In the wake of Jeremy Corbyn's victory in the UK election, many are wondering why so many young people are turning to the far-left. Ben Shapiro argues that it s not just a symptom of growing disillusionment with the status quo. It s also a reflection of the growing discontent of the millennial vote, which has been a consistent theme in recent Western elections. And he argues that the main culprit may not be nationalism, but radical leftist ideas and ideas that appeal to a new generation of disillusioned millennials. Ben Shapiro: What's the real reason for the rise of the far left in Western politics, and why it can t be explained away as a reaction to the current economic and political climate? To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/TheBenShapiroShow and use the promo code at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the discount code: YASSOCIATE at checkout. We're part of the Modern Era Media Podcasts Podcast Network. See all the great network shows on the network including Vimeo, NPR, NPR and the New York Times. Subscribe to our newest podcast, The FiveThirtyEight, wherever you get your ebooks, and subscribe to our new podcast on Audible, iTunes, Podchaser, Podcoin, and The Huffington Post. Subscribe and comment on Apple Podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of The Ben Shapiro's new podcast, Ben Shapiro s new book, The Best of the Besties and much more! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more at bit.ly/Ben Shapiro's newest book: The Besties Besties: The Political Miscalculation? Subscribe & Subscribe to Ben Shapiro Podcasts Subscribe to The Political Machinations Subscribe to his new podcast Other Words For Great Reads by Ben Shapiro on Amazon Prime Video Subscribe on Podchronicity Subscribe on Vimeo Learn more on this podcast by clicking here and listen to his podcast on VaynerSpeaker Subscribe on Itunes Subscribe on the PodCastle on Podcoin Subscribe on Strava Subscribe on SoundCloud Subscribe on Podcast Rowell s New Music by clicking HERE and Subscribe on Spare Cash Subscribe on Your Review & Share it on iTunes Subscribe on PODCAST Subscribe to His Podcasts on Soundcloud Learn More at Podcoin Learn More on This Podcast by Mr. John Grady's Podcasts
00:00:00.000On Thursday, in an apparent attempt to demonstrate that voters in the United States and Germany couldn't be the only ones to embrace reactionary unpredictability, the voters of the United Kingdom dealt the Conservative Party a stunning blow, elevating the far-left Labour Party, led by a Noam Chomsky-esque loon named Jeremy Corbyn, to the brink of power.
00:00:17.000The Conservatives, led by Theresa May, will still retain leadership thanks to a coalition government, but they were expected to walk away with the election, and Labour was supposed to be in disarray.
00:00:26.000Instead, the Conservatives are on the verge of chaos, and Labour is united under a terrorist-supporting anti-Semite with a gut-level hatred of Western civilization.
00:00:36.000Josh Krashour of National Journal makes an even more important point, though.
00:00:39.000The youth vote in Britain went overwhelmingly for Corbyn.
00:00:42.000Corbyn's surprisingly competitive showing was fueled by young voters who rallied behind Labour by a whopping 34 point margin, 63 to 29, according to British exit polling.
00:00:52.000For all the fears of creeping nationalism, it's the growing discontent of the millennial vote that's been a consistent theme in recent Western elections.
00:01:00.000Many young voters are rejecting capitalism entirely, attracted to rhetoric promising free tuition and a generous social safety net at a time when many are struggling to make ends meet.
00:01:09.000Numerous studies also show younger voters are much more skeptical toward the value of democracy than their elders.
00:01:14.000Crash Hour rightly points out that 27% of young French voters felt for an actual communist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
00:01:20.000In the United States, Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders drew, quote, more under 30 voters than Clinton and Trump combined.
00:01:27.000Crash Hour is right to note that the reactionary left is responding to the reactionary right, that young voters who resonated to Corbyn, Melancon, and Sanders were responding in part to Brexit, Le Pen, and Trump.
00:01:37.000And there's nothing new about young people embracing radical politics.
00:01:40.000The 60s and 70s were full of such elections, see George McGovern, and the 1930s were full of radical political movements worldwide supported by youngsters.
00:01:49.000Each generation has its own brand of radicalism, and given the success of the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus, the rebellion was bound to come in the form of far-left redistributionism.
00:02:00.000Clinton and Bush and Blair and Chirac were all of the same general mind on capitalism.
00:02:05.000Young people have reacted to that background.
00:02:07.000Commentators are trying to find economic rationales for the blowback, but there is something else going on.
00:02:13.000We live in a unique time in human history.
00:02:15.000War between major powers is almost inconceivable, and despite economic worries, the vast majority of people are employed.
00:02:21.000The American unemployment rate is currently 4.7%, the Brits 4.8%, the French unemployment rate is 9.6%, where it's been hovering since the economic crash of 2008.
