The Ben Shapiro Show - Why Tucker Carlson Wants You Demoralized

00:00:00.000 Tucker Carlson was shouting at the walls of his cosplay cabin in Maine about boy slop and burritos and Israeli influence operations.

00:00:09.000 Alp does a body good.

00:00:11.000 Because there is actually a metric ton of anti American slop being shovel fed to all of us these days.

00:00:16.000 I want to do something slightly different today.

00:00:18.000 I want to talk about the actual American dream what it is, what it means, and what it most certainly isn't.

00:00:24.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:33.000 So, as I said, I spent yesterday going to New York talking business with some of the most successful and brilliant business people in America.

00:00:39.000 You know what my main takeaway was?

00:00:41.000 America kicks ass.

00:00:42.000 America is great.

00:00:44.000 This is a great country.

00:00:45.000 I know.

00:00:46.000 We are all supposed to be demoralized and upset.

00:00:49.000 And we're all supposed to believe and claim that no one anymore has any shot at getting ahead in America, that the American dream is dead, that we need something brand new, by which most people mean some idea that was tried centuries ago, four centuries.

00:01:03.000 And then fail like over and over and over.

00:01:05.000 And most of those bad ideas revolve around a very, very basic failed idea that people are addicted to that there ought to be a special cadre of elite people who direct the economy toward their specific ends, that your individual freedoms are actually destructive, that you ought to have your choices circumscribed so that they can build whatever it is they want to build.

00:01:26.000 For Hassan Piker, total economic leveling in poverty.

00:01:30.000 For Zorhan Mamdani, third world ascendancy in American weakness.

00:01:33.000 For Tucker Carlson, an agrarian feudal state.

00:01:35.000 For the Muslim Brotherhood, Dar al Islam.

00:01:37.000 So, today I want to talk about what the American dream actually is and what it actually is not.

00:01:43.000 So, you're constantly hearing the American dream is the house and the white picket fence and the dog and the 2.2 children.

00:01:48.000 That's not what the American dream is.

00:01:50.000 The American dream is a process, it is not, in fact, an outcome.

00:01:55.000 The American dream is a process.

00:01:59.000 That process says that there is a relationship between cause and effect, that you, if you make good, virtuous, smart decisions, if you perform dutiful and smart things throughout your life, You will end up better off than you did.

00:02:15.000 And then your parents did.

00:02:16.000 And then if you pass those values on to your kids and they do the same thing, they will be better off than you.

00:02:21.000 That is the American dream.

00:02:23.000 That was the thing.

00:02:24.000 It is not that you will instantaneously go from being the poorest person in America to the richest person in America.

00:02:29.000 That might happen to some people, but that's not the American dream.

00:02:31.000 The American dream says that your talents and abilities should be able to take you as far as possible.

00:02:38.000 And that you will be better off if you do all those things because, again, the process is the thing.

00:02:43.000 And as long as you protect the process, you get your shot.

00:02:46.000 That's the American dream.

00:02:48.000 When my great great grandparents got here at the beginning of the 20th century, they came here without a dollar in their pocket.

00:02:55.000 They only knew Yiddish.

00:02:57.000 And then they did those things.

00:02:59.000 And they weren't rich.

00:03:01.000 Their kids did better than they did.

00:03:02.000 And they weren't precisely rich.

00:03:05.000 And my parents did better than my grandparents, but they weren't rich.

00:03:10.000 And now I'm pretty rich.

00:03:11.000 It's an intergenerational process very often.

00:03:14.000 This is true for all Americans.

00:03:17.000 And that process, in order to work, has to include certain preconditions.

00:03:21.000 There are certain conditions that make the process work.

00:03:24.000 Free markets.

00:03:25.000 So private property.

00:03:26.000 You own your labor.

00:03:27.000 You own the products, goods, and services that you produce.

00:03:30.000 Your innovation is your own.

00:03:32.000 And you can trade it with other people.

00:03:33.000 And you can rent it to people if you want.

00:03:35.000 That's what wage labor is.

00:03:36.000 And you can build businesses.

00:03:37.000 You can do those things.

00:03:39.000 That's what a free market is.

00:03:40.000 We also need things like equal justice before the law, right?

00:03:43.000 We need a law that is equally applied.

00:03:46.000 Not, there's justice For my friends and just beat downs for my enemies.

00:03:50.000 That is not equal justice.

00:03:52.000 And it doesn't protect the process because that's not a process.

00:03:54.000 That is just the Schmidtian friend enemy distinction.

00:03:57.000 We need freedom of mind, so freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

00:04:00.000 So we can think things through, debate them out, so we can actually pursue that process.

00:04:06.000 And of course, we need a social fabric that promotes virtue.

00:04:08.000 You need actual people doing good things.

00:04:11.000 You need to know what a good decision looks like, what a moral decision looks like.

00:04:14.000 Those are all the preconditions for the American dream.

00:04:17.000 And free markets, free minds, equal justice before law, social virtue.

00:04:23.000 Those are the things, those are the preconditions.

00:04:25.000 And when you have that, and then you have a government that protects those things and protects the process, that's when the American dream happens.

00:04:33.000 The process not only protects and promotes freedom, it also happens to have the happy effect of promoting insane, unprecedented human prosperity.

