The Ben Shapiro Show - October 28, 2021


Merrick Garland Is A Legal Hack | Ep. 1364


Episode Stats

Length

49 minutes

Words per Minute

200.40404

Word Count

9,920

Sentence Count

704

Misogynist Sentences

18

Hate Speech Sentences

15


Summary

Ben Shapiro talks about Merrick Garland's day in the Senate, Joe Biden's trip to an international climate summit, and the State Department says people of no gender can now get their passports stamped "X." Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the Daily Wire. He is also a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard and Accuracy in Reporting. If you haven t gotten a VPN yet, you could save $1,300 or more per year on life insurance by comparing quotes from over dozen top insurers all in one place: compare quotes with PolicyGenius, a service that swaps the standard medical exam for a simple phone call, and then you can get covered in as little as a week thanks to an award-winning policy option that swaps your standard medical test for a free, 20-minute, non-negotiated, phone call. This exclusive policy was recently rated No. 1 by Forbes Advisor, and it s very nice to get it right now! Get started with Policygenius by using the discount code: PGPriveius to get 20% off your first month with no annual fee, and get 50% off for life insurance up to $150.00 when you sign up for a year! . You can get it all covered by becoming a PGPistius member for free! and get the best rates, unlimited access to all of the latest PGP products, including insurance, training, and access to the latest tools and training, including the latest in the industry and training FREE Training from PGP's newest app, PGP Plus! Get it all for just $99 a year, plus an additional $5,000 in training, plus a FREE 30% discount when you become a member of the PGP+ membership when you upgrade to PGP PLUS gets you access to a lifetime of PGPPlus gets you an ad-free version of the show, and gets you 20% OFF your first year of the entire service! The PGP membership gets you a FREE 7GBsizes, plus you get an additional 5 GBs, plus heaps of perks, including VIP access, and a $10,000 gets you gets $50,000, and he gets an additional 4 GBs gets an ad discount when he becomes a VIP gets the choice of $100,000 and gets the option of VIP access gets $25,000 is allowing you, he gets it all!


