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. This is the Ben Shapiro Show, and it's the big story internationally. The media in the U.S. are bizarrely blaming Donald Trump for that. And the idea apparently is that when people storm government buildings all over the world, that must be January 6th. Government buildings have not been stormed at any time in Brazil s history. In any case, the story from the 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 US Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump. Yes, indeed, it turns out that the only buildings that have ever been stormed in human history are in unstable democracies. You know, aside from the Bastille, the Reichstag, and the only precedent for this is...January 6th? The bizarre, myopic incompetence of our media is really something to behold. 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. And this is a point of reference for a broader narrative that is now being driven by the media on one side, and by election deniers on the other. And that the democracy will not outlast people storming some government buildings and a couple hundred of them being arrested. The point of view is that this is really an astonishing act of complete incompetence, and that the attack is really a thing to behold the attack. And it happens to be a thing that happens in a completely different country... And that it happens in Brazil. And it's not a bad one, right here in the United States, too. And here's why it's a good one, and here's what's really going to happen in Brazil: What's the difference between Brazil and the USA, and what's going on in Europe, and how it's going to be like in the Middle East, and in the UK, and why it matters in the US, and where it matters the most, and which it matters more than it does it more than that, and more, and who s going to get a chance to vote for it in the next election, and they're going to go to the next one?
00:00:00.000Right-wing rioters storm several government buildings in Brazil, Joe Biden heads to the southern border, and Kevin McCarthy finally becomes Speaker of the House.
00:00:16.000The 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.
00:00:25.000The media in the United States are bizarrely blaming Donald Trump for that.
00:00:28.000I'm not sure exactly how Donald Trump has to do with any of that.
00:00:31.000But the idea apparently is that when people storm government buildings all over the world, that must be January 6th.
00:00:36.000Government buildings have not been stormed at any time in Brazil's history.
00:00:39.000In 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?
00:00:56.000There's never just a normal right-wing leader In a foreign country, everybody is far right.
00:01:00.000In 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.
00:01:13.000Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump.
00:01:15.000Yes, 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.
00:01:27.000You know, aside from that, the only precedent for this is obviously January 6th.
00:01:30.000The bizarre, myopic incompetence of our media is really something to behold the attack.
00:01:36.000The 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.
00:01:46.000It 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.
00:01:55.000Again, 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.
00:02:04.000That the Brazilian democracy will not outlast people storming some government buildings and a couple hundred of them being arrested.
00:02:11.000The 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.
00:02:18.000And if supporters of that person go and do something illegal, it must be the fault of that person.
00:02:22.000If, however, people on the left go and do illegal things, well, that's either an exception or something that ought to be cheered on.
00:02:28.000And this is just true across the spectrum.
00:02:30.000Bolsonaro occupied the National Congress building, many of them sitting or lying on the ground.
00:02:34.000A flag placed in front of the building read, Intervention, a reference to calls for the military to depose Lula, who defeated Bolsonaro in October.
00:02:40.000Most wrapped themselves in the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag.
00:02:42.000Some shouted at police officers, this is just the beginning and may God bless you and prevent you from acting against us patriots.
00:02:47.000Images 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.
00:02:55.000Videos shared on social media showed Bolsonaro supporters taking trophies.
00:02:58.000Again, 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.
00:03:09.000Protesters set off fireworks from the roof of Congress.
00:03:11.000Others 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.
00:03:17.000Bolsonaroistas see the powerful court as an adversary.
00:03:20.000Thousands 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.
00:03:31.000Bolsonaro did condemn the invasions on Sunday evening, hours after they began.
00:03:34.000He said public protests by law are part of democracy.
00:03:36.000However, 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.
00:03:43.000And this is a point that, of course, the media are completely ignoring, and it happens to be true.
00:03:48.000The notion that government buildings being attacked is unprecedented in Brazilian history is obviously not true.
00:03:55.000In May of 2017, for example, the New York Times reported, quote, besieged by protest.
00:03:59.000Brazil's president on Wednesday deployed federal troops to restore order in the capital, Brasilia, after demonstrators calling for his ouster clashed with security forces.
00:04:09.000So again, one of the city's iconic modernist buildings, the Agriculture Ministry, was set on fire during that unrest.
00:04:14.000Other government buildings were vandalized during the mayhem.
00:04:16.000Regional officials in Brasilia, this is in 2017, put the number of protesters around 35,000.
