disconnect that and all you end up with is a bunch of morons rolling around in the mud and then being mad at each other when they have to poop in a bucket.
	Not quite the same thing.
	Okay, in just one second, we're gonna get to the latest polls on Joe Biden.
	There's a reason that Donald Trump continues to lead the Republican primary.
	It's not just because he's a magnetic personality, it's also because Joe Biden is running really, really weak.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, whether we love it or whether we hate it, AI is here to stay.
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	Some jobs include data scientists, product designers, robotics engineers, surprisingly tax managers with AI skills.
	Well, ZipRecruiter is the best way to use AI to help you find people with all kinds of skills.
	So, for example, Matt Kemp.
	He's our director of post-production.
	And Matt is stellar at his job.
	I mean, he makes sure this show looks great.
	There's only one problem with Matt.
	Because he's so dedicated to his job, he's sometimes sending emails at like 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.
	I don't know why.
	Is the expectation that I'm going to be awake at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning to reply?
	That expectation is not reality.
	No.
	The answer is no.
	But let's say that you wanted to replace Matt with somebody who understood what working hours are.
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	Also, We have a huge offer coming up for all DailyWare members.
	Early access to a first look at the highly anticipated 10-part original series from Candace Owens, Convicting a Murderer.
	Early access to the series is September 7th.
	It is only available over at DailyWare+.
	Get ready!
	Candace is about to blow apart the Stephen Avery misrepresentation on the popular Netflix series, Making a Murderer.
	It's a great series.
	Hollywood portrayed Stephen Avery as an innocent victim of corrupt law enforcement.
	Candace blew that narrative apart.
	She exposes Hollywood and the media for carefully crafting stories to elicit a particular reaction and to manipulate you.
	We've seen it all the time, but this time Candace is debunking it.
	Check out Convicting a Murderer.
	She will uncover a shocking amount of detail in the Stephen Avery case that paints quite a different picture.
	Go check them out right now.
	Here is the season teaser.
	Coming up on Convicting a Murderer.
	Part of me don't want to believe that he did this.
	The blood that was on that back area was indicative of a head wound.
	My brother likes to push a lot of people around.
	I don't give a f*** about anything.
	I ain't gotta listen to nobody.
	How were these filmmakers able to convince so many people that a man like Stephen Avery is innocent?
	How many times did he stab her?
	Once.
	And show me where.
	Right here.
	They gave him power.
	They're trying to get everything out there that they can.
	It's not good for an Avery to have power.
	I told you all along, keep your mouth shut.
	That can hurt Steven.
	I'm not gonna lie for him no more.
	I can't do it.
	Watch Convicting a Murderer, a new 10-part series on DailyWirePlus.
	Again, early access to watch Convicting a Murderer is available to DailyWirePlus members September 7th.
	It's free to watch for members.
	There's no reason to miss it.
	The official premiere for Convicting a Murderer takes place on X, formerly known as Twitter, on September 8th, 9 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Candice will be live chatting with special guests at the X event at 5 p.m.
	Make sure you head on over to the X space to join the conversation.
	The full series is available only at DailyWirePlus.
	Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to join us.
	Use code TRUTH for 25% off your Daily Wire Plus subscription.
	Everyone is going to be talking about this new Candace series.
	Don't miss out.
	Subscribe today.
	Okay, meanwhile.
	Donald Trump continues to be an incredibly viable candidate in the Republican primaries right now.
	The RealClearPolitics polling average puts him up 39 points over the rest of the field.
	The latest Wall Street Journal poll has Donald Trump all the way up in the Republican primaries at 59%.
	Ron DeSantis running a distant, distant second at 13, followed by Nikki Haley who's seen a bit of a bump at 8, followed by Vivek at 5.
	Which is probably how the field is truly stacked right now.
	Trump, of course, way the hell out in front.
	One of the reasons for that is the main argument against Trump has been an electability argument.
	That is the main argument because Republican voters, they really like Trump.
	They like a lot of what he did.
	They're willing to overlook or maybe embrace a lot of the foibles and the crazy tweets and all that kind of stuff.
	Certainly there's a lot of warmth inside the Republican Party for Trump.
