The Ben Shapiro Show - Are They The Baddies?

00:00:00.000 Well, the Trump phenomenon has been puzzling people ever since Donald Trump popped onto the political scene and started making waves and drew enormous amounts of support from members of the conservative base, from people who are high school graduates in Ohio, from people who are college graduates in Florida.

00:00:14.000 Where was Trump's support base coming from?

00:00:16.000 And the left was utterly puzzled by this.

00:00:19.000 After all, Donald Trump was not historically socially conservative.

00:00:21.000 Donald Trump was not somebody who's historically even really a Republican.

00:00:24.000 Donald Trump was merely a major cultural figure who didn't seem to sneer at those people.

00:00:29.000 And so ever since, people on the left have been trying to figure out why is his brand so durable?

00:00:33.000 Why is it that so many people feel connected to Donald Trump?

00:00:36.000 And it's particularly true because Donald Trump continues to poll extremely highly among Republicans, despite the fact that his shot at beating Joe Biden is probably weaker than that of other Republicans, despite the fact that he's facing down a bevy of indictments.

00:00:47.000 You know, all of that happens to be true.

00:00:49.000 Trump right now is vulnerable mainly in the early states.

00:00:52.000 The primaries are not yet over.

00:00:54.000 If you look at the early states, Iowa in particular, Donald Trump's lead in Iowa is 24 points as opposed to 37 points nationally.

00:01:02.000 So that is a pretty significant difference.

00:01:05.000 And Ron DeSantis is in second place with 20% versus Trump's 44 in Iowa.

00:01:10.000 Tim Scott earning nine percentage points, Ramaswamy at five, Haley at four, Pence at three, et cetera.

00:01:14.000 Okay, so there are some vulnerabilities there, but the polling stats on, for example, the indictment surrounding Donald Trump, Show a disconnect between what conservatives think the rest of the country thinks and what the rest of the country actually thinks.

00:01:26.000 So conservatives think that people are going to immediately react to news of this spurious Trump indictment in Washington D.C.

00:01:32.000 with the sort of rage that they feel.

00:01:35.000 That we feel.

00:01:36.000 That people like me believe that Donald Trump is in fact being unfairly targeted by legal enforcement.

00:01:42.000 Well, Hunter Biden is being let off the hook, and this is really happening because, of course, he's the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and because Democrats hate the guy, and also because Democrats would like to see him elevated to the nomination.

00:01:53.000 And so we tend to believe, okay, well, you know, if Donald Trump is the nominee, many people in the middle will resonate to that argument, that he's being treated unfairly, therefore he should be elevated to the nation's highest office.

00:02:01.000 But that's not actually what the polls show.

00:02:03.000 When you look at how voters see the indictments, what you see is that on the 2020 election indictment, 52% of voters approve of the federal indictment, the same number on the classified documents indictment, which suggests that it's really not about the topic or even about the legal case against Donald Trump.

00:02:20.000 Basically, 52% of voters want to see Donald Trump in the dock.

00:02:24.000 That is really what that comes down to, which is a sheer majority, because the classified documents case is a much stronger case legally than the 2020 election indictment case.

00:02:33.000 Now, among independents, there actually is a difference.

00:02:36.000 This is what's kind of interesting.

00:02:37.000 Among independents, 59% say that they approve of Donald Trump being indicted on the 2020 election stuff.

00:02:47.000 Only 49% say they approve on the classified documents stuff, which is, again, fascinating.

00:02:51.000 You would think that it would be the reverse because, again, the classified documents case is much stronger, legally speaking, than the election stuff from 2020.

00:02:57.000 All it really shows is that independents really don't like Donald Trump talking about the 2020 election.

00:03:01.000 They really don't like what he did in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

00:03:04.000 They really don't like January 6th.

00:03:05.000 OK, but there remains this massive disconnect between the conservative base and independents and the rest of the country with regard to President Trump.

00:03:13.000 And this raises questions like, why is it that so many Republicans Are really, really behind Trump in deep and abiding ways.

00:03:22.000 And the answer is that it has less to do with Donald Trump than it has to do with reaction to leftist elites.

00:03:28.000 That really is the and that's always been the answer.

00:03:30.000 I've said since the beginning of the Trump phenomenon that Donald Trump has always represented two conservatives and two traditionalists, a giant pulsating middle finger, an orange middle finger.

00:03:40.000 Directed at the entire left-wing apparatus.

00:03:43.000 That's what he is, right? 1.00

00:03:45.000 The single best summation of the Trump phenomenon is, and get ready here with the bleep button, Trump, because f*** you, right? 0.99

00:03:52.000 That has always been the appeal of Donald Trump. 0.97

00:03:54.000 That was the appeal of Donald Trump in 2015, 2016.

00:03:55.000 It was the appeal of Donald Trump in 2020.

00:03:58.000 And it's even more the appeal of Donald Trump in 2023, 2024.

00:04:01.000 You don't get to tell us what to do is sort of the generalized mood with regard to President Trump.

00:04:08.000 So the question is, where does that mood come from?

00:04:11.000 Where does it come from?

00:04:12.000 And the answer is it is a direct reaction to a liberal elite who have decided that their values are more important than your values.

00:04:19.000 Who have decided that their priorities are more important than your priorities.

00:04:24.000 And frankly, it comes from a group of people who could theoretically be called values traitors.

00:04:30.000 Okay, so to understand what exactly is going on here, You sort of have to think of the framework of history, broad read.

00:04:38.000 So Karl Marx famously says at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, along with Engels, he says, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.

