Aug. 1, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Basically, all it takes to silence a majority is a very loud, very aggressive and intransigent minority. | ||
| You can renormalize an entire institution by using, by getting maybe 20% of people inside an institution to be very loud and very solidified and repeating the same thing over and over and over, which of course is what the left is very good at. | ||
| And you can see this happen in your own life. | ||
| Like the example that's used by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the example of you have a family of four and the daughter decides one day she's vegetarian. | ||
| So she comes home, she says to mom, I'm vegetarian and I want a vegetarian meal. | ||
| And mom says, okay, well, I can either make two meals, one that's vegetarian for her and one that's good for everybody else, or I can make a vegetarian meal for everyone. | ||
| And so mom decides I'm making a vegetarian meal for everyone. | ||
| Well, daughter has now renormalized the family. | ||
| The family is now vegetarian because daughter was in transgen. | ||
| And you can expand that outward, right? | ||
| The whole family now wants to go to a block party. | ||
| They say to the person at the block party, we need a vegetarian meal for us because of our daughter. | ||
| And the person says, okay, do I really want to go out and buy two meals? | ||
| I'll buy one meal. | ||
| Now everybody's vegetarian because of this one person. | ||
| You can see that sort of stuff happening inside our institutions. | ||
| It requires intransigence and it requires solidity. | ||
| You can't move on the position. | ||
| You have to be really intransigent. | ||
| And the imposition that you're making on somebody has to be just minor enough | ||
| that they don't really fight back against you. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the founding editor in chief of The Daily Wire, | ||
| the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, author of the new book, "The Authoritarian Moment, | ||
| "How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions "Against Dissent," | ||
| and the fastest talking Jew on all of the internet. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, good to talk to you. | ||
| All right, my friend. | ||
| First off, I googled that, and you did come up as fast as talking Jew on the internet. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| I mean, accurate. | ||
| I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted, but it is what it is. | ||
| Reality. | ||
| Facts don't care about my feelings. | ||
| It's all right. | ||
| Facts do not care about your feelings. | ||
| All right, so look, we're gonna get into the book, obviously. | ||
| This is what, your 87th book, or 95th, or where are we at now? | ||
| Yeah, something like that. | ||
| I can never remember. | ||
| It's either my 11th or 12th, depending on the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a lot of books. | ||
| As a guy who just finished my second, I admire someone that has written this many books. | ||
| But let's just start sort of just generally with what's going on in the world, which will kind of get us to the book, because that's really what this is all about. | ||
| COVID's a little bananas right now, or at least the reaction to COVID. | ||
| Where are you at? | ||
| at this point with the whole thing. | ||
| So the pandemic is over as far as I'm concerned from a public policy perspective. | ||
| That does not mean that the pandemic is like technically over, like you can walk outside | ||
| without vaccination, without mask, everything's fine. | ||
| But what it does mean is that all public policy is designed to do is achieve certain objectives. | ||
| Originally, we were told that the public policy with regard to COVID was designed to prevent | ||
| the overrunning of the hospitals. | ||
| And so we all locked down, and we all masked up, and then we prevented the overrunning of the hospitals. | ||
| And then the idea was, okay, well, now we're going to delay indefinitely until we can get to the vaccine. | ||
| And then these miraculous vaccines came around, and the idea was, okay, the vaccines are now available. | ||
| And then we said, okay, well, we'll wait until every adult has had the chance to either take it or not take it, as the case may be, because they are super duper effective. | ||
| And now we've reached that. | ||
| And now the problem is there's no actual next goal. | ||
| And this is something that is driving me up a wall. | ||
| If you listen to people on CNN or MSNBC or in the administration talk, it seems that the goal is zero COVID, like every single person in the United States getting the vaccine and then COVID just going away. | ||
| And no one actually thinks this is ever going to happen. | ||
| This is a disease that has been seeded over every country, pretty much on planet Earth. | ||
| It's taken a minimum of 4 million lives, probably closer to 6 million if you look at the actual stats from India, and certainly if you include the actual number of dead from China, a lot more lives than that. | ||
| And the notion that this is just going to go away if we yell at people to get the vaccine is crazy, which means to me that basically, now that every adult has had the opportunity to take the vaccine, and because, thank God, this disease is not really affecting kids in severe ways, like the total number of kids under the age of 18 who have died is still under 350 in a subpopulation of 75 million, We're done. | ||
| I mean, as far as what public policy can accomplish or should seek to accomplish, we are pretty much done at this point. | ||
| And the problem for the left is that they set as a goal the idea of zero COVID back last year, and now they can't let go of it. | ||
| So Biden is kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. | ||
| On the one hand, he wants to declare COVID over so we can all go back to work and everybody can enjoy life and he can say that he beat the thing. | ||
| On the other hand, he's actually, in order to do that, he has to acknowledge that we have to live with the virus, which would open the can of worms that last year, Democrats said we should certainly not live with the virus, and anybody who said we should live with the virus, like Governor DeSantis in Florida, was bad and evil. | ||
| So instead, we're gonna get this ridiculous specter of people trying to scare you into being okay with giving up liberties that really, at this point, there's no scientific rationale for. | ||
| So you're gonna continue masking your kid, even though, again, this thing is not radically damaging to children. | ||
| I mean, 810 kids died of pneumonia in the same period that COVID killed something like 350 kids over the course of the last year and a half or so. | ||
| You're supposed to mask up your kid to protect a 40-year-old who decided not to get the vaccine. | ||
| Or if you're vaccinated, you're supposed to mask up in case, God forbid, you give it to somebody who, again, decided not to get the vaccine. | ||
| None of that is good public policy. | ||
| So I'm annoyed by it. | ||
| I'm frustrated by it. | ||
| I also think it's a bad incentive structure because I don't know why I, who According to the powers that be, did the right thing. | ||
| I got vaccinated, my wife got vaccinated, my parents got vaccinated. | ||
| Why am I supposed to penalize myself by masking up to protect people who are overtly not only not vaccinating, but also saying they don't care whether I wear a mask or not? | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
| What would you say to those people at this point? | ||
| Because there obviously are a lot of people. | ||
| I think it might be as many as something like 30 to 40 percent of American adults that are not vaccinated that are saying, I either had it and I have the antibodies or I just don't want this vaccine, which basically was produced in about a year or whatever reasons that might have. | ||
| What would you say to those people at this point? | ||
| So number one, you're a free and independent human being. | ||
| You're an adult, and it's your decision. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Number two, if we're talking about you already had COVID, I certainly see the rationale. | ||
| There's some pretty good data suggesting the natural immunity is as strong, if not stronger, than vaccine immunity. | ||
| What I would say is that for a lot of people, the given evidence shows, depending on your age and depending on your health factors, that your rate of death from COVID outweighs the rate of adverse effects from the vaccine so far as the data that we have yet seen. | ||
| And this is pretty much true for everybody above the age of 18. | ||
| I haven't seen the data between 12 and 18 so much, and certainly for kids. | ||
| I have very little interest in vaccinating my 7, 5 and 1 year old at this point. | ||
| But if you're 35 years old or 40 years old and you're saying, well, you know, I thought I got COVID. | ||
| I'm hearing a lot of this. | ||
| I thought I got COVID, but I wasn't actually tested for COVID. | ||
| I'm sure I had it before. | ||
| Well, Unless you were tested for it, it might have been something else, right? | ||
| There are a lot of other sicknesses going around. | ||
| I was sick several times during the COVID pandemic, never got COVID, so don't rely on that. | ||
