An activist screams at Tucker Carlson in front of his daughter at a fishing store, and the Dems can t let America go back to normal. Ben Shapiro's take on this and much more on the latest episode of The Ben Shapiro Show on the on today's episode of . Subscribe to to get immediate access to all of Ben's newest videos and listen to them wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: PODCAST for $5 off your first month of coverage at checkout. Use coupon "PODCAST" at checkout to receive a discount of $5 or more when you enter the discount code PODCODE at checkout at checkout and get 10% off your entire first month. The show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. If you haven't gotten a VPN yet, why haven t you gotten one yet? Visit Express VPN.com/TheBenShapiroShow and use coupon "VPN" to get $5 OFF your very first month! You can get a FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint, or a Ford Fusion, and get up to 40% off the price of your first pair of new MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro starting at $99.99. Plus, you can get free shipping on your first purchase when you sign up for Express VPN when you use the promo code "ExpressVPN! You won t have to pay $99 at checkout! to receive $5 and get 20% OFF your first box of the service. You get 7 months free when you shop using ExpressVPN, plus an additional $5 when you get a discount when you become a VIP membership when you upgrade your first year gets my discount offer starts! The offer valid through ExpressVPN starts in July 1st! Use the offer starts at $49 and get a maximum of $99 and get an extra $5,99 and a second year get $25,99 gets you an ad-only offer when you start using the discount offer. Free shipping starts in the offer gets better than $99, and a year and I ll get $49,99 a month, and I'll get $24,99 get an ad discount when I get my first month and you get my discount, and you can choose a product starts shipping starts after I redeem my first year, they get $29,99, I'll also get a VIP 4-month and a discount at $50,99.
00:00:51.000They're not going to charge you for it.
00:00:52.000There's a reason that Pure Talk is the highest rated wireless company by Consumer Affairs, why they are the preferred wireless partner A lot of phone companies won't tell you exactly what you are getting for your money.
00:01:01.000They'll give you a big Rolodex of all the things that you're getting without actually explaining what any of that means.
00:02:16.000Dude, you are the worst human being known to mankind.
00:02:20.000I want you to do something to this state, to the United States, to everything else in this world.
00:02:26.000I don't care that your daughter's here. What you've done to people's families, what you've done to everybody else in this society is not enough.
00:02:56.000If you've seen Tucker in these sorts of situations, Tucker is pretty calm.
00:03:00.000Tucker's been confronted many times in public.
00:03:02.000At this point, he handles it really well.
00:03:04.000And as somebody who's been confronted a couple of times in public, I can say it's not always the easiest thing in the world.
00:03:08.000I remember one time I was at a public park and I was holding my then five-year-old daughter in my arms and somebody came up and said, how do you sleep at night?
00:03:22.000But the point here is that this person believes that they did something good.
00:03:25.000In fact, this person, Bailey, actually put up a note online saying, quote, ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family.
00:03:33.000He sorry, he says he put up a note in which he explained how wonderful he was for having done this in the first place on his Instagram.
00:03:44.000Right, saying that it's not often that you get a chance to do something like this.
00:03:47.000It's not every day you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it.
00:04:04.000Let's try and get in his head for a second.
00:04:06.000The person who ambushes Tucker Carlson in public air.
00:04:08.000What does he think he's accomplishing?
00:04:11.000Like really, does he think that if he ambushes Tucker Carlson and yells at him in front of his daughter, that somehow Tucker is going to stop doing what he does on the air on a nightly basis?
00:04:18.000Does he think that he is going to achieve some sort of magical illumination for Tucker, where Tucker suddenly switches all of his positions and becomes a rabid Joe Biden supporter?
00:04:29.000Or start supporting all of the various talking points that this fly-fishing guide wants him to mirror.
00:04:35.000It's not about convincing Tucker Carlson.
00:04:37.000What it is, is about the performative.
00:04:38.000It's about performing for the people online.
00:04:40.000It's about performing for the left-wing, which sees this sort of stuff as heroism.
00:04:44.000And people ranging from Jamel Bouie at the New York Times to half the establishment media were putting up headlines Treating this as not only newsworthy, but praiseworthy.
00:05:04.000You may disagree with what Tucker says.
00:05:06.000You may think that Tucker's wrong some of the time.
00:05:08.000As an independent human being, I think Tucker is wrong sometimes.
00:05:10.000We did an entire hour-long interview maybe a couple of years ago in which he and I disagreed strenuously on everything from economics to sometimes even social policy.
00:05:28.000The idea that you get to go up to people and treat them terribly in front of their children because they are so politically wrong and then performatively post that online and then have all of your political allies tell you what a wonderful person you are for doing this.
00:05:59.000You saw people at the restaurant starting to harass her and the people throwing her out of the restaurant.
00:06:03.000You've seen this with the Black Lives Matter protesters literally going down the street to restaurants in Washington, D.C.
00:06:08.000and berating people who are sitting there eating their dinner.
00:06:11.000Authoritarianism comes in a couple of forms.
00:06:13.000There's the sort of traditional authoritarianism, which is a centralized government power that crams down its viewpoint on you without regard to your individual rights.
00:06:21.000And then there is what Theodore Adorno once suggested was the authoritarian mindset, right?
00:06:27.000Now, Dorno was a Marxist, and so his suggestion about what constituted authoritarianism really more just looked like conventional conservatism.
00:06:35.000But there is such a thing as authoritarianism, and it does exist on the left, and it does exist on the right, and it includes the idea that you get to yell at people and tell them what to do, that your viewpoint is the only viewpoint, and not only that, that all the institutions surrounding a person and protecting a person, those have to be torn down in order to benefit the people.
