The Ben Shapiro Show - The Institutional Collapse Of The West | Ep. 1642

00:00:00.000 Right-wing rioters storm several government buildings in Brazil, Joe Biden heads to the southern border, and Kevin McCarthy finally becomes Speaker of the House.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:07.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:16.000 The big story internationally is the storming of several government buildings, including the presidential palace, as well as Congress and the Supreme Court over in Brazil.

00:00:25.000 The media in the United States are bizarrely blaming Donald Trump for that.

00:00:28.000 I'm not sure exactly how Donald Trump has to do with any of that.

00:00:31.000 But the idea apparently is that when people storm government buildings all over the world, that must be January 6th.

00:00:36.000 Government buildings have not been stormed at any time in Brazil's history.

00:00:39.000 In any case, the story from the Washington Post is that thousands of radical backers of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, and that's the way that anyone who is of the right internationally is described, right?

00:00:52.000 Bolsonaro is far-right.

00:00:53.000 Victor Orban is far-right.

00:00:55.000 Benjamin Netanyahu is far-right.

00:00:56.000 There's never just a normal right-wing leader In a foreign country, everybody is far right. 1.00

00:01:00.000 In any case, Washington Post says thousands of radical backers of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro breached and vandalized Brazil's presidential office building, Congress, and Supreme Court on Sunday in scenes that hauntingly evoked the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S.

00:01:13.000 Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump.

00:01:15.000 Yes, indeed, it turns out that the only buildings that have ever been stormed in human history You know, aside from, like, the Bastille, the Reichstag, or, like, pretty much all the government buildings in unstable democracies.

00:01:27.000 You know, aside from that, the only precedent for this is obviously January 6th.

00:01:30.000 The bizarre, myopic incompetence of our media is really something to behold the attack.

00:01:36.000 The most significant threat to democracy in Latin America's largest nation since a 1964 military coup came a week after the inauguration of President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva to succeed Bolsonaro.

00:01:46.000 It suggested a spreading plague of far-right disruptors in Western democracies as hardliners, radicalized by incendiary political rhetoric, refused to accept election losses, cling to unfounded claims of fraud, and undermine the rule of law.

00:01:55.000 Again, this is part of a broader narrative that is now being driven by the media on one side and by election deniers on the other.

00:02:02.000 The democracy is in peril.

00:02:04.000 That the Brazilian democracy will not outlast people storming some government buildings and a couple hundred of them being arrested.

00:02:11.000 The idea all over the world is anytime somebody doesn't wing on the left, then the right winger must be some sort of proto-fascist.

00:02:18.000 And if supporters of that person go and do something illegal, it must be the fault of that person.

00:02:22.000 If, however, people on the left go and do illegal things, well, that's either an exception or something that ought to be cheered on.

00:02:28.000 And this is just true across the spectrum.

00:02:30.000 Bolsonaro occupied the National Congress building, many of them sitting or lying on the ground.

00:02:34.000 A flag placed in front of the building read, Intervention, a reference to calls for the military to depose Lula, who defeated Bolsonaro in October.

00:02:40.000 Most wrapped themselves in the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag.

00:02:42.000 Some shouted at police officers, this is just the beginning and may God bless you and prevent you from acting against us patriots.

00:02:47.000 Images broadcast by Globo TV showed smashed glass and protesters roaming the halls of the Pinalto Palace, the office of the president, in an echo of the behavior of U.S.

00:02:55.000 Videos shared on social media showed Bolsonaro supporters taking trophies.

00:02:55.000 insurrectionists.

00:02:58.000 Again, the fact that the Washington Post has to keep saying over and over and over that this is January 6th when this is a completely different country.

00:03:05.000 ...is really an astonishing act of complete journalistic failure.

00:03:09.000 Protesters set off fireworks from the roof of Congress.

00:03:11.000 Others waved the yellow and green jersey of the national soccer team, now a symbol of the far right, in the main chamber of the Supreme Federal Court.

00:03:17.000 Bolsonaroistas see the powerful court as an adversary.

00:03:20.000 Thousands more milled about a massive square similar to Washington's National Mall, waving Brazilian flags and chanting, God, Fatherland, Family, and Liberty, which is the slogan for Bolsonaro's party in the last election cycle.

00:03:31.000 Bolsonaro did condemn the invasions on Sunday evening, hours after they began.

00:03:34.000 He said public protests by law are part of democracy.

00:03:36.000 However, depredations and invasions of public buildings, as has occurred today, as well as those that were carried out by the left in 2013 and 2017, were outside the law.

00:03:43.000 And this is a point that, of course, the media are completely ignoring, and it happens to be true. 0.63

00:03:48.000 The notion that government buildings being attacked is unprecedented in Brazilian history is obviously not true.

00:03:55.000 In May of 2017, for example, the New York Times reported, quote, besieged by protest.

00:03:59.000 Brazil's president on Wednesday deployed federal troops to restore order in the capital, Brasilia, after demonstrators calling for his ouster clashed with security forces.

00:04:06.000 This is back in 2017.

00:04:09.000 So again, one of the city's iconic modernist buildings, the Agriculture Ministry, was set on fire during that unrest.

00:04:14.000 Other government buildings were vandalized during the mayhem.

00:04:16.000 Regional officials in Brasilia, this is in 2017, put the number of protesters around 35,000.

00:04:22.000 And the armed forces had to be called in in order to quell those protests and riots.

00:04:29.000 And professors of political science at various universities actually said that the move to call in the armed forces was a mistake.

00:04:35.000 They said that actually calling in the armed forces to break it up, that was a sign of weakness.

00:04:39.000 Now when you call in the armed forces to break up what was going on in Brazil, that of course is a sign of governmental strength.

00:04:44.000 This is why whenever the media compared this sort of stuff to January 6th, the world started turning when Donald Trump became president and stopped turning when Donald Trump left office.

00:04:51.000 By the way, you don't even have to go back to 2017, go back to 2013.

00:04:51.000 It's an absurdity.

00:04:56.000 Brazil had protests in 2013 that expanded to over a million people in massive anti-government demonstrations in which there were violent clashes that broke out in several cities as people demanded improved public services and an end to corruption facing tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets.