| Take into account your own risk factors and then seriously consider getting the vaccine because, frankly, the risks from the vaccine, from what I'm seeing in the data, are not Particularly high. | ||
| And the risks from COVID are, depending on your age, maybe somewhat higher, maybe multiple times higher. | ||
| But again, I respect your ability as an individual to choose as long as you're willing to live with the consequences. | ||
| If you don't get the vaccine and then you get sick, you know, that would be a you problem. | ||
| Don't come to public policy seeking a solution. | ||
| Right. | ||
| To that point, though, how in the last year have you figured out who you can trust or what institutions you can trust? | ||
| Because it seems to me we've just seen a complete collapse across the board. | ||
| Political, cultural, you know, journalistic, just the entire thing has completely collapsed. | ||
| And that's what people ask me almost more than anything else at this point. | ||
| Dave, who do you trust? | ||
| How do you figure out how to make some sense of this? | ||
| I mean, the way that I determine who to trust is whether people were skeptical of the official narrative, but were basing that in data. | ||
| So, for example, one of the people who I personally trust, a guy named Dr. Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins University, very early on, he and I talked pretty much every week on the show, and very early on, he was very skeptical of the lockdowns. | ||
| He was very skeptical of the idea that if you're 20 years old, you shouldn't be working or that we should be Not treating people who are 20 in a different way than we were treating people who are 70, for example. | ||
| Because he was skeptical of that, but he was taking the science pretty seriously, I had a lot of respect for that. | ||
| Same thing with Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford. | ||
| If you just bought Hook, Line, and Sinker, the actual official narrative throughout, and never cited the data, if you ever at any point said, the science says Then I have pretty much a problem with you because science is a process. | ||
| Science is not a person or an institution. | ||
| And so there's sort of a group of people who I think were skeptical of some of the narratives and who would do a good job. | ||
| It's the same way you decide who to trust in politics. | ||
| They do a good job sort of seal manning the other argument and then say, okay, and here's where I think the flaws are. | ||
| And they'd give a nuanced picture of the data as opposed to people who are just like, you listen to me. | ||
| And if you don't listen to me, you're an idiot. | ||
| In which case, I think pretty much always you don't listen to those people. | ||
| Right, so this will kind of segue us to the book, but are you surprised in the last year, | ||
| I remember like two or three weeks into COVID, it was one of the many times in the past year | ||
| that Ben Shapiro has trended on Twitter, because you said the very obvious statement in essence | ||
| that we are gonna have to live with a certain amount of death. | ||
| A certain amount is, it's just what actuaries have to deal with when they're figuring out insurance rates. | ||
| And that's just the reality of life. | ||
| And of course, everyone in Media Matters and all the usual clowns were saying | ||
| that Ben Shapiro wants to kill old people and everything else. | ||
| But when you get into that, are you sort of surprised how quickly everyone folded? | ||
| And even now you can sense that there's a certain amount of people in the media that want lockdowns again. | ||
| They want more government programs. | ||
| Like they just, they're getting off on this. | ||
| They just like it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that that is very true. | ||
| I think that this has become almost a pagan worship ceremony for a lot of people. | ||
| Because again, I'm not anti-masking under certain circumstances. | ||
| I'm not anti-masking for unvaccinated people who are with other unvaccinated people who are vulnerable to COVID. | ||
| I mean, I was never anti-Fauci until he started pretty much overtly lying to us in a wide variety of cases. | ||
| I've been pro-vaccine throughout this entire pandemic. | ||
| So, I find it shocking, however, the number of people who are much more interested in castigating people who are using their own independent risk assessment and coming to a different conclusion or analyzing the data in a different way, but looking at the data. | ||
| I'm, you know, shocked at the number of people who have decided that they are more interested in the partisan virtue signaling than in even examining the data. | ||
| That's the part that I find really shocking. | ||
| And the eagerness with which people are going back to, well, you're not masking, this is where it's going to go, right? | ||
| They're going to say, the CDC will issue some sort of guidance saying if you're vaccinated, you ought to mask up. | ||
| And I'm going to say no. | ||
| I've already said no. | ||
| I've vaccinated. | ||
| I am not transmitting the disease. | ||
| The numbers of people who are asymptomatically transmitting COVID while vaccinated is very low. | ||
| The number of breakthrough infections is very, very low. | ||
| According to the New York Times, there are 160 million people vaccinated in the United States. | ||
| There have been something like 6,000 breakthrough cases. | ||
| I'm not masking up for that. | ||
| And most of all, it's one thing to make the case that I should mask up if somebody can get the disease through no fault of their own. | ||
| But if you've had the opportunity to get a vaccine and then you didn't, and then I give you COVID, that one is kind of on you. | ||
| That's really not on me anymore. | ||
| But there will be this move, like if somebody says that you need to mask up despite being vaccinated and you say no, then it will be back to, oh, you're willing to kill grandma. | ||
| It's like, no, I was never willing to kill grandma. | ||
| But it's become much more about the partisan. | ||
| It's why you see people yelling at people who are unvaccinated, right? | ||
| It's not because they actually want to convince those people to vaccinate. | ||
| If you want to convince somebody to vaccinate, you do what I said earlier. | ||
| You treat them as an individual human being. | ||
| You take a look at their risk factors. | ||
| You try to analyze those on an individual level and assuage the fears. | ||
| If you want to create a sort of polarized, you're a bad person, I'm a good person thing, then when you say you're an idiot and a moron if you don't vaccinate on my timeline as I see fit, and no matter your prior health scenario. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You'll be proud to know, Ben, as a refugee of Los Angeles, that, you know, we have this mask mandate in effect again. | ||
| And I went to a restaurant this weekend. | ||
| I went to Home Depot this weekend. | ||
| And I went to a mall this weekend. | ||
| And I did not wear a mask. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| An awful lot of people nodded at me. | ||
| You know, in support, a lot of people were not wearing masks. | ||
| And yes, when I went into Bloomingdale's and they asked me to put the mask on, I did because I'm not trying to, you know, get somebody fired or get into a fight with somebody. | ||
| But I bring it up because enough people are sort of like, OK, it is time to move on. | ||
| And that's just where we're at at the moment. | ||
| Yeah, well, again, I moved to Florida and I will tell you this, if they try this whole vaccinated need to mask up again, nobody's doing it. | ||
| People weren't doing it originally here. | ||
| I can't imagine that people are going to do it here. | ||
| And again, Governor DeSantis has been very big on everybody should get the vaccine if you are physically able to get the vaccine. | ||
| And there's not much more than that that he can do. | ||
| And I'm just, I gotta say, just on a data level, I'm bewildered by this. | ||
| I was looking at the seven-day running average of death from COVID. | ||
| The average number of deaths from COVID, according to the New York Times, seven-day rolling average right now is 269. | ||
| And when we were at the height of the pandemic, it was well over 3,000 people a day who were dying. | ||
| So we brought down that factor by a factor of 10. | ||
| And we are now seeing fewer people die every day in the United States from COVID than die on a normal day from diabetes. | ||
| Right, and 269, I mean, are they giving us ages on that or other health, you know, the comorbidity stuff? | ||
| Because that's a very small number. | ||
| Of course, we don't want people to die, but it's a small number. | ||
| Well, I mean, again, if you're going to talk about public health crises, then you really do have to talk about the number of people who are dying and the number of people who are being hospitalized. | ||
| And the fact that the media will do things like play with stats where they'll say, well, you know, we've had a 40% increase in the number of hospitalized from three weeks ago. | ||
| And it's like, yes, but the number of hospitalized three weeks ago was very, very low. | ||
| Like a 40% increase means we are still very, very low. | ||
| So this doesn't mean that we're making light of any of this sort of stuff. | ||
| What it does mean is that statistically speaking, the people who are getting serious breakthrough infections have significant underlying illnesses, very significant underlying illnesses. | ||
