The Ben Shapiro Show


Prince Harry’s Big Tell-All: The Full Breakdown | Ep. 1645


Summary

Prince Harry releases his new memoir, and we explore all the sordid details and what it says about the next generation of Western leadership. House Republicans pass a bill preserving the lives of those born in botched abortions, but Democrats scream about it. And another batch of Biden-classified documents is uncovered. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and it's sponsored by Express VPN. It s time to stand up against big tech. Protect your data at ExpressVPN.com/TheBenShapiroShow. Ben Shapiro is the host of the popular podcast and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of several books, including Spare, a memoir about his time in the British royal family, written in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is married to Meghan Markle, who was born in 1981, and they have a 2-year-old son and 2-month old daughter, who were adopted by the royal family at the age of 4 months old. This is the story of Prince Harry and Meghan s early life in the UK, and how they became a royal couple, and what their relationship means to the modern world, and why they are so important to the British public, especially in the 21st century. The story of Harry s new book, Spare is also a clip from Queen Elizabeth II s 1947 address to the world, written by Queen Elizabeth, when she was just 21 years old, calling herself The Great Empress of the realm . The Queen s dedication to the whole empire in her birthday address to her own daughter, I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution, unless you do it alone, unless it be alone, I shall be a solemn act of dedication to which we all belong to carry this alone, or a whole family, a whole resolution, or so alone, and so on, etc., etc., et c. etc. And what we are watching right now in real time, is the clip from the Queen s birthday address? Here s the link to the clip: This show is sponsored by by ExpressVPN, a free, unedited version of the show on this show on my website on my Insta story on this episode on this is a link to a free and unfiltered version of this podcast on the entire thing here.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Prince Harry releases his new memoir, and we explore all the sordid details and what it says about the next generation of Western leadership.
00:00:06.000 House Republicans pass a bill preserving the lives of those born in botched abortions, but Democrats scream about it.
00:00:11.000 And another batch of Biden-classified documents is uncovered.
00:00:14.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:14.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:16.000 This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:00:23.000 It's time to stand up against big tech.
00:00:25.000 Protect your data at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
00:00:28.000 Well, there is a lot of news going on, but it is rare when you have a piece of cultural news that is so big, it sort of eats everything else.
00:00:36.000 And that is what is happening with the release of Prince Harry's new book, Spare.
00:00:39.000 Now, as I've said before, I'm not big into the Royals.
00:00:41.000 I don't really follow the Royals all that much.
00:00:43.000 I haven't followed their various scandals because frankly, we fought an entire revolution, so we don't have to care about the Royals.
00:00:48.000 There is something deeper going on with the battle over whether Prince Harry is a good guy or a bad guy, whether the royal family are villains or heroes and all the rest.
00:00:56.000 And something obviously is happening here because Prince Harry's book sold 1.4 million copies in the US, UK and Canada on its very first day, which means this is going to be one of the biggest bestsellers of all time, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:01:09.000 This is a performance the publisher Penguin Random House said was the largest first day sales total for any non-fiction book it has ever published.
00:01:16.000 The first day sales totals for Spare included pre-orders as well as the sales of print books, digital books, and audiobooks.
00:01:21.000 Penguin Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann S.E., said Wednesday.
00:01:24.000 The publisher said it printed 2 million hardcover copies of Spare for the United States and has already gone back to press.
00:01:31.000 So this book was officially released Tuesday.
00:01:33.000 It was mistakenly leaked a little bit last week, but the demand for spare has been so strong that Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the United States, said on Tuesday the memoir looks certain to set record-breaking day one sales at the bookseller is expected to be one of the biggest books of 2023.
00:01:48.000 That is an understatement.
00:01:49.000 It will end up being one of the biggest books of all time.
00:01:51.000 The reason I say this is because some of the other big books that have been sold recently sold 725,000 copies in the in the first day.
00:01:57.000 That would be Michelle Obama's Becoming, for example, or Mary Trump's ridiculous tell-all book about Donald Trump.
00:02:07.000 That thing sold a little bit less than a million.
00:02:10.000 So this thing is selling 40 to 50% higher and sometimes 100% higher than the biggest bestsellers of our time, which says something about what this book is really about now.
00:02:20.000 Some of this is just pure furience, right?
00:02:22.000 People want to know what's going on behind the walls of an institution that is historically incredibly tight-lipped about what is happening.
00:02:28.000 People are very hungry for this sort of news.
00:02:30.000 This is why, of course, Princess Di was always big press in the UK, but also in the United States.
00:02:35.000 But there's something else going on here, and that is the cultural battle that has broken out around Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the royal family.
00:02:43.000 And in order to understand that cultural battle, I'm going to play you two clips.
00:02:47.000 One is a clip from Prince Harry's new book, and the other is a clip from Queen Elizabeth back in 1947, aged 21, when she assumed the monarchy.
00:02:57.000 And what we are watching right now in real time, because what I really think is that Prince Harry is a metaphor for the new generation of Western leadership.
00:03:07.000 And a new generation in the West that believes that the institutions that bore it are fundamentally evil, and that the way you demonstrate that you are good is by breaking with those institutions without any other sense of morality or decency, and that everything you do is justified by your need for quote-unquote freedom, your need for liberty, your need to be free and fly, little bird.
00:03:27.000 Literally, this book ends, as we will see, with a bird flying away.
00:03:29.000 I'm not kidding you.
00:03:30.000 So, we begin with not Prince Harry, but his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, who recently passed away, obviously.
00:03:37.000 Here she was at age 21, dedicating herself to the realm in her birthday address.
00:03:43.000 I could make my solemn act of dedication with a whole empire listening.
00:03:49.000 I should like to make that dedication now.
00:03:52.000 It is very simple.
00:03:54.000 I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.
00:04:10.000 But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me as I now invite you to do.
00:04:20.000 I know that your support will be unfailingly given.
00:04:24.000 God help me to make good my vow And God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.
00:04:33.000 Okay, so this is how leadership used to work.
00:04:35.000 The way that leadership worked is you were a member of the royal family, and you assumed that role, and the role was to be the leader of the British Empire, at least in name and in face.