00:06:56.000When I see what happened to Tucker, I think that that mindset is extraordinarily prevalent in today's society.
00:07:01.000And you see it by polling data, by the way.
00:07:02.000If you look on college campuses, the number of kids who believe that it is okay to shout down a speaker, not to go and ask questions, not to protest outside, to go into an event and shut down a speaker is very high.
00:07:12.000The number of students who say that it's okay to report a professor for saying something quote-unquote controversial, in many cases, is a majority.
00:07:26.000And this is something that I talk about, is this new mindset that is predominant on the left, but that has institutional support.
00:07:33.000Because again, the mindset that you get to tell everybody else what to do, and that everybody else who disagrees with you ought to be excised from polite society, that exists on all sides of the aisle.
00:07:41.000The question is, where is the institutional support?
00:07:44.000And the answer is, the institutional support for this exists on the left.
00:07:51.000Remember, Joe the Plumber was ripped up and down, his life investigated and he was torn apart by the left-wing media for the sin of Barack Obama walking onto his driveway and him asking Barack Obama about tax policy.
00:08:03.000That was treated by the media the way that this really should be treated by the media, which is you don't get to go out into the public sphere and then find a private person who happens to be walking around with their family and then harass the living crap out of them.
00:08:15.000You don't get to do that. It's a bad thing for the country. The villain in this case is Dan Bailey.
00:08:19.000The villain in this case is not Tucker Carlson, even if you disagree with Tucker Carlson. And people can feel this. So there's an excerpt from my book that was posted in the New York Post, and it's called The Authoritarian Moment.
00:08:29.000It comes out tomorrow. You should go pre-order a copy today because it's a good run out.
00:08:37.000More than six in 10 Americans say they fear saying what they think, including a majority of liberals, 64% moderates, fully 77% of conservatives.
00:08:45.000Only self-described strong liberals feel confident in saying what they believe these days.
00:08:49.000To be a left-wing authoritarian is to feel the certainty of the anti-conventionalism, which means you believe that your viewpoint is the only moral viewpoint because you are anti-conventional, you are ripping down the conventional.
00:09:01.000The passion of top-down censorship, the belief that you should be able to shut people up using all the institutional powers that be, and the thrill of revolutionary aggression, a feeling like you get to confront, like you get to tear down the Maxine Waters, get in their face, yell at them, make their life miserable phenomenon.
00:09:16.000Tomorrow belongs to the far-left authoritarians, to the rest of us.
00:09:20.000A society run by left-wing authoritarians is extraordinarily burdensome.
00:09:24.000It's to be surrounded by institutional hatred.
00:09:26.000If you're conservative or merely non-leftist in America, the hatred is palpable.
00:09:36.000At least, they have been told that they should.
00:09:39.000And they hate you because you think the wrong way.
00:09:42.000This is what so many Americans are feeling, and it's not people who are just thinking like Tucker.
00:09:46.000It is people all the way up to and including mainstream liberals.
00:09:49.000Perhaps the problem is that you attend church regularly.
00:09:52.000Perhaps it's that you want to run your business and be left alone.
00:09:54.000Perhaps it's that you want to raise your kids with traditional social values.
00:09:58.000It could be that you believe that men and women exist, or that the police are not generally racist, or that children deserve a mother and a father, or that hard work pays off, or that the American flag stands for freedom rather than oppression, or that people should be judged based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
00:10:14.000Maybe it's that you haven't put your preferred pronouns in your Twitter profile, or hashtagged with the latest pride symbol for the latest cause, or used the proper emoji in your text messages.
00:10:22.000Or maybe it's that you have friends or family members or even acquaintances who have violated any of the thicket of cultural regulations placed upon us by our supposed moral betters.
00:10:30.000Guilt by association is just as damning as guilt through action or inaction.
00:10:34.000This is what I write in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
00:10:37.000If you watch Tucker Carlson, you could be confronted the same way as Tucker Carlson was confronted in this fly fishing store and the blue checks on Twitter who are of the far left disproportionately.
00:10:54.000One day, you might be a ballyhooed champion of justice for standing up for gay rights or feminist ideals.
00:10:59.000The next day, you might be told you have been banished for your refusal to acknowledge that a man calling himself a woman is not in fact a woman.
00:11:08.000One day, you might find yourself a hero of the intelligentsia for your cynicism about religion.
00:11:12.000The next, you might find yourself a villain for the great sin of suggesting that cancel culture breeds radicalization, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker.
00:11:19.000This is not a question of Democrat or Republican.
00:11:21.000Not one figure named above would identify as a Republican, let alone a conservative.
00:11:26.000There's only one thing, in the end, that unites the disparate figures deemed worthy of the gulag in our ongoing culture war.
00:11:32.000The standards matter less than the simple message, you will comply and you will like it.
00:11:38.000And that is the feeling that so many people have.
00:11:40.000There are a lot of everyday Americans who are not powerful in the media the way that Tucker Carlson is powerful in the media who feel that they are at risk of the same sort of ostracization socially and treatment publicly that Tucker was subjected to when he just went to a fly-fishing store in Montana of all places.
00:11:58.000And this has been a long time It's boiling under the sort of veneer of American society.
00:12:03.000Always, social disapproval has incredible consequences for people.
00:12:07.000But when social disapproval becomes not only something that you use when somebody is way outside the boundaries of the Overton window, but it's something that is used frequently, routinely, it's encouraged, it's good.
00:12:19.000You have to be part of the social ostracizing crowd or be its target.