00:04:22.000And the armed forces had to be called in in order to quell those protests and riots.
00:04:29.000And professors of political science at various universities actually said that the move to call in the armed forces was a mistake.
00:04:35.000They said that actually calling in the armed forces to break it up, that was a sign of weakness.
00:04:39.000Now 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.
00:04:44.000This 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.
00:04:51.000By the way, you don't even have to go back to 2017, go back to 2013.
00:04:56.000Brazil 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.
00:05:11.000Riot police battled protesters in at least five cities.
00:05:13.000An estimated 300,000 demonstrators swarmed into Rio de Janeiro's seaside central area.
00:05:20.000So, this is the point that Bolsonaro is making.
00:05:23.000Yeah, this is really bad and it's illegal and people should be arrested.
00:05:27.000Also, 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.
00:05:38.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:07:45.000Now again, the footage is really stunning.
00:07:46.000Whenever you see a government building overtaken by rioters, that is a stunning piece of footage.
00:07:51.000You can see people on the roof of Brazil's presidential palace in Congress yesterday.
00:08:02.000Thousands of people protesting outside.
00:08:06.000Apparently the authorities did seize the buses that were used by the rioters.
00:08:10.000Governors of other Brazilian states were dispatching security reinforcements to the capital.
00:08:16.000And of course, all the various democracies around the world condemned this.
00:08:18.000The United States put out a statement via National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan saying the United States condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brazil.
00:08:25.000President Biden is following the situation closely.
00:08:27.000Our support for Brazil's democratic institutions is unwavering.
00:08:30.000Brazil's democracy will not be shaken by violence.
00:08:32.000There'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.
00:08:41.000A bunch of countries that were historically not left-wing countries have had elections of left-wing figures.
00:08:46.000This ranges from Chile to Peru to Colombia to now Brazil.
00:08:51.000Bolsonaro said he repudiated any accusations attributed to me by the current head of the executive of Brazil.
00:08:56.000Lula, the new president, immediately blamed Bolsonaro for all of this.
00:09:01.000Now, Bolsonaro did accept the election results.
00:09:03.000And 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.
00:09:13.000Lula came out and just said that he was genocidal, Bolsonaro.
00:09:16.000He said this genocidal person provoked this.
00:09:18.000He encouraged the invasion of the three branches of government.
00:09:22.000It'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.
00:09:38.000One of the questions here is whether those connections are actually going to be made.
00:09:43.000Apparently there were protest camps outside military headquarters in Brasilia and across the country on Friday.
00:09:47.000There were no significant operations that were launched that day.
00:09:49.000There was almost no indication that authorities were prepared for the insurrection on Sunday.
00:09:53.000There was no evidence of increased security presence at the buildings targeted.
00:09:58.000In 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.
00:10:08.000So things could get very repressive very quickly.
00:10:11.000It'll be fascinating to see how the press covers that.
00:10:12.000If 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?
00:10:22.000You fear Far-right people storming buildings and then you fear governments repressing the actual civil rights of citizens in response to all of that.
00:10:30.000And that is how democracies cave in and collapse in on themselves.
00:10:34.000Again, 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.
00:10:43.000This 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.
00:10:51.000But the press is attempting to sort of throw dirt on his political grave by suggesting that he's responsible for all of this.
00:10:56.000This 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.
00:11:06.000But its young democracy survived the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.
00:11:09.000They never ask these questions when the left is in charge.
00:11:11.000And 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.
00:11:18.000Or António Rousseff, who is also of a left-wing party and had to be impeached because of her corruption.
00:11:37.000So this kind of notion that this is a new found problem because of the Arab Bolsonaro is a wild overstatement.
00:11:42.000I mean, you have to be completely ignorant of Brazilian history to suggest that unrest in Brazil is something brand new because of Bolsonaro.
00:11:49.000But 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.
00:12:04.000During his time in office, he did little to soften his bellicosity.
00:12:07.000He warned of a government rupture, like the military coup of 1964, if he were to lose his re-election bid, he said.
00:12:14.000Brazil would have worse problems than the United States did on January 6th.
00:12:18.000His 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.
00:12:26.000So this has prompted all of the usual suspects in Brazil on the left wing to blame the right for this sort of unrest.
00:12:33.000Again, 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.
00:12:44.000Because those are left-wing protesters.
00:12:46.000When it is right-wing rioters, then, of course, we got to quash this thing too sweet.
00:12:50.000And we have to make sure that Bolsonaro is thrown into change.