00:04:40.000 Because it turns out the best way for innovation and competition to happen is to access the diverse knowledge and opinions of all humanity, that free people innovate, free people compete, free people are able to access each other's knowledge levels, they're able to aggregate those knowledge levels.

00:04:58.000 And we are much better off that no single human being knows more than the rest of humanity.

00:05:05.000 That's not a thing.

00:05:06.000 And that's true when it comes to prioritization as well.

00:05:09.000 Free markets mean that everyone can prioritize what they want on a material level.

00:05:13.000 You get to make your own decisions about what makes your life better.

00:05:17.000 You get to decide whether you wish to trade your labor for X number of dollars or whether you wish to trade X number of dollars for a lottery ticket or for a share of stock, right?

00:05:25.000 Those are the decisions.

00:05:27.000 You get to decide what you are willing to do.

00:05:29.000 That's what the free market pricing system is.

00:05:31.000 It is a set of aggregated choices by millions upon millions of individual consumers.

00:05:36.000 And again, free markets also mean that we value everybody's knowledge base.

00:05:41.000 I, as a petty tyrant, I don't get to dictate to you what is the best way to fix a toilet because I have the government gun.

00:05:48.000 Because there are lots of people who can aggregate their knowledge and fix the toilet better.

00:05:52.000 And if you don't know how to do it, somebody else probably does.

00:05:54.000 So again, the American dream is a process.

00:05:57.000 That's the process we have to preserve.

00:05:58.000 It is not an outcome.

00:05:59.000 And that's exciting because the American dream.

00:06:03.000 A process that is reliant on your freedom makes it your adventure.

00:06:07.000 It's your journey.

00:06:08.000 You make the decisions about your life.

00:06:10.000 You make the decisions about what you think is important.

00:06:13.000 You make the decisions about what you think things are worth or what you are willing to trade for what or which profession to go into.

00:06:20.000 You make those decisions.

00:06:21.000 I don't make those decisions.

00:06:23.000 Hassan Piker doesn't make those decisions.

00:06:24.000 Tucker Carlson doesn't make those decisions.

00:06:26.000 You make those decisions.

00:06:28.000 And that's incredible.

00:06:29.000 Do you understand how rare that is in human history?

00:06:32.000 That is absolutely rare across human history.

00:06:35.000 For most of human history, people were just told what to do all the time.

00:06:39.000 The American dream isn't that.

00:06:42.000 That's what I want.

00:06:42.000 I just want the shot.

00:06:43.000 I want the shot to make that choice.

00:06:45.000 I think it's what we all want the shot, right?

00:06:46.000 We want the process protected.

00:06:48.000 That process still works.

00:06:48.000 And guess what?

00:06:49.000 There are people who lie to you and they say the process doesn't work.

00:06:52.000 Now, the process doesn't work as well as it should, thanks to the impositions of people like Hassan Piker on the left or Tucker Carlson on the right.

00:07:00.000 Statists inhibit the process, but the process still works and it works really, really well.

00:07:05.000 We'll get some more on this in just one second.

00:07:08.000 First, when it comes to your upward mobility, one thing that people do need is access to capital, right?

00:07:14.000 That is a thing that you need.

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00:07:38.000 Again, We are a business.

00:07:39.000 That means that we constantly have to be seeking overnight funding, all the rest of that sort of stuff.

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00:08:08.000 Cato Institute did a 2023 study on income mobility.

00:08:11.000 Looking at findings from Pew and Raj Chetty, who's a statistician at Harvard and his tax record.

00:08:18.000 He had a big study of this, an AI study.

00:08:20.000 And what they found, inflation adjusted, is that 93% of kids who grew up in the bottom quintile were better off than their parents were by the time they reached their 30s.

00:08:28.000 93%, nearly everyone.

00:08:30.000 86% of kids from the middle of three quintiles were better off than their parents were by the time they reached their 30s.

00:08:35.000 And 70% of children from the top quintile were better off than their parents by the time they reached their 30s.

00:08:41.000 And again, all of this correlates with making just basic, smart, good decisions.

00:08:47.000 There's something called the success sequence.

00:08:49.000 If you follow the success sequence, you will not be permanently poor in the United States.

00:08:53.000 Statistically speaking, you will not.

00:08:56.000 97% of millennials who follow the so called success sequence were not in poverty by their mid 30s.

00:09:04.000 One, graduate high school.

00:09:05.000 Two, get a full time job.

00:09:06.000 Three, get married before you have kids.

00:09:07.000 By the way, the most important thing here is get married before you have kids for a couple of reasons.

00:09:11.000 One, because if you have kids before you get married, then you have high costs and less income.

00:09:17.000 But number two, it turns out that when people get married, they change how they view their life goals.

00:09:22.000 This is true for every young dude.

00:09:24.000 It's why it's important for young men to get married, particularly.

00:09:27.000 Because income trajectory goes steeply up.

00:09:30.000 When you're a single dude, you are perfectly happy to live in kind of a crappy apartment with a box for a chair and a futon for a bed and eat ramen every night.

00:09:38.000 It's true for me in law school.

00:09:39.000 It's true for a lot of people in college.

