The Ben Shapiro Show - Who’s Really Killing The Kids? | Ep. 1472

00:00:00.000 Teen depression and suicidal ideation are up and there are a bunch of reasons why.

00:00:04.000 The White House warns of catastrophic inflationate numbers and Kamala Harris didn't wear a mask at a public event because feelings.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:10.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

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00:01:37.000 Well, you've heard the argument quite recently that it is conservatives who are killing the kids.

00:01:42.000 This is an argument that has been most clearly articulated by Pete Buttigieg, who literally went on The View two days ago and suggested that Republicans and conservatives are killing kids.

00:01:50.000 And the way that they are killing kids is by not teaching small children about gender ideology and sexual orientation.

00:01:56.000 And if you don't teach them these things about gender identity and sexual orientation, you are murdering the kids because kids have all sorts of questions about their identity.

00:02:05.000 And if you don't answer them, In the most progressive possible way, you are endangering the kids.

00:02:09.000 You've also heard, over the course of the last couple years, that conservatives are murdering the children by not masking them up full-time at schools.

00:02:16.000 You are putting your own children in danger.

00:02:18.000 You don't even care about your own kids.

00:02:21.000 Well, one thing is very clear, and the thing that is clear is that teen suicidality, suicidal ideation, depression, all of these things are up.

00:02:29.000 And the reason that these things are up, there are a bunch of competing reasons as to why these things are up, but the biggest reason of all is the social incentive structure that has been created via social media, via the media, and via progressive thinking on a wide variety of issues that really damages kids in pretty significant ways.

00:02:48.000 There are two big articles from The Atlantic out today specifically about this topic.

00:02:53.000 is from Jonathan Haidt over at New York University, and the other is from Derek Thompson, who's a columnist over at The Atlantic.

00:02:59.000 So let's begin with a piece from Jonathan Haidt, because this is really important stuff.

00:03:02.000 If we're talking about what and who are damaging the kids, then you have to begin with the actual data.

00:03:07.000 So here's what Jonathan Haidt writes today, quote, What would it have been like to live in Babylon the days after its destruction?

00:03:13.000 In the book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar.

00:03:17.000 They built a tower with its top in the heavens to make a name for themselves.

00:03:20.000 God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said, look, they're one people.

00:03:23.000 They all have one language. 0.97

00:03:24.000 This is only the beginning of what they will do.

00:03:26.000 Nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

00:03:28.000 Come, let us go down, confuse their language there, so they will not understand one another's speech. 1.00

00:03:33.000 The text does not say God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let's hold that dramatic image in our minds.

00:03:38.000 People wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

00:03:43.000 The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit.

00:03:49.000 Something went terribly wrong very suddenly.

00:03:51.000 We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.

00:03:54.000 We are cut off from one another and from the past.

00:03:57.000 It has been clear for quite a while now that Red America and Blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. 0.74

00:04:07.000 But Babel is not a story about tribalism.

00:04:09.000 It's a story about the fragmentation of everything.

00:04:11.000 It's about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community.

00:04:15.000 It's a metaphor for what is happening not only between Red and Blue, but within the Left and within the Right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

00:04:24.000 Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country's future and to us as a people.

00:04:31.000 How did it happen and what does it pretend for American life?

00:04:35.000 Says Jonathan Haidt, there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales.

00:04:39.000 We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of major transitions through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships.

00:04:47.000 We see it in cultural evolution too.

00:04:49.000 As Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions driven by rising population density plus new technology, writing, roads, the printing press, that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning.

00:05:03.000 Zero-sum conflicts, like wars of religion, were better thought of as temporary setbacks and sometimes even integral to the process.

00:05:10.000 The early Internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the non-zero thesis, as did the first wave of social media platforms, which launched around 2003.

00:05:19.000 By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users on its way to roughly 3 billion today.

00:05:25.000 In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy.

00:05:29.000 What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry?

00:05:32.000 What regime could build a wall to keep out the Internet?

00:05:34.000 The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement.

00:05:41.000 That's also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.

00:05:47.000 We were closer than we had ever been to being one people, and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language.

00:05:53.000 In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans.

00:05:59.000 Quote, today our society has reached another tipping point, he wrote.

00:06:02.000 Facebook hopes to rewire the way people spread and consume information by giving them the power to share.

00:06:06.000 It would help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

00:06:11.000 So here's where things begin to go wrong, according to Jonathan Haidt.

00:06:14.000 Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow.

00:06:19.000 But what is it that holds together a large and diverse secular democracy, like the United States, or India, or for that matter, Britain or France?

00:06:26.000 Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind successful democracies.

00:06:31.000 First, social capital, extensive social networks with high levels of trust, strong institutions, and shared stories.

00:06:37.000 Social media has weakened all three.

00:06:39.000 To see how, we have to understand how social media changed over time, especially in the several years following 2009.

00:06:44.000 And I want to reiterate what those three factors are according to Jonathan Haidt.

00:06:47.000 He's a really good social scientist.

00:06:49.000 One, social capital.

00:06:51.000 Two, strong institutions.

00:06:52.000 And three, shared stories.

00:06:55.000 Says Haidt, in their early incarnations, platforms like MySpace and Facebook were relatively harmless.

00:06:59.000 They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the most static pages of their friends and favorite bands.

00:07:05.000 In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvement, from the postal service, to telephone, to email, and texting.

00:07:13.000 But gradually, social media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations.

00:07:19.000 As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand, activities that might impress others but don't deepen friendships in the way a private phone conversation will.

00:07:30.000 Once social media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation which began in 2009, the intensification of viral dynamics.

00:07:40.000 Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline, a never-ending stream of content generated by friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom.

00:07:49.000 This was often overwhelming in volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting.

00:07:52.000 That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly like posts with the click of a button.

00:07:58.000 That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful, the retweet button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers.

00:08:05.000 Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own share button, which became available in 2012.

00:08:10.000 Like and share became quickly standard features of most other platforms.

00:08:14.000 Shortly after its like button began to produce data about what best engaged users, Facebook started to develop algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a like.

00:08:22.000 Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions, especially angered outgroups, are the most likely to be shared.

00:08:27.000 By 2013, social media had become a new game with dynamics unlike those in 2008.

00:08:31.000 If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would go viral and make you internet famous for a few days.

00:08:35.000 If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts, roads of fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game. This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics.

00:08:47.000 As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality and politics, I saw this happening.

00:08:52.000 The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out the most moralistic and least reflective selves.

00:08:57.000 The volume of outrage was shocking.

00:08:59.000 And so this undermined all of the factors that you need in order to ensure, for example, that social capital is built.

00:09:09.000 And also to uphold institutions.

00:09:12.000 And also to shared stories.

00:09:13.000 Because people can create competing versions of the same story and the story you like the best is the one that you share.

00:09:17.000 Okay, so according to Jonathan, it really is social media and the viralization of politics and content that has allowed for all of this to happen.

00:09:25.000 The predictable impact of the rise of social media is the nationalization of institutions.

00:09:30.000 When you nationalize all institutions, when you nationalize all ideas, what you end up with is people who are more divided in their actual opinions.

