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July 25, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:19:37

Anti-Racism Witch Trials & The Left DESTROYS America! | Ben Shapiro | POLITICS | Rubin Report

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ben shapiro

01:00:36

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Speaker	Time	Text
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's super clever.
		I mean, the argument is completely circular, right?
		They just say, you're a racist.
		And you say, well, but you have no evidence of my racism.
		They say, well, you don't even recognize your own racism.
		You say, well, then how am I racist?
		They say, because you're complicit in a system of racism.
		You say, right, but the system isn't racist.
		Like, you can't point to something that's racist.
		No, but it results in racial inequality.
		And therefore, it is a racist system.
		And therefore, you are complicit in the system.
		And therefore, you're a racist.
		And you say, OK, well, but all systems perpetuate racial inequality.
		But even saying that, you're demonstrating your white fragility, which means you're a racist.
		This is basic Salem witch trial.
		If you sink, then you are innocent.
unidentified		and if you float then you're a wench.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Quick reminder, everybody, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that notification bell, especially, especially on a day like today when I have a guest so dangerous that we're gonna get in a lot of trouble, you understand?
		The man sitting across from me, that's right, it is Ben Shapiro, author of the new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
		Here we go again, my friend.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I know, just get ready for it.
		You get it worse than I do, I mean, honestly.
		I'm okay.
		My people will be fine.
		You're the one who pays the price.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do I get it worse than you?
		I'm not sure.
		You have a very dedicated group of people at Media Matters who sit and wait for you to nod.
		Or to move in a way that they can imply is white supremacist.
		I have a bunch of anonymous anime genderless trolls on Twitter.
		These are very different things.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		That's fair.
		I have a full employment program going over at Media Matters.
		I know we have at least one, maybe two people who are on us basically full-time at Daily Wire.
		So that's exciting.
		And I'm glad that we can create jobs in all sectors of the economy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We are creating jobs.
		I think the obvious way to start this interview, because I want to focus on your book, but of course we have to talk about some of the things.
		I don't know if you've heard there's a pandemic and then riots.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I missed all of this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you haven't heard of it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I've been out of it just a little bit.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're a busy guy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, I titled my book Don't Burn This Book, and then basically the day the book came out, every store that had the book was on fire.
unidentified		Right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, you didn't say don't burn the store, to be fair.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I didn't say don't burn the store that, you know, houses the book.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Now, your book is called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It was about how to burn your book.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's the basic gist of it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But of all times, America does seem like it's being destroyed right now.
		And that's what you titled the book.
		And I know a little something about writing.
		You finished this book when?
		How long ago?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		December, January.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so actually not that long ago.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		No, this is a quick write.
		So what happened is that I had gone to Israel for the Jewish holidays.
		I came back and I just looked around the country and I thought something is really, really deeply wrong.
		I mean, even more wrong than it has been in prior iterations.
		And it's been, Wrong for a while.
		I mean, there have been things that have been going wrong, which is why I wrote the previous book, Right Side of History, which was the country's kind of falling apart.
		What do we do?
		What common values do we hold?
		And then I thought, well, we really need sort of a nation specific book about what we're supposed to be sharing, because obviously there's this widespread perception that we share nothing, right?
		The only thing that we share is an oppressive, evil, terrible, bigoted system.
		And so I come back from Israel.
		I called up my publisher.
		I have a two book deal with my publisher and my publisher, I actually had another book that was slated to come out probably the beginning of next year.
		And I said, I want a Russia book out before the election.
		I want it to be called "How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps"
		and I'm gonna write it in the next six weeks.
		And they were like- - Do you write as fast as you talk?
		I do.
		Thank God I write incredibly.
		I used to, I was actually, little known Ben Shapiro facts.
		I used to, many, there are many of them, but one of the least well-known is I was a ghostwriter
		for many prominent figures for probably a decade.
		And that's how I supplemented my income.
		So I have something like seven or eight New York Times bestsellers that are not under my own name.
		I was the copyright specialist.
		Publishers would come to me, there'd be some prominent figure who, you know, had three weeks to go until deadline, and they'd be like, okay, well, you've got one sentence, what do we do?
		And so they'd turn me over to the book, and I'd write an entire book in a month.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Can I get you to write a couple of their names on the back of that paper for me?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you later.
		I'll tell you later.
		Not in violation of my NDAs, guys.
		In any case, it was written at white heat and it was very easy to write because the structure of the book is very obvious.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the basic idea- Don't go that far yet.
		I want to talk structure.
		I wrote down all six chapters because I want to talk structure.
		I think the way you broke it down actually is super interesting.
		But before we do full book stuff, let's just talk about the world as it is at the moment for just a little bit.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe on this show?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you can curse your brains out, but what do you mean?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You don't curse.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I know, but if you promise me you'll bleep it, then I'll curse.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, my people will bleep it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we're sort of f**ked.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I've been waiting for that for a long time, Shapiro, because I've heard you say f**k off.
		My guys don't have to bleep my fk. They can bleep your fk. Yeah, that's right.
		I've heard you say f**k privately, and then you put your little asterisks on Twitter.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, as you know, there is a bit of a gap between public persona and... In private, I curse a blue streak, as you know, so that's not a great shock, but yes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so yeah, let's just do it for a little bit.
		Are we fucked?
		Like, what the hell is going on here right now?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It feels that way.
		I mean, it really does feel as though any common bonds that we once shared are basically disintegrating and that you're being pressured into mimicking the belief that all those bonds are gone.
		So even if you believe that the bonds aren't really frayed and that really we should have some stuff in common, if you say that out loud, you're part of the system.
		You're part of the white supremacist system.
		And this is, it's such dangerous stuff.
		I mean, as we're sitting here, very, in the last few hours, there was a sort of graphic that came out from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is a Smithsonian Institute, taxpayer-funded institution.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Funded by the government.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Funded by the government.
		And it was all about whiteness and the evils of whiteness.
		And among the evils of whiteness, things that we have all integrated into our lives because of the prevailing system of white supremacy, were things like hard work, individualism, justice, time management, Delayed gratification?
		Science?
		I'm not kidding.
		This is all in the document.
		These are all things that are listed as elements of white supremacy that must be rejected in order to move forward into a better, more progressive world.
		And so all the things that you would think, like, yeah, I feel like we should all have this in common, like, you know, science.
		This one we should have in common.
		There's a whole movement to say, no, no, no.
		All of these things are outgrowths of an evil system.
		And that, in turn, is the result of An absolutely despicable redefinition of the term racism for what it used to mean in virtually all of human history, but certainly since the 1960s, to what it means now.
		So in the 1960s, racism was what we all think of racism as, believing in the inferiority or superiority of a particular racial group.
		Very easy definition.
		You can spot it wherever you see it, right?
		I mean, it's not hard.
		It's a very easily applied definition.
		And then there's been an attempt in the last several years to redefine racism to mean any system that results in racial inequality is itself racist.
		And so if you're not seeking the destruction of that system, you are complicit in racism.
		And in order to be anti-racism, you have to seek to destroy that system.
		Well, every system in human history has resulted in inequality of some sort or another because human beings have different capacities.
		We make different choices.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute, are you telling me we're not all exactly the same?
		We don't have all the exact same thoughts and gifts and skills?
		You're telling me... Stop being racist.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Stop it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Stop it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We're slightly different.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Ibram Kendi specifically writes this, right, in How to Be an Anti-Racist.
		He says, literally, any system that generates racial inequality is a racist system.
		And so therefore, it's not like you're a bad person because you're a racist.
		You're just a product of the system or you're upholding the system.
		And in order for us to fight that racism, we have to fight the system itself.
		And so anything That is part of that system.
		Anything and everything that is of that system is tainted by racism and must be ripped down completely.
		And if you are complicit in the system by doing things like hard work and individualism, you're an assimilationist, right?
		This is what Ibram Kendi says in How to Be an Antiracist.
		And Robin DiAngelo sort of mirrors this.
		And you're saying to yourself, wait a second, are you closing an awful lot of doors to black Americans and minority Americans?
		Like the pathways to success in a free system are things like hard work, individual effort, You know, thinking ahead, delayed gratification.
		Like, this is not unique to capitalism or the evil American system or anything.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But also, what are you saying about black people at that point?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's insane.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, David Duke could write this shit.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, he really could.
		I mean, David Duke could write the idea that whiteness is about hard work and individual initiative and religious adherence and family structure.
		That's crap David Duke would write.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		But the anti-racists are writing the exact same crap, and then they're saying, yeah, but all those things are bad, right?
		And if we just got rid of our adherence to these systems, well, then we wouldn't really have to have standards that we hold people to, and then equality would be the result.
		I mean, that's insanely dangerous stuff, but because the charge of racism is the most highly charged charge you can make against somebody, it's the worst thing you can call somebody in America, and for good reason, because that is an awful thing to be, right?
		It's an awful thing to say about somebody.
		It's an awful thing to be.
		Because that is such a highly loaded term, It's so easy to cudgel people into line.
		All you have to do is just acquiesce.
		All you have to do is be the person who cheers on the guillotines as the guillotines chop off heads, and we'll leave you alone.
		Now, we're not going to say that you're left alone forever, right?
		This only holds true until the time for the next guillotine.
		I really feel like in this situation it's very much like the action movie where the bad guy comes to the good guy and he's got some blackmail to hold over his head and the good guy says, well how do I know you won't use it?
		And the bad guy goes, you don't.
		That's the anti-racist movement.
		They figure that they can call you a racist and they will hold that over your head.
		Until you acquiesce in all the things.
		And if you don't acquiesce in this one little thing, then you will be ruined, and you will be destroyed, and you will be targeted as part of the opposition.
		And the good news is, I think it is generating some opposition from people who are center-left.
		I think that the only question for the people who are kind of liberal, center-left liberals, you know, the 153 intellectuals who wrote that piece in Harper's Weekly with the obligatory slap at Trump and Trump supporters.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Trump is really the problem, even though he's not the one gonna come burn down our houses.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		The reason that that actually matters is First of all, I'm glad they did what they did.
		I mean, welcome to the party, pal.
		I'm glad they're doing it.
		But are you trying to broaden the Overton window just so it includes you?
		Or are you trying to broaden the Overton window such that we can actually have a conversation?
		Because if the idea is, we only, you know, you lefties, you're mostly right about the things you think are bad, but we just don't want you canceling us.
