The Ben Shapiro Show - January 03, 2023


Welcome To 2023! | Ep. 1638

Topics
Balance of Nature products credit card consolidation loan from Lightstream Andrew Tate allegations courage in speech backlash to societal values Kevin McCarthy Speaker vote America's political divide eternal truths battle
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Andrew Tate Joe Biden Paul Ehrlich Kevin McCarthy Pope Benedict Benedict XVI Julian Simon George Santos Norman Eric Adams Jonathan Haidt Greta Thunberg Johnny Carson Ted Cruz Birchgold Martin Luther King John Stuart Mill Walter Cronkite Jordan Peterson Barry Goldwater and 23 more
The Last Republican Sellout of 2022 | Ep. 1637 Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker Bid Keeps Falling Short | Ep. 1639

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 4 minutes

Words per minute

223.32

Word count

14,404

Sentence count

969

Harmful content

Misogyny

16

sentences flagged

Toxicity

37

sentences flagged

Hate speech

30

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ben Shapiro begins the new year with a brief overview of the political landscape in the United States and around the world going into 2023. He also discusses the passing of Pope Benedict XVI and the implications for the future of Western values and the world as we know it in the 21st century. And he points to a new piece of research from Harvard that could have a major impact on our understanding of the world in the coming years, and why we should all be looking for a return to a more traditional Christian conception of what it means to be a Christian in a world that is secularized and secularized, rather than a system of values that is based on a system that is grounded in the Bible and the teachings of the Holy Spirit. He also points to the new research from UC Berkeley and Harvard that challenges the idea that the Bible is the sole source of all knowledge and reason. And finally, he points out that the Pope Benedict was not a Christian, he was a Catholic, but a Catholic and a teacher of the Bible was a Christian teacher, not a secular teacher, and that a Catholic values are not the root cause of all good things, but are in fact a replacement for Christian values and a replacement of Christian values, and not the replacement for them. Happy New Year, everybody! Happy Holidays! - Ben Shapiro Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Learn about our sponsorships and which products we like best help us reach more listeners. Subscribe in-depth reviews of our listeners worldwide. Become a supporter of our shows like you get the best deals on our best vlogs, best listening to us on social media and social media, the best listening experience, the most personalized experience in the podcast, the ultimate place in the world, and most importantly, our most authentic and coolest podcast in the best podcast on the podcast anywhere you can find the best place to listen to the best of the best vids we get the most of it all. and most authentic reviews and the most inspiring podcast on all things podcasting experience on the internet. Enjoys this episode on the most influential podcast on everything you need to know about politics, tips, trends, trends and everything else going on the highest podcast on culture and culture, everywhere else in the place you should be listening to it! Thank you for listening to the most important things we care about politics and culture?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Pope Benedict XVI dies.
00:00:01.000 60 Minutes features the worst environmentalist doomsayer ever.
00:00:05.000 Andrew Tate is arrested in Romania.
00:00:06.000 Joe Biden preps his re-election run.
00:00:08.000 And Republicans battle each other over whether Kevin McCarthy ought to become Speaker of the House.
00:00:12.000 Happy New Year, everybody.
00:00:13.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:13.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:14.000 It is indeed 2023 and we are back with you.
00:00:23.000 I hope you had a wonderful and meaningful Christmas vacation, as well as a wonderful and happy New Year.
00:00:29.000 And we begin the year on a sort of brief note of overview.
00:00:33.000 So 2023, I believe, is going to be a time of shifting political winds.
00:00:37.000 I think that the wind is about to shift pretty dramatically across Western civilization because the weaknesses that have been brought upon Western civilization by liberalism, by the left, I think that those weaknesses are going to start to come home to roost.
00:00:48.000 It looks like a moment of strength for the left.
00:00:50.000 It looks as though the left is on the march.
00:00:52.000 It looks as though President Joe Biden is doing pretty well.
00:00:55.000 He's had a pretty successful run thus far in terms of legislation.
00:00:58.000 He's got the backing of the media.
00:01:00.000 His approval rating seems to be bumped back into the mid 40s.
00:01:02.000 And it seems as though the left is riding high.
00:01:05.000 After all, it looks as though the stock market may make some sort of reappearance this year.
00:01:09.000 Had a really bad year last year.
00:01:11.000 It looks as though Democrats sort of escaped the blade of the guillotine during the last election cycle.
00:01:15.000 And so if you're on the left, you're feeling pretty good about yourself going into 2023.
00:01:18.000 I do not think 2023 is going to be a good year for the left.
00:01:21.000 I think that a lot of the secular trends, I don't mean secular as in godless, I mean sort of the broad societal trends that have been happening across the West are about to reverse themselves.
00:01:30.000 Because the consequences of those trends are about to be felt in a pretty dramatic way across the West.
00:01:36.000 The truth is, when we do politics here on this show, what we're very often doing is we are telescoping big, broad issues into the news of the day.
00:01:45.000 Because the news of the day is just representative of events at the top of the iceberg.
00:01:48.000 What we like to do here on the show is we like to talk about the broad ideologies, the broad historical movements that underpin what's happening on the very tip of the iceberg.
00:01:58.000 And I think that what we've been doing is essentially rearranging the deck chairs on the top of the Titanic, to mix the metaphor.
00:02:05.000 The iceberg underneath us has been shifting.
00:02:08.000 And I think people are beginning to notice that.
00:02:10.000 And as they begin to notice that, as they begin to feel unstable at the top of the iceberg, people are going to look for solidity again.
00:02:15.000 People are going to look for a restoration of some sort of eternal values.
00:02:18.000 All this came to mind because over the course of the last couple of weeks while we were off the air, The former Pope Benedict XVI passed away, and I think that the reason why it is important for people to note this is because what Pope Benedict actually was, was he was supposed to be, and I think he was in his career as Pope, a repository of the idea that ancient wisdom actually mattered.
00:02:41.000 And we in modern society, we tend to think that tradition and wisdom, these things don't matter at all.
00:02:46.000 We can basically reason ourselves to the proper view on life.
00:02:49.000 Tabula rasa.
00:02:50.000 We're born into the world.
00:02:52.000 And then if you just leave us alone, we can figure out the best way to live.
00:02:55.000 And that's not true.
00:02:56.000 And we tend to discount ancient wisdom.
00:02:57.000 There's a new study from Berkeley.
00:02:58.000 We have to pay attention to this study from Berkeley.
00:03:00.000 There's a brand new study out of Harvard.
00:03:01.000 It's that study that matters.
00:03:03.000 We can dispense with all of the ancient and accumulated wisdom of the human species.
00:03:07.000 We can just ignore all of that.
00:03:08.000 We can ignore all of the rules that have been cultivated over time and the rules that have been cultivated in order to protect those rules.
00:03:13.000 We can just dispense with all of that and we can build a brand new universe on the basis of our own tabula rasa reasoning or on the basis of our emotional feelings or our subjective self-assessment as to what we are.
00:03:24.000 And Pope Benedict, his life and his work were really an answer to that.
00:03:28.000 Because what all good religions, all religions that are worth their salt do, is they act as repositories of traditional wisdom in the face of change.
00:03:35.000 This does not mean that they oppose all change.
00:03:37.000 Sometimes they integrate change.
00:03:39.000 Sometimes they're very progressive in terms of integrating change.
00:03:42.000 All major universities in the West were founded by Christians.
00:03:46.000 That does not mean that Christianity is not a system of thought that believes that it is bringing eternal values to the table.
00:03:53.000 It means that those eternal values allow for the capacity to move and change, just as the Constitution of the United States allows for the capacity to move and change within the boundaries of the Constitution.
00:04:01.000 The problem becomes, When the change eats the Constitution, when the change eats the eternal rules and values of these institutions.
00:04:08.000 And this is something that Pope Benedict stood against.
00:04:09.000 I want to take a moment and talk about Pope Benedict because I think that what we are about to witness in 2023 and over the course of the next few years is going to be a titanic clash between ancient wisdom, traditional wisdom, wisdom that has worked in the world, which is a form of data.
00:04:23.000 If you're a science-driven person, you don't have to believe in the Bible in order to recognize that the traditional wisdom embodied in codes of conduct that have been carried across civilization over the course of thousands of years, this may bear some sort of actual data value.
00:04:39.000 And something Thomas Sowell has pointed out, that if you have a tradition, you have a rule that's been inherited from your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, going back thousands of years, Maybe the reason that people follow that rule is because that rule has worked.
00:04:50.000 And maybe if that rule stopped working, people would stop following that rule.
00:04:54.000 But we've decided to dispense with all of those rules.
00:04:56.000 And so what we're about to see is we've now become a society that says that all those rules are random, they're useless, we can just get rid of them. 0.98
00:05:03.000 Which is very foolish. 0.95
00:05:04.000 It is the equivalent of... I've been rereading a book about the reason why Western people are sort of different than other people, and some of the failings of the West. 0.97
00:05:15.000 The book is titled The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich.
00:05:18.000 And the basic idea of the weirdest people in the world is that Western people are kind of made different by the way that they think.
00:05:25.000 Hey, but one of the things that has been true forever is that every civilization, every society has these pieces of inherited wisdom that they pass along.
00:05:33.000 And when individualism destroys the inherited wisdom, you end up with chaos.
00:05:37.000 If you were in a, if you, if you stumbled upon an African tribe and that African tribe had a very bizarre way of fighting, say a snake bite. 1.00