00:12:23.000Once that happens, the society is in deep trouble.
00:12:27.000There are a lot of people on the left and some people who consider themselves on the so-called moderate right who say that really this is not a problem.
00:12:58.000And in a certain sense, they're not wrong.
00:13:00.000Your boss does have the right to fire you.
00:13:02.000Your friends and family do have a right to cut you off.
00:13:04.000None of that amounts to a violation of the First Amendment.
00:13:07.000As I write in my book, it simply amounts to the end of the Republic.
00:13:10.000Free speech and free exchange of ideas die when the attitude of philosophical tolerance withers.
00:13:15.000Writing in 1831, the greatest observer of America and democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, sums up the threat of democratic despotism in terms that sound shockingly and eerily prescient.
00:13:24.000Quote, If you crave the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not grant it to you.
00:13:28.000If you demand only their esteem, they will still pretend to refuse it to you.
00:13:31.000You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity.
00:13:34.000When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure.
00:13:37.000Those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in their turn.
00:13:46.000What happened to Tucker is indicative of something broader that's happening in American society, and that is, for political gain, the attempt to run roughshod over your fellow citizen and treat them not as an individual worthy of dignity and human rights, but treat them as an opponent to be crushed in front of their children.
00:15:33.000Publicly, you can see how this quickly moves into the realm of targeting officially.
00:15:39.000There is a bleed up that happens in American politics.
00:15:42.000Things that start at a societal level eventually crystallize and become government policy.
00:15:46.000Because if it's okay to target somebody socially, pretty soon there are a lot of people nodding and giggling when somebody is targeted governmentally.
00:15:52.000So you remember that Tucker Carlson went on the air, maybe a month ago, six weeks ago, and he said that the NSA had been reading his texts and his emails.
00:16:00.000They were like, oh, that's not happening, that's silly.
00:16:03.000He said that the NSA was targeting him.
00:16:04.000Now, what I suggested is that the NSA may not have been, quote-unquote, targeting him.
00:16:08.000What they may have done is they may have caught up his communications in a sweep, but that if they unmasked him, meaning they looked for his identity, which you're not supposed to do with domestic American citizens, then we would have a problem.
00:16:20.000And it appears that that is what is going on.
00:16:22.000According to the New York Post, the National Security Agency has quietly admitted that the identity of Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson was, quote-unquote, unmasked and leaked, as he alleged earlier this month, according to a report.
00:16:34.000For the NSA to unmask Tucker Carlson or any journalist attempting to secure a newsworthy interview is entirely unacceptable and raises serious questions about their activities, as well as their original denial, which was wildly misleading.
00:16:45.000A Fox News spokesperson told The Record, a cybersecurity news site.
00:16:49.000Two sources told The Record on Friday that according to an internal NSA investigation, Carlson's name was revealed after it was mentioned in communications between two parties who were under surveillance.
00:16:57.000But the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight was neither a direct nor an incidental target of the agency, the sources said.
00:17:02.000So that means that they were not actually targeting him, but they were unmasking his identity.
00:17:06.000Now typically, you only unmask somebody's identity if they're a domestic American.
00:17:10.000Citizen, if that person is suspected of being involved in illegal activity or if you need to know their identity in order to prosecute and pursue foreign illegal activity.
00:17:20.000Typically, you don't unmask American citizens.
00:17:22.000You remember that this was something that happened with regard to Michael Flynn.
00:17:25.000And Michael Flynn was unmasked by the Obama administration for no apparent reason.
00:17:28.000The use of the intelligence apparatus in order to unmask American citizens who really are posing no national security threat is a serious problem.
00:17:35.000But you're not seeing anybody scream and shout about any of this in the left-wing media.
00:17:39.000I promise you, if the Trump administration were busily unmasking everybody who'd ever booked an interview with a foreign actor while Trump was president, this, of course, would have been a problem.
00:18:07.000A functioning republic has to have neutral rules of equal applicability.
00:18:11.000You cannot have a republic where some people are treated as social outcasts to the point not only where them expressing kind of normal political opinions means that they are treated as lepers in social society and yelled at publicly, but also that the government targets them and everybody just goes, eh, eh.
00:18:30.000If you're a good American citizen, you need to defend the rights of your opponents just as much as you defend your own rights.
00:18:35.000This used to be like a normal thing that we all believed, but now I guess this has gone completely by the wayside.
00:18:41.000And I think the reason for that is that politics has become expressive rather than about problem solving.
00:18:47.000You can see this in the way that people talk about politics generally in the United States.
00:18:51.000No longer are we worried about problem solving.
00:18:53.000Now we are worried about whether politicians express sympathy.
00:18:56.000We have an empathetic president, President Joe Biden, and that matters much more than all of the bad policy that he's pursuing.
00:19:03.000We are looking for people in politics and politics is really about expressing your feeling of solidarity with people.
00:19:09.000It is not about whether the policy is good or bad.
00:19:12.000It is not about whether policy is helpful or harmful.
00:19:15.000In my own marriage, we have a rule in my marriage that we try to cue to.
00:19:21.000When my wife and I start a conversation and she brings up a problem, I will ask her, is this a problem where you want me to offer solutions or is this a problem where you just want me to hear how you're feeling?
00:19:31.000And thankfully, my wife is rational enough to go along with that.
00:19:34.000And the reason this is useful is because if you're married, if you're in a relationship, you know that very often these two conversations get conflated.
00:19:40.000And that if you offer a solution in a feelings conversation, you are now considered unfeeling.
00:19:45.000This happens in marriage all the time, right?
