Six Dr. Seuss books are removed from circulation, liberals make excuses for newfangled book burning, and Texas and Mississippi reopen. Ben Shapiro explains why the cancellation is a good thing and why you should not care about it. He also points out that liberals have collapsed completely into leftism, which is why they don't have a choice but to go along with the utopian dreams of the left. And he explains why it's time to ditch the right and make common cause with the left in order to achieve your policy goals. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. For peace of mind wherever you go online, visit Expressvpn.org/TheBenShapiroShow and use the promo code "ExpressVPN" to get 20% off your first month with discount code "PURCHILL" at checkout. You can't get all the discount deals at ExpressVPN, but you can get them at no extra fee, and you'll get them all the same benefits you're used to get them for free. If you don't already have an ExpressVPN membership, use promo code: Poshmarkup to get 10% off the first month, plus a FREE 7-day trial when you upgrade your membership gets you an extra $10,000! You'll get 7% off for 7 days, plus an additional 3 months free when you sign up and get an ad-free version of the entire service, and a FREE 3-day shipping when you use ExpressVPN gets your first offer, and they'll get you an ad discount when you become an offer of $99 or $99 gets $99, plus they get $5, they'll also get $25,000, they also get you $50, they can get you a VIP membership, plus you get an additional $49,000 in their first year, they get you 4 months of the deal. Allowing you get 7 days of VIP access to the show? FREE M&M's VIP access, and 5,000 miles and they get the deal on the deal starts after they receive your first year of the offer? The offer starts on the show starts on 7/27th and 7/29th and they also gets you 4/4/10/19thor they get your first chance to use the deal, they receive $29/day and they can upgrade their first time they get my ad-only deal, and I'll get a discount.
00:01:42.000So they canceled like six Dr. Seuss books.
00:01:44.000The arguments that we are saying, which we'll get to in just a second, in favor of canceling these Dr. Seuss books are asinine, ridiculous, backwards, and fully demonstrative of the kind of values that the left would love to cram down on your children.
00:01:55.000More importantly, Well, not more importantly, just as importantly, they are fully demonstrative of the fact that liberals have collapsed almost completely into leftism.
00:02:04.000See, I always make the distinction on the show between liberals and leftists.
00:02:07.000Liberals are people who disagree with me about taxes and about abortion, and leftists are people who disagree with me about all those things and want to destroy individual rights in order to pursue utopia.
00:02:17.000In fact, liberals could just disagree with me about the extent to which government ought to lend a helping hand and such.
00:02:23.000But what has been happening is that liberals have decided that they are going to collapse full-scale into leftism.
00:02:27.000They're going to go right along with the utopian dreams of the left.
00:02:30.000Because as I've been saying for, at this point, years, the liberals have a choice.
00:02:34.000They can either make common cause with conservatism and stand up for individual rights, but their job becomes a little bit harder in terms of pursuing their policy goals because conservatives oppose those policy goals.
00:02:44.000So, preserve the rights, but you have to fight a longer, harder slog in order to achieve your policy goals.
00:02:49.000Or, you can throw over the individual rights, move along with the left, achieve your policy goals, but ditch the right.
00:02:54.000And the left And the liberals have decided, it looks like, to make common cause more often than not these days.
00:03:00.000There are a few old school liberals who are objecting to the hardcore cancel culture left, but not many.
00:03:09.000And by the way, what you're seeing is what the left likes to do, which is water down terms like cancel culture to mean anything.
00:03:14.000You see this on the right too, sometimes people will use cancel culture to apply to things that are not in fact cancel culture.
00:03:19.000But cancel culture does have a meaning.
00:03:21.000And that meaning is that people go after you and your career.
00:03:24.000They look to destroy your life based on a view that is relatively mainstream and or something that you did a long time ago that is not controversial.
00:03:33.000Or at least has not been controversial for years.
00:03:36.000Resurfacing old tweets in order to go after you.
00:04:50.000But that doesn't matter, because we now operate under a system in which if anyone even claims offense, this means all of society has to change and reflect their particular whims.
00:05:00.000And this goes back to the discussion we've been having over the past few weeks of expressive individualism.
00:05:03.000We now are a society that values your internal feelings To such an extent that if we refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy or justification of those feelings, then this means we are imposing on you.
00:05:13.000So if you feel a sense of discomfort at one picture from a Dr. Seuss book, the entire society has to cancel that Dr. Seuss book so as to make you feel better, because otherwise we are crimping your style, we are invading your individualism, and after all, that expressive individualism is who you are.
00:05:29.000It's just the same kind of crime against your identity as if somebody refused to serve you because you're black at a restaurant, as if we don't cancel a Dr. Seuss book because you feel sort of uncomfortable because some people read a Dr. Seuss book.
00:05:40.000This is where we have come as a society.
00:05:43.000And we have now gotten to the point where we don't need government to cram this down.
00:05:46.000This is a matter of an intolerant, bizarre culture that has decided to buy full scale into this definition of atomistic individualism governing all of society.
00:05:55.000That is what we have decided as a society.
00:05:56.000We are getting people to preemptively cancel themselves, because that's actually what happened here.
00:06:00.000According to the AP, six Dr. Seuss books, including And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was his first major work, and If I Ran the Zoo, which is a great book.
00:06:08.000Okay, I'm sorry, but If I Ran the Zoo is a great book.
00:06:10.000And name the person who read If I Ran the Zoo and came away thinking, well, you know, Hate Asian people now!
00:06:15.000Because if I ran the zoo, it has a picture of some Asian people carrying an exotic animal on their back, and Gerald McGrew, young Gerald McGrew, riding on top of the cage that holds the animal.