00:05:11.000 Riot police battled protesters in at least five cities.

00:05:13.000 An estimated 300,000 demonstrators swarmed into Rio de Janeiro's seaside central area.

00:05:20.000 So, this is the point that Bolsonaro is making.

00:05:23.000 Yeah, this is really bad and it's illegal and people should be arrested.

00:05:27.000 Also, this kind of bizarrely myopic and self-centered notion on the part of the Western press that when something bad happens in another country, it's because of something that happened in the United States.

00:05:36.000 It's really, really strange.

00:05:38.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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00:07:45.000 Now again, the footage is really stunning.

00:07:46.000 Whenever you see a government building overtaken by rioters, that is a stunning piece of footage.

00:07:51.000 You can see people on the roof of Brazil's presidential palace in Congress yesterday.

00:07:56.000 You can see the video.

00:07:58.000 People wandering around up top.

00:08:02.000 Thousands of people protesting outside.

00:08:06.000 Apparently the authorities did seize the buses that were used by the rioters.

00:08:10.000 Governors of other Brazilian states were dispatching security reinforcements to the capital.

00:08:16.000 And of course, all the various democracies around the world condemned this.

00:08:18.000 The United States put out a statement via National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan saying the United States condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brazil.

00:08:25.000 President Biden is following the situation closely.

00:08:27.000 Our support for Brazil's democratic institutions is unwavering.

00:08:30.000 Brazil's democracy will not be shaken by violence.

00:08:32.000 There's been a lot of instability and uncertainty in Latin and South America as of late, specifically because of what is called the Pink Wave, which has happened over the course of the last few years.

00:08:41.000 A bunch of countries that were historically not left-wing countries have had elections of left-wing figures.

00:08:46.000 This ranges from Chile to Peru to Colombia to now Brazil.

00:08:51.000 Bolsonaro said he repudiated any accusations attributed to me by the current head of the executive of Brazil.

00:08:56.000 Lula, the new president, immediately blamed Bolsonaro for all of this.

00:09:01.000 Now, Bolsonaro did accept the election results.

00:09:03.000 And Bolsonaro did not say that he had won the election in the same way that, for example, Donald Trump, between November 6th and January 6th, said that he had won the election.

00:09:13.000 Lula came out and just said that he was genocidal, Bolsonaro.

00:09:16.000 He said this genocidal person provoked this.

00:09:18.000 He encouraged the invasion of the three branches of government.

00:09:22.000 It's an amazing attempt to link what happened on January 6th to what happened here and also to blame Bolsonaro for what happened in Brasilia without, again, the actual evidence demonstrating that he helped organize all of this.

00:09:38.000 One of the questions here is whether those connections are actually going to be made.

00:09:43.000 Apparently there were protest camps outside military headquarters in Brasilia and across the country on Friday.

00:09:47.000 There were no significant operations that were launched that day.

00:09:49.000 There was almost no indication that authorities were prepared for the insurrection on Sunday.

00:09:53.000 There was no evidence of increased security presence at the buildings targeted.

00:09:58.000 In fact, the government right now is talking about arresting the security chief under Bolsonaro, who's also the head of the regional governor of Brasilia.

00:10:08.000 So things could get very repressive very quickly.

00:10:11.000 It'll be fascinating to see how the press covers that.

00:10:12.000 If Louis decides that he's going to crack down on civil liberties in Brazil, is that going to be considered some sort of real violation of civil rights or is it just going to be preservation of democracy?

00:10:21.000 This is the thing you fear.

00:10:22.000 You fear Far-right people storming buildings and then you fear governments repressing the actual civil rights of citizens in response to all of that.

00:10:30.000 And that is how democracies cave in and collapse in on themselves.

00:10:34.000 Again, the American press is dedicated to the idea that Bolsonaro, who by the way still holds, I believe, the largest party in the Brazilian legislature, his followers still constitute the largest contingent in the Brazilian legislature. 0.90

00:10:43.000 This is why I suggested after he lost the last election cycle that the idea that he was going to go away permanently, I thought was foolish.

00:10:48.000 He's probably going to be back.

00:10:51.000 But the press is attempting to sort of throw dirt on his political grave by suggesting that he's responsible for all of this.

00:10:56.000 This is why the Washington Post has an entire piece today titled, For more than four years, the most fundamental of questions has loomed over Brazil.

00:11:06.000 But its young democracy survived the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.

00:11:09.000 They never ask these questions when the left is in charge.

00:11:11.000 And when, for example, Lula, who is the current president, was actually arrested and was in jail, and then they changed the law to allow him to run again.

00:11:18.000 Or António Rousseff, who is also of a left-wing party and had to be impeached because of her corruption.

00:11:24.000 She left.

00:11:25.000 Her party continued on.

00:11:27.000 Brazil has been having some serious democratic troubles for Really?

00:11:32.000 It's been a wild ride for Brazil since the military dictatorship ended in 1985 or so.

00:11:32.000 Decades?

00:11:37.000 So this kind of notion that this is a new found problem because of the Arab Bolsonaro is a wild overstatement.

00:11:42.000 I mean, you have to be completely ignorant of Brazilian history to suggest that unrest in Brazil is something brand new because of Bolsonaro.

00:11:49.000 But according to the Washington Post columnist, Latin America's largest country embarked on what amounted to a test of its democratic strength in 2018, when it elected the former army captain who openly lamented the collapse of the country's military dictatorship, once threatened to reinstall its rule on the first day of his presidency, and sought at every turn to sow doubt in elections.

00:12:04.000 During his time in office, he did little to soften his bellicosity.

00:12:07.000 He warned of a government rupture, like the military coup of 1964, if he were to lose his re-election bid, he said.

00:12:13.000 It could only be through fraud.

00:12:14.000 Brazil would have worse problems than the United States did on January 6th.

00:12:18.000 His son Eduardo, a federal congressperson, once warned, there will arrive a moment when the situation will be the same as it was in the 1960s.

00:12:26.000 So this has prompted all of the usual suspects in Brazil on the left wing to blame the right for this sort of unrest.