00:09:41.000 It's true for a lot of people in their early work life.

00:09:43.000 Then you get married and it turns out you want to provide for your family and income grows.

00:09:47.000 You make different decisions about your life.

00:09:50.000 Right?

00:09:50.000 So the American dream, the process is still there.

00:09:54.000 It is still there.

00:09:56.000 But, but, There's a different view of the American dream, and this is the perverse view of the American dream, and it actually destroys the American dream.

00:10:04.000 That different view of the American dream is that the American dream is a set of outcomes, right?

00:10:10.000 That the American dream isn't that if you make good, smart, virtuous decisions, you will live better than your parents did and your kids will live better than you.

00:10:17.000 That actually the American dream is the house with the white picket fence, or two kids and a dog, or a nicotine factory in India.

00:10:25.000 Now, listen, I may want all those things except for the factory, and you might too.

00:10:29.000 But when the government, which is at the end of the day, all the government is, is a big gun pointed at people.

00:10:33.000 That's what the government is.

00:10:35.000 It has a monopoly on legitimate use of force.

00:10:37.000 That's what the government is.

00:10:38.000 And sometimes you need it, but you shouldn't use it that much.

00:10:42.000 When you use that gigantic gun pointed at people, directed at achieving certain ends, not protecting the process, but achieving the ends, you end up actually destroying the process.

00:10:53.000 And by the way, never achieving the ends to boot.

00:10:55.000 So now let's talk about prices.

00:10:57.000 Listen, I get it.

00:10:58.000 Everyone is worried about prices.

00:11:00.000 I totally get it.

00:11:01.000 Things are way too expensive.

00:11:03.000 Of course, I've said this all along.

00:11:05.000 So let's talk about those prices, right?

00:11:06.000 The prices are high and people are worried about the prices as they should be.

00:11:10.000 People are correctly upset about inflation on a wide variety of topics.

00:11:14.000 Let's start with food, right?

00:11:15.000 Hence Burrito Gate, right?

00:11:17.000 This bizarre discussion about the price of burritos.

00:11:19.000 Now, again, I want to start off with a basic, with this sort of basic primer.

00:11:23.000 For those who missed it, Andrew Colvitt, who's one of the guys who helps run TPUSA, put out a tweet where he was saying that some 20 year old was complaining about $20 burritos and this is the problem with America.

00:11:34.000 And As usual, the conversation sort of degraded into the dumbest form of itself because two things can simultaneously be true.

00:11:41.000 Food is too expensive.

00:11:42.000 And also, $20 for a burrito is a lot of money for a burrito.

00:11:46.000 You can get a burrito a lot cheaper than that.

00:11:48.000 And so the conversation sort of bifurcated into two areas.

00:11:53.000 People claiming that certain of us were saying that food wasn't too expensive, which is dumb.

00:11:57.000 We all agree food is too expensive.

00:11:59.000 And other people saying, guys, there is some virtue to making responsible decisions with your money.

00:12:04.000 And if you're 20 and you're having trouble making the rent, Going out for dinner to buy a $20 burrito is probably not the wisest expenditure of cash.

00:12:11.000 In any case, let's be real about how food inflation works.

00:12:15.000 Free markets create better and cheaper burritos, to use the burrito as an example.

00:12:20.000 Because again, the byproduct of human choice and widely disseminated knowledge and innovation and free competition is better and cheaper burritos.

00:12:31.000 Now, here are some things that do not create better and cheaper burritos tariffs that are meant to protect the American working man.

00:12:37.000 If you increase the price of the inputs, the burrito price goes up.

00:12:41.000 Or let's say lower interest rates that are designed to make credit easier for the American family.

00:12:46.000 Because that creates inflation.

00:12:49.000 Or even policies I agree with.

00:12:50.000 There are some policies I agree with that make burritos more expensive.

00:12:53.000 Like if you deport a bunch of people who make burritos, it turns out that probably the price of burritos will go up.

00:12:59.000 Okay, but let's not lie and pretend that all of your favorite policies somehow make burritos cheaper.

00:13:06.000 This, by the way, is a great way to tell the people who whine from the people who solve problems that life is a series of trade offs.

00:13:10.000 And people who solve problems acknowledge these trade offs and then try to get to the answer to the problem.

00:13:15.000 Okay, but here's the bottom line.

00:13:17.000 When you use the government guns, you focus everyone on cheaper burritos through subsidies and regulations.

00:13:22.000 You inhibit freedom and you break the process and you end up making burritos more expensive.

00:13:28.000 This is also true for housing.

00:13:29.000 A lot of people today screaming about the evils of free markets and econ 101.

00:13:34.000 Oh, right.

00:13:35.000 And all those people are talking about how the rent is too expensive.

00:13:38.000 It is too expensive.

00:13:39.000 I agree.

00:13:40.000 You know whose fault that isn't the free markets and the process and the American dream.

00:13:47.000 The reason that Housing is too expensive right now, is because some people decided the American dream was not the process.

00:13:55.000 It was the house.

00:13:56.000 And then they mobilized the American government to ensure that everyone could get a house.

00:14:01.000 And they ended up pushing a basket of policies that made housing way more expensive.

