The truth about America has been obscured and deleted by the far-American left. But in this week s Sunday special, we re going down memory lane with some folks who talk about what about America is worth preserving, because that really is the battle right now. It s not between right and left, so much as between people who wish for the country to continue and those who wish to see the country destroyed. Well, if you wish for America to continue, you have to find some points of commonality. In my viewpoint, that means a common philosophy, culture, and history, a belief that the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence were indeed self-evident and correct, that you have natural rights that pre-exist government, that limited government was designed in order to protect those rights, and that if the government were to invade them, it would lose its reason for being. We have to cultivate a culture where we tolerate each other s exercise of rights, even if we don t necessarily like how those rights are being exercised, and a culture of adventure where the only thing guaranteed is adventure. And finally, we have to believe that American history is the story of living up to the principles set out in the declaration of Independence, not the story we re supposed to live up to. The future of America lies in recognizing what we share rather than what divides us. Without that culture, all of this falls in on itself. This week s episode features several guests discussing the things that unify and break down America, highlighting the aspects of America we must hold on to in order for it to survive in the 21st century. If you want an antidote to stupidity like white fragility and stupidity, head on over to Amazon or BarnesandNoble and Noble and pick up your copy of How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps by Ben Barnes and Noble's How to be an Anti-racist, head over to the Barnes & Noble or Barnes and Noble chart by clicking here. Now, before we continue, pick up a copy of the book How to Be An Anti-Racist? by Ben Noble and How To Destroy America by How to Destroying America by Blame White Fragile by How To Be an Antidote to White Fragility? by the author of the best selling book, "How to Be an Antiracist, How to Declare America in Three Easy Steps" by Ben Shapiro, head to Amazon and pick it up today! by clicking HERE. The book is out now!
00:00:00.000The truth about America has been obscured and deleted by the far American left. But in this week's Sunday special, we will be bringing it to you.
00:00:27.000As you all know, I have a new book out.
00:00:28.000It's called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
00:00:30.000And this week's podcast, we're going to go down memory lane with some folks who talk about what about America is worth preserving, because that really is the battle right now.
00:00:38.000It's not between right and left so much as it is between people who wish for the country to continue and people who wish for the country to be destroyed.
00:00:44.000Well, if you wish for the country to continue, you have to find some points of commonality.
00:00:48.000In my viewpoint, that means a common philosophy, culture, and history, a belief that the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence were indeed self-evident and correct, that you have natural rights that pre-exist government, that limited government was designed in order to protect those rights, and that if the government were to invade those rights, it would lose its reason for being.
00:01:05.000We have to share a culture, a culture where we tolerate each other's exercise of rights, even if we don't necessarily like how those rights are being exercised.
00:01:11.000We have to cultivate a culture of adventure and entrepreneurship where the only thing guaranteed is adventure and you are basically expected to pick up the slack.
00:01:20.000You're expected to make the right decisions.
00:01:22.000We have to cultivate a culture where social institutions are valued and where we value our neighbors.
00:01:26.000Without that culture, all of this falls in on itself.
00:01:28.000And finally, we have to share a common history, a belief that the history of the United States is the perfection of a principle.
00:01:34.000It is not, in fact, a headlong rush away from founding principle.
00:01:37.000We have to believe that American history is the story of living up to the principles set out in the Declaration of Independence, not the story of various groups clubbing each other over the head for purposes of power relations.
00:01:47.000If we believe that, the country is going to fall apart.
00:01:51.000There is a vast group in the United States that is seeking to dissolve all the bonds that tie us together.
00:01:56.000There are normal conversations that happen between people on the right and the left about just how far founding principles extend, about just how much further we have to go.
00:02:04.000But then there are folks who just want to bathe the entire thing in acid.
00:02:07.000And this is what you see from the Robin DiAngelo crowd.
00:02:09.000This is what you see from Ibram Kendi.
00:02:11.000The basic idea being that the American system itself is deeply disgusting.
00:02:15.000The American system itself is rooted in brutality and evil and racism and bigotry.
00:02:19.000And the only way to fight against that is to tear down the system Well, if we don't know what we're standing for, it's going to be very difficult to stand against the winds that are about to blow.
00:02:28.000Increasingly in the United States, we don't know what we stand for.
00:02:31.000Increasingly in the United States, our cultural institutions have fallen down on the job or been taken over by the disintegrationists who wish to see all of these common ties fall apart.
00:02:41.000I think on this week's episode, you'll see the reasons why we have to hold together.
00:02:44.000You're going to see a lot of people disagree about a variety of topics, but they are all operating inside the rubric that suggests that the American flag stands for freedom, that the Declaration of Independence was, in its essence, correct, and that the future of America lies in recognizing what we share rather than what divides us.
00:02:59.000We're bringing you the best moments from the last two years of shows with unique perspectives surrounding a topic and some of my own reflections on the collection.
00:03:06.000This week, we focus on several guests discussing the things that unify and the things that break down America, highlighting the aspects of America we must hold on to in order to take back the country and fend it off from utter destruction.
00:03:18.000The topics in this video are also covered extensively in my brand new bestselling book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
00:03:25.000It's coming in at the top of every bestseller chart.
00:03:27.000If you want an antidote to divisive stupidity like white fragility and how to be an anti-racist, head on over to Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com and pick up your copy today.
00:03:35.000Now, before we continue, we're going to look at a couple of awesome responses we received from past guests.
00:03:40.000First, from William Lane Craig, who is featured in our Judeo-Christian Values collection.
00:03:44.000Asked about the chaos we're seeing around America the past few months, Dr. Craig says, quote, As we go through these tumultuous times, it's important for each of us personally to keep in mind the ethics of Jesus, including respect for all persons, love of one's enemies, turning the other cheek at personal insult, submission to governmental authorities, and above all, love for God.
00:04:03.000Dr. Craig, thanks so much for sending the letter.
00:04:07.000We also released a collection of favorite moments from The Intellectual Dark Web.
00:04:10.000In response to her segment, Christina Hoff Summers sent this letter to us, quote, Hey Ben, enjoyed your retrospective on The Intellectual Dark Web.
00:04:18.000I was just thinking back to November 2016, when I replaced you as a YAF speaker at DePaul University.
00:04:23.000You'd been banished from that campus by some frightened, clueless, pusillanimous administrators.
00:04:29.000You were going to sit in the audience and I would invite you on stage.
00:04:31.000Unfortunately, campus security nabbed you and forbade you to set foot on campus.
00:04:36.000So am I to understand that if I take three steps forward, you'll attempt to have me arrested?
00:04:39.000If you create a problem and you will not, you know, leave the campus, yes.
00:04:43.000Okay, so... Undeterred, you called my cell phone from off-campus and invited me and the 200-plus audience to join you in a nearby bar.
00:04:49.000It had sort of a theater dungeon in the basement.
00:04:51.000If you want to hear me speak and you want to hear Christina finish her lecture, just head over to the Green Room Theater, about .7 miles away.
00:05:41.000At least no sane person can any longer deny the existence of cancel culture.
