According to the left, the "exceptions" should get to make all the rules on gender, crime, and marriage. Plus, the Chicago Teachers Union decides never to go back to school, and Joe Biden addresses the nation on the Omicron Surge. Ben Shapiro explains why this is a terrible idea and why we should dismantle it. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Thousands of my listeners have already secured their internet connections, join them at ExpressVpn.me/BenShapiroShow and you can save 50% on your very first month of coverage. Then, because they love my listeners, enter promo code Ben Shapiro and you will get 50% off your very FIRST MONTH of coverage with PureTalk. That's PureTalk, the plan that's right for you, find the phone you can trust, or just bring your own. Then join me, Ben Shapiro, and we will save you $50 on your first month and hundreds of bucks down the road with a company you can't wait to trust, Puretalk. Thanks to Puretalk for sponsoring the show! Head on over to puretalk.fm/benshapiropodcast and use promo code "Ben Shapiro" to save $50 and get a FREE month of PureTalk membership. If you like the show and want to support it, you can do so by becoming a patron of the show, then you can get 20% off for the first month! and get 10% off the entire month for the resturant, plus an additional $5,000 in the second month, plus a free trial when you sign up for the third month, you get an ad-free version of the full-service version of The Ben Shapiro VIP membership offer when you get the full service service, plus I'll get a 20% discount when you shop at Puretalk, they get the ad-only offer starts starting at $50,000, plus they receive $10,000 gets you a year, and they get an extra $25,000 discount, and get an additional 2 years of VIP membership gets you get a choice of the first place promo code, they also get the choice of Ben Shapiro starts starting the show starts in two months, and I get a discount, they can get $10% off their first rate, and a 2-day shipping starts starts starts after they receive the entire place they can choose, they'll get the entire service starts shipping the whole place they receive in two weeks of the deal starts shipping their first place, they receive two-place they receive for the show?
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00:01:34.000There's a phenomenon that has now cropped up throughout American society, and that phenomenon is that we are supposed to let the exceptions make the rules.
00:01:41.000That if somebody just is very different from every other human, that that person gets to make all the rules for all the other humans.
00:01:49.000I'm not talking about individual rights, rights that apply to everyone.
00:01:52.000Right, rights that adhere to everyone.
00:01:55.000What I'm talking about here are specifically the overthrow of institutions that are generated for the benefit of the vast majority of human beings, and that, broadly speaking, bring success and happiness, being overthrown because there's an exception who has not brought success or happiness by a historic institution that has been a part of life for literally centuries, for eons.
00:02:14.000This philosophy, which is that if you don't fit into the box, the box must be changed, is the death of society.
00:02:20.000It is the death of society and it is what is breaking down pretty much every institution in our society these days from religious institutions to governmental institutions to basic institutions of life like marriage.
00:02:32.000All of these institutions were originally created, I shouldn't say created, they originally evolved because that is a more accurate way of describing how these institutions came about.
00:02:44.000As the great economist Frederick Hayek suggests, wisdom is essentially just a bunch of things that have happened and that have stood the test of time.
00:02:53.000They've evolved, they've changed gradually over time, and so we should respect those things that have done this.
00:02:58.000It doesn't mean we can't change them, but it means we have to take some very serious thought about why we ought to change these institutions before we change them.
00:03:05.000Chesterton, the famous Catholic theologian and philosopher, he gave what is probably the greatest description of the difference between the left and the right.
00:03:11.000He said that if you are a person of the left and you walk across a field and you see a fence in the middle of the field and you have no idea why the fence is there, your first move is to immediately start removing the fence.
00:03:20.000And if you're a person of the right, you say to the person from the left, you don't get to remove the fence until you can explain to me why the fence was built there in the first place.
00:03:27.000In other words, we have to accept that there must have been a reason why things were the way they were before you just start dismantling it.
00:03:35.000Maybe you look at the institution, you say, there's a serious problem with this institution, and now we're going to change it because we have considered the ramifications of changing it.
00:03:42.000And we believe that perhaps times have changed or there's new evidence or they just got it wrong.
00:03:46.000But you first have to understand the logic of why those institutions were built in the first place.
00:03:50.000Well, we have completely dispensed with that in Western civilization.
00:03:53.000We have now come to the point where if one person has a problem with an institution, or a very, very vanishingly small group of people have a problem with an institution, it's the institution that's wrong.
00:04:53.000If you're living on a desert island, there are not a lot of rules that apply to you because there are no other people that it affects.
00:04:58.000However, when you are interacting with other people, there have to be some militating institutions.
00:05:02.000There have to be some institutions in the middle that you can all sort of agree on and work within the framework of.
00:05:08.000He says that social systems are generally built by individuals interacting with one another, motivated by the optimization of individual gratification and happiness, as defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.
00:05:21.000In other words, we have to share some common rules.
00:05:24.000We have to share some common institutions.
00:05:26.000Well, if those things have stood the test of thousands of years of time, then perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to dispense with them because one person doesn't like the rules.
00:05:34.000However, what the left suggests is that If government is meant to be God, right?
00:05:39.000Or if society at large is meant to be God-like, then these institutions can be dispensed with.
00:05:55.000If we get rid of all the rules, then natural human man will emerge and we will be freed from all of the All of the institutions that have burdened us for so long, right?
00:06:03.000As Rousseau suggested, man is everywhere born free, man everywhere should be free, but he's born in chains, essentially.
00:06:09.000And that we are free spirited individuals and it's only institutions of society that have chained us down.