00:19:46.000Your wife comes home, she had a bad day at work, and she says, you know, I want to tell you about all these problems I'm having at work.
00:19:51.000You say, you know, all you could do is this, this, and this.
00:19:53.000And she says, that's not what I, I don't want to hear your solutions.
00:20:08.000Because we are such an expressive society, and because we have wrapped up our own personal identities in our politics, this means that if somebody offers you a solution to your problem that fails to recognize your emotional state, that person is now a problem.
00:20:31.000You can see this in a wide variety of areas in American life.
00:20:35.000It's particularly true when it comes to areas like race, for example.
00:20:39.000Our great racial reckoning is not about coming up with solutions that actually boost the performance of, for example, black schoolchildren.
00:20:56.000What it is about is expressing the belief that the United States is bad, expressing solidarity with the belief that the United States is bad.
00:21:02.000And if you refuse to express that solidarity, then you're the problem.
00:21:05.000In fact, if you refuse to go along with the policy agenda, that is really just empathy in terms of policy.
00:21:12.000If you refuse to go along with that, then you're a bad person.
00:21:14.000The conflation of empathy with policy is one of the worst things that can happen in our political sphere, and it is happening each and every day.
00:21:20.000Because that means that people for whom you are empathetic deserve your help, and people for whom you are not empathetic do not.
00:21:26.000It also means that policy is simply supposed to be interpreted as a sign of empathy rather than as a measure of success or problem solving.
00:21:34.000And that is a real, real problem in American society.
00:21:37.000Okay, so let's talk about race for a second.
00:21:39.000So over the weekend, there were a couple of interviews about race and racial reckoning that were quite telling and kind of fascinating.
00:21:46.000And again, policy has now been conflated with empathy, which creates two separate problems.
00:21:50.000One is that if your policy solves problems, but is not rooted in a belief that the person's feelings are justified, then you are unempathetic and bad.
00:22:01.000So we judge policy by whether it is empathetic.
00:22:04.000Also, we judge whether you are empathetic by the policy you choose.
00:22:07.000So, if you choose a policy that is not rooted in empathy, you are bad.
00:22:12.000So there are two separate problems with conflating empathy and policy.
00:22:17.000One is bad policy, and one is the targeting of people who disagree with you on policy as non-empathetic.
00:22:23.000And both of these things are now a routine part of American politics, and it helps explain why so many Americans hate other Americans based on their political viewpoint.
00:22:29.000Because you might think to yourself, wait a second, there are usually more than one way to skin a deer here.
00:22:34.000There are a couple of different ways to approach this problem.
00:22:39.000We don't seem to be able to come to an agreement about that, but why don't we try and see whose solution is better?
00:22:43.000That's not how politics is done anymore.
00:22:45.000The overt conflation of empathy and policymaking.
00:22:49.000It's the worst thing for both empathy and policymaking.
00:22:51.000It makes you less empathetic to people who think not like you, and it makes your policy worse because your policy is now just an expression of how much you care.
00:22:59.000So when it comes to race, you can see this most of all, because there are certain policies that are likely to facilitate, for example, better performance.
00:23:05.000Those policies include things like standardized testing.
00:23:09.000Standardized testing is an incentive structure that causes people to try to perform up to tests.
00:23:14.000Treating people as individuals is an excellent way of rectifying social imbalances.
00:23:19.000Because if you treat people as individuals, then everybody is held to the same standard.
00:23:23.000And then I'm not judging you based on your race or group identity.
00:23:26.000I'm judging you based on whether you hit these objective metrics.
00:23:29.000How do we know that these sorts of neutral policies are excellent for the country and excellent for people who have historically been dispossessed in the United States?
00:23:38.000Because for a wide variety of minority groups, these have been the ladders to success.
00:23:44.000It's neutrality that has provided the ladders to success for Jews, for example, who are not treated as a group.
00:23:49.000We're originally treated as a group, but no longer are, right?
00:23:51.000Are treated as individuals based on performance.
00:23:53.000We judge whether you've done well in American society.
00:23:56.000The same thing is true of Asian Americans.
00:23:58.000But when it comes to the divides between black and white, because America does have a history of treating black people as a group and treating them horribly up through the end of Jim Crow.
00:24:07.000Because of that, there's this idea that even that going back to the same tools that have worked for every minority group gaining power, gaining financial success, gaining educational success, that it just doesn't apply to black people. Now, you have to explain why it wouldn't apply to black people, and there are only two explanations. One is, you are unempathetic, right?
00:24:29.000You're not empathetic to the experience of black Americans, and this is why you don't understand that the ladder that's been used by every single minority group in the United States does not apply to black people.
00:24:38.000This is the argument of Robin DiAngelo and Abraham X. Kennedy.
00:25:32.000It is about whether the policy is in effect good and whether the policy can be morally justified on the basis of respecting individual human beings.
00:25:40.000But we've lost that in the United States.
00:25:42.000So on race, particularly, we've lost this.
00:25:44.000Because, again, the left's agenda with regard to race and the left's quote-unquote empathy with regard to race requires you to think of people as member of groups rather than as individuals.
00:25:54.000And so what this ends with is we need to teach your kids in school that they're a member of a different group from black people and that they are, in fact, the subjugators of black people.
00:26:02.000And if they call for things like neutral rules or treating people like individuals, that is merely re-enshrining hierarchies of power.
00:26:10.000And if you refuse to go along with this kind of garbage indoctrination that is immoral in its essence, this means that you are a racist.
00:26:16.000So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said this pretty openly over the weekend.
00:26:20.000It's funny, you have all these critical race theorists out there saying, no, no, no, it's more sophisticated than that.
