The Ben Shapiro Show - The Democrats’ Circular Firing Squad CONTINUES

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Nov. 12, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:05:14

The Democrats’ Circular Firing Squad CONTINUES

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ben shapiro

54:12

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donald j trump

02:48

matt fradd

02:52

rich tidwell

01:05

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hakeem jeffries

00:26

jb pritzker

00:34

john fetterman

00:27

kevin hassett

00:46

laura ingraham

00:13

ro khanna

00:36

scott bessent

00:19

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Speaker	Time	Text
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Democrats engage in their circular firing squad, the radicals versus the traditionalists versus the moderates, and it's getting ugly out there.
		Plus, more economic news from the Trump administration.
		What actually would provide affordability?
		Republicans fighting over H-1B visas.
		And why are some supposed traditionalists now embracing polygyne, like men marrying more than one woman?
		We'll get to all of that.
		But first, join Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Claven, and me next Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire Plus, as we do what we do best.
		Debate, discuss, disagree on the biggest stories in politics and culture.
		Plus, we're world premiering the first official trailer for the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin.
		Don't miss it.
		Friendly Fire Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern only on Daily Wire Plus.
		Well, the Democrats' circular firing squad continues.
		There is a vast battle happening inside the Democratic Party, ranging from the radicals led by people like Zaran Mamdani and AOC and Bernie Sanders to the more traditional liberals who don't seem to have any sort of systemic immunity to that, to the moderate Democrats who are increasingly feeling out of step with their own party.
		Meanwhile, President Trump just keeps trucking along.
		Yesterday was Veterans Day, and the president of the United States spent Veterans Day speaking about the value of our veterans.
		Here he was yesterday.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		This morning on these hallowed grounds where generations of American heroes rest in eternal glory, we gather to fulfill the sacred duty of every free man and woman.
		On Veterans Day, we honor those who have worn the uniform, who have borne the battle, who have stood to watch and whose ranks have formed the mighty wall of flesh and blood, bravery, and devotion that has defended our freedom for 250 years.
		Today, to every veteran, we love our veterans.
		We say the words too often left unsaid.
		Thank you for your service.
		Thank you very much.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And again, President Trump has a baseline level of patriotism that comes through in everything that he does, truly.
		I mean, the man loves the country.
		Obviously, he loves the American flag.
		He loves the American military.
		That was the president at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday.
		And here he was, again, saying everything that we have, we owe to the military, which is something, again, the Radical Democrats do not believe this.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Yet every captain of industry, every pioneer of science, and every star whose brilliance has lit up the lights of Broadway all share one thing in common.
		They only had the chance to soar because the veterans had the courage to serve.
		They took care of those people.
		They took care of all the stars.
		The stars that you read about wouldn't be here without our veterans.
		Everything we have, everything our country has achieved has been purchased by the muscle, spine, and steel of the United States military.
		We owe it all to the fierce and noble men and women of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, Space Force, Coast Guard, and the United States Marines.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, contrast that with how Hassan Piker has been spending the last few days.
		Apparently, he went to China, and while he was in China, he decided that he was going to blather about how America is terrible in a country that legitimately censors everything you do, kills its opposition, runs them over with tanks.
		This was Hassan Piker literally in Tiananmen Square, where protesters against the Chinese government were murdered, talking about American patriotism.
unidentified		I don't have any sort of patriotism in my heart for any.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I'm not like a very Well, I mean, if that is the choice that Americans are put to, and if Democrats continue to embrace this sort of radicalism, then, you know, I think the Democrats are in some real trouble here.
		And the fact is, Hassan Piker is, of course, fairly close with Zarmamdandi, the new mayor-elect of New York.
		He was at his party, his victory party in New York, where he was going around literally telling camera people that it was a tragedy that the Soviet Union had collapsed.
		And so radicals are, in fact, taking over the Democratic Party.
		There's no question that they are the ones with the momentum at this point if the Democratic Party refuses to stand up and say no.
		So again, it's sort of fascinating the dynamic here.
		Ryan Ennos is a political scientist at Harvard, and he argues in his substack quoted in the New York Times today, that Mamdani's significance lies more in the fact that there was enough enthusiasm for change rooted in dissatisfaction with the status quo and anger at those who perpetuated that voters in a major election were willing to elect a true outsider candidate and to work hard enough to do so in the face of enormous establishment resistance.
		And this, I think, is the common thread you're seeing it on the right also, is that anger at the status quo leads people to embrace radicalism.
		And when there are no leaders who are willing to stand up and either say the truth or at least to tell people who are lying that they are lying, then what you end up with is the radicals taking over the party.
		And the radicals in the Democratic Party and the people on the fringes of the Democratic Party, they are an increasing number of people inside the Democratic Party.
		This is presumably how you end up with continued violence from the left at, for example, TPSA events.
		In a second, we'll get to whether the left can actually stop its radicals, plus the economy, affordability, what's the Fed going to do at the next rate meeting.
		We'll get to all of it.
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		On Monday, there was a protest that turned into a quasi-small riot outside a TPUSA event at University of California, Berkeley.
		A demonstrator whose name is Jihad, Jihad DeFrepalez, 25, who apparently snatched a chain necklace from one of the attendees, and that left him in a vicious fight that left the victim covered in blood.
		Here's what that looked like.
unidentified		Police!
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Break it off!
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Police!
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Break it off!
unidentified		Hey, Whiteboard!
unidentified		Break it off!
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		You're bleeding!
unidentified		Hey, Whiteboard!
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		You're bleeding!
unidentified		White boy!
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Whiteboard!
unidentified		White boy!
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		You're in the lead!
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Break it off!
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		You're out of it!
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		What I'm doing!
		That's a fair bit of blood on the face.
		And of course, you know, this sort of thing has unfortunately become not particularly rare when Antifa radicals and their allies show up at events like the TPUSA event.
		So, are there enough normie Democrats to stop this from taking over the party?
		Well, the problem for them is that the sort of normie Democrats, the liberals, the not even the moderates, I'm just talking about like the mainstream liberal Democratic Party has no systemic immunity to this sort of stuff.
		They are perfectly willing to go along with this sort of thing, which is why presumably they're so angry about the end of the government shutdown.
		What Chuck Schumer did here in allowing a vote, essentially, and eight Democrats in moderate states joining with the Republicans to end the government shutdown.
		That is a normie policy.
		The shutdown was a radical policy that was embraced for electoral purposes.