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Republicans subject Attorney General Merrick Garland to a rough day in the Senate.
00:00:03.000 Joe Biden heads to an international climate summit.
00:00:06.000 And the State Department says people of no gender can now get their passports stamped X. I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:11.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:18.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressiveVPN.
00:00:20.000 Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
00:00:22.000 Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
00:00:24.000 We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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00:01:51.000 All righty. So yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland, remember, this was supposed to be a legal mind for the ages. And he wasn't just some sort of political hack who did the law.
00:02:01.000 No, he was not an Eric Holder type.
00:02:03.000 He was going to be a nonpartisan unifying figure.
00:02:06.000 That's why he was picked.
00:02:07.000 Remember, some of the alternatives that Joe Biden had been looking at were far more radical publicly facing than Merrick Garland was for attorney general.
00:02:14.000 And there'd been talk about Doug Jones from Alabama as the attorney general of the United States.
00:02:18.000 There'd been talk about bringing back some of the Obama holdovers.
00:02:21.000 Instead, Joe Biden picked Merrick Garland specifically because Merrick Garland was supposed to not be a political hack, widely respected, almost made the Supreme Court.
00:02:29.000 Instead, it turns out that pretty much every left-minded judicial appointee, if given the power of the Attorney General would turn into Merrick Garland.
00:02:38.000 This seems to be the case.
00:02:39.000 So Merrick Garland has been a very highly political Attorney General.
00:02:43.000 And he was called in front of the Senate yesterday to talk about how the DOJ was targeting parents.
00:02:49.000 Because remember, the DOJ put out an entire memo talking about how they were going to essentially sick the FBI on parents who had questions about how school boards were running.
00:02:59.000 And they did so at the behest of a National School Boards Association which had claimed that there was a massive uptick in violence against school boards without actually demonstrating that that was in fact the case.
00:03:10.000 So yesterday, Merrick Garland was called to the Hill, and he was asked questions about this.
00:03:14.000 Because when the federal government is called upon by an outside source to start investigating violence, and then, on the basis of no evidence, starts to do that, this could have a pretty significant chilling effect on people who might want to get involved in, say, the local school board.
00:03:26.000 If you found out that the FBI and DOJ were suddenly targeting your point of view and giving you a little bit of extra scrutiny because they had been told to by your political opponents, Might that not be somewhat chilling?
00:03:37.000 So Merrick Garland was specifically asked about the fact that if this really was a pressing law enforcement issue that required the intervention of the DOJ, could he name any specific act of violence that had led to this large-scale announcement from the DOJ?
00:03:51.000 Here is Merrick Garland saying, well, not so much.
00:03:55.000 Just in my recollection I said that the impetus for the letter from my memorandum was that letter and also reports of this kind of activity.
00:04:06.000 What reports?
00:04:07.000 I said again that at the time that they were news reports that had been published and I think that some of the other senators here have described some of those news reports and we've certainly seen subsequently more news reports and more statements by board members of threats to kill them.
00:04:26.000 Okay, so, threats of violence, okay?
00:04:28.000 But when Cotton asked him specifically about the memo that the DOJ put out, which included, quote, violence, threats of violence, as well as harassment and intimidation, Garland had no response, because harassment and intimidation are not quite the same thing as threats of violence.
00:04:44.000 Because it turns out that if somebody disagrees with you at a school board meeting, that could be considered, quote-unquote, harassment or intimidation.
00:04:49.000 This is something Mike Lee pointed out.
00:04:52.000 So Merrick Garland then admitted that the original letter that caused the DOJ to start looking into parents did not include acts of violence in the letter.
00:05:03.000 You didn't investigate the incidents in the letter, did you?
00:05:06.000 No, this is the first step.
00:05:08.000 This is an assessment step.
00:05:09.000 It comes before investigations.
00:05:12.000 Right.
00:05:12.000 Before you issued your memo, you didn't investigate the incidents.
00:05:16.000 The memo is intended to begin assessments.
00:05:20.000 It is intended... And in fact, most of the incidents In the letter did not involve threats of violence, did they?
00:05:27.000 I think that's correct.
00:05:28.000 Most of them did not.
00:05:29.000 And they would not be covered by either federal or state law.
00:05:32.000 I agree with that.
00:05:33.000 And they would be protected by the First Amendment.
00:05:37.000 Okay, so then the question is, if you did not have a pressing need to do this, why did you do this?
00:05:40.000 And the answer, of course, is that this served the left-leaning agenda, suggesting that school boards everywhere are doing a wonderful job and parents who have questions about school boards are doing a terrible job.
00:05:49.000 This led Tom Cotton to rip into Merrick Garland, telling him he probably should just resign his job.
00:05:55.000 Do you apologize to Scott Smith and his 15-year-old daughter, Judge?
00:06:02.000 This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful.
00:06:06.000 Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court.
00:06:07.000 entitled and protected by the First Amendment to protest to their school board about that. But he was cited by the School Board Association as a domestic terrorist which we now know that letter and those reports were the basis for your judgment. No, Senator. This is shameful. Judge, this is shameful. This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful. Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court. You should resign in disgrace, Judge.
00:06:33.000 Okay, and of course Merrick Garland was very upset because he said, well, it's not really the NSBA letter that caused It was just kind of the NSBA letter that caused us to do all this.
00:06:41.000 Josh Hawley got in on the act as well, the senator from Missouri.
00:06:44.000 He said that you guys are talking about using the language of domestic terrorism via the NSBA to apply to parents.
00:06:51.000 What are you doing here?
00:06:54.000 Several of my Democrat colleagues have today, just today in this hearing, multiple times have compared parents who show up at school board meetings, like Mr. Smith here, have compared them to criminal rioters.
00:07:03.000 You think that's right?
00:07:04.000 You think that a parent who shows up at a school board meeting who has a complaint, who wants to voice that complaint, and maybe she doesn't use exactly the right grammar, you think they're akin to criminal rioters?
00:07:13.000 Do you agree with that?
00:07:14.000 I do not, and I do not remember any senator here making that comparison.
00:07:18.000 Oh really?
00:07:19.000 These people are just like the folks who came here on January 6th and the riot at the Capitol?
00:07:25.000 I don't think they were referring to the picture that you're showing there.
00:07:30.000 So then, who exactly were they referring to?
00:07:32.000 Here is the thing.
00:07:33.000 When it comes to the application of law, the Attorney General's Office, when it comes to the DOJ, the DOJ has to be a somewhat Honorable institution.
00:07:44.000 Bill Barr got an enormous amount of flack when he was Attorney General because the idea from the left is that he was doing the bidding of Donald Trump routinely.
00:07:50.000 That was not true.
00:07:51.000 We know many occasions where Bill Barr was directly at odds with Donald Trump.
00:07:55.000 Donald Trump, for example, wanted Bill Barr.
00:07:57.000 He wanted Jeff Sessions to investigate Hillary Clinton.
00:07:59.000 They didn't do that.
00:07:59.000 He wanted Bill Barr to start initiating investigations of the election and Bill Barr wouldn't do that.
00:08:06.000 This sort of stuff happened all the time under Donald Trump.