00:06:15.000Okay, that is completely ass backwards.
00:06:17.000That is not the way that real life works and it is not the way that institutions work.
00:06:21.000The reason I bring this up is because there's a column in the New York Times today that is just a perfect example of this.
00:06:24.000And again, once you spot the pattern, it is impossible to unspot the pattern.
00:06:29.000Once you spot the pattern from the left, which is there's an institution.
00:06:32.000Let me give you an example of X person.
00:06:34.000For whom this institution makes life more difficult.
00:06:37.000Therefore, the institution is bad, tear down the institution.
00:06:41.000That is the logic that is constantly used everywhere and always by people who completely want to restructure society to the detriment of the vast majority of humanity.
00:06:52.000Let us talk about the fact that they're everyday things that you really don't pay a lot of attention to make a huge difference in your life, right?
00:06:58.000If you have a pair of shoes, the shoes are uncomfortable, you kind of don't worry about it for a while.
00:07:02.000Eventually, you're like, you know what?
00:08:16.000Okay, so the reason that I'm talking about the destruction of institutions is because pretty much every day now there's an article in the op-ed section of the Washington Post or the New York Times or any other left-wing publication talking about why a historic institution is bad for me and therefore the institution should go away.
00:08:32.000The latest The latest iteration of this ridiculous thesis comes courtesy of Caitlin Greenidge, who is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
00:08:43.000And she wrote a piece that's up today titled, What Does Marriage Ask Us to Give Up?
00:08:49.000And now, normally, the answer to that is marriage asks you to sacrifice, for example, the possibility of sexual variety in favor of one partner.
00:08:58.000Marriage asks you to give up the possibility of endless hedonism in pursuit of a deeper and more profound relationship with one human being from whom you create children and create the next generation of civilized human beings, right?
00:09:09.000That's what marriage asks you to give up.
00:09:11.000And tradition is pretty clear about this.
00:09:13.000I mean, in every marriage ceremony, every ritual ceremony I'm aware of, there's great talk about what exactly you are giving up, what you are sacrificing, right?
00:09:20.000Whether you're talking about till death do us part, or whether you're talking about in the Jewish marriages, full-on prenuptial agreements, right?
00:09:27.000The Ketubah in a Jewish marriage actually lists the obligations that men and women owe to one another in the actual marital contract, which is read out loud under the chuppah.
00:09:36.000So it's not as though people who are familiar with marital tradition are unaware of the sacrifices that they're making.
00:09:41.000This is, in fact, the goal of the institution.
00:09:43.000The goal of the institution of marriage is that men are to sacrifice sexual variety for the sake of being able to build a family.
00:09:51.000And women are asked to sacrifice the possibility of mating with another option in order to settle down and civilize the man, right?
00:09:59.000These are sacrifices that everybody has known about throughout all human society when it comes to the monogamous institution of marriage.
00:10:05.000According to Caitlin Greenidge, however, she has discovered Something about marriage and that is that it doesn't it wasn't good for her therefore We need a new society that completely dispenses with the idea of marriage as a norm Now you might say to yourself, wait a second, haven't we been doing that since the 60s and hasn't it paid off with tremendous downsides for women and men?
00:10:24.000Hasn't it created a society where women by polling data are less happy now than they were in the 1960s?
00:10:29.000Hasn't it created a society where men are lonelier now and more addicted to pornography now than they were several decades ago?
00:10:36.000Like where is the great spate of happiness that has arisen thanks to the destruction of the institution of marriage?
00:10:41.000But again, the idea was marriage wasn't great for everyone.
00:10:44.000Therefore, marriage should not be the norm.
00:10:54.000Once you get rid of it, once you set the standard of something else, you destroy the society.
00:10:57.000But again, this is the way the left thinks.
00:10:59.000So according to Caitlin Greenidge, quote, I spent most of my 20s and 30s single only to marry and then come to the conclusion that my marriage should end.
00:11:05.000Now I am single again, but I am not alone. My marriage ended during the pandemic while I was at home with family. Since the pandemic began, my daughter and I have been living in what my family jokingly calls the compound, a house my mom and I bought together before I was married.
00:11:17.000She and my siblings and their families live there in an attempt to withstand the waves of gentrification that have displaced everyone in my family every four to five years as the sketchy neighborhoods we afford get discovered by rich young people.
00:11:30.000Sometimes when everyone is talking and laughing and joking at once, my daughter, who is young enough that language is still new to her, will raise her voice in a keening screech to try and join the cacophony.
00:11:38.000Living with all this noise has stirred up many emotions.
00:11:40.000Gratitude to my family for their support.
00:11:42.000The irritation of adolescence, as we sometimes catch ourselves in the dances of our older selves.
00:11:46.000A longing for sleep that can only be felt in a household full of children who are all awake and ready to play by 6.30am on a Saturday.
00:11:53.000What has not materialized is the intense loneliness that people warned me would come with divorce.
00:11:57.000It was always interesting telling people about the divorce.
00:11:59.000Some friends with small children almost panicked about what would come, about how the separation was too rash.
00:12:04.000But I am lucky in that most of my friends have lived lives falling in and out of partnerships.
00:12:07.000You can go it alone, you know, was the much more common response.
00:12:11.000We are living through a time when all the stories the larger culture tells us about ourselves are being rewritten.
00:12:16.000The story of what the United States is, what it means to be a man or woman, what it means to be a child, what it means to love oneself or other people.
00:12:24.000We are imagining all of this again so these stories can guide and comfort us rather than control us.
00:12:28.000That paragraph is leftism in a nutshell.
