The Charlie Kirk Show - Ben Shapiro | The Great American Divorce

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:09.000 Very special episode for you with Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of the Daily Wire and also author of the very good new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.

00:00:21.000 This is a very interesting episode.

00:00:24.000 Ben makes some phenomenal points, most of which I agree with, and we have some disagreement on one part of this podcast.

00:00:30.000 So you make sure to listen to the whole thing through.

00:00:32.000 And I also get his 2020 predictions.

00:00:34.000 And I ask him, has he ever changed his mind on anything?

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00:01:11.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:12.000 Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk Show.

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00:01:17.000 Here we go.

00:01:19.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:03:15.000 Hey, everybody.

00:03:16.000 Welcome to this special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:19.000 Joining us today is Ben Shapiro, who needs no introduction, author of the new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.

00:03:27.000 You know, Ben, it seems like you wrote this in like the last two weeks.

00:03:33.000 It almost writes as if it was a long-form essay, just kind of diagnosing where we are.

00:03:38.000 But I think you wrote this six or seven months ago, as all book publishing goes.

00:03:42.000 Did you have any idea it would be as relevant, as applicable today as?

00:03:47.000 No, not at all.

00:03:48.000 Not at all.

00:03:48.000 So when I wrote it, I wrote it because I figured I got to rush something out before the election, given the stakes of the election, and also given sort of the cultural breakdown we were experiencing even back last year.

00:03:58.000 And then after COVID hit, I figured it was going to be completely irrelevant because the only thing anyone cares about is a global pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people.

00:04:05.000 And then over the last eight weeks, it was as though everybody who is in what I call the disintegrationist movement decided to unite at once and just burn things.

00:04:14.000 And so I thank them for their marketing aptitude.

00:04:17.000 But I don't think that, you know, I don't think it was prophetic so much as describing something that just had not fully flowered until the last six or eight weeks or so.

00:04:25.000 So I have to compliment you.

00:04:27.000 It's a very organized book in the sense that it puts the thesis forward very simply and clearly at the beginning.

00:04:34.000 Unlike a lot of political books, where it's just like this meandering catch-all of what's in the news when they're writing the book.

00:04:39.000 So I think this is going to be as timely a couple years from now as it is today.

00:04:44.000 And so you basically describe the divide in America of unionism, unionism versus disintegrationism.

00:04:52.000 And I think that's very appropriate.

00:04:53.000 I think that is the divide that is happening in our country.

00:04:56.000 And then you kind of describe three very important, let's just say, brackets, for lack of a better term, of how the disintegrationists are trying to destroy our country through philosophy, history, and shared culture.

00:05:10.000 And then you describe what the American philosophy is and how they're trying to destroy it, what the American history is and how they're trying to destroy it, and the American culture and how they're trying to destroy it.

00:05:19.000 Can you just elaborate on that a little bit?

00:05:21.000 I thought you did a very good job on that.

00:05:23.000 Sure.

00:05:24.000 Any nation in order to continue existing has to share a common philosophical framework, has to share a common culture, and has to share a common history.

00:05:31.000 And that's sort of the starting point for the book.

00:05:34.000 And then I describe what exactly was that shared philosophy supposed to be?

00:05:37.000 What was that shared culture supposed to be?

00:05:39.000 And what was that shared history supposed to be?

00:05:41.000 And then why are all three elements there being undermined?

00:05:43.000 So the shared philosophy was the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, which suggests essentially three key components.

00:05:49.000 One, that all men are created equal, that we're all made in the image of God.

00:05:52.000 And from that, there are natural rights.

00:05:54.000 Those natural rights adhere to you as a human being.

00:05:56.000 And just by virtue of you being a human being, you have natural rights.

00:05:59.000 And these natural rights are rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or life, liberty, and property, as John Walk suggested.

00:06:05.000 The second element is that these rights pre-exist government.

00:06:08.000 They do not come from government.

00:06:09.000 Therefore, when you enter into a societal pact, when a government is formed, it was created in order to protect those rights, not in order to invade those rights, which brings us to the third point, which is that if the government were to invade those rights, it would lose its reason for existing.

00:06:21.000 So all of this is encapsulated in that fundamental paragraph in the Declaration of Independence, talking about the fact that we are given natural rights by nature and nature is God, that we are all equal before the law, that all men are created equal, given certain inalienable rights, and that a government is duty-bound to enforce those rights.

00:06:39.000 So that is the American philosophy that has united us.

00:06:41.000 We haven't always lived up to it.

00:06:42.000 Obviously, the story of American history is realizing those rights for broader and broader swaths of people, which is why the great civil rights leader in American history, all of them, universally cited the Declaration of Independence and its central contentions as the themes of what they were trying to achieve more broadly in practicality.

00:06:58.000 This is why MLK called the Declaration of Independence a promissory note that had yet to be fulfilled.

00:07:03.000 It's why Frederick Douglass did a whole famous and wonderful speech on July 4th in 1852 when slavery was still legal, saying, why are we not included in the promises of the Declaration of Independence and Independence Day?

00:07:14.000 Those who have invoked the promises of the Founding Fathers have been successful in increasing and broadening the protections of that philosophy for a broader and broader category of people in the United States.

00:07:23.000 That's the founding philosophy, that philosophy we're all supposed to share.

00:07:26.000 And that philosophy is also connected to a culture of rights.

00:07:30.000 So we believe that rights are not just entitlements from government.

00:07:34.000 Rights, again, pre-exist government, which means that you have a right against other people.

00:07:37.000 You have a right to freedom of speech.

00:07:38.000 You have a right to freedom of the press.

00:07:40.000 You have a right to freedom of association.

00:07:41.000 You have a right to freedom to practice your religion.

00:07:43.000 You have a right to bear arms.

00:07:44.000 All of these are embedded in that idea that there are natural rights.

00:07:47.000 Then you get to the question of culture.

00:07:48.000 So one of the big questions that's arisen now is the question of cancel culture.

00:07:52.000 And what people on the disintegrationist left very often say is there is no cancel culture.

00:07:57.000 After all, government is not cracking down on you.

00:08:00.000 So, what's the problem, right?

00:08:01.000 This is all just happening in the private sphere.

00:08:02.000 The idea behind this is that culture is a different thing than just government.

00:08:07.000 Culture is a sort of shared set of attitudes that prevail across the United States.

00:08:13.000 And that shared set of attitudes includes a few key components.

00:08:16.000 One is the idea that you have to have tolerance for other people's exercise of their rights, even if you don't like how they're exercising their rights.

00:08:21.000 So, I may not agree with you religiously, but I agree you have the right to practice your religion.

00:08:24.000 I may not agree with what you're saying, but you have a right to freedom of speech.

00:08:27.000 Now, this sort of stuff used to be commonplace on the American left.

00:08:29.000 The ACLU famously suggested that they would defend everybody's right to speech up to and including the KKK because the principle of freedom of speech was just so necessary.

00:08:37.000 Marching literally, yes.

00:08:40.000 Exactly.

00:08:40.000 So, the culture of rights, which is this tolerance for others.

00:08:43.000 The culture of rights also suggests support for societal institutions outside of government to inculcate virtue.

00:08:48.000 So, we were all supposed to be members of our community.

00:08:50.000 We were supposed to back churches and synagogues.

00:08:52.000 We were supposed to back methods of education.

00:08:55.000 We were supposed to believe that these institutions were responsible for inculcating virtue.

00:08:59.000 We were supposed to believe in the fundamental unit of the American family so that this would inculcate virtue and a sense of responsibility.

00:09:05.000 The culture of rights also presupposes that we are going to defend those rights and defend those rights militantly, which is one of the reasons why the Second Amendment is so important.

00:09:12.000 The idea is that don't tread on us, right?

00:09:14.000 I mean, if you violate our rights, then we are going to fight back against that either governmentally or culturally, or in the last resort, even using the force of arms.

00:09:22.000 And then, and then finally, the culture of rights presupposes an industrious and entrepreneurial people, people who are adventure-seeking, who are looking to embrace the adventure, embrace the journey.

00:09:33.000 It wasn't about what was being given to you, it's about rights that you had as a human being and your vast capacity in exercising those rights, the ability to exercise your own free will and shape the world around you.

00:09:44.000 That was this sort of optimistic American vision that spans the pioneers and the cowboys and the civil rights movement, by the way.

00:09:50.000 So, all of those were sort of the cultural hallmarks of the United States.

00:09:52.000 Those have been undermined as well.

00:09:53.000 And then, finally, American history is a belief that American history is an attempt to fulfill the founding ideals that we have fallen short in many cases, that we have striven and we've fallen down, but we've always gotten back up.

00:10:04.000 We've stumbled forward toward the fulfillment of those ideals.

00:10:06.000 And that is why the story of the United States is not an evil story or a story of 1619.

00:10:12.000 It's a story of 1776 and the perfection of those principles.

