The Ben Shapiro Show - Chuck Schumer’s Great Replacement Theory | Ep. 1613

00:00:00.000 Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says America isn't producing enough kids, so we have to amnesty 11 million illegal immigrants, 12 Republican senators vote to enshrine same-sex marriage in federal law, and the fallout from Trump's 2024 announcement continues.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:12.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:19.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:00:25.000 Well, folks, as you may have noticed, inflation continues to be really, really bad in the United States, and the government is going to keep spending your money, and the government is going to keep regulating business.

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00:01:23.000 Meanwhile, as an Orthodox Jew, Israel is of course very important to me.

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00:02:31.000 There's something that folks call online the Celebration Paradox.

00:02:35.000 The Celebration Paradox is essentially when a person on the left says a thing, and they say it in celebratory fashion, and it's good.

00:02:43.000 It's a good thing.

00:02:43.000 And then you say, well, you know, I don't like that thing so much.

00:02:46.000 And they say, how dare you even notice this thing?

00:02:48.000 You're not celebrating.

00:02:48.000 And if you're not celebrating it, this means that you're super bad.

00:02:51.000 If you even mention that it's happening, this means that you are super bad.

00:02:55.000 There's a great example of this yesterday.

00:02:57.000 Chuck Schumer, who is going to maintain his majority leader status thanks to Republican underperformance in the last midterm election.

00:03:03.000 Chuck Schumer yesterday, he was talking about why there needs to be an amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants.

00:03:10.000 And the case that essentially he made was the Great Replacement Theory.

00:03:14.000 So the Great Replacement Theory is this theory that basically there are people who are purposefully bringing in folks from south of the border to replace people who are not being born in the United States in an attempt to change the demographics of the country.

00:03:27.000 And that's considered a racist theory, because after all, the idea that there are people who are being shipped into the country of different races and ethnicities, and that that's going to change the demographic makeup of the country and therefore the voting base of the country, if you oppose this, this means that you are a racist.

00:03:43.000 Now, here's the reality.

00:03:45.000 As somebody who believes that ethnicity is not destiny, that demography is not destiny, I don't really care where people come from, so long as they actually reflect the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

00:03:55.000 And as we've seen throughout American history, there are populations that come here, and they come in seeking welfare benefits, or they come in seeking democratic policies, and then they shift over to the Republican side of the aisle, then we're evenly split.

00:04:07.000 You're seeing this happening right now, for example, in the American Hispanic community.

00:04:10.000 And the American Hispanic community voted much more evenly Republican Democrat in the last midterm election than they did a couple of election cycles ago.

00:04:17.000 So populations change.

00:04:19.000 But the theory that was put out there by people on the right was originally promoted by people on the left.

00:04:25.000 And we talked about this, that Roy Tishera, John Giudice, they wrote an entire book called The New Emerging Democratic Coalition.

00:04:31.000 No emerging Democratic majority that suggested this was the future of the Democratic Party.

00:04:35.000 That for about 20 years, this was the line from the Democratic Party.

00:04:38.000 That there was going to be a rising coalition of minorities, and they were going to vote heavily Democrat, and they were going to replace the white voters of the United States.

00:04:44.000 The white voters were going to decrease in the size and scope, and therefore there would be an everlasting Democratic majority. 0.93

00:04:51.000 And people on the right, some people on the right were like, well, that's bad.

00:04:55.000 And the answer to that is to restrict immigration.

00:04:57.000 There were some people who were racially tinged, were like, well, it's about race, right?

00:05:01.000 The Democrats are talking in terms of race.

00:05:03.000 And so we will also talk in terms of race.

00:05:05.000 Neither of those two things are good.

00:05:06.000 But you were labeled a crazy person if you suggested that there were Democrats who in fact are seeking to change the demographic of the electorate.

00:05:15.000 to promote particular purposes. Well, Chuck Schumer, who is the Senate Majority Leader, just said it out loud yesterday. It's kind of amazing. Now, if you say it and you're smiling about it, then it's good. If you say it and you're not smiling about it, then this means that you're evil and Hitlerian. So here is Chuck Schumer saying just the Great Replacement Theory yesterday.

00:05:32.000 Now more than ever, we're short of workers. We have a population that is not reproducing it on its own with the same level that it used to.

00:05:44.000 The only way we're going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers, and all of them.

00:05:51.000 Because our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers, but get a path to citizenship.

00:05:56.000 I mean, it's an amazing statement.

00:05:57.000 He says the birth rate part right out loud.

00:05:59.000 There are people on the other side of the aisle say, well, you know, declining American birth rates are actually a really, really bad thing.

00:06:04.000 That if you wish to have a durable civilization, you need to actually reproduce within that civilization.

00:06:11.000 You can't just keep bringing in people from other civilizations, and then, especially if you're the Democrats and you have no interest in actually assimilating people to American traditions, American ways of life, you don't actually like those ways of life, you think the Constitution and Declaration are kind of bad, that they're systemically racist or whatever.

00:06:26.000 And when you bring people in from other civilizations who don't actually have any history with those particular documents or those particular ideas, then that's a bad thing. 1.00

00:06:32.000 But if you're Chuck Schumer and you say it's a good thing, then it's totally, totally fine.

00:06:37.000 Well, this speaks to something broader.

00:06:39.000 And what this speaks to is an underlying question.

00:06:41.000 And that question came up in the U.S.

00:06:43.000 Senate yesterday.

00:06:44.000 What this speaks to, the part that, you know, we can talk about the immigration, the fact that Chuck Schumer's immigration policy is ridiculous, that you leave a wide open border and you propose to amnesty 11 million illegal immigrants, but what you're really doing is you're creating a giant sucking sound north.

00:06:55.000 Essentially, you're saying that anyone who crosses the border illegally will eventually become an American citizen.

00:07:00.000 We're already having, month on month, 240,000, 240,000 Border encounters between border police and people attempting to get across the border.

00:07:10.000 That's not including the gotaways.

00:07:12.000 And the number of people who are immigrating to the country illegally right now is extraordinarily high.

00:07:16.000 We're talking millions of people every single year.

00:07:19.000 Two, three million people every single year.

00:07:21.000 These are big, big numbers.

00:07:23.000 But put aside the immigration issue.

00:07:24.000 The issue that he sort of states and then just blows right past is the fact that Americans are not having babies.

00:07:30.000 The fact that in the West, people have just stopped having babies.

00:07:32.000 The declining birth rates are actually a problem.

00:07:34.000 Now, we on the right say, yes, declining birth rates are a problem.

00:07:36.000 They're a moral problem.

00:07:37.000 They, by the way, are also a logistical problem.

00:07:39.000 The fact is that if you are on the left and you wish to support a massive inverted pyramid of a social structure in which a few people are supporting a lot of people on welfare, and then the demographic base of that inverted pyramid is getting smaller and smaller because fewer and fewer babies are going to be born, what you need to do is ship in a bunch of cheap labor in order to prop up that demographic base.

00:08:00.000 That's essentially the case that he's making, Chuck Schumer.

00:08:03.000 It's a bad case.

00:08:04.000 It's a bad moral case.

00:08:05.000 The answer would be, theoretically, maybe people in America should have more babies. 0.65

00:08:09.000 Maybe if you wish to preserve a civilization and certain institutions, it's important that parents who have a history with those institutions actually have kids.

00:08:17.000 But folks on the left don't actually want people to have kids, apparently.

00:08:20.000 That's not... One of the solutions he proposes is not, maybe we should have more babies.

00:08:20.000 Right?

00:08:23.000 Maybe we should encourage people to get married and have babies.

00:08:25.000 That's not one of the solutions.

00:08:26.000 The solution is, what if we bring people from different parts of the world who may or may not share our values?

00:08:31.000 And frankly, we don't care if they share our values.