00:05:47.000 And what they did is they put together some sort of weird formula that you'd never seen before.
00:05:50.000 This weird formula where they took some berries and they took some animal fats and they burned them and then they buried them and they uncovered them and they gave them to you.
00:05:57.000 And it helped to stop the actual snake bite.
00:06:01.000 As a Westerner, your first thought might be, well, I don't know how they did that, so I'm not going to even do that.
00:06:04.000 I'm not going to take any of this.
00:06:06.000 Or you could think, wait, maybe this has been working for them for a very long time, so before I don't take the thing, maybe I ought to take the thing, and then I can figure out which ingredients are wrong, and which ingredients need to go, and which ingredients are useless, and how much of this is ritual, and how much of this is actual science.
00:06:19.000 We are foolish in Western civilization to simply throw out the baby with the bathwater and take all these traditions and throw them away.
00:06:25.000 And this is what Pope Benedict stood for. 0.95
00:06:27.000 We'll get to more on all of this in just one moment.
00:06:29.000 First, the current administration's New Year's goals.
00:06:31.000 Tax spend.
00:06:32.000 Turn a blind eye to inflation.
00:06:33.000 This is their thing.
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00:07:07.000 Which seems more and more like the Biden administration playbook, actually.
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00:07:33.000 Also, it's the beginning of a brand new year.
00:07:35.000 You need to live a healthier lifestyle, right?
00:07:36.000 This is one of your big New Year's resolutions to get healthier.
00:07:38.000 But, you know, it's really tough getting all those veggies and fruits.
00:07:41.000 And it's hard to do that in your daily diet.
00:07:43.000 Well, I can make it a lot easier for you.
00:07:45.000 You should use what I'm using.
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00:08:01.000 Balance of Nature sent a bunch of their product down to the studio for my team to try.
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00:08:05.000 I was very excited to find out that they are kosher, which means that I can have them as well, and I'm feeling more energy, which I need because I have a brand new puppy this new year.
00:08:12.000 It's keeping me up all night, so I need the energy.
00:08:13.000 When you're disciplined enough to take care of your health, you reap all those benefits.
00:08:16.000 More energy, less fatigue, better focus.
00:08:18.000 Consuming the right balance of fruits and veggies every day is an important first step.
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00:08:44.000 So Pope Benedict, obviously, as the Wall Street Journal points out, his death has left conservative Catholics without their figurehead amid deep divisions over how much the church should adapt to the times or reaffirm its traditional teachings against the challenge of secularism.
00:08:55.000 The retired pope was for more than three decades a leader in the culture wars that have shaken the Catholic Church and wider society since the late 1960s.
00:09:01.000 He was a living symbol, depending on one's point of view, of an intolerant and punitive religiosity or of stalwart fidelity amid disorienting change.
00:09:09.000 So again, the people who believe that Pope Benedict XVI was an emissary of intolerant and punitive religiosity believe that religion generally has no value.
00:09:18.000 That that body of inherited wisdom basically has no value.
00:09:21.000 And I wanted to read a few quotes from Pope Benedict on the occasion of his death to remind people What exactly he stood for and why what he says is important.
00:09:29.000 And this is coming from an Orthodox Jew.
00:09:31.000 I don't have a dog in the Catholic Church fight other than this is a very, very important repository of fundamental truths for Western civilization that has obviously affected the outgrowth of Western civilization.
00:09:40.000 I think that people of conservative bent, people of traditionalist bent, people who actually believe in God, all of us should take the words of Pope Benedict XVI to heart.
00:09:50.000 Here is a quote from Pope Benedict a few years back.
00:09:52.000 His truth means more than knowledge.
00:09:53.000 Knowing the truth leads us to discover the good.
00:09:56.000 Truth speaks to the individual in his or her the entirety, inviting us to respond with our whole being.
00:10:01.000 The profound responsibility to lead the young to truth is nothing less than an act of love.
00:10:04.000 In other words, he's not a moral relativist.
00:10:06.000 There is such a thing as truth.
00:10:07.000 That truth is worth pursuing.
00:10:09.000 And one of the ways that people pursue truth is they accept the things that they have heard from their fathers.
00:10:13.000 And then they ask questions of their fathers to determine just how true those things they have heard are.
00:10:17.000 But it is a responsibility of a civilization to teach truth to its young.
00:10:22.000 And as we'll discuss in a moment, when I talk about the shifting political winds, we are a civilization that is now actively teaching lies to our young.
00:10:28.000 When we teach lies to our young, you fundamentally undermine the civilization and it starts to fall apart and the blowback is coming.
00:10:35.000 Here's something that the Pope, Pope Benedict XVI, is what he said when he was talking to the bishops of the United States.
00:10:40.000 States, he said the church in the United States is called in season and out of season to proclaim a gospel, which not only proposes unchanging moral truths, but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering. To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that will curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being an ultimate vocation, our relationship to God.
00:11:10.000 What he is saying there is that there are fundamental truths, and when those are attacked by either a majoritarian mob, as you've seen over and over in elections around the world, or whether they are attacked by scientific rationalists who pretend that they are the repositories of all knowledge, much of which they've already inherited, or whether it is a bunch of people who simply don't want to follow the rules.
00:11:28.000 The simple fact is that the path to human happiness lies in truth.
00:11:31.000 And a lot of those truths are things that we have to inherit.
00:11:34.000 Here is a flashback to a speech that Pope Benedict XVI gave in 2008.
00:11:39.000 I believe this is Georgetown.
00:11:41.000 Here he was.
00:11:43.000 Freedom is not an opting out.
00:11:45.000 It is an opting in, a participation in being itself.
00:11:51.000 Hence, authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God.
00:11:58.000 Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.
00:12:07.000 Notice the focus that he is putting on the word truth.
00:12:10.000 Because truth is going to be where happiness lies.
00:12:12.000 If you are living your life in opposition to the truth, you're going to end up in a very unhappy world.
00:12:18.000 And this is exactly what's happening to Generation Z. So Jonathan Haidt had a fascinating interview, the social psychologist, he had a fascinating interview over the weekend with the Wall Street Journal in which he talked about the falsehood that is being taught to Generation Z and how Generation Z is in serious trouble.
00:12:33.000 He says his research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise all of a sudden around 2013, especially for teen girls.
00:12:40.000 But it's only Generation Z, not the older generations.
00:12:42.000 If you'd stopped collecting data in 2011, says Haidt, you'd see little change from previous years.
00:12:47.000 By 2015, it's an epidemic.
00:12:48.000 What happened in 2012, when the oldest generation's e-babies were in their middle teens? 0.99
00:12:52.000 That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site.
00:12:55.000 It was also the beginning of the selfie era.
00:12:57.000 Apple's iPhone 4, released in 2010, had the first front-facing camera, which was much improved in the iPhone 5, reintroduced two years later.
00:13:04.000 Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 to 8, to between 10 and 12.
00:13:13.000 That meant, according to Haidt, that first social media generation was one of weakened kids who hadn't practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment with other children.
00:13:22.000 They were deprived of the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
00:13:26.000 Before 2010, teenagers had flip phones.
00:13:28.000 They'd text each other and say, let's meet down at the mall.
00:13:30.000 Now their childhood is largely just through the phone.
00:13:32.000 They no longer even hang out together.
00:13:34.000 Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
00:13:37.000 Height worries especially about girls.
00:13:38.000 By 2020, more than 25% of female teenagers had a major depression.
00:13:43.000 The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
00:13:45.000 The comparable number for millennials of the same age registered at half the Generation Z rate, about 13% for girls and 5% for boys.
00:13:52.000 He said kids are on their devices all the time.
00:13:55.000 It says boys play video games, often in groups, but girls are drawn to visual platforms, Instagram and TikTok.
00:13:59.000 About display and performance, you post your perfect life, then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
00:14:05.000 What is he really talking about?
00:14:05.000 He's talking about the narcissist effect.
00:14:08.000 The legend of the narcissist is that the narcissist sees himself in a reflection, in a pool, and he's so taken with his own visage that he can't look away.
00:14:15.000 This is what we have become as a civilization, and this is what we are doing to our young.
00:14:18.000 We have robbed them of eternal values that make them answerable to people outside themselves, and instead, they are now answerable to the subjective feeling within.
00:14:25.000 And once you're answerable only to the subjective feeling within, you are destined for unhappiness.
00:14:30.000 Because there's no external action in the world that can make you feel good.
00:14:33.000 There's nothing that can fill that gap that you've now created.
00:14:36.000 You've cut yourself off from the world.
00:14:38.000 You've cut yourself off from the possibility of eternal truth, with a capital T, by embracing, quote unquote, my truth, which is what we now have an entire generation doing.
00:14:47.000 This is why we have an entire generation that identifies as whatever it feels inside.
00:14:53.000 You wonder where this whole insane movement has come from that boys can be girls and girls can be boys and we must teach girls that they can be boys and boys that they can be girls.
00:15:00.000 This is where it's coming from.
00:15:01.000 It's coming from people who believe that subjectivity is the realm of real truth.
00:15:06.000 Not any sort of eternal accepted truth over the course of millennia, but the truth that lies inside you.
00:15:10.000 The truth of your own feelings.
00:15:12.000 And it's absolutely crippling an entire generation of people.
00:15:16.000 Social media is making all of this worse.
