The Ben Shapiro Show - May 30, 2025


Battling For The Heart of Western Civilization | @ CPAC Hungary

Topics
spiritual obligations woke culture
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Donald Trump Shapiro Jean-Paul Sartre Putin King Charles Frantz Fanon JD Vance Alexander Solzhenitsyn Machine Learning Pascal Bruckner Friedrich Merz Daniel Cohen Pure Talk J.D. Wenz Al-Andalus Sabbath Israel
Elon’s Farewell and Trump’s Tariff War Dead? Greta Goes To Gaza!

Episode Stats


Length

41 minutes

Words per minute

177.08

Word count

7,346

Sentence count

501

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

25

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking is a world-renowned neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of The Dark Side of Enlightenment. He is a leading voice in the anti-Western, anti-Marxist and anti-colonial movements of the 20th and 30th centuries, and is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. His work has been widely known and appreciated throughout history, and he is a frequent lecturer at international conferences and conferences. He has been a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, and The New Republic, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1989.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:14.000 Thank you so much for having me.
00:00:15.000 I really appreciate it.
00:00:16.000 It is amazing to be here in Budapest.
00:00:20.000 I want to talk today about the battle for the heart of Western civilization.
00:00:24.000 But to do that, we have to start with a definition of what Western civilization actually is.
00:00:30.000 Western civilization, rooted in man's individual liberty and his collective duty, in his freedom of speech and in his duty to act virtuously, in his property rights and in his familial obligations.
00:00:44.000 In the right to the equal application of the law, Western civilization is unique.
00:00:48.000 It is the wellspring of virtually all human prosperity and all human progress.
00:00:54.000 And Western civilization did not come from nowhere.
00:00:57.000 It came from biblical wisdom, the wisdom of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:01:03.000 It came from the Bible's admonition that we ought to seek truth through the light of reason.
00:01:08.000 When we cut ourselves off from the sources of our own civilization, Our civilization decays.
00:01:14.000 And make no mistake, our civilization is now in the midst of decay.
00:01:19.000 We can see that decay in the anarchic marchers in the streets, chanting on behalf of radical Islamic terror groups by the hundreds of thousands.
00:01:28.000 We can see it in the push by intellectual elitists for a bizarre alternative morality that suggests the fundamental free-flowing nature of sexual identity, where boys can be girls.
00:01:41.000 And behavior ought to be separated utterly from the realm of morality.
00:01:45.000 We can see it in the push for an ever-growing domination of a powerful governmental infrastructure, crowding out familial bonds, crowding out church in favor of a faceless state that offers money rather than virtue.
00:01:59.000 We can see it in that crusade against churches that refuse to jettison their values in favor of moral relativism flying rainbow flags.
00:02:08.000 What are these forces that have mobilized against our civilization?
00:02:11.000 Well, the key force is the force of Western postmodern leftism.
00:02:16.000 Sure, we can look at the radical Islamists who have invaded Europe, who support terrorism, who use Western governments to impose effective fatwas against Westerners who speak out against them, people who target Jews and Christians, who openly chant for the downfall of the civilization that they leech upon. 0.62
00:02:33.000 But the question really isn't radical Islamists.
00:02:36.000 They, after all, are doing just what they have always done, invading and conquering. 0.74
00:02:40.000 The question is why the West allowed them in.
00:02:44.000 And the answer is that the West, thanks to that postmodern left, bears a peculiar and self-defeating blood guilt.
00:02:51.000 A guilt that says that because the West is too successful, it owes it to the rest of the world to destroy itself.
00:02:59.000 Maybe the most colorful champion of this philosophy was the Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.
00:03:05.000 In 1961, a Francophone rebel named Frans Fanon wrote a shockingly violent book titled The Wretched of the Earth, in which he posited that colonized peoples had a moral duty to kill their colonizers, that they ought to unleash, in his words, red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.
00:03:22.000 Frans Fanon expressed that the colonized man was right to want to rape the wipe of his colonizer, to murder him, to take what he had.
00:03:30.000 And Sartre, just a Western leftist, agreed.
00:03:33.000 The West, Sartre said, was an inherent colonizer.
00:03:37.000 Its very success in the world, whether through war or through markets, was a sign of its uniquely rapacious and exploitative nature.
00:03:45.000 Thus, Sartre argued, Europeans had to die at the hands of their victims.
00:03:50.000 He said, quote, To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.
00:03:58.000 Then there remains a dead man and a free man.
00:04:01.000 In other words, Sartre...
00:04:05.000 And the West largely complied.
00:04:07.000 But why did the West comply?
00:04:09.000 Now part of the answer that lies in the West's pathological and religiously based adherence to the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance. 0.62
00:04:17.000 Our culture, Western culture, is a guilt culture.
00:04:20.000 A culture that focuses on the reality of absolute morality.
00:04:23.000 And says that when we fail, we are guilty.
00:04:26.000 This means that we feel bad when we sin.