		So just leave us alone and we'll be okay.
		Or is it going to be, you know, you'll actually allow people like a Dave Rubin or Ben Shapiro or a Dennis Prager or Glenn Beck to actually speak?
		And if the answer is no, then you really haven't added anything to the debate.
		All you're doing is trying to feed the crocodile so the DDT lasts.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I sense you know my feelings on this.
		I mean, right, they're protecting their asses.
		I'm glad that they wrote the letter, but the fact that they had to make it clear, we're not conservatives, we're not Trump people, Trump is doing this, and it's like, but he's not the one that's rampaging through your universities.
		He's not the one out in the streets.
		When they come for all your mansions, it's not gonna be Trump and Trump supporters.
		I mean, we all know that.
		So yes, I think we know what they're doing with the overdue.
		Yeah, I mean, that being said, I still think it's good at some level.
		It's better than nothing.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		The next step is I want to see some of those people actually have open conversations with people on the right.
		How about that?
		I mean, why is this?
		What's amazing for both you and for me is why is that such a wild request?
		Like, I have conversations with people on the left all the time.
		And many of those people will not come on my show because they're afraid of being canceled.
		And I know that the same is true for you.
		You've had conversations with people all across the political spectrum, but many of them won't have you on, and I know many of them won't have me on, because they're afraid of being canceled by their own folks for conversations that we have privately, but they won't have publicly.
		And so then it's just, okay, you're just being a coward at that point.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So we've sort of talked about this a little bit before, but do you think there is a fundamental reason for that?
		That there is a fundamental reason that underlies the philosophy of someone who broadly is on the left versus on the right, that why people on the right are willing to do it?
		If I put someone on the left on my show, I put Marianne Williamson on, I put on Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, all the people on the right, virtually, who disagree with them say, eh, you know, I disagree with her and him on this and that and the other thing, but it's glad you...
		I'm glad you had the conversation.
		If I put you on or Prager on, the lefties go bananas.
		I'm endorsing white supremacy.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Because I think that for the left, and there are many liberals who buy into this, all human relations are power relations.
		You saw this in sort of Ezra Klein's response to Matt Iglesias, right?
		How did I end up on the same side as Matt Iglesias, the Ralph Wiggum of the internet?
		How does this happen?
		But Matt Iglesias had the temerity to sign that letter.
		And then Ezra Klein was like, there are a lot of people who stand up for free speech
		who are really doing this because it's a way of gaining power.
		For a lot of people, this is, on the left, this is how they think of things, right?
		All human relationships are power dynamics.
		There are no big principles that we all share, like freedom of speech matters.
		That's just a bunch of people who are seeking to use the principle of freedom of speech
		as a weapon in order to reenact the hierarchy, in order to preserve the hierarchy.
		And this argument you see being made more and more by folks on the left,
		which is that rights are not actually universal principles that we all should hold to.
		Rights are just a way for me to shut you up while I'm still speaking, right?
		And that's, and I think that the liberal left has been somewhat warm to that argument for a while,
		at least warm enough that they were willing to hear it.
		And they just didn't see it turning on them at any point.
		The left moved so far so fast that the liberals were like, we were with you up until the point where you started canceling us.
		And then we realized, oh wait, that was a bad mistake, right?
		Iglesias was one of the guys who was like cheering on there's no cancel culture, cancellation doesn't exist.
		And then it came for him.
		And he was like, uh, this is bad, right guys?
		It's like, yes, it's bad.
		Well, yes, thank you for recognizing it as bad.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do you love seeing that now, where there's this move by them now, AOC's doing this, and a bunch of other people to completely tell us that cancel culture, it doesn't even exist.
unidentified		It doesn't exist!
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't exist, yeah.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Figments of your imagination.
		Figments of your, when she's not explaining that people are shooting each other in the inner city for bread.
		For bread, right?
		That's why you should wonder what their playground is, because they're hungry.
		That's what I do when I'm hungry.
		I say to my wife, are we out of cereal?
		She says, yes, and I immediately go and shoot somebody in the face.
		That's the way I deal with my own personal anger.
		Yeah, yeah.
		When she's not saying that sort of stuff, this is becoming a very popular notion on the left, which is that all America is a group of people who are dispossessed and the people who are victimizers.
		And any principle that exists in the system, that is the victimizing system, again, this goes back to the Kendi point or the Robin DiAngelo point, any aspect of that system is inherently bad and reinforces a power hierarchy.
		And so you must remove those systems of power in order to allow the dispossessed to claim their full share of the earth.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're a sci-fi guy.
		Do you sort of admire the beauty of their evil?
		You know what I mean?
		Like, really, if someone were to create a system that proves itself, that in and of itself is the proof, like, there's a certain beauty to that, as evil as it is.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's super clever.
		I mean, the argument is completely circular, right?
		They just say, you're a racist.
		And you say, well, but you have no evidence of my racism.
		They say, well, you don't even recognize your own racism.
		You say, well, then how am I racist?
		They say, because you're complicit in a system of racism.
		You say, right, but the system isn't racist.
		Like, you can't point to something that's racist.
		No.
		But it results in racial inequality.
		And therefore, it is a racist system.
		And therefore, you are complicit in the system.
		And therefore, you're a racist.
		And you say, OK, well, but all systems perpetuate racial inequality.
		But even saying that, you're demonstrating your white fragility, which means you're a racist.
		This is basic Salem witch trial.
		If you sink, then you are innocent.
		And if you float, then you're a witch.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, all right.
		So a lot of this actually is very much the point of the book.
		So just quickly, before we fully go into that, let's just do COVID quickly.
		Like where the hell are we at in this?
		Let's just talk about California for a second.
		I mean, we just, in the last couple of days, went into another freaking lockdown.
		It's beautiful outside.
		I'm not sure what the beach situation is, whether we can go there, but I know I can't go to a restaurant.
		It's like, what the hell is going on here at this point?
		What do you think is honestly happening at this point?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So I think what's honestly happening is that you have a deadly disease that has probably somewhere between a two times and six times deadly as an effect as the flu.
		It's somewhere between 0.2 and 0.6 infection fatality rate.
		And that's dangerous.
		And it's very, very infectious.
		And all of that is true.
		The whole point of flattening the curve was to prevent the overwhelming of the healthcare system.
		We are not seeing the healthcare system being overwhelmed right now.
		And so the idea that the only tactic that is available is full-scale lockdown, I think, is not backed by evidence.
		I am also growing extraordinarily tired of people shouting that they are on the side of science while variously changing their opinion literally every 15 seconds.
		So when masks are bad, now masks are good.
		Protests are bad with anti-lockdown protests.
		Now, protests are good.
		And this woke virus spares you so long as you're kneeling for George Floyd.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, think how bananas that is.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's crazy.
		It's utterly nuts.
		I mean, that was mind-bogglingly incredible.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		De Blasio this week said that, in effect.
		You are allowed to protest because racism is so systemic and profoundly evil that somehow it supersedes the deadly virus.
		But everyone else, a couple of Orthodox Jews playing in a park in Brooklyn, we got a problem.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's a seriously woke virus.
		I mean, good for Colin Kaepernick, who should win the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the Nobel Prize in Biology, because kneeling, it turns out, actually cures coronavirus, which is pretty awesome when you think about it.
		That's incredible, incredible.
		I think that there have been a bunch of false binaries that have been set up, and those false binaries are things like it's either total lockdown or total openness.
		It annoys me when people on the right treat mask wearing as though it's like a virtue signal, and it annoys me on the left when people treat mask wearing as though it's an incredible virtue signal.
		You're an evil, evil person if you're not wearing a mask when you go to sleep at night, and you're a better person if you wear a mask.
		And on the right, there are people, for sure, who are like, well, I'm not wearing a mask under any circumstance.
		It's a violation of my freedoms and all this kind of stuff.
		When you're in a populated area with a lot of other people, wear a mask.
		Isn't that bad?
		You should do it because you don't want other people to get sick.
		That's the best we can do at this point in time.
		With that said, the idea that we're going to full scale lock down the entire American economy, or that we are going to leave children out of school for the next year because of COVID, that seems patently insane to me.
		The reason it seems patently insane is because the data are Pretty murky on a lot of issues.
		They're absolutely not murky on the risk to children.
		There is so little risk to children.
		If you're under the age of 20, you have a better chance of dying from the flu than you do of COVID.
		I mean, that's just a straight stat.
		And what that means is that maybe we can come up with some creative solutions where parents actually have a place where their kids can go for schooling.
		So my friend, Jon Pythor, over at Commentary Magazine, I thought he had a good idea.
		He said, why don't you keep the schools open?
		And then you have a bunch of 20-year-old proctors, and then you have the teachers zoom in.
		That's interesting.
		The teacher has to do it to all the kids at home, right?
		Why don't they just do it at school?
		Right, that seems like a fairly decent idea.
		But the incentive structure is created for politicians to lock down
		because the more sternly you treat the virus, the better the media are going to treat you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, the more virtuous you are.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, exactly.
		And this is how you see Andrew Cuomo, who was a garbage heap of a governor in this whole time, and who now creates magical posters, tributes to himself, with literally a curve that represents the number of dead bodies in his state, being treated as though he was great at this, when his death rate is like eight or nine times that of Florida, where Ron DeSantis is the font of all evil, and Greg Abbott in Texas, it's like 11 or 12 times the death rate in Texas.
		None of the media coverage makes sense.
		There are a bunch of issues here.
		The politics of it makes no sense.
		The media coverage of it makes some sense, but it's a really ugly sense because the politics have overwhelmed the data.
		And then on the data level, there's just a lot we actually don't know at this point.
		We don't know whether there's such a thing as T cell immunity.
		That's been one of the theories that herd immunity actually may start to kick in as low as 20%.
		This is a theory from Sweden.
		Could be at 60%.
		We don't know whether this thing is, how far away you have to be from somebody.
		They say six feet, but the WHO was saying a meter until five minutes ago.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		By the way, technically, my guy's measured.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We're seven feet away.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah, no, and I insisted on that.
		I'm a person who's taking this very seriously.
		I've been taking it seriously because I have 65-year-old parents.
		So I'm not on the, let's be skeptical of all of this stuff.
		But the idea that it's gonna wipe out vast swaths of the American public and that it's, They don't care.
		dangerous thing that has ever existed on planet Earth and that we have to shut down the economy ad infinitum.
		Here's the problem.
