The Ben Shapiro Show - Why A Leftist Just Yelled At Tucker Carlson In Front Of His Child | Ep. 1304

00:00:00.000 An activist screams at Tucker Carlson in front of his daughter at a fishing store and the Democrats can't let America go back to normal.

00:00:06.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

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00:01:30.000 Alrighty, so over the weekend, there was this viral video that was going around.

00:01:34.000 There's a video of a person named Dan Bailey, who's I guess a fly fishing guide in Montana.

00:01:42.000 And he posted this video himself, which means this was not taken really by a third party who then posted it.

00:01:47.000 This is a person who is very, very proud of himself.

00:01:50.000 He saw Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host in Montana at a fly fishing shop, and he just started berating him.

00:01:56.000 And apparently Tucker's daughter was there.

00:01:57.000 And this guy doesn't care.

00:01:59.000 And the left, on Twitter particularly, but also in the media, seem to believe that this guy is committing an act of heroism. 0.99

00:02:06.000 That this guy has done something wonderful and good for the country by confronting Tucker Carlson and frankly acting like a jerk. 0.99

00:02:12.000 Here is a little bit of the tape. 0.99

00:02:14.000 I don't care, man. 1.00

00:02:16.000 Dude, you are the worst human being known to mankind. 0.99

00:02:20.000 I want you to do something to this state, to the United States, to everything else in this world. 1.00

00:02:26.000 I 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.

00:02:34.000 Don't call me son, please.

00:02:37.000 Okay, so what he's actually saying, if you can't hear it, is that he is, he's telling him he doesn't care if his daughter is there. 0.99

00:02:44.000 He says, dude, you are the worst human being known to mankind. 0.95

00:02:46.000 I want you to know that, what you've done to the States, to the United States, to everything else in the world. 0.99

00:02:50.000 I don't care your daughter's here. 0.67

00:02:51.000 What you've done to people's families, what you've done to everyone else in the world.

00:02:55.000 And Tucker tries to defuse it.

00:02:56.000 If you've seen Tucker in these sorts of situations, Tucker is pretty calm.

00:03:00.000 Tucker's been confronted many times in public.

00:03:02.000 At this point, he handles it really well.

00:03:04.000 And 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.

00:03:08.000 I 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?

00:03:16.000 I was like, you know what?

00:03:16.000 I'm not going to do this.

00:03:17.000 And I sort of walked away.

00:03:18.000 That's sort of what Tucker does here, right?

00:03:20.000 He handles this pretty well.

00:03:22.000 But the point here is that this person believes that they did something good.

00:03:25.000 In fact, this person, Bailey, actually put up a note online saying, quote, ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family.

00:03:33.000 He 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.

00:03:44.000 Right, saying that it's not often that you get a chance to do something like this.

00:03:47.000 It's not every day you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it. 0.99

00:03:50.000 What an a-hole. 0.98

00:03:51.000 This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation. 1.00

00:03:53.000 He has supported extreme racism. 1.00

00:03:55.000 He is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American. 0.98

00:04:01.000 So I have a question. 1.00

00:04:04.000 Let's try and get in his head for a second.

00:04:06.000 The person who ambushes Tucker Carlson in public air.

00:04:08.000 What does he think he's accomplishing?

00:04:11.000 Like 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?

00:04:18.000 Does 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?

00:04:29.000 Or start supporting all of the various talking points that this fly-fishing guide wants him to mirror.

00:04:35.000 Of course not.

00:04:35.000 It's not about convincing Tucker Carlson.

00:04:37.000 What it is, is about the performative.

00:04:38.000 It's about performing for the people online.

00:04:40.000 It's about performing for the left-wing, which sees this sort of stuff as heroism.

00:04:44.000 And 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.

00:04:53.000 Because this guy is a hero.

00:04:55.000 He has stood up to power, and he has said what so many people, unleft, want him to say.

00:04:59.000 And what this really is, is a mentality that is endangering America.

00:05:03.000 Not what Tucker says.

00:05:04.000 You may disagree with what Tucker says.

00:05:06.000 You may think that Tucker's wrong some of the time.

00:05:08.000 As an independent human being, I think Tucker is wrong sometimes.

00:05:10.000 We 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.

00:05:18.000 But that's not the same thing.

00:05:20.000 Disagreeing with somebody's political point of view is not the same thing as what you're seeing here.

00:05:24.000 What you are seeing here It's an authoritarian mindset.

00:05:27.000 It really is.

00:05:28.000 The 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.

00:05:40.000 Right?

00:05:40.000 Again, you're not confronting somebody in a public setting.

00:05:42.000 This isn't Tucker Carlson on his show.

00:05:44.000 It's not even Tucker Carlson.

00:05:45.000 Walking on the street by himself, which would still not be wonderful.

00:05:48.000 But this is him eating with- and you've seen this sort of thing before.

00:05:51.000 He's in a fishing- fly store- a fly fishing store with his family.

00:05:54.000 You saw this with Sarah Huckabee Sanders when she was working for the Trump administration.

00:05:58.000 She was eating at a restaurant.

00:05:59.000 You saw people at the restaurant starting to harass her and the people throwing her out of the restaurant. 0.94

00:06:03.000 You've seen this with the Black Lives Matter protesters literally going down the street to restaurants in Washington, D.C.

00:06:08.000 and berating people who are sitting there eating their dinner.

00:06:11.000 Authoritarianism comes in a couple of forms.

00:06:13.000 There'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.

00:06:21.000 And then there is what Theodore Adorno once suggested was the authoritarian mindset, right?

00:06:25.000 The authoritarian mind.

00:06:27.000 Now, Dorno was a Marxist, and so his suggestion about what constituted authoritarianism really more just looked like conventional conservatism.

00:06:35.000 But 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.

00:06:56.000 When I see what happened to Tucker, I think that that mindset is extraordinarily prevalent in today's society.