00:05:45.000As Air Force vet Rob Henderson said on Twitter, when people say, there's no such thing as cancel culture, it reminds me of season 1 episode 5 when Tony Soprano tells his daughter there is no mafia.
00:05:54.000And as more people realize what is going on, resistance to it will grow.
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00:07:08.000It takes just a few minutes to compare quotes from those top insurers.
00:07:42.000On the topic of free speech and the threat to it in the country right now, we start with Tucker Carlson.
00:07:46.000This past week, Tucker talked on his show about the New York Times releasing a story revealing the location of his family's home.
00:07:52.000Tucker, like many of us, has been long harassed and threatened by people who disagree with him.
00:07:56.000Tucker is without a doubt one of the leading political voices in the country.
00:07:59.000He's been the host of the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight for the past four years.
00:08:03.000This year, he became the highest rated primetime cable news show in the country.
00:08:07.000Before Fox News, Tucker was a host for programs at CNN and MSNBC, totaling over 10 years of hosting cable news TV.
00:08:14.000Tucker is one of the most fascinating minds in American public life.
00:08:16.000There's so much that we agree on and so much that we disagree on.
00:08:19.000I think we disagree very largely on the role of government in American life.
00:08:22.000Government choosing winners and losers.
00:08:24.000Is it the job of government to push certain social institutions at the expense of other social institutions?
00:08:29.000How should government be used in order to prop up certain institutions as opposed to general rules of liberty and then social and cultural institutions Filling the gap, the way that I propose.
00:08:39.000But one thing we certainly agree on is the neo-Marxist left and their absolute willingness to destroy every hallmark of the country.
00:08:45.000Tucker is extraordinarily strong on that stuff.
00:08:47.000He and I are in total agreement on all of that, for sure.
00:08:50.000In episode 26, Tucker notes the inversion of truth in the phrase diversity is our strength and how our ruling class has divided the country.
00:08:56.000Issue number one is sort of the free speech issue.
00:09:08.000People should be able to say what they want.
00:09:09.000People should be able to lead their families how they want to lead them.
00:09:27.000And you talk a lot in Ship of Fools, particularly, about the threat to these sorts of ideas from a left that is focused on a sort of forced diversity.
00:09:35.000And you've been labeled racist by folks at Media Matters for this, of course, because they label everyone a racist.
00:09:40.000I'm a Nazi, according to Media Matters, because of my yarmulke, apparently.
00:09:43.000But your viewpoint on diversity is basically, as I see it expressed in the book, that diversity is a neutral.
00:09:53.000Right, and so where do you see the conflict lying between right and left on that particular issue?
00:09:57.000Well, so where I agree with you is that, you know, while, as I noted, I am distrustful of complex ideologies, I do think that you need to start with certain things that you believe are true and act on them if you want to get to the place you deserve to be.
00:10:13.000So, what I just noticed, just as an American, and I'm not an intellectual, I'm a talk show host, so this is a very obvious thing, That our national motto has been redefined to its mirror image.
00:10:24.000So of course it was, out of many, one.
00:10:27.000And now it is diversity is our strength.
00:10:30.000So I think it's fair if you, without asking my consent, replace the core principle of our country.
00:10:36.000It's fair for me to ask if that principle is worth organizing a country around.
00:10:41.000So I'll just ask the obvious question.
00:11:14.000And by the way, at the same time I noted it, as I did, you know, 50 nights in the past 200 nights, I made the case explicitly against racism.
00:11:25.000Which is, you are not responsible for your immutable qualities.
00:11:28.000You can't control your height, your hair color, your DNA, what your parents did.
00:11:33.000None of that is your fault, and you should not be punished for it or rewarded for it.
00:11:55.000They throw at you the very things that they are doing in order to silence you and I just happen for this brief window of my life to have the freedom to say what I think is true and I'm going to.
00:12:06.000There's a lot of talk these days about political realignment, and I wonder if it's not really political realignment that's taking place, but a hunkering down of the far left into the diversity politics, identity politics, and then just the backlash to that.
00:12:18.000Because it seems to me that was the real dividing line between Obama and Trump.
00:12:22.000It's not even on economics, where in some areas there's actually some sort of populist agreement.
00:12:27.000But it's really on these sort of cultural divisions where President Obama was basically saying, you know, we can be divided into various ethnic groups, all of whom have been victimized by America, and then we can create a coalition of the dispossessed to come back in and sweep into power, and the new demographic shift will basically buoy our boat all the way to victory from now until the end of time.
00:12:46.000And then the backlash to that was, well, wait a second.
00:12:48.000You know, you guys don't get to do identity politics when you've been saying that identity politics is what's wrong with America for generations, correctly.
00:13:22.000But our ruling class, and I do think this is the least responsible, the most reckless thing they have done, is they have not only failed to come up with what that set of common beliefs is, they have argued against the fact That it should exist.
00:13:36.000And so, like, what they're doing clearly is, I mean, it's not complicated.
00:13:40.000They're dividing in order to rule, of course, what the British did in India.
00:13:44.000But that's the shortest term thinking.
00:13:46.000I mean, that's like day trader thinking.
00:14:21.000So I'm pretty good at telling you what I think is wrong.
00:14:23.000It's not as clear how you fix it other than go back to the obvious things.
00:14:29.000Like, demand that everybody who comes to this country for economic opportunity, for example, or for the safety of our rule of law, also buy into the things that make all of us Americans.
00:14:45.000So yeah, I would start with the Bill of Rights.
00:14:46.000You have an absolute right, as defined in 1967 by the Supreme Court, but also by centuries of tradition here in this country, which we inherited from another culture across the ocean, to believe what you believe.
00:15:07.000And that right is under assault, not by a political party, but by, in effect, a secular evangelical faith, which we're calling progressive or liberal or whatever, but it's not.
00:15:15.000It's a species of religion that seeks to convert by force.
00:15:19.000And that is deeply anguished and concerned that other people disagree.
00:15:23.000So, like, I doubt you go home tonight and fret at any length over the idea that somewhere in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, someone disagrees with you on an issue.
00:15:33.000But I can promise you somewhere in Williamsburg, right now, someone is lying in a studio apartment fretting that in the, you know, the far reaches of red clay Alabama, someone's not fully on board with the bathroom program.
00:15:46.000And they need to do something about it.
00:15:48.000So actually, it's an asymmetrical contest between one group that wants to affect policy outcomes and the other group that wants to convert by the sword.
00:15:56.000So it's the religious people versus the political people, and I don't even think we acknowledge that most of the time.
00:16:02.000Larry is the host of the radio talk show, The Larry Elder Show, which has been on the air in Los Angeles since 1994.
00:16:08.000He's the author of the best-selling book, The Ten Things You Can't Say in America, amongst others.
00:16:12.000Just last month, a documentary Larry produced, Uncle Tom, was released.
00:16:16.000The film explores what it's like to be a minority within a minority, a black conservative.
00:16:20.000You can find that film right now at UncleTom.com.
00:16:24.000Actually, the first radio show I ever did was The Larry Elder Show.
00:16:27.000I was 16 years old, I was at UCLA, and Larry hosted me on the show to talk about radicalism at the UCLA Daily Bruin.
00:16:34.000So Larry and I have a long, glorious history.
