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Dec. 22, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:22
Five Lessons For 2024
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It's our last broadcast of the year, so I wanted to do some summing up of 2023 and some lessons moving forward for 2024.
Overall, 2023 was a pretty meh year.
Meh in the sense that our politics has only gotten more ugly, in the sense that the economy has continued to plod along at best, in the sense that foreign policy is now a complete dumpster fire.
I had predicted the beginning of the year like a 90% bad year.
I came in a little low, it was like 96%, so I'm predicting for 2024 like 99% bad, just to be safe.
Nonetheless, There's some lessons for all of us to learn and remember from 2023.
Lesson number one.
When people say they are coming for your kids, you should listen.
In July 2021, the San Francisco Gay Men's Choir sang a uniquely honest song in an attempt to slap at social conservatives.
The choir created and posted a song in which they said they were, quote, coming for your children.
Here's what this creepy song sounded like.
We'll convert your children.
Someone's got to teach them not to hate.
We're coming for them.
We're coming for your children.
Well, that was true, of course.
Radical progressives believe the only way to create a better world is to rip children away from their parents ideologically, to indoctrinate them in the ways of left-wing social change, to turn them into little activists bent on exploding their parents' values.
That's how you create a better world.
Those progressives have They're not new.
They've spent generations taking over the schools, the media, the entertainment industry.
It's the reason why, as we discussed earlier this week, a new Harvard-Harris poll shows 79% of people aged 18 to 24 in the United States believe that, quote, white people are oppressors and non-white people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment.
It's why 67% of those same young people believe that, quote, Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.
If you're wondering just why hundreds of thousands of young people, Western leftists, are in the streets chanting for Hamas, that would be the reason why.
If we're also wondering just why 20% of all young people now consider themselves LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, that is also why generations of children have been hijacked into a neo-Marxist binary of oppressor versus oppressed.
And it is always better to identify as the oppressed than the oppressor, makes you feel a lot better, and it gives you unending power to do anything you want.
After all, if you are the oppressed, you can do whatever you want to the oppressor to free yourself and liberate yourself.
Recruiters for this perverse ideology start really young.
Really, really young.
That is why this week, Cocomelon Lane on Netflix featured two gay dads teaching their son to put on a skirt and a tiara in the name of self-fulfillment.
Here's what that looked like.
You learn to get up and dance.
How about you break out those moves?
For your two biggest fans If you're not sure what to choose
Think about all the things you like to do Just be you.
Just be me?
Yup!
Just be you.
Yup!
When you're trying to decide, think about all the things you like to do.
Just be you.
Just be me!
For context, Coco Melon's YouTube channel has 170 million subscribers and 173 billion views.
So yes, the producers of the most watched children's content in human history are coming for your kids too, teaching them gender fluidity and exploding the idea of the traditional family structure.
Whether it's the educational system, whether it's the media, whether it's entertainment, there are a lot of people who want to change how your children think.
So that's lesson number one.
They're coming for your kids, and you should do something about it.
One of the reasons why we here at Daily Wire built an entire streaming network called BentKey so you can put your kids in front of children's programming that doesn't wreck their lives, that actually reflects your values.
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Okay, lesson number two from 2023.
There are a lot of people who do not think like you.
This is something Westerners have a really tough time with.
A lot of Enlightenment philosophy is based on the idea that everybody is basically the same.
All the same.
Now, obviously, we are all equal in the eyes of God.
We all have innate human value, but we certainly do not think the same.
And the Enlightenment idea that every single person wants the same things at root, that every single person, regardless of culture, regardless of education, regardless of how they are brought up, thinks sort of the same things, That is a lie.
And it's a stupid lie.
And it's a really dangerous lie.
In 2023, Hamas slaughtered children in their cribs, burned them alive, raped women in front of their husbands, and then killed them or dragged them off to Gaza after shooting their husbands in the head.
And an entire cadre of Westerners thought, well, it's probably because they were victimized in some way.
Something must have happened to drive them to that.
Because after all, who would do that?
This is why, in this current conflict between Israel and Hamas, when Hamas takes its own children and uses them as human shields, The West, at least the leftist West, decides that it must be Israel's fault somehow, because after all, the people of Hamas, they must think the same way that Western leftists do.
They must be driven to this sort of thing.
Well, there's another possibility, and that's because Hamas does not think like you.
They don't have your priorities.
They actually don't care about their children in the same way that you do, or at least in the way that you think that they should.
They have different priorities than you, which is why they are fine with burning babies alive in their cribs.
And here's the thing.
Pretending that people are all thinking like you will get you killed.
People do not all want the same thing.
They don't all want freedom.
Freedom does not beat in the breast of every human being, as George W. Bush once foolishly said.
That is not reality.
There are a lot of people who prize, for example, religious fealty over freedom.
There are a lot of people There are a lot of people who prize a lot of different things in ways that you don't prize and that's why you have to understand who they are in order to deal with them realistically.