00:07:01.000 And you see it by polling data, by the way.

00:07:02.000 If 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.

00:07:12.000 The 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.

00:07:19.000 And people feel this, right?

00:07:20.000 People can feel this.

00:07:22.000 I have a brand new book out.

00:07:23.000 It comes out tomorrow.

00:07:24.000 It's called The Authoritarian Moment.

00:07:26.000 And this is something that I talk about, is this new mindset that is predominant on the left, but that has institutional support.

00:07:33.000 Because 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.

00:07:41.000 The question is, where is the institutional support?

00:07:44.000 And the answer is, the institutional support for this exists on the left.

00:07:47.000 It exists on the left.

00:07:49.000 This is not.

00:07:51.000 Remember, 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.

00:08:02.000 Remember this. 0.66

00:08:03.000 That 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.

00:08:15.000 You don't get to do that. It's a bad thing for the country. The villain in this case is Dan Bailey.

00:08:19.000 The 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.

00:08:29.000 It comes out tomorrow. You should go pre-order a copy today because it's a good run out.

00:08:34.000 It is that popular, thank God.

00:08:35.000 Here is what I write in the book.

00:08:37.000 More than six in 10 Americans say they fear saying what they think, including a majority of liberals, 64% moderates, fully 77% of conservatives.

00:08:45.000 Only self-described strong liberals feel confident in saying what they believe these days.

00:08:49.000 To 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.

00:09:01.000 The 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.

00:09:16.000 Tomorrow belongs to the far-left authoritarians, to the rest of us.

00:09:20.000 A society run by left-wing authoritarians is extraordinarily burdensome.

00:09:24.000 It's to be surrounded by institutional hatred.

00:09:26.000 If you're conservative or merely non-leftist in America, the hatred is palpable.

00:09:30.000 They hate you in academia.

00:09:31.000 They hate you in the media.

00:09:32.000 They hate you on the sports field, in the movies, on Facebook and Twitter.

00:09:35.000 Your boss hates you.

00:09:35.000 Your colleagues hate you.

00:09:36.000 At least, they have been told that they should.

00:09:39.000 And they hate you because you think the wrong way.

00:09:42.000 This is what so many Americans are feeling, and it's not people who are just thinking like Tucker.

00:09:46.000 It is people all the way up to and including mainstream liberals.

00:09:49.000 Perhaps the problem is that you attend church regularly.

00:09:52.000 Perhaps it's that you want to run your business and be left alone.

00:09:54.000 Perhaps it's that you want to raise your kids with traditional social values.

00:09:58.000 It 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.

00:10:14.000 Maybe 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.

00:10:22.000 Or 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.

00:10:30.000 Guilt by association is just as damning as guilt through action or inaction.

00:10:34.000 This is what I write in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment.

00:10:36.000 This is true.

00:10:37.000 If 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. 0.53

00:10:45.000 They will cheer.

00:10:46.000 They will think that you are the bad guy and the person confronting you and yelling at you is the good guy.

00:10:51.000 The reasons they hate you, I write, are legion.

00:10:53.000 They change day to day.

00:10:54.000 One day, you might be a ballyhooed champion of justice for standing up for gay rights or feminist ideals.

00:10:59.000 The 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.

00:11:05.000 Martina Navratilova or J.K.

00:11:07.000 Rowling.

00:11:08.000 One day, you might find yourself a hero of the intelligentsia for your cynicism about religion.

00:11:12.000 The next, you might find yourself a villain for the great sin of suggesting that cancel culture breeds radicalization, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker.

00:11:19.000 This is not a question of Democrat or Republican.

00:11:21.000 Not one figure named above would identify as a Republican, let alone a conservative.

00:11:26.000 There's only one thing, in the end, that unites the disparate figures deemed worthy of the gulag in our ongoing culture war.

00:11:32.000 Refusal.

00:11:32.000 The standards matter less than the simple message, you will comply and you will like it.

00:11:38.000 And that is the feeling that so many people have.

00:11:40.000 There 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.

00:11:58.000 And this has been a long time It's boiling under the sort of veneer of American society.

00:12:03.000 Always, social disapproval has incredible consequences for people.

00:12:07.000 But 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.

00:12:19.000 You have to be part of the social ostracizing crowd or be its target.

00:12:23.000 Once that happens, the society is in deep trouble.

00:12:27.000 There 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.

00:12:36.000 Cultural authoritarianism this way?

00:12:38.000 You're exaggerating.

00:12:39.000 It's not a big deal.

00:12:40.000 There's no such thing as cancel culture.

00:12:42.000 This is what woke rulers assure us while busily hunting down our most embarrassing political faux pas.

00:12:46.000 There's nothing wrong, they say, with calling your boss to try to get you fired.

00:12:49.000 After all, that's the free market working.

00:12:51.000 Why are you whining about social media censorship or about social ostracism?

00:12:54.000 People have a right to tear you to shreds, to end your career, to malign your character.

00:12:57.000 It's all free speech.

00:12:58.000 And in a certain sense, they're not wrong.

00:13:00.000 Your boss does have the right to fire you.

00:13:02.000 Your friends and family do have a right to cut you off.

00:13:04.000 None of that amounts to a violation of the First Amendment.

00:13:07.000 As I write in my book, it simply amounts to the end of the Republic.

00:13:10.000 Free speech and free exchange of ideas die when the attitude of philosophical tolerance withers.

00:13:15.000 Writing 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.

00:13:24.000 Quote, If you crave the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not grant it to you.

00:13:28.000 If you demand only their esteem, they will still pretend to refuse it to you.

00:13:31.000 You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity. 0.57

00:13:34.000 When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure.

00:13:37.000 Those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in their turn.

00:13:43.000 This is the problem.

00:13:46.000 What 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.

00:14:02.000 You can't have a country this way.