00:04:46.000 And this is wrong.

00:04:48.000 Now, that phrase has shaped nearly every theory about politics in the modern era.

00:04:54.000 Everybody ranging from Francis Fukuyama to the Marxist theorists of the early 20th century is shaped by the idea that everything is about class.

00:05:02.000 Today's politicians, left and right, Bernie Sanders, and on the right, people like Tucker Carlson, very often tend to conflate issues that are values-laden with issues that are economic-laden.

00:05:13.000 So the idea is that the forgotten man is actually the person who's being left behind by the new meritocracy, by the economy, that everything is about class conflict.

00:05:20.000 And if only we could redistribute, if only we could subsidize, we could do all of that and we could create solidarity again.

00:05:25.000 All we would have to do is change the economic systems by which we live and this would magically fix everything.

00:05:29.000 But it's not true.

00:05:31.000 The history of existing society, for all of human history, has not actually been about class conflict.

00:05:37.000 In fact, virtually no conflicts in the history of humanity have been fought purely over class.

00:05:42.000 This is what World War I did to the Marxist idea. 0.67

00:05:44.000 World War I completely defeated the Marxist idea.

00:05:47.000 The Marxist idea in World War I is that there would be, Europe-wide, a class revolution to end World War I. In fact, the home of Marxist revolution was not supposed to be in Russia, which basically had no classes.

00:06:01.000 It had like a group of a few elites, and then it had a giant, giant proletariat. 0.76

00:06:06.000 Basically, farmers, serfs, people who are very poor.

00:06:09.000 It wasn't supposed to happen in poor countries.

00:06:11.000 If you look at Karl Marx's writings, it was supposed to happen in, like, Great Britain.

00:06:15.000 It was supposed to happen in richer countries, where the excesses of capitalism would eventually cause so much income inequality and wealth inequality that lower classes would rebel against upper classes.

00:06:24.000 And thus, when World War I broke out, Marxists were utterly befuddled.

00:06:28.000 Because instead of the conflict breaking out between lower classes, middle classes, and upper classes, the conflict instead broke out between nationalities.

00:06:34.000 It broke out over borders.

00:06:36.000 And Germans who are very poor sided with Germans who are very rich to fight British people who are very poor and British people who are very rich.

00:06:42.000 And it didn't cross-pollinate across class.

00:06:45.000 Marx was wrong.

00:06:46.000 World War I proved him wrong.

00:06:47.000 But his idea continues to be the motivating factor in nearly all thinking politically still, which is the idea that economic circumstances determine class solidarity, which in turn determines politics.

00:06:59.000 And it's not true.

00:07:01.000 The real answer to the driving force behind history is, in fact, community.

00:07:07.000 Community.

00:07:07.000 Community of interest.

00:07:09.000 If we were going to rephrase Marx, what we would come up with is the history of all hitherto existing societies, the history of community struggles.

00:07:16.000 Struggles between creedal communities, religious communities.

00:07:20.000 People who have a common interest because they live together, because they share certain values.

00:07:25.000 That is the real struggle that is taking place in America, and that is the real reason that Donald Trump is a representative of a particular class.

00:07:31.000 He's not a representative of the lower classes, Donald Trump.

00:07:34.000 Because there are a bunch of people, like me, who make a lot of money, who would support Donald Trump against Joe Biden, and did in 2020.

00:07:42.000 There are a bunch of people who are middle class, who are supporting Donald Trump against Joe Biden.

00:07:48.000 And there are a bunch of people who are lower class who are supporting Donald Trump against Joe Biden despite the redistributionist promises of Democrats.

00:07:54.000 So what is that about?

00:07:55.000 That is not about economic circumstances.

00:07:57.000 It's not about pure redistributionism.

00:07:59.000 It's not about class struggle.

00:08:01.000 It's about community struggle.

00:08:02.000 We'll get to what that means in just one second.

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00:09:18.000 Okay, so which is a description of how society works?

00:09:25.000 Which is a description of what are the sort of cleavage points, the points at which Americans separate from one another.

00:09:33.000 And where do you, in order to explain, you have to explain where Americans unify.

00:09:36.000 We don't unify around class.

00:09:38.000 Middle-class people in California don't necessarily agree with middle-class people in Florida.

00:09:42.000 Poor people in Mississippi don't necessarily agree with poor people in New York.

00:09:46.000 Rich people in Nebraska don't necessarily agree with rich people in Chicago.

00:09:51.000 So it's really not about class.

00:09:53.000 It really is about communities of interest.

00:09:55.000 Historically, that has often been religious community.

00:09:57.000 If you're talking about historic wars, basically, from the dawn of time until the Peace of Westphalia, virtually all war was religious in nature.

00:10:05.000 Then afterward, it turned into nationalistic war.

00:10:09.000 And now we are sort of back to religious war.

00:10:11.000 As it turns out, wars are very rarely fought on the basis of pure economic ideals alone.

00:10:17.000 And if it is an economic ideal, it's not because it's an economic ideal.

00:10:19.000 It's because it's a religion.

00:10:20.000 Marxism has effectively become a religion.

00:10:22.000 Soviet communism was a religion with a great sainted leader at the top who must be worshipped. 0.92

00:10:28.000 And so the real cleavage in American society right now is not an economic cleavage per se.

00:10:34.000 It is a values cleavage.

00:10:35.000 It is a community cleavage.

00:10:38.000 It is a cleavage between people who have more traditionalist values with regard to the United States and people who do not.