00:08:32.000 And actually, we kind of hope they don't share our values because we don't even share our values.

00:08:37.000 That's Chuck Schumer's proposal.

00:08:38.000 And that's an amazing proposal.

00:08:40.000 And it blows right past the problem at the core of our civilization, which is that we are a civilization that does not have a future.

00:08:46.000 We have taken all the fundamental elements of a civilization and we have carved them away in the name of radical individual autonomy.

00:08:52.000 This is not a call for fascism.

00:08:54.000 This is not a call for restricting people by force of law.

00:08:58.000 What this is a call for is encouraging the durability of social institutions that undergird every fundamental civilizational good.

00:09:06.000 And one of those happens to be marriage.

00:09:09.000 I know that we in this country, we've redefined marriage, we've decided that marriage doesn't matter anymore.

00:09:12.000 But it turns out that when you get rid of marriage and people are getting married at 28 and 30, if they even get married at all, and when they're having one kid instead of four kids, and when the number of people who are getting married at all is declining markedly, What you end up with is a population that doesn't reproduce and a population that doesn't actually pass on values to its kids because it doesn't have any kids.

00:09:30.000 And this is a major problem.

00:09:32.000 This is why I've been talking a lot over the past week about the issue of same-sex marriage.

00:09:36.000 And a lot of folks are like, well, you know, it's a dead issue.

00:09:38.000 I mean, the Supreme Court decided in Obergefell.

00:09:40.000 Well, yes, it is a legally dead issue because it has been decided in Obergefell.

00:09:45.000 But any society that redefines marriage itself It's making an enormous mistake.

00:09:50.000 It's making an enormous mistake.

00:09:52.000 So yesterday, the Senate of the United States voted to push forward same-sex marriage legislation that they are calling the Respect for Marriage Act, which is absurd.

00:10:02.000 It is not a Respect for Marriage Act because when you fundamentally change the definition of the word marriage, that is not respect for marriage.

00:10:08.000 You can call it a lot of things.

00:10:09.000 You can't call it respect for marriage.

00:10:11.000 You can suggest that it is an enshrinement of same-sex marriage.

00:10:14.000 You can call it the broadening of rights, if that's the rubric you wish to use.

00:10:17.000 What you can't suggest is that it's respect for marriage.

00:10:21.000 It's as though you are changing the definition of the color blue to yellow, and then you call the act the respect for blue act.

00:10:27.000 That's not what it is.

00:10:28.000 When you fundamentally change the definition of a thing, that is not respect for the thing, that is changing the thing.

00:10:32.000 Let's at least acknowledge what is happening here.

00:10:35.000 Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, landmark legislation that would cement same-sex marriage rights into federal law cleared a decisive hurdle in the Senate on Wednesday, with lawmakers aiming to get the measure to President Biden's desk in the coming weeks.

00:10:46.000 The 62-37 vote underscored how a once politically divisive issue now draws bipartisan support, despite opposition from some social conservatives, less than a decade after same-sex marriage became legal nationwide under a 2015 Supreme Court ruling.

00:10:57.000 Okay, so it is 2022.

00:10:57.000 It has been seven years.

00:11:00.000 In seven short years, the Republican Party, like one-third of the senators in the Republican Party, actually supported a bill that defines marriage in federal law as man-man, female-female.

00:11:11.000 Which is an amazing, amazing thing.

00:11:12.000 I mean, that is a social transformation on a massive scale.

00:11:16.000 The Respect for Marriage Act, if signed into law, would codify the ability of same-sex as well as interracial couples to get married.

00:11:21.000 Okay, so the reason that the left added interracial couples is because nobody's had a problem with that for literally decades in the United States.

00:11:26.000 Like no one.

00:11:27.000 If you look at the rates in polls of people who approve of interracial relationships, the answer is nearly 100%. 0.57

00:11:32.000 The Democrats threw that in there so that they can say that if you voted against this, it's because you don't like interracial marriage, right? 0.93

00:11:37.000 It's just one of these stupid legislative tricks that people play all the time with omnibus packages, as I mentioned yesterday. 0.99

00:11:42.000 They basically have a crap sandwich of a bill, and you add in one provision that's good, and then people vote against the crap sandwich and say, oh, well. 0.99

00:11:47.000 You oppose the provision that's good. 0.98

00:11:49.000 You pass a trillion dollar boondoggle, but in there you say, and also, we wish to give a million dollars to women who have disabled babies.

00:11:58.000 And you're like, I'm not going to vote for that bill.

00:12:00.000 You hate women with disabled babies. 1.00

00:12:01.000 This is the stupid game that we play in American legislative politics. 1.00

00:12:05.000 It's not about interracial marriage. 1.00

00:12:06.000 That's not what this bill is about at all.

00:12:08.000 It is about Same-sex marriage, obviously.

00:12:10.000 The bill needed 60 votes to proceed under Senate rules, and it got, apparently, 62.

00:12:14.000 The proposal faces at least one more vote in the Senate would need approval by the House by the end of the year to become law.

00:12:20.000 So they're gonna try and ram this thing through before Republicans take over the House of Representatives. 0.59

00:12:25.000 Joe Biden reiterated Wednesday he backed the legislation the House is expected to pass it after approving a similar bill earlier this year.

00:12:31.000 So, what exactly happened here?

00:12:33.000 Well, what is in the bill?

00:12:35.000 It basically says that even if Obergefell were to be overturned in the future, the federal definition of marriage would still include male, male, female, female.

00:12:44.000 Also, it does not require states to issue licenses to same-sex couples, but it does require states to essentially assume full faith and credit For marriages that happen in other states.

00:12:54.000 So let's say Texas does not have same-sex marriage, but California does.

00:12:57.000 Okay, so you get on a plane, you get married in California, you come back to Texas, and now Texas has to treat your same-sex marriage the same way under law it would treat a male-female dyad. 0.89

00:13:06.000 That's what this says.

00:13:07.000 What it also says is it says that if you have a sincere religious belief, and it's within the context of your religious institution, then the law cannot force you to cater to same-sex couples.

00:13:18.000 So, for example, you are a church.

00:13:20.000 The law, under the federal law, can't force you to participate in a same-sex marriage.

00:13:25.000 The non-profit status shall not be endangered if you are a church.

00:13:28.000 Now, first of all, the reality is that the Supreme Court would be very likely to rule that way anyway, so you're not actually adding any additional rights for religious people.

00:13:37.000 So that's been the sort of fig leaf for the Republicans.

00:13:40.000 Well, we're broadening religious rights.

00:13:41.000 We're just acknowledging the reality and then we are broadening religious rights.

00:13:43.000 That's not what this is doing.

00:13:44.000 You're not broadening one single thing in this bill.

00:13:46.000 You're also complete neglecting the fact that religious people don't just, they're not just religious at church or synagogue.

00:13:52.000 I'm not just a religious person at my church or synagogue.

00:13:55.000 I'm a religious person throughout my life.

00:13:57.000 It dominates my behavior.

00:13:59.000 This is true for literally all religious people.

00:14:01.000 If you ask a Christian, are you only Christian at church or in your home?

00:14:05.000 They would say, no, I'm Christian throughout my life.

00:14:07.000 I'm Christian in how I run my business.

00:14:09.000 And I bring those principles to how I run my business.

00:14:12.000 For example, which is why you've seen cases that have arisen in places like Colorado with Masterpiece Cake Shop, where a baker has now been dragged into court repeatedly told that by the Civil Rights Commission in Colorado that he has to bake a cake for a gay couple, that he has to bake a cake for a transgender person's gender coming out, that he has to bake a cake for the Satanists, right?

00:14:35.000 The idea here is that even though he is a Christian in his life, he doesn't get to be a Christian when he's a baker.

00:14:41.000 Now, the Supreme Court has ruled in his favor, but they did so under the artistic license sort of notion.