00:09:37.000 You agree very strongly with the people you live near.

00:09:40.000 Ideological sorting is a thing.

00:09:42.000 So take my community, for example.

00:09:43.000 I'm an Orthodox Jew.

00:09:44.000 Because I'm an Orthodox Jew, this means, according to Jewish law, I have to live within walking distance of a temple so that I can walk to my synagogue on Saturday.

00:09:50.000 This means that my community is largely demographically Orthodox Jewish.

00:09:54.000 So I share a lot of values with the people among whom I live.

00:09:57.000 And this is true across the country.

00:09:58.000 People live in pockets of people with whom they generally tend to share values.

00:10:03.000 And this is becoming exacerbated because as politics infuse everybody's lives in a lot of ways, people are beginning to ideologically sort.

00:10:10.000 So red states are now getting redder and blue states are getting bluer and purple states are hitting a tipping point and then getting either red or blue.

00:10:16.000 And what this means is that the values that you share are more tenuous than they used to be unless you happen to live in a place where people really strongly agree with you.

00:10:26.000 When you nationalize all issues, when every local issue becomes a national issue, what that ends up doing is undermining the social trust that you have in communities, where the stuff you used to share was apolitical stuff, like going bowling, as Robert Putnam of Harvard used to say.

00:10:37.000 Where the stuff you used to share was Little League with your kids.

00:10:41.000 And you didn't know what the other parents of the Little League thought about politics.

00:10:43.000 You really didn't talk about that.

00:10:44.000 You just knew that your kids were on the same team, and you could be nice to each other, and you could hang out together, and you could be friends.

00:10:49.000 And then every issue not only became nationalized, but also it was basically downloaded directly into your brain via social media and your smartphone, which you were constantly scrolling for the little endorphin rush that you got every time you refreshed your Twitter page.

00:11:04.000 Yeah, all of this is really, really dangerous.

00:11:07.000 When you add on top of this, particularly for teens, The need for social approval and an incentive structure that creates social approval for the most bizarre and confused behavior, you end up with higher rates of teen suicidality, with higher rates of teen depression.

00:11:23.000 None of this should be a shock.

00:11:24.000 We've incentivized the most vulnerable people among us, minors, to engage in activities that get the most clicks and likes.

00:11:30.000 And clicks and likes are going to be defined by level of societal celebration and acceptance of particular behavior.

00:11:37.000 And society today does not celebrate and accept behavior that is driven by duty or morality in the traditional sense.

00:11:45.000 You're gonna get a lot more clicks and likes, for example, on TikTok, if you suggest that you are a transgender person, then you will, if you put up a TikTok video of yourself handing out food at a homeless shelter with your church.

00:11:58.000 Viral content is driven by stuff that people want to see, and people are naturally driven to see and look at things that are out of the ordinary, that are considered strange or new.

00:12:10.000 We're driven by the need to see the new.

00:12:12.000 That's something the human brain is driven by.

00:12:15.000 And you cannot disconnect the rise of social media from the rise of progressive politics.

00:12:18.000 Social media, without the rise of a progressive, mainlined attitude toward extraordinarily radical issues, would not be nearly as damaging as it has now become.

00:12:26.000 Well, as social media corrupts the entire country, and as people embrace values that are destroying all of our social fabric, now might be a good time for you to get the insurance that you need.

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00:13:35.000 Which brings us to this other piece by Derek Thompson today over at The Atlantic.

00:13:39.000 It's called, Why American Teens Are So Sad.

00:13:42.000 It's about four forces that are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

00:13:47.000 He points out the United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental health crisis.

00:13:50.000 From 2009 to 2011, 2021, the share of American high school students who say they feel persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness rose from 26% a quarter to 44%, according to a new CDC study.

00:14:03.000 This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.

00:14:06.000 Now, theoretically, we should have the highest levels of teenage happiness ever recorded, should we not?

00:14:09.000 Because after all, teens are freer to do now what they want to do than ever before.

00:14:13.000 Their parents celebrate them doing whatever they want to do, whatever floats their boat, however they identify, whatever sexual behavior they wish to engage in.

00:14:20.000 Whatever they do is met with societal approval because self-esteem is the key.

00:14:24.000 As we become a more progressive society in terms of how we raise our teenagers and in terms of how social media treats teenagers, teenagers are not becoming happier, they're becoming a lot sadder.

00:14:33.000 Because it turns out that human liberty and human freedom requires boundaries.

00:14:37.000 It requires duties.

00:14:39.000 It requires institutions.

00:14:40.000 It requires roles.

00:14:43.000 The truth is that human happiness is reliant on you playing a series of roles.

00:14:48.000 And we used to understand this in civilization.

00:14:50.000 All sorts of civilizations understood this.

00:14:52.000 And in fact, if you go to the cemeteries, I've mentioned before, if you go to the cemetery, you can see this.

00:14:56.000 When you go to the cemetery and you look at the epitaphs on the graves, what you will see on the headstones is a description of roles.

00:15:02.000 Father and husband.

00:15:03.000 Mother and daughter.

00:15:05.000 Mother and sister.

00:15:06.000 Friend.

00:15:07.000 These are all roles.

00:15:07.000 Right?

00:15:08.000 These are things that have rules attached to them.

00:15:10.000 You can't be a good mother unless you perform a series of rituals with your kids. 1.00

00:15:14.000 Unless you fulfill a series of duties with your kids.

00:15:17.000 The same thing is true of being a good son, or being a good daughter, or being a good husband, or being a good wife.

00:15:22.000 All of these roles are what give your life definition.

00:15:25.000 And then, in the 20th century, Western civilization decided that the truth about human happiness lay in blowing up those rules.

00:15:34.000 That if you blew up the rules, and you experienced unfettered liberty, meaning libertinism, if you were just able to get rid of the rules, all of the rules, and discovered the inner authenticity, the inner you, this is where happiness truly lay.

00:15:46.000 And for a long time, And that sort of ideology had been basically stymied by the realities of life.

00:15:51.000 Because the thing is that if you acted like a libertine, there were actual consequences to it.

00:15:55.000 And then in the 1960s, we alleviated a lot of those consequences through the creation of new technologies.

00:16:01.000 For good and for bad, right?

00:16:03.000 Birth control pill.

00:16:04.000 Very good in many ways because it allowed people to plan how they wanted to live their lives in terms of having kids.

00:16:09.000 Very bad in the sense that it completely disconnected sex from obligation.

00:16:13.000 Which is actually has some pretty dire side effects as it turns out societally.

00:16:17.000 Well, once you blew up the rules, and then once you as a society created a social media contagion that celebrated, the more authentic you were, and the more authentic, you know how we can tell you're truly authentic?

00:16:29.000 The more rules that you defy, the more rules that you blow up, that's the more authentic you are.

00:16:34.000 In fact, we can adjudicate your level of authenticity by how many rules you destroy, by how many people you refuse to go along with the social institutions.

00:16:42.000 You are a hero.

00:16:43.000 This means you are the most authentic you.

00:16:45.000 The most authentic you is not the person who lives in accordance with duty and with roles and with society building and building social capital and helping to reshore up those institutions and helping to share stories with one another, all the factors that build civilizations.