This means that we must be realistic about our enemies on the foreign front, obviously.
Jobs are not going to solve the problems that you have with Hamas or Hezbollah.
Appeasement is not going to solve the problems you have with the Chinese government.
Being realistic about your enemies.
Reading what they teach their kids.
Reading what they themselves think.
That is the best way to understand them rather than simply projecting your own thoughts onto them and then assuming that if something makes them angry, it must be you.
But it's not just being realistic about our enemies on the foreign front.
It also means we have to be realistic about many of the people who live with us, fellow Americans, fellow Westerners, many of whom also don't want the same things that you do.
And what that really means is that we're going to have to have some extremely serious discussions in this country about what holds us all together.
As the country feels like it's fraying, as it feels like it's coming apart, we're gonna have to figure out what do we hold in common?
Because if it turns out that people don't think like you in the country that you live in, You have a serious problem, a very serious problem.
We'll get to more on that in just one second.
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Okay.
When you take a look at the problem of people in the country who don't think like you, we're gonna have to start thinking pretty seriously about what holds us together.
Now, the very notion of free speech is not it.
Because it turns out that free speech, it's an important principle, but it also does not speak to what kind of speech is good.
A room in which any opinion is held is indeed a room that theoretically has a common value, namely that any opinion should be allowed to be held, but that is not enough to build a society upon.
You have to have a common vision of the good.
So what exactly is going to hold us together?
Is it the Constitution and rule of law?
Well, it feels like that's falling apart pretty quickly right now when you have the Colorado State Supreme Court that is basically overthrowing the Constitution and the rule of law in order to bar Donald Trump from the ballot.
Is it gonna be the rule of law from the White House?
Well, not while they're promoting the violation of law with illegal executive orders and the DOJ being militarized against political opponents.
And as we'll discuss in a minute, there's gonna be a backlash to that that's gonna be just as ugly.
What else holds us together?
How about property rights?
Well, a lot of the country right now does not believe in property rights.
By the way, back to free speech.
A huge percentage of the country doesn't actually believe in free speech principles at all.
They believe that people who disagree with them mainline political opponents.
Forget about fringy people.
Mainline political opponents should be silenced.
We live in a country in which college campuses will kick you off the campus for saying that men are men and women are women, and then the college presidents will go testify in front of Congress, simultaneously, about how it requires context to truly understand in a serious way whether or not calling for genocide of Jews is bad.
How about freedom of religion?
That used to be something that held us together.
Well now, there are states that are actively targeting religious practice.
And as our institutions wane, which was the glue that held us together, because we all used to go to church or synagogue together, we used to have common events, a common culture, what's going to hold us together then?
Lesson number three.
Weakness breeds aggression.
We found this one out good and hard this year.
If America and the West go to sleep on our enemies, our enemies take advantage.
There's this bizarre notion that has become quite prevalent on the left and on the right, that if America just goes to sleep and retreats into itself, the rest of the world stays exactly the way that it was one moment ago.
And that's really, really stupid.
It's not true.
If America abandons the world, the world becomes significantly worse.
And that has real spillover for the United States.
Not just in terms of bad things happening all over the world, because you can always close your eyes and pretend it doesn't affect you, it's happening very far away, but also in terms of how you live your life.
The economy, which you do rely upon, gets a lot worse.
Your safety becomes a lot more tenuous when it turns out there are a lot more people around your borders who hate your guts.
If you go to sleep on your enemies, they take advantage.
That's been clear since Joe Biden decided to ignominiously and cowardly fashion run away from Afghanistan and hand over the country to 7th century barbarians.
It's also true, by the way, in Ukraine, the reality is that thanks to Barack Obama and prior presidents, including George W. Bush, basically doing very little when Russia invaded Georgia, when Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbass, It turns out that that encouraged Russia to invade Ukraine.
There's been a lot of talk about how Western militants created Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Now, Western weakness created Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Because if Russia actually felt they were going to get clocked in severe fashion and lose the war, they wouldn't have entered the war.
This is what deterrence is based on.
As always, there are basically two strategies when it comes to preemptively preventing a war.
One is appeasement and the other is deterrence.
Those are the only two strategies available.
There really is no third.
Not when it comes to intransigent enemies who don't like the way that you live and have fundamental disagreements about how the world order should be structured.
When it comes to those countries, only two options.
Appeasement, deterrence.
There is no third.
Isolation is generally a form of appeasement.
Deterrence is where nobody walks across that border because they're afraid that they're gonna get clocked into next Monday.
Well, when you run away from the world, the world becomes worse.
This is true in the Gaza Strip.
Both Israel and the United States were weak with Palestinian terrorism.
Both Israel and the United States decided that Hamas could basically be contained and dealt with.
Both Israel and the United States were easy with the Palestinian Authority.
They relied on technology.
They relied on the idea that forcing Israel into concessions to its terrorist enemies would somehow buy peace.
Appeasement would be the preemptive anti-war strategy.