00:10:44.000 And that has led to a class conflict as people who are high-income earners have essentially left behind their church and their community of interest and have formed a new community of interest with other people who earn.

00:10:55.000 So we are now transmuting what were values conflicts into class conflicts.

00:10:59.000 Which is weird, because, again, if you actually go over to Silicon Valley, widely perceived as a leftist hotbed, and I know tons of people in Silicon Valley, I talk with them regularly.

00:11:08.000 If you actually go over to Silicon Valley, and you talk to the heads of social media companies, the same people who are promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, environmental, social governance, those same exact people, in their own homes, they are practicing conservatives.

00:11:20.000 Those same people are married.

00:11:21.000 They've been married for 20 years.

00:11:22.000 They have kids.

00:11:23.000 They don't let their kids play with the social media apps that they themselves create.

00:11:28.000 The values they actually live out in their daily lives are fairly conservative.

00:11:31.000 This is a point that Charles Murray makes in Coming Apart.

00:11:34.000 All the same people who are preaching liberal nonsense directed at the very poorest in society who they see as essentially playthings of the gods, the gods being themselves.

00:11:43.000 Those very same people live values that are much more consistent with conservative middle class Americans.

00:11:48.000 Traditionalist Americans.

00:11:51.000 And it's sort of a fascinating phenomenon.

00:11:55.000 To understand this, you have to understand two separate ideas of what they call the Forgotten Man.

00:11:59.000 So the Forgotten Man is a phrase that's used in politics all the time.

00:12:02.000 And who is the person at whom politics ought to be directed?

00:12:05.000 The Forgotten Man, the person who is left behind.

00:12:07.000 So who exactly is this Forgotten Man?

00:12:08.000 That phrase was made famous originally by Franklin Delano Roosevelt back in 1932.

00:12:13.000 And the Forgotten Man, according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the guy who's poor.

00:12:17.000 The guy who's really poor.

00:12:18.000 He's been forgotten by society, and it's our job to make it up for him.

00:12:21.000 And the way to do that is to essentially redistribute all of America's resources with that guy in mind.

00:12:27.000 Leave meritocracy behind.

00:12:28.000 Leave the idea of performance behind.

00:12:30.000 The person at the bottom of the spectrum is the person we ought to focus on.

00:12:32.000 And this has defined Democratic Party policy for a very long time.

00:12:35.000 You combine that on an economic level with the idea that liberal social policy ought to prevail, and that basically defines the Democratic Party today.

00:12:41.000 According to Democrats, the Forgotten Man is the poor guy who must be given money and then preached to about the virtues of transgenderism and social justice.

00:12:49.000 And then there's another concept of who the Forgotten Man is.

00:12:51.000 And that's the actual original concept of who the Forgotten Man is.

00:12:54.000 So there was a Yale University professor named William Graham Sumner.

00:13:00.000 As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B. And A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X.

00:13:21.000 What I want to do is look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is.

00:13:26.000 I call him the Forgotten Man.

00:13:28.000 Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct.

00:13:30.000 He is the man who is never thought of.

00:13:32.000 I call him the Forgotten Man.

00:13:33.000 He works.

00:13:34.000 He votes.

00:13:35.000 Generally, he prays, but he always pays.

00:13:39.000 So who is the Forgotten Man, according to Sumner?

00:13:41.000 That is the person who has the traditional values.

00:13:43.000 It's the person who goes to church, the person who supports his community, and the person who is targeted by the people in the elite class On a values level.

00:13:52.000 Because they don't care about his values.

00:13:54.000 They don't care about that.

00:13:55.000 And he's always the person who they are taking from, both in terms of values, for themselves, and then attempting to destroy the values and institutions upon which he relies.

00:14:04.000 And they're also taking from him economically in certain ways as well.

00:14:07.000 But it's really more about the values than it is even about the economic takings.

00:14:10.000 Because the truth is, in the United States, the people at the very top of the economic spectrum pay nearly all income tax.

00:14:14.000 It is not the middle class paying income tax in the United States.

00:14:17.000 It is the rich people paying income tax.

00:14:19.000 So really, what is this?

00:14:19.000 It's not a class conflict.

00:14:21.000 It is a values conflict in which you have an elite group at the top who are promulgating a set of values that is absolutely destructive and that they themselves do not live by to people in the middle class and people who are in the lower economic classes.

00:14:33.000 That is not an economic conflict.

00:14:35.000 That is, in fact, a community struggle, as I say.

00:14:38.000 That is not part of the history of class conflict.

00:14:40.000 It's a community struggle.

00:14:40.000 And this is what is undergirding David Brooks's column today.

00:14:44.000 It's a fascinating column in the New York Times where he's trying to grapple with the Trump phenomenon.

00:14:48.000 He can't quite escape the sort of Marxist tinge to all history being described by class conflict, but it is starting to dawn on him that perhaps attacks on traditional Judeo-Christian values are in fact the defining feature of our politics right now.

00:15:03.000 And that when America is dividing, it is not dividing along class lines, it's dividing between people who believe that traditional Judeo-Christian values are good and people who believe that traditional Judeo-Christian values are really, really bad.

00:15:13.000 You wonder why culture wars are first and foremost in everybody's mind?

00:15:15.000 Because the things that we actually care about It's not actually predominantly our pocketbook.

00:15:20.000 We all care about our pocketbook.

00:15:21.000 That is not predominantly what we care about when it comes time to make our lifelong decisions about what matters to us.

00:15:27.000 It is values.

00:15:28.000 It is always values.