	But the only counter-argument would be, yeah, but also he lost to Biden in 2020 and will probably lose again.
	The problem is, when the polls show that Joe Biden is absolutely weak, that makes Trump look a lot more durable inside the Republican primaries.
	So it's like, well, I mean, I get both of the things I want at once.
	The guy who I really like on a personal level, and also he can probably beat Biden.
	Which is what the Republican polls are showing right now inside the Republican primaries.
	I have my doubts because I think that a lot of the polls that we're seeing right now are overestimating, for example, minority support for Donald Trump, underestimating that support for Joe Biden.
	I think a lot of Democrats who right now are saying that they are wavering on Biden are going to come home in the same way that a lot of Republicans who say they waver about Trump are going to come home.
	However, It is Joe Biden's weakness that is leading to this impasse.
	Voters overwhelmingly think Biden is too old to run for re-election and give him low marks for handling the economy, according to the latest Wall Street Journal poll.
	The negative views of Biden's age and performance help explain why only 39% of voters hold a favorable view of Joe Biden.
	In a separate question, 42% said they approve of how he's handling his job, well below the 57% who disapprove.
	And right now, in a potential rematch, a Trump versus Biden rematch, each of them has 46% head-to-head.
	The journal survey points to a large set of challenges that Biden faces in persuading voters he deserves re-election.
	It also finds a lot of weaknesses.
	In Trump, voters in the survey rated Trump as less honest and likable than Biden, a majority viewed at Trump's actions after his 2020 election loss as an illegal effort to stop Congress from declaring Biden the proper winner.
	But if you look at the disapproved numbers for Joe Biden on a wide variety of issues, they are absolutely devastating.
	When it comes to inflation, the disapproval numbers are well over 60%.
	Same on securing the border.
	When it comes to dealing with China, just over 30% of voters approve, nearly 60% disapprove.
	When it comes to creating jobs, even there he is split at like 46-46.
	And right now, in terms of handling of the war in Ukraine, he is registering in at a well over 50% disapproval.
	Furthermore, 73% of voters say they think Biden is too old to seek a second term.
	That's only 47% of voters who say the same of Donald Trump.
	Even two-thirds of Democrats say that Joe Biden is too old to run again.
	There's more in this poll that again bolsters Trump and hurts Biden.
	By an 11-point margin, more voters see Trump rather than Biden as having the record of accomplishments as president.
	Some 40% said Biden had a good record as president.
	51% say that Trump had a good record as president.
	By an 8-point margin, more voters said Trump has a vision for the future.
	By 10 points, more described Trump as mentally up for the presidency.
	46% said that was true of Trump.
	Only 36% said that of Biden.
	Now, what's amazing about that is that those numbers are really awful for Joe Biden, like truly, truly garbage for Joe Biden.
	You would think that if Joe Biden had numbers that low, his Republican opponent would be like at 50%, 52%.
	The problem is that Donald Trump's negatives are also super high.
	So basically the American public thinks that Donald Trump committed criminal acts, like the, I'm not saying everyone, I'm saying that a plurality of the American public believes that Donald Trump did illegal or at least morally bad things in the aftermath of last time's election.
	And they also don't like him personally.
	But also they think that he's more competent than Biden and they like his record.
	Now, that provides an opening to Trump if he runs on his record.
	But if the entire campaign is going to be about what he did after the election last time and his criminal cases, that's going to be kind of a problem going forward into the election.
	This is what Tony Fabrizio says.
	He pulls for a super back that supports Trump.
	He says, if this race is about personality and temperament, Biden has an advantage.
	If the race is about policies and performance, Trump has the advantage.
	But let me remind you, right now, that virtually all races end up being about performance and temperament.
	Because if it were about policies and performance, Trump would have won in 2020.
	Without a doubt.
	So again, these are really bad numbers for Biden, and it's those bad numbers for Biden that are really strengthening Donald Trump inside the Republican primaries because the electability argument basically goes away.
	Democrats cannot believe that Joe Biden is polling this low.
	They can't believe it because they live in an echo chamber where everybody loves Joe Biden.
	So here's George Stephanopoulos, former lackey for Hillary Clinton, being quite shocked.
