The Ben Shapiro Show - Bari Weiss | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 119

00:00:00.000 There's one word that sums up how we've gotten to this insane pass, and it's cowardice.

00:00:05.000 The number one ingredient that, if it were present, would change the outcome of almost all of these stories, all of the smearing of good people for maybe at worst making a mistake, is courage.

00:00:18.000 It's a story of cowardice and courage, the moment that we're in.

00:00:23.000 From 2017 to 2020, she was an opinion writer for the New York Times.

00:00:27.000 Then, in a very public resignation, she torched the work culture there and revealed the tense, radical environment she was working within.

00:00:35.000 Before our guest Barry Weiss was at the Times, she was at the Wall Street Journal for five years.

00:00:38.000 And now, stepping away from the biggest news outlet in the country, she's in the midst of crafting her own media property.

00:00:44.000 She now releases Common Sense with Barry Weiss, a newsletter on Substack, with the freedom to investigate and pursue stories she simply didn't have before.

00:00:52.000 She recently launched her own podcast as well, Honestly, with Barry Weiss, featuring unique and captivating conversations and stories rooted in the most fundamental issues the country, and all of us, are up against right now.

00:01:02.000 Barry wrote about and popularized the intellectual dark web at the New York Times back in 2018.

00:01:06.000 It was at that time that we connected.

00:01:08.000 We've been friends since, and in this episode we talk about why she's been avoiding joining my show these past three years.

00:01:13.000 Plus, in our conversation, Barry talks about how the 2016 election landed her at the New York Times, the first experience she had being virally attacked across the internet and media, and some ideas to preserve the middle, where most Americans are politically.

00:01:36.000 Hey, hey, and welcome.

00:01:37.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

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00:01:46.000 Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Barry.

00:01:49.000 The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.

00:01:53.000 Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.

00:01:59.000 Barry Weiss, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:02:01.000 I'm really happy to be here.

00:02:02.000 Finally left the New York Times so I could come here as a safe space.

00:02:06.000 Right, just for that, just for that.

00:02:08.000 So let's talk about how you got involved with the New York Times.

00:02:11.000 I want to go through kind of your whole evolution here because I first got to know you when you were still writing at the New York Times and you were doing a big story on the so-called intellectual dark web, which has gone through some iterations at this point.

00:02:23.000 But you were writing for the New York Times and how did you get that gig?

00:02:27.000 What was the sort of idea going in there?

00:02:29.000 Yeah, so I had been at the Wall Street Journal editorial page where I was the resident squish. 0.94

00:02:34.000 I was the most sort of left-leaning person in an otherwise, as your audience will know, conservative editorial page.

00:02:40.000 Then came Trump, and the very same sort of civil war, cold civil war, that happened in the conservative movement, happened in the Republican Party, happened inside the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

00:02:51.000 I very much found myself on the never-Trump side of things, along with Bret Stephens and a number of my other colleagues.

00:02:57.000 And after his nomination and his eventual win, a lot of us were sort of looking for a new home.

00:03:03.000 At the very same time, the New York Times was sort of looking in the mirror.

00:03:07.000 This lasted only a very brief time, but for a little bit of time, they were engaged in a period of self-reflection.

00:03:14.000 Everyone will remember the night before Trump's win in 2016 that the infamous needle had Hillary Clinton winning by a margin of 99% or whatever it was.

00:03:23.000 And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, Donald Trump won.

00:03:26.000 And the New York Times, which prides itself, or at least ostensibly, on being the paper of record, on being able to hold up a mirror to the country and the world as it actually is, thought to themselves, how did we get it so wrong?

00:03:37.000 And I was brought in, to be blunt, as an intellectual diversity hire.

00:03:41.000 My specific, explicit job was to be an op-ed editor that would bring in pieces from people that wouldn't otherwise think of the New York Times As a natural home for them to publish.

00:03:52.000 So that meant conservatives.

00:03:54.000 It meant libertarians.

00:03:55.000 It meant heterodox thinkers.

00:03:57.000 It meant, and this is a particular passion of mine, dissidents throughout the Arab world, Christians in Hong Kong, people who have English as a second language.

00:04:06.000 That's the kind of bread and butter work I had always done at the Wall Street Journal.

00:04:11.000 And so that's how I arrived.

00:04:12.000 That's how Bret Stephens arrived.

00:04:14.000 And then things sort of took a turn.

00:04:16.000 So let's talk about kind of why things went sour because that was something that I observed as well and you could see it kind of throughout the left.

00:04:22.000 And when Trump won there was a moment of shocking realization that maybe we don't know all the things there are to know because after 2012 there was sort of this impression that Democrats were going to win from now on to forever because Barack Obama had forged this brand new coalition, the kind of coalition of the dispossessed who are now going to overwhelm American politics and so there was no need to worry about those white people out in the sticks anymore and so we're just going to ignore those people. 0.60

00:04:43.000 We're instead going to focus in on this coterie and then Trump wins and so the idea was suddenly it dawned on them that there need to be some investigation of what happened but the way that they seemed to investigate, it was sort of like Steve Irwin going out into the wild.

00:04:56.000 They would send some guy with like an Australian outfit out to some diner in Ohio and they'd be like, what do the locals think?

00:05:03.000 And what was so astonishing is one of the only people I personally knew that called the election or that told me she really, really suspected Trump would win was my mom.

00:05:12.000 Why?

00:05:12.000 Because I'm from Pittsburgh, and my mom at that time had a flooring business that took her to driving an hour, two hours outside of Pittsburgh into, you know, Pennsylvania, as people call it.

00:05:24.000 And she would call me and say, Barry, I've never seen anything like this.

00:05:28.000 It's like the side of barns are made with homemade signs for this guy. 0.99

00:05:33.000 Like, I'm telling you, you guys are crazy. 0.98

00:05:35.000 This guy, you know, the Times is crazy.

00:05:38.000 This guy has momentum that you just can't, isn't being captured in the mainstream press.

00:05:43.000 So that was my mom, you know, someone without any expertise, none of the tools that Nate Silver has at his disposal.

00:05:49.000 I went to the Times Not naive.

00:05:52.000 I'm from, you know, a Zionist Jewish family.

00:05:55.000 I had seen the bias that the New York Times had toward Israel for my entire life.

00:05:59.000 My dad's a political conservative.

00:06:01.000 My mom's a liberal. 0.94

00:06:03.000 The New York Times and its bias was a topic of incredible and sustained discussion in my house from the time that I was young.

00:06:09.000 What I didn't expect was the sort of lack of collegiality that was there almost from the beginning and then really, really, really grew.

00:06:18.000 And also the sense, and this of course, you know, burst into public view with the decision to publish this op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton last June in our sort of fevered summer of COVID and George Floyd's killing and the rest, that people genuinely believed That ideas that they disagreed with were literal violence and harm.

00:06:40.000 That's what I didn't expect.

00:06:42.000 Did I expect that, you know, conservative ideas or, you know, non-progressive ideas would be written off as sort of backward and retrograde?

00:06:50.000 Of course.

00:06:51.000 Did I expect that there would be biases on any number of issues, not least of which Israel is sort of biased, let's say, against American power?

00:06:59.000 Of course.

00:06:59.000 What I did not expect was the idea that that Being exposed to those ideas and exposing our readers to those ideas was actually violence, was actually putting people's literal lives in danger.

00:07:13.000 That's when I realized, you know, as Andrew Sullivan's put it better than anyone, we all live on campus now.

00:07:20.000 You know, I was a student at Columbia 15 years ago.

00:07:22.000 That was sort of my original sort of waking up moment to the excesses of the illiberal left.

00:07:28.000 Long story short, you know, I found myself sort of being called a conservative and a, you know, a Zion Nazi and a neocon when I was very much a progressive.

00:07:37.000 And that's when I sort of started to witness the nature of this ideology.