00:08:08.000 Can anyone name a single time where a Democratic president has gone to his AG and said, I'd like to do X and the AG said no?
00:08:15.000 See, this is the dirty little secret about the way that politics work at the presidential level.
00:08:20.000 Pretty frequently, when there's a Republican president and he says something untoward, the people around him say, you're not allowed to do that.
00:08:26.000 This happened with Trump all the time.
00:08:28.000 Half of the things that Trump suggested on Twitter were then walked back by his own administration, and people around him said, we won't implement that, and then Trump just dropped it.
00:08:35.000 But when Joe Biden says jump, the people around him say, how high?
00:08:39.000 And this has some pretty deleterious effects on Americans' lives.
00:08:42.000 And to take just another example, it is Merrick Garland who's been spending his days cracking down on police departments around the country while simultaneously the crime rate's been going up.
00:08:50.000 Murder rates have spiked in nearly every major American city, but it was Merrick Garland who decided very early on that he was going to rescind the Trump administration's policies with regard to consent decrees with regard to local police departments.
00:09:02.000 It was all the way back in April that CNBC reported that Merrick Garland had rescinded Trump-era limits on consent decrees, which the DOJ had used to enforce reforms in police departments accused of widespread misconduct.
00:09:15.000 Garland said he would return to the traditional process in place before Trump's administration imposed sharp restrictions on the tool.
00:09:21.000 Garland said in a memo, together we will continue the department's legacy of promoting the rule of law, protecting the public, working collaboratively with state and local governmental entities to meet those ends. That is not what consent decrees historically have been under democratic administrations. Consent decrees have been a way to force local police departments to tell cops not to do things.
00:09:40.000 These consent decrees have largely been based on bad evidence.
00:09:42.000 This is certainly the case with the Seattle consent decree under the Obama administration.
00:09:46.000 It's been a way to cram down particular diversity-laden viewpoints that have nothing to do with the reality of policing.
00:09:53.000 How the law is enforced matters an awful lot.
00:09:57.000 And this also happens to be the case, I mean, Merrick Garland got rigged over the coals yesterday for having greenlit a settlement with former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe.
00:10:06.000 You'll remember that Andy McCabe was fired because an inspector general found that Andy McCabe had lied in testimony, like he had lied to the FBI.
00:10:14.000 And he leaked out information that he was not cleared to leak.
00:10:17.000 And that's according to James Comey.
00:10:19.000 And now the Justice Department agreed to pay McCabe and his attorneys over $700,000.
00:10:26.000 During a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Senator Chuck Grassley expressed outrage over the settlement, calling the move, quote, beyond incredible, noting that a DOJ inspector general review found McCabe to be lying to investigators on seven separate occasions.
00:10:39.000 Garland's answer, quote, the McCabe settlement was a recommendation of the career lawyers litigating that case based on their prospects of success in the case.
00:10:47.000 Garland said it involved a claim that he was not given the amount of time necessary to respond to allegations.
00:10:51.000 The litigators concluded they needed to settle the case because of the likelihood of loss on the merits of the claim.
00:10:56.000 Do you think that on principle, if McCabe had been a strong Democrat, that that would have been a thing that the DOJ decided to settle out?
00:11:05.000 What do you think?
00:11:07.000 And once the DOJ becomes an overtly political tool, which it is under Merrick Garland, people start to lose trust in the institutions.
00:11:12.000 And again, this didn't start with him.
00:11:14.000 Janet Reno was a tool of the Clinton administration going all the way back.
00:11:18.000 But it is worthy of note that this administration, which pledged to be a bipartisan unifying administration, is basically the soft face of authoritarianism.
00:11:27.000 They're constantly doing authoritarian things via powers delegated to them by a feckless and incompetent Congress over the course of decades.
00:11:35.000 And they're just doing what they will with it.
00:11:37.000 And it's really, really ugly.
00:11:38.000 Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden is headed overseas to a climate summit.
00:11:43.000 It's very important, according to Joe Biden, that he goes to this climate change summit.
00:11:47.000 In fact, he had built his entire we're gonna make a deal routine around going to this climate summit, as though anyone in America cared.
00:11:54.000 As though anyone in America was like, you know what?
00:11:56.000 We need a budget deal.
00:11:57.000 We need to spend trillions of dollars so Joe Biden can go to Europe, to Glasgow, and talk with the international community about climate change.
00:12:05.000 No one in America cares about that.
00:12:06.000 That was their false deadline that they had set.
00:12:08.000 Well, they didn't hit that false deadline.
00:12:10.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.
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00:13:13.000 Alrighty, so Joe Biden is headed overseas.
00:13:16.000 To this UN Global Climate Summit.
00:13:18.000 Ooh!
00:13:20.000 We should definitely formulate our policy around what Kenya thinks about climate change.
00:13:25.000 Really important to find out what the Swedes think about climate change.
00:13:28.000 Frankly, if Greta Thunberg is disappointed in me, I'm willing to pay trillions of dollars just to prevent that.
00:13:33.000 Because if this now-adult-who-I-can-make-fun-of person stares at me angrily and tells me that as an adult she's disappointed in me, I know that that sears me down to my soul.
00:13:46.000 It sears me to the point where I am perfectly willing to allow Joe Biden to spend trillions of dollars we don't have, inflate the economy, and completely dissuade people from going back to work in order so that Greta Thunberg sleeps better at night on her yacht.
00:13:59.000 It's very important to me.
00:14:03.000 So according to CBS News, we have now reached... It's funny, I'm not sure how many turning points there can be before you're just all the way around in a circle, but they keep talking about how every climate summit is going to be a turning point.
00:14:14.000 Here is the thing, gang.
00:14:16.000 Most global warming is already baked into the cake.
00:14:19.000 The reality is that any measure that dramatically harms the global economy on behalf of lowering carbon emissions is a fool's errand.
00:14:28.000 You are much better off taking some of that potential gain and using it on mitigation efforts and adaptation efforts rather than attempting to completely remake the world economy to stop carbon emissions altogether considering a huge percentage of the world's population still lives in abject poverty burning dung for fuel.
00:14:45.000 Carbon emissions are not the specific problem in the long run.
00:14:49.000 The specific problem is how human beings deal with carbon emissions.
00:14:52.000 The Earth is not going to boil.
00:14:53.000 Not all human life is going to die.
00:14:55.000 All the catastrophic nonsense about how billions of people are going to be living in basically a Mad Max universe if global warming continues.
00:15:04.000 It's silly.
00:15:05.000 It's not true.
00:15:06.000 Technology has improved.
00:15:07.000 The United States, for example, our emissions have leveled off.
00:15:10.000 China's are not going to level off.
00:15:11.000 China's going to continue to emit at high rates.
00:15:13.000 Developing countries are going to continue to emit at high rates.
00:15:15.000 And by the way, if you wanted them to stop emitting at those high rates, you'd have to pay them trillions of dollars.
00:15:19.000 They are openly saying this now.
00:15:21.000 So your choice.
00:15:22.000 Do you wish to sink the growth of the world economy?
00:15:25.000 Which, by the way, is what allows people to live longer.
00:15:27.000 It allows people to be healthy.
00:15:28.000 It allows people to care about the environment.
00:15:30.000 Because I'll tell you what you don't care about when you are living in abject poverty, burning dung for fuel.
00:15:33.000 Global warming.
00:15:34.000 That's not something that's on the top one million of your issues.