00:14:06.000 So if you look at a chart of rent as a percentage of income, it basically stays stable up through 2000, and then it just explodes.

00:14:15.000 Why?

00:14:16.000 Well, because the government decided everyone needed a house.

00:14:18.000 So what did they do?

00:14:19.000 The government started.

00:14:20.000 Subsidizing and mandating subprime mortgages inherently backed by the government.

00:14:26.000 Subprime mortgages were low rate mortgages for people who were very unlikely to repay the mortgage.

00:14:32.000 They also decided that they would artificially keep the interest rates low, meaning keeping the mortgage rates low.

00:14:37.000 So you got cheap mortgages plus subprime mortgages for bad borrowers.

00:14:43.000 What do those things do?

00:14:44.000 Well, that artificially spurs demand.

00:14:46.000 That creates artificial demand for people who really shouldn't be getting a mortgage.

00:14:51.000 And those people push up.

00:14:53.000 The price, because you have many, many more people entering the housing market.

00:14:58.000 And as the prices go up, more people want to get in as an investment.

00:15:01.000 And then the prices spiral.

00:15:03.000 And then eventually, it turns out those people can't pay their bills, and then the housing market collapses.

00:15:08.000 And then people stop building because the housing market collapsed.

00:15:11.000 That is the story of the real estate collapse of 2007, 2008, and the subsequent drop off in the building of new units, which is what happened in the aftermath of 2007, 2008.

00:15:20.000 Add on top of that other government policies designed to achieve affordable housing, like, for example, rent control.

00:15:25.000 Rent control destroys affordable housing.

00:15:28.000 It controls a few apartments at the cost of all future development.

00:15:32.000 Why would I possibly build an apartment building where I lose money?

00:15:36.000 Not going to happen.

00:15:37.000 And then there are a bunch of people who have engaged in so-called NIMBY policies and not in my backyard policies.

00:15:43.000 These are people who already have a house and they say, I want to maintain the value of my house and make it more expensive.

00:15:47.000 That means no more building on my street.

00:15:50.000 So it turns out that using the government to achieve the kind of housing that you desire ends up making housing more expensive and less affordable.

00:15:58.000 In other words, when you inhibit the process of the American dream, again, the American dream is very simple free markets, free minds, equal justice before law, social virtue, government's there just to protect those things.

00:16:09.000 When you start using the government to achieve the end, you end up achieving the opposite.

00:16:14.000 This is also, by the way, true for college education, right?

00:16:16.000 People are correctly complaining about college debt.

00:16:19.000 How do you think that happened?

00:16:21.000 How do you think it happened that so many Americans, a huge percentage of Americans, have gigantic college debt?

00:16:27.000 The answer is we artificially increased demand through government subsidy and we did not do anything about the supply.

00:16:35.000 And in fact, we started supplying crap degrees that are worth nothing to people just because we had this dumb idea that because people who went to college earned more, therefore everyone should go to college and then they will all earn more.

00:16:47.000 That's not how that works.

00:16:49.000 So, we gave out tons, like trillions of dollars in loans, billions and billions and billions of dollars in loans that are unpayable.

00:16:58.000 We did that on a governmental level.

00:16:59.000 We spurred demand without increasing supply.

00:17:04.000 Right?

00:17:04.000 That is a thing that we did.

00:17:07.000 Again, there are a lot of real solutions out there to make life affordable on a personal level.

00:17:12.000 By the way, there are also solutions you don't have to wait for the government on, you can implement right now.

00:17:16.000 Again, for a limited time, you can switch your plan, get any plan, including unlimited, for just 15 bucks a month for your first three months.

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00:17:26.000 Also, by the way, I'm sure we're going to debate some of this today.

00:17:28.000 We have a Friendly Fire episode.

00:17:31.000 That is tonight, 7 p.m. Eastern.

00:17:34.000 Obviously, there are those at Daily Wire who disagree with my vision here.

00:17:36.000 Tune in live on the Daily Wire.

00:17:38.000 Watch it the next day, wherever you get your podcasts.

00:17:39.000 If you haven't seen Friendly Fire yet, that's a show where we all argue with each other for your entertainment.

00:17:44.000 This episode, you're going to get me and Michael Moles shooting from the hip.

00:17:47.000 No moderator, no safe words.

00:17:48.000 Don't miss it.

00:17:49.000 All righty.

00:17:50.000 So, again, the American dream is a process.

00:17:53.000 It is not a set of outcomes.

00:17:54.000 When the government pursues the outcomes, it typically destroys the process and also doesn't even achieve the outcome.

00:18:00.000 Okay, fine.

00:18:01.000 Say the economic tyrants.

00:18:03.000 Their first goalpost was affordability.

00:18:06.000 And sure, we're not going to achieve affordability with any of our actual policies.

00:18:12.000 And you're giving us solutions that would actually achieve affordability.

00:18:15.000 But in the end, we don't like free markets.

00:18:17.000 That's really the thing.

00:18:18.000 So, let's get to the real reason so many of these people hate free markets.

00:18:22.000 I really despise free markets and think they're bad.

00:18:24.000 Free markets are an extension of your individual autonomy.

00:18:28.000 Your individual autonomy is an obstacle to all of these people, left, right, and Islamist, from achieving their specific version of utopia.