00:15:18.000 It's creating social contagions that are spreading across the country unchecked.
00:15:22.000 And those social contagions are absolutely making kids more depressed.
00:15:25.000 They feel like they are chaotic.
00:15:26.000 They feel like they're living in a world without rules or rules where they have no responsibilities, where they're not taught what to do, and where adults are abandoning them and then patting themselves on the back, proclaiming that they are doing something good for the kids.
00:15:38.000 That they're liberating them.
00:15:40.000 You wouldn't liberate a five-year-old. 1.00
00:15:41.000 The reason you wouldn't liberate a five-year-old is because that'd be an idiotic thing to do. 0.99
00:15:45.000 As a parent of eight, six, two, one on the way. 0.99
00:15:48.000 And even a puppy.
00:15:49.000 K. Something we did over the New Year.
00:15:52.000 Rules are really, really important.
00:15:54.000 You have to have rules, and you have to teach those rules.
00:15:56.000 And if you don't teach those rules, if you don't teach those truths, the realities of life, what you end up with is an entire generation adrift.
00:16:02.000 And that's what we are facing.
00:16:04.000 And so our civilization has decided to discard a lot of the eternal truths that Pope Benedict talked about in favor of subjectivity.
00:16:11.000 And also in favor of a sort of bizarre paganism.
00:16:16.000 This bizarre paganism most obviously takes on an environmental affect.
00:16:22.000 When you get rid of God, it's not that people lose the need for God.
00:16:25.000 They just fill it with something else.
00:16:26.000 So one of the things they have filled that with is, of course, that subjective sense of self-assessment, the constant search within for your own sexual identity, your own gender, and the rest of this.
00:16:36.000 But they fill the role of God with something else.
00:16:38.000 And the role of God is now filled by many in the United States and in the West generally with the environment.
00:16:44.000 There's this great cosmic force out there that will revenge itself upon you because you're living too well.
00:16:49.000 And because the West is too rich, Because the West has done too much, materially, and so the West must be punished.
00:16:56.000 This is why you see people like Greta Thunberg, who are held up as though they are sort of icons of religious leadership.
00:17:04.000 Almost like members of a children's crusade.
00:17:06.000 They don't know anything, but the children will lead us from Europe into the Holy Land.
00:17:11.000 That's not going to work, but we'll follow them.
00:17:13.000 It's like a religious figure.
00:17:16.000 And you have your prophets, your doomsaying prophets.
00:17:18.000 The latest doomsaying prophet is actually an old doomsaying prophet.
00:17:21.000 So 60 Minutes, I couldn't help it, but notice the insanity of this.
00:17:24.000 60 Minutes decided that they were going to do another special with a person named Paul Ehrlich.
00:17:29.000 For those who are not familiar with Paul Ehrlich, Paul Ehrlich became famous as a professor at UC Berkeley.
00:17:33.000 He wrote a book called The Population Bomb.
00:17:36.000 It was complete lies. 1.00
00:17:37.000 It was complete trash. 1.00
00:17:38.000 What he said was completely and utterly debunked. 0.97
00:17:41.000 So 60 Minutes featured him last night to talk about how we are about to reach the end of civilization.
00:17:48.000 This is the equivalent of ESPN having on a sports handicapper who's gotten wrong every, not some games, every single game he has ever picked on the air.
00:17:57.000 Paul Ehrlich has been wrong about every single thing, but that's not why 60 Minutes is having him on.
00:18:01.000 They are having him on because you need the wizened old visage of a pseudoscientist to tell you that doom is coming unless you engage in the socialistic redistribution programs that the left would love.
00:18:14.000 So, what exactly are the policy recommendations that Ehrlich is recommending?
00:18:17.000 Obviously, socialist redistribution programs, zero growth programs.
00:18:20.000 Here he is.
00:18:22.000 Ehrlich's views on how to bring that birth rate down were concrete.
00:18:27.000 Compulsion if voluntary methods fail.
00:18:29.000 Creating a blacklist of people, companies, and organizations impeding population control in the United States.
00:18:37.000 Responsibility prizes for childless marriages. 0.67
00:18:40.000 A tax on children.
00:18:42.000 And a luxury tax on diapers and cribs.
00:18:45.000 The concerns about population became misanthropic.
00:18:48.000 And it was taken with so much seriousness that Paul Ehrlich would recommend things like putting stuff in public water that would make people not as fertile.
00:18:57.000 This is what he was actually advocating back in the 70s.
00:18:59.000 Now he advocates redistribution of all sorts of resources.
00:19:03.000 He advocates in favor of zero growth programs.
00:19:06.000 He advocates in favor of dismantling full industries.
00:19:09.000 And he says, we don't do that, then doom is coming.
00:19:11.000 And here's the thing, Paul Ehrlich's been wrong about all of this.
00:19:13.000 So if you assume that the wisdom of Pope Benedict is wisdom that has been time tested over the course of generations, and so maybe we should take it seriously, the wisdom of Paul Ehrlich has been disproved over the course of a single generation.
00:19:25.000 Over and over and over again.
00:19:27.000 And here's Paul Ehrlich promoting his book, The Population Bomb.
00:19:29.000 This book sold three million copies, The Population Bomb.
00:19:32.000 And in The Population Bomb, which was written in 1968, he said that there would be billions of people that would die in the 1970s and 1980s of starvation.
00:19:39.000 Here is Paul Ehrlich promoting The Population Bomb back in 68.
00:19:42.000 If we continue to let population Bro, and if we continue to exploit the underdeveloped countries, if we continue to pollute the seas with a wide variety of compounds and so on, it's very difficult for me to picture things holding together for more than another decade or so. 0.88
00:19:59.000 Hey, that's just him young.
00:20:00.000 He's saying the same thing now.
00:20:01.000 He was really, really wrong then.
00:20:03.000 And he did it over and over.
00:20:04.000 I mean, he was invited onto Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in order to promote this is the single biggest environmental doomsday book ever written.
00:20:11.000 And it was totally wrong in every aspect.
00:20:14.000 Here is.
00:20:15.000 Here's Paul Ehrlich back on Johnny Carson again, this is back in the 70s.
00:20:20.000 Would you welcome Dr. Paul Ehrlich.
00:20:23.000 You have to get the death rate and birth rate in balance, and there's only two ways to do it.
00:20:28.000 One is to bring the birth rate down, the other is to push the death rate up.
00:20:33.000 Okay, and if you don't push the birth rate down through forcible sterilization, then you will end up with massive death rate because Malthusian trap, because there just won't be enough resources.
00:20:41.000 Now, he was totally wrong about all of this.
00:20:44.000 He was absolutely wrong about all of this.
00:20:45.000 But that did not stop the media from parroting every aspect of this.
00:20:49.000 Major media figures.
00:20:49.000 We'll get to more on all of this in just one moment.
00:20:52.000 First, the situation in Ukraine continues to be extremely bad.
00:20:54.000 That war apparently is just going to go on for the foreseeable future.
00:20:57.000 Well, whatever you think politically about the war, there are a lot of people on the ground in Ukraine right now who are suffering.
00:21:02.000 My friends over at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews have been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.
00:21:08.000 They've never seen hunger and suffering like they are seeing right now.
00:21:11.000 This is why I'm asking for your help.
00:21:13.000 Norman is an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor.
00:21:15.000 He's been blind since birth and he lives in a Jewish old age home in Odessa, Ukraine.
00:21:18.000 With so much of the infrastructure destroyed over the recent month, including the power grid, Norman has been without heat or clean water for a long time.
00:21:23.000 The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has supplied blankets, food, and other essentials to help Norman survive through the winter.
00:21:29.000 They urgently need your help to continue getting Norman supplies.
00:21:32.000 Please consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
00:21:35.000 Just 45 bucks can ensure warmth, food, and clean water to Jewish kids and the elderly in need.
00:21:39.000 Right now, the fellowship has a special matching challenge where your donation will double in impact.
00:21:43.000 Your tax deductible gift will be multiplied two times to help provide twice the winter necessities and save lives.
00:21:48.000 So head online right now to benforthefellowship.org or text Shapiro to 41444.
00:21:53.000 That's benforthefellowship.org, text Shapiro to 41444.
00:21:57.000 Again, you need to help people who are suffering.
00:22:00.000 One great way to help people who are suffering this brand new year, head on over to benforthefellowship.org or text Shapiro to 41444 and give generously.
00:22:06.000 Also, it is that time of year When you're starting to look at those holiday bills and you go, Oh no, you spent way too much money.
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00:23:25.000 The president of the United States, Richard Nixon, was promoting this sort of stuff.
00:23:28.000 This is what the loss of traditional Western values began really in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
00:23:35.000 So what we are seeing now is just a replay of that and exacerbation of that.
00:23:37.000 That's why you see lying doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich back on the air.
00:23:41.000 But this is true back in the 90s.
00:23:42.000 I mean, here's Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, promoting the population bomb way back when.
00:23:48.000 That world population is increasing by 23 people every 10 seconds.
00:23:53.000 It's clear that world population growth remains completely out of control.
00:23:59.000 Hey, populations, entire groups of people, media, your politicians who are promoting this stuff, and it turned out not to be true.
00:24:06.000 There's an economist named Julian Simon who challenged Paul Ehrlich.
00:24:09.000 He actually made him a challenge.
00:24:10.000 And the challenge was, you pick a basket of resources, any basket of resources, and I promise you they will get cheaper over time.
00:24:16.000 Now, Paul Ehrlich's entire worldview was that resources would get more expensive because population would outstrip the capacity of the earth to provide for those populations.
00:24:25.000 Simon's view was people are innately creative and innovative, and therefore people will be able to innovate their way out of these problems.
00:24:32.000 And so they made a bet.
00:24:32.000 It was a $1,000 bet in which Paul Simon, in which rather Paul Ehrlich picked five resources.
00:24:39.000 And if they became more expensive over time, then Julian Simon would give $1,000 to Paul Ehrlich.
00:24:44.000 And if they became less expensive over time, then Ehrlich would give $1,000 to Julian Simon.
