Ben Shapiro begins the new year with a brief overview of the political landscape in the United States and around the world going into 2023. He also discusses the passing of Pope Benedict XVI and the implications for the future of Western values and the world as we know it in the 21st century. And he points to a new piece of research from Harvard that could have a major impact on our understanding of the world in the coming years, and why we should all be looking for a return to a more traditional Christian conception of what it means to be a Christian in a world that is secularized and secularized, rather than a system of values that is based on a system that is grounded in the Bible and the teachings of the Holy Spirit. He also points to the new research from UC Berkeley and Harvard that challenges the idea that the Bible is the sole source of all knowledge and reason. And finally, he points out that the Pope Benedict was not a Christian, he was a Catholic, but a Catholic and a teacher of the Bible was a Christian teacher, not a secular teacher, and that a Catholic values are not the root cause of all good things, but are in fact a replacement for Christian values and a replacement of Christian values, and not the replacement for them. Happy New Year, everybody! Happy Holidays! - Ben Shapiro Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Learn about our sponsorships and which products we like best help us reach more listeners. Subscribe in-depth reviews of our listeners worldwide. Become a supporter of our shows like you get the best deals on our best vlogs, best listening to us on social media and social media, the best listening experience, the most personalized experience in the podcast, the ultimate place in the world, and most importantly, our most authentic and coolest podcast in the best podcast on the podcast anywhere you can find the best place to listen to the best of the best vids we get the most of it all. and most authentic reviews and the most inspiring podcast on all things podcasting experience on the internet. Enjoys this episode on the most influential podcast on everything you need to know about politics, tips, trends, trends and everything else going on the highest podcast on culture and culture, everywhere else in the place you should be listening to it! Thank you for listening to the most important things we care about politics and culture?
00:00:14.000It is indeed 2023 and we are back with you.
00:00:23.000I hope you had a wonderful and meaningful Christmas vacation, as well as a wonderful and happy New Year.
00:00:29.000And we begin the year on a sort of brief note of overview.
00:00:33.000So 2023, I believe, is going to be a time of shifting political winds.
00:00:37.000I think that the wind is about to shift pretty dramatically across Western civilization because the weaknesses that have been brought upon Western civilization by liberalism, by the left, I think that those weaknesses are going to start to come home to roost.
00:00:48.000It looks like a moment of strength for the left.
00:00:50.000It looks as though the left is on the march.
00:00:52.000It looks as though President Joe Biden is doing pretty well.
00:00:55.000He's had a pretty successful run thus far in terms of legislation.
00:01:11.000It looks as though Democrats sort of escaped the blade of the guillotine during the last election cycle.
00:01:15.000And so if you're on the left, you're feeling pretty good about yourself going into 2023.
00:01:18.000I do not think 2023 is going to be a good year for the left.
00:01:21.000I think that a lot of the secular trends, I don't mean secular as in godless, I mean sort of the broad societal trends that have been happening across the West are about to reverse themselves.
00:01:30.000Because the consequences of those trends are about to be felt in a pretty dramatic way across the West.
00:01:36.000The truth is, when we do politics here on this show, what we're very often doing is we are telescoping big, broad issues into the news of the day.
00:01:45.000Because the news of the day is just representative of events at the top of the iceberg.
00:01:48.000What we like to do here on the show is we like to talk about the broad ideologies, the broad historical movements that underpin what's happening on the very tip of the iceberg.
00:01:58.000And I think that what we've been doing is essentially rearranging the deck chairs on the top of the Titanic, to mix the metaphor.
00:02:05.000The iceberg underneath us has been shifting.
00:02:08.000And I think people are beginning to notice that.
00:02:10.000And as they begin to notice that, as they begin to feel unstable at the top of the iceberg, people are going to look for solidity again.
00:02:15.000People are going to look for a restoration of some sort of eternal values.
00:02:18.000All this came to mind because over the course of the last couple of weeks while we were off the air, The former Pope Benedict XVI passed away, and I think that the reason why it is important for people to note this is because what Pope Benedict actually was, was he was supposed to be, and I think he was in his career as Pope, a repository of the idea that ancient wisdom actually mattered.
00:02:41.000And we in modern society, we tend to think that tradition and wisdom, these things don't matter at all.
00:02:46.000We can basically reason ourselves to the proper view on life.
00:03:08.000We can ignore all of the rules that have been cultivated over time and the rules that have been cultivated in order to protect those rules.
00:03:13.000We can just dispense with all of that and we can build a brand new universe on the basis of our own tabula rasa reasoning or on the basis of our emotional feelings or our subjective self-assessment as to what we are.
00:03:24.000And Pope Benedict, his life and his work were really an answer to that.
00:03:28.000Because what all good religions, all religions that are worth their salt do, is they act as repositories of traditional wisdom in the face of change.
00:03:35.000This does not mean that they oppose all change.
00:03:39.000Sometimes they're very progressive in terms of integrating change.
00:03:42.000All major universities in the West were founded by Christians.
00:03:46.000That does not mean that Christianity is not a system of thought that believes that it is bringing eternal values to the table.
00:03:53.000It means that those eternal values allow for the capacity to move and change, just as the Constitution of the United States allows for the capacity to move and change within the boundaries of the Constitution.
00:04:01.000The problem becomes, When the change eats the Constitution, when the change eats the eternal rules and values of these institutions.
00:04:08.000And this is something that Pope Benedict stood against.
00:04:09.000I want to take a moment and talk about Pope Benedict because I think that what we are about to witness in 2023 and over the course of the next few years is going to be a titanic clash between ancient wisdom, traditional wisdom, wisdom that has worked in the world, which is a form of data.
00:04:23.000If you're a science-driven person, you don't have to believe in the Bible in order to recognize that the traditional wisdom embodied in codes of conduct that have been carried across civilization over the course of thousands of years, this may bear some sort of actual data value.
00:04:39.000And something Thomas Sowell has pointed out, that if you have a tradition, you have a rule that's been inherited from your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, going back thousands of years, Maybe the reason that people follow that rule is because that rule has worked.
00:04:50.000And maybe if that rule stopped working, people would stop following that rule.
00:04:54.000But we've decided to dispense with all of those rules.
00:04:56.000And so what we're about to see is we've now become a society that says that all those rules are random, they're useless, we can just get rid of them.
00:05:04.000It is the equivalent of... I've been rereading a book about the reason why Western people are sort of different than other people, and some of the failings of the West.
00:05:15.000The book is titled The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich.
00:05:18.000And the basic idea of the weirdest people in the world is that Western people are kind of made different by the way that they think.
00:05:25.000Hey, but one of the things that has been true forever is that every civilization, every society has these pieces of inherited wisdom that they pass along.