00:06:25.000Obviously, this is young, white Gerald McGrew making those Asian people subservient.
00:06:30.000No one has ever, honestly, come by that opinion.
00:06:33.000Okay, the only way you come by that opinion is if some woke jackass decides that they are going to make it an issue, and then shame you into believing that that's what that page is about.
00:06:43.000I've read that book to my kids probably a hundred times.
00:06:46.000And by the way, it's never occurred to anyone, except for this tiny group of malcontents who believe that culture ought to be essentially made subservient to their dumbass, over-sensitive feelings.
00:07:05.000They've made them into samizdat, which is forbidden literature in the Soviet Union.
00:07:09.000You're not allowed to even get them anymore.
00:07:12.000Honestly, I think that we should... I'm very rarely into the idea of government regulation, but the idea of trademark and copyright were provided specifically in order to provide so that nobody could take advantage of your intellectual property.
00:07:25.000You write a book, nobody gets to infringe upon your copyright until a certain time has passed since your death.
00:07:31.000And at that point, then it becomes open to anyone.
00:07:36.000But the purpose of copyright was to ensure that things are published, because why would you publish your work if somebody could just copy it?
00:07:41.000Copyright was not designed in order so you could suppress material.
00:07:46.000Copyright was not designed so that I could buy up somebody's copyright and then just kill it.
00:07:52.000I mean, this is federal regulation, right?
00:07:56.000Part of the Constitution of the United States involves patenting copyright.
00:07:59.000Perhaps there ought to be a piece of regulation that says that if you take a piece of literature off the market for more than two years, then it becomes public domain.
00:08:09.000Because otherwise, what you're going to have is exactly what you're seeing right here, which is Dr. Seuss Enterprises, who own the intellectual property of Dr. Seuss, literally just taking the books off the shelves.
00:08:17.000If I ran, the zoo was going for $1,500 a copy yesterday, which makes it a better investment than the U.S.
00:08:28.000I mean, what we are watching right now is book-burning.
00:08:30.000And you can call it whatever you want, but the only difference is that you're not actively taking a physical book and burning it.
00:08:36.000Because all it takes now to cancel a book, to burn a book, is just a couple IT guys and a delete button.
00:08:40.000This is the danger of digitization, which we'll get to in just one second.
00:08:43.000First, let us talk about the fact that your rights are certainly under assault right now.
00:08:48.000If you believe in individual liberty, one of the best protectors of individual liberty, of your rights, is your ability to own a firearm.
00:08:54.000That is an ability that Joe Biden would love to infringe upon.
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00:09:35.000Every American is responsible for questioning, debating, confronting issues.
00:09:39.000If and when your life and liberty ever come under threat, firearms are first and foremost a means to preserve the life and liberty of ourselves and others.
00:09:44.000This is why the Second Amendment exists.
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00:10:02.000Okay, so, Dr. Seuss Enterprises told the Associated Press in a statement, quote, these books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
00:10:08.000These books were written in like 1940s, 1950s America.
00:10:13.000The notion that you are deeply offended 80 years later by something that was drawn then, we're not talking about in Der Schirmer, We are not talking about in the local KKK newspaper.
00:10:23.000We are talking about in a children's book that have been read by millions and millions of people.
00:10:27.000And no one of serious mind has ever been offended by this stuff.
00:10:31.000I mean, let's just be real about this.
00:10:32.000The depiction of Asian people in And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street has offended precisely zero people over the course of time.
00:10:40.000It has faux offended a lot of people because we live in a society where you're granted a sort of moral credibility by claiming you're a member of a victimized minority.
00:10:48.000And in order to prove you're a member of a victimized minority, you have to claim victimhood.
00:10:51.000But Dr. Seuss has not victimized you and children reading these books has not victimized you, obviously.
00:10:56.000But because digital book burning is so easy, all you have to do is hit that delete button and boom, the book is gone.
00:11:03.000In the future, the only people who are going to have access to books are the Orthodox Jews who bought them so they could read them on Sabbath to their kids.
00:11:10.000By the way, they're going to do this with movies, too.
00:11:12.000If you think that the digitization process, which, by the way, was the single greatest, I mean, exponential explosion of information availability to the general public in human history, That has now been completely reversed.
00:11:25.000What we are now going to watch is digitization, which makes it incredibly easy to disappear material, is going to become the method by which they just disappear things.
00:11:32.000You will have bought a copy of Dumbo from Amazon Prime like three years ago, and one day you will just go on to Amazon Prime and it'll just be gone.
00:11:40.000It'll be as though you never bought it.
00:11:43.000You'll have bought a copy of Ryan Anderson's book on your Kindle and it'll just be gone.
00:11:47.000As though it had never happened in the first place.
00:11:49.000Digitization makes it super easy to disappear dissenting ideas.
00:11:53.000Which is why you should always buy hard copies of the things that you love by the DVD of the movies you love because they can't come in your house and grab it and burn it.
00:12:01.000But the bigger story here is that you have a culture that pressures creators into censoring their own works.
00:12:08.000And pressures estates like Dr. Seuss Enterprises into taking books down.
00:12:13.000into taking those books off the market completely.
00:12:16.000Dr. Seuss Enterprises said ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises' catalog represents and supports all communities and families.
00:12:26.000They're also getting rid of McGillicudd's Pool, On Beyond Zebra, Scrambled Egg Super, and The Cat's Quizzer.
00:12:32.000Apparently, they said, Dr. Seuss Enterprises listened and took feedback from our audiences, including teachers, academics, and specialists in the field as part of our review process.
