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Aug. 11, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:21
CIVIL WAR: Red America vs. Blue America; Plus... Fmr. PM Liz Truss Stops By
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All righty, folks.
So I'm not live today, but a few weeks ago, I sat down with Liz Truss, the former Prime Minister of the UK, who was unfairly maligned by the media, treated as though she had done something terrible by talking about the necessity for tax cuts and regulatory cuts in Great Britain.
We sat down to talk about the essentially invasion of the West by people who really, really hate the West.
It's a pressing issue for not just Europeans, but for Americans.
Here's what it sounded like.
Well, Liz Truss, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, thanks so much for taking the time.
Really appreciate it.
Great to be here.
So why don't we start with what went wrong in Great Britain?
Kirstarmer is now the Prime Minister of Great Britain, to the shock and despair of many of us.
How exactly did that come about?
Because you had Conservative dominance for a period of time.
It appeared the Conservative Party moved in basically a leftward direction.
There was heavy emphasis on things like Green New Deal type things that you would see in the United States, an unwillingness to revise any of the sort of bad fiscal bargains of the past.
How do you arrive at a point in British politics where Kirst Armour and the Labour Party are dominant?
And you have a rising Reform Party with Nigel Farage and the Tory Party, which had been dominant for well over a decade here, now seems to be sort of fading.
I think a lot of Britain's problems go back many, many years.
And we've always had a problem with our bureaucracy and the power of the administrative state in Britain.
But Tony Blair made it a whole lot worse in 1997.
He gave more powers to the Bank of England.
He outsourced huge powers to the Human Rights Act, to the judiciary.
He made the judiciary unaccountable.
So what happened under Blair is a massive shift to the left.
And all of these institutions, whether it's the police, the judiciary, they've been captured by left-wing ideology.
So you see the promotion essentially of Islamism, of the net zero zealotry, of things like pro-transgender extremism.
This is all now baked into British institutions.
And the problem for the Conservatives is rather than saying we're going to reverse all that stuff, they said, we're the heir to Blair.
We want to copy him.
We want to triangulate.
And we didn't take the steps necessary to get control back in the hands of parliament and actually do the things the public wanted, like controlling immigration, like having cheap energy and all of those policies.
And I spent 10 years as a government minister struggling against the bureaucracy, but all the time I felt like I was swimming against the tide because they had so much power in the system.
And this is ultimately why I ran to be prime minister in 2022.
I wanted to take on the orthodoxy, the net zero orthodoxy, the Keynesian orthodoxy, the mass migration orthodoxy.
But what I discovered was when I tried to do a package of essentially keeping taxes low, getting on with fracking, controlling government spending, I just faced the most massive barrage.
And it wasn't just the bureaucrats.
It was some people in the Conservative Party that I would call conservatives in name only.
But it was also the whole international, you know, Davos elite.
The IMF intervened.
Even Joe Biden criticized my policies.
And what I found out was just how powerful in Britain the system is.
And what we've had is we've had for many years a failing system.
Tony Blair made it a lot worse.
He took the levers out of the hands of politicians.
We failed to turn it round as conservatives.
And the British public hate it.
That's why they voted Brexit in 2016.
They wanted things to change in our country.
They voted again in 2019 for Boris Johnson because he said the things would change.
And they voted again for Kirst Armer, which was a kind of last ditch attempt.
But the problem is the same people are still in charge of whoever you vote for.
You've still got the same governor of the Bank of England.
You've still got the same people running the Home Office.
You've still got the same people in the police force.
You've still got the judges that are unaccountable making these crazy decisions, like locking up people for posting on X. That is what is going on in our country.
And frankly, I think in 2029, which is when the next election is going to be, people will vote for change and they may well vote for Nigel Farage.
But if he doesn't deal with the bureaucracy, if he doesn't reverse those laws that Tony Blair put in, he is not going to be able To deliver change either, because I've seen it on the front line.
You know, you cannot deliver massive system change with people who are against you and people who want to undermine you.
And they don't just want to undermine me.
They want to undermine Western civilization.
That is what we're talking about.
And I think this is what Trump has learnt from his first administration: you've got to actually take on the Harvards of this world.
You know, you've got to take on the State Department.
You've got to take on the Congressional Budget Office.
All of these people that make up the system are part of the problem.
I mean, I think that your example is such a telling one because when you came into the office when you became Prime Minister, essentially you were trying to push forward a package of deregulation and tax cuts.
