Ben Shapiro talks Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's illness and why you should be worried about her health. He also talks about the New York Times' complete meltdown and the media's complete redefinition of the media itself, and why it's time to diversify your money into precious metals. Finally, he discusses the California teachers' strike and the potential impact it could have on the economy and the rest of the country. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro Show on the FiveThirtyEight Radio Network and is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. His new book, The Devil Next Door is out now and is available for pre-order now. He is also the author of The Right Side of History: A Guide to America s Most Influential People and Their Lives, which you should read before you buy a copy of the book. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first pack! Subscribe, Like, and Share on Apple Podcasts and become a Friend! It helps spread the word to the world about what's going on! Subscribe to, and learn more about, Ben Shapiro and all things financial freedom and financial freedom. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Protect your data from prying eyes at ExpressVPN! Protect Your Data from Prying Eyes at Parris Vets: Protect your Data Protect Your Day Offs and Protect Your Privacy by Protect Your Private Data at ExpressVpn.org/Protect Your Data Protect You'll Never Be Stagnosyservices and much, Much, Much More! Today s show is Sponsored by: Birch Gold, the world-class, safe, secure, reliable, high-grade gold and more! . . . . Birch Gold's A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau rating system, and Birch Gold & much, much, better than any other company in the world's finest gold and silver and precious metals? ...and much, cheaper than you'll get a chance to own a signed copy of The Devil's Guide to Gold and Silver & Silver, and much more. ... , and so much more! ...and so much MORE! , .... in this episode of The Price is right here's a good one! ...so much more... on The Devil Explains It All on this episode is $5,000!
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00:00:23.000You may have noticed, things are kind of uncertain, right?
00:00:25.000It looked like we were reopening the economy and then out here in California, Governor Newsom was like, we're going to stop that right now.
00:00:30.000No more of the reopening of the economy.
00:00:32.000It seems like there's COVID upticks here, but what exactly is going to happen next?
00:00:36.000the hell knows. Nobody knows anything. That is the theme of this year 2020. Nobody knows bleep, which is why you should probably buy diversified at least a little bit into precious metals. The market has come a long way since COVID-19 hit.
00:00:47.000It is still down over 8% for the year. Gold is up 18% this year. Why? Well, because people diversified and also because people recognize that uncertainty is not really great for your bank account. Birch Gold is the place to go if you are interested in diversifying into precious metals. Birch Gold has an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, hundreds of five star reviews. They have the precious metal experts that will hold your hand, walk you through the transitioning of one of your eligible IRAs or 401ks into an IRA in gold or silver if that's something you are interested in.
00:01:41.000We'll give you the brief news update, because there's a lot of news out there today before we even get to everything related to the complete meltdown over at the New York Times, the meltdown in mainstream media, and the complete redefinition of the media itself, which is a pretty damned big story.
00:02:09.000She received treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after experiencing fever and chills.
00:02:13.000She underwent a procedure to clean a bile duct stent and will stay in the hospital for a few days.
00:02:17.000According to her spokesperson, the justice is resting comfortably and will stay in the hospital for a few days to receive intravenous antibiotic treatment.
00:02:25.000In January, she was cancer-free after undergoing treatment for what was likely pancreatic cancer.
00:02:29.000Last year, the year before, she had treatment for cancer on her lungs.
00:02:32.000So, it's been a health mess for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:02:35.000Obviously, everybody praying for her health, although some of us would like to see her step down voluntarily from the Supreme Court because Two things can be true at once.
00:02:42.000I want her to be healthy, and also I think she's a terrible justice, but certainly the writers of 2020 have Trump season five.
00:02:49.000They've really decided to pull out all the stops here.
00:02:51.000If you can just imagine a Supreme Court vacancy, which, you know, God forbid it should happen through something bad happening to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but if she were to step down for any reason, for any reason, if there is a Supreme Court vacancy in this election year, oh my God, the hellish riots that will occur as a result of replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett, for example, would just be insane.
00:03:09.000Meanwhile, we've been watching this COVID uptick and the re-lockdown of California.
00:03:13.000So, Los Angeles is completely locked down again.
00:03:16.000Virtually all businesses have been shuttered.
00:03:18.000You're still allowed to eat outdoors, but that's pretty much it.
00:03:20.000All indoor businesses have been shut down, including hair salons, including restaurants, including pretty much everything.
00:03:26.000Like, all the things have been shut down across the state of California, and LA announced that they would not be reopening the schools in August.
00:03:33.000So basically, you're going to be learning from home again, which is really a sop to the teachers' union because the data on students and how healthy they are and how much COVID affects them, it is pretty non-conflicting when it comes to the health of the students.
00:03:46.000The real problem with opening schools is teachers and administrators, which is why the suggestion that I've made, and my friend Jon Podhoretz over at the Commentary Magazine podcast made it, and so I'm going to copy him.
00:04:21.000I'll give you the good news first, because I think that you're getting enough of the bad news from the media.
00:04:24.000And frankly, I think the media are overplaying some of the bad news.
00:04:27.000They're implying that we are in exactly the same place we were back in April or March, that we are about to see this New York-type surge across the country that overwhelms the healthcare system.
00:04:36.000The data on that is extremely limited.
00:04:38.000It does not look at this point as though Florida is going to be overwhelmed.
00:04:40.000It does not look as though Texas is going to be overwhelmed.