00:07:42.000 What I didn't expect, and what I think no one fully expected, was the extent to which that ideology would come to swallow all of the sense-making institutions of American life.

00:07:55.000 All of the institutions that are charged with upholding our liberal order, and I mean that in the most capacious sense of the word.

00:08:02.000 You know, our publishing houses, our newspapers, our magazines, our universities, our movie studios, as you know, a lot of our tech companies and increasingly corporate America.

00:08:13.000 That's, I think, what many people didn't expect.

00:08:16.000 And all of these ideas were treated as a kind of punchline.

00:08:19.000 And then all of a sudden you're sitting there at the most important newspaper in the world, whether or not you read it, whether or not you subscribe, it is the most important newspaper in the world.

00:08:28.000 And it's supposed to, you know, it has a job, which is to be the paper of record.

00:08:33.000 And instead of, you know, instead of abiding by its motto, which is all the news that's fit to print, it's, no, it's all the news that fits the narrative.

00:08:40.000 It's all the news that advances our political agenda.

00:08:45.000 So anything that doesn't is either ignored, it's overlooked, it's neutered, it's papered over, and that was something that was obvious to me within the first year that I was there, but it really just got progressively more intense, I would say.

00:08:59.000 So I guess what I was going to ask is, when was that first moment where you realized that they were going to try and buy this back?

00:09:05.000 Where there was that moment where they were like, okay, we're going to try and give some sort of credibility or at least try to make sense of these people we don't understand.

00:09:11.000 And then it went to principal Skinner.

00:09:12.000 It's not us who are wrong.

00:09:13.000 It's the children who are wrong.

00:09:14.000 When did that first kick in for you?

00:09:16.000 God, there were a few sort of signal moments, signal events.

00:09:21.000 One of them that I remember really clearly has been, I'm sure you'll, you'll remember that there was Hanukkah.

00:09:26.000 I think it was Hanukkah of 2019. 0.91

00:09:28.000 That was, there was an attack, a violent attack against Jews almost every single day of that Holiday.

00:09:34.000 There was the machete attack upstate in Muncie, New York, where a rabbi's home was invaded by a guy with giant machete, tried to kill as many people as he could, ended up murdering a guy named Joseph Newman. 0.76

00:09:47.000 There was the attack on the New Jersey kosher supermarket that was carried out by acolytes of the black Hebrew Israelites, which are not Hebrew Israelites, but are just sort of like a hate group, Nation of Islam, Farrakhan kind of vibe.

00:10:01.000 And anyway, I wrote a piece at the time, a column called America's Bloody Hanukkah or America's Bloody Pogrom.

00:10:07.000 And I thought it was a really good column.

00:10:08.000 It was the, you know, it was really my subject.

00:10:11.000 I mean, I'd written a book called How to Fight Anti-Semitism.

00:10:14.000 I was bat mitzvahed at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Tree of Life, where the most lethal attack against American Jews in all of American history was carried out.

00:10:22.000 I have some skin in the game and I know a lot about this subject.

00:10:25.000 And I was basically called into my editor's office and was told, we can't really run this.

00:10:30.000 And the reason, in the end of the day, why we couldn't really run it is that the people that were carrying out the attacks weren't white supremacists carrying tiki torches.

00:10:41.000 When the person carrying out the attack against Jews is a white supremacist, is a neo-Nazi, there's incredible moral clarity.

00:10:49.000 But because of this, the nature of this ideology, when an anti-Semite comes from a group that has been deemed, you know, fundamentally oppressed no matter what, Then all of a sudden it's morally confusing in this ideology when that person also happens to be a victimizer.

00:11:07.000 And so that was a moment for me where I thought to myself, hold on, this is news.

00:11:12.000 This is important.

00:11:14.000 I am an expert in this subject and I'm being told that it doesn't have a place in the times.

00:11:19.000 And then I found, and this is the really insidious nature of it, Ideas and op-eds and columns that I would write that sort of suited the narrative, those went right into the paper.

00:11:32.000 The amount of energy and sort of diplomacy and political capital that you needed to sort of smuggle through pieces that didn't suit the ideology, it just took so much work And this was the part that I found, that I was, found myself, this was the trap I found myself falling into, that you thought yourself out of commissioning those pieces to begin with.

00:11:57.000 And I thought to myself, this is, like, not why I became a journalist.

00:12:01.000 I became a journalist to pursue my curiosity.

00:12:04.000 I became a journalist to hear the ideas of people that I don't always agree with.

00:12:09.000 I became a journalist because I want to expose readers to things that are provocative or surprising or serendipitous.

00:12:17.000 And it just became deadening.

00:12:20.000 And it became really boring.

00:12:21.000 And then, of course, Tom Cotton happened.

00:12:24.000 So let's talk in just a second about what actually triggered you to leave because that was a bit of a process in and of itself.

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00:12:33.000 If you had $1 billion, what would you do?

00:12:35.000 Spend $500 million on a yacht like a tech billionaire or take a rocket ship to space for four minutes?

00:12:40.000 How about buying a ticket to the world's most expensive dinner and then railing against the rich like AOC? 0.99

00:12:44.000 Well, nothing makes me happier than to tell you I wouldn't do any of those things.

00:12:47.000 If I were a billionaire, I'd only put my money into things I actually believe in.

00:12:51.000 There is an asset that I've had my eye on for a while.

00:12:53.000 I could never own it.

00:12:54.000 It's called Blue Chip Art.

00:12:56.000 Now seriously, I do invest in art.

00:12:57.000 A year ago, you'd need tens of millions of dollars or you'd get laughed out of the building.

00:13:00.000 All of that has changed with Masterworks.io.

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00:13:19.000 After all, There's nothing more patriotic than taking something made for the kings and queens and giving it to the people.

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00:13:31.000 Masterworks.io has democratized more than $250 million worth of art away from the ultra-rich and placed it into the pockets of the populace. So join over 200,000 members, many of whom are Ben Shapiro listeners and skip to the front of the wait list with my unique link. Go to masterworks.io slash Ben. That's masterworks.io slash Ben. Before deciding to invest carefully review the important disclosures at masterworks.io slash disclaimer. Okay. So over this course of time, you're increasingly under pressure.

00:13:59.000 My first experience actually speaking with you was right after that IDW piece, because I think we talked for the IDW piece, and I remember you got an enormous blowback for the IDW piece as well.

00:14:10.000 And to me, that was kind of my first inkling even then.

00:14:13.000 I think, what was that, 2018 maybe?

00:14:14.000 Yeah, and there had been like a viral tweet where I was trying to praise immigrants, and I quoted a line from Hamilton, and I was describing a figure skater.

00:14:25.000 It's not even worth getting into it.

00:14:26.000 I remember, I remember.

00:14:27.000 It's so absurd. 0.90

00:14:28.000 It was ridiculous. 0.81

00:14:30.000 I, you know, and I have a very long history of writing pieces in favor of immigration.

00:14:34.000 And yet, you know, this caused such consternation at the New York Times that when I went on Bill Maher a week or a week later, the Times pressured me and I was expected to.

00:14:43.000 And I did explain the tweet and essentially apologize for it.

00:14:48.000 This is over a tweet.

00:14:49.000 Yeah.

00:14:49.000 You know, so if if that amount of risk, you know, generates that kind of stress level, I remember that they were parroting you on SNL, you were trending on Twitter.

00:15:01.000 Like, basically, you had my record on Twitter.

00:15:04.000 You were being trended every couple of weeks.

00:15:05.000 Exactly.

00:15:06.000 Now I'm used to it.

00:15:06.000 But at the time, and I think anyone who's sort of emerging as someone in the public square in any way will admit, it flattened me.

00:15:17.000 It flattened me.

00:15:18.000 I mean, I was at a family wedding that weekend, and all of a sudden, all of these people who I thought ostensibly were my colleagues, both literal employees of the New York Times, but also broader journalists who I knew, were pouncing on me and were calling me xenophobic.