00:24:49.000 And Simon won.
00:24:50.000 And here was Simon's case.
00:24:51.000 Here's the case that Simon was making, denying the sort of paganistic wisdom of Paul Ehrlich.
00:24:55.000 And it was paganistic.
00:24:56.000 This is why it became popular.
00:24:57.000 Because when you are a doomsayer, when you're doing Jeremiah ads on national television about how the world's about to collapse unless you do the socialistic and anti-tradition things that we want you to do, you become very popular with the group that really is kind of socialistic and doesn't like tradition all that much.
00:25:12.000 Here's Julian Simon challenging Paul Ehrlich way back when.
00:25:16.000 The newspaper stories you customarily read would tell you that we should be worrying about running out of natural resources, copper, wheat, what have you.
00:25:30.000 But the history of the past 200 years, in fact the whole history of humanity, has shown us the extraordinary event, contrary to all common sense, That the more that we use of natural resources, the more we have of them.
00:25:50.000 That is, rather than natural resources becoming more scarce as we use them, they have been becoming more available.
00:25:59.000 Okay, and Julian Simon happened to be right about that, but the doomsaying is what takes over in a period in which you've lost all moorings to reality.
00:26:06.000 When the truth no longer matters, but an agenda matters, well then you end up with elites like Paul Ehrlich back on 60 Minutes, whether you're talking about the 1970s or whether you're talking about now.
00:26:14.000 Okay, so I think that what we are having right now, what the 1960s were, were a move away from tradition.
00:26:21.000 In some ways, there were changes to tradition that happened within the line of tradition, right?
00:26:24.000 That's why Martin Luther King is citing the Bible when he's talking about civil rights.
00:26:28.000 But there were also moves that were just dramatically anti-tradition.
00:26:31.000 The sexual revolution, the environmentalist revolution.
00:26:33.000 These were things that were just tremendously anti-tradition.
00:26:36.000 And they were well accepted in the 1960s.
00:26:37.000 And then there was massive blowback in the United States in the 70s and 80s.
00:26:41.000 That's precisely what you're about to see in the United States because we're being lied to.
00:26:45.000 And when the lies become clear, people don't like it very much.
00:26:49.000 When the lies become clear, people react very, very strongly to being lied to.
00:26:53.000 Whether they are being lied to about how every single person on earth is going to die of COVID, or whether they are being lied to about the possibilities of socialist redistribution radically increasing the economy, or they're being lied to about how we have to crimp our own lifestyles in dramatic fashion in order to achieve the avoidance of global catastrophe.
00:27:14.000 People do not like being lied to.
00:27:16.000 Paul Ehrlich happens to be a liar, but the media are lying along with him. 0.58
00:27:18.000 They know he's been wrong this whole time. 0.98
00:27:20.000 They're bringing him back out in order to promote these lies.
00:27:23.000 Now the question is going to become, what does the reaction look like?
00:27:26.000 I've said that there's a reaction coming.
00:27:27.000 What does the reaction look like?
00:27:28.000 Well, there are a couple of possible reactions.
00:27:31.000 One is the reaction that says we have to go back to time-tested tradition.
00:27:35.000 We have to go back and we have to look not at we are going to become 1950 again.
00:27:39.000 We have to understand change has happened in the United States.
00:27:42.000 Some of that change good, much of that change bad.
00:27:43.000 We're going to have to look back at tradition and find the best of tradition and bring it forward into the current day and say it still applies.
00:27:51.000 That's the kind of Reaction that would be good for the world.
00:27:54.000 My fear is that the reaction that we are going to see, the shifting winds that we are going to see, will go too far.
00:27:59.000 And this is what we are seeing in the world of, say, Andrew Tate, for example.
00:28:02.000 So I have a lot of younger listeners who are big fans of Andrew Tate, who really enjoy Andrew Tate.
00:28:06.000 Now, the big news over the course of the last couple of weeks is that Andrew Tate, for those who don't know, Andrew Tate is a very online guy who was a lightweight kickboxing champion, I believe, and he's become big in the so-called manosphere.
00:28:21.000 He was banned from YouTube, I believe, he was banned from Twitter, and he was banned from these things because he was a self-described misogynist, right?
00:28:27.000 Somebody who believes that men are superior to women in pretty much every possible way.
00:28:31.000 Well, over the last couple of weeks, He got in an online fight with Greta Thunberg in which he was tweeting at her about how he had Bugattis and lots of gas guzzlers and he was heating up the climate. 0.98
00:28:41.000 And then she tweeted back at him that he had a small d***. 0.99
00:28:42.000 It was all very silly. 0.99
00:28:44.000 And then, one day later, he ended up being arrested by Romanian authorities. 0.95
00:28:48.000 And the allegations against Andrew Tate is that he was engaging in sex trafficking.
00:28:52.000 According to the New York Post, police in tactical gear descended on a villa where Andrew Tate and brother Tristan were staying Thursday to detain the British brothers on kidnapping and rape charges, judicial sources told Romanian outlet Libertadia.
00:29:02.000 Video shows the officers with battering rams and guns sweeping through the dark villa before escorting Tate into a car.
00:29:07.000 The brothers in April had allegedly detained two young women, one with American citizenship and one Romanian, inside the villa against their will where they were subjected to physical violence and mental coercion, according to the authorities.
00:29:17.000 Police said the Tates allegedly formed an organized crime group and sexually exploited women by forcing them to perform pornographic demonstrations for the purpose of producing and disseminating through social media platforms.
00:29:27.000 The brothers had been questioned for five hours by the police back in April, but were released at the time.
00:29:32.000 And then they're currently still being held in Romania right now.
00:29:37.000 Now, Tate had predicted for a long time this would happen to him.
00:29:40.000 He had predicted that people were going to come after him, that they were going to arrest him.
00:29:42.000 Does that mean that he's not guilty of something?
00:29:44.000 I have no idea whether he's guilty of these crimes.
00:29:44.000 I have no idea.
00:29:46.000 It could be the Romanian authorities who are embarrassed by Tate.
00:29:46.000 It could be trumped up.
00:29:48.000 It could be anything.
00:29:50.000 I don't place a lot of stake in the law-abiding nature of the Romanian authorities.
00:29:54.000 I literally know nothing about how the law... I mean, Andrew Tate literally said he moved to Romania in order to avoid law enforcement.
00:29:59.000 So, I don't know whether that's true or whether that's not.
00:30:01.000 I assume all of that will come out in the wash.
00:30:02.000 The thing I want to focus on is the popularity of Andrew Tate for a moment.
00:30:06.000 And it's fascinating because, again, I have a lot of young listeners who are interested in the stuff that Andrew Tate says.
00:30:13.000 The reason they're interested in the stuff that Andrew Tate says is because he's transgressive.
00:30:16.000 He's transgressive in that he says things that no one else will say.
00:30:20.000 Some of the stuff that he says is, frankly, terrible.
00:30:25.000 And some of the stuff that he says is not terrible.
00:30:26.000 Some of the stuff that he says is actually a version of truth.
00:30:30.000 I mean, when he says that promiscuity is generally a bad thing, he says it only among women.
00:30:35.000 When he says promiscuity for women is a bad thing, that used to be a relatively uncontroversial thought, but it's been considered bad to say that now.
00:30:43.000 It's wrong.
00:30:44.000 It's banned.
00:30:45.000 Now, we live in a moment because we are so censorious online and sort of in the political world.
00:30:49.000 We're so censorious.
00:30:50.000 The Overton window has shrunk so much.
00:30:52.000 That there are two concepts that have been crimped.
00:30:55.000 One is truth, as in like Pope Benedict XVI truth.
00:30:58.000 Things, eternal things of value that you're not supposed to say anymore.
00:30:58.000 Right?
00:31:01.000 A man is not a woman. 1.00
00:31:02.000 Men should marry women. 1.00
00:31:04.000 They should have kids.
00:31:05.000 These are things that are now considered very controversial in the elite circles of the West.
00:31:05.000 Right?
00:31:09.000 You're not supposed to say any of those things.
00:31:11.000 So truth, like capital T, long-standing truths, these things have been denied.
00:31:16.000 And then there's also been stuff that's been denied. 0.95
00:31:19.000 That's just kind of garbage, like stuff that's not nasty to say or yucky. 0.88
00:31:23.000 And so what's been crimped is courage, right? 0.98
00:31:26.000 People are afraid to say the truth, and they're also afraid to say their opinion because they lack courage because the social sanctions are so strong.
00:31:32.000 And so because the social sanctions are so strong and because they go beyond just crimping the truth, they go to crimping pretty much everybody's feeling that they can even say anything, their opinion, jokes.
00:31:41.000 Because of all of that, courage is now held in higher value than truth itself.
00:31:46.000 Being willing to transgress lines is considered a highest value because in a time where courage is under attack, courage is a very, very high value.
00:31:53.000 Courage is always the first value.
00:31:54.000 I mean, C.S.
00:31:54.000 Lewis says, courage is the first value.
00:31:56.000 Christian.
00:31:57.000 Courage is the first value in order to speak the truth.
00:32:00.000 A courage is instrumental.
00:32:02.000 Courage is useful so that you can speak the truth.
00:32:04.000 What's happened in our society because we have decided to shut down so many modes of speech, because we've decided to ban people from social media, and unperson them, and destroy their lives and their livelihoods.
00:32:13.000 Because we've done all of that, people who speak loudly are considered the best and the bravest.
00:32:19.000 And it's particularly appealing to young people.
00:32:20.000 And so when you draw a lot of fire, the way that Andrew Tate does, a lot of people see that as more courageous than if you say something that is, say, a little bit better calibrated.
00:32:31.000 And mourn consonance with eternal truth.
00:32:34.000 Whoever draws most fire, in other words, is the person who's considered the most courageous.
00:32:37.000 And this sort of pithy saying that is mostly true, but kind of not, right?
00:32:41.000 That you must be over the target if you're drawing flack.
00:32:44.000 A large percentage of the time, that's true.
00:32:46.000 But sometimes, the person who's drawing the most flack is drawing the most flack, because what they're saying is actually kind of bad, right?
00:32:50.000 So, the problem for Andrew Tate, and the reason why he's become so popular, is because he's very transgressive.