00:12:30.000We are reimagining, reimagining, just out of our own heads.
00:12:34.000The complete reimagination, the complete destruction of all institutions and basic facts about human life.
00:12:40.000From the value of marriage to the differences between men and women to what it means to be a child.
00:12:45.000And we are doing all of this because there are exceptions to rules in which people don't enjoy their marriage and want to get out.
00:12:51.000Now, first of all, I think it's been a pretty long standing feature of marriage that there are some people who don't enjoy it.
00:12:56.000This is, again, not a surprise to anyone who has read the Bible, for example, in which there are a fair number of somewhat dysfunctional marriages.
00:13:07.000That is not a rarity if you read biblical literature.
00:13:10.000So go back several thousand years, lots of failing marriages.
00:13:12.000That does not mean that marriage as an institution is bad, nor does it mean because there are some bad men, which again, we've known about for all of human history.
00:13:21.000This means that man and woman, the definition needs to change.
00:13:23.000But the idea is institutions, we need to be liberated from institutions because there are exceptions to rules, except that when you destroy the institutions, you make people less free.
00:13:32.000Because in order for there to be a sphere of freedom, a sphere of liberty, you cannot live in a fully chaotic world.
00:13:38.000A fully chaotic world where there are no rules, where there is no framework, where there are no institutions, is a completely unfree world.
00:13:45.000The man who is alone on a desert island is maybe the least free human because that person has no capacity to interact with other human beings, which is what brings about huge measures of happiness.
00:13:56.000This is something the philosopher Joseph Raz has suggested, is that freedom has to exist within boundaries, because if there's no boundaries, there's no freedom.
00:14:05.000The boundaries are necessary in order for you to cultivate relationships with other people that make you free and happy.
00:14:12.000Living in a fully chaotic society in which no one's rights are guaranteed by any militating institutions, and in which there's no support for the social institutions that allow for the possibility of human flourishing and happiness, is not freedom.
00:14:23.000It is in fact slavery, whether it is to the chaos around you, or whether it is to the drives that you find in your own brain subjectively changing from day to day.
00:14:33.000But says this columnist for the New York Times, it's good to get rid of these institutions because she had a bad marital experience.
00:14:38.000The innate narcissism here is truly astonishing.
00:14:42.000Even as a child, I bristled at the assumptions behind the question that it was just her mom bringing her up.
00:14:48.000It seemed obvious to me then, having lived in a two-parent home that was deeply unhappy and dysfunctional, that the number of parents around to make a working family was arbitrary.
00:14:56.000That people beholden to the rigid mathematics of mother and father and children equals stability were short-sighted, ignoring all we know of human interactions and ways we make family throughout human history.
00:15:05.000To believe that one equation would work for us all seemed so simplistic and childish that for much of my young adulthood, I simply disregarded it.
00:15:13.000It's such a deeply... It truly is a profound philosophical essay, this thing in the New York Times, but not in the way that the author thinks it is.
00:15:20.000When she says, to believe one equation would work for us all seemed simplistic and childish, no one said marriage works for every single human.
00:15:27.000What we all said is that marriage is an important institution that facilitates the bringing up of the next generation within a stable two-parent household.
00:15:34.000And that is true for the vast majority of humans, not for all humans.
00:15:37.000But the converse is not get rid of the institution.
00:15:40.000She says that the equation doesn't work for everybody.
00:15:48.000There are people for whom this does not work.
00:15:51.000And those people, we're not forcing them to get married.
00:15:54.000But if society is to get rid of the institutions in favor of a different equation, which is no equation.
00:16:00.000Then there's no formula for happiness whatsoever.
00:16:02.000And if you believe that you subjectively can create your own level of happiness without any sort of militating societal institutions, good luck to you.
00:16:10.000And more importantly, good luck to the society you've helped to fragment and destroy.
00:16:15.000Atomistic individualism is the destruction of society.
00:16:18.000I'm an individualist insofar as I believe that freedom is deeply important.
00:16:23.000That self-definition is a very important aspect of freedom, but it is not the only aspect of freedom.
00:16:31.000And some of those others include the civilizing institutions that make you fully human.
00:16:35.000We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
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00:17:56.000All right, so back to this piece in the New York Times, because again, it goes to something deep that is happening in Western civilization.
00:18:01.000The destruction of civilizing institutions on the basis that we are all freely acting atomistic individuals who get to define reality around us.
00:18:09.000Now, the reality is that they are trying to set a set of rules.
00:18:11.000So the lie is, well, we don't want any rules.
00:18:14.000The rule is that marriage is actually an act of bad and we have to rethink the institutions such that we actually actively discourage marriage, or at the very least, we are indifference to whether marriage is a positive good.
00:18:29.000In a wide variety of contexts, this is a great distinction that we have to make.
00:18:34.000How you treat individuals who don't fit into the box is a different thing from saying that the box itself needs to be exploded.
00:18:41.000When you explode the box, that is not a neutral standard.
00:18:45.000Because you have still created an institution.
00:18:47.000Now it's an institution that is indifferent as to whether marriage occurs or whether marriage does not occur.
00:18:52.000Indifference is not a neutral standard.
00:18:56.000Human beings do require institutions that support particular decisions that we as a society believe, and have historically believed, facilitate human flourishing.
00:19:40.000Okay, so this columnist for the New York Times says, there's a lot of hand-wringing currently about the decline of marriage in the United States, no matter that divorce rates have also gone down and that when people are marrying, it is at later ages.