00:12:53.000There is actually a member of American Congress over the weekend who's calling for Bolsonaro to be extradited to Brazil.
00:13:00.000Now, there haven't even been any criminal charges that have been filed against Bolsonaro in Brazil.
00:13:38.000In fact, it was reported that he was under investigation for corruption and fled Brazil to the United States.
00:13:47.000Okay, 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.
00:13:56.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:14:08.000So what do we know about the situation?
00:14:10.000Yeah, Fred, it's looking more and more like what happened here in the United States on January 6, two years ago.
00:14:16.000And 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.
00:14:34.000This is why whenever you read the newspaper, it's an amazing thing.
00:14:36.000When 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.
00:14:43.000Then you move three pages later in the newspaper and they're talking about another topic you don't know about.
00:14:46.000And they assume they know what they're talking about.
00:14:48.000They generally are operating through whatever is the political lens through which they're operating.
00:14:52.000Well, this does raise some broader questions about what has been termed the crisis of democracy in westernized countries.
00:14:59.000And it really is a problem, because as we are seeing, the stakes of politics seem so high, the passions are so high right now.
00:15:06.000And 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.
00:15:19.000There's a generalized feeling in a lot of westernized countries right now that civil society is in a state of complete breakdown.
00:15:26.000And 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?
00:15:34.000How do you establish the legitimacy of a government to the point where people don't care so much about who wins and loses?
00:15:38.000I mean, they care, obviously, but not to the point where they feel like every election loss is the end of society as a whole.
00:15:45.000And the answer is society has to be more than government.
00:15:47.000If society is only government, then that means that anytime you lose control of the government, you've lost control of all of society itself.
00:15:54.000This is why it was so dangerous in 2012 during the Democratic National Convention, when Barack Obama's in Charlotte, North Carolina.
00:16:01.000There is a big slogan that was emblazoned on the giant sort of scoreboard.
00:16:22.000Again, government is supposed to be a repository of certain trust.
00:16:25.000If that trust dissolves, then we're just battling each other over control of the government gun.
00:16:29.000Because the government is a giant compulsion machine in the end.
00:16:32.000And 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.
00:16:42.000And this is really the great failure of the West in terms of what's happened since the end of the Cold War.
00:16:48.000During 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.
00:17:04.000This is exactly what, it was this point that separated us from the USSR.
00:17:08.000The 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.
00:17:17.000And if the promises never materialized, well, the gun was still there anyway to compel you to pretend that the promises had materialized.
00:17:24.000So the West said, that's a terrible system.
00:17:26.000And what makes that a terrible system is in fact the compulsion.
00:17:28.000What we have in the West is a thriving civil society.
00:17:31.000We have all those little platoons of family.
00:17:33.000We have thriving churches and social institutions and all this exists outside of government.
00:17:37.000We have localism where people can make decisions for their own communities.
00:17:40.000But we don't have this giant centrally planned monster with its tentacles in all of the areas of our lives.
00:18:15.000The West said, okay, we don't have to pay for military spending anymore.
00:18:18.000We don't have to worry about the future of the planet.
00:18:20.000We don't have to worry about the directionality of history.
00:18:23.000Instead, what we should do is we should just maximize the promises that we make via government.
00:18:29.000And gradually and slowly, that became a sort of bipartisan consensus.
00:18:33.000Not just for members of government, but for enormous numbers of people on the ground.
00:18:37.000They started to believe that government could be the guarantor of all that they needed.
00:18:42.000And 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.
00:18:51.000Whether 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.
00:19:00.000And centralized government control undermines legitimacy.
00:19:03.000This 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.
00:19:32.000And this is precisely the problem that you're seeing in Brazil right now.
00:19:36.000Brazil has a lot of regional identities.
00:19:38.000Brazil is an extraordinarily diverse place.
00:19:40.000Over the course of the last 20 years or so, there's been a promise that Brazil really bragged about and talked a lot about.
00:19:46.000And that was the idea of this sort of rainbow of people.
00:19:49.000Brazil was famously tolerant because it was extraordinarily racially diverse.
00:19:52.000You 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.
00:20:02.000And the idea was that there weren't going to be these tribal divisions.
00:20:06.000And 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.
00:20:13.000It's been widely remarked upon in the academic press.
00:20:16.000And 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.
00:20:23.000And 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.
00:20:38.000What you end up with is more and more anger.