00:10:15.000 It's the story of the most powerful, free, prosperous nation in the history of the world rising from literally nothing to become that through the use of founding principle.

00:10:23.000 So, those are the traditional structures that bound us all.

00:10:26.000 And by the way, again, there used to be broad agreement on a lot of this across the right and the left.

00:10:30.000 The idea of patriotism was not anathema to people.

00:10:32.000 When you said America is a great country, there weren't a huge swath of Americans going, No, you know what? 0.98

00:10:36.000 You're wrong, America sucks. 0.82

00:10:38.000 That was not a thing that was really held in high esteem probably until the 60s, although there were earlier strains of that in American thought. 0.96

00:10:44.000 When you said America's Declaration of Independence is the philosophy that binds us, right, left, and center, that was the document that was cited as the rationale for whatever your political program.

00:10:53.000 And when you said we have to have a spirit of industriousness and entrepreneurialism, we have to tolerate each other's rights.

00:10:58.000 Again, there are members of the left who believe this.

00:11:00.000 So, this is why, instead of using the terms right and left, I use the terms unionist and disintegrationist, because I really don't think that it has to be right and left.

00:11:07.000 I think you can be on the left and believe all of the things that I'm talking about.

00:11:11.000 But increasingly, unfortunately, the American left is moving in a more radical direction that looks to disintegrate the union by fighting all three of these elements.

00:11:18.000 Totally correct.

00:11:19.000 On page 128, it's probably one of the best, I just think, rebuttals to the entire 1619 idea.

00:11:25.000 And you go through very factually how we were actually founded on freedom and ending slavery, not a country that was founded on slavery.

00:11:33.000 And I want to get into the new editor-in-chief of the New York Times, Nicole Hannah Jones.

00:11:37.000 I'm half kidding, of course. 0.99

00:11:38.000 She basically runs the place, and I think you aptly put that.

00:11:41.000 Where this idea is now widespread, where you basically have half the country think that they think that there's nothing admirable, nothing righteous, nothing good about American history.

00:11:50.000 And so, I guess there's a lot I want to unpack there.

00:11:54.000 So, Ben, in the book, you say Americans basically want a divorce.

00:11:58.000 And one of my favorite parts of the intro is you say, if Trump wins, we're more likely to want an American divorce.

00:12:03.000 If Trump loses, we're more likely to want an American divorce.

00:12:06.000 Essentially saying we're headed for this no matter what.

00:12:10.000 A lot of the book is very descriptive.

00:12:13.000 It's about what's happening.

00:12:14.000 Part of it is prescriptive about how what we actually can do.

00:12:19.000 Are you optimistic that we can actually continue in this unionist form?

00:12:23.000 Or the way you see things moving, especially since you've written the book in the last six months, I think things have definitely changed.

00:12:31.000 Do you think that we're getting further and further away from each other and more likely to a national divorce?

00:12:36.000 I mean, it does feel that way.

00:12:37.000 And I think one of the reasons that it feels that way is because the left feels so empowered and so mobilized.

00:12:42.000 I mean, I was frankly shocked that there wasn't a fairly unified response on behalf of nearly everything that's happened in the last six months, from COVID to the George Floyd situation.

00:12:51.000 There was no one on the right who was defending the officer in the George Floyd situation, literally not a human being. 0.91

00:12:55.000 And yet somehow this became a polarized political issue because it turned into a broader narrative about how America is crappy on every level and how the system of the United States is endemically racist and cruel.

00:13:05.000 And that is not an argument that either needs to be made or should be made on the back of what is a horrible incident, which by the way, even that incident, it's not clear was a racial incident as opposed to just a pure incident of police cruelty and brutality.

00:13:17.000 So the attempt to polarize America along these lines and then the willingness of so many in our institutional culture to go along with the absolute radicalism and insanity we've seen over the past six to eight weeks with people tearing down statues of not only Christopher Columbus but George Washington, people who are rioting in the streets and breaking into businesses, people like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez suggesting that when people commit acts of violence up to and including shootings, it really is just because they want bread and the American system makes people want bread.

00:13:45.000 Now this kind of stuff is incredibly ugly.

00:13:47.000 It didn't have to go in this direction.

00:13:48.000 So on the one hand, I'm more pessimistic because there are more people than I thought, I think, who are disintegrationists.

00:13:53.000 I used to believe it was a very small percentage of the population.

00:13:55.000 Now I believe it's a sizable minority.

00:13:57.000 I don't think it's quite a majority yet.

00:13:59.000 I will say the one thing I find encouraging is that the radical left is so radical. 0.75

00:14:02.000 Disintegrationists are really taking off the mask at this point, that I think there's the real possibility of a backlash. 0.61

00:14:07.000 Now, that backlash doesn't have to materialize as Trump gets re-elected. 0.71

00:14:11.000 It could materialize that way.

00:14:12.000 It doesn't have to materialize that way.

00:14:13.000 But I think the backlash is coming.

00:14:15.000 And I think you're starting to see some of the early signs of that in things like Barry Weiss leaving the New York Times or Andrew Sullivan leaving New York Magazine or that letter from Harper's Weekly, a bunch of old school liberals saying this cancel culture stuff has got to stop.

00:14:27.000 I think that's right.

00:14:29.000 I guess, and part of it, and I'm a huge supporter of the president, is that the left is more unified on this insane disintegration because of how much they hate Trump.

00:14:37.000 So they use their pathological hatred of Trump as justification for something that they otherwise and independently never would have supported.

00:14:45.000 Oh, yeah, sure, 1619, sure, whatever, because you hate Trump a lot, so you must be right.

00:14:49.000 I mean, it's just a incredible foolish way of because what the radical left has been able to do is make Trump the face of the country and then take whatever they can kind of pile onto Trump and say, well, everything about Trump that's bad is what's bad about the country and what has always been bad about the country.

00:15:06.000 And, you know, they'll make up stuff about Trump in order to push that point forward.

00:15:09.000 So this is why you saw the entire Democratic Party basically rally around the 1619 project, which is a pseudo-history ripped by four different Pulitzer Prize winning historians.

00:15:17.000 It doesn't matter.

00:15:17.000 Nicole Hannah-Jones wins the Pulitzer Prize, and you end up with a bunch of Democratic nominees mirroring it.

00:15:22.000 Well, because President Trump says, make America great again.

00:15:22.000 Why?

00:15:24.000 And the response, as I talk about in the book, from the left is not, let's continue to make America great, right?

00:15:30.000 It was America was never great, which is a very different statement, right?

00:15:34.000 There is a halfway point between make America great again and America was never great.

00:15:37.000 And that was America was always great and it's getting better.

00:15:39.000 That is the halfway point.

00:15:41.000 But instead, what we end up with is America was never great. 0.99

00:15:43.000 America always sucked and it continues to suck until we continue to tear down the entire system. 0.68

00:15:46.000 Yeah, it's a Woodrow Wilson movement that hasn't stopped over the last hundred years, which the founders are actually awful people, and we have to get rid of them, and everything that they've done is evil and wrong, and they have a completely different philosophical approach of what the country should actually be. 0.93

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00:17:10.000 So I want to ask you a question about the three categories that you describe.

00:17:17.000 And I think it's well put, philosophy, history, and culture.

00:17:20.000 But Ben, I travel the country a lot, and so do you.

00:17:22.000 And I've met people that are Trump supporters that do believe in the shared history, philosophy, and culture of our country.

00:17:28.000 But some of them, particularly middle-class workers that work with their hands and they've had their jobs either shipped overseas or disappeared, they don't necessarily believe that America is currently in a position to benefit them.

00:17:42.000 So here's my question is, can you believe in those three things and also basically say, economically, the country is not working for me?

00:17:52.000 And this is a common argument that you've seen surface in the last couple years, right?

00:17:56.000 Especially with the rise of Donald Trump and more white working class voters supporting the Republican Party.

00:18:02.000 Is it enough just to have a shared philosophy, history, and culture?

00:18:05.000 But I guess my question is, do you think economics also can play a role in this?

00:18:08.000 When you have...

00:18:09.000 Yeah, you know where the question's going.

00:18:11.000 I'd love your thoughts on it.

00:18:12.000 Yeah, so I mean, I think that economics can play a role, but there's a difference between saying there are certain key industries that we want to protect because we think they're so important and free trade itself is bad.

00:18:21.000 Markets are bad.

00:18:22.000 We have to chain up the market and make the market work for us.

00:18:25.000 When we get to sort of the economic questions, the question is, what is a market?

00:18:29.000 So obviously, Tucker Carlson is the most famous expositor of this idea that markets need to be chained up and work for us.

00:18:34.000 And he's suggested that some of Elizabeth Warren's plans are good plans.

00:18:38.000 And he's very big on government getting involved and sort of picking winners and losers in this particular arena.

00:18:43.000 And when he says that markets are just things that work for us, that's a failure of description.

00:18:48.000 Markets are a recognition of fundamental human nature and human rights.