00:16:36.000I'm a big Larry Elder fan, one of the most formative people in my thinking when it came to libertarianism, for sure.
00:16:42.000In episode 39, Larry discusses all the ways that President Obama, a full-on disintegrationist, contributed in dividing America and stressed our race relations.
00:16:50.000Looking back on this conversation, Larry sent us some thoughts.
00:16:53.000We're in a new place when someone as respected and as respectable as New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees feels a need to apologize for saying he would quote, never agree with anyone who disrespects the flag.
00:17:03.000The next day he apologizes again and again the following day and then his wife apologizes.
00:17:07.000Whoever said compound interest was the greatest force in the universe never encountered white guilt.
00:17:11.000Where are we with this cancel culture?
00:17:13.000Some activists are petitioning to remove John Wayne's name from the John Wayne Airport because of remarks considered racially intemperate Wayne made in a 1971 Playboy interview.
00:17:22.000In 1958, Martin Luther King wrote an advice column for Ebony Magazine.
00:17:26.000A gay black teen in the closet wrote him seeking advice on what the young man considered his sexual confusion.
00:17:31.000King gave advice that today would be considered homophobic, if not abusive.
00:17:34.000King told him to pray and consult a psychiatrist.
00:17:37.000Harry Truman, without whose support as president the modern state of Israel might not have come into existence, in a 1911 letter to his future wife, referred to Jews as the K-word and New York as K-town and used a number of other ethnic slurs.
00:17:50.000Trump was criticized for referring to Haiti and some African countries as bleephole countries.
00:17:55.000President John F. Kennedy, according to a former New York Times investigative reporter, once derisively referred to some African countries as, quote, boogie republics.
00:18:03.000Do we remove his name from JFK Airport?
00:18:05.000Here, Larry and I discuss the recent surge in division and in intersectionality, and refute the idea that America is a racist country.
00:18:12.000So, Larry, I want to ask you about a philosophy that seems to have taken over the Democratic Party almost wholesale, and that is the philosophy of intersectionality.
00:18:28.000As a precursor to that, I want to get your opinion on the legacy of Barack Obama, because it's my opinion that intersectionality really became a thing under the Obama presidency.
00:18:38.000People tried to blame President Trump for the rise in increased racial tensions in the United States.
00:18:42.000But if you look at the polls, what the polls say is that Americans were pretty optimistic across the racial spectrum before Barack Obama became president.
00:18:47.000Barack Obama became president, and then things started to sink pretty quickly.
00:18:51.000And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Americans elected President Obama under the auspices of he was going to be a great uniter, somebody who tried to get us beyond race.
00:18:59.000He, in his own persona, was a unification of black and white, considering his father was black and his mother was white.
00:19:05.000And then instead of coming forth and saying, listen, We can all call out racism together when we see it, but not every problem is a race problem.
00:19:12.000A lot of problems are just people problems.
00:19:15.000Instead of him doing that, he decided to build an intersectional coalition around himself and then suggest the people who disagreed with him were inevitably racist.
00:19:23.000I want to get your opinion on Barack Obama's impact on sort of the race debate in the United States.
00:19:27.000You know, I was in the Boston arena in 2004 when Obama gave that speech for John Kerry.
00:19:44.000And I said to him, this guy's going to run for president, he's going to get elected.
00:19:48.000He didn't say a damn thing, but he said it well.
00:19:51.000And so Brahma gets elected, and you're absolutely right, I believe that people voted for him in large part because they thought that He was going to put the nail in the coffin that America is a racist society.
00:20:04.000A number of people, I think, pulled the lever for him because of that.
00:20:08.000And he proceeds to do just the opposite.
00:20:13.000Before he became president, he gave a speech as a senator at a church in Atlanta.
00:20:19.000And he was talking about how much racism there is in America.
00:20:22.000And he said, the generation of MLK, the Moses generation, has, quote, gotten us 90% of the way there, close quote, to realizing MLK's dream of a society where people evaluate you based on content of character.
00:20:34.000And I thought that was reasonable, 90%.
00:20:36.00010% of Americans believe Elvis is still alive.
00:20:38.0008% believe if you send him a letter, he'll get it.
00:20:40.0007% of adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
00:21:26.000The professor from Harvard had forgotten his door key.
00:21:30.000He was on vacation, came home, realized he didn't have his door key, and he and the cab driver pushed the door in, broke into his own home.
00:21:42.000A cop shows up very politely, asks Skip Gates to come out of his house, and he cops a tude and says something like, I'll come out if your mama tells me to come out.
00:21:50.000And instead of Obama going on television saying, look, Skip, I know you're a friend of mine.
00:21:54.000You and I have been friends a long time.
00:21:56.000But you have done exactly the wrong thing for young black boys.
00:22:01.000Instead of being respectful, instead of responding to the request, you copped an attitude.
00:22:06.000This is exactly why a lot of young black people are getting killed by the police, because they look at this as a confrontation instead of following instructions.
00:22:12.000My father told me, whenever I'm pulled over by the police, make sure your hand's at 10 o'clock, your right hand's at 2 o'clock, you say yes sir, say no sir, make sure your paperwork is in order, And if you feel you're mistreated, get a badge number, write it down, and you and I will deal with it while we're both still alive.
00:22:26.000That's what Obama could have said and should have said and didn't.
00:22:28.000Instead he said, the Cambridge police acted stupidly.
00:22:31.000And the cops then realized that he was not on their side.
00:22:34.000And Obama fumbled around with that stupid beard thing to try and walk it back a little bit.
00:22:42.000If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.
00:22:43.000I don't even know what that even means.
00:22:46.000And, of course, Trayvon Martin was found not guilty, and the jurors said race never even came up.
00:22:52.000There were no blacks on the jury, but there was a black alternate, and the alternate said he would have voted the same way, not guilty, and race was not a factor.
00:22:59.000Obama gave a speech before the United Nations and invoked Ferguson.
00:23:03.000Now, this is while Ferguson was still being investigated.
00:23:07.000This cop was assumed to have been a racist.
00:23:09.000Michael Brown allegedly had his hands up, don't shoot.
00:23:12.000And Obama mentions this to a United Nations address and says, we have our own problems, a place called Ferguson.
00:23:17.000Ferguson turned out to be a complete farce, as you know.
00:23:20.000And the DOJ comes in, exonerates the cop, but nevertheless says that the Ferguson PD is institutionally racist.
00:24:02.000And the answer is you can't do it by numbers.
00:24:04.000You have to do it by differences and offending.
00:24:06.000And there's a report that came out in 2013 under the Obama administration by the National Institutes of Justice, which is a research arm of the DOJ called Race and Traffic Stops.
00:24:28.000Years ago, in New Jersey, black motorists were being stopped disproportionately by the New Jersey troopers, and they were yelling and screaming about racism.
00:24:37.000Christie Todd Whitman ordered a study.
00:24:39.000The study came back and said, The faster the car, the more likely it is to be a black guy.
00:25:13.000And so people like Eric Holder, the NAACP, Barack Obama have been perpetuating this BS lie.