00:15:37.000 They were calling me a bigot.

00:15:38.000 They were calling me everything that I hate.

00:15:40.000 And it's very painful.

00:15:42.000 And that's the thing about this trend and this culture and this movement that is so terrible, is that it weaponizes empathy.

00:15:53.000 One of the things that I think is really important as writers and journalists and You know, intellectuals to the extent that I am one, is being able to change your mind.

00:16:02.000 And to be able to change your mind, you need to be able to hear criticism.

00:16:06.000 But when that criticism is coming in such bad faith, it almost makes you want to sort of build a fortress around yourself, which is a terrible thing if you're trying to be able to be someone that is open-minded and hears criticism in good faith, if that makes sense.

00:16:21.000 No, it makes so much sense.

00:16:22.000 I mean, I've had this experience personally many, many times, where if you're a good-hearted person, forget about being a journalist, if you're a good-hearted person and you want to make yourself better in any way, you have to have some sort of feedback mechanism where somebody can tell you you're doing something wrong and keep you within the lanes of doing the right thing.

00:16:36.000 And when that feedback mechanism gets hijacked by people who despise you, and they just start giving you bad feedback that is designed to tearing you down, the natural instinct is to create a bubble and an echo chamber.

00:16:46.000 And so the question is, how do you create a life where you can receive the feedback that's necessary, but sort of prevent the feedback that is badly motivated from hitting you?

00:16:55.000 And prevent, and I think that we could both think of examples in mind, but prevent the kind of...

00:17:01.000 Radicalization and hardening that comes from getting that bad feedback.

00:17:06.000 And I think I've been able to do it pretty well.

00:17:09.000 But that's just a risk that comes with sort of being in the public square and getting that kind of, you know, negative and irrational and nonsensical often feedback.

00:17:20.000 And that was really that tweet was the first time that it happened to me.

00:17:23.000 And one of the things that was very difficult about it is that I didn't really understand the kind of support structure that I needed yet.

00:17:32.000 And I also was getting that feedback from people that were sitting two desks away from me.

00:17:37.000 And that's really, really difficult.

00:17:40.000 It's hard to work in an environment where you have a conversation.

00:17:43.000 It's an open newsroom.

00:17:44.000 And then you hear that the conversation you had on your phone in what's supposed to be a newsroom is getting repeated as, you know, cocktail party fodder.

00:17:52.000 And that makes you paranoid and it makes you just unable to take the kind of risk that I want to be able to do and that since I've left, I've really been able to do again.

00:18:02.000 So finally you make the decision that you want to leave and you write this very widely trafficked letter, it's a terrific letter, about the shortcomings of the New York Times.

00:18:10.000 I think I read it in its entirety on the air.

00:18:12.000 The letter discusses all the problems with the closing of the mind at the New York Times and it also discusses the fact that the higher ups at the New York Times stood for this.

00:18:19.000 And that really is the big question to me. 0.98

00:18:21.000 It's not the fact that you have schmucks working at the New York Times. 1.00

00:18:24.000 Cowards. 1.00

00:18:25.000 The leaders at these institutions have become such unbelievable cowards, and this is true at virtually every major institution in the country, that they are allowing the insane to run the asylum. 0.99

00:18:34.000 The people who are in charge of the New York Times are not the heads of the New York Times. 0.94

00:18:37.000 They are the woke wing of the New York Times who get to dictate what the coverage looks like.

00:18:41.000 There's one word that sums up how we've gotten to this insane pass, and it's cowardice.

00:18:46.000 There's a million other words that we can use to describe how we've gotten here.

00:18:51.000 The number one ingredient that, if it were present, would change the outcome of almost all of these stories, all of these cancellations, all of the hijacking of these institutions, all of the smearing of good people for maybe at worst making a mistake, Is courage.

00:19:08.000 It's a story of cowardice and courage, the moment that we're in.

00:19:11.000 And what has been astonishing to me is to find, you know, to look around and see, wait, hold on, you're supposed to be the adult in the room.

00:19:19.000 You're the person that is being charged with upholding the mission of these institutions.

00:19:24.000 I'm thinking now about the times, but also I could be thinking about any number of universities or any of the other institutions that we mentioned before.

00:19:31.000 The amount of work that it takes to build up that kind of cultural capital, that kind of trust with your audience or with the public, I mean, that is work that takes decades and centuries.

00:19:44.000 We have seen in the case of the New York Times that it takes really a couple years to just fundamentally trash it and destroy it.

00:19:51.000 And the fact that they are sort of making this bad bet where they somehow believe that by acquiescing or negotiating with this illiberal faction, and it's illiberal inside of the institution, that they will somehow be able to preserve the institution is exactly the wrong thing.

00:20:10.000 When the Times decided to run the Tom Cotton op-ed, there were something like 800 of my colleagues who signed a letter saying that this op-ed, by a sitting United States senator, literally put their lives in danger.

00:20:23.000 If you're running the New York Times, you know what you need to say to those people?

00:20:27.000 If you believe that a 900-word op-ed puts your life in danger, then maybe journalism is not the right line of work for you, and certainly not The New York Times, and you should seek employment elsewhere.

00:20:38.000 Do you know how many unemployed journalists there are in this country right now, with every single almost local newspaper being swallowed up or destroyed?

00:20:47.000 How many blue-collar journalists there are who would be fantastic in The New York Times?

00:20:52.000 Because the idea that you need an Ivy League degree or college degree at all to go and ask people questions, which is what journalism is about, you know, you could have filled the newsroom ten times over.

00:21:02.000 But instead they acquiesce to it because it turns out they're more scared of being called an ism or a phobe or whatever in public than they are of, you know, doing the work of preserving their institution.

00:21:14.000 And one of the things that obviously has happened here is not only that they're afraid of being called those things, but they're afraid of being associated with anybody who might be called those things.

00:21:21.000 Correct.

00:21:21.000 So I was recently at a kind of a hoity-toity event.

00:21:24.000 I only do a couple of these a year.

00:21:26.000 And it was a bunch of people with whom I disagree on politics.

00:21:29.000 And there was a big discussion of political polarization.

00:21:32.000 And they came to me and I said, if you want to end political polarization... Take a picture of me right now and post it on the Internet.

00:21:37.000 That's exactly what I said.

00:21:38.000 I said, if you want to end political polarization, all you have to do, it doesn't have to be me, But what you need to do, because these are all people with big Twitter followings, is go on Twitter, find somebody who didn't vote like you in the last election cycle, say, this is a nice person, I enjoy having dinner with them, and their ideas are worth listening to, even if I disagree.

00:21:52.000 That's all you have to do, and political polarization will be over.

00:21:55.000 Not one person did it, obviously.

00:21:56.000 Of course.

00:21:56.000 Because the amount of fear out there is just astonishing.

00:22:00.000 But the fear is justified. 0.99

00:22:02.000 That's what's so sad about where we are.

00:22:04.000 Meaning, you know, one of the reasons that I've hesitated to come on your show or hesitated to do other shows is like, first of all, is it worth the headache that it's going to take for the next, you know, month of my life that I'm sure I'm going to get online?

00:22:17.000 But also, you know, what's in the balance for a lot of these people?

00:22:21.000 Especially the ones who are still working inside of these institutions is, you know, am I going to lose my job?

00:22:27.000 Am I going to lose my reputation?

00:22:28.000 Am I going to lose my children's reputation?

00:22:30.000 Is my kid going to be bullied at school or soccer practice?

00:22:33.000 Like, crowdsourced McCarthyism actually works!

00:22:37.000 You know, the recent Cato study had something like 62% of Americans were unwilling to voice their true views out loud.

00:22:45.000 That's the thing that I think is really fascinating about the moment that we're in.

00:22:49.000 We believed, or at least I believed, studying history, that this kind of behavior and this kind of fear and this kind of doublespeak was only possible under a Stalin or a Mao.

