The Ben Shapiro Show

00:00:00.000 The cancel culture comes for liberals who decry the cancel culture.

00:00:03.000 Callie Berry apologizes for acting.

00:00:05.000 And Ilhan Omar makes clear, once again, she isn't too fond of the United States.

00:00:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:10.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:00:18.000 You have a right to privacy protected at expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:00:22.000 Well, Benjamin Franklin once suggested that death and taxes were the only inevitabilities.

00:00:26.000 Wrong he was!

00:00:27.000 Cancel culture is an inevitability as well.

00:00:30.000 Everyone will be canceled, unless you're on the full-on woke left, in which case you can say anything.

00:00:34.000 I mean, you can literally quote Hitler, and if you're on the full-on woke left, you won't be canceled.

00:00:38.000 You'll be tried just a little bit because you made everybody look bad, but You won't be canceled full out.

00:00:42.000 We'll get to that story in a little while.

00:00:44.000 But canceled culture is quite real.

00:00:46.000 It particularly exists not at the top levels, although it does exist at the top levels.

00:00:49.000 I mean, if you're the national book critic circle, then half of your board members are forced to resign for not being sufficiently woke, for not being sufficiently supplicatory toward Black Lives Matter.

00:01:00.000 The Vulture.com reported a week ago that 12 board members of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization of 800 critics, began to draft a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, noting the publishing industry has long been overwhelmingly white from top to bottom.

00:01:13.000 They wrote of their culpability in this system of erasure of black and indigenous voices from the cultural conversation and listed a bunch of steps they wanted to take.

00:01:21.000 Ismail Mohamed, a black writer and critic, said, It was really exciting.

00:01:24.000 We were hoping to change ourselves and then model something for the entire industry.

00:01:27.000 Just as the group was starting to share the statement of the world, the organization began to fracture and then implode.

00:01:31.000 Over the past several days, more than half of the National Book Critics Circle's 24 board members, which had included six people of color, have resigned in a flurry of recriminations over racism, privacy concerns, and political correctness.

00:01:42.000 What exactly happened?

00:01:43.000 Well, the organization's president, one Lori Hertzel, who is white, ran the statement by several board members who hadn't participated in writing it.

00:01:49.000 One board member, Carlin Romano, said he disagreed with some of the claims in the letter, but didn't want to distract from the great majority of the board from its mission.

00:01:56.000 But he went on to detail his objections to a number of those claims, dismissing the statement's fundamental premise as absolute nonsense, that the publishing industry has been attempting to silence the voices of people of color, which is absolute nonsense, by the way.

00:02:06.000 I mean, it's just not true.

00:02:08.000 I know a lot of the heads of these major publishing corporations, the last thing they are attempting to do is silence people of color.

00:02:14.000 It's insane.

00:02:15.000 I mean, fully insane.

00:02:17.000 A white critic and former board president, he took issue with the idea that publishing business operated with, quote, the full benefits of white supremacy and institutional racism, and that white gatekeeping had been working to stifle black voices at every level of our industry.

00:02:28.000 These are statements that were made in this little letter.

00:02:31.000 And then he was chided, and then other people got angry, and then a bunch of people were basically forced to resign from the National Book Critics Circle.

00:02:39.000 We've seen data analysts who work for liberal organizations like David Shore.

00:02:44.000 Put out, basically, anodyne data points, and then be forced to resign from organizations like Civics Analytics.

00:02:50.000 We've seen high-level people who've been forced to resign from their jobs.

00:02:53.000 The Boeing communications chief was forced to resign because 33 years ago he wrote a piece saying that women shouldn't be in direct combat.

00:03:00.000 This stuff does exist, and it's existed for quite a long time.

00:03:02.000 I mean, let's not pretend that this is a creation of this year.

00:03:05.000 I'm old enough to remember when Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla Firefox, was forced to resign from his position for the great sin of having supported traditional marriage Under the proposition in 2008 in California that proposed that traditional marriage be preserved.

00:03:20.000 By the way, that was at a time when Barack Obama supported traditional marriage.

00:03:23.000 He was forced to resign, Brendan Eich.

00:03:25.000 And so cancel culture has been around for a very, very long time.

00:03:28.000 It has just picked up a lot of speed and more and more it is being applied to the common everyday citizen.

00:03:32.000 It's not just being applied to people at high levels of power and prestige.

00:03:35.000 It is being applied to everyone.

00:03:36.000 If you are a person who is working in a corporation and you're at a very low level and you have a Facebook post from three years ago suggesting that Hands Up, Don't Shoot was a lie, maybe you'll be canceled.

00:03:45.000 If you say all Black Lives Matter, not just Black Lives Matter, you could find yourself on the chopping block.

00:03:49.000 If you point out that Robin DiAngelo's white fragility is a bag of hogwash, well, then you are going to be canceled probably.

00:03:55.000 So cancel culture undoubtedly exists because we are watching it every single day.

00:03:58.000 And if you don't feel like cancel culture exists, it's because you are ignorant or you're a member of the persecuting party.

00:04:05.000 There are a lot of people out there, particularly on the hard left, who are members of the cancel culture, who insist that they are not actually part of a cancel culture.

00:04:11.000 They're just holding people accountable.

00:04:13.000 Except they're not holding people accountable.

00:04:15.000 Because the accountability is generally chiding somebody for their bad behavior.

00:04:19.000 It's not going to their employer and having them fired over something that is absolutely not fireable and has nothing to do with their employment.

00:04:25.000 The difference between cancel culture and regular criticism is, I disagree with what you just said.

00:04:30.000 And I'm going to go to your boss and see whether your boss disagrees with what you just said.

00:04:34.000 Cancel culture is about trying to ruin somebody's life over something they said that you disagree with.

00:04:39.000 That's the definition of cancel culture.

00:04:41.000 It is not just we are going to criticize what you said.

00:04:44.000 We're not going to point out that you're wrong.

00:04:45.000 We're not going to have a conversation about that.

00:04:47.000 It is we are going to go to all of the ways that you make your money and make your living and earn your bread.

00:04:51.000 And we are going to attempt to deprive you of those things because we disagree with the thing that you just said.

00:04:57.000 That is the nature of cancel culture.

00:04:59.000 The great defenders of cancel culture, of course, claim that it doesn't exist.

00:05:01.000 So Judd Legum, who writes Popular Information, which is this blog that is specifically dedicated to going after outlets on the right and very often just making up information about them.

00:05:10.000 Full disclosure, he's been coming after Daily Wire recently for the bizarre claim that the way that we make our money is by marketing via a third-party Facebook page that was responsible for, count it, 1.01% of the grand total of traffic in the last three months via our analytics.

00:05:26.000 In any case, Judd Legum, Suggested, quote, cancel culture is something that does not exist.

00:05:31.000 But it's a very popular concept among people who do terrible things and don't like being held accountable.

00:05:36.000 So cancel culture doesn't exist.

00:05:38.000 And also, I am the leader of it.

00:05:41.000 Right.

00:05:41.000 That statement said cancel culture doesn't exist.

00:05:44.000 Also, I'm just going to say that I'm going to ruin your life and your career if you disagree with me.

00:05:49.000 Right.

00:05:49.000 Who do terrible things.

00:05:50.000 What are the terrible things that are being done?

00:05:52.000 The terrible things that are being done?

00:05:54.000 are typically things like not being quote-unquote anti-racist enough in the Ibram Kendi definition of anti-racism.