00:16:58.000 The thing that makes you the most authentic is bucking all those things.

00:17:01.000 If you break the social capital, this means that you are just being the most you that you could possibly be.

00:17:05.000 If you destroy institutions that create roles and rules, this means you are the most you that you could possibly be.

00:17:11.000 And so we celebrate you.

00:17:12.000 If you have your own story, forget about history, herstory.

00:17:16.000 We need your story, your truth, your refusal to share a story with others.

00:17:21.000 But instead, everybody else to accept your story?

00:17:23.000 This means that you're the most authentic you that you can be.

00:17:25.000 The cult of authenticity that has arisen basically from the 1960s on had been tried beginning in the early 1800s by the Romantics, but then it actually took real hold in Western civilization in the 60s, and now it has been wildly exacerbated by the rise of social media, which allows you to like and make viral a bunch of content that demonstrates authenticity.

00:17:44.000 This sort of stuff has dire ramifications for the most vulnerable among us.

00:17:48.000 Because guess what it is to raise a child?

00:17:50.000 What it is to raise a child in any sort of normal civilization is to civilize the child.

00:17:55.000 I have three kids.

00:17:56.000 They're eight, five, and two.

00:17:57.000 And they are uncivilized.

00:17:58.000 Because kids are uncivilized.

00:18:00.000 They have no prefrontal cortex to speak of. 0.95

00:18:02.000 They are all amygdala.

00:18:03.000 All they are in terms of brain development is an emotional center and not a lot of forethought.

00:18:07.000 Your forethought happens here and your emotional center happens in the amygdala.

00:18:10.000 Your prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until you hit your mid-twenties.

00:18:14.000 So, what this means is that teenagers have the greatest imbalance between amygdala response and prefrontal cortex.

00:18:21.000 Their prefrontal cortexes are really underdeveloped.

00:18:24.000 Their amygdalas are really overdeveloped because the hormones are now flowing.

00:18:27.000 And what this means is that they are really unstable.

00:18:29.000 So it requires stronger institutions to hem in kids.

00:18:33.000 Stronger rules.

00:18:34.000 And kids like the rules.

00:18:36.000 They desire the rules.

00:18:37.000 They require the rules.

00:18:38.000 And if you don't give them the rules, they destroy themselves.

00:18:40.000 And this is what we are watching right now.

00:18:42.000 All this nonsense about how parents need to just give kids the freedom to be kids.

00:18:48.000 Okay, that's true to the extent that you need to give kids the freedom to make mistakes.

00:18:51.000 It is not true to the extent that you allow kids to make up their own rules and to buck institutions and destroy those institutions or suggest that the institutions of which you are a part are actually guilty of killing kids by existing.

00:19:02.000 What kills kids is destroying all of the boundaries.

00:19:06.000 That is the same thing as allowing your three-year-old to walk alone on the freeway.

00:19:09.000 You would never do that.

00:19:10.000 But societally speaking, this is precisely what we have done, not only with small kids, but also with teenagers.

00:19:15.000 So here's what Derek Thompson writes today.

00:19:17.000 And again, his message is not exactly mine.

00:19:19.000 I'm just gonna read you what he says, and then I'm gonna explain where we differ.

00:19:23.000 He says, the government survey of almost 8,000 high school students, which was conducted in the first months of 2021, found a great deal of variation in mental health among different groups.

00:19:31.000 More than one in four girls reported they had seriously contemplated attempting suicide during the pandemic, which was twice the rate of boys.

00:19:36.000 Now, this happens to be fairly consistent.

00:19:39.000 Teenage girls tend to be more suicidal than teenage boys.

00:19:42.000 Nearly half of LGBTQ teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14% of their heterosexual peers.

00:19:50.000 Sadness among white teens seems to be rising faster than among other groups.

00:19:54.000 But overall, there's a general rise.

00:19:57.000 The differentials, by the way, are very, very consistent.

00:19:59.000 So LGBT teens are significantly more suicidal and more depressed than teens who are not LGBT.

00:20:06.000 And males are significantly less depressed and less suicidal than females are.

00:20:13.000 According to Derek Thompson, the big picture is the same across all categories.

00:20:16.000 Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse.

00:20:18.000 For every teenage demographic, it's happening all over the country.

00:20:20.000 Since 2009, statilists and hopelessness have increased for every race, for straight teens and gay teens, for teens who say they've never had sex, and for those who say they've had sex with males and or females, for students in each year of high school, for teens in all 50 states.

00:20:31.000 Why is this happening?

00:20:33.000 So he says the first fallacy is we can chalk all this up to teens behaving badly.

00:20:37.000 In fact, a lot of self-reported teen behaviors are moving in a positive direction.

00:20:41.000 Drinking and driving is down 50% from the 90s.

00:20:43.000 School fights are down 50%.

00:20:45.000 Sex is down more than 70% before the age of 13.

00:20:48.000 And LGBTQ acceptance is up.

00:20:51.000 So the idea here is that It's not bullying, right?

00:20:54.000 Which that's true.

00:20:55.000 It is not bullying.

00:20:56.000 But again, as we will see when he speaks of bad behavior, he is speaking of behavior that you would call a victim driven behavior, right?

00:21:02.000 Bullying or drunk driving.

00:21:04.000 But he's not talking about bad behavior in the sense of breaking institutions and roles and indoctrinating kids in the idea that the destruction of roles and rules is good for them, which is the long term trend in destroying the mental health of minors.

00:21:17.000 The second fallacy is the teens have always been moody and sadness looks like it is rising because more people are willing to talk about it.

00:21:21.000 Objective measures of anxiety and depression like eating disorders, self-harming behaviors, teen suicides are up sharply over the past decade.

00:21:28.000 The third fallacy is today's mental health crisis was principally caused by the pandemic and an overreaction to COVID.

00:21:33.000 It wasn't principally caused by those things.

00:21:36.000 So instead, Derek Thompson suggests that there are four factors that are propelling the increase in depression and suicidality.

00:21:44.000 And underscoring all of this, as I'm going to argue in just a moment, underscoring all of these factors, is the rising tide of a progressive social ethos that believes that the destruction of social fabric, social institutions, and shared stories is actually a net good for society.

00:21:59.000 Again, a man alone on a desert island is not truly free.

00:22:02.000 That is the only person, by the way, who has no rules and rules attached to him.

00:22:06.000 But that person is not free.

00:22:07.000 That's what we've created.

00:22:08.000 We've isolated teens by not having them engage in the process of civilization. 0.99

00:22:12.000 While we are destroying our teens through a combination of stupidity and self-involvement, but here's the thing. 0.99

00:22:19.000 You need to look to the future. 0.99

00:22:20.000 And one of the ways that you look to the future is by refinancing that home mortgage.

00:22:25.000 If you're paying rent right now, you're actually paying a mortgage, but not You're actually just helping your landlord pay off the mortgage.

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00:23:22.000 Okay, so here's what Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic about the four factors that are militating in favor of the increase in teen depression and suicidality.

00:23:29.000 One, social media use.