	It is kind of shocking in a way that despite all of the baggage that Donald Trump carries, he's tied with Joe Biden right now.
	Yeah, I mean, George, when I looked at that recent poll, the Wall Street Journal, I said, oh, this could keep me up at night.
	Look, the problem is, and the biggest challenge we face as Democrats, I say we because I'm a Democrat, is that young voters, young black and Latino voters, they're not ready to come back to the party.
	They're not even looking at the so-called messaging that's being sent to them about the economy, about climate change, about student debt relief.
	So again, even Democrats are stunned by his unpopularity, but it's not all that stunning.
	Joe Biden is not an empathetic figure, as we've been pointing out for months on this program.
	Joe Biden is not good at his job.
	I love the fact that Joe Biden is trying to steer into his age at this point, but simultaneously denying that he is lazy, which at this point in his life he is.
	He spent like the last month on vacation while Lahaina was burning down.
	Like, what does he do for a living other than sit on the beach and then say words badly into a microphone and then run away from the press?
	Yesterday, he was asked why he was in Rehoboth Beach.
	He's like, well, I certainly wasn't on vacation.
	Well, then what the hell are you doing in Rehoboth Beach?
	You go there for business?
	He's not here today, just for one day.
	I know.
	I'm on vacation.
	I'm not.
	I have no home to go to.
	Secret Service has torn my house up in a good way to make it secure.
	So I have no place to go when I come to Delaware to secure it.
	I'm only here for one day.
	No, I'm not homeless.
	I just have one home.
	I have a beautiful home.
	Okay, so my favorite part of this is also, he doesn't just say it's hard to hear him, but he says he's not on vacation.
	He's going to Rehoboth Beach because he doesn't have any other place to go.
	Like if his house were to burn down in Lahaina or something.
	He's just like that.
	What a victim he is.
	Meanwhile, he flew up to Philadelphia to do a rally.
	By a rally, we mean, once again, he escaped death, so you can say that for him.
	And every day with Joe Biden just feels like appointment in Samara at this point.
	In any case, Joe Biden, he at this rally was saying, I've been doing this longer than anyone.
	Well, yeah, we noticed.
	By this, I hope you mean corruption, because that's true.
	Someone said, you know, that Biden, he's getting old, man, I tell you what.
	Well, guess what?
	Guess what?
	You know, the only thing that comes today is a little bit of wisdom.
	Well, incontinence.
	Well, I mean, one thing that does not come along with age is speaking English clearly.
	That's a lot of mashed potatoes in the mouth right there.
	I say I'm gonna take a longer than age.
	Wisdomy as you will.
	Solid stuff there from the President of the United States.
	One of my favorite things he says on the campaign trail is where he says, people call me middle-class Joe.
	No one has ever called him middle-class Joe.
	Literally no one.
	That has never happened, not once.
	There's no one who's like, that guy over there, you're running around, that's middle-class Joe!
	You know why no one called him middle-class Joe?
	Because he hasn't been middle-class since he was a child.
	That is why.
	Middle-class Joe was making $44,600 per year when he first entered the Senate at the age of 30.
	In inflation money, that's $326,000 a year.
	Middle class Joe, my ass.
	Here we go.
	Folks, all my time in public office, I've been referred to as middle class Joe.
	I guess they thought that was a... What was that?
	Not very complimentary.
	Well, guess what?
	That's who I am.
	And doesn't mean you're not sophisticated because you're middle class.
	It means you work like hell and you know what?
	Your family has to work like hell to be able to make it.
	Joe Biden is a corrupt Paul.
	He's been a corrupt politician his entire life.
	He's not remotely middle class.
	That dude owns multi-million dollar properties.
	He is not middle class.
	That's absurd.
	And he's still... Also, by the way, who like... I'm wondering, who in the country looks down on the middle class?
	Seriously, who's like looking at the middle class?
	The only people who look down on the middle class are people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the morons at Burning Man.
	Like, those are the only people.
	They're the people who look at middle class Americans like, ah, those rubes living the lifestyle.
	Remember, it's Barack Obama who's declaring that people voted Republican because they were bitter clingers who were clinging to God and xenophobia because they were losing their jobs.