00:04:44.000 And you were supposed to live for that institution.
00:04:46.000 You had been handed down a heritage of generations, a thousand-year heritage, and it was your job now to fit yourself into that role, to mold yourself to that role, to abide by that role.
00:04:55.000 This is what made you an important and worthwhile human being.
00:04:58.000 was conformity to that role.
00:05:00.000 And yes, of course, changing the role and shaping the role.
00:05:03.000 But most of all, respecting the role that you had been given.
00:05:06.000 That is one form of leadership.
00:05:07.000 That's the leadership of the West for generations.
00:05:09.000 And in most other cultures, this is the way that leadership works as well.
00:05:12.000 We have a new brand of leadership in the West.
00:05:15.000 And unfortunately, it is characterized by people like Prince Harry.
00:05:19.000 His brand of leadership is, the system is bad.
00:05:21.000 I must break with the system.
00:05:23.000 And this amounts to an extraordinary self-censored narcissism.
00:05:27.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:07:55.000 This book is incredibly narcissistic.
00:07:57.000 Now, it's tragic because obviously this is a person.
00:08:00.000 He is about my age.
00:08:02.000 I think we were born in the same year.
00:08:03.000 He's 38.
00:08:04.000 I'm also 38.
00:08:05.000 And Prince Harry obviously experienced tremendous tragedy when he was young.
00:08:10.000 And because he blames that tragedy on the press and the British royal family simultaneously, really his own father, he sort of blames it on.
00:08:16.000 Because he blames the tragedy of Princess Di's death on these institutions.
00:08:21.000 The institutions are bad and he is a hero for breaking free from those institutions.
00:08:25.000 And so what results is not a heroic portrait of a person doing a heroic thing.
00:08:30.000 Well, result is a man in search of his authenticity.
00:08:33.000 And so the book reads incredibly small.
00:08:37.000 The book reads unbelievably narcissistic and self-serving, which is why it also has some very bizarre moments.
00:08:46.000 And one of the so the clip that I actually want to play here is going to be clip 30.
00:08:52.000 So this is Harry explaining.
00:08:56.000 Why it is.
00:08:58.000 That Harry sees himself as inferior.
00:09:02.000 What is important about Harry?
00:09:04.000 Right, he's insulted by the fact that he has a role in the family and that that role isn't the primary role in the family.
00:09:11.000 So here he is explaining in his own words why exactly he's so upset.
00:09:16.000 Wooly was the heir, whereas I was the spare.
00:09:20.000 This was shorthand often used by Pa and Mummy and Grandpa, and even Granny.
00:09:26.000 The heir and the spare, there was no judgement about it, but also no ambiguity.
00:09:32.000 I was the shadow, the support, the plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy.
00:09:39.000 I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion, and, if necessary, a spare pot.
00:09:46.000 Kidney, perhaps.
00:09:47.000 Blood transfusion.
00:09:49.000 Speck of bone marrow.
00:09:52.000 This is how he sees himself.
00:09:54.000 The role that he has been given, which is to be essentially backup for his brother, who is going to be the king, or to be a member of the broader royal family.
00:10:03.000 That's not enough for him.
00:10:04.000 What he needs is to feel free.
00:10:06.000 What he needs is to find himself, to search for his authenticity.
00:10:09.000 He has to break out of being the spare.
00:10:12.000 Now, does it seem kind of brutal that people are calling him the spare in front of him?
00:10:17.000 He admits, by the way, that that is a joke.
00:10:19.000 That people were saying that sort of joke in front of him.
00:10:21.000 And yeah, that's cruel and it's not a nice thing to say.
00:10:24.000 Also, he's an adult.
00:10:25.000 And the reality is that in any system, you have a role.
00:10:29.000 At your job, are you the boss?
00:10:30.000 Sometimes you're the boss.
00:10:32.000 But very often, you're not the boss.
00:10:33.000 Does this mean that you are not a relevant piece of the system?
00:10:36.000 Does it mean you're not important?
00:10:39.000 Are you always the primary?
00:10:40.000 In other words, So what this as listen, I mean, you listen to what Queen Elizabeth says right upon her 21st birthday that she's dedicating herself to the realm.
00:10:49.000 And then you hear Harry complain about a role that does not actually require all that much of him.
00:10:54.000 He's given tremendous freedom within that role to go and do whatever humanitarian work he wants to do as he makes clear in the book is a pretty solid budget.
00:11:02.000 This is a person who is not poor.
00:11:04.000 And yet, it's not enough because, again, what this comes down to is personal peek at his own life and the status of his own life.
00:11:11.000 And he's going to dump on his family and the institutions that make him an important person in the first place.
00:11:16.000 And in doing so, he's going to make himself more important, which, by the way, is why, as others have observed, there will be no second act for Prince Harry.
00:11:22.000 Once you already dumped the dirt on your family, there's nothing more you have to offer to the public.
00:11:26.000 Once you've ripped on the institution, you're no longer of relevance.
00:11:30.000 You have actually destroyed the thing that you were standing on.
00:11:35.000 Okay, so to understand what exactly Harry is doing in this book, you have to understand that he's ripping down these institutions and he's tearing away at his own family and at the crown and he's doing all of this stuff.
00:11:47.000 Specifically, because he feels personally hurt.
00:11:51.000 And the theme running throughout the book, and of course he's an unreliable narrator because everybody's an unreliable narrator.
00:11:54.000 He's a particularly unreliable narrator because he has a ghostwriter.
00:11:58.000 And the ghost in this book, the ghostwriter in this book, is the same guy apparently who wrote Andre Agassi's Open and wrote Film Night's Shoe Dog.
00:12:05.000 So he's a very good writer, the ghostwriter.
00:12:06.000 The ghostwriter, I won't say, captures Harry particularly well in many places.
00:12:11.000 So my favorite personal example of this is that Harry is consistently saying throughout the book, I never read books.
00:12:17.000 I don't know.
00:12:17.000 I don't read.
00:12:18.000 I'm not a good student.
00:12:19.000 I don't like poetry.
00:12:21.000 And yet the the ghostwriter can't seem to stop himself because he feels like I'm writing for a prince.