00:12:33.000 Again, these are the same exact people who back in 2017, when there was mass unrest, including the storming of government buildings, including the agriculture ministry, were saying, you definitely don't call in the military because it's going to undermine the Legitimacy of the government.

00:12:44.000 Because those are left-wing protesters.

00:12:46.000 When it is right-wing rioters, then, of course, we got to quash this thing too sweet.

00:12:50.000 And we have to make sure that Bolsonaro is thrown into change.

00:12:53.000 There is actually a member of American Congress over the weekend who's calling for Bolsonaro to be extradited to Brazil.

00:13:00.000 Now, there haven't even been any criminal charges that have been filed against Bolsonaro in Brazil.

00:13:04.000 So how could he be extradited?

00:13:05.000 For what?

00:13:06.000 That didn't stop Democratic Congressman Representative Joaquin Castro from Texas to call for the extradition of Bolsonaro.

00:13:13.000 Well, Bolsonaro was an authoritarian leader, and I stand with the democratically elected leadership in Brazil.

00:13:21.000 And he basically used the Trump playbook to inspire domestic terrorists to try to take over the government.

00:13:28.000 And you're right, it looks a lot like January 6th in the United States.

00:13:31.000 And right now, Bolsonaro is in Florida, and he's actually very close to Donald Trump.

00:13:36.000 He should be extradited to Brazil.

00:13:38.000 In fact, it was reported that he was under investigation for corruption and fled Brazil to the United States.

00:13:47.000 Okay, so again, the insanity of suggesting that we have to extradite a person who has not yet even been indicted for a crime in Brazil is pretty incredible.

00:13:56.000 Meanwhile, CNN, doing the usual routine from the reporters, the reporters in the United States, again, being completely ignorant about most of the things that they report on, they simply suggest that this is about January 6th, which again, is an amazing stretch.

00:14:08.000 So what do we know about the situation?

00:14:10.000 Yeah, Fred, it's looking more and more like what happened here in the United States on January 6, two years ago.

00:14:16.000 And what happened was that earlier, a group of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro managed to breach the barriers established by authorities at the Congressional Building in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.

00:14:31.000 Again, it's just like January 6.

00:14:33.000 This is a big takeaway.

00:14:34.000 This is why whenever you read the newspaper, it's an amazing thing.

00:14:36.000 When you read the newspaper and they're writing about something that you know about, And you read an article written by one of these reporters, you say, wait, they don't know what they're talking about.

00:14:43.000 Then you move three pages later in the newspaper and they're talking about another topic you don't know about.

00:14:46.000 And they assume they know what they're talking about.

00:14:47.000 Nope.

00:14:48.000 They generally are operating through whatever is the political lens through which they're operating.

00:14:52.000 Well, this does raise some broader questions about what has been termed the crisis of democracy in westernized countries.

00:14:59.000 And it really is a problem, because as we are seeing, the stakes of politics seem so high, the passions are so high right now.

00:15:06.000 And what we are seeing in Brazil is the same thing in some ways that we have seen in a wide variety of countries, where people are more and more agitated over politics, whether you're talking about widespread rioting in France, or whether you're talking about January 6th, where you're talking about the BLM riots.

00:15:19.000 There's a generalized feeling in a lot of westernized countries right now that civil society is in a state of complete breakdown.

00:15:26.000 And this is a question I've been thinking about for a long time is how do you actually establish legitimacy of a government to the point where people actually accept elections?

00:15:34.000 How do you establish the legitimacy of a government to the point where people don't care so much about who wins and loses?

00:15:38.000 I mean, they care, obviously, but not to the point where they feel like every election loss is the end of society as a whole.

00:15:45.000 And the answer is society has to be more than government.

00:15:47.000 If society is only government, then that means that anytime you lose control of the government, you've lost control of all of society itself.

00:15:54.000 This is why it was so dangerous in 2012 during the Democratic National Convention, when Barack Obama's in Charlotte, North Carolina.

00:16:01.000 There is a big slogan that was emblazoned on the giant sort of scoreboard.

00:16:09.000 It was at a basketball stadium.

00:16:10.000 And it said democracy is the only thing we all share, or government is the only thing we all share, rather.

00:16:15.000 It says government is the only thing we all share.

00:16:17.000 And we don't share much of anything, because what exactly do we share?

00:16:20.000 What, the form of government?

00:16:22.000 Again, government is supposed to be a repository of certain trust.

00:16:25.000 If that trust dissolves, then we're just battling each other over control of the government gun.

00:16:29.000 Because the government is a giant compulsion machine in the end.

00:16:32.000 And so if the government makes you a lot of promises, and the only way it can guarantee those promises is by pointing a gun at you, and you don't like the promises it's making, things are going to get really heated really, really quickly.

00:16:42.000 And this is really the great failure of the West in terms of what's happened since the end of the Cold War.

00:16:48.000 During the Cold War, the West, because it was put up against communist Russia, because it posited itself in opposition to a centrally planned state and a centrally planned economy, The West banked on the idea that civil society and community had to thrive.

00:17:04.000 This is exactly what, it was this point that separated us from the USSR. 0.51

00:17:08.000 The USSR completely did away with civil society and community and replaced them with a giant overarching centralized government that made a bunch of promises and then guaranteed the fulfillments of those promises at point of gun.

00:17:17.000 And if the promises never materialized, well, the gun was still there anyway to compel you to pretend that the promises had materialized.

00:17:24.000 So the West said, that's a terrible system.

00:17:26.000 And what makes that a terrible system is in fact the compulsion.

00:17:28.000 What we have in the West is a thriving civil society.

00:17:31.000 We have all those little platoons of family.

00:17:33.000 We have thriving churches and social institutions and all this exists outside of government.

00:17:37.000 We have localism where people can make decisions for their own communities.

00:17:40.000 But we don't have this giant centrally planned monster with its tentacles in all of the areas of our lives.

00:17:46.000 And then the Soviet Union fell.

00:17:48.000 And instead of the West saying, what allowed us to win was our recognition that government can't be the be all end all.

00:17:54.000 The West decided, you know what we can really do?

00:17:56.000 Now we have the freedom to expand government.