00:15:28.000 It will always be values.

00:15:29.000 It has always been values.

00:15:31.000 Economics determine what jobs we take.

00:15:33.000 They may determine where we live, but it's values that determine how we live.

00:15:37.000 And that's the thing in the end that actually matters the most to us.

00:15:40.000 When you have an entire cadre of elite liberals who presumably do not even live their own values but are cramming down an alternative set of values on all of America in the name of the quote-unquote marginalized.

00:15:50.000 When that happens there is going to be a backlash and that backlash is taking the form of Trump.

00:15:54.000 Not because Trump is a great representative of traditional Judeo-Christian values but because when you are assaulted enough all you want to do is throw the bird.

00:16:02.000 That's what Trump is.

00:16:03.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:17:16.000 Okay, so, all this is a lead up to this David Brooks column, which is making the rounds today, called, What If We're the Bad Guys Here?

00:17:22.000 And here's what David Brooks writes, quote, Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis.

00:17:26.000 And he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls.

00:17:28.000 And he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys.

00:17:31.000 Trump's poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

00:17:34.000 What's going on here?

00:17:35.000 Why is this guy still politically viable after all he's done?

00:17:38.000 We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that.

00:17:41.000 It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Mark

00:17:44.000 Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas Edsel recently quote,

00:17:47.000 Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want to slow it down,

00:17:51.000 maybe even take a step backward. But if you're a person of color, a woman who values gender 0.94

00:17:54.000 equality or an LGBT person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it. 0.84

00:17:59.000 In this story, says David Brooks, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys,

00:18:02.000 the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians.

00:18:06.000 Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day, he's still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentment, and that's what matters to the most.

00:18:14.000 I partly agree with this story, says David Brooks, but it's also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

00:18:17.000 So let's be clear about this.

00:18:19.000 This elite self-satisfaction really took the fourth Barack Obama.

00:18:22.000 There's a fascinating interview over at Tablet Magazine all about Barack Obama and his value system.

00:18:26.000 And all the things the media ignored about Barack Obama, including the fact that he was like a bleeding anti-Semite back in his college days and all this.

00:18:32.000 But he's a member of the liberal elite who hated the values of the so-called bitter clingers.

00:18:36.000 And it became a sort of cultural cachet to rip on people who had traditional Judeo-Christian values with regard to life.

00:18:46.000 So David Brooks says, let me try another story on you.

00:18:49.000 I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys.

00:18:52.000 In fact, we're the bad guys.

00:18:54.000 And here is where David Brooks, some of what he's about to say is right, and some of it is a conflation of sort of Marxist theory with the actual history of humanity, which is the story of community struggle.

00:19:02.000 Quote, this story begins in the 1960s when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam,

00:19:07.000 but the children of the educated class got college deferments.

00:19:09.000 Okay, that that is true, right?

00:19:12.000 He's trying to draw this as a class conflict.

00:19:14.000 That high school grads went to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferment.

00:19:18.000 That is certainly true.

00:19:19.000 However, it is also true that the objections to the Vietnam War did not come from the high school educated class.

00:19:25.000 They came from the same college elites who got the college deferments.

00:19:29.000 Patriotic Americans were willing to go fight in Vietnam, and they did. 0.93

00:19:32.000 And they died in large numbers.

00:19:33.000 By the way, disproportionately white people.

00:19:35.000 All the myths about how Vietnam was a bunch of poor black people who were dying, that's actually not true.

00:19:40.000 It's like 88% of all casualties in Vietnam were white people.

00:19:44.000 50% of all people who were serving in Vietnam were middle class.

00:19:48.000 So it was not all kind of poor brown people as the platoon myth would sort of suggest.

00:19:53.000 Virtually a huge percentage, like 86% of everybody who served in Vietnam was actually a volunteer, not drafted.

00:19:59.000 But put all that aside, what David Brooks is missing here is that Vietnam was a values conflict.

00:20:05.000 It was a community conflict between a bunch of long-haired, hippie, left-wing, Judeo-Christian, values-rejecting elites on college campuses who weren't even serving who objected to the war.

00:20:16.000 It was not all the people who went to church who objected to the war.

00:20:18.000 It was all the people who dropped out of church and dropped acid who objected to the war.

00:20:22.000 That was the actual cultural breakdown that we now try to rewrite into a history of class conflict.

00:20:27.000 He said it continues in the 1970s when the authorities imposed busing on working class areas of Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves live.

00:20:33.000 That is 100% true.

00:20:35.000 That part, again, that's a communities conflict, right?

00:20:38.000 The idea here is that a bunch of liberal left-wing elites went and lived in super white areas and then imposed forced busing on a bunch of poor white people and poor black people. 0.55

00:20:47.000 That part is true, but that's not, again, a class conflict.

00:20:49.000 That's a community conflict because if those liberals actually believed their own values, they would be imposing it on themselves as well.

00:20:56.000 The ideal that we're all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.

00:21:03.000 He is right about this, but on a values level, as I'll discuss more in just one second.

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00:22:10.000 Okay, so back to this David Brooks column.

00:22:12.000 He says, Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

00:22:18.000 This is again true, but the reality is that it's not even that they build systems that serve themselves.

00:22:24.000 It's that the systems that they themselves build are not intended for themselves on a values level.

00:22:30.000 So, David Brooks has this thing against the meritocracy, and this is where I don't like the conflation between the Marxist history of class struggle and the history of community struggle, which is not the same.

00:22:39.000 It really is not.