00:02:30.000Yes, terrorism is a threat, as is multiculturalism, but the far left isn't pledging to do anything about any of those things.
00:02:37.000What we have here is an entire generation of Westerners brought up to believe that prosperity and freedom are the norm, and given a background noise, and that the next mission for which they should fight is redistributionism.
00:02:49.000Income inequality is the next Rubicon to cross, and income inequality springs from the same origins as racism and sexism and bigotry, Western civilization.
00:02:58.000This perspective is not coming from disillusionment.
00:03:00.000It's springing from an existential meaninglessness taught by two generations of parents who abandoned traditional values in favor of secularism and are now surprised to find their secular kids and grandkids embracing transformative Marxism as a way to animate their lives.
00:03:24.000As economist Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw said way back in 1998, when it appeared the global capitalist consensus was unshakable, quote, a system that takes the pursuit of self-interest and profit as its guiding light does not necessarily satisfy the yearning in the human soul for belief and some higher meaning beyond materialism.
00:03:42.000Few people would die with the words free markets on their lips.
00:03:45.000The West has failed to teach its children meaning.
00:03:48.000The children found their own meaning in Marxism, and so we appear ready to re-embrace the horrors of the past, unless we get to work right now teaching young Westerners that they are part of a fight for liberty and freedom and responsibility, rather than for transformative, crushing redistributionism.
00:04:37.000I mean, if that British election showed you nothing else, it showed that the global markets are contingent on some sort of steadiness in the West.
00:04:44.000And that steadiness is not exactly there right now.
00:05:21.000That is a reflection of consumer anxiety, of investor anxiety about the markets and I don't think that that anxiety is totally misplaced.
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00:06:55.000And remember, as I said yesterday, the entire Democrat narrative since Hillary lost the election was that Hillary lost because Donald Trump worked with Vladimir Putin to corrupt the election.
00:07:04.000And in doing so, he then had to fire James Comey because Comey was this close to finding out about it.
00:07:32.000And the final piece of big news is that Comey leaked his memos to prompt the naming of a special counsel.
00:07:38.000So people on the right are jumping on this to suggest that this means that Comey is a leaker and that Comey is going to be prosecuted for leaking.
00:07:44.000We'll talk about all of these things, but here are the key clips from the hearing yesterday.
00:07:49.000Did any individual working for this administration, including the Justice Department, ask you to stop the Russian investigation?
00:07:57.000At one point the Attorney General had directed me not to call it an investigation, but instead to call it a matter which confused me and concerned me.
00:08:06.000And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI director, the administration then chose to defame me and more importantly the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader.
00:08:28.000I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter.
00:08:33.000Didn't do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
00:08:40.000Okay, so here were the big headlines, and there's a lot of conflict over what the headlines should be.
00:08:45.000I mean, just to show you how much conflict there was over what the headlines should be, this is a picture of CNN and Fox News covering the exact same hearing and having precisely opposite headlines.
00:08:56.000You can see CNN saying that Comey took Trump's request about dropping the Flynn investigation as a directive.
00:09:03.000And then on the right, you see Fox News saying, Comey, the president did not order me to let the Flynn probe go.
00:09:09.000You know, again, everyone's sort of taking out of this what they want to hear.
00:09:12.000I'm going to give you the big headlines as I saw them yesterday, and then we're going to go through what the reaction to all this has been.
00:09:18.000So as I said, first headline, Comey basically blows out of the water the Democratic narrative that there was collusion between Trump and Russia in this election cycle, and that Trump fired Comey to cover this up.
00:09:30.000Even Chris Matthews is acknowledging this now.
00:09:32.000Here's Chris Matthews acknowledging as much.
00:09:34.000But the big story to me has always been, as all of us, and I think Nicole really touched on it there, the assumption of the critics of the President, of his pursuers you might say, is that somewhere along the line in the last year, the President had something to do with colluding with the Russians.
00:09:48.000Something to do with helping hand, encouraging them, feeding their desire to affect the election in some way.
00:09:53.000Some role they played, some conversation he had with Michael Flynn, or Paul Manafort, or somewhere.
00:09:59.000And yet what came apart this morning was that theory because, in two regards, the president said, according to the written testimony of Mr. Comey, go ahead and get anybody's satellite to my operation and nail them.
00:10:38.000But in other words, they could flip him because they had him caught on something he dishonestly answered.
00:10:43.000But he wasn't central, it seemed, to the Russian thing.
00:10:46.000And I've always assumed what Trump was afraid of, he had said something to Flynn, and Flynn could be flipped on that, and Flynn would testify against the President that he had had some conversation with Flynn in terms of dealing with the Russians affirmatively.
00:11:01.000And if that's not the case, where's the there there?