00:04:42.000It doesn't look as though California is going to be overwhelmed.
00:04:45.000It looks instead as though there has been a surge in positive tests, although that may be plateauing.
00:04:51.000And it is also true that the identification of the positives is a lot higher than it was back in March or April.
00:04:59.000It is likely that we were actually wildly under-identifying positive cases back in March or April.
00:05:03.000We are now running, in like a six-day period, seven-day period, as many tests for COVID-19 as we ran in all of 2017, 2018, and 2019 combined for the flu.
00:05:16.000I mean, it means that we're identifying the cases.
00:05:18.000It also means that we are getting a better picture of the actual infection fatality rate.
00:05:22.000You know, how many people have it versus how many people are dying.
00:05:24.000And that's why even as you see the numbers rising from last week, as far as the number of people dying, and that is a trailing indicator, usually it's anywhere from two weeks to a month trailing indicator.
00:05:33.000Those numbers, in proportion to the number of cases, have actually been declining.
00:05:36.000So you've been seeing, at the same time, an absolute rise in deaths.
00:05:39.000So we saw about a thousand yesterday, according to Johns Hopkins, or at least a thousand reported.
00:05:45.000Again, the reporting procedures here are a little bit confused because sometimes There are people who are backdating, right?
00:05:50.000They're taking a death from two weeks ago, they realize now it was COVID and now they're reporting it that way.
00:05:55.000There's a bit of a lag time, in other words.
00:05:56.000But whatever you say, there has been a surge in deaths over the past week or so.
00:06:00.000But as a percentage of total infections, the rates have actually gone down.
00:06:04.000And you've seen a decreasing positivity rate in places like Florida and Texas over the last few days as well.
00:06:09.000So the notion that we are about to be just overwhelmed with death in the system, The data on that is pretty scanty.
00:06:15.000In fact, what we might be looking at, and here's the optimist in me, what we might be looking at is, I would hope, a plateauing.
00:06:21.000Right, what I would hope is a plateauing.
00:06:23.000And this brings us to piece of possible good news, number one, that is that there is a theory that is out there and it is now being increasingly backed by data from, of all places, Sweden, right?
00:06:33.000Sweden, the worst country on earth because Sweden didn't really shut down.
00:06:36.000They sort of allowed people to go out.
00:06:38.000They basically allowed young people to go out.
00:06:42.000And their big mistake was they didn't protect nursing homes very early, but they basically followed the same protocols that Florida did without protecting the nursing homes.
00:06:48.000They said that if you want to go out, wear a mask, socially distance, but life has to go on.
00:06:53.000And Sweden was heavily criticized for this.
00:06:55.000Their deaths per million were compared unfavorably with places like Norway, with places like Denmark that were next door.
00:07:01.000But Sweden is now seeing an increased number of cases and almost no death.
00:07:06.000So this has led people to suggest what exactly is going on here, right?
00:07:10.000I mean, normally you would see increased number of cases and increased number of deaths.
00:07:13.000So what exactly is going on in Sweden?
00:07:15.000Well, the data sort of suggests that maybe the herd immunity rate is not 60%.
00:07:21.000Maybe the herd immunity rate isn't even 40%.
00:07:24.000Maybe, in fact, the herd immunity rate is like 10 to 20%.
00:07:28.000Which would explain, by the way, why New York State is not seeing a vast uptick in number of deaths, even as they reopen.
00:07:34.000It's why New Jersey isn't seeing vast upticks in death once they reopen.
00:07:37.000In other words, once this thing runs through your population, it's pretty much done.
00:07:40.000I mean, that would be the great hope here.
00:07:41.000And that's sort of what you're seeing in Sweden.
00:07:45.000Because normally, herd immunity is 60, 70, 80%.
00:07:48.000How could it be that herd immunity would be like 10 or 20%?
00:07:50.000Well, there's something called T-cell immunity.
00:07:53.000Jim Garrity over at National Review wrote about this yesterday.
00:07:55.000He says, the Guardian over in the UK has reported on a study by King's College London suggesting that after infection, coronavirus patients could lose their built-in immunity to reinfection fairly quickly.
00:08:04.000And then in Vox, there's a guy named Clay Ackerley, an internal medicine and primary care physician practicing in Washington, D.C., who described a 50-year-old patient who tested positive, suffered effects of coronavirus, tested negative twice, then tested positive again with more severe symptoms a second time about six weeks later.
00:08:20.000And there were these worries earlier in the year.
00:08:23.000But those worries were about South Korea.
00:08:26.000The South Korean CDC reported that you might be able to be reinfected with all of this.
00:08:30.000But there's some data that came out from this.
00:08:34.000And the data that came out from this is that maybe it turns out that this person's immune system, these secondary sort of infections, that that was actually just a reflection of the first infection.
00:08:42.000That actually, what is happening here is that some people have a pre-existing resistance to coronavirus.
00:08:49.000So, as Jim Garrity writes, the body's response to a viral infection utilizes both antibodies and T-cells, which you may have heard of in the context of cancer treatments.
00:08:57.000T-cells are produced in bone marrow, but get their name because they develop in the thymus gland.
00:09:01.000T-cells are basically the special forces of your immune system, split into two groups.
00:09:05.000The first, CD8, acts as navy seals of your immune system.
00:09:08.000They take on infections, virus bacteria, tumors, and, God willing, take them all down.