00:26:24.000We're not teaching your kids that they're racist.
00:26:26.000We're teaching them that the structures of power are racist.
00:26:28.000Okay, but here's Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who's basically letting the cat out of the bag.
00:26:32.000She's like, no, no, no, we're teaching your kids that they're racist.
00:26:34.000And if they refuse to acknowledge that they're racist, this is just demonstrative of the fact that they are unempathetic and therefore racist.
00:26:41.000So why don't Republicans want us to learn how to not be racist?
00:26:47.000Why don't Republicans want kids to know how to not be racist?
00:26:55.000Why don't Republicans want us to know how to not be racist?
00:26:58.000Because your definition of racist is not about individual intent.
00:27:01.000Your definition of racist isn't even about whether black people are better off or worse off under your policies.
00:27:06.000Your definition of racist is, do they mirror my policy preferences, which are the only empathetic policy preferences, because my policy preferences are a substitute for success.
00:27:16.000Politics is not the game of empathy, but it has become the game of empathy.
00:27:21.000Robin DiAngelo, who's made an amazing living being just an unbelievable racial grifter, over the weekend, she says that even comedy is an excuse to be racist.
00:27:31.000Because, again, if everything is about empathy, then we can't have things like, you can make fun of everybody.
00:28:12.000And I think TV shows like Family Guy and South Park and maybe a little bit The Simpsons, right, allowed white people to be racist self-consciously.
00:28:23.000And there is a concept in comedy called punching up, not down.
00:28:28.000So, you know, you want to punch up, there's very different power dynamics and it doesn't hurt in the same way.
00:28:35.000It doesn't invoke a deep, deep centuries-long history of oppression when you poke fun at, say, white people.
00:28:43.000But it's very, very different when you poke fun at people of color.
00:28:49.000So the only people you're allowed to make fun of are people who are white, right?
00:28:51.000You have to think of each other in terms of groups.
00:29:01.000Now, there are people who I generally, like, there are people who I'm friends with, who I think have fallen into this trap of conflating policymaking and empathy, as though these are the same thing.
00:29:12.000I consider myself a pretty good friend with David French.
00:29:14.000I talk to David fairly frequently, although not as much recently.
00:29:17.000He has a piece that I think is worthy of consideration under this rubric, because I think that you are seeing moderate America slide into this morass whereby empathy and policymaking are considered one and the same, and this is particularly true on the issue of race.
00:29:31.000So he has a piece in the Dispatch called, Structural Racism Isn't Wokeness, It's Reality.
00:29:36.000Now, it depends how you define structural racism.
00:29:39.000As I've said many, many times, when we talk about institutional racism, or white privilege, or structural racism, what are we talking about?
00:29:45.000Are we talking about the structures of America perpetuate racism today?
00:29:49.000Or are we talking about history has consequences, and for all of human history, you have inherited problems that your parents had, and then you've had to deal with those problems.
00:29:57.000This has been true literally for all time and will always continue to be true.
00:30:05.000The conflation of the two is really dangerous, because if the idea is that history has created imbalances, but that the institutions of society have to be changed on a fundamental level now, even though they are not racist, in order to rectify those historic problems, the institutions now must be made unequal and discriminatory in order to rectify those historic problems, What you are doing is perpetuating a new problem.
00:30:28.000Now you have made the institutions themselves discriminatory as a substitute for empathy.
00:30:33.000You have made the policy geared not toward equality under the law, not at individual freedoms and human rights.
00:30:38.000Instead, you have geared the policy toward quote-unquote fixing problems of the past based on group empathy.
00:30:43.000You can have empathy for people who have been members of groups.
00:30:45.000You can have empathy for individuals who have had to live with the burden of, for example, not inheriting as much wealth from their parents or grandparents.
00:31:01.000Empathy and policymaking, again, are not the same thing.
00:31:04.000But David French goes further than that.
00:31:06.000And I find this bewildering because if you read David's writing from even three or four years ago, it was almost completely converse to this.
00:31:11.000You can recognize the problems of historic injustice without suggesting that the systems need to be torn down.
00:31:20.000He says, he's talking about a problem within major churches.
00:31:25.000The Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, for example, basically all these major churches are now having problems in which there are sort of leaders of these churches who have started to mimic and mirror many of the policy viewpoints and philosophical descriptions of the critical race theory movement.
00:31:45.000He says, this is David French, the congregants object to what they perceive as a pastoral embrace of critical race theory.
00:31:51.000They assert that the Bible alone contains teachings sufficient to address America's race problems.
00:31:55.000You can read the comprehensive complaint against a guy named David Platt and his team here, and the allegations of teaching or advocating CRT in another place.
00:32:02.000Without restating, all the contents of these lengthy documents include complaints that Platt and his MBC colleague, Pastor Mike Kelsey, MBC is the McLean Bible Church, March in a Christian Black Lives Matter march and that Kelsey has endorsed the CRT concepts of systemic racism and white privilege.
00:32:19.000They also condemn Platt for this comment, which argues that the absence of over prejudice does not absolve one of the problems of racism and racialization.
00:32:56.000Okay, so the mere fact of a disparity does not imply that discrimination is responsible solely for the disparity.
00:33:01.000It could be that discrimination is it.
00:33:03.000Could be historic discrimination is it.
00:33:05.000Or it could be that people make different decisions.
00:33:07.000Those different decisions have different consequences and we need to incentivize better decision making thus to ensure better consequences.
00:33:14.000It could also be that while there is undoubtedly imbalances, there are undoubtedly imbalances that have been inherited from the past, it could be.