00:32:56.000 He says the thing that no one else will say.
00:32:58.000 Sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's really not good.
00:33:01.000 And so, we're gonna look at some of the things Andrew Tate says because, again, he's a very popular figure, particularly with young men.
00:33:06.000 And when people ask me about Tate, one of the things that I've said, I've said this to some teenage boys who are friends of the family, they asked me about him like, I don't know, a week ago, what I said is, some of the diagnoses that Andrew Tate has of secular society are correct.
00:33:20.000 His prescriptions are largely incorrect.
00:33:23.000 And the things that he puts, he has a rule, a list of rules.
00:33:25.000 And many of the rules that he puts online are actually pretty good.
00:33:29.000 And then the way that he acts, right?
00:33:30.000 His version of masculinity, which is have a bunch of kids by a bunch of different women, live in a castle with 30 Bugattis, right? 0.98
00:33:39.000 Put pictures online and muscle, like this kind of stuff.
00:33:42.000 That's not the traditional mark of masculinity.
00:33:45.000 What Pope Benedict XVI would say, what I would say, what sort of members of the traditional wisdom cadre would say, is that the ultimate in manliness is get married, protect your family, provide for your kids and your family, provide a space for them to grow in safety and security, provide them roles and responsibilities.
00:34:02.000 This is the role of a man.
00:34:03.000 This is what a man does.
00:34:06.000 What Andrew Tate focuses mainly on is the critique of how society has undermined a lot of this stuff.
00:34:11.000 And then his prescription is, I'm gonna put a picture of myself online with like 30 cars and it makes me look cool, makes me look masculine.
00:34:16.000 Hey, I also like cool cars.
00:34:18.000 Cool cars are amazing.
00:34:19.000 But, because we have lost eternal truth, because we have decided as a society the eternal truth has to go, the backlash is not coming in the form of a restoration of eternal truth.
00:34:29.000 Very often the backlash is coming in the form of punch the people in the face who destroyed the eternal truth.
00:34:35.000 That's the society in which we're living in, and I'm afraid that that could get worse unless what we actually have is a return to some eternal truth.
00:34:41.000 So here's a couple of clips of Andrew Tate, and it kind of shows you what I'm talking about, that some of what he's saying is kind of half correct, but he's saying it in such a way that is meant to draw fire.
00:34:50.000 So here is Andrew Tate talking about women belonging to men.
00:34:57.000 I don't know, because I think the women belong to the man. 1.00
00:34:58.000 I think the woman's given over to the man. 1.00
00:35:00.000 Yeah, that's inherently where you get called sexist.
00:35:02.000 Well, you can call me sexist if you want, but if you look at marriage, it's the bride's father who gives her away. 0.99
00:35:02.000 No, it's not. 0.99
00:35:07.000 It's not the groom's father, is it?
00:35:08.000 In old tradition.
00:35:09.000 The woman is always given over to the man. 1.00
00:35:11.000 Read the Bible, read the Koran, you can go to... Walking down the aisle, no chance.
00:35:15.000 There's definitely, there's like African cultures where they don't do that.
00:35:19.000 I'm sure there are some obscure tribes somewhere.
00:35:21.000 I mean, I can't say I'm not a professional.
00:35:24.000 You get it.
00:35:25.000 You seem like a very smart guy.
00:35:26.000 You seem like a smart guy.
00:35:28.000 You're saying a woman is the property of a man if they're dating. 0.75
00:35:31.000 I'm not saying they're appropriate.
00:35:32.000 I'm saying they're given to the man and they belong to the man. 0.69
00:35:34.000 It doesn't mean they're a pure property without emotion.
00:35:38.000 OK, so notice the contrast here.
00:35:41.000 So Portnoy is so afraid of saying that a woman and a man belong together and that a woman When she gets married, now belongs to the man sexually in the same way that the man ought to belong to the woman sexually.
00:35:51.000 This is literally Genesis 2.24.
00:35:52.000 For this reason, a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh.
00:35:59.000 So that would be the eternal truth.
00:35:59.000 Genesis 2.24.
00:36:03.000 That is the truth according to every mainstream religion.
00:36:06.000 That would be the thing that you would say.
00:36:07.000 And the reason for that from an evolutionary biology perspective is because when a woman joins with a man and they create a baby, the woman is sure of her parentage, but the man is not sure of his parentage.
00:36:16.000 And so we as a society tend to prefer monogamy, right?
00:36:19.000 This is the evolutionary biological reason why humanity embraced monogamy is because it is the best distribution of sexual resources.
00:36:27.000 It's from an evolutionary biological perspective, not a moral perspective.
00:36:29.000 That's just evolutionary biology.
00:36:31.000 Bret Weinstein, Heather Heyer talk about it.
00:36:33.000 Heather Hying talk about it. 1.00
00:36:35.000 All of this is very well established.
00:36:38.000 When it comes to morality, morality is that a woman should not be promiscuous and a man should also not be promiscuous.
00:36:45.000 Now, this is the part where Andrew Tate gets the diagnosis right, but he gets the solution wrong.
00:36:49.000 So here is Andrew Tate talking about how women should not be promiscuous.
00:36:52.000 It's bad for them.
00:36:54.000 Well, a woman could say that same thing if she decided. 0.99
00:36:56.000 She could say, I can sleep with multiple men, but my men can't sleep with multiple women if she so choose. 1.00
00:37:00.000 We're all free individuals, right?
00:37:01.000 Yeah, but you don't, you wouldn't agree if a woman said that. 1.00
00:37:04.000 I don't think I, I would personally find that revolting.
00:37:06.000 But there are women who find what I say revolting. 0.76
00:37:06.000 Correct. 0.76
00:37:08.000 So you're not telling other people what to think.
00:37:10.000 You're just saying how you think.
00:37:11.000 Yeah.
00:37:12.000 I mean, I think that I think of a man is, uh, Sexual is not sexually exclusive.
00:37:17.000 It's not the same as if a woman is. 1.00
00:37:19.000 Because with a woman, you have the paternity issue. 1.00
00:37:20.000 With a man, you don't have a paternity issue. 0.87
00:37:22.000 Look, read the Bible.
00:37:23.000 Every single man had multiple wives. 0.51
00:37:24.000 Not a single woman had multiple husbands.
00:37:25.000 It's against the will of God. 0.73
00:37:26.000 It's disgusting.
00:37:27.000 In the eyes of God himself.
00:37:31.000 Okay, so again, historically speaking, what Andrew Tate is saying is not wrong.
00:37:34.000 Morally, the reason why church, where we talked about the capacity for change within eternal rules, moves towards monogamy as opposed to polygyny, right, where a man has multiple wives, the reason for that is because the sophisticated arrangement of one man and one woman is the best arrangement. 0.59
00:37:51.000 And so it is not good when a woman is promiscuous. 1.00
00:37:54.000 It also happens not to be good when a man is promiscuous.
00:37:57.000 Those may not be equivalent in evolutionary biological terms, but that is why eternal morality suggests one man, one woman.
00:38:03.000 So the point that I'm making here is that when the moorings of a society come loose, when the society starts to sort of float, when the iceberg is floating, is no longer moored to anything that keeps it stable, once that happens, the reactions tend to be extremely chaotic.
00:38:18.000 You get an entire movement on the left that is incredibly destructive, and you get a reactive movement that gets a lot of the diagnosis right, but a lot of the diagnosis wrong, right?
00:38:26.000 Gets a lot of diagnosis right and a lot of prescription wrong, right?
00:38:29.000 We have many problems in our society.
00:38:30.000 Those problems continue into the realm of male and female. 0.98
00:38:35.000 It encourages bad behavior by women, but then the answer to that is not bad behavior by men. 0.87
00:38:38.000 The answer to that is better behavior by women and better behavior by men. 0.95
00:38:43.000 This is... So if we're going to have a restoration, we need to have an actual restoration.
00:38:48.000 Now the reason I think the backlash is coming, however, is because the forces of the left are not going to stop.
00:38:52.000 They're going to continue marching.
00:38:53.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.
00:38:55.000 Well folks, the holiday season is coming to a close.
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00:39:08.000 But this is your last chance.
00:39:10.000 Today is the final day.
00:39:11.000 We had so much happening in 2022.
00:39:14.000 The launch of What is a Woman? 0.98
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00:39:18.000 All sorts of great new series from me.
00:39:20.000 We have so much coming in 2023.
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00:39:32.000 So head on over to dailywire.com slash ben right now.
00:39:35.000 So as I say, the backlash to a society coming on board from eternal values is going to be People who diagnose that unmooring correctly, but very often who speak sort of the most brash, loud, and sometimes half-wrong version of that.
00:39:50.000 So this is why I think Andrew Tate has become quite popular.
00:39:53.000 And for people who are sort of dismissing him out of hand, you have to acknowledge why he has become popular.
00:39:57.000 It's because some of his diagnosis is correct.
00:39:59.000 So here is Andrew Tate recently on Piers Morgan talking about marriage in the traditional sense.
00:40:03.000 I'm reserving judgment on his guilt or innocence in a criminal case.
00:40:05.000 I have no information on the criminal case at this point.
00:40:07.000 I just want to, this brought Andrew Tate into the news, the fact that he's been arrested in Romania.
00:40:11.000 And so I think the more important cultural phenomenon is the fact that this guy has a lot of followers.
00:40:15.000 And so we should try to figure out why.
00:40:18.000 But you believe in the concept of marriage?
00:40:19.000 Completely.
00:40:20.000 That's what we were talking about the whole time.
00:40:22.000 What do you think- We talked about a man giving a woman away.
00:40:24.000 I believe in marriage more than anybody.
00:40:26.000 In fact, I believe in marriage and- No, please. 0.92
00:40:28.000 I believe in marriage in the traditional sense.
00:40:30.000 I believe a man has a duty to stand up and be a real man.
00:40:32.000 I believe that the problem with the world today that we are facing is that not enough men are sticking to the age-old ways of masculinity.
00:40:39.000 Okay, so this part is exactly correct.
00:40:41.000 Right?
00:40:42.000 What he's saying right now is exactly that.
00:40:43.000 And so when you accompany that correctness with some incorrectness, people will take the correctness.
00:40:49.000 And that is the point that I think is worth thriving home.
00:40:53.000 What that means is that we ought to have a real conversation about the eternal values that are important and not lose them.
00:40:59.000 Because if we do lose them, things are likely to get much worse.