		And then the election was over, and then Democrats let it go.
		But this is prompting extraordinary anks from the liberal mainstream Democratic Party because they want to capture these zeitgeists.
		They want to capture what they think is the jet fuel of the radicals.
		So, for example, Gavin Newsom, who wants to run for president, governor of California, he raged against the end of the shutdown on X.
		He said, tonight's Senate vote on the federal government shutdown should have been a time for strength.
		Instead, we saw capitulation and a betrayal of working Americans.
		The American people need more from their leaders.
		What more would it be?
		Like a continuation of people not getting their SNAP benefits?
		A continuation of the FAA not being actually functional?
		His press office then put out a statement, pathetic.
		This isn't a deal.
		It's a surrender.
		Don't bend the knee.
		Don't bend the knee.
		And that is Gavin Newsom linking arms with the radicals in his own party.
		Roe Konick, he says the Democratic leadership is out of touch.
ro khanna ▲ ● ▼		It's mind-boggling.
		It's just people who are out of touch, who don't understand the political moment that we're in.
		Look, the good news is there's a new generation of leaders.
		Zorhan Mamdani, one, Abigail Spanberger, one, Mikey Sherrill, one.
		There are people who get it.
		You know, someone jokingly, or maybe it was serious, described me as a backbencher calling for Schumer's ouster.
		Some people who liked me came to my defense saying, no, he's not a backbencher.
		I said, no, the problem is those of us in the back need to get to the front.
		This party needs a change in the leadership.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so again, what you now have inside the Democratic Party, you know, to look for a historical analogy, go back to the Russian Revolution, where you basically had some soft socialists, the so-called Russian whites, led by a guy named Alexander Kerensky, who are trying to hold off the Reds.
		And the Reds actually started off in an unenviable position militarily, and they ended up winning because eventually there wasn't enough systemic immunity to stop them.
		And that's basically where it seems we are right now.
		The systemic immunity is gone.
		J.B. Pritzker, who also wants to run for president, the governor of Illinois, who must be lowered into the state capitol by Crane, he says that the government should have remained closed.
jb pritzker ▲ ● ▼		Look, I have enormous respect and always have for Senator Durbin.
		I disagree with his vote.
		I do not think that the eight members of the Senate that voted the way that they did should have done that.
		I think that we had an opportunity to make sure that we were protecting people's health care across the nation.
		But for whatever reason, those members decided to vote the way that they did.
		Again, I'm disappointed.
		I think that more could have been done here.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so, you know, again, this is where the Democratic Party is going.
		They're following their radicals down the rabbit hole.
		And the Democrats who refuse to do so increasingly do seem out of touch, as Rocana says.
		Hakeem Jeffries, the would-be Speaker of the House, the House minority leader, is still out there praising Schumer, despite the fact that he actually disagreed with ending the government shutdown.
john fetterman ▲ ● ▼		What do you think, Leader Jeffries?
jb pritzker ▲ ● ▼		Do you agree with RoCanna?
unidentified		Do you think Schumer should be replaced?
hakeem jeffries ▲ ● ▼		Leader Schumer did not bless this agreement.
		He voted against it.
		And of course, Senate Democrats who voted no have made that clear.
		And what we've seen from Senate Democrats over the last seven weeks has been part of a valiant fight that we have waged together to stand up in defense of the health, the safety, and the economic well-being of the American people.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So, again, does he seem as though he is in touch right now?
		He's trying to bridge the gap.
		I'm not sure that gap is particularly bridgeable.
		Maybe the last honest Democrat in the Congress is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who points out that a basically normie position in America, just to be generally pro-Israel, which by the polls is a fully normie position, that is the mainstream moderate position in the United States.
		Doesn't mean you have to back everything Israel does, doesn't mean you have to love the prime minister of the state, but to just be generally supportive of Israel.
		That has now become incompatible with being a proud Democrat, according to Fetterman.
john fetterman ▲ ● ▼		I've met with widows, their husbands were lost in the Gaza War, and they have eight children raising eight children by their own.
		That's a hero for all of it.
		So for me, it's heartbreaking.
		And that's been what's so difficult for me is like being devotion to Israel becoming increasingly incompatible with being a proud Democrat now, too.
		And that's put me at odds.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And so we'll see how long this current Democratic Party can last without splitting into pieces.
		Now, meanwhile, the biggest threat to the Republicans at this point is indeed the economy.
		This has been true for a very long time.
		The reality is, I've been saying for legitimately months, that an economy that is on the precipice, that feels uncertain, that is not a growth-oriented economy, is going to have some problems.
		And so there's been a lot of angst properly over affordability in the United States.
		It is true, as the president says, that there is some hangover here from the Biden years, obviously.
		Massive inflation during the Biden years.
		And over the course of the last year, moderate inflation would be the best way to describe it.
		Inflation clocking in on an annualized basis, like 3%, which is too high by about 50%, but it's not like the 9% or 10% or 11% we had during some months during the Biden administration.
		Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, he's blaming Joe Biden for the affordability crisis.
		And again, he's not wrong.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		I think that we inherited an affordability crisis.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		We have slowed the price increases down, and they are going to continue to slow down, and that real working class wages will go up, and that that will address the affordability issue.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so again, that is the theory, and hopefully that is correct.
		Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the National Economic Council, he says that the inflation that we're seeing is actually coming down.
		It's moving in the right direction.
		Wages are going to increase.
		Here he was explaining on CNBC.
		He was asked why inflation has increased for five straight months.
kevin hassett ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess if you look at it from January, there's ups and downs and seasonals.
		But yeah, we have surprised on the downside.
		People were expecting it to accelerate, and it didn't.
		And I think that that is because this growth that we're getting is not from printing a massive amount of government debt and sending checks to people like Joe Biden did.
		I mean, think about it.
		If you look at the macroeconomic picture, the way you get inflation down is you don't have the government spend like crazy.
		And we've actually got a deficit reduction so far this year that's really on track by December to be down $600 billion for the year alone.
		And so that $600 billion reduction in the deficit takes the macroeconomic pressure off.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so again, perhaps that's true, but Americans have to see the results.
		This is one of the reasons why I have been against the Federal Reserve cutting the interest rates.
		I was against the rate cuts.
		I do not think that the current rate cuts are designed to actually do what the Federal Reserve is supposed to do, bring down inflation.
		Again, I've always been critical of the idea that you can have an agency with two mandates.
		For example, when you look at the Homeland Security Department, that department has been tasked with both facilitating legal immigration and ending illegal immigration.
		That's stupid.
		If you have two separate purposes, they should have two separate agencies.
		The Federal Reserve should not be charged with both keeping unemployment low and keeping inflation low.
		They should be charged with keeping inflation low.
		Keeping unemployment low is a function of innovation.
		It is a function of deregulation.
		It should not be a function of inflationary government policy.