00:12:26.000 So I have to I have to make literary allusions.
00:12:28.000 So he will make literary allusions and buy them.
00:12:31.000 It's really funny.
00:12:32.000 So he'll say so.
00:12:34.000 So Harry literally says about his own father, what troubled him most was how I went out of my way to avoid books.
00:12:41.000 And then randomly you'll have clip, you'll have sections of the book where he says stuff like, ours is not to reason why, as Flea's great granddad said, or Tennyson, whoever.
00:12:49.000 The ghostwriter will insert a literary illusion and then have to buy it back because you recognize that Harry would never make that literary illusion.
00:12:56.000 He does this over and over.
00:12:57.000 He invokes Wordsworth, and then he's like, that old guy.
00:13:00.000 He says, Wordsworth, for one, I'd managed to avoid reading that old gent's stuff in school, but now I thought he must be pretty damn good if he spent time around these parts.
00:13:07.000 He hadn't thought about Wordsworth.
00:13:08.000 That's not a thing.
00:13:09.000 But put aside the gap between the ghostwriter and the actual narrator of the book, Prince Harry.
00:13:15.000 And you get to the underlying seething discontent that Harry has at his own role and at the royal family itself.
00:13:23.000 And his baseline justification for his seething discontent is the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997 in a car crash in which the driver had a blood alcohol level that was like three times the legal limit and spun out of control and ended up killing Princess Di and others in the car.
00:13:41.000 So Prince Harry blames this on pretty much everybody.
00:13:43.000 He blames this on the press.
00:13:45.000 He blames this on his family in some ways, kind of his father and Camilla.
00:13:49.000 But most of all, what he basically says is this is the original sin.
00:13:54.000 Now, the problem is that if you say that the original sin of the royal family is Princess Di's death, this leads to a pretty stark contrast because there's another brother, right?
00:14:01.000 And that older brother, William, is going to be the king.
00:14:05.000 And William does not blame the institution for his mother's death.
00:14:08.000 William is not a person who's trying to undermine the institution.
00:14:11.000 He's going to be the king.
00:14:13.000 And so what that means is that Harry has to somehow draw some sort of excuse as to why he is not taking the role that he is given in stride the same way that William is.
00:14:23.000 And that is one of the themes running throughout the book.
00:14:25.000 So as we say, this whole thing begins with Princess Di, and it gets very weird because the ghostwriter is a fan of Jung and Freud.
00:14:32.000 He starts inserting very odd allusions throughout the book that are somewhat creepy.
00:14:38.000 Harry sort of makes himself out to be the only legitimate heir of Diana in the book.
00:14:42.000 He says stuff like this, I'd inherited this from her, I thought, along with her nose, her blue eyes, her love of people, her hatred of smugness and fakery and all things posh.
00:14:50.000 That's what he inherited from Diana.
00:14:51.000 He's the true sort of Diana in the family.
00:14:54.000 And as it'll turn out later, Meghan Markle is the real Diana figure in the family.
00:15:00.000 And listen, the beginning of the book, the first 120 pages, really, really sad because about a kid losing his mom.
00:15:07.000 And telling himself the lie that his mom isn't actually dead, she just ran away.
00:15:11.000 And it's very sad and very upsetting.
00:15:13.000 Obviously.
00:15:14.000 It also leads to some obviously deep-seated psychological issues for Harry.
00:15:18.000 I mean, here is a clip.
00:15:20.000 This is the most probably well-publicized clip of the book so far.
00:15:23.000 Of Prince Harry talking about a point in his life where he went to the North Pole and proceeded to get frostbite on his penis.
00:15:32.000 And that led him to try to take measures to alleviate the symptoms of this frostbite and leads to this extraordinarily weird clip.
00:15:40.000 My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.
00:15:45.000 The last place I wanted to be was Frostnippistan.
00:15:49.000 I'd been trying some home remedies, including one recommended by a friend.
00:15:52.000 She urged me to apply Elizabeth Arden cream.
00:15:56.000 My mom used that on her lips.
00:15:57.000 You want me to put that on my Todger?
00:15:59.000 It works, Harry.
00:16:00.000 Trust me.
00:16:01.000 I found a tube, and the minute I opened it, the smell transported me through time.
00:16:06.000 I felt as if my mother was right there in the room.
00:16:09.000 Then I took a smidge and applied it down there.
00:16:16.000 This is a troubled human.
00:16:16.000 Yeah.
00:16:19.000 That is not good.
00:16:21.000 We learned some things, aside from the word Todger, in that particular clip.
00:16:26.000 So, if the original sin of the royal family is the death and treatment of Princess Di, a sin for which Prince Harry never forgives anybody, and again, there's some of this stuff that does seem Fairly, I wouldn't say unforgivable, very difficult.
00:16:38.000 I mean, the fact that you had a 12-year-old walking behind his mother's coffin at a state funeral in front of millions of people watching, that's brutal.
00:16:44.000 I mean, that's brutal stuff, no question.
00:16:46.000 However, does that provide the excuse for your new moral system being dissociation from your family and yelling at your family publicly and going on television and essentially saying that they are racist and then buying it back?
00:16:58.000 Because your wife, who seems like somewhat of a harpy, as we'll get to in just a moment, has taken advantage of you, which is really the story of the book as well.
00:17:06.000 It's about a young man who is very troubled in search of some sort of safe haven, and he finds it in a woman who is pretty clearly seeking to take advantage of his position.
00:17:17.000 So much of the book is wrapped up in this sort of narcissistic, small-minded, petty sort of grievance.
00:17:23.000 If Queen Elizabeth had written a memoir, it wouldn't read anything like this.
00:17:27.000 We can point out.
00:17:29.000 And it's all the sense of victimization.
00:17:31.000 Quote, centuries ago, royal men and women were considered divine.
00:17:33.000 Now they were insects.
00:17:34.000 What fun to pluck their wings.
00:17:36.000 He's a super giant victim.
00:17:38.000 Now, here's the thing.
00:17:39.000 All the other members of the royal family are in the same boat.
00:17:41.000 All the other members of the royal family are under a microscope, but they're not reacting the same way that Prince Harry is.