00:19:50.000Our culture may have changed to allow for other ways for people to chart their lives, but whole industries and institutions, banking, real estate, healthcare, insurance, advertising, and most important, taxation, Revolve around assumptions of marriage as the norm.
00:20:01.000Without that base assumption, the logic of many of these transactions is thrown out.
00:20:06.000It can feel daunting to come up with new narratives about what it means to mature, to be worthy of housing and financial stability and healthcare, to find companionship or emotional support, when these industries have so much invested both financially and ideologically in a particular way of measuring life and community.
00:20:19.000Okay, so what this columnist is doing now is making the Marxist move.
00:20:48.000So, says this columnist for the New York Times, in search of new narratives, I found myself drawn to Diane DiPrima's 2001 memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman.
00:20:57.000It focuses on her childhood and life in New York, a portrait of the artist as a young woman in all her romantic and intuitive glory.
00:21:03.000DiPrima is remarkable because as a poet in her early 20s in 1950s New York, she decided she wanted to be a mother and a single mother at that.
00:21:11.000I mean, except for the kid who now lacks a father.
00:21:13.000But apparently this means she's virtuous because, again, she didn't fit in the box.
00:21:17.000And the box is always bad, according to the left.
00:21:19.000Her memoir revolves around this conflict between motherhood and the demands of an artist.
00:21:23.000At a certain point, overwhelmed by the demands of parenting children alone while running a press, founding an avant-garde theater, Protecting her left-wing friends from raids by the FBI and the grinding poverty of an artist's life in New York City.
00:21:33.000At no point, by the way, do we have any discussion of the impact of this on the child.
00:21:36.000Mr. Prima entered into a marriage of convenience with a man she distrusted.
00:21:39.000He was the ex-boyfriend of her male best friend.
00:21:41.000Besides its messy origins, this relationship resembles the dream I've heard so many straight women describe in a joking, not joking way.
00:21:47.000Wishing to start a family with a friend to avoid the complications of romantic love.
00:21:52.000DiPrima is honest about the limitations of the arrangement.
00:21:54.000She wrote that she avoided the pains of romance, but the man she married is still a domineering, abusive mess in her recounting.
00:21:59.000Furthermore, in marriage, she has lost something integral to herself.
00:22:02.000Quote, one of my most precious and valued possessions was my independence, my struggle for control over my own life.
00:22:08.000I didn't see that it had no intrinsic value for anyone but myself, that it was a coin that was precious only within the realm, a currency that could not cross borders.
00:22:15.000Says the columnist for the New York Times, Those who panic over the rise in the number of single Americans do not see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independents.
00:22:22.000is about her. All the rules have to be changed for her. She is the only person in the world.
00:22:26.000Those who panic over the rise in the number of single Americans do not see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independence. Lives that still intersect with a community, with a home, with a belief in something wider than oneself. The people clinging to old narratives around singledom and marriage can't yet see these lives for what they are.
00:22:43.000Because, as Mr. Prima puts it, they are not an objectively valuable commodity.
00:22:47.000Their meaning is a currency that cannot cross borders.
00:22:49.000These lives threaten the communal narratives currently in place.
00:22:52.000But what is a threat to some can be to others a glimmer of a new world coming.
00:23:25.000When you blow up these institutions, institutions don't go away.
00:23:28.000You just get new institutions, and they are much, much, much worse.
00:23:32.000Because when people live together, there have to be rules and shared frameworks, and somebody has to design those rules and shared frameworks.
00:23:38.000Either it can be the wisdom of ages passed down generation over generation, gradually attuned by human reason and by the wisdom of experience, or it can be a bunch of morons who have decided that their subjective pleasure is more important than actual institutions that have helped create human happiness over the course of thousands of years.
00:24:00.000The reason I spend so much time on this is because as we will see, this applies to a variety of political issues that affect your daily life.
00:24:06.000People have decided that institutions don't matter because they're the only people on earth who matter.
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00:24:48.000They had a bunch of boxes that were filled with old photos and old film reels and I sent them all in two legacy box and they came back all digitally preserved.
00:25:23.000You can see this philosophy carried out in policy, not just in terms of social policy and sort of approach to social issues, but the left-wing belief that exceptions ought to make the rules because after all, the rules aren't great for everyone.
00:25:35.000That belief system ends with some pretty pathetic ramifications for all of human society.
00:25:40.000So for example, California has now mandated that every big box store in California, this kicked in in the new year, every big toy store is required to create a gender neutral toy section.
00:25:52.000So the answer that people will give you is, well, you know, we need a gender neutral toy section for those kids who are having trouble with their gender identity.
00:25:59.000So what you're really saying is that gender doesn't exist.
00:26:02.000What you're really saying is there's no such thing as biological sex or human proclivities that are directed by biological sex or connected to it.
00:26:11.000That human tendencies are not connected to sex.
00:26:13.000In any way, we have to redefine sex across the biological spectrum to account for the fact that there are some people who feel uncomfortable.
00:26:51.000That societally speaking, that's quite a good thing.
00:26:54.000That doesn't mean that there aren't exceptions to the rule and we ought not treat those people with tolerance, we should, but that does not mean that you redefine gender entirely.
00:27:00.000And yet this is seen as a positive good.
00:27:02.000Because there are exceptions and we have to make sure that all of society is restructured in favor of this small group of people who have a problem with the societal institutions.
00:27:14.000When you blow up the institutions, something else fills the gap.
00:27:17.000Now, it's compulsory government gender theory.
00:27:20.000Here we go, this is a report from NBC News on the new California law.