00:18:52.000 You have the right to alienate your own labor.

00:18:53.000 You have the right to engage in the labor that you choose.

00:18:56.000 You don't have the right to steal anybody else's labor from them through a majority vote.

00:18:59.000 You don't have the right to do any of those things.

00:19:01.000 Now, does that mean that there can't be any sort of industrial policy that is particularly a temporary stopgap?

00:19:07.000 So, for example, a transition away from particular types of business or an acknowledgement that certain types of business are so important for, say, national defense that we shouldn't be giving them subsidies?

00:19:15.000 Of course not.

00:19:16.000 I mean, that's a question of policy that doesn't fundamentally attack the root of the market itself.

00:19:20.000 Where you start to get into disintegrationist territory is where you say that it's the government's job to either inculcate virtue top down or to overall pick winners and losers in the American economy for no reason other than in some vague idea of yours, it quote unquote benefits America.

00:19:35.000 If by Benefits America, you mean I'm a member of a subgroup that I would like the government to act on behalf of, it's hard to make the argument that that is quote unquote benefiting America, especially because every economic policy has winners and losers.

00:19:46.000 So, if you're going to talk about curbing the free market in order to, for example, achieve some level of social mobility for people who need to switch careers or who need to move from one arena to another, or more importantly, if you're talking about curbing economic freedom in order to shore up the national defense, which when it comes to China, I think is much more important, that's a different thing than saying that markets themselves are fundamentally of no value.

00:20:11.000 Markets are of deep value.

00:20:12.000 They're of deep and abiding value that are a reflection of human nature, and they're a reflection of your individual human rights.

00:20:17.000 Because the same government that is capable of suggesting that markets are merely a tool to achieve an outcome can rob you of all of your economic rights, and your economic rights are indeed rights.

00:20:25.000 So, to kind of continue off that question, if you have a portion of the American population that does feel as if they've been disenfranchised economically, and they do share the philosophy, the history, the culture, and they think they believe in unified language and all of that, and let's just play it out.

00:20:42.000 All of a sudden, their factory closes and goes halfway across the world.

00:20:46.000 I agree with you that markets are generally very helpful towards human flourishing and prosperity.

00:20:53.000 I guess my question is: over the last 30, 40 years, do you think that the children that have become disintegrationists, I got to get better at pronouncing that, the disintegrationists, the parents might believe in the history and the philosophy and the culture, but their kids, they end up shipping them off to college and they see their parents are really kind of in debt and their wages haven't gone up a lot.

00:21:14.000 I would argue that a big part of this reason why we have a climate where revolution feels more likely than not is because we do have kind of an uncertain and disintegrating middle class.

00:21:25.000 Do you see a sense of that?

00:21:27.000 No, I don't.

00:21:28.000 I mean, I think I have a fundamental disagreement here.

00:21:30.000 And I think the polls sort of back the perspective that I'm about to explain, which is that the vast majority of disintegrationism among young white people is coming from college-educated people.

00:21:39.000 If you look at the polls, what you see is kids who are high school-educated and growing up in the Midwest are not the source of the anti-Americanism we're now seeing in America's streets.

00:21:47.000 You're not seeing these riots happening in poor towns in Ohio.

00:21:49.000 You're seeing them happen in Seattle and Portland, and it's upper-class white liberal kids who are going to community college on the public dime who are really mimicking this sort of viewpoint.

00:21:57.000 So, I understand fully being dissatisfied with your economic circumstance, and I understand thinking that our trade deals in the past have been skewed in ways that you don't like.

00:22:06.000 I get all of that.

00:22:07.000 I don't think that fundamentally the disintegration of the country is quite as materialist as it's sort of been made out to be.

00:22:14.000 I don't think this is about just poor people rising up.

00:22:16.000 I don't think it's a class war so much as it is an ideological war. 0.99

00:22:18.000 And again, you're seeing this with all the college-educated morons in Seattle and Portland who are running around burning crap, right? 0.99

00:22:23.000 Again, you're not seeing these riots in the middle of white Appalachia. 1.00

00:22:27.000 There, you're seeing people who are resistant to that kind of stuff.

00:22:29.000 What you're actually seeing is these riots in places where people have been inculcated with a certain perspective on the United States. 0.65

00:22:35.000 I don't think that there's a lot of ripe ground for like, I don't think the ripe ground for the disintegrationist left is to be found in dispossessed white working-class towns.

00:22:46.000 I think mostly that fodder is to be found in upper-class white enclaves and in minority neighborhoods where the Democratic Party has made heavy inroads by essentially suggesting that every problem is due to the system of the United States as opposed to people making bad personal decisions. 0.63

00:23:02.000 I think that's correct. 0.72

00:23:03.000 However, I think what ends up happening, though, is those white working-class towns become further radicalized and further want a national divorce, right?

00:23:10.000 So, they only bracket themselves down further, right?

00:23:14.000 So, they say, whatever Portland is doing, we have to do the exact opposite.

00:23:16.000 So, I don't think I agree that Akron, Ohio, or Hubbard, Ohio is not going to be likely to have a BLM Inc. protest anytime soon, or at least tolerate that, right?

00:23:26.000 Or take down a statue.

00:23:28.000 But I think whatever the opposite of what Portland and Seattle is doing, they're going to want to do that, and they're only going to try to fasten themselves down further.

00:23:36.000 And I think it's interesting, Ben, and I've done a lot of thinking about this.

00:23:39.000 I'm not really sure where I land on this, but I do think that the cultural landscape is the most important part.

00:23:45.000 But we as conservatives, I think, have only focused on the cultural landscape.

00:23:50.000 And I think we have to ask ourselves the question: are people more likely to continue to go to church and buy into the American ideal if they don't think the country is working for them economically?

00:24:00.000 And I agree that we need to tell people to be more self-reliant.

00:24:03.000 We have to tell them to have more individual initiative.

00:24:05.000 I agree with all those things.

00:24:06.000 But just looking materially and anecdotally, I'm afraid that we're losing an entire portion of the American society that no longer thinks their kids are going to be as productive and prosperous as they were.

00:24:22.000 And I'm very worried that that transition can quickly descend into an easy marketing opportunity for the disintegrationists.

00:24:30.000 So I guess here's my question then, just kind of continue it on and not continue in that same cycle, which is, have we as conservatives, have we done anything incorrectly politically and legislatively over the last 20, 30 years that has contributed to the cultural decline?

00:24:44.000 So I think, first of all, the complete maintenance of a massive top-down federal government, which seeks winners and losers and then deliberately seems to pick certain types of winners and losers, that's been a major problem.

00:24:54.000 A hands-off policy that basically says it's a free country, fend for yourself, is a lot more even-handed than a federal top-down policy that creates benefits that are contingent upon economic class or race or area or anything like that.

00:25:08.000 As far as the notion that this is going to be reversed by economic circumstance, that economic circumstances are really the great driver of the disintegration.

00:25:18.000 The American middle class has not disintegrated.

00:25:20.000 The American middle class, statistically speaking, turned into the upper middle class.

00:25:23.000 The vast majority of people in the United States are vastly better off than they were in 1980.

00:25:27.000 And all you have to do is check the stuff that's in their houses to recognize that this is the case.

00:25:31.000 I think the kind of false narrative that America is falling apart, I know it was driven by President Trump in 2016.

00:25:36.000 I fundamentally disagreed with him on it at the time.

00:25:38.000 I think statistically it's not true.

00:25:40.000 I know that there are many conservatives who disagree with me on this, ranging from Orrin Cass to Tucker.

00:25:44.000 But I think that the idea that economics solves what is in essence a cultural problem is not correct.

00:25:50.000 In the 1930s, people continued to go to church.

00:25:52.000 In the 1960s, they stopped going to church.

00:25:54.000 In the 1930s, they were a lot poorer than they were in the 1960s.

00:25:57.000 Tim Carney in his book Alienated America tries to sort of ferret out how much of this is economic and how much of this is just cultural decline and churches shutting down.

00:26:04.000 And what he comes up with is basically that the decline of religion and the rise of secularism in America is the real problem.

00:26:10.000 And here's the thing: people don't get paid more so they go to church.

00:26:13.000 And that's not the way this works.

00:26:14.000 It's not as though, okay, you brought all the middle-class jobs back, now everybody starts going back to church.

00:26:19.000 The fact is that the collapse of cultural institutions at the behest of a cultural elite has been far more provocative in tearing down social institutions than merely people declining on the economic scale.

00:26:31.000 In fact, there tends to be a pretty strong reverse correlation between how much money you earn and how often you go to church in this country.

00:26:38.000 And the richer you are, the less you tend to go to church over time.

00:26:41.000 Yeah, I think this is where the conservative debate is heading.

00:26:44.000 And again, I'm open-minded because I see it in, I have a lot of respect for Oren Cass and what he's researched.

00:26:51.000 And his argument is that the middle class is disappearing quickly and evaporating.