00:14:03.000 You really cannot, regardless of what you think, of anything that Tucker has to say.

00:14:07.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

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00:15:29.000 OK, so here's the thing.

00:15:31.000 Once you start targeting, Tucker.

00:15:33.000 Publicly, you can see how this quickly moves into the realm of targeting officially.

00:15:39.000 There is a bleed up that happens in American politics.

00:15:42.000 Things that start at a societal level eventually crystallize and become government policy.

00:15:46.000 Because if it's okay to target somebody socially, pretty soon there are a lot of people nodding and giggling when somebody is targeted governmentally.

00:15:52.000 So 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.

00:15:59.000 And a lot of people poo-pooed that.

00:16:00.000 They were like, oh, that's not happening, that's silly.

00:16:03.000 He said that the NSA was targeting him.

00:16:04.000 Now, what I suggested is that the NSA may not have been, quote-unquote, targeting him.

00:16:08.000 What 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.

00:16:20.000 And it appears that that is what is going on.

00:16:22.000 According 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.

00:16:34.000 For 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.

00:16:45.000 A Fox News spokesperson told The Record, a cybersecurity news site.

00:16:49.000 Two 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.

00:16:57.000 But the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight was neither a direct nor an incidental target of the agency, the sources said.

00:17:02.000 So that means that they were not actually targeting him, but they were unmasking his identity.

00:17:06.000 Now typically, you only unmask somebody's identity if they're a domestic American.

00:17:10.000 Citizen, 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.

00:17:20.000 Typically, you don't unmask American citizens.

00:17:22.000 You remember that this was something that happened with regard to Michael Flynn.

00:17:25.000 And Michael Flynn was unmasked by the Obama administration for no apparent reason.

00:17:28.000 The use of the intelligence apparatus in order to unmask American citizens who really are posing no national security threat is a serious problem.

00:17:35.000 But you're not seeing anybody scream and shout about any of this in the left-wing media.

00:17:39.000 I 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.

00:17:46.000 But Tucker, it's okay.

00:17:48.000 It's not a big deal.

00:17:49.000 And by the way, it's the same thing with regard to all... It's not just with regard to people like Tucker.

00:17:54.000 It's also true with regard to, for example, ProPublica releasing IRS records on a wide bevy of rich Americans.

00:17:59.000 Rich people are bad.

00:18:00.000 Therefore, it's okay that ProPublica is illegally obtaining records and then publishing them.

00:18:05.000 None of this is okay.

00:18:07.000 A functioning republic has to have neutral rules of equal applicability.

00:18:11.000 You 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.

00:18:30.000 If you're a good American citizen, you need to defend the rights of your opponents just as much as you defend your own rights.

00:18:35.000 This used to be like a normal thing that we all believed, but now I guess this has gone completely by the wayside.

00:18:41.000 And I think the reason for that is that politics has become expressive rather than about problem solving.

00:18:47.000 You can see this in the way that people talk about politics generally in the United States.

00:18:51.000 No longer are we worried about problem solving.

00:18:53.000 Now we are worried about whether politicians express sympathy.

00:18:56.000 We have an empathetic president, President Joe Biden, and that matters much more than all of the bad policy that he's pursuing.

00:19:03.000 We are looking for people in politics and politics is really about expressing your feeling of solidarity with people.

00:19:09.000 It is not about whether the policy is good or bad.

00:19:12.000 It is not about whether policy is helpful or harmful.

00:19:15.000 In my own marriage, we have a rule in my marriage that we try to cue to.

00:19:19.000 And this rule is pretty simple.

00:19:21.000 When 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?

00:19:31.000 And thankfully, my wife is rational enough to go along with that. 1.00

00:19:34.000 And 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.

00:19:40.000 And that if you offer a solution in a feelings conversation, you are now considered unfeeling.

00:19:45.000 This happens in marriage all the time, right?

00:19:46.000 Your 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.

00:19:51.000 You say, you know, all you could do is this, this, and this.

00:19:53.000 And she says, that's not what I, I don't want to hear your solutions.

00:19:56.000 I don't need your solutions.

00:19:57.000 I know I can do those things.

00:19:58.000 What I want is for you to just hear me.

00:20:00.000 I just want you to hear.

00:20:01.000 Now, politics is not supposed to be like that.

00:20:03.000 If politics is supposed to be here as a problem, now let's figure out a solution.

00:20:06.000 But politics is no longer about that.

00:20:08.000 Because 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.

00:20:21.000 That person is now an enemy.

00:20:23.000 If that person engages in solutions talk rather than feelings talk, that person ought to be ostracized.

00:20:29.000 That person is the problem.

00:20:31.000 You can see this in a wide variety of areas in American life.

00:20:35.000 It's particularly true when it comes to areas like race, for example.

00:20:39.000 Our great racial reckoning is not about coming up with solutions that actually boost the performance of, for example, black schoolchildren.

00:20:47.000 It is not about that.

00:20:49.000 It is not about coming up with policies that are best geared toward rectifying historic imbalances.

00:20:55.000 It's not about that.

00:20:56.000 What it is about is expressing the belief that the United States is bad, expressing solidarity with the belief that the United States is bad.

00:21:02.000 And if you refuse to express that solidarity, then you're the problem.

00:21:05.000 In fact, if you refuse to go along with the policy agenda, that is really just empathy in terms of policy.

00:21:12.000 If you refuse to go along with that, then you're a bad person.

00:21:14.000 The 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.

00:21:20.000 Because that means that people for whom you are empathetic deserve your help, and people for whom you are not empathetic do not.

00:21:26.000 It 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.

00:21:34.000 And that is a real, real problem in American society.

00:21:37.000 Okay, so let's talk about race for a second.

00:21:39.000 So over the weekend, there were a couple of interviews about race and racial reckoning that were quite telling and kind of fascinating.