00:11:05.000What Matthews is saying right there, what Matthews is saying right there is the key and that's the thing that Trump should be seizing on because that debunks the entire leftist narrative and when even Chris Matthews...
00:11:20.000When even Chris Matthews gets it, that demonstrates that the Democratic narrative fell apart.
00:11:25.000Headline number two was that Loretta Lynch pressured James Comey to change the way they were terming the investigation into Hillary Clinton, calling it, instead of an investigation, calling it a matter.
00:11:35.000Okay, now that had already been revealed by the New York Times way back in April.
00:11:39.000People really didn't pay attention to it at the time.
00:11:40.000Comey said it now, so now it's in the testimony, and people on the right are jumping on that.
00:11:47.000And yes, Comey should have done something about it, he should have gone public with it, or he should have written a memo to file, as he is so fond of doing, and all of that is true.
00:11:54.000It is also true, to be fair, that if we are going to say that we are disturbed by Loretta Lynch putting pressure on James Comey in how he discusses the Hillary investigation,
00:12:04.000Then we should be similarly concerned if President Trump is putting pressure on Comey in any way with regard to any other investigation.
00:12:10.000Like, let's be a little bit consistent here in all of this.
00:12:14.000President Trump apparently acted improperly and Comey found it troubling.
00:12:18.000So we can't get away from, and this is what the left is jumping on, they've now pivoted from their original narrative to the new narrative, which is that Trump is a bully and a thug because Trump said to Comey, pulled him aside in a meeting, told everybody else to get out of the room, and then told him he hoped that Comey could find a way
00:12:34.000Now people on the right are sort of ignoring this or pretending it doesn't exist or saying, well, it's not obstruction.
00:12:39.000No one's saying it has to be technical obstruction.
00:12:41.000As Alan Dershowitz has said, Trump could overtly tell James Comey that he wanted him to drop the investigation and that he would, and he's ordering him to do so.
00:12:50.000And that wouldn't necessarily constitute obstruction of justice.
00:12:53.000On a criminal level, but impeachment is not a criminal offense.
00:12:56.000Impeachment is about what is politically palatable to do.
00:12:59.000Democrats could jump on this and they are.
00:13:02.000The biggest problem for Trump is that now, because he said all this stuff, now you could end up with a situation where Trump actually is under investigation.
00:13:09.000So we found out that Trump is not under investigation.
00:13:13.000We found out that he wasn't under investigation when Comey was the head of the FBI, and that Comey told him that several times, and that's probably why Trump fired him, is because Comey wouldn't say it publicly.
00:13:22.000But now, because of the conversations that he had with Comey, he may very well be under federal investigation from Bob Mueller, the special investigator.
00:13:29.000So that means that Comey, if he wanted to nail Trump, has played his cards exactly rightly, which means that Comey is kind of a sleaze, but it also means that Comey has outplayed Trump here.
00:13:40.000Basically, Comey was called into Trump's office and Trump said to him, I'd appreciate it if you could get rid of this Flynn thing, right?
00:13:47.000I hope that you get rid of this Flynn thing, however you want to put it.
00:13:49.000And then Comey didn't pay attention to Trump, continued on his merry way, didn't see anything so wrong he had to report it, and then he gets fired.
00:13:56.000And then Trump tweets that there must be conversations between Trump and Comey that are on tape, and Comey better hope they're earned, at which point Comey responds by revealing the presence of the memos, which prompts the creation of the special investigator.
00:14:11.000And now that special investigator is going to look into Trump over obstruction.
00:14:14.000So in other words, Trump did two things that now have put him on the hook where he wouldn't have been on the hook before.
00:14:18.000One, he had conversations with Comey about Flynn that he shouldn't have had.
00:14:21.000And two, he then tweeted about how he had tapes,
00:14:24.000Which prompted, supposedly, Comey to reveal the memos, and leaked the memos out, which prompted the appointment of the special prosecutor.
00:14:33.000Now some people on the right are saying, well that means we should get rid of the special prosecutor.
00:14:37.000A little bit late for that, okay guys?
00:14:38.000Regardless of whether you think that Comey did the wrong thing in revealing the contents of the memos, in order to debunk what Trump was saying about him,
00:14:48.000You shut down the special prosecutor right now, it looks like Trump really does have something to hide.
00:14:52.000So Trump's in a catch-22 because now the special prosecutor, according to Comey, will probably end up looking at Trump's activity toward Comey and may come up with some sort of obstruction charge, or at least the implication of obstruction, giving Democrats something to hang their hat on.
00:15:06.000In other words, the quote-unquote cover-up of a crime that didn't occur may snag Trump because Trump has a big mouth.
00:15:13.000That's what Democrats are hoping, anyway.