00:14:45.000 Now, what this bill really does, what it really does, is it establishes a social standard.

00:14:49.000 The social standard is The same as the Supreme Court tried to argue, Justice Kennedy tried to argue in Oberstfell itself, which is the only reason that you would think that society should treat same-sex couples differently than male-female couples.

00:15:03.000 The only reason you would think that is because you are a bigot.

00:15:06.000 That's what this bill actually does. 0.99

00:15:08.000 What this bill actually does is it says the only reason that we are going to allow you to avoid the consequences of our belief that same-sex marriage is a wonderful moral good is because you're one of those hackneyed, ridiculous religious people who believe in that silly book. 0.95

00:15:21.000 And if you can show that you seriously believe in that silly book, then we will allow you to believe in that silly book, but only in the building that has a cross on top of it. 0.97

00:15:28.000 Only in the building that has like a Magen David, that has a Jewish star on the side of it. 0.82

00:15:32.000 Those are the only buildings where you can actually believe the things you believe. 1.00

00:15:35.000 And by the way, the only reason you would believe that is because of the stupid book. 1.00

00:15:39.000 If it were not for the stupid book, you would totally agree with us. 1.00

00:15:41.000 There is no rational reason why you would believe that society requires preference for male-female dyads as opposed to male-male or female-female. 1.00

00:15:50.000 And this of course has now been ensconced in our public education system.

00:15:54.000 There are consequences.

00:15:55.000 On the state level, where Obergefell has already been in play for a long time, these consequences include the idea that you're supposed to start teaching same-sex marriage to kids at the same time that you're teaching them about marriage, you're also teaching them about male-male, female-female, and Jackie has two mommies, or whatever.

00:16:10.000 The idea is to treat natural law as bigotry.

00:16:15.000 That's what this bill does.

00:16:16.000 And this is why it's absurd that Republicans are voting for it. 0.79

00:16:20.000 It's a silliness. 0.90

00:16:21.000 It's not just a silliness. 0.85

00:16:22.000 It's actually an egregious wrong.

00:16:24.000 Now, I'm not going to pretend that this actual issue is about same-sex marriage, because it's not.

00:16:27.000 Same-sex marriage, as I've said before, is merely the tip of the iceberg. 0.97

00:16:32.000 It's sort of the last step in recognizing that marriage itself, definitionally, has been destroyed over the course of the last half century in the United States, because it has.

00:16:41.000 Marriage used to be recognized as about family formation.

00:16:44.000 Family was the essential unit of society.

00:16:46.000 Historically speaking, it was not the individual who was the central unit of society, it was families.

00:16:49.000 Families, you were born into one.

00:16:51.000 You're not born as an individual in a forest somewhere.

00:16:53.000 You're born into a family, into a family structure, with a mom and a dad, historically speaking.

00:16:58.000 With brothers and sisters, usually grandparents were part of this broader family structure.

00:17:02.000 You were born, in essence, into institutions that pre-existed you, and you were expected to perpetuate new institutions that would exist for your children.

00:17:10.000 And society was dependent on this.

00:17:12.000 These little platoons, as Edmund Burke suggested, you have loyalty to them, then you have loyalty to the local community that's made up of a bunch of families who think similarly, and then you have loyalty to a broader social structure that encompasses those families.

00:17:24.000 But the family was key to society.

00:17:27.000 And the assumption is that when you got married, the key constituent, the key element of marriage was not, in fact, what we would call romantic love.

00:17:34.000 The key element of marriage was what we would call duty.

00:17:38.000 It was duty to your wife, if you're a man. 0.92

00:17:40.000 Duty to your husband, if you are a woman. 1.00

00:17:42.000 Duty to your children, for both.

00:17:44.000 This is what marriage was about.

00:17:45.000 And this is why marriage, when you were looking for somebody to marry, typically you didn't do it in rom-com fashion.

00:17:50.000 The way that you found somebody to marry is you did it through your church, you did it through your synagogue, you tried to find someone who shared values with you, which is why durable marriages tend to share values.

00:18:00.000 Now, of course, the idea is that you're only supposed to get married if you get married at all.

00:18:05.000 Basically, on a whim.

00:18:06.000 But essentially, you have sex first before you fall in love with somebody.

00:18:10.000 Then maybe you fall in love with them, and then maybe if you're like one of those old-fashioned people, for old-fashioned reasons, maybe you get married.

00:18:17.000 Because marriage is no longer about the generation of a new family unit.

00:18:21.000 Instead, what marriage really is about is about your mutual pleasure with somebody else.

00:18:25.000 That's all marriage. 0.54

00:18:26.000 But once that happens, same-sex marriage is the natural coda to that. 0.99

00:18:30.000 Same-sex marriage is not really the issue that we're talking about here.

00:18:33.000 What we're actually talking about is the enshrinement in American law of the idea that marriage is no longer about family formation.

00:18:39.000 Because it's not about family formation.

00:18:40.000 Because family is not about voluntary formation.

00:18:43.000 The idea of the voluntaristic family is a very new idea in all of human history.

00:18:48.000 Before that, it was just a thing that happened.

00:18:50.000 It was a thing you were born into.

00:18:51.000 You didn't volunteer yourself into a family, you're born into one.

00:18:55.000 You didn't even volunteer yourself in human history into a family formation in terms of marriage sometimes.

00:19:02.000 Like 40% of all marriages in about 1940 were shotgun weddings, where somebody would get pregnant and then the baby was early, right?

00:19:09.000 The idea was that family formation was a natural part of humanity, and it was something that society had to prop up.

00:19:14.000 It was something that society had to foment.

00:19:16.000 Society had to have social standards, not even by law, but just socially.

00:19:20.000 You had to have social standards that promoted things like monogamy, that promoted things like sex within marriage, that promoted things like have babies.

00:19:28.000 These were all social standards that were considered societal goods and necessities, not just goods, necessities.

00:19:33.000 Very, very important stuff.

00:19:35.000 And then we decided that we were essentially going to discard all of that.

00:19:38.000 We decided that it was no longer necessary in a prosperous society that we had substitutes for things like the institution of family.

00:19:46.000 And this came about for a variety of reasons.

00:19:47.000 Birth control is a big one because it turned out that nature cut very much against the idea that voluntaristic romantic association was the key to life because usually that resulted in a baby and then somebody had to take care of a baby and so the family would automatically form around the baby.

00:20:01.000 Birth control severed that connection, so that was one thing.

00:20:04.000 And then welfare came about.

00:20:05.000 Welfare completely severed the connection because now the idea was even if you had a baby, daddy doesn't have to be around.

00:20:09.000 Government will be the daddy and government will pay for everything. 0.99

00:20:12.000 And so marriage basically became sort of an evolutionary holdover.

00:20:16.000 It was essentially a vestigial organ.

00:20:19.000 It was like your appendix.

00:20:20.000 It was a vestigial organ in institutional life.

00:20:23.000 Well, the problem is marriage is not vestigial.

00:20:25.000 Marriage remains essential. 0.84

00:20:27.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

00:20:28.000 First, getting stuck in Black Friday crowds not comfortable.

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00:21:29.000 Also, compared to the 2019 mid-year figure, some major cities are experiencing as much as a 50% increase in homicide, a 36% increase in aggravated assault.

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00:22:32.000 So I'm not going to blame people today who support same-sex marriage and who think that same-sex marriage is Because, again, when we talk about traditional marriage, you have to understand that traditional marriage was lost 50 years ago, 60 years ago.

00:22:47.000 So, the idea that the marriage was a vestigial organ in public life, that has bleed-over effect, right?

00:22:53.000 We're talking about no-fault divorce, which leads to tremendous levels of singlehood.

00:22:59.000 We're talking about rising levels of people never getting married, rising levels of cohabitation.

