00:00:00.000Do you remember when the New York Times referred to Ben Shapiro as a provocative gladiator and the left went nuts?
00:00:07.440Shapiro goes viral every couple of months, and every time it's a spectacle, anytime anything big happens,
00:00:13.720suddenly you start seeing screenshots of a Shapiro tweet everywhere.
00:00:18.680It is the reason why the New York Times article that I just mentioned went crazy,
00:00:23.320because they referred to him as the voice of the conservative millennial movement.
00:00:28.060And if you need proof of that claim, you can find hours of Libs Get Wrecked by Ben Shapiro compilations on YouTube.
00:00:37.620Most recently, he was asked to write an article for Politico.
00:00:41.920We're going to talk to him about it. The staff went out of their mind his crime.
00:00:48.140He wrote an article for Politico at their invitation defending Republicans who oppose the second impeachment of Donald Trump.
00:00:58.000Which is somehow more ridiculous than the first one.
00:01:01.400In response, he called the journalists fragile little babies and mocked their phony outrage.
00:01:07.100He usually triggers AOC, which isn't that hard to do.
00:01:11.340But Shapiro does it with style and grace.
00:01:15.260Although they almost agreed recently, AOC had to ruin it by accusing Ted Cruz of attempting to murder her.
00:01:23.840Ben Shapiro, world-renowned for his ability to expose hypocrisy, call out idiocy, and to do it at an extraordinarily high rate of words, really fast.
00:01:39.000It's why people who are on the deranged left actually wish for Shapiro's death.
00:01:46.000Last year, a guy was arrested for trying to kill Ben.
00:01:49.860Although he has been targeted by the far right, in 2016, the Anti-Deaf Mission League determined that he was the most frequent target of anti-Semitic tweets against journalists.
00:02:04.000We seem to be living through one of the most chaotic times in human history, and Ben Shapiro will go down as an important person in this insanity.
00:02:15.280Ben Shapiro is really a cultural gladiator.
00:02:19.080Caught in the fight to save our republic, to save America as we know it.
00:02:23.520Today, on the Glenn Beck Podcast, Ben Shapiro.
00:02:39.320Ben, I know that you have been called a provocative, conservative gladiator, but I want you to know I'm not afraid of you, my friend.
00:02:48.560I'm not afraid of you, because we're on to you.
00:02:51.780Marjorie Taylor Greene has exposed you, and she claims, hey, you're Jewish.
00:02:58.600I don't know if that's true or not, but if you are indeed Jewish, I would like you to explain her theory on the Jewish space laser that apparently PG&E has.
00:03:16.220They can target California, starts the forest fires, and PG&E, of course, either owned or operated or invested.
00:03:26.440I don't know exactly her tie, but the Jews are involved.
00:03:56.940I wish I were that optimistic, to be frank with you.
00:03:59.760There's a very old joke about two Holocaust survivors who are sitting around reading the anti-Semitic newspapers, and one says to the other, why are you laughing?
00:04:06.840The other one says, because this newspaper makes me so happy.
00:04:11.120So, you didn't move to Tennessee because you know something that I don't know, that we're, like, everybody's going to be circumcised, or everybody, we're going to have a forest fire because of the Jewish space laser.
00:04:28.120And if you're in Tennessee, it's fine?
00:04:31.660Well, all I can say is that I bought an enormous amount of unused desert land right along the Nevada border.
00:05:12.260And I think that they are going to grow worse over the coming period unless there is a coalition that forms not just to people on the right, but also people who are moderate, people who are traditionally liberal.
00:05:21.300Because the real threat to the republic is really not even a right-left gap as much as it is a left-versus-everybody-else gap.
00:05:28.560I mean, there's a whole side of the aisle that really does seek to destroy fundamental American freedoms in the name of unity.
00:05:35.660And, you know, when Joe Biden took office and he gave his speech about unity, I said at the time that there are two ways to interpret unity.
00:05:42.320I mean, there are two ways to achieve it.
00:05:43.360One is there's unity through we agree on the fundamental principle of tolerance for other people's speech and other people's rights.
00:05:49.360We don't have to agree on everything, but we have to agree that you have a right to live your individual life.
00:05:53.540And we can have unity that way, which is unity through a certain amount of baseline agreement and then a lot of diversity piled on top of that sort of baseline agreement.
00:06:01.860And then there's unity through the purge.
00:06:03.240And it seems like the hard left is in the ascendant.
00:06:05.740The unity through the purge method seems to be what they prefer at this point.
00:06:09.840And that's why you're seeing this sort of full-scale assault on First Amendment freedoms ranging from speech to the press to religion, unfortunately.