00:05:33.000And when individualism destroys the inherited wisdom, you end up with chaos.
00:05:37.000If you were in a, if you, if you stumbled upon an African tribe and that African tribe had a very bizarre way of fighting, say a snake bite.
00:05:47.000And what they did is they put together some sort of weird formula that you'd never seen before.
00:05:50.000This weird formula where they took some berries and they took some animal fats and they burned them and then they buried them and they uncovered them and they gave them to you.
00:05:57.000And it helped to stop the actual snake bite.
00:06:01.000As a Westerner, your first thought might be, well, I don't know how they did that, so I'm not going to even do that.
00:06:06.000Or you could think, wait, maybe this has been working for them for a very long time, so before I don't take the thing, maybe I ought to take the thing, and then I can figure out which ingredients are wrong, and which ingredients need to go, and which ingredients are useless, and how much of this is ritual, and how much of this is actual science.
00:06:19.000We are foolish in Western civilization to simply throw out the baby with the bathwater and take all these traditions and throw them away.
00:06:25.000And this is what Pope Benedict stood for.
00:06:27.000We'll get to more on all of this in just one moment.
00:06:29.000First, the current administration's New Year's goals.
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00:07:07.000Which seems more and more like the Biden administration playbook, actually.
00:07:10.000It's like they read the book and now they're using it in their own favor.
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00:07:54.000Balance of Nature uses a cold vacuum process that preserves the natural phytonutrients in whole fruits and vegetables and encapsulates them for easy consumption.
00:08:01.000Balance of Nature sent a bunch of their product down to the studio for my team to try.
00:08:05.000I was very excited to find out that they are kosher, which means that I can have them as well, and I'm feeling more energy, which I need because I have a brand new puppy this new year.
00:08:12.000It's keeping me up all night, so I need the energy.
00:08:13.000When you're disciplined enough to take care of your health, you reap all those benefits.
00:08:16.000More energy, less fatigue, better focus.
00:08:18.000Consuming the right balance of fruits and veggies every day is an important first step.
00:08:44.000So Pope Benedict, obviously, as the Wall Street Journal points out, his death has left conservative Catholics without their figurehead amid deep divisions over how much the church should adapt to the times or reaffirm its traditional teachings against the challenge of secularism.
00:08:55.000The retired pope was for more than three decades a leader in the culture wars that have shaken the Catholic Church and wider society since the late 1960s.
00:09:01.000He was a living symbol, depending on one's point of view, of an intolerant and punitive religiosity or of stalwart fidelity amid disorienting change.
00:09:09.000So again, the people who believe that Pope Benedict XVI was an emissary of intolerant and punitive religiosity believe that religion generally has no value.
00:09:18.000That that body of inherited wisdom basically has no value.
00:09:21.000And I wanted to read a few quotes from Pope Benedict on the occasion of his death to remind people What exactly he stood for and why what he says is important.
00:09:29.000And this is coming from an Orthodox Jew.
00:09:31.000I don't have a dog in the Catholic Church fight other than this is a very, very important repository of fundamental truths for Western civilization that has obviously affected the outgrowth of Western civilization.
00:09:40.000I think that people of conservative bent, people of traditionalist bent, people who actually believe in God, all of us should take the words of Pope Benedict XVI to heart.
00:09:50.000Here is a quote from Pope Benedict a few years back.
00:10:09.000And one of the ways that people pursue truth is they accept the things that they have heard from their fathers.
00:10:13.000And then they ask questions of their fathers to determine just how true those things they have heard are.
00:10:17.000But it is a responsibility of a civilization to teach truth to its young.
00:10:22.000And as we'll discuss in a moment, when I talk about the shifting political winds, we are a civilization that is now actively teaching lies to our young.
00:10:28.000When we teach lies to our young, you fundamentally undermine the civilization and it starts to fall apart and the blowback is coming.
00:10:35.000Here's something that the Pope, Pope Benedict XVI, is what he said when he was talking to the bishops of the United States.
00:10:40.000States, he said the church in the United States is called in season and out of season to proclaim a gospel, which not only proposes unchanging moral truths, but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering. To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that will curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being an ultimate vocation, our relationship to God.
00:11:10.000What he is saying there is that there are fundamental truths, and when those are attacked by either a majoritarian mob, as you've seen over and over in elections around the world, or whether they are attacked by scientific rationalists who pretend that they are the repositories of all knowledge, much of which they've already inherited, or whether it is a bunch of people who simply don't want to follow the rules.
00:11:28.000The simple fact is that the path to human happiness lies in truth.
00:11:31.000And a lot of those truths are things that we have to inherit.
00:11:34.000Here is a flashback to a speech that Pope Benedict XVI gave in 2008.
00:11:45.000It is an opting in, a participation in being itself.
00:11:51.000Hence, authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God.
00:11:58.000Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.
00:12:07.000Notice the focus that he is putting on the word truth.
00:12:10.000Because truth is going to be where happiness lies.
00:12:12.000If you are living your life in opposition to the truth, you're going to end up in a very unhappy world.
00:12:18.000And this is exactly what's happening to Generation Z. So Jonathan Haidt had a fascinating interview, the social psychologist, he had a fascinating interview over the weekend with the Wall Street Journal in which he talked about the falsehood that is being taught to Generation Z and how Generation Z is in serious trouble.
00:12:33.000He says his research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise all of a sudden around 2013, especially for teen girls.
00:12:40.000But it's only Generation Z, not the older generations.
00:12:42.000If you'd stopped collecting data in 2011, says Haidt, you'd see little change from previous years.
00:12:48.000What happened in 2012, when the oldest generation's e-babies were in their middle teens?
00:12:52.000That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site.
00:12:55.000It was also the beginning of the selfie era.
00:12:57.000Apple's iPhone 4, released in 2010, had the first front-facing camera, which was much improved in the iPhone 5, reintroduced two years later.
00:13:04.000Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 to 8, to between 10 and 12.
00:13:13.000That meant, according to Haidt, that first social media generation was one of weakened kids who hadn't practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment with other children.
00:13:22.000They were deprived of the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
00:13:26.000Before 2010, teenagers had flip phones.
00:13:28.000They'd text each other and say, let's meet down at the mall.
00:13:30.000Now their childhood is largely just through the phone.
00:13:32.000They no longer even hang out together.
00:13:34.000Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
00:13:37.000Height worries especially about girls.
00:13:38.000By 2020, more than 25% of female teenagers had a major depression.
00:13:43.000The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
00:13:45.000The comparable number for millennials of the same age registered at half the Generation Z rate, about 13% for girls and 5% for boys.
00:13:52.000He said kids are on their devices all the time.
00:13:55.000It says boys play video games, often in groups, but girls are drawn to visual platforms, Instagram and TikTok.