00:06:01.000 Being too fragile.

00:06:02.000 Crying.

00:06:03.000 A white woman crying at a meeting.

00:06:04.000 These are things that are terrible things and don't like being held accountable.

00:06:08.000 Judd Legum says the problem with the United States is not that there is too much accountability, but there is too little.

00:06:13.000 Too little accountability.

00:06:15.000 He says it's amazing the self-proclaimed champions of free speech scream, stop criticizing me, you are attacking free speech every time they say something pernicious and someone responds.

00:06:22.000 That is the opposite of free speech.

00:06:23.000 If you believe in free speech, defend your position.

00:06:26.000 Okay, but this is what's hilarious.

00:06:28.000 He then goes on to use as his example of people who are falsely claiming cancel culture, a case in which somebody actually was canceled, right?

00:06:37.000 So then he says, so from his little screed here, in which he suggests cancel culture doesn't exist, his suggestion is that if I say something and Judd Legum criticizes it, that I call that cancel culture.

00:06:47.000 No, that's not cancel culture.

00:06:48.000 Cancel culture is when you attempt to take me off the air because you disagree with what I say.

00:06:53.000 But he's fine with that too, okay?

00:06:54.000 Because his exact example of something that is quote-unquote not cancel culture is when the New Yorkers, David Remnick, was supposed to interview Steve Bannon at an event and then cancelled the actual interview because there was so much blowback about Steve Bannon.

00:07:08.000 That's an actual cancelling.

00:07:09.000 That's an actual event that was cancelled, okay?

00:07:11.000 It is not just somebody disagreed with Steve Bannon.

00:07:13.000 It was you had booked an event and then you cancelled the event thanks to blowback.

00:07:17.000 So Judd Legum says, I'm taking back free speech from this tiresome group of people who just complain all the time about being silenced, but actually get paid lots of money to say boring things.

00:07:27.000 No.

00:07:29.000 Do you not understand?

00:07:30.000 The answer is he does understand English.

00:07:31.000 He's just a damned liar, right?

00:07:32.000 I mean, this is what people do.

00:07:34.000 Okay, so it's not just Judd Legum, of course.

00:07:37.000 There's a whole group of people on the left.

00:07:42.000 Now, the reason this has come up at this moment particularly is not just because we've had a wave of cancellations, a tsunami of cancellations coming for literally everyone.

00:07:52.000 I mean, they're now going after Lin-Manuel Miranda and trying to ruin his career for the great sin of having created a musical in which the founders are played by people of color.

00:08:02.000 And he didn't speak up loudly enough against Black Lives Matter.

00:08:04.000 I mean, they're trying to cancel Lin-Manuel Miranda, not just criticizing him.

00:08:07.000 They're trying to basically suggest that maybe Hamilton shouldn't be on things like Disney Plus, right?

00:08:11.000 Maybe we should remove the mechanisms of dissemination.

00:08:13.000 There are people who are actually doing this.

00:08:15.000 Everyone will be canceled.

00:08:16.000 If you are not sufficiently on the left or if you have not paid obeisance to the left, the very hard radical left, then you will be canceled.

00:08:26.000 Well, a group of academics stood up yesterday and they said, well, we're not, you know, we don't like this.

00:08:30.000 We're not into it.

00:08:31.000 They issued a letter on justice and open debate.

00:08:33.000 And this letter was signed by a huge group of people from right, left and center.

00:08:38.000 It included people like Wynton Marsalis, the famous jazz musician.

00:08:42.000 And Applebaum, who's certainly of the political left, she's a political liberal.

00:08:46.000 Margaret Atwood, who's the writer of The Handmaid's Tale.

00:08:49.000 And it extended to people like Yasha Monk from The Atlantic.

00:08:53.000 It extended to Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine.

00:08:55.000 It extended to Noam Chomsky all the way on the left and right, a defender of Pol Pot and the Camille Rouge.

00:08:59.000 Noam Chomsky was like, I don't like this stuff.

00:09:01.000 Nicholas Christakis, who's the Yale professor.

00:09:03.000 Who was ousted from his job for the great crime of suggesting that Halloween costumes were merely Halloween costumes.

00:09:08.000 He signed on the letter.

00:09:08.000 Right?

00:09:09.000 Rowling is on the letter.

00:09:09.000 J.K.

00:09:10.000 Salman Rushdie is on the letter.

00:09:11.000 Jesse Singal is on the letter from New York, formerly of New York Magazine.

00:09:16.000 The list is very, very long.

00:09:17.000 Randy Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers.

00:09:20.000 Barry Weiss is on the list.

00:09:21.000 Sean Wilentz from Princeton University is on the list.

00:09:24.000 Thomas Chatterton Williams was the writer, who is black, who had created the letter in the first place.

00:09:29.000 Matthew Iglesias, as we will see, an important figure here, was on the list.

00:09:33.000 I can't name on the list a single person who I believe voted for Trump.

00:09:37.000 I think every single one of these people, so far as I can see, is somebody who did not vote for Trump.

00:09:41.000 These are all people who are on the political left for the most part.

00:09:45.000 There may be one or two exceptions, but I'm hard-pressed to find them.

00:09:50.000 Maybe Francis Fukuyama, maybe?

00:09:52.000 But pretty much everybody else who's on this list is on the political left.

00:09:56.000 So we're going to get to the actual content of the letter, which has generated a thousand backlashes.

00:10:01.000 A thousand backlashes.

00:10:02.000 And we'll see how it is.

00:10:03.000 It's an utterly uncontroversial letter.

00:10:05.000 It seems almost like virtue signaling.

00:10:06.000 It's like, you guys were late on this bandwagon, guys.

00:10:08.000 Some of us have been talking about this for quite a while.

00:10:10.000 My friend, Eric Weinstein, who is famous for coming up with the term intellectual dark web to describe a group of people who just wanted to have open conversations.

00:10:17.000 And we took inordinate incoming fire over this, right?

00:10:20.000 For years, we took incoming fire over this.

00:10:22.000 He was like, welcome to the party, pal.

00:10:24.000 Okay, so we'll get to this letter in a second, because as you will see, the same people who are claiming there is no cancel culture are now attempting to cancel the people who signed the letter about the evils of cancel culture.

00:10:35.000 And I'm not sure what's funnier, people claiming that there is no cancel culture while simultaneously being key cogs in cancel culture, or people who signed this letter, there have been at least a couple, who signed this letter decrying cancel culture, and then out of fear of cancellation, unsigned the letter.

00:10:48.000 That's been a thing that's been going on.

00:10:49.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:12:09.000 Okay, so this letter from Harper's is what has generated inordinate controversy.

00:12:12.000 What exactly does this letter, what does this letter say?

00:12:15.000 It says, our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial.

00:12:18.000 Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.

00:12:29.000 But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.

00:12:40.000 As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second.

00:12:43.000 The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.

00:12:50.000 But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion, which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.

00:12:56.000 See, the letter is so apologetic about the point that it's making.

00:13:00.000 I think we don't want to find ourselves on the same side of this issue as, you know, Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro.

00:13:05.000 We don't want to find ourselves on the same side.

00:13:06.000 But that's where we find ourselves.

00:13:08.000 And the right wing demagogues are exploiting the fact.

00:13:10.000 It's all about the balancing.

00:13:11.000 The right wing.

00:13:12.000 Remember, these are all liberals signing this.

00:13:14.000 The right wing is exploiting the fact that cancel culture exists.