Rather than deterrence.
And it turns out that broke down.
And it failed.
And that bred massive aggression.
And it's breeding more aggression right now.
For example, a much more aggressive Iran in the Middle East.
The Obama administration spent years appeasing the Iranians.
The Trump administration pushed back.
The Biden administration went back to appeasing the Iranians, and the first thing they did was get militants on literally every border they have via every single proxy group that they have, from Hamas to Hezbollah in the north of Israel to the Houthis.
Here, in fact, is a video that the Houthis just released championing their own militants in taking over ships from the Red Sea.
Here's what that video looks like.
As you can see, these are ships with Houthi flags and Palestinian flags.
And they say, O Palestine, we have come with steadfastness and bravery.
The strength of God is within us.
After Taha and his family, O Palestine, we have come.
Remember, this is a country with $700 GDP per capita.
Very poor country.
They developed all these resources specifically to kill people and take over shipping lanes.
The Axis of Al-Quds is coming.
O misguided masses, The fulfillment of the promise of the hereafter and triumph of the message.
Again, they don't think like you.
The axis of Al-Quds is coming.
Al-Quds is a reference to Iran.
O misguided masses, the fulfillment of the promise of the hereafter and the triumph of the message.
And again, it's just a bunch of ragtag pirates in kind of crappy boats with some machine guns.
And it's a very well produced video.
I will say they did a good job with their drone footage.
Here's the problem.
If the West doesn't blow them out of the water, you're going to get even more aggression.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Every time a mom sees her baby on ultrasound, it's going to radically increase the chance that that baby Okay, again, when it comes to weakness, it breeds aggression.
Weakness in the Red Sea is going to breed aggression from China.
China's already making noises about the possibility of taking Taiwan.
I would say that if things keep going the way that they are, I would say there's better than a 50-50 shot that China attempts to make a more aggressive move against Taiwan.
For example, attempting to blockade Taiwan and daring the West to break that blockade at the risk of getting into a direct war with China.
and at the risk of China shutting down the Taiwan Strait or creating such trouble in the South China Sea that the world economy absolutely tanks in advance of an election.
You could certainly see China doing that while Joe Biden is president because they see that he is weak.
They see, just as well as everyone else does, that San Francisco is literally a cesspool filled with human feces until the Chinese president shows up, at which point the dictator gets to see clean streets and they clean up the streets for him.
Appeasement to China is going to breed more aggression.
This is also true, by the way, with regard to immigration.
Weakness on our southern border means lots and lots of people are taking advantage, which is why the Biden administration has been seen by illegal immigrants the world over as a patsy.
It's why you see people chanting Joe Biden's name as they approach the southern border.
It's why you are seeing hundreds of thousands of people arriving at the southern border every month.
Unprecedented levels.
Waves of illegal immigrants.
Other forms of weakness include multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism being the idea that there is no advanced versus non-advanced culture.
There is no better or worse culture.
That all cultures exist in a sort of lukewarm miasma of mediocrity.
You can't distinguish between them.
You shouldn't discriminate between cultures.
But if you don't stand up for your own culture, you end up importing extraordinary numbers of people who actually hate your culture and undermine your culture.
It breeds aggression.
Conversely, strength means facing actual, hard realities.
It means not backing down on your principles, even when that cost is insanely high.
This is why it's so important that, for example, the West not cave just because war is ugly.
Of course war is ugly.
I'll give you an example of what bravery actually looks like, because this is just an astonishing story.
Last week we covered what has been the worst story of the war for the Israelis after October 7th, which was there were three hostages who were taken by Hamas and its civilian allies into the Gaza Strip and these three hostages somehow got loose.
And they put up a sign in Hebrew that said, we are hostages.
They apparently were free for three days or so.
And then they tried to surrender to the Israeli troops.
They were bare chested and they were carrying white flags.
And the Israeli troops thought that they were probably terrorists because that looks like a trap.
This was not an area where hostages are supposed to be roaming free.
Israel had been dealing with booby traps and bombs on bodies for a very long time in this war.
And so the Israeli troops, the IDF, shot these three hostages by accident and killed them.
Horrific story.
I want to read you this letter, because this is the kind of bravery it takes to actually win wars against intransigent and evil enemies.
So there's a woman named Iris Chaim.
She's the mother of one of the hostages who was killed by the IDF, Yotam Chaim.
And she sent this message to the Israeli soldiers from that tragic incident.
I'm going to translate it.
Beret Iris Chaim.
She says, hello, this is Iris Chaim.
I'm Yotam's mother.
I wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and that I'm sending you my hugs from afar.
I know that everything that happened is not your fault at all.
It's no one's fault, except for Hamas.
Know that you are doing the greatest thing in the world that could happen, that could help us.
The people of Israel and all of us need you to stay healthy.
Don't hesitate, even for a moment if you see a terrorist.
Do not think to yourself that you killed a hostage deliberately.
You need to protect yourself, because that's the only way you can protect us.