00:21:46.000 And again, policy has now been conflated with empathy, which creates two separate problems.

00:21:50.000 One 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.

00:21:59.000 The policy itself is bad.

00:22:01.000 So we judge policy by whether it is empathetic.

00:22:04.000 Also, we judge whether you are empathetic by the policy you choose.

00:22:07.000 So, if you choose a policy that is not rooted in empathy, you are bad.

00:22:12.000 So there are two separate problems with conflating empathy and policy.

00:22:17.000 One is bad policy, and one is the targeting of people who disagree with you on policy as non-empathetic.

00:22:23.000 And 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.

00:22:29.000 Because you might think to yourself, wait a second, there are usually more than one way to skin a deer here.

00:22:34.000 There are a couple of different ways to approach this problem.

00:22:37.000 I'm offering a solution.

00:22:38.000 You offer another solution.

00:22:39.000 We 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?

00:22:43.000 That's not how politics is done anymore.

00:22:45.000 The overt conflation of empathy and policymaking.

00:22:49.000 It's the worst thing for both empathy and policymaking.

00:22:51.000 It 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.

00:22:59.000 So 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.

00:23:05.000 Those policies include things like standardized testing.

00:23:09.000 Standardized testing is an incentive structure that causes people to try to perform up to tests.

00:23:14.000 Treating people as individuals is an excellent way of rectifying social imbalances.

00:23:19.000 Because if you treat people as individuals, then everybody is held to the same standard.

00:23:19.000 Why?

00:23:23.000 And then I'm not judging you based on your race or group identity.

00:23:26.000 I'm judging you based on whether you hit these objective metrics.

00:23:29.000 How 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?

00:23:38.000 Because for a wide variety of minority groups, these have been the ladders to success.

00:23:44.000 It's neutrality that has provided the ladders to success for Jews, for example, who are not treated as a group.

00:23:49.000 We're originally treated as a group, but no longer are, right?

00:23:51.000 Are treated as individuals based on performance.

00:23:53.000 We judge whether you've done well in American society.

00:23:56.000 The same thing is true of Asian Americans. 0.97

00:23:58.000 But 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.

00:24:07.000 Because 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?

00:24:27.000 This is the explanation of the left. 0.98

00:24:29.000 You'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.

00:24:38.000 This is the argument of Robin DiAngelo and Abraham X. Kennedy.

00:24:38.000 It just doesn't apply.

00:24:41.000 If you use neutral rules, then you are actually doing something to harm black Americans because you are unempathetic. 0.98

00:24:48.000 That is one of the arguments that is made. 0.97

00:24:51.000 And the other is that you refuse to acknowledge your own racism.

00:24:54.000 It's really about you.

00:24:55.000 It's not about trying to solve the problem.

00:24:57.000 It's about you and your lack of empathy.

00:24:59.000 And your lack of empathy is because you don't understand the problem or you wish not to understand the problem.

00:25:05.000 Again, policy is now secondary.

00:25:07.000 Empathy is key.

00:25:10.000 In politics, empathy should never be key.

00:25:11.000 Policy should always be key.

00:25:13.000 Because how you feel on the inside has no bearing on whether your policy is good or not.

00:25:16.000 There's not a single human being who has ever implemented a policy on planet Earth who believed they were implementing an evil policy.

00:25:24.000 The most evil people on the planet, right now, today, believe they are implementing policy that quote-unquote helps people.

00:25:30.000 It is not about intent.

00:25:31.000 It is not about empathy.

00:25:32.000 It 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.

00:25:40.000 But we've lost that in the United States.

00:25:42.000 So on race, particularly, we've lost this.

00:25:44.000 Because, 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. 0.57

00:25:54.000 And 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. 0.99

00:26:02.000 And if they call for things like neutral rules or treating people like individuals, that is merely re-enshrining hierarchies of power. 0.99

00:26:10.000 And 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. 0.94

00:26:16.000 So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said this pretty openly over the weekend. 0.98

00:26:20.000 It's funny, you have all these critical race theorists out there saying, no, no, no, it's more sophisticated than that.

00:26:24.000 We're not teaching your kids that they're racist.

00:26:25.000 It's not about that.

00:26:26.000 We're teaching them that the structures of power are racist.

00:26:28.000 Okay, but here's Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who's basically letting the cat out of the bag. 1.00

00:26:32.000 She's like, no, no, no, we're teaching your kids that they're racist. 0.89

00:26:34.000 And if they refuse to acknowledge that they're racist, this is just demonstrative of the fact that they are unempathetic and therefore racist.

00:26:41.000 So why don't Republicans want us to learn how to not be racist?

00:26:47.000 Why don't Republicans want kids to know how to not be racist?

00:26:55.000 Why don't Republicans want us to know how to not be racist?

00:26:58.000 Because your definition of racist is not about individual intent.

00:27:01.000 Your definition of racist isn't even about whether black people are better off or worse off under your policies.

00:27:06.000 Your 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.

00:27:16.000 Politics is not the game of empathy, but it has become the game of empathy.

00:27:19.000 And this can be applied broadly.

00:27:21.000 Robin 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.

00:27:31.000 Because, again, if everything is about empathy, then we can't have things like, you can make fun of everybody.

00:27:35.000 That's unempathetic.

00:27:37.000 Now, that makes us less free.

00:27:39.000 Free human beings make jokes about lots of people, including people of other groups.

00:27:43.000 People make Jewish jokes?

00:27:44.000 Honestly, it really doesn't bother me.

00:27:47.000 As a general rule, it really does not bother me.

00:27:49.000 Because human beings make fun of each other all the time.

00:27:51.000 That is just an aspect.

00:27:52.000 It's one of the more joyful aspects of being human, by the way.

00:27:54.000 A lot of group jokes I find, you know, inappropriate and ugly.

00:27:57.000 But when I quash the ability of people to tell jokes, I mean, Robin DiAngelo would.

