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June 5, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:21
Ben Shapiro on the Authoritarian Moment
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I want all of you to know, I, Dennis Prager, pay my own money to be a member of the Daily Wire.
I did not want a free subscription.
I think you should support the things that are good.
And he is giving what PragerU has every year, a commencement address.
After all, we call ourselves a university.
We fully acknowledge we're not an accredited university, but we teach a lot.
So we have an annual commencement address.
This year, Ben Shapiro gives it.
So, Ben, what is the topic?
The topic is how to fight back against the institutional authoritarian left that you are undoubtedly going to experience after you leave college.
I think a lot of people exit college and they have this sort of conservative idea that the real world is going to knock some sense into everybody else and you don't have to go through the sort of authoritarian nonsense you went through while you were at university.
And unfortunately, that is just not the case anymore.
All of the same authoritarians you had to deal with in a classroom now are your bosses at the corporations you're about to enter.
And so the commencement address is about the challenges you're likely to face in the work world, which frankly looks very similar to the challenges you face when you're at university.
And what should they do about it?
What's your advice?
I think the first thing they have to do is get organized.
You have to find allies.
You have to treat the renormalization of American institutions as a threat that it is.
And what that means is that a small group of very stubborn people can make a very large difference in a company's.
Saying no is a really, really important thing.
And having a bunch of friends who will say no with you is an even more important thing.
So just as the left likes to think institutionally by taking a kind of small, intransigent core of people and then insisting that everybody bow to them, everybody mimic their win, you can do that in reverse.
If your company is cramming down critical race theory on you, you're fully within your rights to, number one, go get a lawyer and sue them for violation of the Civil Rights Act, but number two...
You can find enough people inside your company, probably, if it's large enough or depending where you are, to side with you.
And if you guys sign a letter to the bosses saying, listen, we are just not going to do your critical race theory training.
We're not going to do this form of diversity training.
Either fire all of us or fire none of us.
Corporations tend to back down.
Corporations are really risk averse.
They do not like litigation.
They do not like controversy.
And the goal of conservatives at this point should not be to make corporations overtly conservative.
Again, maybe that's in the future, but to actually just reestablish the possibility of openness in a lot of these corporations and a lot of the workplaces that no longer exist.
Talking about the corporations, what do you think drives them to make these woke statements, these hate America statements, hate white statements?
Is it cowardice?
Is it young employees who are pushing them?
What do you think it is?
So it's all of the above, and it depends which group you're talking about.
If you're talking about the people at the head of the corporation, it's risk conversion.
Corporations are not known for being particularly risk-seeking because, again, they're profit-seeking and profit-maximizing, and they don't want to take risks that they don't have to take in their pursuit of profit in a particular sphere.
What the left has done is they've created a really perverse incentive structure where if you say something that violates the tenets of the woke, they will activate on social media.
They will activate all of their friends and family to attack you on social media.
And the typical risk-averse move is to immediately take that sort of pressure.
Okay, so we issue a statement.
What's the big deal?
Okay, so we send a letter to our employees.
What's the big deal?
It gets everybody off our back, and we can go about our daily business.
Well, the problem is, soon you have the wolf basically running the place, right?
This has happened everywhere from the New York Times to Coca-Cola, apparently.
You have a small coterie of people who've been able to use the risk aversion of corporate bosses against them.
And that means that these corporate bosses are scared.
The other thing that's happened is because of the complete rewriting of American law in the wake of the 1960s Civil Rights Act, some of which was very good, but some of which went too far in terms of violations of individual rights.
There's a lot of legal risk aversion that takes place as well, and there's this idea that if we train you in diversity training, if we hire Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Tenney to give a lecture for 20 grand a pop.
Then we've insulated ourselves from possible liability.
Because if somebody sues you for discrimination, you say, well, hey, we have diversity training.
I don't know what you want from us.
And we have individual employees who do this stuff, but we certainly didn't create a climate of racial intolerance.
And so there's a legal risk aversion.
There's a market risk aversion.
There are studies that show, by the way, that if corporations are liberal...
Then the crowd tends to react to them not at all.
People aren't typically bothered by it.
They don't care.
If corporations are apolitical, people don't tend to react particularly strongly to it.
If a corporation is identified in any way as conservative, it immediately loses 30 points in popularity all from the left deciding the corporation is evil because it's in any way conservative.
So why do they pay a price?
If half the country is conservative, why do they only pay a price being conservative and never leftist?
The right wing doesn't think institutionally, number one.
We tend to think individually.
So our idea is, okay, well, if I don't like the product, I won't buy the product.
But for the left, that's not the way this works.
For them, if I don't like the company, not only will I not buy their product, I will tell all my friends not to buy their product.
I will wallop them in public.
I will try and destroy the people who are at the head of the institution.
I will shame them publicly.
It's important to take over the institution.
That's one thing.
The other thing is that the right tends to separate off, I think, in a very...
of the people who are making it.
Right, I've always done that.
That's a good idea, right?
Because if you want to have open markets, you really shouldn't have to check the ideology of your plumber before you hire a plumber.
You shouldn't really have to check the ideology of the person who runs Coke before you buy a can of Coke.
But the left doesn't think that way.
The left has decided that it is a kind of moral virtue to shop based on ideology.
Just as they said in the 1960s that the personal is the political, they've now extended that to say that any product you buy is personal, which is political.
So I want to remind everybody, Ben Shapiro gives this year's commencement address at PragerU.com.
in 10 seconds, what do you think of living in Florida after a life in California?
It's an actual free state.
I mean, honestly, if you've lived an entire life in California and you arrive in Florida, it feels like a different country.
There's a different level of liberty that they put aside to tax rates I mean, the fact is that this state was open last June, and it shows.
I mean, there's a more relaxed feel.
There's a feeling of more tolerance for people around you.
It's really diverse.
Well, bless you.
Bless you.
Ben Shapiro.
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