At the first opportunity, you are invited to come to our home.
Anyone who can come to our home.
We want to see you with our own eyes, to hug you, and tell you that you did everything you could, as much as it hurts to say it was the right thing.
Not one of us judges you.
Not one of us are angry at you.
That's astonishing strength.
And that's the actual kind of strength it takes to defeat people who fundamentally wish to make the world an incredibly horrible place.
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Okay, so we've talked about the first three lessons of 2023.
First, when people say they're coming for your kids, you should listen and do something about it.
Two, lots of people don't actually think like you.
And three, weakness breeds aggression.
Now, lesson four, what goes around comes around always and forever.
If you do something to somebody else politically in the United States, the chances are extremely high that that is going to come back to haunt you.
So when it comes to domestic politics, Democrats seem to be under the weird impression that playing with legal fire has no consequences.
That is a lie.
It is an incredibly stupid lie.
The prosecutions of Donald J. Trump, which are going to carry well into next year throughout the election cycle, four separate prosecutions, three of which are entirely spurious.
The New York prosecution of Donald Trump.
The Washington D.C.
prosecution of Donald Trump.
The Georgia prosecution of Donald Trump.
All of those are deliberate misreads of the law and obvious misreads of the law.
They are stretches.
Not only are they stretches, there's now an attempt to push them before the elections.
The trial actually happens before the election so as to theoretically convict Donald Trump before the election to affect the election.
The fourth case, which is the classified documents case down in Florida, Just by the statute, Trump violated the statute.
Also, it happens to be that Hillary Clinton violated the same exact statute and no one cared.
And no one did anything.
In fact, James Comey specifically went out of his way to change the nature of the law to let her off the hook.
So all of that wrapped together looks like a political prosecution of Trump.
And Trump has been making the case that the system is weaponized against him.
And then the cherry was put on top of that particular sundae by the Colorado State Supreme Court this week, which announced that Donald Trump could simply be removed from the ballot in primaries and the general election as a quote-unquote insurrectionist, despite the fact that there is no definition of insurrectionist in law that Donald Trump has not been convicted of or tried for insurrection.
Even the cases in which he is currently tried do not allege violation of insurrection law.
The attempt to turn Donald Trump into the test case for this is totally insane.
Furthermore, when you issue executive orders that move well beyond the Constitution, when you, Joe Biden, decide that you're going to use OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Hazards Administration, to cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans in violation of law, when you use your pen in order to simply relieve student loan debt, When you do those things, you are setting the stage for precisely the reverse to be done to you.
If you wish for Republicans to abide by the law, you can't break the law.
If you wish for Republicans not to abuse executive power, you cannot abuse executive power.
Once you open Pandora's box, the box is now open.
And the box is open because Republicans seem to think that if bad Democratic behavior justifies Republican reactionary bad behavior, that's also totally fine.
So things are going to get worse because then Democrats are going to take whatever Republicans add on to the bad behavior and then they're going to add on to that bad behavior.
So if Democrats.
Decide that they're going to try to take down Trump post-2016 with a series of lies.
That justifies Donald Trump lying about the law with regard to the 2020 election and suggesting that the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, had the unilateral ability to simply throw out certified votes.
And that then justifies Democrats reacting by abusing the law to bar Trump from the ballot overtly or to prosecute him politically to stop him.
All of which will then justify Donald Trump denying the election results in 2024 if he loses.
All of which will then justify riots and prosecutions.
We can see precisely where all of this is going.
The endless cycle of reactionary politics can only be stopped if somebody decides not to be a reactionary and to be reasonable and to stop.
That is the only way.
But it's not just one side.
Both sides have to stop.
Because otherwise, one side is unilaterally disarming.
And herein lies the problem with our modern politics.
There is no consensus that both sides need to stop this.
There are too many Democrats who are out there celebrating barring Donald Trump from the ballot.
There are too many Democrats who are out there celebrating the political prosecutions of Donald Trump.
There are too many Democrats who are perfectly willing to watch Joe Biden be dictatorial in his presidency because he's a member of their party.
And all that's gonna justify is similar but more action from the other side, which will justify similar but more action from the other side.
The nature of American politics is incredibly reactionary at this point in time.
What you really need is for both sides to go weapons down, all of which goes back to the second lesson, which is we better find some common ground pretty damned quickly or things are going to get really ugly really fast, a lot uglier even than they are right now, which is why 2024 is shaping up to just be a dumpster fire.
Okay, finally, lesson number five from 2023.
Incompetence has consequences.
This is true for everyone.
Incompetence rules the roost.
We are now in a race to the bottom.
Now on the left, that incompetence is coming from the fact that the meritocracy is seen as an imposition of power.
That somehow, if you are good at things and you are successful, that's not because you're good at things, it's because you exploited someone.
And so the best thing that we can do is get rid of the meritocracy and then ignore the incompetence.
The incompetence has now bled through to every area of our government.