And this ended the financial world, apparently.
Everyone went nuts.
The Bank of England suggested that the entire country would no longer be credit worthy.
And that sort of bizarre reaction can only be explained by a desire to maintain the status quo because all of those budgetary issues still exist under Kirstarmer.
It's not as though the spending has dramatically decreased under Kirstarma.
It's increased.
Or as though they're bending the cost curve on the National Health Service or something.
They're not touching any of the underlying dramatic drivers of Britain's national debt and slow growth.
But the minute you say, let's try to unleash the economy through tax cuts and deregulation, they're like, oh, oh my gosh, you've now created a gap between government revenues and government expenditures.
And that gap is unsustainable.
It was unsustainable before.
It's unsustainable now.
You were just trying to actually change the system to actually get some growth and dynamism in the system, from what I understand.
That is right.
And in fact, after the fact, the Bank of England admitted that two-thirds of the rise in bond prices was down to their failure to regulate the pension industry.
So they successfully blamed what was a market jump on me, although they subsequently admitted that it's their fault.
But nobody in the mainstream media in Britain wants to report that.
And in fact, only today, Keir Starmer is attacking Nigel Farage, saying he would implement the same economic policies as me.
So they use me as a kind of bogeyman of what happens when you cut taxes.
But of course, my tax cuts weren't allowed to stand.
So the policy was never even tried.
What happened was that some relatively small changes in taxes, plus unleashing the supply side, as you're talking about, like getting on with fracking, were essentially blocked by the economic establishment.
And they didn't just like, they didn't just dislike my policies.
They also disliked the fact that I wanted to make the decisions rather than them making the decisions.
And this is what I'm saying about Keir Starmer.
Keir Starmer is not coming up with these policies.
These policies are being designed by the Treasury and the Bank of England.
And he is going along with what the bureaucracy want to do.
And because I challenged them, they went for me and they smeared me and they lied about me.
And as you rightly say, the taxes were risen, were increased after I left office.
What happened?
The revenues didn't come in.
Because surprise, surprise, businesses left Britain, millionaires left Britain.
People decided not to work the extra hours because the taxes were so high.
So there's an even bigger gap.
So if my policies had remained in place, there would be a smaller gap between revenue and expenditure because it would have encouraged activity.
And this is what Ronald Reagan understood.
This is what Donald Trump understands.
But the fact is we have a very powerful orthodoxy that's not just in Britain.
It's also there in the Congressional Budget Office that refused to score Trump's tax cuts.
It's there in the IMF who provide the commentary.
It's there in Davos.
So we are fighting against a massive leftist machine.
And all of these issues are connected because they believe migration is a good thing for the economy.
So they won't let politicians cut migration.
They believe that net zero is good for the economy.
Do you remember when Mark Carney was saying that we're going to get all these green jobs and net zero is going to power the economy?
No, it's not.
The British economy is on its knees.
But what has Mark Carney been rewarded with?
The prime ministership of Canada.
So you have all these people circulating, sharing bad ideas, undermining the West.
And yet there's just a circuit of those people getting promoted Into ever, ever higher positions.
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This kind of sad history of Great Britain over the course of the last several decades, and it really is a sad history because as somebody who loves British history, as somebody who loves the Anglo-American tradition, the decline of Britain, not just from an empire, but toward a sort of second-rateness, just generally, is truly a tragedy in world history because of the amount of good that the British Empire was capable of spreading and the amount of good that it did historically.
I mean, I know that there are a lot of people out there who want to rip on the British Empire and British imperialism, but let's be real.
It was the British Empire that ended world slavery.
It was the British Empire that brought capitalism and free markets to huge swaths of the globe.
It was the British Empire that guaranteed freedom of the seas.
There wouldn't be the United States, Australia, or Canada without the British Empire.
Well, I like to say you're our greatest invention.
Yeah, exactly.
We were pretty good if we don't screw it up, right?
As Franklin likes to say.
But it was 1695 that the free press was invented in Britain.
That was before the United States of America was established.
We came up with these things, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights.
I find it utterly shameful that those ancient liberties, which have promoted so much freedom around the world, including, I think, the jewel in the crown, the United States of America, have become completely bastardized in Britain.
I mean, imagine people being arrested and jailed for a post on X. But this is what is happening.
It's typically a post on X that is deemed anti-Islamic because the post-on X will be against a terrorist march in the middle of London or something.
