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Feb. 22, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:15
20230222_piers-morgan-uncensored-ben-shapiro-exclusive
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Ben Shapiro Uncensored Tonight 00:03:31
He's one of the most controversial and popular commentators in global politics.
A media mogul, best-selling author, host of one of the biggest podcasts on the planet.
He's influential, he's intellectual, he can be inflammatory.
And tonight, Ben Shapiro is most definitely going to be uncensored.
Live from New York, this is Piers Morgan, Uncensored.
Well, good evening, live from New York City.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored from the Big Apple.
These are incendiary times in global politics.
Debate has become tribal warfare.
We used to say that we vehemently disagree.
We defend each other's right to our opinions.
We go and have a drink or a cup of tea and a laugh after sharing those opinions, but intelligent discussion has turned into derangement.
Our politics is dangerously polarized.
It's no longer okay to support or oppose Trump or Brexit without detesting, shaming or vilifying the people on the opposite side of the argument.
Taking offense has become a full-time occupation and there's currency and clicks in being outraged and perverse pleasure in silencing, censoring and shaming, especially if you deviate from the radical woke agenda.
Opposing limitless self-identity is apparently transphobic.
Debating immigration at all is bigotry and racism.
Defending the context of history is also racist.
The world, ironically, has become binary.
It's right or left, right or wrong, good or evil.
There's no room for nuance.
These are dangerous times for democracies built on free speech and free expression.
We've never been more inclined to miss anger and hatred of one another on the basis of our views alone.
And yet at the same time, we've never been so fragile, so weak.
It doesn't take a genius to see that these two things can't exist comfortably together.
Now, I agree with my guest tonight about, I would say, about 80% of the stuff he says.
I passionately disagree with the other 20%.
I suspect with him, the percentage might be higher on the second part.
But Ben Shapiro and I have clashed on air many times before.
And I think we've come to a place now where we have a better understanding of each other.
And it's not just about the accents.
But whatever tonight is going to be live and uncensored, and it definitely won't be dull.
He's one of the biggest and most controversial voices in American politics.
Millions watch Ben Shapiro as he skewers politicians and serves up savage takes on the most incendiary debates of the day.
He's the fast-talking host of one of the world's most successful podcasts.
The social relationships that ought to be subsidized by governments are the ones that produce children, and that would be Man, Women, Baby.
A former editor of the Conservative website Breitbart, already a household name by the first time he confronted me.
You tend to demonize people who differ from you politically by standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Holland.
How dare you?
I've seen you do it repeatedly, Piers.
Like I say, how dare you?
But since then, this acid-tongue debater has become a world-famous agitator.
Created Daily Wire, a lightning rod platform for polemic stars like Candice Owens and Jordan Peterson.
He's a best-selling author and a thorn in the side of politicians on the left and the right.
To his fans, he's a fearless free speech champion.
To his enemies, he's a dangerous merchant of hate.
You cut that out now, or you'll go home in an ambulance.
Tonight, fear him or revere him.
He'll be here, uncensored.
Ben Shapiro.
Well, Ben Shapiro is here live and uncensored.
The Truth vs Cancel Culture 00:09:13
Well, that's quite an intro we've given you there.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
You better live up to it.
Well, I mean, I look at that old tape and suddenly I hit puberty, right?
We both look so young.
Oh, my God.
I mean, that was what, that's probably over 10 years ago.
That's 10 years ago.
Right.
10 years ago.
And it was interesting because I was at the time, you know, getting very angry about a series of mass shootings in America with a British sensibility and saying, you know, obviously my country, we don't really have any guns.
And I was hectoring and lecturing, I guess, Americans about their gun laws.
And it went down as badly as that phrase would suggest, particularly with you.
But what was interesting was when you came on, I thought, who's this snotty little kid who's going to start trying to take me on?
And then it rapidly became clear to me, you were a hell of a lot smarter than you appear.
So we've moved on from then.
Anyway, we've had our kiss and make up interview after that.
But I think what was pretty interesting to me, 2016, So seven years ago now, you tweeted a tweet.
This is your pinned tweet to this date.
Simply said, facts don't care about your feelings.
And if any phrase I think perfectly epitomizes this woke era that we have somehow stumbled into, it's fact.
Because the woke brigade put feelings before facts.
How do we get there?
Well, I mean, culturally speaking, I think that what happened is that the value of subjective authenticity became the core to pretty much everybody.
So the idea of individualism was taken to its logical extreme, which was I'm so important and everything I feel is so important that I can ignore the rest of reality.
And in fact, reality is an imposition on me.
Institutions, rules, roles, the rules of the road, all that sort of stuff, it's an imposition on who I truly am.
And in order for me to be actually free, I have to speak my truth.
Now, you know, as I've said and you've said, there's no such thing as my truth, right?
There's your opinion and then there's the truth.
But as soon as you start speaking in terms of my truth, as soon as you start saying, well, there's how I feel about the world and how I feel about the rules is the core of me.
What that also does is it means that other people are aggressing on you when they disagree with you.
Because obviously assured reality means that we can disagree about things out here, but we sort of as human beings are intact.
But the moment that you start to identify your truth with the truth, then anybody attacking your truth is attacking you as a human being.
And I think that that's where we've gone, is this movement away from we're having a political debate, but again, we can go out and have a drink afterward because we are not the political debate.
The political debate's a different thing, to my politics are who I am or my feelings about who I am or my feelings about the world.
That's the thing that matters more than anything else.