00:28:01.000 It's a humorless society they're creating here.

00:28:04.000 So comedy is, um, I think it's an excuse to get to be racist, right?

00:28:11.000 Like irony.

00:28:12.000 And 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.

00:28:23.000 And there is a concept in comedy called punching up, not down.

00:28:28.000 So, you know, you want to punch up, there's very different power dynamics and it doesn't hurt in the same way.

00:28:35.000 It doesn't invoke a deep, deep centuries-long history of oppression when you poke fun at, say, white people.

00:28:43.000 But it's very, very different when you poke fun at people of color. 0.87

00:28:49.000 So the only people you're allowed to make fun of are people who are white, right? 0.55

00:28:51.000 You have to think of each other in terms of groups.

00:28:52.000 This demonstrates your empathy.

00:28:55.000 And this is how we determine policy now.

00:28:56.000 Policy is not about whether it accomplishes its effect.

00:28:59.000 It's about whether you're empathetic.

00:29:01.000 Now, 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.

00:29:10.000 One of those people is David French.

00:29:12.000 I consider myself a pretty good friend with David French.

00:29:14.000 I talk to David fairly frequently, although not as much recently.

00:29:17.000 He 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.

00:29:31.000 So he has a piece in the Dispatch called, Structural Racism Isn't Wokeness, It's Reality.

00:29:36.000 Now, it depends how you define structural racism.

00:29:39.000 As I've said many, many times, when we talk about institutional racism, or white privilege, or structural racism, what are we talking about?

00:29:45.000 Are we talking about the structures of America perpetuate racism today?

00:29:49.000 Or 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.

00:29:57.000 This has been true literally for all time and will always continue to be true.

00:30:01.000 History has consequences.

00:30:02.000 We all know that.

00:30:03.000 So which are we talking about?

00:30:05.000 The 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.

00:30:28.000 Now you have made the institutions themselves discriminatory as a substitute for empathy.

00:30:33.000 You have made the policy geared not toward equality under the law, not at individual freedoms and human rights.

00:30:38.000 Instead, you have geared the policy toward quote-unquote fixing problems of the past based on group empathy.

00:30:43.000 You can have empathy for people who have been members of groups.

00:30:45.000 You 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.

00:30:52.000 That's worthy of empathy.

00:30:53.000 But does that mean that the way to rectify that is to treat people of particular racial groups as inherent victims of the society today?

00:30:59.000 It seems not.

00:31:01.000 Empathy and policymaking, again, are not the same thing.

00:31:04.000 But David French goes further than that.

00:31:06.000 And 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.

00:31:11.000 You can recognize the problems of historic injustice without suggesting that the systems need to be torn down.

00:31:17.000 So here's what David writes today.

00:31:20.000 He says, he's talking about a problem within major churches.

00:31:25.000 The 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.

00:31:45.000 He says, this is David French, the congregants object to what they perceive as a pastoral embrace of critical race theory.

00:31:51.000 They assert that the Bible alone contains teachings sufficient to address America's race problems.

00:31:55.000 You 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.

00:32:02.000 Without 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.

00:32:19.000 They 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.

00:32:26.000 Quote, a disparity exists.

00:32:28.000 We can't deny this.

00:32:28.000 These are not opinions.

00:32:29.000 They're facts.

00:32:30.000 It matters in our country whether one is white or black.

00:32:32.000 Now, we don't want it to matter, which is why I think we try to convince ourselves it doesn't matter.

00:32:36.000 We think to ourselves, I don't hold prejudice toward black or white people, so racism is not my problem.

00:32:40.000 But this is where we need to see that racialization is our problem.

00:32:43.000 It's all of our problem.

00:32:45.000 We subtly, almost unknowingly, contribute to it.

00:32:47.000 Okay, well, there are many problems with this statement that are put forward here by, again, Mike Kelsey.

00:32:54.000 Or rather, David Platt.

00:32:56.000 Okay, so the mere fact of a disparity does not imply that discrimination is responsible solely for the disparity.

00:33:01.000 It could be that discrimination is it.

00:33:03.000 Could be historic discrimination is it.

00:33:05.000 Or it could be that people make different decisions.

00:33:07.000 Those different decisions have different consequences and we need to incentivize better decision making thus to ensure better consequences.

00:33:13.000 It could be that.

00:33:14.000 It could also be that while there is undoubtedly imbalances, there are undoubtedly imbalances that have been inherited from the past, it could be.

00:33:22.000 It could also be And the solution to that is not to get rid of, again, neutral laws of equal applicability.

00:33:29.000 The solution to that is to acknowledge that that is just the way that life works.

00:33:29.000 Right?

00:33:33.000 That that is unfairness.

00:33:35.000 And that the best way to rectify the unfairness is not to perpetuate new unfairness.

00:33:38.000 But David, I think, slides here and gets into some pretty dicey territory.

00:33:43.000 He says, the dissenters argue that the solution to the race problem in America is more Bible, not more sociology books.

00:33:47.000 It is not the Bible plus a secular reading list, but solo scriptura.

00:33:51.000 It's not just unwise to rely on secular scholarship to address American racism.

00:33:54.000 They argue it's unbiblical.

00:33:55.000 Now, there's some truth to this.

00:33:57.000 And when people say that the solution to what ails us is treating people well individually, they are correct about this.

00:34:03.000 They are correct, especially in a country where legal discrimination is actively forbidden by the federal, state, and local government.

00:34:10.000 Yes, we need more God.

00:34:12.000 Yes, we need more Bible.

00:34:13.000 And yes, we need to treat each other as individual human beings better.

00:34:17.000 Recently, 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.

00:34:23.000 I said, I have a very simple solution.

00:34:24.000 Really, it's very, very simple.

00:34:26.000 Every 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.

00:34:37.000 I disagree.