00:20:41.000And again, this is not just a Brazilian problem.
00:20:44.000If you do not have a thriving community, and community has to be based in the end on family.
00:20:50.000If 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.
00:21:05.000Where the social solidarity required to actually support a giant governmental structure is too thin.
00:21:11.000And that's exactly what you are seeing right now.
00:21:15.000Now, I've been thinking about this an awful lot lately in relation to the United States, obviously in relation to other countries as well.
00:21:21.000Countries that seem to be thriving are the ones that actually have a certain level of social solidarity.
00:21:26.000They're the countries that actually do have a vision of what they are as a country.
00:21:30.000They do have something that binds them, whether it is national identity or religious identity, something that binds them beyond local community and beyond government.
00:21:38.000And if they lack that, they start to fall apart.
00:21:41.000One of the little remarked upon aspects of Brazil's changing culture, for example, is its lack of religiosity.
00:21:47.000Brazil has been losing religious adherence for a very, very long time.
00:21:52.000Brazil, over the course of the last 20 years, went from about 90% Catholic to about 65% Catholic.
00:21:57.000It is a fast secularizing society, and in coordination with that, what you've seen is a dramatic drop in the Brazilian birth rate.
00:22:03.000Birth rates are a really good way of telling when a culture has lost its way.
00:22:06.000When 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.
00:22:13.000Brazil has had an extraordinarily fast decline in its birth rate.
00:22:17.000In 1960, for example, Brazil had six kids per family.
00:22:23.000Today, Brazil is at 1.65 kids per family.
00:22:38.000As 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.
00:22:46.000We'll get to more on all of this in just a second.
00:22:48.000First, let's talk about your sleep quality.
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00:24:47.000Okay, 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.
00:24:55.000Because 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.
00:25:28.000It has a numerator and a denominator for folks who are listening to this.
00:25:31.000The numerator essentially represents consent, and the denominator represents levels of control.
00:25:37.000The 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.
00:25:46.000So 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.
00:25:58.000That's what you're seeing in large swaths of the West right now.
00:26:00.000However, 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.
00:26:12.000The 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.
00:26:37.000L 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.
00:26:47.000So 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.
00:27:00.000Plus, responsiveness of the authority to input, that's R, times the avoidability of the authority.
00:27:05.000So if you know that the government is both responsive to you and also if You're unable to get a response from the government.
00:27:12.000You're able to avoid the government where I can move out of the area.
00:27:14.000And this also contributes to the legitimacy of the government.
00:27:18.000If I'm in California and I don't like California, I can leave.
00:27:21.000That means that the government has a high level of legitimacy.
00:27:23.000One 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.
00:27:32.000Plus I, which is the ability of any authority to advance the interests of its population.
00:27:37.000So in other words, if government has the following aspects, it is going to have a lot of legitimacy at any level.
00:27:43.000This, by the way, doesn't just apply to governments.
00:27:44.000It actually applies to families as well.
00:27:46.000If 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.
00:27:59.000And 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.
00:28:30.000It's the regulatory strictness of the authority.
00:28:31.000So the authority passes very, very strong regulations to move against you.
00:28:36.000This undermines the legitimacy of the government, unless you've consented at a very high level to that government.
00:28:42.000And finally, the aggressiveness of the enforcement by the authority.
00:28:45.000So 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.
00:28:55.000And at the same time, if the numerator is really low, meaning your consent to that government is really, really low.
00:29:00.000This is what we are increasingly seeing at the top level of Western societies right now.
00:29:04.000Very low levels of social solidarity within the polity governed by the authority.
00:29:09.000Multiculturalism rips apart social solidarity.
00:29:11.000Decline of religion, which is a great combined factor in preventing tribalism, is falling away.
00:29:17.000As social fabric fades, that numerator starts to decline.
00:29:20.000It declines still further when the authorities are less responsive to input.
00:29:23.000This is one of the facets of bureaucratic government.
00:29:26.000When 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.
00:29:38.000When 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.
00:29:44.000It's a lot harder to leave the United States.
00:29:46.000So if the federal government decides that it is going to undermine my rights, it's going to.
00:29:50.000Increase regulation and then aggressively enforce that regulation?
00:29:53.000It means it's very difficult for me to avoid.
00:29:57.000And this prompts, presumably, bad action against the government.
00:30:01.000And finally, is the government actually good at doing the things the population wants it to do?
00:30:05.000And the answer here is more and more no.
00:30:08.000Now, 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.