And what's extraordinary?
I mean, I remember this, we're going to come to them later, sadly, but Megan and Harry, when they went on Oprah Winfrey and she started talking constantly about my truth and Oprah was endorsing your truth and everything.
I was like, I'm living in a sort of mad world where truth is no longer factual.
It's just whatever you're feeling in any given moment.
It seems such a perverse thing for a democratic society that you move away from fact-based, from science, whatever it may be, to just feelings dominating a culture.
And if you defy those feelings, you are instantly branded the enemy and you must be destroyed.
Well, there's no conversation to be had, right?
I can't have a conversation about your feelings.
You're feeling your feelings.
There's no way for me to dissuade you from.
You can't deny my feelings.
Correct.
I can deny the facts that you bring to the table.
But the problem is once that becomes irrelevant, then we're just at an impasse.
There's no more conversation to be had.
How big a problem is it that at the same time, simultaneously, I think, you've had the rise of very populist leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson in the UK, and others who play pretty fast and loose with the truth.
That you have people who say, well, hang on, you talk about the sanctity of truth, but you've got these political leaders, US presidents, British prime ministers, where they don't seem to care about the truth.
They just bumble through with whatever suits them from day to day.
How dangerous is that to the whole shebang?
I mean, I think that that is dangerous, but it's dangerous in a different way.
And it's also dangerous in a more consistent and, I would say, historically precedented way.
I mean, the fact is that politicians have always fibbed us.
I mean, there's nothing new about politicians saying things that are not true, from LBJ to George W. Bush to Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
I mean, like, literally every politician.
And Joe Biden.
I mean, to President Biden.
You see this all the time.
So the idea of a politician not telling the truth or shading the truth in particular ways, that's not what's new.
I think what's new is where people are presented with data and their immediate response isn't, let me bring you some data that rebuts that data, but I don't even have to look at your data because your motivation is bad.
This philosophy.
How dangerous is it, though, that we've also become incredibly tribal?
I think more than I can ever remember in modern history, actually.
You know, when I read your Twitter feed, I think you're always prepared to call out your own side if you genuinely feel there's been some egregious wrongdoing that they've done or a terrible mistake or whatever.
But the number of people prepared to do that now on social media in particular is minuscule.
Most people part themselves into their tribe, whatever that tribe may be, and there is no moving them.
There's no deviation, even if the facts change.
And again, it plays into, well, if your feelings are the facts, then if you feel that fact is wrong, well, that's enough.
Right.
The tribalism that I think has cropped up is rooted in a philosophy called emotivism, which is the idea that everybody's actual viewpoints are not driven by their view of the facts.
It's driven by their internal emotions.
What that allows me to do on the converse is attribute malicious intent to people that I'm arguing with.
And it means that I get to ignore all of their facts.
The reason that I'm disagreeing with you is because I'm good and you're a bad person.
And what that means is that people on my own side, for example, they might be upset with me for talking with people on the other side of the aisle.
Because why would you talk to somebody who's a nasty person who has bad motivations?
And the same thing on people on the other side talking to me.
I was having a conversation one time with a very, very large left-wing podcaster.
This is probably 2018.
And I said, you know, we should really do like a crossover podcast for the midterm elections.
It will do huge business.
And my side will be totally fine with it.
It'll be great.
And he said, your side will be fine with it.
My side will kill me.
Right.
And that's probably...
Well, that's the way it's gone.
And Bill Maher said to me, you know, that comedy used to be rooted really in right-wing extremism being comedic.
And that was where liberal comics like him could get their material.
Now he said it's mainly to the left.
It's the woke area of politics that gives him the most comedic material.
And he can't believe it.
And as a liberal himself, he feels just really frustrated that they don't understand how ridiculous and laughable their positions on things have become.
Well, it's driving a bunch of people who consider themselves center or censor left into the arms of people who are more conservative, actually.
I've made the point before that I think the future of the West may ride not on people who agree with me most of the time, you know, conservatives, traditionalists.
I think the future of the West might ride on people who consider themselves kind of traditional liberals, who may agree with some of the left's prescriptions economically, but who disagree with the way they want to get there, which is very often by silencing debate, using censorship, shutting things down.
So the question is going to be, are they willing to put off utopia for a while in order to engage in the debate?
Because I was debating.
Like myself, I've always thought myself not really as a political ideologue, right?
I think I'm pretty centrist and call out everybody really.
I see myself as a journalist fundamentally and don't think that being partisan helps that particular profession very much, as we've seen from those who've actually drifted down into being partisan as journalists.
It doesn't work.
You become an activist.
But someone said the other day, you know, are you a conservative?
I said, well, I'd never identified as a conservative.
But the farther lunatic that the left woke go, the more the pendulum swings.
And eventually we all get sucked into thinking, well, okay, actually, by comparison to this, I probably am getting a bit conservative because I think they're lunatics.
I think what's happening right now, and it's happening in a bunch of countries, is people are just craving any sense of normality.
And common sense.
And no one is providing it to them.
No one is providing it to them.
They're taking a slap at the people who are responsible for the status quo as licensed to now do whatever they want.
And so you're seeing the pendulum swinging wildly side to side because if you're a political leader, you're trying to harness the passions of the moment to get done the thing that you really, really want to get done.
When in reality, the population just wants things to kind of just stop.
Just like us alone and stop.
Right, I totally agree.
And I think that's the majority of people, right?
I mean, today, Rolling Stone published an opinion piece on why cancel culture is good for democracy.