00:04:28.000 That's actually one of our virtues.
00:04:30.000 But there are lots of other cultures, shame cultures, like, say, the Islamic cultures, or pre-World War II culture of Imperial Japan, or, say, the modern left, that focuses not on any absolute standard of morality or conscience, but on the evil of being humiliated.
00:04:45.000 For these folks, admitting fault is the weakness.
00:04:48.000 Well, because we in the West reflexively look to our own sins before those of others, we fall prey to civilizationally suicidal impulses.
00:04:56.000 Our enemies don't.
00:04:57.000 They're happy to blame us for their problems, And unfortunately, we're all too happy to blame ourselves.
00:05:03.000 As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, quote, the duty to repent forbids the Western bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions.
00:05:13.000 Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths closed.
00:05:17.000 Our only right is to remain silent.
00:05:19.000 But why should we feel uniquely guilty?
00:05:22.000 The West seems to bear a unique amount of guilt because we have come to believe a giant lie.
00:05:28.000 A great, giant lie about ourselves.
00:05:31.000 And that lie is that we, the West, are uniquely evil.
00:05:34.000 And we hear this lie all the time.
00:05:36.000 Just a couple of days ago, for example, King Charles visited Canada, a country with a parliament, only because it was once a dominion of the British crown, and then read a land acknowledgement to the Algonquin Indians as though the British Empire ought to repent its establishment of the country of Canada. 0.91
00:05:52.000 The very concept is ridiculous. 0.61
00:05:53.000 Watching King Charles sit there in all of his royal regalia, lamenting his own empire, is insane. 0.89
00:06:09.000 And that lie gained an enormous amount of credibility due to the horrors of the 20th century.
00:06:14.000 We were told, often by Marxists like Sartre, that imperialism was a uniquely Western phenomenon, despite the fact that human beings have conquered other people for as long as human beings have existed.
00:06:24.000 We were told that the Nazis and their allies We're natural outgrowths of Western civilization rather than perversions of it.
00:06:32.000 We were told that if we abandoned biblical values in favor of a sort of namby-pamby secularism, we could avoid all the terrible atrocities of the past, even though it was the pagan dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, the secular dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, not their biblical adherents that led to their assault on humanity.
00:06:49.000 We were told that if we mitigated our cultural honor, if we discarded it, we could then expunge our sins.
00:06:56.000 Even though it was craving cowardice in the face of transnational left-wing movements like Nazism and Communism that led to their domination of the European continent, and proud resurgent patriotism that stopped it.
00:07:08.000 We were told that if we abandoned our borders, we could alleviate our guilt, even though, obviously, the Nazis and the Soviets had no respect for borders and sought to obliterate them themselves.
00:07:17.000 It was not Western civilization.
00:07:19.000 It was not adherence to biblical values, rule of law, free speech, and private property rights that led to the tragedies and horrors of the 20th century.
00:07:27.000 It was the rejection of the West's core values that led to those horrors.
00:07:31.000 But too many in the West believed the lie that the horrors were the result of Western civilization rather than a perversion of it.
00:07:37.000 And in believing that lie, we surrendered our own civilization to people who would destroy it. 0.96
00:07:42.000 We turned over our nations to consortiums of international elitists.
00:07:49.000 Well, now it is time to reverse that process.
00:07:58.000 We have to, in all humility, recognize that Western civilization, like all civilizations, has of course committed sordid wrongs and egregious evils.
00:08:06.000 But the truth, the real truth, something we have known for a very long time, like since the Garden of Eden, is that all human beings have a capacity for evil.
00:08:14.000 Human evil is a universal truth.
00:08:17.000 But the glories of Western civilization are not universal.
00:08:20.000 They come from a particular philosophy, a particular history, a particular culture.
00:08:25.000 Western civilization isn't uniquely evil.
00:08:28.000 Western civilization is uniquely good.
00:08:30.000 Slavery was a human universal.
00:08:33.000 It was Western civilization that ended it.
00:08:35.000 Poverty is a human universal.
00:08:38.000 It was Western civilization that has exponentially mitigated it.
00:08:41.000 War is a human universal.
00:08:43.000 Western civilization has wildly reduced it.
00:08:46.000 And the secular postmodern leftists who refuse to admit this, they are engaging in evil of their own.
00:08:52.000 This country, the very country these secular postmodern leftists seem to despise, a country they label Nazi-esque, is the only country in Europe, perhaps, that is not currently overrun by Islamic radicals. 0.93
00:09:03.000 This supposedly Nazi-esque country is the only country in Europe where I, an Orthodox Jew, can walk in safety and comfort down the street wearing a yarmulke.
00:09:12.000 It is a country where children don't actually have to fear that their innocence will be robbed by a perverse anti-biblical left seeking the spiritual destruction of those children.
00:09:22.000 Hungary, like the rest of the West, isn't perfect, because no country is. 0.54
00:09:26.000 But Hungarians are trying to stand up for their civilization, our shared Western heritage and civilization.