00:30:27.000We're not providing them the things that they want us to provide.
00:30:30.000We don't have social solidarity within the polity.
00:30:31.000We haven't spent any time rebuilding that social solidarity.
00:30:33.000We're not responsive to input from the outside.
00:30:36.000Now 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.
00:30:44.000And what you want to do here is lower the amount of control that is available, right?
00:30:52.000You don't want violation of fundamental rights.
00:30:55.000And so we'll create checks and balances in order to prevent all this.
00:30:57.000But 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.
00:31:15.000Because of this, people got used to the idea the government was going to provide everything.
00:31:18.000And so they're very, very disappointed.
00:31:20.000And 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.
00:31:30.000And this is what we are seeing across Western societies right now.
00:32:10.000If 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.
00:32:17.000And what the government wants, more and more often, is to control.
00:32:20.000Because they feel like they are losing control.
00:32:22.000And they are losing control because they made promises they can't fulfill.
00:32:24.000And this is true of nearly every institution in Western life right now.
00:32:29.000They 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.
00:32:38.000Instead, 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.
00:32:49.000And this is why you're ending up with tremendous levels of social instability and governmental instability across the Western world right now.
00:32:56.000Democracy is going to respond this way.
00:33:18.000In the United States, there's no excuse for going and rioting on January 6th and taking over Capitol buildings for no apparent reason.
00:33:25.000It's not going to accomplish anything.
00:33:27.000And beyond that, you can actually win elections.
00:33:29.000The Republicans just took back the House of Representatives, for example.
00:33:32.000Donald Trump may still be president again.
00:33:34.000What this is to say is that we are going to get into hotter and hotter and more volatile water as time goes on.
00:33:40.000If people in politics don't recognize a basic truth, the numerator matters more than the denominator.
00:33:45.000That consent matters an awful lot more than control.
00:33:47.000Social solidarity matters a lot more than control.
00:33:51.000And 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.
00:34:04.000So this is particularly true on the issue of immigration.
00:34:05.000This continues to be a hot issue in the United States.
00:34:08.000Joe Biden visited the southern border over the weekend.
00:34:12.000And 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.
00:34:21.000You'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.
00:34:30.000We can't avoid it because it's literally happening in the country in which we live and people are entering without our permission.
00:34:36.000And it obviously is not in the interest of the American population.
00:34:38.000It's in the interest of a foreign population.
00:34:40.000This is why people are so upset about what's happening at the southern border.
00:34:49.000Millions more people are waking up to it.
00:34:51.000So, no surprise that Morning Wire, The Daily Wire's fastest growing news podcast, is continuing to climb the charts with new episodes seven days a week.
00:34:58.000It is a great show in which you learn everything you need to know about the news in 15 minutes or less every single morning.
00:35:02.000Join editor-in-chief John Bickley with co-host Georgia Howe as they cut through the corporate agenda and manufactured outrage to bring you the facts first on all the news you need to know.
00:35:10.000Wake up with Morning Wire on Daily Wire Plus, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:35:15.000So 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.
00:35:26.000You know what's in the interest of American citizens?
00:35:28.000To know who's coming through our border.
00:35:29.000You know what's not in the interest of American citizens?
00:35:33.000And yet Joe Biden is still out there futzing around on the border.
00:35:36.000He'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.
00:35:46.000Well 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.
00:35:55.000Biden arrived Sunday afternoon in El Paso, Texas, which in December saw a surge of mostly Nicaraguan migrants.
00:36:00.000He 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.
00:36:09.000By the way, why are people leaving Nicaragua?
00:36:11.000Specifically, for many of the reasons we've been talking about.
00:36:13.000Nicaragua is a left-wing dictatorship.
00:36:14.000His first stop was at the bridge of the Americas Port of Entry, where the president toured the facility with border officials.
00:36:19.000He then stopped along the border fence that separates El Paso from Juarez.
00:36:22.000He also visited the El Paso County Migrant Services Support Center.
00:36:26.000He said, we're going to get a lot of resources to these migrants.
00:36:29.000Again, this, of course, comes amid an attempt to spin toward the center for Joe Biden in an incoherent fashion.
00:36:34.000He 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.
00:36:42.000But 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.
00:36:54.000Biden was greeted at the airport by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
00:36:57.000Republicans have been calling on Biden to travel to the region for two years, saying he wasn't focused enough on the issues.