| And the people who are mostly getting hospitalized and the people who are dying tend to be people who are unvaccinated. | ||
| And that really resides in sort of the middle section of the age range of the population because dirty little secret, pretty much everybody who's over the age of 65 in this country got the vaccine. | ||
| Yeah, Ben, I'm not a mathemagician like you are, but if there's one person who had COVID and then the next week there's two, what's the percent increase on that? | ||
| Yeah, it's 100% increase, right. | ||
| My God, that's a huge, huge increase. | ||
| All right, well, all of this leads us perfectly to the authoritarian moment because it does seem like we are in it right now. | ||
| Are you sort of having a pat yourself on the back moment? | ||
| Because I've been feeling that a little bit lately, like we were in a group of people that were screaming about all of this, about five years ago. | ||
| Not to say there weren't plenty of people doing it before that, | ||
| but like we were really on the internet front end of like, guys, this horrible thing is here. | ||
| And everyone kept saying, no, no, it's just on college campuses. | ||
| And now it has burst forth for everyone to see. | ||
| Yeah, no question. | ||
| I mean, I used to think as a religious Jew, there's a whole take on prophecy | ||
| that prophecy is like God speaking through you. | ||
| But I tend to think now that prophecy is more along my Mount Adean lines, | ||
| just seeing very clearly what's happening right now. | ||
| I think the reason that Orwell's 1984 is prophetic is not because it was prophecy, it's because he was actually describing a thing that was happening in the Soviet Union at the time. | ||
|
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Mm-hmm. | |
| And so when we look at things happening elsewhere, we're like, wow, how could he have foreseen? | ||
| He wasn't foreseeing anything. | ||
| He was literally describing and describing what's going on, you know, five years ago and then looking what's happening. | ||
| It was a smaller phenomenon then. | ||
| It's a much larger phenomenon now. | ||
| And I don't think any of us were prophets. | ||
| I think that we just all saw clearly what was happening and the direction that people were moving. | ||
| And the authoritarianism that I talk about in the book is really not The government top-down authoritarianism that we've worried about in the past, the idea the government is going to tell you what to do, although that may be the natural outgrowth of a sort of attitudinal authoritarianism that's taken over. | ||
| What I'm talking about more is all of the institutions of society, the non-governmental institutions of society in large part, becoming more and more intolerant of dissent, outlawing dissent, social ostracization, People losing their jobs, people having family members not speaking to them anymore. | ||
| And this is leading to a complete breakdown in the possibility of us even having a republic together. | ||
| It's really, really dangerous stuff. | ||
| And everybody feels it. | ||
| This is the part that's amazing, is that we're all being gaslit by the media that says that this stuff is not important, or that, you know, it's just making the country better. | ||
| But by polling data, every single subgroup in the United States, including mainstream liberals, with the exception of far left radicals, with the exception of the far left, Every single subgroup in the United States says they are afraid to say what they believe about politics publicly. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Okay, that is a good indicator of where we are and how far we have to go. | ||
| What do you make of the last liberals at this point? | ||
| I mean, do you consider them part of a new conservative movement or some sort of wide tent thing on the right? | ||
| I mean, that's what I would say. | ||
| I'm not talking about obviously the crazy lefties, but the last few, the Sam Harris's, the Barry Weiss's, whoever else has left. | ||
| Like, what do you make of that crew at this point? | ||
| I mean, so frankly, I think that the future of the country rests on them, because I think that the folks in the middle are going to have to make a decision. | ||
| There are a lot of sort of mainstream establishment liberals who have a decision to make. | ||
| The decision is this. | ||
| They can either move along with the hardcore left with whom they agree on policy a lot of the time, and they can get their left-wing utopia at the expense of individual rights, comedy, having a country, or they can say to the radical left, We may agree with you on a lot of your policy prescriptions, but the way you're going about this is going to break the country. | ||
| And we need to have these discussions with people on the right. | ||
| We need to preserve individual rights. | ||
| And if it takes us longer to get where we're going, or maybe even if we don't get there at all, the higher principles are still worth standing up for. | ||
| I am unsure of which way the establishment liberals are going to go, because you do see things like the Harper's letter with 150 liberal intellectuals saying that they are very much in favor of individual rights. | ||
| It would have been nice to see one Trump supporter on that list. | ||
| It would also be nice to know, really, whether mainstream establishment liberals are interested in opening the Overton window wider than themselves. | ||
| In other words, are they saying we don't like cancel culture for us? | ||
| Or are they saying we don't like cancel culture even for people with whom we disagree? | ||
| So today on Twitter, I put out sort of a challenge, maybe called the Nice Bucket Challenge. | ||
| But the basic challenge is, if you are a person in politics, can you name and publicly say about somebody who voted differently than you that they're a nice person? | ||
| Can you say that? | ||
| Because the answer for a lot of folks on the left is no. | ||
| The answer for a lot of folks, and I'm including mainstream liberals there, people who just will not treat you as a human being publicly. | ||
| They won't come out and say publicly, I disagree with this person on nearly everything. | ||
| They're a nice person and you should read their stuff and consider it. | ||
| You say that kind of crap all the time. | ||
| I say that all the time. | ||
| I literally refer people to left-wing podcasts and say, you should listen to them and listen to me and then decide who you agree with. | ||
| I've never heard of a left-wing podcast that has suggested anything remotely similar about my own. | ||
| Ben, because you're a Nazi. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Duh. | ||
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Right. | |
| I mean, that's how it works. | ||
| Always, always, always, yep. | ||
| Yeah, I hate to tell you that I think I can give you the conclusion on your hypothesis here, which is that they're not, for the most part, gonna move in the direction you want them to move. | ||
| I don't think they'll necessarily move towards the left anymore, but they'll stay in this sort of irrelevant limbo phase. | ||
| Because I've met, and you know I know a lot of these people, and they just, more than anything else, more than saving the country, they just don't want to be called conservatives. | ||
| Because you guys are very scary. | ||
| You guys are very, very scary. | ||
| It's a real problem, and it's why I opened the book by talking about January 6th, because I think that there's a trick that's being played right now, and it's why the Democrats are trying to do the January 6th commission, make a big deal out of January 6th. | ||
| Listen, January 6th was a big deal, but it was a big deal because law enforcement failed to stop a couple of hundred idiots from running into the Capitol building. | ||
| The notion that it was a full-scale assault on democracy that was going to end with the overthrow of our democracy, the worst Yeah, it's insane. | ||
| I mean, it's totally and utterly insane. | ||
| What I pose at the beginning of the book is a basic question. | ||
| Let me give you two realities, okay? | ||
| We were an hour away from martial law is what she said. | ||
| Yeah, it's insane. | ||
| I mean, it's totally and utterly insane. | ||
| What I posed at the beginning of the book is a basic question. | ||
| Who, let me give you two realities, okay? | ||
| One is we have January 6th, that's an act of evil by a bunch of idiots | ||
| who are gonna be arrested and go to jail. | ||
| Then we have an entire left wing that labels the entire right wing responsible | ||
| Then we have an entire left wing that labels the entire right wing responsible for January | ||
| for January 6th, starts suggesting overt social controls with regard to media, with regard to free speech, | ||
| 6th, starts suggesting overt social controls with regard to media, with regard to free | ||
| speech, starts deplatforming places like Parler, using neutral service providers like Amazon | ||
| starts deplatforming places like Parler, using neutral service providers like Amazon Web Services | ||
| Web Services, starts openly moving to push social media to ban people, like mainstream | ||
| conservative voices, starts talking to corporations about how they're not allowed to give any | ||
| more to members of the Republican Party who didn't vote the way they wanted them to vote | ||