00:33:22.000It could also be And the solution to that is not to get rid of, again, neutral laws of equal applicability.
00:33:29.000The solution to that is to acknowledge that that is just the way that life works.
00:34:13.000And yes, we need to treat each other as individual human beings better.
00:34:17.000Recently, I was talking to a group of liberal folks and they were talking about polarization in the society and how can we solve it together.
00:34:23.000I said, I have a very simple solution.
00:34:26.000Every one of you, because you're some prominent folks on the left, I said, every one of you, go online tonight on Twitter, find somebody who voted for Trump who you know and personally like and say, I know this person voted for Trump.
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00:37:51.000So we're talking again about the equation of empathy and policymaking in politics and how this has led to the idea that if somebody disagrees with you on policy, you can confront them at a fly fishing store and yell at them to the wild cheers of the blue check media.
00:38:11.000And again, there's a piece from my friend David French over at the Dispatch that I think is actually not a good piece and actually quite telling as to how people fall into the ideological trap of conflating empathy and policymaking.
00:38:22.000And he is talking about how in the Christian community, there's been a pushback against He says...
00:38:30.000That under this mode of thinking, the critics of critical race theory, the concept of equality under the law as mandated by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act is both necessary and largely sufficient to address the causes and consequences of centuries of slavery followed by generations of Jim Crow.
00:38:45.000The argument is not that the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act, the 14th Amendment, and equality under law, that those are sufficient to address the consequences of history, because nothing will ever be sufficient to address the consequences of history.
00:38:57.000I mean, truthfully, there is no way That you can repay people for their great-great-great-grandparents being enslaved.
00:39:06.000I mean, how do you, like, the notion of reparations is in and of itself, the concept, is somewhat insulting in the sense that there is no way to actively repair the kinds of damages that have been done to people over time.
00:39:18.000When people talk about Holocaust reparations, if the German government signs somebody 80 grand, like their grandkid, 80 grand, because grandma got gassed at the age of 14, Or grandma got gassed at the age of 20?
00:39:29.000Okay, then sorry, that is not a reparation, right?
00:39:31.000That may be a payoff, and it may be something that is an attempt at reparation, but it is not an actual reparation.
00:39:36.000And no one is arguing that equality under law is the thing that makes up for the past.
00:39:42.000All we're saying is it's the only ladder to success in American society.
00:39:46.000And it's the only ladder back to anything remotely approaching civility and political consonants.
00:39:52.000There's only one way the country comes back together, and that's if the same rules apply to all of us.
00:39:55.000But, says David French, no, that's wrong.
00:39:57.000This is on the core issues of American racism.
00:40:00.000This pastor, David Platt, is biblically and historically right.
00:40:03.000It's his detractors who are biblically and historically wrong.
00:40:05.000These conservatives have placed a secular political frame around an issue with profound religious significance.
00:40:10.000They've thus not just abandoned the whole counsel of scripture, they've even contradicted a core component of the secular conservatism they claim to uphold.
00:40:17.000And then he cites the Bible and he talks about the fact that in the Bible there are certain soul situations where there is blood guilt on particular people.
00:40:26.000Now, there are a couple of contradictory verses in the Bible, seemingly contradictory verses.
00:40:30.000One is that God revisits payment on the third and fourth generations.
00:40:34.000Now, to my ears, what that sounds like is God recognizing that history has consequences in the Bible.
00:40:39.000That if you do something, there will be consequences to the third and fourth generation.
00:40:42.000But the Bible, unlike, for example, old Mesopotamian law, like the Code of Hammurabi, says that you are not allowed to punish a child for the sins of their father.
00:40:51.000You're not allowed to do that by the law.
00:40:53.000There is a difference between how God judges the universe and how we are supposed to judge the children of people who sinned in the past.
00:40:59.000And the only way we can have a society moving forward is to treat everyone by the exact same rules.
00:41:05.000But David seems to be straying from that here.
00:41:08.000He says that we have to confess our sins.
00:41:10.000So he says it's our job to confess the sins of the past.
00:41:14.000Because, for example, in the book of 2 Kings, Josiah tore his clothes and wept when the high priest found the book of the law neglected in the temple.
00:41:46.000Again, this is the conflation of empathy with policy.
00:41:49.000I can have full empathy for people who suffer because in the past, their family was victimized.
00:41:54.000That does not change the fact that if they wish to rise to any level of success in American society, they have to use the exact same ladder that has been provided and is provided to every individual in the United States.
00:42:04.000And that's been particularly true for the last half century.
00:42:07.000But again, once you get to the point where the policy is the empathy, you get into really ugly territory because the converse is, if you disagree with me on policy, you deserve no empathy.
00:42:16.000And if you deserve no empathy, we can target you as much as we could possibly want.
00:42:21.000And this lies behind so much of our politics these days.
00:42:26.000It is not about problem solving and getting to yes.
00:42:28.000It is about treating people who disagree with you as though they are the problem, as though they are not only Okay, so this has consequences for a lot of various issues in our society.
00:42:42.000It has consequences, for example, when it comes to COVID.
00:43:06.000Okay, but a lot of people in this office didn't get vaccinated.
00:43:09.000They're independent, free human beings.
00:43:11.000If I wanted to get them vaccinated, I would treat them as independent, free human beings.
00:43:14.000I would mention the fact that COVID has higher risk factors than getting the vaccine by all available data for people who are above the age of 18, for sure.
00:43:22.000For people who are above the age of 12, that seems to be the case as well.
00:43:26.000Okay, and that being the case, you now get to make an independent and free decision.