00:17:58.000 Now we have the, we have the resources and the power to pay for both guns and butter.

00:18:02.000 And this is the argument that LBJ made in the 1960s.

00:18:04.000 He said, why, why can't we pay for both guns and butter?

00:18:06.000 And as it turns out, we could not, right?

00:18:07.000 Which is why we had to bankrupt in 1970s leading to the Reagan revolution of the eighties.

00:18:12.000 The West did the same thing in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union.

00:18:14.000 The West got greedy.

00:18:15.000 The West said, okay, we don't have to pay for military spending anymore.

00:18:18.000 We don't have to worry about the future of the planet.

00:18:20.000 We don't have to worry about the directionality of history.

00:18:23.000 Instead, what we should do is we should just maximize the promises that we make via government.

00:18:29.000 And gradually and slowly, that became a sort of bipartisan consensus.

00:18:33.000 Not just for members of government, but for enormous numbers of people on the ground.

00:18:37.000 They started to believe that government could be the guarantor of all that they needed.

00:18:42.000 And this is why we've seen repeated shocks to the economy, because as it turns out, when the government gets too involved, when the government skews all the incentive structures, you get massive bubbles and they burst.

00:18:51.000 Whether it is the dot-com bubble in 2000, whether it's the real estate bubble in 2007, 2008, or whether it is the recession that we're about to see coming in 2023 globally.

00:19:00.000 And centralized government control undermines legitimacy.

00:19:03.000 This is the thing that I think people need to understand because the tendency is when you start to see dissolution that people in government and people who believe in government tend to think grip harder.

00:19:13.000 Grip harder.

00:19:14.000 Exert more control.

00:19:15.000 Create ersatz social solidarity through government compulsion.

00:19:20.000 And what you end up doing is driving more opposition and more rage and more anger.

00:19:24.000 The answer to crisis of legitimacy in government is not government.

00:19:27.000 It's everything else.

00:19:28.000 It's rebuilding that community.

00:19:30.000 It's rebuilding that civil society.

00:19:32.000 And this is precisely the problem that you're seeing in Brazil right now.

00:19:36.000 Brazil has a lot of regional identities.

00:19:38.000 Brazil is an extraordinarily diverse place.

00:19:40.000 Over the course of the last 20 years or so, there's been a promise that Brazil really bragged about and talked a lot about.

00:19:46.000 And that was the idea of this sort of rainbow of people.

00:19:49.000 Brazil was famously tolerant because it was extraordinarily racially diverse.

00:19:52.000 You had indigenous people, and you had people who were Afro-Latino, and you had Latinos, and you had a huge variety of people of different ethnicities, and they all lived together.

00:20:02.000 And the idea was that there weren't going to be these tribal divisions.

00:20:06.000 And then multiculturalism sort of became the order of the day, and government attempted to start propping up particular cultures at the expense of other cultures.

00:20:13.000 It's been widely remarked upon in the academic press.

00:20:16.000 And Brazilian identity, which had been sort of forging toward a common point, started to sort of break apart again, and regionalism began to rise again.

00:20:23.000 And when you have very strong regional identity and central identity becomes weaker, and not only that, the central government starts to exert more and more power through left-wing figures like Lula da Silva, through left-wing figures like Dilma Rousseff.

00:20:38.000 What you end up with is more and more anger.

00:20:41.000 And again, this is not just a Brazilian problem.

00:20:43.000 It's a problem everywhere.

00:20:44.000 If you do not have a thriving community, and community has to be based in the end on family.

00:20:50.000 If you don't have thriving families, and that doesn't build into thriving local communities, and that doesn't build into thriving civil society at the local level, and then at the city level, and then at the state level, and then finally at the top level, what you end up with is an inverted pyramid.

00:21:05.000 Where the social solidarity required to actually support a giant governmental structure is too thin.

00:21:10.000 Everything starts to wobble.

00:21:11.000 And that's exactly what you are seeing right now.

00:21:15.000 Now, I've been thinking about this an awful lot lately in relation to the United States, obviously in relation to other countries as well.

00:21:21.000 Countries that seem to be thriving are the ones that actually have a certain level of social solidarity.

00:21:26.000 They're the countries that actually do have a vision of what they are as a country.

00:21:30.000 They do have something that binds them, whether it is national identity or religious identity, something that binds them beyond local community and beyond government.

00:21:38.000 And if they lack that, they start to fall apart.

00:21:41.000 One of the little remarked upon aspects of Brazil's changing culture, for example, is its lack of religiosity.

00:21:47.000 Brazil has been losing religious adherence for a very, very long time.

00:21:52.000 Brazil, over the course of the last 20 years, went from about 90% Catholic to about 65% Catholic.

00:21:57.000 It is a fast secularizing society, and in coordination with that, what you've seen is a dramatic drop in the Brazilian birth rate.

00:22:03.000 Birth rates are a really good way of telling when a culture has lost its way.

00:22:06.000 When a culture begins to lose its way to the point where it drops below replacement birth rates, you start to see a culture that is in decline.

00:22:13.000 Brazil has had an extraordinarily fast decline in its birth rate.

00:22:17.000 In 1960, for example, Brazil had six kids per family.

00:22:23.000 Today, Brazil is at 1.65 kids per family.

00:22:26.000 That is a huge decline.

00:22:29.000 As recently as 2000, Brazil was above replacement rates.

00:22:32.000 And it's been in steep decline.

00:22:33.000 The same thing is held true in a wide variety of countries in Latin and South America.

00:22:37.000 He's in.

00:22:38.000 As the family falls apart, as religious adherence falls apart, as all those structures fall apart, and as government dependence grows, what you start to see is less solidarity.

00:22:46.000 We'll get to more on all of this in just a second.

00:22:48.000 First, let's talk about your sleep quality.

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00:24:47.000 Okay, so, I've created a bit of a formula here, and it's applicable to American government, it's applicable to government in Brazil, it's applicable pretty much everywhere.

00:24:55.000 Because the truth is, that legitimacy of any institution, which is what we're talking about here, the legitimacy of Brazil's governmental institutions, or the United States' governmental institutions, rests on simple fundamental premises.

