April 8, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:58:46
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unidentified
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♪♪♪ Nice room. | |
| ♪♪♪ Alright, people! We're live on the YouTube, and I've got | ||
| the sage of the alt-right... | ||
| Without the rage, without the rage, apparently. | ||
| The sage without the rage of the alt-right. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, welcome back. | ||
| Hey, how's it going, dude? | ||
| All right, we got a lot of things to talk about. | ||
| I want to cover a ton of new ground. | ||
| I read your book over the weekend. | ||
| Well, thank you for doing that. | ||
| You have a new PragerU video going up. | ||
| You're still doing this Daily Wire thing and a thousand other things. | ||
| So we got a lot to do here, but let's just start with this alt-right nonsense. | ||
| I hate that we even have to talk about it. | ||
| It's so freaking stupid, but this happens to be the world that we live in at the moment. | ||
| So about two weeks ago, about 10 days ago or so, The Economist did an interview with you. | ||
| I assume that was by the phone, probably? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Originally, yeah. | ||
| So you did a phone interview with them, and they then- It was perfectly nice, the interview, by the way. | ||
| You actually read the transcript, it's perfectly nice, a little bit adversarial, but that's good, that's fine. | ||
| They usually are, Shapiro, that's how it works, right? | ||
| Like the interviews themselves and the thoughts usually stand on their own. | ||
| Anyway, they published this interview, and what was the title of the book? | ||
| It was called Ben Shapiro, The Alt-Right Sage Without the Rage. | ||
| Which is wrong on at least a couple of scores. | ||
| Well the funny thing is half the media tries to portray you as if you've got this evil rage within you all the time. | ||
| So I thought that was funny on itself. | ||
| Which is weird because you've met me and I'm fairly calm. | ||
| This is as ragey. | ||
| Like nearly all the time. | ||
| This is about as ragey as it gets right here. | ||
| Yeah, so okay, let's put aside the rage part. | ||
| The alt-right part, and just what the media is constantly doing. | ||
| So, okay, so after you publicly then shamed them for it, and everybody jumped on board to defend you, and, you know, all these things got thousands and thousands of retweets, eventually they did print a retraction. | ||
| They apologized. | ||
| They apologized, and they, you know, they printed this retraction where basically they just said, oh, he's not part of the alt-right. | ||
| And it's like, well, what just happened here? | ||
| You guys just said he's the sage of the alt-right. | ||
| There's this thing called the Google machine. | ||
| And if they had just typed in my name with alt-right, they would have seen probably the first result is a piece I wrote for the Washington Post in 2015 talking about how evil alt-right is. | ||
| I mean, it was a review of the book. | ||
| In the book, which you have read, I referenced the alt-right I think three or four separate times and talk about how terrible their ideas are and how evil their ideology is and how white supremacy is gross. | ||
| The whole point of the book is that you're trying to show people the clean way to think, the sort of right way to think, so that you don't fall prey Correct. | ||
| Western civilization is not built on race. | ||
| Western civilization is built on certain immutable principles. | ||
| That's the basis of the book. | ||
| It's the basis of conservatism, too, or classical liberalism. | ||
| All of this is built on the same idea, which is that this stuff is not relegated to race. | ||
| I'm a Jew. | ||
| The Jews weren't part of that original white people bargain, if there was a white people bargain. | ||
| You're Jewish, too. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| And I've done open battle with the alt-right for legitimately years. | ||
| I mean, I always cite the stat just because it's a useful stat, but it's true. | ||
| I mean, I was attacked more than any other Jewish journalist online in 2016. | ||
| The vast majority of that crap was from the alt-right. | ||
| The alt-right still hates my guts. | ||
| I have to have significant security around me nearly all times because of the number of threats we get from people on the alt-right. | ||
| And I'm being called alt-right by The Economist, which is supposed to be a center-right magazine in Europe. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| That, I think, is the question. | ||
| It's like, everyone gets it. | ||
| This is what the media does. | ||
| They don't mind, they lie, they label, they smear, all of those things. | ||
| Everyone understands that, but what is it? | ||
| The Economist is basically a respectable, as you said, center-right magazine. | ||
| These are people who you would think ideologically basically line up with you. | ||
| So what do you think is truly going on there? | ||
| Is it purely just a quest for clicks? | ||
| Put Shapiro's picture up, put Alt-Right, all hell's gonna break loose. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I tend to hold by the Hanlon's razor idea that it's mostly ignorance and not malice. | ||
| And I think for some of these people, it is ignorance. | ||
| I think that for The Economist, they apologized within a couple of hours. | ||
| I think it legitimately was. | ||
| There was somebody writing a headline who doesn't know what the alt-right is. | ||
| They don't know the difference between the alt-right and conservatism in the United States. | ||
| And in Europe, the alt-right is a lot closer to European right-wing populism than the alt-right is to American conservatism in a lot of ways. | ||
| And so I think they just figure anybody who's anti-left is alt-right. | ||
| I mean, they've labeled Jordan alt-right. | ||
| They've labeled you alt-right. | ||
| Not the economists, but a lot of people in the media will do this routine. | ||
| They'll say that the IDW generally is alt-right. | ||
| I believe I'm the only registered Republican, as far as I'm aware, in the IDW. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You've got a lot of people that voted for Bernie. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There are more people who voted for Bernie than voted for Trump among members of the IDW. | ||
| I think that's fair to say, correct? | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's true, right? | ||
| I mean, I think Brad voted for Bernie. | ||
| I think that Eric voted for Bernie. | ||
| I know that Sam voted for Hillary. | ||
| There are many more members of the political left. | ||
| I voted for Gary Johnson. | ||
| Right, you voted for Gary Johnson. | ||
| I didn't vote at all in the 2016 election at the top of the ticket, so I'm not sure there is one person who voted for Trump in the IDW, but we become alt-right because if you're a heterodox thinker or if you're somebody who asks questions and then comes up with answers that specifically are designed to reject the alt-right, then you are suddenly a member of the alt-right, just by taking the question seriously. | ||
| And this is the part that's really dangerous, right? | ||
| You see this with Steven Pinker. | ||
| I think this is the best example that I saw. | ||
| You remember Steven Pinker gave this speech? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A few years back, where he said, you know, the problem with the rise of the alt-right is that there are a bunch of people on the left who are rejecting the question, and then they refuse to give an answer to the question, and so people go looking for the answer, and the only answer they get is the worst answer. | ||
| Right, he wasn't defending the answer, that's the point. | ||
| The whole point of his speech was, no, we need to give correct answers so that people don't fall prey to the stupid crap that's being said about race and IQ, for example. | ||
| But we can't ignore the questions about race and IQ, because otherwise people are still going to look for the answers to these questions. | ||
| And what he's saying is effectively the same thing that people in the religious community | ||
| are constantly saying about—you know, you see people who go to Sunday school, and then | ||
| it's like, well, I asked all my questions, and the rabbi or the pastor or the priest, | ||
| they all said, you know, you're not allowed to ask those questions, and so I left the | ||
| religion. | ||
| Well, that's what Pinker is saying about logic and reason in Western civilized ideas, | ||
| that people came in and they asked these questions, and instead of the questions being answered, | ||
| people are like, you're not allowed to ask that question. | ||
| It's a very bad question. | ||
| And you saw Vox did this to Sam Harris, right, when Sam was talking about race and IQ. | ||
| And when people say that, when people ask about whether Islam has a problem with violence, | ||
| right, then this is considered an alt-right perspective. | ||
| And so they'll ban Jordan's book in Christchurch from Whitcoll's briefly based on the idea | ||
| that Jordan has suggested that Islamophobia is an overused term and is misapplied, right? | ||
| That's somehow. | ||
| Well, he also took that picture with the guy in the shirt. | ||
| With a human. | ||
| With a human. | ||
| And you've done many of these and I've been on tour with Jordan. | ||
| He said he's been taking pictures with about 30,000 people. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine that's a low-end estimate probably. | ||
| I've been there where he's had lines of hundreds of people. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| After giving a two-hour lecture, after doing 10 interviews during the day, | ||
| after flying into the city that morning, the idea that he's investigating what everyone's wearing | ||
| or that anyone is paying any attention to that, forget what you think about what it said or did. | ||
| Unless the shirt legitimately is a giant swastika or a giant hammer or sickle or something. | ||
| Like people are milled through every 10 seconds. | ||
| I mean, they legitimately come up, they take the picture, they shake your hand, they leave. | ||
| I mean, you guys have done tens of thousands of pictures, I've done tens of thousands. | ||
| I don't remember any of the pictures that I took. | ||
| I mean, legitimately, I remember none of them. | ||
| But the idea was that he took a picture with this guy and now we're gonna. | ||
| Right, now we're gonna ban his book. | ||
| And then the Cambridge thing, which is even worse. | ||
| Right, that was even worse. | ||
| But, I mean, even the New Zealand thing, where the notion that you are going to be able to crack down on white supremacy by banning speech, generally, is so dangerous. | ||
| And listen, if white supremacy were cracked down on, I'd be one of the chief beneficiaries of the crackdown. | ||
| I mean, they hate me, right? | ||
| You almost said it! | ||
| I said it on Rogan. | ||
| I'm not going to do it again. | ||
| I'm being really careful about my F-word use. | ||
| Very selective. | ||
| I mean, as you know, because We're friends. | ||
| One of the bizarre things is how little I curse on camera and how much I curse off camera. | ||
| It's a lot of F-bombs off camera. | ||
| A lot of F-bombs off camera. | ||
| I said, good morning, Ben. | ||
| Good fucking morning to you. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But New Zealand legitimately is now going to prosecute people who downloaded the manifesto for the white supremacist. | ||
| And I thought to myself, well, I downloaded it because I wanted to read what was in there so that I knew how to rebut it. | ||
| I mean, the solution to this stuff is not to crack down on speech. | ||
| It's really scary. | ||
| There's so much I want to do here. | ||
| So let's go with that for a second. | ||
| So in a case of what happened in Christchurch, do you think actually that reading it does add value? | ||
| Because I get you want to understand it a little bit, at least the people that are talking about it. | ||
| But in another way, doesn't it just incentivize other people to do crazy things? | ||
| Because then it's like, holy shit, Ben Shapiro, all these internet people, they're going to read what I said, even if it's complete insanity and this thing had conflicting I openly said, don't mention the guy's name, don't repeat his ideas. | ||
| And you guys never publish names of people, right? | ||
| We don't publish names of shooters. | ||
| We won't do it. | ||
| And I even instructed our people, like, only report on the manifesto to the extent necessary to knock down myths about the manifesto. | ||
| And that was the big problem. | ||
| The reason that I downloaded it was not because I originally wanted to read what the guy said, because you don't want to give that credence. | ||
| It's because the media started immediately misreporting what the guy had said. | ||
| Effectively doing exactly what he told them to do, which is report on everything that I say, so as to divide people, and then the division itself will create more polarization in society, which is what I want. | ||
| I mean, he says this in the manifesto, and the media were like, yeah, let's do that thing, which is, you know, it's interesting which manifestos they choose to report on and which ones become irrelevant nearly as soon as they are released. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a whole other show, really, in how they decide what is relevant. | ||
| But I will say, regardless of, like, I don't think it should be distributed. | ||
| I don't think people should read it. | ||
| But if you do pick it up and read it, I don't think that you should be arrested for that. | ||
| I mean, criminalizing people who downloaded a file seems to me really, really dangerous stuff, because you can link virtually anything. | ||
| I mean, again, they tried to ban The best-selling book on planet Earth from the biggest bookseller in New Zealand because Jordan was in a picture with a human. | ||
| I don't trust anybody to regulate speech that way. | ||
| And weren't they looking to arrest people that shared the video also? | ||
| Yeah, they were doing that too. | ||
| And now they're saying they want to hold members of social media hierarchies personally responsible for distribution of bad material. | ||
| This is one of the things they're pushing in the UK. | ||
| They're trying to regulate social media to the extent that they could haul Zuckerberg into court and jail him if certain controversial material is distributed via Facebook. | ||
| I mean, this is not... It's un-American is the easy way to say it, but it's not un-European, I guess. | ||
| Do you think that's why Zuckerberg, just in the last week, has sort of been hinting off, like, regulate me, please? | ||
| Like, they actually want regulation now. | ||
| Well, I think what's happening for Zuckerberg... Because it'll get them off the hook. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| It's a couple of things. | ||
| One is, he's hoping for regulation from the United States government, because he knows he's going to get regulated from the Europeans. | ||
| And what he's afraid of is being stuck in this catch-22, where the Europeans regulate him on speech. | ||
| And then, for business reasons, he starts using those regulations as the basis for policing stuff in the United States. | ||
| And then people in the United States say, well, you're policing, and your policing is not even, and so you're actually an editorial outlet now, and you should be treated like an editorial outlet, as opposed to like a platform. | ||
| I think they should do it for a long time. | ||
| I think they should be treated like an editorial outlet if they're going to act like an editorial outlet. | ||
| But he's stuck sort of between a rock and a hard place. | ||
| Whenever you see a business that is calling for additional regulation on itself, you can fairly guarantee that this is a corporatist attempt to crowd other people out of the market and to avoid responsibility. | ||
| And it seems to me that that's mainly what's happening here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So let's back up for a second. | ||
| So after the Christchurch attack, Bluecheck Twitter went completely bananas on you, on me, on several other people. | ||
| Sam, Jordan, everybody. | ||
| Well, a ton on Sam. | ||
| None of us have ever called for violence, obviously. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Every single one of us have no problem condemning this, want these things to be stopped. | ||
| I can see the glossed over look in your eyes as I'm saying it. | ||
| It's sickening and boring to have to say it. | ||
| What do you think our responsibility or our Our duty to respond to some of this is, because it seems to me it's getting haywire. | ||
| The people that when someone, when 50 people are killed in a horrific attack halfway across the world, when that happens and then blue check journalists directly blame you, let's say, let's just keep this on you for a second. | ||
| It seems to me they're putting more of a price tag on your head or more of a direct threat on your head than anything that you have ever said. | ||
| I mean, I think that's true. | ||
| I think there's not much I can do about it. | ||
| I mean, there's certain material that obviously is libelous, and theoretically you could take legal action, but I'm a public figure. | ||
| That means I'm going to take plenty of slings and arrows, and that's fine. | ||
| I mean, that's part of the debate. | ||
| I'm the one advocating that we should be able to speak about this stuff as much as we want to. | ||
| It's one thing for The Economist to label me a label that is clearly not true. | ||
| It's another thing for people to draw the attenuated sort of connection between I've criticized Islam's violent tendencies across the world without saying that every Muslim is violent or, and certainly not saying that any Muslim should be treated with violence. | ||
| I mean, I've never said any of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the way, Jewish theologians and Catholic theologians, Christian theologians, have been arguing about what's in the Bible and what it all means and all of those things forever. | ||
| It would be insane to say. | ||
| I specifically say, and I've been saying this for As long as I can remember, I do not analyze the Quran. | ||
| I do not analyze the religion of Islam. | ||
| Because you can go through the religious texts of virtually any religion, including my own, and find stuff that is deeply uncomfortable and ugly. | ||
| And that's why I believe in a reinterpretive structure. | ||
| I mean, I talk about that in the book, and we'll get to that, I'm sure. | ||
| But the fact is that the balance between reason and revelation is very key to my thinking. | ||
| I don't look at the Quran and go looking for verses to take that—I'm not an Islamic scholar. | ||
| There are many people who are. | ||
| They're moderate and Reform Muslims who I've had routinely on my radio show to try and talk about the reinterpretation of Islam. | ||
| They are much better situated to do that than I am. | ||
| All I can do is point out that by polling data, there are a lot of Muslims across the world who believe some really radical things, that if any Christian believed them, the media would immediately say this person is a radical Christian by any definition. | ||
| So I point that out and suddenly it's, I'm saying that, what now? | ||
| I'm calling for violence against people who I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what they, not only I don't know what they think, but they're allowed to think whatever the hell they want. | ||
| You can think what you want without being subjected to violence. | ||
| I don't know how they act. | ||
| I don't know any of that stuff. | ||
| I mean, it's, it's absurdity on its face. | ||
| And yet the attempt is of course to, I mean, and you saw the media do this. | ||
| They immediately shifted from, What happened in Christchurch is the result of people who were critical, particularly of Ilhan Omar. | ||
| You actually saw this, right? | ||
| There was this move to say, well, if you call Ilhan Omar an anti-Semite, then you're contributing to just the kind of Islamophobia that led to what happened in Christchurch. | ||
| It's like, wait, hold on a second. | ||
| I defended Ilhan Omar being able to wear hijab on the house floor. | ||
| I think that's a good thing. | ||
| I wear a funny hat all day long, right? | ||
| Like, that's fine with me. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I think it's good. | ||
| I came out originally against Trump's originally formulated Muslim ban, when he was like, yeah, no Muslims coming in. | ||