		Has anyone ever actually done on the lockdown side any analysis of what the costs are on the other side?
		All I hear is if you mention those costs, then you're bad and you don't care about human beings.
		And that's insane.
		Like, these are public policy decisions, and we should obviously be having conversations about how to protect the most vulnerable, and also how to tranche people back into work.
		I mean, I've been saying for a long time that it may end up being that the way that we end up moving forward is what won, I think it was Hebrew University.
		or Tel Aviv University scientists suggested was controlled avalanche.
		The idea was if you're most vulnerable, you stay home and we figure out ways to protect you.
		And if you're less vulnerable, then you go out and if you get it, you get it.
		And then you're one person closer to herd immunity.
		That may be effectively de facto what we're seeing anyway, right?
		'Cause this is how, let's be real about this.
		If you're 20, this is kind of how you're treating it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And this is where they're gonna say you wanna kill people.
		Last time you were here, you were here for my book launch and then the video, you were the number one trend on
		Twitter because you said we're gonna have to deal
		with some level of death.
		It's a problem, we don't want to, but that's just reality.
		And then they came after you and said, "No, no, no one should die in our perfect planet."
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I made the very pure and obvious--
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Which everyone.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Everyone understands the argument I was making, which is that if you're looking at days of life versus just lives lost, that is a different calculation, and it is done by actuaries every single day.
		The federal government has actuaries that do this on every single policy.
		But again, the media narrative is very easy here.
		If you don't mirror the policies they want, then you're a grandma killer who wants to murder your own grandma.
		It doesn't matter that I'm taking all sorts of extraordinary, you know, measures in order to protect my own parents on this thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so, all right, one more thing on this then, which is without going too far down the conspiracy channel road, how much of this is that the system just wants to destroy Trump?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because I don't think that none of it's about that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think that in the media, I'll say it's mostly unconscious, but I'd say a heavy percentage of it.
		I'd say over 50% is.
		If a Democrat were president, it would be how the president has handled this.
		He's got the ventilators.
		Everybody's doing the right things.
		Everybody's trying.
		This is an unprecedented situation.
		If it's Trump's fault, why are we seeing secondary spikes in countries ranging from Australia to Japan to Israel?
		Is he president?
		We'd be seeing that sort of narrative.
		We're not, because Trump is the president.
		I'm not going to give any credit to the media.
		For Democratic governors, I think all these stars align for lockdown, the economy's bad.
		OK, well, if I have to blame Trump, I'll blame Trump.
		I mean, this is what Cuomo's shtick is, right?
		That all problems in New York state are attributable to the federal government.
		They're not attributable to him, the governor of New York state.
		So, I mean, Trump is convenient, is a convenient Yeah.
		to hit and you get the added benefit of maybe throwing him out of office.
		There have been those who predicted that as soon as Joe Biden is president that this will
		disappear from the news within a month.
		I'm not sure it'll be quite that quick, but I think that there is a good shot that at
		least the alarmism, the sort of what we're stirring in the dark without any sort of oarsmen.
		Okay, that's true.
		And guess what?
		It's true everywhere.
		It's true everywhere.
		It's not just true in the United States.
		It's true in the UK.
		It's true in France.
		It's true in Spain.
		It's true in Italy.
		Nobody knows anything.
		Okay, and once you recognize that, you realize that politicians may not have all that much power to do anything here.
		Because guess what?
		New York locked all the way down, and they lost 33,000 people.
		And Florida didn't lock down as much, and they've lost like 4,000 people.
		Colorado opened up at the exact same time as Georgia.
		Exact same time, like same week.
		Colorado's caseload is down 40%.
		Georgia's caseload is up like 100%.
		So nobody knows anything.
		So this idea that like everyone's sitting there with their slide rule and going, here's how many people I want to die.
		It's just, it's not true.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		All right.
		With that in mind, let's talk about the book a little bit.
		One of the interesting things.
		So you're talking about three easy steps, but one of the interesting things that you did with the book, there's only six chapters in a pretty, what do you, how many pages?
		About 250, something like that.
		All right.
		So first chapter one, you talk about the American philosophy.
		You think it's pretty good, the American philosophy.
		What do you think the American philosophy is, you radical?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So I think the Declaration of Independence pretty well expresses the American philosophy.
		It has a few key elements, right?
		There's an idea that your rights pre-exist government, and that government was instituted in order to protect those rights.
		So those rights adhere to you as an individual.
		They are given to you by nature or God, whichever you prefer.
		And the idea is that those are discoverable in nature using our reason.
		Those would be the right to free speech, the right to practice of religion, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right?
		All of these are embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
		So those rights pre-exist government.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people struggle with that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And we'll get to in a second what the actual counter vision here is.
		Because what we're seeing right now is two separate and very conflicting visions of the United States and what it ought to be.
		The second, kind of the second element here is the idea that because government was instituted to protect those rights, if government violates those rights, it loses its raison d'etre.
		So the idea is that government is accountable to the people and that the government doesn't have the,
		even if a majority wants it to, the government does not have the wherewithal
		to violate those rights without undermining its own reason for existence.
		That idea of limited and enumerated powers that we see in the declaration and the constitution,
		that's a central part of American philosophy.
		The idea that we are equal, the equality provisions of the Declaration of Independence,
		all men are created equal.
		Now, obviously Jefferson, and the founders were very clear about this,
		they don't mean everybody has equal talents, it doesn't mean everybody makes equal choices,
		it doesn't mean that I'm gonna play in the NBA, never gonna happen.
		Sadly for you, it also means that you will not be playing in the NBA.
		But with that said, the idea is that we all have equal rights
		before government and before the creator.
		We have to be treated equivalently by the law.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But then these people owned slaves, women couldn't vote, how could this be?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So this is the countervailing vision of the American philosophy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Oh, should we wait?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We're doing chapter one, right?
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		Okay.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		All right, keep going.
		And all of these kind of root beliefs, rights that pre-exist government, the idea that all men are created equal and there's an equality before law, the idea that the government is accountable to the people, but that even a majority is not allowed to
		run roughshod over the rights of the minority.
		All of these are then embodied in the Constitution, which is designed with checks and balances
		and enumerated powers.
		Those are really the kind of key provisions.
		They're really kind of three key provisions of the Constitution when you boil it all down.
		Checks and balances, enumerated powers, and federalism, right, subsidiarity.
		The idea that the best governance is local because you and I live in the same town, we
		probably agree more than I do with some guy 3,000 miles away I've never met.
		The idea that there are checks and balances because if I'm given ultimate power, I could
		be a tyrant.
		You can be a tyrant, but if we check each other, then we won't be running.
		Not you, you're awesome.
		I for sure would be.
		And then the idea that, so subsidiarity, the idea of checks and balances, and the idea of enumerated powers, meaning the government is given a very specific set of things to do, and does not have any power beyond those things.
		That was the goal of the Constitution, is to provide the actual institutions that preserve the rights that are talked about in the Declaration of Independence.
		And this creates an explosion in liberty, not only in the United States, but an explosion of liberty that carries throughout the world.
		Now, that sort of brings us to the question of American history, right?
		So we can go through, I think the best way to discuss it, not to dictate to you how I
		do the job, but when it comes to the book, I think that there are three things that are
		being destroyed.
		One is the American philosophy, and the second is American history.
		So the idea in American history is that these founding principles were good, great, they're
		universal, and that we've not always lived up to them.
		And the story of America is about human beings falling short of principle, which is what
		human beings always do.
		Human beings are sinful.
		Human beings can be evil.
		Human beings do horrible things to each other.
		And so the story of American history is us seeking to live up to those principles, and then failing, and then striving, and then succeeding.
		And that's a great story, because that's a story of triumph.
		And it means that we're all part of the same history.
		Even if we're part of a victimized group, then we're the heroes of the story because we overcame that victimization to become part of this great chain that is the United States, to claim our share of the American dream.
		And I'm not the one saying this.
		Frederick Douglass was saying this as a former freed slave in 1852.
		He was talking about how July 4th doesn't include us.
		But it should include us because Independence Day was meant to apply to everyone.
		So are you going to live up to your promises or not?
		This is Martin Luther King's promissory note, the idea that we're here to make good on the check that you signed us in 1776.
		And so American history is the story of us trying to fulfill those principles.
		and getting better and better at extending those principles to a broader and broader group of people,
		which is a story of triumph.
		And not just extend those principles internally, but also extend those principles around the world.
		The idea of free markets and ownership of your own means of production,
		and extending this around the world to free billions of people from enslavement and poverty.
		The idea of an America that frees billions of people from abject tyranny.
		That's an amazing, amazing story.
		So the story of America is that America, President Trump once sloganeered, "Make America Great Again."
		But the idea of American history is that America always had great principles, but people are not always great.
		So America was always great if you think of America as an idea.
		If you think of America as a set of Americans, there were some who sucked and there were some who were great, right?
		But the idea is that America was always great.
		It was great from inception.
		It just didn't live up to its own founding creed.
		And then finally, there's the idea of a culture that ties us together.
		And this doesn't mean that we watch the same TV shows.
		It means that we speak sort of the same language, right?
		That when I say, right, you know inherently what I mean.
		When I say free speech, we both immediately flash to you, okay, that means I get to say what I want.
		When I say that there's freedom of association, it means I get to hang out with the person I want to hang out with.
		If we say freedom of religion, it means I get to worship in the way that I want.
		These are just clear-cut things that we agree on, ways that we discuss the world.
		And a culture of rights, not just legal rights that are enshrined, a culture of rights means that even outside the bounds of government, we should respect each other enough to acknowledge that we're going to
	disagree sometimes, right?
	This is where we get into cancel culture.
	Because the idea is that, and you'll hear this from the left,
	well, you know, we're not, when the New York Times, you know,
	ousts somebody or when the Atlantic fires Kevin Williamson or something,
	that's not, that's not the government doing it.
	So what are you complaining about? That's just the free market at work.
	That's true. That's true. It's not the government.
	But that only goes so far.
	If we don't have a culture where we actually respect each other's ability to speak,
	then culture always precedes what happens in law.
	It's a pretty short leap from the entire culture says a view is out of balance to let's make that view illegal eventually.
	Now, that doesn't mean all views have to be held in equal respect.
	It doesn't mean there's no such thing as an Overton window.
	Of course, there is an Overton window.
	But it does mean that you have to have enough respect for your neighbor to say, listen, we're allowed to disagree.