00:13:17.000 And this is why we have to fight against cancel culture.

00:13:19.000 You know who's really bad?

00:13:20.000 Donald Trump is also really bad.

00:13:22.000 Donald Trump, he's a powerful ally of illiberalism.

00:13:26.000 Okay, Donald Trump has not done anything to stop free speech in the United States of America.

00:13:30.000 Nothing.

00:13:32.000 Nothing.

00:13:32.000 Zero things has Donald Trump done to stop the free speech in America.

00:13:36.000 The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate this has set on all sides.

00:13:42.000 So this is a very tepid statement, right?

00:13:44.000 It's a very tepid statement from the center-left to the left.

00:13:48.000 The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.

00:13:54.000 Well, we have come to expect this on the radical right.

00:13:56.000 Censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture.

00:13:59.000 Okay, I love this.

00:14:00.000 It's the, again, the entire letter is about how we have to keep saying the right, the right, the right, the right.

00:14:03.000 Okay, the free exchange of information ideas.

00:14:05.000 Let me let you know a little secret, folks.

00:14:08.000 The right has not been complicit in this for a long time.

00:14:11.000 The notion that the right Unless you're talking about the radical, radical right, like you're talking about the alt-right or white supremacist or something.

00:14:16.000 If you're talking about the mainstream right attempting to shut down the free exchange of information ideas, that has not been a thing for a very long time, which is why so many people on the left have been texting me from their elite perches at major media institutions going, why am I on your side?

00:14:31.000 What's going on?

00:14:33.000 And I'm saying to them, like, listen, if you get fired, I'll help you find a job.

00:14:35.000 They're coming to me, OK?

00:14:36.000 It's not the other way around.

00:14:38.000 I've been standing over here with this flag for quite a while, guys.

00:14:41.000 You don't get to go, well, you know, the radical right normally normally does this sort of stuff.

00:14:44.000 But we've been perturbed to find the left doing this sort of stuff.

00:14:46.000 Guys, maybe that was true in like 1966.

00:14:49.000 It is not true in 2020, and it hasn't been true for a very long time.

00:14:53.000 The censorious left, those are the people who are attempting to shut down my speeches on college campuses, or go after my advertisers, or shut down shows like mine, or shut down shows on Fox News, or shut down Rush Limbaugh.

00:15:02.000 What are you talking about?

00:15:04.000 I love this creation.

00:15:06.000 I'm not even a fan of this letter, but the letter goes on.

00:15:10.000 They say, While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture.

00:15:15.000 An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in blinding moral certainty.

00:15:23.000 We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters, but it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

00:15:32.000 More troubling still, institutional leaders in a spirit of panicked damage control are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

00:15:40.000 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces.

00:15:42.000 That's a reference to the New York Times op-ed editor who was fired for running a Tom Cotton piece.

00:15:45.000 Books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity.

00:15:48.000 That is a reference to a novel called American Dirt, in which a woman who was, I believe, not of Latina extraction, she wrote a novel about illegal immigration, and it was considered very, very very bad because she was not actually an illegal immigrant.

00:16:01.000 Journalists are barred from writing on certain topics, which happens all the time.

00:16:04.000 Professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class, has happened several times.

00:16:08.000 A researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study, that'd be David Shore.

00:16:11.000 The heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

00:16:15.000 That'd be the op-ed editor, the Philadelphia Inquirer, or the head of Bon Appetit, or the guy who is, they're trying to now oust from his perch over at the Southern Food Group, or whatever it is, who had committed the great sin of being a white guy.

00:16:28.000 Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without threat of reprisal.

00:16:34.000 We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

00:16:42.000 This sifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time.

00:16:45.000 The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power, and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.

00:16:53.000 This is all the letter in Harper, signed by, again, a bevy of people who are on the left.

00:16:57.000 Like, it's a list of maybe 150 people.

00:17:00.000 Again, not a single one voted for Trump.

00:17:01.000 The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

00:17:06.000 We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.

00:17:11.000 As writers, we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk-taking, and even mistakes.

00:17:15.000 We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

00:17:19.000 If we won't defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn't expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

00:17:24.000 Okay.

00:17:26.000 Except for all of the bizarre kind of slaps at the right that are just virtue-signaling nonsense to their leftist friends.

00:17:31.000 Don't worry, guys.

00:17:31.000 We're still on your side.

00:17:32.000 We still agree.

00:17:34.000 Except for all of that, this is basically just reality, right?

00:17:36.000 I mean, that is just the reality.

00:17:38.000 And that is why you have people ranging from, on the right, people like Deirdre McCloskey, all the way to folks like Noam Chomsky on the far left, right?

00:17:45.000 David Brooks and Noam Chomsky.

00:17:48.000 Steven Pinker.

00:17:49.000 And Tawfiq Rahim, right?

00:17:51.000 I mean, a very large swath of the left, right?

00:17:55.000 Malcolm Gladwell, all the way to people like Gloria Steinem and Nadine Strassen.

00:18:00.000 And so that's a very big list of people who are, again, center to left.

00:18:06.000 The blowback has been intense and not shocking, not shocking.

00:18:11.000 And we'll get to that blowback in just one second because it is so telling about where we are in society.

00:18:15.000 That letter, which is pretty straightforwardly of the left, again, has the requisite slaps against Trump and the requisite slaps against the radical right and the evil conservatives and all this stuff.

00:18:24.000 That letter is now being ripped up by the hard political left.

00:18:28.000 And in an attempt to prove the cancel culture doesn't exist and or is being exaggerated, people on the list are now coming under pressure to be canceled.

00:18:35.000 We're having to sign the letter, which is just perfect.

00:18:38.000 It's just perfect.

00:18:39.000 Cancel culture doesn't exist, says the man as he tries to club you into submission.

00:18:44.000 That's where we are right now.

00:18:45.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

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00:19:55.000 Okay, so the blowback on this letter is intense and huge, right?

00:19:59.000 The radical left is like, I can't even believe that people would say that cancel culture is bad because what the radical left has been hoping to do is again, push and then gain adherence simply through intimidation tactics.

00:20:10.000 It's like a snowball.

00:20:11.000 You start the snowball effect, you can sort of get people to stay silent.

00:20:14.000 And then once they've stayed silent, Then you can compel them to repeat the nostrums you want them to repeat.

00:20:19.000 And then you can get them to become part of the mob.

00:20:20.000 Because better to be part of the mob than to be eaten by the mob.

00:20:23.000 And so here you have an obstacle to the mob mentality that is now formed on the radical left to cancel everybody who disagrees.

00:20:28.000 And so you're seeing journalists, reporters, who are like, you know what?

00:20:32.000 This letter's real bad.

00:20:34.000 Letter's real bad.

00:20:35.000 Felicia Sanchez is a Washington Post national political reporter.

00:20:38.000 Here's what she wrote.

00:20:39.000 She said, there's definitely a debate to be had about ordinary people whose lives are turned upside down by a viral moment, a phenomenon that's happening more and more these days.

00:20:46.000 It's not just happening.

00:20:47.000 It's being pushed by places like the Washington Post and the New York Times.

00:20:51.000 And we have seen how many incidents have we seen that have been blown up into national stories that are not even local news.

00:20:57.000 That whole story about the woman in the bird park who had a racially tinged conversation.

00:21:02.000 It was kind of nasty, a racially tinged conversation with the black birdwatching guy.

00:21:06.000 That was a national story that ran for like five days on the front page of the New York Times.