00:06:16.620And Joe Biden apparently isn't aware of this cycle.
00:06:21.600I mean, in Seattle alone, you know, they had the first lesbian sheriff in King County.
00:06:41.540And so they purge and purge and purge.
00:06:45.540What is that going to mean to the Biden administration?
00:06:47.580You know, the big problem is that the Democratic Party is trying to square a circle here.
00:06:54.040And that is that they are really at the heads of revolutionary movement.
00:06:57.700And the revolutionary movement requires constant revolution.
00:06:59.580And so if you are at the head of a government and your entire movement is suggesting that government does not have the power as the full corrective to American society.
00:07:09.740In fact, the way the government is constituted is in and of itself a white supremacist institution and a threat to the sort of utopian future that you hold dear.
00:07:18.260There's been an attempt by the Democratic Party higher echelon to sort of capture the mood of the woke and capture the passion of the woke and channel that toward systemic change from within.
00:07:28.060This is something Barack Obama, I think, tried to do.
00:07:29.940But I don't know that that's going to be able to hold over the course of time.
00:07:35.540It's just going to be a constant turnover.
00:07:37.000It's either going to be turnover within the system or it's going to be attacks from without the system.
00:07:40.680And you're seeing some of both of that, right?
00:07:41.900You see the violence is not abated in places like Portland.
00:07:43.900It's going to continue to sort of foster in places like Portland.
00:07:46.960You're going to start there will be riots during the Biden administration.
00:07:49.620It's not going to all go away just because Joe Biden is president of the United States.
00:07:53.600At the same time, what you're going to see is an attempt by the Biden administration to sort of either co-opt the rioters and the protesters and use their passion per se or to make a deal with them where they say, OK, you know, if you guys just put this off for a little while, we will give you X.
00:08:08.040Well, the problem is once you give them X, then they want Y.
00:08:13.620This is the problem with with radicalism.
00:08:16.900So but I think these people, I mean, I don't know.
00:08:21.720Do they do the people in the administration that are speaking the language of revolutionaries?
00:08:28.200Are they is this is this the Clinton kind of grifter kind of class that is looking at things like the Great Reset and they know they can be in a ruling class and they're just using these revolutionaries as fuel right now?
00:08:47.000Or do they actually believe this stuff?
00:08:50.060I mean, I think it's sort of halfway in between.
00:08:52.980I think the number of people who are so nefariously motivated that they understand their own motivations to be corrupt is pretty small.
00:08:58.840Very few people truly believe in sociopathic fashion that they are willing to do the wrong thing in order to achieve the right result.
00:09:05.360And so they sort of buy into the baseline premise of the woke, which is that America is a fundamentally racist institution, that America is white supremacist, the sort of premises of the 1619 project.
00:09:14.640And then also that happens to allow them all sorts of fodder to push forward with an agenda they were already going to see anyway.
00:09:20.680This is why you're seeing the language of, quote unquote, racial equity, like Ibram X.
00:09:24.200Kendi style racial equity being pushed into every element of the Biden administration.
00:09:27.800It's not just that it is relegated to race policy.
00:09:59.280I mean, honestly, it's one of those situations where you hope that the people who are who are ordering that sort of stuff are not politically motivated and they actually have intelligence that we haven't seen.
00:10:08.620But it does make me somewhat suspicious that we are weeks in.
00:10:11.820Donald Trump has no access to social media unless there's an enormous amount of chatter that's happening that you and I just don't know about.
00:11:29.940But beyond that, there's something that's that's really ugly that's been happening, which is that the January 6th riot, which was an act of evil.
00:11:37.600I mean, it was a criminal act of evil that that riot has been used as an excuse in order to, again, achieve a bunch of purposes the left has wanted to achieve.
00:11:46.220And then when you get suspicious, they say, well, you know, your suspicion is just another form of conspiracy theorizing.
00:11:51.900There is this sort of bizarre circular reasoning that we saw over from an outlet that I very often like, Axios.
00:11:58.740As Jim Vande Hei wrote a piece maybe three, four weeks ago in which he said, blue America is ascendant in every area of American life.
00:12:04.980They're ascendant in all the institutions.
00:12:11.980And this means that there's going to be a radical rethinking of everything from speech to freedom of religion.
00:12:17.260And then about a week ago, Axios wrote a piece quoting me, quoting Tucker Carlson, saying that the right is coalescing around the idea that the right is being silenced and that the right is going to be essentially cudgeled into into quiescence about all of this.
00:12:30.540And the angle of the piece was that it was sort of paranoid to think that.