| I said, this is dumb, this is counterproductive, and it's intolerant. | ||
| I said all of those things because those are true. | ||
| And then it was, but if you critique the fact that Ilhan Omar is clearly anti-Semitic, then you are—like, this is an attempt to carve out speech, right? | ||
| It's an attempt to say, you're not allowed to criticize X because we don't like you criticizing X. And if we can blame this thing over here on you, then that allows us to silence you on this particular issue. | ||
| So what tactic maybe are some of us missing to clean some of this up? | ||
| Because I agree that basically what's happening here is these people have been incentivized for any time anything bad happens, you blame a few people that have some influence. | ||
| So let's say you blame Peterson and you and a couple other people because it's like, oh, you guys are helping wake up people to their own thoughts and to how to live their own lives by their own volition and all the things that are in this book. | ||
| So there is every reason to attack you because this is what Right. | ||
| And it's also an easy game, because the fact is, whoever has been very productive in the public sphere I'm sure has said things that they don't like. | ||
| I mean, I keep referring to it because it's true. | ||
| I have a running list of crap that I've said over the past... I've been doing this since I was 17 years old. | ||
| I'm now 35, so more than half my life I have been doing this. | ||
| I've written legitimately millions of words. | ||
| I don't remember everything I wrote. | ||
| I've written a column a week since I was 17 years old. | ||
| I've written legitimately thousands of columns at this point and I was writing like eight pieces a day when I was | ||
| at Breitbart and I was writing four pieces a day for Daily Wire for years on end. | ||
| I don't remember everything I wrote. I remember I have 140,000 tweets. I remember everything that I've tweeted. | ||
| So if somebody points something out to me, I'm like, yeah, that was bad. | ||
| Then I'm happy to say, yeah, that was bad. | ||
| But you wrote a piece. You wrote a piece for Daily Wire last year, basically. | ||
| Correct. And I update it. I do update it. People will remind me and they'll be like, yeah, this was a bad tweet. | ||
| I'm like, you're right, that was a bad tweet. | ||
| I did it back in 2008, and it was a dumb thing to do, and I'm sorry that that happened. | ||
| It's like, I don't remember all that stuff, but it's really a bad faith attempt to take down people who are not like—this is what Tucker Carlson rightly pointed out when people were coming after him. | ||
| This was not an attempt to make the public space better. | ||
| It was not an attempt to wipe out bad speech that was happening in the here and now, because we don't have a time machine. | ||
| We can call up stuff from 15 years ago. | ||
| Like, they're digging up interviews from John Wayne, who's been dead for 40 years. | ||
| It's like, well, I don't know what you want from John Wayne. | ||
| Dude's dead, right? | ||
| We can't dig up his skeleton and ask him for an apology. | ||
| If I say something now that you don't like, then we can have a debate over that thing. | ||
| But if you are digging up something I said 15 years ago, all I can do is either say I disagree with me from back then, or I agree, and then we can have a discussion about what I think now. | ||
| But I can't... | ||
| Like I don't have a time machine. | ||
| So this is all bad faith. | ||
| And it's and it's really pretty hideous. | ||
| It's one thing to dig up something somebody has said in the past and then say this fits in with their generalized worldview. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But to take something out of context and then say ignore all contrary evidence. | ||
| And then just say, well, this is the worldview because I want this to be the worldview so I can suggest that they're outside the Overton window and we don't have to deal with them anymore. | ||
| That's that's ugly. | ||
| And that's that's what's happening. | ||
| I mean, even there's this video that was going around and it got a bunch of hits from some lefty who had taken legitimately taken. | ||
| I mean, openly taking stuff out of context and put it in a video to suggest that I was calling for the murder of Muslims. | ||
| And it is a lie. | ||
| It is a full-on, full-stop, absolute bullshit lie. | ||
| I mean, he took a section from an ad read that I do for a Second Amendment group called | ||
| the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, in which I say that citizens should be—law-abiding | ||
| citizens should be armed and they should have concealed carry permits, because if you are | ||
| going to be victimized by a crime, the government can't stop that, so you should be able to | ||
| defend yourself. | ||
| He took the part where I say the government can't stop this and connected it to my video | ||
| about how many radical Muslims there are on Earth, and then suggested that what I was | ||
| saying is that you should arm up and go kill Muslims, because there are a lot of violent-thinking | ||
| Muslims on Earth, or extreme Muslims on Earth, that now I'm suggesting that you should preemptively | ||
| take action because the government can't protect you. | ||
| I mean, he was legitimately taking two disconnected thoughts on two separate topics, cobbling them together, and then suggesting that was my position. | ||
| It was just an open lie. | ||
| Was this a public person? | ||
| Oh yeah, no, this is a public person. | ||
| So this is an actual, with a name. | ||
| This is a human, yeah, this is a human. | ||
| Yeah, not just an anonymous account. | ||
| So what do you do in a case like that? | ||
| Okay, you can defend yourself, I get it. | ||
| We've all done this, but I'm starting to think that that's not enough, and it's an odd place, and I had Robert Barnes here a couple weeks ago, a lawyer, and it's like, it's an odd place for the free speech guys to be going, we have to figure out what are the legal protections around speech, because it's so not, And I hate it. | ||
| This is the worst position for me to possibly be in, I think. | ||
| And yet here we are. | ||
| I mean, you just defending yourself. | ||
| Well, the guy's just going to keep doing it. | ||
| You get him clicks. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And that is what it is. | ||
| You know, I loathe to either change libel or defamation laws in the United States. | ||
| I prefer that people say more rather than less. | ||
| I think most people see through this nonsense, and if I didn't think that, then we couldn't really have a republic, is the truth. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it's obviously deeply disturbing, and as a good person, the first thing that happens, you know, if you're trying to be good, like, I don't think... | ||
| I think I'm a person who's trying to be a good person. | ||
| I think most people who are trying to be good people, when you are critiqued, the first thing you think is, OK, is that true? | ||
| And your first instinct is, did I do something wrong? | ||
| And then the more you think about it, you're like, no, I didn't. | ||
| This is just bullshit. | ||
| So I mean, other than just calling it out when it occurs, I'm not sure what else people can do and even giving it airtime is a problem | ||
| because then it just drives them to double down in response and then suggest, | ||
| no, no, no, now he's lying, now he's lying because they wanna read in what they wanna read in. | ||
| You can't have a good faith discussion this way and it's not meant to be a good faith discussion. | ||
| How much do you think is just they wanna take you out versus just they wanna scare everybody else? | ||
| Like it's pretty clear to me, they're not gonna take you out out of fear. | ||
| Right. Like they're not going. | ||
| I mean, I think that it's two things. | ||
| One, there's always the pipe dream that they'll be able to take somebody like me out. | ||
| But I think that it's about more than that. | ||
| It's about making sure that people who are considered inside the Overton window won't even have a conversation with people like me. | ||
| So Andrew Yang comes on my Sunday special. | ||
| And it's great. | ||
| I mean, it's a really tolerant, civil conversation. | ||
| I took his ideas seriously. | ||
| I read his book. | ||
| I let him speak his piece. | ||
| It was really nice. | ||
| Very nice guy. | ||
| I've invited every major Democratic candidate on. | ||
| Buttigieg had suggested that he was going to come on at one point, and then he just never has responded yet. | ||
| I'd love to have him on and ask him some questions. | ||
| And it would be very civil, because the Sunday special is a very civil place. | ||
| And that's I mean, Yang has gotten excoriated by the left for even coming on the show. | ||
| Joe Rogan has me on his show, and he gets hit by the left with, you're having on that white supremacist Shapiro, you're going to get hit just for having me on. | ||
| That's the way this works, because if they can alienate enough people by saying, OK, well, if we can deplatform everybody, then it's an easy way of avoiding actually having to regulate. | ||
| What you do is you just make it deeply uncomfortable. | ||
| Do I really want the flack of having on XY or Z? | ||
| Right, so you just shift that Overton window. | ||
| Well, I guess I gotta go this way. | ||
| You keep moving it left to the point that any, that any moderate anything is outside. | ||
| And the truth is that that's an effective tactic specifically because there is an Overton window. | ||
| I mean, it does exist. | ||
| There are people I wouldn't have on my Sunday special. | ||
| There are people who I wouldn't appear with. | ||
| I mean, I've said that before. | ||
| And so because that's a little murkier of a line, it's easier to manipulate that line. | ||
| It's easier to say, okay, well, since we all accept that there is this Overton window, | ||
| then we can use that Overton window and shift the line here and there. | ||
| Now, it's interesting that the Overton window is constantly shifting, as you say, left in every direction, | ||
| meaning that you can express the wildest, most insane views on the left | ||
| and still be considered well inside the Overton window. | ||
| And if you are. | ||
| As heterodox as Sam Harris, a Hillary Clinton supporter, who has said a couple of heterodox things like, I like, I want to look at the evidence on IQ and then analyze how much of that is environmental and how much of that is genetic. | ||
| And I want to look at how much that affects disparities overall. | ||
| Or Sam saying that, you know, Islam has a relationship with violence, globally speaking. | ||
| Those heterodox opinions mean they're, I mean, they'll rule out Sam before they rule out Maxine Waters, right? | ||
| That's the way that this works. | ||
| They'll rule out anybody. | ||
| Christina Hoff Sommers is too far right for them. | ||
| She's a white supremacist now. | ||
| But they'll keep expanding that all the way to the point where anybody's wild opinion is acceptable. | ||
| Like, the right is routinely throwing people out for expressing opinions that we find Unpleasant, outside of our norm, right? | ||
| When Steve King came and finally said, kind of openly, the white nationalist comment to the New York Times, we threw him out. | ||
| I mean, we took away his committee assignments. | ||
| I donated the Max to his opponent. | ||
| I raised money for Kevin Feenstra, who's running in his district, right? | ||
| And the left's response was, why was he even a part? | ||
| Ben, you once took a picture with the guy. | ||
| I took a picture with him, right. | ||
| Before he said that, They said that stuff that was open. | ||
| Time machine ban. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And so that's what it becomes, is, well, were you once nice to this person? | ||
| It's like, well, that was before. | ||
| And also, you guys are—like, Louis Farrakhan is still a person who meets with members of | ||
| the Democratic caucus. | ||
| Like, what—why is it the—the window only shifts in one direction. | ||
| I'm not going to listen to people who tell me about who should be inside the Overton window when they legitimately refuse to throw anyone outside the Overton window, no matter how vile they are. | ||
| Ilhan Omar just got defended by the entire Democratic Congress after saying four—three anti-Semitic things in the course of seven weeks, right? | ||
| She was defended by the Democratic caucus and left with her position on the Foreign Affairs Committee. | ||
| Well, because they're afraid that their own tactics will be used against them. | ||
| So I would imagine- Which they will. | ||
| I mean, Biden's getting it now, right? | ||
| Well, I mean, I've been calling this forever, and it eventually will happen to Bernie, too. | ||
| It has to happen. | ||
| That's the nature of the beast. | ||
| How much of this, though, do you think is that by- because I see this now, because I get a lot of former lefties, let's say, even some who've been on this show, who publicly they're like, This thing, the left, is just burned. | ||
| We get what it is. | ||
| But publicly they won't say that they've shifted or that they're evolving or that if you're an old school liberal you can actually be okay with a lot of conservative ideas or conservative people because there's a protection involved. | ||
| This is right. | ||
| If you're basically a Democrat or on the left, Joe Biden can run around with a gazillion | ||
| videos of sniffing girls hair and grabbing people and all of that. | ||
| And yet the people that were going crazy over Kavanaugh have nothing to say about that. | ||
| That there's just a protection you get as a lefty that you simply don't get. | ||
| And it's comfortable not to raise your head above the waterline. | ||
| I mean, what I like to tell the story, on my birthday, so I have a lot of friends in the media, or people who I'm friendly with. | ||
| I wouldn't call them friends because of this. | ||
| Because of this. | ||
| People who I'm acquaintance with. | ||
| The question is, would they consider you a friend? | ||
| Well, that really is the question, because it's my birthday, right? | ||
| I routinely wish people who I disagree with happy birthday online. | ||
| It seems like a basic thing of courtesy. | ||
| It's somebody's birthday, they're on the left, fine, it's your birthday, happy birthday. | ||
| People will text me on the left, happy birthday. | ||
| I can't do this publicly. | ||
| They will not tweet happy birthday, because they are afraid that if they tweet happy birthday, they have then given me the credence of I was born and therefore I'm a human being. | ||
| And they're going to get hit with, how dare you wish this terrible person, this orthodox Jewish neo-Nazi, how dare you wish that person happy birthday, right? | ||
| The effect of being Duplaste is a thing. | ||
| I mean, the Duplaste thing I thought was so telling. | ||
| Everybody knew gut level that if you said that a person on the other side is a human being, you get hit. | ||
| But it's funny. | ||
| I don't get this from the right. | ||
| Meaning that I say Andrew Yang is a human, right? | ||
| He's running for the 2020 nomination. | ||
| I treat him really well. | ||
| I think he's an intelligent guy. | ||
| I think he's a nice guy. | ||
| I've said about Buttigieg, who I've never met, he seems like a nice person. | ||
| I will say that about the vast majority of people who I disagree with on the left, that they're nice people who I disagree with. | ||
| There are some who are badly motivated, and those people I try to avoid. | ||
| But the vast majority of them are people you'd want to hang out with and seem like nice people who you can have a conversation with. | ||
| When is the last time somebody has ever said that about somebody on the right? | ||
| Joe Biden, you recall this actually happened to Biden. | ||
| So Biden said this about Pence, right? | ||
| He said Pence was a nice person. | ||
| And then Biden got hit so hard that he backed off of it. | ||
| And he was like, well, you know what? | ||
| No one can hold the beliefs that Mike Pence has and still be a nice person. | ||
| I'm sorry, we can't have a politics. | ||
| If the idea is that you are my enemy, that we are no longer even operating in the same sphere, that my politics make me evil, but your politics make you a nice person, How am I supposed to have a conversation with you on that basis? | ||
| So do you think then that Biden is the last chance for any Democrat to be somewhat centrist or decent, for all the disagreements you may have with Biden? | ||
| I mean, even in the last week, he's seen it not only with the Pence thing, but he had to double down with a whole bunch of... Well, he's on his apology tour, yeah. | ||
| And he's on the apology tour. | ||
| But when you see how radical the Democrats have gone, and again, this is like everything I was fighting against for all these years, you know what I mean? | ||
| This was like, guys, this is going to happen if we don't start fixing it, right? | ||
| Now, I don't even think it's my job to fix anymore. | ||
| I think it has to just sort of burn. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| That's very unfortunate because I think, as Jordan would say, you need a certain tension between the right and the left that's sort of equal tension, let's say. | ||
| But do you think Biden's like the last chance for anything that's sort of I think they're carving out his soul right now. | ||
| And so we'll see where he stands by the end. | ||
| I mean, they've taken basically an ice cream scoop and gone through his innards with this. | ||
| And I just, I don't know how much Biden is going to be left at the end of this. | ||
| I think Biden's initial instincts, and I really don't like Joe Biden as a politician. | ||
| I think he fibs a lot. | ||
| I don't like his policies, but I think his initial instinct before he gets political is that he can talk with people on the other side of the aisle. | ||
| That's why he was friends with McCain for so many years and all of this. | ||
| I think that Yeah. | ||
| this is being beat out of him in the primaries because it's just unacceptable. | ||
| I was hoping the same thing was true about Buttigieg. | ||
| I was hoping that Buttigieg was going to be that. | ||
| If he said something like, you know, I don't like the position of Dan Cathy, the head of | ||
| Chick-fil-A, but they make good chicken, so I'll eat there. | ||
| And I was like, well, that's refreshing. | ||
| Isn't that a nice thing? | ||
| A radical change. | ||
| I know, but that was the only moderate thing I've heard in the entire Democratic primary. | ||
| And now, Buttigieg is switching, and it's, again, Mike Pence hates me, Mike Pence is out to get me because he's a bad guy, and if Mike Pence thinks that I'm a bad person, what he's really doing is he's rejecting God because God made me the way that I am. | ||
| It's like, whatever Mike Pence's views on the sinfulness of homosexual activity, Mike Pence has treated Buttigieg really well. | ||
| I mean, there's a bunch of records of him, like, when Buttigieg was activated in the military, Pence personally called him up. | ||
| to wish him best of luck in all of that. | ||
| He's never said a bad word about Buttigieg, as far as I'm aware. | ||
| Our friend, Rick Rinell, who's the ambassador to Germany, who's gay, has only good things to say about Mike Pence. | ||
| I'm not saying that everything Mike Pence says or believes would line up with everything I believe, but Trump has also been president for two plus years. | ||
| Are they coming for the gays? | ||
| Did you bring anyone with you? | ||
| The fact that Buttigieg has to make up a fake Mike Pence, where Pence is now his enemy and out to get him, It's really telling about the polarization of politics and the attempt to shift political differences into character assassination. | ||
| This idea that Pence disagrees with me about same-sex marriage and therefore he actually hates me. | ||
| And it's like, well, you have no evidence whatsoever that that is the case. | ||
| But also you're allowed to hate other people as long as you don't want laws that are different for them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You are allowed to hate people. | ||
| It just is, right? | ||
| You're allowed to be mean. | ||
| You're allowed to not like people. | ||
| I mean, and I think more importantly, you are allowed to dislike the behavior in which others engage, so long as you are not attempting to compel them to either engage or not engage in behavior. | ||
| I think that there's a fundamental distinction that every religious person understands, and a lot of non-religious people don't, when it comes to issues like homosexual marriage or same-sex marriage, which is, I don't like a lot of things that people do. | ||