00:23:02.000 So, the natural outcome of that is that any people who love each other should be able to get married because, after all, that's what marriage is.

00:23:06.000 Marriage is love.

00:23:07.000 Marriage is not duty.

00:23:08.000 Marriage is not family formation.

00:23:09.000 Marriage is none of those things.

00:23:10.000 Okay, but society has no interest in any of that stuff.

00:23:13.000 This is the whole point about marriage as a societal institution, which is what we are talking about when we are talking about law.

00:23:17.000 If the law is a teacher.

00:23:18.000 If the law has impact on culture.

00:23:21.000 Then, of course, the laws are now going to change to reflect a cultural mood that suggests that marriage is no longer valuable or important.

00:23:28.000 That's what we're watching in the United States Senate.

00:23:30.000 That's why you're seeing so... There are many people of traditional bent who can't even explain to themselves or their kids why it is important that marriage be between a man and a woman.

00:23:37.000 But it's actually a very easy thing to explain.

00:23:39.000 Because historically speaking, for literally all of human history, there was an understanding that man-woman-child was the definition of family formation, and that marriage lay at the root of that.

00:23:48.000 That's what marriage was designed to do, societally speaking. 1.00

00:23:50.000 Everyone understood this.

00:23:51.000 This was not even a question.

00:23:52.000 But now, when you carve out the heart of marriage, and you say, well, that's not what marriage is.

00:23:56.000 Marriage is just love.

00:23:58.000 Is it any wonder that people have a hard time defending the idea of traditional marriage when it's been carved out decades ago?

00:24:04.000 So that's what's happening.

00:24:05.000 And then we have declining birth rates.

00:24:07.000 We have skyrocketing rates of single motherhood in American society. 1.00

00:24:10.000 40% of all babies in the United States are born out of wedlock in the United States.

00:24:13.000 People aren't even having babies.

00:24:15.000 The reproduction rate in the United States has dropped from approximately 3.

00:24:18.000 The fertility rate has dropped from approximately 3 in the 1950s all the way down to about 1.7 today.

00:24:24.000 This is true, by the way, not just in the United States.

00:24:26.000 It's happening throughout Western civilization.

00:24:29.000 And so, of course, as a natural corollary of that, what you're going to end up with is that societies who continue to actually see family formation as an important thing and baby-making as an important thing, they're going to continue to produce babies.

00:24:41.000 And we're going to ship those babies in, right? 0.82

00:24:43.000 That's how you end up with Chuck Schumer's apparently almost bizarrely paternalistic notion that there should be a group of people, this cadre of elites, who don't value marriage, who don't value children, who don't have children, who don't think that this is the purpose of life, that at best, if you have a kid, you should have maybe one. 0.65

00:25:02.000 If you're like crazy, you have two. 0.98

00:25:03.000 If you're nuts, you have two. 1.00

00:25:05.000 No one has four. 0.98

00:25:06.000 Four is nuts. 1.00

00:25:07.000 If you have four, five, six kids, this is because you're a crazy religious bigot. 0.93

00:25:12.000 And so that society can only survive by shipping in kids from other societies that actually value still having kids.

00:25:18.000 This is Chuck Schumer's idea.

00:25:20.000 It's part of a broader societal breakdown.

00:25:22.000 Again, when you get rid of large-scale societal institutions, that has consequences.

00:25:27.000 Now, you can think that those consequences are good for human freedom.

00:25:30.000 This is what people say about same-sex marriage because it puts at the very heart of who you are, your sexual identity, and who you wish to sleep with, and who you wish to have romantic relations with.

00:25:40.000 And society's job is to apparently just validate and green light and rubber stamp all of your particular predilections and goals and like that.

00:25:50.000 That is society's job.

00:25:51.000 Society's job is not to reinforce societal institutions that allow for the continuation of that society.

00:25:57.000 That's not society's job.

00:25:58.000 Society's job is to make you feel good about yourself.

00:25:59.000 And that's what the government is here to do.

00:26:01.000 This is what Justice Kennedy actually writes in Obergefell.

00:26:03.000 He says that petitioners are entitled to respect and honor by the government.

00:26:09.000 Since when?

00:26:10.000 The government's job is not to grant you respect or honor.

00:26:13.000 The government's job is to provide you basic services under the Constitution of the United States and to protect basic civil institutions that allow for the propagation of the society.

00:26:22.000 But again, we've changed our entire mindset around this.

00:26:25.000 And the natural outcome of this is no babies, no marriage. 0.53

00:26:29.000 You gotta fill that gap somehow, so you ship in literally tens of millions of immigrants, legally or illegally, in order to fill that gap. 0.98

00:26:37.000 You validate abortion as a wonderful thing. 0.74

00:26:39.000 Abortion is not just A thing that is safe, legal, and rare, right?

00:26:43.000 A moral negative.

00:26:44.000 Abortion is actually a societal positive because that allows us to continue to express our sexual identities and freedoms in the way that we so choose. 0.62

00:26:50.000 It allows romantic love to lie at the center of our life as opposed to family formation.

00:26:54.000 Family formation is seen as an actual bad.

00:26:56.000 Accidental family formation is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you, is that you and a person who you're having sex with actually make a baby.

00:27:02.000 By accident.

00:27:02.000 And I say by accident in quotation marks there because, again, A foreseeable consequence of having sex is the possibility of having children.

00:27:09.000 This has been true for all of mammalian propagation.

00:27:12.000 But abortion is now seen as an actual act of good.

00:27:15.000 I mean, this is what AOC says, right?

00:27:17.000 AOC says abortion is a class struggle.

00:27:19.000 Abortion is a necessity.

00:27:20.000 Abortion is a wonderful, validating thing.

00:27:23.000 It makes life better.

00:27:24.000 Here's AOC.

00:27:26.000 Forcing poor and working class people to give birth against their will, against their consent, against their ability to provide for themselves or a child is a profound economic issue and it's certainly a way to keep a workforce 1.00

00:27:52.000 This is the last part, by the way.

00:28:01.000 Even within her own rubric, what she's saying at the very end there is totally crazy.

00:28:05.000 I mean, if you actually want to keep people in the workforce, what you do is prevent them from having babies. 0.86

00:28:09.000 Because it turns out that women who have kids tend to work less than women who don't have kids. 0.99

00:28:14.000 So that last part is just stupid on its face. 0.99

00:28:16.000 But what she's actually saying there, the sort of flip in logic, which is that having babies is a bad. 0.99

00:28:21.000 And you can't force people.

00:28:23.000 See, what society used to say is, we will actually help create institutions around women who have babies because they are doing important things, like the most important thing that any species can do, which is reproduce the species and then raise the young of that species.

00:28:36.000 We will actually propagate and create institutions That are excellent for the woman and for the child.

00:28:43.000 And we've gotten away with that.

00:28:44.000 Marriage doesn't matter anymore.

00:28:45.000 Marriage is bad. 1.00

00:28:46.000 A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and all of that. 1.00

00:28:49.000 And so the natural corollary of that is we have to get rid of the baby because babies are burdens.

00:28:53.000 Babies are a problem. 1.00

00:28:54.000 Babies are an obstacle to the individual human happiness that I seek.

00:28:59.000 Again, when you get rid of marriage, it has all sorts of consequences.

00:29:01.000 It leads to the idea that kids are completely irrelevant.

00:29:04.000 It also leads to the idea, by the way, that human beings are completely androgynous.

00:29:09.000 Because after all, if the suggestion is that women are burdened by babies, that the chief biological function of female of a species is no longer relevant, That, by the way, from an evolutionary biology perspective, put the morality aside, from an evolutionary biological perspective, the chief purpose of having sexual dichotomy in any species is the propagation of the species.

00:29:31.000 That is the purpose of the thing.