I mean, it really is a literally somebody was arrested the other day for mocking a terrorist who had been bombed as part of the page of mocking a terrorist.
They were arrested.
I mean, how in a, and this is not policies that any parliament has passed.
These are policies that have been come up with by so-called independent bodies.
So they're not legitimate.
They don't have the authority of the electorate, but they are being imposed on the British people.
The whole concept of a non-crime hate incident, which sounds completely Orwellian, no politician came up with that.
That was invented by the College of Policing, which is a body that is completely unaccountable.
And we just live, we now live in a kind of Orwellian state in Britain where lots of people are worried about what they say.
And this is the whole purpose.
The whole purpose is to cover up what's going on in our country because people know there are massive issues with the grooming gangs, of young girls being of the authorities not being held to account for that.
They know that our economy is in decline.
They can see steel works closing down because of the environmental policies.
They can see businesses not being able to start up.
And the authorities and the establishment don't want people really to know how bad it is.
And that is why they're going for suppressing, distorting, using the mainstream media to try and cover up this stuff.
And it won't work.
It won't work.
There will be, and there is a brewing rebellion against this.
There really is.
And the Lucy Connolly case, people are now coming out and saying she needs to be freed.
She needs to be less out of jail.
So when you look at sort of the current political dynamics in Great Britain and you look at the Labour Party, which – and their policies are bad, so I assume that they are going to – I mean, they are just the Democrats.
They are the same as Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton.
That is what they are.
Right.
There is a support base for them.
It's people that work in the public sector.
It's woke people.
You know, There is a support base for them, but it's not the majority of the country.
And then if you look at the other side of the aisle, do you think that the Tories are capable of reconstituting themselves?
Obviously, they've gotten some new leadership.
I think it's very difficult because I think there are far too many Conservative MPs that are Conservative in name only and don't want to take on the establishment.
They don't want to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
They don't want to challenge the judiciary.
They don't want to challenge the Bank of England.
And I think unless they are prepared to do that and say, we got it wrong for 14 years, we got it wrong because we didn't deal with these institutions that have become corrupted.
You know, they are corrupted.
If you look at one of the chief constables recently said they weren't going to police some activities by Islamicist terrorists because they were dealing with the local community.
I mean, it's astonishing.
These institutions have been corrupted.
They need to be brought under parliamentary control.
And the Conservative Party isn't saying that at the moment.
What should be done about immigration policy?
Obviously, this is sort of the elephant in the room that's really not the elephant in the room because everybody in Britain is talking about it.
Everybody is talking about it.
You've got to leave the human, you've got to repeal the Human Rights Act.
You've got to change the judiciary so they're actually accountable.
At the moment, we have a Supreme Court that was only invented in 2005.
You know, we had a thousand years of the Lord Chancellor who was a democratically appointed individual deciding who the senior judges were.
Tony Blair changed all that.
He created a Supreme Court.
It's not accountable.
You've got to change all that.
You've got to make sure you've got a proper judiciary making proper decisions.
You've got to get rid of these human rights excuses for allowing to stay in the country because that is what is going on at the moment.
And you just have to say no to more immigration.
And that means taking on the Treasury and the Bank of England because those are the people pursuing the high migration policies.
Because they're saying the only way we're going to keep Britain afloat is not by Britons having more children, which is obviously what we should be doing, it's actually by importing more migrants.
And those people have to be taken on.
So that is what has to happen.
It is kind of amazing how for well over 20 years, there's been open talk in Britain about how multiculturalism has failed.
I remember when David Cower was saying this: he was saying that multiculturalism was not a success.
And yet, the importation of migrants from third world countries who hate the West just continued.
This is all part of the absurd idea.
That's the way you balance the books.
And that's driven by the Treasury, the Bank of England, all of their sort of people in the media.
They're saying if you cut migration, the British economy will go bust.
I've got news for them.
The British economy is going bust anyway.
It's happening anyway.
If you look at the rates of bonds, the bomb price, it's much higher than when I was in office now.
But nobody is creating a fuss about it because they've all bought into this model.
They've all bought into the idea that net zero is going to give you more jobs, that migration is going to make everybody richer.
That's obviously not true, but nobody wants to admit that they've got the last 40 years of policy so deeply wrong.
And this is why the establishment is fighting back so viciously and fought back so viciously against what I said, because it would force them into a massive rethink.