00:23:00.000 But it turns out, that's not true.

00:23:02.000 You can do it in a crowdsourced way, fueled by big tech and big social, and this is where we've ended up.

00:23:08.000 The astonishing thing, and the thing I think we both realize, is that if a thousand people stood up, A thousand people and did exactly what you're describing, the whole country would be different.

00:23:20.000 It is an amazing thing.

00:23:21.000 And the unwillingness of people to do it, as you say, is it is both justified and also amazing.

00:23:26.000 In a second, I want to ask you about whether you think that there is that sort of stomach and spine in what I think is sort of the classical liberal center to actually save the country.

00:23:34.000 I actually think that the future of the country does not rest with conservatives or people on the left.

00:23:38.000 I think it actually rests with the people in the middle and which way they're going to go.

00:23:41.000 I'll explain in a second.

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00:24:54.000 So here's my going theory.

00:24:56.000 So the Harper's Weekly letter comes out sometime last year and it basically suggests cancel culture is bad.

00:25:01.000 And what I said at the time is I noticed that there wasn't a single person who actually was a signatory to the Harper's Weekly letter who had publicly voted for Trump.

00:25:08.000 There wasn't a single person who said that they were intending on voting for Trump.

00:25:11.000 I don't think there was a single person that identified as a conservative.

00:25:13.000 That's right.

00:25:14.000 There might have been a couple of people who maybe tangentially were connected with conservatism, but not really so much.

00:25:21.000 I think I barely made the cut is the point.

00:25:24.000 I don't think I would qualify as a conservative.

00:25:26.000 So my big question about the Harper's Weekly letter, and it's my question for sort of the people who consider themselves politically centered but also in favor of individual rights.

00:25:34.000 is whether the attempt is to open the Overton window just enough so that they themselves can sneak through or is the attempt to open the Overton window broad enough that we can actually have a conversation.

00:25:43.000 That's an actual real question because it seems to me that there are a lot of people who are, you know, classically liberal encompasses a couple different definitions.

00:25:49.000 One is the classical liberal economic fair, which I don't know that everybody who we are now categorizing as liberal is in that category.

00:25:57.000 Then there is the sort of broader liberal rubric of individual rights post-Enlightenment.

00:26:02.000 And those are the people I think we're talking about.

00:26:04.000 The question is for those folks who actually agree politically with a lot of the policy agenda of the left, but disagree with their agenda on individual rights.

00:26:11.000 Are they willing to make the sacrifice of putting off utopia in order to preserve the individual rights?

00:26:15.000 Or are they just going to say, you know what?

00:26:18.000 Screw the individual rights for the moment.

00:26:19.000 We need to be fellow travelers with the people who are going to get us where we need to go in terms of more even redistribution of wealth, or in terms of more redistributive means of racial reparations.

00:26:30.000 Where do you think that movement is?

00:26:31.000 Do you think there are enough of people, you know, who are like you or Andrew Sullivan, or do you think that it's going to trend more toward, you know, what we've seen from some outlets like the Atlantic, where if you differ, the Overton window is only open just this far past Hillary Clinton, maybe.

00:26:46.000 I think the question is, you know, someone joked the other day that a lot of these people have a rule and the rule is no friends to the right of me.

00:26:53.000 You know, no associations to the right of me.

00:26:55.000 That's a really good litmus test.

00:26:57.000 Are you willing to be associated with people who are conservative?

00:27:02.000 Are you willing to see the truth right now, which is that we're living through this massive political realignment?

00:27:09.000 One in which, you know, you sometimes sound more liberal than a lot of the people who are like to the right, you know, everything feels like it's sort of thrown up in the air.

00:27:18.000 And the question is, do you have the intestinal fortitude, you know, to say, you know what, this person is to the right of me, this person right now, you know, like, I'm sure you disapprove of my marriage to a woman.

00:27:31.000 I know we disagree on abortion.

00:27:32.000 I know we disagree on any number of things.

00:27:35.000 And you know what?

00:27:36.000 I don't care.

00:27:37.000 And the reason I don't care is because I really feel like we're in a fundamental war to preserve the bedrock of liberalism, to preserve the thing that allows us to sit here and have this conversation without ripping each other's heads off.

00:27:52.000 That's what's at stake.

00:27:54.000 And I think for those who are able to see that that's what's at stake, yes, they will have that sort of spine and fortitude and all of the other metaphors that we could come up with.

00:28:03.000 The question, as you put it, is how many are there, right?

00:28:07.000 How many are there?

00:28:08.000 I really, really believe that the self-silencing majority of this country is broadly in the center, wants a different choice other than Laura Ingraham and Rachel Maddow at night.

00:28:19.000 But because of a million reasons we can point to, including polarization, including the incentives of cable news, including the incentives of, you know, big tech wanting to keep us enraged so we stay online, and on and on and on, and because of cancel culture, these people are quiet.

00:28:35.000 These are the people that, you know, are dissidents in some of the most liberal institutions in the country, the people that write me.

00:28:41.000 These are people who say to me, you know, I don't know where to go.

00:28:45.000 I don't fit in anymore.

00:28:46.000 I'm homeless.

00:28:47.000 Those are the people that I am trying to speak to.

00:28:50.000 Those are the people who I believe are the majority, and those are the people I agree with you, Ben.

00:28:54.000 Whether or not America is able to preserve itself as a liberal democracy really depends on those people standing up and speaking out right now.

00:29:02.000 Yeah, I mean, I think the big question that I keep having, and it's to people on the left and to people on the right, is whether we want to share a country anymore.

00:29:09.000 If the question is whether we want to share a country anymore, I think that as we nationalize every single issue, is every issue, the way we think about politics is not local.

00:29:16.000 No, it's all flattened.

00:29:16.000 It's all one big national story and everything is seen through that lens.

00:29:20.000 Exactly.

00:29:21.000 No one cares what state governments do anymore unless it becomes a federal issue, but it's all what the federal government does or what you're seeing on national media or what you are seeing in terms of social media where what somebody is doing in New York affects me in Florida because it's on social media.

00:29:34.000 Because of that great flattening effect that you're talking about, it's actually resulting in not people combining or people actually making connections, it's resulting in precisely the opposite.

00:29:43.000 You're actually starting to see this massive self-sorting effect Listen, I'm part of it.

00:29:46.000 I left California because of this.

00:29:48.000 We moved down to Florida because I didn't want to live in California anymore.

00:29:51.000 And I think you're going to start to see more and more of that.

00:29:53.000 And so the question is going to become, if we actually want to share a country together, we are going to have to have a lighter hand when it comes to what happens at the very top level, and then say that we're going to have to leave each other alone closer to the bottom level, or there isn't going to be a country anymore.

00:30:06.000 I agree with that.

00:30:07.000 I also think, and I think we're starting to see the seeds of maybe the backlash in a positive way.

00:30:13.000 There's a scarier backlash we can talk about, but a backlash to the sort of nationalization, flattening effect of everything and the online-ification of everything.

00:30:24.000 A movement, I think, afoot in this country that wants to say, you know what, it really matters who my neighbors are.

00:30:30.000 And it really matters that I'm connected to people.

00:30:32.000 And you know, like, you know, public safety in my neighborhood is the thing that actually matters to me.

00:30:37.000 And feeling connected to people that you're surrounded by.

00:30:40.000 The other thing that I've noticed that blew my mind, there was a statistic that came out the other day, something like, you know, 50% of millennials, did you see this, pray to God every day, identify, it's mind-blowing.

00:30:52.000 And I don't know, I just think that people are sick of the way that we're living.

00:30:56.000 It's literally making people sick, and I think that a backlash to that is coming.

00:31:00.000 Now, whether or not that backlash looks like something that's healthy, that's focused on people's communities, that's focused on local life, that's focused on reviving civic and religious organizations, that's one way we can go.