00:15:18.000Now I want to talk about how Trump can get out of this, and what Trump actually should be saying about all this, because I think that he has a pretty good case to make, if he were just honest about it, but he's not making that case, unfortunately.
00:15:36.000Every day you see stories about somebody breaking into somebody's house, somebody breaking into somebody's store, robberies, carjackings, riots.
00:15:42.000There's been an uptick in the last couple of years in murder in major cities all over the United States.
00:15:49.000And you want to sleep a little bit better at night because you know that if you have to defend yourself, there's going to be somebody standing next to you.
00:15:54.000Then you need to go over to the USCCA at defendmyfamily.com.
00:15:58.000Defendmyfamily.com and sign up with the USCCA.
00:16:02.000What the USCCA does is they give responsible gun owners like you and like me complete peace of mind.
00:16:06.000They give you training in how to use your weapon, but they also provide you the defense resources necessary in case you do use your weapon.
00:16:13.000That means if I shoot a bad guy coming onto my property, then there is at least a significant chance that I will be prosecuted or I'll end up in legal peril.
00:17:20.000With all the headlines that came out about Comey, and with the newfound attempt by the left to push the notion that Trump obstructed justice, even though, as Chris Matthews says, there is no real there there, there's something that Trump could do, right?
00:17:33.000What Trump should do, here's what Trump should do.
00:19:27.000And if Trump actually said that, then he might be able to make a good defense.
00:19:31.000What he should not do is get into a credibility fight with James Comey.
00:19:34.000He should not get into the business of trying to say that James Comey is lying about him and that James Comey is not telling the truth about what he said about Flynn.
00:19:41.000The reason being, Comey just testified before Congress, under oath, under penalty of perjury.
00:20:33.000Did I even try to quash the Flynn investigation?
00:20:36.000Hard to accuse me of obstruction when I didn't do anything other than saying to him that I hoped he would see his way clear to letting Flynn go.
00:20:43.000Maybe it was sort of a ham-handed thing for me to say, but obstruction?
00:20:54.000Unfortunately, that's not what Trump is doing.
00:20:56.000So Trump came out on Twitter today, and Trump immediately decided to attack Comey's credibility, which is just not smart.
00:21:02.000Because again, he's relying on Comey's credibility in order for him to get out of the Trump-Russia stuff.
00:21:08.000Right, he wants to say that Comey is credible when he says that Trump was not under investigation and that there's no evidence of collusion, but he wants to say he's not credible when it comes to what Trump said to Comey in the privacy of the Oval Office or at Trump Tower.
00:21:21.000So Trump tweets, quote, That's what he originally tweeted that got him in trouble.
00:21:24.000Now here's what he tweeted, quote, Okay, on this leaker thing, quick note,
00:21:37.000People who are trying to say that Comey should be prosecuted for leaking, his notes were not government documents.
00:21:43.000If I have a personal diary that I am taking, and it's not classified, and this apparently was not classified material, and Trump did not assert executive privilege, from a legal, from a lawyer's perspective, this is not prosecutable.
00:21:55.000What Comey did, you may not like the leak, you may think it makes him a politically motivated actor, I certainly do, but I think that to say that he's a leaker and therefore he did something illegal,
00:22:04.000He didn't actually do anything illegal any more than Trump did something illegal by talking to the Russians about Israeli intel.
00:22:15.000I'm not saying that Trump, again, did anything deeply wrong here.
00:22:18.000In fact, I'm trying to figure out a good way to defend Trump, but this is not the smartest way to do this.
00:22:22.000You know, in conclusion with that, he sends out Mark Kasowitz, his lawyer, to make the case that Trump was, that Comey is lying about Trump.
00:22:35.000And he's fighting back aggressively rather than in intelligent fashion.
00:22:38.000Here's Mark Kasowitz, his lawyer, saying that Comey's the liar, not Trump.
00:22:41.000The president never suggested that Mr. Comey, quote, let Flynn go, close quote.
00:22:50.000Okay, so him saying that is really not smart, because again, unless he has tapes to prove that, and he said he has, and now the White House won't say whether there are tapes or whether there aren't tapes, the tapes will be subpoenaed.
00:23:00.000Trump, unless he goes under oath, is going to lose this particular credibility battle.
00:23:04.000The best move would be to do what I just said, admit basically that everything that Comey said is true, and then say Comey is misconstruing everything because Comey's a politically motivated actor.
00:23:34.000To the rest of the show live, you can be part of the mailbag, which we are now doing on Fridays, because, hey, we're five days a week now, which is super exciting.
00:23:40.000Plus, if you want the annual subscription at Daily Wire, then if you get that annual subscription, you get a free signed copy of this very book, the one that I hold here in my hand, Say It, Sell.
00:23:52.000It's a book by me and my dad, there we are, yes.