	And our rights mean that you're allowed to misuse that right.
	Even if I don't like the way you're using that right, the way to overcome your misuse of that right is by using my rights to free speech to gather a group of people who disagree with you.
	And then we can win, right?
	Then we can convince you and convince the people around you, right?
	That's the way that rights were always approached.
	That culture of rights has been undermined.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So let's pause there for a second because we're dealing with this cancel culture nonsense.
		Right now do you think that there is just a certain inertia to movements like cancel culture because of because of all of the stuff that we started this conversation talking about that it's like we've had this thing slowly building but now it does feel like it hit the tipping point and now it's just spread everywhere.
		Do you think there's like a functional reason for that?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I think that there have been decades of an attempt to rethink what rights actually mean.
		So one of the things that the left has done is, in the same way that we started off by talking about the redefinition of racism, they've redefined nearly every term that we've talked about here.
		They've redefined every element of American philosophy to mean almost the precise reverse of what it originally was meant to mean.
		They've redefined virtually all of American history, which is what the 1619 Project is about.
		And they've redefined our culture of rights so that rights are, in fact, ways to oppress people.
		This is when we talked a little bit earlier about the right to free speech being seen as a way for the powerful to silence the powerless.
		And you see people actually saying this kind of stuff.
		It's crazy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is in effect what white fragility is about.
		This is in effect what all of the, the whole BLM platform, this is what it is about.
		Like you're not just making this stuff up.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		No, I mean, and when I wrote the book, I didn't realize that it was going to break in the open this way.
		I really thought that, honestly, when COVID hit in March, I thought, OK, I wrote this book to rush out before the election, and now it's going to be irrelevant because it's all going to be COVID all the time.
		And then all this stuff just broke loose in the last couple of months.
		And I thought, wow, I mean, I'm not a prophet, but if I were.
		But that's really how it feels.
		I mean, looking back through the book and realizing that all the arguments that I was making against this particular vision of America, which I call disintegrationist.
		And the reason I call it disintegrationist is because I think that it really stands for the coming apart of America.
		I think that there's a group of people who say, here are all the things we have in common.
		And as Lincoln said, we have to be brothers, because if we're not brothers, we're going to be enemies, right?
		That's just how this is going to be.
		The better angels of our nature had better win, and we better all be on the same page.
		Or we're going to fall apart.
		I think there's a group of people who believe that they are the sole expositors of ultimate truth.
		And as the sole expositors of ultimate truth, they get to club everybody else into submission.
		And therefore, all of the checks and balances should go away because they are now the godlike leaders who know all the wisdom of the ages.
		They're the best people who have ever lived.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it incredible that they are better than everyone that came before them?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		What lucky people we are to be living in this time with such unbelievably special people who get to rip down statues of Ulysses S. Grant and who get to suggest that Abraham Lincoln was a bad man.
		Whereas they, if they had been living in 1863, they wouldn't have just been abolitionists.
		They would have been people who are arguing for all end to segregation and complete Mixing of people of different races.
		All the principles they hold today that are good principles, right?
		All those principles, they would have held them doubtless in 1863 with no background in any of this stuff.
		If they had been born, all of their values are sort of floating miasmatically in the atmosphere, and they internalize them, and they would have been... It wouldn't matter.
		You could have plopped them down in Rome in 100 BC, and they would have held exactly the same values.
		They exist outside of time.
		They exist outside of history.
		They exist absent any other outside influences.
		They're just the most incredible people who have ever lived in the history of humanity.
		Good for them, and good for us that we get to live at a time of such things.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's so interesting because I've been thinking about this a lot, like if you think about how fast it seems the world is moving right now, like just think about today versus just what we were talking about say 10 years ago in 2010, whatever the hell it was.
		Now if you take that further back and you plop that person down in 1863 and try to imagine how different the world is, like people don't really just sit in that for a minute and realize how different it was without plumbing and electricity and all of those things.
		And yet somehow their entire moral code Would have been, you know, which they make up.
		It would be exactly the same.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		They're not standing on the shoulders of giants.
		They didn't learn anything from Lincoln.
		American history has nothing to do with their positions.
		They exist as free-floating moral actors in the universe without any background whatsoever.
		They came to all of the exact right conclusions about life simply through a priori thinking.
		It's truly an unbelievable achievement of the human mind.
		I think, again, we should all feel very lucky to be in their presence.
		Robert George, he's the professor of moral philosophy over at Princeton.
		He says he uses this as a sort of thought experiment.
		He says, okay, so he'll ask his class, you're living in 1860 in Alabama.
		Are you an abolitionist or are you pro-slavery?
		And everybody in the room, everyone says I'm an abolitionist.
		And then he's like, really?
		Really are you?
		Because I'd love for you to name the extremely unpopular position you're taking at the risk to your life, reputation, and career right now today.
		Like it actually risks anything.
		Because none of you can name any of them, right?
		You're actually going along to get along with most of your morality.
		The example that I like to use on this is, we're living in an era where everybody thinks of themselves as deeply enlightened and all of this.
		A hundred years from now, all the statues of President Obama will come down.
		Why?
		Because he ate meat.
		A hundred years from now, all the statues of President Obama will come down because there's video of him at campaign rallies, you know, in Iowa.
		A campaign stops eating a corn dog.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		He had that hot dog.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, and people are going to say, I'm with you on this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's the next frontier of this lunacy.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And what's going to happen is it's going to be, there were people who knew back then that this was being mean to animals, and you ignored that sort of suffering.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And worse than mean to animals, it's also destroying the environment.
		Right, it's destroying the environment.
		The cow farts.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, you drove a car.
		I mean, there were people who weren't driving cars.
		You can't say that you were completely innocent in all of this.
		Look, nobody is completely innocent in all of this.
		The reason that we erect monuments to people is for the good stuff they did, not the bad stuff they did.
		But, again, when you think of yourself as better than any human being who has ever lived, it gives you an awful lot of moral authority to rip down everything around you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so we've sort of veered into Chapter 2 here, which is when you talk about that disintegration.
		Do you think that once something starts disintegrating at a certain rate, that then it's inevitable that it will disintegrate?
		I think a lot of people are feeling that right now.
		Like, oh my God, the world really has shifted, the conversation has shifted, it feels like everything's out of control.
		Can it actually, you know, if the wave has started, can you actually turn the wave around?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think the only way to really turn the wave around is to re-familiarize ourselves with principles, which is a difficult task.
		I mean, we've basically assumed that freedom was in the water for 50 years, 60 years, and it turns out freedom was not in the water.
		Kool-Aid was in the water.
		And people have been drinking it at university campuses, and they've been reading Howard Zinn for a while.
		And now they think they have a very sophisticated view of the world.
		And so it takes some education in American history and American philosophy to really re-inculcate that.
		But that's a hard slog.
		I think it's going to be a rough time here.
		I don't think this is going to... I think there's this assumption on the part of liberals, like good-hearted liberals, who actually believe a lot of the stuff in the book.
		Because this is not partisan, right?
		I really believe that everything that I've said about American history and American culture, like rights are good, and the Declaration of Independence, All human beings are equal before the law.
		Like, this should be pretty consensus stuff.
		I mean, this is not right, left, or center.
		I know a lot of liberals who agree with this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		But I think that there's this assumption that because everything is Trump polarized, that if Biden is elected, that all this sort of goes back to normal, everybody calms down, it goes away.
		I think they are really underestimating an ascendant left that sees the wave of history behind them.
		And they also see a weak actor in Joe Biden.
		They feel like they can push him around.
		I think they're probably right about that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the guy's got serious problems.
		It's like, that's the scandal, right?
		Like, isn't that the scandal that no one will talk about the scandal, which is that obviously something's wrong with him?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it is pretty incredible that that's considered such an out-of-balance opinion.
		I mean, without any evidence, you're suggesting that he's on the verge of senility.
		I mean, watch a tape of him like eight years ago, and then watch a tape of him today.
		Joe Biden was never any great shakes, but he looks like a different dude.
		And listen, you can elect him if you want.
		I mean, that's your prerogative.
		But recognize that there's a high likelihood you're also electing his vice president.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so okay, so we started talking about culture, and I wanted to pause you in the middle of it, because when we talk about culture, Ben, someone's gonna say, you're talking about American culture, that's chapter three, but American culture must mean white culture, that's what you really mean, Shapiro, is that it's about white culture.
unidentified		Right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And this goes back to this whole anti-racist idea, which is that rights themselves are a vestige of a white supremacist system, which ignores all of the progress not only made by black people, but made by black people in the name of rights.
		In the name of rights.
		Martin Luther King saying, we ought to have the same freedoms that you all are guaranteed.
		Our freedom of speech matters no less than your freedom of speech.
		An American saying, because you're making that argument, not the argument that the entire system is bad, not the sort of early Malcolm X argument that white people are devils and that the entire system is garbage and all of this stuff that he abandoned later in his career, because you're making the actual American argument, Yeah, we'll give that a hearing.
		That makes sense to us, right?
		I mean, this is the argument, again, being made by Frederick Douglass.
		He wasn't saying that July 4th is bad.
		He's saying we're not included in that promise.
		We should be included in that promise.
		When you invoke the deep principles of America, your movement is likely to see victory, right?
		This is the same thing that happened with the gay rights movement.
		The gay rights movement said, listen, you guys are guaranteed freedom of association.
		You're guaranteed freedom in who you love.
		Right? So it was a rights argument.
		Now, I may not have agreed with the application with regard to behavior,
		but the actual rights with regard to marriage, with the actual early argument, which was everybody should
		basically be left alone, that was a very robust argument and had a lot of power
		behind it because most Americans went, "Yeah, that makes sense to me."
		I mean, I have that kind of freedom.
		Why shouldn't that guy have that kind of freedom?
		Like, why not?
		Which is a different argument than some of the arguments we're now having, which have moved beyond the rubric of rights into, well, I can demand from you a good or service.
		That's a bit of a different thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And by the way, as you know, we've discussed this a million times, that issue of the gay rights thing was one of the first things that really sort of broke me related to what was happening with the right, how the right was being tolerant, because all I get is this endless hate from the he, him, she, her, Z, Whatever, tolerant people in the name of diversity, I just get endless hate from them, and yet here I can sit across from you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We've done it a million times already, and it's all been seen a gajillion times before, but, and it's like, yeah, here we are, and we live in the same country, and I know we want to live.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		People in America have always responded to rights arguments.