00:29:32.000 It is why women have ovaries. 1.00

00:29:35.000 The fact that this even has to be explained demonstrates how far we have sunk as a society in terms of basic logic and reason and basic biology.

00:29:42.000 But what this means is that women can be men and men can be women, because after all, that is the goal, right?

00:29:46.000 I mean, the goal is to androgynize everyone. 0.95

00:29:49.000 Everything is just about romantic love feeling.

00:29:51.000 Marriage is about romantic love feeling.

00:29:54.000 And your gender is about romantic love feeling. 0.56

00:29:57.000 And that can't be obscured by such basic human realities as biology.

00:30:02.000 I mean, biology itself is an obstacle.

00:30:05.000 Which is why you see AOC and the rest of her cadre promoting this notion that men can be women and women can be men.

00:30:10.000 And that's what the science says.

00:30:11.000 The science does not say that, by the way.

00:30:14.000 I think another thing that I'd like to address is that the same folks who tell us and told us that COVID's just a flu, that climate change isn't real, that January 6th was nothing but a tourist visit, are now trying to tell us that transgender people are not real.

00:30:36.000 And I would say that their claim is probably just as legitimate as all their others, which is to say, not very much at all.

00:30:46.000 Okay, I mean, I'm sorry.

00:30:47.000 This sort of ridiculous lumping together of everyone is a stupid way of avoiding a reality, which is that the same people who are telling you that marriage is not important, that abortion is an act of good, are the same people who are telling you that men can be women and women can be men, because those ideas are deeply tied together. 0.85

00:31:03.000 They're deeply tied together. 0.94

00:31:05.000 If marriage is rooted in the idea of man, woman, child, and if abortion is rooted in the idea that that should not be the case, and if the idea behind all of that is that androgynous sexual identity is the thing that matters more than anything, that you can identify as anything you want to be, of course that's all tied together.

00:31:20.000 That is part of the same basic philosophy.

00:31:23.000 By the way, you can see how the left is now trying to prop up social institutions, alternative social institutions.

00:31:29.000 So what are the alternative social institutions to family?

00:31:32.000 Family was designed for economic reasons.

00:31:34.000 And when I say designed, I mean evolutionarily arose for basic economic reasons as well as basic biological reasons, right?

00:31:40.000 Consanguinity, the idea that you share blood with your children is a very important thing, but it also meant that you are now an economic unit.

00:31:46.000 You had to support that economic unit.

00:31:47.000 Family was the structure for support for the people who are related to you.

00:31:53.000 That's what family was.

00:31:54.000 It was an economic unit.

00:31:56.000 Which is why Joseph Schumpeter, the advocate of capitalism, suggested that capitalism, in atomizing individuals into work units, might actually break down the family.

00:32:04.000 Now, it didn't have to necessarily do that, because families could also be seen as units, economically speaking.

00:32:09.000 When you had dad working and mom part-time working, or dad working and mom not working, and they were doing it to bring home the bacon for family.

00:32:15.000 Which, by the way, is in fact how families generally operate.

00:32:17.000 It's why married men make more money than single men. 0.99

00:32:20.000 If you have a substitute for the family unit, what's it going to be?

00:32:23.000 It's going to look like something like what San Francisco is doing, the logical outcome of this in policy terms.

00:32:27.000 According to KRON4 in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has announced the launch of a new guaranteed income program for San Francisco's trans community.

00:32:37.000 The Guaranteed Income for Trans People program will provide low-income transgender San Franciscans With $1,200 every month for up to 18 months to help address financial insecurity within the trans community.

00:32:48.000 So now if you're a man who identifies as a woman, you're going to get a guaranteed income in San Francisco. 0.95

00:32:53.000 By the way, if you actually look at the form to file for this thing, according to our friends over at Libs of TikTok, there are 96 genders you can pick from.

00:33:00.000 Isn't that exciting?

00:33:01.000 So if you just want $1,200 a year or $1,200 a month, if you want $1,200 a month, all you have to do as a man is say that you are gender non-binary.

00:33:09.000 Or say that you are two-spirit, or whatever you decide to call yourself.

00:33:12.000 The pilot program is the first guaranteed income initiative to focus solely on trans people.

00:33:16.000 Which, by the way, is apparently non-discriminatory.

00:33:17.000 It's non-discriminatory to specifically pick people of a particular gender identity and then just give them money.

00:33:23.000 It will provide regular, unconditional cash transfers to individuals or households who qualify, according to the mayor's office.

00:33:29.000 This differs from other social safety net practices by providing a steady, predictable stream of cash to recipients to spend as they see fit, without limitations.

00:33:36.000 Ah, the substitution.

00:33:38.000 The beautiful end product of left-wing utopia.

00:33:42.000 We've reached the end point.

00:33:43.000 Marriage is not important. 0.54

00:33:44.000 Family formation is not important.

00:33:46.000 Gender is not important. 0.99

00:33:48.000 The only thing that's important is that the government support you as an atomistic individual without any tie to reality.

00:33:52.000 It's very, very exciting stuff.

00:33:55.000 Alright, well we're going to talk about another aspect of the moral breakdown of society.

00:33:58.000 You know, things that we used to take for granted that we have now broken down.

00:34:01.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:35:00.000 Well folks, last week we released a brand new episode of The Search, innit?

00:35:03.000 I sat down with newly re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan B. Peterson in Tel Aviv.

00:35:07.000 It is a fantastic and unique conversation.

00:35:09.000 You're not going to be able to see it anywhere else.

00:35:11.000 This episode is available exclusively at DailyWare+.

00:35:13.000 So if you're not yet a member, Head on over to dailywire.com slash ben and join us.

00:35:16.000 That's dailywire.com slash ben.

00:35:19.000 Okay, so if we're talking about the destruction of institutions in our society, that comes complete with the destruction of sort of basic moral standards in our society because, of course, morality is an institution.

00:35:29.000 And there's a notion that has become very prevalent in our society that morality does not have absolutes.

00:35:34.000 There's no such thing as an absolute good or an absolute right or an absolute wrong.

00:35:38.000 And in any given situation, there are multiple points of view, which is why, in the end, the only thing that we can rely on is radical subjectivism.

00:35:44.000 This is what we have decided upon when it comes to marriage.

00:35:46.000 Radical subjectivism is now a substitute for the basic idea of an Aristotelian good when it comes to how we act vis-a-vis members of the opposite sex and kids. 0.99

00:35:55.000 And none of that matters.

00:35:56.000 The only thing that matters is how we feel about it in the end.

00:35:59.000 Well, the same thing holds true if you like that sort of thing.

00:36:01.000 The same thing is going to hold true in business.

00:36:04.000 And this is what we are seeing right now.

00:36:06.000 It's fascinating to watch with Sam Bankman-Fried.

00:36:09.000 So if you've been following the meltdown of FTX, We've covered it on the show.

00:36:14.000 FTX was the world's second largest crypto exchange market.

00:36:18.000 And Sam Bankman Freed basically was engaged in what looks very much like fraud.

00:36:22.000 It looks as though he was essentially taking assets of users over at FTX, they're being held in the exchange, and he was lending them out to Alameda Research, which was an associated hedge fund.

00:36:31.000 Alameda Research was then using that money in order to prop up FTT, which was the Bitcoin version.

00:36:38.000 It was the cryptocurrency of FTX, which was used in order to sort of prop up the enterprise value of FTX.

00:36:46.000 And then they were lending against that stuff.

00:36:48.000 They were taking that asset base in FTX and they were taking out money and they were borrowing from it and then they were just going and buying themselves really, really nice condos in the Bahamas and having polycules and sex with one another and all of this.

00:36:57.000 All the people who are involved.

00:36:58.000 Okay, that's sort of the basic story of what was happening over at FTX.