00:26:55.000 And one of the statistics he contributes, he's a really smart guy, as you know.

00:26:58.000 Oh, yeah, he is.

00:26:59.000 He contributes that in 1985, about 36 weeks of labor could support a family of four throughout the entire year, 36 weeks.

00:27:08.000 Now it takes 53 weeks of labor.

00:27:12.000 That's only looking at labor and not the price of goods.

00:27:14.000 And I understand it's not exactly a holistic view.

00:27:18.000 And I think that you're correct in the sense that just because you're going to have, let's just say, manufacturing plants reopening doesn't necessarily mean that the local Episcopalian church is going to be completely busting at the seams because of that.

00:27:32.000 I do think that there is something to say, though, that you have almost a dispiriting aspect of it, especially in rural America, where they feel as if the entire system has just been about trading cards on their communities, and they almost feel like it's rigged against those parts of America. 0.96

00:27:49.000 And that might be true.

00:27:50.000 It might be somewhat true.

00:27:52.000 It might be completely true, but that's at least the sentiment, right?

00:27:55.000 Well, the problem I have with this argument, generally speaking, is that it either applies to everyone or it applies to no one.

00:28:00.000 So if you are going to apply it to small-town white communities where people are losing jobs and therefore the community is falling apart and they feel disintegrationist, then this is exactly the argument that the quasi-Marxist left has made about minority communities in the United States, which is the reason that these communities are not doing better is because of economic shortcomings.

00:28:19.000 And if we would just spend a lot more money on those communities or rig the business community in a particular way or require rent control and building controls and increase taxation and redistribution and slavery reparations, well, then that would fix all of the problems.

00:28:30.000 I'm not enough of a materialist to believe that economic circumstance really explains the collapse of the ideological strength of the country.

00:28:37.000 Because again, overall, Oren can say that 36 weeks of labor supported a family of four in 1980, in 1985, and it's now 53 weeks that supports a family of four.

00:28:48.000 But what is the stuff that you are getting?

00:28:49.000 I mean, you can't, you mentioned it briefly, but you can't delide the difference that the house that you are living in now is significantly bigger than the house you were living in in 1985.

00:28:57.000 The fridge you have now is much better than the fridge you had in 1985.

00:29:00.000 You probably have two cars instead of one. 0.95

00:29:01.000 You probably have a flat screen TV instead of a piece of crap, old giant box. 0.97

00:29:05.000 Like, you're comparing apples to oranges in a certain way. 0.88

00:29:10.000 The price of the exact same goods from 1980, you could probably buy with three weeks' worth of labor, given how crappy the stuff was in 1980.

00:29:17.000 So that's not really recognizing how much markets work, as opposed to it is recognizing that products and services develop over time, and that if you want nicer things, it's going to cost more money.

00:29:28.000 Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't areas where you can bring costs down, obviously.

00:29:31.000 Like, if you're going to talk about deregulating the health insurance industry, if you're going to talk about bringing down the cost of health care by allowing more competition, if you're going to talk about school vouchers that alleviate the cost of education for a lot of people, well, I'm all in favor of all of those things.

00:29:44.000 I'm just, I'm deeply, I don't think there's a limiting principle to the idea that the collapse of the country can be blamed on people exercising independent economic decision-making.

00:29:53.000 Because once you start down that path, I literally do not know where that path ends.

00:29:57.000 And it seems to me there's very little division between what Tucker's saying and what Elizabeth Warren is saying.

00:30:01.000 And when I say that, I mean like Tucker himself has said there's very little division between himself and Elizabeth Warren on a lot of these issues.

00:30:06.000 I don't like Elizabeth Warren's agenda very much.

00:30:08.000 And when I look at this, so I do see, though, that it's, is there a sustainability question where eventually you are going to have, you know, let's just say demagogue politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders prey on the haves and haves not and say, hey, look how rich this person is and therefore give me all this power.

00:30:29.000 And you get into this in the book a little bit, and I encourage everyone to check it out, just how to destroy America in three easy steps, where it's hard to have liberty because then, and Mark Levin mentioned this in his interview with you, one of the great puzzling, one of the great most perplexing parts about liberty is if you allow people to speak freely and allow all of this freedom of thought, eventually will that be used to destroy liberty itself.

00:30:52.000 And so, and this is the old William F. Buckley quote, which they say, well, what would happen if you won the election?

00:30:59.000 He would say, well, I demand a recount, right?

00:31:01.000 So it's, do you think that the American ideal, as you put it, as you put forth, pioneer spirit, individual initiative, one that is around natural rights?

00:31:12.000 Do you actually think that it's inevitable that a majority of the country will want to embrace that?

00:31:19.000 I don't think it's inevitable by any stretch of the imagination.

00:31:21.000 In fact, I think that we have people who are pretty motivated to push against that, the idea of entrepreneurship being bad and that you have a right from government to basically stay where you are and not switch industries and all this.

00:31:31.000 I think that there are a lot of demagogues who absolutely can make hay out of that.

00:31:35.000 But I think this is one of the great failures of the Republican Party and their spirit of communication is that they very much oriented themselves toward the idea that they're now in the competition business with the Democrats as far as what we can give you and what we can guarantee you.

00:31:47.000 And saying to folks, listen, the thing that you are guaranteed in this country is adventure.

00:31:50.000 The thing that you are guaranteed is the ability to use your own labor in a way that you see fit.

00:31:56.000 The thing that you are, no one's guaranteeing you anything.

00:31:58.000 Like, first of all, this sort of tough love message actually, I think, has a fairly heavy constituency because I think that most people take that as a more optimistic message than your life blows.

00:32:06.000 Let me give you a thing.

00:32:07.000 Your life blows, let me give you a thing.

00:32:09.000 Let me give you a thing is very attractive.

00:32:10.000 Let's not underestimate.

00:32:11.000 Let me give you a thing is very attractive, particularly if you don't want to make decisions.

00:32:15.000 But your life blows, therefore, let me give you a thing, or you have no agency, therefore, let me give you a thing.

00:32:19.000 That's actually a pretty depressing message.

00:32:21.000 So it depends which half of the message you lead with.

00:32:23.000 I think that the Democrats have led with, let me give you a thing, and then sotto voce, because you have no control over your own life.

00:32:29.000 And Republicans have basically said, well, what you're saying is that you have no control over your life, and therefore let them give you a thing, and castigated people who are taking the things, when the actual message should be the converse, which is you do have agency, and the only thing that you're guaranteed is adventure.

00:32:43.000 So buck up and go out there and fight for it.

00:32:46.000 That doesn't mean that there aren't great and generous and virtuous people who are willing to give you a chance and help you out.

00:32:51.000 We all need those great and virtuous and generous people.

00:32:52.000 And I think America is filled with those people.

00:32:54.000 But the notion that government is going to redistribute from some and give to others and pick winners and losers and treat the market as merely a tool to achieve certain policy ends, that's very dangerous thinking.

00:33:07.000 And again, there is no limiting principle.

00:33:08.000 And I think that is dangerous.

00:33:10.000 In the book, I talk pretty openly about this.

00:33:12.000 I talk about sort of the differences between traditional classical liberalism and the sort of Patrick Deneen, Tucker Carlson, Marco Rubio wing of the party, Orrin Cass about the sort of attempt to chain the market to particular end goals that they think are going to uphold the system.

00:33:29.000 And yeah, I think that one of the big problems that we've seen over and over is that, number one, every time you grow the government, it ends up in the hands of the left.

00:33:36.000 I think you've got to be real careful about what exactly you are doing when you make the size of the sword larger because you're probably not going to be the one who wields the sword.

00:33:42.000 I know in this context, there have been a lot of people who have argued about, you know, drag queen story hour sort of become the buzzword for this.

00:33:48.000 Well, you know, you're in favor of free speech and the First Amendment.

00:33:51.000 And so what are you going to do about the local drag queen story hour?

00:33:54.000 A couple of things.

00:33:55.000 One, I also believe in subsidiarity.

00:33:57.000 I believe that local communities get to take a lot different action than the federal government because they're a lot more homogenous.

00:34:02.000 And if you don't like it, you move out of the community, just on a general federalist level.

00:34:05.000 But beyond that, on like a federal level, do I think that there should be legislation against drag queen story hour on a federal level with absent a showing of any harm?

00:34:14.000 I'm hesitant to do that because I think that it is much more likely, given the cultural direction of the moment, that that sort of legislation is used to ban prayer service than I think it's likely to ban drag queen story hour.

00:34:25.000 I think the left has shown an almost insatiable willingness to use the power of government to crack down on viewpoints that it doesn't like. 0.99

00:34:32.000 And I think that you're kind of spitting into the wind if you give the government more power to do that in the assumption that it's never going to come back and bite you on the ass. 0.99

00:34:38.000 It works for both sides, by the way. 0.99

00:34:39.000 When Harry Reid got rid of the judicial filibuster, he never thought that was going to come back to haunt Democrats.