| on certification of the election without actually overthrowing the election. | ||
| Which one is more authoritarian? | ||
| A bunch of idiots running into the Capitol building and then getting themselves arrested? | ||
| Or every major institution in America declaring January 6th such an unbelievable crisis that | ||
| they have to maximize their power over your life? | ||
| I mean, it seems to me that there's a wild imbalance in the amount of institutional support from one authoritarian ideal versus the other. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And speaking of Twitter and today, I just saw like within the last hour that the ADL is now working with PayPal to basically, you know, hunt down white supremacists, which will be basically anyone who's not a lefty. | ||
| And then it's like, all right, well, now if you can't be on PayPal, what can't you be on tomorrow? | ||
| Is it going to be Chase Bank? | ||
| Is it going to be some other financial service? | ||
| And that white supremacist thing will keep getting wider and wider. | ||
| Yeah, well what the left has succeeded in doing is instead of just utilizing the government to violate the First Amendment, instead what they've done is they've found a way to pressure private companies into doing it. | ||
| And this is really, really dangerous stuff. | ||
| You're seeing this with Facebook as well. | ||
| Obviously last week NPR ran an entire piece, it's a government funded entity, they ran an entire piece trying to Push Facebook into suppressing traffic from my website. | ||
| They admit in the piece, we don't lie. | ||
| They say we don't, we don't, we don't engage in conspiracy theorizing. | ||
| We openly admit at the bottom of every single story and say and brag about the fact that we are openly conservative, like, and they should suppress their traffic anyway. | ||
| Like they're not even trying to hide it at this point. | ||
| And then they say, well, it's not a first amendment issue if government entities or, or if the white house is pushing private actors to violate your first amendment rights, because those private actors are not government entities. | ||
| Okay, well, if the government is essentially chartering an institution and then restricting what the institution can and cannot do with the First Amendment, they have become a government agent and it's becoming very, very dangerous. | ||
| Is the real issue there that we simply don't know because it's like the whole machine doesn't work anymore and everything is so filled with lies that when Jen Psaki says that the administration is flagging posts for, that was her word, for Facebook, It's like, yeah, that obviously to us seems like some sort of government coercion related to a private company, if we're to believe that Facebook is private. | ||
| But the bigger issue is, it's like, how are we ever gonna really find out what they're doing? | ||
| Because there is no honest actor to deal with it, right? | ||
| Like, we're gonna have another congressional hearing to figure out what happened? | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And one of the bigger problems here is that, as we have seen, and this was the really kind of revelatory moment of what happened with Parler, For a while, the line from the left and many people on the right, including people like me on the libertarian right, was, okay, if you don't like how Twitter handles its business, go build your own Twitter. | ||
| So then Parler built its own Twitter. | ||
| And then the neutral service providers came along and they were like, well, what if we just deny you neutral service? | ||
| And so you can see how we moved away from, you know, there's sort of a baseline of neutral service providers, then you can build on top of that and compete within that structure too. | ||
| You have to build entirely parallel mechanisms. | ||
| That cost billions and billions of dollars with, you know, 30 years of Head Start from the left on all of this stuff and the government standing in the background pushing. | ||
| I mean, that is extremely dangerous stuff. | ||
| And again, the predictable result of all of this is going to be fragmentation because people aren't going to go along with this. | ||
| You're seeing it right now. | ||
| You're seeing states cracking down on Facebook. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Since when did Florida have an interest in Facebook? | ||
| Since when does Texas have an interest? | ||
| When these places started basically mimicking the line of the Democratic Party and states said, OK, well, the federal government is no longer going to protect our citizens, so I guess we're going to have to do it. | ||
| The fragmentation is upon us unless people back away. | ||
| Do you think the fragmentation is good? | ||
| I mean, I'm sort of at the point where, look, we have a federalist system for a reason, you move to Florida for a reason, like, let the fragmentation occur, let local governments figure out what's good, and then I would say, perhaps we just need a complete fragmentation of the economy too, and we'll just, I mean, you know I'm working on locals, like, we'll just build different things, and it kinda sucks, because I know that your gut feeling is that we shouldn't go that route, but it's like, I don't see an alternative in a way. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it may be an eventuality. | ||
| So it's not something I would prefer. | ||
| I've said this over and over and over again. | ||
| I would prefer that we all be able to eat at whatever restaurant we want | ||
| without having to worry about the politics of the owner. | ||
| But if the left is going to militarize all of the institutions, there's not gonna be a choice. | ||
| And listen, on a personal level, it's fine with me because I'll make plenty of money from it. | ||
| I have a huge platform and if there's going to be a conservative razor company, it'll probably be branded by us. | ||
| But at the same time, is that good for the country? | ||
| Is it good that you can identify your neighbor by what, you know, what razor they use in the morning? | ||
| Like, I don't think any of that is good for the country. | ||
| And I also have real doubt that, you know, we talk about the fragmentation, the federalist system. | ||
| The left is making increasingly clear that they are not going to abide by that. | ||
| This is why they're attempting to federalize all the election procedures because their idea is not, okay, Texas does what Texas does and California does what California does and we share a country and we have some baseline rules at the top. | ||
| It's that Texas should not be allowed to do what Texas does. | ||
| And Florida should not be allowed to do it. | ||
| Florida doesn't. | ||
| If you don't like it, well, we're just going to change the law at the top line. | ||
| It's going to lead to some pretty significant conflict. | ||
| And that's when things really start to get dangerous as the left continues to suck more power up into the top level and then cram down the California view on Texas or Florida. | ||
| Yeah, so listen, I want to go through quickly each, a little bit on each chapter, but I want to jump to chapter seven for a second about fake news, because you mentioned the election stuff. | ||
| And one of the things I've been doing on the show in the last two, three weeks is I've been reading what's in these election bills, what was in HB3 and in Texas, what they're doing in Georgia. | ||
| And there's nothing racist. | ||
| In many cases, it allows for More time to vote and people to actually, you know, for paper trails and let's actually make sure there's cameras when we're counting. | ||
| I mean, everything in these bills, as far as I can see it, is to make sure there is more transparency. | ||
| But the reason I liken this to chapter seven, the fake news, is that the media will not cover these things. | ||
| Honestly, the media keeps telling us these bills are racist. | ||
| They're about keeping black and brown people from voting. | ||
| And no matter how many times we expose them, Jake Tapper is not going to talk about that. | ||
| Brian Stelter is not going to talk about it. | ||
| The New York Times is not going to talk about it. | ||
| So what do we do? | ||
| I mean, the only answer there is that people in the states seem to know this, which is why they keep electing Republicans. | ||
| I mean, like these election security bills are very popular in the states that they are currently being passed. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| I mean, the media are at this point just open agents of the Democratic Party pushing the Democratic Party line, whether it's All this information ought to be banned online or whether it's all these voter fraud, all these voter fraud bills are really about suppressing the black vote. | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| The amount of the lie, they keep saying it's the big lie that voter fraud decided the last election. | ||
| All right. | ||
| If that's a big lie, it is just as big a lie that voter suppression is widespread in the United States. | ||
| That is just an overt, ridiculous lie. | ||
| There is no evidence to suggest that black people are being suppressed. | ||
| on a systematic level and prevent it being from voting. It's just not true. There is no evidence | ||
| of it whatsoever. And yet that's the basis of the For the People Act. So the Democrats are like, | ||