Joe Biden is incompetent.
I mean, he is mentally incompetent at this point.
I mean, here is video of Joe Biden, literally yesterday, randomly shuffling into curtains.
I'm telling you, like the joke from Shane Gillis about him being a Roomba is just true.
It's not even a joke anymore.
Here was Joe Biden finishing his speech and not knowing where to go because he is not
he is non compos mentis.
There he is.
He turned around.
He doesn't know where to go.
He's just going to randomly smiling.
No one knows where.
Where is he going?
So random dude has to pop out from behind the curtain to give him some sort of direction as to where he is supposed to go.
Where am I going?
Still don't know where I'm going.
No, Joe, you're going the wrong way.
Oh, oh, that way.
OK, trying to motor on over here.
Moving at the speed of light.
Joe Biden, not competent.
There's a reason he's in the 30s in approval rating.
Even less competent, Kamala Harris, who was picked because she is incompetent.
She was not picked for being excellent at her job.
She's picked despite being crappy at her job because she is a DEI candidate.
She is a candidate who's selected specifically by Joe Biden because she is a black woman, not because she was good at her job.
She ran one of the most incompetent presidential campaigns of all time.
She dropped out before her home state in an open primary.
That's crazy.
Alejandro Mayorkas, our Homeland Security Secretary, wildly incompetent, leaving the border fully open while maintaining that it is actually closed.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who loves choo-choo trains.
That dude took off for like a couple of months and no one even noticed, then he came back and none of the planes land on time and trains are blowing up.
The levels of incompetence are astonishing.
Democrats in the Senate are wildly incompetent.
Democrats in the House are even more incompetent.
They can't even find it in their maimed hearts to somehow condemn the anti-Semitism of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
But don't worry, it is not just Democrats.
Republicans are also incompetent.
Republicans in Congress have decided to engage in an idiotic race to the bottom, ousting a Speaker of the House this year for no apparent reason to replace him with a person who's just fine, Mike Johnson, but who is now incentivized by the exact same structure so they will pass the exact same bills, except that they're probably going to lose Kevin McCarthy's seat.
So just really smart stuff happening right here.
Incompetence has been wildly rewarded on all sides of the political aisle because there is something.
A really sick seed that has been buried in the American body politic in the ground and it's borne ugly fruit.
And that seed is that if you fail, your failure is someone else's fault.
This is true in terms of our agencies.
Our agencies are wildly incompetent on the state level, as evidenced by the Maui fire, where the state agencies not only did not do their environmental work, they then didn't even sound the alarms properly to let people get the hell out when everything was on fire.
Our institutions are incompetent.
It's not just government.
Our institutions are incompetent.
Our churches are wildly incompetent.
They're filled with people who are abandoning eternal values.
The only reason you go to church, they're abandoning those eternal values in this bizarre push to fill the pews with left-wingers who don't actually worship God, but worship a weird lawn sign that's multicolored and says dumb crap like, water is wet.
The amount of incompetence throughout every element of our society is truly a problem, especially because when people are faced with incompetence, they get mad.
Now, the normal reaction would be get mad at the incompetence and then put competent people in power.
But we've forbidden that because we've created an entire ideology that bars getting rid of the incompetent people.
Take, for example, our universities.
The best example of the day, this is an amazing, it's a wonderful story, so Claudine Gay, who is the president of Harvard, she of course has come under fire recently because she went in front of Congress and she made an ass of herself because she was asked whether in fact calling for the genocide of Jews was violative of Harvard student policy.
The answer is yes, we shouldn't be calling for the genocide of Jews.
Now, if she had said, we love free speech here, and then Harvard actually did love free speech, that might be an argument, but they don't love free speech at Harvard, they suck at free speech at Harvard.
So what she really meant is, you can call for the genocide of Jews, but pretty much no other group.
Well, this then led to the opening of Claudine Gay's past, and it turns out that she is a garbage scholar who has plagiarized in dozens of instances.
According to the New York Times, Harvard University, in the face of mounting questions over possible plagiarism in the scholarly work of its president, Claudine Gay, said on Wednesday it had found two additional instances of insufficient citation in her work.
Those issues were found in Dr. Gay's 1997 doctoral dissertation, in which Harvard said it had found two examples of what they called, this is amazing language.
You know what, you ready for some incompetence covering right here?
Get ready for this language.
It's not plagiarism, folks.
It is, quote, duplicative language without appropriate attribution.
Oh, you mean plagiarism.
That's literally the definition of plagiarism.
It's amazing!
Literally, the definition of the word plagiarism is, quote, the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.
Here's what Harvard is now calling this practice.
They're now calling this practice, again, the phrase was duplicative language without appropriate attribution.
Oh, you mean copying someone's language without citing them, which is stealing their language, which is plagiarism.
But they can't get rid of Cloudy and Gay, because you see, Cloudy and Gay is a black woman.
The first black woman president in the history of Harvard.