00:25:20.000And in my opinion, they do it because they want that 95% monolithic black vote without which they cannot succeed.
00:25:25.000And if blacks started thinking of themselves as individuals and not as an aggrieved group and started looking at things like the crappy public school that I'm mandated to go to.
00:25:35.000job-killing laws like minimum wage, they would rethink their assumptions with the Democratic Party, and their Democratic Party is definitely afraid of that, and that's why they have to malign people like Larry Elder's Uncle Tom's and slam other people as racist, because you cannot get 95% of people to think a certain way unless you lie to them.
00:25:55.000Well, speaking of that, one of the ways that this has been intellectualized is in this philosophy of intersectionality.
00:26:00.000And the philosophy has been put out there basically that historically a lot of groups in the United States, specifically black people most of all obviously, have been victimized by the power hierarchy.
00:26:10.000The hierarchy was set up for that end and then the only way to fight back against that power hierarchy and institutions of power is to band together in groups that they can get then get together themselves and then attack that hierarchy and tear it down from the inside out.
00:26:23.000The only way if you are on the top of the power hierarchy, if you're if you're a white male for example, the only way that you get out of this unfortunate situation is by acknowledging and reading Ta-Nehisi Codes apparently.
00:26:35.000The problem with all of this is that in order to escape poverty and get to the middle class, this has been studied by the left and by the right and they agree.
00:26:42.000If you look at the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation, they're diametrically opposed on many issues, but on the formula to get from poverty to the middle class, they all say the same thing.
00:26:53.000Number two, don't have a kid before you're 20.
00:26:55.000Number three, get married before you have a kid.
00:26:58.000And they phrase it a little bit differently, but that's what all three of them have said.
00:27:01.000And if you argue, as Obama did, that a kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in jail, that is the number one problem facing America.
00:27:12.000And if slavery and Jim Crow had this effect, how do we go from having 25% black out-of-wedlock birth in 1965 to almost 70% now?
00:27:23.000I would think that anybody would argue we're less racist today than we were in 1965, so you can't attribute it to that.
00:27:29.000In fact, during slavery, a black child was more likely to be born under a roof with his biological mother and biological father than today.
00:27:37.000It is the number one problem facing this country, not racism.
00:27:40.000Take a magic wand and wave it over America and remove every smidgen of racism from the hearts of white America.
00:27:45.00050% inner city dropout rate in some schools.
00:27:48.00070% of black kids born outside of wedlock, as I mentioned.
00:27:50.00025% of young black boys have criminal records.
00:27:52.000The CDC just said that a young black man is 10 times more likely to be the victim of a homicide compared to a white person.
00:27:59.000And the number one cause of preventable death for young white men are accidents, like car accidents.
00:28:04.000The number one cause of preventable cause of death for young black men is homicide, almost always at the hand of another black person.
00:28:10.000Chicago, A third black, a third white, a third Hispanic, 70% of the homicides are black-on-black, and about 75% of those, Ben, are unsolved.
00:28:18.000And we're talking about intersectionality?
00:28:23.000Now let's look at someone I admire who speaks to the experience of growing up being taught the value and blessings of liberty in America, and later found herself in the debate over the historical symbols in the American South.
00:28:33.000Nikki Haley is perhaps best known as the U.S.
00:28:35.000Ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018 under the Trump administration.
00:28:40.000So, as you all know, Nikki Haley is my spirit animal.
00:28:46.000And a true conservative in every sense of the word.
00:28:48.000and grays. So as you all know Nikki Haley is my spirit animal. I love Nikki Haley. She's just the sweetest person on earth. I also happen to know her family.
00:28:56.000Wonderful, wonderful human being and a true conservative in every sense of the word. She really thinks through the policies that she promotes and she is strong and stands up against people who refuse to give her the respect to which she is due, which is something that I think feminists should take note of when they rip her down in a couple of years when she runs for president.
00:29:13.000In June 2015, while Nikki was governor, a tragic shooting occurred at Mother Emanuel, an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina.
00:29:20.000A hateful shooter proudly displayed a Confederate flag on his manifesto, and as a result, Nikki made the decision to remove the flag from the state capitol.
00:29:27.000In this discussion from episode 49, Nikki details that decision and explains why removing a confederate flag is different than removing a confederate monument.
00:29:34.000But first, listen to us discuss the virtue of hard work and patriotism she learned being raised by an immigrant family.
00:29:40.000Well, you know, first I was born in a small rural town in South Carolina.
00:30:10.000And I remember coming home after being bullied, and my mom would always say, your job is not to show how you're different.
00:30:17.000Your job is to show how you're similar.
00:30:19.000And it's interesting because going through life, I've treated everything like that.
00:30:25.000So the same thing that happened as a five-year-old on the playground is the same thing I did when I was a governor.
00:30:33.000It's what I did as an ambassador, is when you have challenges, it's a lot easier if you will go through all the things you agree on first and then go to the challenge.
00:30:43.000Because it puts everybody's guard down.
00:30:46.000It all of a sudden lets them relate to you a little bit more.
00:30:48.000And so, those kinds of things really impacted everything I did.
00:30:53.000I started doing the books for my parents' business when I was 13.
00:30:57.000I did not know that wasn't normal until I got to college.
00:31:05.000But it was there that I learned the value of a dollar.
00:31:08.000You know, when times were tough in our small business, I knew that we had to hunker down, we got creative, we got lean, and we got smart.
00:31:17.000And then when times were good, we never celebrated, because we knew it wouldn't last forever.
00:31:22.000And I carried that whole mindset to my love of numbers.
00:31:25.000And that's when I went to Clemson, go Tigers, and graduated with a degree in accounting, went to corporate America, and worked there for a bit, and then I came back home to the family business.
00:31:37.000And it was there that, again, my mom heard me saying how hard it was to make a dollar and how easy it was for government to take it.
00:31:47.000And my mom said, quit complaining about it.
00:32:34.000My parents, literally, there was not a day that went by where my brothers, my sister, and me didn't hear from my parents about how blessed we were to be in this country and how we had to remember that.
00:32:45.000And so that feeling, they always encouraged us to do anything.
00:32:50.000My husband was always supportive at everything.
00:32:53.000And then the kids, I think, just went along for the ride.
00:32:55.000So as governor of South Carolina, I think the first time that a lot of people saw you on the national stage was the controversy with regard to the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the war monument that was outside the state capitol building, I believe.
00:33:08.000So maybe you can take us through your thinking on that.
00:33:13.000The whole controversy emerged in the aftermath of the horrible terrorist attack on the historically black church in South Carolina.
00:33:18.000Maybe you can take us through your logic on that, because I know that that raised a lot of ire on both sides, and obviously you had to take a tough position.
00:34:24.000It was what every South Carolinian did.
00:34:27.000And the pain of that And the fact that it was in the most sacred of places, that was the part I couldn't get my heart around, was when you go to a place of worship, you're with God.
00:34:44.000That's your closest feeling to God, and you feel the safest, and you feel like you can let your guard down, and you're your most vulnerable.
00:34:54.000And the idea that someone could do this in a church, was just pure hate.
00:35:00.000And I remember going to my law enforcement director, and I said, Chief, please tell me he had a mental illness.