| well, you know, you're lying. The lies about January 6th and November 4th, those are leading | ||
| to all these voter fraud bills. Okay, even if that were true, the lies that you guys are telling | ||
| about voter suppression have led to you trying to federalize the entire system in violation of | ||
| the Constitution. You're right. | ||
| The media lie about this stuff on a routine basis, and then they obscure it by pretending that they're objective. | ||
| But I think that their day of dominance is ending, which is why I think that the discussion over the fake news is actually secondary to the discussion over social media, because what's happened is that it used to be that you used to bookmark all the sites that you wanted to visit, and this is the old way of doing things. | ||
| In 2003, 2004, you'd bookmark Drudge, and then you'd bookmark You know, the Huffington Post, but you actually check all the different sites individually. | ||
| Because everybody started getting their news through these feeds, whether it's Facebook or Twitter, the centralization of news consumption in one source has allowed the left to swoop in and then try to bottleneck the amounts of information they can get out via these sources. | ||
| That's the part that's really dangerous. | ||
| I'm not worried about the New York Times being a propaganda outfit. | ||
| They've been a propaganda outfit as long as I've been alive. | ||
| I'm much more worried about them trying to reestablish a monopolistic control of the dissemination of information than I am about them being who they are. | ||
| Yeah, so to that point, can you talk a little bit about your position, the difference between, say, a purely libertarian position on big tech versus a conservative opinion? | ||
| Because this is now becoming the hot thing. | ||
| It's like, maybe there's no chance. | ||
| Maybe the ship has sailed and we can't do anything at this point. | ||
| I'm guessing you don't want, or at least I've never heard you say that you want, you know, government regulators with hard hats, you know, walking into Google to look at the algorithm. | ||
| But what do you think we should or could do, if anything? | ||
| So I think that the pretty easy solution here seems to be to make a minor change to Section 230. | ||
| And the minor change would be to just get rid of the catch-all clause. | ||
| So if you take a look at Section 230, Section 230 says that you are relieved from liability if you remove, for example, obscenity or pornography or violent material or anything otherwise objectionable. | ||
| Is that anything otherwise objectionable that is the catch-all provision? | ||
| And I understand why this originally was, right? | ||
| To understand why Section 230 is drawn the way it is, you have to understand the history a little bit. | ||
| Basically, platforms were created. | ||
| These platforms were open platforms, and then there was, and you didn't have liability | ||
| for what was on the platform, so long as you didn't police what was on the platform, | ||
| 'cause it was just like a phone line, right? | ||
| What I say on the phone line, if I threaten to murder somebody, | ||
| AT&T's not responsible for that. | ||
| I'm responsible for that. | ||
| Okay, so platforms were basically just, you post something, the platform is not responsible for the thing that you post. | ||
| Then there was a website that started going in and deleting all the obscene material. | ||
| And the people who were putting up the obscene material, they said, you've now violated, you're now a publisher. | ||
| Because you're editing and you're deleting stuff, this makes you a publisher, so if somebody posts something defamatory and you don't delete it, You're a publisher, you ought to be treated with liability. | ||
| And so Congress said, well, that seems weird that if I decide to get rid of obscenity, it's now my job to treat the entire platform as a publisher. | ||
| Well, the problem is that has now been completely reversed. | ||
| The idea behind 230 was to promulgate and allow people to get rid of truly objectionable material while not absorbing the liability of becoming like the Daily Wire or the New York Times having to fact check every post because it's an open platform. | ||
| Instead, what the left did is they reversed the polarity. | ||
| They said, well, actually the job now of Section 230 is to make you into a publisher. Right now your job is to remove all of | ||
| the objectionable content, including politically objectionable content. And we will | ||
| threaten you with getting rid of all Section 230 protections if you don't get rid of quote-unquote | ||
| misinformation. Well, the easy way to fix this is to just get rid of the otherwise objectionable | ||
| clause, meaning that you can get rid of stuff that violates the law. You can get rid of | ||
| stuff that is pornographic. You can get rid of, you know, repeated spam, for example. | ||
| But if you start discriminating on the basis of politics, you're no longer a publisher. | ||
| You're no longer a platform. | ||
| Now you're a publisher and liability attaches. | ||
| But do you think we have a government or any officials? | ||
| I mean, there's a couple of Republicans talking about this, you know, Mike Lee and Jim Jordan, Rand Paul. | ||
| I mean, a few people. | ||
| But it's like, do you think we have any political will to actually ever do anything other than have hearings about this stuff? | ||
| Like you think they can do something? | ||
| Well, the problem is that everybody says they want to do something, but the stuff they want to do is radically different. | ||
| So Democrats are not in favor of getting rid of the otherwise objectionable clause because that would do what we're talking about. | ||
| It would open up the platforms. | ||
| Instead, what they would like to do is close off the platform. | ||
| So what they would like to do is treat Facebook as a monopoly and then have somebody sit on top of the government like an Elizabeth Warren appointee and decide what Facebook can and cannot put up. | ||
| And that, of course, is incredibly dangerous. | ||
| So you'll see these New York Times articles where it's like, ah, there's broad spectrum agreement that Facebook has to be regulated. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's really not correct. | ||
| I mean, the question is, what is the content of the regulation? | ||
| It's like saying that my child and I have an agreement that there ought to be consequences for not doing our homework. | ||
| Yeah, my child's consequence is that she would like to be able to eat cookies. | ||
| My consequence is she goes to a room. | ||
| Like, we agree that there ought to be consequences, but these are wildly variant. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's just jump into each chapter for a little bit. | ||
| We've sort of bounced around through some of them already. | ||
| How to Silence a Majority is chapter one, and it does feel like... | ||
| Most people have been silenced just by their own acquiescence to all of this. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Basically, all it takes to silence a majority is a very loud, very aggressive and intransigent minority. | ||
| You can renormalize an entire institution by using, by getting maybe 20% of people inside an institution to be very loud and very solidified. | ||
| And repeating the same thing over and over and over, which of course is what the left is very good at. | ||
| And you can see this happen in your own life. | ||
| Like the example that's used by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the example of you have a family of four and the daughter decides one day she's vegetarian. | ||
| So she comes home, she says to mom, I'm vegetarian and I want a vegetarian meal. | ||
| And mom says, okay, well, I can either make two meals, one that's vegetarian for her and one that's good for everybody else, or I can make a vegetarian meal for everyone. | ||
| And so mom decides I'm making a vegetarian meal for everyone. | ||
| Well, daughter has now renormalized the family. | ||
| The family is now vegetarian because daughter was intransigent. | ||
| And you can expand that outward, right? | ||
| The whole family now wants to go to a block party. | ||
| They say to the person at the block party, we need a vegetarian meal for us because of our daughter. | ||
| And the person says, okay, do I really want to go out and buy two meals? | ||
| I'll buy one meal. | ||
| Now everybody's vegetarian because of this one person. | ||
| You can see that sort of stuff happening inside our institutions. | ||
| It requires intransigence and it requires solidity. | ||
| You can't move on the position. | ||
| You have to be really intransigent. | ||
| And the imposition that you're making on somebody has to be just minor enough that they don't really fight back against you. | ||
| It can't be something where you like demand that you're gonna be the, that you are the captain, like you run the place now. | ||
| It can't be that. | ||
| It has to be something where, you know, we just want diversity training. | ||
| That's all we want. | ||
| We just want diversity training. | ||
| And if we get diversity training, then we'll be happy. | ||
| And we'll leave you alone. | ||
| And we won't go make our HR reports and won't file lawsuits and everything will be good. | ||
| And people in the middle like, well, you know, it's annoying, but do I really want to spend my day doing this? | ||