		Using the central bank as your policymaker of first resort is a mistake, and it leads to mistakes that tend to be inflationary in nature.
		Pretty rare that you get a Federal Reserve since the Great Depression that is deflationary in nature.
		They tend to favor inflation over deflation for obvious reasons.
		Well, now, apparently, the Federal Reserve is torn over an interest rate cut.
		According to the Wall Street Journal, officials are fractured over which poses the greater threat, persistent inflation or a sluggish labor market, and even a resumption of official economic data may not bridge the differences.
		The rupture has complicated what looked like a workable plan less than two months ago, though investors think a rate cut at the Fed's next meeting is still more likely than not.
		When policymakers agreed to cut rates by a quarter percent in September, 10 of 19 officials, a slim majority, penciled in cuts for October and December.
		Cutting rates at three consecutive meetings would echo the downward adjustments that Powell last made in 2019.
		You'll remember that what came after that was a gigantic inflationary spiral tapped off by COVID, but then radically accelerating under Joe Biden.
		A contingent of Hawks has questioned the need for further reductions.
		The resistance hardened after officials reduced rates again in late October to the current range between 3.75 and 4%.
		Hawks are challenging the presumption of another rate cut.
		And that is why presumably Jerome Powell has been sort of downplaying the expectations that there will be another rate cut in December.
		Again, it's hard to see why there should be a rate cut given the fact that liquidity conditions in the United States are not actually all that difficult.
		They're worse than they were a few years ago in terms of mortgages, in terms of car loans, but in terms of business loans, in terms of the ability to access capital for startups.
		That's not a liquidity problem.
		That's an innovation problem.
		That's an uncertainty problem.
		It generally is not a liquidity problem.
		There are a lot of investors sitting on the sidelines right now because they just don't know what is coming next.
		The last official data released before the government shutdown showed a key measure of inflation at 2.9%, and that is up from 2.6%.
		That is below some of the forecast because of the tariffs.
		But is that due to a drop off in demand?
		We don't really know.
		Again, inflation in prices is a function not only of the amount of money in the economy, but also it is the effect of demand.
		If demand increases, then you tend to get higher prices.
		If demand decreases, then you tend to get lower prices.
		Well, again, the big question in all of this is how do you bring down prices?
		How do you bring down prices?
		Historically speaking, the way to make things affordable, the way to bring down prices is fairly simple.
		You increase supply.
		That is how prices go down.
		Any product, anytime, increase supply, keep demand steady, the prices go down.
		That is just how markets work.
		That is how realities work.
		Any attempt to do anything else is going to be at best a band-aid and at worst radically counterproductive to the cause of bringing down the prices.
		And so intervening with government-backed programs is more likely to lead to inflationary policy than the opposite.
		One of my favorite charts is a chart showing the differences in prices between government-subsidized products and non-government subsidized products over the course of the last 40 years in American life.
		Every single government subsidized product from education to healthcare has skyrocketed in terms of cost.
		Because when you increase demand and subsidize it, you end up with higher prices.
		Everything the government does not subsidize, the prices have gone down because that's how markets work.
		And so my advice for the Trump administration is to move less toward government solutions and more toward government getting out of the way.
		Deregulation, yes, lower taxes, less subsidies, fewer interventions in the market economy, more growth innovative policies.
		This is one of the reasons why I'm not a huge fan of this idea of now like a government-backed 50-year mortgage.
		All righty, coming up, we'll get to affordability.
		We'll get to President Trump with Laura Ingram talking about H1BVs.
		There's a lot to talk about.
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	There's been talk about trying to make housing more affordable by bringing down essentially what you pay on your monthly payment by extending your mortgage out from a 30-year mortgage to a 50-year mortgage.
	Now, one of the questions is why there aren't sort of natural 50-year mortgages.
	Why don't private lenders just offer a 50-year mortgage?
	And the answer is that private lenders don't offer 50-year mortgages because, in many cases, they are illegal, because the amount of money that you end up paying over the course of 50 years is so much more than the actual sticker price of a house that it's insane.
	If you're paying a fairly low interest rate on an $800,000 loan over the course of 50 years, you'll end up paying many times the original price of the house just in the interest because the loan is so long.
	So you're actually losing money every month.
	Beyond that, the gamble that is being made by the lender at that point is that if you default, your house will be worth more than it was.
	Okay, well, maybe that's true, but the problem is you are setting yourself up basically for a second subprime housing crisis.
	If ever the housing market drops off in terms of prices and all those banks then foreclose on the houses and have valueless assets in exchange for money that they lent out, then you have a major banking crisis that actually ends up eating the system.
	That's a point being made by the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
	High home prices are a problem, having soared 56% since January 2020.
	Two reasons are excessive government spending that fueled inflation and historically low pandemic era interest rates, which, of course, is right.
	Again, when you lower the interest rates, that is a subsidy to demand.
	Because maybe I wasn't thinking about taking out a mortgage at 7%, but I am thinking about taking out a second mortgage at 2%.
	The Federal Reserve then had to raise rates to bring inflation under control.
	The result, average monthly payments on a new home have climbed some 80% over the last five years.
	This means fewer young people can afford a home.
	The median age of first-time buyers this year reached an all-time high of 40 compared to the late 20s in the 1980s.
	Public surveys show the cost of housing is an acute worry for young Americans.
	So President Trump has now been sold, apparently, on the idea of a 50-year mortgage by Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
	The aim is to reduce monthly payments by amortizing the loan over a longer period.
	So instead of paying down the principal over 30 years, which is already a super long loan, by the way, most countries do not offer 30-year mortgages.
	Borrowers would now have 50 years to do it.
	So again, a 50-year mortgage, as I've said, it would cut monthly payments, but it would also radically increase the amount of interest that borrowers pay over the life of the loan.
	Also, borrowers may have to pay higher interest rates to compensate for the enormous risk that sometime over the next half century, you're going to default.
	And as the Wall Street Journal points out, this has happened before.
	As the housing bubble inflated, Fannie Mae began buying more four-year mortgages, which let borrowers take out bigger loans than they could otherwise afford.
	Borrowers were slower to build equity.
	Many walked away from their mortgages when the home prices collapsed.
	Or look at the subprime auto market.
	As car prices rose with inflation, auto dealers extended the duration of loans for less creditworthy borrowers.
	Some struggling borrowers are now turning in their keys and leaving lenders with big losses.
	So again, the only way to truly do a 50-year mortgage is to have some sort of government backstop.
	And a government backstop, you're looking at too big to fail.
	Repeat of 2008.
	It turns out that government invention, intervention into the economy tends to create inflationary policy, not affordability.
	Okay, the president is, in fact, however, pursuing some policies that are supply-side policies intended to bring down the prices.
	One of those, for example, is the president's push for more oil drilling off the California coast.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is poised to unveil a plan that would allow oil drilling off the California coast, according to people familiar with the matter.
	And of course, Gavin Newsom is eager for this.
	He loves fights.