00:23:31.000 As we've discussed from Jonathan Haidt, not a shock.

00:23:34.000 As teens look for approval from others, and they look for the likes, and they try to craft their public images, and they feel the blowback when their public image does not meet with approval, this has increased teen depression.

00:23:44.000 He says, one explanation is that teenagers, and teenage girls in particular, are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd.

00:23:51.000 As I've written, social media seems to hijack this keen peer sensitivity and drive obsessive thinking about body image and popularity.

00:23:56.000 The problem isn't just that social media fuels anxiety, but also that it makes it harder for today's young people to cope with the pressures of growing up.

00:24:03.000 Two, sociality is down.

00:24:06.000 According to a couple of social scientists, one is named Jean Twenge, a psychologist, And the other is named Steinberg.

00:24:17.000 According to these two social scientists, they stress the biggest problem with social media might not be social media itself, but rather the activities it replaces.

00:24:25.000 Steinberg says, I tell parents all the time, if Instagram is merely displacing TV, I'm not concerned about it.

00:24:29.000 But today's teens spend more time than ever on social media, five hours daily on social media.

00:24:35.000 And that habit seems to be displacing a lot of beneficial activity.

00:24:37.000 The share of high school students who got eight or more hours of sleep declined 30% between 2007 and 2019.

00:24:44.000 Today's teens are less likely to go out with friends, get their driver's licenses, or play youth sports.

00:24:49.000 Three, the world is stressful and there's more news about the world's stressors.

00:24:53.000 Lisa D'Amour, clinical psychologist and author, said no single factor can account for the rise of teen sadness.

00:24:57.000 She believes a part of the answer is that the world has become more stressful, or at least teenagers' perceptions of the world seem to be causing them more stress.

00:25:04.000 In the last decade, teenagers have become increasingly stressed by concerns about gun violence, climate change, and the political environment, she wrote in an email.

00:25:10.000 Hey, who does that sound like?

00:25:11.000 Who's militating in favor of a panic-emergency-driven state?

00:25:14.000 Gun violence, climate change, the political environment?

00:25:17.000 Would that be progressivism rearing its ugly head?

00:25:20.000 I mean, by the way, you tell teens that the world is going to end during their lifetime, and you try out Greta Thunberg to explain how disappointed she is in all of you?

00:25:26.000 That's not gonna have a great mental impact.

00:25:28.000 So sociality is down.

00:25:29.000 Socializing, by the way, happens in the context of institutions.

00:25:33.000 Happens in school, happens in church, happens in sports leagues, happens in all the places you need to build social capital.

00:25:38.000 All the places that have been deemed not particularly necessary or appropriate, and more likely to cram down conservative social values than is necessary.

00:25:46.000 And finally, Derek Thompson says, modern parenting strategies.

00:25:49.000 He says in the past 40 years, American parents, especially those with a college degree, have nearly doubled the amount of time they spend coaching, chauffeuring, tutoring, and otherwise helping their teenage children.

00:25:57.000 The economist Valerie Ramey has labeled this the rug rat race.

00:26:01.000 High-income parents in particular are spending much more time preparing their kids for competitive college admissions process.

00:26:07.000 He says the rug rat race is an upper-class phenomenon that can't explain a generalized increase in teen sadness, but it could well explain part of what is going on. 1.00

00:26:15.000 So, um, This is the part that I disagree with.

00:26:19.000 The idea that the parents are now more demanding than ever because kids are basically over-parented.

00:26:25.000 No, there's one other problem that has been happening that no one is going to talk about.

00:26:29.000 And so we'll talk about it now.

00:26:30.000 And that is, again, the destruction of all of the traditional demands upon teens to socialize and to engage in proper behavior and to form their identity in conjunction with the institutions that help them live a happier life.

00:26:44.000 I'm gonna come back to, as church attendance has declined, sadness and depression have gone up.

00:26:48.000 As synagogue attendance has declined, sadness and depression have gone up.

00:26:51.000 As sexual freedom, and not even just how much sex teens are having, because that's gone down, the idea that your identity is wrapped up in your sexual identity, as that has gone up, teen sadness and depression have also gone up.

00:27:05.000 There is a wide differential, by the way, between, with regard to teens, Suicidality, depression rates between, for example, lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth and heterosexual youths.

00:27:16.000 And that is not due to societal discrimination.

00:27:20.000 It is very consistent across place.

00:27:22.000 It is very consistent across time.

00:27:24.000 Because there's no question that LGBT acceptance by the media and by society generally has led to a tremendous increase in the number of people who now identify this way.

00:27:35.000 And celebration has led to an enormous increase in the number of people who identify this way.

00:27:39.000 And so, just two factors we're gonna have to take into account when we look at the rising rates in total of teens who are experiencing depression, suicidal ideation.

00:27:48.000 Okay, one, people who identify as Non-cis heterosexual people who identify this way are much more likely to suffer from depression and suicidality.

00:28:02.000 And two, the number of people who identify this way has spiked dramatically among teenagers.

00:28:07.000 Those are just two facts.

00:28:09.000 Take from that what you will, but those are the statistical facts.

00:28:12.000 And so is it possible that a society that actually cheers, celebrates, deems as the height of human happiness and authenticity, the finding that you are not in conjunction with society's rules is actually incentivizing teens to be more depressed?

00:28:24.000 Is actually confusing teens and making them less happy?

00:28:28.000 The rates is according to the CDC.

00:28:30.000 Percentage of US high school students who felt sad or hopeless 2019 Lesbian, gay, and bisexual, 66.3% in 2019.

00:28:37.000 Heterosexual, 32.2%. 0.88

00:28:41.000 So more than double the rate for LGB youth.

00:28:44.000 This doesn't include T. We'll get to T in just one second because T is rising dramatically.

00:28:49.000 Seriously considered suicide.

00:28:50.000 LGB, 47% in 2019.

00:28:51.000 Heterosexual, 14.5%. 0.99

00:28:52.000 Made a suicide plan. 0.90

00:28:52.000 Okay, so that's pretty serious. 0.90

00:28:54.000 Lesbian, gay, and bisexual, 40.2%.

00:28:55.000 Heterosexual, 12.1%. 0.92

00:28:56.000 Attempted suicide.

00:28:57.000 Actual suicide attempt.

00:28:59.000 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, 23.4%.

00:29:00.000 Heterosexual, 6.4%. 0.90

00:29:01.000 40.2% heterosexual 12.1% attempted suicide actual suicide attempt lesbian gay bisexual 23.4% heterosexual 6.4% about four times the rate if you are lgb now this does not mean that we shouldn't have sympathy for people who are suicidal no matter why they are suicidal

00:29:22.000 But, if you are driving an increasing number of young people to identify as members of the LGBTQ+, IA-, etc., and it turns out that the suicidality and depression rates among this group of people is very, very high, you should not be surprised when there's additional suicidality in the cohort in general.

00:29:42.000 Obviously.

00:29:44.000 I mean, again, there are wild disparities in these statistics.

00:29:47.000 And pretending they don't exist isn't going to make them go away.

00:29:50.000 This does not include, by the way, the transgender adolescent suicide rate is extraordinary.