00:37:01.000 There's a moral component to this that everybody is going to ignore because we're no longer allowed to talk about morality unless it is left-wing morality.

00:37:08.000 You can be as immoral and fraudulent as you want to be so long as you are parroting woke nonsense slogans.

00:37:13.000 So, Fascinating stuff.

00:37:16.000 There's a new CEO named John Ray who just took over at FTX.

00:37:20.000 Now he also took over at Enron after Enron started to collapse because he's sort of a cleanup guy.

00:37:25.000 And here is his first day declaration quote.

00:37:28.000 I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience.

00:37:31.000 I've been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history.

00:37:35.000 I've supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance at Enron.

00:37:39.000 I've supervised situations involving novel financial structures, Enron and residential capital, and cross-border asset recovery and maximization, Nortel and overseas shipholding.

00:37:47.000 Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources, and systems integrity.

00:37:55.000 Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.

00:38:03.000 Never!

00:38:04.000 So this is worse than Enron.

00:38:05.000 So the question is, how did this happen?

00:38:08.000 How did nobody see this coming?

00:38:09.000 There are only a million red flags.

00:38:11.000 Sam Bankman-Fried is a weirdo, the guy who was running FTX.

00:38:14.000 He was showing up to major conferences wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt and sitting next to Bill Clinton, jabbering about crypto.

00:38:22.000 He was a person who in his interviews was explicitly talking about the necessity to sort of ignore morality so long as you're using the money for left-wing political causes.

00:38:37.000 And this was his thing.

00:38:38.000 He called it effective altruism.

00:38:40.000 Effective altruism is basically the idea that you should get as rich as you can and then use the money for whatever you want to use it for, the moral causes.

00:38:47.000 And the left apparently is okay with this, however you get the money, so long as you use that money for moral causes, which is why the Washington Post has a headline about Sam Beckman Freed today, saying that him going down is really going to hurt the fight against the pandemic.

00:38:59.000 Because he's used some of that money and he's given it to groups that fight the pandemic.

00:39:03.000 Which is pretty incredible.

00:39:05.000 Basically, the idea is that prostitution is totally okay so long as you give the money to the church at the end.

00:39:10.000 That seems to be the idea of effective altruism as practiced by the left.

00:39:14.000 There's no actual moral standard here except for, do you back the woke projects of the left?

00:39:18.000 And if you do, then we'll look the other way.

00:39:20.000 Because here's the thing, Sam Bankman Freed, not only was he funded by an enormous number of hedge funds and big capital, Players in the markets.

00:39:30.000 He was also being ushered into the halls of respectability by all of the best people and all the best people were not only looking the other way on what he was doing.

00:39:38.000 They were championing him and talking about how wonderful he was.

00:39:42.000 I mean, literally today, we find out that the New York Times was supposed to, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, which is a big pusher of effective altruism, they call it something else.

00:39:50.000 They call it stakeholder capitalism, which we've talked about on the show before.

00:39:53.000 Shareholder capitalism is the idea that if you're a CEO, you're answerable to the people who own the company, the shareholders.

00:39:58.000 Stakeholder capitalism is the idea that you're answerable to no one except your own conscience.

00:40:03.000 Which is Sam Bankman-Friede's idea of effective altruism.

00:40:06.000 Well, WEF, partner Accenture, and the New York Times were hosting a live event with Sam Bankman-Friede as of next week.

00:40:13.000 Sitting next to him were supposed to be, I kid you not, Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine, Mark Zuckerberg of MEDA, and the current U.S.

00:40:21.000 Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen.

00:40:23.000 Janet Yellen, like the highest ranking people in public life internationally were going to sit next to this guy. 0.99

00:40:29.000 So the question is, how did he get away with it?

00:40:32.000 And what was the moral system that allowed him to lie to himself and to everybody else?

00:40:37.000 So he's been... One of the things about Sam Bankman, Freed, is that the guy obviously has some sort of mental issue.

00:40:43.000 Because just any sane and rational person at this point, given the fact that he's likely to go to jail for a very long time, would shut the hell up and talk to his lawyer.

00:40:50.000 But he's not doing that, apparently.

00:40:52.000 Instead, he's texting with a reporter from Vox.

00:40:54.000 I kid you not.

00:40:55.000 And these texts are so telling.

00:40:57.000 They really are.

00:40:58.000 They're fascinating.

00:41:00.000 According to Vox, before his empire collapsed, Bankman Freed was actively engaged in lobbying in Washington for a regulatory framework for crypto.

00:41:07.000 While many crypto CEOs, like Bankman Freed's nemesis, Binance CEO Changpin Zhao of CZ, are openly skeptical of government regulation, Bankman Freed has largely avoided criticizing regulators.

00:41:16.000 But in our conversation, he dismissed their role.

00:41:18.000 He characterized his past conciliatory statements, like when he said just last month that some amount of crypto regulation would be definitively good, as little more than PR.

00:41:26.000 In doing so, he all but confirmed the view of critics who have argued his overtures for Washington were much more about image than substance.

00:41:31.000 Well, they were about substance.

00:41:32.000 He wanted his competitors regulated and he wanted himself monopolized.

00:41:37.000 So he's texting with this reporter.

00:41:39.000 And the reporter said, you said a lot of stuff about how you wanted to make regulations, just good ones.

00:41:42.000 Was that pretty much just PR?

00:41:44.000 And he said, there's no one out there really making sure good things happen and bad things don't.

00:41:48.000 Yeah, just PR, F regulators.

00:41:50.000 They make everything worse.

00:41:51.000 They don't protect customers at all.

00:41:53.000 And the reporter says, it does seem like some sort of consumer protection would be good though.

00:41:57.000 Like maybe regulators can't deliver it, but sure does look like consumers lose their shirts a bunch.

00:42:01.000 He said, it would be good, but regulators can't do it.

00:42:03.000 Now he's not wrong about this.

00:42:04.000 You know who could do it?

00:42:05.000 People acting morally within the purview of social institutions.

00:42:09.000 But SPF feels no allegiance to that idea.

00:42:12.000 This is the part of the text interview that is just fantastic.

00:42:16.000 It's really fantastic, okay?

00:42:18.000 And I say fantastic in the most cynical way, because he's just saying the quiet part out loud.

00:42:23.000 Hey, here's the conversation.

00:42:25.000 He said, the reporter says, I was just re-listening to that conversation we had this summer about whether you should do unethical stuff for the greater good.

00:42:32.000 And Bank Manfred says, what did I say?

00:42:33.000 He says, you were like, nah, don't do unethical stuff.

00:42:35.000 Like if you're running Philip Morris, no one's going to want to work with you on philanthropy.

00:42:38.000 And there's a risk of doing more harm than good, but even if you subtract that out, pretty not worth it.

00:42:42.000 I was trying to figure out if that was kind of PR off the cuff answer.

00:42:46.000 He said, it's not true, really.

00:42:47.000 Not really.

00:42:48.000 Everyone goes around pretending perception reflects reality.

00:42:50.000 It doesn't.

00:42:51.000 Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known.

00:42:53.000 Some of his most beloved people are basically shams. 1.00

00:42:57.000 So the reporter asks, the ethics stuff, mostly a front.

00:43:00.000 People will like you if you win and hate you if you lose.

00:43:02.000 And that's how it all really works.

00:43:03.000 And SPF says this.

00:43:05.000 Yeah.

00:43:06.000 I mean, that's not all of it, but it's a lot.

00:43:08.000 The worst quadrant is being sketchy and losing.

00:43:10.000 The best is win and who cares?

00:43:13.000 Clean plus lose is bad, but not terrible.

00:43:16.000 And the reporter says, you're really good at talking about ethics.

00:43:18.000 For someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers, he said, yeah, he he, I had to be.