	The announcement is expected to include a proposal for drilling around Alaska in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
	That's part of the drill, baby, drill campaign that President Trump was pushing.
	And that, of course, is good policy.
	Increasing supply is a good policy.
	It brings down the price.
	If you're worried about the price of oil, then actually increasing the supply of domestically produced oil is a very, very good thing.
	President Trump has said he can rapidly cut Americans' energy costs by 50% or more by expanding oil and gas production.
	Now, again, it'll be interesting to see who takes him up on it because there is, in fact, a supply-demand equilibrium where at a certain point, it costs more to actually drill the well than you will get by selling the oil.
	With that said, are we anywhere near that at this point?
	We are not.
	In April, Interior Secretary Doug Bergham directed his agency to begin to plan to develop a schedule for offshore oil and gas lease sales.
	The plan was part of the administration's focus on responsible offshore energy development.
	Again, this is good supply-side policy, and I hope that the president continues to pursue it.
	Meanwhile, one of the fascinating things that's happening on the right is that there are a lot of people on the right who seem to simultaneously complain about affordability, but also want to restrict the factors that lead to affordability.
	This is incoherent.
	It's incoherent.
	You can say there are things more important than affordability.
	That's fine.
	I agree.
	There are many things in life that are more important than affordability.
	Living close to family might be one of those things.
	A beautiful sunset might be more important to you than affordability, right?
	There are lots of things in life that are more important than affordability.
	However, if you are simultaneously complaining about affordability and also seeking to restrict the supply of an item, then what you are saying is logically and economically incoherent.
	If you want the president to create more affordability in the United States, you need the prices of things to go down.
	The way the prices of things go down is with more supply, right?
	This is very simple.
	This is why I find it fascinating that there is so much talk these days about H-1B visas.
	Okay, now, there are many problems with the H-1B visa program.
	You can make the claim, I think somewhat accurate, that the H-1B visa program is too broad.
	The H-1B visa program, about 65,000 are offered every year.
	Enormous number of renewals of people who have been in under H-1B visas before.
	I asked our sponsors over at Comet to explain this.
	It's a project of perplexity.
	H-1B visas are a U.S. immigration program that allows employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations that require at least a bachelor's degree or equivalent expertise.
	Around 85,000 new H-1B visas are issued annually.
	The total number, including renewals, exceeds 400,000 per year.
	That means somebody got an H-1B last year and now they got it renewed for this year as well.
	So you're bringing in foreign workers mainly in tech.
	Something like 50% of all H-1B visas are coming in the tech industry.
	They're people who are coming over to work in computer engineering or computer science or something.
	They're working for Intel or they're working for Microsoft or they're working for Google.
	This has become a point of contention on the right, not because of the usual reasons that the right is concerned about immigration, but for economic reasons.
	So there are lots of reasons to be concerned about legal immigration in the United States, not just illegal immigration, legal immigration.
	So for example, if you are bringing in people who are low skilled, don't have jobs, are going to be dependent on welfare and be more of a net draw on the treasury than they are a benefit economically.
	That would be a reason not to let somebody into the country.
	Cultural differentiation, a massive reason not to let in certain people from certain countries.
	They might be qualified in computer science, but if they're coming here and they don't like American values and they like terrorist groups, for example, we shouldn't let them in.
	It's like basic common sense.
	You can make the case that there are a lot of people who are being let in who are actively Chinese agents, infiltrators at our tech companies who are stealing IP.
	That would be an amazing reason not to let somebody in.
	However, the case that's being made right now against H-1B visas is that H-1B visas are bad economically speaking in general for the American population.
	Now, in order to make that case, you have to make the case that they are artificially driving down the price of labor, which we can argue about in a second, and that there are no externalities that are beneficial to bringing them in, that the country is better off banning them and using quote-unquote domestically supplied labor than bringing in people on H-1B visas.
	Now, if we're talking about pricing of labor, there's no question, obviously, that you bring in more people who are applicants for a job and the price of the labor goes down.
	That is a deflationary policy.
	Just in terms of affordability, it makes products more affordable.
	If labor is cheaper, products are more affordable.
	For the people who don't get those jobs, life is worse.
	For the broad American public, life is better because the affordability went up.
	Again, all economic policies have beneficiaries and have people who are harmed by those economic policies.
	The question is, how widespread are the beneficiaries and how discreet are the people who are being hurt and vice versa?
	Let's be adults about how we discuss economics when we're going to talk about these big issues.
	Okay, so here is the case for importing certain types of labor.
	One, there are, in fact, certain positions in the United States that require a level of expertise that may not be reachable in the numbers that are currently being turned out by American universities.
	That is a shortcoming of our educational system, and it is a problem.
	And so you can say we should up our game, education.
	I agree.
	We should absolutely up our game educationally.
	But in the meantime, if you do not bring in the labor supply, particularly to tech, tech will go find the labor supply.
	And so what you will end up with is an office that was employing 30 Americans and three H-1B visa people.
	If the costs grow too high, simply moving to another country where they hire 30 Indians and zero Americans.
	This is the problem with all the reason companies offshore is not because it's easy or fun to simply move your company somewhere else.
	It's because the labor cost becomes so prohibitive in the United States that companies move away.
	And you can try to tariff them back, but all that does is artificially raise the price on Americans.
	Again, we're talking about affordability.
	There are trade-offs in economics.
	Autarky comes with the fun feeling that everybody in America is making American product.
	It comes with the very large downside that your products are economically inefficient.
	They don't work as well and you're not globally competitive.
	All policies have trade-offs.
	It is also better for the American people, broadly speaking, to bring in the best from other countries.
	Now, how do you determine the best?
	You can make, again, the case.
	The H-1B visa program is fatally flawed.
	It's not bringing in enough of the best.
	I will point out that many of our best founders in the United States are either immigrants or the children of immigrants who came in on H-1B visas or who came in just generally without an H-1B visa through other forms of legal immigration as students.
	And the reality is that maybe our screening procedures should be different, but we need to see specifics on what the screening procedures you're applying are that would allow for there to be, for example, an Elon Musk American citizen creating tens of thousands of jobs.
	Or the head of Google, Sinder Pinchai, creating tens of thousands of jobs.
	Or the head of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, creating tens of thousands of jobs.
	Now, you can say that maybe if those people didn't exist, there would be an American who just did that job, but that is now living in the realm of theory.
	It's not living in the realm of reality.
	Brain draining other countries is also a good thing for America in terms of our own global competitiveness.
	I'd rather bring all the smartest people from around the globe if they are going to, again, this is assuming the precondition that they are going to assimilate to American values, that they like America, that they are American patriots.
	If they're not, they shouldn't come in, period, no matter what industry they're in.
	But if they're going to be good American patriots, creating tens of thousands of jobs is a good thing while depriving those jobs from China, from other countries.