		Not everybody at every time, but overall the chain of American history is Americans recognizing that arguments that are based on rights are good arguments.
		Now the left has abandoned arguments based on rights.
		They've made arguments based on either entitlements, like you owe me X, which is not you leave me alone.
		You owe me this specific thing.
		Or the argument that rights themselves are again, and this is so pernicious, rights themselves
		are reinforcement of an evil hierarchy.
		And that is so unbelievably dangerous because what that leads to is now we get to encroach
		upon your rights in order so that we can get rid of the hierarchy.
		This is an argument that was first made by Herbert Marcuse who was a neo-Marxist philosophy
		professor at UC Berkeley, very, very influential guy in the 60s.
		He's the creator of Make Love Not War.
		And one of his big ideas was this idea of what he called repressive tolerance.
		Meaning tolerance for, he literally says this, tolerance for opinions from the left, intolerance of opinions from the right.
		Because if you tolerate opinions from the right, then the people on the right might win.
		And if the people on the right win, they're going to use that power over you.
		So we have to actually stop the right before it gets started.
		And we do that by curbing their right to speak freely.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It sounds like basically every professor at Harvard for the last 30 years probably.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, and it's every fascist in history, which is I know the road to utopia
		and it runs directly over your house, right?
		It runs directly over your rights.
		And so the argument that's now being made that all rights are essentially just vestiges
		of power relationships and they're covers for evil racist arguments,
		that if you say freedom of speech, what you're really saying is you don't wanna hear
		from this black guy.
		It's like, that is not only a nasty and scurrilous accusation, it's also incredibly dangerous
		because you have now conflated the idea that individuals have rights
		that cannot be encroached upon by anyone with the idea that those people are somehow supremacist.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, are you worried that within the cultural aspect of this, that as we're seeing population shifts now, the amount of people moving out of New York City, people moving out of California, they're moving to Texas, and then they're gonna turn Texas blue, and then we've got a whole other problem, but as we're seeing sort of the idea of federalism in play, right?
		The good part of federalism, so people are taking responsibility for their lives, that it's gonna come at a cost that our cultural unity is going to really be ripped apart, because we will all just move to places that are more in line with us.
		And then it's like, well, what the hell is the point of the union?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's exactly right.
		I mean, I think as we polarize, and it's not just states, which I think are getting redder or bluer.
		I mean, this is one thing that we are seeing.
		Purple states are sort of disappearing.
		They either turn redder, like Ohio was turning redder until the last few moments, and Iowa was turning redder, or they're turning bluer, like Colorado or Virginia.
		As the states polarize, that's gonna be a problem.
		It's gonna be even more of a problem in just everyday life.
		So yes, California is blue and Texas is red.
		But what happens when companies are either blue or red?
		When you're the head of Goya and you say a nice thing about Trump and suddenly your company is verboten.
		Now your company is bad and we're going to boycott your company.
		Listen, I wear Nike shoes.
		They fit my feet well.
		I like them.
		Good.
		Whatever.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But you also like the repression of speech in China.
unidentified		Come on.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I do.
		It's one of my favorite things.
		But Nike's... At no point before they started overtly signaling on politics did I think to myself, I really wonder how Phil Knight voted.
		It never occurred to me.
		It never occurred to me to say, you know what?
		I'm looking at this Apple computer.
		I really...
		Do Tim Cook's principles match my own principles?
		It never occurred to me to do that because the idea was, okay, he's providing me a good or service that I like.
		His politics have nothing to do with it.
		And good, that's how we should live because we can have common spaces.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They say made in Cupertino.
		Oh, no, no.
		They say, what do they say?
		Designed in Cupertino.
		They don't tell you where it's made.
		That's the genius of what they do.
		But yes, that sort of endless polarization of everything.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And the politicization of everything makes things so ugly and it makes it so that, I mean, I got mocked online for this.
		I said like, I'm going to find it harder to watch the NBA this season if the NBA has Black Lives Matter on the side of the court.
		Because, again, the offense in Black Lives Matter is not the actual phrase.
		Of course Black Lives Matter!
		It's perfectly obvious.
		The whole point of painting Black Lives Matter on a court is to suggest that there is a vast swath of the American public for whom this is not obvious.
		You're not painting on the side of the court, babies are good.
		We all kind of agree babies are good.
		It would make no sense to paint that.
		The minute you paint Black Lives Matter on a court what you're really saying is, And there's a bunch of nefarious people we don't like, wink, wink, nod, nod, Trump supporters, who don't believe Black Lives Matter.
		When you're saying that you can put a slogan on the back of your NBA jersey, I don't want to see, I really, I don't want to see, defund the police lobbing an alley-oop to raise taxes.
		That's not my...
		That's not my thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		By the way, this is literally a policy of the NBA now.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		There's, what is it, about 20 social justice phrases.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, not free Hong Kong.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		You can't do free Hong Kong.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You can't do free Hong Kong, right.
		That's one you can't do.
		They won't let you even make it as a fan.
		But you're not making this thing up.
		I mean, they've allowed for about 20 phrases that are social justice phrases so that you don't have to have James on the back of your uniform.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So what you'll inevitably end up with is people who are like, yeah, but I still like basketball.
		And they'll start a basketball league that's like the patriotic basketball.
		I don't want that.
		I want to be able to share basketball with people that I disagree with.
		I want to be able to watch TV and understand that I'm not going to be sucker punched just for the fact that I tend to believe in lower taxes and more personal freedom.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't it suck though in some way that we really were ahead of the curve on this?
		I don't mean that to pass - Oh yeah, I know.
		But literally, people can watch videos.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		We've been having the same conversation for years. - Three years ago,
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		or four years ago, we were talking about how as politics infects everything,
		it is going to destroy everything.
		That if you, every time you turn on ESPN, if it's about race or it's about politics,
		it will have destroyed sports, and we're there.
		You know, I have a great idea for a show.
		You wanna do a show together?
		How about we will watch, this is what I do for cardio anyway, we will watch old NBA games together and do play-by-play.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I 100% do that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We'll do play-by-play and stream it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Just straight play-by-play.
		Yeah, exactly.
		I 100% do that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You wanna do color or play by play?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You talk fast, so you gotta be play by play and I'm color?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think that's probably right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we gotta do it that way.
		That's what I do for cardio.
		Watching 90s Bulls games with Jordan is way more interesting than when they bring this thing back and I gotta hear about...
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I don't feel like all the common spaces that we had where we weren't being lectured are now being taken over and then militarized.
		And this is one of the things I do talk about in the book with regard to corporations.
		So there's this widespread perception corporations are right wing.
		They're so conservative they're right wing.
		Corporations are profit seeking enterprises.
		If you are the squeakiest wheel and you suggest that you're going to go after a corporation, the corporation will probably hate you.
		And so what the left has realized is they can do this on any variety of topics.
		They can go after Coca-Cola and say, you know, Coke, you really shouldn't appear on Facebook because Facebook allows people who are right-wing on there.
		And Coke's like, listen, I don't have a dog in this fight.
		I don't really want to get involved.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I just want people to drink soda.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, exactly.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's my thing.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And so all of the people who wanted to stay out of the fight are now in the business of virtue signaling to the left because the squeakiest wheel gets the grease.
		Well, eventually, what's going to happen?
		and it's going to be bad, is the right's going to fight back the exact same way.
		Eventually, the right's going to say, "Listen, if you don't give us the messages we want,
		we're not going to patronize your company.
		We're going to be the only..."
		And by the way, you see companies that are doing great business specifically based on
		this model.
		Our friends over at Black Rifle Coffee are doing exactly this kind of business.
		They basically said, "We're the anti-Starbucks.
		Starbucks is your woke, progressive, SJW coffee."
		And over here, you know what we like?
		We like guns.
		We like freedom.
		We like the military.
		Drink our coffee.
		And people are like, sounds better to me.
		I guess I'll do that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And they're killing it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And they're killing it.
		And that's what's going to happen.
		There's going to be two companies.
		Now, can there be a lot of money made?
		Sure.
		But does that further polarize the culture?
		In every single way, it polarizes the culture.
		You're not going to be able to live next door to somebody who you disagree with without suspecting they're trying to get one over on you.
		And this is also where the left All these things cross streams, right?
		The destruction of the culture, the destruction of the history, the destruction of the philosophy.
		These all cross streams because once you destroy the culture and all the commonality, then you know what's a really important thing at that point?
		All the checks and balances of the government, right?
		Because that prevents 51% of the population from cramming down their perspective on the other 49%.
		So naturally, the disintegrationists would love nothing better than to ditch all of the checks and balances.
		Ditch the United States Senate, ditch the Electoral College, get rid of all those things.
		We'll just have a pure majoritarian system, and we'll just ram down, get rid of federalism, we'll ram down from the top this one, and once you do that, then the risk of the country really splitting becomes incredibly severe.
		Because with 51% of the population, you can say to me that you're going to tell me how to raise my child?
		Forget about it.
		And there are hundreds of millions of people like me, I would think.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you have a line, I think it's on page three of the book, about that basically the way we look at the world is that viral picture from a couple years ago that either you see the dress as black and blue or you see the dress as gold and white.
		Is that really what this is now?
		That we are at the point that I think about 20 of us tried to stop from happening for a couple years.
		There may be more than 20 of us, but a bunch of us tried online to stop it from happening.
		That this thing was going to happen no matter what.
		And that basically we're there now and we both just see a different dress.
		And to actually bring that together, you already hit on it in a certain way, we have to go back to some of those principles and things like that.
		But in a certain way that may be, if you factor in the internet and just the pervasive nature of woke culture, it may be an impossible project.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It might be.
		It might be.
		The only way that you bridge that gap between how you view the dress is by saying, hey, maybe we can see this in different ways and still agree to be friends.
		And that, I think, is the one thing that the disintegrationists do not want above all.
		Because if we all agree that we can disagree, well, then maybe I might convince some of you, and you might convince some of us, and we might have a conversation, and we might leave each other alone and recognize that we're human beings.
		So the key is the polarization is the point.
		It's not a byproduct.
		The polarization is the feature, not the bug.
		And it's really depressing.
		But the point that I'm trying to make in the book is that when I say this stuff about the
		Declaration or the Constitution, when I talk about checks and balances or equal rights
		before law, when I say this stuff, I feel like most Americans, I'm not talking about
		a silent majority, I mean like most Americans, period, basically agree with this stuff.