00:09:31.000 And that is a thing that is worth fighting for.
00:09:34.000 And if we fight for it, we will emerge victorious against the forces that seek to destroy our civilization from outside and inside as well.
00:09:42.000 Happy to take your questions.
00:09:42.000 Thanks so much.
00:09:43.000 Happy to take your questions.
00:10:05.000 There's a lot coming up.
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00:10:50.000 Hello, Mr. Shapiro.
00:10:52.000 Thank you so much for your speech.
00:10:54.000 I have a question regarding the national identity.
00:10:58.000 So although President Trump took office in Washington, D.C., here globalist elites in Europe are actually trying to erode our national sovereignty by mass migration and by open border policies.
00:11:14.000 And my question to you is, what do you think, what is the best way for European conservatives to reassert our national identities?
00:11:23.000 And thank you so much in advance.
00:11:26.000 It's a great question.
00:11:27.000 I mean, I think, number one, One place where Hungary clearly has led Europe is in reasserting its national identity, specifically with regard to rejecting mass migration from areas that absolutely reject Western civilization as a whole. 0.56
00:11:40.000 And you guys are paying, I believe, something like a million euros a day for the privilege right now, thanks to the predations of the European Union.
00:11:47.000 I think that you are starting to see a rising tide that is going to reject mass migration.
00:11:53.000 That rising tide is happening in France.
00:11:54.000 It's obviously happening in Germany.
00:11:56.000 It's actually happened in Denmark, where a left-wing party has radically restricted immigration.
00:12:00.000 So I think that the era of open migration is over.
00:12:03.000 There's one area where the Prime Minister, he was ahead of his time.
00:12:07.000 He took an enormous amount of flack for doing what Hungary did. 0.96
00:12:10.000 And time has proved him right.
00:12:12.000 And nations that refuse to protect their own border are nations that are going to suffer for it.
00:12:16.000 And the populations of those nations know it.
00:12:18.000 Now, obviously, there are people...
00:12:26.000 You'll see an upsurge in right-wing or conservative or anti-mass immigration sentiment.
00:12:31.000 And then it will sort of be shoveled off to the side because no one really wants to talk about it.
00:12:35.000 But you can only suppress that for so long.
00:12:37.000 That situation for supposedly center-right or center-left parties that are siding with the radical left on these issues, eventually the lid is going to blow off of that jar, and what's going to come out is going to be the sentiment of Europeans, that they do not actually wish to have their cultures discarded in favor of a failed multiculturalism that has destroyed every state it's touched.
00:12:58.000 Thank you.
00:13:04.000 Hi, Ben.
00:13:05.000 I'm here.
00:13:07.000 It's an honor to ask you.
00:13:08.000 My name is Balazs and my question is the following.
00:13:11.000 Secularism has hollowed out the spiritual core of the Western civilization. 0.94
00:13:17.000 How can conservatism survive in such conditions in a godless culture?
00:13:23.000 And how can we actively reintroduce the Judeo-Christian values set to our societies to ensure order and the real meaning?
00:13:39.000 So, I mean, the answer is that Western civilization cannot survive full-scale secularism and godlessness, and that's what we've been watching.
00:13:46.000 And the restoration of church is the fundamental basis of a restoration of the West.
00:13:52.000 I say this as a Jew.
00:13:54.000 Everybody who grew up in a Christian household and whose grandparents were Christian needs to go to church. 1.00
00:13:59.000 Everyone.
00:14:00.000 It is deeply, deeply important that they go to church and re-engage with their religious heritage and re-engage with God and re-engage with an absolute morality that suggests that there is a right and that there is a wrong.
00:14:09.000 Because again, all the things that I just talked about spring from those biblical values.
00:14:13.000 And there is no substitute for it.
00:14:15.000 And I think that's why you're seeing, actually, in the United States, an increase in religious adherence among young people.
00:14:19.000 For the first time in my lifetime, it was going in one direction.
00:14:22.000 It was going down and to the right.
00:14:23.000 And now it's moving up again.
00:14:24.000 And the reason is because it turns out that a life that's filled with secularism eventually becomes hollow.
00:14:31.000 And not for everybody.
00:14:32.000 There are some people who can lead fulfilled lives of their own making.
00:14:34.000 But the reality is that for a broad population, finding meaning in a meaningless universe is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.
00:14:42.000 And for a civilization, it's actually just impossible.
00:14:45.000 Because to slide from secularism to nihilism is not much of a slide.
00:14:49.000 But if you actually want to, for example, have a civilization that has children, I mean, this is what every statistic shows.
00:14:54.000 Religious adherence and having lots of kids go hand in hand.
00:14:57.000 You're not going to restore natalism in the West without having people go to church. 0.94
00:15:01.000 It's just not going to happen.
00:15:02.000 You have to have a national mission.
00:15:03.000 You have to have a godly mission.
00:15:05.000 It's why the only country actually in the West that currently has above replacement rates of population growth is Israel.