And I read this piece and it was so completely deluded.
Because of course, cancel culture is the antithesis of a democracy.
It's actually the antithesis of liberalism.
You can't pretend to be liberal with what that actually was intended to mean and support cancel culture.
I think the left uses cancel culture in a very different way than most of us use cancel culture.
When we talk about cancel culture, typically what we mean is you say something that they don't like on the air and they decide to secondarily boycott your advertisers or they go to your bosses and call for you to be fired.
And that's what we mean by cancel culture.
What they mean is, well, we're allowed to disapprove of you.
Well, sure, you're allowed to disapprove.
Turn the channel, right?
You don't have to subscribe to Daily Wire.
You don't have to watch your show.
But what they do with that instead is they attempt to get you kicked off the air, not by dint of lack of ratings or something, but just because they're so angry that they're going to go yell at people and bother them until you get kicked off the air.
That's what cancel culture really is.
I interviewed Congressman George Santos this week, who even by the standards of fibbing politicians.
I mean, it was quite startling.
Calling Out Political Lies 00:02:13
I'll just play the clip where he admits to being a terrible liar.
I've been a terrible liar.
I mean, would you be prepared to say that?
Sure.
Like I said, well, I've been a terrible liar on those subjects.
I mean, this guy's a serving member of the United States Congress.
He's one of the most powerful politicians in the country by default.
And he just admitted to being a terrible liar, whether that meant just volume of lies or he's very bad at them, or in his case, uniquely, probably both.
But what did you make of that?
And should someone like him be allowed to stay in Congress?
I mean, I think that the voters are going to decide whether he has to stay in Congress or not.
I don't have a lot of standards for who gets kicked out of Congress by members of their own party because, frankly, I think that he's almost the apotheosis of what politics reached, which is I'm going to lie as much as I can get away with it.
And then the minute I can't get away with it, I'll just be like, well, I'm sorry I lied.
I mean, that's a good idea.
As a high-profile Jewish man, I want to play you the clip where he talks about being Jew-ish, where he separates the two parts of the word.
Let's have a look at this.
I'd always say, I was raised Catholic, but I come from a Jewish family, so that makes me Jew-ish.
I said it to a room with a thousand people in November.
People were hysterically laughing.
It was funny to them.
They loved it.
Now, the people have already said they were at that event and they weren't laughing with him.
There's no sign of any evidence he has any Jewish heritage.
He claimed his grandparents fled the Holocaust.
There seems to be no evidence for that.
His parents are both from Brazil.
And this idea that somehow he can be Jew-ish, i.e., not actually Jewish, just ish.
Well, I mean, honestly, what he should have said is I just, on the inside, I feel Jewish.
I feel so Jewish on the inside.
So I'm Jewish.
I mean, what are you going to do?
Challenge my feelings?
But he has repeatedly said he's Jewish.
I mean, he wasn't joking.
We've seen the clip.
So he said it repeatedly.
Yeah, no, again, I sort of see him as sort of, he's almost the apex predator of politicians at this point.
He's reached the logical endpoint of where our politics is going.
And, you know, it is the job of people like you or me to call it out when he says things that are not true.
But I think that we have reached a sort of post-truth era, not in that people don't pay attention to the truth, but I'm not even sure how many people care about the truth.
Now, I do think that can be exaggerated.
Never Lie to Your Audience 00:03:27
I do think the bulk of the population really does care very much about the truth.
And that's why I think There's going to be a tidal wave of resentment that is about to crash across a bunch of people.
How important is the truth to you?
Because you've got this huge following now, massive podcasts, tens of millions of people watching your stuff on social media and so on.
How important is truth to you now?
That everything comes out of your mouth or that you write is factual.
I mean, it's the most important thing to me because I have to sleep at night.
I mean, it's something that I try to think about as much as humanly possible: never lie to your audience.
Never say to your audience a thing that you know to be not true and try to follow the best data possible.
And that does mean that you're very often having to be more nuanced than sort of the politics of the situation may allow.
Because the easiest position in politics is always to take the hardest right or the hardest left position, the sort of most pure, most easily understood position, or to just play the easiest game of all, which is, again, my opponent is a bad guy.
My opponent is a person who hates yourself.
When we had our dust up at CNN about gun control, for example, I'm not going to go over all that again.
But had I been very different with you, if I'd been very respectful and said, look, I'm a British guy, these aren't my laws.
I'm just as horrified as you are by these massacres, and didn't talk about gun control, which I think has always been a terribly inflammatory phrase for many Americans.
They don't want to be controlled.
And they certainly don't want to hear a British accent telling them about how there should be more control.
But if I'd phrased it as about gun safety, if that had always been the debate in America, how do you make it safer in a country that has 400 million firearms in circulation?
Would that have been a more constructive debate, do you think?
I think it would have been a more informative debate.
The reason being, I think that clarity is very much opposed sometimes by passion.
And we listen, we all get passionate about these issues.
I'm not going to pretend I'm not passionate on my show or I'm completely dispassionate in all circumstances.
I'm obviously not.
But I think that that would have allowed for the kind of discussion where we could have looked at data from various areas of the world, where have regulations been effective?
Where have they not been effective?
As I said on the show, actually, at the time, I believe, what are the risks and rewards of particular policies?
That's where the good discussion area, I think, gets done.
Have you, I mean, just final point on the gun thing.
And I'm aware many viewers who watch this in America own guns and support Second Amendment rights and so on.
Where do you see the line going?