00:09:12.000The second category of T-cells, CD4, are the support staff, performing a variety of duties, including the protection of cytokines.
00:09:18.000Remember, cytokine storms, this is the idea that the body was reacting too fast to COVID-19 and was actually shutting down systems in the body.
00:09:27.000Our body's production of T-cells slows after puberty and is basically gone by age 65, which is one reason why elderly people are more vulnerable to infection.
00:09:34.000Well, some new research suggests that bodies with not-so-great antibody levels can still have effective T-cell responses against the virus.
00:09:40.000In other words, you haven't had it before and you don't actually have to have immunity to the virus.
00:09:44.000Your T-cells already are able to fight this thing off.
00:09:46.000The study found that SARS-CoV-19-specific CD8 T-cells were found in about 70% of recovering patients and 100% of patients had COVID-2-specific CD4 T-cells.
00:09:57.000Importantly, they detected SARS-CoV-2 reactive CD4 plus T-cells in 40 to 60 percent of unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactive T-cell recognition between circulating common cold coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.
00:10:10.000So in other words, if you had a cold in the last couple of years, your T-cells may be prepped for this thing.
00:10:15.000Because you're cold, it's a coronavirus.
00:10:18.000So it is possible that there is a heavy percentage of the population that already has sort of pre-existing immunity.
00:10:23.000Think of all the zombie movies that you've seen where there's a small percentage of the population that was resistant to the zombie plague and they're the big survivors.
00:10:29.000Well, what if it turns out that half the population already has a pre-existing resistance to COVID-19?
00:10:35.000So it's possible that herd immunity is actually a lot closer than a lot of people think.
00:10:40.000As Jim Garrity suggests, it is reasonable to believe that certain neighborhoods and communities that were particularly hard hit in the early stages of this pandemic may have reached herd immunity or something close to it.
00:10:50.000We already know that in New York, there is a good amount of data that suggests that herd immunity may have already been reached in particular areas.
00:10:57.000But it's possible, and this would be the great hope, that you actually don't have to infect 60 to 70% of the population with COVID-19 to achieve something kind of approximating herd immunity.
00:11:06.000And so what you could see here is that as the infections rise, The death rates continue to fall, but they sort of plateau and then they fall because it turns out that number one, the people who are now being infected are the people who are more healthy.
00:11:17.000And number two, it may turn out that the infections rise and then they sort of tail off because there are a bunch of people who just maybe they're asymptomatic because their T cells are actually strong enough to fight off the infection.
00:12:10.000Mayor Eric Garcetti, there are only 766 hospital beds left for the region's 10 million residents, but again, that is really sort of an exaggeration of the case, because again, it's not like there's millions of hospital beds available and they're all full.
00:12:23.000To say there are only 766 hospital beds, there is flex capacity, there's ability to send people home who You just don't perform elective surgery on them.
00:12:46.000The question is whether this is still rising or whether this is plateauing.
00:12:52.000Okay, but another piece of good news, right?
00:12:53.000So, piece of good news number one is look at Sweden.
00:12:56.000Okay, everybody was ripping on Sweden.
00:12:57.000Maybe Sweden is actually showing that we are closer to immunity than we think.
00:13:02.000Piece of good news number two is that there's some very good news on the vaccine front.
00:13:06.000Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, who you could say is very hawkish on COVID-19, he says that no matter how you slice it, this is good news.
00:13:12.000There's an experimental vaccine developed by the NIH and Moderna And key testing of the vaccine is going to start around July 27th, tracking 30,000 people to prove if the shots really work in preventing infections.
00:13:23.000Tuesday, they announced that they had taken 45 volunteers, they gave them all the vaccine, all 45 developed antibodies.
00:13:31.000So this would be obviously very good news.
00:13:34.000That does not mean that we are like a month away from the vaccine, probably means beginning of next year, but that is good news as well.
00:13:40.000So what does this mean on a practical level?
00:13:43.000Well, what it means on a practical level is a couple of things.
00:13:46.000One, it means that we should be optimistic about the next few months, right?
00:13:51.000It means that we're learning to treat this thing better.
00:13:53.000It means that there are a couple of things coming down the pike that may change things fairly radically.
00:13:56.000It means that a vaccine could be coming in the near future, which would obviously be very good.
00:14:02.000And number two, it means that some of the sort of outsized panic that we are seeing over opening schools, for example, seems a bit exaggerated, shall we say.
00:14:09.000It seems like some of this is narrative-driven.
00:14:28.000And by the way, we should all get the flu shot when it comes to this winter, because with hospitals already dealing with COVID, having a secondary strain of flu that really harms a lot of people and fills up hospital beds would be a bad thing as well.
00:14:52.000I'm kind of cautiously optimistic, but okay.
00:14:55.000Wait a couple weeks before you start going into doom and gloom mode.
00:14:58.000Wait a couple weeks before you go into everyone's going to die mode because the stats don't actually demonstrate that that is the case right now.
00:15:05.000What's going to confound the data, by the way, is that you do have renewed lockdowns in certain places in the country, and people are going to attribute any downtick that happens to the renewed lockdown.
00:15:14.000It's gonna be very hard to make that fit.
00:15:17.000If there's a plateau over the next week or so, like it'll take at least two to three weeks for us to see any result of a lockdown, right?