00:43:22.000 It's what reputations are made of to some extent. 0.68

00:43:24.000 I feel bad for those who get effed by it, by this dumb game we woke Westerners play, where we say all the right shibboleths, and so everyone likes us. 0.60

00:43:32.000 Isn't that, I mean, that's kind of riveting stuff, isn't it? 0.91

00:43:36.000 It's kind of fascinating.

00:43:37.000 So this guy, who is going to be one of the great con men of all time, He was basically covering up for the con by just parroting the woke shibboleths.

00:43:46.000 So we've set up a new morality. 0.99

00:43:47.000 It's just that our morality is garbage. 0.69

00:43:49.000 And the new morality that we've set up is basically pay off a couple of environmental causes and jabber about the pandemic and throw some money at Democrats and everybody will look the other way. 0.97

00:43:57.000 And in fact, they'll treat you with kid gloves.

00:43:59.000 You'll have 3,000 word stories in the New York Times talking about how you blew it on crypto with nary a mention of the fact that you gave $40 million to Democrats.

00:44:08.000 It's amazing.

00:44:09.000 I mean, the Wall Street Journal is pointing out the relationship between SPF and Democrats.

00:44:13.000 While cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried's Icarus-like crash could make compelling Netflix material, one storyline that deserves more attention is how the FTX founder tried to buy influence with Democrats in Washington.

00:44:22.000 Bankman-Fried became a celebrity and spokesman for the cryptocurrency industry by embracing progressive causes and giving liberally.

00:44:28.000 Literally.

00:44:29.000 Last year, FTX committed to making its trading platform carbon neutral and promised millions of dollars to climate causes.

00:44:34.000 He also supported a nonprofit that gave to progressive media outlets like ProPublica, Vox, and The Intercept.

00:44:39.000 So he was actively funding a bunch of left-wing media outlets.

00:44:42.000 In an interview with the New York Times last month, he said he planned to give away most of his fortune over the next couple of decades to effective altruistic causes.

00:44:49.000 After FTX's collapse, he might not have any to give.

00:44:50.000 His net value is now zero, apparently.

00:44:53.000 The media loved the 30-year-old, but reports that he leveraged customer funds to make risky bets.

00:44:57.000 By making his bankrolling of liberal causes inconvenient, Bankman Freed was Democrats' second biggest donor this election cycle after George Soros.

00:45:04.000 Democrats accounted for more than 90% of his nearly $40 million in political giving.

00:45:09.000 During a September interview on NBC, he said his goal was to support great public servants, apparently his code for Democrats.

00:45:14.000 He said his top issue was COVID.

00:45:16.000 No doubt lockdowns and pandemic transfer payments helped boost trading on his platform.

00:45:20.000 Bankman Freed's individual donations, mainly went to Democrats, will be crucial to enacting crypto legislation that would affect his company, including Senate Agriculture Committee members Debbie Stabenow, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Tina Smith.

00:45:30.000 He also gave to ranking Republican John Boozman.

00:45:32.000 FTX backed legislation by Stabenow and Boozman that would assign primary jurisdiction over crypto, brokers, and exchanges to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

00:45:41.000 That is the legislation.

00:45:42.000 Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler is seeking to regulate cryptocurrency as securities, which would have limited Bankman Freed's profit-making activities.

00:45:49.000 And it is widely suspected that, essentially, Bankman Freed was befriending Democrats in order to keep Gensler off his back.

00:45:55.000 Plus, his parents, it turns out, have very close personal associations with Gary Gensler.

00:46:00.000 So, what does all this say?

00:46:02.000 You know, the idea of cryptocurrency was always that it was a trustless system.

00:46:05.000 And it is, in the sense that you actually have a blockchain that is designed in order to verify every transaction.

00:46:10.000 What happens?

00:46:11.000 Who do you trust with the money?

00:46:13.000 The fundamental aspect of any functional economy is going to be, as Adam Smith said very long ago in The Theory of Moral Sentiment, which was written before Wealth of Nations.

00:46:22.000 He talked about the idea that unless you actually had a moral gridwork that undergirded society, there wouldn't be enough social fabric to support functional markets because eventually people are going to have to take heuristic shortcuts.

00:46:34.000 You can say as much as you want caveat emptor, buyer beware, but the truth is that the way that you function in the world is by finding people you trust and then doing business with them.

00:46:44.000 What happens if those people don't share a moral system with you?

00:46:46.000 Or what happens if the ersatz morality that has replaced traditional morality is a morality that is mostly about social causes and political giving?

00:46:55.000 You don't actually have to share a moral system with somebody who believes in a higher moral precept, doesn't believe in morality at all, who just believes and can cynically use the way that Sam Bankman Freed did.

00:47:04.000 These systems vote capital in order to escape scrutiny.

00:47:09.000 This is the thing about economic success.

00:47:11.000 Very often people will look at the Jews, look at their economic success, the Jews, their economic success.

00:47:16.000 Well, there are a few reasons for the economic success of the Jews.

00:47:20.000 One is very, very strong social fabric over the course of time.

00:47:25.000 The Jews, historically speaking, have had very strong family structures.

00:47:29.000 This is a point that's been made by the sociologist and historian Robert Nisbet.

00:47:33.000 And those strong family structures also extend to kinship networks, which is why you see, for example, in the diamond business, right, if you want to use a stereotypical Jewish trade, in the diamond business, a Jew in New York has a cousin in Israel, and they call each other up on the phone without a contract, and they know each other, and they trust each other, and they have the same moral structure, and so they know that they can trade with one another.

00:47:50.000 It's not restricted to the Jews, by the way.

00:47:53.000 This is what we would call the marginalized middlemen, as Thomas Sowell discusses.

00:47:57.000 So ethnic Chinese people in places like Taiwan, in places like South Korea, ethnic Chinese people in places like Singapore.

00:48:08.000 They tend to be disproportionately successful.

00:48:10.000 Why?

00:48:10.000 Because they have these moral and kinship networks that have been built up over time.

00:48:13.000 Because the basis is the family, and then you extend that morality out more broadly.

00:48:16.000 So you destroy the family, and then you destroy the broader moral system, and then you have a bunch of people who are sort of wandering around wondering how they can use each other.

00:48:22.000 And the only way that you can show solidarity is not by a buy-in to any moral system other than the virtue signaling about woke politics or environmentalism.

00:48:30.000 That is supposed to fill the gap.

00:48:31.000 And you know what's going to happen?

00:48:32.000 People are going to exploit that, which is exactly what Sam Bankman Frey did.

00:48:35.000 He is openly admitting that he exploited that.

00:48:38.000 Let me read that again.

00:48:40.000 The reporter says, you were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game of winners and losers.

00:48:45.000 And he said, it's what reputations are made of to some extent. 0.58

00:48:47.000 This dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us. 0.93

00:48:53.000 Right? 0.96

00:48:53.000 This is ESG, environmental social governance systems. 0.96

00:48:57.000 That have been put in place for corporate America and the international corporate sphere.

00:49:01.000 The idea is we don't actually have to have an old school moral system where people are held to account for their moral breaches.

00:49:05.000 We'll have a new system and the way that we tell if you're moral is how much money you spend on solar panels.

00:49:11.000 The way we tell that you're moral is whether there is a great pay imbalance between your female employees and your male employees or how many black people work for a company. 0.71

00:49:17.000 That's the way we tell if you're moral or not.

00:49:20.000 We don't actually look to Does that person maybe go to church?

00:49:24.000 Does that person maybe have a solid family structure?

00:49:26.000 Does that person maybe have a social institution that he is a part of and that is interested in upholding a higher morality?

00:49:32.000 All that has gone away.

00:49:33.000 And so what you end up with is atomized individuals who are attempting to form Ersatz social fabric on the basis of political sensibilities.

00:49:41.000 That is not going to work.

00:49:42.000 It is going to fail dramatically.