00:41:01.000 And people right now are reacting in the strongest possible ways because they feel like they're getting gas lit.
00:41:04.000 They feel like they can't have any of those conversations.
00:41:07.000 And correctly so.
00:41:08.000 Wouldn't it be a major story, for example, if a quote-unquote white supremacist had driven into Times Square and then attacked a couple of police officers in the middle of the New Year's Eve festivities?
00:41:17.000 That would, of course, be a national story.
00:41:18.000 We'd get the president of the United States on national television talking about this.
00:41:21.000 We'd have talks about trends in the United States toward white nationalism.
00:41:24.000 We'd talk about Donald Trump.
00:41:25.000 We'd talk about all this stuff for weeks on end, right?
00:41:28.000 Well, over the course of New Year's, there was a person who actually went to Times Square and attacked two police officers, three police officers, rather, with a machete near Times Square.
00:41:38.000 He had traveled to New York from his home in Maine to injure the police.
00:41:42.000 And it turns out that the reason this is not getting broad spectrum media coverage is because he's an Islamic extremist.
00:41:49.000 This man is 19.
00:41:49.000 He's now been charged with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of attempted assault.
00:41:53.000 I don't mention the names of attempted mass killers on the air because I don't wish to glorify them.
00:41:58.000 Shortly after 10 p.m.
00:41:59.000 on Saturday, the police said, the suspect began swinging the knife without provocation at three officers who are at 8th Avenue and 52nd Street, just outside the security cordon for the Times Square celebration.
00:42:07.000 One of the officers then shot the suspect in the shoulder.
00:42:11.000 One of the officers who had just graduated from the police academy suffered a fractured skull in the attack.
00:42:15.000 He's now been released from the hospital as has one other officer and another one as well.
00:42:21.000 Sometime on Saturday before the attack, the suspect wrote a farewell letter to his family in a diary that was found on him afterward.
00:42:26.000 In it, he wrote to his mother, quote, I fear greatly.
00:42:27.000 You will not repent to Allah. 0.98
00:42:28.000 And therefore, I hold hope in my heart that a piece of you believes so that you may be taken out of the hellfire.
00:42:33.000 He also referred in his diary to his brother, who's in the US military, as having assumed the uniform of the enemy, the law enforcement official said.
00:42:39.000 Now, the reason why people feel...
00:42:42.000 Increasingly, as though you can't say the truth is because this sort of stuff does not get the same sort of attention that it would get based on the ideological motivation of the person who committed this act of terrorism.
00:42:51.000 This is a terror assault in the middle of New Year's Eve in Times Square.
00:42:55.000 And apparently it is it is just not worthy of the sort of national news attention based on the motivation of the person who committed the crime.
00:43:01.000 And so you end up with is reaction from the general public.
00:43:04.000 Reaction against the media.
00:43:06.000 Correct.
00:43:07.000 Reaction against trends to shut down conversations.
00:43:09.000 Correct.
00:43:10.000 Reaction in favor of some people who are sort of half true, half false, because they have the courage to cross the lines that other people won't cross.
00:43:16.000 And herein lies the problem.
00:43:18.000 Meanwhile, as the left pushes further and further, and as they close that censorship window closer and closer, and as they just continue on pace to change the world and unmoor the iceberg.
00:43:29.000 That is now floating around freely and starting to break up.
00:43:32.000 As they do this, the backlash is going to get stronger and stronger.
00:43:35.000 Joe Biden has no intentions of letting up in his world changing ambitions.
00:43:40.000 According to Politico, Biden begins 2023 with a stronger hand to play in an inclination to play it.
00:43:44.000 Quote, a year makes a difference after all.
00:43:47.000 President Joe Biden begins at 2023 politically stronger than 12 months ago, bolstered by his party's surprise midterm success, a robust set of legislative accomplishments, and the resilience of the alliance he rallied to support Ukraine after Russia's invasion.
00:43:58.000 Indeed, as he vacations on St.
00:43:59.000 Croix, the biggest decision he faces is whether to seek re-election to the office he holds.
00:44:03.000 Biden is not yet fully committed to another term, according to three people with knowledge of the deliberations, but not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
00:44:10.000 On his island vacation, Biden continued his running conversation with family and a select few friends and allies about a re-election bid.
00:44:16.000 There are still challenges on the horizon, from an economy threatening to slow down, to the war in Europe, to an incoming Republican House majority threatening gridlock and investigations.
00:44:23.000 But those in the president's circle believe there is a strong and growing likelihood he will run again, and that an announcement could potentially come earlier than had been expected, possibly as soon as mid-February, around the expected date of the State of the Union, according to those people.
00:44:34.000 That potentially accelerated time is owed in part to a sense inside the White House and among Biden allies that the New Year dawns on a note of revival, when marked by an unlikely comeback that has reassured fellow Democrats.
00:44:43.000 So Joe Biden is going to push forward his ambitions unabated.
00:44:47.000 He feels as though he has not been chastised by the American public, and so he's going to continue to take the moorings out of that iceberg.
00:44:54.000 We're going to continue to break up as a society.
00:44:56.000 And meanwhile, the American public is looking at the consequences of Joe Biden's rule and what they see is not good.
00:45:02.000 They see social dissolution.
00:45:03.000 They see an increasingly bad economy.
00:45:06.000 It turns out that this was, in fact, the worst year in modern American history for the stock market.
00:45:12.000 This was its worst year since 2008.
00:45:16.000 The S&P 500 finished 2022 down 19.4%.
00:45:21.000 There is no excuse for that, given the fact that we are out of the pandemic and have been out of the pandemic for quite a while right here.
00:45:25.000 And all he had to do was sit by and shut up, and he didn't do any of that.
00:45:29.000 And yet he's going to continue forward with his big ambitions.
00:45:33.000 The backlash is going to be extreme.
00:45:36.000 Economists are predicting a recession.
00:45:39.000 We are going to see some new tax events taking place because of Democratic legislation in the last Congress.
00:45:45.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, happy new year, or if you're in business, unhappy new tax year, American employers are getting hit in 2023 with a variety of tax increases, even as the risk of recession rises along with interest rates.
00:45:55.000 The tax hikes arrive for two reasons, provisions of the 2017 GOP tax reform that are phasing out and big tax increases that passed as part of the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act.
00:46:03.000 The Biden administration doesn't want to tell you this, so we thought we'd list the unmentionables.
00:46:06.000 Capital expensing.
00:46:07.000 The biggest business tax hit is the end of full immediate expensing for equipment.
00:46:11.000 The 2017 tax reform spurred investment by letting businesses immediately deduct the full cost of hardware, like trucks and machines.
00:46:17.000 But that policy is set to phase out.
00:46:19.000 The maximum early deduction drops this year to 80%.
00:46:21.000 It's going to continue to decrease now each year until it disappears in 2026.
00:46:26.000 R&D Expensing That hit has already arrived.
00:46:29.000 January 2022 marked the end of full expensing for corporate research and development, a benefit that began in 1954.
00:46:34.000 Companies could previously deduct R&D spending from their next tax bill.
00:46:37.000 Now they have to spread the deduction over several years.
00:46:41.000 Interest expensing.
00:46:42.000 The cap on the business interest deduction dropped last year when the formula changed to exclude amortization.
00:46:47.000 This is justifiable as part of tax reform because the tax code shouldn't have a subsidy for debt over equity, but the timing now is really bad.
00:46:52.000 In other words, all of these taxes, including a new corporate minimum tax, a stock buyback tax, all of this is going to impact the economy in really, really negative ways.
00:47:02.000 One of the reasons why big banks are now predicting a recession, and they're also expecting the Fed is going to have to pivot, According to the Wall Street Journal, more than two-thirds of the economists at 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve are betting the United States will have a recession in 2023.
00:47:16.000 Two others are predicting a recession in 2024.
00:47:18.000 The firms, known as primary dealers, are a collection of trading firms and investment banks that include companies like Barclays Bank of America, TD Securities, and UBF.
00:47:27.000 They cited a number of red flags.
00:47:28.000 Americans are spending down their pandemic savings.
00:47:30.000 The housing market is now in decline.
00:47:31.000 Banks are tightening their lending standards.
00:47:33.000 We expect a downturn in global GDP growth in 2022, led by recessions in both the U.S.
00:47:38.000 and the Eurozone, according to PNB Paribas.
00:47:40.000 The main culprit is the Federal Reserve, which has been raising rates for months to try to slow the economy and curb inflation.
00:47:46.000 So the economy is likely to get worse.
00:47:48.000 This is not going to stop the spending binge that our Congress is currently on, according to a brand new study out of the Out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, American fiscal policy is, quote, in permanent imbalance as current debt plus projected future spending outstrips future tax revenue, which means that the federal government budget is going to have to require, if we were to balance the books, a 30% spending cut or a 40% increase in taxes, according to DailyWire.com.
00:48:13.000 So things are likely to get worse, and Joe Biden, again, is not slowing down.
00:48:17.000 He's going to continue to push this, and he's going to continue to enjoy his life.
00:48:20.000 You'll notice that in the middle of the worst cold snap in decades in the United States resulting in some actual deaths, Joe Biden was vacationing off in the U.S.
00:48:29.000 Virgin Islands, and no one seemed to matter.
00:48:31.000 It didn't seem to matter to the media.
00:48:32.000 The media didn't care.
00:48:33.000 Like one iota.
00:48:34.000 So when Ted Cruz, in the middle of a cold snap in Texas, goes down to Cancun with his family, this is a national scandal.
00:48:40.000 How dare he leave his state?
00:48:41.000 By the way, he's a federal senator who has Virtually no impact on the running of the state when it comes to energy policy.
00:48:47.000 But Ted Cruz is a really, really bad guy.
00:48:48.000 The president of the United States takes off in the middle of the worst cold snap in decades in the United States, where people are dying, to go to a warm place for a week and sleep in the sun because he's grandpa.