| I'm a religious person. | ||
| That means that there are a lot of things that Jews do. | ||
| Like, you don't take off Shabbat. | ||
| I've actually been trying to a little bit more. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| Mostly because I want to get off my phone. | ||
| But bottom line is, you or anybody else, lots of Jews don't celebrate Shabbat. | ||
| That's a sin from where I sit, right? | ||
| That doesn't mean that I dislike you. | ||
| I sin all the time, right? | ||
| I violated Shabbat before, either by accident or a while ago when I wasn't from it on purpose. | ||
| I do stuff in my daily life all the time where I think, am I sinning? | ||
| You're not a perfect human being? | ||
| But this is the religious thing. | ||
| Religious people understand that nobody is, and so when we look at somebody engaging in a behavior that we deem sinful, it's not like we're sitting there all day going, ah, well, look at that sinner. | ||
| It's like, well, right, that's human beings, right? | ||
| We all sin, that's what we do, and as long as I'm not trying to compel you not to engage in the sin, what do you even care? | ||
| Like, it's confusing to me. | ||
| I mean, how many times have I said to your face, I actually don't care what your most personal belief is on gay marriage? | ||
| I genuinely don't care. | ||
| I know this will be clipped a zillion ways to sound people... | ||
| Yeah, the tolerant lessees are now Rubens. | ||
| But I really mean that. | ||
| If you were out there right now, if you were campaigning for people that wanted to flip gay marriage, or every day you were doing diatribes about how evil gay people are, then we would have a problem. | ||
| But by you taking the libertarian position, and maybe from your moral center, and we'll get into that shortly, you're not thrilled with it. | ||
| OK. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| I live in a country with people that I don't agree with. | ||
|
unidentified
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OK? | |
| And this has been my perspective. | ||
| I mean, I said this on Rogan's show. | ||
| There are legitimately millions of people in this country who believe that I will go to hell because I don't believe in Jesus. | ||
| And you know what I think about that? | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Like, it makes no difference to me. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| You're not coming after me. | ||
| That's the best thing that's happened to Jews in thousands of years, that people aren't coming after me. | ||
| Good! | ||
| You know, believe what you want, as long as you're nice to me, and as long as you are, and as long as you... But I don't even think you have to be nice to me, right? | ||
| Well, no, I mean, as long as you are... Yes, first of all, you don't have to be, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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You mean civil, as long as you're basically civil with the laws. | |
| Right, and as long as you're not using the government to compel me to do things. | ||
| And when I say nice to me, I mean, if you're not... Look, if we're talking about if I like somebody or not, if you're overtly mean to me, I'm not going to like you. | ||
| But when it comes to politics, as long as you're not trying to compel me, I don't even care whether you like me or not, or I like you or not. | ||
| This is why, in my view, libertarianism is maybe the only way we're ever gonna be able to survive this stuff, because if we don't leave each other alone, we're just gonna club each other into submission. | ||
| I mean, that's why I've been ranting and raving about all this. | ||
| All right, so let's shift to the book a little bit. | ||
| So I really enjoyed it, and then this morning you put up, or Prager, you put up a video that basically is in conjunction with the book. | ||
| So first off, the title, The Right Side of History, That's what the lefties always say. | ||
| I hate that phrase. | ||
| Let's talk about that for a second because that's what they always say. | ||
| Every time a conservative or anyone on the right remotely says anything, they always say you're on the wrong side of history. | ||
| Obama most famously used that to talk about same-sex marriage. | ||
| If you were anti same-sex marriage, then this meant you were on the wrong side of history. | ||
| Who was the guy that ran against Games... | ||
| Yeah, that's correct. | ||
| He was on the wrong side of history at that point, though. | ||
| Then he became on the right side of history. | ||
| The reason that I use the phrase, obviously, was a bit of a poke in the eye to that phrase, | ||
| and it's a play on words, is the conservative side of history, | ||
| the right side of history. | ||
| But there's also this idea that what I don't like is using history as a club to beat someone with | ||
| when it hasn't unfolded yet. | ||
| So people will say, you're on the wrong side, you don't agree with me | ||
| on tax policy? | ||
| Well, that's because in the future, it will be proved that I was right and you were wrong | ||
| and you were on the wrong side of history. | ||
| And that's what Obama was saying about same-sex marriage, was people who are saying that traditional marriage | ||
| has been X for thousands of years, those people are on the wrong side of history | ||
| because history will justify my position and they will have been shown to be non-progressive | ||
| and non-decent. | ||
| Maybe that's right, maybe that's wrong. | ||
| You don't know yet. | ||
| History hasn't progressed yet. | ||
| But there are certain things... | ||
| It would be very scary, though, if that was true, that we would, once things change, that you would look back and think that the thousands of years before you, and this is sort of what you're talking about in the book, that all of the people that believed different things were backwards or evil or on the wrong side of things. | ||
| I mean, it takes no context of how they lived. | ||
| Right, and again, I think there's a difference between saying, here's a bunch of good stuff that we have in today's society, and here's all the things that we love. | ||
| Where did that come from? | ||
| That's when I say the right side of history. | ||
| Here's the stuff that we know that is right. | ||
| And where did that come from? | ||
| Okay, so that's the right side of history. | ||
| As opposed to, here's my politics today. | ||
| Here's my political position. | ||
| I have not a lot of evidence historically that it's going to work or it's not going to work, but it will be proved one day that you are on the wrong side of history if you oppose me. | ||
| You're not really talking about history. | ||
| You're talking about, you know, you're basically forecasting into the future something that you can't possibly know. | ||
| So that sort of use of the phrase is highly irritating to me, especially because there are times when their politics in the ascendancy, they're really ugly and are proved later to be completely wrong. | ||
| I mean, there was a point where Jews were pretty regularly getting murdered in Europe. | ||
| They were on the wrong side of history at that point. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then it turns out that in the long run, they're not on the wrong side of history. | ||
| The Nazis are on the wrong side of history. | ||
| If you'd said the opposite in 1934, people would have thought you were crazy. | ||
| So, you can't really say where history is going. | ||
| What you can do is look back and say, here's where history has gone, and here's what we like about what history has been, and here's where we have broad agreement. | ||
| And that's really what I'm talking about. | ||
| Where are the issues where we in Western civilization should have broad agreement, and why is that broad agreement starting to fall apart? | ||
| So, you know, the IDW is a great example of this. | ||
| There's not a lot of agreement on policy in the IDW, virtually at all. | ||
| But there are certain basic principles that we all kind of take for granted. | ||
| Democracy is better than dictatorship. | ||
| Free speech is better than limited speech. | ||
| Personal responsibility is better than shirking personal responsibility. | ||
| Like, these are things that everybody seems to basically take in common. | ||
| And so what I say is, OK, where do these values come from? | ||
| Because they didn't spring up in a vacuum. | ||
| And the fact that we have great material prosperity and free markets and wealth and all of this great stuff, That did not happen either by accident or everywhere at once. | ||
| So it's not just magic. | ||
| It's not just some sort of man-made magic. | ||
| So let's talk about the two cities then. | ||
| Let's start with Jerusalem. | ||
| Take me to Jerusalem. | ||
| Okay, so the basic thesis of the book is a very Straussian thesis. | ||
| Leo Strauss, famous 20th century philosopher, he posited that Western civilization was predicated | ||
| on these two poles that were constantly fighting with one another. | ||
| One was Jerusalem and one was Athens. | ||
| So, Jerusalem was the idea of Judeo-Christian values. | ||
| That undergirds our social fabric. | ||
| The vast majority of people who are members of a community are members of a Judeo-Christian | ||
| community in the West, obviously. | ||
| And there are certain values that are inherent in the Bible that are different from most | ||
| pagan cultures. | ||
| So, for example, the Judeo-Christian ethic—and we can discuss where that comes from. | ||
| You know, Jordan would say that it's rooted in human nature and then manifests in the Bible. | ||
| People like Sam would say that it's sort of an evolutionary hangover. | ||
| But, you know, we can get to whether the revelation actually occurred or not. | ||
| But the basic premises of Judeo-Christian revelation, there are several of them. | ||
| One is that there is such a thing as an orderly universe. | ||
| So this seems perfectly obvious to us now that we can discover the rules of science, that things are out there that make sense. | ||
| For a huge majority of cultures over time, that was not true. | ||
| You worshipped various gods because they were arbitrary, they were fighting with each other, and you tried to appease one at the expense of the other. | ||
| There are no discoverable rules to the universe. | ||
| Is it weird though that you have to take a leap of faith to get to a place that starts with order? | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy. | ||
| It is, and this is one of the points that I make, is that people see reason and revelation as intention, but the point that I keep making to Sam whenever we discuss this is that Sam makes a leap of faith, too, about these principles. | ||
| He and I started the same principles. | ||
| It's just that I acknowledge that I'm making a leap of faith to get there, and he thinks you can reason your way back using sort of a priori reason to these fundamental principles, like the orderliness of being able to discover rules in the universe. | ||
| I don't think any of that is perfectly obvious to the human mind, nor do I think that for | ||
| the vast majority of human history people thought that. | ||
| People tended to think that basically you were a cork bobbing about on the eddies of | ||
| chaos and that there was no real way for you to discover any logic to the universe. | ||
| So the idea of the Bible is there is a God. | ||
| The God creates a universe using a mind. | ||
| That mind is orderly in nature and there are certain logical rules that that mind uses | ||
| and then we are created in the image of God, which has a couple of separate implications. | ||
| One is that our mind reflects His to the extent that we can grasp at a certain level what | ||
| exactly is the order of that universe. | ||
| And then the second is... | ||
| The actual meaning of that we are made in the image of God, it means that each of us has inestimable value. | ||
| Now, that is something that, again, we tend to think of as perfectly obvious, that we are all valuable human beings. | ||
| But all was restricted to the tribe for most of human history, and we are reverting back to that now, which is all, you know, we are all valuable except for that guy. | ||
| That guy's not valuable. | ||
| Screw that guy, right? | ||
| He's a member of an opposing tribe. | ||
| And so the story of Western civilization is the broadening out of that principle that we are all made in God's image to all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's why when people say, OK, well, Western civilization had slavery and Western civilization had racism. | ||
| All that's true. | ||
| The question is why Western civilization got rid of those things or has been trying to fight those things, whereas other cultures have basically reinforced those things or have decided those things are OK and that tribalism is a good thing. | ||
| So what do we do then about the people that always want to focus on the bad part of it? | ||
| Because one of the things I liked in the PragerU video, you made a point of saying, yeah, a lot of bad things have happened. | ||
| The West has made mistakes along the way, but that the arc has bent so that there is more freedom, there is more wealth, there is more prosperity, all that. | ||
| But it seems to me that, and I think this is what's happening on the left by and large, is that if they could step back for a moment, they might see that it's a lot better. | ||
| I mean, every college gig I go to, I always open it up to the crowd. | ||
| I say, does anyone have it worse? | ||
| I say this to the hecklers, and they never respond. | ||
| Does anyone in this room have it worse than their grandkids? | ||
| And nobody ever says yes. | ||
| It's almost impossible. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| If you live in the United States. | ||
| If you're an honest human. | ||
| Yes, your grandfather could have been an oil baron and then lost it. | ||
| Right, that's pretty much it. | ||
| They'd be happy for that too, because they don't want inherited wealth to go through the generations, right? | ||
| But the point is, It's very hard to get them to look at that. | ||
| What do you make of the type of mind that always goes to the worst? | ||
| Is that because of the disconnect with Jerusalem in your opinion? | ||
| Yes, because I think that to a certain extent, and this is sort of the thesis of the book, is that if you're ungrateful for the society that you've been given, that's because you don't understand the society that you've been given. | ||
| So we tend to think of all this stuff as natural. | ||
| It is completely unnatural. | ||
| It's a point that Jonah Goldberg makes in his book. | ||
| The prosperity. | ||
| The fact that you have a baby. | ||
| The babies will live to 80 in the United States, barring some sort of cataclysmic health event. | ||
| The fact that you are going to live not only in relative prosperity, but the greatest prosperity that any human being has ever known. | ||
| You can go on a machine and click a button and a product that you like will arrive at your door in two days, made in 10 different countries, for an affordable price that costs you less than an hour of labor, right? | ||
| But thank God those people aren't going to New York. | ||
| Right. | ||
| With those 25,000 jobs. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I think that one of the great debates of our society right now is that on one side you have a bunch of people who say, OK, well, things are awesome. | ||
| Things are historically awesome. | ||
| You wouldn't want to be born in any other time in any other place. | ||
| It's an amazing place. | ||
| And all of the problems of history exist. | ||
| But what that's about is us struggling to maximize the principles that were good in their inception, and then it's a question of us fulfilling those principles. | ||
| And this is true for the Declaration and the Constitution. | ||
| And yes, slavery was contemplated in the Constitution, and that was a great evil. | ||
| And then we fought a great civil war. | ||
| And then there was racism that was implicit in American society. | ||
| Then we fought ourselves. | ||
| Using these great universal principles. | ||
| And you would say that's always ongoing, right? | ||
| There's no end. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| There's no end point at which all human sin has been alleviated because we're sinful creatures and we tend to revert back into all of these things. | ||
| Tribalism and racism and illogic and all of these things. | ||
| But the fundamental principles at the root of the civilization are good. | ||
| And then you have a bunch of folks who say Right. | ||
| We have a lot of prosperity. | ||
| But look, there's still racism, there's still sexism, there's still bigotry. | ||
| And that's because the actual natural state of man would be the prosperity. | ||
| It's all this other stuff that Western civilization added. | ||
| And that, I think, comes from just a complete ignorance of the realities of history in the world, which is that everything bad that has happened in Western civilization Yes, is truly awful and evil, and also has existed in virtually every other civilization in the history of the world. | ||
| The question is, why is the good stuff happening? | ||
| The natural state of man, Hobbes is right about this, it's nasty, brutish, and short. | ||
| The natural state of man is not the Rousseauian noble savage living out there enjoying the fruits and the nuts. | ||
| I mean, that's not exactly what was going on. | ||
| This is the point that, as I say, Goldberg makes, is that Something happened, and suddenly we are all living in paradise. | ||
| So what was the thing that happened? | ||
| So, and this is where, on the one hand, I really accept Goldberg and Pinker and the Enlightenment argument, and Stam's argument, and Michael Shermer's argument. | ||
| I love the Enlightenment. | ||
| It's so funny, people have characterized this book as anti-Enlightenment. | ||
| No, it's very anti-French Enlightenment. | ||
| No, half the book is actually, I mean, the Athens portion of this is about the Enlightenment. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It's funny how people sort of see what they want to see. | ||
| So I've gotten letters from religious people saying, I don't think you're taking seriously enough the contribution of religion. | ||
| And then I get people from the secular humanist side going, I don't think you've taken seriously enough the contribution of Athens. | ||
| No, the whole point is that these two things are in tension. | ||
| And not only are they in tension, but that tension is necessary. | ||
| I describe civilization as effectively a suspension bridge. | ||
| On one end you have certain principles you must take for granted and that are | ||
| embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. | ||
| And on the other hand, you have all the reason that must be used in order to not end up in | ||
| theocracy land. | ||
| And these two things are pulling against each other and pushing against each other and pulling | ||
| against—and that's the history of Western civilization. | ||
| And I think the greatest balance was reached in the American founding and in those principles. | ||
| And then those promises were expanded outward to a broader and broader group of people. | ||
| And that's the story of the West as opposed to Western civilization is that the Marxist take is that Western civilization is effectively a power hierarchy. | ||
| All these principles are a lie and that the principles are a simple gloss on on what is a reversion to a power hierarchy. | ||
| So, for example, there was somebody on the left who got very upset because in the section | ||
| of the book I say, you know, we used to believe that we were brothers and sisters. | ||
| We seem to believe that we had these principles in common. | ||
| And people are like, who's weak, Himo Sabe, because a lot of black folks were not included | ||
| in that bargain. | ||
| But if you go back as late as 2006, 2007, 2008, and you look at the poll numbers, people believed that racism was receding in the United States. | ||
| People believed that effectively we were trying to get rid of all of this stuff. | ||
| And the reason that we've been able to curb racism in our society, the reason we've | ||
| been able to curb sexism is because we were able to use these principles to overcome the | ||
| natural tribalism and sinfulness inherent in human beings. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, when I say we used to believe we were all brothers, we did believe that we were | ||
| all brothers, but then we expanded the definition of brothers. | ||
| That was the story, right? | ||
| The reason that Western civilization has been effective is because we have these principles. | ||
| The principles are good. | ||