		And they've just not recognized that there is a threat to these things.
		Because what the left has so cleverly done, is what I referred to earlier, is they've really shifted the language.
		So it went from, I have a right to free speech to, well, you know, I have a right not to be offended.
		Well, no, that's a very different use of the word right.
		The word right typically meant that you have a right not to be encroached upon by me.
		You have a right against me doing something bad to you.
		You do not have a right to violate my ability to speak freely because some unspecified harm may at some point attend upon you.
		You don't have a right to my stuff.
		You don't have a right to run my business.
		You don't have a right to tell me how to raise my kids.
		The redefinition of right from something I had that pre-existed government.
		It was a thing I had that pre-existed government and I had it against all other people.
		To, I have a demand of you, and I wish that demand to be honored.
		So redefining right as a demand is a very clever trick.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So, but do you, let's give the devil his due here.
		Do you think, and I know we have to separate the leaders of this thing from the foot soldiers, but do you think they believe it?
		When they tell you words are violence, but then they'll also tell you burning down a business isn't violence because it's not, you know, you're not murdering a person.
		Although I suspect if we burned down their house, they might think it's a violent act.
		Do you think they genuinely and honestly believe what they're saying, or that they've just outsourced their faculties, I suppose, to the greater cause?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I think there's some of both.
		I mean, I'll grant them, either one ends with the same kind of conclusion, which is authenticity.
		They're authentically believing, or they're authentically stupid, or both.
		And I think that there's some of both.
		I mean, I think that there's certainly an element of the narrative matters a lot more than this particular fact pattern, right?
		There's the AOC line about how, you know, why are you so focused on whether what I'm saying is true or not?
		It's really the overall message that matters, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I think she said it has to not be factually true, but morally right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		But morally right, right?
		That is the line of the ages right here.
		And you can see it very clearly in the 1619 Project, right?
		The 1619 Project is like the best example of this ever, where the title essay includes the preposterous claim that the revolution was fought to preserve slavery, which is pure insanity.
		I mean, like, there's not a shred of evidence whatsoever to support this claim.
		Like, none.
		Zero zip zilch.
		Okay?
		And this thing was given the Pulitzer Prize.
		And Nicole Hennon-Jones doesn't give a damn about the truth.
		I mean, she really does not.
		The entire project, the 1619 project, I talk about it at length, is replete with just ridiculous claims that have nothing to do with fact.
		And an incredibly reductionist view of the universe in which everything is simply a reflection of underlying American racism.
		There can never be any other rationale for a bad thing happening.
		Everything bad that has ever happened or is happening is a result of racism.
		There are no other intervening factors.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if you know the answer to this, but has any other nation more quickly gotten rid of slavery, been formed as a nation that had slavery and then gotten rid of slavery that quickly?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I don't know the answer to that question, actually.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We gotta be in the top five!
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, things that people don't know.
		Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1961.
		The British Empire only abolished slavery in its own colonies in the 1830s.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Qatar is using slave labor right now, and somehow Al Jazeera is a hero.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And so this is not to justify slavery in the United States, but it is to recognize that history is a thing that happened, and also, there are lots of other things happening on Earth.
		It's one of my big bugaboos, is people looking at the United States in a vacuum.
		And then you look at somebody in a vacuum, and of course they look flawed.
		Any individual.
		This happens to a lot of people when they're dating, is they look at the person they're dating, and they're like, it starts off, and you're really hot and heavy on this, and you're like, ah, this is fantastic.
unidentified		And then about three weeks in, you're like, yeah, but do I like her?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I like his nose.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And then you think about it and you go, yeah, but of all the other people I know, this is like the best person.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's the best one I get.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		But if you look at anybody in a vacuum, you're like, God, look at all the flaws.
		Look at all the flaws here.
		And that's what people tend to do with the United States.
		They're looking for flaws.
		And so when you're nitpicking and looking for flaws, you don't have to nitpick to find flaws in the United States.
		But when you find flaws in the United States and you refuse to even look across the pond, and say, wait, is there a comparative case here?
		Like, is it possible, like, when people will make the claim that the United States was an imperialist, colonialist
		power and stole all the land that it's sitting on,
		it's like, well, what were native tribes doing to each other, like, for the several thousand years
		preceding that?
		Is it possible--
unidentified		All good stuff.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		--that actually seizure of land is one of the universals of human history?
		Is it possible that slavery was one of the evil universals of human history and the United States was very
		instrumental in stopping slavery and, in fact, fought a war in which 600,000 Americans died in order
		to end slavery?
		Putting things in context is actually quite useful, but it's one of the things that people on the left really don't want.
		I mean, Nikole Hannah-Jones has said this.
		Nikole Hannah-Jones said that you're not supposed to say about Jefferson, for example, that he was a man of his
		times or Ulysses S. Grant, that he was a man of his times.
		'Cause she says, well, Hitler was a man of his times, Pol Pot was a man of his times.
		Like, I'm pretty sure Hitler was not a man of his times the exact same way that George Washington
		was a man of his times.
		I really, in 1939, I don't think there were tons of people on planet Earth who were like, you know what?
		Let's just massacre 6 million Jews for no reason at all.
		But slavery was a universal of human culture for all time.
		That's not an excuse for evil.
		What it is is a recognition that human beings progress beyond evil as part of a chain of history when they learn from the past and when they stand on the shoulders of other people.
		Nicole Hannon-Jones, in her belief that slavery is bad, is standing on the shoulders of people who believe that slavery was bad.
		And that was a process of learning for all of humanity, not just in America.
		I mean, slavery, again, when I say it's universal, I mean it is universal.
		Slavery was in Africa, there's still slavery in parts of Africa today.
		Slavery was in Latin America, it was in South America, it was in Europe.
		I mean, there is no culture on earth of which I am aware that slavery was never practiced, at the very least, among warring tribes.
		So this idea that the United States is the font of all evil.
		The New York Times ran a piece where they said that the most Durable caste systems in history were India, Nazi Germany, and the United States.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, insane.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		That's patently crazy.
		You have to be so ignorant of anything remotely resembling history to make that claim.
		But this kind of stuff is cheered on at the New York Times.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, all right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So let's actually do the New York Times for a little bit here, as long as we're doing it, because as we're sitting here, this New York Times thing has burst into the world.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		At full disclosure, we both know Barry.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I'm friendlier with Barry than you are, I think, but yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I guess so, but Barry Weiss was the opinion editor who wrote the original piece on the IDW, which you reminded me, right before we started, that you weren't even in, which was psychotic, but there's a reason for that.
		You weren't in it because you're a scary conservative, and the farthest she could sort of push it was basically me and Jordan, and maybe Michael Shermer a little bit, something like that.
		But then the rest, it was good liberals and shit.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I remember finding it quite bizarre because I was literally on the stage when Eric coined the term IDW.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I was in the audience.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You were on the stage.
unidentified		It was literally Sam Harris and me and Eric, yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But I actually think you can link a lot of what's now happened at the Times right to that IDW article, because it was her way of trying to inject the last bit of liberalism, true liberalism, into the paper.
		She got demolished for it.
		She threw me under the bus because you'd have to be, what was the line?
		You'd have to be cynical or stupid to talk to some of these people on the right.
		That was a shot of me and Rogan, but more so me.
		And then by the way, I just tweeted this out and I don't like all these little silly things, but she just, David just reminded me that two years ago at dinner after the article, she apologized to him about what she did with me and said she was forced to do it by the editors.
		I don't mean any of this for Insider Baseballer to gloat, but she has now stepped away from the times, and it seems like it's a true pivotal moment that may be to now link this to your book.
		Now the full-on disintegration of the New York Times that we've been calling for years.
		But do you sense now that this is the thing, the core meltdown?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		No question.
		The inmates are in charge of the asylum.
		Barry stepping away is actually sort of the second bomb to fall, right?
		The first bomb was James Bennett, the opinion editor there, getting fired over the great crime of printing an op-ed from a sitting United States Senator on an issue where over 50% of Americans agreed.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Law and order.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
		Like, oh my god, we should stop rioting and looting.
		A threat to the safety of staffers at the New York Times.
		They were literally tweeting this bullshit safetyism out.
		I mean, it was crazy.
		They were tweeting out stuff like, you know, Tom Cotton's op-ed is threatening the safety of Nicole Hannah-Jones.
		Like, really?
		Does she feel unsafe today?
		Does she really?
		with her Pulitzer Prize sitting there shining in the corner and her six figure salary
		from the bastion of liberalism that is the New York Times.
		Barry's letter is very, very good.
		I mean, Barry's letter, which basically details, there's so many lines in it that I think are worthy of note
		and are so true.
		But the one paragraph that really, I think, goes to what we're talking about is,
		it used to be that there was a belief that journalism was about the collective enterprise of truth seeking.
		And that meant that we were all supposed to argue with each other and we were supposed
		to turn over the rocks and see what was underneath and examine all of the sculptures from a different angle,
		feel the elephant from all the different angles so you know it's an elephant and not either a snake
		or a rat or a tree, right?
		I mean, like that, but what she says is that orthodoxy has replaced that.
		This self-righteous orthodoxy where we are the keepers of all knowledge and we will cram down that version
		of knowledge on everybody else.
		That has now become the cause at the New York Times.
		That is perfectly obvious.
		That's been quite obvious for quite a long time that truth takes a backstage to all of this.
		Barry simply saying it out loud.
		And then people at the New York Times saying, "How cynical of Barry Weiss to do this."
		That's not true.
		Barry just deserved to go because she's a weakling.
		All these same idiots who are saying things like, We need to rename the Washington Redskins in order to rectify the past injustices of the United States.
		I'm offended by Washington Redskins, but Barry Weiss, that weakling, being offended by people in internal Slack channels with her editors posting her name with axe emojis.
		It's like, well, okay, hold up a second.
		I'm perfectly willing to hear you and the Washington Redskins thing.
		I frankly don't care about that very much, although I will say that Native Americans are a lot less offended than the woke white liberals who are interested in getting rid of the name Washington Redskins by polling data.
		But with all of that said, the idea that Barry's a weakling while you guys are out there saying that the term master bedroom should be removed from the lexicon because it is reminiscent of slavery, or that master and slave units on electronics need to be removed because it's reminiscent Of your great, great, great, great grandfather who was enslaved on a plantation in Alabama.
		Like, really?
		Who needs to buck up a little bit here?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so should we be feeling pretty good about things then?