00:12:39.000Okay, first of all, that's your problem.
00:12:41.000Don't pay any attention to the academics and the specialists because they're idiots.
00:12:46.000Why don't you just listen to the general public that wants to buy it and about whom there is no evidence that Dr. Seuss book has ever turned them racist.
00:12:53.000We worked with a panel of experts, including educators, to review our catalog of titles.
00:12:56.000Well, if the experts say so, well then, we know that it must be true.
00:13:00.000The National Education Association founded Read Across America Day in 1998 and deliberately aligned it with Ted Geisel's birthday, right?
00:13:09.000Because yesterday was Dr. Seuss's birthday.
00:13:10.000My kids celebrated it at school because they go to a non-crappy school.
00:13:14.000The NEA founded the day on Dr. Seuss's birthday, and now they're busily canceling Dr. Seuss.
00:13:21.000For several years, they've de-emphasized Dr. Seuss because he's bad, you see, and encouraged a more diverse reading list for children.
00:13:28.000As my colleague Matt Walsh has pointed out, basically, we should just cancel everybody who was not born over the course of the last 10 years.
00:13:34.000Because if you go 80 years ago, there was not a single human being in any living human society who did not hold a view you would find to be antithetical to your own today.
00:13:46.000But apparently, the NEA thinks that we should de-emphasize Dr. Seuss In 2018, a Dr. Seuss museum in his hometown of Springfield removed a mural that included an Asian stereotype.
00:13:57.000Because we can never have cartoons that are stereotypical about people in any way, right?
00:14:02.000You can't draw an Asian stereotype or a person who looks black because, like, how are cartoons supposed to work again?
00:14:10.000There are some that are significantly worse than others, you know, namely the ones with racist or anti-Semitic or bigoted intent, but then they're just cartoons.
00:14:17.000And if you look at virtually any cartoon, it looks like a stereotype, like literally all the cartoons.
00:14:22.000As producer Elliot was pointing out before the show, Moana looks like a stereotype of Hawaiian people.
00:14:27.000Pocahontas looks like a stereotype of Native American people.
00:14:31.000In fact, it is impossible to draw a cartoon that does not look like a stereotype in certain ways, because otherwise you wouldn't know that cartoon from, you know, a white person cartoon.
00:14:41.000So it sort of depends on what the cartoon looks like and what the intent of the cartoon was, and what people take away from the cartoon.
00:14:48.000And for the 1000th time, you cannot name the individual who was damaged by any of these Dr. Seuss books.
00:14:52.000You cannot name them because they don't exist.
00:14:56.000The Cat in the Hat, one of Seuss's most popular books, has received criticism too, but will continue to be published.
00:15:19.000Like literally all the things that Western culture celebrates are now going to be cancelled because they offend somebody.
00:15:26.000Jen Psaki yesterday was deliberately asked about Dr. Seuss being dropped from Joe Biden's reading proclamation.
00:15:31.000So Joe Biden put out a reading proclamation.
00:15:34.000And in this reading proclamation for Read Across America Day, he didn't mention Dr. Seuss.
00:15:37.000This was odd because President Obama had mentioned Dr. Seuss, like, repeatedly.
00:15:41.000In 2015, for example, Barack Obama put out a statement saying, That was his 2015 statement.
00:15:45.000Dr. Seuss Geisel, better known to us as Dr. Seuss, have sparked a love for reading in generations of students.
00:15:50.000His whimsical wordplay and curious characters inspire children to dream big and remind readers of all ages that a person's a person no matter how small.
00:15:58.000Then again, 2016, he put out a statement saying, March 2nd is also the birthday of one of America's revered wordsmiths.
00:16:05.000Theodore Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear.
00:16:11.000Through a prolific collection of stories, he made children see that reading is fun.
00:16:14.000And in the process, he emphasized respect for all, pushed us to accept ourselves for who we are, challenged preconceived notions, and encouraged trying new things, and by example, taught us that we are limited by nothing but the range of our aspirations and the vibrancy of our imaginations.
00:16:26.000And for older lovers of literature, he reminded us not to take ourselves too seriously, creating whacking wild characters and envisioning creative and colorful places.
00:16:33.000But we have to take ourselves super seriously, which is why Joe Biden has now participated in the cancellation of Dr. Seuss, right?
00:16:39.000Removed from the presidential proclamation.
00:16:41.000Speaking of which, 2018, Barack Obama.
00:16:53.000So here's Jen Psaki responding to the fact that Dr. Seuss was left out of the presidential proclamation because essentially a bunch of woke academic morons decided that Dr. Seuss's books were somehow spreading racism.
00:17:04.000And Joe Biden took that up because the liberals have been so intimidated by the woke left that they refused to stand up even for iconic authors.
00:17:13.000The proclamation was written by the Department of Education, and you could certainly speak to them about more specifics about the drafting of it.
00:17:19.000But Read Across America Day, which as you're right, has not existed forever, has only been around for a short period of time, elevates and celebrates a love of reading among our nation's youngest leaders.
00:17:30.000And the day is also a chance to celebrate diverse authors whose work and lived experience reflect the diversity of our country.
00:17:36.000And that's certainly what they attempted to do or hope to do this year.
00:17:43.000Okay, so, meanwhile, over at Universal Islands of Adventure in Florida, they're now talking about removing an exhibit for If I Ran the Zoo, because it's no longer going to be published.
00:17:54.000So there's something called Seuss Landing over at Universal Studios.
00:17:56.000We must not allow people to see the The Tufted Mazurka, right?