00:21:10.000 So don't tell me that this stuff is just sort of happening.

00:21:12.000 It's not just sort of happening.

00:21:13.000 Sometimes the consequences are warranted, and sometimes they're not.

00:21:15.000 Each case is different, says Felicia Sonmez.

00:21:17.000 But high-profile cancellations, such as the ones alluded to in the Harper's letter, are a different beast.

00:21:21.000 And it's disingenuous to describe them in such innocuous terms as the letter does.

00:21:25.000 It's not about free speech.

00:21:26.000 It's about words and actions that harm the vulnerable.

00:21:29.000 And this is the line of cancel culture.

00:21:31.000 The line of cancel culture.

00:21:32.000 Some of us have been describing this for years, so it's a point of high irritation to people like me, who've been calling this out for literally years in exactly the tactics they are using.

00:21:41.000 And now people are starting to come around and be like, no, that's either saying, no, that's not real, or explicitly saying the thing I've been saying they're saying.

00:21:49.000 I gave testimony in Congress, in the congressional record, in which I explicitly talked about the attempt to treat speech as violence.

00:21:59.000 When I was at Berkeley, people were literally chanting, speech is violence.

00:22:03.000 Because the idea is that if I say something that you don't like, I have done a violence to you, I have micro-aggressed you, and therefore you're allowed to perform physical violence on me and or harm me or my career.

00:22:13.000 That is what you're allowed to do because my words hurt your feelings.

00:22:16.000 And if I hurt your feelings, I've done you harm.

00:22:18.000 It's words or actions that harm the vulnerable.

00:22:21.000 Now, the beautiful thing about that standard is there is no way to disprove it.

00:22:25.000 Because how exactly do you prove that words harm the vulnerable?

00:22:28.000 When we were all kids, we used to hear, sticks and stones may break your bones, but words may never hurt me.

00:22:32.000 But we have decided, no, that words are actual weapons.

00:22:34.000 Words are things that hurt you.

00:22:35.000 And if something hurts you, you're allowed to fight back.

00:22:37.000 The proper response to being hurt is to punch back and to defend yourself.

00:22:42.000 And thus, canceling someone and ruining their career or ruining their life, getting them fired for no apparent reason, all you're doing is defending yourself from harm.

00:22:50.000 And this is, again, a Washington Post national political reporter, not an op-ed editor.

00:22:55.000 And she says, Okay, hold on.

00:22:56.000 You just lumped together sexual assault and the quote-unquote marginalization of trans people.

00:22:59.000 harm.

00:23:01.000 As though sexual assault, racial epithets, and the marginalization of trans people were all frivolous things, just part of some intellectual exercise.

00:23:08.000 Okay, hold on.

00:23:08.000 You just lumped together sexual assault and the quote-unquote marginalization of trans people.

00:23:13.000 If you are now equating an attempted rape with I used the proper biological pronoun to describe a person, I have a feeling that you are the problem here intellectually.

00:23:25.000 That's a horrifying equation.

00:23:27.000 Right?

00:23:28.000 Instead of thinking of the cancelled as figures whose merits and flaws can be weighed in a vacuum, why not view them within the context in which they actually exist?

00:23:34.000 As figures whose action may be putting their co-workers or students or others around them at risk.

00:23:38.000 Ah, so here, now we get to the crux.

00:23:40.000 We can't actually view people with their merits and flaws in a vacuum.

00:23:44.000 We can't view them as individuals.

00:23:45.000 In the name of social justice, we have to view them for the impact their words have had.

00:23:49.000 This is one of the nostrums of the social justice movement.

00:23:51.000 One of the nostrums is that intent doesn't matter, only effect matters.

00:23:54.000 So if you say something perfectly innocuous and somebody else feels harmed by that, that is still your fault.

00:23:59.000 This is one of the key points of the anti-racism, white fragility movement.

00:24:04.000 So absolutely insane.

00:24:06.000 But that right there, that's a Washington Post national political reporter.

00:24:08.000 So part of the blowback is, you don't get to claim anything about cancel culture, because absolutely, you're hurting people with your speech.

00:24:14.000 Your speech is hurting people.

00:24:15.000 So you're canceled.

00:24:16.000 Cancel culture is good.

00:24:18.000 It's not just, it's not just, it both exists, it both does not exist and is also good, is the argument that is being made right now.

00:24:24.000 It does not exist, but also if it is happening, it's because it's not cancel culture, it's just awesomeness.

00:24:29.000 We're gonna get to more of this and the blowback and the predictable and the predictable walk back from some of the people who signed the letter in just a second.

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00:25:43.000 Okay, so the blowback again continues.

00:25:46.000 A journalist for the New York Times named Farnaz Farsihi She writes, the letter, this Harper's letter, was shaped slash spearheaded from conversations by four privileged white men.

00:25:55.000 Apparently they felt entitled to really weigh in on racism, diversity, and inclusion.

00:25:59.000 That says it all.

00:26:02.000 Actually, some of the key figures, it was spearheaded by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who is a black man.

00:26:08.000 So that is not actually true.

00:26:10.000 But again, cancel the letter because too many white people involved.

00:26:14.000 Too many white people involved.

00:26:15.000 And then the cancelings will continue apace So, Matthew Iglesias, who I am not a fan of, as you will recall.

00:26:22.000 I have referred to him on this show repeatedly as the Ralph Wiggum of the internet.

00:26:26.000 So, I do not think you can count me in the Iglesias fan pack.

00:26:30.000 Okay, How Far Is the Left Gone?

00:26:31.000 They've forced me into now defending Matthew Iglesias.

00:26:35.000 So, well done everybody all the way around.

00:26:38.000 Just really well done stuff.

00:26:40.000 There's a writer named Emily Vanderwerf, was a trans woman, which is to say a biological man who says he is a woman.

00:26:48.000 And this person writes to the editors of Vox.

00:26:52.000 Tries to go over the head of Matthew Iglesias to quote-unquote the editors of Vox.

00:26:57.000 To the editors, as a trans woman who very much values her position at Fox and the support the publication has given her through the emotional and physical turmoil of transition, I was deeply saddened to see Matt Iglesias' signature on the Harper's Weekly letter.

00:27:08.000 Now, you may be saying to yourself, wait a second, trans stuff isn't even mentioned in that letter.

00:27:12.000 Like, I just read the entire text of the letter to you out loud.

00:27:15.000 Not once are trans issues mentioned.

00:27:17.000 Not a single solitary time.

00:27:19.000 But, says Emily Vanderwerf, Matt is, of course, entitled to his own opinion.

00:27:24.000 I know he's a more nuanced thinker than signing the letter would suggest.

00:27:27.000 Saying you're a more nuanced thinker is just a suggestion that you didn't really know what you were signing.

00:27:31.000 There's no nuance to the letter.

00:27:33.000 No, there is nuance to the letter.

00:27:34.000 You just don't like what the letter says.

00:27:36.000 Why don't you just say it?

00:27:38.000 You're not nuanced enough is a way for somebody on the left to basically sneer at you in derision and paternalistic concern for your stupidity.

00:27:38.000 Right?

00:27:47.000 Again, this was written to Matt Iglesias, the editors at Vox, where he's co-founder, right?

00:27:52.000 But!

00:27:53.000 It has never been anything but kind to me and has often supported my work publicly, all of which I'm extremely grateful for.