00:15:23.000Everything is sort of delayed by two to three weeks because there's a seven-day infection period and then it takes two to three weeks for somebody to die, God forbid, once they get COVID-19.
00:15:30.000So if we lock down now and then there's a decline next week, don't attribute it to the lockdown.
00:15:34.000If there's a lockdown right now and then there's a decline three weeks from now, then you could fairly think that maybe the lockdown has something to do with it.
00:15:41.000Bottom line, as I've been saying all along, I wish I had better news for you here.
00:15:47.000Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the politics of the day.
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00:17:00.000So, in other media news, and this is, I think, the broader political narrative that is of import today.
00:17:06.000You know, we can put aside the COVID-19 stuff for just a second because time will tell who is right and who is wrong on that.
00:17:12.000One of the nice things about time is that it does reveal truths when it comes to the science.
00:17:17.000And when people in the media constantly say, follow the science, follow the science, the science is leading in several different directions here.
00:17:22.000If we're all that clear-cut, I have a feeling we'd all be on the same page.
00:17:25.000Unfortunately, it is not all that clear-cut and everybody is having to act in the absence of hard information.
00:17:30.000But when it comes to the media, we now have hard data on exactly who the media are and what exactly the media do.
00:17:35.000So, full disclosure up front, I consider Barry Weiss a personal friend.
00:17:41.000I think that she is a really interesting thinker.
00:17:43.000She and I disagree on a great deal, but I also know that Barry has basically been savaged from inside the New York Times for years.
00:17:49.000She's been persona non grata inside the halls in which she works.
00:17:52.000For literally years at this point, I think it's fair to say that Barry knew that she was living on borrowed time there for at least the last couple of years, ever since she wrote a piece, frankly, on the Intellectual Dark Web, of which I'm a part.
00:18:04.000I don't believe I was even mentioned in the piece.
00:18:28.000And there's some really deep truths here that I think have been completely forgotten by our mainstream media who've decided to basically become Teen Vogue.
00:18:35.000I said yesterday the New York Times should just rename itself Teen Vogue.
00:18:38.000I really failed to see the difference.
00:18:39.000They've got Taylor Lorenz reporting on how everything is cake.
00:18:42.000I'm not kidding, that was an actual report from the New York Times.
00:18:44.000And she'll take a picture of a cucumber and somebody cuts it and inside it's a cake.
00:18:47.000Okay, that's over at the New York Times.
00:18:51.000You literally cannot tell the difference between the editorials at Teen Vogue or at the New York Times.
00:18:54.000Teen Vogue now just prints, like, straight Marxist claptrap, and so does the New York Times.
00:18:58.000If you remove the mast, then you'd have no idea which is which, particularly on the op-ed page.
00:19:04.000So Barry, who writes at the op-ed page, but actually was doing fairly good reporting on the op-ed page, because the New York Times simply won't report narratives that it doesn't like, so Barry ends up doing a lot of that reporting over on the op-ed pages.
00:19:15.000Meanwhile, The New York Times pushes, on their non-op-ed pages, actual op-eds, right?
00:19:20.000Half of their mainstream news is actually just op-ed stuff.
00:19:24.000This is why the 1619 Project, which is just a piece of historical propaganda and rewriting and pseudo-history, that's treated as news, but Barry Weiss was on the op-ed page.
00:19:31.000In any case, here's what Barry writes.
00:19:33.000She wrote a letter to Pinch Sulzberger, who's the head of the New York Times.
00:19:37.000And she said this, It is with sadness that I write to tell you I'm resigning from the New York Times.
00:19:41.000I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago.
00:19:43.000I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages.
00:19:47.000First-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others, who would not naturally think of the Times as their home.
00:19:53.000The paper's failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant it didn't have a firm grasp of the country it covers.
00:19:59.000Dean Beckett and others have admitted as much on various occasions.
00:20:02.000The priority and opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.
00:20:05.000I was honored to be part of that effort led by James Bennett.
00:20:08.000I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor.
00:20:11.000Among those I helped bring to our pages, the Venezuelan dissident, Willy Artiega, the Iranian chess champion, Dorsa Darakshani, and the Hong Kong Christian Democrat, Derek Lam.
00:20:19.000Also, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Al-Najjad, Zaina Arafat, Elma Baker, Rachel Denhollander, Maddie Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Hying, Randall Kennedy, and then the list goes on and on and on.
00:20:29.000The lessons that ought to have followed the election.
00:20:31.000Lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society have not been learned.
00:20:41.000Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper, that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
00:20:53.000And Barry hits this right on the head.
00:20:55.000Over at the New York Times, over in the halls of media, over at CNN, at MSNBC, The idea is, and this is all part of the conversation we've been having about cancel culture and the Overton window, that the Overton window is designed to allow a robust debate over what is true and what is not, over what is correct and what isn't, to happen.
00:21:41.000Balance isn't we provide a balance between truth and falsehood.
00:21:44.000Balance is just when we don't know the answer, we provide a balance.
00:21:48.000Okay, but the New York Times editors now suggest that they know the answers to everything.
00:21:51.000There's a moral certitude that has taken place, that has taken the place of the general commitment to ideological diversity that originally was allowed because a marketplace of ideas allows the best products to rise forth.
00:22:03.000But the New York Times, as Barry points out, has decided that that idea no longer holds true.
00:22:17.000That taking woke progressives, who are essentially activists, and saying to them, you are going to dictate the truth from on high, and we are all going to sit down here.