00:17:45.000 And herein lies the problem for Prince Harry.
00:17:47.000 So he has to blame everybody else for his own bad decision making.
00:17:50.000 So he blames the press, for example, for covering his teenage drug use.
00:17:55.000 Now, again, should we cover minors the same way that the press covers the royals?
00:17:58.000 I think not.
00:18:00.000 It is also true that Prince Harry was fairly regularly lying to the press about his drug use, right?
00:18:06.000 Quote, of course, I had been doing cocaine around this time is when he was 17 years old, I believe.
00:18:11.000 And then you had the controversy surrounding Prince Harry about when he wore that Nazi uniform.
00:18:14.000 Remember, there's a big controversy.
00:18:15.000 He went to a Halloween party and he wore a Nazi uniform because Prince Harry, as is very clear in the book, is not a high IQ person.
00:18:23.000 And so in the book, he blames William and Kate.
00:18:27.000 Quote, I phoned Willie and Kate, asked what they thought.
00:18:30.000 Nazi uniform, they said.
00:18:32.000 Off we went to the party where no one looked twice at my costume.
00:18:34.000 All the natives and colonials were more focused on getting drunk and groping each other.
00:18:37.000 But this reporter spotted something else.
00:18:39.000 Hello, what's this?
00:18:40.000 Despair?
00:18:41.000 As a Nazi?
00:18:42.000 Again, this sense of peculiar victimization when you make a pretty obviously terrible decision to wear a Nazi uniform to a Halloween party.
00:18:49.000 Pretty, pretty amazing stuff.
00:18:52.000 And again, one of the running themes here is that it's not that Harry makes bad decisions, which he does throughout the book.
00:18:58.000 The theme is that people notice that he makes bad decisions and cover him making the bad decisions.
00:19:02.000 And he blames presumably Camilla specifically for his own press coverage.
00:19:10.000 So in this book, the evil stepmother is the one who is leaking to the press nearly the entire time.
00:19:15.000 That is the story that he is trotting out there.
00:19:18.000 So he doesn't just go after After the press.
00:19:22.000 I mean, he goes after the press really hard.
00:19:24.000 In fact, his language about the press is really kind of shocking.
00:19:28.000 He actually compares the press to Islamic terrorists, which is quite a statement considering that in the book he brags about killing 25 members of the Taliban.
00:19:36.000 He says, the Paps, the paparazzi, had always been grotesque people.
00:19:39.000 But as I reached maturity, they were worse.
00:19:41.000 You could see it in their eyes, their body language.
00:19:42.000 They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized.
00:19:46.000 Their mullahs were editors, the same ones you'd vowed to do better after mummy died.
00:19:52.000 And of course, he also characterized Rupert Murdoch personally as a Taliban-like person.
00:19:57.000 Quote, I was around this time I began to think Rupert Murdoch was evil.
00:20:00.000 No, strike that.
00:20:01.000 I began to know that he was.
00:20:02.000 Of course, I didn't care for Murdoch's politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban.
00:20:06.000 Again, this is him woke signaling.
00:20:08.000 OK, so he hates the press and he blames the press for his mother's death, obviously.
00:20:13.000 But really, what a lot of this is about is his despise, his deep sense of anger at his own family.
00:20:21.000 Which is what makes the book particularly ugly.
00:20:22.000 When you air dirty laundry like this, particularly when your family seems to have gone out of its way to publicly avoid criticizing you despite you making a series of bad decisions, them warning you over and over and over.
00:20:31.000 In the book, they warn Harry over and over and over that Meghan Markle is bad news and just ignores them completely.
00:20:36.000 Despite the fact that they were very much on board with him getting psychiatric help after his military service, apparently he had PTSD.
00:20:42.000 Despite the fact that they seem to facilitate a lot of his events.
00:20:45.000 that he wanted to do, including very praiseworthy things like Olympic Games for people who'd been wounded in action.
00:20:51.000 But his language with regard to his family is really quite ugly.
00:20:56.000 And he says, at the very beginning of the book, he's talking about a confrontation that he has with his father, the king, who he treats really poorly in the book.
00:21:08.000 And his brother, William, who he also treats really poorly in the book.
00:21:10.000 He says, at last I saw them, shoulder to shoulder, striding towards me.
00:21:14.000 They looked grim, almost menacing.
00:21:15.000 More, they looked tightly aligned.
00:21:17.000 A thought occurred, hang on, are we meeting for a walk or a duel?
00:21:20.000 And again, the idea here is that Willie is the bad one, right?
00:21:26.000 William is the true villain of the book.
00:21:28.000 Charles is a villain.
00:21:29.000 William is a villain.
00:21:30.000 Kate is a villain.
00:21:31.000 The press is a villain.
00:21:31.000 The institution is a villain.
00:21:33.000 The Queen is a villain.
00:21:34.000 Meghan Markle is an angel.
00:21:35.000 And Harry, of course, is just an innocent abroad, essentially.
00:21:40.000 He says, quote, my family had declared me a nullity.
00:21:42.000 The spare.
00:21:43.000 I didn't complain about it, but I didn't need to dwell on it either.
00:21:45.000 Far better in my mind not to think about certain facts, such as the cardinal rule for royal travel.
00:21:49.000 Pa and William could never be on the same flight together because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out.
00:21:55.000 But no one gave a damn whom I traveled with.
00:21:56.000 The spare could always be spared.
00:21:59.000 So you're now angry that you get to travel with your father?
00:22:02.000 So you get to travel.
00:22:03.000 He wants it both ways.
00:22:04.000 On the one hand, he says, I wish people would leave me alone.
00:22:07.000 And then on the other hand, he's like, why won't they?
00:22:09.000 Why won't they pay attention to me?
00:22:11.000 Why am I less important than my brother?
00:22:14.000 There's a lot of Cain and Abel in this particular book, for sure.
00:22:16.000 It says, no matter how much you might love someone, you could never cross the chasm between, say, monarch or child, or heir and spare, physically, but also emotionally.
00:22:26.000 And this carries forward into the way that he talks about the members of his family.
00:22:28.000 That's what makes the book pretty despicable.