| We were too restrictive in the use of those principles. | ||
| And then using reason, we broadened out those principles to encompass more and more people. | ||
| So when I say we used to consider all of each other brothers, that was true in theory and not in action. | ||
| And then it was broadened out to action, and that's what's made our world a better place. | ||
| So is that part of the problem right now is that we're in our eating fruits and nuts stage here in the West. | ||
| We are in such spectacular wealth and freedom and all of those things. | ||
| And of course, everybody's not wealthy and we have a homeless problem and all sorts of things. | ||
| And there's problems, there's mental health problems and everything else. | ||
| But that we have so by and large, Conquered racism. | ||
| We have so by and large conquered all of the inequities in society, not all of them, but we've done a pretty good job. | ||
| As you're saying, the train is still going, but that then becomes the weakness. | ||
| That then people, young people, I mean, if you look at the millennials and now everything that was born out of this new progressive lefty thing, it's that it's not perfect, so we must burn it down. | ||
| So it's almost that that is now, it's a symptom of the success. | ||
| It's almost a inevitable symptom of the success. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| I mean, this is what I talk about in the book when I get to, you know, sort of the philosophy of the 1960s, which was, we need to replace the heart of stone within man with the heart of flesh. | ||
| It was a religious concept, but it was from a Marxist idea, which was, there is something fundamentally wrong with the Western soul, and what we need to do is shift the entire system. | ||
| This is the Marxist—the actual Marxist promise is not, you're going to be wealthier and more spectacular in your living standard. | ||
| than under capitalism. | ||
| Very few Marxists actually make this claim, and if they do, they're ignorant. | ||
| The actual Marxist claim is that it will fundamentally change the nature of human beings | ||
| to live in different relations with each other in a certain economic system. | ||
| And we will become different humans. | ||
| Now, the conservative view and the religious view is no, you won't, right? | ||
| I mean, you're going to be exactly the same human you were before. | ||
| The system can change. | ||
| Human beings are always what they are. | ||
| You can alleviate certain material conditions that make people more likely to be less stressed, for example. | ||
| But overall, human beings are sinful creatures. | ||
| We tend toward tribalism and anger. | ||
| We have to train ourselves to be good. | ||
| Anybody who's had kids, I'm frankly astounded that anyone who has kids buys into the Marxist thesis, because the notion that people are inherently good is such absolute utter crap. That doesn't mean we don't have good instincts. | ||
| We do have a good instinct, but that is balanced with a very selfish instinct as well. | ||
| I mean, I know there's a new book out. I'm trying to remember who's the author. It was just | ||
| reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, talking about sort of the natural goodness of human beings. | ||
| And there is some of that. | ||
| I mean, look at, as Jordan likes to talk about, if you look at Piaget, people play games with | ||
| each other and they tend to form common rules, and all of that is true. | ||
| There's also a real selfishness to human beings that naturally comes out, and you see it among kids. | ||
| And if that's not trained, if people aren't cultivated to become better human beings, they just don't become better human beings. | ||
| And so this is why I say you need to re-examine what it is that's good about your life and then ask, why did it get so good? | ||
| You didn't build this thing. | ||
| I don't want to, I mean, I do want to quote Obama here. | ||
| Obama says, you didn't build it when I spend my entire life building a business. | ||
| But you didn't build the system. | ||
| The system you were born into, right? | ||
| You think that free speech is something that just magically exists here and that everybody is entitled to it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Welcome to a thing that only exists for the last couple of hundred years and that legitimately millions of people have been killed fighting over. | ||
| Is this why what's happening right now with the Democratic candidates is so dangerous? | ||
| I mean, just in the last couple of weeks. | ||
| So now they're talking about reparations. | ||
| They're talking about adding Supreme Court justices. | ||
| They're talking about, there was a whole slew. | ||
| Give me a couple of other. | ||
| Yeah, Electoral College. | ||
| Oh, get rid of Electoral College. | ||
| Get rid of the Senate also. | ||
| They want to get rid of the Senate because it's not represented by population. | ||
| Yeah, all of these things that these are now would be, you know, look, these ideas were man-made ideas, but that they think only in their day, if they can just rejigger the entire way we look at everything, It will be better, where I would argue in almost every, I can't imagine a case where if we flipped any of those things, things would be any better. | ||
| Yeah, no, I really have serious doubts that if you get rid of the Senate, that suddenly people in Montana are gonna be like totally okay with everything. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Or that people, let's not pretend that people in California are- Well, because then the progressives in the big cities would control everybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And by the way, the people in the rural areas would try to break away. | ||
| I mean, they would. | ||
| The Civil War was about slavery, and there was also a massive economic gap between the South and the North, which was reflected in a lot of the terror fights that existed up until the Civil War. | ||
| That was a rural-urban gap, and it's one of the reasons why the North won, is because they had so much more urban power than the South. | ||
| You know, that was about slavery. | ||
| You could see a certain situation in the United States where the rurals look at the cities and they say, we don't want you ruling us. | ||
| You don't live out here. | ||
| Why should I listen to a bunch of people who live in San Francisco when I live in the Central Valley of California? | ||
| I'm a farmer out here. | ||
| Why can't you leave me the hell alone? | ||
| And, you know, I used to at least be able to punch above my weight in terms of, you used to have to take my opinion into account. | ||
| Now you can just ignore me and run roughshod over me. | ||
| Why should I be part of that system? | ||
| I don't buy into your majoritarian system where you are always the majority. | ||
| That's not something I'm interested in. | ||
| The founders did not trust pure majoritarianism, and they were right not to trust pure majoritarianism because majorities of people have often believed incredibly stupid and dangerous things. | ||
| That's why they wanted checks and balances. | ||
| We've sort of run roughshod over those over the course of the last century. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the fundamental disconnect between conservatives and people on the American left was summed up by Chesterton in his very famous fence analogy, that if you're on the left and you're walking through a field and you see a fence in the middle of the field, just in the middle of nowhere, your first instinct is, I don't know why this fence is here. | ||
| Let's take down the fence. | ||
| This fence does not belong here. | ||
| It's just dumb. | ||
| There's no reason for this fence to be here. | ||
| Get rid of the fence. | ||
| If you're on the right, your first instinct is to say, I'm not going to remove the fence until I know why it was here in the first place. | ||
| Once I figure out why it was here, then we can talk about removing the fence. | ||
| And that is true right now in politics. | ||
| The left seems to be saying, I don't know why any of this stuff is here. | ||
| They even ascribe bad history to these things, right? | ||
| They'll say that the Electoral College was put in place to protect slavery or some such nonsense. | ||
| Which is just not true. | ||
| And then it's like, well, we created this false history. | ||
| Let's get rid of the thing. | ||
| I don't know why it's there in the first place. | ||
| No reason. | ||
| Dump it. | ||
| And people on the right, well, maybe we should think about what the actual possible downsides here are, because virtually every action that we take has some unintended consequences. | ||
| And maybe we overstate the unintended consequences. | ||
| I think that Has probably happened, for example, with gay marriage, right? | ||
| I used to be anti-same-sex marriage on the legal level, right? | ||
| I used to say, like, I think that if the government legalizes same-sex marriage, that it's gonna have some pretty dramatic impact on how people interact with one another. | ||
| And then before Obergefell, I said, we should get out of the business specifically because I don't want anybody imposing their views on anybody else. | ||
| We can all live how we want and just leave each other alone. | ||
| And I think the right overestimated- What kind of pushback did you get from religious people on that? | ||
| I don't know that we've ever actually specifically talked about that. | ||
| I don't know that I got significantly heavy pushback, specifically because I wasn't making the case that you have to overrule your own vision of what sin constitutes. | ||
| I'm just saying you can't impose that on anybody else. | ||
| Meaning that if you want to protect yourself from the other side using government for its argument, then you need to stop using government for your argument. | ||
| I was making the anti-institutional argument, right? | ||
| I wasn't making the case that everybody who's religious has to reshift away from their religious orientation. | ||
| I wasn't doing the Hillary Clinton thing. | ||
| Right, but a certain amount of religious people, I get that. | ||
| That's the argument that I make, obviously. | ||
| I would imagine a certain amount of religious people, if they're viewing this as sort of a foundational societal belief. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you change this institution. | ||
| I'll tell you, I didn't get a ton of pushback specifically because I wasn't coming out against the institution. | ||
| I think a lot of the pushback that surrounded same-sex marriage was a twofold idea from the religious community. | ||
| One was, you must personally in your own life accept that same-sex marriage is morally equivalent to heterosexual marriage. | ||
| And if you don't, you're a bigot. | ||
| And that offended a lot of religious people. | ||
| People were like, I don't—that's not an argument I'm willing to listen to, because you're immediately labeling me a bigot based on both my religious views and a view of natural law, which is fairly common to most religions. | ||
| And I'm not going to hear that. | ||
| I think that if the left had approached it as, you don't get to use power, we don't get to use power, nobody gets to use power, the right is much more receptive. | ||
| That's been my argument. | ||
| All along, that's why I think libertarianism has a lot more draw than social leftism to the right. | ||
| Right, you can solve most of those problems by having the government just not be involved. | ||
| This has been my contention, because what I'll say to religious people is, I may even agree with you on the nature of sinfulness of particular activity, but it's none of my business. | ||
| And not only that, I think that if you make it the government's business, you're all happy to use the government right now for your particular ends, but there's going to be a time when you're not running the government anymore, and they're going to come for you, and you're not going to be real happy about it. | ||
| They don't seem to like this Trump guy, yet their answer is more government. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So that's why I didn't get a lot of pushback when I suggested that, because it wasn't coming from a place of me trying to castigate people for their own personal moral views. | ||
| And I think that for a lot of the gay rights movement, it was about that. | ||
| It was about, I'm trying to castigate people. | ||
| If you believe that what I do is a sin, that's because you're a non-meritorious, intolerant bigot. | ||
| Does that also show you that, unfortunately, religious people have been tarred with this idea of intolerance when it isn't true? | ||
| I mean, is that like a really good, succinct example of it? | ||
| I mean, I think it's a good example because the fact is that, listen, has there been religious intolerance toward people? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I mean, come on, I can't pretend that it exists in the Jewish community, exists in the Christian community, exists in the Muslim community. | ||
| It's true that there's been intolerance. | ||
| I don't want to portray religious people as all, Completely innocent in this, because obviously that's untrue. | ||
| There are people who have been excised and treated badly by religious communities. | ||
| Of course that's true. | ||
| But this is what I was talking about earlier with Buttigieg. | ||
| His treatment of Pence, the attribution of motive to Pence, as though Pence is sitting there, like, day in and day out, thinking, oh, that Buttigieg and his sexual proclivities. | ||
| Like, that's... I don't know anybody who thinks that way. | ||
| If they do think that way, there's something wrong with them, frankly. | ||
| And so that's... | ||
| And also, we just came out of a year of Me Too, where it was like, right before all that happened, what was everyone making fun of Pence over? | ||
| That he doesn't, you know, go into rooms with other women. | ||
| And yeah, that may sound odd to me, or, you know, all right, that's what he's decided to do, and guess what? | ||
| He's not accused of doing something so horrible. | ||
| And frankly, listen, that's been Jewish religious law for a very long time. | ||
| You're not supposed to be alone with a woman who is not your wife with the door closed. | ||
| This is like legitimately part of Jewish law, and it has been for several thousand years. | ||
| It's called yichud, you're not actually supposed to do it. | ||
| So like Mike Pence said that, I was like, oh, well, welcome to the club, dude. | ||
| What do you do in a situation like that then? | ||
| So if you're in your office and a female co-worker. | ||
| I mean, we've got glass doors, so it's not as much of an issue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Meaning like, you know, I don't really thought it all through. | ||
| I mean, I don't. | ||
| Like, I never want to be in a position where I can be accused of acting with impropriety. | ||
| And by the way, this is true for doctors, too. | ||
| Like, I'm shocked that people took Pence that way. | ||
| My wife, who is a doctor, when she goes in— Is your wife a doctor? | ||
| She is, it turns out. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| When she goes in and she examines a patient, when a male doctor examines a female patient, the new rule, basically, is there must be some third party in the room to ensure that there's no claim made against the doctor. | ||
| It seems to me if you're a prominent person, then you should be considering exactly the same thing. | ||
| This doesn't seem illogical to me. | ||
| This just seems like, for the same reason that I like body cameras on cops as a general matter, I like evidence and I like people who are there to debunk or enforce the actual account that happened. | ||
| Is this another one of those things where they The road to hell is paved with good intentions where the idea of course is you know we're gonna put everybody in situations where that you I wouldn't care I don't care the person that I hire I don't look at their I mean when we did our last job posting I made a point of saying I don't care about your gender I don't care about your sexuality I don't care about your skin color etc etc but in reality because the world is so out of whack right now | ||
| The truth, the real truth is, I don't know that I've ever said this publicly, when we were looking at resumes, I was less inclined to hire a gay man because I thought, well, I could be in a room with this person and then they could just announce that I asked them. | ||
| And how insane is that? | ||
| So now you've created a, because you create the system of incentives that it doesn't help anybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you've seen, actually, this sort of thing, materially speaking, in terms of, for example, policies that say that you're not allowed to do criminal background checks on potential employees, because there are too many black folks who have criminal backgrounds, and so we want to make sure more black people are employed. | ||
| You actually end up with the reverse. | ||
| What you end up with is employers who look at resumes and, in many cases, cannot check the criminal background of people. | ||
| And so they say, OK, statistically speaking, it's more likely that a black person went to prison than a white person went to prison. | ||
| That's not a racial statement. | ||
| It's a statistical statement of fact. | ||
| And so I'm just not going to hire this black person." | ||
| Well, who gets hurt by that? | ||
| The black guy who didn't commit a crime, right? | ||
| This is the sort of thing that — like, there are dangerous, unintended consequences to | ||
| public policies that are well-intentioned. | ||
| Again, I think it's a well-intentioned public policy, but I think that it's a bad public | ||
| policy. | ||
| And to pretend that people aren't people is stupid. | ||
| People are going to use whatever information they have at hand to make judgments and to | ||
| protect themselves. | ||
| And this is true if — this is true with regard to employers and women taking time | ||
| off from the workforce. | ||
| This is true with regard to sexual harassment allegations. | ||
| Listen, when I was growing up, my mom always said to me, and my mom ran businesses. | ||
| I mean, she was a higher-up at the company that did Hell's Kitchen. | ||
| She did major reality TV shows. | ||
| So she was a high-powered woman. | ||
| My mom worked, my dad stayed at home. | ||
| And my mom said to me, if you ever get a secretary, get a 70-year-old woman. | ||
| Because you're never going to be accused of anything because she's 70. | ||
| That was my mom saying that to me. | ||
| Some people have that fetish. | ||
| As a general rule. | ||
| And that's not entirely... human nature is human nature. | ||
| There's been this willful attempt to blind ourselves to human nature that I find... | ||
| alternatively hilarious and ridiculous and scary. | ||
| It's like, well, we're supposed to pretend that reality doesn't exist | ||
| because we wish reality were not what it was. | ||
| And the truth is the unhappiest people on earth are the people who are constantly fighting reality, | ||
| whether you're talking about in your dating life where it's like, I wanna look just exactly | ||
| as I feel like looking at everybody else who won't date me, it's their problem | ||
| and we can't get a date. | ||
| And it's like, well, maybe it's because you haven't worked out in 10 years, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, you stink. | ||
| Right, or maybe, or whether it's in the job market where it's like, well, I wish that I could get this job | ||
| and I deserve to get this job and I'm not gonna do what I need resume wise to get the job | ||
| or I'm going to rely on such and such to get the job and then I don't get to, | ||
| or I'm gonna sit in this dying town and I'm never gonna leave this dying town | ||
| because I deserve to have a job in this dying town. | ||
| The nice thing about politics is you can pander to everybody by lying to them about these realities, right? | ||
| Did you happen to see last night, I think it was on 60 Minutes, there's a clip going around of this young, you saw this, this med student. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or they interviewed several good students and the thrust of it, I didn't see the full thing, I just saw what they tweeted out, the videos that they tweeted out. | ||
| The thrust of it was all these young people, but there's this particular young man saying, you know, if college was free and medical school was free and all that, I wouldn't have to work and then because of that I could study more, thus I could be a better doctor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's like, hey, there's no proof that that's actually true | ||