00:29:55.000 According to an article, this is from PubMed, the authors are Russell Toomey, Amy Sivertson, and Morris Schramko.

00:30:02.000 This is from the Journal of Pediatrics, October of 2018.

00:30:06.000 Nearly 14% of adolescents reported a suicide attempt.

00:30:09.000 Disparities by gender identity in suicide attempts were found.

00:30:12.000 Female to male adolescents, Right? 0.73

00:30:15.000 This is the most fast-growing group of people who now identify as transgender or female-to-male.

00:30:20.000 So it used to be a vast majority of people who identified as transgender were male-to-female.

00:30:24.000 Now it has reversed because of rapid onset gender dysphoria, social contagion, and social media.

00:30:29.000 The suicide rate, attempted suicide rate, okay?

00:30:31.000 This isn't even like suicidal ideation, like thought about suicide.

00:30:34.000 This is attempted suicide rate.

00:30:36.000 Female-to-male adolescents, 50.8%, more than half, Followed by adolescents who identified as not exclusively male or female, 41.8%.

00:30:48.000 Male to female adolescents, 29.9%.

00:30:51.000 Questioning adolescents, 27.9%.

00:30:54.000 Female adolescents generally, 17.6%.

00:30:57.000 And male adolescents, 9.8%.

00:31:00.000 Identifying as non-heterosexual exacerbated the risk for all adolescents, except for those who did not exclusively identify as male or female.

00:31:06.000 If you're non-binary, it didn't really exacerbate it.

00:31:08.000 It was just sort of wrapped into the package.

00:31:11.000 For transgender adolescents, no other sociodemographic characteristic was associated with suicide attempts.

00:31:16.000 So the idea that it's just, you know, class, or that it's race, no.

00:31:20.000 Across all boundaries, these are the stats.

00:31:23.000 What that suggests is, again, if you have a population that has gone from, and I'm looking at the Gallup polls right now, the LGBT identification in the United States has spiked unbelievably dramatically.

00:31:35.000 In 2012, the number of Americans who self-identified as LGBTQIA+, etc.

00:31:40.000 was 3.5%.

00:31:40.000 In 2013, it was 3.6%.

00:31:41.000 In 2014, it was 3.7%.

00:31:42.000 By 2021, it was 7.1%, more than doubling from 2012.

00:31:43.000 In 2013, it was 3.6%.

00:31:45.000 In 2014, it was 3.7%.

00:31:47.000 By 2021, it was 7.1%, more than doubling from 2012.

00:31:53.000 And it is very, very striated by age.

00:31:57.000 Here are the responses by age.

00:32:01.000 If you were born before 1946, 0.8% of people born before 1946 identified as LGBTQ.

00:32:03.000 If you were born from 1997 to 2003, 20.8% identify as LGBTQ.

00:32:06.000 as LGBTQ. If you were born from 1997 to 2003, 20.8% identify as LGBTQ.

00:32:16.000 Okay, by the way, that is people who are aged 19 to 25. 19 to 25.

00:32:23.000 For people who are currently aged 12 to 19, I guarantee you it's way higher than 20.8%.

00:32:28.000 How do I know?

00:32:29.000 Because for each successive generation, it is increasing dramatically.

00:32:32.000 And it's increasing dramatically specifically because of social contagion and social incentivization and all of this sort of stuff.

00:32:40.000 Okay, add on top of that, By the way, all of the insanity about locking people in their homes during COVID and masking them up so that they don't even have social contact.

00:32:49.000 And is it any shock whatsoever that you have this massive increase in suicidal ideation and depression?

00:32:54.000 Why is this a shock at all?

00:32:55.000 Again, remove all boundaries for people who have no capacity to create their own. 0.99

00:32:59.000 And what you end up with is not freedom.

00:33:01.000 You end up with suffering.

00:33:03.000 A great example of this.

00:33:04.000 Today, there's an article, it's a heartbreaking article in the Washington Post, by a person named Corinna Cohn.

00:33:09.000 It's called, What I Wish I'd Known When I Was 19 and Had Sex Reassignment Surgery.

00:33:12.000 Because we've not been able to talk about any of this stuff.

00:33:15.000 You're not supposed to.

00:33:16.000 If you mention the costs of sex reassignment surgery, or if you mention the fact that transition does not actually prevent suicide, according to best available data, Longitudinal study from Sweden, for example, that covered a 30-year time span found adults who underwent surgical transition were 19 times more likely than age-matched peers to die by suicide overall.

00:33:37.000 Female-to-male participants was 40 times the expected rate, according to one 2011 study, for example.

00:33:44.000 If you mention this stuff, you're considered very bad.

00:33:46.000 You're breaking the rules, the new rules.

00:33:47.000 Okay, so according to this columnist in the Washington Post, this person talks openly about the cost of this sort of stuff that you're not supposed to talk about.

00:33:53.000 Is it any shock that when you have a society that lies to you, About the evils of traditional male and female roles, for example.

00:34:01.000 Not suggesting that females belong in the kitchen and that males are out killing tigers in front of the cave, but suggests that females Are different than males in very strong and important ways, including the ability to bear and rear children differently than males do.

00:34:16.000 And when you destroy all of that and you don't prepare people for motherhood and fatherhood, when you don't prepare people for becoming responsible members of a religious or social community, that they don't do that, that instead they become free-floating, atomistic agents who are a danger to themselves.

00:34:31.000 Is that a shock?

00:34:32.000 It shouldn't be.

00:34:32.000 We'll get into this amazing piece in the Washington Post in a moment.

00:34:35.000 First, we're a little over a year into Joe Biden's presidency, and honest to God, I didn't think that it was possible for a doddering old fool to set so many things on fire this quickly. 0.95

00:34:43.000 From gas prices to the war in Ukraine, it's safe to say the leader of the free world, he is just stumbling around and banging his head against hard objects. 0.59

00:34:51.000 Not only that, massive corporations like Disney are showing us what they really have in mind for our future generations, complete left-wing indoctrination on social issues.

00:34:57.000 Which is why you should tune in to catch an all-new episode of all of your favorites discussing what's happening and how we are actively fighting it on Backstage tomorrow.

00:35:05.000 It's me, Jeremy Boring, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Andrew Klavan.

00:35:08.000 It streams tomorrow, 7pm Eastern, 6pm Central on dailywire.com and on our YouTube channel, Daily Wire.

00:35:14.000 Do not miss it!

00:35:15.000 If you're not a member yet, head on over to dailyware.com slash subscribe, use code build the future for 45% off your membership today.

00:35:22.000 You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.

00:35:26.000 So there's a heartbreaking article from a person named Corinna Cohn, a software developer in Indianapolis.

00:35:36.000 who is an officer in the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network and is titled, What I Wish I'd Known When I Was 19 and Had Sex Reassignment Surgery.

00:35:42.000 Quote, When I was 19, I had surgery for sex reassignment, or what is now called gender affirmation surgery.

00:35:47.000 A callow young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood could not have imagined reaching middle age.

00:35:51.000 But now I'm closer to 50, keeping a watchful eye on my 401k and dieting and exercising the hope I'll have a healthy retirement.