00:34:38.000 They're a good person and I respect them as a human.

00:34:41.000 Say that! 0.97

00:34:41.000 Polarization goes away overnight. 0.97

00:34:43.000 But that is not the point.

00:34:44.000 They won't do it.

00:34:45.000 That's unempathetic.

00:34:46.000 The empathy is unempathetic.

00:34:48.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

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00:36:12.000 All righty, we'll get some more on this in just one second.

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00:37:51.000 So 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.

00:38:11.000 And 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.

00:38:21.000 It's all about race. 0.87

00:38:22.000 And he is talking about how in the Christian community, there's been a pushback against He says...

00:38:30.000 That 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.

00:38:44.000 No, that's not the argument.

00:38:45.000 The 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.

00:38:57.000 I mean, truthfully, there is no way That you can repay people for their great-great-great-grandparents being enslaved.

00:39:04.000 How exactly do you repay that?

00:39:05.000 There's no way.

00:39:06.000 I 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.

00:39:18.000 When 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?

00:39:29.000 Okay, then sorry, that is not a reparation, right?

00:39:31.000 That may be a payoff, and it may be something that is an attempt at reparation, but it is not an actual reparation.

00:39:36.000 And no one is arguing that equality under law is the thing that makes up for the past.

00:39:42.000 All we're saying is it's the only ladder to success in American society.

00:39:46.000 And it's the only ladder back to anything remotely approaching civility and political consonants.

00:39:52.000 There's only one way the country comes back together, and that's if the same rules apply to all of us.

00:39:55.000 But, says David French, no, that's wrong.

00:39:57.000 This is on the core issues of American racism.

00:40:00.000 This pastor, David Platt, is biblically and historically right.

00:40:03.000 It's his detractors who are biblically and historically wrong.

00:40:05.000 These conservatives have placed a secular political frame around an issue with profound religious significance.

00:40:10.000 They'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.

00:40:17.000 And 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.

00:40:26.000 Now, there are a couple of contradictory verses in the Bible, seemingly contradictory verses.

00:40:30.000 One is that God revisits payment on the third and fourth generations.

00:40:34.000 Now, to my ears, what that sounds like is God recognizing that history has consequences in the Bible.

00:40:39.000 That if you do something, there will be consequences to the third and fourth generation.

00:40:42.000 But 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.

00:40:51.000 You're not allowed to do that by the law.

00:40:53.000 There 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.

00:40:59.000 And the only way we can have a society moving forward is to treat everyone by the exact same rules.

00:41:05.000 But David seems to be straying from that here.

00:41:08.000 Right?

00:41:08.000 He says that we have to confess our sins.

00:41:10.000 So he says it's our job to confess the sins of the past.

00:41:14.000 Because, 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.

00:41:21.000 Why?

00:41:21.000 Josiah said, quote, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book.

00:41:26.000 And in the book of Nehemiah, the Israelites confessed the sins and iniquities of their fathers.

00:41:31.000 In the book of Leviticus, God commanded the Israelites to confess the iniquity and iniquity of their fathers.

00:41:35.000 Okay, so I can confess the sins of people who have come before me in the United States.

00:41:39.000 That does not mean that you get to subject my children to disparate treatment.

00:41:43.000 Or me.

00:41:44.000 That's not how any of that works.

00:41:46.000 Again, this is the conflation of empathy with policy.

00:41:49.000 I can have full empathy for people who suffer because in the past, their family was victimized.

00:41:54.000 That 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.

00:42:04.000 And that's been particularly true for the last half century.

00:42:07.000 But 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.

00:42:16.000 And if you deserve no empathy, we can target you as much as we could possibly want.

00:42:21.000 And this lies behind so much of our politics these days.

00:42:23.000 It's not about problem solving.

00:42:25.000 It's about othering people.

00:42:26.000 It is not about problem solving and getting to yes.

00:42:28.000 It 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.

00:42:42.000 It has consequences, for example, when it comes to COVID.

00:42:44.000 So...

00:42:45.000 Let's say that you wish to convince people that they ought to get vaccinated.

00:42:49.000 So I found out recently that a lot of people in our office, people I work with, are not vaccinated.

00:42:53.000 As you know, I'm a very large-scale proponent of vaccination.

00:42:56.000 I've been a proponent of vaccination since the beginning.

00:42:58.000 I've been a proponent of vaccination since way before COVID.

00:43:01.000 It's one of my more controversial views among conservatives.

00:43:04.000 I'm very pro-vaccination.

00:43:06.000 Okay, but a lot of people in this office didn't get vaccinated.

00:43:09.000 They're independent, free human beings.

00:43:11.000 If I wanted to get them vaccinated, I would treat them as independent, free human beings.

00:43:14.000 I 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.

00:43:22.000 For people who are above the age of 12, that seems to be the case as well.

00:43:26.000 Okay, and that being the case, you now get to make an independent and free decision.

00:43:29.000 But this is not how people of the left are approaching the problem.

00:43:32.000 The 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.

00:43:40.000 Notice, 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.

00:43:49.000 If you choose to take a risk, Bear the consequences.

00:43:52.000 Same rules for everybody.

00:43:53.000 Same exact rules for everybody.

00:43:55.000 I got the vaccine.

00:43:56.000 My wife got the vaccine.

00:43:57.000 My parents got the vaccine.

00:43:58.000 And now we bear the risk of the vaccine.

00:44:00.000 And if you don't get the vaccine, you bear the risk of the vaccine.

00:44:03.000 Same rule for every single human being.

00:44:05.000 And you get to make that decision yourself because you're a free, independent human being. 1.00

00:44:08.000 But 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. 1.00

00:44:17.000 You're a bad person. 1.00

00:44:18.000 Now, even if you believe that that's the case, is that the way to treat fellow human beings? 0.55

00:44:23.000 Really, like on a serious level, is that the way that you think you're going to convince them to do things?