00:22:26.000And if we disagree with you, then you get to stomp on us.
00:22:30.000That is not the way to run any sort of open journalistic enterprise.
00:22:34.000Barry was a dissenting voice of the New York Times.
00:22:36.000All dissent had to go away because dissent is not the highest form of patriotism, nor is dissent even allowed in an area where you know the absolute truth.
00:22:45.000There's a religious aspect to this over at the New York Times and in the mainstream media where they know the gospel truth, and the gospel truth means that everybody else is bound for hell.
00:22:55.000So, Berry continues along these lines, she says, Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times, but Twitter has become its ultimate editor.
00:23:01.000As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.
00:23:07.000Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.
00:23:15.000I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first draft of history.
00:23:18.000Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.
00:23:24.000That would be a slap at the 1619 project, obviously, which has decided that history is now malleable and that history can be made and twisted to fit a narrative that is absolutely untrue.
00:23:36.000Again, every word of this, it's a brilliant letter by Barry, and you can see what the New York Times lost in basically alienating her.
00:23:42.000Because what happened here is that the editors of the New York Times basically allowed a malice shaming to occur inside their op-ed pages and inside their newsrooms, and then Barry quit.
00:23:51.000It's exactly the same thing they did to their executive editor of the op-ed page, James Bennett.
00:23:55.000And they basically allowed the woke staffers to make life so miserable that James Bennett handed in his resignation.
00:24:00.000That's exactly what happened to Barry.
00:24:01.000We'll get to more of Barry's quite brilliant letter in just one second.
00:24:04.000First, Let me tell you, right now, you're home a lot with your kids.
00:24:07.000And that means that you need great children's literature.
00:24:09.000But you're having a tough time picking which kids' books are good and which kids' books are bad.
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00:24:24.000Literati knows home deliveries are critical for meeting your needs for uplifting educational tools during the coming weeks, particularly if you're in LA and they just shut down the school district.
00:24:32.000Reading books together will help create a time of adventure and bonding for family and has real educational benefits.
00:24:37.000So let me just say, they personalize these things to your kids.
00:25:03.000You only keep your favorites and then you send the rest back for free.
00:25:06.000Literati beats the Amazon list price on these books.
00:25:08.000That means you're only paying for the books your kids love and you're getting a lower price.
00:25:11.000With schools and libraries closed, Literati is working to get books in the hands of families who don't have access to educational materials of their own.
00:25:41.000Okay, so back to Barry Weiss's letter over at the New York Times.
00:25:44.000So, Barry quit yesterday, and she has this entire letter, and she says, Have made me subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.
00:25:53.000They have called me a Nazi and a racist.
00:25:55.000I've learned to brush off comments about how I'm quote, writing about the Jews again.
00:25:58.000Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by co-workers.
00:26:02.000My work and my character are openly demeans on company-wide Slack channels, where masthead editors regularly weigh in.
00:26:07.000There, some co-workers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be truly inclusive, while others post axe emojis next to my name.
00:26:16.000Presumably because they want her axed.
00:26:17.000Still, other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter, with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action.
00:26:26.000Unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, constructive discharge.
00:26:29.000I'm no legal expert, but I know this is wrong.
00:26:31.000I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company, in full view of the paper's entire staff and the public.
00:26:37.000And I certainly can't square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage.
00:26:43.000Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.
00:26:48.000This is Barry Weiss writing to the publisher of the New York Times.
00:26:50.000Part of me wishes I could say my experience was unique.
00:26:53.000But the truth is that intellectual curiosity, let alone risk-taking, is now a liability at The Times.
00:26:58.000Why edit something challenging to our readers or write something bold, only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher when we can assure ourselves of job security and clicks by publishing our 4,000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world?
00:27:11.000And so self-censorship has become the norm.
00:27:13.000What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity.
00:27:17.000If a person's ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized.
00:27:21.000Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.
00:27:24.000Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
00:27:29.000Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble if not fired.
00:27:34.000If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it.
00:27:40.000If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground.
00:27:44.000And if every now and then she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated, and caveated.
00:27:53.000It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed fell short of our standards.
00:27:58.000We attached an editor's note on a travel story about Jaffa, that's the Israeli city of Jaffa, shortly after it was published because it, quote, failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa's makeup and its history.
00:28:08.000But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed's fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.
00:28:15.000The paper of record is more and more, says Barry Weiss, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.
00:28:23.000This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its diversity, the doxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned, and the worst case systems in human history include the United States alongside Nazi Germany.
00:28:35.000Even now, I'm confident most people at the Times don't hold these views.
00:28:38.000Yet they are accounted by those who do.
00:28:41.000Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous.
00:28:43.000Perhaps because they believe they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm, language, is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes.
00:28:51.000Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.
00:28:57.000Or perhaps it is because they know that nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits, it puts a target on your back.
00:29:02.000Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the new McCarthyism that has taken root at the paper of record.
00:29:08.000All of this bodes ill, says Barry Weiss, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they'll have to do to risk advance in their careers.
00:29:21.000Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain.
00:29:24.000Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you'll be hung out to dry.
00:29:30.000For these young writers, there is one consolation.
00:29:32.000As places like the Times and other once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles, Americans still hunger for news that is accurate.
00:29:51.000America is a great country that deserves a great newspaper.
00:29:54.000Is Barry Weiss writing against the publisher of the New York Times on her way out, just setting fire to the place?