| And soon, it escalates from, okay, we need this anti-discrimination, we need diversity training, to we need active anti-racism training. | ||
| And now you got Ibram X. Kendi in there. | ||
| And they figure, okay, well, 10,000 bucks, we can get these people off our back. | ||
| Ibram X. Kendi comes in, spouts some bull crap, and we all move on with our lives. | ||
| And they say, well, yeah, but here's the thing. | ||
| You haven't established the principles of equity. | ||
| We need hiring based on race. | ||
| And now you start saying, OK, well, I don't really like that, but I'm also afraid that if I fight back against you, you might file some sort of lawsuit and claim that I'm discriminating against you and you might lead a walkout. | ||
| So I guess we'll go along with that maybe. | ||
| And then it's everybody at the company needs to put out a black square. | ||
| You can see how it just moves along, because the more you give, the more you're willing to give. | ||
| Does that also tell you a little something about the human condition? | ||
| Because as you were talking about that, I mean, you could have given the exact same examples with COVID. | ||
| It was two weeks to flatten the curve. | ||
| It was, you know, a month of lockdown. | ||
| Now it's a year and a half later. | ||
| Let's mask vaccinated people. | ||
| I mean, it's just something about humans and how much we just give in the face of tyranny, right? | ||
| I mean, one of the great lies about human beings that we're very confrontational, we are not. | ||
| We are very conflict-averse. | ||
| And people who are conflict-seeking tend to be the winners in this particular game theory situation, right? | ||
| It's like the kid in high school who's the craziest kid no one wanted to fight. | ||
| And maybe you could beat him in a fight, but you never knew whether he was going to pull a knife. | ||
| And that's these people working inside companies. | ||
| It's like, are they going to pull a knife? | ||
| Are they going to knife you? | ||
| Are they going to knife your friends? | ||
| Are they going to go after the heads of the company? | ||
| Are they going to tank the stock? | ||
| Are they going to lead to the New York Times? | ||
| And maybe we ought to just give them this little concession. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| All right, chapter two, how the authoritarian left re-normalized America. | ||
| I mean, we're watching everything being sort of attacked right now. | ||
| Yeah, I think that the key to understand how this went from sort of small institutions to the nation broadly, I think the Obama presidency was transformational. | ||
| And I think the reason the Obama presidency was transformational is when Barack Obama ran in 2008. | ||
| He ran on the basis that he was going to be a unifying force in America. | ||
| He was gonna bring together black and white. | ||
| There was no black, no white, there were just Americans. | ||
| No red, no blue, right, the whole shtick. | ||
| And then, after 2008, he governed very, very much to the left. | ||
| And there was the Tea Party movement that cropped up. | ||
| There was this really hard pushback against Obamacare. | ||
| In 2010, he takes, according to his own lights, a shellacking. | ||
| And by 2012, he's no longer running as a unifier. | ||
| He's decided, you know what? | ||
| I can unify a couple of different strands in leftist thought. | ||
| One strand is the very heavy government-run progressivism that begins in the early 20th century, and I can do that, right? | ||
| That's my policy. | ||
| And then the other strand is this kind of critical race theory, far left, burn it all down idea. | ||
| And these two ideas have been in conflict. | ||
| The radical left had always said, burn it all down. | ||
| We don't trust LBJ. | ||
| He's part of the system. | ||
| Burn it all down. | ||
| And then you had sort of the moderate left, which was, let's spend a crap load of money. | ||
| We can fix all problems with the government. | ||
| Now, those two things appear to be sort of in conflict with one another, but Barack Obama brought them together because what he said is, yes, I can do anything with government, right? | ||
| But I'm actually tearing down the system from the inside. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I took over the system. | ||
| I'm one of you. | ||
| And now I'm going to tear it down from the inside on behalf of all of these intersectional, oppressed minorities, and we're going to cobble together a coalition of the ascendant, and they're going to overwhelm the old majority in the United States, and we are going to win for the rest of time. | ||
| And in 2012, when Obama did that, right, he overtly pandered to a wide variety of intersectional groups. | ||
| He did DACA in order to appeal to Hispanics. | ||
| And then he did gay marriage, remember, in 2012, right? | ||
| It was 2011-2012, right before the election, that he makes the shift on gay marriage in order to appeal to the LGBT coalition. | ||
| And then he starts making, you know, overt plays, for example, with regard to, I believe he made some overt plays with regard to Asian Americans. | ||
| on certain issues. | ||
| And it was, he was one of the first candidates to have like specific outreach groups | ||
| for every intersectional coalition member. | ||
| And then the idea was, and then we'll all side together in the same way you see this on college campuses | ||
| to fight the institutions and the powers that be. | ||
| Now, the irony was he was the institution. | ||
| He was the powers that be. | ||
| But this is why he kept saying, we need to gut the institutions and remake them. | ||
| We need to remake them from within. | ||
| You're getting the same thing from Biden now. | ||
| We have to build back better. | ||
| It's not enough for us to go back to the thriving economy that we had a year and a half ago. | ||
| No, we have to build back better. | ||
| We are going to fundamentally rechange the institutions by combining the progressive power of the government with this revolutionary idea that the institutions themselves are bad and need to be uprooted. | ||
| Right, and then we hear like my governor, at least for now, Gavin Newsom saying, this is the opportunity we've been looking for. | ||
| So in some ways it's like, yeah, they did all want this because now federal bailouts, suddenly California has money, even though money isn't worth much. | ||
| Inflation, that's not a thing anymore, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the basic idea from the left has always been that emergency is a ratchet. | ||
| It's a one-way ratchet. | ||
| And whether you're talking about the Great Depression or World War II, or whether you're talking about The so-called war on poverty. | ||
| And certainly now, every crisis is an opportunity to grow government. | ||
| And because the left thinks, not only in terms of institutional control, but in terms of doing things, right? | ||
| The way that you measure a good president, according to the left, is the president did things. | ||
| Now, the way you measure a good president, according to the right, is did they pursue policies that were effective in helping Americans? | ||
| For the left, it doesn't matter, right? | ||
| The most transformative presidents are the ones who may have lengthened the Great Depression by eight years and interned hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, but they did a lot of stuff And the same thing with LBJ. | ||
| He was a terrible president. | ||
| He presided over the disastrous Vietnam War. | ||
| He presided over a tremendous breakdown in race relations. | ||
| He did a couple of things that were obviously very good, the Voting Rights Bill and the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| But overall, not a good president, but a transformational president because he did a lot of stuff. | ||
| Barack Obama, much less successful president than Bill Clinton. | ||
| Bill Clinton, footnote to history because he was too moderate. | ||
| Barack Obama, hugely important because he passed Obamacare. | ||
| And you're seeing the same thing with Biden now. | ||
| This is Biden's mentality with regard to government action. | ||
| So I've been thinking something that I'm gonna drop in this interview with Ben Shapiro right now, since you're bringing up Biden and Obama. | ||
| My suspicion, and Ben, you know I'm going off the grid in a week, but that the Biden mental collapse is so obvious at this point that it can't hold much longer, and I think they thought they were gonna get at least a year, I'm not so sure they are, that the way it's gonna break the seal, the way it's gonna actually get into mainstream, because we can all talk about it, but no one will talk about it on CNN, et cetera, is that Obama, in an interview, say something. He's going to have a one-liner saying, you | ||
| know, maybe Joe's lost a step or two and then suddenly everyone's going to start saying | ||
| it. What do you think about that crazy theory? | ||
| I think the only way that Obama does that is if he thinks that there's a backup plan. | ||
| The problem for the Democrats is that they're really- Oh, no, meaning he'll have a full backup plan, but he'll be | ||
| the one that is basically going to take out Biden. | ||
| I mean, I think that if that does happen, if there's a backup plan, you're right that | ||
| it would be Obama who would do it. | ||
| He's the only person inside the Democratic Party who is well-respected enough to get away with it. | ||