00:37:02.000And Abbott told reporters that Biden was two years and $20 billion too late.
00:37:06.000And 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.
00:37:13.000Biden said he had not read the letter, nor will he, I am sure.
00:37:17.000So just amazing stuff here from the Biden administration.
00:37:19.000You wonder, these are the issues that get people mad.
00:37:22.000And 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.
00:37:31.000This, by the way, is why presumably Joe Biden was attempting to essentially lie by proxy by having El Paso cleaned up before he arrived.
00:37:39.000This 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.
00:37:47.000It's why the Biden administration has historically been so angry.
00:37:50.000Reporters like Bill Malugan for actually reporting what's going on at the border.
00:37:53.000According 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.
00:38:02.000What he won't see are the miserable makeshift camps dotted around El Paso that triggered headlines last month about migrants taking over the streets.
00:38:08.000On Tuesday and Wednesday, law enforcement teams moved through the downtown area, picking up migrants who had entered the country illegally.
00:38:14.000As a result, Biden would get a view of the border, but not of the crisis.
00:38:17.000Border agents wanted him to see the scale of the chaos.
00:38:21.000Instead of volunteer helping dozens of migrants seeking shelter at the Sacred Heart Church, they've cleaned it all up for him.
00:38:27.000Officials say they're just enforcing the rules and any timing is a coincidence, but everybody knows that that is a bunch of crap.
00:38:32.000Everybody understands that that is not true.
00:38:36.000The reality is that unfortunately we have an elite set in the U.S.
00:38:40.000government 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.
00:38:50.000That 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.
00:39:03.000It makes no sense on any pragmatic level.
00:39:06.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be angry anytime he's asked about this.
00:39:10.000Apparently, Biden officials were very angry over the weekend.
00:39:12.000A 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.
00:39:19.000You're never allowed to say the T-word, Trump, without saying that Trump was Hitler.
00:39:23.000And so when you say worse than Trump, what you really mean is worse than Hitler, according to the Biden administration.
00:39:27.000What 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.
00:40:18.000You guys were in charge of Congress for the last two years and you got nothing done.
00:40:21.000Meanwhile, you have the greatest migrant search in human history on our southern border.
00:40:25.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:40:34.000Title 42 will still be there and the transit ban will still be there.
00:40:38.000How do you feel about these decisions?
00:40:42.000Well, I look forward to hearing what President Biden has to say later after his communications.
00:40:47.000I 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.
00:41:10.000Everybody knows this is just pure pap.
00:41:13.000It's a nothing burger from this administration and that people are trying to happy talk their way through it.
00:41:18.000One 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.
00:41:29.000Normal Americans, they look at this and like, no, there is a way to handle it.
00:41:31.000The 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.
00:41:42.000Everyone understands this with an ounce of common sense.
00:42:02.000According 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.
00:42:15.000All 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.
00:42:24.000It 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.
00:42:30.000Oh, it was deflating and lonely for him, was it?
00:42:32.000Oh, my heart goes out to the most powerful man in the world.
00:42:40.000Instead, 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.
00:43:03.000Alejandro 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.
00:43:09.000This 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.
00:43:22.000Alejandro Mayorkas, he says, yeah, I figured there'll be investigations into me, but I'm prepared.
00:43:27.000He suggested that you might be impeached if you don't resign.
00:43:58.000I will be, and I'll continue to do my work throughout them.
00:44:03.000Oh, well, um, you know, you have a job to do and you're going to do it.
00:44:06.000That would be a change from from what is normally happening.
00:44:09.000Again, the legitimacy of the government is radically undermined when you have people who are declaring that they control everything in your life.
00:44:15.000How 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.
00:44:24.000And 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.
00:44:44.000Well, meanwhile, this has led again to a massive sort of disconnect in the minds of Americans.
00:44:48.000This has been an ongoing problem, particularly for Republicans.
00:44:51.000A massive disconnect in the mind of Americans has been that on the one hand, they want to go back to rebuilding social fabric.
00:44:58.000Americans wish to rebuild social solidarity.
00:45:01.000Americans 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.
00:45:08.000At the same time, people still have it in their head that all the promises that they have been sold are real.
00:45:14.000That the pony still exists somewhere in that giant pile of horse crap.
00:45:22.000It 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.
00:45:34.000Well, when it comes to the government making you promises, generally there's no pony.
00:45:39.000But 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.
00:45:47.000This is going to be the big battle that is facing incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
00:45:50.000Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.