Mediocrity and incompetence must be rewarded.
Endlessly.
And those who call out mediocrity and failure, those people are really the people to blame.
So the comment of the year on this particular topic comes courtesy of a person I actually had for contracts when I was at Harvard Law School, Charles Freed.
Is Professor Freed when I was there?
He was old then, so he's really old now.
Charles Freed, I mean, this is such an amazing quote.
He worked for Reagan, he was a solicitor general under Reagan, so he was one of the supposed conservatives at the law school, but he was never particularly conservative.
He was always middle of the road, politically, at best.
Here's what he said, quote, it's part of this extreme right-wing attack
on elite institutions.
The obvious point is to make it look as if there is a woke double standard
at elite institutions.
And then he says this, here's the comment, quote, if it came from some other quarter,
I might be granting it some credence, but not from these people.
you That's right.
If you point out the incompetence, but you're of the wrong political persuasion, if you're Chris Ruffo, and you point out the plagiarism, or if you are Aaron Siberian, and you point out the plagiarism, then Charles Freed won't even take it under advisement.
Because again, the precious must be protected.
It is more important to protect your ideological leanings than it is to protect any level of meritocracy.
In fact, we've built entire edifices of ideology to excuse incompetence and failure.
On both sides, we now find conspiracy theories to undermine the basic idea of merit.
On the left, if you're failing, it's because, as stated before, you're victimized by the white oppressors.
And this is a prevalent ideology, particularly among young people.
79% of people 18 to 24 agree with that.
That if you fail, If you suck at life, that's not because you've made bad decisions, it's because you're being victimized by some evil cadre of people in the back room who are screwing you.
On the right, if you are failing, it's also, shockingly, because of a cadre of evil people in the back room who are screwing you.
Maybe it's the hedge fund managers.
Maybe it's the people who love free markets.
And maybe it's people who want to maximize profits instead of, you know, turning this all over to a bunch of government bureaucrats for government subsidization of particular electoral cliques.
Understand that the theory of populism, which is, effectively speaking, that your own failures are not under your own control ever, ever, ever.
That's modern populism, at least.
Doesn't have to be that way, but that's what it is right now.
That theory breeds more incompetence.
It makes the world worse.
More people fail.
And then because more people fail, the beauty is that it's a completely unfalsifiable system in theory.
As more people fail, the answer is not, oh, maybe we got this wrong.
Maybe we ought to promote merit.
It becomes, well, that conspiracy theory, man, that must be true.
That conspiracy is so strong.
And then, because you believe that conspiracy, you don't get confident at things, and then you fail more.
And then you're like, oh man, every year it's getting worse.
Here's the reality.
The meritocracy is the great American idea.
The meritocracy, the idea that if you work hard, and if you are smart, and if you make good moral decisions, you will succeed.
That is a unique, Western, beautiful idea.
It is the best idea, maybe the best idea in all of human history, because what it suggests is that if you make the right decisions, you can create positive externalities for everybody else.
See, competence creates great externalities for everybody.
It makes the world better for everyone.
Elon Musk being competent at building cars makes better cars for you.
Elon Musk sucking at building cars would be really bad.
And the same thing is true in every single job.
It is true in every area of life.
We need competence in our government.
We need competence in our institutions.
If we don't get competence, things are likely to get worse and worse.
And then people will blame, ironically, the system and call for more control by people who still have not actually shown any competence in these areas.
So what does all this add up to?
It adds up to 2024.
Unless these trends are reversed, unless these lessons are learned and people start to get it through their heads, that meritocracy matters and incompetence should not be rewarded.
That perhaps we should seek common ground at least with regard to baseline American principles instead of ripping each other apart.
That weakness breeds aggression.
That there are lots of people worldwide and domestically who don't think like you.
And that there are people who actually wish to pervert the minds of everyone.
Unless we actually get real about the world in other words.
That's the real short story here.
Unless we get real about the world.
We're not just gonna get 2023 again.
We're gonna get way worse.
2024?
I don't mean to be doom and gloom heading into Christmas.
But uh...
Dude.
Okay, in just one second, speaking of what's coming our way, we'll get to the latest on the 2024 election first.
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Okay, meanwhile.
Alrighty, speaking of the 2024 election cycle, um, it's gonna get worse, like, all the way across the board.
Particularly because, again, Joe Biden is wildly underperforming.
Indicators that Joe Biden is wildly underperforming.
So Oprah Winfrey, who is a longtime Democrat devotee, I mean, she she campaigned with Barack Obama.
I believe she endorsed Joe Biden last time around.
She was asked if she endorses Biden this time around, and she's like, I'm going to walk slowly away.
Bye.
Oprah, are you supporting the president again in 2024?
I'm just here to celebrate this event.
How does this compare to your other accomplishments in your career?
Well, this is one I never even imagined.
You know, this is what I never even imagined.
Well, bye.
See you later.
I love that she won't answer the election.
She's like, I'm just I'm just here to sell.