And it's the same.
You can see the same thing going on in the United States with the attacks on Donald Trump's economic policies because people don't want to admit that they got it so badly wrong.
One of the things that just keeps occurring to me every time I look at the news from Britain is something that is true of the United States also, and maybe the West more generally, just an incredible shyness about championing what Britain is and what it historically has been.
And so what comes to mind here is when Britain hosted the Olympics and there was an entire display about the NHS, a gigantic display of like dancing syringes and such for the National Health Service.
It's like, this is the country that brought the world, the Magna Carta, as you mentioned, free speech, parliament.
These are all concepts that built the modern world, all of it.
And what they chose to celebrate was a giant welfare system that has many women giving birth in hallways.
And it's like, what was the trade here?
And can there be a restoration of a true pride in what Great Britain was and should be in the middle of this bizarre sort of melange of multiculturalism which has taken over London?
The views expressed in the Olympic ceremony are not the views of the average Britain.
The problem is we have an elite that hates Britain and they have done for some time.
And that is, you know, the history of people like Jeremy Corbyn, Kier Starmer.
They want to help the human rights of anybody who doesn't live in Britain, but they're very reticent about actually defending our own interests.
And we need to be much more, we need to galvanize the people who are patriots in our country.
But they have been neglected.
They generally don't live in London.
They live in small towns.
They live in rural areas.
They don't have much of a voice.
And what is happening is the elite are trying to suppress those voices.
So we need a media revolution like you've had in the United States with things like the Daily Wild, you know, with Jay Rogan, all of that actually gets the message across about what people are actually thinking about what's actually going on in our country.
That has to be the start of changing because I know people in Britain do want change.
They voted for Brexit, even though the establishment told them it would be a disaster and it would be terrible for the British economy and no one would ever speak to us again.
They voted for it because they want change.
The problem has been that when politicians get into office, they get captured by this establishment bureaucracy.
And I know because I tried to go against it that you get pretty harshly punished if you go for it.
So what we've got to do is we've got to learn from Trump.
You know, he had the experience in his first term of having people in his administration that were disloyal.
He had a media that was actively hostile.
And what's happened in between is Project 2025 was built up, alternative media was built up to give the Trump campaign more momentum.
And when he got into office, he had a plan of what to do.
That is exactly what needs to happen in Britain.
And to be honest, the leadership is one part of it.
And we can talk for hours about whether it should be reform or the Conservatives or a combination of the two.
But there's a hell of a lot of other stuff that needs to happen in our country so that the voices of normal Brits are actually driving the country's policy rather than the Davos elite.
I mean, Keir Starmer was famously asked, which do you prefer, Westminster or the World Economic Forum?
And he chose the World Economic Forum.
I thought it was the most revelatory interview he's ever given because he just said it.
He said it.
He literally is batting for the Davos elite.
And that is not what the people of Britain want.
So you mentioned before that question that obviously is coming up a lot right now: the Conservative Party versus the Reform Party.
What is the future of the right in Britain?
Is the Reform Party just sort of cannibalizing a chunk of the Conservative Party, or are the two parties together going to be more than the sum of their parts?
What do you make of that question?
If you were of the right in Britain, where should you be putting your eggs?
Where should you be putting your pressure?
Where should you put your vote?
What's interesting about reform is they are winning areas from Labour now.
So the traditional working class areas, people that are patriots, people who believe in Britain, are thoroughly annoyed with Keir Starmer.
So they are voting and supporting the Reform Party.
So it's a different electoral coalition, just like in America, the way that Trump was able to rin over bits of the Rust Belt.
The same thing is happening with reform in Britain.
And Boris Johnson, to some extent, won those people over.
But the problem is, once he got into office, the Conservatives didn't deliver the policies because so many Conservative MPs are part of the establishment.
They don't want to be unpopular at dinner parties.
They don't want to upset their friends who work in the big corporations or the Bank of England or are human rights lawyers.
So they don't want to fight.
And I think that the winning coalition has to be people in Britain who are prepared to take on that establishment.
I think there's an open question about whether Nigel Farage is actually prepared to do that or, you know, does he just become another David Cameron who goes into office promising all sorts of things and doesn't deliver it.
But the big message I want To get across to the British public, is we have a problem not just with politicians, but with the deep state, with the administrative state, with our establishment.