00:13:59.000About display and performance, you post your perfect life, then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
00:14:05.000He's talking about the narcissist effect.
00:14:08.000The legend of the narcissist is that the narcissist sees himself in a reflection, in a pool, and he's so taken with his own visage that he can't look away.
00:14:15.000This is what we have become as a civilization, and this is what we are doing to our young.
00:14:18.000We have robbed them of eternal values that make them answerable to people outside themselves, and instead, they are now answerable to the subjective feeling within.
00:14:25.000And once you're answerable only to the subjective feeling within, you are destined for unhappiness.
00:14:30.000Because there's no external action in the world that can make you feel good.
00:14:33.000There's nothing that can fill that gap that you've now created.
00:14:36.000You've cut yourself off from the world.
00:14:38.000You've cut yourself off from the possibility of eternal truth, with a capital T, by embracing, quote unquote, my truth, which is what we now have an entire generation doing.
00:14:47.000This is why we have an entire generation that identifies as whatever it feels inside.
00:14:53.000You wonder where this whole insane movement has come from that boys can be girls and girls can be boys and we must teach girls that they can be boys and boys that they can be girls.
00:15:26.000They feel like they're living in a world without rules or rules where they have no responsibilities, where they're not taught what to do, and where adults are abandoning them and then patting themselves on the back, proclaiming that they are doing something good for the kids.
00:15:54.000You have to have rules, and you have to teach those rules.
00:15:56.000And if you don't teach those rules, if you don't teach those truths, the realities of life, what you end up with is an entire generation adrift.
00:16:04.000And so our civilization has decided to discard a lot of the eternal truths that Pope Benedict talked about in favor of subjectivity.
00:16:11.000And also in favor of a sort of bizarre paganism.
00:16:16.000This bizarre paganism most obviously takes on an environmental affect.
00:16:22.000When you get rid of God, it's not that people lose the need for God.
00:16:25.000They just fill it with something else.
00:16:26.000So one of the things they have filled that with is, of course, that subjective sense of self-assessment, the constant search within for your own sexual identity, your own gender, and the rest of this.
00:16:36.000But they fill the role of God with something else.
00:16:38.000And the role of God is now filled by many in the United States and in the West generally with the environment.
00:16:44.000There's this great cosmic force out there that will revenge itself upon you because you're living too well.
00:16:49.000And because the West is too rich, Because the West has done too much, materially, and so the West must be punished.
00:16:56.000This is why you see people like Greta Thunberg, who are held up as though they are sort of icons of religious leadership.
00:17:04.000Almost like members of a children's crusade.
00:17:06.000They don't know anything, but the children will lead us from Europe into the Holy Land.
00:17:11.000That's not going to work, but we'll follow them.
00:17:38.000What he said was completely and utterly debunked.
00:17:41.000So 60 Minutes featured him last night to talk about how we are about to reach the end of civilization.
00:17:48.000This is the equivalent of ESPN having on a sports handicapper who's gotten wrong every, not some games, every single game he has ever picked on the air.
00:17:57.000Paul Ehrlich has been wrong about every single thing, but that's not why 60 Minutes is having him on.
00:18:01.000They are having him on because you need the wizened old visage of a pseudoscientist to tell you that doom is coming unless you engage in the socialistic redistribution programs that the left would love.
00:18:14.000So, what exactly are the policy recommendations that Ehrlich is recommending?
00:18:17.000Obviously, socialist redistribution programs, zero growth programs.
00:18:42.000And a luxury tax on diapers and cribs.
00:18:45.000The concerns about population became misanthropic.
00:18:48.000And it was taken with so much seriousness that Paul Ehrlich would recommend things like putting stuff in public water that would make people not as fertile.
00:18:57.000This is what he was actually advocating back in the 70s.
00:18:59.000Now he advocates redistribution of all sorts of resources.
00:19:03.000He advocates in favor of zero growth programs.
00:19:06.000He advocates in favor of dismantling full industries.
00:19:09.000And he says, we don't do that, then doom is coming.
00:19:11.000And here's the thing, Paul Ehrlich's been wrong about all of this.
00:19:13.000So if you assume that the wisdom of Pope Benedict is wisdom that has been time tested over the course of generations, and so maybe we should take it seriously, the wisdom of Paul Ehrlich has been disproved over the course of a single generation.
00:19:27.000And here's Paul Ehrlich promoting his book, The Population Bomb.
00:19:29.000This book sold three million copies, The Population Bomb.
00:19:32.000And in The Population Bomb, which was written in 1968, he said that there would be billions of people that would die in the 1970s and 1980s of starvation.
00:19:39.000Here is Paul Ehrlich promoting The Population Bomb back in 68.
00:19:42.000If we continue to let population Bro, and if we continue to exploit the underdeveloped countries, if we continue to pollute the seas with a wide variety of compounds and so on, it's very difficult for me to picture things holding together for more than another decade or so.
00:20:04.000I mean, he was invited onto Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in order to promote this is the single biggest environmental doomsday book ever written.
00:20:11.000And it was totally wrong in every aspect.
00:20:23.000You have to get the death rate and birth rate in balance, and there's only two ways to do it.
00:20:28.000One is to bring the birth rate down, the other is to push the death rate up.
00:20:33.000Okay, and if you don't push the birth rate down through forcible sterilization, then you will end up with massive death rate because Malthusian trap, because there just won't be enough resources.
00:20:41.000Now, he was totally wrong about all of this.
00:20:44.000He was absolutely wrong about all of this.
00:20:45.000But that did not stop the media from parroting every aspect of this.
00:20:49.000We'll get to more on all of this in just one moment.
00:20:52.000First, the situation in Ukraine continues to be extremely bad.
00:20:54.000That war apparently is just going to go on for the foreseeable future.
00:20:57.000Well, whatever you think politically about the war, there are a lot of people on the ground in Ukraine right now who are suffering.
00:21:02.000My friends over at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews have been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.
00:21:08.000They've never seen hunger and suffering like they are seeing right now.
00:21:13.000Norman is an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor.
00:21:15.000He's been blind since birth and he lives in a Jewish old age home in Odessa, Ukraine.
00:21:18.000With so much of the infrastructure destroyed over the recent month, including the power grid, Norman has been without heat or clean water for a long time.
00:21:23.000The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has supplied blankets, food, and other essentials to help Norman survive through the winter.
00:21:29.000They urgently need your help to continue getting Norman supplies.
00:21:32.000Please consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
00:21:35.000Just 45 bucks can ensure warmth, food, and clean water to Jewish kids and the elderly in need.
00:21:39.000Right now, the fellowship has a special matching challenge where your donation will double in impact.
