As Joe Biden prepares for his Inauguration, Democrats push radical policies and revenge, and we ask whether a worse authoritarian threat is around the corner. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro - On today's show, Ben Shapiro talks about: Joe Biden's Inaugural day in Washington, D.C. on January 20th, 2019 What to expect from the inaugural ceremony Who will be attending? How many people will be allowed to attend? What are the security concerns about the inauguration Is there any chance that Joe Biden will be the first person to be impeached by the Supreme Court for some form of corruption or other form of misconduct? And what will the media do with all of the people who are invited to the inaugural and will they be asked tough questions by the President? If you're worried about any of those things, you should be looking to diversify your asset base, and consider checking out my friends, Birch Gold Group. They'll help you diversify a portion of your savings in IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by gold and silver! They're the premier precious metals IRA company in the United States with an A-plus Better Business Bureau rating, countless 5-star reviews, and thousands of satisfied customers! There's a tidal wave of inflation coming, it is coming. Text Ben to 474747 to get started. Text BONUS! - Ben Shapiro! to get a FREE information kit on Precious metals and precious metals! and silver today! Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet? Visit ExpressVPN yet? ? Visit expressvpn.com slash Ben Shapiro's show on the ExpressVPN website slash BenShapiro on the show? Ben's Show? Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on the expressVPN site slash Ben's Podcast! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes! Subscribe to Ben's Podchaser on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and get 20% off your first month free on Prime Video + 7 other ways to get 10% off the first month of Prime Video Prime membership starting July 1st, 2019. Subscribe & 7% off for 7 days for the next month! Learn more at Prime Video Plus Subscribe to the Prime Video 4.1FM Radio & 7 other premium plans? You get 7 days of 7GB & 7GB of Vimeo worldwide!
00:00:50.000They'll help you diversify a portion of your savings in IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by gold and silver.
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00:01:37.000So, as we say, tomorrow is the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States.
00:01:44.000The inauguration is going to be kind of a weird ceremony because obviously the Washington Mall is completely blocked off.
00:01:49.000They've put out some 200,000 flags on the National Mall.
00:01:53.000They're supposed to represent people who would gather for the inauguration.
00:01:55.000They've also put up 56 pillars of light that are supposed to represent America's states and territories.
00:02:02.000And, you know, it's going to be an odd sight.
00:02:04.000Some of this is because of the pandemic.
00:02:06.000So Joe Biden had already announced it was going to be a very restrictive crowd, even if there had not been safety concerns about the inauguration.
00:02:11.000There are safety concerns about the inauguration.
00:02:13.000So there is heavy military presence in Washington, D.C.
00:02:15.000There is barbed wire that is blocking people off from places like the Capitol building, as well as the White House.
00:02:21.000We know that Joe Biden's inauguration is going to return the cavalcade of stars.
00:02:26.000So the cavalcade of stars for Joe Biden's inauguration, they are back because of course, Hollywood is fully in the tank for Joe Biden, as they always have been.
00:02:33.000This is supposed to include some of the people that we have come to know.
00:02:37.000And expect people like Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez and Bruce Springsteen, they will all be back.
00:02:43.000And the era of good feelings of Obama will return, which means the media is just not going to ask any tough questions of Joe Biden for the next four years.
00:02:49.000So they've earned their vacation, don't you think?
00:02:51.000I mean, they really just spent the last four years being as vicious and brutal to Trump as possible.
00:02:56.000And honestly, asking tough questions of politicians by the president, I don't have a problem with that.
00:02:59.000My problem is, it's extraordinarily selective.
00:03:02.000When it was Barack Obama, the entire job of the media was to walk around holding a drool cup for him.
00:03:07.000When it's Joe Biden, they will go around wiping his ass.
00:03:11.000But when it comes to Donald Trump, obviously, they are definitely on top of things.
00:03:15.000Well, now they've earned their vacation.
00:03:16.000They're going to go back to vacation as soon as humanly possible.
00:03:21.000Meanwhile, President Trump is planning a last spate of pardons and commutations today.
00:03:25.000He's expected to issue up to 100 of them.
00:03:27.000That is not expected to include any members of his family.
00:03:32.000In fact, there's a fairly solid legal case that one of the big problems with pardoning himself is it would actually cause the possibility of prosecution afterward because then, theoretically, he could be prosecuted for some form of corruption.
00:03:45.000It's not clear who exactly Trump is planning on pardoning.
00:03:49.000Trump is going to be leaving the Capitol.
00:03:50.000He is not going to be attending the inauguration.
00:03:52.000The Trumps will be the first president and first lady to skip the inauguration in more than 150 years, which is, in fact, a bad luck.
00:04:07.000Instead, he will have sort of a scaled back sendoff at 8 a.m.
00:04:09.000on Wednesday, and then he will head on over to Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
00:04:13.000Meanwhile, the Pentagon has authorized more than 25,000 National Guard troops to secure the inauguration.
00:04:19.000The FBI is currently vetting all National Guard members, which is a weird move.
00:04:24.000I guess the idea here is that there can be members of the National Guard who are sympathetic to Trump and may attempt to do some form of violence.