00:18:01.000These fake creatures that Seuss created.
00:18:03.000We definitely cannot allow people to see all the bizarre creatures from If I Ran the Zoo, because, I don't know, kids might then go look at the book, and they might see a portrayal of an Asian person that looks stereotypical, and then they might, I don't know, go and hurt an Asian person.
00:18:17.000All of this based on zero, on nothing.
00:18:19.000Also, they're gonna get rid of a gift shop called Mulberry Street Store, which comes from And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was, again, only his breakthrough book.
00:18:26.000Now, the defenses from the liberals here are the part here that's truly telling.
00:18:31.000Okay, because again, up until five minutes ago, Dr. Seuss was one of the uncancellables.
00:18:35.000The fact is, politically speaking, Dr. Seuss was not on the right, he was on the left.
00:18:40.000I mean, he was so uncancellable that Michelle Obama was dancing with Dr. Seuss characters.
00:18:46.000While she was the First Lady of the United States, here she was, dancing with Dr. Seuss characters.
00:18:49.000Look right there, next to her, there's a picture of the cat in the hat.
00:18:53.000And all the kids are wearing Cat in the Hat outfits, including, you can see in the front row, some black kids wearing Cat in the Hat hats.
00:19:01.000But I guess they don't understand that they are contributing to their own subjugation.
00:19:04.000We have to cancel Cat in the Hat, too.
00:19:05.000Here's Michelle Obama, just a few years ago, dancing with Dr. Seuss characters.
00:19:52.000By the way, just a quick note, the National Education Association, which is busily canceling Dr. Seuss, some of their recommended books for small children include I Am Jazz, in which children learn that they can be members of the other sex, in which a boy is treated as a girl, and this is considered a wonderful, wonderful thing, and Jacob's New Dress, which encourages children to cross-dress, which is really, really great.
00:20:11.000So we cannot have books from 1940 that include A stereotypical cartoon of an Asian person.
00:20:18.000But we can definitely be encouraging our kids to read Anti-Racist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, which encourages people to think in racist and racially essentialist ways.
00:20:27.000And also, we can encourage our 3 and 4 year olds to cross-dress and or choose their own gender.
00:20:31.000Yes, our society might be completely effed.
00:20:35.000And it's the liberal defense of this that's truly astonishing.
00:20:37.000Again, as I've been saying for a long time here, in the future of American society, the fate of American society does not rest with conservatives.
00:20:45.000It rests with people in the middle who might consider themselves good-hearted liberals, people who might be in favor of a little bit more government interventionism, or who don't follow politics all that closely.
00:20:54.000Are those people going to just go along with the woke crowd because the woke crowd is the loudest, and the most annoying, and the most irritating, or are they gonna stand up?
00:21:02.000Are they going to provide a full-throated defense of individual rights?
00:21:09.000Why are you making a big deal out of Dr. Seuss?
00:21:12.000Because you're taking iconic figures and canceling them, and then you play this little gaslighting mind game where it's like, how dare you pay attention to us completely destroying children's childhoods by suggesting that they can change their gender and sex, but they can't read Dr. Seuss?
00:21:26.000Why aren't you more worried about other things?
00:21:29.000Because that's the thing to worry about, gang.
00:21:31.000I'm mostly worried about the kind of country my kids grow up in and how I'm able to raise my children.
00:21:36.000That is my chief concern in life as a parent.
00:21:38.000And you are trying to re-indoctrinate my kids into values you hold dear by getting companies to cancel books that I like reading to my kids because you know better for my kid than I do.
00:21:49.000And then you claim that I should not feel imposed upon?
00:21:51.000You are literally imposing on me by banning me from doing things.
00:21:55.000And yet I should not feel imposed upon.
00:22:11.000The vaunted Ezra Klein, formerly of Vox.com, now of the New York Times, because there's only failure upward in the world of the left-wing media.
00:22:18.000So, Ezra Klein, he tweeted out an article from his old publication, Vox.com, why Fox News is having a day-long meltdown over Dr. Seuss.
00:22:28.000It says a lot about the modern GOP that Biden and the Democrats are about to pass a $1.9 trillion bill with dozens of longtime liberal policies.
00:22:34.000And what's really generating the heat on the right is some nonsense about Dr. Seuss.
00:22:44.000What do you think is of more fundamental value?
00:22:46.000I care deeply about the national debt.
00:22:48.000I've been railing against this garbage $1.9 trillion bill that is unsupportable by fact or economics for as long as Joe Biden's been proposing it.
00:22:56.000And to make the brief case against that $1.9 trillion plan once again, here is the case.
00:23:00.000According to the most liberal institutions, the United States is going to experience about a $450 billion GDP shortfall this year due to COVID.
00:23:06.000The bill is $1.9 trillion, so four times that large.
00:23:10.000That bill also happens to include barrels of pork, barrels and barrels and barrels of pork for the teachers unions and for a variety of states that have blown out their own spending.
00:23:17.000There's a study that came out yesterday from the Brookings Institute, a left-wing institute that found Okay, so there's your case against that.
00:23:24.000and yet we are bailing them out with tens of billions of dollars from federal tax coffers, money that no longer exists and that we are borrowing from the future.
00:23:30.000Okay, so there's your case against that.
00:23:32.000Now, which is more important to me, bad public policy when it comes to taxing and spending, which has been endemic to both parties and has been the curse of the American Republic for as long as I have been alive, or the complete and wholesale destruction of children's innocence by a bunch of woke assholes who have decided that it is deeply important to remove content that my kids want to see because maybe, just maybe, There will be somebody woke enough to inform them that content is racist.