00:35:08.000I so wanted him to say that, and he said he didn't.
00:35:13.000So once we knew it was hate, I knew that I had to protect the state, but my bigger problem was I had to keep the national media out.
00:35:35.000We're going to give the respect to these families.
00:35:38.000And during that time, it was a presidential primary, so all the candidates wanted to weigh in on it.
00:35:43.000So I was on the phone with the candidates, telling them to stay out.
00:35:46.000But the beautiful part was, that next day, when the killer presented himself for the first time in front of the judge, those families, unscripted, unrehearsed, not having talked to each other, walked up, looked the killer in the eye, and forgave him.
00:36:06.000I mean, that kind of forgiveness through their pain.
00:37:26.000What made it hard is we had to have two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.
00:37:32.000And, you know, it was just a matter of, I think there was a little bit of You know, just communication, a lot of prayer, and just believing in the people in South Carolina.
00:38:00.000A monument represents a moment in history, a past moment in time.
00:38:07.000So I made it very clear to my estate that, look, the flag needs to come down because I don't want a single child to look at that flag and feel pain or see the killer's face or any of that.
00:38:19.000But we're not going to start taking down monuments because those are monuments we learn from.
00:38:26.000That's how we make sure we never forget.
00:38:28.000So what we did on the monument side was an African-American museum went up.
00:38:33.000A monument to the Mother Emanuel in tribute went up.
00:38:50.000To better understand American history, we have David Barton, a historian and the founder of WallBuilders, an organization that presents America's forgotten history and heroes with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage.
00:39:02.000He's authored many bestselling books, he serves as a consultant to state and federal legislators, and even helped to develop the history and social studies standards for states like Texas and California.
00:39:11.000Newsmax named him one of America's top 100 most influential evangelicals, Time Magazine put him in the top 25.
00:39:18.000So meeting David Barton was super cool, especially because he brought a ton of historical items.
00:39:40.000Ben and I had an extensive discussion about the substantial positive impact religious thought, belief, and practice had on America's founding fathers.
00:39:47.000The overwhelming majority of the more than 200 of them, with only a few exceptions, were men of deeply devout and pious biblical faith.
00:39:52.000They took deliberate steps to ensure that America would never become secularist in education, government, or the public square.
00:39:58.000But today, most Americans know so little of our history that they believe just the opposite, which has led to bad public policy.
00:40:03.000We are seeing this same pattern repeated with the current attacks on our foundational, cultural, and historical ideas and symbols.
00:40:09.000Many of the statues being torn down were actually early pioneers leading the fight against racism and had historic breakthroughs in changing the policies of their day.
00:40:16.000None of them were perfect, but even Thomas Jefferson was the first to announce to the world that America wanted to end the slave trade, and he was the first leader of any nation to sign a law banning the international slave trade.
00:40:26.000As a result of the efforts of so many founding fathers, America became the fourth nation in the world to ban slavery, making us one of the earliest anywhere on the globe.
00:40:33.000Yet we want to tear down the statues of those who helped move the world in the right direction.
00:40:36.000The portrayal of American history today is too often reduced to historically inaccurate memes and ridiculously simplistic soundbites.
00:40:43.000Our historical knowledge affects our public policy.
00:40:45.000If our laws are built on an inaccurate view of the past, then they will be ineffective at best and onerous at worst.
00:40:50.000But if they are built on a foundation of truth, they can be effective in achieving good.
00:40:55.000David, thanks so much for sending that in.
00:40:56.000Obviously, our conversation was great.
00:40:58.000You can go listen to that in the back catalog or part of it today.
00:41:00.000From episode 57, David and I discuss the founding fathers and their reliance and encouragement of religious thought, George Washington's warnings and wise words from his farewell address, and the real meaning of the separation of church and state.
00:41:12.000One of the things that you've been talking about a lot and is really important to me, I mean I wrote a book that largely concerns this, is the impact of religious thought on American founding thought.
00:41:29.000So, obviously, you've mentioned it a couple of times, we should hone in on it.
00:41:32.000There's this idea that's taught in schools that effectively America is a secular country, that it was founded along the idea of separation of church and state.
00:41:40.000To this end, the First Amendment is often cited, the idea that you can't establish a religion.
00:41:45.000And then forgetting about the second half, which is that there's freedom of religion.
00:41:48.000So what exactly, in your view, was the relationship of founding thought to religion?
00:41:53.000How much did the founders rely on religious thought and what did they think in terms of governance and religion, how those two should be balanced?
00:41:59.000They were very adamant that you do not separate religious principles.
00:42:04.000Now, doctrines are one thing, religious principles are something else.
00:42:08.000And so when they said there should be no establishment of religion back then, an establishment of religion was a state-established religion.
00:42:18.000The first federal law that was passed dealing with how you become a territory in the United States is called the Northwest Ordinance.
00:42:25.000George Washington signed that on August the 7th of 1789.
00:42:29.000That's how 32 states became states in the United States.
00:42:33.000And that law specifically says, Article 3, religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall forever be encouraged.
00:42:46.000So, to this day, if you look in constitutions like the current North Carolina constitution, you look in Iowa, Kansas, etc., it says forever in the public schools of this state, religion and morality will be taught as well as knowledge.
00:42:58.000So, they saw that as a mandate that you can't be part of America if your schools don't promote religion and morality.
00:43:08.000But the principles of Bible, principles of how we control ourselves, behave, our morality, it all comes from there.
00:43:16.000And so they were huge into promoting that.
00:43:19.000I mentioned that there were two documents that just kind of turned me around.
00:43:23.000One of them was I actually got a copy of George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address, and that's considered one of the most significant presidential speeches ever given.
00:43:34.000It's interesting that we have state laws from 1820, where then in 1820, You were required in states to take a written exam on four documents every year for the first eight years of school.
00:43:47.000And those four documents were the U.S.
00:43:49.000Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the State Constitution, and George Washington's Farewell Address.
00:43:55.000You had to study that, you had to know that, a written exam for the first eight years of school once a year.
00:43:59.000It's interesting that in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln actually issued a general order to all the Union troops and said, guys, if you're not fighting the enemy today, I want you to spend the whole day reading George Washington's Farewell Address, meditating on his principles, thinking about what he said.
00:44:15.000Same happened in World War I with Woodrow Wilson.
00:44:41.000I mean, one of the things he says is, don't let the federal government get into deficit spending.
00:44:45.000You know, it's one of his great warnings.
00:44:47.000He talks about avoiding foreign entanglements, you know, try to keep sovereignty here and don't get tied in foreign wars.
00:44:54.000And so all this wise stuff, but what he says, he says, of all the habits and dispositions that lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.
00:45:06.000He said, in vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars.
00:45:12.000So he goes out saying, guys, anybody that tries to separate religion and morality from public life, from politics, They're not patriots.
00:45:23.000I was told that Washington was a great deist, that he was not a faith guy.
00:45:28.000Here he's saying, guys, if anybody tries to take faith out of the public square, they're not a patriot.
00:45:34.000I'm going, oh my gosh, that's not what I was taught.
00:45:37.000And so when I read his farewell address, it really got me thinking, what else did I not get taught right?