As you have all these massacres and as gun ownership increases, there's just more guns in circulation.
What do you do about that?
I mean, as a country as big and powerful as America, what more can be done to just make it safer?
I mean, again, the measures that I've always suggested are measures that tend more toward the gun owner than toward the weapon itself, meaning that we obviously need better screening procedures for people who have a history of severe mental illness.
We have red flag laws on the books, but they're not enacted.
I mean, people don't actually practically follow the red flag laws, which is why I'm kind of skeptical of the idea that if we pass some more text from the legislature, that's magically going to translate into better action.
What we need is more alacrity from the cops.
I mean, how many of these mass shootings have we seen where there are a thousand red flags and the cops go to the house and then they're told, well, no, we're not going to do anything.
We're going to leave you back out there.
It's almost in every circumstance.
So we actually do need law enforcement to have more ability and will to carry out, for example, when they know somebody is severely mentally disturbed or somebody is shooting a gun at their mother, which we've had a case like that.
That would be a time where you actually remove the person's guns and keep track of them, make sure they can't actually get guns.
Protecting Kids from Nonsense 00:15:48
See, if I, by way, again, when I was doing that debating, I would have had this kind of conversation.
I can look back at those and realize I was having my own emotions override.
We all have these.
Yeah, but it's interesting, isn't it?
I do think an important part of how we get to a better place as society now, away from this tribalism, away from all this stuff, is you've got to be prepared to have this kind of conversation, which doesn't end up with me just looking at you and shouting, well, you're a complete idiot because you don't agree with me, right?
It's more complicated.
It's more nuanced.
Life is more nuanced than that.
I like to think so.
And I think that, again, those conversations can be really, really productive.
I try to make a habit.
I have my regular daily show, but I also have a show called The Sunday Special that You've Been On, in which I bring on a bunch of people who disagree, from Bill Maher to Anna Kasparian.
And we actually try to talk through these issues.
And last time I came, and I found it a very surprisingly pleasant experience.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's take a short break.
I want to come back and ask you that I'm in the most deadly question in the world right now.
What is a woman?
Welcome back to Petersburg and Uncensored, live from New York.
Ben Shapiro is live and uncensored.
So come on, then, what is a woman?
Well, I mean, a woman is whatever J.K. Rowling says a woman is.
And she's right.
A woman is a biological human female.
How on earth have we got to a place where stating that simple fact has now become a stick to beat people with?
When, from what I can ascertain, 99% of the entire planet agrees with that fact.
Yep.
Again, it goes back to that idea that your subjective feeling about yourself must be reflected by the rest of the world, cheered and celebrated by the rest of the world, because that's actually what the ask is, right?
The ask isn't even, you know, I wish to be treated well in society.
And you can think whatever you want of me, but you should treat me decently.
That's not the actual ask.
The actual ask is, I wish for you to participate in a delusion whereby I am a biological human female, or exactly the same in many important respects as a biological human female.
Trans women are women, which again, if you refuse to define what...
You've warned about this, and I've warned about it, and we've taken it to, we've said in the warnings, if you take this to a logical conclusion, it's going to get abused.
And we had a stark example of this in Scotland several weeks ago with this rapist, Adam Graham, who at his trial, having raped two women with his penis.
Let's be graphic.
Her penis.
Well, this is the point.
He then turned up as Isla Bryson and said, I'm now a woman.
So that's him before.
And then he comes along as Isla Bryson there.
And the game plan, according to his ex-wife, is, well, he just wants to get into a women's prison, which is obviously what his game plan was.
And he got into one, put into a woman's prison where there are women there who are vulnerable to attacks from people like him.
That to me showed the insanity of this.
We had a leader, Nicola Sturgeon, been leader of Scotland for eight years, who supported this limitless gender identity nonsense and lost her job, actually, I think, as a direct consequence of this.
I mean, let's see what she said.
I'll play it to you.
Question is, are all trans women women?
You haven't answered that question.
Well, that's not the point that we're dealing with the question at mind.
Trans women are women, but in the prison context, there is no automatic right for a trans woman.
There are contexts where a trans woman is not a woman.
No, there is circumstances in which a trans woman will be housed in the male prison estate.
I think that interview cost her her job because when I watched that, it went on for about 50 seconds.
It was jaw-dropping.
Because actually, her ideology about this was just cruelly exposed as being completely ridiculous.
Well, it's an emperor's new clothes kind of thing.
And again, when that happens to politicians who are supposed to supposedly traffic in fact, it makes it very difficult for them.
And so when you take a completely logically unsustainable position, like trans women are women, but some of those women are going to be housed with the men, which is what she does in that clip, everybody can see how ridiculous it is.
And it exposes the ideology for what it is, which is baseless and nonsense and extraordinarily negative.
Because again, if you undermine societal perceptions of truth, we're supposed to be living in this terrible time of misinformation and disinformation.
I can't think of anything worse in terms of misinformation than the idea that a biological man is in fact a female.
And when you see what's happening in sport, it's even more absurd where you see six foot, three inch swimmers, formerly male swimmers, dominating the women's sport.
And you think, well, where does this leave women's sport?
If you just allow this to continue, ultimately, women's sport will get destroyed.
I mean, honestly, the most frightening part of this to me is not even sort of the direct consequences of this.
And some of it is directed at kids, right?
I mean, we are teaching kids in the United States who are five, six, seven years old about gender fluidity, about how boys can become girls, which kids are vulnerable.
Kids need to be protected from nonsense.