00:22:41.000 I mean, just to take a quick example, John J. Rockefeller used to go to church, like on the regular, and he gave tons of charity inside his own church from the time he was very young.

00:22:51.000 He was more in line with poor members of his church than he was in line with many members of his own social class.

00:22:57.000 This is just the reality.

00:22:59.000 Ripping on meritocracy doesn't solve the problem.

00:23:01.000 It's a Marxist solution to a spiritual values problem.

00:23:05.000 Because here's the thing, what's the alternative to a meritocracy?

00:23:08.000 When I see people both left and right ripping on the meritocracy, meaning like the people who are most meritorious get the job, and right now in an information age that is going to benefit people who have more facility with information than other people.

00:23:20.000 But it's also true in construction where people who have more facility with machines are going to do better than people who do not have facility with machines.

00:23:26.000 People who have facility with plumbing are going to do better in that industry than people who do not have facility with plumbing.

00:23:32.000 What's the alternative?

00:23:32.000 No one has ever provided an alternative to meritocracy that makes any sense on the economic level.

00:23:37.000 This is why I really object to the crossing streams of promoting the meritocracy with promoting liberal left-wing social values.

00:23:45.000 Those are not the same thing.

00:23:46.000 The best system is a system in which, economically speaking, meritocracy does obtain, but also that is backed by Judeo-Christian values of community, wherein we all care about each other because we share a set of values.

00:23:58.000 That is the best form of the system.

00:24:01.000 David Brooks, however, again, infused by this sort of thoroughgoing Marxist ideal.

00:24:07.000 And again, he's not a Marxist, but this is an ideal that has permeated pretty much every area of social science.

00:24:11.000 The class struggle and all this nonsense.

00:24:13.000 He says the meritocracy is the problem.

00:24:15.000 He says the most important of these systems that's a problem is the modern meritocracy.

00:24:18.000 We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality we possess most.

00:24:23.000 Academic achievement.

00:24:24.000 Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs, and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other, and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

00:24:34.000 He's conflating a bunch of stuff here.

00:24:36.000 So, credentialism is indeed bad.

00:24:38.000 You don't have to go to college in order to make an amazing living in the United States and lead a business.

00:24:43.000 Our business here at Daily Wire is led by a triumvirate.

00:24:46.000 It is me, a Harvard Law School and UCLA grad.

00:24:49.000 It is Jeremy Boring, a guy who did not graduate from college.

00:24:52.000 And it's Caleb Robinson, a person who did not even go to college.

00:24:55.000 That is our triumvirate.

00:24:56.000 The thing that we share is we're pretty good at business, and we're all pretty smart, but it ain't the credential, it's the performance.

00:25:02.000 When he says that this is a pathway that's unavailable to anyone, by the way, I challenge him to look at the entire Asian community in the United States, which wildly outperforms, based on class data, where they should be.

00:25:12.000 In terms of their kids.

00:25:14.000 By the way, how does he think that people become rich in this country?

00:25:16.000 He's assuming a self-perpetuating elite.

00:25:19.000 But let's be real about this.

00:25:20.000 Again, Jeremy did not grow up wealthy.

00:25:23.000 His kids will.

00:25:24.000 Caleb did not grow up wealthy.

00:25:25.000 His kids will.

00:25:26.000 I, contrary to public opinion, did not grow up wealthy.

00:25:29.000 My kids will.

00:25:31.000 For the record, I grew up until I was 11 years old in a two-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot house in Burbank, California, with six people sharing one bathroom.

00:25:38.000 I shared a bedroom with three younger sisters until I was 11 years old, okay?

00:25:41.000 That doesn't mean I was poor, I was solidly middle class.

00:25:44.000 But that's like solidly middle class, not solidly upper class.

00:25:47.000 The point here is that, again, he's conflating class struggle with the actual struggle here, and so he's missing the point.

00:25:54.000 Here is the part where he is totally right, however.

00:25:58.000 He says, And when he gets beyond all of this, quote, armed with all kinds of economic, cultural, and political power, we support policies that help ourselves.

00:26:06.000 Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China.

00:26:10.000 Again, he's messing up the economics here, but here's the part where he gets to the part that actually matters.

00:26:14.000 Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others.

00:26:19.000 Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx, and intersectional is a sure sign you've got cultural capital coming out of your ears.

00:26:25.000 Meanwhile, members of the less educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we've changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

00:26:33.000 We also changed the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others.

00:26:36.000 For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedoms.

00:26:46.000 After the social norms eroded, a funny thing happened.

00:26:49.000 Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock.

00:26:52.000 People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.

00:26:56.000 As Adrian Woolridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, The Aristocracy of Talent, quote, 60% of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with 10% to women with a university degree.

00:27:08.000 That matters, he continues, because the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.

00:27:13.000 Does this mean I think people in my class are vicious and evil?

00:27:15.000 No.

00:27:16.000 Most of us are earnest, kind, and public-spirited, but we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive.

00:27:22.000 Elite institutions have become politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.

00:27:29.000 It's easy to understand why people in less educated classes would conclude they are under economic, political, cultural, and moral assault.

00:27:35.000 And why they've rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.

00:27:38.000 Again, it is not really about the educated class.

00:27:40.000 It's about a cultural class that has decided, writ large, that the morality of the forgotten man, the person who actively holds together the community, who provides the glue, who provides the nationalism, patriotism, and allegiance to traditional Judeo-Christian values that undergird any sense of social solidarity, it's those people they're attacking.

00:27:57.000 It's that glue that they are disintegrating.