00:18:37.000 So the next goal becomes demoralization.

00:18:39.000 We have to tell you that your individual autonomy is a ruse.

00:18:42.000 Your life sucks.

00:18:43.000 Everything sucks.

00:18:43.000 You can't control your life.

00:18:45.000 You should give me and my friends power because your life actually sucks.

00:18:48.000 This is the demoralization effort.

00:18:50.000 This is what Zorhan Mamdani says.

00:18:51.000 It's what Bernie Sanders says.

00:18:52.000 It's what Hassan Piker says.

00:18:53.000 Hell, the Muslim Brotherhood says that.

00:18:55.000 It's also what Tucker Carlson has been saying as well.

00:18:58.000 We'll get to more on this in just a moment.

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00:20:01.000 Tucker Carlson is a statist.

00:20:02.000 If he thought it would achieve his ends, he would call for full scale nationalization of industries with Lord Carlson at the helm, a petty tyrant ruling America from his flannel, all in the name of your spiritual welfare.

00:20:17.000 This is what Tucker's doing, right?

00:20:18.000 This is why Tucker constantly does this routine where he says that America is like the post Soviet Russian oligarchy, which, by the way, is kind of hilarious since he loves the post Soviet Russian oligarchy.

00:20:27.000 He goes over there to talk about how wonderful their bread is, how we need feudalism.

00:20:31.000 But again, don't expect any sort of internal consistency from this rather addled human.

00:20:38.000 As I hear your big picture description of this transition through which we're moving, the first thought that comes to mind is boy, that sounds a little bit like what happened after the Soviet Union collapsed in the summer of 1991.

00:20:52.000 And all of a sudden, Russians woke up 10 years later and all state industries were owned by a small group of people.

00:20:57.000 It was correct.

00:20:59.000 That's kind of what it sounds like.

00:21:02.000 So, again, I'm not sure exactly why he's complaining about that since he loves Russia.

00:21:02.000 Okay.

00:21:05.000 I mean, he's very, very, very into it.

00:21:07.000 Again, the goal is to demoralize you with all this, right?

00:21:09.000 America sucks.

00:21:10.000 You don't have free choice.

00:21:11.000 The free choice is a lie.

00:21:12.000 You're experiencing false consciousness put in your head by whomever.

00:21:17.000 Again, in the end, all these people are quite happy for you to be poorer, for you to be less free, so long as they can build whatever utopia they want to build.

00:21:26.000 So, again, on the left, that takes a bunch of forms.

00:21:27.000 For Zorhan Mamdani, it's a third worldist utopia in which America is really brought to heel.

00:21:33.000 For Hassan Piker, it's a complete leveling.

00:21:36.000 For the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists, It is Dar al Islam, presumably.

00:21:41.000 On the right, this takes the form of what is now called post liberalism.

00:21:45.000 Post liberalism basically argues that individualism, and that includes individualism and free markets, saps us of our virtue.

00:21:52.000 What we actually need is a top down state run by oligarchs so that we can have virtue again.

00:21:57.000 This is a bad idea, and it was tried for many centuries, and it was horrible.

00:22:01.000 It turns out that one of the premises of the American founding is that virtue is a thing that you should pursue in your church and in your community and on an individual level.

00:22:12.000 And that government has a role protecting people from insidious infectious problems.

00:22:19.000 Government does have social standards.

00:22:19.000 Right?

00:22:21.000 But there is no idea in the American founding that somehow there's an inherent link between being wealthy and having no virtue.

00:22:30.000 You know what actually saps virtue?

00:22:32.000 What really saps virtue in individuals?

00:22:35.000 If you are told that you are not in control of your own destiny, that your decisions don't matter, if people keep telling you over and over and over, That you can't do anything about your life, but you deserve everything.

00:22:46.000 This makes you a worse person.

00:22:48.000 Take this to parenting for a second.

00:22:51.000 If your kid comes home, didn't study for the test, gets an F, and you say, listen, it's not your fault.

00:22:58.000 You don't ask any questions about did you study?

00:23:00.000 Did you understand the concept?

00:23:01.000 You just go, it's not your fault.

00:23:01.000 Nothing.

00:23:03.000 You are always bound to fail.

00:23:04.000 The system is rigged.

00:23:05.000 Your teacher was going to fail you.

00:23:06.000 Doesn't matter how hard you studied, doesn't matter how much work you put in, you were going to fail because the system is rigged against you.

00:23:13.000 And you deserved an A. You deserved an A.

00:23:17.000 And because you deserve an A and there's nothing you could do about it, go to your room and what do you think the kid's gonna do?

00:23:22.000 Is the kid gonna go study?

00:23:24.000 Is the kid gonna try to get better at the thing?

00:23:27.000 Is the kid going to work?

00:23:29.000 Or is the kid gonna go to the kid's room and eat candy and play video games?

00:23:34.000 This is a bad way to do life.

00:23:37.000 But you know who says this kind of stuff all the time?

00:23:39.000 The status.

00:23:40.000 Their entire idea is promote ingratitude.

00:23:42.000 You can't do anything about your life, it's a Russian oligarchy.