00:29:59.000None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don't still labor for this newspaper.
00:30:03.000They do, which is what makes the illiberal environment especially heartbreaking.
00:30:06.000I will be, as ever, a dedicated reader of their work, but I can no longer do the work you brought me here to do, the work that Adolph Oaks described in that famous 1896 statement, to make of the columns of the New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end, to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.
00:30:22.000Oak's idea is one of the best I've encountered.
00:30:23.000I've always comforted myself with the notion the best ideas win out.
00:30:47.000If my writers were attacking each other, openly, like in the media, or even back channel, if there were a Slack board where somebody was just getting routinely beaten up, those people would be fired.
00:30:57.000Okay, that's the way that normally these companies work, but that's not the way these companies work anymore.
00:31:01.000They're run by the woke staffers and by the editors who are too cowardly to stand up to the woke staffers.
00:31:06.000They've decided to shut the Overton window in moral certitude that they are right and everybody who disagrees is absolutely wrong.
00:31:13.000Okay, so Barry is not wrong about her characterization here.
00:31:16.000And frankly, I don't blame her for leaving.
00:31:17.000She was under, again, this sort of pressure every single day.
00:31:44.000It's a movie about the revelation of the Ukrainian Holodomor, which was Stalin basically starving millions of people in Ukraine in order to usurp all of the produce from Ukraine and use it to build whatever he wanted to build.
00:31:57.000And the mainstream Pulitzer Prize winning reporter from the New York Times was a guy named Walter Durante, who was just a shill for the Soviet regime.
00:32:05.000And there's a fantastic scene where there is a sort of acolyte of Walter Durante who's talking to the journalist who breaks the story about the Ukrainian famine.
00:32:21.000Well, she says, we need a better world, but what if you're wrong?
00:32:24.000And it finally occurs to her that maybe she could be wrong, that any system that requires the breaking of the eggs in this way, maybe she's wrong about the system.
00:32:32.000Well, over at the New York Times, they have never let go of the certainty that they are right about the system.
00:32:36.000It's just a new brand of right about the system.
00:32:38.000Walter Duranty was sure that the communists were right, and so he was willing to overlook the Ukrainian famine.
00:32:43.000And now you have a group of people over at the New York Times, the woke staffers, who hate America so much.
00:32:46.000They hate the American system so much, they wish to tear it down.
00:32:49.000They believe that it is rooted in racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia.
00:32:52.000It needs to be torn down, and that is a moral certainty.
00:32:54.000And that means that if you have to abuse people who disagree with you, you do it.
00:32:58.000If it means you have to basically passive-aggressively threaten people at your own publication, you go ahead and you do it.
00:33:03.000Because you have the moral high ground.
00:33:05.000And it doesn't matter who has to suffer in order to make that happen.
00:33:08.000It doesn't matter if the Overton window has to shut.
00:33:10.000The Overton window shouldn't even exist.
00:33:12.000There is one approved opinion, and it is the only approved opinion.
00:33:17.000And now, it's not just Barry over at the New York Times that this is happening to.
00:33:20.000So Andrew Sullivan, a man with whom I have had significant disagreements, remember Andrew Sullivan, who has been interesting on many issues, but also is the same guy who once suggested that Sarah Palin's daughter was not actually her own daughter and all this, right?
00:33:31.000Like, Andrew Sullivan has kind of a quirky history, but a lot of his writing is really interesting.
00:33:35.000He writes over at New York Magazine, he's been speaking out about cancel culture, and now he has quit New York Magazine.
00:33:41.000He announced he's leaving at the end of the week.
00:33:43.000He said this will be my last week in New York Magazine.
00:33:45.000I'm sad because the editors I worked with there are among the finest in the country.
00:33:48.000I'm immensely grateful to them for vastly improving my work.
00:33:50.000I'm also proud of the essays and columns I wrote at New York Magazine, some of which will be published in a collection of my writings scheduled for next year.
00:33:57.000The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident.
00:34:01.000Again, it's pretty obvious exactly what happened here.
00:34:04.000He felt the same way at New York Magazine that Barry Weiss felt at the New York Times.
00:34:10.000He wrote about Barry Weiss actually in mid-June and about the general perspective of the New York Times.
00:34:14.000He said that they have a view of the world with moral clarity but no moral complexity.
00:34:18.000He's talking about the 1619 Project and the view of people like Nicole Hannah-Jones.
00:34:21.000So, the New York Magazine editor-in-chief, a guy named David Haskell, responded to Sullivan leaving.
00:34:28.000His response is just as important as Barry's letter because it really does demonstrate the thought processes that go on inside the editorial halls of power where cowards surrender to the woke staff who are intent on creating a new hierarchical orthodoxy in thought.
00:34:43.000First, reminder, my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, it goes on sale Tuesday, Tuesday, less than a week away, July 21st, 6 p.m.
00:35:03.000You can pre-order your signed copy and write in your question at dailywire.com slash Ben.
00:35:07.000The book covers two fundamentally different visions of America.
00:35:09.000That's what we're talking about right now.
00:35:11.000One vision is the unifying traditional vision of America, where we say that we have a shared philosophy based on the Declaration of Independence.
00:35:17.000We have a shared culture, where we respect each other's rights.
00:35:20.000We're all part of the same stream of history.