00:21:43.000Your tax deductible gift will be multiplied two times to help provide twice the winter necessities and save lives.
00:21:48.000So head online right now to benforthefellowship.org or text Shapiro to 41444.
00:21:53.000That's benforthefellowship.org, text Shapiro to 41444.
00:21:57.000Again, you need to help people who are suffering.
00:22:00.000One great way to help people who are suffering this brand new year, head on over to benforthefellowship.org or text Shapiro to 41444 and give generously.
00:22:06.000Also, it is that time of year When you're starting to look at those holiday bills and you go, Oh no, you spent way too much money.
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00:24:10.000And the challenge was, you pick a basket of resources, any basket of resources, and I promise you they will get cheaper over time.
00:24:16.000Now, Paul Ehrlich's entire worldview was that resources would get more expensive because population would outstrip the capacity of the earth to provide for those populations.
00:24:25.000Simon's view was people are innately creative and innovative, and therefore people will be able to innovate their way out of these problems.
00:24:57.000Because when you are a doomsayer, when you're doing Jeremiah ads on national television about how the world's about to collapse unless you do the socialistic and anti-tradition things that we want you to do, you become very popular with the group that really is kind of socialistic and doesn't like tradition all that much.
00:25:12.000Here's Julian Simon challenging Paul Ehrlich way back when.
00:25:16.000The newspaper stories you customarily read would tell you that we should be worrying about running out of natural resources, copper, wheat, what have you.
00:25:30.000But the history of the past 200 years, in fact the whole history of humanity, has shown us the extraordinary event, contrary to all common sense, That the more that we use of natural resources, the more we have of them.
00:25:50.000That is, rather than natural resources becoming more scarce as we use them, they have been becoming more available.
00:25:59.000Okay, and Julian Simon happened to be right about that, but the doomsaying is what takes over in a period in which you've lost all moorings to reality.
00:26:06.000When the truth no longer matters, but an agenda matters, well then you end up with elites like Paul Ehrlich back on 60 Minutes, whether you're talking about the 1970s or whether you're talking about now.
00:26:14.000Okay, so I think that what we are having right now, what the 1960s were, were a move away from tradition.
00:26:21.000In some ways, there were changes to tradition that happened within the line of tradition, right?
00:26:24.000That's why Martin Luther King is citing the Bible when he's talking about civil rights.
00:26:28.000But there were also moves that were just dramatically anti-tradition.
00:26:31.000The sexual revolution, the environmentalist revolution.
00:26:33.000These were things that were just tremendously anti-tradition.
00:26:36.000And they were well accepted in the 1960s.
00:26:37.000And then there was massive blowback in the United States in the 70s and 80s.
00:26:41.000That's precisely what you're about to see in the United States because we're being lied to.
00:26:45.000And when the lies become clear, people don't like it very much.
00:26:49.000When the lies become clear, people react very, very strongly to being lied to.
00:26:53.000Whether they are being lied to about how every single person on earth is going to die of COVID, or whether they are being lied to about the possibilities of socialist redistribution radically increasing the economy, or they're being lied to about how we have to crimp our own lifestyles in dramatic fashion in order to achieve the avoidance of global catastrophe.
00:27:28.000Well, there are a couple of possible reactions.
00:27:31.000One is the reaction that says we have to go back to time-tested tradition.
00:27:35.000We have to go back and we have to look not at we are going to become 1950 again.
00:27:39.000We have to understand change has happened in the United States.
00:27:42.000Some of that change good, much of that change bad.
00:27:43.000We're going to have to look back at tradition and find the best of tradition and bring it forward into the current day and say it still applies.
00:27:51.000That's the kind of Reaction that would be good for the world.
00:27:54.000My fear is that the reaction that we are going to see, the shifting winds that we are going to see, will go too far.
00:27:59.000And this is what we are seeing in the world of, say, Andrew Tate, for example.
00:28:02.000So I have a lot of younger listeners who are big fans of Andrew Tate, who really enjoy Andrew Tate.
00:28:06.000Now, the big news over the course of the last couple of weeks is that Andrew Tate, for those who don't know, Andrew Tate is a very online guy who was a lightweight kickboxing champion, I believe, and he's become big in the so-called manosphere.
00:28:21.000He was banned from YouTube, I believe, he was banned from Twitter, and he was banned from these things because he was a self-described misogynist, right?
00:28:27.000Somebody who believes that men are superior to women in pretty much every possible way.
00:28:31.000Well, over the last couple of weeks, He got in an online fight with Greta Thunberg in which he was tweeting at her about how he had Bugattis and lots of gas guzzlers and he was heating up the climate.
00:28:41.000And then she tweeted back at him that he had a small d***.
00:28:44.000And then, one day later, he ended up being arrested by Romanian authorities.
00:28:48.000And the allegations against Andrew Tate is that he was engaging in sex trafficking.
00:28:52.000According to the New York Post, police in tactical gear descended on a villa where Andrew Tate and brother Tristan were staying Thursday to detain the British brothers on kidnapping and rape charges, judicial sources told Romanian outlet Libertadia.
00:29:02.000Video shows the officers with battering rams and guns sweeping through the dark villa before escorting Tate into a car.
00:29:07.000The brothers in April had allegedly detained two young women, one with American citizenship and one Romanian, inside the villa against their will where they were subjected to physical violence and mental coercion, according to the authorities.
00:29:17.000Police said the Tates allegedly formed an organized crime group and sexually exploited women by forcing them to perform pornographic demonstrations for the purpose of producing and disseminating through social media platforms.
00:29:27.000The brothers had been questioned for five hours by the police back in April, but were released at the time.
00:29:32.000And then they're currently still being held in Romania right now.
00:29:37.000Now, Tate had predicted for a long time this would happen to him.
00:29:40.000He had predicted that people were going to come after him, that they were going to arrest him.
00:29:42.000Does that mean that he's not guilty of something?
00:29:44.000I have no idea whether he's guilty of these crimes.
00:29:50.000I don't place a lot of stake in the law-abiding nature of the Romanian authorities.
00:29:54.000I literally know nothing about how the law... I mean, Andrew Tate literally said he moved to Romania in order to avoid law enforcement.
00:29:59.000So, I don't know whether that's true or whether that's not.
00:30:01.000I assume all of that will come out in the wash.
00:30:02.000The thing I want to focus on is the popularity of Andrew Tate for a moment.
00:30:06.000And it's fascinating because, again, I have a lot of young listeners who are interested in the stuff that Andrew Tate says.
00:30:13.000The reason they're interested in the stuff that Andrew Tate says is because he's transgressive.
00:30:16.000He's transgressive in that he says things that no one else will say.
00:30:20.000Some of the stuff that he says is, frankly, terrible.
00:30:25.000And some of the stuff that he says is not terrible.