00:15:12.000 Because it's a country that is largely religious.
00:15:15.000 Even the secular people in Israel have some semblance of religion.
00:15:17.000 And also because they're surrounded by enemies on all sides, and that means that they feel the actual patriotic necessity to have kids.
00:15:24.000 That sort of thing can be restored, but you have to have civilizational pride, and that civilizational pride is rooted in a belief in a higher power that demands something of you.
00:15:33.000 Also, the success of Western civilization rests on a very simple principle, which is, if you fail, it's probably your own fault.
00:15:40.000 Every failed civilization is rooted in the opposite.
00:15:42.000 That if you fail, it's somebody else's fault.
00:15:44.000 But successes in life and successful civilizations say that freedom exists so that if you fail, you're the one to blame.
00:15:50.000 That's what religion says.
00:15:51.000 What the Bible says, all over the Bible, is if you fail, that's not God's fault.
00:15:56.000 That's your fault.
00:15:57.000 You did it.
00:15:58.000 And that means you need to take responsibility for your life and make it better.
00:16:00.000 And without that...
00:16:04.000 So I think there's a reason why people are going back to church, thank God.
00:16:07.000 I think that there's a God-shaped hole in people's hearts that was opened up by secularism.
00:16:11.000 People have tried to fill that hole with everything from pornography to chatbots to just the Internet itself to rage and political polarization.
00:16:21.000 None of that fills the God-shaped hole.
00:16:23.000 The only thing that fills the God-shaped hole is God.
00:16:25.000 Thank you.
00:16:25.000 Thank you.
00:16:32.000 Hello.
00:16:33.000 Mr. Shapiro, allow me to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said that the strength and weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization.
00:16:43.000 If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development.
00:16:52.000 A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
00:16:55.000 Mr. Shapiro, we all see the efforts of the Trump administration, which you support.
00:17:00.000 To improve the industrial and governmental structure of the United States.
00:17:04.000 However, is equally as much being done to reinvigorate the more important spiritual energies of the West?
00:17:10.000 And if so, what?
00:17:12.000 So, this is a great question.
00:17:14.000 And it goes to the heart of what government can actually do in concert with religious institutions.
00:17:19.000 Because the truth is that religious institutions are what we would call intermediary institutions in life, right?
00:17:25.000 You have, like, you and your family, and then you have the government, which...
00:17:30.000 But then you have these sort of intermediate institutions that you deal with, these informal societal institutions where you really form all of your social bonds.
00:17:37.000 The question is, what can government do to prop those up and strengthen them?
00:17:41.000 And by the way, I totally agree with you that everybody who's looking for re-industrialization to fill the God-shaped hole, again, the only thing that fills the God-shaped hole is God, not a factory job.
00:17:51.000 And so if you're trying to actually fill that God-shaped hole with God again, then what you actually need to do...
00:18:00.000 That's something that we in the state of Florida, in Florida, we do this.
00:18:04.000 We actually have stipends for everybody who wants to go to private school, and religious schools are really filling the gap.
00:18:08.000 We have huge vouchers for every kid in the state of Florida.
00:18:12.000 And my kids, for example, our recipients, they go to a Jewish day school.
00:18:16.000 They have a lot of friends who go to Christian schools, specifically because of this.
00:18:19.000 That is a big one, obviously.
00:18:21.000 We also need to get government out of the business of crowding out churches.
00:18:24.000 So it used to be So in my community, for example, I'll take mine as an example just because I know it the best.
00:18:33.000 If somebody loses their job, the first move is to go to members of the community and say, does anybody know who has a job for this person?
00:18:40.000 How do we help this person get a job?
00:18:41.000 If there needs to be a meal train, right, everybody needs to get together and help fund this person to get through hard times, people in the community do it.
00:18:48.000 When government fulfills that role, when government comes in and just hands you a check, It breaks the bonds that you actually have with the people in your church and in your society.
00:18:56.000 That level of mutual dependence that exists at the intermediate level, that comes along with spiritual obligations.
00:19:01.000 Because if you want to be part of that social club that represents my synagogue, that comes along with certain duties to God.
00:19:07.000 You have to keep Sabbath, you have to send your kids to Jewish day school probably, you have to keep kosher. 1.00
00:19:11.000 And that was true for literally all churches for all the time.
00:19:14.000 To be part of this social club, there were obligations that attached as well, which is also how you knew that your neighbor wasn't mooching off of you.
00:19:20.000 You knew that your neighbor wasn't just taking money out of your pocket because they had to fulfill religious obligations and show skin in the game.
00:19:26.000 The increase in the size and scope of government has crowded out a lot of the social functions of churches and intermediate institutions.
00:19:32.000 I would, number one, suggest that government does have an active role to play in allowing people to send their kids to more expensive religious schools in the United States, for example, because that's good.
00:19:44.000 But I also think that the government should get out of a lot of these realms and allow that social gap to be filled by what it used to be filled by, namely the people that you live next to and with, and with whom you share a religious belief system.