00:35:22.000None of this ignores the problems with America, but it recognizes America is the greatest nation in the history of the Earth.
00:35:28.000And then there's a second narrative, a second vision.
00:35:31.000And that narrative is that America's history is evil, its philosophy is corrupt, and its culture of rights is merely a cover for power.
00:35:38.000This would be the New York Times 1619 Project, the New York Times Editorial Board, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility.
00:35:42.000These are classic examples of the vision I call disintegrationist.
00:35:46.000Disintegrationists, they're people who want the country to fall apart.
00:35:48.000Disintegrationists use weapons like cancel culture, deleting or silencing anyone or anything that disagrees with them to build their whole new world order.
00:35:55.000How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps details How the disintegrationist vision has gained the ascendancy.
00:36:01.000It offers a penetrating view, I think, of our country at this time.
00:36:19.000When you sign up, you get that first month for only 99 cents.
00:36:21.000You also get access to our mobile app, articles ad-free, and access to exclusive editorials like this satire from our friend Andrew Klavan.
00:36:28.000Medical experts now believe Joe Biden's election will completely cure coronavirus.
00:36:31.000Well, that'd make it the second thing to cure coronavirus.
00:36:33.000Kneeling, for woke purposes, also cures coronavirus.
00:36:36.000If you haven't already checked out the Reader's Pass, head on over to dailywire.com and sign up for just a dollar a year listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:36:45.000♪♪ -♪♪ Alrighty, so the letter in response to Andrew Sullivan leaving from David Haskell, who's the editor over at New York Magazine, is everything, right?
00:36:58.000It is everything, because it's an admission that everything that Barry Weiss says and that Andrew Sullivan says, that our media have basically become just loudspeakers for one point of view, willing to shut out anybody else at the behest of the loudest voices who claim that if you refuse to acquiesce to their requests, then they will destroy you as insufficiently woke, That they are absolutely accurate in that assessment.
00:37:16.000So here's what David Haskell just wrote.
00:37:18.000He said, hey everybody, as you may have seen, Andrew Sullivan's last week will be this one, as he finishes the feature we've published in the print magazine and writes a final column.
00:37:25.000The decision to part ways was mutual. Andrew and I agreed that his editorial project and the magazines, the overlapping in many ways, were no longer the right match for each other.
00:37:33.000With the news of Andrew's departure, I'd like to share some thoughts about my approach to politics coverage more generally.
00:37:39.000I'm trying hard to create in this magazine a civil, respectful, intellectually honest face for political debate.
00:37:44.000I believe there's a way to write from a conservative perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life, while still upholding our values.
00:37:51.000I also think our magazine in particular has an opportunity to be a place where the liberal project is hashed out, which is to say, not only championed, but also interrogated.
00:37:59.000Our readers regularly encounter some of the best writing coming from the left, from our politics writers on Intelligencer and The Cut, as well as many of our culture writers on Vulture.
00:38:06.000Then we also have some writers who share our values, but not always the politics of most of our staff is, to my mind, a credit to the organization and a benefit to the reader.
00:38:13.000I will continue to push us to publish work that challenges the liberal assumptions of much of our readership.
00:38:23.000But publishing conservative commentary or critiques of liberalism in the left in 2020 is difficult to get right, and thoughtful, well-meaning people can come to different conclusions about it.
00:38:36.000How to weigh the value of plurality of political opinion against other journalistic and community values?
00:38:41.000So question, what is the other competing journalistic and community value?
00:38:45.000And we're not talking about printing neo-Nazi stuff.
00:38:47.000We're talking about printing... I mean, Andrew Sullivan is at best mildly right-of-center.
00:39:04.000How to weigh the value of plurality of political opinion against other journalistic and community values.
00:39:09.000Whether our current publication does, in fact, create the environment I'm trying to foster.
00:39:12.000That vague, mealy-mouthed language is safetyism.
00:39:15.000That if you print something, it's damaging to others.
00:39:18.000So, just to be straight, There are a group of people on the left who believe that Barry Weiss, writing about the IDW, or me on a college campus talking about abortion, this is threatening the safety of others.
00:39:28.000Whereas, if you go to one of my lectures and you burn crap outside, not threatening to others, or if you go on the Slack channel at the New York Times and you tweet Barry Weiss's name next to axe emojis, that's not threatening.
00:39:39.000Safetyism is the idea that anything somebody says you disagree with makes you unsafe.
00:39:45.000But the same people who are claiming that Barry is whining too much and Andrew Sullivan is complaining too much about the hostile work environment and all this, these are the same idiots who are suggesting we need to rename master bedrooms because master bedrooms are reminiscent of slavery even though they have nothing to do with anything.
00:40:02.000So this New York Magazine editor says, What to think of certain writers in particular?
00:40:38.000I'm not saying that there is no such thing as the Overton window or that there is no opinion that is outside the Overton window.
00:40:44.000I'm not saying that there aren't opinions for which the blowback is absolutely merited.
00:40:48.000I mean, I absolutely think that there is such a thing as an opinion that is so clearly horrible and wrong that even granting it a platform, you doing it, I'm not saying you should be the platform from a general public, Listen, there's an Overton window at Daily Wire.
00:41:08.000I don't print everything at the Daily Wire because we have a set of values, and if you don't abide by our values, I'm not printing it.
00:41:16.000And I'm not saying that if you're the Atlantic, that there aren't things that the Atlantic doesn't have a right to basically reject, right?