		Because we were kind of right?
		I mean, or it is at some level, this goes to the institution thing, I mean, you're gonna need institutions in this new world no matter what.
		So it's like, you'd like some of them to exist at some level, right?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, so I think that clarity is good.
		Borrow from Prager, I think the clarity is definitely a good thing.
		So I'm glad that the masks are off.
		I think all the masks are coming off simultaneously, which is quite frightening.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That, I guess, is the weird part.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Normally they sort of slip gradually, and right now it's like mask, mask, mask, and they all drop simultaneously.
		And I'm like, whoa!
		I didn't realize this is that weird party from that Tom Cruise movie.
		This is a weird place, man!
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Very, very weird.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Eyes wide shut, I got it, I got it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly, you got it.
		That in and of itself is sort of frightening.
		What's going to have to happen next is what we were talking about a little earlier.
		The people who consider themselves liberal and are very angry at the censorious culture are going to have to acknowledge that the Overton window has to be just not them.
		That's the next step.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They can't.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		They won't.
		If they don't, then it really is over.
		Right?
		I mean, if the people who signed that Harper's letter still say that they can't talk with
		you, or they can't talk with me, or that they can't talk with Glenn, not even they agree
		with any of us, or think that we're wonderful human beings, but they can't talk with us,
		or say, "He's a nice guy, we just don't get along."
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I am now too scary for them.
		I know, this is great.
		Because you know what it is?
		It's also, I think this is sort of one of the things I've been thinking lately is there's a reason that so many people hate liberals.
		And you know why it kills me to make that statement.
		But it's like this self-important worldview that it's like they would never, I don't mean this for every single person that signed the thing.
		Of course, we're being sort of broad here.
		But they would never, ever want to have to admit And maybe that's right.
		I mean, that's why, again, that Harper's letter, all they had to do was find one person who voted for Trump.
		One.
		And I think that hubris is actually, they would rather sink with the ship, I think, ultimately.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And maybe that's right.
		I mean, that's why, again, that Harper's letter, all they had to do was find one person who voted for Trump.
		Yep. - One.
		And there were 63 million of them, right?
		They could have even found people I mean, I would have signed that letter if they had taken out some of the silliness about the right-wing militarizing cancel culture against cancel culture and all this kind of stuff.
		But the fact that they could not even see it in their purview to find someone- But do you think it's that they couldn't see it or that they intentionally didn't?
		I think they intentionally didn't.
		No, I think that's correct.
		I agree with you.
		I think that it's intentional because I think they knew that if I had signed on to that letter, half the people who signed it would have dropped it.
		They can have Noam Chomsky, who literally defended Pol Pot's Cambodian genocide.
		But if they put somebody like me on the letter or any of the other people who, again, it drives me up a wall because I've defended so many of these people.
		I've done it publicly.
		I've put my own resources behind them.
		I've called them privately to offer them support.
		The number of these people who will text, this is my happy birthday test, who will text me happy birthday, but will never publicly say happy birthday for fear that it will then be known that I was born and was born a human being.
		That maintains, and as long as that maintains, there ain't...
		I'll come back to the cancel culture because they're part of it.
		They just disagree with the boundaries of it.
		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's a lot.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I'm not saying that there aren't people in society who, you know, have views that are so far out of the mainstream that Dave Rubin doesn't have to host them, right?
		Or that I don't have to have a debate with them or something.
		Like, I think that that's perfectly legit.
		I'm a person.
		You're a person.
		We all get to make that standard for ourselves.
		But my window is pretty damned wide and their window is pretty damn narrow.
		They better widen that window real fast.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so with all that in mind, though, you've got to be feeling pretty good about the future of the center-right, right?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think that the future of the center-right is pretty strong.
		I think this is a weird time for it because everything has been so trumped.
		Everything is about Trump.
		I mean, I do talk a little bit in the book about Trump.
		It's pretty spare.
		But what I do say about Trump is that I think that people We need to understand the other side's perspective on what Trump is.
		So people on the left see Trump and they see he's vulgarian, he's nasty, he breaks all the rules, he's a bad man who says terrible things about people, and he's a jerk, and he's crude, and all this kind of stuff.
		And they say, I can't vote for somebody of that character.
		I think, okay, I mean, all right, fair, all right, okay, fine.
		And then people on the left have to acknowledge what many people on the right see in Trump, and what they see in Trump is not saint, That's it.
		I agree.
		a human being, what they see against him is just the only person right now
		who is standing in the breach.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's literally it. - That's it, I agree.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The one guy who will do it. - He's just the speed bump.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		He's the only speed bump that's there to slow down this thing for like half a second.
		And so kind of doing this routine that the left does and that they did in that Harper's Weekly letter,
		which is if you voted for Trump, it's probably because you are Trump.
		And it's like, well, no, actually, people are voting for Trump and voted for Trump last time.
		And many will vote for him this time, despite all of the mishandling and all of the botchery
		and all of the tweeting, because in the end, if the debate is down to make America great again
		versus America was never great, which is the argument that the hard left is making,
		I think most Americans are more in line with make America great again than America was never great.
		Now, Biden is doing it smart because he's trying to align the debate completely, right?
		Biden is smart enough to recognize that playing dead and then being very milquetoast in his own opinions is the best way to win victory, right?
		He's offering nothing hard for Trump to push back against.
		He'll be asked about monuments and he'll say, I think that the Confederates should come down, but we should leave up Columbus and Washington and Jefferson.
		Like that's a smart thing for Biden to do, but he's not gonna be a bulwark against this stuff.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, well, and also it is, him doing that is sort of the liberal signing that letter, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's like just the temporary move to make sure you're okay while they tear down everything else.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, and again, I think there's a decent argument to be made for moving Confederate statues.
		They're not heroes of mine.
		I don't think they were heroes when they were fighting.
		I get that, but you do get the feeling from Biden that he's doing that more as a political ploy than he's doing that out of pure, unbridled enthusiasm for the American family.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You know what it reminds me of?
		You know how many times I've told you that we've debated abortion in here and that I always say to you, it's not your good arguments that have moved me.
		It's the bananas left me eight-month arguments.
		I'm having that with the statues now because I used to say my preference would be you leave them all up and you put a counter plaque or something right but I kind of moved on that at one point I was like you know what to build bridges here you can put them in in museums and then you have right you know do your multimedia things about them and all that but now they're gonna burn down museum right So again, it's not the good arguments that move me in many ways, it's the ridiculousness.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, once you doubt the authenticity of the actual agenda, then it's like, all bets are off.
		Then people are gonna say I'm not budging an inch.
		And I feel the same way about the policing issue.
		Originally, when this thing started, it was like, well, sometimes the police are brutal with people and that's bad.
		All right, I feel like 193% of Americans agree with that.
		I think that there's nothing inarguable about that.
		I think most Americans also agree that the cops are generally doing an amazing job at keeping law and order.
		And most cops are standing between you and vicious villains on a daily basis.
		But, sure, there are cops who are brutal and go past the line.
		And there are a few things we can do about that.
		We can curb qualified immunity in certain cases.
		We can dispense with some of the procedures of police unions.
		We can see if there are better training programs.
		We can make it easier to fire bad officers.
		We can have a federal registry of fulfilled complaints.
		There are things we can do.
		And so if you listen to my early podcast during this George Floyd thing, a lot of it was on this.
		It was like, OK, well, here's some stuff that we could do if we actually want to do something.
		And then it turns out that all the left wanted to do was root for rioting and looting.
		I mean, Nikole Hannah-Jones literally said that she was celebrating the fact that people were calling these the 1619 riots.
		celebrating rioting and looting, talking about how it wasn't just about curbing bad behavior,
		it was about defunding the police and how the police were actually just the modern-day
		slave catchers, about how law and order need to go by the wayside, which by the way is
		going to end with dead black people.
		It's already ending with dead black people in New York City.
		100% of the people who have been shot in New York are people of color.
		100%.
		Not 95%, 100.
		Okay?
		And so once it moved beyond that--
		And so once you move beyond that...
		I think a lot of people are having that reaction.
		I can go like, screw off.
		You were never legit about this in the first place.
		You're not looking for common ground.
		You're not looking for a solution.
		You're looking for, again, a reinforcement of the idea that everything about America is inherently terrible
		and inherently bad.
		And I'm not gonna go along with you on that.
		I think a lot of people are having that reaction.
		So I think it is fair to make the simultaneous arguments that if there were to be a good faith debate
		about Confederate statues, then I could definitely see my way clear
		to saying things like, I don't see why Confederate statues should stay up.
		But if it's being argued by the same people who are like, every statue of the American founders must come down, and they must all be replaced by statues of Nicole Hannah-Jones, I'm like, well, you know, I'm gonna go no on everything, and also, I'm not interested in having a conversation with you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That really is the rock and the hard place then, because the more that they do that, the more that just average people who are just not particularly political even, they just have to say, no, we'll never move on anything.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's too bad that Trump is not a better vehicle for the resistance, right?
		I mean, in 2016, there was a feeling that he was, that he was sort of a backlash to some of these things that were happening.
		And then it turns out that he's just so easily distractible that he doesn't have the ability to focus in on this.
		Like, if you told me that there is a Republican president against whom there were essentially race riots or that there were race riots on the basis of tearing down statues of Washington and Jefferson and defunding the police, And that this president somehow was not gaining poll credence from this while his opponent was hiding in a basement and the entire Democratic Party was half rooting for the looters and rioters.
		How?
		How?
		This is one argument that I've been having with some of the folks who are, you know, Very pro-Trump.
		And again, I planned because all the factories talk about voting for him.
		Yes, me too.
		He's the only stopgap at this point.
		But that does not mean that if he loses, it's not on him.
		If he loses, it's on him.
		I mean, the media is a pre-existing condition.
		The Democrats are a pre-existing condition.
		If you somehow lose to a dead man in a time when you can literally say that your opponents are supporting the burning down of churches in some cases and are spending their days trying to defund the police while painting giant murals on Fifth Avenue, Then, you know, if you are losing my 13 points to that, that's got to be on you at a certain point.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		See, it's interesting because I'm with you on that, except to me the polls in the last 10 years, or at least in the last five years, let's say in the age of Trump, have just become completely meaningless at this point.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Not all, I don't mean Pew polls on opinions, but I mean on presidential politics, I think they've become completely meaningless.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, the national polling last time was pretty good.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And the one thing that's happened, the difference between 2016... Wait, what do you mean?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You mean in 2016 it was pretty good?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		In 2016, the state-level polling in Wisconsin and Michigan was obviously bad, and Pennsylvania too.