00:04:30.000There's not a lot of information to suggest that that is in fact the case.
00:04:33.000In fact, even the Democrats who are making this claim acknowledge that this is not in fact the case, that there is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that there is a threat emanating from within the National Guard or within the police forces.
00:04:44.000You can really chalk it up to a sort of systemic distrust of the police on the left side of the aisle.
00:04:49.000A Democratic congressman named Steve Cohen He's been suggesting for a long time that the National Guard is going to be risky.
00:04:56.000He went on CNN yesterday and suggested that he fears the National Guard.
00:05:02.000The Guard is 90 some odd percent, I believe, male.
00:05:09.000About 20% of white males voted for Biden.
00:05:12.000You've got to figure that in the Guard, which is predominantly more conservative, and I see that on my social media and we know it, they're probably not more than 25% of the people that are there protecting us who voted for Biden.
00:05:23.000The other 75% are in the class that would be the large class of folks who might want to do something.
00:05:31.000They're part of the large group of people who might want to do something.
00:05:33.000That's kind of an extraordinary accusation.
00:05:35.000So again, this is all part and parcel of the broader agenda for the Democratic Party, which is to suggest that every single person who voted for Trump or who did not support Joe Biden is a member of the Capitol riot brigade.
00:05:47.000If they are not criminal themselves, then they support the criminals.
00:05:50.000The fact that they're now vetting, I understand why they're doing it.
00:05:53.000They're doing it because obviously they don't want anything to go wrong or somebody gets blamed.
00:05:57.000But the basic notion that the National Guard is rife with people who are going to do violence on behalf of Donald Trump on the day of the inauguration, not a lot of evidence to suggest that's true.
00:06:06.000Even Steve Cohen acknowledges there's not a lot of evidence to suggest that is true.
00:06:09.000But as I mentioned, the great message going into the unity, the time of unity, renewed unity, is of course that half the country is evil.
00:06:27.000And the Capitol riots are just an excuse to highlight that fact.
00:06:30.000And what we really need, what we really need is to divide the country further.
00:06:34.000So Bill Maher got shellacked over the weekend because Bill Maher did a monologue in which he pointed out that there are about 5,000 rioters total, maybe.
00:06:42.000I mean, in terms of the number who actually broke into the Capitol, it's probably far smaller.
00:06:48.000And this is coming from Bill Maher, a guy who is wildly non-Trumpy, a person who despises Trump.
00:06:53.000I mean, Bill Maher has suggested on his show that he wanted the economy to tank before the election just so Trump wouldn't be reelected.
00:06:58.000That's how much he dislikes Donald Trump.
00:07:00.000But Maher happens to be correct about this, that when you conflate 5,000 rioters with 74 million Americans, there might be something else at work here.
00:07:08.000Let's not confuse 5,000 people with 74 million.
00:07:13.000Yes, even supporting the insurrection in spirit is, well, deplorable.
00:07:21.000But there's a difference between holding illiberal beliefs and acting violently on them.
00:07:25.000At least, that's what they always told me about Islamic terrorism.
00:07:28.000I've preached, and still do, that you can hate Trump, but not all the people who like him.
00:07:34.000And as counterintuitive as it may seem, you can like something run by assholes without being one yourself.
00:07:41.000Okay, and he happens to be right about every word of that.
00:07:44.000This meant that Bill Maher was now on the poop list for people on the left.
00:07:48.000They were very angry at Bill Maher for pointing out this little fact, because the preferred vision of the left is that they themselves are the arbiters of virtue, and therefore they get to shut down everybody who is not on their side of the aisle.
00:07:59.000of the left than Bill Maher's reaction, which is what a true liberal would say, right?
00:08:03.000Bill Maher happens to be much more of the sort of old school liberal than he happens to be of the hard left.
00:08:08.000And the distinction that I've made on the show routinely, literally every day, I make the distinction between the left and liberals.
00:08:12.000I've made it every day for the past several weeks when I talk about this particular issue, is that liberals will say things like, we hate what happened at the Capitol riots.
00:08:20.000We don't agree with people on the right about nearly anything, but they have the right to say what they want to say.
00:08:25.000This has been a thing that Bill Maher has said many, many times.
00:08:29.000But the hardcore left doesn't want that.
00:08:31.000The hardcore left would like to push forward the propaganda that 74 million Americans are awful and terrible and therefore need to be silenced.
00:08:38.000So Don Winslow, who is a sort of action thriller author, I've recommended some of his books on the program.
00:08:43.000I like Don Winslow's I mean, they're very much to the left, but his writing is interesting.
00:08:48.000Well, his Twitter persona is far less interesting.
00:08:53.000It currently has 2.5 million views, this video on Twitter.
00:08:57.000And the entire premise of the video is that when Trump leaves office, he's then going to weaponize and militarize a giant army of his supporters in order to do violence and do harm to others.
00:09:06.000And you need to be drafted into the counter army.
00:09:09.000Because the battle is going to happen online.
00:09:11.000So you need to be the person who monitors your neighbor.
00:09:13.000You need to be reporting on your neighbor.
00:09:15.000You need to make sure that your neighbor has good views.