00:19:56.000 We'll get to more on that in a moment.
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00:22:10.000 Hi, Ben.
00:22:11.000 Welcome to Hungary. 0.65
00:22:12.000 My question is regarding J.D. Wenz's Naval Academy speech that you also covered on your show earlier this week, I think.
00:22:20.000 What do you think is the meaning behind the sort of strategic shift of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy that he spoke in length about?
00:22:29.000 Thank you.
00:22:30.000 So the question is about the shift in American foreign policy and what it represents right now.
00:22:34.000 I will say that I think there are multiple strains of foreign policy that are currently playing out simultaneously inside the Trump administration, and the result is a lot of uncertainty.
00:22:43.000 I'm not sure that anyone has sort of a solid read on what the next move from the Trump administration will be in, say, Ukraine, or with regard to Israel, with regard to Iran, with regard to China.
00:22:54.000 There are a bunch of strains that are competing.
00:22:56.000 So the speech that you mentioned, J.D. Vance's speech at the Naval Academy.
00:22:59.000 What he was rejecting was, I think, a straw man that's been burned 20 years ago, essentially.
00:23:04.000 He's saying that we will no longer engage in the sort of interventionist Wilsonian philosophy that led to the war in Iraq.
00:23:13.000 I'm not sure how many Americans at this point raise their hand when you say, if you know then what you know now, would you go to war in Iraq?
00:23:19.000 How many hands go up?
00:23:20.000 The answer is probably zero.
00:23:21.000 So he's fighting against an impulse that no longer exists in the American body politic.
00:23:26.000 The question is, what does he mean practically?
00:23:29.000 And so I've always believed that President Trump understands peace through strength, which was sort of Trump 1.0, which was we don't have interests in every conflict all along the globe.
00:23:39.000 We don't have to get involved in every conflict.
00:23:40.000 But where we do have interests, we have to muscularly defend those interests.
00:23:44.000 And the only thing in some cases that defends those interests is the credible threat of use of force.
00:23:49.000 And that's why, for example, when it comes to Ukraine, I've taken the position that President Trump is right that he wants to get to an off ramp.
00:23:55.000 I've been calling for an off-ramp in Ukraine since August of 2022, but He gave him a 30-day ceasefire.
00:24:06.000 He's giving him the rare earth minerals deal.
00:24:08.000 He's giving him the possibility of a face-to-face negotiation with Putin, no preconditions.
00:24:12.000 And Putin, meanwhile, is doing none of those things.
00:24:14.000 And so the only way to get Putin to the table, presumably, is to up the ante on the pressure with an eye toward an off-ramp.
00:24:21.000 Now, is that something that J.D. Vance wants?
00:24:22.000 I have no idea.
00:24:23.000 I have no idea what J.D. wants.
00:24:24.000 I'm not sure what the president's foreign policy is.
00:24:27.000 With regard to Ukraine, it seems to shift fairly frequently.
00:24:30.000 And again, there's something to strategic ambiguity, but there's a point where strategic ambiguity, like, you don't know what he's going to do next, so don't screw with this guy.
00:24:37.000 There's a point where strategic ambiguity shifts over into just pure uncertainty.
00:24:41.000 And America's enemies can take uncertainty as a sign of weakness, and that's one of my concerns.
00:24:51.000 Hi, Ben.
00:24:52.000 Malka, fellow Orthodox Jew.
00:24:53.000 And my question was, we have 10 kids and we moved out of the States because of how intense and invasive the woke culture has gotten in the States.
00:25:04.000 And my question is, how do you think Donald Trump, if he can stall this decline in the U.S., if he can reinstate conservative values, what do you think?
00:25:15.000 What is your opinion on this?
00:25:16.000 So I do think that woke culture is on...
00:25:21.000 By this I mean that ten years ago, when I was saying that boys are not girls, I was nearly kicked off of every social media platform.
00:25:29.000 Now, that is actual government policy from the White House on down.
00:25:33.000 And I think that there's been a very harsh reaction to the woke philosophy, which essentially suggests, in essence, that every disparity in outcome is due to discrimination.
00:25:43.000 That if one group does worse than another group, it must be because the system is designed in order to harm that group.
00:25:48.000 I think the American people are tired of that.
00:25:49.000 I think that's why some of the most popular stuff that President Trump has done is taking on, for example, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is just wokeness, or taking on the transagenda in the United States, which, again, is really unpopular in the United States.
00:26:02.000 I think that wokeness has a real problem on its hands. 1.00
00:26:05.000 Now, the thing that I'm fearful of is that all the good that President Trump is doing, how long does it last?
00:26:12.000 Is there a reversion back to woke in the aftermath of President Trump?
00:26:16.000 And the answer there is going to be determined by how successful President Trump is on sort of the baseline governance things.
00:26:23.000 If the economy remains very strong, I think wokeness is in serious trouble for the long haul.