00:44:26.000 Remember, the guy who shouted at Tucker Carlson was not interested in convincing Tucker Carlson to change his opinion.

00:44:32.000 He was interested in virtue signaling to all of his friends.

00:44:34.000 This is the same thing in the media today.

00:44:36.000 It's the same thing from, for example, Anthony Fauci.

00:44:38.000 So Anthony Fauci, the great and sainted, second greatest doctor in America after Dr. Joe Biden, he says, you know, maybe we should blame people.

00:44:44.000 Maybe that will work.

00:44:46.000 Or maybe it won't.

00:44:47.000 Maybe it won't.

00:44:48.000 Maybe 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.

00:45:00.000 I 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.

00:45:13.000 She 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.

00:45:27.000 I don't want to blame people, but if they get blamed, well, you know.

00:45:30.000 That's the way they- Don Lemon is even- is way worse, obviously.

00:45:32.000 Don Lemon is the worst at all of this on CNN. 1.00

00:45:34.000 He says that everyone who's not getting vaccinated, they're idiotic. 1.00

00:45:37.000 They're nonsensical. 1.00

00:45:37.000 Okay, here's the thing. 1.00

00:45:38.000 Even if you believe that, is that gonna convince anybody?

00:45:41.000 Or is that really much more about- Treating somebody as morally lesser.

00:45:46.000 The people who are the greatest proponents of empathy, it turns out, are really non-empathetic for anybody who disagrees with them.

00:45:51.000 And here's the thing.

00:45:52.000 When 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.

00:46:05.000 The pandemic continues among the unvaccinated. 0.79

00:46:07.000 The unvaccinated have exactly the same risk factors they had when they were dying by the thousands back in January.

00:46:12.000 And so if you choose to make that decision, you bear the risk.

00:46:16.000 You do.

00:46:16.000 If you're vaccinated, you're doing pretty well these days.

00:46:18.000 If you're unvaccinated, you're probably not doing nearly as well.

00:46:21.000 So probably you should get vaccinated.

00:46:22.000 But, your decision. 1.00

00:46:23.000 Wouldn't that be a better way to convince people than shouting at them that they're idiots? 1.00

00:46:26.000 But here is Don Lemon shouting at people that they're idiots. 1.00

00:46:29.000 I'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. 1.00

00:46:42.000 But Michael, how much more?

00:46:44.000 You've got to call it what it is. 1.00

00:46:48.000 Behavior is idiotic. 1.00

00:46:50.000 and nonsensical, I think that you need to tell people that their behavior is idiotic and nonsensical. 1.00

00:46:56.000 It doesn't mean that they are idiots, it's just that their behavior on this particular point, that is not making sense. 1.00

00:47:03.000 Just 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. 1.00

00:47:11.000 You 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. 0.99

00:47:23.000 No, that's medically appropriate. 1.00

00:47:25.000 And if you doubt that that's medically appropriate, then it's because you're a bigot.

00:47:29.000 Just a quick note there on medicine, circa CNN 2021.

00:47:33.000 But here's the broader point with regard to all of this.

00:47:37.000 When 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.

00:47:48.000 And again, the reverse is true as well.

00:47:50.000 It is an excuse for bad policymaking.

00:47:52.000 One 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.

00:47:59.000 And the solution to the pandemic is you learn to live with it.

00:48:03.000 It's a solution that's always been available.

00:48:05.000 The problem is that the left rejected that solution.

00:48:06.000 So now, when the pandemic is rearing its ugly head again, they have to control people.

00:48:11.000 Because, in the beginning, they, in authoritarian fashion, shut down everything.

00:48:14.000 They shut down businesses.

00:48:15.000 They maintained the shutdown on businesses when it became clear that this was very age-stratified.

00:48:20.000 And 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.

00:48:28.000 They knew this very early on.

00:48:29.000 They 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.

00:48:37.000 Why?

00:48:37.000 Because again, it's about empathy, right?

00:48:39.000 My empathy for society is demonstrated by the amount of control that I lavish upon you.

00:48:44.000 It's helicopter politicking.

00:48:46.000 The more attention I lavish on you, the more I control you top down, the more I'm demonstrating my empathy.

00:48:51.000 Well, the problem with that is that Joe Biden had basically declared the pandemic was going to be over July 4th, right?

00:48:56.000 It's now the end of July, and the pandemic is not in fact over.

00:49:01.000 People on the right are saying, but it is.

00:49:03.000 And when we say it is, we don't mean that people aren't dying of the virus.

00:49:05.000 We 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.

00:49:17.000 The government literally has no more role to play here.

00:49:19.000 Once 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.

00:49:28.000 Once you can protect yourself, then this becomes very much like you eat too much and you're obese and you get heart disease.

00:49:33.000 It looks a lot more like that because it's preventable, right?

00:49:35.000 In this particular case, why are you worried about people, seriously, who are making free decisions of their own accord not to get vaccinated?

00:49:42.000 In 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.

00:49:53.000 The problem is that we could have made that solution last year.

00:49:55.000 Ron DeSantis was very bad in Florida for having engaged in that solution.

00:49:59.000 Sweden 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.

00:50:06.000 You can go out.

00:50:07.000 You can live your life.

00:50:07.000 If you're older, you should protect yourself and we should protect you.

00:50:09.000 This is what Ron DeSantis said.

00:50:10.000 He was ripped up and down.

00:50:11.000 Because again, the height of empathy was we lock you in your home for months at a time.

00:50:15.000 That was empathetic.

00:50:17.000 It didn't matter whether it worked or not. 0.96

00:50:18.000 It didn't matter that Andrew Cuomo killed all the olds in New York.

00:50:20.000 He was empathetic, right?

00:50:21.000 He got on TV every night and he said things very confidently that were completely wrong, but he was empathetic and that was the key.