00:28:00.000 And those people, by the way, are living off the fat of the land because they are benefiting from all of those things.

00:28:05.000 They are still living inside solid two-parent households, taking care of their kids and sending them to private schools.

00:28:10.000 The limousine liberal is not a limousine liberal because he takes a literal limousine.

00:28:16.000 He's a limousine liberal because he lives a set of values that he then rejects writ large.

00:28:21.000 When you say at your church, I want my kids to get married, Go to church, have children within wedlock, and get a job.

00:28:28.000 When you say that, and then the person who does virtually all of those things in San Jose says, no, no, no, that's bigotry.

00:28:35.000 We need to set up a system where if you don't get married, you have kids out of wedlock, you don't go to church, and you don't get a job, we pay you. 1.00

00:28:40.000 Then of course people in the middle are going to say, what in the hell is going on?

00:28:44.000 What is wrong with you people?

00:28:46.000 If you want to talk about people, there's phraseology in Marxism that talks about class traitors.

00:28:50.000 Class traitors, presumably, are people in the working class who vote with the elite. 0.77

00:28:54.000 People who vote for the meritocracy or who vote for capitalism, even though they're members of the lower class. 0.91

00:29:00.000 This was the basis.

00:29:01.000 of a famous book by Thomas Frank in the middle of the 2000s called What's the Matter with Kansas in which he said, Why are there all these poor people in Kansas who keep voting Republican when they could be voting benefits to themselves?

00:29:10.000 And the answer, of course, was they're not voting based on the benefits.

00:29:12.000 They're voting based on the values which matter more to them than the actual government handouts.

00:29:17.000 But that's how the left tends to think.

00:29:20.000 The reality is that we shouldn't be talking about class traitors.

00:29:23.000 We should be talking about values traitors. 1.00

00:29:24.000 People who live a set of values and then promulgate a completely different set of values to other people who are too stupid and too poor to actually live those values. 0.99

00:29:33.000 The assumption is that everybody who is not living in San Jose, everybody who's not living in Uppercross Manhattan, all those people are too stupid to actually live values that most of these people themselves actually live. 0.98

00:29:46.000 And that's, by the way, why people who live traditional Judeo-Christian values, they tend to have stereotypical beliefs about people living in San Jose and New York. 0.93

00:29:54.000 They think that they're all in polygamous gay relationships because they believe that that's a set of values being promoted by San Jose and Manhattan, when that actually is not what they're actually living out.

00:30:04.000 And then people in San Jose and Manhattan are like, well, why do they think all this stuff about us?

00:30:07.000 Well, maybe it's because you make the mark of virtue flying the Pride Progress flag from your house.

00:30:13.000 Maybe it's that.

00:30:14.000 Even while you are living in a heterosexual monogamous relationship with three children with a white picket fence.

00:30:20.000 Maybe it's that thing.

00:30:22.000 Maybe the way that social solidarity was actually created and promulgated in the United States used to be rich people, poor people, and middle class people all went to church together.

00:30:29.000 They all sent their kids to the same schools.

00:30:31.000 They all actually interacted with one another and had very similar sets of values.

00:30:34.000 Again, John J. Rockefeller went to the same church as the poor janitor down the street.

00:30:39.000 But I have a question.

00:30:42.000 Do you really believe that, say, Jack Dorsey or Susan Wojcicki Or any of the bank leaders?

00:30:51.000 Do you think those people are going to church with poor people?

00:30:53.000 Or do you think they are hanging out exclusively with people at their country club who are members of the same socio-economic liberal elite?

00:31:02.000 The answer is the latter.

00:31:04.000 And that means that they've cut themselves off from the same value system that used to actually create social solidarity.

00:31:10.000 Okay, and that is now being telescoped.

00:31:11.000 All that's being telescoped into Trump.

00:31:13.000 Because, again, the way that virtually all politics works is that even unconsciously, we all just look for symbols.

00:31:19.000 And the symbol right now of resistance to these liberal elites who have decided to make virtue signaling the most important thing among themselves, that is the thing that matters more than anything, there are two symbols today.

00:31:29.000 That this has happened, and it's amazing to watch it happen.

00:31:32.000 One is resistance to Trump.

00:31:33.000 They are the resistance. 1.00

00:31:34.000 Trump is a fascist. 0.99

00:31:34.000 That means everybody on the right goes, you know what? 0.99

00:31:36.000 Middle finger.

00:31:37.000 Trump.

00:31:38.000 That's one reason for Trump's durability.

00:31:39.000 Another issue where you can see this absolutely clearly is in support for the war in Ukraine.

00:31:43.000 So the beginning of the war in Ukraine, heavy bipartisan support for the war in Ukraine.

00:31:47.000 Heavy.

00:31:48.000 I mean, look at the polling data.

00:31:49.000 Republicans, Democrats, Independents, everybody supported the idea that Ukraine should be able to fend off a Russian invasion.

00:31:54.000 And then, the minute that the left transmuted that into a values conflict about upholding, quote-unquote, liberal democracy with pride progress flags, an enormous number of people on the right went, oh, now we see what you're doing.

00:32:06.000 They said, oh, the minute that a conflict that was not actually a cultural values conflict was transmuted into a cultural values conflict in which the same liberal elites who hate your church suddenly love Ukraine, a bunch of people went, nope, not interested.

00:32:19.000 It's that reactionary and understandable reactionary politics that's driving everything right now.

00:32:24.000 The answer to all of this would be a re-engagement in social solidarity by the liberal elite.