00:22:31.000 When you dump on your family this way publicly, specifically for lots and lots of money, and Harry is making a boatload of money off of ripping on his family.
00:22:40.000 He's making a boatload of money off of that.
00:22:43.000 He's got a huge Netflix deal.
00:22:44.000 He did this ridiculous miniseries with Meghan Markle.
00:22:46.000 He's got a Spotify deal.
00:22:48.000 He's got deals from some major networks.
00:22:50.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:22:52.000 First, let us talk about the state of your business.
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00:23:52.000 The way that he talks about every member of his family is pretty gross.
00:23:55.000 So, for example, his father, This hasn't really struck any of the reviewers yet, but it really is a betrayal.
00:24:02.000 He talks about his father and how his father was victimized in school.
00:24:05.000 The king.
00:24:06.000 Charles.
00:24:08.000 And he says this, quote, So you're talking about your father, the king, and you're talking about how he drags around a teddy bear from his childhood.
00:24:14.000 Isn't that kind of private?
00:24:15.000 Isn't that kind of victimizing your father by revealing that to public view?
00:24:18.000 better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.
00:24:20.000 So you're talking about your father, the king, and you're talking about how he drags around a teddy bear from his childhood.
00:24:24.000 Isn't that kind of private?
00:24:26.000 Isn't that kind of victimizing your father by revealing it to public view?
00:24:29.000 His father, by the way, throughout the book is very considerate of the fact that Harry makes a bunch of dumb mistakes, ranging from drug use to dating quote-unquote page three girls.
00:24:38.000 I mean, this is a book where Harry admits to going to like Courtney Cox's house and eating mushrooms out of the fridge, like magic mushrooms out of the fridge.
00:24:46.000 I mean, this is not a book where Harry's behavior is particularly worthwhile.
00:24:51.000 And as it turns out, even his actual worthwhile behavior, his service in the military, he then talks down, which makes no sense to me.
00:24:57.000 He sort of undercuts his own military service in a couple of different ways, which truly is heroic when you serve in the military on behalf of your country.
00:25:04.000 But the sort of veil through which Harry sees his dad, again, is indicative of how he sees the institution of the monarchy in general.
00:25:11.000 He is standing on top of the monarchy to be rich and famous, and he is ripping on that institution.
00:25:16.000 And this is what makes him rich and famous in the modern world of young leadership.
00:25:21.000 And so he's talking about his dad at one point in the book, and how he had been caught Naked, at a party, on camera, which again, this stuff just keeps happening to Harry.
00:25:33.000 It just keeps happening randomly.
00:25:33.000 It's very weird.
00:25:35.000 So he's talking about his dad's response.
00:25:36.000 He didn't gloss over the facts.
00:25:37.000 Darling boy, how could you be so foolish?
00:25:39.000 My cheeks burned.
00:25:40.000 I know, I know.
00:25:41.000 But he quickly went on to say it was the foolishness of youth that he remembered being publicly vilified for youthful sins.
00:25:46.000 It wasn't fair, because youth is the time when you are by definition unfinished.
00:25:51.000 And that, by the way, is the picture of Charles throughout the book, is him being very conciliatory and solicitous of his ne'er-do-well son.
00:25:58.000 Like his dad going out of his way for his son, but he's still the bad guy.
00:26:01.000 Now, the true villain here is, of course, Camilla.
00:26:04.000 He suggests that Camilla, because obviously Charles was having an affair with Camilla, had known Camilla before he knew Diana.
00:26:09.000 Diana emerges from this book completely unscathed, as you would imagine.
00:26:12.000 I mean, Harry is, in fact, the son of Princess Di, but let's just say the Princess Di's own history was somewhat unwonderful in terms of her Marital activities or extra marital activities or whatever.
00:26:27.000 He blames Camilla for going to the press and suggests that all the bad press coverage is coming from inside the house, essentially.
00:26:33.000 Again, this is all really about the victimization of Harry.
00:26:35.000 Thershey began to play the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown with Paz blessing, we presumed again, this is all really about the victimization of Harry.
00:26:42.000 Now there's only one problem.
00:26:43.000 As I say, all of this opposition to the family, to the royalty, to the institution, to the role, to the monarchy, all of this is given the lie by the fact that his brother, his older brother, who's actually the heir is acting well within the boundaries of the role that he's expected to perform.
00:27:00.000 And so Harry has to come up with some excuse.
00:27:02.000 And the excuse is that William is mean.
00:27:05.000 The excuse is that William is cruel and malevolent and uncaring and nasty.
00:27:10.000 And therefore, William, the reason he buys into all of this is not because Harry has it wrong and Harry really ought to be somewhat grateful for the position that he's been put in.
00:27:20.000 Not with regard to the press, obviously, no one likes the paparazzi, but with regard to having the opportunity to do all the things that you, I mean, how many people would like to be born a prince of England?
00:27:31.000 And so he has to come up with some reason why William is wrong and Harry is right.
00:27:35.000 And the answer is because William is a bad, malevolent person.
00:27:38.000 So, he reads this back into history.
00:27:40.000 He basically says, throughout our entire childhood, William was very mean and cruel to me.
00:27:43.000 Now, that neglects the fact that, as he admits in the book, William actually spent an awful lot of time with him, that William roomed with him at a certain point, that William boarded with him, that William went out of his way to back him on multiple occasions.
00:27:57.000 Now, William is bad.
00:27:58.000 So, he says about William, the future king, Quote, I took it all in.
00:28:02.000 This is about the later confrontation that they have, not in their childhood.
00:28:05.000 Quote, I took it all in.
00:28:06.000 His familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me.
00:28:09.000 His alarming baldness, more advanced than my own.
00:28:12.000 I mean, this is going out of his way to slap at his brother, right?
00:28:14.000 His famous resemblance to mummy, which was aging with time.
00:28:18.000 Which was fading with time, rather.
00:28:20.000 Again, remember, Harry is the true heir to Diana.
00:28:22.000 It is William who's not the true heir to Diana because his resemblance to mummy is fading with time.
00:28:27.000 With age.
00:28:28.000 In some ways, he was my mirror.