00:31:11.000 The other really scary way we can go, and this is one of the reasons that I've been so outspoken about woke ideology, is a world in which everything is seen through the lens of race.

00:31:22.000 Everyone becomes hyper-racialized, and that can lead to a very scary backlash that we were talking about before the show, in which, you know, if you tell ten-year-old boys that your whiteness is the thing that really matters to you, your whiteness gives you a lot of power.

00:31:38.000 I don't want to live in a country where that is the idea that's given to young children, you know, from the time that they're little kids.

00:31:45.000 That their race is the thing that matters to them, it's the thing that matters more than anything else, and in fact it gives them tremendous power.

00:31:51.000 That's very scary to me.

00:31:53.000 So this is some of the stuff that you've been writing about at your Substack, which is now wildly popular.

00:31:56.000 And thank God it proves that there's a market for the kind of stuff that you actually want to get out there.

00:32:00.000 The disintegration of centralized media has had a lot of beneficial side effects.

00:32:04.000 I think so.

00:32:05.000 And your Substack is part of that.

00:32:07.000 Obviously, Daily Wire is part of that.

00:32:08.000 People can get their news from a bunch of different sources, which is something I highly recommend.

00:32:11.000 You've been writing a lot about the takeover of particularly lower levels of schooling by sort of woke intersectional ideology and exactly the sort of self-silencing effect that we've been discussing.

00:32:20.000 And you see it at private schools across the country.

00:32:22.000 You see it certainly in public schools across the country.

00:32:24.000 Parents who are afraid of going up against their peers, even though their peers probably agree with them.

00:32:28.000 The idea is that if you keep enough people silent, they can never actually unionize.

00:32:32.000 They can never actually get together and say, yeah, what they're doing at school is bad.

00:32:35.000 You just shut them up and then you never have to worry about it for the administration.

00:32:38.000 Right.

00:32:38.000 This is a good moment where people should take lessons from the left about solidarity and collective action.

00:32:45.000 One of the things that's sort of blown my mind as I've reported on these stories in public schools and private schools and blue states and red, it's everywhere now, is how insulated people are from each other.

00:32:56.000 So a parent will come to me and say, don't say I say anything.

00:32:59.000 Another parent will come to me, don't say I said anything.

00:33:01.000 And then I'll hear from a teacher and I'm like, You guys realize that most of the people agree with you, but they've been so scared to even voice their opposition to this, even behind closed doors, even to other parents, that they really don't know any better.

00:33:16.000 And one of the main things that I tell parents that are concerned about the direction of their school is collective action, solidarity.

00:33:23.000 Find other people that agree with you.

00:33:25.000 You will be so much more effective in standing up to this.

00:33:28.000 One of the most unbelievable examples of it has played out in Lowndon County, Virginia.

00:33:33.000 where parents like Asra Noumani and Xi Van Fleet, who survived Mao's Cultural Revolution in China, you know, and on and on and on, mostly minority parents have been standing up to the school board there, and it's been an incredible example to watch.

00:33:46.000 You know, we were talking before about cowardice and courage.

00:33:49.000 I think one of the things that's been really inspiring to me and also surprising about the moment that we're living in is that you would think that courage would come from the people that have sort of accrued capital, that have reached the pinnacle of their careers.

00:34:04.000 But it's the opposite.

00:34:06.000 Courage is coming from the periphery.

00:34:08.000 Courage is coming from people like there's this amazing mom, Gabby Clark, in Nevada, whose son, William, was a student at a democracy prep there.

00:34:16.000 And he was forced, like kids in so many schools these days, to publicly self-identify his race and his gender and his sexual orientation, and then to attach negative labels to them, if they were negative, like white or male.

00:34:28.000 And William's biracial, and he refused to do it. 0.97

00:34:31.000 And they failed him.

00:34:33.000 And most parents in that situation would say to their kid, and say in maybe their family meeting, Let's just move on.

00:34:38.000 Let's get you into good college.

00:34:40.000 Let's forget about them.

00:34:41.000 And Gabby Clark decided to sue the school, and to sue based on her child's First Amendment rights and other constitutional rights.

00:34:48.000 And when I called her to ask her where she got the courage to do it, she was completely baffled by the question.

00:34:54.000 She said to me, what are you talking about?

00:34:56.000 This is wrong, and I'm just standing up for what's right, and every single parent should be doing the same for their kid.

00:35:02.000 That's it.

00:35:03.000 That's kind of it.

00:35:04.000 You know, like, now is the moment.

00:35:05.000 You know, you saw in Peter Boghossian's resignation letter to Portland State University where he'd been trying for the past decade to stand up for liberalism.

00:35:14.000 And he wrote in the end of his letter, which we published on my Substack, you know, I've been teaching my students for 10 years that one of the things that I am obligated to do and we're all obligated to do as liberals and Americans is to defend liberalism.

00:35:27.000 Who would I be if I didn't?

00:35:29.000 Who would I be if I capitulated to this?

00:35:31.000 And that's the question I think should be ringing in everyone's ears right now.

00:35:35.000 Think about how hard it is right now for you or for anyone to stand up against this.

00:35:41.000 Where are we going to be as a country 5, 10, 20 years from now if we don't stand up?

00:35:46.000 It's only going to get harder.

00:35:48.000 It's only going to get harder.

00:35:49.000 It's the easiest that it's going to be is in this very moment.

00:35:52.000 And I think it's really important for us to do it right now.

00:35:55.000 So one of the things that you've written a lot about, obviously, and that you had to deal with at the New York Times is the intersectional coalition, this idea of intersectionality as a philosophy, not the sort of game playing where we go back to Kimberly Crenshaw's original legal article and we discuss how if you fit more than one box, maybe you're discriminated against in a variety of ways.

00:36:13.000 Which is true! 0.56

00:36:14.000 Of course it's true.

00:36:15.000 Of course it's true.

00:36:16.000 But the basic idea was then expanded out to essentially suggest that there is a hierarchy of victimization in the United States, and that depending where you are on the hierarchy of victimization, You are no longer capable of causing offense, and also if somebody is less victimized than you, then you are free to do or say about them pretty much whatever you want.

00:36:34.000 Yeah, it's, I think, therefore I am has been replaced with, you know, I am this identity, therefore I am right.

00:36:40.000 Or I am, therefore I have a greater claim to truth or morality.

00:36:44.000 That's what's so, you know, malicious about this idea.

00:36:48.000 So how did this kind of slay traditional left-wing thought, traditional liberalism?

00:36:51.000 Because there was a pretty large-scale conflict over this.

00:36:55.000 I mean, this sort of racial radicalism was tried and found wanting by the Democratic Party in large part in the early 1970s, for example, with George McGovern, who promoted some of this sort of stuff.

00:37:06.000 You saw it with attempts in the 1980s by some of the Democrats, and then it was pretty much rejected.

00:37:10.000 I mean, Bill Clinton in 1992 literally had a sister soldier moment in which people who were promoting this sort of ideology were called out on the campaign trail by the leading Democratic contender for the presidency.

00:37:19.000 And it went away for a while, and then it came back with a vengeance.

00:37:23.000 And it seems like there's almost no systemic immunity on the left to this sort of ideology.

00:37:28.000 Why do you think?

00:37:30.000 So, I mean, frankly, I think that Barack Obama's elevation to the presidency in 2009 and his shift from who he campaigned as in 2008 to what he became in his second term was pretty dramatic.

00:37:42.000 So in 2008, my theory goes, he campaigned as the guy he was at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

00:37:48.000 No red states, no blue states, we're all the United States, no white, no black.

00:37:51.000 We're all just Americans.

00:37:53.000 And then he won.

00:37:54.000 And after he won this broad sweeping victory with huge levels of popularity, then he was faced with what all presidents are faced with, a lot of people who didn't like his agenda.