00:23:56.000What do you think has more of an impact on my daily life?
00:23:59.000The spending that's been going on every day, and that is a problem, and a persistent problem, and that shows no signs of going away?
00:24:04.000Or the complete vitiation of American culture, particularly aimed at children?
00:24:39.000Five seconds ago, you were talking about getting rid of books that you didn't like that were actually racist.
00:24:45.000And now you're talking about just getting rid of mainstream Dr. Seuss books that have never actually been interpreted by any sentient human being as racist.
00:24:50.000And so you just found a bunch of experts at college who have no actual jobs to push the notion that this stuff has to be removed from the public square.
00:24:58.000Okay, so you got Ezra Klein saying, we got bigger things to worry about.
00:25:15.000And there's not a doubt in my mind he would have thought all the people at Fox News suddenly taking him up as a cause are the world's biggest a-holes.
00:25:21.000Well, there's no question Dr. Seuss was on the left, on the political left.
00:25:25.000Also, he would not have thought that we were the world's biggest a-holes.
00:25:28.000He would have thought we were the second biggest a-holes after people who think it's okay to burn his books.
00:25:32.000Probably, if I had to just make a guess.
00:25:34.000And listen to Mark Harris's justification for this.
00:25:36.000Geisel was a fascinating and remarkably non-defensive man who deplored racism and was also capable of recognizing where he himself had erred.
00:25:43.000So the blowhard right should stop panicking.
00:26:39.000Meanwhile, you have CNN's Chris Chiles.
00:26:40.000Remember, these are members of the press.
00:26:42.000Who would have thought, honest to God, who would have thought that the biggest advocates for restricting freedom of the press and restricting freedom of speech in America would be members of the press?
00:26:50.000Who saw that one coming on their bingo card, on their woke, idiotic, left-wing bingo card?
00:27:13.000And they want to go after all those things because those are competition.
00:27:16.000Members of the press openly stumping for companies to remove their service abilities from people they disagree with.
00:27:24.000And now you have members of the press who are openly arguing in favor of book-burning because that's what this is.
00:27:27.000When you take books down and you make them unavailable anymore, that is the equivalent of book-burning.
00:27:31.000The purpose of a book-burning is to make the book unavailable anymore because it has been burned.
00:27:34.000Okay, so we are now engaged in digital book-burning.
00:27:38.000So Chris Chilesa, theâtheâdoltish columnist over at CNN, has a piece today titled, Why Republicans Think Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head Can Save Them.
00:27:49.000He says, Yes, that is, in fact, our argument.
00:27:51.000to cancel long cherished cultural touchstones.
00:27:53.000That is the message for Republicans, solely because it doesn't comport with their preferred vision for America.
00:27:57.000Yes, that is in fact our argument, that you're trying to cancel all the cultural touchstones because you have a utopian vision for what the world should be, and anything that stands in your way is an obstacle, so you burn it.
00:28:06.000Correct, that is a proper assessment of our argument.
00:28:10.000He says, if you look back at what has truly animated conservatives in the months since Trump lost the election, it's consistently been less about policy and far more about this idea that Democrats are trying to rid the country of our cultural icons.
00:28:21.000Well, I mean, yes, you literally spent the summer cheering on people burning down cities.
00:28:26.000Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project, cheered the fact that these city burnings were being called the 1619 riots.
00:28:32.000People are literally being iconoclastic, tearing down statues of George Washington, of Abraham Lincoln, of a guy who's an abolitionist, fighting for the North, at like the Wisconsin Statehouse.
00:28:44.000So yes, we are worried about you, vitiating and destroying American history.
00:28:48.000Yes, we are worried about all of that.
00:28:50.000Now on Tuesday morning, says Chris Chiliza at CNN, comes word that six Dr. Seuss books would no longer be published by the company that owns them, because they quote, portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
00:28:59.000What's remarkable about these attacks, by the right, on so-called cancel culture is that they don't even fit the description.
00:30:05.000Two of those examples, the thing didn't go away.
00:30:07.000In one of those examples, the thing went away.
00:30:10.000And you're still saying it's not cancel culture.
00:30:11.000You're still saying it wasn't canceled.
00:30:13.000Except that it was literally canceled and unavailable and selling for $1,500 on Amazon.
00:30:19.000So what is Chris Chalisa's conclusion?
00:30:21.000What is happening in all three of these most recent instances is that the culture is changing, changing to incorporate more views from more varied perspectives, not just the opinions of what white people, white people, the ultimate insult, white people, you have to pronounce the H before the W or it doesn't sound right, white people, and mostly men, men with their penises sometimes, Do you see this?
00:30:54.000And it's changing to incorporate more views.
00:30:55.000is that, let me just read these two sentences back to back, okay?
00:30:59.000That conservatives have argued, liberals are trying to cancel long cherished cultural touchstones solely because it doesn't comport with their preferred vision for America.
00:31:31.000So I'm arguing that you guys are trying to cancel cultural touchstones because you want the world to comport with your perverse vision of expressive individualism.
00:31:40.000And your counter-argument is, well, the world is changing, so you're wrong?
00:31:45.000No, it is that you have a vision of society.
00:31:47.000I disagree with your vision of society.
00:32:06.000Change and evolution in our culture and our society is both necessary and unstoppable.
00:32:09.000The idea we always have had everything right, or we can't always be growing closer to a more perfect union, is not only narrow-minded, but fundamentally anti-American.
00:32:16.000You see, not to remove the books is anti-American now.