00:27:57.000 But, but, the letter, signed as it is by several prominent anti-trans voices and containing as many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions as it does, ideally would not have been signed by anybody at Box, much less one of the most prominent people at our publication.

00:28:11.000 Again, Matt's opinions and experiences are his own.

00:28:13.000 He can do what he wants with his free time.

00:28:15.000 But his signature being on the letter makes me feel less safe at Vox.

00:28:19.000 Ah, there it is.

00:28:20.000 There it is.

00:28:21.000 All you have to do is just wait for it for like seven sentences, eight sentences.

00:28:25.000 Every time.

00:28:26.000 The cancel culture warriors, they go to, oh, I feel unsafe.

00:28:26.000 Every time.

00:28:29.000 You know what you should do?

00:28:30.000 You should really start something.

00:28:31.000 I think you can call it maybe like the Committee on Public Safety.

00:28:34.000 You can call it the Committee on Public Safety.

00:28:36.000 And then you can just go around canceling people.

00:28:39.000 And if you don't really, it really, if you got a problem with them, you just behead them.

00:28:42.000 In fact, like the committee on public safety, which was a, for those who are not getting the reference, this isn't in it.

00:28:49.000 Overt reference to the French Revolution.

00:28:51.000 The Committee of Public Safety was the provisional government of France during the Reign of Terror.

00:28:55.000 That's why I'm making the reference.

00:28:56.000 You can call it the Committee on Public Safety because your safety has been threatened, don't you see?

00:28:59.000 You've been threatened by the fact that Matthew Iglesias signed on to an extraordinarily anodyne letter about the evils of council culture, and you can say, well, you know, as a trans woman, I now feel threatened.

00:29:09.000 So the letter can simultaneously suggest that the person that you're writing about, quote, has never been anything but kind to me and has often supported my work publicly.

00:29:16.000 But also, his opinion makes me feel less safe.

00:29:19.000 Ooh, so, so unsafe.

00:29:21.000 So much unsafeness happening.

00:29:24.000 They used the exact same excuse, by the way, for firing Kevin Williamson at the Atlantic, right?

00:29:27.000 They hired Kevin Williamson at the Atlantic, and then a bunch of feminists said, I feel unsafe that Kevin Williamson has been hired at the Atlantic.

00:29:33.000 He's sitting in his house in Texas, He's never met any of these people.

00:29:38.000 Like, I feel so unsafe.

00:29:39.000 I'm feeling so unsafe.

00:29:41.000 Really?

00:29:41.000 Did he send a death threat to you?

00:29:42.000 Did he leave like an anonymous phone call on your phone?

00:29:45.000 What exactly did he do?

00:29:46.000 What did Matt Iglesias do to Emily Vanderwerf?

00:29:48.000 Did he call this person up on their phone and say, I think that you are a biological man and therefore I dismiss your existence?

00:29:56.000 Like what exactly is the big threatening thing Matt Iglesias did?

00:29:59.000 He didn't say anything about trans stuff.

00:30:00.000 Matt Iglesias agrees with this person on trans policies.

00:30:03.000 He's written about it extensively.

00:30:05.000 Okay, like, what are you, what?

00:30:07.000 But apparently it's a threat to safety for this person to even appear on a list of people Like J.K.

00:30:13.000 Because J.K.

00:30:13.000 Rowling.

00:30:14.000 Rowling signed the letter.

00:30:15.000 That's really what this letter is, this particular blowback is about.

00:30:17.000 J.K.

00:30:18.000 Rowling, who has said that biological women exist, which by the way is not a threatening position.

00:30:22.000 I'm sorry, it is not a threat to your safety for me to point out that a biological man is in fact a biological man and not a woman.

00:30:28.000 Okay, that is not a threat to your safety.

00:30:30.000 I'm not saying anything bad should happen to you.

00:30:32.000 I think anybody who tries to threaten you should go to jail, right?

00:30:35.000 The law applies to you just as it applies to everyone else.

00:30:37.000 But the idea is if you disagree with me, if you make me feel lesser, if you make me feel bad, then you have threatened my safety.

00:30:44.000 You have threatened my safety.

00:30:46.000 Your words are more damaging than me ruining your career or going to the editors at your publication and publicly... By the way, Let me just say this to Matt Iglesias, you're the co-founder of Ox.

00:30:56.000 If somebody at my organization said something like this, like put out a public letter suggesting that I had threatened their safety for an opinion of mine, they'd be out on their ass the next day.

00:31:04.000 I would fire them the next day.

00:31:06.000 The next day.

00:31:07.000 Because, let me explain.

00:31:09.000 I run my publication, okay?

00:31:11.000 And I'm not gonna take crap from staffers who believe that opinions are threatening to safety.

00:31:17.000 I'm not gonna be accused of threatening someone's safety for signing on to an anodyne opinion about how council culture is generally bad.

00:31:23.000 Do they?

00:31:24.000 Do they really?

00:31:24.000 Vanderwerf says, his signature on the letter makes me feel less safe at Vox and believe slightly less in its stated goals of building a more diverse and more thoughtful workplace.

00:31:31.000 On a more practical level, the presence of Matt's tweets and his signature to a letter like this do make my job slightly more difficult.

00:31:37.000 Do they?

00:31:38.000 Do they really?

00:31:38.000 As would-be readers and sources, too often equate my positions with his.

00:31:42.000 After all, he remains one of our most prominent staffers.

00:31:44.000 I don't want Matt to be reprimanded or fired or even asked to submit an apology.

00:31:49.000 I don't want Matt to be reprimanded Doing any of the above would only solidify, in his own mind, the idea that he is being martyred for his beliefs.

00:31:53.000 But I do want to make clear that those beliefs cost him nothing.

00:31:56.000 They are not particularly risky.

00:31:57.000 They are not particularly sound, even.

00:32:00.000 I'm used to hearing them from people who believe my own lived experiences pale in comparison to their own momentary social media discomfort.

00:32:06.000 I'm sorry to find that among those voices.

00:32:08.000 At no point did Iglesias compare his experiences in life to this Emily Vanderwerf character.

00:32:12.000 I mean, it's just, it's amazing.

00:32:14.000 It's amazing.

00:32:14.000 So calling out Matthew Iglesias publicly because Matthew Iglesias was bad enough to sign this letter.

00:32:21.000 Well, this sort of pressure, which has bubbled up again, There's nothing in the letter that's about trans people.

00:32:26.000 Not a single thing in the letter.

00:32:28.000 In fact, the letter basically says we are members of the left.

00:32:31.000 If you just read that letter in any objective way, what you would come away with is they support all of the propaganda put forth by the trans movement generally.

00:32:39.000 JK Rowling is on the letter because it doesn't make that explicit.

00:32:41.000 But the whole thing is about social justice and equality and we hate Trump and all of this.

00:32:45.000 If you just read that letter without knowing any of the signatories, there's no way that you could possibly come away with the opinion that the people who wrote that letter Do anything except support the idea that a biological man can become a woman, right?

00:32:56.000 I mean, that just does not exist in the text of the letter.

00:32:58.000 But what's hilarious is that there are these tweets that are going around, things like, you know, one of the things we should think about in that letter are, are you responsible for the actions and opinions of people who are also signatories to the letter?

00:33:09.000 Should we assume that if you're Matt Iglesias, you now agree with J.K.

00:33:12.000 Rowling on trans issues?

00:33:13.000 Of course not!

00:33:14.000 That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

00:33:16.000 Should we assume that Matthew Iglesias is also a Cambodian genocide denier like Noam Chomsky?