00:25:06.000 And that is, A social fabric.

00:25:08.000 If there's no social fabric, you can't have a solid government.

00:25:11.000 It really is that simple.

00:25:13.000 So here's the formula for legitimacy.

00:25:15.000 And now it's a bunch of symbols here.

00:25:16.000 I'm going to explain them.

00:25:18.000 And it is a formula that I've been working through myself.

00:25:20.000 I'm not getting this from anywhere else.

00:25:21.000 So take it with whatever grain of salt you wish to apply.

00:25:25.000 Legitimacy.

00:25:25.000 L equals.

00:25:27.000 And then here is the equation.

00:25:28.000 It has a numerator and a denominator for folks who are listening to this.

00:25:31.000 The numerator essentially represents consent, and the denominator represents levels of control.

00:25:37.000 The more consent you have to any authority, the more legitimate it is, and the more control is exercised, the less legitimacy you have if you don't have enough consent.

00:25:46.000 So when control is really high and you don't have a lot of consent, when the denominator in this equation is really high and you don't have a lot of consent, the numerator is very, very low, you end up with fractional legitimacy, loss of legitimacy.

00:25:58.000 That's what you're seeing in large swaths of the West right now.

00:26:00.000 However, when you have high levels of consent, when people live in social solidarity with one another, and when the government is good at its job, people are willing to give up a certain level of control to the government.

00:26:12.000 The problem is that governments have a real tendency, when the numerator declines, when social solidarity declines, when the efficacy of the government declines, they have a tendency to try to ramp up the levels of control In order to jack up the adherence to the government, and it ends up becoming a spiral that fails, what you really have to do is loosen your grip and allow everything to be rebuilt at the local level.

00:26:36.000 So here is the equation.

00:26:37.000 L equals, and the numerator is S plus, and then it's R times A plus I. Okay, so S in this particular equation represents social solidarity.

00:26:47.000 So if you have an area that has a lot of social solidarity, that's going to help the government because obviously social solidarity means you're all going to vote in ways that you're not going to offend your neighbor because you like your neighbor and you're not there to use the government to crack down on your neighbor.

00:27:00.000 Plus, responsiveness of the authority to input, that's R, times the avoidability of the authority.

00:27:05.000 So if you know that the government is both responsive to you and also if You're unable to get a response from the government.

00:27:12.000 You're able to avoid the government where I can move out of the area.

00:27:14.000 And this also contributes to the legitimacy of the government.

00:27:18.000 I don't have to.

00:27:18.000 If I'm in California and I don't like California, I can leave.

00:27:21.000 That means that the government has a high level of legitimacy.

00:27:23.000 One of the reasons being, even though I disagree with the way that California is governed, I can always take off, which means the people who are left there are consenting to being there.

00:27:32.000 Plus I, which is the ability of any authority to advance the interests of its population.

00:27:37.000 So in other words, if government has the following aspects, it is going to have a lot of legitimacy at any level.

00:27:43.000 This, by the way, doesn't just apply to governments.

00:27:44.000 It actually applies to families as well.

00:27:46.000 If there's a lot of social solidarity within the area governed by the government, if that government is responsive to input from people, if you can avoid the government, if the government Doesn't rule the way you want to, you can leave.

00:27:59.000 And if the government is very effective at implementing the needs and wants of its citizens, it's going to have a high level of consent.

00:28:04.000 Okay, the denominator.

00:28:06.000 These are the things the government can do to undermine its own authority, essentially.

00:28:09.000 V is violation of fundamental or pragmatic rights by the authority or destruction of rules and rules by the authority.

00:28:16.000 So the government decides it's going to wipe away civil society.

00:28:19.000 It's going to wipe away your rights.

00:28:21.000 It is now jacked up the levels of control it is using against you.

00:28:25.000 It undermines the legitimacy of the government.

00:28:28.000 R, right?

00:28:28.000 This is R prime.

00:28:30.000 It's the regulatory strictness of the authority.

00:28:31.000 So the authority passes very, very strong regulations to move against you.

00:28:36.000 This undermines the legitimacy of the government, unless you've consented at a very high level to that government.

00:28:42.000 And finally, the aggressiveness of the enforcement by the authority.

00:28:45.000 So the factors that militate in favor of the delegitimacy of the government are if the government violates your rights, if it's very, very strict in its regulations, and if it aggressively enforces those restrictions.

00:28:55.000 And at the same time, if the numerator is really low, meaning your consent to that government is really, really low.

00:29:00.000 This is what we are increasingly seeing at the top level of Western societies right now.

00:29:04.000 Very low levels of social solidarity within the polity governed by the authority.

00:29:09.000 Multiculturalism rips apart social solidarity. 1.00

00:29:11.000 Decline of religion, which is a great combined factor in preventing tribalism, is falling away.

00:29:17.000 As social fabric fades, that numerator starts to decline.

00:29:20.000 It declines still further when the authorities are less responsive to input.

00:29:23.000 This is one of the facets of bureaucratic government.

00:29:26.000 When you have in the United States or in Brazil or anywhere else, a regulatory state that basically has no input from the public and you feel completely disassociated from that government, You have no input.

00:29:36.000 That's a real problem.

00:29:37.000 Avoidability.

00:29:38.000 When you're talking at the federal level, avoidability basically disappears, unlike California, where if I don't like California, I can just move to Florida.

00:29:44.000 It's a lot harder to leave the United States.

00:29:46.000 So if the federal government decides that it is going to undermine my rights, it's going to.

00:29:50.000 Increase regulation and then aggressively enforce that regulation?

00:29:53.000 It means it's very difficult for me to avoid.

00:29:55.000 It's very difficult for me to leave.

00:29:57.000 And this prompts, presumably, bad action against the government.

00:30:01.000 And finally, is the government actually good at doing the things the population wants it to do?

00:30:05.000 And the answer here is more and more no.

00:30:08.000 Now, the great irony of this is that in Western societies, as this numerator decreases and as the denominator increases, We have not gotten a set of rulers who have decided, hey, we better ease back on the amount of control we're trying to exert over our citizens because we don't have their consent.

00:30:27.000 We're not providing them the things that they want us to provide.