00:09:17.000Here's a little bit of this video that has gone viral on the left.
00:09:20.000On January 20th, Donald Trump will become the commander in chief of a different army.
00:10:13.000First, let's talk about the fact now Terrible time to go to an auto parts store.
00:10:17.000In fact, pretty much always terrible time to go to an auto parts store.
00:10:21.000Instead, you should just go directly online.
00:10:22.000Because if you go to an auto parts store, you're probably going to go there, you're going to have somebody recommend you a part, they're going to order it online, they're going to upcharge you for the privilege of them ordering you the part, or you could just, you know, skip the middleman and go directly to rockauto.com.
00:10:35.000They always offer the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like airlines do.
00:10:39.000Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same exact parts?
00:11:10.000Head on over to RockAuto.com right now.
00:11:12.000Okay, so Max Boot, again, a guy who used to write for Commentary Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, now he is writing pieces for the Washington Post, openly declaring that the government should essentially ban Fox News, which is about as authoritarian a thought as has been expressed in recent memory.
00:11:37.000Okay, I mean, to be fair, we're still experiencing a peaceful transfer of power.
00:11:39.000state the enormity of what happened on January 6th, 2021, a date that will live in infamy alongside December 7th, 1941 and September 11th, 2000 and 2001.
00:11:48.000This was the first time the US Capitol had been ransacked since the War of 1812, the first time ever that the United States has not experienced a peaceful transfer of power.
00:11:55.000Okay, I mean, to be fair, we're still experiencing a peaceful transfer of power.
00:12:06.000There was no official mechanism by which Donald Trump stayed in office.
00:12:09.000That is, in fact, a peaceful transfer of power.
00:12:11.000The fact that there was mob violence does not mean that it is not technically a peaceful â that's not to downplay the evil of the Capitol riot.
00:12:18.000It is to point out that that's still a peaceful transfer of power in which the military is not used to ensconce a quote-unquote dictator in office.
00:12:26.000And the fact is, for all of the talk about how the system broke down, the system didn't break down.
00:13:48.000But the line from the media is that January 6th represented a serious attempt to foment insurrection in such a way that it would have been an actual coup.
00:14:17.000In any case, Max Boot continues along these lines, because in order to push for what he's about to push for, you have to claim that the United States is on the brink of collapsing from within.
00:14:25.000He says, the seditionists assembled at the president's invitation.
00:14:29.000The Wall Street Journal reports that one social media post from the Proud Boys told their members, POTUS wants you in D.C.
00:14:36.000Impeaching and convicting Trump is the least we can do, given his role in inciting the violent insurrection, but, and here's where we go, here's where it goes next, while holding Trump to account is necessary, it is also insufficient.
00:14:46.000There is a whole infrastructure of incitement that will remain intact even after Trump leaves office.
00:14:51.000Just as we do with foreign terrorist groups, so with domestic terrorists.
00:14:53.000We need to shut down the influencers who radicalize people and set them on the path toward violence and sedition.
00:14:59.000Even if you were to make the case that there are people who are encouraging violence or inciting violence, you'd then have to distinguish between those people and people who are just sort of mainstream conservatives who are willing to let the legal process play out, or even people who are saying things that weren't true about election stealing.
00:15:14.000That is not the same thing as suggesting that violence is the necessity.
00:15:18.000But Max Boot is encouraging now a full crackdown, right?
00:15:20.000This is violative of the First Amendment in the extreme.
00:15:23.000He says, some argue that trying to silence the voices of insurrection is a hopeless task that hate will always find a way to get through.
00:15:30.000And it's true that there is a danger that seditious plots will now move to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, where they will be harder to track.
00:15:35.000But research from Zignal Labs found that online misinformation about election fraud fell 73% after Trump and key allies were suspended from social media.
00:15:43.000Well, you would imagine that if Trump was kicked off social media, he couldn't make those claims anymore.
00:15:48.000Does that mean that it is justified to shut down the mechanisms of free speech, even for people who are not telling the truth?
00:15:53.000But, says Max Boot, even that's not enough.
00:15:56.000Anyone who cherishes our democracy should be grateful to the management of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites for their newfound sense of social responsibility.
00:16:03.000We should expect at least the same level of responsibility from broadcast media, and in particular from Fox News, which has the largest reach on the right.
00:16:11.000To its credit, Fox News acknowledged that Joe Biden won, but reports Media Matters, he's now quoting Media Matters, a partisan left-wing group whose sole goal in life is to get everybody on the right platform, get their advertisers canceled and destroy their lives, right?
00:16:22.000That's all Media Matters exists to do.
00:16:24.000It was a David Brock project created in combination with John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's deputy.
00:16:29.000It was designed as a weapons center for the Democratic Party.
00:16:33.000So now you got Max Boot, former conservative, neoconservative, ripping into, using media matters in order to attack Fox News.
00:16:40.000I mean, I guess when you go, you go all the way.
00:16:43.000He quotes them saying in the two weeks after Fox News called the election for Biden, Fox News cast doubts on the results of the election at least 774 times.