00:45:44.000And so separation, church, and state is one of those phrases that the way we use it today, probably the best way to explain it, the phrase did not originate with Jefferson.
00:45:54.000It originated back in the 14 and 1500s.
00:45:57.000John Greenwood, a pastor in Great Britain, is probably the first guy credited with saying it back in the 1500s.
00:46:03.000And so they wrote about it for hundreds of years before Jefferson picked it up.
00:46:07.000So he was repeating what historical writers had said.
00:46:10.000But even in Jefferson's letter, which he wrote on January the 1st, 1802, that's the famous letter the courts quote today on separation of church and state.
00:46:18.000That letter is 233 words long, it's three paragraphs, it's easy to put a footnote in any court case, and since 1947, no court has quoted more than eight words.
00:46:31.000A wall of separation between church and state.
00:46:35.000Every court that used it before 47 quoted the whole letter, like Reynolds v. United States in 1878, and every time they quoted the whole letter of Jefferson, they said, look, based on what Jefferson said, separation church and state means you can't stop a public religious activity.
00:46:51.000And so we always kept religion in public life using the separation phrase until a case in 47 called Everson v. Board of Education, and the court said, oh, look what Jefferson said, separation, we can't have any religion alive.
00:47:06.000There's a reason they don't put the whole letter in there.
00:47:08.000When you read the whole letter, it's obvious what Jefferson said, because he had a group in Connecticut saying, we're afraid the government's going to shut down our religious activities and expression.
00:47:18.000He said, no, there's a wall of separation between church and state.
00:47:21.000They will not stop your religious activities.
00:48:04.000Next, to take on some of the criticisms of American nationalism and to make the argument that America isn't simply held together by common ideas, we go to Rich Lowry from episode 78.
00:48:14.000Rich began his career as a research assistant to Charles Krauthammer and was selected by William F. Buckley to lead National Review as editor in 1997.
00:48:23.000He's a frequent guest on programs like Meet the Press.
00:48:26.000Rich has authored books like Lincoln Unbound, The Case for Nationalism, How It Made Us Powerful, United and Free, and Legacy, Paying the Price for the Clinton Years, a New York Times bestseller.
00:48:35.000Rich is one of the most creative and intelligent minds in conservative circles.
00:48:38.000His defense of nationalism is particularly fascinating, especially because it's come under such bad odor in modern American society.
00:48:45.000If you say you're a nationalist, everybody in the media simply says you're a Nazi, which is insane and crazy.
00:48:49.000Nationalism has an actual meaning, and there's a lot of complexity to the idea.
00:48:53.000Rich and I have discussed this at length, and we discussed it in our interview as well.
00:48:57.000In that discussion, Rich addresses criticisms of American nationalism and explains what a truthful history of the United States should look like, how the 1619 Project is unprecedented, what separates group identity from national identity, and what truly makes us American.
00:49:10.000So let's talk about American nationalism.
00:49:21.000The chief critique of American nationalism is that we're not actually a nation, that we're a set of different competing interest groups and that we have been bound together by fate or by military power, depending on how you see it.
00:49:33.000But realistically, The idea of a common American nation that spans both slaves and slaveholders, that spans Native Americans and the people who drove them off their land, that spans oppressors and people who were oppressed, that that is a fantasy or a mirage and that it's history written by the winners.
00:49:51.000Well, there's been an American nation for a very long time, and my contention is that it predates the revolution in 1776.
00:49:58.000I can't tell you exactly when the American nation arises, but it's sometime between the early 17th century, where the settlement starts here, and the revolution.
00:50:09.000Where you have people who become used to governing themselves, that have their own governing institutions, most importantly these colonial assemblies that are governing for a hundred years.
00:50:20.000You don't get the revolution if you don't have a nation prior to it that feels that it has its own claims and rights that need to be vindicated.
00:50:29.000Now the shortcomings of the nation, African-Americans are part of the cultural nation from the very beginning, but their rights aren't recognized by the government and the state.
00:50:38.000Native Americans are pushed aside by the American nation.
00:50:42.000So these are two shameful aspects of our history.
00:50:45.000And I spent a lot of time talking in the book how we need a truthful history of the United States that includes our sins, but it shouldn't necessitate lying about ourselves, which is what we see now in the 1619 Project, the New York Times, and elsewhere, which is something I think really unprecedented in human history.
00:51:04.000Usually the national tendency is you lie about the other guy.
00:51:07.000You lie about the other country to drag them down.
00:51:10.000We have people now who are dragging our own country down.
00:51:13.000So when we talk about people joining the stream of American history, being admitted to the, The broader stream of American history in the case of freed slaves, for example, or Native Americans who decide not to live in tribal reservations, which are a separate governed area.
00:51:26.000How do people join the American nation?
00:51:29.000Because if America is a creedal idea, that makes sense, but if America is more than a creed, how do you join with a nation that has a separate history or a separate culture?
00:51:37.000Yes, I think one of the pillars of the American nation is a cultural core.
00:51:42.000And African-Americans were contributing to that from the very beginning.
00:51:46.000I spent some time talking in the book about how Southern culture is really impossible to disaggregate in certain important respects.
00:51:53.000What's the African influence and what's the European influence?
00:51:59.000Native Americans, again, a different case.
00:52:01.000They were pushed aside, they were excluded, and that's part of the original sin of this country.
00:52:08.000But you become an American fundamentally by you learn the language, you adopt the mores, you thrill to the stories and the heroes, you honor the symbols.
00:52:23.000And something I say in talks about this topic is if, hypothetically tonight, take a tourist metaphor, an African American meets a white American on the streets, on the stairs of the Paris Opera House, they instantly have more in common than anyone around them.
00:52:42.000It doesn't matter whether their ideologies are different, their politics are different, where they are from this country, they have a common language, a common mode of dress likely, common cuisine, tend to like the same kind of food, and a huge stock of common cultural references.
00:52:56.000And I just don't think you can minimize the importance of that to what it is to making an American.
00:53:04.000So yes, the creed is important and is part of that, and the culture and the creed interact with one another and support one another, but it's not just a creed entirely.
00:53:12.000So, philosophically, what separates group identity from national identity?
00:53:17.000So, you know, we can say that, for example, black Americans obviously are part of the American story, but there are some black Americans who say, well, we're not.
00:53:25.000We were left out of the American story, and our chief loyalty lies to the black American story, which is different from the general national American story, and trying to pretend that we are just one part of a broader American history is selling us short.
00:53:36.000Why should loyalty be to a nation, and in some cases, a nation that victimized the group to which it belonged?
00:53:42.000As opposed to the group to which you, which seems closer to you in terms of proximity.
00:53:47.000Well, I mean, I think they're overlapping loyalties, right?
00:53:50.000We're all loyal, most of all, to our family.
00:53:54.000We might have an affiliation, you know, if you're an Irish American, you might be particularly have a connection to Ireland and St.
00:54:03.000Patrick's Day and aspects of that language and culture.
00:54:08.000But ultimately, I think we're all in this together.
00:54:11.000And none of us are what we are if it weren't for this country.