00:32:21.000Chrystaliza is making the argument that if you don't stand in favor of digital book burning, this means you are anti-American, because change is American, you see.
00:32:30.000Do you see the ideological perversion that is happening in front of you?
00:32:33.000Should I be upset that there's an entire wing of American society that now argues that you can justify the basic violation of individual liberty and free speech and you can start burning books because change is good?
00:32:46.000You know who has said that same thing?
00:32:47.000Every fascist in human history has said that same thing.
00:32:49.000There has never been a fascist who said that he is doing something in order to do a bad thing.
00:32:55.000No one ever believes they're doing something in order to do a bad thing.
00:32:57.000This is why we have neutral principles like individual rights.
00:33:00.000But he is saying, well, you know, sometimes change overrides individual rights, and to oppose that would be fundamentally anti-American.
00:33:10.000And then you have that same sentiment from Philip Bump over at the Washington Post.
00:33:14.000His argument is that if you oppose the cancellation of If I Ran the Zoo, this is because you're a racist and you agree with racism.
00:33:21.000So his article is such a giveaway, Philip Bum.
00:33:23.000Again, this guy is the media columnist, the politics and media columnist over at the Washington Post.
00:33:28.000Again, members of the press are super on board with destroying everything they disagree with.
00:33:33.000They are the cheerleaders for ideological authoritarianism here.
00:33:39.000Here's what Philip Bump writes, quote, This is the keyword.
00:33:41.000If you just keep saying change, change, change, as in like Barack Obama, hope and change, if you just keep saying change over and over and over, that allows you to override individual rights.
00:33:48.000If you just keep saying change over and over and over, that means you can burn books.
00:33:51.000can serve as spackle for frustrations over a changing world.
00:34:39.000Right, so he read this as a boy, and then he wanted to read it to his kids, and at no point did it occur to him that the book was racist, but now he knows it's racist, and that means that his kid will presumably come out a vicious racist, or not, or maybe not.
00:34:53.000Maybe this is all perfectly harmless, because you can't name the... Harmless means not harmed, right?
00:35:12.000That if his kid reads a Dr. Seuss book, that his kid might come away a vicious racist?
00:35:17.000I sat down to read it with Thomas and rambled along in rhythm.
00:35:19.000Then I turned the page to the African island of Yurka, on which lived the tufted Mazurka.
00:35:25.000In the Seuss's drawing, the bird thing is perched on a pole being held by two caricatures of African men that are so obviously and immediately racist that it was almost breathtaking.
00:35:33.000It would be like watching an interview with Tom Hanks in which he started suddenly casually dropping racial slurs, a grotesque act accentuated by astonishments at the source.
00:35:42.000This was Dr. Seuss, the benchmark for authors of children's book.
00:35:44.000And here are the racist caricatures he drew.
00:35:51.000Again, racism doesn't require intent anymore, and it doesn't even require effect anymore.
00:36:30.000The idea is that if you defend, if I ran the zoo, this means that you are in favor of racism, of course.
00:36:37.000The answer is that people who perceive criticism of casual racism of the past as criticism of their own behavior or as a reminder of how the world around them is changing.
00:36:45.000It's that Seuss is a benchmark for a particular sort of American upbringing.
00:36:48.000Calling out Seuss' infrequent racist imagery is therefore an attack on that view of American identity.
00:36:53.000It's a short hop from here to rhetoric demanding we make America great again.
00:36:56.000So, you're a Trump voter if you don't want these books burned.
00:37:01.000And again, the basic idea here is that you are a racist unless you agree that Dr. Seuss was a racist and unless you are in favor of the book burning.
00:37:11.000Seuss's caricatures are hurtful anachronisms.
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00:39:47.000This week, it is teachers unions and unions in the public sector more generally.
00:39:51.000Tune in to get the simple facts and logic that Debunk left his claims on these and more issues to come.
00:39:57.000All the controversial issues, we're gonna deal with them week by week on Debunked.
00:40:00.000You're gonna have more material to argue with your friends with, have more material to edify yourself, or maybe to have your mind changed.
00:40:06.000Debunked is available exclusively to DailyWire members, so head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code DEBUNKED to get 25% off your new membership.
00:40:25.000All of this is perfectly predictable because authoritarians always are predictable.
00:40:29.000And if you read Fahrenheit 451 right now, there are a bunch of dystopian novels from the 20th century that people like to make comparisons to.
00:40:38.000Brave New World is obviously quite prophetic in how modern society treats pleasure, and hedonism, and sex, and how governments use such things to control people.
00:40:48.000But Fahrenheit 451 has some sections that are just absolutely prophetic.
00:40:52.000I'm gonna read you one of those sections from Fahrenheit 451, a book that I'm sure will be burned at some point in the future for being insufficiently woke.
00:41:17.000Okay, so Captain Beatty is explaining how it came to be that firefighters, instead of saving houses, ended up burning books and how society went along with it.
00:42:05.000It can have a vast minority of minorities, by the way.
00:42:08.000Most black people do not want if I ran the Zoo Band, and most Asian people don't want if I ran the Zoo Band.
00:42:12.000It's a small coterie of pseudo-intellectuals who earn their stripes on a college campus by saying extreme things and receiving attention for it, and get tenure for that, mainstreaming that through a bunch of allied liberal press members, and then pushing that into the halls of government.
00:42:41.000So they figure it's okay, so we'll take the short-term hit.
00:42:43.000They're not going after Cat in the Hat after all.
00:42:44.000But here's the thing, they will go after Cat in the Hat, as we know.