00:48:58.000 And that's totally fine.
00:48:59.000 Eric Adams, by the way, did the exact same thing.
00:49:01.000 Hey, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, He actually left New York in the middle of this cold snap.
00:49:07.000 The mayor is the executive of the city, right?
00:49:08.000 He's not a senator.
00:49:09.000 He's the mayor.
00:49:10.000 He left also for the U.S.
00:49:11.000 Virgin Islands.
00:49:12.000 His excuse was he missed his mom, who died a couple of years ago, is my understanding.
00:49:17.000 So if I miss my grandfather, do I just get to go on random vacations and abdicate my duties now?
00:49:22.000 Is that the way this works?
00:49:23.000 His excuse was, again, the sense of entitlement from Democrats who feel that the winds of history are at their back is really, really strong.
00:49:30.000 Here's Eric Adams over the course of the break saying that he deserves his vacation.
00:49:34.000 So after 365 days of commitment to the city, I decided to take two days to reflect on Mommy.
00:49:43.000 And to watch how you responded to my two days out of the city was really alarming.
00:49:51.000 I deserve good work-life balance like you do.
00:49:54.000 I bet you went on a vacation.
00:49:56.000 I bet you have not worked 365 days in the city.
00:50:02.000 Unbelievable.
00:50:03.000 I mean, truly, the level of self-absorption of the public officials is really an amazing, amazing thing.
00:50:10.000 OK, so as I've been saying the whole show, if this is the year of the backlash, if the backlash is coming, then that would require some sort of cohesiveness on the Republican side of the aisle.
00:50:19.000 And here is where we run into a bit of trouble for the backlash theory.
00:50:21.000 And that is that the Republicans are really bad at this.
00:50:23.000 Republicans are, in fact, quite capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. 1.00
00:50:27.000 And so they're now having an idiotic fight today. 0.99
00:50:30.000 over whether or not Kevin McCarthy ought to be Speaker of the House. 0.99
00:50:33.000 This is a fight with no consequences for the American people.
00:50:36.000 I'm just going to put it out there, the American people don't care.
00:50:38.000 They do not care one iota.
00:50:39.000 The reason they don't care one iota is because with the Republicans holding a majority in the House, Joe Biden's legislative agenda ought to be DOA.
00:50:46.000 Ought to be dead on arrival.
00:50:47.000 There's not going to be a lot of legislation that gets done over the course of the next couple of years.
00:50:51.000 All the Republicans have to do is plant their feet and say no.
00:50:53.000 It does not matter who the Speaker is in order to do any of that.
00:50:57.000 And so the people who are holding out, shouting at Kevin McCarthy, he can't be the speaker because he's not committed enough.
00:51:02.000 Then who else?
00:51:03.000 And meanwhile, the people who are like, oh, I love Kevin McCarthy.
00:51:05.000 It's got to be him.
00:51:06.000 Kevin McCarthy's a nice guy, but why?
00:51:10.000 The answer is the American people don't care.
00:51:11.000 They don't care.
00:51:12.000 So the answer is whoever has the votes should become the speaker.
00:51:15.000 Kevin McCarthy has the most votes, so he should probably become the speaker. 0.98
00:51:17.000 Right now we have an idiot fest in which we have five or six congresspeople who are basically holding up the works for no gain. 1.00
00:51:26.000 What exactly is the gain here? 0.98
00:51:28.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy worked on Monday to lock down support to become House Speaker.
00:51:34.000 His bid remained up in the air as some conservative lawmakers threatened to turn Tuesday's leadership vote into the most unpredictable in a century. 0.98
00:51:40.000 Man, totally useless. 0.97
00:51:40.000 There is no reason for this. 0.97
00:51:42.000 Whether you like McCarthy, whether you don't like McCarthy, it does not matter.
00:51:44.000 As the Speaker of the House, his entire job is to just say no to Joe Biden.
00:51:48.000 You could put a dog in that seat.
00:51:52.000 A dog with a sign that says no.
00:51:54.000 And it would essentially do the same thing as what the Speaker of the House is going to do.
00:51:57.000 The Speaker vote is set for midday.
00:51:58.000 It comes after McCarthy spent the weekend scrambling to get the votes necessary from House Republicans to win the gavel.
00:52:03.000 He acquiesced on a requested rules change that gives rank-and-file members more power, including making it easier to oust the Speaker.
00:52:08.000 But a significant number of GOP lawmakers said they still remain opposed to the Californians' bid.
00:52:13.000 One of those people is Representative Bob Goode.
00:52:15.000 He tried to explain why McCarthy was not going to get his vote.
00:52:20.000 Is there any scenario under which you could support and vote for Kevin McCarthy?
00:52:26.000 No, I won't be voting for Kevin McCarthy tomorrow.
00:52:29.000 He's part of the problem.
00:52:30.000 He's not part of the solution.
00:52:32.000 I'll be following the will of my constituents, the voters of Virginia's 5th District, who hundreds of which have told me over the past couple of years not to support Kevin McCarthy.
00:52:43.000 But why?
00:52:45.000 Like, who's the alternative?
00:52:46.000 If there's a great alternative waiting in the wings, I'm waiting to hear it.
00:52:49.000 Who has the support of the majority caucus?
00:52:52.000 Because here are the alternatives right now.
00:52:54.000 Either the Republicans just spend the next month voting over and over and over not for Kevin McCarthy and then probably for Kevin McCarthy because you have a bunch of Republicans in the House, some of whom I've talked to, who have said they're only voting for Kevin McCarthy just to stop this stuff.
00:53:06.000 Or you're going to end up with five or six Republicans who are weak-kneed joining with the Democrats to pick the Speaker.
00:53:11.000 The way that the Speaker of the House gets picked is a majority of the membership of the House picks who the Speaker is.
00:53:16.000 Democrats right now have 212 votes.
00:53:17.000 All they need is 218.
00:53:19.000 So all they have to do is peel off five or six Republicans and suddenly they control who the Speaker is.
00:53:25.000 That doesn't mean that they're going to get to make a Democrat Speaker.
00:53:27.000 You're not going to get Republicans voting in favor of that, but they could certainly pick somebody who is a quote unquote moderate.
00:53:32.000 So what exactly is the point of any of this?
00:53:34.000 There is no point of any of this, except presumably to embarrass McCarthy in some way.
00:53:40.000 It's just, why?
00:53:42.000 Again, I just ask why? 0.96
00:53:43.000 Why are Republicans so incompetent at this? 1.00
00:53:45.000 All you have to do is sit there and shut up. 1.00
00:53:48.000 That's all you have to do. 0.99
00:53:49.000 Because again, Democrats are running hard to the left.
00:53:52.000 Listen, would I love if Kevin McCarthy were a better speaker on behalf of values I care about?
00:53:55.000 Sure.
00:53:56.000 That's true of nearly everybody in elected office in the United States.
00:53:59.000 Do I think that Republicans can afford a fight like this right now?
00:54:02.000 I do not, not with a very slim majority in the House and Joe Biden thinking that he is riding high.
00:54:08.000 If ever you are in doubt as to whether your party is doing the right thing, all you should do if you're a Republican is look at Yamiche Alcindor on NBC.
00:54:15.000 Yamiche Alcindor hates the Republicans, she's a partisan hat, and she is gleeful about what's happening inside the Republican caucus right now. 1.00
00:54:24.000 Right now, the incoming House Republican majority is in a state of disarray ahead of tomorrow's opening session, which could mean a level of Capitol Hill drama this town hasn't seen in 100 years as a floor fight over who will be Speaker of the House.
00:54:40.000 At the center of the drama is House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy.
00:54:43.000 He needs nearly everyone in the GOP's razor-thin five-seat majority to vote for him in order to become Speaker.
00:54:50.000 But he has a serious math problem on his hands, and he knows it.
00:54:54.000 Over the weekend, McCarthy held a call with rank-and-file Republicans in an attempt to sure up support, but it doesn't appear to have worked.
00:55:03.000 Well, again, the glee in the media over all of this is like, the Republicans win the House, they finally get to stop Joe Biden's agenda, and now we're having a large-scale conversation about who should fill a seat that basically all it represents is who gets committee assignments.
00:55:15.000 Because every arrangement is going to come down to the same thing.
00:55:18.000 And by the way, anyone who thinks that whoever is elected Speaker is now going to have a full-scale debt ceiling fight with Joe Biden, they're lying to you.
00:55:24.000 It's not going to happen.
00:55:25.000 They're not going to have a full-scale debt ceiling fight with Joe Biden, because Republicans haven't won a debt ceiling fight my entire career following this stuff.
00:55:32.000 Not in public opinion, not inside their own caucus, which is not going to happen. 0.76
00:55:36.000 So, you know, this is, it's absolute foolishness. 1.00
00:55:40.000 Only Republicans could be this stupid, especially given the fact that it is quite possible that their majority is going to shrink. 1.00
00:55:47.000 Remember that there is still one Republican out there who may have to resign. 1.00
00:55:51.000 That would be Representative-elect George Santos.
00:55:53.000 Santos is now, apparently, under federal investigation.
00:55:56.000 He has falsified a number of attributes of his background.
00:55:59.000 He falsely claimed a degree from Baruch College and jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
00:56:03.000 And now, apparently, federal prosecutors, state prosecutors, and the New York AG are looking into Santos' deception.
00:56:08.000 Now, that's not something I'm not sure that's justified.
00:56:12.000 Joe Biden has lied about every aspect of his past, his entire career.
00:56:15.000 Like, every single aspect of it, he has lied about.
00:56:18.000 And there's been no federal investigation into what, did he plagiarize his speeches in 1988?
00:56:22.000 Did he go to college?
00:56:23.000 Was, was somebody actually drunk when his, when his wife and child were killed in a car accident?
00:56:27.000 A story he's told many times.
00:56:29.000 Did he actually fight corn?
00:56:30.000 Like the guy, the guy routinely lies all the time.
00:56:33.000 Joe Biden.
00:56:33.000 Nobody follows up with a federal investigation.
00:56:35.000 Santos, there may be some tax ramifications.
00:56:37.000 I'm very uncomfortable with the idea.
00:56:39.000 Federal investigators look into a person who's caught publicly lying and look to see immediately whether he's committed a crime.
00:56:44.000 That's not typically how you prosecute crime.
00:56:45.000 You try to identify the crime and then you try to prosecute the culprit for the crime.
00:56:49.000 You don't identify the culprit and then try to find the crime.
00:56:51.000 If we did that with other normal human beings across American society would be really bad.