00:50:27.000 Okay, well now, The Biden administration is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

00:50:31.000 Because on the one hand, they have done the thing that technically ends the pandemic.

00:50:35.000 Namely, 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.

00:50:45.000 160 million adults in the United States have taken the vaccine.

00:50:49.000 And 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.

00:50:58.000 And which means that technically he should be done, right?

00:51:01.000 But he can't be done.

00:51:03.000 He can't be done.

00:51:03.000 Because to be done would mean that he's unempathetic.

00:51:06.000 Because the policy which started out empathy was locked down to save every life.

00:51:10.000 Then 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.

00:51:19.000 That to me looks a lot more empathetic and provides a neutral standard by which we can allow people to live their own lives.

00:51:25.000 But if empathy is just top-down control, if empathy is I am most empathetic because government action is the empathetic thing.

00:51:33.000 Then you can't end the pandemic.

00:51:34.000 It can never end.

00:51:35.000 There can never be any end.

00:51:36.000 The only way the pandemic ends is when we have zero COVID.

00:51:40.000 Zero COVID is never happening.

00:51:41.000 And so, instead of the Biden administration just saying, listen, you've all had the opportunity to do what you're doing.

00:51:45.000 We're going to learn to live with the virus now.

00:51:46.000 If you choose not to get it, disagree.

00:51:48.000 Think it's bad.

00:51:48.000 You should go get the vaccine.

00:51:51.000 That's on you.

00:51:52.000 Instead of doing that, he can't do that.

00:51:54.000 Because 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.

00:52:01.000 He can't do that.

00:52:02.000 It's zero COVID or nothing for this administration.

00:52:05.000 And so they're stuck.

00:52:06.000 Because on the one hand, they want to say, look at our magical success in fighting the virus.

00:52:09.000 On 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.

00:52:22.000 I keep looking.

00:52:23.000 I'm looking at the same stats that you are.

00:52:25.000 And what I come up with is...

00:52:27.000 The 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.

00:52:35.000 Right 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.

00:52:45.000 When we were at the height of the pandemic, we were talking about 3,000.

00:52:48.000 3,300 seven-day running average of deaths.

00:52:53.000 We are down tenfold from that.

00:52:55.000 And yet we are treating this as though it's a crisis.

00:52:57.000 The 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.

00:53:03.000 That's all.

00:53:04.000 And if you disagree with the policy, you're non-empathetic.

00:53:06.000 It's why the media are focusing in right now on Florida.

00:53:09.000 They're saying, oh, look at this hotspot of Florida.

00:53:11.000 So many cases here.

00:53:12.000 Right.

00:53:12.000 People who are unvaccinated are getting it.

00:53:14.000 And?

00:53:16.000 And?

00:53:17.000 True empathy looks like I treat you as a full, independent, individual human being.

00:53:23.000 But we're not going to do that.

00:53:24.000 So 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.

00:53:37.000 And 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.

00:53:43.000 We'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.

00:53:51.000 That 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.

00:53:59.000 Here is Dr. Fauci, though, talking about how true empathy is authoritarian cram-downs.

00:54:04.000 Do you think masks should be brought back for vaccinated Americans?

00:54:12.000 You know, Jake, this is under active consideration.

00:54:14.000 The 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.

00:54:25.000 So even if you are vaccinated, you should wear a mask.

00:54:28.000 That's a local decision.

00:54:30.000 That's not incompatible with the CDC's overall recommendations that give a lot of discretion to the locals.

00:54:41.000 Okay, 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.

00:54:50.000 But 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.

00:54:58.000 And by the way, the solutions now being proposed by the left are exactly along these lines.

00:55:00.000 You'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.

00:55:10.000 We saw NPR do this last week.

00:55:11.000 It was by Noah Weiland saying, in Louisiana, vaccine misinformation has public health workers feeling quote-unquote stuck.

00:55:17.000 So the only solution there, obviously, is top-down censorship.

00:55:19.000 You have to censor the misinformation.

00:55:20.000 And we're going to define misinformation as anything that the New York Times agrees with.

00:55:27.000 If the New York Times disagrees with anything, it is now misinformation.

00:55:31.000 And so, obviously, we need to crack down on the misinformation.

00:55:34.000 Or maybe the problem is the Washington Post.

00:55:37.000 The Washington Post says, the big problem here is that the GOP is moving to limit public health powers.

00:55:43.000 Right, that what we need to do is more lockdowns. 0.92

00:55:45.000 And if you don't wish to see lockdowns, you're unempathetic. 0.92

00:55:47.000 You want more people to die.

00:55:48.000 Okay, 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.

00:55:56.000 We've got to stop these GOP lawmakers from, you know, giving people individual freedoms.

00:56:00.000 We need to stop that.

00:56:01.000 That needs to end right now.

00:56:03.000 Well, then the solution is only one-party rule forever.

00:56:06.000 Right, this is how authoritarianism bleeds up from attitude toward actual policy.

00:56:12.000 And it's very ugly stuff.

00:56:13.000 Alrighty, we will be back here later today with an additional hour of content.

00:56:16.000 In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles show today.

00:56:18.000 He discusses the Olympics flopping in the ratings.

00:56:20.000 You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show.

00:56:22.000 That's available right now.

00:56:23.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:56:23.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:56:24.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld.

00:56:33.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.

00:56:34.000 Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.

00:56:37.000 Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.

00:56:38.000 Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.

00:56:40.000 Post-Producer Justin Barber.

00:56:42.000 The show is edited by Adam Sievitz.

00:56:44.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

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00:56:50.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:56:52.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:56:56.000 John Bickley here, editor-in-chief of Daily Wire.

00:56:59.000 Wake up every morning with our new show, Morning Wire.

00:57:02.000 On 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.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 26, 2021

Why A Leftist Just Yelled At Tucker Carlson In Front Of His Child | Ep. 1304

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