00:34:43.000 And within four years, it was coming back to haunt Democrats.

00:34:45.000 So just be careful of what you wish for.

00:34:47.000 Politics is the monkey's ball.

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00:35:59.000 You've said before in a podcast interview, there's only one gun on the table, right?

00:36:04.000 And it could be used.

00:36:05.000 I mean, be careful because it could end up being pointed at you.

00:36:08.000 And so let's stick with that analogy.

00:36:10.000 And it's something that I'm still working my way through one part of the book.

00:36:14.000 I'm not sure if you mentioned it there or not, but I hadn't seen it to where I've been through, which is this idea of what happens if there's another gun on the table and there's something that is more powerful than the government.

00:36:26.000 I'm, of course, talking about the tech companies.

00:36:27.000 This is probably one of the number one issues that I get questions on, and you deal with it every single day.

00:36:32.000 The censorship from Google, the nefarious activity from all the social media tech giants.

00:36:38.000 And I would argue that part of the reason why some people feel disenfranchised is they don't feel as if the current collection of corporate companies are even, they even want what's best for our country.

00:36:50.000 And it's not just Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and all these companies, but it's also any company that's on the DAO. 0.69

00:36:57.000 Every single one of them, almost in extortionist fashion, sent BLM money. 0.62

00:37:02.000 And so I guess the question is: do you see an issue as being someone who's a capitalist, and I am too, with the fact that now we are the wealthiest companies, most powerful companies are now kind of actively contributing and involving themselves in behavior and social activism, if you will, financially that contributes to the disintegration that you articulate so well in the book. 0.52

00:37:26.000 I definitely talk about the hijacking of corporate America toward particular leftist ends.

00:37:31.000 And it's something that is deeply troubling.

00:37:33.000 It's also incredibly short-sighted.

00:37:35.000 One of the great lies of modern American politics is the idea that corporations are right-wing, that because they're profit-seeking, this means that they're conservative.

00:37:41.000 This is absolute nonsense.

00:37:42.000 I challenge you to find 10 corporate CEOs who'd openly identify as Trump supporters. 0.57

00:37:48.000 There are probably a few. 1.00

00:37:50.000 And the reason there are not many is because, exactly, is because if you're a Goya, you get boycotted. 1.00

00:37:50.000 They're not many. 1.00

00:37:54.000 I mean, that's why you won't openly identify. 0.98

00:37:56.000 Whereas if you tweet out a black square, then all of a sudden you're inured to the vicissitudes of the multitudes, at least in the moment. 1.00

00:38:03.000 So that's very dangerous.

00:38:05.000 I mean, these companies, because they're profit-seeking, because of the risk-averse, tend to cave to whoever the squeakiest wheel is.

00:38:10.000 And that's exactly what you've seen happening.

00:38:12.000 Do I think that that calls for regulation, whether in the tech sphere or anywhere else?

00:38:15.000 No, I think what that calls for is what's eventually going to happen.

00:38:18.000 I think it's unfortunate, but I think it will happen.

00:38:19.000 And that is there will be right-wing companies, left-wing companies.

00:38:22.000 I think the incessant willingness to politicize every single thing that the left seems to want to do is going to lead to just two parallel companies.

00:38:30.000 You see this, for example, in the coffee world.

00:38:31.000 So Starbucks is a lefty company.

00:38:33.000 And my friends over Black Rifle Coffee, they're like, you know what?

00:38:35.000 We're tired of this nonsense.

00:38:36.000 They started Black Rifle Coffee.

00:38:37.000 They are raking in the money because there are a lot of people who don't want to be associated with the far leftism that Starbucks is pushing.

00:38:44.000 You're going to see this with shoes.

00:38:45.000 You're going to see this with food.

00:38:47.000 You're going to see this with pretty much everything.

00:38:48.000 And all of this accelerates the national divorce.

00:38:50.000 And I'm not blaming people who respond to left-wing monopolization of corporate halls of power for creating competitors.

00:38:57.000 I'm saying that the disintegrationist tendency to politicize every single thing and turn every single thing into a political football ends with a predictable response, which is people on the other side going, okay, well, I don't feel like patronizing your business.

00:39:09.000 And I got all sorts of crap for suggesting that I'm less likely to watch the NBA this year if I have to watch Black Lives Matter throwing up an alleyup to 1619 project.

00:39:18.000 But let's be real about this. 0.81

00:39:19.000 I would not really want to watch that very much.

00:39:21.000 I like basketball, but I don't like basketball enough to be propagandized to while I'm watching basketball.

00:39:25.000 So in the end, what there will be is probably some sort of competitive league that doesn't do any of those sorts of things.

00:39:31.000 So the acceleration of this is due to the left.

00:39:34.000 And a right-wing response to it is not necessarily wrong.

00:39:37.000 I think that that's truer in the culture than it is in the government, just because, again, with the government, there is only one gun on the table.

00:39:42.000 In culture, there are a lot of guns on the table.

00:39:44.000 And that means that there are a couple of ways we can go.

00:39:47.000 We can either all go weapons down, which is my preference, which is we all sort of leave each other alone and go back to normal and shop at each other's businesses and stop being general jackasses, or we can all go weapons up and we'll all have our own sets of businesses that conflict with each other ideologically and we'll silo ourselves off into our own cultural cubbyholes, which innately will lead to the sort of national divorce that we're talking about, both culturally and governmentally.

00:40:08.000 I want to ask you about the national divorce and what does that actually look like and is it inevitable?

00:40:13.000 But I want to finish on the tech issue, which is, I argue that Google in some ways is more powerful than the Pentagon.

00:40:18.000 I mean, they track our behavior.

00:40:19.000 They can topple a government.

00:40:21.000 At what point, Ben, as someone who defends the free market and in your history chapter, you're very, let's say, critical of Teddy Roosevelt.

00:40:30.000 I think some of that is warranted.

00:40:32.000 I think that we can learn some things from Teddy Roosevelt.

00:40:34.000 I actually love some of the stuff you did.

00:40:36.000 But is there ever a point where you say, sure, I'm an antitrust act, you go after Google?

00:40:39.000 Or do you think that in today's time should not be needed?

00:40:44.000 So it depends.

00:40:45.000 I mean, really, I tend to believe when it comes to antitrust and the Robert Bork antitrust paradox, which is very often people say that they are against a particular business because of its, there are really two ways of approaching antitrust.

00:40:56.000 One is the size of the company, and the other is the danger to consumers in the company.

00:41:01.000 And if you get to the point where Google is literally the only monopoly search engine on the internet, and it is impossible for anyone else to start a search engine, and Google monopolizes information with such alacrity that only one side of the political aisle can get out there and they essentially start rigging markets, then you could theoretically bring antitrust to bear.

00:41:18.000 I don't think that we're at that point yet, although I do believe that Google is getting a lot closer to that than some of the other outlets.

00:41:25.000 I mean, Google is, their monopoly on search traffic is absolutely insane.

00:41:30.000 But I'm also old enough to, yeah, I'm also old enough to remember when Alta Vista and Yahoo are a thing.

00:41:33.000 So, you know, I think that the possibility of turnover in these industries remains serious.

00:41:40.000 I mean, MySpace used to be valued at more than $1.97.

00:41:43.000 So there's a tendency when we look at business or when we look at tech to think how it is is how it always will be.

00:41:50.000 And I would just urge you to look at the history of IBM and Apple to realize that that isn't necessarily the case.

00:41:56.000 And I think there is a lot of disruption in the tech sphere.

00:41:59.000 I think what's different about Google is they seem that they're just getting started with a lot of their, you know, let's just say, social profiling and how left-wing they are.

00:42:08.000 So you mentioned national divorce.

00:42:10.000 Do you think it's inevitable?

00:42:13.000 I think that a sort of natural dissolution will probably is at this point, I think it's inevitable.

00:42:18.000 I wouldn't written the book if I thought it was inevitable, but I think that it is at least a 50-50 shot.

00:42:22.000 And when I say a national divorce, I don't mean that the United States has an all-out bloody civil war.

00:42:27.000 I think that it starts to look more like the Articles of Confederation than it did like the Constitution of the United States.

00:42:32.000 Instead of a unified country, you have all of these states basically running themselves because of the possibility that states will actually resist a more powerful federal government.

00:42:40.000 And so the United States kind of goes back to the Continental Army version where the states sort of run themselves, which would be quite tragic.

00:42:48.000 I mean, we are the most powerful, prosperous, and free country in the history of the world.

00:42:51.000 We've done more good for the world than any other country, bar none, not close.

00:42:54.000 And so for California and Texas to not really be part of the same country anymore would be quite terrible.

00:43:00.000 But it may be inevitable.

00:43:01.000 I mean, the EU came apart.

00:43:02.000 I don't see a reason why if the values that hold us together come apart, you won't see an increasing willingness to divorce from either Texas or California.