And those are the people who also need to be challenged and, you know, a lot of those institutions need to be dismantled because they're simply not working for Britain.
And what I think has happened over the last 10 years is people are now become skeptical of the police.
They've become skeptical of the judiciary.
They've become skeptical because they can see that justice isn't being done.
And that's a very dangerous position for a country to be in.
I mean, this does raise a broader sort of European question that we're seeing repeated in a wide variety of countries, which is a party that's to the right of kind of the normie right party that starts to gain an enormous amount of sway, AFD in Germany or national rally in France.
And then moves that are made by sort of the establishment parties to bar those and even cross the aisle to the far left rather than trying to make any concessions to that right.
Where does the Conservative Party in Britain lie along that spectrum?
I don't think that's so true in Britain because I think the danger is that reform become part of the establishment.
That's the British way is to infiltrate and to sort of try and smooth things over.
And any incoming prime minister, the civil service will say, oh, yes, prime minister, we will get straight to it.
We will action everything you say.
And what you find out is they haven't actioned it.
And a week later, nothing's happened.
So the British approach, I mean, you've probably seen yes, minister, and yes, prime minister, is more manipulative than an outright ban.
So I don't think we'd see an outright ban of reform.
I think the danger is that these issues that have plagued Britain, certainly since the 1990s, but even way far back.
It goes right back to the 1850s of North Trevelyan, where the permanent bureaucracy was invented.
These issues that have plagued our country for over a century need to be dealt with.
And that's the discussion that I want to see the Conservative Party and the Reform Party having.
They need to get serious about what the problem is in our country.
Otherwise, we're not going to fix it.
And Donald Trump, by talking about the deep state, by talking about the swamp, he started explaining to people what was actually going wrong.
And that discussion hasn't really happened yet in Britain, partly because we have an incredibly supine media that just feed off leaks from the bureaucracy.
You know, that's where they get all their information from.
And they're completely part of the cabal.
So what's next for you personally?
Obviously, you've been out of government for a little while.
What do you want to do next?
Well, I'm still very committed to getting the change we need in Britain.
I believe the media is absolutely key.
So I'm working on a new free speech media network to try and bring the type of energy that you're bringing in the United States to the UK and Europe.
I think that's incredibly important.
I think it's important we work with other conservative, other patriots across Europe and America.
That's why I'm here at CPAC, because we all face the same battle against what is a very powerful international network, you know, the Davos elite, the EU, all of these organizations.
We even found out that USAID was funding Tony Blair.
You know, they were funding the Tony Blair Institute.
So, you know, they've been funding a lot of the Soros activity.
So I think it's, I'm interested in how we work together to take these forces on.
People that believe in free speech, that believe in sovereignty, that believe in the family, that believe in patriotism.
That's where the future lies.
And that's what I'm working on.
Well, Liz Trust, thank you so much for stopping by.
It's been wonderful.
It's great to see you.
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Okay, meanwhile, the controversy around gerrymandering continues over in Texas where Republicans are looking to change the congressional districts, pick up a couple of seats.
In fact, there are new reports that are out right now that Republicans may nationwide look to pick up many more seats than that.
And there's a reason for that.
I asked our friends over at Comet, which is the new web browser from Perplexity, our sponsors, how many Democratic congresspeople are there in states that Donald Trump won in the 2024 election?
How many Republican congresspeople are there in states Kamala Harris won in the 2024 election?
And the answer is pretty astonishing, actually.
There are 67 Democratic House members in states that Donald Trump won.
There are 39 Republican House members in states Kamala Harris won, which means that theoretically, if everybody were to gerrymander to the maximum extent possible, like do a Massachusetts, where in Massachusetts, literally all nine congressional districts are Democrat.
That means that Republicans would pick up, by my math, 28 seats in the House if everybody purely gerrymandered along state control lines.
Meaning, California gerrymandered out all the Republican seats, Texas gerrymandered out all the Democratic seats.
So you can see why Republicans are looking to do what they are doing.
They're saying that they are underrepresented in Congress, and that's kind of true by the electoral map.
That also happens to be true thanks to the terrible 2020 census.
We've talked about this before.
The 2020 census radically undercounted populations in several Republican-leaning states, notably Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
Again, our sponsors at Comet point out Florida was undercounted by about three quarters of a million people.
That's a seat in the Electoral College.
Texas was undercounted by roughly 548,000 to 560,000 people, resulting in the state missing out on at least one additional seat beyond the two that it did receive.