00:38:02.000 And instead of him saying, okay, well, maybe they don't like my agenda because my agenda is actually pretty radical left for the time.

00:38:09.000 Instead, there was this move toward, well, perhaps the reason that this is happening is because I'm black.

00:38:14.000 And the media went right along with this. 0.51

00:38:16.000 The idea was that if you attack Barack Obama in any way, it's because you were racist.

00:38:19.000 Tea Party was an outgrowth of racism.

00:38:21.000 This is why there was that whole massive controversy over whether John Lewis had been called an N-word and no tape ever emerged of that. 0.86

00:38:28.000 And there was this, there were article after article, the Tea Party, they're like terrorists, all these people who oppose Barack Obama are really doing this because Barack Obama is the first black president.

00:38:36.000 And so resistance to anything that he wants to do is really a racially driven resistance.

00:38:41.000 And then in 2012, you saw that upped with Mitt Romney being, you want to put you all back in chains, our current president said about Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human being ever to walk the earth.

00:38:50.000 And the entire campaign of 2012 was basically run along, if not overtly intersectional lines, sort of, I would say, relatively, relatively overt intersectional lines.

00:39:01.000 There was an attempt to appeal to particular racial groups specifically.

00:39:05.000 And there were African Americans for Obama and there were Hispanic Americans for Obama.

00:39:08.000 And the idea was that everybody would sort of get an agenda item and these agenda items would be cobbled together into a coalition.

00:39:15.000 And you saw a lot of articles around this time when Obama won about how there was this new coalition of the dispossessed who were going to overwhelm American politics. 0.74

00:39:22.000 Ronald Brownstein was writing about how Democrats were never going to lose an election again.

00:39:25.000 There's this idea among Democrats that if they were able to cobble together an intersectional coalition, they'd never lose again.

00:39:31.000 And so Obama, because he was so in his own person, such a popular president, And because he campaigned as post-racial, the failure of that ideal in 2008 and the breakdown into polarization post-2008, I think led a lot of Democrats to believe, okay, well, there really is a sort of racial battle that's simmering under the surface here even though Pretty explicitly, the reason that Barack Obama was elected in 2008 is because he was going to be the first black president.

00:39:55.000 A lot of people voted for Barack Obama in the primaries.

00:39:58.000 Who never would have voted for a first term junior senator from Illinois with no actual legislative accomplishments on his record if he had not been the first black president. 0.79

00:40:05.000 Super talented politician, yes.

00:40:06.000 But of course, the nature of who he was led to his immense popularity.

00:40:11.000 I mean, people taking pictures of themselves at the ballot box voting for the first black president.

00:40:14.000 supposed to be the culmination of America's victory over our horrific record on race. 0.76

00:40:21.000 And instead, and you can see this in the polls, visions of how race was going in America immediately began to turn. You can see in the polls that on race, America immediately started to hit the downskids about 2009, 2010. Up to 2008, 2009, the polls were really good in terms of how many Americans thought we were getting closer in terms of race, how many Americans thought we were doing well in terms of race. And then both white and black Americans after 2009, 2010, you start to see the polls really start to dip pretty significantly.

00:40:46.000 Okay. That is a very cogent political explanation. And I do think there's something there about Democratic Party strategy in terms of how it's sort of cobbled together, this coalition.

00:40:59.000 Yes.

00:41:00.000 My answer maybe is a little bit more metaphysical.

00:41:02.000 I believe that the surge of this and the reason especially that so many young people are drawn to it is crisis of meaning and the death of God in this country.

00:41:14.000 I just really believe that People are searching for some moral purpose to their life, the sense of being part of a coalition of the righteous, sense of being on the right side of history.

00:41:29.000 All of the things that we used to get from other structures that because of, you know, let's be honest, like many of the Fallouts of things like globalization and tech and the rest, you know, that are so much bigger than we have time for in this conversation have led people sort of grasping for meaning. 0.99

00:41:49.000 I don't think the reason that people are drawn to this ideology in our generation younger is because they're stupid. 0.90

00:41:56.000 I really think it's, you know, I think it's because it sort of lights their soul on fire in a real way. 0.98

00:42:04.000 And it sort of reminds me of just like any religious revival movement at the beginning, which is like, it lights your soul on fire and then you want to go light other people on fire.

00:42:13.000 I don't think there's a mutually exclusive explanation.

00:42:15.000 I mean, the explanation I'm giving is sort of why it happened when it happened.

00:42:18.000 But the explanation that you're giving As to, you know, why it's happening at all, I think is of course the right explanation.

00:42:23.000 I also think it has something to do with the fact that if you look at when these ideas sort of started taking root in the academy, it's just around the time that, you know, it's sort of us and the kids about five or kids, the people five or ten years younger than us, who have only marinated in this ideology.

00:42:43.000 When our parents went to college, I don't know if your parents went to college, it was not the political monoculture that it is now.

00:42:50.000 When I was in Colombia, whatever it was now, 15 years, a million years ago, 15 years ago, this was it, right?

00:42:56.000 Like Edward Said's Orientalism, you know, the idea that all of the sort of maladies of the Middle East could be blamed on Israel or America, that was the only idea that you encountered in the Middle East Studies Department.

00:43:08.000 That was it.

00:43:09.000 And so, look, it turns out that ideas really matter.

00:43:12.000 And that if you are only marinating in a particular set of ideas, and you don't even have the ability to understand why someone would come to a different set of conclusions because you're literally never encountering it, Well, guess what?

00:43:26.000 It turns out that you make your way into the world and the things that you learned about in the Gender Studies Department at Oberlin or the Anthropology Department at Vassar, those have shaped your mind in its most important and impressionable years.

00:43:40.000 And so why should we be surprised that people actually believe them?

00:43:45.000 And they actually go into these companies and change those companies in their image.

00:43:50.000 The other thing I would add is, you know, this is Yuval Levin's idea, not mine, but the transformation of these institutions into platforms, platforms on which it's a stage where we all sort of play for our own benefit.

00:44:04.000 You know, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone.

00:44:06.000 Those are the incentives right now.

00:44:07.000 Build your audience, bring your audience with you.

00:44:10.000 Well, that's just transformationally different, you know, than when, you know, 20 years ago before the Internet was around.

00:44:16.000 So I think all of those things sort of have combined.

00:44:18.000 To bring us to this current moment.

00:44:20.000 OK, so let's talk about the fact you're obviously very openly Jewish, very openly Zionistic. 0.88

00:44:26.000 I'm extremely openly Jewish and openly Zionistic. 0.61

00:44:29.000 The yarmulke says it all.

00:44:31.000 But what that means is that I think for you, the aspect of the intersectional movement that was pretty obvious from the start was the crossover with anti-Semitism, which is Which is really kind of surprising and shocking if you're on the left.

00:44:46.000 And it's not quite as shocking if you have studied anything about anti-Semitism in the past, where basically labeling of all sorts of peoples always ends horribly for the Jews.

00:44:55.000 I mean, first of all, in that sentence you could pretty much supplant everything for the first half of that sentence, blank, and then it ends horribly for the Jews. 0.61

00:45:04.000 That's really the, you just covered all of Jewish history.

00:45:06.000 You don't need to read Paul Johnson's book, that's it.

00:45:08.000 We survive, let's eat.

00:45:10.000 Or fast.

00:45:10.000 No, they tried to kill us, we survived.

00:45:12.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:13.000 But the kind of, what you wrote about in your book, How to Fight Antisemitism, which was looked upon very critically by members of the left is the fact that there is an unwillingness to look antisemitism in the face, depending on your political viewpoint.

00:45:28.000 You and I discussed this before the book came out, because we talked about you coming on the show, and one of the things that I said is, I think that you're gonna find that a lot of people on the left are gonna be angry at you for writing this book, specifically because you point out that there is antisemitism on the left.