	It's people like Joe Biden who look down on the middle class.
	Joe Biden is there to enrich his corrupt union buddies, which has been true since literally he was elected to the Senate.
	He has been in the union's pocket since the day he entered the Senate in Delaware.
	Again, Ben Schreckinger writes in his book about the Bidens that there is a very solid basis to believe that Joe Biden won his first Senate race basically at the behest of unions that may have illegally picketed a newspaper to prevent a mailer going out about him from his opposition.
	In any case, one of my favorite things about Joe Biden is that he equates being pro-middle class with being pro the heads of major labor unions.
	Which, not the same thing.
	It turns out that forcibly removing a piece of people's paycheck and giving it to a bunch of union bosses then to let corrupt politicians like Joe Biden so they can enrich their funds is pretty amazing stuff.
	This is presumably why the acting Labor Secretary right now, Julie Hsu, she's out there saying that Joe Biden, he loves the middle class because he loves labor.
	That's it.
	He loves the unions.
	You know what I noticed?
	The unions represent fewer and fewer members of the middle class.
	That's what I noticed.
	Can you lay out what the administration's role is in these negotiations to the extent there is one at all?
	Yes, thank you so much, Phil.
	I mean, this president is the most pro-worker, pro-union president that we have had.
	And that means economic policies that center working people, that are good for workers.
	It has created a tight labor market in which workers and unions have more power to demand change and demand what's right for workers, demand their fair share at the bargaining table.
	We are living in an unprecedented moment in American history.
	of the unions, that's really what it's all about.
	Again, the only argument for Joe Biden at this point is that he's not Trump.
	Bernie Sanders just said that out loud.
	He's like, really, Joe Biden's old, he's bad at this job, but at least he's not Trump.
	So right now you have the Republican Party betting on at least he's not Biden.
	You have the Democratic Party betting on at least he's not Trump, and only one party can be right.
	Here's Bernie making that case.
	We are living in an unprecedented moment in American history.
	Donald Trump is not only a pathological liar, has not only helped wage an insurrection, if you like,
	to prevent President Biden from taking office, Not only is denying American democracy, moving against American democracy.
	So I think at this moment, Bob, we have got to bring the progressive community together to say, you know what?
	We're going to fight for a progressive agenda, but we cannot have four more years of Donald Trump in the White House.
	Again, that's all they care about.
	And so what you have is, as Jim Garrity at National Review says, a frozen battlefield.
	Republicans think that anyone can be Biden.
	Democrats believe anyone can be Trump.
	And so you're going to end up with Trump-Biden in all likelihood right now.
	Meanwhile, the media are attempting to do their best to ensure that Ron DeSantis and everyone else in the Republican Party remain secondary to Donald Trump.
	They're doing so in some cases by just lying.
	So Rolling Stone Magazine, which is not famous for its honesty, they wrote up a report suggesting that a bunch of neo-Nazis marching in Florida by a bunch, I mean like 15, marching in Florida are representative of Governor DeSantis' political support.
	According to Rolling Stone's misleading report, they said some of the marchers individually expressed their distaste for Donald Trump, saying they prefer Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
	And supposedly, they said we're all DeSantis supporters.
	It's only one problem, which is not true.
	Which is not true at all.
	Here's the actual video that Rolling Stone was lying about.
	We don't vote Pike Wing!
	He's got all these laws against him.
	We're all dissenters!
	What are you doing here?
	You're joking when you say dissenters.
	What are you doing here, Lurch?
	They're saying F to dissenters, right?
	They're saying it sarcastically.
	Rolling Stone left that part out so they could make it look as though all the Nazis in Florida support DeSantis, which is a weird thing since all the Orthodox Jews in Florida support DeSantis.
	So, uh, so there's that.
	That's all going really well.
	Meanwhile...
	Over the weekend, Joe Biden stopped by Florida very briefly in the aftermath of a hurricane that actually didn't do a tremendous amount of damage.
	Thank God.
	And the big controversy over the weekend in Florida was why isn't Ron DeSantis getting together with Joe Biden?
	And the answer is there's no reason for him to get together with Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden was just going to stand there and jabber about climate change.
	So what exactly is the purpose?