Bye.
Yeah, when Oprah Winfrey can't get on board with like, of course I hate Donald Trump.
I love Joe Biden.
Like Oprah Winfrey is a Democrat, obviously.
And even she is not on board.
Meanwhile, even Joe Biden's supposed successes are now turning to failure.
We mentioned those student loan payments that he illegally decided to approve and then got struck down by the Supreme Court.
Well, now they're back.
According to the Wall Street Journal, as millions of student loan borrowers make payments this year for the first time since 2020, many are grappling with maddening bureaucratic problems.
Borrowers subscribing, Waiting on hold for hours, trying and failing to get answers from their loan servicers.
Some receive inaccurate or conflicting information about amounts owed and the status of their loans.
Others heard barely anything at all, only to be hit with surprise bills.
The logistical morass, which comes less than a year before the 2024 election, has complicated Joe Biden's efforts to ensure that voters credit him for slashing student debt.
Biden's initial plan to cancel up to 20 grand in federal student loan debt for people making less than $125,000 a year was struck down by the Supreme Court in June.
But that didn't stop Joe Biden.
Since then, the administration advanced narrower loan relief.
They wiped away $132 billion in debt for 3.6 million borrowers.
And just keep going with the illegality, but it turns out that even that is a bleep show.
Meanwhile, even the Education Department is noting the risks associated with transferring loans and messing around with all of this.
The Education Department says these borrowers are returning to a student loan system that is midstream and making fundamental reforms to student loan servicing and borrower benefits.
So it's a mess.
It's not going to be great for all those people who are relying on Joe Biden.
It turns out that when you lie to people and then people discover the lies, they're not particularly happy with you.
Meanwhile, Jerome Powell is sowing confusion over at the Federal Reserve.
Again, according to the Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was asked at a recent gathering what he does for fun.
He said, quote, for me, a really big party is a really good inflation report, but it doesn't matter because right now it's unclear exactly what the hell the Fed is going to do.
Officials last week didn't rule out higher rates, but Jerome Powell ignited a market rally when he volunteered that some officials described their own rate cut outlooks, even if that wasn't a central focus.
So, it's unclear what exactly is coming out from the Fed.
The markets believe that the Fed is going to lower the rates again.
The Fed has not made clear whether it's going to leave them or even increase the rates if the inflation continues the way that it has.
All of this is leading to serious uncertainty.
Interest rates could still be quite restrictive even if we adjust policy by lowering rates three times next year, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly pointed out in an interview on Monday.
Also, it's unclear exactly whether the interest rates are going to stay up.
In the fives for a while to come.
So if Joe Biden is hoping for the Fed to completely save him next year, that doesn't look like that's likely to happen.
So he is down to his last resort, which always and forever is that democracy is a threat if you allow Donald Trump to be reelected.
That is the final case that all of these people are going to make.
It's gonna be nothing but threats to democracy from here to the election.
This is presumably why Jack Smith continues to push forward an obviously politically motivated prosecution in Washington, D.C.
So on Thursday, Smith filed a response to a motion by Trump.
They had filed demanding the court wait until a lower appeals court rules on the issue of presidential immunity.
They want to slow down the process.
The longer the process takes, the longer it takes to get past the election.
Smith wants to speed up the process.
What exactly is his excuse?
He says the public interest in a prompt resolution of this case favors an immediate definitive decision by this court.
The charges here are of the utmost gravity.
This case involves criminal charges against a former president based on his actions while in office.
Not just any actions, alleged acts to perpetuate himself in power by frustrating the constitutionally prescribed process for certifying the lawful winner of an election.
The nation has a compelling interest in a decision on respondents claim of immunity from these charges and if they are to be tried a resolution by conviction or acquittal without undue delay.
So why Why?
I mean, these trials take years very often.
What is the big rush?
And we all know the big rush.
The big rush is for Jack Smith to get a conviction in under the wire so as to damage Donald Trump's presidential chances in 2024.
So, in other words, get ready for things to get really hot and really upsetting next year.
2024 is gonna be an election year.
Election years are usually exciting.
There's gonna be the frisson of violence in the streets.
That is going to be a thing that just Man, I'm glad I live in Florida and not California is all I can say to that one.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the latest from Prague.
There was a horrific mass shooting in Prague yesterday.
We'll get to that in just one second, but first, a majority of Gen Z supports left-wing policies like open borders, even socialism.
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Meanwhile, horrific story out of Prague.
At least 15 people are reported dead, shot by a gunman from a balcony at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Prague on Thursday.
The gunman was reported by local media to have fallen off the roof, according to Breitbart.
The mass shooter was eliminated.
They said there were several dead and dozens of injured around that Faculty of Arts building at the University of Prague.
Apparently, the presumed shooter had been interested in Killing as many people as possible in a school shooting.
Apparently was obsessed with school shootings all around the world.
He apparently shot his father earlier in the day in a small village outside of Prague.