So the sort of best supported estimate is that Republican states should have picked up at least three Electoral College votes in the last election cycle that they did not.
So Republicans are looking at the map and saying, yeah, we are wildly undercounted.
And so you can see why, according to Jake Sherman over at Punch Bowl News, House Republicans are now aiming to pick up a dozen or more House seats in an unprecedented Donald Trump-backed redistricting drive, looking to head off a Democratic wave in the 2026 midterms and cement the president's power.
So Republicans are looking at a possibility of three additional House seats in Florida, five seats in Texas, one in Missouri, one in Indiana, two or three in Ohio.
In Ohio, they have to do a redistricting anyway because state law mandates a redraw ahead of 2026.
Also, the Supreme Court has a high-profile Louisiana redistricting case that they have yet to rule upon.
So what does that mean?
I mean, that is a lot of seats.
That is a lot of seats.
So if you add all that up, you're talking about an addition of 12 to 13 Republican seats right off the bat, which could be enough to preserve Congress for them.
Now, again, you can see why Republicans would obviously want to do this.
Right now, Republicans have the power to do it.
And, you know, midterm elections typically go badly for the party in power.
Here, for example, was Harry Enton on Friday explaining that right now, the congressional generic ballot is looking pretty good for the Democrats.
It seems as though their enthusiasm is up.
And again, that is not unusual when you have the president of the United States of one party and he controls Congress.
It is quite unusual in American politics for that party to do better in the midterm elections rather than worse.
Here is Harry Enton explaining.
So, you know, we're talking about warning signs for the Republican Party, and I will just say, uh-oh, for them.
That is the phrase of the day.
Uh-oh.
Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot.
And you can see their lead is expanding.
It's becoming bigger.
Look at this in spring.
CNBC, it was two.
Now it's five.
How about Ipsos?
It was one for the Democrats.
Now it's four.
How about the Wall Street Journal?
It was one.
And now it is three.
So now the average lead here is four, which is up from just about a point.
That's about a three-point move on average in the Democrats' direction.
And of course, K-Paul, when this is coming amidst the fights over redistricting, I think there are going to be a lot of people wondering: wait a minute, are Republicans wanting to change the Lines because they are losing, which they absolutely are on the generic congressional ballot.
At this point, Democrats are winning, Republicans are losing, and maybe they're trying to change the lines in order to give themselves a little bit more wiggle room, given what we're seeing a clear Democratic momentum on the generic congressional ballot.
So you can see why they are doing what they're doing.
Democrats, of course, are freaking out about it, as well, they should.
According to Punch Bull, Democrats are scrambling to counter this redistricting offensive, primarily with a hasty attempt to amend California's Constitution.
But Democrats can't come close to matching the potential GOP gains in red states, where Trump has those enviable approval ratings and compliant legislatures looking to do his bidding.
So the chair of the DCCC, Susan Delbeni, said, quote, Republicans are running scared.
They know they can't win on the issues, so they are resorting to rigging the system in a desperate scheme to save their minuscule majority.
Democrats everywhere are prepared to fight back using every tool at our disposal.
We refuse to play by a different set of rules while Republicans cave to Trump's demands to light the rule book on fire.
Now, again, that part is ridiculous.
Democrats, if they had the power, would in fact light the rule book on fire.
Kathy Hochul in New York, who's been complaining about Republican redistricting in Texas, again, called an early redistricting in New York just within the last couple of years.
So it's not as though if Democrats gain the power, they're not going to actually use that power.
Now, Punchball points out that a lot of moderates in swing districts are going to get squeezed out of office.
And this is sort of the longer downstream effect of what is happening right here, which is that blue states, if they get bluer, more Republicans will move out.
Red states, as they get redder, more Democrats will move out.
And so the continuing sort of voting with their feet will continue.
You will see red states get redder.
You'll see population movements.
You will see the gigantic culture gap that has emerged in American life continue to grow and grow.
And that is why, you know, silly sort of cultural stories that don't seem to matter very much, they actually kind of matter a lot because most people now engage the world in emotional and meme-driven ways.
There's a fascinating set of charts from a columnist named John Bern Murdoch, who works for the Financial Times, in which he looks at young adults and how their personalities have been changing over the course of the last few years.
And a large part of that is due to social media and due to memory and due to the fact that they are spending less time with people who they disagree with in common contexts.