	Brain draining is good.
	We brain drained Germany in the 1930s, and that was quite good for the American economy.
	We have brain drained a number of other countries around the globe, which is why America is the global economic powerhouse.
	So again, when we are talking about affordability, we have to talk about things like supply.
	And conflating all of these issues and pretending they don't exist doesn't solve the affordability crisis.
	It just means that we have an affordability crisis and we rip each other to shreds over sort of ancillary issues.
	Because I think, again, everyone on the right agrees that people who shouldn't be in America shouldn't be in America.
	The question is, should we bring the best and brightest here if they are going to be great Americans?
	And my answer is absolutely.
	Should we be having more people come here to found companies who are going to be good Americans?
unidentified		Sure.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Is the H-1B visa program totally geared toward that?
		No.
		Maybe there need to be changes there.
		But again, pretending that we can just go autaric, that is a mistake.
		The reason this comes up is because yesterday the president of the United States was on with Laura Ingram and he was asked about H-1B visas.
		And he's being ripped up by a certain portion of the right for his answer here, which, frankly, I think is mostly reasonable.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		There's never going to be a country like what we have right now.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		The Republicans have to talk about it later.
laura ingraham ▲ ● ▼		And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration?
laura ingraham ▲ ● ▼		Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Thousands of foreign workers.
		Also, do have to bring in talent when you have talented people.
		No, you don't.
		No, you don't.
laura ingraham ▲ ● ▼		We don't have talented people in there.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		No, you don't have certain talents and people have to learn.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		You can't take people off an unemployment, like an unemployment line and say, I'm going to put you into a factory where we're going to make missiles or I'm going to put you in the middle of the money.
laura ingraham ▲ ● ▼		How did we ever do it before?
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me tell you.
laura ingraham ▲ ● ▼		When you and I were.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		I'll give you an example.
		In Georgia, they raided because they wanted illegal immigrants out.
		They had people from South Korea that made batteries all their lives.
		You know, making batteries are very complicated.
		It's not an easy thing.
		It's very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems.
		They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages to make batteries and to teach people how to do it.
		Well, they wanted them to get out of the country.
		You're going to need that, Laura.
		I mean, I know you and I disagree on this.
		You can't just say a country's coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and going to take people off an unemployment line who haven't worked in five years, and they're going to start making missiles.
		It doesn't work that way.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		The president happens to be right about this.
		When he says there isn't talent, again, people are reading that, I think, wrongly.
		He's saying there's not enough talent in particular industries at this time.
		You need a transitional skill set force to come in and sometimes teach Americans to do something.
		I'm not sure what's totally unreasonable about that.
		I think, frankly, there's a lot of demagoguery of these issues going on because people don't want to acknowledge the realities of how economics actually works.
		It's more fun to rail against the idea that there are any shortcomings at all anywhere in the American labor force, or that it's actually good to brain drain other countries, or that we should have the best and brightest from other places come here and engage in our economy.
		And again, I love Laura Ingram.
		I think she's wonderful.
		When Laura says, if you go back to the 1950s and 60s, how did we do it then?
		The answer is there were a lot of foreign-born people who actually were founding some of these companies and were involved in the production of some of our most sophisticated technologies.
		I mean, she's talking about missile technologies, for example.
		I mean, it was an ex-Nazi Werner von Braun who was heading up a rocket program in the United States.
		And that's on a defense of Werner von Braun's Nazi associations.
		That is a recognition that importation of talent actually matters when you are crafting a dynamic economy, of course, of course.
		But it seems that when it comes to affordability, people are more interested, again, in demagoguing the issues than actually talking about solutions to the issues.
		And if you do that, what you'll end up with is a lot of people who are angry about affordability, but get no actual answers that provide affordability.
		When Laura says she's interested in raising American wages, everyone's interested in raising American wages.
		But the problem is this.
		If you raise the American wages and you raise the American prices faster than the wages, then the wages get eaten up by the price increases.
		This is what happened during the Biden administration.
		You need two things, increased wages and lowering prices.
		And the way that you do that is with innovation and with increased supply.
		That is how that works.
		You need both of those things.
		I can artificially raise the wages in the city of Detroit in 1950 by unionizing the entire workforce and negotiating extraordinarily lucrative contracts.
		And by 1965, the American auto industry will be getting its lunch eaten by the Japanese.
		You can do this.
		Again, there are ways to artificially increase the price of labor.
		What you end up doing is increasing the price of the product that the labor produces.
		And that ends up making that product non-competitive.
		And then eventually the industry dies.
		Short-term thinking here is the enemy of actual economic health, robust economic health in the long term, which requires innovation and malleability of labor supply and movability of labor is a big thing here.
		And again, none of this is to argue that we should have free, unfettered immigration or the United States is just in economic form.
		I started this conversation by acknowledging full scale.
		The H-1B visa program may be letting in too many people.
		It may be letting in the wrong people.
		But the argument that is being made against the H-1B visa is an argument that proves too much, as we used to say in law school.
		It is too broad an argument.
		And it basically says we should simply shut our borders.
		And again, if what we are worried about is quote unquote the price of labor in the United States, and we are saying that we need higher wages, then we probably should go all the way and just ban tech.
		I mean, these arguments, these are not good arguments.
		The argument that economic health comes, for example, from artificially increasing the price of labor by restricting supply, that applies just as much to tech developments themselves, to robotics, for example, as it does to importation of labor.
		If you want to maintain manufacturing jobs in Ohio, and that's like the only thing you care about is increasing the actual wage paid for a manufacturing job in Ohio, you probably should ban all robotics.
		Because if you take a look at where all those manufacturing jobs went in the United States, manufacturing productivity did not go down in the United States.
		It has increased since NAFTA in the United States.
		The number of jobs went down, not because they were shipped to Mexico, but because robots are doing a lot of those jobs.
		Now, you can ban the robots.
		You can.
		It'll just make you globally and domestically non-competitive and make everybody broad spectrum poor.
		Because again, it's not just about the amount of money in your pocket.
		It's about what you can buy with that money.
		If the price of all the goods goes up and your wage goes up, but the price is going up faster and you have worse products, you don't have a better life.
		And that's the thing that everybody is seeking when it comes to affordability.
		Well, speaking of affordability, I did an interview last week that aired early this week with Trigonometry.
		That's Constantine Kissen and Francis Foster talking about the affordability debate in New York.