00:26:26.000 If the economy were to tank, and now it's a package deal where you get a sort of left-wing populism that surges along with the wokeness, you could get a package deal where wokeness rears its ugly head all over again. 0.83
00:26:38.000 I don't think you can wipe out wokeness in a single moment. 1.00
00:26:40.000 I think the attempt to do so is laudable, but I think that...
00:26:50.000 It's going to take a more long-term vision of how to keep that at bay.
00:26:54.000 But I do think the American people are very, very tired of it.
00:26:57.000 So let's put it this way.
00:26:57.000 I'm significantly more optimistic about the death of wokeness than I was, say, three years ago.
00:27:01.000 Thank you.
00:27:06.000 Hi, Ben.
00:27:07.000 You often emphasize facts and logic.
00:27:11.000 And you've already mentioned in your speech that many of our opponents operate purely on an emotional and pseudo-moralistic level.
00:27:19.000 So do you think that the right should embrace moral and emotional arguments more strategically in order to win the cultural war?
00:27:27.000 Thank you.
00:27:28.000 I mean, I think that's a great question.
00:27:29.000 So I frequently say facts don't care about your feelings, but the response very frequently is in feelings don't care about your facts.
00:27:35.000 Which is very often true. 0.97
00:27:37.000 People are making emotional arguments.
00:27:39.000 You cite a fact at them.
00:27:40.000 They ignore the fact because they feel a particular way about a particular issue.
00:27:43.000 Should we be making more emotionally laden arguments?
00:27:45.000 I mean, the answer is absolutely sometimes.
00:27:48.000 I mean, my hope would be that the emotional argument comes atop a layer of facts.
00:27:53.000 It's sort of a pie in which the crust of the pie, the base of the pie, is going to be the facts.
00:27:59.000 And then you do have to put in some emotional content that appeals to the heartstrings if you hope to actually foster a positive agenda sometimes, because, of course, you're going I think that when the emotions substitute for the facts, that's where I start to lose it.
00:28:17.000 And, again, I'm not sure that that's only a left-wing phenomenon.
00:28:19.000 I think it's a universal human phenomenon.
00:28:21.000 You sometimes see this on the right, which is why the right will drift into sort of conspiracy theories.
00:28:25.000 They'll say, I don't care about the facts.
00:28:27.000 There must be somebody who's attempting to screw me.
00:28:28.000 It's probably the small cadre of people.
00:28:30.000 And, you know, if there's no facts to back that, I'm very uninterested in that take.
00:28:35.000 If there are facts to back it, now you're talking about something completely different.
00:28:37.000 So, again, I think you're right.
00:28:39.000 The foundation has to be facts.
00:28:40.000 But, yeah, sure, you're going to have to build some sort of emotional superstructure atop that if you hope to be convincing.
00:28:50.000 Hi, Ben.
00:28:51.000 I'm Shalom.
00:28:52.000 I'm a big fan.
00:28:53.000 And my question is about what people like to call lately the woke right.
00:28:59.000 So, as we all see and all observe in the last two years since the war began in Israel, that more and more pretty prominent conservative voices in America started to say sometimes subtle, sometimes not as subtle.
00:29:18.000 Quite explicit anti-Semitic stuff.
00:29:22.000 And for me, as an Israeli Jew, that's pretty worrying because I always saw the conservative movement in America as a natural ally.
00:29:30.000 So my question is, how much of a percentage does that represent of conservatives in America?
00:29:36.000 How much are you worried about it?
00:29:38.000 And how do you think we should reply or we should deal with this new financial?
00:29:49.000 And so I'll try to be very specific about who I think you're talking about and you tell me if I'm wrong.
00:29:54.000 I think that the philosophy of the people that you are referring to essentially says that there is, just like the left, a group of people who are put upon.
00:30:03.000 And that group of people who are put upon are put upon by an elite cadre of people.
00:30:07.000 You hear they're often named Czech Jews or Israelis or Israeli foreign aid.
00:30:12.000 And that's what's making their life bad.
00:30:14.000 So it's that in the same way that the left will argue that every disparity is, in fact, discrimination, that everything that is unequal between two parties must be because someone is harming the right might say that it's white Appalachian people in America.
00:30:35.000 But the similarity...
00:30:43.000 And so, is that a problem on the right?
00:30:45.000 I mean, you can see sort of a populist right that edges toward that and veers directly into it more than a little these days.
00:30:45.000 Absolutely.
00:30:55.000 I don't like that.
00:30:56.000 You know, along any lines.
00:30:57.000 I think that it's very bad.
00:30:58.000 How popular is it?
00:31:00.000 I think some of it is being bolstered, frankly, by algorithmic problems at places like TikTok, which is a Chinese spy app, or like at, certainly, X is being gamed by malign actors. 0.64
00:31:12.000 There's no question that's the case.
00:31:13.000 So how popular is it in reality?
00:31:16.000 Not particularly popular with the American people generally.