00:43:11.000 If Donald Trump wins re-election, there'll be people in California calling for California to secede.

00:43:16.000 And if Joe Biden wins election and then leaves his presidency to Elizabeth Warren, I think there'll be some pretty heavy calls from Wyoming to leave.

00:43:24.000 So there's some pretty significant distances right here to travel in order to bridge this gap.

00:43:29.000 And that's really what the book is about, is trying to remind us why we should be part of the same country.

00:43:33.000 I think increasingly most Americans are like, I'm not sure we should.

00:43:35.000 And that's a dangerous thing.

00:43:37.000 Yeah, I mean, I just spent time in Rapid City, South Dakota, and before that, Los Angeles.

00:43:41.000 When I find a Los Angeles, I feel like I have to get my passport stamped.

00:43:44.000 I feel like I'm going to another country.

00:43:46.000 And I mean, the three things that you articulate, shared philosophy, shared history, shared culture, not to be pessimistic, but just to be honest.

00:43:54.000 I mean, most of the kids in the LA Unified School District right now learning on a Zoom call by some overpaid cartel member, teacher union individual, they're learning philosophy that is Rousseauian in nature and is against everything that we believe in as Americans.

00:44:10.000 They're learning history that is written by Nicole Hanna-Jones, and they're believing in a culture of victimology and oppression Olympics.

00:44:16.000 And so then I go to Rapid City, South Dakota, and it's actually everything our country is supposed to believe in.

00:44:21.000 And there is that kind of commonality.

00:44:23.000 And so I do see, as you articulated, as we're going to have right-wing companies and left-wing companies, I don't think that's healthy at all.

00:44:32.000 And I think it's incredibly unsustainable.

00:44:34.000 And I ask myself the question, what does the person in LA that believes in all this opposite philosophy, history, and culture and actually wants to judge people on skin color, not on character, they have very little in common with the person in Rapid City, South Dakota.

00:44:48.000 And until there is that kind of unionist mindset, or at least an agreeable nature that we want to go for it as a country, then I don't even know if it's inevitable that we will.

00:44:58.000 In fact, I think it's more likely at the current trajectory that we will hit national divorce.

00:45:03.000 And I don't even know what that would look like.

00:45:05.000 I would hope that it would, if that were to happen, God forbid, it would be something that wouldn't be tragically, let's just say, I'm struggling for the words.

00:45:15.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:45:16.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:45:17.000 Hopefully, if there's a divorce, it's a divorce and not anything terrible.

00:45:21.000 But yeah, these are serious questions to be asked.

00:45:25.000 And I think that before we are sanguine about the possibility of national divorce, everybody should think to themselves, okay, I say I don't really like that guy from California.

00:45:32.000 Okay, I say I don't like that guy from Texas.

00:45:34.000 I say I hate the Democrats or I say I hate the Republicans.

00:45:37.000 Do we really want to split up the country over this?

00:45:40.000 And for a lot of people, if the answer is yes, then eventually that number will become a majority.

00:45:44.000 And that's when things get pretty dire, especially if in the meantime, in a quest to get what we want done, we've overridden all the checks and balances of government.

00:45:53.000 If we've empowered the federal government and we've gotten used to the idea that 51% of the American population can cram down whatever they damn well please on the other 49% of the American population, then when somebody says, listen, I just don't want to do this anymore, there's a good shot that things do get really ugly.

00:46:07.000 Well, and the book is so clairvoyant because, I mean, again, it reads like an essay you just spent a long weekend writing in the last two weeks, not something that you wrote back in December.

00:46:15.000 I want to get into current events.

00:46:16.000 And again, I encourage everyone to check out the book, Please Go Buy It, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro.

00:46:22.000 Let's talk more just modern politics.

00:46:25.000 So President Trump is down on the polls.

00:46:27.000 That's nothing new.

00:46:27.000 We've seen him come back from that.

00:46:30.000 The president has been on this podcast before, and he watches our Twitter feed.

00:46:34.000 If he were listening to you directly, what advice would you give to him and his campaign?

00:46:39.000 So, two pieces of advice.

00:46:41.000 One is look focused.

00:46:42.000 Look focused.

00:46:43.000 I know this is difficult, but the Twitter account is not helpful.

00:46:46.000 Everybody knows this.

00:46:47.000 The polls show that even a plurality of Republicans don't believe that Twitter account is always helpful.

00:46:52.000 The president, we're living through some pretty grave times.

00:46:54.000 And so, a focused and concerted attempt to focus on two issues, unifying the country and fighting COVID, that's what he needs to be campaigning on.

00:47:01.000 And what that means is, in practical political terms, I do not for the life of me understand why the Trump campaign has not yet cut an ad that is just clips of the various Democratic governors saying that Trump gave them what they needed on COVID.

00:47:14.000 Because they all said this.

00:47:15.000 They literally all said this.

00:47:16.000 I've played the clips on my show.

00:47:17.000 I mean, everybody from Whitmer to Newsom to Cuomo said he gave us that, we asked him for this and he gave it to us.

00:47:24.000 And yet now they're out there saying, well, he's completely insufficient in his approach to this problem.

00:47:27.000 So why not cut that ad and say, listen, if it was good enough for all these Democrats, then it should be good enough for you.

00:47:33.000 The fact is that our actual material response to this thing has been good.

00:47:37.000 So that would be point number one.

00:47:38.000 He has to look focused.

00:47:39.000 He has to look like he's taking things seriously because in a time when things are pretty serious, Democrats are making a mint politically off the idea that Trump is just dilettanting around and doesn't take this thing seriously enough.

00:47:48.000 So that, like, I think it was a strategic error, for example, to try and hold that rally in Tulsa in the middle of this because the Democrats had just made the massive strategic blunder of saying you can go out in the streets and willy-nilly protest whatever you want in the middle of a pandemic.

00:48:02.000 To me, politically speaking, that would have been the point where for Trump to say, listen, we got to take this thing seriously.

00:48:05.000 I'm putting on a mask.

00:48:06.000 And I cannot believe, frankly, that so many of my Democratic colleagues are suggesting that protesting by the hundreds of thousands publicly in the street is a good idea.

00:48:13.000 And whatever happens next, let's recall what exactly just happened in all of America's major cities where they're backing rioting, looting, and mass protests in a time of pandemic, right?

00:48:21.000 Like that would have been a much better, just forget the policy for a second on a political attack.

00:48:25.000 That would have been much better with regard to COVID.

00:48:27.000 The second thing is that we're all sort of waiting for Godot here, which is for Biden to choose a VP.

00:48:33.000 It's going to be difficult to attack Biden.

00:48:35.000 Biden is not the easiest guy to tear down.

00:48:37.000 The reason it's not easy to tear him down is because he's not alive.

00:48:39.000 So it's very, very difficult to beat a dead horse.

00:48:42.000 And what that means is...

00:48:43.000 Or a dead candidate.

00:48:44.000 Right, exactly.

00:48:45.000 Exactly.

00:48:46.000 It's weak ended Bernie's.

00:48:48.000 But what we actually need is for Biden to choose his VP.

00:48:52.000 And then all Trump has to do is cut an ad in which Biden says openly, right?

00:48:56.000 I mean, this tape has been talking about how he's a transitional candidate, right?

00:48:58.000 He's not meant to be the guy.

00:49:00.000 And then make the real issue Kamala Harris.

00:49:02.000 Because guess what?

00:49:03.000 The choice between Trump and Biden right now is basically the choice for most Americans between volatility and what they think of as a certain level of stability.

00:49:10.000 The stability coming not from Joe Biden being particularly stable, but from the fact that he's not alive.

00:49:14.000 Again, assuming room temperature means that you are a little more stable than somebody who's kind of running around doing whatever he wants.

00:49:20.000 But the same is not going to hold true for his VP.

00:49:22.000 His VP, like Biden is fairly well liked in a way that Hillary Clinton was not.

00:49:25.000 Biden is considered non-threatening in a way that Hillary was not.

00:49:28.000 And so it's very difficult to simultaneously paint somebody as deeply threatening and malevolent.

00:49:33.000 And also, if they were sitting in this room being interviewed right now, they would be screaming for their mother.

00:49:38.000 That's a very difficult, simultaneous pitch.

00:49:41.000 And so, yeah, I think that that pitch gets easier if he picks somebody who is actively threatening to a lot of Republicans, somebody like a Kamala Harris, which I think is his probable pick.

00:49:50.000 Yeah, and especially for suburban voters where they think Biden is a flight to safety.

00:49:55.000 And I made this recommendation privately.

00:49:57.000 I'm going to say it publicly.

00:49:58.000 President Trump should do Joe Rogan's podcast for three hours for two reasons.

00:50:02.000 It would be the greatest piece of interview I think we could possibly imagine.

00:50:06.000 President Trump could also, I think, do really well in it because he actually answers questions and he's super entertaining.