00:16:51.000Fox News host Mark Levin told viewers, if you don't fight January 6th on the floor of the Senate and the House, and that is the joint meeting of Congress on these electors, then we are done.
00:16:58.000The pro-Trump insurrectionists were listening.
00:17:21.000He says Cumulus Media, one of America's largest talk radio companies, has ordered its hosts, who include some Fox News personalities, to stop spreading false claims of election fraud.
00:17:29.000If only Cumulus were doing a better job of enforcing its new policy.
00:17:32.000But Fox News itself has no such edict.
00:17:35.000James and Catherine Murdoch, part of the family that controls Fox News, just called on media property owners to stop propagating lies that have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces.
00:17:43.000If James' brother Loughlin and father Rupert won't listen, large cable companies such as Comcast and Charter, which carry Fox News and provide much of its revenue in the form of user feeds, need to step in and kick Fox News off.
00:17:56.000Well, we should expect better behavior from media executives who shouldn't count on it.
00:17:59.000CNN notes that the UK doesn't have its own version of Fox News because it has a government regulator that meets out heavy fines to broadcasters that violate minimal standards of impartiality and accuracy.
00:18:08.000The United States hasn't had that since the FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s.
00:18:13.000As president, Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC or domestic terrorism may be only the beginning rather than the end of the plot against America.
00:18:20.000So in other words, it is time for the government to forcibly step in and use the FCC to crack down on views that Max Boot does not That needs to happen.
00:18:29.000Authoritarianism is the only protection against supposed authoritarianism.
00:18:34.000The threat of authoritarianism on the right is so grave, we were so close to the end of the republic on January 6th, that now you have to step in.
00:18:40.000In order to protect democracy, you have to shut down the mechanisms of individual rights.
00:18:45.000That is the point that Max Boot and others on the left are making.
00:18:48.000And they're going to voluntarily undergo a form of social ostracism to ensure that people cannot work.
00:18:53.000And people like Deborah Messing, the actress, who came out and said that she would not appear on any network that platforms McEnany.
00:19:02.000She says, If I ever see Kayleigh McEnany on a panel on a news show or hired by a network, I am immediately ceasing to support every single advertiser on that network.
00:19:15.000Try and destroy any outlet that does a thing you don't like.
00:19:18.000And the folks who are doing this proclaim that they are advocates for freedom.
00:19:21.000Because after all, they are protecting freedom.
00:19:24.000In order to get to this logic, you have to assume that the threat to freedom was so widespread and so grave on January 6th that it necessitates the shutdowns of basic First Amendment freedoms.
00:19:34.000This is the argument that's been made in Germany.
00:19:48.000Okay, the bottom line is that the Nazi party in Germany has been banned for a long time.
00:19:52.000Nazi symbols have been banned for a long time.
00:19:54.000The Stalemein Kampf has been banned for a long time.
00:19:56.000By the way, has that stopped the rising of the neo-Nazis in Germany?
00:19:59.000Not particularly much, but it doesn't matter.
00:20:02.000The idea is that you can ban those views because those views are anti-democracy, and so if you stop those views from being propagated, you protect democracy.
00:20:08.000Okay, maybe that's a fair argument when it comes to the Nazis.
00:20:10.000I tend to think that it's not particularly helpful.
00:20:13.000Me being the Orthodox Jew, not a fan of Nazis as it turns out.
00:20:16.000I still think that that may be bad policy by the Germans.
00:20:19.000That the best way to reject Nazism is to take it head on and explain why it is wrong.
00:20:24.000Okay, but even if you were to use that logic with regard to Nazis to label 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in that category, to suggest that Fox News is in that category, that in order to protect democracy, we have to shut down the First Amendment, that is authoritarianism.
00:20:38.000So in a second, we're gonna get to authoritarianism and where the threat of authoritarianism lies in the United States, because there's some authoritarianism on both sides, but I think on one side, it has some institutional control it does not have on the other side.
00:20:50.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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00:22:13.000Okay, so the sort of authoritarian mindset of the left is being extended to virtually every area of American life.
00:22:20.000The attack on the social media companies from the left has been, how dare those social media companies value free speech?
00:22:25.000Now, on this show, I've been very critical of the social media companies for their arbitrary and opaque standards when it comes to censorship.
00:22:30.000They do not make clear why they are banning certain people.
00:22:33.000They do not make clear the consistent rationale, because there is no consistent rationale.
00:23:30.000You have destroyed this country, and quite frankly, it's still happening right now.
00:23:36.000Okay, so again, the idea here from everybody on the left universally, not people, not liberals, people on the hard left, is that the big thing to blame here is freedom of speech itself.
00:23:46.000The right is to, not like the political right, rights are to blame for the misuse of rights.
00:25:14.000The authors of that study, this 1950 flawed study, they suggested, quote, So the basic idea is you have to remake all of American society so it stops churning out these proto-fascists.
00:25:21.000cannot be achieved by psychological means alone.
00:25:23.000The task is comparable to that of eliminating neurosis or delinquency or nationalism from the world.
00:25:28.000These are the products of the total organization of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed.
00:25:33.000Right, so the basic idea is you have to remake all of American society so it stops churning out these proto-fascists.