		And one of the things that apparently went viral is somebody taking, like clearly taking something I said out of context and then pretending that what I'm saying is that the solution, economically speaking, to affordability is people just leaving their houses, which is not what I'm saying.
		So I want to play the full clip so people can understand what I said.
		And then I'm happy to explain what I meant about general affordability and about the decisions that we make in our individual lives.
		And so the fact that everyone's flattering Mamzani by saying, well, you know, he did talk a lot about affordability.
		And what I keep saying to people is, well, affordability is not like Beetlejuice, where if you just say it over and over, it suddenly arrives.
		You actually have to pursue policies that are likely to alleviate an affordability problem.
		But if your solution is always give me more power, and it does seem like that is the solution of the day from both sides, actually, then you're likely to just continue penduluming one side to the other because people don't want to learn the actual lesson, which is if you actually want affordability, then either you have to change policies or change locations.
	Those are really the only two things.
	And also, I think more broadly, it's not about affordability.
	We have trained an entire generation of people to believe that if their lives are not what they want them to be, it's the fault of systems as opposed to decisions that are in their own control.
	And politicians absolutely have a stake in selling that.
	A lot of people in our industry have a stake in selling that.
	It makes people feel good about themselves and bad about the world.
	And the reality is, if you want a better life, you should feel better about the world and worse about yourself until you actually go do the right things.
unidentified		I broadly, generally speaking, as a matter of principle, agree with you.
		But I mean, I was looking around at property prices, real estate prices in New York.
		I'm doing pretty well for myself.
		I feel kind of poor looking at those.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
		And I'm not saying it's not affordable, but it absolutely is unaffordable.
		And if you wanted to make a political difference, what you would do is you would relieve the building regulations.
		You would make it easier for people to build, not harder.
		You wouldn't rent control because if you stop rent controlling, then that creates incentive for people to build.
		You would allow people to build up further.
		You would get rid of many of the code regulations that are kind of antiquated.
		Like there are things you actually could do.
		And then if you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here.
		I mean, that is a real thing.
		I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up.
		But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that.
		The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity.
		And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.
		Again, that's not saying that public policy can't change.
		I think it can, but I think that the solutions being offered are untenable.
		Okay, so I agree with me, as a famous man once said.
		So as you will note there, I'm offering two specific things for people to do.
		One is change the public policy where you're at.
		If you're in New York, change the public policies that the public policy is better, alleviate some of the problems that you have with affordability by doing all the things that I'm talking about right there.
		And then I say that as an individual, as an individual human being, if you are upset with the public policy and you feel like it's not going to change anytime in the near future and that your life is being ruined by that public policy, you're left with two choices.
		One is to sit there and be miserable and fulminate against a system that is not changing.
		Again, if you can change the system, great, do it.
		Vote out Mom Donnie, vote out the bad city council, vote in somebody who understands basic economics and isn't a third worldist socialist.
		Do all those things.
		Great.
		Stay and fight.
		I did this in California for years.
		And then there came a point where I realized California was never going to provide me the public policy backdrop for a successful life, the kind of life that I wanted to live.
		And so I moved.
		And again, that comes with costs.
		I'm not pretending that moving doesn't have costs.
		And when I moved, I made sure that, you know, I'm lucky.
		I was able to, my parents were able to move with me.
		Our in-laws were able to move.
		A couple of sisters were able to move.
		We were able to take our entire family, which at that point was actually geographically disparate and move into the same area.
		No one has talked more publicly about the importance of having a supportive family structure near you than I have.
		It is also true that if you're a young person, a 20, 21-year-old, 22-year-old, and you're not finding successful conditions in the city, and those conditions are not likely to change.
		If you want to seek happiness, you can either get angry at the system that's not going to change, which will not make your life better, or you can do the things that are in your control, like maybe looking outside of New York City.
		This seems fairly inarguable to me.
		That is not an argument for, quote unquote, abandoning the city or abandoning your principles or anything like that.
		Every individual has to make their own decision about what level of bad policy they are willing to undergo in order to maintain their status in the city.
		But simply shouting at the moon doesn't solve problems.
		It doesn't.
		David Harsanyi has an excellent piece over at the Washington Examiner talking about this.
		And he quotes one of the very online people saying, quote, if we want Democrats to have a supermajority, this is the message for the GOP to adopt.
		Tell people they need to move.
		Don't form family bonds.
		Worship the banks and big corporations.
		My goodness.
		Okay, first of all, that's absurd.
		There is no one in America who's talked more about forming family bonds than I have.
		And let me explain something about forming family bonds.
		The reason that people in New York City are not forming family bonds is not because the price of rent is too high.
		That is not the reason.
		If you get married, there are two of you in New York City, likely both of you have jobs now sharing one space.
		So it is cheaper for you to get married and live with your working spouse in that same apartment complex than it would have been for you to do it by yourself.
		Okay, the reason we have a marriage crisis in America is not because of economics.
		This is a lie.
		There are places all over the world that are poorer than the United States that have much higher marriage rates.
		In fact, one of the bizarre things about the way that the developed countries work is the more developed the country, the fewer people tend to get married and the fewer children they have.
		So, this notion that broad speaking, Americans are not having kids because they're too poor is silly.
		You know what?
	Americans were having tons of kids in the 1930s, like lots and lots and lots of kids.
	And then they had lots of kids again in the 40s and lots of kids again in the 50s.
	And then they stopped having kids when birth control became available because we're a rich country.
	And this is true for every developed country.
	This attempt to link a sort of Marxist redistributionist economics, heavy regulation, and government subsidized.
	That's what's going to make the kids happen.
	I have zero, zero evidence supports this.
	Zero, literally none.
	Okay, but as Harsanyi says, if there's a better way to worship a bank than borrowing 800 grand on a 30-year mortgage at 6.5% for a 900-square-foot home in Park Slope, I've yet to hear of it.
	Though no one, as far as I can tell, is arguing that the GOP should adopt moving as a central message.
	That's correct.
	I'm not saying that that's the central message.
	I'm saying that you, in your personal life, when you're talking about what makes your life better, be accurate about what are the things that you can do to make your life better.
	As Harsanyi points out, it should be noted it's a myth that all or perhaps even most people grows about housing costs in expensive metros are native to those cities.
	Most of these people would not surrender familial and communal bonds if they relocated to less expensive cities.
	So, again, the idea that like you're living in New York because that's where your family is.
	For the most part, that's not true of a lot of these people.
	70% of the population in Washington is not native to DC.
	A huge percentage of New York is not native to DC.
	The average home price in New York is $735,000.
	It's not much better in the outlying suburbs or even exurbs.
	None of that is considering the sky-high cost of living in the area, says Harsanye.