00:27:24.000This might seem like a silly piece of typical California politics, but the truth is that big box toy stores across the country have been moving in this direction.
00:27:33.000Both Walmart and Target have done away with gendered toy sections.
00:27:38.000And experts say that's good, because gendered toys shape how children see themselves and each other.
00:27:52.000They're experts who don't care about the majority of children flourishing because it turns out that kids like gender roles.
00:27:57.000Okay, this is, by the way, this is true in primates as well.
00:28:00.000Okay, if you find, if you find female primates, female primates will try to comfort, they'll turn random objects into dolls and they'll try to comfort them and male primates will turn everything into a weapon.
00:28:16.000Kids like to be told that there are gender roles and that what they have are specifically created biological powers that merge with civilizational institutions that re-inculcate very important things about humanity.
00:28:29.000that boys grow up to be men, are supposed to be protectors and guardians, and that girls grow up to be women, are supposed to be creators and nurturers.
00:28:36.000This does not mean that women can't also be protectors and guardians, or that men can't also be nurturers.
00:28:40.000It does mean that there are stereotypical attributes to masculinity and femininity, which by the way, even the trans community acknowledges, which is why they attempt to adopt the stereotypical garb of the opposite sex in order to claim membership in it very often.
00:28:53.000They have surgeries to effectuate that change.
00:28:57.000But the experts say that the institutions are bad.
00:29:01.000Were there really a huge, a huge number of kids so deeply disaffected by societal institutions around gender?
00:29:08.000Like huge numbers of kids who walked into toy stores and just started weeping because the Barbies were in the girls' section and the guns, the Nerf guns were in the boys' section.
00:29:15.000Was it an overwhelming societal problem or was it that experts don't like the institutions because all institutions are militating factors in favor of civilizational things that are good and positive and they don't like the civilization itself and they want to remold the civilization itself.
00:29:37.000Truly, what even makes them an expert on human happiness?
00:29:40.000In order to direct policy, you have to determine what is the good you are seeking with the policy for whom are you seeking this good? It is pretty obvious here.
00:29:48.000The good that they are seeking for society is tearing down roles.
00:29:51.000Because roles are inherently bad, because we are all malleable widgets, and if you get rid of societal roles, you can remake humanity as essentially a piece of clay in the mold that you wish to remake it.
00:30:01.000That is a utopian, nonsensical dream that always ends in tyranny.
00:30:20.000So you cared enough to make a law compelling toy stores to have gender-neutral toy sections.
00:30:24.000Don't tell me I shouldn't care about that.
00:30:26.000When you're openly saying you wish to remold society and destroy societal institutions.
00:30:30.000Okay, but it's not just with regard to things like men and women.
00:30:33.000It's also with regard to things like crime.
00:30:34.000So the entire criminal policy of the left, of the hard left, is that there are certain people who they don't think should be in jail.
00:30:40.000Therefore, no one should be in jail, apparently.
00:30:42.000According to the New York Post, Manhattan's new DA has now ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing, according to a set of progressive policies made public on Tuesday.
00:30:58.000In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office, quote, will not seek a carceral sentence, meaning put people in jail, except for homicide and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.
00:31:11.000This rule may be accepted only in extraordinary circumstances based on holistic analysis of the facts, criminal history, victims' input, and any other information available, the memo reads.
00:31:22.000Assistant DAs must also now keep in mind the impacts of incarceration, including whether it really does increase public safety, potential future barriers to convicts involving housing and employment, the financial cost of prison, and, and, the racial disparities over who gets time.
00:31:35.000Now, again, we are making rules for the entire society based on a small minority of people who commit criminal acts.
00:31:42.000By the way, minorities are the minorities.
00:31:44.000Because when we talk about, oh, there are too many black men going to prison, that is still a vast minority of black men.
00:31:48.000The vast majority of black men do not go to prison.
00:31:52.000This baseline idea that we have to completely reshape how criminal law and institutions of justice are done in this country because you don't like the outcome for a minority of humans who decide to commit crimes is patently crazy.
00:32:06.000But that is what they are seeking to do, because the idea is that we have created a quote-unquote carceral society, and our carceral society is having downstream effects that shape how people live, and we don't like how those people are living, and therefore we have to get rid of these institutions altogether.
00:32:18.000Well, we've done that, but guess what replaces it?
00:32:32.000That's why you've seen mass increases in murder rates across major cities in the United States.
00:32:37.000Because prosecutors have decided that they are not interested in prosecuting people on behalf of the small minority.
00:32:41.000So just as the institution of marriage must be destroyed because there are some people who don't like it and they don't fit within the box.
00:32:47.000And the institutions of law must be destroyed because there are some people who don't like the law and commit crimes.
00:32:52.000And the institution of gender must be destroyed because there are some people who feel uncomfortable.
00:32:57.000And of course, we have to destroy the institution of schooling as well because there are some people who feel uncomfortable.
00:33:01.000So, for example, the Chicago public schools have now cancelled all classes because the union voted to go virtual.
00:33:07.000Now, we have been told by the Biden administration that public sector unions are a are a fulsome good.
00:33:20.000And we need to make sure that these teachers, who are the heroes of the pandemic after all, I mean, soldiering on, soldiering on from their homes and apartments, doing Zoom classes to a bunch of kids who aren't watching them.
00:33:32.000Now listen, there are some teachers who actually tried to go back into school, and those people are just as heroic as everybody else who went to work.