00:30:30.000 We don't have social solidarity within the polity.

00:30:31.000 We haven't spent any time rebuilding that social solidarity.

00:30:33.000 We're not responsive to input from the outside.

00:30:36.000 Now what the founders understood, what the founding fathers of the United States understood, is that the best way to preserve the numerator was to lower the denominator.

00:30:44.000 And what you want to do here is lower the amount of control that is available, right?

00:30:48.000 You don't want heavy regulation.

00:30:49.000 You don't want aggressive enforcement.

00:30:51.000 You don't want regulatory strictness.

00:30:52.000 You don't want violation of fundamental rights.

00:30:55.000 And so we'll create checks and balances in order to prevent all this.

00:30:57.000 But because people, citizens, were made promises by governmental actors, by politicians, because they were told By both a neoliberal consensus and by people who believe that if they centralized power in their own hands and then used a sort of state-sponsored mercantilism, that they would be able to promise the world.

00:31:15.000 Because of this, people got used to the idea the government was going to provide everything.

00:31:18.000 And so they're very, very disappointed.

00:31:20.000 And that disappointment leads them to believe that if they don't control the government, because the government, after all, has very high levels of control and not a lot of consent, which means if I don't control it, it's going to control me.

00:31:30.000 And this is what we are seeing across Western societies right now.

00:31:33.000 And it's really, really dangerous.

00:31:35.000 It's one of the reasons why there's a disconnect between what people call the elites and everybody else.

00:31:40.000 It's why the common citizens of countries ranging the West right now feel so disconnected from the people at the top.

00:31:46.000 The people at the top are seeking to increase the amount of control they leverage down on the population.

00:31:51.000 And the people at the bottom are saying, we don't have the social solidarity to do this.

00:31:54.000 We can't avoid your authority and you're not serving our interests.

00:31:56.000 And you don't listen to us.

00:31:59.000 And so, this disconnect means that the population is seeking to increase the numerator.

00:32:04.000 And meanwhile, the government is undermining the numerator by increasing the denominator.

00:32:08.000 I know this sounds complicated.

00:32:09.000 It really is not.

00:32:10.000 If you were to sum this up, what the people want is to consent to those who rule them, and they want to consent to the rules by which they live.

00:32:17.000 And what the government wants, more and more often, is to control.

00:32:20.000 Because they feel like they are losing control.

00:32:22.000 And they are losing control because they made promises they can't fulfill.

00:32:24.000 And this is true of nearly every institution in Western life right now.

00:32:29.000 They have made promises they cannot fulfill, and instead of saying, perhaps we should make more humble promises, perhaps we should make fewer promises, perhaps we should stick to the job that we are supposed to do.

00:32:38.000 Instead, they say, we will increase the number of promises we make, and then we will use more and more compulsion in order to ensure a rebuilding of a false social solidarity in which government is the only thing that we share.

00:32:49.000 And this is why you're ending up with tremendous levels of social instability and governmental instability across the Western world right now.

00:32:56.000 Democracy is going to respond this way.

00:32:58.000 This is what's going to happen.

00:33:01.000 And it's also why people feel that the government that does not serve their interests, they feel dissatisfied with that.

00:33:08.000 Again, none of this is an excuse for actual violent action in Brazil, which has a democracy.

00:33:11.000 You do have the responsive ability to actually go and vote and to change your government in Brazil.

00:33:15.000 You've seen it just a few years ago.

00:33:17.000 Bolsonaro became the head of Brazil.

00:33:18.000 In the United States, there's no excuse for going and rioting on January 6th and taking over Capitol buildings for no apparent reason.

00:33:25.000 It's not going to accomplish anything.

00:33:27.000 And beyond that, you can actually win elections.

00:33:29.000 The Republicans just took back the House of Representatives, for example.

00:33:32.000 Donald Trump may still be president again.

00:33:34.000 What this is to say is that we are going to get into hotter and hotter and more volatile water as time goes on.

00:33:40.000 If people in politics don't recognize a basic truth, the numerator matters more than the denominator.

00:33:45.000 That consent matters an awful lot more than control.

00:33:47.000 Social solidarity matters a lot more than control.

00:33:51.000 And this is why so many people are deeply upset about the fact that it seems as though, for example, in American government, there are a lot of people who are invested in the idea that we can continue to undermine the numerator in favor of the denominator.

00:34:04.000 So this is particularly true on the issue of immigration.

00:34:05.000 This continues to be a hot issue in the United States.

00:34:08.000 Joe Biden visited the southern border over the weekend.

00:34:12.000 And again, if you take a look at that equation, what you're doing when you vastly increase the amount of illegal immigration into the country is you're undermining social solidarity.

00:34:21.000 You're getting rid of perceived responsiveness of the authority to input because again, those people are not citizens, which means they have no input and we are citizens and they're not listening to us.

00:34:30.000 We can't avoid it because it's literally happening in the country in which we live and people are entering without our permission.

00:34:36.000 And it obviously is not in the interest of the American population.

00:34:38.000 It's in the interest of a foreign population.

00:34:40.000 This is why people are so upset about what's happening at the southern border.

00:34:42.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

00:34:44.000 Well, folks, if there's one thing to be learned from the release of the Twitter files, it's that mainstream media cannot be trusted.

00:34:48.000 You know it.

00:34:49.000 We know it.

00:34:49.000 Millions more people are waking up to it.

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00:35:15.000 So if we're talking about the elites that are undermining trust in the government, there is no question that undermining America's border security is a big issue here because this one is easy.

00:35:26.000 You know what's in the interest of American citizens?

00:35:28.000 To know who's coming through our border.

00:35:29.000 You know what's not in the interest of American citizens?

00:35:30.000 An open border.

00:35:31.000 This is a real simple one.

00:35:33.000 And yet Joe Biden is still out there futzing around on the border.

00:35:36.000 He's trying to pretend a centrist policy now after letting 5 million people through the border in his first couple of years as president, the single greatest migrant wave illegally in the history of the United States.

00:35:46.000 Well now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Joe Biden made his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office, visiting a port of entry and a center for migrants as his immigration policy faces criticism from both parties.