00:33:21.000 Like, no!

00:33:21.000 If I sign on to a letter with a bunch of other people, the text of the letter is what we have in common.

00:33:26.000 Okay, it is nothing else.

00:33:28.000 There is no way to impute any other agreements on any other issue, other than the letter that we have commonly signed.

00:33:35.000 What in the world?

00:33:36.000 But what does this result in?

00:33:37.000 It results in people starting to pull down their support.

00:33:40.000 So one of the original signatories was a person named Jennifer Finney Boylan, who's a trans person.

00:33:46.000 Correct, I believe that Jennifer, I'm gonna look it up just to make sure, but Jennifer Finney Boylan writes for the New York Times, And is, in fact, a transgender activist, professor at Barnard College of Columbia University.

00:33:57.000 And this person put out a statement, quote, I did not know who else had signed that letter.

00:34:02.000 I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning and vague message against internet shaming.

00:34:05.000 I didn't know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.

00:34:08.000 First of all, this demonstrates your perspective when you think that Noam Chomsky is good company, and Gloria Steinem is great company.

00:34:13.000 But, says Jennifer Finney Boylan, the consequences are mine to bear.

00:34:16.000 I I'm so sorry.

00:34:19.000 I'm so sorry.

00:34:21.000 So out of fear of being cancelled and being ostracized by the trans rights community, a trans person who signed on to the letter now has to now has to apologize.

00:34:30.000 And then there's a person named Kerry Greenidge.

00:34:33.000 Kerry Greenidge is one of the signatories and I believe is the Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.

00:34:44.000 And so this is a person very much of the left.

00:34:46.000 So Kerry Greenidge signed the letter and then wrote in a tweet, I do not endorse this Harper's letter.

00:34:51.000 I'm in contact with Harper's about a retraction.

00:34:54.000 So people are now walking this stuff back, right?

00:34:56.000 They have to walk it back because the blowback, cancel culture isn't real.

00:35:00.000 And also you will be canceled if you sign a letter saying the cancel culture is real.

00:35:04.000 Really well done, everyone.

00:35:05.000 Really well done.

00:35:07.000 We'll get to more of this.

00:35:07.000 By the way, there's a whole cadre of people who will never be canceled.

00:35:10.000 We'll get to the cadre of people who will never be canceled in just a second.

00:35:13.000 And I'll point out a couple of outstanding instances of how cancel culture comes for us all, like death and taxes, in just one second.

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00:37:05.000 Okay, we're gonna get into more of the cancel culture that apparently isn't real, but also is so real that people are afraid of saying that it's real.

00:37:16.000 If you say Betelgeuse three times, cancel culture appears.

00:37:18.000 It's basically how this goes.

00:37:19.000 We're going to get to that in just one second.

00:37:20.000 First, if you're not already a Daily Wire member, you should consider getting a Reader's Pass to dailywire.com.

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00:37:29.000 You also get access to our mobile app, articles ad free, access to exclusive editorials like this one, Star Trek's Stealth Conservatism, 11 classic episodes.

00:37:37.000 The woke crowd would cancel today by our friend Christian Toto.

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00:37:49.000 Hey, so how bad is cancel culture?

00:37:56.000 Cancel culture is so bad that we have now canceled acting and also research.

00:38:00.000 These are a couple things that we have canceled.

00:38:01.000 But don't worry, it doesn't exist.

00:38:02.000 And if you mention it exists, then you are a threat to somebody else's safety.

00:38:05.000 You're a threat to somebody else's safety.

00:38:06.000 So how do we just cancel acting?

00:38:08.000 Well, we've had in the past, what, couple of years, several high profile actresses who have been told that they are not allowed to play trans people.

00:38:15.000 That if you want to cast a trans person, the person has to be trans.

00:38:18.000 So in other words, let's say that you want to play a trans man, which means a biological woman who believes that she is a male.

00:38:25.000 Let's say that you want to play that, and you're a biological woman, which seems like it checks most of the marks for playing a biological woman.

00:38:31.000 Like, last I checked, playing a biological woman who believes she is a man, that seems like you should be able to play that if you're a biological woman.

00:38:38.000 Correct?

00:38:38.000 Like, just putting it out there.

00:38:40.000 That's like saying you have a black person who believes in a particular cause, so if you're a black person, you should be able to play that person even if you don't necessarily believe in that political cause, right?

00:38:50.000 I mean, that's called acting, guys.

00:38:52.000 It's called acting.

00:38:54.000 But here, you even fulfill the physical criteria.

00:38:58.000 Because, again, biological woman playing biological woman.

00:39:03.000 Apparently not.

00:39:04.000 We've had a couple of situations in the recent past in which this has not been the case.

00:39:07.000 First of all, just pointing out, from Hollywood's perspective, if you are not a trans person and you play a trans person, in any iteration you win an Oscar or you're at least nominated for one.

00:39:17.000 Jared Leto won an Oscar, like, a couple of years ago for Dallas Buyers Club playing a trans person.

00:39:21.000 And I believe Eddie Redmayne was nominated for an Oscar for playing a trans person a couple of years ago.

00:39:26.000 So it's pretty much gold ticket to Oscardom.

00:39:28.000 But not anymore!

00:39:29.000 Not anymore, now it's all stopped.

00:39:30.000 Scarlett Johansson, you'll recall, about a year ago, was supposed to play a trans person in a movie that was, I think, called Rub & Tug or something.

00:39:36.000 And the movie was cancelled because Scarlett Johansson is in fact a woman, a biological woman who does not believe that she is a biological man and therefore not trans.

00:39:44.000 Okay, Halle Berry just went through the same thing.

00:39:46.000 So Halle Berry was about to be cast in a story about a trans man, meaning a biological woman, and now she's pulled out of this.

00:39:53.000 Here is the statement she released, with the full malice struggle session attached.

00:39:57.000 This is the best acting, frankly, that Halle Berry has done since Monsters Ball.

00:40:00.000 It's right here in this statement.

00:40:01.000 First of all, I'm also going to need an explanation on why Halle Berry was able to play an X-Men character when she's in fact not a mutant.

00:40:09.000 She actually is not a mutant, and yet she was playing a mutant who can shoot lightning from her fingertips.

00:40:14.000 So I'm going to need an explanation as to the bigotry against lightning fingertips mutants.

00:40:18.000 Anyway, Halle Berry says, Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to discuss my consideration of an upcoming role as a transgender man.

00:40:25.000 I'd like to apologize for those remarks.

00:40:27.000 As a cisgender woman, I now understand I should not have considered this role, and that the transgender community should undeniably have the opportunity to tell their own stories.

00:40:36.000 Okay, by the way, this is now two Oscar-winning actresses.

00:40:39.000 who would have greatly increased the profile of the trans movement, who have now been cancelled, or even considering these roles.

00:40:45.000 I am grateful for the guidance and critical conversations over the past few days, and I will continue to listen, educate, and learn from this mistake.

00:40:52.000 Man, these now struggle sessions, they are not entertaining, I will say that.

00:40:55.000 I vow to be an ally in using my voice to promote better representation on screen, both in front of and behind the camera.

00:41:01.000 So acting is now against the law.

00:41:04.000 We can only have, by the way, I'm about to make a joke, but it's not actually a joke.

00:41:08.000 We can only have somebody who's a quadriplegic play a quadriplegic.

00:41:11.000 That's a thing that actually was discussed, right, about Breaking Bad Guy.