00:30:26.000Some of the stuff that he says is actually a version of truth.
00:30:30.000I mean, when he says that promiscuity is generally a bad thing, he says it only among women.
00:30:35.000When he says promiscuity for women is a bad thing, that used to be a relatively uncontroversial thought, but it's been considered bad to say that now.
00:31:09.000You're not supposed to say any of those things.
00:31:11.000So truth, like capital T, long-standing truths, these things have been denied.
00:31:16.000And then there's also been stuff that's been denied.
00:31:19.000That's just kind of garbage, like stuff that's not nasty to say or yucky.
00:31:23.000And so what's been crimped is courage, right?
00:31:26.000People are afraid to say the truth, and they're also afraid to say their opinion because they lack courage because the social sanctions are so strong.
00:31:32.000And so because the social sanctions are so strong and because they go beyond just crimping the truth, they go to crimping pretty much everybody's feeling that they can even say anything, their opinion, jokes.
00:31:41.000Because of all of that, courage is now held in higher value than truth itself.
00:31:46.000Being willing to transgress lines is considered a highest value because in a time where courage is under attack, courage is a very, very high value.
00:32:02.000Courage is useful so that you can speak the truth.
00:32:04.000What's happened in our society because we have decided to shut down so many modes of speech, because we've decided to ban people from social media, and unperson them, and destroy their lives and their livelihoods.
00:32:13.000Because we've done all of that, people who speak loudly are considered the best and the bravest.
00:32:19.000And it's particularly appealing to young people.
00:32:20.000And so when you draw a lot of fire, the way that Andrew Tate does, a lot of people see that as more courageous than if you say something that is, say, a little bit better calibrated.
00:32:31.000And mourn consonance with eternal truth.
00:32:34.000Whoever draws most fire, in other words, is the person who's considered the most courageous.
00:32:37.000And this sort of pithy saying that is mostly true, but kind of not, right?
00:32:41.000That you must be over the target if you're drawing flack.
00:32:44.000A large percentage of the time, that's true.
00:32:46.000But sometimes, the person who's drawing the most flack is drawing the most flack, because what they're saying is actually kind of bad, right?
00:32:50.000So, the problem for Andrew Tate, and the reason why he's become so popular, is because he's very transgressive.
00:32:56.000He says the thing that no one else will say.
00:32:58.000Sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's really not good.
00:33:01.000And so, we're gonna look at some of the things Andrew Tate says because, again, he's a very popular figure, particularly with young men.
00:33:06.000And when people ask me about Tate, one of the things that I've said, I've said this to some teenage boys who are friends of the family, they asked me about him like, I don't know, a week ago, what I said is, some of the diagnoses that Andrew Tate has of secular society are correct.
00:33:20.000His prescriptions are largely incorrect.
00:33:23.000And the things that he puts, he has a rule, a list of rules.
00:33:25.000And many of the rules that he puts online are actually pretty good.
00:33:30.000His version of masculinity, which is have a bunch of kids by a bunch of different women, live in a castle with 30 Bugattis, right?
00:33:39.000Put pictures online and muscle, like this kind of stuff.
00:33:42.000That's not the traditional mark of masculinity.
00:33:45.000What Pope Benedict XVI would say, what I would say, what sort of members of the traditional wisdom cadre would say, is that the ultimate in manliness is get married, protect your family, provide for your kids and your family, provide a space for them to grow in safety and security, provide them roles and responsibilities.
00:34:06.000What Andrew Tate focuses mainly on is the critique of how society has undermined a lot of this stuff.
00:34:11.000And then his prescription is, I'm gonna put a picture of myself online with like 30 cars and it makes me look cool, makes me look masculine.
00:34:19.000But, because we have lost eternal truth, because we have decided as a society the eternal truth has to go, the backlash is not coming in the form of a restoration of eternal truth.
00:34:29.000Very often the backlash is coming in the form of punch the people in the face who destroyed the eternal truth.
00:34:35.000That's the society in which we're living in, and I'm afraid that that could get worse unless what we actually have is a return to some eternal truth.
00:34:41.000So here's a couple of clips of Andrew Tate, and it kind of shows you what I'm talking about, that some of what he's saying is kind of half correct, but he's saying it in such a way that is meant to draw fire.
00:34:50.000So here is Andrew Tate talking about women belonging to men.
00:34:57.000I don't know, because I think the women belong to the man.
00:34:58.000I think the woman's given over to the man.
00:35:00.000Yeah, that's inherently where you get called sexist.
00:35:02.000Well, you can call me sexist if you want, but if you look at marriage, it's the bride's father who gives her away.
00:35:41.000So Portnoy is so afraid of saying that a woman and a man belong together and that a woman When she gets married, now belongs to the man sexually in the same way that the man ought to belong to the woman sexually.
00:36:03.000That is the truth according to every mainstream religion.
00:36:06.000That would be the thing that you would say.
00:36:07.000And the reason for that from an evolutionary biology perspective is because when a woman joins with a man and they create a baby, the woman is sure of her parentage, but the man is not sure of his parentage.
00:36:16.000And so we as a society tend to prefer monogamy, right?
00:36:19.000This is the evolutionary biological reason why humanity embraced monogamy is because it is the best distribution of sexual resources.
00:36:27.000It's from an evolutionary biological perspective, not a moral perspective.
00:37:31.000Okay, so again, historically speaking, what Andrew Tate is saying is not wrong.
00:37:34.000Morally, the reason why church, where we talked about the capacity for change within eternal rules, moves towards monogamy as opposed to polygyny, right, where a man has multiple wives, the reason for that is because the sophisticated arrangement of one man and one woman is the best arrangement.
00:37:51.000And so it is not good when a woman is promiscuous.
00:37:54.000It also happens not to be good when a man is promiscuous.
00:37:57.000Those may not be equivalent in evolutionary biological terms, but that is why eternal morality suggests one man, one woman.
00:38:03.000So the point that I'm making here is that when the moorings of a society come loose, when the society starts to sort of float, when the iceberg is floating, is no longer moored to anything that keeps it stable, once that happens, the reactions tend to be extremely chaotic.
00:38:18.000You get an entire movement on the left that is incredibly destructive, and you get a reactive movement that gets a lot of the diagnosis right, but a lot of the diagnosis wrong, right?
00:38:26.000Gets a lot of diagnosis right and a lot of prescription wrong, right?
00:39:22.000Can't wait to announce all of it for you.
00:39:24.000Including kids programming coming sometime a little bit later this year.
00:39:27.000Today is your last chance to get 30% off annual memberships and gift memberships by using code HOLIDAY at checkout.
00:39:32.000So head on over to dailywire.com slash ben right now.