And kids actually need rules and expectations.
And basically saying to them that you can be a member of the opposite sex is insane.
And what we've seen... predictably enough from young people, from teenagers, is a radical, skyrocketing, increasing rate of people who are identifying as trans or gender non-binary.
And then not shockingly, at the exact same time, a rapid rise in suicidal ideation and depression and confusion.
None of that is a shock.
This is all a social contagion.
There's never been anything else.
Well, there was the scandal of the Tavistock Clinic in London, which, you know, anyone who raised any concerns about this was immediately branded transphobic, which put people off raising concerns.
But it turned out 97% of the young kids that were sent there for this gender reassignment turned out to have other issues from autism to depression.
97%.
And what they really needed was an adult to be adult about this and say, well, before we irrevocably change your body and cut you to pieces, we're actually going to have a proper conversation about these other issues you've got, right?
Exactly.
But again, I think this is part of a broader attack on the notion of truth and the attack on institutions is really what it is in the end.
Because the question is, why is it so important to teach kids who are five, six, seven years old about being gender non-binary or trans?
Again, there is an actual condition called gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder, and some people suffer from it.
It's a very small percentage of the population.
It is not 30, 40%, 20%, 10%, 5% of the population.
But it does exist, obviously.
And those people are suffering.
And we should try to find ways to help them, whether that is in the medical context with regard to therapy or whether we're talking about just families treating them well.
But that is not the same thing as indoctrinating entire generations of people and forcing all of society to go along with it.
I mean, this is the real issue.
You're asking all of society to tell a lie in the name of sensitivity.
Well, once you've done that with any issue, you can do that with pretty much every issue.
Well, we saw it with the ridiculous farce of the Roll Dahl books all having this sensitivity reading.
Removing hundreds and hundreds of words and phrases from this iconic author.
He's sold through 300 million books.
Suddenly they're rewriting this stuff.
And some of the rewrites were so completely ridiculous.
One where tractors are referred to as black.
They had to change that because somehow you can't have a black tractor.
Well, what if the tractor's black?
One of the real problems here is that the modern context cannot understand why kids would read Roll Dahl.
That really is the major issue.
So I read Roll Dahl to my kids.
I just got through, I think, pretty much his entire corpus with my six-year-old.
And they're an extraordinary book.
Kids love it.
Of course.
Because the books are mean.
Because the books are mean, right?
The books are about life is a rough place where people are mean to you and social expectations are set for you.
And people will talk to you about that.
That's a great preparation for what the actual world is like.
Correct.
Now you move to a place where even egg and spoon races have been banned in England, for example, at schools, because they encourage too much aggression amongst the kids who want to win.
He's like, well, where does that leave you then?
So kids get taught, everybody wins.
You all get a participation prize.
Once you have that mindset, where's the preparation for the real world?
That's right.
It's a war against reality.
And the reality is that, for example, in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, being fat is not as good for you as not being fat, right?
If you're Augustus Gloop, it turns out that you probably shouldn't overeat.
But this is considered mean.
So we're just going to cut the word fat.
Right, but the reader, the sensitivity reader said that you...
They call it enormous, right?
You couldn't be fat, but you could be enormous.
What the hell are you talking about?
You can't wipe that away.
But again, I think that's setting up a predicate for a broader ideological shift, which is any problems you experience in your life are through no volition of your own or any action of your own.
You're not responsible for your own actions.
Society at large is responsible for your actions for setting up unrealistic standards of beauty, or society is responsible for setting up some sort of sensitivity to you as a human being.
What about the damage it's done, for example, I think, a lot of damage to being male, being a man, being masculine, that everything is now characterized as toxic masculinity.
Absolutely.
I mean, the effect on men, and by the way, by proxy on women, because it turns out that women actually kind of like masculine men.
All of human procreation is rooted in this essential biological fact.
The destruction of men in the West is the great story of the last 40 years, which is men basically somehow got the patriarchy was so clever that they somehow convinced women that sexual liberation was actually the most wonderful thing for women.
But as it turns out, it actually backfired and it ended up destroying men because men do need marriage.
Men need roles.
Men need actual things to do in the course of their lifetime.
And the thing that most men did for virtually all of human history was get married, have kids, protect and defend your wife and kids.
That was the role.
And you were trained to do this from the time that you were a small kid.
It's what, you know, I have three kids going on four.
I train my kids to do this now.
I talk to them about how many kids do you want to have?
What kind of job do you want to have?
How do you want to bring up those kids?
They're small.
You train kids to be adults because you know what kids want?
They want to be adults.
And what they want is a path from how I get to point A, being a child, to being an adult.
But we as a society have completely destroyed that path because we've said that adulting is now, number one, a verb.
And number two, we've said that being an adult is somehow no longer required of you.
Society is going to take care of you no matter what problem you have.
It's everybody else's job to fix all of the problems.
And you see why people like Andrew Tate got such traction.
Yes, so what I've said about Andrew Tate is that I would say that 75% of Andrew Tate's diagnoses of the problem are pretty correct.
Yeah, I agree.
And then I would say that a lot of his prescriptions are completely wrong.
So he will say men have lost their role in the world.
And then what he will model is cam girls.
It's like, well, that's not actually the solution.
But what you're saying about the problem of men losing their role and men needing to be masculine and men needing to want to win and men needing to cultivate an ability to go out and succeed and thrive in the world, all of that is 100% true.
I just think that he himself on a personal level wasn't providing a model of that.