00:32:28.000 But that would require them to understand that their quote-unquote pursuit of justice for the marginalized It's not about pursuit of justice for the marginalized anymore and hasn't been for a very, very long time.

00:32:38.000 What it's really about is a transgressive notion that if you destroy the center, you have made the world a better place.

00:32:45.000 Okay, the Cultural War was not started by the right.

00:32:48.000 It was not even remotely started by the right.

00:32:50.000 You know how you know?

00:32:51.000 Because of the battlefield.

00:32:52.000 If the Cultural War had been started by the right, would we be talking about whether boys can become girls and girls can become boys? 0.77

00:32:57.000 Of course not.

00:32:58.000 That wasn't even considered a battle five years ago.

00:33:00.000 Now it's a massive battle.

00:33:02.000 And this is true for every victory gained on the liberal elite battlefield.

00:33:06.000 And now it's all being, as I say, telescoped into Trump.

00:33:09.000 And if Trump is the symbol of resistance, then attacks on Trump are seen as symbols of the regime tearing down Trump.

00:33:14.000 Which brings us to Donald Trump showing up in Washington, D.C.

00:33:17.000 yesterday.

00:33:17.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:34:59.000 Meanwhile, Donald Trump, of course, the symbol of this entire conflict between communities.

00:35:05.000 Again, it is not a class conflict.

00:35:06.000 It is a communities conflict, which is why you are seeing churchgoers who are Latino and churchgoers who are black and churchgoers who are white all supporting Donald Trump.

00:35:14.000 That would be the reason.

00:35:15.000 In any case, Donald Trump pled not guilty yesterday in a Washington, D.C.

00:35:19.000 courtroom.

00:35:21.000 He appeared in federal court.

00:35:23.000 There was no mugshot.

00:35:24.000 Everybody's still assuming there will at some point be a mugshot of Trump in court.

00:35:27.000 There probably will.

00:35:27.000 Probably is gonna happen when he gets arrested in this Georgia case surrounding January 6th.

00:35:32.000 The cases I've been describing is really, really spurious.

00:35:35.000 Politico describes what it was like inside the courtroom.

00:35:38.000 They said if you blinked, you missed it for a fleeting moment.

00:35:40.000 Thursday, Donald Trump and special counsel Jack Smith appeared to make eye contact as the former president prepared to fend off charges that he sought to subvert American democracy itself.

00:35:47.000 That shared grants crystallized the historic weight of Thursday's arraignment.

00:35:50.000 The third in recent months for the former president was fighting federal and local prosecutors, even as he appears to be coasting to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

00:35:58.000 Smith said nothing audible during his hour in the room, but repeatedly shot glances at Trump, who occasionally shot them back until their eyes briefly met.

00:36:04.000 Even before Donald Trump entered, a federal courtman declared himself not guilty.

00:36:07.000 The weight of history was evident in Washington, D.C.' 's federal courthouse.

00:36:12.000 Minutes before Trump entered the silent room, several federal judges filed into the public gallery, turning themselves into spectators in a building they typically rule.

00:36:19.000 After a day of anticipation, the atmosphere darkened the moment Smith strode into the wood-paneled chandelier courtroom from a nearby antechamber.

00:36:25.000 Smith was flanked by Assistant Special Counselor Ray Hulser and several FBI case agents as he made his way to the back of the courtroom as well.

00:36:32.000 Moments later, there was Trump, seated at a table that has in recent months been occupied by some of the very people who stormed the Capitol and are now paying a legal price.

00:36:40.000 Oh, the drama!

00:36:41.000 Oh, the magical drama!

00:36:42.000 Well, Donald Trump came out and was, you know, a combination of, I would say, Stoic, blasé, and a little bit, I would say, puckish.

00:36:55.000 So, Donald Trump actually posted this on Truth Social.

00:36:58.000 Honestly, this is why people love him.

00:36:59.000 Giant middle finger.

00:37:00.000 Pulsating giant middle finger.

00:37:01.000 All the time middle finger.

00:37:02.000 And that I was then arrested by my political opponent, who's losing badly to me in the polls,

00:37:05.000 crooked Joe Biden. It was a very good day.

00:37:06.000 Honestly, this is why people love him. Giant middle finger, pulsating giant middle finger,

00:37:16.000 all the time middle finger, all the time. Again, Donald Trump 2024, because f*** you. 1.00

00:37:22.000 Here is Donald Trump's actual verbal response. 1.00

00:37:25.000 Well, thank you very much.

00:37:26.000 This is a very sad day for America.

00:37:30.000 And it was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C.

00:37:34.000 and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti.

00:37:43.000 The place that I left.

00:37:44.000 It's a very sad thing to see it.

00:37:47.000 When you look at what's happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent.

00:37:52.000 This was never supposed to happen in America.

00:37:55.000 This is the persecution of the person that's leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary and leading Biden by a lot.

00:38:05.000 So if you can't beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him.

00:38:09.000 We can't let this happen in America.

00:38:11.000 Thank you very much.

00:38:14.000 I mean, to be fair, he is not in the polls leading Joe Biden by a lot.

00:38:18.000 The last polls have him basically dead even.

00:38:21.000 But the point is taken.

00:38:22.000 It is obviously true that he is, in fact, being hit with a variety of charges that no one in the Democratic Party would ever be hit with without a doubt.

00:38:31.000 He then added later on another show that would be very dangerous if he were jailed, which, of course, is also true.

00:38:36.000 We have not seen in the United States a former president of the United States thrown in jail.