	There's no actual fundamental obligation for a governor of a state of either party.
	I don't like any of these optics.
	I've talked about this for years.
	I think it's all stupid.
	But DeSantis actually has a job to do.
	He's the governor of the state.
	Joe Biden is coming around to stand around and look at things and wander around aimlessly and bump into walls and talk about climate change.
	So Governor DeSantis said on Friday there were no plans for him to meet with Joe Biden, contradicting comments that Biden had made earlier in the day indicating that they would.
	The media immediately took this as a great insult to the honor of Joe Biden.
	I will say this.
	To his credit, Biden was asked about meeting DeSantis and he didn't actually take the opportunity to bash DeSantis.
	rare moment of a rare moment of of not garbage behavior from our current president.
	Are you disappointed that the governor didn't join you on your visit today and that his handling
	of your visit makes it seem like politics is getting in the way of your joint response to
	this crisis? Well no I'm not disappointed he He may have had other reasons, but he did help us plan this.
	He sat with FEMA and decided where we should go, where would be the least disruption.
	And I'm very pleased.
	The guy who we don't agree very much at all, the distinguished former governor and senior senator, he came.
	Talked about to me and to you all about how incredible, what an incredible job the federal government was doing.
	And I found that reassuring.
	Yeah, well, you know, again, rare moment of shocking decency there from the current president of the United States.
	MSNBC, however, was not going to be deterred by Biden's words.
	Instead, they jumped.
	This is horrible.
	How could he not meet with with Joe Biden?
	Oh, my God.
	People will.
	Here we go.
	I remember being on the ground for Sandy, for Hurricane Sandy, way back when.
	And you think back to the meeting that Chris Christie then had, then-New Jersey governor had with President Obama, right, and the embrace.
	And some folks said that is the reason why then-President Obama got reelected.
	Is this, you think, one of the reasons why DeSantis is choosing not to meet with the president today and making it more about politics?
	Well, I would just note, I do not think that going to her, going to be the president, to do your presidential duty when President Obama was president, was in fact the reason that he was re-elected.
	Look, I think that Governor DeSantis, his team, and by the way, he has two teams, right?
	He has a team in the governor's office and then he has a team on his campaign.
	I think that the team of the campaign is likely negatively influencing what the decisions of the team in the governor's office makes.
	Okay, so yeah, the media are not going to let that one go.
	Okay, meanwhile, Elon Musk is now at war with the Anti-Defamation League.
	So let's be clear about the Anti-Defamation League.
	It is a progressive interest group that proclaims that it is speaking in the name of Jewish causes.
	That is untrue.
	It is just a progressive interest group.
	That's all.
	And sometimes they cross streams with actual not horrific Ideas.
	And a lot of the time, they're targeting people on the basis of spurious nonsense or ignoring people on the basis of other spurious nonsense.
	Because, again, they're a progressive interest group.
	Well, Elon Musk is now in a battle with the ADL.
	And he's in a battle with them because he's saying that you guys are basically trying to slur X, formerly known as Twitter, by having advertisers remove their revenue.
	He's right about that.
	A lot of these progressive interest groups are very much interested in removing advertising revenue from sources where they can't control the speech.
	So he posted on X saying the ADL has been, quote, trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being anti-semitic.
	If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the Anti-Defamation League.
	If they lose the defamation suit, we will insist they drop the anti part of their name since, obviously.
	Now, is that really going to happen?
	It's almost impossible to win a defamation suit against a public figure.
	It's really, really, really rough because you have to show actual malice, which is a nearly impossible standard.
	With that said, is the ADL constantly speaking up on behalf of the right causes?
	Absolutely not.
	I mean, they've made excuses for some of the world's worst anti-Semites in Congress, so long as they're Democrats.
	Because again, it is a progressive interest group.
	They posted a report suggesting that X is now filled with horrible hate.
	This is a way for them to work together with groups that we've discussed on the program before, like Garm, in order to reduce advertising to platforms like X.
	Basically, abide by left-wing standards of speech or watch your advertising dollars disappear.
	That's what Elon Musk is sounding off about, and he happens to be correct about all of that.