| and you might learn a lot of things by working and all that. | ||
| Now, the idea that med school maybe is too much money and college is completely out of | ||
| whack that's a perfectly legit conversation to have, right? | ||
| And we can't have that conversation. | ||
| But I just thought the way it was spun by the Twitter account was like, see, it's obvious. | ||
| You shouldn't have to work if you're gonna be a doctor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's like, no, no. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're missing something here. | ||
| We're missing something here. | ||
| Well, that's the so what was funny about that story is CBS News covered it as isn't this | ||
| Well, that's, so what was funny about that story is CBS News covered it as, isn't this a great example | ||
| a great example of why we should make medical school free. | ||
| of why we should make medical school free? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what actually happened is that there was a donor, I believe it was Bernie Marcus from Home Depot, | ||
| And what actually happened is that there was a donor, I believe it was Bernie Marcus from | ||
| Home Depot, who went to NYU and he donated several, I believe it was like $100 million | ||
| to NYU to pay for the medical education of the kids who went to NYU. | ||
| So this is a private donor doing something good for these kids. | ||
| And they're like, what if we just made a government policy? | ||
| Well, then you completely skew the incentive structure is what would happen, because I'll | ||
| tell you what would be the next thing that happened. | ||
| The next thing that happened is that doctors would be would be granted free tuition, presumably. | ||
| And the next thing that would happen is they would say, okay, well now you have to be regulated, so you need to work for $60,000 a year. | ||
| At which point the registration rates would dramatically drop, and you'd get a completely different crop of people who are going into medicine in the first place, because you know that you're going to get a free education, but you're only going to make $60,000, $70,000 on the other end. | ||
| All those people who right now are paying $200,000 to go to medical school so they can make $400,000 a year coming out, all those people decide to go work at McKinsey instead. | ||
| That's all that happens, because people are profit-seeking and want to live a certain lifestyle. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| After 11 years of this shit, my wife deserves to be able to earn whatever she can earn. | ||
| I mean, I've been doing this thing, okay? | ||
| I cannot tell you how many things we've had to forego. | ||
| And I've paid for her medical education, right? | ||
| I mean, I've gone out of pocket for all of it. | ||
| I've paid for every iota of her medical education, and it's cost us a lot. | ||
| She's working for below minimum wage right now, because doctors in residency effectively work for below minimum wage. | ||
| They're making 40, 50 grand a year, and they're working 80 hours a week. | ||
| That's what they go through. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| That's because they should make money on the other end. | ||
| The market does have a value in determining what the value of these things are. | ||
| So you would say the two solutions to that are either the market or private people like the Home Depot guy coming in. | ||
| That basically is it. | ||
| It's not perfect. | ||
| Well, frankly, I don't think that there is a... Nobody's forced to do that, right? | ||
| I don't think that there is a... Okay, so there are a couple things you can do to bring down medical school tuition. | ||
| One, you can stop with the licensure requirements for things that nurse practitioners could do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Because that way, you have a bunch of people who are going to nursing school or PA school, and they can do a lot of this stuff, and then you don't have to create this cartel, and the cartel charges a lot of money for you to get into it. | ||
| That'd be one thing. | ||
| But number two... | ||
| So what? | ||
| So you take out a bunch of loans to go to medical school and then you make a bunch of money coming out, which you should make because you have spent a lot of money going in. | ||
| The question is, do you want your doctors to be people who make a lot of money? | ||
| Do you think doctoring is an important thing as a society such that you want the smartest people going into it? | ||
| If you want the smartest people going into any industry, you have to make sure that the pay grade is high enough. | ||
| And my problem here is not free medical school. | ||
| My problem is that it will be used as an incentive to force doctors to take less of a cost from Medicare, for example, and then you will get a lesser group of people intellectually than you otherwise would. | ||
| There's an unintended consequence to this sort of stuff. | ||
| So is this just the fundamental flaw with almost every argument that comes out of the progressive these days, that if you give free college, that this will somehow ultimately do good, even though we know that there are more jobs disappearing, That you wouldn't need college for those reasons. | ||
| You could go to trade school. | ||
| Or any of these things where it's like we can, or Medicare. | ||
| The free college education argument is one of the worst arguments I've ever heard. | ||
| It's legitimately a terrible argument. | ||
| I mean the idea that, look, everybody in college is earning more than people who didn't go to college. | ||
| Therefore, if everyone went to college they would all earn more. | ||
| No, I'm sorry. | ||
| The reason people earn more from going to college is because it is a sorting mechanism. | ||
| If you get rid of the sorting mechanism, you know what will happen? | ||
| There will be another sorting mechanism, which is exactly what's happened with grad schools. | ||
| They've asked a huge number of, like, as you sort, the incomes go up. | ||
| And as you get rid of the sorting mechanism, there are new sorting mechanisms that are added to the job market and to the educational market, where you're actually getting, unless you're actually, you know, going there for math or science or something. | ||
| But as I said, if you go to college, And I went to UCLA and then Harvard Law School. | ||
| So I have plenty of experience with going and majoring in useless things at major universities. | ||
| You were a poli sci major. | ||
| I was a poli sci major at UCLA, which is a useless thing at a major university. | ||
| All that these things are are twofold. | ||
| A sorting mechanism, because I went to UCLA and not CSUN. | ||
| And that means that presumably I'm smarter because it's a higher SAT score to get into UCLA | ||
| than it is to get into CSUN. | ||
| And second, an AirSat social fabric where you meet a bunch of people who then you can later | ||
| on call on his friends. | ||
| And this is what JD Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy, coming from Appalachia, going to Yale Law School, suddenly he has a group of people he can call on, and he's part of a social fabric, and he's operating in different social circles. | ||
| Neither of those two things are going to be cured by universal college, because the social fabric goes away because it's not selective anymore, and the sorting mechanism goes away because it's not selective anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And also, do you get free college no matter what your major is? | ||
| Well, this is the other thing. | ||
| So if you major in lesbian dance theory, is that free college? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And then what did we give to society when you're not qualified to do anything? | ||
| By the way, Buttigieg is exactly right about this. | ||
| This he was correct on. | ||
| He says, why are we having middle class people subsidizing people who are upper class? | ||
| Totally correct. | ||
| Totally correct. | ||
| The people who are going to end up in college and able to get into college are going to be the people who would have been able to go to college anyway. | ||
| We don't need more people going to college. | ||
| We need fewer people going to college. | ||
| We need less useless majors. | ||
| We need people being able to apprentice directly into law school. | ||
| We need, like, why is it that you have to be 23, and you've gone through seven years of education to go to law school? | ||
| Why? | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| Why couldn't you just- How important, when you're hiring right now, because Daily Wire is killing it, you guys are growing fast, you're doing all sorts of stuff over at the office. | ||
| When you look at resume, I don't know how involved specifically you are, but I assume- Yeah, my best partner Jeremy is much more involved, but yeah. | ||
| Do you even care that much? | ||
| Work experience matters more than where you went to college, for sure. | ||
| I mean, Jeremy is a perfect example. | ||
| My business partner didn't finish college. | ||
| He went to a music school and dropped out after two years. | ||
| And people used to look down their noses at him. | ||
| I remember there was a very prominent person, whose name everyone would recognize, who once called up Jeremy cursing at him because he had not gone to college. | ||
| And Jeremy was like, why? | ||
| Jeremy now runs a company that we have Close to 100 employees. | ||
| We clear a lot of money every year. | ||
| We gross a lot of money. | ||
| Some of the smartest people I know never went to college or finished college. | ||
| It's good for what it's good for, and it's bad for what it's bad for. | ||
| It's good for pre-med. | ||
| It's good for math. | ||
| I got a lot of flack for saying this about what we call the North Campus majors at UCLA, the poly-sci, English, history majors. | ||
| Effectively useless and you should you know unless you're majoring in a hard science You should think about going elsewhere like well your whole book is about Western civilized philosophy. | ||
| I'm like right We don't learn any of that crap when I go to college anymore Well, that's the reason I wrote the book is because none of these people learn any of this stuff Nobody's ever heard of Aquinas when you go like when's the last time they taught Aquinas at a major? | ||
| University other than in sort of religious studies classes. | ||
| They don't even mandate Western Civ anymore at these classes Nor I mean like this stuff should be imbibed with your mother's milk I mean this should be this should be part of just the generalized educational curriculum So is that, if we want to go down the conspiracy road a little bit, is that part of it too? | ||
| Is that if you really wanted to keep indoctrinating people with lefty ideas and socialist ideas and big government ideas and all of those things and collectivist ideas, Well, give them free college, and then just teach them those ideas for four years, and then you've really whacked them at the knees before they get out into the real world. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It would make sense. | ||
| Bernie say, go, everyone's getting free college. | ||
| And what are we gonna do to you at college? | ||
| Teach you postmodernism. | ||
| I think it's less conspiratorial than that, but I do think that there are a bunch of people on the left who certainly are not upset about the fact that colleges are dominated by the left, and who are very angry every time somebody tries to break that domination. | ||
| I mean, this is why I get banned from colleges speaking about stuff like this. | ||
| It's, you know, again, it's a foolhardy policy. | ||
| How do you take the ideas between Jerusalem and Athens and how do you then just beat the easy ideas of the day? | ||
| Because that's, to me, that is where we're at right now. | ||
| We're just at a place of easy answer, everyone that I disagree with is a racist, bigot, homophobe, I know how to do everything, everyone before me was evil, all of those things. | ||
| Let's change everything, the current laws in electoral college and everything else. | ||
| Let's do all of those things because we're so good and everyone else is so stupid. | ||
| Well, how do you actually beat that? | ||
| I mean, that's what we're trying to do here, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, I think that the first thing to do is to get people involved in re-educating themselves, and I think you're seeing a tremendous hunger for that, obviously. | ||
| I mean, this is a book on Western philosophy, and in the first two weeks we sold well over 100,000 copies. | ||
| It's a book on Western philosophy, right? | ||
| That is not exactly pop reading. | ||
| I mean, it's not happy dappy do kind of stuff. | ||
| So it's- Jordan told people how to clean their room | ||
| and sold 5 million copies. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, like there's a market for hard stuff right now because people are looking for something | ||
| that means something. | ||
| And we haven't created a much better world with the Twitter woke police out there. | ||
| I don't think that people are feeling happy or secure because of all that stuff. | ||
| So do you think it's fundamentally a crisis of meaning? | ||
| That's really what I took away from your book. | ||
| And I really, I was thinking about it over the weekend. | ||
| It's like, we listen, you know, we fight on Twitter all day long. | ||
| We all siphon off into our own little places. | ||
| And now between fake news and everything else, it's like, nobody really knows, in the secular world, let's say, Nobody really has this, and this is the sadness of liberalism right now for me, it's like maybe liberalism didn't give enough through a secular lens, and I think maybe you'd argue that's because it got disconnected from Jerusalem. | ||
| We're in a crisis. | ||
| We're in a crisis of belief. | ||
| A crisis of reality. | ||
| Here's my real argument with sort of the secular version of the Enlightenment, the French-German version of the Enlightenment, which is that by disconnecting the connection to Judeo-Christian values, the idea was that we were going to untether ourselves, to be able to fly to the stars, we can make our own meaning. | ||
| And I think people suck at making their own meaning, frankly. | ||
| I think that generally when people make their own meaning, they tend to fall into hedonism or nihilism. | ||
| I think that there are... But you judge some people can do that. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Some people can do it. | ||
| Some people can do it. | ||
| Some people can live with this. | ||
| I mean, I think that Sam seems like a fulfilled guy. | ||
| Michael Shermer is a fulfilled guy. | ||
| I think there are people who can live with this and make their own meaning, but for the vast majority of people, the answer is absolutely not. | ||
| You cannot make your own meaning, because if you make your own meaning, you tend toward either selfishness or meaninglessness. | ||
| You need to be told that your life has value and that you're in control of your own life, and there needs to be a rooted philosophy to support that. | ||
| And that begins with teaching these very simple stories. | ||
| I mean, fundamentally, I think that religious education begins with the stuff that is harder to believe, because that's the simplest to understand. | ||
| It's hardest to believe and simplest to understand, right? | ||
| The stories in Genesis are the hardest to believe on their face, but they're also the simplest to understand. | ||
| Like, you get from the idea of Adam and Eve that you are not the creator of your own meaning, right? | ||
| That the knowledge of good and evil, your knowledge of good and evil, is not the same as God's knowledge of good and evil, and that by attempting to create your own meaning, you're actually Egotistically sinning against God. | ||
| That's the message of the Adam and Eve story. | ||
| Or the Cain and Abel story, which is that ceaseless jealousy and a belief in your incapacity to take control of your life, that that results in violence and cruelty. | ||
| That's the basic issue of Cain and Abel, which is God says to Cain, you know, Tim Schell, you can do this. | ||
| And then Cain's like, nope, I'm gonna kill my brother. | ||
| And you see that down, and it's an aspect of human nature, you teach these very simple stories to people. | ||
| David versus Goliath. | ||
| The little guy can beat the big guy. | ||
| There are plenty of great stories that embed fundamental values. | ||
| This is how you teach kids. | ||
| Everybody teaches kids secular and religious. | ||
| You teach kids stories. | ||
| When I read to my daughter at night, I'm not reading her from Sam's book. | ||
| She wouldn't understand it. | ||
| I'm not going to read her Enlightenment Now or How the Mind Works by Pinker. | ||
| You have to start with certain fundamental values. | ||
| Those fundamental values are generally rooted in story. This is where Jordan is | ||
| totally correct. And those are deeply embedded in the human psyche. And so there's an immediate | ||
| resonance to a lot of the biblical stories, which is why the Bible has staying and selling | ||
| power. And then you use those stories in coordination with reason to expand those stories outward | ||
| and to develop. Right. But you have to always stay tethered. I mean, you can lengthen the | ||
| chain, but at a certain point, the chain breaks. Then you're off and running and then you | ||
| got a problem. The point that I'm making here is that I think the West has has undercut its | ||
| own allegiance to fundamental principle. And they thought that this would allow the rise | ||
| of reason to dominate. | ||
| And what it's instead allowed for is, in the worst cases, some really horrible things. | ||
| And in the best cases, yes, a continuation of material prosperity, but also a crisis of purpose and meaning that's happening to people where they're looking around, okay, okay, I'm a ball of meat wandering through the universe purposeless. | ||
| I don't have free will. | ||
| I don't have the capacity to control my own life. | ||
| What am I supposed to do now? | ||
| So I think basically what you're saying is you think it could work for a while, that Athens alone could work for a certain amount of time, right? | ||
| As long as it's living off the fumes of the Judeo-Christian ethic. | ||
| And this is the point that I made to Sam when we debated in San Francisco, was I said, you know, Sam, why is it that we hold the same values? | ||
| Because we do. | ||
| On a fundamental level, we have basically the same values. | ||
| So why? | ||
| And he said, well, I've studied this and I've studied this. | ||
| I've studied Eastern philosophy. | ||
| This is where I get my values. | ||
| I said, well, that's great. | ||
| But why are ours the same? | ||
| Because I haven't studied any of those things. | ||
| So why are those the same? | ||
| And I don't think it's because I've studied deeply in the Bible and Sam hasn't. | ||
| I think it's because we both grew up On the fumes of this culture, right? | ||
| I mean, we grew up 10 miles from each other in Los Angeles. | ||
| That seems to me a better kind of historical explanation of why we believe fundamentally the same things than that he studied one philosophy and I studied another philosophy. | ||
| So do you think we're in the fume stage now? | ||
| Yeah, I think the fumes are running out. | ||
| The Jerusalem fumes? | ||
| Yeah, the Jerusalem fumes. | ||
| And I think that as the Jerusalem fumes run out, so do the great hopes that were behind the reason-based enlightenment. | ||
| Meaning that one of the points that I make is that The Enlightenment makes fundamental assumptions that are unsustainable on the grounds of the Enlightenment, meaning the secular Enlightenment, the non-American Anglo-Enlightenment, makes the argument that basically we are Spinoza's stone. | ||
| We're a ball of meat wandering through the universe, no will of our own, no free will. | ||
| I mean, Sam wrote an entire book about there not being free will. | ||
| And that we don't have the capacity to choose. | ||
| And when Sam talks about reason, as I asked him before, like, so according to evolutionary biology, reason is just a beneficial firing of the neurons. | ||
| But you make a moral argument in favor of reason. | ||
| So my question is, on what basis? | ||
| What if there is a more evolutionarily beneficial firing of the neurons, say genocide? | ||
| I mean genocide, and this is Hitler's rationale effectively. | ||
| Just apply Darwinism to the social sphere, and we can effectively wipe out everybody who we don't like, and that will better humanity by getting rid of the weaklings, and we can move on. | ||