00:15:38.000 But for the very rich among us, these are the top issues.
00:15:41.000 The top issues are great systems.
00:15:43.000 How can we impact great systems of climate by also taking control of the great systems of economics?
00:15:50.000 A civilization whose primary worry is whether there is going to be global warming over the course of the next hundred years that causes some people to move from their homes and causes, if the estimates are correct and the economy continues to grow as it has done for the past century and a half, It will cause a few thousand deaths over the course of a century.
00:16:12.000 This is according to the estimates from Bjorn Lomborg over at the Copenhagen Institute.
00:16:16.000 The notion that hundreds of thousands or millions of people are going to die from global warming is just based on the fact that human beings adapt to their environment and adapt to the climate.
00:16:23.000 That's not true.
00:16:25.000 The notion that you're going to sink the world economy on that basis, that is a rich people thing.
00:16:31.000 And there's a reason that this is a rich people conference.
00:16:34.000 Everybody's taking private jets to these climate change conferences because if you don't live in a rich country, this is not a major concern to you.
00:16:39.000 Your first concern is, how do I make sure that my kids live through the next year?
00:16:43.000 Not, what is the climate going to be like in a hundred years?
00:16:47.000 And so if we, who are looking long-term, wish to protect the human species from whatever vacillations and vicissitudes of climate fall upon us, we ought to be looking at things like building seawalls, maybe geoengineering, Maybe painting the roads white.
00:17:03.000 There are things that we can do that are designed to mitigate the effects of climate change.
00:17:08.000 Human beings are really good at adaptation.
00:17:09.000 We really, really suck at completely changing entire systems of how we live in order to prevent long-off costs that we still don't know will materialize in the way that the UN keeps saying they will materialize.
00:17:22.000 But this means that every climate summit is hailed by our brilliant media as the turning point for civilization.
00:17:29.000 According to CBS News, President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, but Senate Democrats are still fighting over new climate legislation that would give Mr. Biden something to brag about as the U.S.
00:17:39.000 attempts to reassert itself as a leader at next week's Global Climate Summit.
00:17:42.000 Let me just tell you something.
00:17:43.000 I don't care whether the European CS is a leader.
00:17:45.000 We are the leaders and they're just going to have to deal with it.
00:17:47.000 And the fact is that Europe is a dying continent.
00:17:50.000 It's been a dying continent for quite a long time.
00:17:52.000 If we wish to follow Europe down the primrose path, we can.
00:17:55.000 But to pretend that we are subject to the moral whim of a continent responsible for two world wars, responsible not only for those world wars, but for a lack of growth, a spineless embrace of a of an innervated future.
00:18:16.000 What makes us subject to the Europeans?
00:18:18.000 They've been hanging on our coattails for well over a century at this point.
00:18:21.000 Why exactly would I care what the French think about our climate policy?
00:18:25.000 Considering, again, that the United States is actually reducing its climate emissions and, by the way, is the basis for all global growth in the economy.
00:18:36.000 Why would that make a difference to me?
00:18:37.000 There's a great book out right now by David Harsanyi.
00:18:40.000 It's called Eurotrash.
00:18:42.000 All about the problems in the European Union.
00:18:45.000 There's a whole group of people in the United States who sort of love Europe, but refuse to see any of the downsides of Europe.
00:18:50.000 Like, for example, the fact that a huge percentage of their population sits home and gets paid by the government to do nothing.
00:18:55.000 Like, for example, the fact that they have no growth rates.
00:18:57.000 Like, for example, as we'll get to, the fact that there are no children in Europe.
00:19:02.000 So why are we taking our cues from Europe, exactly?
00:19:04.000 But I love the assumptions in the media.
00:19:06.000 We have to have Joe Biden, a decrepit old man, wander over to Europe in order to provide a moral example to the Europeans.
00:19:14.000 Reassert ourselves as a leader.
00:19:16.000 Come on.
00:19:17.000 The countries that adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, now nearly every country in the world except Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, are to meet every five years to update their ambitions.
00:19:25.000 The summit was delayed last year because of the pandemic.
00:19:27.000 I love that they update their ambitions.
00:19:29.000 Because remember, the Paris Accords were not binding.
00:19:32.000 The Paris Accords said, we are going to try to do X in five years.
00:19:36.000 We're going to try to lower our emissions by this percentage in 10 years.
00:19:39.000 Okay, so people get together and they make a pinky swear.
00:19:43.000 They're going to lower their emissions.
00:19:45.000 And most of the time, they don't hit any of those targets, but they all feel real good about themselves.
00:19:48.000 And then the media talk about how we have finally achieved world peace.
00:19:52.000 This year, the goal is to prove that countries take the priorities seriously and are working on issues such as methane emission reduction, enacting a global carbon market and weaning countries off coal production.
00:20:01.000 The action of the U.S.
00:20:02.000 delegation are under a microscope.
00:20:04.000 Oh, really?
00:20:04.000 What are they going to do about it?
00:20:05.000 Seriously, America is historically the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases and still the world's leading producer of fossil fuels.
00:20:11.000 However, Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats are deadlocked trying to negotiate a deal that would invest hundreds of billions in climate policies.
00:20:18.000 West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has opposed the price of the package, a clean electricity performance program, and a carbon tax.
00:20:24.000 Data show that without those policies, the U.S.
00:20:26.000 will fail to meet their goal of lower emissions, and therefore, global temperatures.
00:20:30.000 By the way, the United States could go to zero emissions tomorrow.
00:20:32.000 The change in the climate trajectory would be a fraction of a degree Celsius over the course of the next century.
00:20:38.000 Saying just about the United States, China is by far the world's leading emitter.
00:20:41.000 India is emitting like crazy.
00:20:43.000 Developing countries emit as they develop.
00:20:45.000 Before the Paris Agreement, the global economy was on track to, by the year 2100, warm the planet at least 3.7 degrees Celsius above 1900's pre-industrial levels.
00:20:55.000 Hey, not today.
00:20:55.000 1900, right?
00:20:57.000 Today, existing policies will lead to a 2.9 degree increase, and announced targets would lessen the increase to 2.4 degrees.
00:21:03.000 Still hotter than the Paris Agreement's objective of less than two degrees warmer.
00:21:05.000 But William Nordhaus, Nobel Prize winning economist, he says, why are we even aiming for 1.5 degrees Celsius change?
00:21:12.000 The costs of that, economically speaking, are actually higher than if we let that amount of change happen.
00:21:18.000 The agreement has three main pillars that will be in focus at the summit.
00:21:21.000 So-called nationally determined contributions are the targets countries set for lowering emissions.
00:21:26.000 The goals are not legally binding.
00:21:28.000 A second pillar is international climate financing.
00:21:31.000 Mr. Biden announced in April he would double U.S.
00:21:33.000 aid sent to help developing countries to help them adapt to a green economy and avoid climate-related devastation.
00:21:39.000 Mr. Biden doubled that commitment again last month, a promise of $11.4 billion in need of congressional approval.
00:21:44.000 By the way, those countries are saying, no, no, we don't need $11.4 billion.
00:21:47.000 We need like $70 billion a year.
00:21:49.000 We need like trillions of dollars, which of course is true.
00:21:51.000 The third pillar is born by climate envoy John Kerry.
00:21:56.000 Kerry's been traveling the world for the past 10 months, meeting with world leaders on the climate crisis, vocalizing America's commitment to the issue, pressuring others to do the same.