| The problem for the Democrats is they really, really need Joe Biden. | ||
| I mean, they really need Joe Biden, because what's waiting in the wings is Kamala Harris. | ||
| And man, is she unpopular, and man, is she bad at this. | ||
| She is just garbage at this job. | ||
| And her job is really easy, and she's really terrible at it. | ||
| I wouldn't, honestly, if the Democrats had a way of supplanting Kamala Harris with Michelle Obama, I think that they would try something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just, I just have a feeling it's gonna be Obama that's the one that's the airlock, basically, because he's the one that will just slightly leak it out and then the plan will be there. | ||
| That is my almost August prediction. | ||
| All right, chapter three, you sort of hit on some of this already. | ||
| The creation of a new ruling class. | ||
| That seems to be what this is all about right now. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think this is really about the university system. | ||
| So there was this sort of presumption by people on the right that what happens in the university stays in the universities, and that's not correct. | ||
| Basically, an entire ruling elite class was created in the universities. | ||
| To understand why that is, you have to understand what universities have become. | ||
| It used to be universities trained you to be a good citizen and also trained you for a job. | ||
| And now, unless you are what we call the UCLA South Campus major, right, a STEM major, They're not training you for either. | ||
| They're training you to not be a very good citizen, but they are training you to be a membership of the ruling class. | ||
| And the way we can tell you're a member of the ruling class is you speak the lingo. | ||
| This is what colleges have become. | ||
| There's a reason, like, what did you learn in college? | ||
| I was a North Campus major. | ||
| Not much. | ||
| I came out with a credential. | ||
| What does the credential mean? | ||
| The credential means two things. | ||
| One, I'm smart enough to make it through college. | ||
| And two, I've now been trained in speaking the language of the sophisticates. | ||
| And this is what you see on Twitter when people put their pronouns in their profiles, for example. | ||
| It's the reason why people put their college degrees in their profiles. | ||
| It's because it is saying, "I am a member of the elect." | ||
| Now, what they hate more than anything is if you're a member of the elect, | ||
| but you don't actually speak the lingo or you don't like the lingo. | ||
| That's not okay. | ||
| But we've created this sort of super-powered group of people who are going to run the world. | ||
| And we did it by sending them to these institutions where they rack up massive amounts of debt and learn what they are supposed to say at cocktail parties in order so that they are well accepted in the halls of liberal intelligentsia and in the halls of power. | ||
| And that's a real problem because the reality, I mean, as Peter Thiel is fond of saying, is that college does not educate you for a job. | ||
| We'd be much better off if we had an apprenticeship system in the United States for most jobs. | ||
| And college is basically a place where you go to get a credential and blow a couple hundred thousand bucks and drink. | ||
| By the time your kids, who are all under 10, by the time they make it to college age, do you think college is going to look anything remotely like it looks? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't. | |
| I mean, I think that by the time my kids are in college, I think that everything is going to be online. | ||
| I think they're going to be able to pick and choose what kind of courses they want to take. | ||
| And I think, frankly, that a lot of businesses will have gotten wise to the scam that college is, and they'll just start hiring directly out of high school. | ||
| I think you're going to see people Going back to almost an old model where they say, okay, well, you got straight A's in high school. | ||
| You're obviously smart. | ||
| Come here and apprentice for two, three years and then we'll pay you. | ||
| Chapter four, how science trademark defeated actual science. | ||
| This was making me think of that great Fauci line when he basically said, I am the science. | ||
| He went full Palpatine on us. | ||
| That's basically what's happened here, right? | ||
| You challenge this guy and you're challenging science. | ||
| Yeah, and this is the shtick of the left. | ||
| There are two problems with regard to science and the sort of move toward authoritarianism. | ||
| One is the idea that the science is an institution and not an actual process, right? | ||
| Normally, science is a process, not an institution. | ||
| When you have Fauci declaring Order 66, On everybody who disagrees with him. | ||
| It's obviously indicative of a broader mindset. | ||
| The two big problems that you see inside the scientific community are, one, I label the ultracrepidarian problem, mainly because I love the word ultracrepidarian, but it basically just means speaking outside of your actual purview. | ||
| So you see this from, for example, during the last pandemic, when people said all of a sudden that racial justice was a health issue. | ||
| And you say to yourself, whoa, whoa, hold up a second. | ||
| I'm gonna need you to explain that one. | ||
| How exactly is racial justice a public health issue? | ||
| And there's no actual rationale. | ||
| It's just we're scientists. | ||
| We have a doctrine in front of our name. | ||
| Therefore, respect me when I talk about race relations. | ||
| It's like, well, you don't know anything about race relations. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| So scientists speaking outside their purview, but using the imprimatur of science in order to push it. | ||
| And this leads in reverse to what I call the bleed over effect, which is where people will say | ||
| things that are unscientific and then pretend | ||
| that the actual science supports them. | ||
| And so you have this people who will say things that are just political, but then they will say | ||
| that this is the science, right? | ||
| So that's what Fauci was doing is he was saying, you know, not, he was saying, | ||
| here is a political perspective on what the rates of herd immunity are, but politics is defining that, | ||
| but I'm now going to say that that's science. | ||
| And that opens the door to all sorts of bad things being treated as science, even though they're not actually scientific. | ||
| And so it's a really high-level form of gaslighting, specifically because we all do—science is like the last institution that we actually respect, because it's verifiable. | ||
| So if you remove the verifiability of science, and instead you make it into an institution, you guarantee yourself an enormous amount of power, but only by undermining what science was supposed to be in the first place. | ||
| Well, they love science, except if you ask them how many genders there are. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Then it gets a little bit confusing. | ||
| Or whether a baby in the womb is a baby, like a minute before it's born. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Even though, as you know, we're in the middle of surrogacy right now, and basically a day after, or two days after, they put the egg and the sperm together, we know the sex. | ||
| And it's like, the doctor isn't saying- How dare you? | ||
| You don't, you don't, you don't. | ||
| You're projecting the sex onto the child. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| It's not a click-down menu with, you know, 47 options. | ||
| This isn't specifically what's in the book, but when I was reading this chapter on science, I was thinking that it's a little bit sort of like your last book, We're worshipping science now, perhaps instead of worshipping God or having some set of beliefs outside of ourselves. | ||
| Does that just seem like the obvious conclusion of a purely secular society? | ||
| That we'll just worship things that will change every day? | ||
| Yeah, I mean I think that's right. | ||
| I think that human beings have a religious impulse. | ||
| And something's gonna fill that religious impulse. | ||
| And why not the thing that has brought us unbelievable prosperity, high levels of technological advancement? | ||
| It's prevented, up to this point, disease and death in extraordinary numbers. | ||
| Why wouldn't you worship that thing? | ||
| The problem is it's not a thing, it's a process. | ||
| So you can certainly have respect for the process, but there have to be some guiding values beyond just the process. | ||
| The problem is that people don't have a habit of following the system. | ||
| They're more interested in just appointing people as their great leaders. | ||
| Chapter six, the radicalization of entertainment. | ||
| This is where you tell me to cancel Netflix, right? | ||
| You know, I don't say that everybody should cancel Netflix or Disney+, I just say that you should go and subscribe to Daily Wire when we bring out new entertainment content. | ||
| Because listen, I understand, I watch all of these same TV shows, but the point about the radicalization of entertainment is just the attempt, the pretty clear attempt now to get rid of full storylines, the open attempt, to throw people out of Hollywood. | ||