00:50:11.000 But also, it would force Joe Biden to possibly go do an interview.

00:50:14.000 And I said this to the campaign.

00:50:16.000 I said it publicly.

00:50:16.000 The best part of the Chris Wallace interview, as turbulent as that was, the best part of the whole interview, and even Chris Wallace agreed, was I do interviews, Joe Biden doesn't.

00:50:24.000 I do interviews, Joe Biden doesn't.

00:50:25.000 The American people are not going to tolerate that.

00:50:27.000 That's the number one, I think they will not tolerate the fact that one candidate is out there doing interviews and the other isn't.

00:50:35.000 And I think that.

00:50:36.000 COVID is cutting.

00:50:37.000 No, you're right.

00:50:37.000 I mean, COVID is cutting very much in Biden's favor in this way right now, right?

00:50:40.000 Because everybody, like, Trump's main asset as a campaigner is his energy level.

00:50:46.000 With the help of God, I should have his energy level when I'm his age.

00:50:49.000 I have to stop exercising for the next 30, 40 years and really save up that life essence.

00:50:53.000 And then I can have the energy level the president has.

00:50:56.000 The problem is that that's of no avail when you can't do rallies and when you can't really get out of the house.

00:51:00.000 Joe Biden has been handed the easiest election battle of anybody's lifetime because his campaign strategy, namely to hide in a basement, is also what COVID sort of dictates, which is to hide in a basement.

00:51:12.000 I mean, the man's nearly 80 years old, and who knows if he's in great health.

00:51:16.000 So that means that it's really cut in Trump's favorite.

00:51:19.000 It's cut in Biden's favor a lot, but you're right.

00:51:21.000 I mean, Trump being open and out there and Biden not being open and out there as we can all hope the economy starts to open up and people start to go out again, that will pick up in his favor at least a little bit.

00:51:30.000 And provoking him.

00:51:31.000 And provoking Biden and saying, come on out, why are you hiding?

00:51:35.000 The American people.

00:51:36.000 I think Biden's not going to debate him.

00:51:37.000 I think Biden's not going to debate him.

00:51:39.000 I'm going to talk about that more.

00:51:40.000 Yeah.

00:51:41.000 So, you know, Thomas Friedman sort of floated this trial bullet in the New York Times saying that Biden should just say, if you're not going to release your tax returns, I'm not going to debate you.

00:51:48.000 If Biden is out there.

00:51:49.000 That's a great red herring.

00:51:50.000 Like, yeah, you're not going to do it.

00:51:51.000 Therefore, what are you talking about?

00:51:52.000 It's a presidential election.

00:51:53.000 Right.

00:51:54.000 But Biden, it would be clever only in the sense that if you've got a big lead, you sit on it.

00:51:59.000 I mean, actually, Donald Trump, who knew this, Donald Trump back in 2016 when he was in the lead after Iowa, he had just come in second to cruise, and he had good polling going in New Hampshire.

00:52:07.000 And there was another debate where Megan Kelly was supposed to be the moderator and he didn't want to do it.

00:52:11.000 So he just dumped out.

00:52:12.000 He just said, I'm not doing it.

00:52:13.000 I'm going to go hold my pro-veteran rally that night.

00:52:15.000 And that's what he did.

00:52:16.000 So I could certainly see Joe Biden trying to pull that with Donald Trump.

00:52:20.000 And again, given the fact that COVID is out there, it doesn't look as much like hiding in the basement as it normally does.

00:52:26.000 So I would not be surprised.

00:52:28.000 Listen, Biden is playing a very risk-averse strategy right here, which is why he's basically all things to all people.

00:52:34.000 He's smart enough to recognize.

00:52:36.000 I will say this about Biden.

00:52:37.000 He is with it enough not to make the giant boo-boo.

00:52:40.000 He's not made the giant boo-boo yet.

00:52:41.000 Every time he's asked to side with Bernie publicly, he just doesn't.

00:52:44.000 He does secretly.

00:52:45.000 He does behind closed doors.

00:52:46.000 He does it when it's the platform.

00:52:47.000 But when he's asked about tearing down statues, he says yes on the Confederate statues, no on Columbus, Washington, and Jefferson. 0.75

00:52:53.000 That's the smart thing to say.

00:52:54.000 That's avoiding the big boo-boo.

00:52:55.000 When he's asked about defund the police, he says, I don't want to defund the police.

00:52:58.000 Then, of course, he goes on to explain how he wants to take funds from the police and give it to social workers. 0.65

00:53:01.000 But that's smart to avoid the big boo-boo.

00:53:04.000 The campaign has almost been crafted for him in terms of time and in terms of limitation to access to whatever is going on upstairs, whoever is left in the attic.

00:53:12.000 That's a real disadvantage for President Trump, which is why I say he's going to have a lot more to play with when Biden selects a running mate, because my guess is that he's not going to select somebody who's particularly moderate.

00:53:22.000 That's what Biden should do, by the way.

00:53:23.000 If Biden were smart, what he would do is he would go and select somebody who comes off as quasi-moderate, but I don't think he's going to do it.

00:53:30.000 I think he's going to go for broke.

00:53:31.000 The person that will be hardest to run against would be Tammy Duckworth.

00:53:34.000 And I'm from Illinois. 0.90

00:53:35.000 I think that she's a military background, and she comes across as a moderate, even though she isn't. 0.93

00:53:40.000 And the media loves her. 0.97

00:53:41.000 It just loves her, and especially suburban voters.

00:53:44.000 So to kind of tie the election together in the couple minutes we have remaining, Ben, if we want to see America succeed, I know that I'm a very big Trump supporter, and you've been critical of Trump and also supportive Trump.

00:53:54.000 You do good Trump, bad Trump.

00:53:56.000 Yeah, and I plan on voting for him in 2020.

00:53:58.000 I've said this plenty of times.

00:53:59.000 Yep.

00:54:00.000 And so, but you believe that it's good for the Republic and good for not destroying, but saving America that Donald Trump gets four more years.

00:54:06.000 Can you elaborate on that?

00:54:07.000 Well, right now, I think that I do talk about this in the book a little bit, that what people on the left have to understand about people on the right supporting Trump is that just because you support Trump doesn't mean that you agree with all of his foibles or all of the myriad sillinesses or any of that kind of stuff.

00:54:19.000 What it does mean is that you look at Trump and you say, this guy is going to be a bulwark against the people who actually want to disintegrate all of these common ties.

00:54:25.000 And I don't think that Joe Biden is going to be that bulwark.

00:54:27.000 In fact, I think that Joe Biden is going to hand over the party to a lot of those people after campaigning as a bulwark against some of this stuff, right?

00:54:34.000 Won because he was the anti-Bernie in the race, the most prominent anti-Bernie in the race.

00:54:38.000 But I have very little faith that Joe Biden, pushed by his left flank, wouldn't do exactly what Nancy Pelosi has done and just hand over the keys to the car to that disintegrationist wing of the Democratic Party.

00:54:49.000 I'm not sure he would love to do it, but I think that he would do it.

00:54:51.000 And I think that President Trump militantly opposes a lot of those things.

00:54:54.000 You can see this in the way that both Biden and, for example, Tammy Duckworth responded to Trump's Mount Rushmore address, which was very much on this theme, right?

00:55:01.000 The theme of the Mount Rushmore address was: America was always great.

00:55:05.000 America, our founders were heroes.

00:55:07.000 The American story is a story of heroism and adventure and greatness.

00:55:11.000 And people were like, oh, he's pro-Confederacy.

00:55:13.000 Okay, well, if I have to make that choice between people who think that saying that patriotic things are good and people who say that patriotic things are pro-Confederacy, that's not a hard choice for me.

00:55:22.000 And whatever personality is baked into the cake here, and it's all we've been through it a thousand times, it ain't going to change.

00:55:28.000 It is what it is.

00:55:29.000 The question right now is: who's the person who's going to hold back what appears to be this encroaching high tide of disintegrationism?

00:55:37.000 And if I think that that's Trump, then I'll vote for Trump.

00:55:38.000 And so I think a lot of other people feel that way too.

00:55:41.000 And I'm hoping that it's enough to swing the election.

00:55:42.000 It would help if the president would make himself a more, I would say, concerted voice of that message as opposed to sort of just reacting.

00:55:50.000 Trump's a counterpuncher.

00:55:52.000 What we actually need right now is a laser pointer.

00:55:55.000 And that's going to take a little bit of a difference in strategy and a bit of a change.

00:55:58.000 Well, one of the reasons I also think that we're losing on the philosophical, historical, and cultural landscape is we have such weak Republicans that have no idea how to fight on that landscape at all whatsoever.

00:56:08.000 They ran for Congress because they knew how to fix one specific part of the tax code.

00:56:13.000 And they have no real understanding that the left cares more about destroying our history than actually fighting corporate taxes.

00:56:20.000 Like for them, that's just street theater.