00:25:38.000Now, the way that these fascists were identified was with this scale, the so-called F-scale, which gave you a bunch of questions.
00:25:45.000And if you answered too many of the questions in a quote-unquote authoritarian way, this meant that you had a proto-fascist personality or a potential fascist personality.
00:25:54.000And the left took this up with alacrity, because essentially what it did was medicalize anybody who was conservative.
00:25:58.000The basic idea was that if you were on the right, you were an authoritarian.
00:26:02.000Okay, but in fact, it turns out that there's a grain of truth to the idea that people do have authoritarian personalities.
00:26:08.000Now, the left twist it for generations.
00:26:10.000The left suggested that only the right had authoritarian personalities.
00:26:15.000Right-wing authoritarianism does, in fact, exist.
00:26:17.000So there's a Harvard social scientist named Robert Altemeier.
00:26:20.000He created a right-wing authoritarianism scale, right?
00:26:25.000What characterized you as being a right-wing authoritarian?
00:26:28.000And he detected three character traits that he said made somebody a potential right-wing authoritarian.
00:26:33.000Here are the three character traits that exist on the right.
00:26:36.000And you see these in some of the capital rioters, right?
00:26:41.000One is authoritarian submission, willingness to submit to established and legitimate authorities, at least in their own minds.
00:26:46.000So for a lot of the people who believe that Donald Trump was telling them the truth, that Donald Trump could never be wrong, and that Donald Trump was the only legitimate authority in the United States, you see that sort of authoritarian, worshipful submission to Trump in, we're going to run into the Capitol building and try to overthrow the auspices of democracy.
00:27:02.000The second factor is authoritarian aggression.
00:27:05.000Aggressiveness approved by the authorities against a particular outgroup.
00:27:08.000So, again, if you're rushing into the Capitol building and you are attacking police officers and you're trying to attack Congress people because you believe that your leader, whether or not this is justified, you believe that your leader has ordered you to do so, that is, in fact, an indicator of authoritarian aggression, according to the right-wing authoritarianism scale developed by Harvard social scientist Robert Altemeier.
00:27:26.000The third characteristic is conventionalism, which is defined by adherence to approved social conventions.
00:27:32.000And so the basic idea there is that if you believe in sort of traditional values, then this makes you a right-wing authoritarian, and if combined with authoritarian submission and authoritarian aggression.
00:27:42.000Okay, so Altemeyer and other folks on the left found that there's nobody on the left who's authoritarian.
00:27:47.000Well, it turns out that was rather self-flattering because, like Adorno, Altemeyer is of the left, and so he created an incredibly faulty scale to try and measure left-wing authoritarianism.
00:27:56.000So left-wing authoritarianism, it turns out, does in fact exist.
00:27:59.000There's a University of Montana social psychologist.
00:28:04.000He took Altemeyer's exact scale that was used to measure right-wing authoritarianism, and then he just substituted some words.
00:28:11.000Instead of, for example, saying that I submit to proper governmental and religious authorities, rather than listening to the rabble, Right, which was used as sort of a right-wing authoritarian mindset.
00:28:22.000He just said, instead of religious authorities, he said scientific authorities.
00:28:26.000Now, when you take that statement and you flip it to the left, obviously a huge swath of the left believes that.
00:28:30.000You have to listen to the governmental and scientific authorities.
00:28:33.000You cannot listen to anybody who descends from those authorities, right?
00:28:37.000That sounds very much like much of the left today.
00:28:39.000So, Lucian Conway simply took Altmeier's scale, and then he flipped some of the premises, and it turns out, not only does left-wing authoritarianism exist, it exists in huge numbers.
00:28:49.000Conway found that the highest score for authoritarianism was for liberals on left-wing authoritarianism.
00:28:55.000He says, our data suggests that average Americans on the political left are just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the political right.
00:29:02.000And those left-wing authoritarians can be just as prejudiced, dogmatic, and extremist as right-wing authoritarians. It turns out that the content of the dogma is just different.
00:29:11.000So there's some sociologists who came up with character traits for left-wing authoritarianism.
00:29:15.000So remember, the right-wing authoritarianism character traits are authoritarian submission, where you submit to a great leader, authoritarian aggression, you do aggression at their behest, and conventionalism, meaning that you adhere to approved social conventions.
00:29:27.000Well, as you could predict, the left-wing authoritarianism scale, right, the character traits that you're looking for, are revolutionary aggression, designed to quote, forcefully overthrow the established hierarchy and punish those in power, top-down censorship, directed at wielding group authority as a means of regulating characteristically right-wing beliefs and behaviors,
00:29:46.000And anti-conventionalism, reflecting a moral absolutism concerning progressive values and concomitant dismissal of conservatives as inherently immoral, an intolerant desire for coercively imposing left-wing beliefs and values on others, and a need for social and ideological homogeneity in one's environment.
00:30:02.000Hey, does that sound familiar, any of that?
00:30:34.000The sort of right-wing authoritarianism that you see on the right culminating in the Capitol riots, or the left-wing authoritarianism you see on the left?
00:30:47.000Which one has taken over our social media?