Polarization and siloing actually does have a pretty significant effect, as it turns out.
See, it used to be that if you'd go to a church or a synagogue or anywhere else, common social situation with somebody who you disagreed with politically, but you recognized that they were a decent human being and you could get along, that made for a better social fabric.
Well, then we lost trust in one another and our institutions, and now we're siloing.
So what does that mean?
It's only going to get worse from here.
I mean, it's a real problem.
That doesn't mean Republicans shouldn't gerrymander or that this isn't the natural consequence of what is happening.
But if you are predicting the future, the polarization is likely to get significantly worse before it gets better at this point.
According to these charts put together by Bern Murdoch, if you look at young adults' personalities, like actual personalities, there is a massive change in different personality traits by age group.
So for example, conscientiousness, which is basically your willingness to take responsibility for your own actions, dutifully doing the thing you're supposed to do.
That has declined among people age 60 plus from maybe 55% of people down to about 50% of people.
For people age 40 to 59, it's declined from just above 50% to just above 40%.
For people who are age 16 to 39, it has declined from 45% in 2016 to below 30% in 2025, which is disastrous.
Conscientiousness is a good thing.
Conscientiousness dictates whether you are going to actually be a productive member of society and it's diving in America right now.
You don't feel responsible for other people and you barely feel responsible for yourself.
Neuroticism, which is essentially kind of a worried aspect of mind.
Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot.
Neuroticism being a sort of predictor of stress levels, high stress, exploding, particularly among young people.
People 60 plus, basically where they were in 2016.
People who are between 40 and 59 have increased slightly.
People who are age 16 to 39 exploded.
Neuroticism went from 60% in 2016 to over 70% today.
Agreeableness, meaning do you get along with other people or try to get along with other people?
People age 60, pretty steady.
People who are age 40 to 59, agreeableness has declined by about 8% to 10 percentage points.
Again, people 16 to 39, it has dropped off a cliff, went from the mid-40s all the way down to the mid-30s.
So people are less agreeable, more neurotic, and significantly less conscientious if they are young.
And meanwhile, for all groups, extraversion has gone down, meaning people are just not associating with one another.
They're not talking with one another.
So that is leading to some pretty terrible behavior as well, like sociopathic behavior that is then treated as normalized by the internet.
And that cuts in, I think, a bunch of different ways, like really a lot of different ways.
In one way, it means that sort of traditional American normalcy is treated as totally crazy because the neurotics treat it as nuts.
A good example being Sidney Sweeney Gate.
Sweeney Gate is now entering week three, which is totally insane.
It is just a jeans ad with an attractive woman wearing a low-cut gene jacket, essentially.
And this blew up the internet.
Why?
Because agreeableness down.
Because neuroticism, up.
Those would be the reasons.
And apparently, the expectation in the media is that American Eagle, which is the company that did the ad, is supposed to cave to all of the neuroticism.
Good for American Eagle.
They are not.
I guess the disagreeableness goes both ways.
American Eagle said on Instagram that the ad campaign, quote, is and always was about the jeans, her genes, her story.
We'll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence their way.
Great jeans look good on everyone.
And this, of course, is ticking off some of the usual sort of politically correct sources.
Nathan Miller, founder and CEO of the crisis management firm Miller Inc., said, quote, the corporate comm script is you apologize when you offend people.
Now they do the cost-benefit analysis and realize if you do apologize, it's not going to placate the critics and will also promote further ire from those that initially applauded the campaign.
Miller says you're seeing a lot of brands trying to distance themselves from what was previously described as woke culture.
They believe there's a market for those who don't abide by the cultural norms that were previously enforced.
And that's a good thing, right?
Again, that is a good thing that they're not abiding by those norms, but there have been no replacement norms.
There's been no reversion to traditional norms.
Instead, what you are getting is memory on all sides.
So you're getting the meme of the idea that Sidney Sweeney is a Nazi or that people who like her ad or think she's pretty are Nazis.
And then on the right, you are getting what is clearly meme material and is funny, but is also kind of sociopathic behavior.
I mean, both those things can be true.
So, for example, big controversy has now broken out over WNBA games where people are throwing toys on the court.
Now, just by any normal stretch of human behavior, this is a bad thing to do.
You should not go to games and throw toys on the court.
It's obscene.
It's ridiculous.
And no matter how much you dislike WNBA, you probably shouldn't go there and throw a giant on the court, right?