	Years ago, a couple starting out could comfortably live in many towns on Long Island.
	Not today.
	You're paying three quarters of a million dollars for a new house, not to mention outlandish property taxes in any neighborhood with a decent school district.
	For that kind of money, a young couple could get a veritable mansion with a pool, parks, low taxes, more opportunity, and a thriving school district in a Dallas or Indianapolis suburb.
	There is nothing wrong with pointing that out.
	That is correct, obviously.
	And it is also true, as I said in that tape, that the history of America is a history of people moving.
	As Harsanye points out, in 1950, Detroit was a booming industrial city with 1.8 million residents, and Phoenix had 106,000 residents.
	Today, 640,000 people live in Detroit, and 1.6 million people live in Phoenix.
	Moving is not a new thing.
	We are moving significantly less than our parents.
	We are less mobile.
	And that is because politicians are lying to people.
	They are lying to you when they say the politicians, stay in place, we will solve the affordability crisis.
	And then they provide for policies that do nothing of the sort.
	It just makes you frustrated.
	And then you go to the other party who says the same thing.
	And then they don't do it.
	And it makes you frustrated.
	And this is why you get more and more radical politics in these unaffordable cities.
	But none of these politicians are going to solve that problem.
	Number one, the solutions they are applying are not actual solutions.
	And number two, they are lying to you because they don't even have solutions to these things.
	There's an article in the Washington Post today talking about affordable cities.
	And there's one in particular they point out: Pittsburgh.
	As real estate prices and interest rates shot up in recent years, the prospect of homeownership moved further for many Americans, especially young adults in large metro areas, where the median home price can run well over half a million dollars, but not in Pittsburgh.
	After dropping $10,000 to rehab a bathroom and decrepit kitchen cabinets, Isaac Ray and Liam Weaver bought their first home for $163,000.
	Though the housing market has tempered since the frenetic days of 2020, prices remain relentlessly high.
	The U.S. median topped $410,000 in the second quarter.
	That's more than 50% climb in five years, which of course is due to government inflationary policy.
	For people on the coasts, it's even higher.
	In LA, it's $995,000.
	How about Greater Pittsburgh?
	$229,000 with a low unemployment rate, with new industries.
	Private redevelopment is happening at rapid rates.
	Deregulation, ability to build, fixer-uppers.
	And when I made the case that personal mobility is something that people should consider, again, that's not for everybody.
	But this is this kind of bizarre notion that has set in on the right that personal mobility is not part of the American story.
	That is not true.
	And I'm not talking about abandoning families.
	I'm not talking, again, we are already in atomized society.
	You think New York is a place that's filled with families who just don't want to move?
	New York, truly.
	That's what we're talking about here.
	We're not talking about singles who are living in rent-controlled apartments with a couple of roommates.
	New York is like the center of American familial life.
	The reason I'm pointing this out is because if you want to have realistic expectations of how politics works and what it can achieve, your life will be better.
	And if you want to have realistic expectations about how you can make your own life better, which is what we all want, our own lives to be better, we want the lives of our families to be better, then recognizing baseline realities is the key component to happiness.
	Ignoring reality in favor of political utopianism is a recipe for personal unhappiness.
	And it's not something that, honestly, people on the right should be promoting.
	All righty, meanwhile, speaking of idiocy, Vogue has now decided in a piece by Shante Joseph that having a boyfriend is embarrassing.
	Again, these are the people complaining about affordability in New York.
	The people complaining about affordability are the people who write pieces for Vogue about having a boyfriend is embarrassing.
	I'm amazed by conservatives telling me that ultra-liberal New York and saying, hey, maybe you might want to consider moving to Nashville or Florida if you can, that somehow this is an anti-conservative point.
	Okay?
	According to this columnist, there's been a pronounced shift in the way people showcase their relationships online.
	Far from fully hard-launching romantic partners, straight women are opting for subtler signs, a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone's head.
	On the more confusing end, you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures or entirely professional edited photos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all the shots.
	So, what gives?
	Are people embarrassed by their boyfriends now, or is something more complicated going on?
	To me, it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefit of having a partner, but also appear not so boyfriend-obsessed, they come across as culturally loserish.
	They want the prize in celebration of partnership, but understand the norminess of it, says Zoe Samudzi, the writer and activist.
	Women don't want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered.
	But it's not all about image.
	Apparently, some people believe in the evil eye, which is that your happy relationship will make your near friends upset or something, or people being icked out.
	Okay, a society that doesn't champion partnerships, that doesn't champion having a wife or a husband, is a society doomed to failure.
	Turns out the post-religious society is pretty bad.
	I also say that the post-traditional religious society is pretty bad.
	There is a movement that is, shall we say, post-traditional biblical that is growing in size.
	People who are sort of reinterpreting their religious tradition in order to, I would say, tickle their fancies.
	There is a pastor of a small non-denominational church in Canton, Missouri, who's now making a big deal out of the fact that according to his website, he has now taken a second wife.
	I don't mean he got divorced and then got married again.
	I mean, he has two wives.
	And so he looks at the biblical text and he says he has two beautiful wives.
	My second wife is expecting my eighth child.
	We're thrilled for what the Lord has done for our family.
	And then he says, in 2019, I discovered the surprising fact that God not only never prohibited polygamy throughout the entire biblical narrative, he divinely ordained it in several cases, including David, Jacob, and Joash in the book of Chronicles.
	God lawfully regulated the practice of plural marriage.
	And so, first of all, if you just got familiar with the Bible like six years ago and you read it for the first time, you're like, hey, look, there's polygamy in, you know, 3,000 years ago, 3,500 years ago.
	Congratulations on being able to read.
	And also congratulations on knowing nothing literally about the subsequent biblical tradition in Catholicism, Judaism, and Protestantism.
	Like really well done here.
	But here he is explaining polygon.
	Again, this is not a good thing.
rich tidwell ▲ ● ▼		Now, I want to share something with you.
		I believe first and foremost that all lawful marriage is divinely ordained.
		In other words, if the woman is lawfully available, the union is brought about by God.
		Starting with Adam and Eve, when God brought her to the man.
		Go to Genesis 2.22.
		This is very important.
		So that we don't accuse David or anyone of some kind of sin that they didn't commit.
		You need to understand how marriage actually works.
		It's not through dating websites.
		That's number one.
		Now, can God bring people together through a dating website?
		Sure.
		But here's how this works.
		Genesis 2.22.
unidentified		The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man.
unidentified		Everybody say brought her to the man.
rich tidwell ▲ ● ▼		I'm submitting to you with lots of scriptural evidence that as long as the union is lawful, God brought her to the man.
		And I can prove this over and over again.
		It wasn't just Eve.
		All lawful marriages, God brings the woman to the man.
		This goes for a first wife.
		This goes for a second wife, third wife, however many David ended up.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so it's true for all the wives.
		Okay, so first of all, we should point out the multiple marriages in the Bible tend not to work out particularly well.
		Sarah and Hagar, it doesn't work out particularly well.
		Rachel and Leah, it doesn't work out particularly well.
		Isaac only had one wife, Rebecca.