00:56:22.000 I mean, basically for them in the Senate, what they really care about is trying to get eight, nine, and ten-year-olds to hate the country that they live in.

00:56:30.000 And I think a lot of these Republicans just run to the hills when these debates happen.

00:56:34.000 They're like, I don't want anything to do with this.

00:56:35.000 Well, you can see this.

00:56:36.000 I mean, the amount of Republican support that existed for the police reform bill, right, from Senator Tim Scott, overwhelming support for Republicans for that.

00:56:43.000 It was an attempt to battle the problem that supposedly Democrats cared about.

00:56:47.000 And Democrats trashed him.

00:56:48.000 I mean, they suggested that Tim Scott was a sellout.

00:56:50.000 And they suggested that there's something wrong with Tim Scott because they don't actually want a solution to this problem.

00:56:55.000 They would like to instead attribute ever-increasingly grave problems to the United States more broadly.

00:57:02.000 And I think that Republicans tend to be solutions-oriented in a time when they need to be culture-fight-oriented.

00:57:08.000 Trump is culture-fight-oriented and not solutions-oriented, but he needs to be very concerted about the culture fights that he picks.

00:57:14.000 And he needs to be more exact about all of that.

00:57:16.000 And this is why, again, I know it cuts against his nature.

00:57:19.000 Go back on the teleprompter.

00:57:20.000 Seriously, go back on the teleprompter.

00:57:22.000 The Mount Rushmore speech was excellent, right?

00:57:24.000 His speech in Poland was excellent.

00:57:26.000 He's given several great, his state of the unions are excellent.

00:57:29.000 There's nothing wrong with just using what works.

00:57:32.000 If it weren't for Trump's Twitter account, he probably would still be down some in the polls because of COVID.

00:57:36.000 He wouldn't be down 10 points in the polls because of COVID.

00:57:38.000 I mean, the fact is that it is the feeling of volatility that is hurting him more than even his politics, more than anything that's going on.

00:57:44.000 The feeling of volatility in a time when everybody feels that chaos is surrounding them is one of the reasons why he's suffering right now.

00:57:49.000 So a feeling of stability and durability is what he needs to go for.

00:57:52.000 And he should do a State of the Union every night where he shows up to put on a show for the country, and he has testimonials and he's willing to be magnanimous.

00:58:01.000 I think that that from now to the election and actually doing that publicly, unlike Biden.

00:58:06.000 So, Ben, I want to ask you a question.

00:58:07.000 I ask a lot of my guests this.

00:58:09.000 Have you changed your mind about anything lately?

00:58:11.000 And if so, why?

00:58:16.000 Lately.

00:58:17.000 Maybe I went from a little more optimistic about the country to a little more pessimistic about the country.

00:58:21.000 How about more broadly in the last couple of years or even in the last five to 10 years?

00:58:24.000 I ask this question a lot.

00:58:25.000 Especially young conservatives say, is it okay if I change my mind on something?

00:58:28.000 I say, of course it is.

00:58:29.000 I mean, I think it's healthy.

00:58:31.000 And so is there anything big that you've changed your mind on since you've entered politics?

00:58:36.000 I would say that I've generally become more libertarian, not less libertarian over time, which I know is sort of counter the prevailing sentiment these days.

00:58:44.000 I've become more libertarian specifically because there are so many people who seem like they are perfectly willing to use the tools of government at their disposal.

00:58:50.000 So I would say I've become probably less friendly toward government intrusion.

00:58:54.000 I was never friendly toward government intrusion in markets, but I've become even less friendly toward that.

00:58:58.000 I've become more friendly toward the idea of less federal regulation on a wide variety of issues simply because I want more authority delegated back to the state.

00:59:09.000 I think that I can't think of any major policy thing that I've changed in the last couple of years.

00:59:16.000 Maybe the one thing that I've changed is just my feeling that, I mean, here's the thing that I've changed, right?

00:59:24.000 I mean, I said I wouldn't vote for Trump in 2016.

00:59:26.000 I'm going to vote for him in 2020.

00:59:27.000 So obviously that's a thing that changed.

00:59:29.000 I will say that instead of me changing, I think that the circumstances changed because I think that that is more accurate.

00:59:34.000 I don't think that I've changed my perspective on Trump very much.

00:59:37.000 I think I've changed my perspective on him as far as his conservative governance.

00:59:41.000 But I don't think that I've changed on sort of character and personality.

00:59:45.000 What has changed is everything else.

00:59:46.000 I mean, as circumstances change, your opinions change.

00:59:49.000 And I think that when the Flight 93 election came out in 2016, I thought to myself, I'm not sure this is a Flight 93 election.

00:59:54.000 Like Hillary Clinton as president is going to suck, but Mitch McConnell will be the Senate majority leader. 0.90

00:59:58.000 So how much is it actually going to suck? 0.99

01:00:00.000 And I don't know what the other pathway looks like.

01:00:03.000 And this is starting to look a lot more like a Flight 93 election to me, given the fact that it could be Joe Biden plus a Democratic majority in the Senate, plus a Democratic majority in the House.

01:00:11.000 And given the fact that Joe Biden is on his last legs and could nominate somebody incredibly radical.

01:00:15.000 So the urgency of this election is, I think a lot of people took 2016 as incredibly urgent.

01:00:21.000 This one seems a lot more urgent to me, frankly, especially with people rioting in the streets.

01:00:24.000 So last question.

01:00:25.000 I get this all the time.

01:00:26.000 I'm sure you do too.

01:00:27.000 Lots of emails of people that just pour in and they say, what can I do?

01:00:30.000 What can I do?

01:00:31.000 What can I do?

01:00:32.000 I love watching your show.

01:00:33.000 I love doing this.

01:00:34.000 And a lot of people support your show.

01:00:37.000 Let's talk just in closing, prescriptively.

01:00:39.000 What can a human being do to help save their country?

01:00:42.000 I mean, the most important things that you can do are forge social ties with others.

01:00:46.000 And I know it sounds trite, but here's the thing.

01:00:48.000 It's an actual thing you can do.

01:00:50.000 Very often people will say, you go out and you fight or you go out and you campaign, run for Congress.

01:00:54.000 How many people are going to actually run for Congress?

01:00:56.000 How many people are actually going to dedicate their spare time to phone banking?

01:00:59.000 But how many people are actually going to lead better lives, nicer lives with other people, inform themselves by reading a couple of books a year, and then informing their children on the proper values, interacting well with friends, generously with friends, such that they see you as a human being and not just as a political stand.

01:01:13.000 And that is the way that people change their politics in this country.

01:01:16.000 It's not because the politicians change their minds.

01:01:18.000 It's because the people around them change theirs.

01:01:20.000 So influence the people around you, lead a good and virtuous life, and you'll be doing a lot more than even people in the public sphere do to help change the nature of the country.

01:01:27.000 I can rail against the wind as much as I want, and hopefully people listen and use it as a guide.

01:01:32.000 But I think that the number of individuals who are converting voters on an individual level and converting people in their hearts and minds on an individual level is far greater and far more important than anything I'm doing.

01:01:42.000 The book is How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.

01:01:44.000 Any closing thoughts, Ben, that you want our audience to be aware of?

01:01:47.000 Things you're working on?

01:01:49.000 Well, all I would say is that it is preventable.

01:01:51.000 When we say how to destroy America in three easy steps, that's what the left is trying to do, is what the disintegrationists are trying to do.

01:01:56.000 It is preventable, but it's going to require some actual re-education of ourselves and reinculcation in founding principle and a new sort of patriotic fervor that drives us all together instead of apart.

01:02:07.000 And the commitment to fight.

01:02:08.000 Well, Ben, thank you for everything.

01:02:10.000 I've considered you a friend, and I read almost everything you put out, and I've learned a lot from you.

01:02:14.000 So everyone, check out How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.

01:02:17.000 It's very well written, very organized, and very thoughtful.

01:02:20.000 So, Ben, thanks for coming back on the Charlie Kirk Show.

01:02:23.000 Thanks so much, Charlie.

01:02:24.000 You bet.

01:02:24.000 See you soon, Ben.

01:02:26.000 What a great conversation that was with Ben Shapiro.

01:02:29.000 Please email me your questions.

01:02:30.000 Freedom at CharlieKirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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01:02:42.000 Please get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.

01:02:46.000 That is tpusa.com.

01:02:48.000 Check out divestyou.com if you want to divest some of your dollars from the sinister, backwards, malevolent higher education cartel.

01:02:57.000 Check out our professor watch list at professorwatchlist.org.

01:03:00.000 ProfessorWatchlist.org, we have some incredible new additions that you do not want to miss of radicals that are teaching your children right now to hate America.

01:03:08.000 It's professorwatchlist.org.

01:03:10.000 Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com, your ideas and questions you want me to ask our guests here on the Charlie Kirk Show.

01:03:17.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.

01:03:19.000 Till next time, God

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 21, 2020

Ben Shapiro | The Great American Divorce

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