00:33:39.000They're not more heroic for having gone into a school than the guy is for having gone into a factory, or even the banker is for having gone into his office today.
00:33:46.000The silliness where teachers are more heroic than every other member of the population is really foolish when it comes to Omicron, when it comes to COVID generally, considering that kids are not getting sick.
00:33:55.000You're more likely to get sick at your local factory working than you are likely to get sick at your local school working.
00:34:01.000This has been true throughout the pandemic, by the way.
00:34:04.000In fact, you remember that last summer, when Delta was beginning to spike, there was all this talk, well, if we reopen schools, teachers are going to get sick.
00:34:10.000And it turned out that every story that was coming up about teachers dying was from a teacher who'd gotten infected outside of school.
00:34:15.000Well, now the Chicago Teachers Union, the greatest of all people who are running the Biden administration, by the way, Randy Weingarten is in the White House every other minute.
00:34:24.000The Chicago Teachers Union voted to teach virtually rather than in the classroom because, of course, these are heroes, heroes of the republic.
00:34:30.000CPS is the third largest school district in the country.
00:34:32.000They resumed in-person learning on Monday in conditions that union leaders described as unsafe.
00:34:38.000The union held an emergency meeting on Tuesday.
00:34:40.000The vote was 73% in favor of the remote work-only job action, the union said on Twitter.
00:34:47.000Chicago public schools described the union vote as, quote, an unfortunate decision.
00:34:51.000The union said the action will end when the current surge in cases substantially subsides.
00:35:29.000You know, what people on the left will say is, well, yeah, but you on the right, you guys, you also want a few people to rule the roost in terms of the prevailing societal rules.
00:35:39.000You're not doing it for the broad spectrum of humanity.
00:35:42.000And what they will mention is, for example, vax mandates.
00:35:44.000They'll say, well, why aren't you in favor of vax mandates?
00:35:48.000Vaccinations are good for the vast majority of people.
00:35:50.000So why are you saying that we shouldn't mandate vaccinations?
00:35:53.000First of all, nothing I've said in here says that marriage ought to be compulsory, for example.
00:35:57.000Or that gender segregated toy stores, gender separated toy stores ought to be compulsory.
00:36:02.000So the use of government compulsion is one factor that militates here.
00:36:08.000So there is a very big difference between rights that adhere to every individual and that you choose to exercise when you get a vaccine or don't get a vaccine, and the collective institutions that we share as a society.
00:36:21.000There's rights exist within certain boundaries.
00:36:25.000And one of those rights is the right to say, I don't wish to vaccinate myself because my health is essentially my business.
00:36:34.000But according to Lori Lightfoot, it's amazing.
00:36:37.000So what the left will say is you have no rights when it comes to your own health.
00:36:40.000But also we are going to completely restructure society when it comes to things like marriage, gender and crime.
00:36:45.000Here's Lori Lightfoot, who has done all of these things, saying that businesses love the vaccine mandates, love them.
00:36:51.000And what we're hearing from a lot of folks, particularly business people, is they want to create a safe environment and they're grateful for us imposing this vaccine mandate in entertainment venues.
00:37:03.000So, restaurants, bars, gyms, and the like.
00:37:08.000Okay, imposing actual coercive measures on individuals is a very different thing from there being societal institutions that we foster and uphold.
00:37:18.000To understand what rights are, you have to think about rights within a framework.
00:37:21.000When we think about rights generally, like for example, the right not to get a vaccine, you have to determine what rights apply, which rights obtain, you have to be pretty specific about how rights work.
00:37:30.000We're going to get into that in just a second, because when we use the language of rights, very often we are unclear about what exactly we are talking about.
00:37:36.000And I think it's kind of important to clarify, so we'll get into that in just one moment.
00:37:40.000Let's talk about the fact that you're spending too much on gas because you are spending too much on gas.
00:37:44.000This is why you need that free app I've been talking about, GetUpside.
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00:37:55.000Use promo code SHAPIRO and get a bonus $0.25 per gallon on your first fill up.
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00:38:45.000Alrighty, we'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:38:47.000First, if you're looking for some motivation to start your year off strong, look no further than the brand new book club that I am launching once a month.
00:39:22.000Just head on over to thirdthursdaybookclub.com, that is T-H-I-R-D, thursdaybookclub.com, and join me.
00:39:29.000I mean, I'm really excited about this.
00:39:30.000I've been reading the books in preparation.
00:39:31.000You'll receive this month's book recommendations and some of the materials you'll need to participate in our first members-only discussion on January 20th when you head on over to thirdthursdaybookclub.com and put in your email address to get started today and start the new year off right.
00:39:48.000Check out thirdthursdaybookclub.com and join me in that quest.
00:39:51.000Also, as you know, this Friday, the Supreme Court is going to convene to hear arguments on the legality and constitutionality of the Biden administration's absurdly tyrannical vaccine mandate.
00:39:59.000That means this week is going to be huge for the lawsuit that we have filed against the Biden administration and medical tyranny.
00:40:04.000Already, over 1 million people have signed our Do Not Comply petition.
00:40:08.000We would love to increase that number vastly before Friday.
00:40:11.000Help us send our message loud and clear.
00:40:13.000Head on over to dailywire.com slash do not comply and help us push back against the tyrannical VAX mandate from the Biden administration.
00:40:20.000You are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:40:23.000Okay, so let's talk for a second about rights.
00:40:30.000So, what the left is constantly doing is they're cramming down from above their version of society.
00:40:36.000What they suggest, of course, is that they're not.
00:40:50.000And how does that differentiate from, for example, your right to medical freedom, right?