00:30:50.000So, Theodor Adorno, who originally came up with the idea of the authoritarian personality, and first wrote it up in that very flawed 1950 book, later in life, he was teaching at the Free University of Berlin, 1968, and there was a group called SDS, it was a German social democratic, kind of revolutionary group, And in Europe, much the same sort of stuff was happening in the late 1960s that was happening in the United States.
00:31:13.000You had students who were violent, aggressive, taking over universities.
00:31:17.000And Adorno, who had escaped Europe in order to avoid the Holocaust, he wrote to a fellow Frankfurt School theorist named Herbert Marcuse.
00:31:26.000Okay, and Adorno mentioned that a bunch of these revolutionary students had broken into his offices, they had then occupied his offices and treated him horribly, and he had to call the police.
00:31:35.000So he wrote to Herbert Marcuse, again another Marxist Frankfurt school theorist, he said, we had to call the police who then arrested all those they found in the room.
00:31:42.000They treated the students far more leniently than the students treated me.
00:31:44.000O'Dorno wrote that the students had displayed something of that thoughtless violence that once belonged to fascism. The response is what's interesting.
00:31:52.000So Herbert Marcuse was one of the most influential thinkers on the left for most of the 1960s.
00:31:58.000He was the author, the coiner of the slogan, Make Love Not War.
00:32:04.000And he was a proponent of what he called repressive tolerance, called liberating tolerance.
00:32:10.000So liberating tolerance was the idea that you could stop people on the right from speaking so as to prevent them from violating your tenets of tolerance, which sounds very much like left-wing authoritarianism.
00:32:21.000So Marcuse wrote back to Adorno and chided him for having called the cops.
00:32:26.000He said, our cause is better taken up by the rebellious students than by the police.
00:32:29.000And he argued that violence from the left was merely fresh air.
00:32:33.000So, again, Marcuse and other members of the left, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge right-wing authoritarianism, but left-wing authoritarianism does not exist.
00:32:42.000And this is the blind spot for America's political left.
00:32:45.000They do not see themselves clearly at all in the mirror.
00:32:49.000I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that there is a segment of the right, I think it is fairly small, that is authoritarian in nature, that seeks an idol, that follows that idol, that is willing to do aggressive violence on behalf of that idol.
00:33:02.000I think the evidence that it's fairly small is that 74 million Americans voted for Trump and like a few hundred morons decided to invade the Capitol and many of those were devotees of fringe QAnon conspiracy theory that is absurd in its basis and ridiculous in all of its implications.
00:33:20.000On the left, The description that I just gave of left-wing authoritarianism, how rife is that in our institutions?
00:33:26.000When I talk about revolutionary aggression approved by those in power, when I talk about top-down censorship sought by those in power, when I talk about anti-conventionalism, seeing your own morality as absolute, everybody else's morality is bad, and we need to coercively impose our beliefs on everybody else, and we need social and ideological homogeneity.
00:33:48.000The answer is, that is incredibly prevalent.
00:33:50.000If you look at the institutions of our society, the threat of authoritarianism, it exists on both sides, but it is predominant, predominant on the left.
00:33:59.000The threat of authoritarianism is fringe and dangerous when it comes to the right.
00:34:04.000It is mainstream when it comes to the left.
00:34:06.000The institutions of our society have decided to preemptively purge people who do not agree with them.
00:34:13.000The pages of the Washington Post have been... Can you imagine anybody on the right side of the aisle literally writing editorials for places like Daily Wire claiming that we should de-platform, that we should censor, that we should use the government to shut down CNN or MSNBC?
00:34:27.000I've never seen anything remotely like that.
00:34:34.000I've not seen that at the Washington Examiner.
00:34:36.000All evil right-wing outlets, according to the left.
00:34:38.000I've never seen it on Fox News, by the way.
00:34:40.000And yet, this is a commonplace assertion on the left.
00:34:43.000By what Max Boot argues, which is that the FCC should be cracking down and barring Fox News, that is not a fringe idea.
00:34:49.000That appeared in the pages of the Washington Post.
00:34:53.000The New York Times makes these sorts of contentions all the time.
00:34:55.000And then, speaking of ideological homogeneity and top-down censorship imposed from above, and speaking of approval for revolutionary aggression, the New York Times fires its own op-ed editor for printing an editorial from Tom Cotton, a sitting United States senator, suggesting that rioting and violence should be met by use of the Insurrection Act in order to call forth troops to quell it.
00:35:16.000This is not a fringe philosophy on the left.
00:35:19.000Left-wing authoritarianism is ripe on the left, and rife on the left.
00:35:25.000When we talk about the perversion of our institutions, when we talk about the threat to the American way of life and the threat to your rights, when we talk about the social authoritarianism that eventually is going to percolate into governmental authoritarianism, the chief threat of that is not from the right.
00:35:39.000I know there are a lot of people on the left who look at Trump and they say, that's a guy who talks like an authoritarian.
00:35:43.000And a lot of the time, he does talk like that.
00:35:45.000Okay, Trump's language has been horrible along these lines.
00:35:48.000He says things that sound authoritarian all the time.