		The national polling was within 0.5% of the actual outcome.
		So when they say that Trump is out by 10, he's not out by 2 if he's out by 10.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, the thing that I can't get over though is that it seems to me if you voted for Trump in 2016, I can't see many people going, all right, I voted for Trump in 2016, maybe things aren't exactly as I wanted them to be, but I'm gonna vote for Biden and tearing down statues and burning things and everything else.
		So I don't see many of those guys moving, but I could see an awful lot of people who voted for Hillary Going, the party's gone completely bananas, and at least Hillary had an excited base.
		I think I mean this literally.
		I can't find one human being excited for Joe Biden, including Joe Biden.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So listen, I am no expert on this.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I called it wrong in 2016, just like everybody else who professed to have data expertise on it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Still, it was such a joy to be with you that night.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It really was.
unidentified		That was hilarious, even.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		But the problem is that he's not running against Hillary.
		2016 was a referendum on Hillary, it was not a referendum on Trump.
		She was unpopular.
		Of the voters who despised both candidates, and that was something like 10-15% of the population, they broke very, very strongly for Trump.
		The same poll done today shows them breaking strongly for Biden, and that's specifically because of the one advantage that Joe Biden has that Trump does not, which is that Joe Biden is dead.
		Joe Biden being dead is his greatest advantage.
		I've been saying this for years.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You think they're going to debate?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		No, actually.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I think not.
		I think if I had to put money on it, I would say very unlikely, because I think that, what's the point for Biden?
		I think that he'll just say, you won't turn over your tax returns, we're in the middle of a pandemic anyway, what are we gonna do?
		Like Skype debate?
		It's gonna be too weird.
		I think that if you're leading by 10 or 11, and he can actually cite Trump on this, right?
		I mean, Trump actually just didn't do a Republican debate in the middle of the last election cycle because he was insulted by Megyn Kelly or something.
		So he can actually say, listen, if it was good enough for Trump, it's good enough for me.
		I think that Biden's strategy here is the Dracula strategy.
		You stay in the crypt until night falls and then you come out.
		And I think that that's not a bad strategy because again, he doesn't make people, the problem for Trump is that it's very difficult to make people feel like Joe Biden is secretly rooting for the rioters because he's so just nothing.
		He's just so nothing.
		Now, if he nominates for VP, Kamala Harris or something, if he nominates for VP, Tammy Duckworth.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But it's coming, right?
		I mean, one way, it's gonna be one of these people, right?
		Like, that's how they have him hostage.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I can see a world where he nominates somebody like Susan Rice, who's more known as, like, foreign policy person, even though she sucked at that and was a liar, to boot.
		I could see him doing something like that.
		I think that'd actually be his smartest pick.
		Just double down on the Obama of it all.
		I mean, if he could get Michelle, he'd win 83 states, right?
		I mean, everybody sort of acknowledges this.
		States that have not yet been invented, he would win, if Michelle Obama joined the ticket.
		But with that said, you know, his, You know, Biden's greatest asset is the fact that he's inoffensive.
		And in a time when Trump wants to be able to point at the Democrats and say, look at all this crap they're doing, Biden's been sitting in the basement going, yeah, I don't really like rioting and looting so much.
		And yeah, I kind of like the Washington statues.
		And that's the tenor of his campaign.
		What that does, it throws the ball squarely in Trump's court, which is earn the vote.
		I've said forever, Trump is great at one half of politics and horrible at the other.
		Politics is about making it hard to vote for your opponent and making it easy to vote for you.
		Trump is very good at the former and he is awful at the latter.
		How many suburban women do you know who are like, yeah, you know, I'm going to bite the bullet and I'm going to vote for this guy even though he's just blech.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		And I don't know very many at all.
		I also think there were a couple of breaking points for a lot of people.
		I think COVID was one of the breaking points.
		I think, honestly, the rioting and the looting were kind of a breaking point for a lot of people, not against the left, but against Trump in some ways.
		How?
unidentified		How?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I'm just not seeing it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So I'll say that I've gotten a lot of letters from people, and I don't want to be too anti-Trump here because, again, I plan on voting for him.
		But the I got a lot of letters from people who are saying, he's the president.
		Where is he?
		You can't just tweet law and order.
		You have to actually implement law and order.
		What is he doing?
		He's out there befuddlingly tweeting about NASCAR while the country is burning.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But what did they want him to do?
		Because in many ways, I think this is what, I actually was just on Dana Perino today talking about this,
		that I think the mayor of Portland and of Seattle, all these places, they want the cities to fail
		so that Trump is forced to bring in the National Guard or something like that.
		So he will look like the Hitler that they want him to look like.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that may very well be true, but the fact is if you're gonna run on a law and order
		agenda at a certain point, you have to actually instill law
		and order.
		I mean, the signing executive order saying, we're gonna prosecute people who tear down statues,
		you know, a month after they shut down the entire city of Los Angeles at 6 p.m. every night to let people riot.
		What he should have done is he should have said, after the first riot, he should have said, listen, you guys have 24 to 48 hours to make sure that your city is secure.
		I offer the full resources of the National Guard.
		At that point, I'm sending in the National Guard.
		And you are going to deal with it.
		We have legal processes in this country for handling objections.
		We have a democracy.
		We do not have a dictatorship of the mob.
		And so if you're not going to handle it, I absolutely will.
		And I think that, frankly, I mean, you were here during the riots.
		How many Los Angelinos, law-abiding Los Angelinos, would have been like, that damned fascist?
		And how many would have been like, you know, I'm kind of glad I can go out of my house at 6.30 at night again?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		No, it was scary.
		There's no doubt it was scary.
		See, it's so interesting, and this is why you can't judge it all by meeting someone on the street and email, because I'm telling you, just walking my dog around the street, a lot of people are coming up to me and saying, I've been a Democrat my whole life, and I'm voting for Trump, and I'm buying the guns, and all kinds of stuff.
		Now again, - No, I was-- - It's a bubble in LA,
		it's a weird place and everything else, but--
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I desperately hope you're right.
		He's gonna need to make up at least some of the ground because I don't think that you can trail
		in every single swing state and then pull it out at the end.
		So he's gonna need to make up some ground, but listen, there are ages in politics.
		I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Bernie Sanders was gonna be the Democratic nominee and the stock market was at near 30,000.
		So, and by old enough, I mean, I'm more than four months old.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is that the depressing part of this though, that in many ways the progressives did win?
		Like the idea that there's an old school Democrat, putting dead Biden, I like that.
		I like that as a rule.
		I like the dragon.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Weekend at Biden's, yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, exactly.
		But that in effect, yeah, they lost the election this time, but they have won everything.
		They demolished the Democratic Party.
		You can't point to me, but please do if you can, Ben.
		Where is any decent Democrat?
		Where is JFK?
		Where is Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
		Where is any...
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		They're few and far between.
		I mean, I think that they've tried to oust them in primaries.
		Nancy Pelosi endorsed Ilhan Omar for re-election the other day.
		I mean, this is not any great shock.
		I think you're right.
		I think they've captured the Democratic Party.
		I mean, more than anything, the right focused on the wrong things.
		So, you know, I talk in the book about culture.
		The right, speaking more broadly about culture, the right Never had the wherewithal to compete in the cultural space or in the educational space.
		And so they basically ceded the ground.
		And then they said, you know what?
		We'll win it back at the ballot box, right?
		We'll elect Republicans.
		Republicans have been elected in several recent presidential elections, 2000, 2004, 2016.
		They held Congress all the way from 1994 to 2006.
		in 2016, they held Congress all the way from 1994 to 2006, and then they held it again from 2010 to 2018.
		You know, they held the Senate for wide stretches of that time,
		and the country continued to move to the left.
		The country continued to move to the left in every way.
		And that is because the institutions of popular culture and the media were totally taken over.
		The great lie that Republicans kept banking on is that reality would eventually kick in for folks, right?
		The idea was, and I know this 'cause I've been operating on campuses for a long time.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'd go and I'd talk about--
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's true.
		But I mean, just from operating on campuses, one of the great things that would happen is my very first book, which I wrote when I was 19, was about liberal bias on college campuses.
		And one of the most frequent questions I got was, well, why are you talking about college campuses?
		Who cares about college campuses?
		And I was like, it's not going to stay on college campuses.
		And people said, no, you know, they'll get out in the real world and then they'll have to be hired.
		They'll have to work a job.
		They'll have to learn to get along in the workplace.
		What if they bend the real world to their will?
		What if the person who graduated the journalism program at NYU goes on to the New York Times and isn't inculcated into a culture that values freedom of speech, but is granted the keys to the kingdom and told it's your turn to redefine the meaning of journalism?
		And that's what's happened.
		And the right basically did nothing.
		The entire ship of state has been listening to the left.
		And meanwhile, the Republicans are running up the slope, trying to plant the chairs on this side of the Titanic.
		Well, it's still listening, guys.
		At a certain point, you're gonna have to fight back culturally.
		I think that's frankly why Trump was elected, because he was seen as a culture guy, not as a governmental guy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And then- Are you saying we're the violinist on the Titanic?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're a violinist.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you're definitely one of the violinists.
		Women and children first.
		That makes me Jack, I suppose.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Women and children first, depending on how you define woman.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Shapiro, we've done about an hour and a half here.
		I know you've got a lot going on.
		I think we actually sort of touched on almost everything in the book.
		Is there anything else that you want to talk about while you're here?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I think we covered a lot.
		I think the main thing that I would just recommend to everybody is do your reading.
		If you do any reading about the American founding, if you do any reading about our culture, if you read the Constitution and the Declaration and you don't come away with tremendous admiration for the ideas behind it, and at least a little bit of respect for the people who wrote it, if your idea of your own self-righteous virtue is that you're tearing down statues of people who did more in their lifetimes than you have done in yours, then you really should be thinking More about what you are as a person and less about what people who died 250 years ago were as people, considering you're standing on their shoulders and propagating the principles that are important to you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Watch this, Shapiro, because you're a professional.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I want you to look at that camera right over there and tell people where they can get the book.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Moi.
		You can get it over at Amazon.com.
		I believe we are still putting out signed copies as well at dailywire.com slash Ben.
		Go check it out today.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here.

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