I mean, like, just as a human, you probably shouldn't do it.
Is it funny?
Sure.
A lot of things are funny.
A lot of violative and transgressive behavior is funny.
It doesn't mean it's good.
Not really, but the internet culture and subculture has become so reactionary, so reactive, and so disagreeable that this thing is now like actually driving economic decision making.
There's an article in the New York Times over the weekend: WNBA's toy incidents may be linked to cryptocurrency groups' money scheme.
I mean, that reads like a fever dream.
Quote, late in the first half of a LA Sparks Indiana fever game on Tuesday night, a neon green toy thrown from the stands landed on the floor of crypto.com arena at the feet of Indiana guard Sophie Cunningham.
Simultaneously, a group of people during an audio live stream on X reveled in the moment and celebrated its potential to help boost the value of a particular meme coin, a cryptocurrency deriving from an internet meme, but traded through very real markets online.
The coin was created July 28th, the day before the first occurrence of a toy being thrown on a WNBA court.
As of Thursday, the coin's worth had nearly tripled in its first week.
Someone is tweeting there's one at the Sparks game, one person said on the stream.
That is literally the best case scenario we could possibly imagine, another replied, because the toy had fallen near Cunningham, who had previously posted a plea for spectators not to throw the objects onto the court, which was met With numerous replies of memes involving the phallic object.
The disruption in LA appeared to be part of a coordinated effort born out of conversations held in some particularly murky, often mysterious corners of internet culture, social media, and opportunistic plays in the cryptocurrency markets.
And in the normal world, all of this would be treated as psychopathic or sociopathic behavior, truly.
Like going to games and throwing toys on the court, regardless of how much you dislike the sport, would be considered, at the very least, bizarre and at the worst, kind of vile.
It could be funny.
Sure, a lot of vile behavior is funny, but it just shows a country with a robust social fabric does not have this kind of behavior, or at least it has less of this kind of behavior, because you wouldn't do this in your community, would you?
And again, I know I'm treating seriously what is a frivolous topic, but I think that we are now entering with the merger of the internet and the real world, we are now entering a time where there are no more frivolous topics.
Every frivolous topic becomes an indicative symptom of true social ills that are dividing us from one another.
Like if you can't get together and say, yeah, we probably shouldn't do that.
Or yeah, you know what?
Gene's ad with Sidney Sweeney, like who cares?
Like, that's fine.
Like, what happened to normalcy?
As normalcy disintegrates and as people take one side or the other on ridiculous meme sociopathy, what you end up with is a very, very polarized electorate.
And that's particularly true as young people age into the voting population.
You're seeing it in terms of sexual polarization between men and women.
Women are swinging wildly to the left.
Men are moving significantly more to the right.
You're seeing it in terms of political polarization where it's more about aesthetic feel than it is even about policy for a lot of these folks.
And so, you know, is it a problem?
How does it tie into gerrymandering?
I mean, it doesn't in the sense that gerrymandering has been going on since 1812 when Elbridge Gehry was first doing it.
But it does say something about the continuing social polarization of a country addicted to its phones, addicted to memes, addicted to the laws, as opposed to the things that actually build a society, namely you spending time with other human beings in a physical setting with a common goal of making your society, country, or community better.
All righty, meanwhile, speaking of this, President Trump is taking some significant action against foreign drug cartels, which actually is quite a good thing.
The New York Times reported late on Friday that President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.
This is the most aggressive step so far in the administration's escalating campaign against the cartels, and it signals President Trump's continued willingness to use military force to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.
So apparently military officials are starting to drop options on how the military could go after those groups.
I mean, it's certainly the case that using the U.S. military to go after drug cartels south of the border that are making our border into bloody chaos, or at least were while Joe Biden was president, that going after that is just as much of a national security threat or more than going after the Houthis in Yemen, for example.
Directing the military to crack down on the illicit trade raises legal issues, including whether it would count as murder if U.S. forces acting outside of a congressionally authorized armed conflict were to kill civilians or criminal suspects who pose no imminent threat.
Nah, the answer there is no.
With that said, President Trump obviously taking a significant action to end, for example, the fentanyl crisis in the United States.
It's not as though he didn't run on this.
He did run on this.
This is what many people voted for.
Indeed, most people voted for.
All righty, folks, we have reached the end of today's show.
We'll be back here with much more on Wednesday, but stay tuned to our channel for more updates.
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