00:28:29.000 In some ways, he was my opposite.
00:28:30.000 My beloved brother.
00:28:31.000 My arch nemesis.
00:28:32.000 How had that happened?
00:28:34.000 And then he goes back through their history.
00:28:35.000 He says that William pretended not to know him at boarding school, which again, you know, siblings treating each other not amazing when they're kids.
00:28:41.000 Generally, that doesn't become the topic of memoirs.
00:28:44.000 He talks about how they would go out and they would shoot fireworks at each other.
00:28:49.000 And one time he got Harry real good.
00:28:51.000 He says, behind us, I could just make out the future King of England plotting his revenge.
00:28:56.000 Yes, this isn't Harry's revenge against William.
00:28:58.000 Really, it's all about William's revenge against Harry.
00:29:03.000 And he takes glory, there's a certain point where he serves in the military, and Harry is allowed to serve, and William's been prevented in some ways.
00:29:10.000 He says, for one brief moment, spare outranked heir.
00:29:13.000 And near the end of the book, he basically just says it right out.
00:29:16.000 He says, William is a bad person, I'm a very good person, and William doesn't care about me.
00:29:19.000 Quote, Willie wasn't quite ready to accept defeat.
00:29:22.000 I felt properly sick and ill after everything that's happened, and I swear to you now on mummy's life that I just want you to be happy.
00:29:28.000 My voice broke as I told him softly, I really don't think you do.
00:29:32.000 So again, it's William who's the problem.
00:29:33.000 Now, remember, William isn't the one who's tattletaling to the press.
00:29:36.000 It's not William who's going on Oprah Winfrey and calling his brother a ne'er-do-well idiot.
00:29:41.000 It's not William who's going on national television and explaining that Meghan Markle is kind of a harpy.
00:29:46.000 He's been quiet this whole time.
00:29:47.000 It is Harry who's doing all of those things.
00:29:49.000 And he's doing so, presumably, in the bizarre apprehension that the family that has supported him his entire life is really nasty and mean to him.
00:29:58.000 Again, the reason that I'm spending so much time on this, folks, is because it is indicative of an entire worldview of at least two generations in the West right now.
00:30:05.000 Gen X and the Millennials.
00:30:07.000 This belief that the people who brought you into the world and who take care of you and the roles that you are given are actually bad and they hem you in and the best way for you to be a hero is to fight those roles and break free of them and then to tattletale about them and talk about how terrible they are.
00:30:23.000 He spends some time ripping on Kate.
00:30:25.000 He spends a lot of time, as I say, ripping on the press.
00:30:27.000 He even rips on the Army, which makes no sense to me.
00:30:29.000 The Army is, again, sort of the bright spot of his resume.
00:30:33.000 And yet, he still has lines like this.
00:30:35.000 He's talking about how they psychologically screened him.
00:30:38.000 What's that you say, young man?
00:30:39.000 Parents divorced?
00:30:40.000 Unresolved grief or psychological trauma?
00:30:40.000 Mom's dead?
00:30:42.000 Step this way.
00:30:43.000 He was victimized by the military.
00:30:44.000 You see, now, what's weird about that is, again, the way that he portrays the military as something he wants to keep going back to because it gives him a sense of belonging.
00:30:50.000 But then he has to rip on the military because, again, the people who he's appealing to, the sort of Meghan Markle crowd, those people don't like the military very much.
00:30:56.000 And they think that the military is a repository of colonialist bigotry.
00:31:00.000 OK, so finally, this brings us to Meghan Markle.
00:31:02.000 And this is really where sort of Harry's break happens with the royal family.
00:31:06.000 And it happens pretty obviously because Harry, throughout the entire book, is searching for someone to love him.
00:31:12.000 He is searching for someone to take care of him.
00:31:14.000 He is searching for someone to make him feel better about himself.
00:31:17.000 Here he is, one of the most famous, rich people on earth.
00:31:20.000 And he's going around, gallivanting around, staying with Hollywood friends, and dating starlets, and dating models, and going out to places in Africa to watch the beautiful animals and all the rest of this sort of stuff.
00:31:33.000 And yet he is unhappy.
00:31:34.000 And so somebody has to provide him with a sense of meaning.
00:31:36.000 And that person, as it turns out, is Meghan Markle.
00:31:38.000 And the way he portrays Meghan Markle is so cult-like and weird.
00:31:42.000 I mean, it really is.
00:31:44.000 And as someone who's been married for 15 years, I love my wife very much.
00:31:48.000 Also, the way that he talks about his wife in this book is very, very, very strange.
00:31:52.000 I mean, there is a section near the end of the book, because he keeps conflating her with Diana.
00:31:58.000 Near the end of the book, he literally brings her to Princess Di's grave.
00:32:03.000 And here is Meg's behavior at Princess Di's grave.
00:32:07.000 Quote, he leaves her at the grave of his mother, who she's never met.
00:32:12.000 Quote, when I came back, Meg was kneeling, eyes shut, palms against the stone.
00:32:17.000 I asked as we walked back to the boat what she'd prayed for.
00:32:19.000 Clarity, she said, and guidance.
00:32:24.000 Now, I'm just going to say that Harry is unbelievably gullible.
00:32:29.000 He's really, really gullible.
00:32:31.000 He's gullible because, again, she makes him feel very special, which you get.
00:32:35.000 I mean, this is presumably what people who are in love do for one another is they make each other feel special, but his gullibility is very extreme.
00:32:43.000 When I say that, I mean, this is a person who says in this book no less than twice that he believes that Meghan Markle never Googled him.
00:32:53.000 Uh, no.
00:32:55.000 She literally had a lifestyle blog in which she wrote, in the lifestyle blog, about Princess Kate's wedding.
00:32:55.000 No.
00:33:01.000 So, yeah, that's not true.
00:33:04.000 And he seems to be under the odd misapprehension, Prince Harry, that Meghan Markle simply picked him out of a lineup, that if he'd been walking through the supermarket, they would have ended up together.
00:33:13.000 Which, you know, that's a very romantic notion and all, but I do not think that it is borne out by any of the available evidence.