00:41:17.000 Breaking Bad Guy was supposed to, what's his name, the name of the actor?

00:41:21.000 Brian Cranston.

00:41:23.000 He plays a quadriplegic in a movie, and people were like, why didn't you cast an actual quadriplegic?

00:41:27.000 It's like, because it's acting, you idiots!

00:41:30.000 We're now canceling acting.

00:41:32.000 Well, they're casting an upcoming Peter Pan.

00:41:35.000 And a friend of mine online, Stephen Miller, not the one who works for Trump, Stephen Miller tweeted out, Why exactly are we considering somebody who isn't naturally hookhanded to play Captain Hook?

00:41:45.000 Because apparently they're considering Jude Law to play Captain Hook.

00:41:47.000 He's been cast.

00:41:48.000 But he doesn't know the pain of having to live with an actual hookhand.

00:41:53.000 We need to cast somebody who actually has a hook for a hand.

00:41:55.000 And we need like the guy that we need that that cleric from London who has a hook for a hand to play Captain Hook.

00:41:59.000 That's the only way that we can really make this thing happen.

00:42:02.000 It's just incredible.

00:42:03.000 So everyone will be canceled.

00:42:04.000 The cancel culture comes for everyone.

00:42:05.000 Halle Berry is canceled.

00:42:07.000 Other people who are canceled.

00:42:09.000 So Princeton University, they have a group of faculty who are now demanding, I'm not kidding you, a committee to investigate research and publications for racism.

00:42:18.000 This is crazy.

00:42:19.000 And by the way, this sort of stuff does exist already.

00:42:20.000 We've seen cases in which Brown University, for example, pulled down a full-on study about rapid-onset gender dysphoria because there were so many people at the school who were mad at the research.

00:42:29.000 The research was bad, so you had to pull it down.

00:42:32.000 Because there was somebody there who pointed out, quite correctly, that there's been a rapid rise in the number of young females who are identifying as trans, and it seems to be—this mentality seems to run roughshod through small social groups.

00:42:42.000 So you have one girl With a bunch of friends, they all have other problems, and one of the girls says, I'm trans, and suddenly many of them are saying they are trans.

00:42:48.000 It's called Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria.

00:42:50.000 It's fairly well substantiated at this point.

00:42:52.000 This researcher from Brown had her study pulled down, and the school basically apologized for the study.

00:42:56.000 So research was being censored.

00:42:57.000 We're seeing it now with my friend Abigail Schreier, graduate of Yale Law.

00:43:02.000 Abigail wrote a book about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria, and Amazon quickly censored any advertising for it.

00:43:09.000 Research is now being silenced.

00:43:12.000 On July 4th, a roughly 4,000-word open letter signed by hundreds of members of the Princeton University faculty was sent to the president, provost, deans, and members of the cabinet of the university, listing a series of demands related to racial justice, including a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incident research, and publication on the part of faculty.

00:43:32.000 So now, you're going to have a racially diverse committee on public safety over at Princeton University, that is going to go through and decide what sort of research is okay.

00:43:44.000 What sort of research is okay?

00:43:47.000 Reparative action is also demanded.

00:43:49.000 Acknowledge, credit, and incentivize anti-racist student activism.

00:43:52.000 Such acknowledgement should, at a minimum, take the form of reparative action, beginning with a formal public university apology to the members of the Black Justice League and their allies.

00:44:01.000 Other demands include nominating no fewer than two faculty members of color for annual elections to C3, C7, and committees on diversity, Commit to anti-racist campus iconography, beginning with the removal of the John Witherspoon statue.

00:44:14.000 Witherspoon is considered maybe the founder of Princeton University, but he held slaves.

00:44:20.000 And therefore, we have to remove the statue.

00:44:23.000 And then the letter concludes, So again, the worst demand here is that they are going to constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors.

00:44:31.000 And again, the worst demand here is that they are going to constitute committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors.

00:44:42.000 Racism is not defined in this document for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in rules and procedures of the faculty guidelines.

00:44:48.000 You're out of your mind.

00:44:49.000 racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

00:44:56.000 So in other words, we want you to grant us a blank check that we can call racist whomever we want and shut down and shut down anybody who participates in behavior we now deem as racist, including research and publication.

00:45:06.000 Okay, if you think that this is not a threat to freedom of thought and freedom of speech, you're out of your mind.

00:45:12.000 You're out of your mind.

00:45:14.000 And thus, I will admit that I am grateful for the simple fact that if you're in a position of public power and you just say no, just say no to cancel culture, guys.

00:45:21.000 Okay, Just like you should have said no to drugs in the 1980s, just say no to cancel culture.

00:45:25.000 Because if you're prominent enough, you can say no.

00:45:27.000 And you know what?

00:45:28.000 Nobody can do anything about it.

00:45:29.000 J.K.

00:45:30.000 Rowling saying no is important because she refused to be canceled and thus she is not canceled.

00:45:34.000 You know who else they're trying to cancel these days?

00:45:36.000 Of course, Zuckerberg over at Facebook.

00:45:38.000 So there are these organizations, left-wing organizations, who are attempting to shut the door to free speech on Facebook by basically trying to club organizations, big corporations, into pulling their advertisement from Facebook until Facebook restricts speech to the preferred forms of speech that are approved by wild leftist groups like the ADL and Color of Change.

00:46:00.000 Okay, the groups had a get-together with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg over at Facebook trying to basically blackmail into changing Zuckerberg's position on free speech.

00:46:10.000 I distinguish Zuckerberg from the other leaders of these groups because Zuckerberg has openly committed to free speech and he has not taken the sort of censorious positions of many of these other social media leaders.

00:46:19.000 I mean, he's been very public about this.

00:46:21.000 But apparently, civil rights leaders called the meeting very disappointing, and blasted Facebook for being functionally flawed.

00:46:27.000 In a media call after the meeting, Rashad Robinson, head of Color of Change, said of Facebook's executives, they showed up to the meeting expecting an A for attendance.

00:46:33.000 Attending alone is not enough.

00:46:36.000 Facebook said in a statement, the groups want Facebook to be free of hate speech, and so do we.

00:46:40.000 They said they were taking steps to keep hate off the platform.

00:46:42.000 And they said, we know we'll be judged by our actions, not by our words.

00:46:45.000 But bottom line is that once you cave, once you start caving to the woke social justice warriors, they expect you to constantly cave, right?

00:46:52.000 It never stops.

00:46:53.000 You'll be rolled into the snowball, and the snowball will be pushed downhill, and you just have to go along with all of this.

00:46:58.000 I will point out that Facebook refusing to go along with all of this, it's having no impact on the stock price.

00:47:02.000 This is why I say you can just say no to cancel culture.

00:47:05.000 You can, and you should.

00:47:07.000 Investors are not worried about the advertisers boycotting Facebook.

00:47:10.000 The fact is, from what I understand, Facebook actually makes most of its money because small businesses use it for advertising, not because you have major corporations dropping a couple mil here or there on advertising.

00:47:20.000 Facebook shares hit an all-time high for the company on the same day that they were being boycotted.

00:47:24.000 So cancel culture doesn't actually work, right?

00:47:26.000 That's the dirty little secret, is that unless you're a low-level employee and can actually be bullied into being fired, Right, then cancel culture doesn't work.

00:47:33.000 All these organizations have to do is just say, no, we're not going to do it.

00:47:35.000 We're not going to do it.