Police attempted to find the 24-year-old afterward.
They discovered that he was scheduled to give a lecture at the university on Thursday afternoon.
Instead, he had what sounded like a machine gun, if you hear the sounds, and he decided to open fire on random innocent people.
Apparently he was a history student with a history of psychological problems.
It's an absolutely terrible story, obviously.
The Czech Republic happens to be a place with significant gun control.
Very, very strong gun control in Prague.
There was not much that really could be done to stop him, so he apparently had free reign with a viewpoint above the areas that he was shooting at.
Students were trying to hide on the balconies.
It was taking place on a high story of a building.
You can see pictures of him on the high story of the building
and students were attempting to cling to the ledge itself.
Apparently one of the people actually fell from the ledge and was killed in the fall.
It's a horrific, horrific story.
It's just terrible stuff.
It's a reminder that evil exists pretty much everywhere.
And once again, it's a reminder that mass shootings, despite what the press will tell you,
is not an America only problem.
It is a problem anywhere you have people who are mentally ill and have serious psychological problems and violent psychological problems, and you can't obtain guns.
It is still possible to obtain guns even in places with significant gun control, and there was no one there who could stop this guy because no one there had a gun in response.
Okay, meanwhile, the Israel-Hamas war continues.
Revelations every single day about the extent to which Hamas was honeycombed throughout the Gaza Strip, including at the hospitals.
In fact, Israel released a video of the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital admitting that he was a Hamas commander.
Remember, he was the director of a hospital admitting that he was a Hamas commander.
Here he was doing just that under interrogation.
He said, what's your full name?
Ahmed Mohamed Hassan Al-Qalout.
What's your nickname?
Abu Hassan.
What's your current position?
Manager of the hospital.
Manager of the Kamal Adnan Hospital.
When did you join Hamas?
2010.
When was the last time you did military training?
2010.
What is your rank in Hamas?
I'm mid-rank.
That's parallel to Brigadier General.
Describe how Hamas uses your hospital to hide military activities.
Those who are hidden officially, which were coordinated, that I know about, according to rank, they are the senior political officials.
They are the seniors, the military and civilian officials.
They had rooms, which they hid in, at the hospital desk.
They stayed there ten days, then they changed places, to a different place, and then they left the hospital.
So, yes, of course they were hiding in the hospital.
And of course, the leadership of these hospitals knew they were hiding in the hospitals, and yet all those leaders of the hospitals have been quoted by the media as excellent sources on the human rights violations that are happening in and around the hospital due to the Israelis.
It's absolutely insane.
I mean, truly crazy.
Meanwhile, you can always count on small-minded bigots like Joy Reid at MSNBC to completely miss the point by comparing what is going on in Gaza to Rwanda and Darfur, you know, places where actual genocides were attempted As opposed to very specific military operations that have, according to Israel, killed upwards of 8,000 members of Hamas out of the 20,000 dead so far.
And by the way, a huge number of the people who are not in that 8,000 number are Hamas fellow travelers who are hanging out with Hamas.
Israel has been more precise in its targeting than any army in modern history, but Joy Reid is comparing this to Darfur and Rwanda.
President Biden has hitched the global credibility of America to the moral credibility of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yeah.
And that's just a disaster for us around the world.
I think of Darfur, I think of Rwanda, I think of previous cases in which the United States sort of watched seemingly helplessly as people died by the hundreds of thousands.
And so, you know, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo.
But in this case, unlike those cases, this feels like this is us doing it.
The human misery is being funded by the United States taxpayers, yet it doesn't seem that U.S.
public opinion has any impact.
Well, that's right.
I think U.S.
public opinion, it's important to note, has shifted a lot on this issue and I think is in a different place than the American political establishment is on this.
That, of course, is a former U.S.
State Department official who left the State Department because the State Department refused to acquiesce to his pro-Hamas viewpoints.
Meanwhile, I'm gonna end today's show, at least for the non-paying members, with the feel-good guy of the year.
If there's only one good story that came out of 2023, it's the transformation of John Fetterman into a raging moderate.
Again, it's an amazing story.
We here are having a little bit of Fettermania.
Here's what John Fetterman said.
He said, with regard to left-wing purity tests, he said, it's just a place where I'm not.
I don't feel I've left the label of progressive.
It's just more that it's left me.
I'm not critical of someone as a progressive.
I believe different things.
He says that a lot of people have warped minds on Israel.
He says, I do find it confusing where the very left progressives in America don't seem to want to support the only progressive nation in the region that really embraces the same kind of values I would expect we would want as a society.
Again, Jon Fetterman, the shock of the year.
And we have more positive shocks in the coming year.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We're going to be getting into the most bizarre defense of a sex tape maybe ever.
So you have to become a member for that.
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Here's also your reminder that while we are not going to be having live shows next week, we have tons of great content that's going to be coming out every day on this channel.
So you're going to want to look out for that.
It's a bunch of fun stuff that we planned just for you for the break.
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