| Thanos also. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Thanos is on board with this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| By the way, Thanos has an infinity stone, right? | ||
| Doesn't he just create more resources? | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Ah, if you met a genie, what's the first thing you wish for? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| More wishes. | ||
| But in any case, the fundamentals of the Enlightenment, which are reason, free will, the capacity to make your own decisions, I agree with Sam, there's objective truth. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Jordan doesn't believe in objective truth in the same way, right? | ||
| Sam says he believes in objective truth. | ||
| I agree with Sam there's objective truth. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Jordan doesn't believe in objective truth in the same way, right? | ||
| Jordan believes in a sort of Charles Pierce—Charles Pierce pragmatism with regard to truth. | ||
| That truth is whatever works. | ||
| And so there are certain things that have been proved to work, and those are true. | ||
| Which is attractively useful for evolutionary biology. | ||
| Sam believes in objective truth. | ||
| Like, there's an actual truth out there to be discovered. | ||
| There are things that are true, and there are things that are false. | ||
| I totally agree with him. | ||
| You believe that, but not for the same reason. | ||
| Well, I don't know, well, as I ask Sam, I don't know what his reason is. | ||
| Meaning Sam says that stuff, and I don't mean to rip on Sam, but I mean, I talk about all this in the book, and I'm sure he can write a really cogent response, because Sam's a bright guy, and I really like his stuff. | ||
| I hate doing this when he's not here. | ||
| We should do it when Sam's here so we can discuss it. | ||
| But the fundamental point that I make is if you are going to argue in favor of reason, if you're going to argue in favor of will, if you're going to argue in favor of all of these things, you need to make some fundamental assumptions that are simply not objective truth. | ||
| Evolutionary biology doesn't speak to objective truth. | ||
| It speaks to what is useful to a species that allows it to survive and thrive. | ||
| But it doesn't speak to what's true if the species didn't exist. | ||
| Would two plus two equals four be true? | ||
| Sam would say yes. | ||
| And I would say, why? | ||
| Because the species doesn't exist to use it. | ||
| So what does that even mean? | ||
| There's the Judeo-Christian ethics, and this is where Greek teleology and Judeo-Christian ethics meet. | ||
| You know, the Greeks, Aristotle, Plato, they believed there was such a thing as an objective truth. | ||
| They believed that there was such a thing as a universe that, a cosmos that is understandable. | ||
| They believed in the idea of free will, that you could make a difference in that cosmos. | ||
| But them believing in it, you would say, is just not enough. | ||
| Right, and I think that they attempt to prove back to the unmoved mover, and that's a good starting point. | ||
| This is why Aquinas is so reliant on Aristotelian theology, and the same thing is true for Maimonides. | ||
| The greatest, I think, attempt historically to merge The religious philosophy of Judeo-Christianity and the Greek philosophy of Aristotle and Plato is simultaneously done in the Islamic world and the Christian world and the Judaic world, actually. | ||
| It's done by Al-Farabi in the Islamic world, and it's done by Maimonides in the Judaic world, and it's done by Aquinas in the Christian world. | ||
| And it's an attempt to merge, but in the merger you sort of lose the tension that's necessary, I think, | ||
| because when you completely merge, then you end up in the same place as the theocrat, | ||
| which is, okay, so natural law and theology are exactly the same, so let's just follow theology. | ||
| Why are we bothering with this reasoning it out thing? | ||
| There's no reason to do that. | ||
| I think the tension exists for a reason. | ||
| So then getting us back, then how do we get out of this thing? | ||
| This polarization that we seem to be in, which I do think, I think you got it right here, it is the tension between these two cities right now. | ||
| So how do we break this? | ||
| Because we're all sort of caught in it, and I've also been thinking about something that we've talked about a bunch before, that we're running out of communal spaces or communal events to have anything left to bring us together. | ||
| Nobody really watches the nightly news anymore. | ||
| After Game of Thrones goes off after this season, we're basically out of TV shows for the rest of our lives. | ||
| And we're stuck with cultural events, not actual meaning-based events. | ||
| Right, we don't have a moon landing coming up. | ||
| We're really running short on- I mean, July 4th parades are controversial. | ||
| Yeah, you're parading genocide or something. | ||
| I mean, it's all nonsense. | ||
| But as this tension ramps up, the fact that we now have no spaces to let the vents off, that seems to me to be the biggest danger. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| And this is not just, you know, people on the right saying this. | ||
| People on the left are recognizing this. | ||
| Robert Putnam is a sociologist at Harvard. | ||
| He writes this great book called Bowling Alone, and in it he talks about the sort of meme diversity is our strength. | ||
| And he says, yeah, I used to believe this diversity is our strength stuff, and then I looked at the social science, and what I found is that as ethnic diversity in a place increases, the only two things that increase are protest marches and television watching. | ||
| Unless there's a common purpose. | ||
| If there's a common purpose, then diversity is your strength. | ||
| So in other words, if you go to a church and you look at the church, bunch of diverse faces, people with different experiences, but they're all there to have a common purpose, worship God and take care of each other, then diversity is great. | ||
| All the experiences, you can tell each other about it, you have the same goal. | ||
| That's all fantastic. | ||
| He says the same thing about the army. | ||
| You go to the army, and you see an incredibly diverse group of people. | ||
| I mean, we both know a lot of people who serve in the military, and the amount of cross-racial friendship in the military is amazing, right? | ||
| For people who just grew up in secular society, and where it's like, yeah, I have my black friend. | ||
| But that's not true in the military. | ||
| In the military, people legitimately bond across races because they're forced into proximity where they are. | ||
| It's like sports. | ||
| Nobody cares! | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Sports is another great example, right? | ||
| They have the same common goal. | ||
| Well, so the question becomes for our society, what is our common goal? | ||
| And it seems like that common goal is receding because some of the fundamental things I think that we are all supposed to agree on, right? | ||
| The free speech, democracy, the use of free will, the use of responsibility. | ||
| Even things as fundamental as that are dissipating in response to people saying, you know what? | ||
| All this is a lie. | ||
| The only way to attain power and protection for my group is return to tribalism, which is intersectionality on the one hand and white supremacy on the other. | ||
| Or we are going to get rid of all of this stuff in the name of the collective because the individual no longer matters. | ||
| Like, I talk in the book about this kind of fourfold matrix for human happiness, that we all exist as human beings on a couple of levels, as individuals and then as members of community. | ||
| And we are all these things, right? | ||
| I mean, people will say, the communists will say, you're just a member of the community, basically. | ||
| And then libertarians will say you're only an individual. | ||
| And the truth is, neither of those things. | ||
| You are a member of a community and you are an individual and they are simultaneous and inextricable. | ||
| And so you need to, so the human happiness in an individual exists when you have the following four things and in a society can exist when you have the following four things. | ||
| Individual, individual purpose. | ||
| So you get up in the morning, you're on a desert island. | ||
| What do you do today? | ||
| Are you nihilistic? | ||
| Do you have something to do? | ||
| What makes, what gives you meaning? | ||
| Communal purpose, meaning what can we all get together to do? | ||
| And what's our goal together as America? | ||
| Are we here to spread liberty? | ||
| Are we here to preserve liberty? | ||
| Are we here to create economic equality? | ||
| What is our goal as a community? | ||
| And how do we not quash individual purpose in that there has to be a balance, right? | ||
| Because if communal purpose is too strong, you quash the individual. | ||
| And then there's individual capacity. | ||
| You have to feel like you as a person are in control of your own life, capable of forging forth into the kind of adventuring wilderness. | ||
| which is the American mentality. | ||
| And you have to have communal capacity, a system that allows me to, as an individual, | ||
| thrive while allowing us as a community to mobilize when need be. | ||
| If you have these four things, then you can be a happy individual and you can have a happy society. | ||
| Now, the way I think this is best balanced in terms of government is that government | ||
| is weak enough not to attack you as an individual, but is strong enough to mobilize when we really | ||
| need to mobilize to protect those individual rights and to protect the system at large. | ||
| That's why I think the founders got it exactly right. | ||
| It's why I think that I rely to a very heavy extent on the social fabric as opposed to government to create a fake social fabric. | ||
| I think the left relies on the government to create a sense of community. | ||
| I don't feel a sense of community in government. | ||
| I don't care about the people in government. | ||
| I don't think they care about me. | ||
| I think that the people who care about me are in my family, in my community. | ||
| I think the more broadly we share values, the more I care about people in the broader community. | ||
| But there's a sense on the left that the way that we create a social fabric is by having a very powerful government. | ||
| In 2012, I was at the DNC when They flashed on the overhead screen that the government is the only thing that we all... The government is the only thing we all share. | ||
| And I thought to myself, well, that's a bunch of... Wait, they flashed that on the screen? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That sounds like 1984. | ||
| Right, it was very... It was really... I saw it. | ||
| I was like, I can't believe that this is a thing that's up on the screen. | ||
| The only thing we all share? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like, that's where we're all participating together? | ||
| Because it seems to me that we all share in a bunch of different things. | ||
| And the fewer things we engage in, the more we're going to need to rebuild that capacity from outside in. | ||
| I don't like outside in. | ||
| So what do we do then about the nationwide, or it's not even nationwide, it's worldwide now. | ||
| I mean the things that were, after this last year of being on tour, the same things that we're talking about here all the time within an American context are happening in virtually every Western society at some level. | ||
| So what do we do to rebuild some of those common public spaces? | ||
| What is it we should be doing? | ||
| So there are a couple things. | ||
| One, the government really needs to stop tearing down religious institutions, because historically speaking, religious institutions have been the bulwark of the social networks that most people rely on. | ||
| And we living in big cities don't tend to rely on it as much, but out in the sticks, people really rely on this stuff, and it's really important. | ||
| Can you give one more push for my atheist viewers and my leftist viewers that may remain, or the progressives, can you give them one more push on why they shouldn't fear that? | ||
| Okay, you shouldn't fear that because so long as there is not government compulsion from religious people in religious communities towards others, the fact that people are belonging to churches is a wonderful thing. | ||
| They're supporting each other. | ||
| They're giving charity to each other. | ||
| They're making sure that you don't have to pay for them. | ||
| They're the ones who are making sure that there is a social fabric people can rely upon. | ||
| You want less opioid? | ||
| Overdoses. | ||
| You want less people who are unemployed and unemployable. | ||
| You want less people who are falling into deaths of despair. | ||
| They need a social fabric. | ||
| You're not creating it, and don't pretend you are. | ||
| You're sitting in the city, far away from these people. | ||
| And when you rip on their church, and when you suggest that their church is the obstacle, you are taking away the one connection to social fabric that people have. | ||
| Tim Carney has a new book called Alienated America, in which he looks at various communities. | ||
| And what he finds is that it's not even an economic thing. | ||
| People on the left and the right populists are like, well, we can fix all this with economics. | ||
| We just put some tariffs here. | ||
| We put some subsidies here. | ||
| We grant universal basic income. | ||
| That's going to fill this gap for these people. | ||
| The question is not lack of benefits. | ||
| There are unemployment benefits. | ||
| There's welfare. | ||
| There's food stamps. | ||
| There's plenty of benefits available for a lot of people. | ||
| That's not the question. | ||
| The question is, where do you find connection with other human beings? | ||
| And while you can sit in a place where you feel like you have connection, and especially if you're a college graduate who's watching this show in a big city, you do have an AirSats social connection, like a different kind. | ||
| AirSats isn't right. | ||
| A different kind of social connection with people you went to college with and people you hang out with. | ||
| That doesn't exist in huge swaths of the country. | ||
| And the first place people go to get connection is their church. | ||
| When those churches disappear, the communities die. | ||
| And then people there are left without even the motivation to move. | ||
| So that's one thing that... And secular... Again, this is not restricted to religious people like me who are saying this. | ||
| Robert Putnam is a secular guy. | ||
| He says, you get rid of the church, you got a real problem on your hands. | ||
| There are plenty of sociologists who are looking at the death of churches and saying, What's going to fill this gap? | ||
| Well, I see it now. | ||
| I mean, I don't come from that default position necessarily, but I do see it now. | ||
| I mean, after being with Jordan on this tour, when he would talk about the importance of the stories of religion, I could see people, it's not a coincidence that people could start thinking about these stories, the messages in these stories, and then suddenly there were thousands of people that I was meeting that were, they stopped. | ||
| doing drugs, and they stopped drinking, and they made amends with their children. | ||
| I mean, every day I saw this. | ||
| This is right. | ||
| That can't be a coincidence. | ||
| And this is the other element that we really need to re-inculcate, and that is that the smart people don't have all the solutions. | ||
| But the one thing that you can do is solve your own problems. | ||
| And this is a mindset thing. | ||
| So notice that everything that I'm saying has nothing to do with governmental compulsion. | ||
| It's the opposite. | ||
| I want the government out of everything because I don't think that compulsion is going to fix any of this. | ||
| The biggest thing that needs to change is people need to reembrace the spirit of adventure in their own lives. | ||
| And this is something that I really believe that this is the thing that makes Jordan most popular. | ||
| So this is what Jordan says. | ||
| Life is a struggle. | ||
| Life is chaotic. | ||
| Life is difficult. | ||
| Go and forge forth in spite of those things. | ||
| And this is what makes you a man. | ||
| This is what makes you a woman. | ||
| This is what makes you a person worthy of having freedom. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| I think it's fundamentally a religious message in nature. | ||
| It's certainly an inspirational one. | ||
| And we have a society where we've basically said to people, No, you know what? | ||
| You got a problem. | ||
| I can solve it for you. | ||
| The smart people will solve it for you. | ||
| We'll solve it through UBI. | ||
| We'll solve it through tariffs. | ||
| We'll solve it through going after China and Mexico. | ||
| You're never going to have to leave your hometown. | ||
| I had this conversation with Tucker Carlson, and Tucker's a really interesting dude. | ||
| And we were talking about Specifically, his sort of anti-tech take. | ||
| So he's very concerned about self-driving trucks destroying millions of jobs. | ||
| I'm a little bit more sanguine about that. | ||
| I don't think it's going to happen overnight. | ||
| I think that you still need drivers behind the wheels. | ||
| But in any case, there's one point in the conversation where Tucker said something to the effect of, You know, so you're going to say to a bunch of people who are living in the town where their grandparents are buried that they need to pick up and move. | ||
| And what I'm saying is they should be able to stay there and have jobs. | ||
| And I said, right. | ||
| Like this is, he said, you want them to leave the town where their parents are, where their grandparents died? | ||
| And I said, Right, or biblically speaking, leave the land of your fathers and go to a land that you know not, right? | ||
| I mean, this is the spirit of the individual forging forth is what made the country fantastic. | ||
| One statistic that is just utterly astonishing is that in an era where we have this rising underclass of folks who have sort of been left behind, we have less mobility in the United States than any time in modern American history. | ||
| People are leaving home less often than they did, and people are saying, well, it's because they're living with their parents. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Why aren't they moving where the jobs are? | ||
| I mean, this was literally what every one of our parents did, right? | ||
| I mean, I don't know where your parents grew up. | ||
| My parents grew up in Chicago, and they moved to Boston, and they moved to L.A. | ||
| Brooklyn and Westchester. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Everyone in California's original story was that no one was born in California. | ||
| I was born in L.A. | ||
| I'm one of the only people I knew who was born in L.A., right? | ||
| And that sort of movement, this hunger to go out there and adventure and take control of your own life, That needs to be re-inculcated, and that comes, we have to cut against- Did you move him on that at all? | ||
| Because I know that, I'm on Tucker tonight, I'm going on all the time, and I have these discussions with him, and I'm, did you move him on that? | ||
| I'm not sure, I don't really think so. | ||
| Right, I mean this is a fact, don't care about your feelings. | ||
| What he's saying there, it does feel right, like if your whole family, if your family lived in a town, a mining town for a hundred years, it doesn't feel right I mean, this is what I would say about the baker and the gay wedding cake. | ||
| It's like, it doesn't feel right that you can't get the cake there, but that doesn't mean that the government should fix the problem or can fix the problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is, and again, I think that there's a mentality shift that's happened. | ||
| I think it's true of immigration, too. | ||
| I think it has real policy ramifications. | ||
| This idea that you were born in America, therefore you're owed a bunch of stuff. | ||
| And I just don't think that that's Frankly, I don't think it's a good perspective. | ||
| I think on a religious level, it's not a religious perspective. | ||
| My perspective is that you're effectively owed nothing, right? | ||
| You're owed the adventure. | ||
| You're owed the freedom to be able to do what it is that you want to do. | ||
| And then the reason you need the social fabric is to help the people who can't do it without the hand up. | ||