00:35:57.000 In terms of my priorities and interests today, that younger incarnation of myself might as well have been a different person.

00:36:02.000 Yet that was the person who committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers.

00:36:06.000 There's much debate today about transgender treatment, especially for young people.

00:36:09.000 Others might feel differently about their choices, but I know now I wasn't old enough to make that decision.

00:36:13.000 Given the strong cultural forces today casting a benign light on these matters, I thought it might be helpful for young people and their parents to hear what I wish I had known.

00:36:21.000 I once believed I would be more successful finding love as a woman than as a man.

00:36:24.000 But in truth, few straight men are interested in having a physical relationship with a person who was born the same sex as they were.

00:36:29.000 In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body. 0.73

00:36:35.000 It turned out several of my crushes were gay.

00:36:37.000 If I had confessed my interest, what might have happened?

00:36:40.000 As a teenager, I was repelled by the thought of having biological children.

00:36:43.000 But in my vision of the adult future, I imagined marrying a man and adopting a child.

00:36:47.000 It was easy to sacrifice my ability to reproduce in pursuit of fulfilling my dream.

00:36:50.000 Years later, I was surprised by the pangs I felt as my friends and younger sister started families of their own.

00:36:56.000 The sacrifices I made seemed irrelevant to the teenager I was.

00:36:58.000 Someone with gender dysphoria, yes, but also anxiety and depression.

00:37:01.000 The most severe cause of dread came from my own body.

00:37:04.000 I was not prepared for puberty, nor for the strong sexual drive typical for my age and sex.

00:37:08.000 Surgery unshackled me from my body's urges, but the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage.

00:37:13.000 From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient, and will remain one for the rest of my life.

00:37:17.000 I must choose between the risks of taking exogenous estrogen, which include venous thromboembolism and stroke, or the risks of taking nothing, which includes degeneration of bone health.

00:37:26.000 In either case, my risk of dementia is higher, a side effect of eschewing testosterone.

00:37:30.000 What was I seeking for my sacrifice?

00:37:32.000 A feeling of wholeness and perfection.

00:37:33.000 I was still a virgin when I went in for surgery.

00:37:35.000 I mistakenly believed this made my choice more serious and authentic.

00:37:38.000 I chose an irreversible change before I'd even begun to understand my sexuality.

00:37:42.000 The surgeon deemed my operation a good outcome, but intercourse never became pleasurable.

00:37:47.000 When I tell friends they're saddened by the loss, but to abstract me, I cannot grieve the absence of a thing I've never had.

00:37:53.000 Weren't my parents in all this?

00:37:54.000 They were aware of what I was doing, but by that point, I had pushed them out of my life.

00:37:58.000 I didn't need parents questioning me or establishing realistic expectations, especially when I found all I needed online.

00:38:03.000 Is this sound?

00:38:03.000 Like, maybe this is what we're talking about here?

00:38:06.000 I shudder to think of how distorting today's social media is for confused teenagers.

00:38:09.000 I'm also alarmed by how readily authority figures facilitate transition.

00:38:13.000 I had to persuade two therapists, an endocrinologist, and a surgeon to give me what I wanted.

00:38:17.000 None of them were under the crushing professional pressure as they would now be to quote-unquote affirm my choice.

00:38:22.000 I may well have transitioned after waiting a few years.

00:38:24.000 If I hadn't transitioned, I likely would have suffered from the world in other ways.

00:38:27.000 In other words, I'm still working out how much regret to feel, but I'm comfortable with the ambiguity.

00:38:31.000 What advice would I pass on to young people?

00:38:33.000 Learning to fit in your body is a common struggle.

00:38:35.000 Fad diets, body shape and clothing, cosmetic surgery are all signs that countless millions of people, at some point, have a hard time accepting their own reflection.

00:38:42.000 The prospect of sex can be intimidating, but sex is essential in healthy relationships.

00:38:46.000 Give it a chance before permanently altering your body.

00:38:48.000 Most of all, slow down.

00:38:50.000 Or maybe, perhaps, we should think about the roles that have been developed over the course of centuries because they are important.

00:38:57.000 Maybe it turns out that the source of all wisdom is not your bizarre new notions of how society ought to work and how biology ought not count.

00:39:03.000 Perhaps, in the end, there are really only three sources of human knowledge.

00:39:08.000 One is the actual facts on the ground, biological reality.

00:39:12.000 Two is the accepted wisdom of the ages, which is, in fact, a tested and tried hypothesis.

00:39:17.000 And you need to actually debunk that hypothesis before simply tossing it out the window, especially when it's been tried over the course of centuries.

00:39:24.000 The basic rule when it comes to destroying roles and rules in society, you have to explain why those roles and rules have failed and why things will be better if you uproot them.

00:39:32.000 You can't just destroy them willy-nilly.

00:39:34.000 Because they are far more tested and tried than whatever nonsense you came up with at your head this very moment.

00:39:40.000 And finally, human reason.

00:39:41.000 But it has to be connected.

00:39:43.000 Reason can't be free-floating.

00:39:45.000 Rationalism is not a solution here. 0.99

00:39:46.000 Because people come up with all sorts of dumb ideas out of their own heads. 0.63

00:39:50.000 It has to be connected with realities, factual, biological realities. 0.98

00:39:54.000 It has to be connected with the realities of tradition.

00:39:58.000 And then you can make incremental changes if you are engaged in that ongoing dialectic process, that conversation between reason and biology and accepted tradition and wisdom.

00:40:09.000 If you just jettison two of the three, or as we now do, all three, you shouldn't be surprised when people find themselves to be completely disconnected from reality, from logic, and from happiness.

00:40:20.000 None of that should be a shock.

00:40:22.000 And of course, all of this is exacerbated again by a social media climate that celebrates you the more that you violate the rules, which is how you end up with videos like this one.

00:40:30.000 There's an Oklahoma teacher who's literally explaining to kids that if your parents disagree with you, I will be your new parent.

00:40:38.000 And when social media is your parent, you don't have parents who are an orphan. 1.00

00:40:43.000 If your parents don't love and accept you for who you are this Christmas, f*** them. 1.00

00:40:47.000 I'm your parents now. 1.00

00:40:48.000 I'm proud of you.

00:40:49.000 Drink some water.

00:40:50.000 I love you.

00:40:51.000 Bye.

00:40:54.000 You don't.

00:40:54.000 He doesn't know you.

00:40:54.000 He doesn't know anything about you.

00:40:56.000 This doesn't seem like a particularly happy person either.

00:40:59.000 But again, destroying rules, destroying rules.

00:41:02.000 This is what the progressive left lives for. 0.95

00:41:05.000 And as they win, and as that message is spread via social media, and as control is taken out of the hands of parents who actually care about their kids a lot more than these morons on social media, kids are going to become less and less happy. 0.99

00:41:18.000 So who's really killing the kids? 1.00

00:41:19.000 An ideology that suggests that the most vulnerable people in our society should be making life-altering decisions forever based on the celebration of a bunch of idiots on social media who spend all day clicking like buttons. 1.00

00:41:31.000 That's a great way to destroy your society and we are definitely doing that right now. 1.00

00:41:36.000 Okay, meanwhile...