00:33:19.000 And so his behavior, like the way that he writes about this, is so Frankly, thick.
00:33:24.000 It's pretty amazing.
00:33:25.000 Quote, I felt pretty sure she hadn't Googled me because she was always asking questions.
00:33:30.000 She seemed to know about nothing.
00:33:31.000 So refreshing.
00:33:32.000 It showed that she wasn't impressed by royalty, which I thought the first step to surviving it.
00:33:37.000 He says this no less than twice that she had not Googled him.
00:33:42.000 I guarantee you that is not the case.
00:33:44.000 And there are other instances in the book where he talks about Meghan Markle and her behavior.
00:33:47.000 So, for example, there is one event where he brings her a present.
00:33:50.000 The present is cupcakes.
00:33:54.000 Now, I like cupcakes as much as the next dude.
00:34:06.000 My wife enjoys a good cupcake every once in a while.
00:34:08.000 Again, for seven bucks down at the local Winn-Dixie.
00:34:12.000 Meghan Markle literally went with him to Africa for like a two-week jaunt on their third date, according to Prince Harry.
00:34:19.000 And apparently this should not Google him.
00:34:22.000 Now I have a question, ladies.
00:34:23.000 Do you randomly go with men for two weeks to Africa or a week to Africa on your third date without finding out who they are?
00:34:31.000 Or is that like a serial killer move?
00:34:34.000 That's in any case.
00:34:36.000 Because he's so taken with her and because she fills all these longings that he has and because she provides him with a sense of mission, which is, of course, that the monarchy is bad and must be torn down.
00:34:44.000 Because of all that, he refuses to hear from all of the blaring red warnings that his family is providing about what Meghan Markle is.
00:34:53.000 So at one point, William warns her and he says, Meg's difficult.
00:34:57.000 And he says, oh, really?
00:34:58.000 She's abrasive.
00:34:58.000 She's rude.
00:34:59.000 She's alienated half the staff.
00:35:00.000 Not the first time he'd parroted the press narrative.
00:35:03.000 Apparently, there's all sorts of accurate reporting from inside the house, except for the stuff about Meghan Markle.
00:35:12.000 So, again, so much of this is built around the press's mean to Meghan Markle, and then he says that he wants to defend her.
00:35:20.000 And obviously, there's some Freudian aspects to this.
00:35:21.000 He wants to defend her in the same way that he feels like he wish he could have defended his mom, Princess Di, from the press.
00:35:26.000 Princess Di, by the way, used the press herself pretty aptly.
00:35:30.000 But all of this led to the break with the family.
00:35:33.000 And so the conclusion here is the one that really matters.
00:35:35.000 The conclusion here.
00:35:36.000 So at the very end of the book, Prince Harry has now left Britain.
00:35:40.000 He's left behind his family.
00:35:41.000 He's left behind the royalty.
00:35:43.000 He's left behind the monarchy.
00:35:44.000 And he sees a hummingbird.
00:35:46.000 Such a metaphor.
00:35:47.000 There are many animal metaphors in this particular book.
00:35:50.000 At the very end, there's a hummingbird that gets into their palatial estate in Los Angeles.
00:35:55.000 That is paid for by selling out his family, presumably.
00:35:58.000 And he says, quote, You're free.
00:36:00.000 Fly away.
00:36:01.000 And then against all odds and all expectations, that wonderful, magical little creature bestirred itself and did just that.
00:36:07.000 The hummingbird.
00:36:07.000 But he means him.
00:36:09.000 Right?
00:36:10.000 That's him.
00:36:11.000 You're free.
00:36:12.000 Fly away.
00:36:13.000 So this is why this book is important.
00:36:16.000 The reason this book is important, again, is because what we have in Western civilization is a true battle.
00:36:21.000 And this is true for pretty much all historic cultures.
00:36:23.000 A battle over whether you as a human being ought to respect and conform to roles and rules that have been established over generations, acknowledging the benefit of those institutions, or whether what makes you a hero is rebelling against those rules, flying away, violating all of those rules, ripping on your family, ripping on these institutions, while living off their benefits, by the way, because if it had not been for those benefits, there wouldn't be a single human reading Prince Harry's memoir.
00:36:46.000 He certainly couldn't have afforded to pay this ghostwriter to write the memoir, and I highly doubt that Prince Harry is nearly as articulate or Be stirring, as this particular memoir is.
00:36:58.000 What do we wish our leadership class to look like?
00:37:01.000 This is why the whole Prince Harry, Meghan Markle thing crosses the water and has become so political.
00:37:06.000 It's why you see so many conservatives in the United States who are angry with Prince Harry, even though they have really no stake in the monarchy.
00:37:11.000 And why you see so many people on the left who are very, very happy with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and see them as real fighters.
00:37:16.000 Now, one of the things that is notable about this book is that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle went on Oprah and basically said that members of the royal family were racists.
00:37:24.000 That does not appear anywhere in the book.
00:37:26.000 All of the allegations of racism are attributed to the press.
00:37:29.000 With that said, I think that if you see Prince Harry as sort of a sad human who has made for himself a sad life and now feels a mission in destroying that which made him sad, that is a better read on this.
00:37:46.000 And if you see that as heroic, then that says something about what you think of institutions and whether they are worthy of preserving, generally speaking.
00:37:55.000 There's a lot here to be sad about, obviously.
00:37:57.000 Prince Harry's a sad person.
00:37:58.000 Princess Di's death is tragic.
00:38:00.000 The monarchy seems like a very hard way to live, particularly for young people.
00:38:03.000 Prince Harry is now 38 years old.
00:38:05.000 And the fact that he has decided to essentially rip down an institution that provided him with all of his fame and all of his fortune, and yes, his wife, because if you were not a prince, you would not have given him a second look.
00:38:15.000 He would have been a non-college graduate who served in the military, dating the Star of Suits.
00:38:23.000 I will let you wonder whether that is a thing that normally happens.
00:38:26.000 You know, all of that is worthy of consideration as we move forward and decide which institutions are worth preserving and which people we ought to treat as heroes.
00:38:34.000 Okay, we'll get to more news in just one second.