| And it's funny. | ||
| You talk to people who live in religious communities, and because they've had the social fabric, They instinctively feel, like the government has filled a lot of the social fabric in a lot of big cities, but you talk to people who live in religious communities, and everyone has a story that's like this, where it's like there was somebody in the community who's struggling, so the rabbi got together a bunch of people and they gave him some money, and the guy knew where the money came from, and he went out and he made a plan, and he fixed it. | ||
| And that was the way that things got fixed. | ||
| Now, is that going to fill every single gap? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| I mean, you do need local government sometimes to fill these gaps. | ||
| Local is better than national because you have more sympathy with people who live close to you and you see the impact of the problem where you live. | ||
| But the idea that you need a social fabric It's why I don't consider myself libertarian, even though I'm libertarian on government policy, because I think the mistake that some libertarians make is to suggest that libertarianism applies on a social level, too. | ||
| Right, so that limited government in and of itself is enough to keep everything going. | ||
| Right, and I don't think that's correct. | ||
| I mean, I think that rights and duties are two sides of the same coin, and as Washington suggested, you need a moral people to sustain liberty. | ||
| So this is a bit of a non-sequitur, sort of, but maybe not. | ||
| So do you think this is why the left is going so bananas with the Jews at the moment? | ||
| That there's some connection there? | ||
| Because Jews did get up and went? | ||
| I mean, when you were describing that conversation with Tucker, I was thinking, that's the end of Fiddler on the Roof, right? | ||
| They don't want to leave when Ted is saying goodbye. | ||
| So I think there is truth to that and I don't think it's restricted to Jews. | ||
| I'm going to Chicago, you're going wherever. | ||
| But it's like, we have to go now. | ||
| We have to forge something new. | ||
| And Jews have kind of been doing that forever. | ||
| And that is the antithesis of what the left is offering now. | ||
| So I think there is truth to that. | ||
| And I don't think it's restricted to Jews. | ||
| I think that you've seen the intersectional hierarchy change radically based on which minority groups | ||
| are perceived to be more successful. | ||
| So what you see is the left suggesting that Asians are no longer minorities in the United States. | ||
| Can't get into Harvard. | ||
| Right, you can't get into Harvard. | ||
| You're not truly on the intersectional scale because you're... And now they're doing it with gay folks, right? | ||
| Because people gave Asians everything when they came here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, exactly. | |
| Didn't Asians and Indians just get everything? | ||
| They were just, you know, working these hard jobs and running little hot dog stands and 7-Elevens just because that was... | ||
| You know, why not? | ||
| Right, exactly, exactly. | ||
| It worked hard. | ||
| And you see this is happening on the fringe left already with gay folks, right? | ||
| So the idea, you saw that article at Slate, where they did this with Buttigieg, where they were like, well, is he intersectional enough? | ||
| Because he grew up white, and he grew up privileged, and he went to good schools. | ||
| But also he's gay, so he's a little intersectional, but he's not like intersectional. | ||
| Does he count as oppressed? | ||
| In what level of oppression? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Does he count as a gay guy? | ||
| It was legitimately, did he count as a gay guy, I think, was sort of the headline. | ||
| It was like, he's not fully, I don't understand. | ||
| He's married to a man, so last I checked, yeah. | ||
| First of all, I'm not even sure what they're going for there except for he doesn't rate high enough on the oppression scale. | ||
| Well, the craziest one of those that I ever saw was a couple years ago. | ||
| I think it was either Out Magazine or Advocate, I can't remember which one, when they said that Peter Thiel is no longer gay because his politics don't line up with gay. | ||
| So what would really make you gay, the physical part, no, no, that doesn't, fact. | ||
| Doesn't matter, what matters is how we feel about it. | ||
| And you're gonna, by the way, they'll come after Kamala Harris on the same grounds. | ||
| One parent is Jamaican, one parent is Indian. | ||
| I mean, that's not traditional, grew up in the inner city. | ||
| I mean, her dad, I think, was a professor at Stanford or something. | ||
| They'll come for anybody who doesn't, we'll pretend intersectionality applies until it no longer applies. | ||
| So does that make you very hopeful then? | ||
| Because I think we're seeing minority groups crack. | ||
| We're seeing Asians go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't want to be on the reverse side of this. | ||
| Jews are finally going, wait, we don't have to vote 80% Democrat. | ||
| Black people, I mean, just the fact that now Reparations is becoming virtually every Democratic candidate is now talking about Reparations. | ||
| To me, regardless, I know you have a little bit of a love-hate thing with Candace Owens, but it's like, she did it. | ||
| I'm just like Candace. | ||
| No, no, no, I don't mean to dislike, but I mean, you guys go at it and that's fine. | ||
| I think more it's like I just sit here and sometimes she does it to me. | ||
| To be fair, yes. | ||
| I was with her a couple days ago. | ||
| She likes you. | ||
| I meant more that you just don't agree on everything. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| The point being, when I see all these Democrats suddenly going, oh, we should have a commission to figure out reparations, it's like, Whoa, Candace really must have done something here within the black community, because now all they're going is, all we got left is cash. | ||
| Well, I think that they're, you know, I hope that that's true. | ||
| You know, I don't know the data to bear it out, but I certainly hope that there is that cracking that is taking place. | ||
| But the left has a couple of very powerful forces, and one of them is, as we discussed, the attempt to Make it uncomfortable to have different thoughts, or to engage with people who have different thoughts, that you are no longer welcome in the circle of the woke if you have a conversation with somebody on there. | ||
| I mean, legitimately have a conversation or watch a video. | ||
| I mean, there was a story that was out of, I think it was Michigan State two weeks ago, where a student at Michigan State College Fix reported this, was watching one of my videos on YouTube, and the roommate Made a rights violation complaint to the administration at Michigan State for the student watching my video, and the administration was like, fine, we'll move you. | ||
| It's come to the point where if you mention names, like people who legitimately don't know anything about you, don't know anything about Candace, don't know anything about me, don't know anything about Jordan, they'll make claims about people they legitimately cannot back up because they've never engaged with their content, but the very fact that they haven't engaged with the content is their credibility on speaking on the content. | ||
| Because if they ever engaged on the content, then they wouldn't believe all these things, but they don't engage and therefore they are good. | ||
| Lack of engagement is good, right? | ||
| It's not that you engage and now you're better because you've had a better conversation. | ||
| If you didn't engage, you're better. | ||
| So those are the, that's the countervailing intimidation factor that's taking place. | ||
| And that I think is still quite powerful. | ||
| It's why every single Democratic candidate, I mean, it really is incredibly powerful. | ||
| Every single Democratic candidate effectively skipped AIPAC this year. | ||
| Because Ilhan Omar has impact and because folks on the hard left hate Israel and that has impact. | ||
| And then they all showed up for Al Sharpton, who's legitimately one of the worst people in modern American politics, like in modern American history. | ||
| He ran a Jussie Smollett hoax and accused an actual human being of committing a rape against a black girl who was not raped. | ||
| He accused Stephen Pagones of raping a black girl and then scrawling racial slurs on her body and shit. | ||
| And it was all false. | ||
| He called Jews diamond merchants. | ||
| He suggested white interlopers were taking over Freddie's fashion mart. | ||
| And then somebody went and burned down the place. | ||
| He's the worst guy, Al Sharpton. | ||
| And every Democrat showed up at the National Action Network because to be woke means to be in the club. | ||
| Here's the thing about those of us in the IDW. | ||
| People think that we have a club. | ||
| It's not a club, it's just people who like to talk about things. | ||
| And anybody is welcome to the club, which is why you see these weird videos | ||
| where people who we've never talked to or had conversations with are suddenly, | ||
| quote unquote, members of the IDW. | ||
| We talk with each other and there's a core group, I think, of us who every so often, | ||
| like really every so often, go out and get drinks or have dinner. | ||
| But that's not the same thing as this, you're unwelcome in the club if you don't do X. | ||
| Like that's not. | ||
| It's the weird thing that if the IDW, let's say, whatever it is at the moment, | ||
| you're right, we're not walking around with a card, we don't have a clubhouse, you know, all those things. | ||
| But like if this collection, and of course it's way wider than just us, | ||
| but if this middle collection, which seemingly it's pretty small | ||
| and it's kinda getting smaller because it's just getting tougher | ||
| to have centrist opinions. | ||
|
unidentified
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But if this thing doesn't hold, Thank you. | |
| Yeah, I mean, that's right. | ||
| And you can see how viciously the left is trying to carve it apart by what they'll do is they'll come after me and then they'll ask you for comment, or they'll come after Sam and then they'll ask me for comment, or they'll come after Jordan and they'll go after... But that's why I think it's important. | ||
| I know people attack me, oh, he's always shitting on the left, but it's like, this is the perfect example of what's going on here. | ||
| On the right, does anyone on the right relentlessly, viciously, and dishonestly attack the Weinstein brothers? | ||
| Or Sam even, or anyone that's on the left. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| They agree to disagree. | ||
| It really is as simple as that. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| If you read the comments on the, I take Yang as an example because it just happened, but if you read the comments on the Sunday special that I did with Yang, there is nothing, like legitimately, I never read the comments, but I was curious, there is nothing but appreciation that Yang would even come on the show. | ||
| That's the entire thing. | ||
| It's like, oh look, a cordial conversation between people who disagree. | ||
| That's so nice. | ||
| Like, how pathetic is it that that is considered, like, the big win here? | ||
| There wasn't a single comment about, like, oh, Shapiro destroyed Yang there, because that wasn't the purpose of it. | ||
| Everybody got what it was supposed to be. | ||
| It's a conversation, and that's great. | ||
| Did he move you on anything, like a UBI situation? | ||
| Well, I mean, I read his book. | ||
| Right, I had read his book, and I didn't find it utterly convincing on a UBI. | ||
| I think that, as I've said before, when it comes to UBI, If we reach the point of absolute crisis where nothing else, like, let's put it this way, UBI as negative income tax in lieu of all of the welfare systems we currently have, I would sign on to it in a heartbeat. | ||
|
unidentified
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The idea of we get rid of- So a real repeal and replace. | |
| Right. | ||
| If you repeal all the welfare programs and you replace it with a single check that is signed, then—but I think the promises of UBR are a little bit too big for us, Bridget. | ||
| So people are saying, well, it'll solve the opioid epidemic, or it'll solve the—as I say in the book, I think it's a crisis of meaning, not a crisis of money. | ||
| And so I don't think that's going to solve it. | ||
| if the idea is that people are going to be liberated, as Andrew says in his book, to go and do art | ||
| and volunteering and charity, I don't see any evidence of that. | ||
| That's the part I don't buy at all. | ||
| That's the part where I was like, no. | ||
| Even if you could get me on the robots are replacing all our regular job part, | ||
| so let's say you could get me on that. | ||
| The other part is just that it takes away something about fundamental human nature, | ||
| about what you were talking about before, about the individual going out there | ||
| and getting theirs. | ||
| You would just end up having this class of people that would be given just enough. | ||
| I mean, you have a new welfare system. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And what he said was, well, it's not enough to actually live on, it's just enough to actually supplement. | ||
| And what I said is, so what's the limiting principle? | ||
| Like, is it just the $1,000, or is a politician going to come around next week and say it ought to be $3,000, and then you have... What did he say to that? | ||
| Because I haven't seen it before. | ||
| He didn't really... I don't think he really firmly addressed it. | ||
| Because that's the key question, right? | ||
| It's not, well, okay, we'll give you $1,000 and we're good. | ||
| It's that literally the next week, There are some problems in implementation of UBI that exist with the welfare state. | ||
| Also a lot of the studies that suggest that there's the same level of employment. | ||
| and they'll call them racist or... | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, there are some problems in implementation of UBI that exist with the welfare state. | ||
| Also, a lot of the studies that suggest that there is the same level of employment, those | ||
| are temporary UBI attempts, right? | ||
| If there were a permanent UBI, I think that you would see a decline in employment. | ||
| But also, as I said to him, there's a conflict between what UBI says it's trying to do and | ||
| what it actually would do. | ||
| So I think it would do the same thing as the welfare state. | ||
| And that's why I say, as a replacement for the welfare state, I'm kind of warm to it. | ||
| Because you're just like, let's give it a shot, basically. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| We have something that's failing, let's... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also because I'd rather have the government sign an understandable check rather than you have to go through, you have to de-incentivize work or de-incentivize fatherhood or, you know, all these incentive-based structures. | ||
| I'm not a fan. | ||
| And they've been rather ineffective. | ||
| But as a general principle, the idea that it's going to solve the work crisis What he talks about in his book is the crisis of people who don't have jobs, and that crisis is the not having of the job, not merely the not having of the money. | ||
| Signing people a check in lieu of a job doesn't actually, like, he points out in the book, the number of people on disability has been rising dramatically. | ||
| Right, and they're all getting a check. | ||
| And are they happy? | ||
| Are they spending their time volunteering? | ||
| Are they spending their time down at the local weigh station helping people? | ||
| Or are they, you know... | ||
| Well, that's the right thing. | ||
| It's like, it all sounds good. | ||
| Medicare for all. | ||
| It sounds good. | ||
| We will all have the same thing. | ||
| Now, we know that that's not going to be the case because, of course, well, now they're talking about getting rid of private insurance altogether. | ||
| Which is insane. | ||
| I mean, that's fully, but they have to do it because otherwise doctors just will not accept Medicare reimbursement rates. | ||
| I mean, that's the reality. | ||
| Again, as somebody who works closely with people in the medical industry, and in fact sleeps with a person in the medical industry, the idea that doctors are gonna just accept 60% on the dollar of what they're making right now is absolute sheer nonsense. | ||
| But also, it's such a disconnect of what I think they view, I mean, I get it that they think government is something that I don't think it should be, but it's like, what right would the government have to tell a doctor he can't be in the private business that he wants to be in? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And they actually think that's okay. | ||
| I mean, quite literally, Kamala and I think Cory Booker and a couple of others. | ||
| They think it's good. | ||
| No private insurance. | ||
| Well, I mean, this is another thing that I asked Yang about, because he said he was for Medicare for All. | ||
| And there's a section in his book where he says, so how are we going to deal with the fact that doctors are going to just stop going to medical school? | ||
| Because that's a real thing that will happen. | ||
| I mean, already, if you want to see how perverse incentives work in the medical industry, look | ||
| how many people come out of medical school and go into what are called the road fields. | ||
| It's radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology and dermatology. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Those are the least regulated fields. | ||
| There's the least Medicare there. | ||
| Nobody's taking reimbursement rates. | ||
| Those are all areas where people basically show up with an insurance company or cash | ||
| in hand. | ||
| That's where everybody's going. | ||
| It's where all the money is. | ||
| So, that's how perverse incentives work. | ||
| He says in the book, well, we're going to have to convince doctors that basically they | ||
| need to rethink about what the lifestyle of a doctor is going to be, that they're not | ||
| going to live high on the hog anymore, that they're going to be putting out more for the | ||
| public service. | ||
| And I said, well, you can do that, but it's not going to be the same people. | ||
| Does he say how to do that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| I mean, he sort of says that we should, that we should, just people will have to be informed that the incentive structure is different. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| If you have a different incentive structure, you're going to get a different thing. | ||
| My wife would not have gone to medical school if she were assured of, for 11 years, if she were assured of coming out Making $65,000 or $100,000, right? | ||
| The reality is that she wanted a certain lifestyle. | ||
| It's why she went to medical school. | ||
| You change those incentives. | ||
| You think all these guys who are going in to be surgeons are going to spend years on end doing this so that they can then work for years on end working for Medicare? | ||
| Does that sound awesome to anyone? | ||
| The reason that smart people become doctors is because smart people would like to make money and be paid for their work. | ||
| This is why smart people, like, yes, there is a self-sacrificial component to all of this. | ||
| There are easier ways to make money than being a doctor. | ||
| But to eliminate the money factor is to eliminate half the reason that people become doctors in the first place. | ||
| You want a lot more people who are lawyers and McKinsey associates. | ||
| This is the way to do it. | ||
| I have a good friend, two or three best friends from childhood since second grade who was like my chief sparring political partner our whole lives and he's now become a huge Trump supporter. | ||
| And why? | ||
| Because he was a doctor, went to medical school, raised all the debt, realized he could never live in New York where he grew up. | ||
| He's now in Texas and he's often doing things that have nothing to make money now because Yeah. | ||
| it's so hard, and then he became a Trump supporter because of Obamacare, because he was crushed | ||
| with paperwork and bureaucracy and nonsense. | ||
| And now to make money, because it's so much harder than just doing the procedures, he's basically doing | ||
| like medical real estate things. | ||
| And it just shows you that the whole system, I know that's just one guy, but it's like, | ||