00:41:37.000 The new inflation stats are out and they are absolutely horrifying.

00:41:40.000 The new inflation stats show that we are now at 8.5%.

00:41:43.000 8.5% is the highest since the late 70s, early 1980s.

00:41:47.000 This is massive inflation.

00:41:52.000 Now, the White House was warning yesterday this is exactly what was going to be announced.

00:41:55.000 There was Jen Psaki yesterday announcing this.

00:41:57.000 Because of the actions we've taken to address the Putin price hike, we are in a better place than we were last month. 0.59

00:42:04.000 But we expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin's price hike.

00:42:12.000 And we expect a large difference between core and headline inflation reflecting the global disruptions in energy and food markets.

00:42:20.000 The numbers are astonishing.

00:42:21.000 The food index increased 8.8%.

00:42:24.000 That is the largest 12-month increase since the period ending May of 1981 when we were in the middle of Jimmy Carter's stagflation.

00:42:30.000 That was the tail end of it before Paul Volcker ratcheted up the interest rates to like 18-20%.

00:42:35.000 President Biden, by the way, is fighting back the oil prices.

00:42:38.000 How's he doing so?

00:42:39.000 He's going to announce that his administration will temporarily allow E15 gasoline, which is gasoline that uses a 15% ethanol blend, typically banned for sale from June to September to be sold this summer.

00:42:48.000 Wow, that's gonna fix the problem.

00:42:50.000 Is ethanol.

00:42:51.000 Ethanol is gonna fix the problem.

00:42:54.000 Sure.

00:42:55.000 It is a 1.2% increase in the inflation rate since last month's report.

00:42:58.000 That is still the highest single increase since 2005.

00:43:00.000 Hourly earnings are down 2.7%.

00:43:04.000 Weekly earnings are down 6%.

00:43:06.000 That renders essentially all wage gains absolutely meaningless.

00:43:10.000 So just a disaster area of inflation under the Biden administration.

00:43:16.000 None of that is particularly shocking.

00:43:19.000 Well, the good news is we have Kamala Harris out there to explain how they are really interested in lowering Americans' monthly bills.

00:43:26.000 The president and I know that one of the biggest challenges facing working families today is the rising cost of living.

00:43:34.000 Helping Americans lower their monthly bills is one of our administration's top priorities.

00:43:41.000 And that is why we are here today.

00:43:42.000 Yeah, and you've been so good at it that you've ratcheted up America's living bills beyond the measure of the rational.

00:43:51.000 Speaking of which, the people who are getting hurt the worst are the people who are on fixed incomes, of course.

00:43:55.000 If you're on a fixed income, the new inflation stats are just wrecking you.

00:43:58.000 Because, after all, the amount of money that you're getting every month is exactly the same, and now everything costs a lot more.

00:44:03.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, signs are mounting that high inflation is helping propel more people, including retirees, back into the labor force, according to economists.

00:44:10.000 That could be good for the economy overall, as a growing workforce boosts the economy's growth prospects.

00:44:14.000 It could ease staffing shortages that have pushed up wages and added to price pressures.

00:44:17.000 But for many people, including those who rely on pensions or limited savings, rising prices are an unwelcome development, forcing them back onto the job market.

00:44:24.000 Inflation is a tax on a couple of types of people.

00:44:27.000 One, people with savings, and two, people of low income.

00:44:30.000 That is where inflation really hurts people.

00:44:32.000 According to Joseph Broussoulis, the chief economist at RSMUS, quote, We're beginning to see the migration of the older cohort who expected to live on fixed income and a low interest rate and low inflation environment that has not materialized.

00:44:43.000 Therefore, they have to come back to the labor force to create the conditions so they can retire.

00:44:46.000 He said, really, what you're dealing with is an inflationary shock that has elicited a change in this behavior.

00:44:52.000 The share of people aged over 55 either working or looking for a job rose to 39% in March from 38% in October.

00:45:01.000 More than 480,000 people in that age group entered the labor force during the past six months.

00:45:04.000 Now, this makes sense.

00:45:05.000 Inflation is basically driving people back into the workforce.

00:45:08.000 So all of the talk about how people were going to be quitting long-term from the economy, that was only true so long as Joe Biden could subsidize them.

00:45:14.000 But he can't subsidize them, not to the tune of the inflation that he has now created.

00:45:19.000 Roughly 2.6 million Americans retired earlier than expected between February 2020 and October 2021.

00:45:24.000 Now many are returning to work at rates not seen since March 2020.

00:45:29.000 Again, people still need to pay their bills. 0.98

00:45:31.000 And this is deeply connected with the stupidity of the Biden administration, which continues to pour money on raging gas fires of inflation. 0.99

00:45:40.000 It's pretty incredible. 0.99

00:45:40.000 I mean, Joe Biden's solution to this, by the way, is still to push the bill back better. 0.99

00:45:45.000 Meanwhile, one of the things that is exacerbating the ramp up, the lack of production, which is necessary in order to cut down on inflation, is continued talk about COVID mandates and COVID restrictions.

00:45:56.000 This administration just can't let go.

00:45:59.000 So Joe Biden's new COVID advisor, Ashish Jha, said yesterday, maybe we'll extend the airline mask mandates.

00:46:04.000 On what basis?

00:46:06.000 The airline mask mandates have never been useful, ever.

00:46:09.000 Those HIPAA filters in the planes are incredibly good.

00:46:12.000 Planes were never a vector of transmission.

00:46:14.000 And yet, here is the Biden administration saying they want to mask up forever on planes.

00:46:17.000 Again, it's this sort of stuff.

00:46:18.000 This stuff does have an impact on how the economy works.

00:46:22.000 Does that mean that extending the mask mandate in public transportation is a live option?

00:46:27.000 It's on the table?

00:46:29.000 Yeah, look, this is a CDC decision, and I think it is absolutely on the table, and Dr. Walensky is going to make her decision based on the framework that the CDC scientists create, and we'll make a decision collectively based on that.

00:46:44.000 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

00:46:46.000 No, I think you'll make a decision based on what you think is politically valuable at the time.

00:46:51.000 The good news about this White House is that even as they push things like masks for all of you peasants on the planes, people like Kamala Harris don't need to wear masks.

00:46:58.000 This time, Kamala Harris was not wearing a mask indoors during an event for Keitanji Brown-Jackson, who was just confirmed for her slot to the Supreme Court. 0.98

00:47:07.000 Jen Psaki was asked about why it is that Kamala Harris doesn't have to mask up like the little people, and here was her answer. 0.99

00:47:12.000 You said on Friday that the Vice President was masked indoors all day, but the White House tweeted a video showing her standing over the President without a mask on.

00:47:22.000 Can you explain what happened there?

00:47:25.000 Well, I would say that the Vice President and the President and all of us abide by what the CDC protocols are.

00:47:31.000 It was an emotional day.

00:47:33.000 It was a historic day.

00:47:34.000 And there were moments when she was not wearing a mask inside, including in a photo, but she was wearing it 99.9% of the time.