00:47:36.000 You're only canceled if you agree to be canceled.

00:47:39.000 There's one other group of people who are never canceled, and that is if you're radical left enough, nothing you do will ever be even called up for question by the cancel culture because the right does not have the capacity to cancel the left and the left does not have the capacity to cancel the right.

00:47:52.000 So ironically enough, the people who are most vulnerable are the people in the center of our politics.

00:47:56.000 So if you're a centrist and you are working in a left-wing organization, good shot, you get canceled.

00:48:02.000 If you're a right-winger, you're probably not working in a left-wing organization, right?

00:48:04.000 You're vulnerable if you work for a left-wing organization, but right-wingers and left-wingers have basically self-polarized at this point.

00:48:09.000 So that means people in the center are the most vulnerable.

00:48:12.000 If you're on the right and you earn your living being on the right, you're not gonna get canceled by the right.

00:48:15.000 If you're on the left and you earn your living from the left, the right has no capacity to cancel you.

00:48:19.000 And the left doesn't care about canceling you because anything and everything you do and say that is bad and terrible is perfectly acceptable.

00:48:26.000 You'll never be canceled.

00:48:27.000 Ever.

00:48:28.000 And the agenda never stops on the radical left.

00:48:30.000 Because let's be real about this.

00:48:31.000 Cancel culture is just the club with which the social justice warriors who hope to remold all of American society in their image beat people into submission.

00:48:39.000 That's all that's happening here.

00:48:40.000 And the crusade is very clear, right?

00:48:42.000 The goal here is very, very obvious.

00:48:44.000 So Sean Masawan, who is a socialist city council member of Seattle.

00:48:47.000 She was considered an oddity way back when I was doing a show on KTTH, a radio show on KTTH back in 2014.

00:48:52.000 She was mostly considered just like this kooky oddity who said weird things about how we need to demilitarize Boeing and we're going to occupy Boeing and all this kind of crazy crap.

00:49:00.000 She was pushing $15 minimum wage, and now she's considered sort of a rabble-rousing leader on the Seattle City Council.

00:49:07.000 She made clear immediately After basically, you know, getting chided by Mayor Jenny Durkan for trying to lead a revolution, after passing an Amazon tax, which is a head tax on Amazon employees, which will help drive Amazon out of the city, Shyamalan said, I'm coming for all the Fortune 500 companies.

00:49:24.000 We're coming after all of them.

00:49:25.000 And we're coming after capitalism generally.

00:49:27.000 The agenda is pretty obvious here.

00:49:28.000 It has nothing to do with making the country better and everything to do with overthrowing the system entirely.

00:49:34.000 We are fighting for far more than this tax.

00:49:37.000 We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society.

00:49:41.000 And if you, Jeff Bezos, want to drive that process forward by lashing out against us in our modest demands, then so be it.

00:49:50.000 Because we are coming for you and your rotten system.

00:49:54.000 We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism, this police state.

00:50:05.000 She's never going to be canceled because for the left, none of this is cancelable, right?

00:50:09.000 What counts as a cancelable offense is the big question here.

00:50:11.000 For the left, things that do not count as cancelable offenses include everything in America should be torn down or out in your ears.

00:50:18.000 And also maybe violent criminal activity, right?

00:50:19.000 I mean, the left won't even cancel people who engage in looting.

00:50:21.000 They're trying to bail them out in the middle of the riots.

00:50:24.000 And Ilhan Omar will not be canceled for suggesting we have to rip down the entire economic and political system of the United States.

00:50:29.000 The representative from Minnesota, who was taken in by the most glorious nation in human history, the United States, after living a childhood in war-torn Somalia, has come to the United States and decided that the entire U.S.

00:50:40.000 system must be taken down.

00:50:43.000 She's an American citizen.

00:50:44.000 She's entitled to her opinion.

00:50:46.000 This is also a horrifically, I would say, terrible and particularly ungrateful position to take about a country that took in you and your family from one of the worst hellholes on Earth.

00:50:55.000 And Somalia, there is no way to define it as a non-hellhole.

00:50:58.000 It is a hellhole.

00:50:59.000 Okay?

00:50:59.000 Like, that is just what it is.

00:51:00.000 It is a war-torn hellhole.

00:51:01.000 It has been for decades.

00:51:03.000 And she comes here and is taken in.

00:51:05.000 And she's an American citizen, just as American as you or I. But her position on America is that America sucks and needs to be torn down.

00:51:11.000 All of the pillars have to be torn out.

00:51:13.000 As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit, without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality.

00:51:29.000 So we cannot stop at criminal justice system.

00:51:32.000 We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.

00:51:39.000 Okay, so she won't be canceled, obviously, because too much of the left agrees with this basic premise.

00:51:44.000 Other people who will not be canceled include Eagles wide receiver Deshaun Jackson, who posted a quote saying that white Jews will blackmail and extort America, and quoted Louis Farrakhan, and then apparently quoted Hitler, right?

00:51:54.000 Featured Nancy Smed a quote on his social media feed.

00:51:56.000 He attributed it to Adolf Hitler, Deshaun Jackson.

00:51:59.000 And people are like, well, we have to inform him and chide him.

00:52:01.000 The Eagles put out some ridiculous statements suggesting we've had a talk with Deshaun Jackson.

00:52:05.000 Let's put it this way.

00:52:06.000 If Deshaun Jackson were white and quoted Hitler, how long do you think he'd be in the NFL?

00:52:09.000 Like, gone, right?

00:52:11.000 But if you're on the proper woke side of the aisle, like Ice Cube, you can be as anti-Semitic as you want to be.

00:52:17.000 The last hatred that is allowed in the United States is hatred of Jews, obviously, and sort of the traditional canon of hatred of groups.

00:52:25.000 As long as you're on the right side, you'll never be canceled, is sort of the way that this works.

00:52:31.000 Meanwhile, I want to make a quick note here about COVID-19 deaths.

00:52:35.000 So COVID-19 deaths spiked yesterday in terms of the numbers that we saw.

00:52:39.000 It's hard to tell whether that spike from yesterday is really attributable to a big spike that has happened in deaths, or I think it was something like 900 and some deaths yesterday from COVID, or whether that is just reporting after the long weekend, meaning that that was reporting from Tuesday and there was a three-day weekend.

00:52:54.000 So a lot of people didn't go into the hospital.

00:52:55.000 Some of those deaths didn't get reported.

00:52:57.000 And so this usually happens, right?

00:52:59.000 The Monday count is usually pretty low because you're getting reporting from Sunday, and then the Tuesday count is a little bit higher, and then the Wednesday count is typically higher than that.

00:53:06.000 So we'll keep an eye on that.

00:53:09.000 Obviously, as I've been saying, we should continue to be careful, but I'm still cautiously optimistic that death rates have declined pretty significantly, and we will keep you informed should any of that change in radical fashion.

00:53:20.000 Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow for much more content, so stick around for that.

00:53:24.000 In the meantime, head on over to dailywire.com, subscribe, and leave us a review over at iTunes, we always appreciate it.

00:53:29.000 I'm Ben Shapiro, you're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:53:36.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas, executive producer Jeremy Boring, supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, assistant director Pavel Lydowsky, technical producer Austin Stevens, playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan, associate producer Katie Swinnerton, edited by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.

00:53:56.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2020.

00:54:01.000 Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:54:03.000 You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.

00:54:10.000 But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

Cancel Culture Comes For Us All | Ep. 1047

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