00:54:17.000And being born in this country is something none of us are responsible for.
00:54:21.000It's just an incredibly gratuitous blessing that we're here.
00:54:26.000So for me, that argues for loyalty to the nation.
00:54:30.000Now, African Americans, it's a much more difficult case, because they were Treated unjustly for 150 years, horrifically.
00:54:39.000You know, I've been reading up on slavery because I've been arguing with some of the people who wrote for the 1619 Project, and the Atlantic passage is something it's almost impossible to read about.
00:54:53.000But the story of African-Americans is of loyalty to this country.
00:54:58.000The emphasis on African-American has to be American.
00:55:02.000And the lead essay in the New York Times' 1619 Project, I think, was actually moving and correct on this topic.
00:55:08.000Participated in every American war, even when they had no rights or returning to a country that was going to oppress them.
00:55:16.000And it's a very moving anecdote in that essay where the author describes being a little girl in school and the teacher has some project where all the students are going to point to the country on the globe that their family is originally from, and her African-American friend, they have no idea. They have no idea where to point because they're so American.
00:55:35.000Exactly because they're so American. And because of various factors, including that we didn't import many slaves here compared to Caribbean islands, and our immigration policy was racist, and we didn't welcome African-Americans.
00:55:49.000For that reason, if you're an African-American and your family didn't emigrate fairly recently, your lineage in this country probably goes way, way, way back.
00:55:58.000And in that sense, you're more American than any of the European-American neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, for instance.
00:56:08.000I get into the philosophy of conservatism in episode 56 with the great one, Mark Levin, host of The Mark Levin Show, one of the most respected political radio shows in the country.
00:56:16.000He also hosts Life, Liberty, and Levin on Fox News, hugely rated show.
00:56:19.000He was the first editor-in-chief of Conservative Review, and he's authored several New York Times bestsellers, including his latest on Freedom of the Press.
00:56:26.000Prior to his radio and TV days, Mark served as an advisor to many members of President Reagan's cabinet, eventually becoming chief of staff to Attorney General Ed Meese.
00:56:34.000Mark was awarded the American Conservative Union's Ronald Reagan Award for his work at Landmark Legal Foundation, an American conservative legal advocacy group where he served as president.
00:56:45.000Meeting him was one of the great thrills of my young life, and becoming a colleague is an even bigger thrill.
00:56:50.000Mark is one of the most intelligent commentators on the political scene.
00:56:53.000He knows his founding philosophy down to his marrow.
00:56:56.000He understands the law, and he understands the threat from the left.
00:56:59.000Frankly, I'm honored to be considered a colleague of my friend Mark Levin.
00:57:02.000In our conversation, Listen to us discuss the fight to define conservatism, what we need to teach every American, the narrative shift away from appreciation of our founding, and how the Declaration of Independence, as originally written, is what enabled this country to abolish slavery.
00:57:15.000I don't think Donald Trump is a philosophical conservative.
00:57:27.000I think he's come to his conservatism as a matter of practicality, and in some ways, principle.
00:57:33.000I And so I don't think he's any more a principled or philosophical conservative than George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush.
00:57:45.000I think there have really been two in the last little over a century.
00:57:50.000But other than that, I can't think of any, just off the top of my head.
00:57:55.000Not Nixon, not Ford, not Eisenhower, certainly not Theodore Roosevelt and Harding and so forth.
00:58:02.000So I don't really hold that against him in terms of him promoting that kind of an agenda from a philosophical point of view, but I think it's kind of the Not our job, but our responsibility to try and explain that to a lot of people, what these policies are, our philosophy, and so forth.
00:58:25.000I even think a lot of so-called conservative websites and magazines have lost their way.
00:58:30.000They're fighting with each other over what conservatism means, or they've abandoned it in some ways because they hate Trump, or they love Trump, or whatever the situation is.
00:58:40.000I feel right now the intellectual conservative movement is very weak.
00:59:06.000I'm very troubled by some who've talked about conservatism all these years and then all of a sudden say, well, what has it ever done for us?
00:59:13.000And I say, let me tell you what it's done for you.
00:59:16.000Nine o'clock tonight, I want you to go into one of these supermarkets where I live.
01:00:41.000It's because of all the other reasons.
01:00:43.000And so, part of it is the responsibility of the individual citizen.
01:00:48.000Honestly, I don't look to the President of the United States or a senator or a politician of any kind to tell me, this is what you need to think.
01:00:56.000One of the things that we need to continue to teach people is think for yourselves.
01:01:13.000The first chapter of Liberty and Tyranny, I say one of the reasons why we don't really appreciate liberty is because we're surrounded by it.
01:01:20.000And one of the reasons we don't appreciate what we have is because we're surrounded by it.
01:01:25.000And so we get caught up in really stupid arguments.
01:01:35.000And I play these old clips from World War II.
01:01:38.000And you really Your patriotism is just through the roof and you see how tremendous this country is and the sacrifices people have made for this country.
01:01:48.000So I think it's really on each one of us, more than a president, to really explain liberty and conservatism and constitutionalism.
01:01:58.000And this president doesn't do that anyway.
01:02:20.000And so, at his core, I know he loves this country.
01:02:25.000This is one of the things that's been troubling me so much about the Democratic Party.
01:02:28.000I make a distinction in my language routinely between leftist and liberal.
01:02:32.000Liberals are people I disagree with on politics.
01:02:34.000Leftists are people who want to shut down the debate, who are interested in polarizing people specifically on the basis of race for political gain.
01:02:41.000And it seems like the left has taken over completely.
01:03:04.000And he's telling her all about the wonderful founding philosophy.
01:03:07.000And I turned to my wife and I said, there's no way this movie gets made today, because the entire narrative of the left has shifted even in my lifetime.
01:03:13.000I'm old enough to remember when the Democratic Party actually still at least paid lip service to the foundations of the country and talked about how wonderful founding philosophy was.
01:03:22.000And now it seems that the narrative is dominant in the Democratic Party that the founding philosophy was effectively just racism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia dressed up in fancy clothes and then sold to people.
01:03:33.000And that what we really have to do is cleanse the palate, get rid of all these documents and start afresh.
01:03:38.000Obviously it scares the hell out of me.
01:03:40.000I'm seeing young people who don't know anything about history buying into it.
01:04:38.000The founders had no And yet it was Abraham Lincoln who did the greatest job of explaining the founding and the founders and did more for African-American slaves in this country than any left-wing professor or any leftist on TV that you can imagine.
01:05:03.000And what Lincoln said in 1858 and beyond, and he loved the founders, He said, those men wrote the Declaration of Independence.
01:05:12.000There's not a word about slavery in the Declaration of Independence.
01:05:16.000Every individual is created by God, unalienable rights.
01:05:21.000He said, so those men knew that slavery was wrong, but they also could not create a country because certain states like Georgia and South Carolina weren't going to go for it.
01:05:33.000But they knew that their children and their grandchildren would have to address this.
01:05:36.000That's why they wrote the Declaration of Independence the way that they did.
01:05:40.000And he says it's their writing, their constitution, that will enable us to smite this.