00:23:45.000 And also, you should be ungrateful for America.

00:23:48.000 And if people tell you to be grateful, it's because they're probably neocons.

00:23:52.000 Which, again, Tucker never defines the term neocon because we all know what he means, but here he is.

00:24:00.000 So it's clearly coordinated.

00:24:04.000 But it's not just coordination that gets us to a talking point like that.

00:24:08.000 There was deep feeling behind it.

00:24:10.000 And that feeling was contempt.

00:24:13.000 That was loathing of the people complaining.

00:24:17.000 That was loathing of the population.

00:24:19.000 And that is part and parcel of this whole program.

00:24:21.000 And this ultimately is the reason that the neocon worldview is a cancerous worldview.

00:24:28.000 Not simply because it's wrong about which countries we ought to invade.

00:24:32.000 Which leaders we ought to topple, which democracies we ought to erect in countries whose languages we don't speak.

00:24:37.000 Okay, that's obviously all wrong.

00:24:40.000 But that's not the worst thing about it.

00:24:41.000 The worst thing about it is not just its inattention to the fortunes of actual Americans, it's hostility, it's hatred of Americans.

00:24:52.000 Because there's no other way to describe the kind of feelings that could get you to give a lecture like the one Ben Shapiro gave.

00:25:00.000 I feel like if I say that we all ought to be grateful, me, you, all of us ought to be grateful for America, I don't know if that's hostility to Americans.

00:25:00.000 I don't know.

00:25:06.000 It feels more like love of Americans because it turns out that the greatest country in the history of the world is the place that you are currently living.

00:25:12.000 It is an amazing place and it has all these problems.

00:25:14.000 The problems we've talked about, mostly statist interventions like the ones that Tucker promotes.

00:25:19.000 But if you're ungrateful for America, you're either an idiot or malevolent.

00:25:24.000 And sure, the law is a teacher.

00:25:25.000 We get this a lot, right?

00:25:27.000 The law is a teacher.

00:25:28.000 The government needs to inculcate virtue.

00:25:30.000 Obviously, I believe in an educational system in which traditional virtue is upheld.

00:25:36.000 It is also true that when the law says you cannot handle your own choices and freedoms, when the law says that basically all your freedoms and choices are bad for you, the law then teaches you to be a child and dependent and incapable.

00:25:51.000 And this is what the post liberals are now arguing for ingratitude, because if you're ungrateful for the freedoms, if you're ungrateful for the process, if you say the process is rigged and crap, and what you actually need is someone telling you what to do, how virtue ought to be constituted, what you ought to do with your money, what decisions you ought to make with your life, how you ought to bring up your kids.

00:26:08.000 If you have people who are saying that to you, That somehow individual rights that undergird capitalism destroy your spiritual fulfillment.

00:26:15.000 They're selling you a bag of goods.

00:26:18.000 There's a reason that Max Faber talked about the Protestant work ethic.

00:26:22.000 It is indeed an Anglo American Protestant tradition that leads to the rise of free markets.

00:26:29.000 You do not need to be poor or poorer in order to reach spiritual fulfillment.

00:26:34.000 People who argue that you do typically just want an excuse for making you poor.

00:26:38.000 Here's what I want I want for you to be wealthy and also to go to church.

00:26:42.000 These two things are not mutually exclusive at all.

00:26:45.000 Most of the biblical prophets were wealthy.

00:26:48.000 Why are we, who says that Americans can't have both?

00:26:51.000 Who says we can't have both prosperity and virtue?

00:26:56.000 The very same people who are telling you that I'm somehow feeding you goy slop are sitting in mansions across from Hunter Biden and Andrew Tate and claiming they have the high ground on virtue and they're totally full of it.

00:27:06.000 So I do have a theory about some of these folks.

00:27:09.000 I don't like to go into motivations, but we can look at personal histories.

00:27:13.000 I have a theory about some of these folks.

00:27:14.000 Here is one of my theories.

00:27:16.000 That many, many, many of the people who say the American dream is dead and that the American dream isn't a process, it's a set of ends that they alone can achieve if you give them power, never actually lived within the American process.

00:27:27.000 They never were part of the American process.

00:27:29.000 Hassan Piker didn't live the American dream.

00:27:31.000 Hassan Piker was born in America.

00:27:32.000 He was brought up in Turkey.

00:27:33.000 He came back.

00:27:34.000 He was already well to do.

00:27:35.000 Zarn Mamdani did not live the American dream.

00:27:38.000 Zarn Mamdani grew up alternatively in a mansion in Uganda or in a series of hoity toity areas of the United States with his Columbia University father.

00:27:49.000 And his mom, who made documentaries for Disney.

00:27:50.000 Bernie Sanders didn't live the American process.

00:27:53.000 The dude's been living essentially rent free off the back of taxpayers his entire life.

00:27:58.000 And neither did Tucker Carlson.

00:27:59.000 He didn't live the American process either.

00:28:02.000 That's amazing to watch the projection here.

00:28:03.000 Truly amazing.

00:28:04.000 Really kind of, and kind of insulting.

00:28:07.000 So Tucker Carlson claims, for example, he has to claim that somehow I rigged the system.