00:35:55.000 Biden arrived Sunday afternoon in El Paso, Texas, which in December saw a surge of mostly Nicaraguan migrants.

00:36:00.000 He stopped there on his way to Mexico City, where he will meet Monday and Tuesday with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the North American Leaders Summit.

00:36:09.000 By the way, why are people leaving Nicaragua?

00:36:11.000 Specifically, for many of the reasons we've been talking about.

00:36:13.000 Nicaragua is a left-wing dictatorship.

00:36:14.000 His first stop was at the bridge of the Americas Port of Entry, where the president toured the facility with border officials.

00:36:19.000 He then stopped along the border fence that separates El Paso from Juarez.

00:36:22.000 He also visited the El Paso County Migrant Services Support Center.

00:36:26.000 He said, we're going to get a lot of resources to these migrants.

00:36:29.000 Again, this, of course, comes amid an attempt to spin toward the center for Joe Biden in an incoherent fashion.

00:36:34.000 He announced an aggressive effort to bring down illegal crossings at the border by basically saying that he was going to increase the number of legal crossings at the border.

00:36:40.000 Also, you could apply online.

00:36:42.000 But if you showed up at the border and you were from these specific countries that were largely affected by humanitarian concerns, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, well, then he was going to turn you away if you were beyond those numbers.

00:36:54.000 Biden was greeted at the airport by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

00:36:57.000 Republicans have been calling on Biden to travel to the region for two years, saying he wasn't focused enough on the issues.

00:37:02.000 And Abbott told reporters that Biden was two years and $20 billion too late.

00:37:06.000 And then he gave the president a letter asking him to take a series of enforcement steps, including detaining people who entered the country illegally and resuming construction of a border wall.

00:37:13.000 Biden said he had not read the letter, nor will he, I am sure.

00:37:17.000 So just amazing stuff here from the Biden administration.

00:37:19.000 You wonder, these are the issues that get people mad.

00:37:22.000 And the reason they get people mad is again, because of the belief that these elites in government institutions do not care about the interests of their own people.

00:37:31.000 This, by the way, is why presumably Joe Biden was attempting to essentially lie by proxy by having El Paso cleaned up before he arrived.

00:37:39.000 This is one of these schticks that you see from presidential candidates and presidents is that if the area is really bad and you know the cameras are coming, you just have it cleaned up overnight beforehand.

00:37:47.000 It's why the Biden administration has historically been so angry.

00:37:50.000 Reporters like Bill Malugan for actually reporting what's going on at the border.

00:37:53.000 According to the UK Daily Mail, when Biden made his first visit to the border with Mexico on Sunday, he'll hear from aid workers helping to manage the immigration crisis and local officials desperate for more support.

00:38:02.000 What he won't see are the miserable makeshift camps dotted around El Paso that triggered headlines last month about migrants taking over the streets. 1.00

00:38:08.000 On Tuesday and Wednesday, law enforcement teams moved through the downtown area, picking up migrants who had entered the country illegally.

00:38:14.000 As a result, Biden would get a view of the border, but not of the crisis.

00:38:17.000 Border agents wanted him to see the scale of the chaos.

00:38:19.000 It's like complete tent cities.

00:38:19.000 And it is.

00:38:20.000 It's a dog and pony show.

00:38:21.000 Instead of volunteer helping dozens of migrants seeking shelter at the Sacred Heart Church, they've cleaned it all up for him. 1.00

00:38:27.000 Officials say they're just enforcing the rules and any timing is a coincidence, but everybody knows that that is a bunch of crap. 0.97

00:38:32.000 Everybody understands that that is not true. 0.97

00:38:36.000 The reality is that unfortunately we have an elite set in the U.S.

00:38:40.000 government that is fundamentally unconcerned with illegal immigration because they believe that all of those people are going to change the constituency of the voting base if they eventually legalize everybody.

00:38:50.000 That is the only rational reason why you would import a bunch of very low education labor into the United States who are not culturally assimilated to the philosophy of the United States without vetting them.

00:39:03.000 It makes no sense on any pragmatic level.

00:39:06.000 Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be angry anytime he's asked about this.

00:39:10.000 Apparently, Biden officials were very angry over the weekend.

00:39:12.000 A New York Times reporter had the temerity to point out that treatment of migrants coming into the country is actually worse under Biden than it is under Trump, and they got very mad about this.

00:39:19.000 You're never allowed to say the T-word, Trump, without saying that Trump was Hitler.

00:39:23.000 And so when you say worse than Trump, what you really mean is worse than Hitler, according to the Biden administration.

00:39:27.000 What do you all, what does the administration say to the overwhelming consensus from people who advocate on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees and migrants that what the president did yesterday was Well obviously we take a different view.

00:39:46.000 I'll say this.

00:39:47.000 On his first day in office, he put before Congress an immigration reform bill that has yet to be acted on.

00:39:54.000 We are dealing with immigration laws and processes that are decades old, Michael.

00:40:00.000 Decades old.

00:40:01.000 So the answer to the critics is, first of all, we obviously take a different view in terms of the president's priorities.

00:40:07.000 And if you take a look at the package, you'll see that it is very humane in its structure.

00:40:13.000 But we've got to have the help from members of Congress.

00:40:17.000 I'm sorry, this is absurd.

00:40:18.000 You guys were in charge of Congress for the last two years and you got nothing done.

00:40:21.000 Meanwhile, you have the greatest migrant search in human history on our southern border.

00:40:25.000 Meanwhile, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the new House Minority Leader, he says Joe Biden is making sure there's a strong border, which comes as a surprise to literally everyone with eyes and ears.

00:40:34.000 Title 42 will still be there and the transit ban will still be there.

00:40:38.000 How do you feel about these decisions?

00:40:42.000 Well, I look forward to hearing what President Biden has to say later after his communications.

00:40:47.000 I do think that the Biden administration is trying to tackle a tough issue in a way that is consistent with both the principle that America is a nation of immigrants, that gorgeous mosaic of people from across the world who come here to pursue the American dream, has been a part of American excellence, but also, of course, making sure there's a safe and a secure and a strong border.