00:56:55.000 You can find anybody committing some sort of breach of the rules as long as you look deeply enough into them probably.
00:57:03.000 So, but with that said, is there going to be severe pressure for Santos to step down?
00:57:07.000 There absolutely will be.
00:57:08.000 And Republicans right now hold an incredibly narrow majority, which means McCarthy has to somehow pull together that majority.
00:57:15.000 Can Republicans afford this fight right now?
00:57:17.000 Is this a smart fight for Republicans to have?
00:57:19.000 I have a very hard time seeing how this is a smart fight for Republicans to have.
00:57:24.000 So where does this mean that we stand going into 2023?
00:57:27.000 I was reading some history over the weekend, and I believe that if we are going to look for historical precedent as to where we are in time, The best place to look would probably be the year 1967.
00:57:39.000 I say 1967 because it immediately came on the heels of a bunch of world-breaking legislation from Lyndon Baines Johnson, who of course had assumed the office in the aftermath of JFK's murder in 1963.
00:57:49.000 He assumed the office, he ran for his actual first full election in 1964, and he won overwhelmingly over Barry Goldwater.
00:57:56.000 And then he was the frontrunner going into the 1968 election.
00:57:59.000 And by the middle of 1968, he was out of the race.
00:58:03.000 By March 1968, he said, I'm not going to run for president anymore.
00:58:07.000 What happened?
00:58:08.000 The consequences of his own bad policy came back to haunt him.
00:58:11.000 He's had offensive in Vietnam.
00:58:13.000 The decay of the American economy under Lyndon Baines Johnson because he'd spent too much money.
00:58:17.000 The social dissolution that had been brought about by the LBJ administration and his changes to things like welfare.
00:58:23.000 All of that had started to come home to roost.
00:58:25.000 I think that 2023 is going to look a lot like 1967.
00:58:27.000 You have another president who is quite likely to be a one-term president in Joe Biden.
00:58:32.000 Remember, LBJ's approval ratings in 1967, before he decided that he was still running at this point, were somewhere between 45 and 47 percent.
00:58:40.000 Right now, Joe Biden's are somewhere between 43 and 45 percent.
00:58:43.000 The Democrats at the time had wide, overwhelming control of Congress and the Senate in 1967.
00:58:48.000 They just passed world-breaking legislation.
00:58:49.000 They were about to do some more.
00:58:51.000 Everything was looking up for them until it wasn't.
00:58:54.000 There's just too much change, too quickly in the United States.
00:58:57.000 And that is what you're looking at with Joe Biden.
00:58:58.000 He's not going to stop.
00:58:59.000 And what that means is that Republicans have the opportunity for pushback.
00:59:03.000 It means that the right, generally, forget about Democrats, Republicans, again, that's the stuff at the top of the iceberg, but culturally speaking, a pendulum is beginning to swing back to the other side because the left has moved too far.
00:59:12.000 They've broken apart the common ground upon which we are standing.
00:59:16.000 It is collapsing under our feet.
00:59:18.000 Like Littlefoot in The Land Before Time, you can see the gaps appearing.
00:59:21.000 And now the question is going to be, who is capable of bringing that back together if anybody?
00:59:25.000 And it's not going to be Joe Biden.
00:59:27.000 It's going to be somebody else.
00:59:29.000 And the person who it's going to be is going to have to have a very strong, cohesive, pragmatic agenda.
00:59:36.000 I think that this is why it is very important who the Republicans nominate in 2023.
00:59:40.000 That nomination process is going to begin in earnest this year.
00:59:44.000 If the Republicans decide to nominate somebody who continues to widen those cultural gaps because they are more focused on self than on actual pragmatic problems that people face, it's going to be a real problem for them.
00:59:52.000 If Republicans nominate somebody with a history of pragmatic solution making, there are a bunch of candidates out there who are like this.
00:59:57.000 And they have a chance to really seize back control of the political high ground and maybe the cultural high ground.
01:00:03.000 Again, the left has undermined and unmoored so many things in American life, ranging from the economic arrangements that underpin our lives, to spiritual arrangements that allow us to live more fulfilled lives, the rules, roles, and responsibilities that we teach our children.
01:00:16.000 That the backlash could come, and it could come quickly.
01:00:19.000 So the question is going to be how the backlash should happen.
01:00:21.000 We've talked about how it shouldn't happen, which is a sort of reactionary politics where transgressivism is the norm and where how loudly you say a thing is more important than what you actually say.
01:00:31.000 But one of the other ways that Republicans can fail here is by falling back on sort of the old truisms and tropes of, I would say, traditional John Stuart Mill liberalism.
01:00:40.000 This idea that a pluralism of voices is the thing that matters most.
01:00:43.000 Now, that does not mean that free speech doesn't matter.
01:00:45.000 It does.
01:00:45.000 Free speech is, in fact, an ultimate value.
01:00:47.000 It allows for the possibility of the debates that are necessary in order to achieve the truth.
01:00:51.000 However, many conservatives and Republicans have become very shy about speaking the kinds of truths that Pope Benedict XVI would say.
01:00:58.000 And what they'll do instead is they'll speak to your right to say the truth, but they won't say the actual truth.
01:01:03.000 And this is not enough.
01:01:04.000 It's not enough to say you should have the right to practice your religion in public.
01:01:06.000 You should have the right to be a Catholic.
01:01:07.000 You should have the right to say that marriage is between a man and a woman. 0.67
01:01:10.000 You should actually make the case why marriage is between a man and a woman.
01:01:14.000 You should actively make the case why it is wrong to trans the children. 1.00
01:01:17.000 You should actively make the case why capitalism is the best system of economic distribution.
01:01:23.000 Why it goes to the heart of creativity and innovation.
01:01:26.000 You should make that case.
01:01:27.000 It's not enough to me.
01:01:28.000 A lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives have spent the last 20 years trying to find a middle ground with people on the left saying, OK, well, we're not going to aggressively make the case for our own positions.
01:01:36.000 Instead, we're going to make the case that we should have a safe space for us to discuss these positions.
01:01:41.000 The problem is that, again, that Overton window keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
01:01:45.000 And so, yes, you have to fight for a broader Overton window, and that means defending the rights of people with whom you disagree to speak, while maintaining that they are dead wrong and then making an aggressive case as to why they are dead wrong.
01:01:54.000 So Ben Sasse has a really interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal today called America's True Divide, Pluralists vs. Zealots.
01:02:00.000 Since the most important divide in American politics isn't red versus blue, it's civic pluralists versus political zealots.
01:02:05.000 This is the truth no one in Washington acknowledges, but Americans must realize if we're going to recover.
01:02:09.000 Civic pluralists understand that ideas move the world more than power does, which is why pluralists value debate and persuasion.
01:02:14.000 We believe America is great because it is good, and America is good because the country is committed to human dignity, even for those with whom we disagree.
01:02:20.000 A continental nation of 330 million souls couldn't possibly agree on everything, but we can hash out our disagreements in the communities where we live and the institutions we build.
01:02:27.000 The small but important role of government for the civic pluralist is a framework for ordered liberty.
01:02:30.000 Government doesn't give us rights or meaning or purpose or permission.
01:02:33.000 It exists to protect us from the whims of mobs and majorities.
01:02:36.000 Okay, so this is absolutely true on the federal level.
01:02:38.000 On the federal level, the thing we should be fighting for the most is that space to have the discussion.
01:02:42.000 We should be voting and pressing for a light footprint at the federal level.
01:02:46.000 And then at the local level, where we raise our kids, we need to be pushing for solid communities grounded in eternal truth.
01:02:51.000 I keep saying eternal truth because the real battle of our time is not between pluralists and zealous.
01:02:56.000 It's between people who believe there are, in fact, eternal transmitted truths and people who do not believe that.
01:03:01.000 I don't mean you have to believe everything the Catholic Church believes.
01:03:04.000 I don't.
01:03:05.000 What I mean is there are people who believe that the traditional wisdom of the past is worthy of upholding until you have a really, really good reason for changing things.
01:03:12.000 And then there are people who believe that you should rip everything up.
01:03:14.000 The entire bargain with the past and with the future ought to be ripped up in the name of whatever you think today.
01:03:19.000 That's the real battle.
01:03:20.000 Now, part of that battle is that we have to have the discussion.
01:03:23.000 Part of that battle is that we have to maintain the ability to have that discussion, not get banned from the public square, of course.
01:03:27.000 But that is not the heart of the battle.
01:03:28.000 The heart of the battle is what is the truth?
01:03:30.000 Can you teach the truth?
01:03:31.000 Will you teach the truth to your children?
01:03:33.000 Those are two separate questions.
01:03:34.000 Can you and will you?
01:03:36.000 Yes, we have to fight for you can, but then we really, really have to fight for we will.
01:03:42.000 And it's not enough to say we can.
01:03:43.000 It's not enough to say pluralism wins the day.
01:03:45.000 Pluralism does not always win the day.
01:03:47.000 Pluralism plus the ability to defend your position, the willingness to defend your position, the balls to defend your position, right?
01:03:53.000 This is what real truth is about.
01:03:56.000 It's why the world is going to miss people like Pope Benedict XVI.
01:03:59.000 It's why a new generation is going to have to step forward, pick up that torch, and move forward with those eternal truths.
01:04:04.000 Because otherwise, the country is going to fall into the hands of people ranging from the Paul Ehrlichs, to the people who trans the kids, to the President Joe Biden's on economics. 0.68
01:04:12.000 That's the real battle.
01:04:13.000 It's way under the surface of the iceberg.
01:04:14.000 So, let's focus on the battle at the top of the iceberg, and then let's focus way more on making sure that that iceberg regains its moorings.
01:04:20.000 Otherwise, we are going to be adrift in a world of hurt.
01:04:23.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
01:04:25.000 You're not going to want to miss it because we will be taking your calls on the very first broadcast day of the brand new year.