01:05:48.000Because otherwise we wouldn't have had a country, and you still would have had states or colonies with slavery, and states and colonies without it.
01:06:00.000It certainly wasn't even when I was in high school.
01:06:02.000I still got the same pablum, the same left-wing agenda.
01:06:06.000They have managed, the progressive movement, to really control ideologically virtually every instrumentality of our culture right now.
01:06:15.000That's why we have these culture wars.
01:06:17.000Whether it's the courts, whether it's the bureaucracy, whether it's education, whether it's the media, we always start with the progressive foundation and we're always on defense trying to respond to these things.
01:06:30.000We've got to do something about colleges and universities.
01:06:34.000And I think we, the people, need to start speaking with our wallets.
01:06:38.000And states need to start withholding funds.
01:06:44.000Make sure when you send your kid to college, if you're involved in that decision, that you don't send them to an indoctrination mill.
01:06:50.000You know, just because it's an Ivy League school doesn't mean they have to go there.
01:06:53.000There's other schools out there where they'll get a more traditional education and so on.
01:06:57.000But this is something I've been thinking a lot about.
01:06:59.000Maybe one day I'll write about it and give it more focus thought, but it is a huge, huge problem.
01:07:06.000To end with an uplifting guest from the show discussing some of the aspects and values that all Americans can and should get behind, let's go to episode 41, Arthur Brooks.
01:07:14.000Arthur is the former president of the American Enterprise Institute, conservative think tank, committed to defending human dignity and building a freer world.
01:07:21.000He is now faculty for Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School.
01:07:25.000He's written the New York Times bestsellers, The Road to Freedom, How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise, The Conservative Heart, How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America, and several others.
01:07:34.000Arthur Brooks is legitimately the nicest person in the entire world.
01:07:37.000When he writes books about how we should be nicer to each other, you think, who is this guy?
01:07:41.000And what sort of saccharine nonsense is this?
01:07:43.000And then, you read the books, and they are filled with content and depth, and it turns out that Arthur is just a deep, abiding, loving person, just a wonderful guy.
01:07:52.000Also, he happens to be a classical French hornist.
01:08:20.000But, you know, in the United States the idea is that we are, while we think that we may be enemies, we're actually not enemies, we're brothers in the sort of Lincolnian formulation.
01:08:29.000And the reason I want to ask that is because as certain people on both sides become more radical, I think right now the left is moving in a radical direction faster than the right is.
01:08:37.000Donald Trump is actually in policy somewhat of a moderate Republican.
01:08:41.000The left seems to be moving pretty dramatically in a far left direction, including embrace of democratic socialism.
01:08:48.000You talk about these sort of moral values that you still think unite Americans.
01:08:51.000What do you think those moral values are?
01:09:09.000Because, you know, populism is fundamentally not leadership, it's followership.
01:09:12.000It's basically, and you've made this point a hundred times, I stole this from Ben Shapiro, but there's a parade going down the street, a populist is a guy who says, there's a parade, I better get out in front of it, they need a leader.
01:09:22.000Leadership is something that says, there's a better future, can you see it?
01:09:25.000There's a guy who teaches at Harvard Business School named Daniel Goleman, and he talks about authoritative leadership, which is not, you must come with me.
01:10:10.000Because it talks about how these Judeo-Christian values, these Western values, are a gift to the world.
01:10:16.000People, even if they're not religious, we have a lot of people watching us who are atheists, who are secular completely, but they believe in the equality of human dignity.
01:10:57.000We're going to work together to try to help Americans live up to those standards, even though we haven't hit them yet.
01:11:02.000I mean, I certainly agree with all of that.
01:11:04.000I wonder if there are active opponents to some of that.
01:11:06.000And the reason I say that is because you point out Jonathan Haidt's moral matrix.
01:11:09.000Jonathan's been on the program, Professor Haidt, and we talked about the five factors, maybe six if you include liberty, which he added later.
01:11:17.000And you talk about how conservatives and liberals still believe in a couple of them.
01:11:24.000But even those ones, As Professor Haidt has recognized, are seen in almost diametrically opposed ways.
01:11:30.000So fairness for conservatives is fairness in the meritocratic sense, the idea that we all have equal rights, but that the outcome's not going to be equal.
01:11:37.000And fairness for many on the Democratic side is fairness of outcome, which is directly opposed to fairness of meritocracy.
01:11:43.000When it comes to compassion, on the right side of the aisle, the value system tends to be, well, compassion is me helping you find a job, develop a skill set, care for yourself.
01:11:51.000And compassion on the left side of the aisle is, how do I create a system whereby you don't have to care for yourself, whereby we are caring for you.
01:11:59.000So if that's the case, then even the most basic values, the ones that are necessary for us to be playing the same game, so to speak, have those been radically undermined, or do you think that there are bridges that can still be built?
01:12:09.000And the reason is because, let's take something like fairness, where the right really does focus on meritocratic fairness.
01:12:15.000It's don't take something that somebody else earned.
01:12:18.000And the left really does focus much more on redistributive fairness.
01:12:22.000The idea of redistributing, somebody has more, somebody has less, the person who has less needs more, you take it from the person who has more.
01:12:34.000You believe that there should be a welfare state, and so do I. I mean, I believe that the free enterprise system, one of the greatest accomplishments ever of the free enterprise system, was our ability to support people we've never even met.
01:12:45.000It's an incredible thing that no system in history has been able to accomplish, and it's because of capitalism.
01:12:51.000Because of the largesse that came from capitalism, and it's such a blessing.
01:13:10.000And they don't think that merit's garbage.
01:13:13.000They think that America's great because they want their kids to achieve, and they're kind of proud to live in a country where people can start companies and do great things.
01:13:20.000They just, they want a little bit more redistribution.
01:13:23.000Now, you find radicals, and when I say this, I mean that approximately, depending on how you count it, the 7% of people who are true polarizing radicals in this country who don't see any common ground.
01:13:34.000But if 93% of us, give or take, I actually do believe that there can be some common ground, that we can work together in some way, shape, or form, that I'm going to be bridging that meritocratic redistributive divide, and I'm going to be really forgiving.
01:13:46.000I'm going to be as generous as I possibly can to the people who don't agree quite as much with my meritocratic values, so that I can try to get some fairness that bridges that gap.
01:14:15.000And furthermore, I thought capitalism was great for rich people and bad for poor people.
01:14:19.000And you know, I grew up in a left-wing environment, I knew nobody who cared about economics or business, but I was learning that two billion of my brothers and sisters had been pulled out of poverty since I was a child.
01:14:31.000And I learned that it came from five things.
01:14:35.000And all economists, left, right, and center, this is not controversial stuff, this is not, this is propaganda.
01:14:40.000Five things pulled two billion of Ben and Arthur's brothers and sisters out of poverty since 1970.
01:14:44.000It was globalization, Free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and the culture of free enterprise spreading from America all around the world.
01:15:31.000If you've enjoyed hearing from our past guests in this collection, be sure to check out their full episodes and hear more of The Conversation.
01:15:38.000Links to those are in the description.
01:15:39.000Also be sure to leave us a comment about who some of your favorite past Sunday Special guests have been, and who you'd like to see me talk with next season.