00:28:13.000 So Tucker yesterday spilled out this stuff about how I got into Harvard Law.

00:28:18.000 And his claim is that I was kind of Nepo babied into it, probably by the Israelis.

00:28:24.000 Yes, I'm sure that the state of Israel had nothing better to do than sit on top of my Harvard law application in the year 2004.

00:28:34.000 I'm sure that's when I was 20.

00:28:37.000 Here is Tucker Carlson.

00:28:41.000 Can you imagine four or 500,000 American 18 year olds plucked at random from cities across the country in a field this summer, this month, August, 57 years after Woodstock?

00:28:54.000 Can you imagine what they would look like with their shirts off?

00:28:57.000 Which is not to make fun of their lumpy physiques.

00:29:00.000 That happens to a lot of us over time.

00:29:02.000 But can you imagine what their faces would look like?

00:29:06.000 Would they look as cheerful as the kids you see in the pictures of Woodstock?

00:29:10.000 You hope so.

00:29:12.000 Probably not.

00:29:14.000 So maybe the last thing they need is to be lectured by people who are clearly the beneficiaries of unearned privilege, like Ben Shapiro, who somehow got into Harvard Law School despite a middling IQ.

00:29:27.000 How did that happen?

00:29:28.000 Never asked.

00:29:30.000 People like that have no standing at all to lecture the rest of America's young people.

00:29:39.000 Okay.

00:29:40.000 Put aside the fact that he's using Woodstock as an example of American happiness, which is a bunch of young drug addled people banging in the mud, which is weird.

00:29:48.000 And his weird imaginings of people with their shirts off.

00:29:54.000 I'm just going to point out the reason I got into Harvard Law is because I had a 3.85 GPA from UCLA and a 176.

00:30:03.000 On my LSAT and a published book and a syndicated column at age 17.

00:30:06.000 That would be the reason.

00:30:09.000 You know, it's very funny.

00:30:10.000 Tucker is constantly trying to rip on my IQ.

00:30:13.000 Dude, I mean, if you want to have an IQ off, I suppose we could do that.

00:30:17.000 I've offered Tucker for the past, I don't know, how many years at this point?

00:30:20.000 Years and years and years, an open opportunity to have a public talk about anything or everything.

00:30:25.000 He has never taken me up on it, of course.

00:30:28.000 Okay, but I just want to point out Tucker Carlson never lived within the American process.

00:30:33.000 He thinks everything was rigged because everything was rigged for him.

00:30:36.000 I'm going to give you a brief capsule history of my own life.

00:30:38.000 And here's the thing I don't even like doing this.

00:30:39.000 I really don't.

00:30:40.000 I don't talk about it a lot on the show.

00:30:41.000 Why don't I talk about it a lot?

00:30:42.000 Because I don't think that there is some sort of virtue that is attendant upon whether you grew up in a richer family or a poorer family.

00:30:49.000 I do not associate wealth with virtue inherently.

00:30:52.000 These are not qualities that must be correlative.

00:30:57.000 But I'm just going to make clear my own personal history for just a second.

00:31:02.000 This idea that I was some sort of like Nepo baby who got into Harvard is just.

00:31:06.000 It's made up out of whole cloth.

00:31:07.000 The reason Tucker thinks this is because he was an EPO baby.

00:31:09.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:32:14.000 So I grew up in what would probably best be termed a lower middle class to pure middle class home in Burbank, California in the late 80s.

00:32:24.000 1990s.

00:32:25.000 I was born in 84.

00:32:28.000 Until 1995, until I was 11 years old, my parents and I and my three younger sisters lived in a two bedroom, 1100 square foot house in Burbank, California with one bathroom for six people.

00:32:41.000 It was a great life because America's awesome.

00:32:43.000 I had great parents.

00:32:45.000 We had good neighbors.

00:32:47.000 It was a clean town.

00:32:49.000 Okay.

00:32:49.000 It was great.

00:32:51.000 But we certainly were not wealthy.

00:32:53.000 My mom started off as a secretary at a small television company.

00:32:58.000 And my father played piano on Monday and Tuesday nights at a restaurant called Michelli's.

00:33:04.000 I spent most of my childhood Monday and Tuesday nights at Michelli's, hanging out with the waiters and the bartender while I waited for my mom to finish work so she could pick us up from the restaurant.

00:33:17.000 Me and my younger siblings.

00:33:20.000 And then when I was 11, my parents, quote unquote, got wealthier.

00:33:24.000 And by got wealthier, I mean they moved into a gigantic mansion.

00:33:26.000 By mansion, I mean a 2,400 square foot home where we spent the rest of my childhood.

00:33:31.000 And it was great.

00:33:32.000 Again, I'm very grateful for all these things because only in America, because America's awesome.

00:33:36.000 America kicks ass.

00:33:37.000 Okay, so we moved into, I finally had my own room.

00:33:40.000 And that was, you know, basically for the rest of my childhood in North Hollywood.

00:33:45.000 We're on scholarship at a local private school.

00:33:47.000 But the reality is that sort of my own sort of educational history was public school through grade four, skipping grade three, private school five and six.

00:33:54.000 We couldn't afford private school for seven and eight.

00:33:56.000 So I went back to public school for seven and eight.