00:45:40.000 And if you want to fight antisemitism, you actually have to look at antisemitism on the right and point it out, and antisemitism on the left and point it out, and you have to fight it wherever you see it, or you can't really claim to be anti-antisemitism.

00:45:51.000 But that is, that's an unpopular point of view because there is a pretty strong correlation between belief in intersectionality and willingness to countenance antisemitism.

00:46:01.000 Yeah, I mean, just quick sort of like on one foot explanation is that Jews are getting squeezed from both extremes right now, right?

00:46:10.000 So you know better than probably anyone, you know, what anti-Semitism from the far right looks like.

00:46:15.000 It looks like saying, you know, Jews pretend to be white people. 0.86

00:46:19.000 They look like us.

00:46:20.000 They seem like us.

00:46:21.000 But in fact, you know, they're they're loyal to black people and brown people and Muslims and immigrants. 0.98

00:46:27.000 And in a sense, they're like the greatest trick the devil has ever played. 0.99

00:46:31.000 And that was certainly the ideology of the man that walked into the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah and killed as many Jews as he could. 0.57

00:46:37.000 And he specifically selected that synagogue because the previous Shabbat, the previous weekend, it participated in refugee Shabbat, the idea of, you know, welcoming the stranger and a biblical injunction to do so because we ourselves are strangers in the land of Egypt.

00:46:50.000 That's the right. And everyone knows that because it's explicit. We don't need to have a Talmudic debate about like going on gab.com and saying kill all the Jews. Like we all see what that is.

00:47:01.000 And because of course of, you know, because of course of Hitler and the long shadow of the Holocaust. 0.78

00:47:09.000 We all recognize it and there's incredible clarity around it.

00:47:12.000 And the trick with anti-Semitism from the left is that it comes cloaked in the language of sort of justice and progress and social justice.

00:47:22.000 And people are either willing to be tricked by that or genuinely are.

00:47:26.000 And what it says is sort of the mirror image of the thing I just expressed to you.

00:47:30.000 And it all is in the language of race because that's the language of America right now.

00:47:34.000 And it says, you know, hold on, you know, the Jews say that they're victims.

00:47:39.000 Jews say that they're a minority.

00:47:41.000 But look at them.

00:47:42.000 Look how successful they are. 0.83

00:47:44.000 They benefit from white privilege.

00:47:46.000 Ralph Lauren could change his name from Ralph Lifshitz to Ralph Lauren and pass.

00:47:51.000 You know, and not only do they benefit from white privilege, and therefore they're sort of adjacent to white supremacy, sort of holding up the scaffolding for it.

00:47:58.000 They're also doubly sinful, because they are loyal to the last standing bastion of white colonialism in the Middle East, which is the big lie that the Soviet Union told about Israel, and that has now sort of just made its way into mainstream progressive culture. 0.59

00:48:12.000 And so the Jews then, in their view of the world, become guilty of the two gravest sins, you know, white supremacy, white privilege, etc., and colonialism and imperialism. 0.91

00:48:23.000 And that's what it is right now.

00:48:27.000 And the thing that I just find so incredible is that you have this movement.

00:48:31.000 That is, you know, made up of these offense archaeologists who can go searching, you know, for an utterance that happened 20 years ago.

00:48:39.000 Or for, you know, a taco truck in Portland that's owned by people that aren't actually Hispanic.

00:48:44.000 You know, and, you know, there'll be dozens of stories written about that.

00:48:48.000 Online campaign, change.org. 0.75

00:48:51.000 And then Jews will get hacked up by a machete and they'll have nothing to say about it. 0.90

00:48:54.000 So that's what you need to know. 0.96

00:48:55.000 You don't need to understand, you know, all of the ins and outs of this ideology.

00:49:00.000 This is what they like to do.

00:49:01.000 They pretend they play these semantic games or they tell you you need to have a law degree or you've had to read these ten books by these theorists to understand it.

00:49:07.000 No.

00:49:08.000 You just have to see things with your eyes and ears.

00:49:10.000 And a movement that has more rage about, you know, Using the word Jedi or saying the phrase pregnant women than they do for Jews getting literally beaten in neighborhoods like Borough Park and Crown Heights, that tells you everything you need to know about its priorities.

00:49:29.000 The Democratic Party and the Republican Party obviously is more political than we've been throughout this conversation.

00:49:36.000 But it seems as though the Democratic Party has really drunken from a lot of this well.

00:49:41.000 And we saw, for example, that the Democratic Party, they had to pass a separate bill in order to pass, for example, Iron Dome funding.

00:49:47.000 Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have only recently, has anybody in the Democratic Party actually had the stones to stand up and say it was Ted Deutch from actually this district.

00:49:55.000 But it took a year and a half for anybody in the Democratic Party to point out the obvious, which is that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are not fond of the Jews.

00:50:02.000 It seems as though...

00:50:03.000 Yeah, not that that wasn't obvious before.

00:50:04.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:50:05.000 But, you know, in the same way that Steve King had to be ridden out of Congress on a rail by the Republican Party.

00:50:09.000 Correct.

00:50:10.000 Ilhan Omar is still sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House right now.

00:50:14.000 Yeah, although Marjorie Taylor Greene's still in there with her Jewish space laser comments, but yeah. 0.96

00:50:18.000 I will say that Marjorie Taylor Greene at least had the sense to go to the Holocaust Museum and mouth some words about it, which you really have not gotten from Ilhan Omar at this point.

00:50:18.000 She is.

00:50:28.000 And believe me, that's no defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

00:50:31.000 The point being that if you're looking at where the antisemitism is more mainstream in the parties, It seems as though it's being mainstreamed more into the Democratic Party at this point.

00:50:41.000 I'm wondering if you think that there's going to be any pushback to that, because it seems like the younger breed of Democrats are much more willing to move along with pretty openly anti-Semitic stuff than the older Democrats.

00:50:52.000 The older Democrats are still doing what older Democrats have historically done, which is they're more moderate on Israel.

00:50:56.000 They're still calling for concessions from Israel to the Palestinians.

00:51:00.000 All that sort of stuff.

00:51:00.000 But it's the same dynamic that, it's the exact same dynamic we were talking about before with, you know, the publisher of the New York Times, right?

00:51:08.000 Is he the publisher?

00:51:09.000 Is he in charge?

00:51:10.000 Or is Nicole Hannah-Jones actually in charge of the New York Times?

00:51:13.000 That's the question.

00:51:14.000 And it's like, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, they're supposed to be in charge of the party.

00:51:19.000 So why is it that, you know, it seems to most of us watching that the actual people in charge are AOC and Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar?

00:51:28.000 It's the exact same dynamic playing out everywhere.

00:51:32.000 So when I saw Ted Deutch, you know, stand up to it, I was like, wow, this is shocking.

00:51:37.000 Only because you've seen just utter capitulation.

00:51:40.000 I mean, during the last war with Gaza, I think you saw like, you know, one sentence press release or like the choking out of like the tiniest defense of Israel in a Facebook post by some of these people who are sensibly supposed to be in charge.

00:51:54.000 I think a lot of the institutionalized anti-Semitism, I think a lot of the anti-Semitism that's, you know, acceptable in, you know, elite, upper crust, intellectual circles, there's no question that's coming from the left.

00:52:09.000 But the gutter anti-Semitism, you know, the kind of anti-Semitism that, you know, leads people to send me really crazy letters or, you know, in the case of when I used to live in New York, like, call my rabbi and, you know, threaten us, that's often coming from the right.

00:52:23.000 The physical terror, the physical anti-Semitism, the violence, that's coming from the right.

00:52:29.000 The anti-Semitism that's sort of socially or politically acceptable, that's coming from the left.

00:52:33.000 And the whole thing is that you have to be fighting both.

00:52:37.000 And I think one of the sort of the tests is if you're serious about actually fighting Jew hate and you're on the right, you've got to be calling it out in your own house.

00:52:45.000 You've got to be calling it out on the right.