00:22:04.000 Domestically, Kerry has worked with the private sector to get corporations to agree to lowering their emissions, which could bolster America's reputation.
00:22:12.000 Ooh, our reputation.
00:22:13.000 Man, what will the Germans who are shipping in Russian oil at this very moment?
00:22:19.000 Man, if we don't have the moral approval of the Germans, I don't know what I'll do.
00:22:24.000 I feel like Doc Holliday in Tombstone.
00:22:27.000 Ike, if I thought you weren't my friend.
00:22:29.000 I don't know what I... Who cares?
00:22:32.000 Seriously, who cares what the Europeans think?
00:22:34.000 Who cares?
00:22:36.000 It's so irritating.
00:22:38.000 So, the UN is now also attempting to push... So the UN, which can't control anything of note around the world, the UN is a garbage organization filled with garbage countries, and the UN Which cannot stop full-scale atrocities happening across the globe, can't stop Chinese enslavement of the Uyghurs, can't stop massacres in Myanmar, can't stop anything.
00:23:00.000 But they can preach to us about climate change.
00:23:03.000 They can do so using a cartoon dinosaur.
00:23:06.000 Not Barney, which would at least be amusing.
00:23:08.000 No, they actually created a computer-generated dinosaur to lecture us about climate change.
00:23:13.000 Now, call me crazy, but I don't take my climate change advice from a cartoon extinct species.
00:23:20.000 I just don't.
00:23:21.000 And I certainly don't take my advice from something far worse, the United Nations, which is the most eyesleeve international politics, a hive of scum and villainy.
00:23:29.000 Nonetheless, here is the UN pushing the climate change agenda.
00:23:34.000 Listen up, people.
00:23:36.000 You're headed for a climate disaster.
00:23:38.000 And yet every year, governments spend hundreds of billions of public funds on fossil fuel subsidies.
00:23:44.000 Imagine if we had spent hundreds of billions per year subsidizing giant meteors.
00:23:49.000 That's what you're doing right now!
00:23:52.000 Around the world, people are living in poverty.
00:23:54.000 Don't you think helping them would make more sense than, I don't know, paying for the demise of your entire species?
00:24:02.000 Okay, I love the false binary here drawn by the UN.
00:24:05.000 Like, what idiot produced this?
00:24:06.000 The people living in poverty, you think they care deeply about the climate change policies?
00:24:10.000 Is this like their number one... As I point out, the great escape from poverty is generally based on carbon-based fuels.
00:24:17.000 And by the way, the notion that if you send foreign aid to impoverished countries, that the usual dictators and thugs who run impoverished countries, because there's a high correlation between horrible governance and impoverishment, that those people just take that foreign aid and they hand it out to the people.
00:24:32.000 Ugh, the UN.
00:24:34.000 But we need their moral imprimatur.
00:24:36.000 And we also need the moral imprimatur of the children, of course.
00:24:38.000 This is very important.
00:24:40.000 So we have climate activists who are currently sitting outside the White House starving themselves.
00:24:44.000 They are on a hunger strike.
00:24:49.000 If you can't see this, there's a bunch of people that are now sitting in wheelchairs because they've so weakened themselves in striking against the sun.
00:25:00.000 And they're holding signs that say things like, Hunger-striking for a good job.
00:25:05.000 Well, if you're hunger-striking for a good job, you could, you know, like, eat and then go get one, considering there are 10 million open jobs.
00:25:10.000 This one says, hunger-striking for my future children.
00:25:12.000 We'll get to that in a second, about how we are a civilization that is dying, because we 100% are.
00:25:17.000 Then one person has a sign that says, hunger-striking for my community.
00:25:22.000 I feel like you could do better things than not eating for your community.
00:25:25.000 Anyway, here is one of these activists talking about this.
00:25:28.000 When there's a big flood, when that finally comes, or the big hurricane, or the catastrophe that we can't totally see coming yet.
00:25:37.000 Like, where is our family going to meet up?
00:25:40.000 I don't ever want to have conversations like that.
00:25:42.000 Okay, and then it says, one activist was hospitalized because of the strike.
00:25:48.000 They are all now using wheelchairs to keep steady.
00:25:50.000 That future, where we don't ever have to have a family meeting place, where I can just live.
00:25:59.000 I can be with my future wife and my kids and have that garden.
00:26:02.000 That means everything to me.
00:26:05.000 And I'm willing to do everything for it to be real.
00:26:11.000 I have a question.
00:26:12.000 Who's preventing you from having a house and a life or anything remotely like that?
00:26:18.000 So, Jen Psaki then paid tribute to this because this administration has yet to find a radical activist that it won't support.
00:26:26.000 I have a question.
00:26:26.000 As a society, what are our priorities?
00:26:28.000 the energy of young people who are out there advocating for what they believe in.
00:26:34.000 And the changes that he agrees should be made to how society functions, to long overdue investments in our climate.
00:26:42.000 Okay, so I have a question.
00:26:46.000 As a society, what are our priorities?
00:26:47.000 Really, what are our priorities?
00:26:50.000 Because what I'm finding from this administration and from a huge percentage of the American population is that our priorities don't line up with reality.
00:26:56.000 They spit directly in the face of reality, actually.
00:26:59.000 The realities of climate change are pretty obvious.
00:27:01.000 The climate is changing.
00:27:03.000 A large part of that is human-caused.
00:27:05.000 I'm fully willing to accept the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
00:27:11.000 All of that can be said, and still, the mitigation and adaptation measures that they are recommending can be fully idiotic in every respect.
00:27:18.000 Hey, the exaggerations by the media can be fully idiotic in every respect.
00:27:21.000 But again, the reason this is a top priority for people is because it distracts them from the underlying realities, which are that you need resources in order to maintain life on this planet.
00:27:30.000 You need to actually allow civilizations to grow.
00:27:34.000 And human adaptation is a better strategy than undermining the key institutions of the society.
00:27:40.000 But perhaps that's the point.
00:27:41.000 Perhaps the point is the undermining of the key institutions of our society.
00:27:44.000 I can think of no other reason for why we seem to be pursuing, as a civilization, all these policies at once.
00:27:50.000 Policies that undermine basic institutions and the free market economy, which has produced Unprecedented prosperity in human history.
00:27:57.000 If you look at the growth of per capita GDP on planet Earth up till about 1800, it's essentially kind of flat.
00:28:05.000 For thousands of years.
00:28:07.000 And maybe it grows a little bit.
00:28:09.000 It kind of goes, it's got, it's completely flat for hundreds of thousands of years.
00:28:12.000 Then it starts to increase a little bit.
00:28:14.000 And then you hit about 1800 and suddenly it goes exponential.
00:28:17.000 That is because of free markets.
00:28:18.000 It's because of trade.
00:28:19.000 It's because of technology and innovation.
00:28:20.000 It's because of risk taking.
00:28:22.000 And now we're seeking to undermine all of those things in the name of what?
00:28:26.000 Our inability to adapt to a climate that we've been adapting to for literally the entirety of the human species?
00:28:31.000 It's the institution of free markets has to go.
00:28:33.000 And of course, the institutions of parenting have to go.
00:28:35.000 That's very important.
00:28:37.000 Because school boards need to control your kids.
00:28:40.000 And of course, institutions that are most basic to humanity.
00:28:44.000 Things like biological sex.
00:28:45.000 Those have to go too.
00:28:46.000 All the institutions associated with biological sex have to go.
00:28:48.000 We'll get to that in a second because the State Department has some very, very stringent priorities.
00:28:53.000 The priorities are abandoning women to the Taliban in Afghanistan and making sure that if you're a non-gender If you're a gender non-binary person, you can put an X on your passport.
00:29:02.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.