00:35:54.000I understand that there is a line that is going around that the entire right approved Donald Trump for the last few months.
00:35:59.000Weirdly, again, every person in a position of power to actually do something did not go along with this.
00:36:07.000Donald Trump was never, for one moment, in serious possibility of remaining president on January 20th, once the Electoral College certified, and there was very little doubt that the Electoral College was going to certify, given that states all over the country, Republican and Democrat, with state officials who are Republican, under pressure from Trump directly, ignored him and did their constitutional duty.
00:36:28.000I have zero faith that that constitutional duty will be done by a bunch of people who inherently believe the Constitution is itself an obstacle to utopia and is evil.
00:36:37.000Who believe that their institutions should be militarized against people on the right.
00:36:41.000You wonder why people on the right feel this deep and abiding threat?
00:36:44.000It's because every institution of our society is now being militarized on behalf of a philosophy of left-wing authoritarianism.
00:37:57.000We've been using ZipRecruiter right here at The Daily Wire for years.
00:38:01.000It's so effective that four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the very first day.
00:38:07.000Now, businesses have had to pivot during the pandemic, find better employees.
00:38:11.000There are a lot of people out of work right now who are looking for a job, a lot of employers who are looking for people to hire the best qualified employees.
00:38:36.000Because the left-wing authoritarian threat, which is going to be crammed down by the government, but is present in our social lives, the authoritarian mindset, which is predominant across America right now, that's going to continue, full scale.
00:38:49.000A unity is only unity under Joe Biden if you acquiesce to that form of philosophical authoritarianism.
00:38:56.000First, remember last Thursday, it was a big day for The Daily Wire.
00:38:58.000We made our entrance into entertainment content with our very first feature film, Run, Hide, Fight.
00:39:08.000There is a reason that Rotten Tomatoes currently has given it like a 22% positive score from the critics and a 98% positive score from audiences.
00:39:16.000The feedback on it from our folks is unbelievable.
00:39:18.000If you missed the movie, if you missed Run, Hide, Fight, Head on over to Daily Wire.
00:39:23.000You can stream it on demand from our website, mobile or streaming apps on Apple TV and Roku.
00:39:26.000If you're not a member yet, use promo code RHF to get 25% off.
00:39:46.000It follows Zoe Hull, a high school student, coping with the recent loss of her mother.
00:39:49.000All she wants to do is finish out her last few days of senior year in high school and then go to college.
00:39:54.000Instead, she has to fight her way through an attempted school massacre.
00:39:58.000So, if you saw the movie and, despite what the left thought, you actually have something good to say about it, please go and share it with the world.
00:40:04.000Go write a review online, go to Rotten Tomatoes, or post on your website.
00:40:07.000It's time that conservative opinions are heard in the world of entertainment.
00:40:09.000We're starting to see great reviews coming out.
00:40:11.000And, again, we're excited to continue to bring you excellent stories Hollywood refuses to tell.
00:40:15.000We're gonna fight back in the culture war against cultural authoritarians, and we need your help.
00:40:31.000You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:40:34.000So when it comes to left-wing authoritarians taking over the reins of the government and taking over the reins of the institutions, you can see how this works.
00:40:47.000All unity will be quashed unless you agree with the left-wing authoritarian mindset.
00:40:53.000And that means a complete rethinking of the Constitution of the United States.
00:40:55.000Constitutional rights are bad because they effectuate the possibility of dissent winning.
00:41:00.000Well, we have to make sure that people view the Constitution in a horrible light.
00:41:04.000We have to make sure the Declaration of Independence is viewed in a horrible light.
00:41:07.000Instead, we have to suggest that there's a hierarchy of victimhood that allows you to speak, and that if you are not cognizant of that hierarchy of victimhood, then you must be barred from public life.
00:41:18.000I believe that the Constitution is a racist document.
00:41:20.000MSNBC and now in Washington Journal on C-SPAN.
00:41:22.000And he says the constitution is in its essence, a racist document.
00:41:25.000So any possibility, by the way, of a country in which we unify around founding principles is absolutely destroyed by people who wish to take the institutional reins and then use them against people they dislike.
00:41:36.000Here is Ellie Mistal suggesting that the constitution essentially needs to be thrown out because it's racist.
00:41:41.000I believe that the constitution is a racist document.
00:41:46.000I believe that it was written at a time when the people were racist.
00:41:51.000It was written to support a white supremacist state.
00:41:55.000And it's structurally still that document.
00:41:59.000I tend to think that the 14th Amendment, with its guarantee of equal protection and substantive due process for all, is enough that if applied to the rest of the document to save the Constitution from its original sins, to redeem the Constitution from the racism and bigotry and sexism of its founding.
00:42:24.000Okay, it's fun to see how he takes the 14th Amendment and then just inserts in there the phrase substantive due process.
00:42:29.000For those who are not fluent in legalese, what he is saying there essentially is that the Supreme Court of the United States is basically just supposed to overrule anything that Ellie Mistal doesn't like.
00:42:37.000That's what substantive due process means.
00:42:39.000It's a nonsense phrase that was inserted by the Supreme Court in order to achieve particular political ends.