00:43:29.000But this is not how people of the left are approaching the problem.
00:43:32.000The way they're approaching the problem is that if you didn't get the vaccine, it's not because you made a differential risk-reward calculation for which you ought to bear the consequences.
00:43:40.000Notice, my solution also not only encompasses treating people as individual free human beings, it also suggests that you ought to bear the consequences of the risk you are taking.
00:43:49.000If you choose to take a risk, Bear the consequences.
00:43:58.000And now we bear the risk of the vaccine.
00:44:00.000And if you don't get the vaccine, you bear the risk of the vaccine.
00:44:03.000Same rule for every single human being.
00:44:05.000And you get to make that decision yourself because you're a free, independent human being.
00:44:08.000But the way the left treats this is you're morally inferior if you didn't get the vaccine, Not just that you're an idiot, but you're endangering other people's lives.
00:44:18.000Now, even if you believe that that's the case, is that the way to treat fellow human beings?
00:44:23.000Really, like on a serious level, is that the way that you think you're going to convince them to do things?
00:44:26.000Remember, the guy who shouted at Tucker Carlson was not interested in convincing Tucker Carlson to change his opinion.
00:44:32.000He was interested in virtue signaling to all of his friends.
00:44:34.000This is the same thing in the media today.
00:44:36.000It's the same thing from, for example, Anthony Fauci.
00:44:38.000So Anthony Fauci, the great and sainted, second greatest doctor in America after Dr. Joe Biden, he says, you know, maybe we should blame people.
00:44:48.000Maybe you should look inward a little bit, use a little bit of introspection and realize the reason that nobody trusts Anthony Fauci is because he has been institutionally wrong at nearly every level of this pandemic repeatedly.
00:45:00.000I generally don't like to get involved in blaming people because I think that would maybe push them back even more rather than... I mean, I could totally understand the governor's frustration, so I don't have any problem with that.
00:45:13.000She has every right to be frustrated, but what I would really like to see is more and more of the leaders in those areas that are not vaccinating to get out and speak out and encourage people to get vaccinated.
00:45:27.000I don't want to blame people, but if they get blamed, well, you know.
00:45:30.000That's the way they- Don Lemon is even- is way worse, obviously.
00:45:32.000Don Lemon is the worst at all of this on CNN.
00:45:34.000He says that everyone who's not getting vaccinated, they're idiotic.
00:45:52.000When we're talking about vaccines that have this high level of efficacy, and when we are living in a time where people are bearing the consequences of their own decision-making, it seems to me that now would be an excellent time to say, listen, right now we're having a pandemic.
00:46:05.000The pandemic continues among the unvaccinated.
00:46:07.000The unvaccinated have exactly the same risk factors they had when they were dying by the thousands back in January.
00:46:12.000And so if you choose to make that decision, you bear the risk.
00:46:23.000Wouldn't that be a better way to convince people than shouting at them that they're idiots?
00:46:26.000But here is Don Lemon shouting at people that they're idiots.
00:46:29.000I've heard over the last couple of days that, you know, you shouldn't be, um, don't say bad things about people who don't get the vaccine because then they'll feel like you're attacking them or whatever.
00:46:50.000and nonsensical, I think that you need to tell people that their behavior is idiotic and nonsensical.
00:46:56.000It doesn't mean that they are idiots, it's just that their behavior on this particular point, that is not making sense.
00:47:03.000Just going to note here that according to Don Lemon medically speaking, it is fully idiotic and nonsensical for a 20 year old to consider the risk reward calculation with regard to a vaccine.
00:47:11.000You can't say that anything is idiotic and nonsensical about a 20-year-old trying to completely mutilate their body to look like a member of the opposite gender and then calling themselves a member of the opposite gender.
00:47:25.000And if you doubt that that's medically appropriate, then it's because you're a bigot.
00:47:29.000Just a quick note there on medicine, circa CNN 2021.
00:47:33.000But here's the broader point with regard to all of this.
00:47:37.000When politics becomes just a game of treating the other person as though they are undeserving of empathy on an individual level, and that policy is just an expression of that empathy, you end up in some pretty bad territory.
00:47:48.000And again, the reverse is true as well.
00:47:52.000One of the things that we've seen with regard to the pandemic right now, and we are seeing it right now, is that we actually have a solution to the pandemic.
00:47:59.000And the solution to the pandemic is you learn to live with it.
00:48:03.000It's a solution that's always been available.
00:48:05.000The problem is that the left rejected that solution.
00:48:06.000So now, when the pandemic is rearing its ugly head again, they have to control people.
00:48:11.000Because, in the beginning, they, in authoritarian fashion, shut down everything.
00:48:15.000They maintained the shutdown on businesses when it became clear that this was very age-stratified.
00:48:20.000And striated when it became perfectly clear that people who are 20 were at very little risk of dying of the virus, but people who are 70 were at very high risk of dying of the virus.
00:48:29.000They still know that kids are exorbitantly low risk of dying from the virus, but they're treating it as though kids are at high risk of dying from the virus.
00:48:46.000The more attention I lavish on you, the more I control you top down, the more I'm demonstrating my empathy.
00:48:51.000Well, the problem with that is that Joe Biden had basically declared the pandemic was going to be over July 4th, right?
00:48:56.000It's now the end of July, and the pandemic is not in fact over.
00:49:01.000People on the right are saying, but it is.
00:49:03.000And when we say it is, we don't mean that people aren't dying of the virus.
00:49:05.000We mean that the end of a pandemic can logically be charted to when everybody in a particular country has the opportunity to take a cure, which is the vaccine, or Or not, and then we're done.