00:41:22.000Or that the New York Times doesn't have a right to reject.
00:41:24.000If Richard Spencer writes a piece about how white supremacy ought to rule the day, I don't think the New York Times has an obligation to print that.
00:41:31.000I don't think, for example, that ViacomCBS has an obligation to continue to employ Nick Cannon.
00:41:35.000After Nick Cannon went on a podcast and talked about the JUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU I'd worked as executive producer and chairman of Teen Nick, a spinoff of the network Nickelodeon geared toward teenagers.
00:41:51.000He'd also been a host and executive producer of the MTV comedy Wild Night Out.
00:41:55.000A Viacom CBS spokesperson said in a statement the company categorically denounced all forms of anti-Semitism because, basically, Nick Cannon went on Twitter and suggested that the true Hebrews were black people.
00:42:06.000He's essentially parroting the nonsense from black Hebrew Israelites.
00:42:10.000And he also suggested that Jews control business, is my understanding.
00:42:14.000He said, in an interview with The Washington, he said, apparently, so Kenan was interviewing a rapper named Richard Griffin.
00:42:24.000Griffin left the hip-hop group Public Enemy in 1989 after he said in an interview, Speaking to Canon, Griffin doubled down on his past remarks about Jewish people on the music and media industries.
00:42:31.000were responsible for the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe.
00:42:35.000Speaking to Canon, Griffin doubled down on his past remarks about Jewish people on the music and media industries.
00:42:40.000And Griffin said, I'm hated now because I told the truth.
00:42:44.000There's no reason to be scared of anything when you're speaking the truth.
00:42:47.000He also said it was a shame that Louis Farrakhan had been silenced on Facebook, despite the fact that Louis Farrakhan is, of course, a brutal, vicious anti-Semite who's compared Jews to cockroaches.
00:42:56.000Cannon said in the podcast, I find myself wanting to debate the idea of banking conspiracies about Jews.
00:43:02.000He says, it gets real wishy-washy and unclear to me when we give so much power to the theys and the theys then turn into Illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds.
00:43:10.000And then he said, you can't be anti-Semitic when we are the Semitic people.
00:43:18.000I mean, by the way, I defended the right of, and it was very controversial at the time, I defended the right of CBS to let go Roseanne Barr after Roseanne Barr tweeted out racist stuff about Valerie Jarrett, right?
00:43:27.000Because the bottom line is that when new information is added to the stew of a person's public profile, it has to do with his actual ability to perform his job.
00:43:36.000And when that new information is so vastly outside the window of normal discourse, then there can be blowback.
00:43:42.000So I'm not arguing there can't be blowback.
00:43:44.000I'm just arguing that what the left has done is they've expanded the definition of outside the Overton window such that the Overton window is a pinpoint.
00:43:59.000And if you don't fulfill those litmus tests, then you are cast out.
00:44:02.000Okay, any system that lumps together in the we-should-be-able-to-cast-them-out category, Andrew Sullivan, Barry Weiss, and Nick Cannon is a bad system of thought.
00:44:27.000So this one is from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
00:44:30.000According to Reason Magazine, until last week, Gary Gerles was Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
00:44:37.000He resigned his position after museum employees circulated a petition that accused him of racism and demanded his immediate ouster.
00:44:44.000Gary's removal from SFMOMA is non-negotiable, read the petition.
00:44:48.000Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?
00:44:58.000This accusation is a pretty serious one.
00:45:02.000Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum's holdings by saying, quote, don't worry, we'll definitely still continue to collect white artists.
00:45:55.000On Monday, a Seattle business owner issued a public apology for her dreadlocks after she was vilified on social media.
00:46:01.000Rachel Marshall, founder of Rachel's Ginger Beer in Seattle, responded on Instagram to critics who viewed her dreadlocks as cultural appropriation.
00:46:08.000One critic wrote, Seattle, we gotta talk.
00:46:10.000This person owns a particular business here in Seattle with multiple locations.
00:46:13.000She's a white woman with dreadlocks and allegedly gives her product to cops for free.
00:46:19.000We have seen this woman speak and cozy up regularly with other people in the community and no one has confronted her about her choice to willfully appropriate black hairstyling.
00:46:59.000She says, it's clear I've been stubbornly resistant.
00:47:01.000I sincerely apologize to those I hurt.
00:47:03.000I'm deeply sorry for the pain I caused members of the African-American community who have been and still are discriminated against and mistreated for having dreadlocks.
00:47:10.000And I'm so sorry it took so long to admit and address my mistake.
00:47:12.000I have an appointment to remove my dreadlocks.
00:47:14.000More broadly, I'm committed to earnestly listening to and from the voices and lived experiences different from my own.
00:48:39.000The liberals and the classical liberals are on the same side of this particular debate.
00:48:43.000Otherwise, there will be no debate, and the people who end up winning are the people who are just willing to utilize power in whatever convenient fashion they can.
00:48:53.000Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
00:48:56.000Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
00:49:03.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas, executive producer Jeremy Boring, supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, assistant director Pavel Lydowsky, technical producer Austin Stevens, playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan, associate producer Katie Swinnerton, edited by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
00:49:23.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2020.
00:49:27.000You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
00:49:31.000I think there are enough of those already out there.
00:49:33.000We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
00:49:38.000So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
00:49:42.000Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.