To me, a model of that is a guy who is married, who has kids, who lives in the community, who betters the community he lives in, who hires people, creates a business.
Like these are the things that historically speaking did define manhood and now they no longer define manhood.
I think that you can chart the moment of deterioration for the moment James Bond started crying.
It's like, you know, you take even that, take even Bond and emasculate him.
It's like he has to be in touch with his feelings.
Why?
Why can't he just shoot people and drink martinis and seduce women?
And what's wrong with that?
Well, that is, again, a cultural move.
And you're right, against masculinity in pretty much every sphere.
And the conflation of masculinity, which is good, with toxic masculinity, that all masculinity is bad.
And so we need to feminize society overall.
We don't need to feminize society overall any more than we need to masculinize society overall.
What we need is for men to be men and women to be women.
That doesn't mean that women are barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
As I've said many times, my wife is a doctor, right?
What it does mean is that there are essential qualities to being a woman that are different from many of the essential qualities to being a man.
Because it's not important.
Here's one part of all this debate which I disagree with you about.
So you don't agree with gay marriage or with gay parenting.
I don't want to misquote you, but I think that's your position.
Now, I would say that reading the rest of your views on stuff, you're very about fairness and equality for all, right?
How does that fit in there?
Why shouldn't two men who are gay actually be able to bring a child up?
Why shouldn't they want to get married?
How is it equal fair for them to be excluded?
So we can take those issues one by one.
So marriage is a societal institution.
The question is which relationships society chooses to sanctify.
So I'm not in favor of, for example, laws that criminalize homosexual activity or two men living together or two men making a lifelong commitment to one another in whatever context they wish to do that.
What I'm objecting to is the idea that marriage as a term is equally applicable to relationships that are designed to produce the future generation and then raise them as opposed to two people who love each other.
The fundamental redefinition of marriage actually happened before same-sex marriage, within heterosexual marriage, away from the purpose of heterosexual marriage is man, woman, child to two people who love each other.
Once you do that, then that obviously is going to encompass things like two men or two women.
But it has no limiting principle because then it could be any group of people who love each other.
And I don't think that the government has a fundamental role in propagating relationships other than ones that have externalities that benefit society.
And the chief externality that benefits society from marriage is having children and children raised largely with their biological parents.
As far as gay parenting, what I've said is that there are sort of hierarchies of options, meaning that the ideal is man, woman, child.
And then, you know, if you can't fulfill that ideal, then there's obviously gradations.
I'd rather that two gay men are raising a child than have that child be in an orphanage, for example.
So it's not as though the alternatives are always, you know, the ones that I would want.
But shouldn't they be allowed to have the same just rights in law to what straight couples would have?
Well, I mean, both as a private sector.
It's more benefits than rights, right?
If you're talking about a right, what you're talking about is a government non-intervention with particular activity.
Now, when it comes to children, we obviously do things to protect children or provide them.
I've seen gay parents who are fantastic parents.
I've seen gay parents who I think are not fantastic parents.
Sure.
I've seen a lot of straight parents who are awful, and I've seen some great straight parents.
I don't really see any particular distinction about what combination you have as your parents.
So I do.
And the reason I do is because, again, I think there is a fundamental distinction between woman and man.
And what that means is that mothers and fathers are both necessary.
And so the idea that two men can simply supplant a man and a woman on a generic average level, I don't think it's...
They are, this is what they are.
I mean, you don't think that gay people become gay, presumably, right?
Well, I mean, I think that the notion that everyone who is gay was always gay from the time that they were born, I don't think that the data back that per se, because we are seeing rising levels, for example, across society of people identifying in a particular way.
So there is some fluidity to sexual behavior and sexual activity.
There's less fluidity probably to sexual orientation.
I assume that the majority...
Yeah, but sure.
Majority of gay people, male and female, are born gay, right?
If you take that as a basic premise, the majority are, which I absolutely believe.
I'm just not sure how it's fair or equitable to deny them the same rights to their relationship status or to parenting that you would give to straight people.
So again, I really don't think that has anything to do with being born or not born in a particular way.
I think even if they were not born in a particular way, that the government should not criminalize private activity.
What I do think is that if we are talking about the benefits that a government is giving in order to propagate childbearing and rearing within the context of the biological parents, which is, again, what marriage originally was supposed to be, which is why marriage was government-sponsored.
What would you do if one of your kids, they're all very young, so you have no idea, but if one of your kids turned out to be gay and wanted to get married, would you be tough on nothing to do with that?
I mean, if I would say you can't do that.
I mean, I would oppose that from...
So religion, so again, marriage exists in the middle of the marriage.
No, you're a religious person.
Yeah, I mean, religious.
So marriage exists in a couple of different iterations.
One is religious marriage, which is kind of what I care about.
And then there is governmental sanctioned marriage, which is a public policy question.
When it comes to religious marriage, no, I'm not in favor of my religion sanctifying same-sex couples, specifically because, again, my religion propagates the idea that man, woman, and child is the model for families.
Freedom of Speech Under Attack 00:12:00
I want to come back and talk to you about what, the big question of the Republicans.
Trump v. DeSantis.
What's going to happen?
Who's going to win?
Is Biden going to run again?
And does age matter?
Back to Piers Morgan Uncensored, live from New York City.
Ben Shapiro is still with me, live and uncensored.
Ben, you've got a fourth child coming along.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
I have four as well.
Disturbing report in the New York Post today that Peppa Pig is having an American children.
They're all beginning to speak in English accents.