		It turns out that actually plural marriage turns out historically pretty poorly.
		Okay, so number one, there's that.
		Number two, basic rule of sort of interpretation of scripture, at least in the Old Testament context, which is the one that I'm more familiar with, obviously.
		Just because the Bible talks about people doing a thing does not mean that the Bible is happy with people doing the thing.
		God orders you in the Bible to do particular things or bans you from doing particular things.
		But if the Bible just gives quote unquote permission to do a thing, that doesn't mean that the Bible is celebrating the thing.
		It's usually a transitional rule, which is why in the year 1000 in Judaism, famously, there was a rabbi named Rabbi Nutam who banned plural marriage, like man married to more than one woman.
		In Christianity, as early as the sixth century, there are people who are already moving to ban plural marriage.
		It took another thousand years for that to be made official, but the reality is it fell out of common practice long before that.
		Why?
		Because what is the ideal marriage?
		The ideal marriage is described at the very beginning of the book of Genesis.
		A man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, his wife, not his wives.
		But why is this happening?
		Because the guy wants attention and because he has a desire, presumably, to legitimize his own behavior.
		This is why tradition is good.
		It's why tradition is necessary.
		And when you just free yourself of all tradition and start freewheeling it, you end up in some pretty bad areas, whether that's secular or whether it is pseudo-religious in this way.
		Well, joining me on the line to discuss all of this is an actual expert on the other half of the Bible, the New Testament.
		I'm an Old Testament guy.
		He is the master of the New Testament.
		That would be Matt Frad.
		He's the host of Pines with Aquinas, one of our new Daily Wire shows.
		Matt, thanks so much for taking the time.
		I really appreciate it.
matt fradd ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I reject your affirmation of me, but it is true that I have joined the Daily Wire and I'm thrilled to be with you.
unidentified		Thanks, Ben.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So let's talk about polygyne, because apparently this is now a topic that is emerging once again.
		And one of the things that seems to happen fairly regularly is people going back, looking at the Bible, reading it without any sort of gloss, without any sort of interpretive background, and then simply saying things that have been basically obliterated by several thousand years of religious history.
		There's a pastor who calls himself a pastor who's now quoting the Bible to the effect that a man should be able to marry more than one woman.
		What do you make of this from a biblical perspective?
matt fradd ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I would agree with what you said earlier, that just because something is described in scripture, it doesn't mean that it is commended in scripture.
		So I think it is the case, right, that we do see polygamy in the Old Testament, but that is far from saying it is somehow celebrated as a good.
		I think we could realize in a similar way to how adultery, sorry, not adultery, divorce was permitted in scripture.
		This was permitted, Christ says, because of the hardness of people's hearts.
		So this is the problem, I think, when you take the scriptures and you interpret it without the magisterium of the church.
		Forgive me, but I have to give you the Catholic answer.
		Now, I think most Protestants, right, the majority of Protestants are going to condemn this as unbiblical, and they'd be right too.
		I don't see polygamy popular among Christians ever, even today, and it won't be in the future.
		But one thing I think that the Catholic has that the Protestant doesn't is a teaching office to help him interpret sacred scripture.
		So just because we see polygamy, it doesn't follow that polygamy was God's idea.
		And Christ points us back to the beginning where it was not so.
unidentified		There was male and female.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		You know, one of the points you make here, and obviously for Catholics, you're talking about the authority of the Catholic Church, that the sort of Jewish equivalent would be the oral tradition, which is the idea that there is an interpretive tradition that's carried down over the course of thousands of years that actually, you know, you can go look it up, right?
		You can actually see what people have been saying about this sort of stuff for a very long time.
		You know, that is why one of the answers, one of the questions that's asked very often by secular atheists is they do the same thing, right?
		Richard Dawson will pick up the Bible and then he'll say, here's a verse I don't like.
		It violates my morality and it's bad.
		And you'll say, well, that's because you've never looked at any of the interpretive traditions surrounding that verse.
		And they'll say, well, you know, but if God's eternal, then why would he definitely, why would he have given this scripture?
		Why wouldn't you have just said the thing I want him to say?
		And the answer, of course, is that God was giving orders to a group of people 3,000 years ago who had a different set of priors than you or I have.
		And so this is actually made clear.
		Again, I'm going to use a Jewish reference here because that's the one I know.
		But for example, there is a section of the Bible where it talks about the war bride, right?
		Where the idea that there is a, you go out to war, there's a woman in the war, you bring her home, you shave her head, and then she sits in mourning for her family, and then you can marry her.
		And this is very ugly, right?
		It's pretty terrible.
		And you read it and you say, this is really bad.
		And the rabbis, if you look into the tradition, thousands of years ago, they were talking about the idea that this was basically a temporary attempt by the Bible to stop people from engaging in mass rape.
		That's what it was.
		But now that we've moved beyond that, now that we've developed beyond that through a moral tradition, now we don't do that anymore.
		And that's not something that we should say is okay or engage in.
		The same thing would be true for indentured servitude, right?
		There are lots of things in the Bible that are pointing toward a way forward as humanity interprets the tradition, because what biblical living is, and I pronounce, you know, I put the emphasis on living there, is the interaction between human beings who have an interpretive capacity and a God who is trying to provide them a text with which to work.
		And ignoring either side of that equation is a mistake.
matt fradd ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, in Catholicism, we talk a lot about natural law.
		And one way to kind of describe natural law would just be to say when you use it in accord with its nature, it will flourish.
		And if you use it against its nature or in a way that's contrary to its nature, it won't.
		So if you take a tomato plant and put it in a closet and feed it only beer, it will die because you're treating it contrary to its nature.
		And I think the same thing is shown in the Bible with polygamy.
		You know, every narrative involving polygamy is marked with jealousy, like you mentioned earlier, heartbreak, rivalry, Sarah and Hagar, Leah and Rachel, etc.
		And so, again, as a Catholic, I think there are many, this is, forgive me for harping on this, but I mean, there are many sexual acts in scripture that are condemned by the church that the scripture is silent on.
		So the scripture doesn't directly and explicitly condemn self-abuse or masturbation, nor does it condemn masturbation, sorry, pornography or IVF, obviously.
		Even the scriptures that do, I think, condemn homosexual acts are quibbled with those who would like to reject it.
		In other words, if you're not going to submit yourself to the word of God as your master that knows more than you and is there to direct you so that you can flourish, I think what we all have a tendency to do is to be the master over the word of God and make it say what it wants us to say, but the results are disastrous.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, that is Matt Frad.
		Check out his podcast, Pines with Aquinas, where you're going to get a lot of deep thinking and not the daily news.
		You'll actually get the actual stuff that matters.
		Matt, thanks so much for taking the time.
		I really appreciate it.
kevin hassett ▲ ● ▼		You're welcome.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
		I'll bring you some foreign policy updates from Venezuela.
		And also, why is the UK government now denying the Trump administration intelligence sharing?
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