00:31:19.000 It is increasingly popular with young people who are being told, after years and years of being lied to by the elite, The elites can never be trusted, and the only people you can trust are people who posit conspiracy theories.
00:31:31.000 The logic goes something like, the elitists told us something was false, and they were lying.
00:31:36.000 And I told you the truth because I said they were lying.
00:31:38.000 That means I'm telling you the truth about literally everything, and there's a conspiracy behind everything that I'm also uncovering.
00:31:43.000 That sort of conspiracy theorizing, that just asking questions that I've criticized so frequently.
00:31:48.000 The purpose of a question should be to elicit an answer.
00:31:50.000 The purpose of a question should be to elicit a fact.
00:31:53.000 If you're just asking questions, because what you actually hope to do is seed doubt about people in the minds of other people, not based on fact, but based on sort of a malignant hatred, then yeah, I'm obviously very much worried about that.
00:32:08.000 I think you see it very often.
00:32:09.000 I mean, I spoke about this at length last week, actually.
00:32:11.000 When people suggest that Israel is committing a genocide, for example, in the Gaza Strip, which is an absurdity on every level.
00:32:16.000 There is literally no definition of a genocide that fits what's going on in the Gaza Strip right now.
00:32:20.000 There has never been a genocide.
00:32:22.000 In which the supposedly genocidal party somehow increases the population of the group that it's genociding.
00:32:29.000 That has never happened.
00:32:30.000 It has not fed that group to the tune of hundreds of trucks per day while that group is holding hostages.
00:32:36.000 It makes no sense.
00:32:37.000 If you're participating in that lie, there must be some sort of ulterior motive that is not factually driven.
00:32:43.000 Thank you.
00:32:44.000 Thank you.
00:32:49.000 So, good evening, Mr. Shapiro.
00:32:51.000 Thank you for joining us for this session.
00:32:53.000 My question would be about that both Europe and America is facing with a cultural crisis, which is pressured by cultural vocism.
00:33:09.000 So, what do you think, what could be the cornerstone of a transatlantic conservative alliance?
00:33:15.000 I think that, as we've been talking about, the cornerstone of any transatlantic conservative alliance will actually have to be shared traditional values, which is amazing, because 20 years ago, the right was totally disunified about traditional values, and I think that's why you had the subsequent 20 years.
00:33:31.000 If you went back to the year 2000 and you said, what unifies the right?
00:33:34.000 Well, you would say is there's actually a lot of social debate over everything from sort of abortion to same-sex marriage.
00:33:43.000 And now it's kind of the opposite.
00:33:45.000 If you were to talk about the things that unite the right, the thing that unites the right is opposition to wokeness.
00:33:50.000 So opposition to transgender philosophy, for example.
00:33:54.000 Opposition to the idea that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was a genius move.
00:34:01.000 there's actually pretty wide consensus across the entire right on those particular issues.
00:34:06.000 And what I really mean here is that I mean, we keep coming back to that.
00:34:14.000 But if you're going to build from anything, that's the most solid basis from which human beings have ever built anything.
00:34:18.000 That seems like the best basis from which to build.
00:34:20.000 Everything else can be argued.
00:34:22.000 People can make arguments on either side with regard to the free market.
00:34:25.000 I think the arguments stack up very strongly in favor of the free market.
00:34:28.000 but you can hear people who will suggest particular governmental interventions that they think are more salutary or not.
00:34:34.000 But when it comes to actually building a civilization, That seems like a pretty good basis for a shared civilization.
00:34:59.000 Hi, Ben.
00:35:00.000 Great speech.
00:35:01.000 I really liked what you said, especially about the resurgence and the revival of the church.
00:35:05.000 It was great to hear you say that from the podium there.
00:35:08.000 My name is Daniel Cohen.
00:35:09.000 I'm with the Real Life Network.
00:35:10.000 It's pro-God, pro-Israel, pro-Bible, pro-family.
00:35:13.000 I actually live in Israel.
00:35:14.000 I'm American and Israeli.
00:35:16.000 And I was horrified, as I think most people, most common-sensed people, were by the murder of the Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C. And as shocking as that was, it was shocking, but I have to say,
00:35:47.000 The left is going to do what the left is going to do, but how do you, how do we engage conservatives, people on the right, to become more vocal, to become more active, and to engage in this fight to support Israel? 0.53
00:35:58.000 Well, I mean, I think that the first thing that people on the right and generally in Western civilization should understand are that the people that Israel are fighting are fighting the entire West.
00:36:07.000 I mean, that's something that this country actually really understands, which is why they closed their borders to migrants who are coming from especially those areas. 0.99
00:36:14.000 And the notion that Hamas has a hatred for Jews, but they love Christians, it's insane. 0.95
00:36:21.000 I mean, it's patently insane.
00:36:22.000 The notion that Hamas, they really, all the people shouting from the river to the sea, And wearing, on the one hand, a rainbow flag, and on the other, a Hamas armband. 0.78
00:36:33.000 These people are friends to the traditional people of Western civilization.