00:33:59.000 And then private school again for 10, 11, 12, because I skipped ninth grade and I was on scholarship.

00:34:03.000 Because my parents were by this point middle class to probably upper middle class.

00:34:08.000 Because again, they made responsible decisions and their life progressed.

00:34:12.000 And then I got into UCLA, a state school that does not cost tons of money.

00:34:18.000 And then I got a 3.85 GPA and a 176 on my LSAT.

00:34:25.000 I got one problem wrong on my LSAT.

00:34:27.000 And then I went to Harvard Law and I took out a bunch of private loans that I paid off myself.

00:34:33.000 That is my story.

00:34:34.000 I did not know anyone at Harvard Law.

00:34:37.000 I did not know anyone in the Israeli government when I was 20.

00:34:39.000 I had visited Israel one time at that point in my life when I was 16 with my family for two weeks.

00:34:46.000 This is psycho.

00:34:47.000 But the reason that Tucker thinks this is because, again, Tucker has never engaged in the American process.

00:34:52.000 He has not.

00:34:53.000 He is not someone who got better and stronger and more powerful because he made smart, wise, and virtuous decisions.

00:35:01.000 That is not the story of Tucker Carlson's life, just as it is not the story of Hassan Piker's life or Zorhan Mamdani's life.

00:35:07.000 Or sheet of Tlaib or El Hanau, like this is not their life.

00:35:11.000 Hey, here's what Tucker Carlson's childhood was like Tucker Carlson grew up silver spoon rich in a frozen food empire.

00:35:22.000 He went to a Swiss boarding school for high school.

00:35:27.000 He, according to Jason Zengerly in his book about Tucker Carlson, although Carlson found religion in high school, he continued to drink and smoke and began doing drugs, marijuana, acid, cocaine, even ether.

00:35:41.000 He went to St. George's, which wasn't Exeter or Andover, but it still sent a smattering of graduates each year to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

00:35:49.000 His grades and test scores were nowhere near good enough to get into any of those schools.

00:35:54.000 His academic record at St. George's was sufficiently poor, he had a difficult time at gaining admission to any prestigious university, not just those in the Ivy League.

00:36:03.000 So he got into Trinity College because his then girlfriend Susie's dad, who was the headmaster of St. George's, helped grease the wheels to get him in.

00:36:12.000 There, he was an abysmal student.

00:36:14.000 He stopped showing up to class.

00:36:17.000 When Patel, Neil Patel, with whom he became business partners later, and most of Carlson's other friends received their Trinity diplomas, Carlson was not among them.

00:36:24.000 His 1.9 GPA was deemed too low.

00:36:28.000 He never graduated from college.

00:36:30.000 Then Carlson's daddy called up his friends at the Heritage Foundation, where he landed a $14,000 a year internship fact checking a quarterly journal at Heritage Foundation, and the rest is history.

00:36:41.000 Okay, so again, I'm happy for Tucker that he is richer than he once was.

00:36:45.000 But I think the reason why he despises the American dream as process is because he never lived that process.

00:36:51.000 I love that process.

00:36:53.000 That process is glorious.

00:36:55.000 That is the thing that needs to be protected.

00:36:58.000 The American dream as the process where if you make wise, smart, virtuous decisions, you get ahead.

00:37:04.000 And then if you teach those to your kids, they get ahead of you.

00:37:08.000 I want the American dream.

00:37:09.000 I want my kids to have that process.

00:37:11.000 I do not want the petty tyrants on the left or the right deciding for me what things are worth.

00:37:17.000 Or what they think is fair, because I don't know what they mean by fair, or what I materially require in order to reach spiritual fulfillment.

00:37:24.000 They can all f right off.

00:37:28.000 I would like the freedom that is the process of the American dream.

00:37:33.000 Here's the thing a lot of these people have problems with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

00:37:37.000 They'll say so openly.

00:37:39.000 The Declaration of Independence was right, the Constitution of the United States was right.

00:37:45.000 And all of your crappy, rewarmed oligarchic theories have been tried, and they have failed.

00:37:51.000 You want feudalism?

00:37:52.000 Awesome.

00:37:53.000 Go back to medieval Europe.

00:37:55.000 You want Marxism?

00:37:56.000 Sweet.

00:37:56.000 Head on over to Cuba.

00:37:57.000 You want Islamism?

00:37:59.000 You can get the hell out and go to Qatar.

00:38:02.000 People like this.

00:38:02.000 They like to say America first.

00:38:03.000 But here's the thing Americanism first.

00:38:05.000 Americanism first.

00:38:07.000 You know, the thing that makes us different from every place else.

00:38:10.000 The thing that makes America exceptional and awesome.

00:38:13.000 Those first principles free markets and free minds and equal justice before law and social virtue.

00:38:18.000 Those are the things.

00:38:19.000 That's what government is there to protect.

00:38:22.000 Let's get back to those first principles.

00:38:24.000 And for the love of all that is holy.

00:38:27.000 Will someone please buy Tucker Carlson a burrito?

00:38:31.000 What an amazing video you just watched.

00:38:33.000 Wasn't that amazing?

00:38:34.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 13, 2026

Why Tucker Carlson Wants You Demoralized

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