00:29:03.000 First, let's talk about your sleep quality.
00:29:06.000 So, I will admit, lately I've not been getting enough sleep.
00:29:08.000 Going to bed too late, waking up too early, but when I get on that bed, I better be asleep inside the next five minutes because I know my kids are going to wake me up Any second.
00:29:15.000 This is why I treasure my Helix Sleep mattress.
00:29:18.000 Helix Sleep has a quiz.
00:29:19.000 It takes just two minutes to complete and matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
00:29:23.000 Why would you buy a mattress made for someone else?
00:29:25.000 With Helix, you're getting a mattress you know will be perfect for the way you sleep.
00:29:28.000 Everybody's unique.
00:29:29.000 Helix knows that, so they have several different mattress models to choose from.
00:29:32.000 They have soft, medium, and firm mattresses.
00:29:34.000 Mattress is great for cooling you down if you sleep hot.
00:29:36.000 Mattress is great for spinal alignment to prevent morning aches and pains, even a Helix Plus mattress for plus-size sleepers.
00:29:41.000 So, if you're looking for a mattress, you take the quiz, you order the mattress you're matched to, the mattress comes shipped directly to your door for free.
00:29:47.000 You don't ever need to go to a mattress store again.
00:29:50.000 10-year warranty, try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
00:29:53.000 They'll pick it up for you if you don't love it, but you're going to because it's made just for you.
00:29:56.000 Just go to helixsleep.com slash ben, take their two-minute sleep quiz.
00:29:58.000 They will match you to a customized mattress that'll give you the best sleep of your life.
00:30:01.000 Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders, plus two free pillows for our listeners at helixsleep.com slash ben.
00:30:07.000 Go check them out right now.
00:30:08.000 Okay.
00:30:09.000 We'll get to the suicidal nature of our civilization in just one second.
00:30:13.000 You know, some lighthearted stuff.
00:30:14.000 First, The Daily Wire has had an unbelievable year so far, and we thank you for that.
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00:31:32.000 Okay, so the priorities of this government are very, very screwed up.
00:31:40.000 And the priorities of our civilization are very screwed up.
00:31:42.000 So we're prioritizing cracking down on parents at school boards.
00:31:45.000 We are prioritizing climate change.
00:31:47.000 Meanwhile, the GDP growth in the United States in the third quarter was a 2% annualized growth.
00:31:52.000 That was just reported this morning.
00:31:53.000 That's a garbage rate of growth.
00:31:55.000 It is a garbage rate of growth.
00:31:56.000 And it is created by bad government policy, and that's a choice.
00:32:00.000 It is a choice whether to enervate the American public.
00:32:02.000 I've been saying for months at this point that basically the Biden administration is offering the American public a choice.
00:32:07.000 Do you wish to be a risk-seeking, adventurous people, or do you wish to climb in the bathtub with a box of Cheetos and just die?
00:32:15.000 Because that seems to be the path our civilization is interested in taking.
00:32:19.000 When you concern yourself, not only with silliness, but with fundamentally undermining the keys to growth.
00:32:25.000 In order to grow in reality, you actually have to recognize that reality exists and then work within its confines.
00:32:30.000 You have to work with the tools God gave you.
00:32:33.000 One of those tools, by the way, in terms of like, let's take the most baseline level.
00:32:37.000 In order for you to grow as a society, you have to have babies.
00:32:40.000 This seems pretty obvious.
00:32:42.000 There have to be enough kids in the next generation.
00:32:44.000 Especially if you have social welfare programs, right?
00:32:46.000 You have to have kids who are going to support grandpa and grandma.
00:32:49.000 Somebody's got to pay the bill.
00:32:50.000 Especially when you're taking out trillions of dollars in debt.
00:32:53.000 Well, we are currently, in this country, not doing that.
00:32:55.000 We are not having babies.
00:32:56.000 No one in the West is having babies, by the way.
00:32:58.000 That's not unique to the United States.
00:33:00.000 Right now, the United States has a fertility rate of about 1.7 kids per family.
00:33:04.000 That is not replacement rates.
00:33:05.000 That means the population of the United States declines unless you bring in immigrants, which is what the United States has been doing for quite a while.
00:33:13.000 And again, not rare.
00:33:14.000 Okay, the fact is that if you look at the fertility rates across a wide variety of Western countries, there's literally not a Western country, a European country outside of Georgia, like the country of Georgia, that has fertility rates above 2.
00:33:31.000 The only other quote-unquote Western country, and it's not quite Western because it's in the Middle East, Israel has fertility rates above 2.
00:33:36.000 Every other Western country, European country, America, all of them have fertility rates below 2, which means they are not reproducing at replacement rates.
00:33:46.000 When you don't reproduce, it is very difficult to see how your civilization has a future.
00:33:49.000 Just materially speaking, it's very difficult to see how that's the case.
00:33:52.000 France has a fertility rate of 1.86.
00:33:56.000 Iceland 1.74, Sweden 1.71, Ireland 1.7, Denmark 1.7.
00:34:01.000 When you get to the bottom of the list, you're looking at Italy, which has a replacement rate of 1.27.
00:34:04.000 Fertility rate of 1.27.
00:34:06.000 That means that their population is going to halve over the course of the next couple of generations.
00:34:13.000 It's true for Finland.
00:34:13.000 It's true for Greece.
00:34:14.000 It's like every country in the West is now not reproducing.
00:34:18.000 Instead, we are focused on how do we basically live out our last days as a civilization in comfort.
00:34:24.000 And one of the ways that we live out our days as a civilization in comfort is by lying to ourselves about fulfillment being found not in building.
00:34:32.000 But in being.
00:34:34.000 Fulfillment is not found in having a mission or promulgating good values.
00:34:34.000 Right?
00:34:39.000 Fulfillment is found in navel-gazing.
00:34:42.000 Which is why the State Department has now decided it's very important that we issue the first third gender passport for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming Americans.
00:34:49.000 Now, you might think to yourself, wait a second.
00:34:52.000 It is one thing for you to write on a college essay that you are non-gender conforming or that you are non-gender binary or some nonsense.
00:35:00.000 It's one thing to write that in your little Facebook profile.
00:35:04.000 It's another thing for a governmental document, which is specifically designated in order to help determine who you are, to have you put that, because that's a subjective metric, right?
00:35:13.000 It's like putting on your passport that you're a Bon Jovi fan.
00:35:18.000 There's no way to tell whether that's true or not, nor is it relevant.
00:35:22.000 Your interior feelings have no relevance to the question of how the government ought to identify you for purposes of knowing who the hell's in the country.
00:35:29.000 But the State Department now feels it's very important for you to look at your passport and feel that your passport reflects your innermost feelings.
00:35:36.000 We're a society that now treasures the inner subjectivity of feelings over the identification within reality.
00:35:43.000 According to ABC News, four months after announcing it would allow a third gender option for U.S.
00:35:47.000 citizens on their passports, the State Department said Wednesday it has issued one.
00:35:50.000 It's the first of its kind, denoted with an X for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming U.S.
00:35:56.000 citizens.
00:35:56.000 The recipient is Colorado resident Dana Zhizhim.
00:36:00.000 The reason I pronounce it that way is because the last name is spelled ZZYYM.
00:36:05.000 I have doubts that this is the original last name of this person.
00:36:09.000 Associate Director of the Intersex Campaign for Equality and a client of Lambda Legal.
00:36:14.000 I almost burst into tears when I opened the envelope, pulled out my new passport, and saw the X stamped boldly under sex.
00:36:20.000 I'm also ecstatic that other intersex and non-binary U.S.
00:36:22.000 citizens will soon be able to apply for passports with the correct gender marker.
00:36:26.000 It took six years.