00:36:39.000 They're not friends, they're enemies.
00:36:41.000 There's a reason why the enemies of Israel are constantly talking about how they wish to not only kill Jews, but also to free Al-Andalus, which is Spain.
00:36:52.000 This bizarre notion. 0.99
00:36:54.000 That all of the hatred of the radical Islamic world is directed against Jews is so historically ignorant. 0.93
00:37:00.000 The reality is that for about a thousand years there, for significantly more than a thousand years, the main target of radical Islamists was Christians. 0.83
00:37:08.000 I mean, Istanbul used to be called Constantinople.
00:37:12.000 Lebanon used to be a Christian country.
00:37:14.000 Coptic Christians used to be a major demographic group in Egypt.
00:37:18.000 Actually, I was talking, as I got off the plane today, with a nun from Syria.
00:37:24.000 And she was talking to me about the threats that now exist to Christians in Syria and Lebanon, have existed there for a while.
00:37:30.000 And she was pointing out the solidarity between Jews and Christians along these lines.
00:37:34.000 The absolute willingness to ignore that in favor of bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish power, I wish I could say that I understand it beyond the simple conspiratorial desire for somebody to blame for your own problems.
00:38:05.000 Hello, Mr. Shapiro.
00:38:07.000 My question is about how, across all of the West, art, literature, and history are constantly being rewritten in the name of decolonization.
00:38:17.000 And what can we conservatives personally do to protect our culture without being called a racist or a bigot?
00:38:24.000 I mean, so, I've said this for a long time.
00:38:27.000 I think my entire career.
00:38:29.000 The proper response, very often, you know, I'll go to a campus, somebody will call me a racist, or I'm on a show when somebody calls you a racist.
00:38:34.000 The proper response to, you're a racist, is not, let me explain to you ten reasons why I'm not a racist.
00:38:40.000 That's a losing argument.
00:38:41.000 The proper response is... 0.95
00:38:45.000 If somebody calls you a racist, the proper response is to flip them the bird or to tell them to F off.
00:38:49.000 And the reason for that is because what they're doing there is maligning it.
00:38:53.000 That's not an argument.
00:38:54.000 That's a character assassination.
00:38:55.000 And you can't fight back against a character assassination by legitimizing the person who's actually making the argument.
00:39:01.000 The minute that you start defending yourself, oh, I'm not a racist, and let me tell you all the reasons why I'm not a racist, what you're actually saying is, you're a reasonable person who's calling me a racist, which means that it's reasonable for you to call me a racist or to think that I'm a racist.
00:39:13.000 Which means that maybe I'm a racist.
00:39:15.000 There's no reason to even humor the argument.
00:39:16.000 So I think the first thing that the West has to do when it comes to many of these arguments is to throw the bird.
00:39:21.000 You have no evidence of this. 0.95
00:39:22.000 Not only do you have no evidence of this, it makes you a schmuck to actually make this argument and to character assassinate people that you know nothing about and against all available fact patterns. 0.92
00:39:32.000 It is okay to simply reject out of... 0.95
00:39:41.000 In fact, a logical retort to an insult is typically ineffective.
00:39:44.000 The only actual appropriate response to an insult is to take umbrage and to either walk away or to engage on the same level that somebody's insulting you.
00:39:53.000 All right, one more question.
00:39:58.000 Hi, Mr. Shapiro.
00:39:59.000 I have a question regarding the relationship of Israel and Germany.
00:40:04.000 The new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who is a conservative, says he does no longer understand what Israel is doing in Gaza and that the war cannot be explained with the fight against Hamas anymore.
00:40:17.000 I wonder how dangerous is this for Israel and our Europe and especially Germany still on Israel's side. 0.88
00:40:25.000 I mean, obviously it's not good for Israel that so many of the European powers have decided that basically they are fine with Hamas regaining control of the Gaza Strip.
00:40:32.000 And I'd recommend to the Chancellor that if he has a good plan for Gaza, he should table it right now.
00:40:36.000 Because I've heard zero plans from anyone that are actually practical or practicable in the Gaza Strip.
00:40:42.000 There's a reason that no country in the region will take the Palestinians. 1.00
00:40:45.000 There is a reason for that, and it is because the Palestinian population, by polling data, by literally all polling data, is heavily terror-supported. 0.85
00:40:57.000 The notion that Israel is supposed to sort of leave and then leave Hamas as the governing power in the Gaza Strip is insane.
00:41:05.000 Obviously, no one is positing any other solutions, including the Chancellor.
00:41:09.000 So my response to that is always the same.
00:41:11.000 The minute that you posit an actual practical plan that doesn't involve Hamas actually running the place again, redeveloping all of its terror tunnels, The minute you come up with that plan, I'm happy to hear it. 0.94
00:41:26.000 Otherwise, you should shut up.
00:41:27.000 All right, everybody, thank you so much.
00:41:28.000 I really appreciate it.