00:39:35.000So as I say, the backlash to a society coming on board from eternal values is going to be People who diagnose that unmooring correctly, but very often who speak sort of the most brash, loud, and sometimes half-wrong version of that.
00:39:50.000So this is why I think Andrew Tate has become quite popular.
00:39:53.000And for people who are sort of dismissing him out of hand, you have to acknowledge why he has become popular.
00:39:57.000It's because some of his diagnosis is correct.
00:39:59.000So here is Andrew Tate recently on Piers Morgan talking about marriage in the traditional sense.
00:40:03.000I'm reserving judgment on his guilt or innocence in a criminal case.
00:40:05.000I have no information on the criminal case at this point.
00:40:07.000I just want to, this brought Andrew Tate into the news, the fact that he's been arrested in Romania.
00:40:11.000And so I think the more important cultural phenomenon is the fact that this guy has a lot of followers.
00:40:15.000And so we should try to figure out why.
00:40:18.000But you believe in the concept of marriage?
00:41:08.000Wouldn't it be a major story, for example, if a quote-unquote white supremacist had driven into Times Square and then attacked a couple of police officers in the middle of the New Year's Eve festivities?
00:41:17.000That would, of course, be a national story.
00:41:18.000We'd get the president of the United States on national television talking about this.
00:41:21.000We'd have talks about trends in the United States toward white nationalism.
00:41:25.000We'd talk about all this stuff for weeks on end, right?
00:41:28.000Well, over the course of New Year's, there was a person who actually went to Times Square and attacked two police officers, three police officers, rather, with a machete near Times Square.
00:41:38.000He had traveled to New York from his home in Maine to injure the police.
00:41:42.000And it turns out that the reason this is not getting broad spectrum media coverage is because he's an Islamic extremist.
00:41:59.000on Saturday, the police said, the suspect began swinging the knife without provocation at three officers who are at 8th Avenue and 52nd Street, just outside the security cordon for the Times Square celebration.
00:42:07.000One of the officers then shot the suspect in the shoulder.
00:42:11.000One of the officers who had just graduated from the police academy suffered a fractured skull in the attack.
00:42:15.000He's now been released from the hospital as has one other officer and another one as well.
00:42:21.000Sometime on Saturday before the attack, the suspect wrote a farewell letter to his family in a diary that was found on him afterward.
00:42:26.000In it, he wrote to his mother, quote, I fear greatly.
00:42:28.000And therefore, I hold hope in my heart that a piece of you believes so that you may be taken out of the hellfire.
00:42:33.000He also referred in his diary to his brother, who's in the US military, as having assumed the uniform of the enemy, the law enforcement official said.
00:42:42.000Increasingly, as though you can't say the truth is because this sort of stuff does not get the same sort of attention that it would get based on the ideological motivation of the person who committed this act of terrorism.
00:42:51.000This is a terror assault in the middle of New Year's Eve in Times Square.
00:42:55.000And apparently it is it is just not worthy of the sort of national news attention based on the motivation of the person who committed the crime.
00:43:01.000And so you end up with is reaction from the general public.
00:43:10.000Reaction in favor of some people who are sort of half true, half false, because they have the courage to cross the lines that other people won't cross.
00:43:18.000Meanwhile, as the left pushes further and further, and as they close that censorship window closer and closer, and as they just continue on pace to change the world and unmoor the iceberg.
00:43:29.000That is now floating around freely and starting to break up.
00:43:32.000As they do this, the backlash is going to get stronger and stronger.
00:43:35.000Joe Biden has no intentions of letting up in his world changing ambitions.
00:43:40.000According to Politico, Biden begins 2023 with a stronger hand to play in an inclination to play it.
00:43:44.000Quote, a year makes a difference after all.
00:43:47.000President Joe Biden begins at 2023 politically stronger than 12 months ago, bolstered by his party's surprise midterm success, a robust set of legislative accomplishments, and the resilience of the alliance he rallied to support Ukraine after Russia's invasion.
00:43:59.000Croix, the biggest decision he faces is whether to seek re-election to the office he holds.
00:44:03.000Biden is not yet fully committed to another term, according to three people with knowledge of the deliberations, but not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
00:44:10.000On his island vacation, Biden continued his running conversation with family and a select few friends and allies about a re-election bid.
00:44:16.000There are still challenges on the horizon, from an economy threatening to slow down, to the war in Europe, to an incoming Republican House majority threatening gridlock and investigations.
00:44:23.000But those in the president's circle believe there is a strong and growing likelihood he will run again, and that an announcement could potentially come earlier than had been expected, possibly as soon as mid-February, around the expected date of the State of the Union, according to those people.
00:44:34.000That potentially accelerated time is owed in part to a sense inside the White House and among Biden allies that the New Year dawns on a note of revival, when marked by an unlikely comeback that has reassured fellow Democrats.
00:44:43.000So Joe Biden is going to push forward his ambitions unabated.
00:44:47.000He feels as though he has not been chastised by the American public, and so he's going to continue to take the moorings out of that iceberg.
00:44:54.000We're going to continue to break up as a society.
00:44:56.000And meanwhile, the American public is looking at the consequences of Joe Biden's rule and what they see is not good.
00:45:21.000There is no excuse for that, given the fact that we are out of the pandemic and have been out of the pandemic for quite a while right here.
00:45:25.000And all he had to do was sit by and shut up, and he didn't do any of that.
00:45:29.000And yet he's going to continue forward with his big ambitions.
00:45:36.000Economists are predicting a recession.
00:45:39.000We are going to see some new tax events taking place because of Democratic legislation in the last Congress.
00:45:45.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, happy new year, or if you're in business, unhappy new tax year, American employers are getting hit in 2023 with a variety of tax increases, even as the risk of recession rises along with interest rates.
00:45:55.000The tax hikes arrive for two reasons, provisions of the 2017 GOP tax reform that are phasing out and big tax increases that passed as part of the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act.
00:46:03.000The Biden administration doesn't want to tell you this, so we thought we'd list the unmentionables.
00:46:42.000The cap on the business interest deduction dropped last year when the formula changed to exclude amortization.
00:46:47.000This is justifiable as part of tax reform because the tax code shouldn't have a subsidy for debt over equity, but the timing now is really bad.
00:46:52.000In other words, all of these taxes, including a new corporate minimum tax, a stock buyback tax, all of this is going to impact the economy in really, really negative ways.
00:47:02.000One of the reasons why big banks are now predicting a recession, and they're also expecting the Fed is going to have to pivot, According to the Wall Street Journal, more than two-thirds of the economists at 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve are betting the United States will have a recession in 2023.
00:47:16.000Two others are predicting a recession in 2024.
00:47:18.000The firms, known as primary dealers, are a collection of trading firms and investment banks that include companies like Barclays Bank of America, TD Securities, and UBF.