00:36:27.000 But to have an accurate passport, one that doesn't force me to identify as male or female, but recognizes I am neither, is liberating, Zhijun said in a statement.
00:36:36.000 The agency is still preparing to make the option widely available for passports and other documents, such as the Consular Report of Birth Abroad.
00:36:42.000 So it's not just for Americans, by the way.
00:36:45.000 It's people who are green card holders, who hold a U.S.
00:36:46.000 passport, pretty much anybody trying to get in the country.
00:36:50.000 I want to reiterate on the occasion of this passport issuance that the State Department's commitment to promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people, including LGBTQI persons, said State Department Spokesperson Ned Price in a statement.
00:37:04.000 Just, oh, the heroism.
00:37:06.000 The heroism.
00:37:06.000 Right?
00:37:07.000 We're just going to ignore the objective reality or what ID is supposed to do so that you feel better about yourself.
00:37:14.000 The State Department, meanwhile, is saying that they are pursuing an end to gender-based discrimination with policies like this.
00:37:19.000 I mean, not gender-based discrimination in Afghanistan, where women are literally forced into bags and then into the basement, but gender discrimination, like, you know, for example, being asked to say whether you are biologically male or female on a passport.
00:37:32.000 President Biden and Secretary Blinken have made clear it is the policy of the United States to pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of gender, of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.
00:37:44.000 The Department of State is committed to promoting the freedom, the dignity, and equality of all persons, including, of course, intersex persons.
00:37:55.000 Mm.
00:37:55.000 So, very important stuff.
00:37:57.000 Now, is this, again, is this the mark of a civilization that is on the decline or the mark of a civilization that is on the mend and ready to grow?
00:38:05.000 And if you're worried about people getting married, having babies, a basic, basic thing that is necessary is understanding that men and women exist.
00:38:13.000 That sexual dichotomy exists in mammals.
00:38:16.000 If you refuse to even acknowledge this, it makes it a lot more difficult to convince people that it's important to get together and have kids in stable families.
00:38:23.000 But we as a civilization have decided to abandon that on behalf of higherfalutin ideals like can we make sure that no carbon ever enters the atmosphere or at least pretend to?
00:38:33.000 We have to make sure that gender fluidity is prized above the survival of civilization.
00:38:38.000 These are things that matter.
00:38:40.000 And to pretend that they're not in conflict is very silly.
00:38:43.000 A civilization that embraces fiction about the nature of biological sex is a civilization that is doomed to move away from reality.
00:38:51.000 A civilization that rejects truth on behalf of sensitivity is a civilization that cannot exist for very long in the real world.
00:38:58.000 Reality always has its revenge.
00:39:01.000 It'd take just one indicator.
00:39:02.000 Really interesting piece by Susie Weiss over at Barry Weiss's Substack.
00:39:06.000 Susie is Barry's sister.
00:39:07.000 It's called First Comes Love, Then Comes Sterilization.
00:39:11.000 Rachel Diamond looks like most of the moms at the Park Slope Cafe where we meet.
00:39:14.000 She's wearing a green t-shirt under a black corduroy jumper, sensible shoes, carries a smart leather bag.
00:39:19.000 She sips a $4 iced chai, except the 31-year-old isn't a mom.
00:39:22.000 And she never will be.
00:39:23.000 You know, Diamond says cheerily, I never expected to be the poster child of sterilization.
00:39:28.000 On the Aspiring Actress TikTok, one finds short funny videos about Diamond's job working the register at a cafe near Union Square, and updates on her rescue pitbull, Rue, who has anemia.
00:39:37.000 Mixed in are clips extolling her child-free life.
00:39:40.000 They have titles like Sterilization Attempt No.
00:39:42.000 3 and Being Child-Free, We Do Know What We're Missing.
00:39:45.000 It's been five months since she had her fallopian tubes cut, not tied, and she has 64,000 followers.
00:39:51.000 Growing up near Hershey, Pennsylvania, Diamond always assumed she'd have a family of her own.
00:39:55.000 Then came college at Arcadia University, her political awakening away from her conservative roots and toward progressivism, and a therapist, who she then found online a few months after graduation, who made her realize that being spanked as a child was deeply traumatic, and that it made her fear authority figures like her father.
00:40:11.000 She decided she never wanted to be one herself.
00:40:13.000 Never, ever, ever.
00:40:16.000 Looking back, I never pretended my American Girl dolls were children.
00:40:18.000 They were always my sister, she said.
00:40:20.000 There were little things showing that I wasn't preparing myself for motherhood.
00:40:22.000 I think for me, it's as innate as saying I've always wanted to be a mom.
00:40:27.000 Diamond is hardly an outlier, says Susie Weiss.
00:40:29.000 Americans are making fewer babies than we've made since we started keeping track in the 1930s.
00:40:32.000 Some women, like Diamond, are not just putting off pregnancy, they're eliminating the possibility of it altogether.
00:40:37.000 Last year, the number of deaths exceeded that of births in 25 states, up from five the year before.
00:40:42.000 The marriage rate is at an all-time low, 6.5 marriages per 1,000 people.
00:40:46.000 Millennials are the first generation where a majority are unmarried, about 56%.
00:40:49.000 They're also more likely to live with their parents than previous generations were in their 20s and 30s.
00:40:54.000 They also aren't having sex.
00:40:55.000 The number of young men ages 18 to 30 who admit they've had no sex in the past year tripled between 2008 and 2018.
00:41:02.000 Cities like New York, where secular young Americans flock to build their lives, are increasingly childless.
00:41:06.000 In San Francisco, there are more dogs than children.
00:41:09.000 Any of this speak of a civilization in growth mode?
00:41:13.000 It used to be, says Susie Weiss, that people wanted to make babies.
00:41:16.000 Women, especially.
00:41:17.000 But also men.
00:41:19.000 That was a healthy young person's default position.
00:41:21.000 Our existence depended on it.
00:41:22.000 We wanted to do other things, of course.
00:41:23.000 The great post-feminist challenge was how to have it all.
00:41:25.000 But for an increasing number, the question now isn't how to have it all.
00:41:28.000 It's why do it at all?
00:41:31.000 This psychological reversal didn't just happen.
00:41:33.000 It took place inside the hurricane of spiritual, cultural, environmental forces swirling around us.
00:41:38.000 But the message from this young cohort is clear.
00:41:40.000 Life is exhausting enough, and the world is broken and burning.
00:41:42.000 Who would want to bring new innocent life into a criminally unequal society situated on a planet with catastrophically rising sea levels?
00:41:50.000 According to a new poll, 39% of Gen Zers are hesitant to procreate for fear of the climate apocalypse.
00:41:55.000 Which is just insane, guys.
00:41:57.000 I'm sorry, you're crazy.
00:41:59.000 A nationally representative study of adults in Michigan found over a quarter of adults are child-free by choice.
00:42:05.000 So basically we have decided that all the hallmarks of being an adult, all the hallmarks of adjusting to reality and building a civilization, have been thrown over in favor of a false pursuit of gender identity and hedonism.
00:42:17.000 That's essentially the trade.
00:42:19.000 The trade is you get to have a good time in the moment and feel morally self-righteous as your civilization dies.
00:42:24.000 By the way, there are other civilizations out there.
00:42:26.000 So you can pretend that our civilization dying is somehow a good thing because of all of our historic excesses and all of the problems with our civilization.
00:42:33.000 Just understand, there are other people out there who are waiting to take over and they are far, far worse than our civilization in virtually every way.
00:42:40.000 But our civilization is now socially suicidal and this has massive consequences for the future.
00:42:47.000 It means that the economy slows, for example.
00:42:49.000 It means there's no one there to pay the bills.
00:42:50.000 It means that on foreign policy, more people suffer, broadly speaking.
00:42:55.000 It means that growth rates globally come to an end.