00:42:47.000And here's the, and what's, again, the thing that is most amazing about all of this, to me, is that when you protest that children's innocence is being ruined, that the left has made an overt attempt to change how you raise your children, to censor what you can show your children on the one hand and cram down what you must show your children on the other.
00:43:04.000Then the left says, and you notice this, if you say anything about it, then the left says, why are you even paying attention to children's books and children's literature?
00:43:10.000Why are you even paying attention to that stuff?
00:43:15.000There's a reason you are taking the time to go after Dr. Seuss.
00:43:18.000There's a reason you are taking the time to push I Am Jazz to small school children.
00:43:22.000There's a reason that you are taking the time to reorient how small children are taught in the United States and what sort of materials they are exposed to.
00:43:30.000It's because you know that that is how you reshape a society.
00:43:33.000And if parents don't stand up, then it will just continue.
00:43:37.000Again, I would at this point overtly call on Congress to pass legislation that ends trademark and copyright protection for people who deliberately bury material.
00:43:47.000If you have copyright and trademark and your entire goal is to never let literature see the light of day, you should not have copyright or trademark over that material.
00:43:53.000It should immediately be put into the public domain.
00:43:57.000If Dr. Seuss Enterprises doesn't want If I Ran the Zoo to be out there, it should be public domain.
00:44:00.000Because people have a right to see ideas.
00:44:02.000The whole point of trademarking copyright was to promote people's idea to see those ideas.
00:44:09.000Again, the goal of trademarking copyright was to prevent people from copying those ideas and putting them out there to remove the profit margin so that people wouldn't want to put out those ideas.
00:44:16.000But if you're deliberately suppressing material, then there ain't no profit margin to worry about.
00:44:47.000Unless it's coming from the right, then it's bad.
00:44:48.000But if it's coming from the left, it's good.
00:44:49.000And cultural change justifies any and all invasions of those individual rights because utopia requires that individuals put their own selfish interests behind the interests of the community.
00:45:00.000And the interests of the community lie in creating a space where expressive individualism is respected, but only from the left.
00:45:08.000Alrighty, meanwhile, the COVID controversies continue.
00:45:15.000Joe Biden continues to try to prolong this pandemic.
00:45:18.000I mean, there's no other way to put it.
00:45:19.000I don't mean like in practical terms, he's trying to prolong the inability of people to get vaccines, although I will say that he has been not wildly competent.
00:45:26.000And we keep talking about how we are tranching out vaccines, and it's good, right?
00:45:30.000He says that we'll have assured enough vaccine for everyone by the end of May.
00:45:33.000But you know, there's one area where the federal government really is in control, and that is in the creation of federal mass inoculation sites, right?
00:45:40.000By the end of February, he had a goal.
00:45:42.000His goal was to set up 100 new federally operated max vaccination sites.
00:45:57.000You might have wanted to hurry up by making sure that more than seven mass vaccination sites on the federal level were actually created, especially given the fact that states are churning out their inoculations at wildly differential rates.
00:46:10.000If you're in Florida, much easier to get a vaccine than if you're in New York.
00:46:12.000There are people who are flying to Florida just to get the vaccine.
00:46:16.000There's a reason that, at this point, I believe a majority of seniors in Florida have been vaccinated, if I'm not mistaken.
00:46:23.000Well, meanwhile, in New York, Andrew Cuomo is still the governor.
00:46:26.000Anyway, Joe Biden continues to promote the idea that this pandemic is just going to continue forever because the longer the pandemic continues, the more political priorities he gets to push.
00:46:34.000So here he is saying that, you know, he's asked when we're going to get back to normal.
00:46:38.000And he's like, you know, maybe next year.
00:47:14.000Or we could look at, you know, the actual statistics as to infection rates in the United States, and we can actually see, for example, what that chart looks like.
00:47:23.000And what you can see is that the daily new cases, according to Worldometers, as of March 2nd, the daily new cases in the United States, 56,890.
00:47:30.000Okay, at its height in January, it was 300,000 a day.
00:47:34.000So we are down to a small fraction of what the daily new cases were before.
00:47:39.000Okay, coronavirus deaths have tailed off following the infections, of course.
00:47:44.000Now, people on the left keep claiming, ridiculously enough, that this has to do with social distancing and masking.
00:49:40.000The vaccinations are extraordinarily effective.
00:49:43.000Again, 99% reduction in death, 95% reduction in serious case, 90% reduction by Israeli studies in transmissibility.
00:49:50.000And that's the protection provided to you.
00:49:53.000And we are talking about the vast bulk of deaths in the United States having occurred for people age 65 or over, and a huge number having occurred in nursing homes, which at this point, virtually everywhere across the country, have been inoculated in mass fashion.
00:50:05.000And yet there's an obvious interest in continuing to prolong the suffering here.
00:50:10.000Meanwhile, in Texas, Greg Abbott said, you know what?
00:50:28.000You can still do whatever you want to do.
00:50:31.000If you're a business owner and you're still concerned about COVID breaking out at your business because it's a small business and people are still in close proximity and you think not enough people are vaccinated, you can still put a restriction on the front of your store saying that everybody has to wear a mask.
00:50:43.000That is very common where I live in Florida.
00:52:10.000And you know how long we're gonna continue this further?
00:52:12.000The answer is not long, not nearly at all.
00:52:15.000Ted Fitzsimmons writing for NBC News, the governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their state's mask mandates and rolling back many of their COVID-19 health mandates just one day after the CDC warned against complacency in the face of emerging coronavirus variants.
00:52:30.000Right, this is the new bogeyman, is that there are going to be variants and those are going to take over.