| the whole system is out of whack. | ||
| Doctors are going into concierge care specifically because of this. | ||
| I mean, there are full apps that exist where you're paying like 99 bucks a month, and then a doctor will show up at your door. | ||
| Like, there are so many ways that we could make medical care so—I mean, online should be such an asset for medical care, right? | ||
| We should—there are so many—getting rid of licensing requirements, as I suggested, would be a great thing. | ||
| Like, there are things that we can actively do to do this. | ||
| And the truth is, for healthy people and for people who have private healthcare insurance, There really isn't a problem. | ||
| Like, we like to talk about how it's too expensive. | ||
| Why do you think we have millions and millions of jobs in the healthcare industry? | ||
| Like, what do they think happens when they nationalize this thing? | ||
| All those jobs just transfer over to government? | ||
| Or are a lot of those jobs lost because those people don't work for anybody anymore? | ||
| Why is it that people ignore the upsides of... Well, what do they think? | ||
| Does anyone answer that question? | ||
| What are you going to do with all those people in the private sector? | ||
| Are they going to all be hired by the government to do nothing? | ||
| Right, and nobody seems to understand that The reason that the majority of new drugs and procedures are discovered in the United States is because we are paying those outsized prices. | ||
| So when Trump says that we are paying for everybody else, that is true. | ||
| We are paying for everybody else. | ||
| But if we stop paying for everybody else, they just will stop producing those drugs here, because why else would they produce the drugs here? | ||
| Our system is not good, but to pretend that our system is like the worst system on planet Earth, where the people are dying—I mean, quick statistic that nobody likes to cite but is true, if you get rid of shooting—of homicides and car accident death, where people die, like, at the scene, from the American death rates, America has the number one life expectancy in the industrialized world. | ||
| Those are not medical issues. | ||
| Those are issues of people shooting each other and people getting car wrecks a lot here in the United States. | ||
| So, you know, that's— And as far as us spending per capita, like insane amounts of money, we spend more than other countries. | ||
| It is relatively in line with the OECD income. | ||
| So for on a per capita income basis, we spend a lot of money. | ||
| We also make a lot of money here in the United States. | ||
| And the medical industry here is a huge part of the American economy. | ||
| All of Pittsburgh is basically the medical industry now, as opposed to the steel industry. | ||
| And that is a very good thing for Pittsburgh. | ||
| So the answer to a lot of this is deregulation, not re-regulation. | ||
| But again, those are conversations I think that can be had, but I think that people are not Being realistic about what they expect from the system, and they're not realistic about the downsides of systems that are completely nationalized. | ||
| I mean, in my opinion, if you're actually going to get the government deeply involved, we've got to have a Swiss system where basically people are paying a percentage of their salary into private insurance, and then they are expected to do that, right? | ||
| Like the individual mandate, if you're going to get the government involved, is not the world's worst idea. | ||
| It's just that it's now stacked with enormous amounts of regulation and inefficiency and bureaucratic inefficiency. | ||
| I think again that a free market is better than any of that stuff, but I also think that you ought to take responsibility if you are on it. | ||
| If you don't buy insurance and then you get hit by a car, I'm sorry, that would be a you problem. | ||
| That's why we need a social fabric where I care about you, but on a governmental level, this idea that You're not going to increase the rates of use with government care is just a lie. | ||
| Right, but we are going to pay for those people no matter what, right? | ||
| I mean, they're not going to turn them around at the emergency, but we are going to pay for them. | ||
| Right, but getting hit by the car is usually not the real issue. | ||
| Usually the real issue is how do you pay for the person who didn't buy health insurance for years and then gets a heart condition that requires you know, years-long care. Like the person who's in the ER | ||
| is going to get paid for it. | ||
| We all end up paying for it with elevated insurance rates and all the rest of it. But | ||
| yeah, the problem of the chronically unhealthy, which is a very small percentage of the population | ||
| but the most expensive percentage, that is not really a rationale for overturning healthcare | ||
| that 90% of people seem to enjoy. | ||
| It also is gonna make you hate people for no reason. | ||
| You're gonna go to In-N-Out or McDonald's and see a table of four obese people stuffing their faces, drinking high-fructose corn syrup and everything else, and you're gonna go, wait a minute, these people are all using themselves and I'm paying their, I mean, this is a horrible, I mean, this goes to the community. | ||
| No one wants to look at that and think that. | ||
| Well, this is why I've said people who try to compare, for example, the Nordic healthcare model to the U.S. | ||
| healthcare model, you're not comparing equivalent populations. | ||
| People eat healthy things in Norway. | ||
| People in the United States eat nothing but crap all the time. | ||
| I was just in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark. | ||
| These people look good. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I mean, it's a much healthier population. | ||
| And this is why, if you actually want to compare the efficacy of healthcare systems, you don't look at the generalized population of the United States and the generalized population of Norway. | ||
| And also absurdly tiny countries. | ||
| Right. | ||
| With 5 million people. | ||
| I mean, L.A. | ||
| County is 11 million people or something. | ||
| What you do is you compare people who are Norwegian in America to people who are Norwegian in Norway. | ||
| And what you find is that people who are Norwegian in America outperform on nearly every aspect people who are Norwegian in Norway. | ||
| Then you are comparing apples to apples. | ||
| We compare apples to oranges and then we're like, well, why doesn't this work over here? | ||
| Because they're not the same thing. | ||
| That's why it doesn't work over here. | ||
| All right, Shapiro, let's go dystopian. | ||
| You ready? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's say everything that you've written about here, everything that we're trying to do, all these conversations we're all having, it all just explodes. | ||
| It does not work. | ||
| The ideas that we're fighting for fail in the face of postmodernism, of what's being taught at these colleges, of what the media is throwing at everybody. | ||
| And we get more and more of these people in government and all of these things. | ||
| I think about this sometimes, that what will happen to the outlier people like us in the future? | ||
| Do you ever think about that? | ||
| Right now, for example, for all these people that think Trump is Hitler and all this stuff, Trump tweets anything and then a hundred blue check journalists tell him to go fuck himself and you're gonna be in jail and a zillion things and Trump does nothing. | ||
| That's not even a defense of anything Trump says, that's just reality. | ||
| But now let's do it the other way. | ||
| Imagine now we've got one of these far lefties. | ||
| Yeah, Bernie's president, yeah. | ||
| Who believe that government is the end all, be all to everything. | ||
| And now the outliers who have all been called Nazis all along, right? | ||
| The Ben Shapiros and everybody else that have been called the worst things in the world. | ||
| Now government and tech is against us. | ||
| And now we're doing the same exact things that the lefties of today are doing. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| How do you think that's going to go? | ||
| Well, I mean, this is why at Daily Wire, and I know you've been looking into this too, alternative means of distribution are the entire ballgame. | ||
| I mean, we understand that when it comes to the left, you cannot live on their largesse. | ||
| For God's sake, at the beginning of the year, they came after me and tried to boycott me over making the most anodyne point on abortion I think I've ever made in my life, right? | ||
| They legitimately tried to knock my sponsors off my show for suggesting that pro-lifers don't want to kill any baby, no matter what that baby would turn out to be, because we don't believe that you can kill babies for any rationale based on a minority report reasoning. | ||
| And I mentioned Baby Hitler in this context because that had been a thought experiment that was used by people up to and including Tom Hanks for legitimately years, and they tried to boycott my show based on that. | ||
| I mean, it was insane. | ||
| So we're not focusing on living on the largess of the left when it comes to this sort of stuff. | ||
| We're building a subscription system at Daily Wire. | ||
| This is why we encourage people to subscribe, because then you can get our content no matter what you do, because it's all vertically integrated. | ||
| I know that you're looking at stuff like that as well. | ||
| On a tech level, we're building alternatives, and that's what we ought to be doing. | ||
| On a generalized level, I think what we're watching, and it's really Pretty sad. | ||
| Is that people like us are going to end up in places with people who agree with people like us. | ||
| Meaning that I live in a Jewish community where I'm pretty popular because it's an orthodox community. | ||
| I'm orthodox. | ||
| I went to lunch with you at a kosher place and if I had to take one more picture of you I was going to kill you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, those are my folks. | ||
| But I've spent my entire life living in Los Angeles, a place where the vast majority of people disagree with me. | ||
| Or in Cambridge, where everyone disagrees with me. | ||
| And I like that. | ||
| I think it's nice. | ||
| I think it's good that there are conversations happening across the aisle as the left seeks to basically censor or destroy anyone who even engages in those conversations, where Joe Rogan becomes alt-right because he has a conversation with me. | ||
| Because I once had a conversation with you, and you once had a conversation with Alex Jones, right? | ||
| Like, this is the way that it works. | ||
|
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Clearly, we've all pushed people to the extreme. | |
| Right. | ||
| I mean, and this is, so once that happens, all that's going to happen is it's going to make places like this unlivable for people like us. | ||
| And I mean, even people who just want to have conversations. | ||
| And then you do end up with a real gap in the country that is almost unbridgeable, where it's like everyone agrees in one place and nobody agrees in another place. | ||
| And that's why, honestly, the checks and balances system is so vital, we mentioned before. | ||
| Because if people in Texas feel like they're being run roughshod over by people in California, in the national government, or the other way around, that's not going to last. | ||
| That's not sustainable. | ||
| Right, so that's why it's like, I like doing this as a thought experiment more than like what could potentially happen, but it seems to me that if we have then no co-spaces that we were talking about before, and we all do have to get siphoned off into our own thing just because that's the way the tech landscape is going to work, that it's like, yeah, we got the checks and balances and our system is pretty damn good, I would say. | ||
| Yeah, it's durable. | ||
| I would say it's the best man-made thing, set of ideas probably in the history of all time. | ||
| But how can it survive in an information war? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| How can it survive in a time when, for all we know, the next whoever runs for president isn't gonna accept the results of the election? | ||
| Stacey Abrams still not accepting the results. | ||
| They're undermining, they claim Trump wasn't gonna accept the results of the election. | ||
| And now it's like, that's what they're doing. | ||
| They're trying to undermine everything. | ||
| And if we don't have enough co-spaces to work it out, Well this is why we have a very short window right now to pour resources into grabbing as many eyeballs as possible and ensuring that as many people see countervailing material as possible because you just don't know when that window is going to slam shut. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean that really was it. | ||
| You have to grab as many people as possible and let them know that there are alternative places where they can get your stuff because otherwise You know, here's what I'm concerned about mostly. | ||
| What I'm concerned about is that you're going to see a move by Democrats in Congress and from the presidency to do exactly what Mark Zuckerberg wants, right? | ||
| Where the FCC is suddenly regulating speech on Facebook and to relieve the obligations of Facebook to do it themselves. | ||
| And suddenly, if you are labeled not alt-right, but alt-right adjacent, based on the fact that you once interviewed a person who once interviewed a person who once stood next to a person who was once wearing a shirt, Then, you know, then you're screwed. | ||
| So that's where I don't think that the this is why, you know, you and I make the same distinction. | ||
| I've made a distinction for years and years between the liberals and the left. | ||
| If the left continues to conquer the liberals, I think that it's going to be a rough time ahead and we better have these alternative methods of distribution or we're screwed at that point. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| So let's finish with this then. | ||
| When I was on Candice's show a week or two ago, I said to her, you know, I see something, it's so obvious to me that if you care about ideas, if you want to live in a tolerant, pluralistic society, all of those things, it's very obvious, the center right basically is where that's at. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| Do you think there's room for the center-right, say, conservatives, to have a little more openness when it comes to, like, you know, we've had the abortion discussion many times. | ||
| I mean, I'm really struggling with it. | ||
| And the further that the left goes on eight-month abortions and all of that, and post-life abortions and post-life abortions, I mean, this crazy stuff. | ||
| It's making my position incredibly difficult. | ||
| And I think a lot of decent liberals are struggling with this. | ||
| What do you think the right should do? | ||
| If you guys want to be a little more opening, a little more welcoming, let's say, for people that are seeing where tolerance actually lives right now, what do you think you can do on issues like that? | ||
| Because I'm not saying that the right has to be a pro-choice party or a pro-choice set of ideas or anything like that, but what do you think is your job? | ||
| Well, I mean, that is maybe the only issue that I can think of where The right generally, and I think correctly, believes in government compulsion, meaning that the basic thesis of the right is that when a life is threatened, then the government has a right to step in. | ||
| This is a life that is threatened. | ||
| The government has a right to step in. | ||
| So this I'm not sure is a bridgeable gap. | ||
| What I mean by that is that the right can continue to make the case. | ||
| The right should continue to make the case. | ||
| I mean, it's a case I agree with. | ||
| I'm not libertarian on this issue because I don't think it's a libertarian issue. | ||
| I don't mean that the right has to modify its position. | ||
| I actually don't mean that. | ||
| What I mean is just that for the things that might be the differences, if you were just looking to collect ex-lefties right now, how do you welcome those people? | ||
| Here's where I would start. | ||
| Because I think they're afraid. | ||
| I think most of them have PTSD. | ||
| That's what I really believe. | ||
| The first place to start is why don't we start with the stuff where we agree because the truth is that The checks and balances of the system, just on a practical level, the checks and balances of the system are not going to allow for full protection of life anytime soon. | ||
| The sort of attempts that have been made on the right to move in a more pro-life direction have been incremental at best. | ||
| And so, listen, if that's the issue that's going to, you know, bar you from joining the right, then it's the issue that's going to bar you from joining the right. | ||
| There's not much I can do about that. | ||
| But, you know, I'm happy to welcome anybody to the conversation, and you don't have to agree with me on abortion to be part of the conversation. | ||
| Like, you and I don't agree on this, and we have this conversation on a pretty routine basis. | ||
| I do it all the time. | ||
| As I say, there are certain issues where the right is not going to move. | ||
| And frankly, I don't think the right should move. | ||
| This is one of the only issues. | ||
| Can I make a bold prediction? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 30 years from now, we're going to be sitting here doing this, hopefully in a bigger garage. | ||
| In Texas, probably. | ||
| And you may well have moved me on the abortion issue, and I think I may have moved you on coming to an anniversary party. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| I think there's a possibility. | ||
| I mean, I'd have to think about that. | ||
| Again, the issue, as you know, not to get back into well-trod territory, you know, I think it would be unlikely that you'd move me, but I can never rule out the possibility of being moved on anything, obviously. | ||
| And again, this comes back down to, you know, The difference between approving of activity and approving of human beings. | ||
| If you invited me to a party on Friday night, I also wouldn't go, right? | ||
| It's just not something I do. | ||
| So definitely not a Shabbat anniversary party. | ||
| A Shabbat anniversary I think probably is, yeah. | ||
| A Sunday afternoon... | ||
| A Sunday afternoon gay-ish anniversary? | ||
| Or maybe just... How about you just have, like, a frickin' barbecue, dude? | ||
|
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Like, does everything have to be... No, but the party's not gonna be gay. | |
| It's just, yeah, we'll have a barbecue. | ||
| It'll just be a barbecue. | ||
| Nothing gay is gonna happen there. | ||
| I wasn't worried it was gonna turn into an orgy back there or something. | ||
| I wasn't worried you were gonna bring out the village people or something. | ||
| Do you know that gay people have parties just the same? | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
|
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What? | |
| No, that's crazy. | ||
| No, I was pretty well aware of that, in fact. | ||
| And in fact, as I've said a thousand times, happy to go out to dinner, my wife, your husband, happy to go out to dinner and do any of that stuff, as long as it's not like, you know, rah-rah, here's a thing you think is sinful, join me in celebrating it. | ||
| But again, that applies to a wide variety of sins. | ||
| I mean, listen, it's harder on members of my family than anybody else. | ||
| Like I've said before, I wouldn't attend an intermarriage. | ||
| If a Jew marries an Andra, I won't attend intermarriage. | ||
| So this is exactly the same issue. | ||
| Shapiro, they're giving me the signal that you have a hard hour. | ||
| I feel like we just started. | ||
| I got a radio show to do in like five minutes. | ||
| You gotta get the hell out of here. | ||
| All right, that's Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire, at Ben Shapiro on Twitter. | ||
| The book is The Right Side of History. | ||
| Is it number one on Amazon right now? | ||
| Well, it was number one on the New York Times list in its first week. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| So we knocked off Michelle Obama for a week and then she took revenge and knocked us back down to number three. | ||
| But for a week, for a week. | ||
| That's the battle of the left and the right. | ||
| Encapsulated right there. | ||
| All right, that's it. |
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