00:47:31.000Banks are tightening their lending standards.
00:47:33.000We expect a downturn in global GDP growth in 2022, led by recessions in both the U.S.
00:47:38.000and the Eurozone, according to PNB Paribas.
00:47:40.000The main culprit is the Federal Reserve, which has been raising rates for months to try to slow the economy and curb inflation.
00:47:46.000So the economy is likely to get worse.
00:47:48.000This is not going to stop the spending binge that our Congress is currently on, according to a brand new study out of the Out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, American fiscal policy is, quote, in permanent imbalance as current debt plus projected future spending outstrips future tax revenue, which means that the federal government budget is going to have to require, if we were to balance the books, a 30% spending cut or a 40% increase in taxes, according to DailyWire.com.
00:48:13.000So things are likely to get worse, and Joe Biden, again, is not slowing down.
00:48:17.000He's going to continue to push this, and he's going to continue to enjoy his life.
00:48:20.000You'll notice that in the middle of the worst cold snap in decades in the United States resulting in some actual deaths, Joe Biden was vacationing off in the U.S.
00:48:29.000Virgin Islands, and no one seemed to matter.
00:48:31.000It didn't seem to matter to the media.
00:48:41.000By the way, he's a federal senator who has Virtually no impact on the running of the state when it comes to energy policy.
00:48:47.000But Ted Cruz is a really, really bad guy.
00:48:48.000The president of the United States takes off in the middle of the worst cold snap in decades in the United States, where people are dying, to go to a warm place for a week and sleep in the sun because he's grandpa.
00:49:23.000His excuse was, again, the sense of entitlement from Democrats who feel that the winds of history are at their back is really, really strong.
00:49:30.000Here's Eric Adams over the course of the break saying that he deserves his vacation.
00:49:34.000So after 365 days of commitment to the city, I decided to take two days to reflect on Mommy.
00:49:43.000And to watch how you responded to my two days out of the city was really alarming.
00:49:51.000I deserve good work-life balance like you do.
00:50:03.000I mean, truly, the level of self-absorption of the public officials is really an amazing, amazing thing.
00:50:10.000OK, so as I've been saying the whole show, if this is the year of the backlash, if the backlash is coming, then that would require some sort of cohesiveness on the Republican side of the aisle.
00:50:19.000And here is where we run into a bit of trouble for the backlash theory.
00:50:21.000And that is that the Republicans are really bad at this.
00:50:23.000Republicans are, in fact, quite capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
00:50:27.000And so they're now having an idiotic fight today.
00:50:30.000over whether or not Kevin McCarthy ought to be Speaker of the House.
00:50:33.000This is a fight with no consequences for the American people.
00:50:36.000I'm just going to put it out there, the American people don't care.
00:50:39.000The reason they don't care one iota is because with the Republicans holding a majority in the House, Joe Biden's legislative agenda ought to be DOA.
00:51:28.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy worked on Monday to lock down support to become House Speaker.
00:51:34.000His bid remained up in the air as some conservative lawmakers threatened to turn Tuesday's leadership vote into the most unpredictable in a century.
00:52:32.000I'll be following the will of my constituents, the voters of Virginia's 5th District, who hundreds of which have told me over the past couple of years not to support Kevin McCarthy.
00:52:46.000If there's a great alternative waiting in the wings, I'm waiting to hear it.
00:52:49.000Who has the support of the majority caucus?
00:52:52.000Because here are the alternatives right now.
00:52:54.000Either the Republicans just spend the next month voting over and over and over not for Kevin McCarthy and then probably for Kevin McCarthy because you have a bunch of Republicans in the House, some of whom I've talked to, who have said they're only voting for Kevin McCarthy just to stop this stuff.
00:53:06.000Or you're going to end up with five or six Republicans who are weak-kneed joining with the Democrats to pick the Speaker.
00:53:11.000The way that the Speaker of the House gets picked is a majority of the membership of the House picks who the Speaker is.
00:53:56.000That's true of nearly everybody in elected office in the United States.
00:53:59.000Do I think that Republicans can afford a fight like this right now?
00:54:02.000I do not, not with a very slim majority in the House and Joe Biden thinking that he is riding high.
00:54:08.000If ever you are in doubt as to whether your party is doing the right thing, all you should do if you're a Republican is look at Yamiche Alcindor on NBC.
00:54:15.000Yamiche Alcindor hates the Republicans, she's a partisan hat, and she is gleeful about what's happening inside the Republican caucus right now.
00:54:24.000Right now, the incoming House Republican majority is in a state of disarray ahead of tomorrow's opening session, which could mean a level of Capitol Hill drama this town hasn't seen in 100 years as a floor fight over who will be Speaker of the House.
00:54:40.000At the center of the drama is House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy.
00:54:43.000He needs nearly everyone in the GOP's razor-thin five-seat majority to vote for him in order to become Speaker.
00:54:50.000But he has a serious math problem on his hands, and he knows it.
00:54:54.000Over the weekend, McCarthy held a call with rank-and-file Republicans in an attempt to sure up support, but it doesn't appear to have worked.
00:55:03.000Well, again, the glee in the media over all of this is like, the Republicans win the House, they finally get to stop Joe Biden's agenda, and now we're having a large-scale conversation about who should fill a seat that basically all it represents is who gets committee assignments.
00:55:15.000Because every arrangement is going to come down to the same thing.
00:55:18.000And by the way, anyone who thinks that whoever is elected Speaker is now going to have a full-scale debt ceiling fight with Joe Biden, they're lying to you.
00:55:25.000They're not going to have a full-scale debt ceiling fight with Joe Biden, because Republicans haven't won a debt ceiling fight my entire career following this stuff.
00:55:32.000Not in public opinion, not inside their own caucus, which is not going to happen.
00:55:36.000So, you know, this is, it's absolute foolishness.
00:55:40.000Only Republicans could be this stupid, especially given the fact that it is quite possible that their majority is going to shrink.
00:55:47.000Remember that there is still one Republican out there who may have to resign.
00:55:51.000That would be Representative-elect George Santos.
00:55:53.000Santos is now, apparently, under federal investigation.
00:55:56.000He has falsified a number of attributes of his background.
00:55:59.000He falsely claimed a degree from Baruch College and jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
00:56:03.000And now, apparently, federal prosecutors, state prosecutors, and the New York AG are looking into Santos' deception.
00:56:08.000Now, that's not something I'm not sure that's justified.
00:56:12.000Joe Biden has lied about every aspect of his past, his entire career.
00:56:15.000Like, every single aspect of it, he has lied about.
00:56:18.000And there's been no federal investigation into what, did he plagiarize his speeches in 1988?