00:38:41.000 Is it something that concerns you of, you know, of the people making sure that they don't go out of their right mind if something like that happens?

00:38:51.000 Because I know what I'm thinking of could happen if that, for example, they do, say, Jack Smith says, OK, I'm going to put Donald Trump in jail.

00:39:00.000 I think it's a very dangerous thing to even talk about because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters and I mean maybe, you know, maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty.

00:39:13.000 I've never seen anything like it.

00:39:15.000 Much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016.

00:39:21.000 Okay, so of course the left is taking this as a threat of violence.

00:39:23.000 Trump himself is vowing revenge if he takes office in 2024.

00:39:26.000 He posted on Truth Social to that effect and said, Look, it's not my fault.

00:39:30.000 My political opponent in the Democratic Party, crooked Joe Biden, has told his attorney general to charge the leading Republican nominee and former president of the United States, me, with as many crimes as can be concocted so that he is forced to spend large amounts of time and money to defend himself.

00:39:42.000 The Dems don't want to run against me or they would not be doing this unprecedented weaponization of quote-unquote justice.

00:39:46.000 But soon in 2024, it will be our turn.

00:39:48.000 MAGA! 0.53

00:39:50.000 Um, so, you know, that's what this battle is going to come down to.

00:39:53.000 And of course, this is the language that's being spoken by a lot of the Republican primary electorate, because that has always been the language spoken by the Republican primary electorate.

00:40:01.000 The problem, of course, is that independents don't actually hear this call.

00:40:04.000 And this is the thing that I'm warning a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives, a lot of voters in these primaries.

00:40:08.000 Just because you feel and believe the thing doesn't mean that political independents and swing voters are going to feel the thing.

00:40:15.000 We have to get out of our own heads a little bit.

00:40:17.000 I understand the thing.

00:40:18.000 I feel the thing myself.

00:40:20.000 I also understand that I'm not the only voter in the 2024 election.

00:40:24.000 The Donald Trump case here is going to come down to, in the end, basically one issue with regard to this legal case.

00:40:32.000 The issue is going to be whether Donald Trump actually believed that he lost the election.

00:40:35.000 If they can prove that Donald Trump believed that he lost the election, it'll be fairly easy for them to convince a D.C.

00:40:41.000 jury That Donald Trump was lying, that it was fraudulent, and all this.

00:40:44.000 Now, I don't think that the elements of this crime are tailor-made for this.

00:40:47.000 I think it's very difficult to see how this fits into a civil rights violation, or how this fits into a fraud case, or even how it fits into an obstruction case.

00:40:55.000 But, at the very least, they're going to have to prove that he knowingly did all these things, knowingly gets into Donald Trump's head.

00:41:00.000 That's really what this is all about.

00:41:02.000 And this is what Donald Trump's lawyer was saying yesterday.

00:41:04.000 One of Donald Trump's lawyers, her name was Alina Haba.

00:41:06.000 She said, just because he was told he lost the election doesn't mean that he believed he lost the election.

00:41:10.000 Here she was yesterday. 0.99

00:41:11.000 There's testimony and there's a number of aides that have said that the president was made aware that he lost the election and yet continued to argue that it was stolen from him.

00:41:22.000 How do you reconcile those two things?

00:41:24.000 Well, I think that everybody was made aware that he lost the election, but that doesn't mean that that was the only advice he was given.

00:41:30.000 As anybody understands what happens in the Oval Office, there are a numerous amount of advisors and politicians and lawyers, not just one or two, that are giving you advice and telling you what they believe is true.

00:41:40.000 So, he may not agree with Mike Pence, he may not agree with one of his lawyers, but that doesn't mean that there weren't other people advising him exactly the opposite.

00:41:50.000 Okay, so, again, they're taking her out of context and they're suggesting that, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was told he was told so he knew.

00:41:55.000 He was told.

00:41:55.000 That doesn't mean he believed a thing.

00:41:57.000 That's very common for Donald Trump.

00:41:58.000 He was told lots of things that he doesn't believe.

00:42:01.000 Meanwhile, Ty Cobb, who's a former Trump lawyer, he says that, well, you know, if he actually pursued a conspiracy knowingly, then that is violation of law.

00:42:08.000 That's not free speech.

00:42:09.000 Again, it's all going to come down to knowingly.

00:42:11.000 Here's Ty Cobb.

00:42:14.000 He's been out insisting that they're criminalizing speech, where the simple counter to that is you actually can facilitate and further a crime through speech and be prosecuted for it.

00:42:28.000 I saw an example in some of the reporting today where if Tony Soprano tells one of his guys to whack a witness, well, that's speech, but that's a crime.

00:42:43.000 Okay, well, that's true, but you actually would have to have him do that, which is not exactly what happened in this particular case.

00:42:49.000 So, what's gonna happen in D.C.?

00:42:50.000 Well, I mean, it's a D.C.

00:42:52.000 jury.

00:42:52.000 It probably is gonna be very bad for President Trump.

00:42:54.000 The real question is what that means for the 2024 election.

00:42:57.000 And again, I remind everybody, two things can be true at once.

00:42:59.000 It can be an unjust indictment.

00:43:00.000 They can be going after Trump unfairly.

00:43:02.000 And also, Trump may not be the best person to run for the Republican Party while facing indictments every other day from now until the election, while independents look at him and scoff.

00:43:12.000 Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.

00:43:14.000 We'll be back here on Monday with much more.

00:43:15.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 04, 2023

Are They The Baddies?

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