00:41:10.000 Everybody knows this is just pure pap.

00:41:13.000 It's a nothing burger from this administration and that people are trying to happy talk their way through it.

00:41:18.000 One of my favorite aspects of our legacy media, which spend their time defending Democrats full time, is that any issue where Democrats are just wrong, it's because the issue itself is just too tough.

00:41:27.000 It's just too complex.

00:41:27.000 There's no way to handle it.

00:41:29.000 Normal Americans, they look at this and like, no, there is a way to handle it.

00:41:31.000 The way that you handle it is you close the border, you staff up border patrol, you tell them to reject everybody except for those who are legally applying, you make them wait in line, and then they get to come in once they've been processed.

00:41:42.000 Everyone understands this with an ounce of common sense.

00:41:45.000 But apparently it's just too complex.

00:41:46.000 There's no way to handle it.

00:41:47.000 According to the Washington Post, quote, immigration pivots shows Biden facing a hard reality of border po- It's a hard reality, is it?

00:41:53.000 I thought it wasn't a crisis until literally five seconds ago.

00:41:55.000 You guys were saying it wasn't a crisis.

00:41:56.000 It was a situation.

00:41:57.000 It wasn't even a situation.

00:41:58.000 It was just a thing that was happening.

00:41:59.000 It wasn't even a thing that was happening.

00:42:00.000 It was all in your imagination.

00:42:02.000 According to the Washington Post, President Biden's Irish ancestors escaped the famine on coffin ships, Vice President Harris's parents were scholars from India and Jamaica, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas came to the United States as a baby when his family fled Cuba.

00:42:15.000 All three leaders stood before the TV cameras in Washington this week to announce that some migrants would get new opportunities to pursue similar dreams in the United States, and others would face swift removal to border cities in Mexico.

00:42:24.000 It was a deflating and lonely moment for a president who had promised to leave Donald Trump's harsh immigration policies in the dustbin of history.

00:42:30.000 Oh, it was deflating and lonely for him, was it?

00:42:32.000 Oh, my heart goes out to the most powerful man in the world.

00:42:37.000 Who asked for this job? 0.76

00:42:38.000 Deflating and lonely, was it?

00:42:40.000 Instead, Biden's administration will continue to expel people who cross the border illegally amid record numbers of apprehensions, a move to the center that could threaten support from liberal groups if he seeks a second term, a plan to remediate outrage from Republicans and Democrats who themselves have failed for decades to create a functioning immigration system.

00:42:54.000 It's not his fault, guys.

00:42:55.000 Everyone has failed to create the immigration system.

00:42:57.000 I mean, that's true.

00:42:57.000 Also, he's the president right now.

00:43:00.000 So it is his job, is it not?

00:43:03.000 Alejandro Mayorkas, who has done an absolutely garbage job on the border, who has completely shortchanged the ability of border agents to even do their job.

00:43:09.000 This administration has spent its time yelling at border patrol agents for making sure that migrants don't illegally cross the border and lying about them, up to and including putting out investigations about using whips on Haitian immigrants, which is just not even true.

00:43:22.000 Alejandro Mayorkas, he says, yeah, I figured there'll be investigations into me, but I'm prepared.

00:43:27.000 He suggested that you might be impeached if you don't resign.

00:43:30.000 Here's what he said.

00:43:32.000 If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate every order, every action, and every failure.

00:43:43.000 We'll determine whether we can begin impeachment inquiry.

00:43:49.000 What's your response to the Speaker?

00:43:50.000 I've got a lot of work to do, and we're going to do it.

00:43:53.000 Are you prepared for the investigations?

00:43:57.000 I am.

00:43:58.000 I will be, and I'll continue to do my work throughout them.

00:44:03.000 Oh, well, um, you know, you have a job to do and you're going to do it.

00:44:06.000 That would be a change from from what is normally happening.

00:44:09.000 Again, the legitimacy of the government is radically undermined when you have people who are declaring that they control everything in your life.

00:44:15.000 How you pay your taxes, how you raise your children, whether they're trans, the kids, how much water you can use in a regulation flush toilet, but they cannot control the border. 1.00

00:44:22.000 That's just beyond them.

00:44:24.000 And it does raise questions as to what their motivations are when the biggest and simplest of tasks that a government is designed to do, namely to protect the citizenry of its own country, when it refuses to do that, but it regulates every aspect of your life, and then promises you that it can take care of you cradle to grave, it starts to undermine all of the legitimacy of the government itself.

00:44:44.000 Well, meanwhile, this has led again to a massive sort of disconnect in the minds of Americans.

00:44:48.000 This has been an ongoing problem, particularly for Republicans.

00:44:51.000 A massive disconnect in the mind of Americans has been that on the one hand, they want to go back to rebuilding social fabric.

00:44:58.000 Americans wish to rebuild social solidarity.

00:45:01.000 Americans wish for functioning government institutions, which means that the government makes promises it can keep, which means more limited promises and better keeping of those promises.

00:45:08.000 At the same time, people still have it in their head that all the promises that they have been sold are real. 0.98

00:45:14.000 That the pony still exists somewhere in that giant pile of horse crap. 0.99

00:45:20.000 This is the famous Reagan joke. 0.96

00:45:22.000 It says the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist walks into a room full of horse manure and sees the horse manure, and the optimist walks into the room and sees a giant pile of horse manure and says, there must be a pony in here somewhere.

00:45:34.000 Well, when it comes to the government making you promises, generally there's no pony. 0.99

00:45:37.000 It's just horse crap. 0.99

00:45:39.000 But the problem is that a huge number of Americans have bought into that horse crap, and this leads to a rather unworkable situation for Republicans when it comes to things like spending. 0.99

00:45:47.000 This is going to be the big battle that is facing incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. 0.97

00:45:50.000 Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.

00:45:52.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:45:53.000 We'll be getting into Kevin McCarthy finally becoming Speaker of the House.

00:45:56.000 What does that mean for Republicans going forward?

00:45:58.000 Plus, a college professor is fired for showing a picture of the Prophet Muhammad.

00:46:01.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:46:03.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 09, 2023

The Institutional Collapse Of The West | Ep. 1642

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