	And it's really, really ugly, which is why it's very important that if you are an advertiser and you are looking at platforms to advertise on, you probably should be looking at freer speech platforms like Twitter.
	Because otherwise, Twitter slash X is going to revert back to type and it's going to do the same kind of crap that Facebook has done or YouTube has done in censoring material.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
	So things that I like today.
	If you wish to understand what exactly is going on in China, fantastic new book out by a person named Yasheng Huang.
	This book is titled, The Rise and Fall of the East, How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Why They Might Lead to its Decline.
	The basic premise of the book is that for centuries, millennia almost, baked into the Chinese cake has been this system of test taking, that basically chose single standards of merit in order to elevate people.
	And this has led to top-down authoritarian rule in China.
	It's been incredibly durable, a lot more durable than it would have been in, say, Russia.
	And it's why you can have Xi Jinping, who's being as authoritarian as he wants to be, and still maintain control of a country that theoretically... Like, why does it never fragment?
	Why does China never come apart?
	Why does it seem as though it continues to be durable even when its economic numbers go down?
	It also has some lessons to teach the United States about how economics ought to work,
	and also about the sort of standards that we use in terms of economic growth.
	So one of the points made in the rise and fall of the East is that basically all of the
	test-based systems for elevating people inside the CCP are rooted in growth of GDP.
	If you are a regional leader in China and you grew GDP in your area, you're very likely to be looked at for a top post in the centralized government.
	Well, the problem is that GDP is a standard that is largely reliant in China on government borrowing and spending, which is why you see China now in serious trouble.
	It's borrowed and spent way too much money.
	It's why you have giant empty cities in some of these places, because if you're a public official and you wish to rise in the Chinese Communist Party, what better way to do it than borrow a bunch of money, build a bunch of empty cities and claim that you just increased GDP dramatically?
	It's a really fascinating book.
	Again, go check it out.
	The Rise and Fall of the East by Yasheng Huang, if you're interested in the actual situation going on with China and the durability of the Chinese regime, even if they are experiencing economic failure.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	This is a piece by David Gibson, who's director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, and he's ripping into American conservative Catholics for being at odds with Pope Francis.
	He's saying that the loudest voices in American Catholicism are, quote, backward-looking moralists, disconnected from the roots of the church.
	Catholic tradition and history, says Francis, is about moving forward, changing to live the gospel message in the midst of current realities.
	The Pope's words were both surprisingly frank and frankly unsurprising, giving the persistence of right anger directed at his modernizing approach.
	This episode could be read as part of a long saga of tensions between Rome and the U.S.
	church.
	Since the nation's founding, popes have regarded the American experiment in democracy with suspicion.
	Separation of church and state is dangerous to souls in society.
	They've issued periodic blasts at Americanism and modernist trends.
	The election of Pope Francis in 2013 flipped the script, however, suddenly the Vatican began pushing Americans to be more flexible, more pastoral, more inclusive, less doctrinally rigid.
	Rome is now the engine of reform, a historic reversal.
	France is a world leader in combating climate change.
	He insistently decries economic injustice and the treatment of migrants, while putting new emphasis on the universal right to healthcare, housing, and decent jobs.
	Indeed in Portugal, Francis criticized the fixation on sins below the waist, while if you exploited workers, if you lied or cheated, it didn't matter.
	Meanwhile, says this columnist, much of American church leadership remains focused on a pelvic theology.
	Okay, here is the thing.
	It turns out that the American Catholics who are critical of Francis are right.
	There are certain unchanging principles in Catholicism.
	And Francis hasn't changed them, right?
	Francis has not actually changed the church's position on same-sex marriage.
	He's not changed the church's position on divorce.
	He's not changed the church's position on contraception.
	It's just that he keeps making overtures toward those who would in order to make time on climate change and social redistributionism.
	In essence, he's a liberation theologist who's now occupying the office of the papacy.
	And American Catholics, more conservative Catholics all over the world know this.
	Which is why he, more than any other Pope, has created a schism inside the Catholic Church.
	That is Francis' fault.
	And that is not the fault of American Catholics who are hewing exactly the same line they were hewing 20 years ago.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be talking with Vadhi Bakkam.
	He has a brand new book out.
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