00:52:47.000 And if you're serious about it on the left, you have to be calling it out from the left.

00:52:51.000 And I think so often what we're seeing is people sort of using, you know, fake care about the Jews as a kind of political cudgel in order to beat the other side over the head.

00:53:00.000 So, we were talking before the show a little bit about, you know, our kind of great fears for the country, because you and I differ on a lot of policy prescriptions.

00:53:07.000 In fact, I think that we may differ on more than we agree on in terms of actual, in actual policy.

00:53:12.000 We may be on the same page on some foreign policy matters, but on domestic policy matters, you're much more of a government should be involved in Spending initiatives, person, you're much more socially liberal than I am on virtually all the issues that you mentioned earlier.

00:53:24.000 But we definitely agree on sort of the under the iceberg issues, which are, do we get to talk freely to one another?

00:53:29.000 Should we have conversations about this?

00:53:31.000 Should there be a level of subsidiarity in the United States?

00:53:33.000 Should there be due process?

00:53:34.000 Should people be judged based on the sins of their parents?

00:53:36.000 I mean, those small issues.

00:53:38.000 Right, exactly.

00:53:39.000 And so I guess that my great fear that we were discussing earlier is whether that Center is going to hold, which is sort of the core of the entire conversation.

00:53:48.000 Because what I'm seeing in politics right now is this reactionary ping-ponging where the left goes really far left and so the right very often will just react by saying, okay, well, you know what?

00:53:58.000 If you're going to use the ring of power this way, well, when I get the ring of power, I'm definitely not throwing it into Mount Doom.

00:54:03.000 I'm going to use the ring of power and I'm going to smack you so hard it's going to make your head spin.

00:54:07.000 And the idea is that if you don't smack them so hard that their head spins, they won't stop.

00:54:12.000 We're beyond the point of talking.

00:54:14.000 We're beyond the point of being able to live together in the country.

00:54:16.000 And I wonder how much of that is very online, but I also wonder how much of that's going to bleed down.

00:54:21.000 Because there is this feeling, you know, you're on Twitter a lot, I'm on Twitter a lot, and there is this saying that, you know, don't get too into the Twitter bubble, right?

00:54:27.000 Don't believe that Twitter is real life.

00:54:29.000 But it is.

00:54:30.000 But that's kind of the thing, right?

00:54:32.000 They used to say the same thing about college campuses.

00:54:34.000 I wrote my very first book, which I wrote in 2003, so I would have been 19.

00:54:37.000 12.

00:54:37.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:54:39.000 I was 19 when I wrote it.

00:54:40.000 It came out when I was 20.

00:54:42.000 And that book, which was about bias on college campuses and some of the stuff happening on college campuses, I remember the number one question I got is, who cares why it's happening on college campuses?

00:54:49.000 And the same thing is happening on Twitter.

00:54:52.000 As people start to, the two most live wires kind of in politics on Twitter right now are the hard left, the kind of woke squad left, And the nationalist populist right.

00:55:03.000 And the nationalist populist right.

00:55:04.000 And it seems like everybody who's sort of in between is being categorized as a squish in some way.

00:55:10.000 Exactly.

00:55:10.000 And so I'm wondering how you think, what do you think is the best way to push back against that?

00:55:15.000 This is the number one thing that I think about.

00:55:17.000 And, I mean, for me it's pretty simple.

00:55:19.000 The way that you push back against it is by not succumbing to it.

00:55:23.000 The way you push back against it is by saying, I refuse to make that choice.

00:55:26.000 The way you push back against it is by Doing sort of exactly what we're doing right now and what I'm trying to do with my podcast and my newsletter.

00:55:34.000 It's just calling out the balls and strikes as you see them, telling the truth, being willing, frankly, to piss off your audience.

00:55:43.000 You know, the problem of audience capture is definitely not something that's been solved.

00:55:47.000 The New York Times succumbed to it, but everyone succumbs to it.

00:55:50.000 You know, that's the nature of where we live.

00:55:52.000 And I knew the other day that, you know, I published this sort of forum on the question of vaccine mandates, and it contained, you know, two lightning rods, Glenn Greenwald and Adrian Vermeule.

00:56:02.000 And you better believe I lost a lot of paying subscribers that day from both perspectives.

00:56:07.000 And I thought to myself, you know what, that's okay.

00:56:10.000 Like, that's kind of what I need to be modeling, is I need to be Showing people in my own life, in the way I conduct myself, in the media company that hopefully I'm building, you know, that it is possible.

00:56:22.000 And the way to do it starts by modeling it.

00:56:25.000 I think that's really important.

00:56:26.000 So you've made a lot of life changes over the past few years.

00:56:28.000 You moved to the New York Times, you got married, you moved locations, and now you're thinking about moving locations again.

00:56:34.000 So how are you building?

00:56:35.000 We talked a little bit about building the kind of Life that you need to build, right?

00:56:39.000 With the support structure but allowing a sort of feedback loop to change your mind on things.

00:56:43.000 Yeah.

00:56:43.000 How are you thinking about constructing that sort of life?

00:56:45.000 First of all, I always am going to be grateful to the New York Times because that's where I met my wife, who has subsequently also left, although she's much classier than I am.

00:56:54.000 So she's done it in a much quieter, subtler way.

00:56:57.000 But she's helping me as we build this company.

00:57:00.000 And look, I would say that Judaism has been a huge anchor in my life, and increasingly so.

00:57:07.000 There was a period of my life when I was in college and then afterward where I was pretty religious, you know, keeping Shabbat, keeping kosher and everything, and then I kind of moved away from it.

00:57:15.000 And now I would say we're definitely moving back in that direction.

00:57:18.000 I think that, you know, being anchored in community, hosting Shabbat dinner or going to one every single Friday night, trying very hard to get totally offline for 25 hours, Being deeply connected with my incredible family in Pittsburgh, a huge extended family, we'll probably end up there at some point.

00:57:37.000 These are the things that ultimately make a life.

00:57:39.000 These are the things that make being in public and being disliked and kind of hearing the noise without letting it penetrate your soul, that's what makes it possible.

00:57:49.000 And I just don't think that there's a way to do it and get sort of buffeted by it without having that anchoring, without having that mooring.

00:57:57.000 Definitely want to start a family.

00:58:00.000 I want to have a balanced, good life, and I feel extremely, extremely, extremely lucky that I feel like I've sort of born into that, continuing to build that, and really being able to be free, genuinely, in what I'm doing with my writing and what I'm doing with the kind of people that I'm trying to elevate.

00:58:22.000 I really believe that, you know, if Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter were as famous as Ibram Kendi, you know, if Chloe Valdari were as famous as Nicole Hannah-Jones, if, you know, there's lots of young people I'm talking to all the time, but if they had the kind of sway over the culture that some of these other people have, we would be in a really different place.

00:58:44.000 And so that's what I'm really, really focused on trying to do.

00:58:47.000 So I actually want to ask you about what you think is the future of what you're doing, because it is a growing enterprise.

00:58:53.000 You obviously have a big audience and it's going to get bigger.

00:58:55.000 So I want to talk to you about that in just one second.

00:58:57.000 First, if you want to hear Barry Weiss's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.

00:59:00.000 Go to dailywire.com, click subscribe.

00:59:02.000 You can hear the rest of our conversation over there.

00:59:04.000 Barry, can't wait to see what you build next.

00:59:07.000 Everyone, make sure to check out Barry's new podcast, Honestly with Barry Weiss.

00:59:10.000 It is worth the listen and her sub stack, Common Sense with Barry Weiss.

00:59:13.000 Barry, thanks so much for joining us.

00:59:14.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:59:21.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Glover, executive producer Jeremy Boring, and our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.

00:59:31.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

00:59:33.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

00:59:34.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.

00:59:36.000 Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.

00:59:38.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:59:40.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 17, 2021

Bari Weiss | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 119

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