00:42:58.000 It means that all the nice things that you think are natural to life, start to collapse.
00:43:03.000 Because when institutions that created those things collapse, so do the things.
00:43:08.000 Virtually every westernized, every western country is now experiencing massive drops in births.
00:43:15.000 It's happening pretty much everywhere, according to Pew Research.
00:43:18.000 In Italy, Japan, France, Belgium, they're among the nations that have reported sudden drops in births about nine months after the start of the pandemic, compared with the previous year.
00:43:26.000 Some worry that a baby bust will create societal age imbalances and strain healthcare and retirement systems, while also eventually stripping the economy of young workers who tend to drive innovation and growth.
00:43:37.000 Meanwhile, you can tell, by the way, that these have been dying civilizations for a while, considering how many kids are now being born out of wedlock.
00:43:44.000 One of the fundamental institutions of society is marriage.
00:43:47.000 Why?
00:43:48.000 Because it civilizes men.
00:43:50.000 Marriage was designed to civilize men.
00:43:52.000 It was designed to allow women to grow up in intact, to allow children to grow up in intact homes and therefore have healthy lives and then become productive members of civilization themselves.
00:44:03.000 Marriage was a civilizing institution.
00:44:05.000 We dumped it.
00:44:06.000 We decided that personal self-fulfillment was much more important than giving a kid an actual life with two parents who care about them.
00:44:13.000 Yes, opposite sexes, because a child does need a mother and a child does need a father.
00:44:18.000 Right now, the share of live births outside marriage in the United States, it's 70% in the black community.
00:44:24.000 It's 40% in the white community.
00:44:26.000 It's true abroad.
00:44:28.000 In France, 60.4% of kids are born outside marriage.
00:44:32.000 This is as of 2018.
00:44:33.000 In Sweden, it's 54.5%.
00:44:35.000 In Denmark, it's 54%.
00:44:36.000 If you think that has no relationship with the number of people who are on social assistance, you're out of your mind.
00:44:43.000 If you think this is a healthy way for society to grow, you're crazy, but maybe this is a society with a death wish.
00:44:49.000 Maybe this is a society that has decided to sacrifice truth, logic, and decency in favor of the notion that we are bad, and we deserve to go this way.
00:44:58.000 After all, we are a scourge on the earth.
00:45:01.000 I think there is a strong reason why, when you look at the actual reproduction rates in the United States, they are heavily associated with religion.
00:45:08.000 They are striated by religion.
00:45:11.000 Right now, the only people reproducing above replacement rates in the United States are people who are religious.
00:45:16.000 Period.
00:45:17.000 End of story.
00:45:19.000 I mean, I'm looking at the rates right now.
00:45:21.000 The fertility rates in the United States by religion.
00:45:23.000 Among Catholics, 2.3.
00:45:26.000 Among Mormons, 3.4.
00:45:26.000 These are above replacement rates.
00:45:29.000 Among Jews, 2.0.
00:45:30.000 And among Orthodox Jews, like 4.
00:45:33.000 Among Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, it's 2.3.
00:45:35.000 And then among Atheists, 1.6.
00:45:37.000 Agnostics, 1.3.
00:45:43.000 As a society becomes more secular, as a society decides that the future doesn't matter, and starts to undermine its own institutions, and starts to embrace fictional nonsense, on behalf of the subjective feelings of a few, the society begins to crumble.
00:45:57.000 It also leads to absurdities like this story from BBC News.
00:46:01.000 Quote, I've had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler, says 24-year-old Jenny.
00:46:05.000 They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler.
00:46:08.000 That was so bizarrely violent just because I won't have sex with trans women.
00:46:12.000 Jenny is a lesbian woman.
00:46:13.000 She says she is only attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas.
00:46:17.000 She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.
00:46:21.000 Jenny doesn't think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees.
00:46:24.000 She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert, and a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
00:46:31.000 Jenny, who lives in London, says there's a common argument they try and use that goes, what if you met a woman in a bar and she's really beautiful, and you got on really well, and you went home and you discovered she had a penis?
00:46:40.000 Would you just not be interested?
00:46:42.000 Yes, because if someone seems sexually attractive at first, you can go off them.
00:46:45.000 I just don't possess the capacity to be sexually attracted to people who are biologically male, regardless of how they identify.
00:46:52.000 According to Carolyn at Lowbridge, over at BBC News, I became aware of this particular issue after I wrote an article about sex, lies, and legal consent.
00:47:00.000 Several people got in touch with me to say there was a huge problem for lesbians who are being pressured to accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ.
00:47:07.000 I knew this would be a hugely divisive subject, but I wanted to find out how widespread the issue was.
00:47:12.000 Ultimately, it has been difficult to determine the true scale of the problem because there's been little research on the topic.
00:47:17.000 Only one survey, to my knowledge, however, those effective have told me the pressure comes from a minority of trans women as well as activists who are not necessarily trans themselves.
00:47:26.000 So apparently, this is now a major issue among lesbians, is that because of the stupidity of suggesting gender fluidity, lesbians are being told that they must have sex with biological men.
00:47:37.000 Because if they don't have sex with biological men, this means that they are apparently straight, because some biological men are women.
00:47:45.000 And the illogic has no bounds.
00:47:47.000 There are no limits to it.
00:47:49.000 None.
00:47:50.000 And so, as a civilization, would we like to die?
00:47:52.000 Or are we as a civilization going to embrace basic truths that undergird institutions that allow for growth?
00:47:58.000 Those are the choices before us.
00:48:00.000 It's pretty obvious there's a whole group of people in politics who are opting for the former rather than the latter.
00:48:05.000 That they are opting for a civilization in decline.
00:48:07.000 Because at least we'll have a good time on our way out.
00:48:10.000 Because at least we will feel justified morally in overturning the structural oppressions of reality.
00:48:15.000 Because reality is full of structural oppressions.
00:48:17.000 Reality is full of inequality.
00:48:19.000 Reality is full of difficulties.
00:48:21.000 So if we just ignore those difficulties, if we restructure society around the idea that we can get rid entirely of reality, Then we can put off the nightmares.
00:48:32.000 We can put off having to adjust to civilization.
00:48:37.000 And then, you know, later if the civilization falls apart, you know, I'm pretty sure, well, you know, we did our best.
00:48:41.000 At least we did the moral thing.
00:48:42.000 At least we did the moral thing.
00:48:43.000 All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
00:48:46.000 The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
00:48:48.000 Eastern.
00:48:48.000 Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
00:48:50.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:48:50.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:48:52.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliott Feld.
00:49:00.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
00:49:01.000 Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
00:49:04.000 Production Manager Paweł Wajdowski.
00:49:06.000 Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
00:49:08.000 Host Producer Justin Barber.
00:49:09.000 The show is edited by Adam Sajewicz.
00:49:11.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
00:49:13.000 Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Christina.
00:49:15.000 Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
00:49:17.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:49:19.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
00:49:22.000 On the Matt Wall Show, we talk about the things that matter.
00:49:25.000 Real issues that affect you, your family, our country, not just politics, but culture, faith, current events, all the fundamentals.