00:57:08.000And Republicans right now hold an incredibly narrow majority, which means McCarthy has to somehow pull together that majority.
00:57:15.000Can Republicans afford this fight right now?
00:57:17.000Is this a smart fight for Republicans to have?
00:57:19.000I have a very hard time seeing how this is a smart fight for Republicans to have.
00:57:24.000So where does this mean that we stand going into 2023?
00:57:27.000I was reading some history over the weekend, and I believe that if we are going to look for historical precedent as to where we are in time, The best place to look would probably be the year 1967.
00:57:39.000I say 1967 because it immediately came on the heels of a bunch of world-breaking legislation from Lyndon Baines Johnson, who of course had assumed the office in the aftermath of JFK's murder in 1963.
00:57:49.000He assumed the office, he ran for his actual first full election in 1964, and he won overwhelmingly over Barry Goldwater.
00:57:56.000And then he was the frontrunner going into the 1968 election.
00:57:59.000And by the middle of 1968, he was out of the race.
00:58:03.000By March 1968, he said, I'm not going to run for president anymore.
00:58:13.000The decay of the American economy under Lyndon Baines Johnson because he'd spent too much money.
00:58:17.000The social dissolution that had been brought about by the LBJ administration and his changes to things like welfare.
00:58:23.000All of that had started to come home to roost.
00:58:25.000I think that 2023 is going to look a lot like 1967.
00:58:27.000You have another president who is quite likely to be a one-term president in Joe Biden.
00:58:32.000Remember, LBJ's approval ratings in 1967, before he decided that he was still running at this point, were somewhere between 45 and 47 percent.
00:58:40.000Right now, Joe Biden's are somewhere between 43 and 45 percent.
00:58:43.000The Democrats at the time had wide, overwhelming control of Congress and the Senate in 1967.
00:58:48.000They just passed world-breaking legislation.
00:58:59.000And what that means is that Republicans have the opportunity for pushback.
00:59:03.000It means that the right, generally, forget about Democrats, Republicans, again, that's the stuff at the top of the iceberg, but culturally speaking, a pendulum is beginning to swing back to the other side because the left has moved too far.
00:59:12.000They've broken apart the common ground upon which we are standing.
00:59:29.000And the person who it's going to be is going to have to have a very strong, cohesive, pragmatic agenda.
00:59:36.000I think that this is why it is very important who the Republicans nominate in 2023.
00:59:40.000That nomination process is going to begin in earnest this year.
00:59:44.000If the Republicans decide to nominate somebody who continues to widen those cultural gaps because they are more focused on self than on actual pragmatic problems that people face, it's going to be a real problem for them.
00:59:52.000If Republicans nominate somebody with a history of pragmatic solution making, there are a bunch of candidates out there who are like this.
00:59:57.000And they have a chance to really seize back control of the political high ground and maybe the cultural high ground.
01:00:03.000Again, the left has undermined and unmoored so many things in American life, ranging from the economic arrangements that underpin our lives, to spiritual arrangements that allow us to live more fulfilled lives, the rules, roles, and responsibilities that we teach our children.
01:00:16.000That the backlash could come, and it could come quickly.
01:00:19.000So the question is going to be how the backlash should happen.
01:00:21.000We've talked about how it shouldn't happen, which is a sort of reactionary politics where transgressivism is the norm and where how loudly you say a thing is more important than what you actually say.
01:00:31.000But one of the other ways that Republicans can fail here is by falling back on sort of the old truisms and tropes of, I would say, traditional John Stuart Mill liberalism.
01:00:40.000This idea that a pluralism of voices is the thing that matters most.
01:00:43.000Now, that does not mean that free speech doesn't matter.
01:01:28.000A lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives have spent the last 20 years trying to find a middle ground with people on the left saying, OK, well, we're not going to aggressively make the case for our own positions.
01:01:36.000Instead, we're going to make the case that we should have a safe space for us to discuss these positions.
01:01:41.000The problem is that, again, that Overton window keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
01:01:45.000And so, yes, you have to fight for a broader Overton window, and that means defending the rights of people with whom you disagree to speak, while maintaining that they are dead wrong and then making an aggressive case as to why they are dead wrong.
01:01:54.000So Ben Sasse has a really interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal today called America's True Divide, Pluralists vs. Zealots.
01:02:00.000Since the most important divide in American politics isn't red versus blue, it's civic pluralists versus political zealots.
01:02:05.000This is the truth no one in Washington acknowledges, but Americans must realize if we're going to recover.
01:02:09.000Civic pluralists understand that ideas move the world more than power does, which is why pluralists value debate and persuasion.
01:02:14.000We believe America is great because it is good, and America is good because the country is committed to human dignity, even for those with whom we disagree.
01:02:20.000A continental nation of 330 million souls couldn't possibly agree on everything, but we can hash out our disagreements in the communities where we live and the institutions we build.
01:02:27.000The small but important role of government for the civic pluralist is a framework for ordered liberty.
01:02:30.000Government doesn't give us rights or meaning or purpose or permission.
01:02:33.000It exists to protect us from the whims of mobs and majorities.
01:02:36.000Okay, so this is absolutely true on the federal level.
01:02:38.000On the federal level, the thing we should be fighting for the most is that space to have the discussion.
01:02:42.000We should be voting and pressing for a light footprint at the federal level.
01:02:46.000And then at the local level, where we raise our kids, we need to be pushing for solid communities grounded in eternal truth.
01:02:51.000I keep saying eternal truth because the real battle of our time is not between pluralists and zealous.
01:02:56.000It's between people who believe there are, in fact, eternal transmitted truths and people who do not believe that.
01:03:01.000I don't mean you have to believe everything the Catholic Church believes.
01:03:05.000What I mean is there are people who believe that the traditional wisdom of the past is worthy of upholding until you have a really, really good reason for changing things.
01:03:12.000And then there are people who believe that you should rip everything up.
01:03:14.000The entire bargain with the past and with the future ought to be ripped up in the name of whatever you think today.
01:03:56.000It's why the world is going to miss people like Pope Benedict XVI.
01:03:59.000It's why a new generation is going to have to step forward, pick up that torch, and move forward with those eternal truths.
01:04:04.000Because otherwise, the country is going to fall into the hands of people ranging from the Paul Ehrlichs, to the people who trans the kids, to the President Joe Biden's on economics.
01:04:13.000It's way under the surface of the iceberg.
01:04:14.000So, let's focus on the battle at the top of the iceberg, and then let's focus way more on making sure that that iceberg regains its moorings.
01:04:20.000Otherwise, we are going to be adrift in a world of hurt.
01:04:23.000Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
01:04:25.000You're not going to want to miss it because we will be taking your calls on the very first broadcast day of the brand new year.