| It used to be at least they would try to cover it up. | ||
| The open attempt now to throw people out of Hollywood for not going along with the program, | ||
| the amazing statement that the Academy Awards is now going to be predetermined | ||
| based on what color the leads in your film are, or what your staffing levels are | ||
| of a particular sexual orientation, it's absolutely insane. | ||
| And that does have a rather marked impact on how people think about the world, | ||
| because obviously entertainment is very emotionally driven. | ||
| People tend to think about politics on the back of their emotional state. | ||
| And so if the entire entertainment apparatus is taken over by the left, and it is not in fact appealing to the market, it is more acknowledging that because it has a monopoly in the market, it doesn't have to appeal to the market. | ||
| Whatever they sell, you will buy. | ||
| If they know that, they're just going to continue doing this. | ||
| Do you think that we can build better things and eventually get to the place where Netflix won't be necessary and Disney Plus won't be necessary and everything else? | ||
| I mean, they have a lot of legacy product. | ||
| I mean, the reason that I subscribe to Disney Plus is not because I want to see any of the new stuff. | ||
| It's because I want my kids to be able to see the old stuff and you just skip that little warning at the front telling them that they're racist for watching Lady and the Tramp. | ||
| But it'll take time. | ||
| I mean, Hollywood was a hundred year enterprise. | ||
| So this is the bottom line of all this. | ||
| This stuff takes time. | ||
| Conservatives are always looking for like a turnkey solution because that's always what we do in business. | ||
| But most of this stuff is stuff that members of the left have spent decades building. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the irony is, it's like, man, we need new stories. | ||
| We've discussed this a million times, but Star Wars is basically dead. | ||
| They killed it now. | ||
| The Marvel movies are basically dead. | ||
| They killed them now. | ||
| It's like, we just need new stories, if nothing else. | ||
| And then we got to figure out the way to get them out there and the way to put them together. | ||
| But we, but it's actually, it starts with the story. | ||
| It does. | ||
| And it also starts with people who are willing to actually put money into these things. | ||
| And that's a risky endeavor. | ||
| I mean, Hollywood's risky. | ||
| And when business people on the right think about business, they don't think about Hollywood because Hollywood is such a risk. | ||
| I mean, the last person who actually invested in a movie and made money from it in Hollywood doesn't exist. | ||
| I mean, Hollywood accounting has its own term, right? | ||
| I mean, so it's going to take people who are really committed to the cause to actually start making entertainment that appeals to a broader spectrum of people. | ||
| And by the way, that's exactly what you guys are doing, right? | ||
| Ideally. | ||
| We're doing our best, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's definitely what we're focused on at the moment, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| We talked about chapter seven, but anything you want to add on the fake news? | ||
| I mean, is there anyone, like, do you turn on anyone at this point? | ||
| I thought Jake Tapper was sort of the last hope at CNN. | ||
| To me, he's gone in all the way. | ||
| Like, is there anyone in mainstream media at this point that you're like, ah! | ||
| You're not completely horrible, which is all I would ask. | ||
| They can be mostly horrible, but just not completely horrible. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the way that I tend to characterize this is they're no longer journalists I watch. | ||
| They're acts of journalism that I will watch. | ||
| What I mean by that is that I don't actually believe in the idea that journalists are sort of a separate class of higher human being, because I don't think they very often follow the processes of journalism they themselves espouse. | ||
| And so I'm mostly looking for people who commit acts of journalism, and that's really what Twitter is for, right? | ||
| Jake asked a good question. | ||
| You're like, okay, well, that was a good question. | ||
| It's not like I all of a sudden buy hook, line, and sinker everything that Jake Tapper tells me, but when somebody commits an act of journalism, then they deserve praise, and when they commit an act of journalisming, then they certainly do not. | ||
| Chapter eight, this seems like the right way to end this before we get to the conclusion. | ||
| Unfriending Americans. | ||
| We shouldn't hate everybody, Ben. | ||
| Was that what your tweet from earlier today was all about? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was pretty easy. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| I was talking to some people on the left about polarization a few weeks ago, and people were throwing around ideas, many of which I thought were silly, like get rid of gerrymandering. | ||
| I'm like, well, we've had gerrymandering since the beginning, and I'm pretty sure that our polarization is not because of gerrymandering. | ||
| And I said, I have a very simple thing that all of us could do today. | ||
| Go online, today, on Twitter, find somebody who voted for somebody that you didn't vote for, right, whether, say, Trump, and then say that person's a human being. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| That's the whole tweet. | ||
| And nobody took me up on it. | ||
| Very few people on the left I saw were taking me up on this today. | ||
| I was seeing a lot of people on the right were tweeting out. | ||
| Here are a bunch of people on the left who I am interested in reading and respect and disagree with, but I find them an interesting person. | ||
| I've yet to see anybody from the left tweet that, in fact, the only thing I saw was somebody from Media Matters tweeting out my bad old tweets, right? | ||
| To demonstrate that I am not worthy of being treated that way. | ||
| Because that sort of radical asymmetry, where people on the right tend to consider people on the left mistaken, but people on the left tend to consider people on the right evil, that radical asymmetry is not going to be cured anytime soon. | ||
| At what point does that radical asymmetry no longer work? | ||
| Like, when these people lie over and over, so when they lie about Kavanaugh, and they lie about CRT, and they lie about election bills, and we know they're lying, and they know we're lying, and they know we know they're lying, and they continue to lie, the whole thing, at what point is it just evil? | ||
| Like, really? | ||
| And I don't want to get, you know me, I don't want to get to that hyper-partisan place, but at what point do we just have to call it for what it is? | ||
| Not to say there can't be a couple good people who have different political beliefs, but that the machinery of it is just endless lying. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think that, as I say in the book, the institutions themselves have become these sorts of machines in many cases. | ||
| And so there are only two choices. | ||
| You can try to fix the machinery from within, or you can just pose alternatives to the machinery that outcompete them and destroy them. | ||
| And when it comes to the media, I'm fully convinced that there is no fixing the New York Times, there's no fixing CNN, there's no fixing the Washington Post. | ||
| You need to compete from outside and you need to take them down. | ||
| And I think that that is a worthwhile endeavor. | ||
| Shapiro, we both have one minute remaining, 60 seconds. | ||
| I want fastest Ben Shapiro white pill stuff right now. | ||
| Like how do people feel good about all this? | ||
| That's the direction I'm trying to go with this show and I know that's what you're trying to do. | ||
| I mean, I think the reason that you can feel good is because we have not started to push back yet. | ||
| I think a lot of people on the right thought, oh, Trump was the pushback. | ||
| No, Trump was you went and you voted. | ||
| Now you have to actually push back in the places it matters in your own life. | ||
| You have to push back on the school board. | ||
| You have to push back at your corporation. | ||
| And believe you me, more people agree with you than disagree with you at these places. | ||
| Because you're not even taking radical points of view. | ||
| When you say, I don't want my business telling me how to think about how I'm a racist. | ||
| I don't want my kid taught that stuff in school. | ||
| I don't think that I, as a religious person, ought to be forced into participating in activities I don't like. | ||
| Most Americans agree with you, which means that there is fertile ground here. | ||
| The left has pushed so far. | ||
| I think they've pushed too far. | ||
| And I think the blowback is only beginning. | ||
| Shapiro, you still got it. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| I think if you stick with it, you're going to make something of yourself. | ||
| Good seeing you, brother. | ||
| Good to talk to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Be well. | |
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlists all right over here. |
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