00:47:44.000 For those of you who are not peasants, if you have an emotional day, like, say, you have a parent dying in the hospital, or an emotional day, like, say, a wedding, an emotional day, a historic day, something that matters to you, it doesn't matter.

00:47:54.000 You need to mask up forever.

00:47:55.000 I mean, you're indoors, obviously.

00:47:57.000 But Kamala Harris was having an emotional day. 0.94

00:47:59.000 She's having a moment.

00:48:00.000 She's having an emotional, feelings-driven moment.

00:48:02.000 So she doesn't have to wear a mask.

00:48:03.000 This is like London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, who's unmasked inside in a club, but the spirit moved her, so that was okay.

00:48:09.000 It's amazing how when feelings move, Democrats, they're allowed to take off the mask.

00:48:13.000 And frankly, I think this should be all of our excuses.

00:48:15.000 Every time we get on a plane from now on, we should all just say, listen, I'm having a historic day.

00:48:19.000 It's an emotional day for me here on this plane.

00:48:20.000 This is the first time I've ever been on this particular plane.

00:48:23.000 It's very historic and emotional for me.

00:48:25.000 I don't need to wear a mask anymore because after all, I learned from the vice president of the United States that if I'm having a moment, here's my emotional support animal.

00:48:33.000 My emotional support cheetah, I brought it with me.

00:48:36.000 Here's my proof.

00:48:36.000 I don't need to wear a mask.

00:48:37.000 It's an emotional moment for all of us.

00:48:39.000 And this means I no longer have to wear a mask.

00:48:41.000 It's all just an issue of control for these folks.

00:48:44.000 And those issues of control have serious bleed over effect for how the state is run.

00:48:48.000 And that has bleed over effects for your kids going to school, has bleed over effects for the economy, has bleed over effects even in terms of simple decisions about how you're going to live your life.

00:48:57.000 So you've got the Biden administration, which is out there exacerbating COVID talk, COVID lockdown talk again, and more sorts of restrictions as we enter the summer.

00:49:07.000 And meanwhile, the inflation stats are just out of control, completely out of control.

00:49:11.000 And once again, I bring you Kamala Harris, who does not know what a Pell Grant is, explaining why we need to now have the government essentially waive student debt, which by the way, increases inflation.

00:49:18.000 Have you increased Pell Grants? We have definitely extended the, and it's something that I think we need to keep doing, the awareness about what we have to do on Pell Grants. And I can follow up with you on specifically what we've been doing, but I can tell you that when I was in the Senate, I was definitely working on the Pell Grant issue because it can't be what it was when I was Howard.

00:49:47.000 Okay, so very edifying stuff there from the Vice President of the United States.

00:49:51.000 Meanwhile, Philadelphia is announcing a new indoor mask mandate April 18th.

00:49:55.000 It said, quote, The Philadelphia Department of Public Health established a benchmark system in February that uses case counts, hospitalizations, and the increase in case rates to determine which safety strategies are needed.

00:50:05.000 This is according to Philadelphia Enquirer.

00:50:07.000 The seven-day daily average of cases, 142 as of April 8th, and a 60% increase in case counts over the past 10 days met the standards to reintroduce the indoor mask mandate.

00:50:17.000 The paper cited health commissioner, Cheryl Bedigal, saying the number of cases have prompted the move.

00:50:21.000 Quote, if we fail to act now, knowing every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations and a wave of deaths, it'll be too late for many of our residents.

00:50:29.000 They are reintroducing the indoor mask mandate in Philadelphia.

00:50:31.000 Just genius stuff here happening from the Democrats.

00:50:35.000 By the way, it is worth noting at this point that according to a new paper from Phil Kirpin, Stephen Moore, and Casey Mulligan, available at the National Bureau of Economic Research, it's a report card on states' response to COVID-19.

00:50:46.000 And what they find is essentially the blue states completely blew it.

00:50:48.000 So they measured which states did best, and they measured it using three categories, the economy, education, and mortality.

00:50:55.000 So they looked at unemployment and GDP by state, and then they looked at the Burbio cumulative in-person instruction percentage for the 2020-2020 school year, right?

00:51:03.000 So this is who kept their schools open.

00:51:05.000 And then they looked at COVID-associated deaths reported to the CDC, and all cause excess mortality.

00:51:11.000 And here is what they found.

00:51:14.000 They found that the states that did the best were nearly all red states, and the states that did the worst were nearly all blue states.

00:51:22.000 They said, That on the basis of economics, the states that ended up doing the best in mortality rate, excess mortality, the states that did the best were states like Utah.

00:51:34.000 Vermont did really well.

00:51:35.000 Florida did really well.

00:51:37.000 States like California did incredibly poorly.

00:51:41.000 What they find is that there's no relationship between reduced economic activity during the pandemic and composite mortality measure.

00:51:47.000 So lockdown economies did not actually have better health.

00:51:50.000 There's no actual correlation.

00:51:52.000 They also find that there is only moderate correlation between school closures and the mortality measure, but they don't believe that that relationship is causal.

00:52:02.000 They did find a strong relationship between states that had poor economic performance and closed down schools.

00:52:07.000 So here's what they concluded.

00:52:08.000 Quote, three states that stand out as having combined scores well above the others, Utah, Nebraska, and Vermont.

00:52:13.000 They're substantially above average in all three categories.

00:52:15.000 Six more states followed, including Montana and South Dakota, almost two standard deviations above the average in terms of economy, but 0.8 to 1.0 below in terms of mortality, i.e. higher death rates.

00:52:25.000 New Hampshire and Maine were about 1.5 standard deviations above average on mortality, while also somewhat above average economically.

00:52:31.000 Although sometimes criticized as having policies that were quote, too open, Florida proved to have average mortality while maintaining a high level of economic activity and 96% open schools.

00:52:42.000 When we combined these three categories using z-scores, future research could consider weights reflecting revealed preference.

00:52:48.000 Meaning, like, which things do people think matter the most?

00:52:51.000 But they say that the four states with the most negative per capita rates of net migration from July 2020 to July 2021 were D.C., New York, Illinois, and California, and all were in the bottom six in terms of composite score in terms of economy, open schools, and all-cause mortality.

00:53:06.000 So again, well done to the lockdown crew for, once again, breaking things beyond recognition.

00:53:11.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today for another hour of content.

00:53:15.000 In the meantime, go check out one of our newest podcasts, Morning Wire.

00:53:17.000 On today's episode, they report on the controversial abortion bill.

00:53:20.000 Colorado's governor has now signed into law.

00:53:22.000 That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

00:53:25.000 Make sure to tune in.

00:53:26.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:53:26.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:53:27.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Felt, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our production manager is Pavel Lydowsky, associate producer Bradford Carrington.

00:53:44.000 Editing is by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina, production assistant Jessica Kranz.

00:53:51.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2022.

00:53:57.000 Hey there, this is John Bickley, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief and co-host of Morning Wire.

00:54:01.000 On today's episode, Biden announces new gun control measures, Elon Musk turns down Twitter's offer to join its board of directors, and Colorado's governor signs a controversial abortion bill into law.

The Ben Shapiro Show - April 12, 2022

Who’s Really Killing The Kids? | Ep. 1472

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