00:49:43.000 And Sam Bankman-Fried is an excellent example.

00:49:45.000 And you're going to see a lot more of this.

00:49:46.000 By the way, he's not the first.

00:49:47.000 Elizabeth Holmes did the exact same thing with Theranos.

00:49:50.000 She made all of her inroads based on the idea she was young female exec. 1.00

00:49:53.000 This is how you knew that she was good.

00:49:55.000 It didn't matter that she was completely defrauding people. 0.99

00:49:57.000 And by the way, harming actual human beings in the process.

00:50:00.000 Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos was a good one and the way you knew she was good is she she mouthed woke virtue signaling nonsense and she was a young woman and we knew that because she was a young woman this meant that she was just an example of our beautiful societal morality.

00:50:14.000 That meant she was a deeply immoral con person who's going to go to jail for a very long time now as she should.

00:50:19.000 Moral fabric requires institutions because morality undergirds those institutions.

00:50:24.000 When you obliterate the institutions that preserve morality, it is not a short road.

00:50:28.000 I mean, it's not a long road to the obliteration of the underlying morality itself.

00:50:31.000 When the underlying morality itself goes, the social fabric goes.

00:50:34.000 And when the social fabric goes, what you end up with is a bunch of con men who are out there attempting to grab as much cash as possible from one another.

00:50:39.000 By the way, government is not going to fix this.

00:50:42.000 The idea that legislation is going to fix this, that the same sort of con men don't exist in the government is a lie.

00:50:49.000 What do you think most of your politicians are more like?

00:50:50.000 You think they are more like old school, moral people, wonderful people?

00:50:54.000 Or do you think they're more like Sam Bankman Freed?

00:50:56.000 People who are grasping for power and using whatever tool is at their disposal in order to grab that power.

00:51:01.000 Which do you think?

00:51:03.000 According to the left, the same people who have essentially sidelined marriage, sidelined traditional morality, suggested all of it is religious bigotry, that we can form an ersatz morality around political causes.

00:51:14.000 Those same people are like, wow, probably the government can regulate us into this irresistible morality.

00:51:18.000 If we just use enough compulsion, then things will magically be okay.

00:51:22.000 It turns out that compulsion is no substitute for baseline moral behavior.

00:51:29.000 It's amazing.

00:51:29.000 In the editorial board at the Washington Post, they have a piece talking about how we can just regulate the crypto industry into compliance.

00:51:36.000 Because as it turns out, did you know the financial industry has never been regulated?

00:51:40.000 I didn't know that because it's not true.

00:51:42.000 It's not true.

00:51:42.000 It turns out that bad people break laws all the time.

00:51:45.000 It turns out that Bernie Madoff was a lawbreaker.

00:51:46.000 And he absconded with literally billions of other people's dollars.

00:51:50.000 So then the notion that you're just going to legislate morality into people is wrong.

00:51:54.000 Now you can legislate morality out of people.

00:51:56.000 You can train them using the law that morality is no longer relevant.

00:51:59.000 We've basically done this with marriage over the course of time with things like no-fault divorce.

00:52:02.000 But it turns out that you can't legislate people directly into morality.

00:52:05.000 You have to rebuild a social fabric.

00:52:07.000 But The idea here is that we are going to not even operate off the basis of thousands of years of morality.

00:52:13.000 Instead, we're just going to build new legal structures and these creative legal structures will hem people in and fix all of our problems. 0.95

00:52:17.000 This is what the Washington Post says.

00:52:19.000 Legalism is no substitute for actual morality.

00:52:24.000 But the Washington Post thinks it is.

00:52:25.000 They say Sam Bankman Freed's empire died young last week when his cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy.

00:52:29.000 The details remain scarce.

00:52:30.000 The bottom line is this.

00:52:31.000 FTX was supposed to act as a custodian of the funds that customers traded via the service.

00:52:35.000 Instead, it took billions of dollars of that money and lent it out, including to the trading firm Alameda Research, also owned by Bankman Freed.

00:52:40.000 To make matters worse, Alameda's assets were largely tied up in FTT, FTX's own digital currency.

00:52:46.000 Alameda then used this FTT as collateral for a boatload of loans, possibly including the customer funds it received from FTX.

00:52:52.000 When a CoinDesk report revealed some of this, what ensued was a death spiral.

00:52:55.000 Investors worried about FTX's solvency scrambled to redeem their assets, sending FTT's value plummeting.

00:53:00.000 But FTX didn't have their assets.

00:53:01.000 It had the digital currency FTT and a massive loan to Alameda that the company couldn't return because it too mostly had FTT.

00:53:08.000 This could classically be called a run on the bank.

00:53:09.000 The trouble is FTX wasn't supposed to be operating like a bank at all.

00:53:13.000 The Justice Department, SEC, and Commodities Future Trading Commission are reportedly all now investigating FTX.

00:53:18.000 The SEC claims it had already begun before the scandal erupted.

00:53:20.000 They should pursue these cases more vigorously.

00:53:22.000 What's perplexing is that the SEC and CFTC have done so little, so far.

00:53:26.000 Even as Bankman Freed wooed them and everyone else in Washington with proposals that would supposedly bring the crypto industry to heel.

00:53:31.000 That's not a mystery.

00:53:32.000 We know why.

00:53:33.000 He was giving them all money.

00:53:34.000 That would be the reason, guys.

00:53:35.000 Because he had all of the best friends.

00:53:37.000 He was hanging out with Bill Clinton.

00:53:39.000 He was hanging out with Joe Biden.

00:53:41.000 He was hanging out with all these guys.

00:53:43.000 That is why they weren't looking at him.

00:53:45.000 The reason they weren't looking at him is because he was part of the moral core, don't you understand?

00:53:49.000 The Washington Post says, The entire cryptocurrency industry has proved itself vulnerable to liquidity crisis, if not full-on solvency collapse like the one FTX appears to have suffered.

00:53:57.000 These catastrophes might have landed Alameda in a hole from which it will never manage to climb out, yet for all the conversation about the need for new laws to regulate cryptocurrency, there are existing rules authorities could have and didn't use.

00:54:07.000 That, by the way, is true.

00:54:08.000 The laws are already on the books, so what are they calling for?

00:54:11.000 You guessed it.

00:54:11.000 More laws.

00:54:12.000 That'll fix the problem, guys.

00:54:14.000 Everybody should be able to spot that this was lawbreaking.

00:54:17.000 Doesn't matter.

00:54:17.000 None of it matters.

00:54:18.000 We need more laws.

00:54:21.000 Regulators and lawmakers, says the Washington Post, crafting any crypto rules cannot allow consumers to believe their money is safer than it really is or lead businesses to believe they're entitled to bailouts.

00:54:29.000 Mr. Bankman Freed created an illusion that the cryptocurrency market might actually be a place.

00:54:33.000 Where ordinary people could safely and responsibly invest their assets.

00:54:36.000 The truth might be that it will never be.

00:54:38.000 Either way, investors deserve a regime stricter and more transparent than what they have gotten.

00:54:42.000 Or maybe what they deserve is a class of people who actively pursue a moral goal that is beyond how much money you give to Greenpeace.

00:54:51.000 Maybe they ought to pursue a moral goal beyond how much money you give to PFLAG.

00:54:56.000 Maybe they might pursue the idea that a moral system undergirds all of Western civilization, that when you rip away all the institutions of that, and then when you rip away the morality, there is nothing left except a bunch of Sam Bankman freeds.

00:55:07.000 Maybe that's the idea.

00:55:09.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.

00:55:11.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:55:12.000 We'll be getting into all the reaction to Donald Trump's 2024 announcement, plus the Wall Street Journal interviews some single people who are discovering that being single isn't all that great.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 17, 2022

Chuck Schumer’s Great Replacement Theory | Ep. 1613

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