Has this happened to you, and how do you feel about this?
I mean, it hasn't happened to me.
I do feel like this is a subversive British attempt to reverse the results of the American Revolution.
This would be the second in the course of the last few years.
You sent us Prince Harry, apparently, in an attempt to conquer all.
And he and his wife, she was going to become president, he was going to become first lady or first gentleman.
Can you even imagine if those two?
We're going to come to those two in the last block because I can't get there before then.
It's just too distressing.
Let's talk about American politics.
Trump v. DeSantis is interesting because Trump still wields a lot of power in the Republican Party.
But DeSantis is pretty nearly half his age.
He's got all this dynamism now, very successful in the midterms, really doing a good job in Florida.
How do you see this playing out?
Because they've got to work it out, I think, to have a success in 2024.
I'm not sure that they have to work it out.
I don't think President Trump is really capable of working it out with people he sees as potential or real rivals to him.
That's sort of not his.
Can DeSantis beat him, do you think?
Yes.
And I think the reason that DeSantis can beat him is because Donald Trump is very charming when he's winning, and when he is losing, he just seems whiny.
And that's a real problem for him.
So after 2020, when he maintained that he won and he had not, I think a lot of Republicans were willing to grant him the premise, which was, okay, you pulled off this miracle in 2016.
You're the only man who can win.
So how could he possibly lose in 2020?
If you say you won, okay, fine.
And then the 2021 elections happen in Georgia, and essentially he contributes to the loss of two Senate seats in Georgia.
And then the 2022 elections happen, and pretty much all of his handpicked candidates in the Senate then proceed to lose.
And a lot of Republicans look at this and they say, well, listen, we have a lot of warm feelings toward you personally, but we can't keep losing to these people.
And so we need something new.
We need somebody who wins.
And so when they look at the board, the person who's putting the most W's on the board right now is DeSantis in Florida.
I mean, the same election where Republicans wildly underperformed, there was a red wave, but it only hit one state.
It hit the state where I happened to live.
It hit Florida, and it was eight Tsunami.
And I've been to Florida a lot recently, and they love him in Florida.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you've got Democrats who are voting for him and Independents who are voting for him.
He took a state that he'd won in 2018 by 0.4 percentage points, and he won it by 20 points in the last election cycle.
Joe Biden, if he runs again and wins, he would be 86 by the end of that term.
I mean, he's already the oldest president in history and showing a lot of signs of mental decline.
Let's be kind about it.
I mean, he fell over on the plane again today.
I don't know if we got that clip, but it's just when you see these moments, I think we've got to hear.
This is him over in Europe.
It is hard to watch because this happens quite regularly, and it's not just physical stumbles, it's verbal as well.
Do you think he's going to run again?
Yes.
I think they will have to staple him upright on a horse and run him.
And they will, because I don't think that they want the international warfare of a bunch of also ransom.
I mean, backing him up is the worst politician ever cobbled together in the laboratory, Kamal Harris.
I mean, she is awful.
I mean, she makes Hillary Clinton look like the apotheosis of charm.
And she's backing him up.
And then you have Pete Buttigieg, who is busily destroying his own reputation over this East Palestine train spill.
I mean, he could not go down there for three weeks.
It's just absolutely breathtaking.
So Donald Trump has gone down there today just to be the hero.
Where is the transport secretary?
Especially if you have presidential aspirations the way that they are.
I'm planning on going.
Well, when?
Right.
It's not that hard.
I mean, you just go.
Get on a plane, you turn up, and you, you know.
It's always a bad time when you know the name of the transportation secretary, right?
There are certain departments in the government where you just don't know anybody's name.
Transportation is one of them.
But after presiding over the supply chain problems and then the railroad strike, and then the East Palestine issue and the airlines, I mean, he's had a bad run here.
And so if you're the Democratic Party and you're looking at the next batch of people.
I think he's done himself in out of that.
I think they've got a real problem on their hands.
And so they have to be bad.
I think they're going to for the right thing to do.
Nikki Haley has put her hat in the ring and was immediately the victim of an extraordinary onslaught from Don Lemon, who happened to take my old office at CNN, actually.
Not that I hold a torch to that, obviously.
But here's the clip of what Don Lemon said about Nikki Haley.
He's 51 years old.
Nikki Haley isn't in her prime.
Sorry.
A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.
What do you talk?
That's not according to me.
Prime for what?
It depends.
I mean, it's just like prime.
If you look it up, if you Google when is a woman in her prime, it'll say 20s, 30s, and 40s.
Can you imagine two women either side of you?
And what CNN and people like Christian Amampour and all these great journalists all by his yardstick way past their prime now.
I mean, just the crassness of it.
Well, I mean, I do love the gay man explaining to the two women what a woman in her prime looks like.
And he Googled it.
He Googled it.
He googled it.
He had to Google it.
So there was that.
But yeah, what is amazing about this, sort of a broader trend, is the amount of hatred that Haley is picking up from the left side of the media, which I think is a tell.
So the media have said for years and years and years that they want Trump out.
Trump has to go.
He's a fascist threat to the United States.
And then the minute that a candidate throws her hat in the ring against Trump, she's the first declared candidate against Trump.
And the minute that happens, all of a sudden, she's a child.
White supremacist.
And she's too old for the job at 51, which suggests to me that a lot of these people have been crying into their soup a little bit over Donald Trump.
They really want him out.
Do you think ultimately the race will be DeSantis against Biden?
I think that that's the highest likelihood.
And you think who wins that?