00:40:54.000Not to get a vaccine if you don't want a vaccine.
00:40:56.000Again, I'm a big proponent of the vaccines.
00:40:58.000In fact, I think that there are certain circumstances in which the government can compel vaccination.
00:41:02.000I think particularly for childhood diseases, you know, in the context of public schools.
00:41:05.000If you wish to take part in a public school and this is a childhood disease like measles, mumps, rubella, I have no problem whatsoever with school districts mandating that you get your shots before you go to school because these are childhood diseases.
00:41:15.000The destruction of the disease requires that children get the shot and not transmit it to one another at the public school level, for example.
00:41:22.000Right, so how do you determine when a right obtains and pertains?
00:41:57.000Term the difference between positive liberty and negative liberty.
00:42:00.000A positive liberty, a positive right is you're being given something.
00:42:03.000A negative right is I have a right against you to prevent you from harming me, for example.
00:42:07.000This is a pretty strict difference, but we can get more specific than that.
00:42:10.000And when we talk about rights, we should keep a framework of what exactly we're talking about in our mind because it determines what government can do and what government can't and what our moral duties are and what they aren't.
00:42:19.000So there's a famous legal scholar from the early 20th century.
00:43:06.000So a claim is a right that I can claim against you.
00:43:09.000So, for example, If you have a duty to feed your child, your child has a claim against you.
00:43:15.000Your child has an actual, real-life claim against you, because you have a duty to feed your kid, so your child can say, you have a duty to feed me, you have violated your duty, therefore I have a claim against you.
00:44:27.000Because we don't want to give the government the full-scale authority to reshape how we all live.
00:44:32.000We don't want to give the government the full-scale prudential authority, on a prudential level, right?
00:44:36.000As a matter of what we would like the government to have, the government should not have the ability to reshape all aspects of our health life for our own benefit.
00:44:45.000So we have immunity against government.
00:44:47.000So you can say that you have an immunity without, for example, having the privilege.
00:44:51.000Like, you may have a moral duty on sort of a moral, general level that you should protect yourself and you should make yourself healthier.
00:45:44.000There's a good piece in the Wall Street Journal today talking about how people are fleeing these states.
00:45:47.000So for example, where are people leaving and where are people going?
00:45:51.000According to the National Movers Study released Monday by United Van Lines, the largest net gain in terms of share of move-ins was Vermont.
00:46:01.000The rest of the top five, South Dakota, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Florida.
00:46:05.000One of those common themes is affordability.
00:46:08.000Another one of those common themes is safety.
00:46:10.000Nearly half of the moves into Vermont and Florida were among households earning more than $150,000 a year moving away from higher-priced spots in the Northeast.
00:46:37.000States that have strong social institutions but not a lot of compulsion.
00:46:40.000The left doesn't believe in either of those things.
00:46:41.000They don't like the strong social institutions, which they say hem humanity in, and they also love compulsion, because again, anything that is not prohibited is compulsory, according to the left.
00:46:53.000So, this is resulting in some pretty dire ramifications when it comes to everything from gender, to crime, to COVID.
00:47:01.000They have to compel you to do what they want to do.
00:47:03.000The bottom line is their view of life requires tyranny because social institutions are an excellent militating force against tyranny.
00:47:11.000Things like marriage and family militate against total governmental top-down control.
00:47:15.000Things like church militate against total top-down governmental control.
00:47:20.000Because social pressure is a great force for Social binding.
00:47:25.000When you don't have that, when you blow up all those institutions, the government has to create the ersatz, the fake level of social cohesion necessary in order for a society to operate.
00:47:33.000You can only do that with top-down compulsion.
00:47:36.000So they blow up the institutions on behalf of a small group of people who don't like the institutions or for whom the institutions are not beneficial.
00:47:44.000And then they replace that with governmental compulsion of a new form of social cohesion.
00:47:49.000And then they are shocked when people leave and don't like this, and move instead to places where there's more social cohesion, places where there are a set set of social institutions and rules, and where freedom exists within those social institutions.
00:48:01.000The great irony of life is that the stronger the social institutions, the greater the freedom.
00:48:05.000The weaker the social institutions, the less the freedom, because the government must create some sort of social cohesion, and they can only do that with the billy club.
00:48:13.000That is the only way the government creates social cohesion.
00:48:17.000So, Joe Biden right now is trying to happy talk his way through this thing.
00:48:21.000He tried compulsion, it didn't work when it came to vaccines.
00:48:25.000He has tried everything he can think of in order to create Airsat's social cohesion, top-down, while wrecking institutions on behalf of wokeness and redistributionism, and now he's going to happy talk his way through this thing.
00:48:35.000So yesterday, Joe Biden went out there in the middle of an economy in limbo and an Omicron surge.
00:48:41.000And what he could say is, listen, we have great social institutions in this country.
00:48:44.000We have people, we have hospitals, we have communities, we have people who take care of each other, and we have freedoms.
00:48:50.000And we have vaccines that are available to you.
00:48:52.000We have all these things available to you.
00:48:54.000Go out and live your life happily in a free country.
00:48:57.000Instead, Joe Biden is trying to happy talk his way through his own failures of ideology.
00:49:03.000So first of all, it's always fun to watch the current President of the United States not know what year it is.
00:50:17.000Now, it may be a lot of hospitalizations and death among the unvaccinated.
00:50:20.000The vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths that are currently occurring in the United States are of unvaccinated people when it comes to Omicron.