00:42:44.000But again, this philosophy, which is that the Constitution is basically either a tool or an obstacle on behalf of left-wing viewpoints, that is now being promoted openly by CNN.
00:43:02.000First of all, this is part and parcel of a broader effort by the left to suggest that Republicans can never quote MLK.
00:43:07.000If you say that Martin Luther King's dream, which was that people be treated as individuals rather than as representatives of their race, if you say that that is a very good thing, and it's a good thing that America celebrates that ideal, The left will say, no, no, no, we need ideological homogeneity in order for you to quote MLK.
00:43:22.000Sonny Hostin is representative of this view on the left.
00:43:25.000If you want to cite MLK approvingly for that sentiment, you also have to buy into all left-wing tropes.
00:43:30.000And if you voted for Trump, you are simply not allowed to believe anything that MLK believed.
00:43:34.000Here's Sonny Hostin doing this routine on ABC's The View.
00:43:38.000I saw today, unbelievably, in my view, Ted Cruz, Kayleigh McEnany, Rona McDaniel, Melania Trump, quoting Dr. King, tweeting Dr. King.
00:43:50.000Those were the same people that were, like Melania Trump with this birther lie, but Ted Cruz with challenging, you know, the Electoral College, you know, Kayleigh McEnany.
00:44:02.000Just over and over again with her propaganda.
00:44:04.000How dare they, how dare they try to quote Dr. King on the celebration of his birthday when they enabled, enabled a racist president.
00:44:17.000Okay, so this is my favorite part, is that MLK Day was supposed to be a unifying moment around which all Americans could unify.
00:44:22.000And it would be good if all of your political opponents cited MLK approvingly.
00:44:26.000But if your political opponents cite MLK approvingly and they're political opponents and you're on the left, That's very bad.
00:44:31.000Then you're not allowed to talk about MLK ever, ever, ever again.
00:44:34.000So anyway, CNN has now come out against what is called the 1776 Report.
00:44:38.000Okay, so the president had an advisory committee.
00:44:41.000They put together the 1776 Report, which was designed to be a counter to the 1619 Project.
00:44:47.000And it is a fulsome explanation of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.
00:44:51.000It talks about the greatness of the United States.
00:44:54.000Of course, neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent.
00:45:00.000No nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics.
00:45:05.000None has strived harder or done more to achieve them.
00:45:08.000That is the basis of the 1776 Commission.
00:45:10.000It's a report well worth reading with your kids.
00:45:14.000It talks about the value of the Declaration of Independence and the value of the Constitution of the United States.
00:45:18.000It quotes people ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass.
00:45:22.000It talks about race in the Constitution.
00:45:26.000And the basic idea is that there are a bunch of challenges to American principles that are now rife on the left.
00:45:31.000And this, of course, is exactly right.
00:45:33.000It talks about the evils of progressivism, which held that essentially the Declaration of Independence was irrelevant, and the evils of fascism, the evils of communism.
00:45:41.000And then it talks about racism and identity politics and points out that the Civil Rights Movement was a grand and glorious movement culminating in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights.
00:45:53.000It presented itself and was understood by the American people as consistent with the principles of the founding.
00:45:58.000himself said, when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the declaration of independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. And then, says the report, the civil rights movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades. They distorted many ideas of areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of non-discrimination and equal opportunity in favor of group rights, not unlike those advanced by John C. Calhoun I've written about all of this.
00:46:39.000So, you are now in direct opposition to Martin Luther King Jr.
00:46:41.000if you believe that America was gloriously founded, did not live up to its ideals, and progressively realized those ideals over time, and that identity politics strips away those ideals.
00:47:42.000Donald Trump's a threat to the institutions.
00:47:43.000Here's James Clyburn openly saying, if Congress won't do something Joe Biden wants to do, Joe Biden should just ignore the Constitution and do what he wants to do, which, by the way, is kind of authoritarian, is it not?
00:47:54.000And like a governmental level, the takeover of legislative powers by the executive is an authoritarian leaning.
00:48:02.000I have said to Joe Biden, That I do feel that when he lay out his agenda and fight participation from the other side, if they're going to be recalcitrant, if they're going to throw up roadblocks, go on without them.
00:48:17.000Use your executive authority if they refuse to cooperate.
00:48:22.000That is what Abraham Lincoln did to start dismantling slavery.
00:48:27.000That is what Harry Truman did to start the integration of the armed services.
00:48:32.000All these things were done by executive order.
00:48:34.000Okay, I mean, that is some wild stuff there from James Clyburn.
00:48:38.000But remember, the real authoritarian threat is a bunch of droogs and idiots invading the Capitol and then not achieving any of their goals or purposes.
00:48:50.000The authoritarian threat that's gonna come for you and your rights is not gonna come from morons dressed up as Buffalo inside the Capitol building.
00:48:56.000It's gonna come from people who are coming with a smile and with institutional power in order to cram down their viewpoint in the name of their own virtue.
00:49:03.000Alrighty, we'll be back here today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
00:49:06.000The Matt Walsh Show airing at 1.30 p.m.