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00:39:16.000 Okay, so meanwhile, a second batch of classified documents has now been found by Biden aides at a new location associated with Joe Biden.
00:39:24.000 According to NBC News, aides to President Joe Biden have discovered at least one additional batch of classified documents in a location separate from the Washington office he used after leaving the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the matter.
00:39:34.000 Since November, after the discovery of documents with classified markings in his former office, Biden aides have been searching for any additional classified materials that might be in other locations he used, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details about the ongoing inquiry.
00:39:46.000 The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
00:39:50.000 The Justice Department similarly had no comment.
00:39:52.000 The initial discovery of classified documents in an office used by Biden after his vice presidency was first reported on Monday by CBS News.
00:39:59.000 It is not clear exactly what the classification level was or what these classified documents were.
00:40:03.000 The first batch apparently included documents related to both Ukraine and Iran.
00:40:08.000 And, um, Joe Biden continues to maintain he has no idea what exactly is happening, which is maybe the most plausible thing that he's ever said because he never knows what exactly is happening.
00:40:17.000 But it is worth noting that back in 2018, Joe Biden said he did not have access to classified information anymore, which is weird since we found all of these documents that, you know, places he controlled.
00:40:26.000 Look, here's my understanding, and I don't know, I don't have access to classified information anymore.
00:40:31.000 I don't get briefed every morning by the agency.
00:40:35.000 Oh, oops.
00:40:37.000 So, Peter Doocy of Fox News questioned World War Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about all of this yesterday, saying, you know, the president said that it was irresponsible to keep classified documents outside of classified places.
00:40:49.000 Do you have any comments on that?
00:40:51.000 And KJP's got nothing.
00:40:53.000 On these documents, how could anyone be that irresponsible?
00:41:01.000 Isn't that what this president says about mishandling classified documents?
00:41:03.000 The president spoke to this personally.
00:41:05.000 He spoke to this personally and he, again, he believes that classified documents and information should be taken seriously.
00:41:13.000 He takes them seriously and he was surprised to learn by any records.
00:41:18.000 I disagree.
00:41:19.000 Again, this is under review by the Department of Justice and we're going to let that process continue.
00:41:26.000 How can President Biden be trusted moving forward with America's secrets?
00:41:30.000 Because his lawyers, his team, did the right thing.
00:41:32.000 But he had a closet with classified information in it that they found.
00:41:37.000 Again, again, again.
00:41:40.000 He was surprised that the records were there.
00:41:43.000 He spoke to this.
00:41:46.000 He spoke to this.
00:41:47.000 No, he didn't.
00:41:48.000 He said he didn't know why they were there or what exactly was going on.
00:41:52.000 Meanwhile, she had no comment on why exactly it took the White House and the DOJ two months to announce this.
00:41:55.000 Remember that the classified documents held by Joe Biden, this was revealed in early November, like just before the election.
00:42:02.000 And then it took two months for that to be revealed.
00:42:04.000 Amazing how unleaky the system was when it came to Joe Biden just before an election.
00:42:09.000 These documents were discovered in November 2nd.
00:42:11.000 This didn't become public until my colleagues at CBS News reported this on Monday.
00:42:16.000 That's more than two months later.
00:42:19.000 Why was the public not informed while the White House prepared a PR response for two months?
00:42:25.000 Again, this was under review.
00:42:27.000 This is under review by the Department of Justice.
00:42:29.000 I'm not going to go beyond what the President shared yesterday.
00:42:31.000 I'm not going to go beyond what my colleagues at the White House Council shared with all of you as well.
00:42:40.000 You're not going to go beyond, are you?
00:42:41.000 Well, I'm glad you are so disciplined.
00:42:44.000 Meanwhile, in other news, the U.S.
00:42:45.000 inflation rate has now eased to 6.5% in December compared with one year earlier.
00:42:51.000 That is the 6th straight month of deceleration since a mid 2022 peak.
00:42:55.000 Deceleration meaning that last month the year over year inflation rate was at like 7% and now it's at like 6.5% which is still way too high.
00:43:04.000 The year over year annual inflation rate is supposed to be at 2%.
00:43:08.000 Now, it has been declining over the past 6 months.
00:43:11.000 On an absolute level, the inflation rate is lower over the past six months than it was over the prior six months before that.
00:43:17.000 On a monthly basis, the CPI fell 0.1% in December due to sharply falling energy prices, food prices increased, and those also slowed last month.
00:43:25.000 That compared with a gain of 0.1% in November and 0.4% in October.
00:43:29.000 The Federal Reserve increased interest rates aggressively in 2022 to combat inflation.
00:43:33.000 Officials indicated in December they expected to raise rates further in 2023.
00:43:37.000 CEOs are expecting a sort of short recession at this point.
00:43:41.000 I would not be surprised if it goes a little bit further than that.
00:43:45.000 Still, with all of this said, The peak rate that the Federal Reserve is likely to raise the interest rate to is not going to be 5%.
00:43:52.000 It'll probably be higher than 5.5% in order to really tame inflation.
00:43:57.000 So you're seeing a lot of preemptive celebration, I think, at this point.
00:44:01.000 But wage gains, hiring gains suggest That it is going to be very difficult for the Fed to achieve a full soft landing where we don't hit any recession at all.
00:44:08.000 We just bring down that inflation and tame it.
00:44:10.000 We're starting to feel the pain already.
00:44:12.000 You've seen major tech companies laying off large numbers of people.
00:44:16.000 So while the Biden administration celebrates at the moment, because those unemployment numbers are quite solid.
00:44:21.000 And the inflation rate is in fact coming down.
00:44:23.000 What we are going to end up with on the other end is going to be recession and stagnation.
00:44:26.000 And then it's just a question of how much of Biden's agenda actually gets implemented as to how long that stagnation is in fact going to last.
00:44:34.000 All righty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
00:44:36.000 You're not going to want to miss it.
00:44:37.000 We will be getting into just how Pete Buttigieg screwed up the FAA.
00:44:41.000 And yeah, he kind of did.
00:44:42.000 Plus, we'll be getting into House Republicans trying to protect the unborn after they are actually born, botched abortions, and Democrats screaming and shouting about it.
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