00:50:27.000It also happens to be that Omicron is hitting a huge swath of the population, like over a million positive tests yesterday in the United States, five times the number last year, and somewhere in the same range of deaths on a daily basis, which means this thing, thank God, is significantly less deadly, like up to five times less deadly than Delta, according to the South African data.
00:50:45.000And so Joe Biden is trying to panic everyone.
00:50:47.000What he should be saying is, no one should be panicked at this point.
00:50:50.000If you're unvaccinated and you've never had COVID before, then you should be concerned, particularly if you're immunocompromised or elderly, you should be concerned and maybe you should go get a vaccine.
00:51:00.000But otherwise, everybody should get back to daily life and stop testing asymptomatically or if you have a cold.
00:53:10.000Because of the American Rescue Plan, the first month we were in office, or second month, that I signed in March, the states and the school districts have spent this money well.
00:53:23.000So I encourage the states and school districts to use the funding that you still have to protect your children and keep the schools open.
00:53:31.000Okay, weird, because it's your party that's shutting down schools right now.
00:53:35.000Also, Joe Biden fibbed, he says that hospitals are being overrun thanks to the unvaxxed.
00:53:39.000So first of all, the data on hospitals being overrun is really scanty.
00:53:42.000Okay, maybe hospitals are being strained in some places like rural parts of the country, but if they're being overrun, it turns out that that is probably due to the fact that there are a bunch of people who are not working.
00:53:55.000According to Maria Raven and Gene Noble, writing for the Wall Street Journal, The United States currently has a severe shortage of nurses and healthcare workers are suffering from significant burnout compounded by understaffing.
00:54:06.000As the Omicron variant spreads, outdated COVID-19 testing and quarantine policies are exacerbating healthcare worker shortages.
00:54:12.000It turns out that when you vax mandate a bunch of people who already have natural immunity and they work in hospitals and they go home, and then you have to activate the National Guard in, for example, New York in order to staff hospitals, that creates artificial shortages.
00:54:24.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Omicron is highly contagious and now accounts for most infections in the United States.
00:54:29.000Hospitals are increasing asymptomatic testing of their employees and requiring those with potential exposure to quarantine even if they have no symptoms and a negative test.
00:54:37.000In light of that staffing crisis, the CDC last week reduced the isolation period for COVID-infected healthcare workers to five days.
00:54:44.000But now they're saying, well, maybe you should think about getting a test anyway before you go back to work.
00:54:50.000But here's Joe Biden, again, suggesting that this crisis is not brought about by his own stupid policy.
00:54:54.000It's instead a crisis that's been brought about by the people he can always blame, the unvaxxed.
00:55:00.000Countries across the world are seeing rising cases.
00:55:02.000Here in the United States, our team have been working around the clock during the holiday weeks.
00:55:07.000In the last two weeks, we have deployed hundreds of military doctors and nurses to staff the hospitals in our states that are overrun and overworked because of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients primarily.
00:55:24.000Okay, well, maybe it's because there are shortage of workers created by your federal vaccine mandates and they're having to fill in using the military.
00:55:32.000Also, Joe Biden keeps saying things about testing. He's just incompetent. The level of competence in this administration is truly astonishing. It's just unbelievable incompetence.
00:55:40.000Here's Joe Biden saying, you know what, why don't you go try to find a free COVID test nearby?
00:55:43.000Yeah, good luck with that, by the way, we have a massive COVID test shortage. Google, quote COVID test near me. Go there, Google, excuse me, COVID test near me on Google to find the nearest site where you can get a test most often and free.
00:56:04.000Look, with more capacity for in-person tests, we should see waiting lines shortened and more appointments freed up.
00:56:15.000lines of cars for blocks because of the stupid restrictions that he's put down about how you have to test before you go back to work and about how we have to test the asymptomatic.
00:56:22.000And then you didn't supply the test. My favorite part of this is that Joe Biden says that the testing shortages are very frustrating to him. Are they, though? Because I feel like Joe Biden can get a test. Are they deeply frustrating to Joe Biden? This addled, this addled old man. My goodness.
00:56:37.000I'm testing. I know this remains frustrating. Believe me, it's frustrating to me. But we're making improvements.
00:56:44.000In the last two weeks, we've stood up federal testing sites all over the country.
00:57:33.000And so here is Chuck Schumer, who's trying to happy talk his way through this thing, saying Joe Biden is doing a great job on testing, which is weird because everyone knows he's not.
00:57:40.000I think that they are doing a good job in terms of getting the tests out.
00:57:44.000I've asked that more tests be coming to New York.
00:58:44.000By the way, best thing is that the administration and the panic, the COVID panic porn people, their big thing has been, we are going to focus in on the kids.
00:58:52.000The kids are the ones who are really in danger.
00:59:08.000I think what's important to step back here is recognize we're still in the middle of a pandemic.
00:59:12.000There are still far too many people who are not vaccinated.
00:59:16.000There are still kids who are at risk because there are not enough people, adults, vaccinated.
00:59:20.000And I think what we're all collectively trying to do here is protect more people and save more lives, whether you work here or at the CDC or the FDA.
00:59:31.000By the way, the Today Show picking up on this panic because we basically have a Pravda loop that exists inside the media.
00:59:36.000Anytime the administration says a thing, the immediate response from the media are, how do we mirror this and just keep repeating it back to the White House?
00:59:45.000And the media will be cited by the White House as justification for their policy.
01:01:16.000So because a minority of people in the United States are deeply panicked and deeply worried over a thing that should not panic or worry them, we all must live under their rule.