00:49:17.000The government literally has no more role to play here.
00:49:19.000Once you have the ability to get a problem fixed and you are not passing that problem on to other people, meaning that you yourself can protect yourself.
00:49:28.000Once you can protect yourself, then this becomes very much like you eat too much and you're obese and you get heart disease.
00:49:33.000It looks a lot more like that because it's preventable, right?
00:49:35.000In this particular case, why are you worried about people, seriously, who are making free decisions of their own accord not to get vaccinated?
00:49:42.000In a free country, normally, you would say, okay, well, it's a free country, and if people decide that they are going to do things that I disagree with, I may think it's dumb, I may think it's wrong-headed, but they have a right to do that.
00:49:53.000The problem is that we could have made that solution last year.
00:49:55.000Ron DeSantis was very bad in Florida for having engaged in that solution.
00:49:59.000Sweden was a terrible country for having engaged in that solution, for saying, listen, you're a young person, You're not a very high risk.
00:50:21.000He got on TV every night and he said things very confidently that were completely wrong, but he was empathetic and that was the key.
00:50:27.000Okay, well now, The Biden administration is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
00:50:31.000Because on the one hand, they have done the thing that technically ends the pandemic.
00:50:35.000Namely, they have helped, because they used the Trump vaccine and the Trump rollout plan, they have been able to tranche out hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine across the United States.
00:50:45.000160 million adults in the United States have taken the vaccine.
00:50:49.000And meaning that the vast majority of the adult population above the age of 18, more than 60% of the population above the age of 18 in the United States has now taken the vaccine.
00:50:58.000And which means that technically he should be done, right?
00:51:03.000Because to be done would mean that he's unempathetic.
00:51:06.000Because the policy which started out empathy was locked down to save every life.
00:51:10.000Then it became, okay, well, normally you'd say, well, no, empathy is providing people with the solutions that they can use in order to preserve their own lives while preserving their freedom.
00:51:19.000That to me looks a lot more empathetic and provides a neutral standard by which we can allow people to live their own lives.
00:51:25.000But if empathy is just top-down control, if empathy is I am most empathetic because government action is the empathetic thing.
00:51:52.000Instead of doing that, he can't do that.
00:51:54.000Because to do that would be to implicitly acknowledge that the policies that were pursued last year were not empathetic and were not good and were not smart.
00:52:06.000Because on the one hand, they want to say, look at our magical success in fighting the virus.
00:52:09.000On the other hand, they can't actually point to their magical success in fighting the virus until they reach the actual end goal, which is we lock down so hard everywhere in the United States that the virus completely goes away as a sign of our empathy.
00:52:27.000The number of deaths in the United States right now on a daily basis is so significantly lower than it was even a few months ago.
00:52:35.000Right now, if you look at the chart, the average daily death rate, according to the New York Times, I'm looking it up on Google right now, as of July 25th, the seven-day average of deaths, 269.
00:52:45.000When we were at the height of the pandemic, we were talking about 3,000.
00:52:48.0003,300 seven-day running average of deaths.
00:52:55.000And yet we are treating this as though it's a crisis.
00:52:57.000The reason we're treating this as though it's a crisis, even though, again, the solution is widely available, is because empathy is politics and politics is empathy.
00:53:24.000So here's Dr. Anthony Fauci saying, maybe we will reconsider forcing the vaccinated to mask, which it's hard to think of something less empathetic than, we told you to get the vaccine, you did, you did the responsible thing, and now we are going to mask you.
00:53:37.000And we're gonna mask you, not because you're gonna pass it on to somebody who, through no fault of their own, could get the virus.
00:53:43.000We're going to mask you to the adult down the road, who is also a free, individual human being, is protected from a virus for which they are not protecting themselves.
00:53:51.000That does not sound empathetic to me or the person who's unvaccinated, who's obviously made an independent human decision that Dr. Fauci, and by the way, I, disagree with.
00:53:59.000Here is Dr. Fauci, though, talking about how true empathy is authoritarian cram-downs.
00:54:04.000Do you think masks should be brought back for vaccinated Americans?
00:54:12.000You know, Jake, this is under active consideration.
00:54:14.000The CDC agrees with that ability and discretion capability to say, you know, you're in a situation where we're having a lot of dynamics of infection.
00:54:25.000So even if you are vaccinated, you should wear a mask.
00:54:30.000That's not incompatible with the CDC's overall recommendations that give a lot of discretion to the locals.
00:54:41.000Okay, again, the fact that we are now talking about more masking, more lockdowns, more of this stuff when the solution is already on the table, to me it's a demonstration of non-empathy.
00:54:50.000But the way we have defined empathy is, empathy is, we are going to tell you what to do, and if you don't like it, I guess that you lack empathy.
00:54:58.000And by the way, the solutions now being proposed by the left are exactly along these lines.
00:55:00.000You've got the New York Times pushing very hard on the idea that the only way to stop the pandemic is to fight quote-unquote misinformation, which is to crack down on free speech.
00:55:48.000Okay, well, once you get to the point where you believe that your political opposition wants more people to die, and the only solution is to silence them, right, no more misinformation.
00:55:56.000We've got to stop these GOP lawmakers from, you know, giving people individual freedoms.
00:56:56.000John Bickley here, editor-in-chief of Daily Wire.
00:56:59.000Wake up every morning with our new show, Morning Wire.
00:57:02.000On today's episode, the Biden administration signals a push for renewed mask mandates and vaccine boosters, Australia erupts in protest after another round of lockdowns, and the NFL experiences blowback to its new vaccine rules.