00:52:34.000Okay, so let's say there is a variant.
00:52:35.000Are we still going to shut down the society like for another year?
00:52:57.000Shortly after Greg Abbott made his announcement, Governor Tate Reeves announced he would end Mississippi's statewide mask mandate effective Wednesday of this week.
00:53:03.000Reeves tweeted, our hospitalizations and case numbers have plummeted.
00:53:06.000The vaccine is being rapidly distributed.
00:53:08.000Now, remember, the whole purpose of the COVID social distancing and the masking and all of that, the whole purpose of the lockdowns was to prevent the overwhelming of the hospitals.
00:53:17.000Nowhere in America are the hospitals threatened with overwhelm.
00:53:21.000In fact, even the Texas regulations suggest that you can kick in local mask mandates if You get within 15% capacity in the ICUs, except that nobody's close to that.
00:53:33.000There are actually reports coming out yesterday that there were certain hospital administrators trying to game the system so as to artificially decrease the number of ICU beds so they could say they were within 15% of capacity and thus kick in the mask mandates, which is just unbelievable perversion.
00:53:47.000CDC Director Rochelle Walensky strongly cautioned against those rollbacks.
00:53:50.000She said, I'm really worried about the reports.
00:53:52.000More states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.
00:53:57.000We stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained.
00:54:19.000As some of us have been saying from literally the second month of the pandemic, as soon as it was clear what this virus was.
00:54:25.000So, you know, they're gonna continue to push this.
00:54:27.000And at this point, it is fully political.
00:54:29.000I mean, it used to be, at the beginning, I didn't think this was political.
00:54:32.000Now, it has become obviously fully political.
00:54:36.000There's an amazing piece from Miguel Cardona, who is the new education secretary, talking about reopening schools.
00:54:41.000Now, the CDC recommendations for school reopening suggest 96% of kids should not be in school right now, or at least they should be in a hybrid program.
00:55:14.000One thing we do know is that if you are in a small enclosed space for prolonged periods of time with people who are above the age of essentially 15, then there's a better shot that you get the thing.
00:55:24.000But with vaccinations and the fact that so many people have already had it, I mean like tens of millions of Americans have already had it.
00:55:29.000We are looking at herd immunity in the very near future, if we have not already hit it in certain places in the United States.
00:55:34.000Nonetheless, you have the education secretary putting out a piece explaining how he's going to reopen the schools.
00:55:39.000And let me just give you his steps to reopening the schools.
00:55:42.000He says, we must continue to reopen America's schools for in-person learning as quickly and safely as possible.
00:55:46.000Safely is code for, let me just sell out to the teachers unions.
00:57:11.000And meanwhile, I will just note that my theory about Andrew Cuomo, that the reason Andrew Cuomo is going down in flames right now on the sexual harassment stuff is because everybody secretly knows that Andrew Cuomo should be going down on his COVID policy stuff, that he was not the best governor in America.
00:57:23.000He was, in fact, the second worst governor in America after Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
00:57:27.000You know how I can make that statement clearly?
00:57:29.000Because all I have to do is look at the death per million rate.
00:57:34.000In fact, I can do this ranking pretty solidly, and I can say that, you know, if we just gauge elderly population versus death per million rate, that's a pretty good metric for which governors did well.
00:57:55.000But now they're going to oust Andrew Cuomo on the basis of all the sexual harassment stuff, which by the way is like nothing compared to killing old people and then lying about it to your own legislature.
00:58:04.000They're going to oust him for that because they don't want to come face to face with the reality.
00:58:08.000This is why you're starting to see the damn break against Andrew Cuomo.
00:58:11.000You'll note that New York lawmakers voted to remove Andrew Cuomo's emergency powers on the pandemic.
00:58:17.000According to the United Press, Senate Democratic Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie announced the legislature would pass legislation to immediately strip Cuomo of the powers set to expire April 30th. They said a year into the pandemic and as New Yorkers received the vaccine, the temporary emergency powers served their purpose, it's time for them to be repealed. Okay, notice they're repealing his emergency powers amidst the investigation into the COVID cover-up and the sexual harassment allegations.
00:58:45.000Now's a convenient time for them to remove Cuomo's power, but we all should recognize that what's really happening here is just everybody covering their ass for the fact that they never should have gone along with the Cuomo train in the first place.
00:58:56.000In fact, Trevor Noah basically admitted as much.
00:58:59.000Credit to Trevor Noah here for at least a little bit of self-reflection.
00:59:03.000All those people who praised Cuomo so highly last year, whew!
00:59:08.000Those people really don't look so smart now.
00:59:10.000Delete the tapes, delete the tapes, delete them all.
00:59:29.000Yeah, I think it's been really, it genuinely has been very inspiring and refreshing to see a leader like Cuomo Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:59:41.000Yeah, so just remember, the real reason that Cuomo's going down, the real one, is because he was a crappy governor who handled COVID horribly and lied about it and probably got old people killed.
00:59:49.000And the reason they're gonna use is this sexual harassment stuff.
00:59:52.000That's just a reason to knock him off and then pretend that it wasn't about the COVID.
00:59:56.000Because if it was about the COVID, then they were also wrong, right?
00:59:57.000They didn't sexually harass anybody, but they went right along with him on the COVID stuff.
01:00:01.000So they would have to, you know, avoid all complicity in that.
01:00:04.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
01:00:07.000In the meantime, go check out The Michael Nolans Show.
01:00:09.000On today's episode, Michael will be talking about Neera Tanden being spiked for her OMB nomination.
01:00:13.000That episode is available right this moment.
01:00:15.000Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.