I think DeSantis wins that race.
I think that Biden's been cruising for a bruising and he narrowly avoided it in 2020 because the Republicans decided to raid the local homeless shelter for candidates.
Let's come back.
We've got to finally get to them.
Harry and Megan and the South Park devastating destruction of everything they represent.
We want our privacy!
Which the whole world's been chuckling over.
We'll talk about that after the break.
Welcome back to Piers Working Our Censored live from New York.
Ben Shapiro still with me.
So we've got to get to them.
Harry and Megan, unfortunately.
Let's take a little look at South Park just because it makes me howl with laughter every time I look at it.
Thanks for having us on the show.
In a way, these two absolutely personify woke culture, don't they?
The entitlement, the virtue signaling, the hypocrisy, all of it is encapsulated in these two.
And the untouchability.
I mean, you found out, right?
If you say something that crosses them, you hurt their feelings, and they're very upset.
And they believe they have a right to get people removed from their jobs if they don't agree with everything they're saying.
Well, and I will say that.
I think the public reaction to them is so heartening because they really are quite terrible.
I mean, I'm watching this as an American.
I have no dog in this particular fight.
But I got to say, they're just the worst.
I actually read Prince Harry's awful memoir, and the number of things that are obviously not true and the absolute self-delusion and an arrogant self-delusion was a very important thing.
How many amount of intrusion into his own family's life, quoting family members from funerals and stuff, far more intrusive than anything anyone else is doing?
He wants privacy, but he has very specific memories of using particular facial cream on...
I didn't know the word Todd.
I mean, I'm American.
We don't use the word Todger in my country.
I have no idea what...
I mean, now I know, but, you know, you learn something.
What happens to them now?
I mean, they've done all this stuff, Netflix, but it's all basically their entire value is predicated on trashing the family and the monarchy.
That's a diminishing returns, right?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's a next step here.
I mean, once you actually destroy your source of value, which is the inside view of the monarchy and you've already spilled that, what else is there to do other than stand outside and just shout a lot?
And then, as South Park implies, Americans, I mean, is there any love for them here or not?
I can't.
I'm searching for it.
Is it now ridiculed?
Yeah, I think it's all ridicule at this point.
I want to talk about chat GPT, which I don't know much about other than it's a bit worrying when we asked them to write a tweet in my style and they came back with, I'm tired of these PC snowflakes trying to dictate what I can and can't say.
Freedom of speech is under attack.
Hashtag wake up, which was pretty damn accurate.
So I interviewed Professor Stephen Hawking before he died.
Last TV interview he ever gave.
An amazing day we did up in Cambridge.
I said, what's the biggest threat to mankind?
He said, when AI learns to self-design, that's it.
Are we getting anywhere near now?
I mean, it certainly feels like we are approaching it.
And this would just be the latest iteration of us unleashing forces that we have no idea the consequences.
What those are.
Can we be unleashing them?
I have some serious doubts about whether we should be unleashing them, at least in the sort of uncontrolled fashion that we're seeing right now.
I'm not sure the government is capable of controlling any of this sort of stuff.
The thing, honestly, that I'm most worried about is when you combine the rise of internet pornography with the rise of chat GPT, which is going to, I think, play on the emotions of people using the internet.
I mean, we could be one generation away from human extinction at this point.
I mean, if you look at the actual rates of propagation in the West and you look at the rates of dating and the rates of marriage, like all that stuff is taking a mass dive.
And yeah, I'm pretty worried about that.
So apart from the imminent end of the entire planet, Ben Shapiro, is there anything positive you can give us?
Well, I mean, the good news is that we're not.
You think about the world, what do you feel good about?
My good news is twofold.
One is that the era of Anglo-American dominance is not yet over.
What we're seeing in Ukraine is actually rather heartening because it suggests that the post-World War II system is not yet dead.
So that's a good thing.
And the other thing that I think that is good is that I root for reality.
Reality always wins.
And so all of these kind of forces that we've unleashed, they are running up directly against the rocks of reality.
And there will be consequences.
Do you feel the woke worm is turning?
Because I do.
I feel that the backlash against wokery is now real and people have basically now said enough.
I think that's right.
And I think what's even more heartening is that the people who are pushing it don't realize that yet.
So they're going to continue to push right into the teeth of the resistance.
And when the jaws clamp shut, it's going to get very ugly for them, I think.
You've made a business now which is generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Extraordinary story, really.
Probably all down to the way you tuned me up on CNN those years ago.
Things have worked out quite well for me, too.
So happy days for both of us.
It's an amazing business.
Why do you think you've resonated so hugely, not just in America, but around the world?
Again, I think that the central brand, which is that we are very honest about where we are coming from, so we're honest about our own political biases, but we're also trying to be as factual as humanly possible.
And we do provide a wide variety of views.
I mean, all of our hosts disagree with one another.
Candace disagrees with me, disagrees with Matt.
I think that's the power of your brand.
I really do.
I think it's, and that's what I try to inspire to be myself.
You've got to be fair-minded about it.
Right.
I mean, hopefully if you're opening up that conversation, then people are going to learn more than they came in with.
I think today they will.
Ben Shapiro, great to see you.
Great to see you.
All the best.
That's it from me.
Tomorrow I'll be talking exclusively to the YouTube megastar term boxer Jake Paul and the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about Ukraine.
Whatever you're up to, keep it uncensored.
That's it from me.
Live in New York.
We're going to go and get a drink, aren't we?
Chew the
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