00:12:33.720And I literally just clipped his piece from three weeks ago.
00:13:01.240That if you go on an outlet that is not right wing, then people on the left cudgel the left wing outlet or the moderate outlet for even having you.
00:13:08.320And they say, well, you know, you can go here.
00:13:39.700And then once it's already happened, they say, well, of course, you deserve that to happen because you're conspirators.
00:13:43.320There's there's an amazing thing happening over at CNN.
00:13:47.140I'm convinced I'd love to hear your opinion on this.
00:13:49.180I am absolutely convinced that Brian Stelter is like a self-appointed leader of the band to take away everyone's instrument and everyone's sheet music that doesn't play exactly the way he and CNN think.
00:14:04.500They are now behind a lot of this movement to get Fox and some of our other allies off of cable by going after these companies.
00:14:16.880And they're they are inside trying to go after their competitors.
00:14:24.580So Brian Stelter, maybe it was probably four years ago, five years ago, I was on Stelter's show and we were talking about bias in the media because I said CNN is a bias source.
00:14:33.800And he said, well, if you think CNN is so biased, you should try to come work over here someplace like CNN as opposed to starting your own outlet.
00:14:38.620And I said to him, Brian, you offering me a job because I really don't think you are.
00:14:42.240And the and the answer, of course, is no.
00:14:44.780CNN doesn't want to offer any conservative a job.
00:14:47.420Right. You can only be a CNN conservative if you then parrot the the sort of anti-Trump, anti-conservative.
00:14:53.120The Republicans are the bad guys line.
00:14:54.720I was probably that you're no longer on CNN anymore.
00:14:56.980Right. You're the Lincoln Project conservative.
00:14:58.960And then they say, OK, well, you go over there and you just go watch Fox News.
00:15:02.980Fox News is OK. And then you have Stelter saying, you know, we need a concerted attempt to take Fox off the air, not just by advertisers.
00:15:08.680Let's go after their advertisers, but also let's tell Comcast to take Fox News off the air.
00:15:13.360And it's not just Stelter, unfortunately.
00:15:38.800Margaret Sullivan wrote a column the other day where she said, you know, we shouldn't allow people to write for opposing outlets because it legitimizes them.
00:15:46.180And we should try to de-platform Fox News.
00:15:48.320You know, media matters says this really isn't cancel culture.
00:15:50.280And it's like, OK, so now you are literally having I mean, you are you're not doing the equivalent.
00:15:57.800You're doing the equivalent of asking O.J. Simpson for his definition of murder and then using that as the as the baseline for how we should adjudicate murder cases in the future.
00:16:06.960If I'm not mistaken, didn't you write for The Washington Post?
00:16:11.260Didn't you write a op ed for The Post?
00:16:13.400So. Should we de-platform The Washington Post?
00:16:19.560See, I could I could write for The Post in 2016 when I oppose Trump.
00:16:23.440Right. But then I'm not allowed to write for anybody anymore because back in 2010, there was a bad tweet that I've explained a million times and also apologized for.
00:16:31.240Even though 2010 is before 2016, the magical thing about how cancel culture works is that the time machine only works sporadically.
00:16:38.000Right. 2016 was was after 2010, but not when I was saying not nice things about Trump.
00:16:43.520The minute that I said that people should vote for Trump in 2020, then 2010 was before 2016.
00:16:49.500And at that point, you could actually go back and uncover my old tweets.
00:16:52.120It's really convenient how the time machine works.
00:16:53.920Ben, I got into a lot of trouble here recently because I spoke about digital ghettos and the ghettoization.
00:17:04.520You know, if you were a Jew in Nazi Germany, you were fine.
00:17:08.420You could do whatever you want behind the wall.
00:17:10.380But if nobody's seeing you, if nobody's hearing you, whatever you're doing on the other side of the wall or whatever is being done to you on the other side of the wall, nobody sees.
00:17:20.460And I got in trouble because I guess I'm a Nazi.
00:17:25.360But that term was coined by a friend of mine, Edwin Black, who, as you might know, is the leading Holocaust historian who lost members of his own family in the in the Holocaust.
00:18:02.600It actually began in Italy long before the Nazis had ever, you know, anyone who ever dreamed of Nazis or the Nazis had been around.
00:18:09.640Jews had been placed in, you know, fenced off areas of major cities.
00:18:14.800In fact, one of the my Rothschild's friends who owned the Jewish space lasers, one of one of the ways that they were very instrumental was in opening up the ghettos in the 19th century in in in France and other places around Europe.
00:18:27.060So I don't think that the term ghetto itself, unless we are specifically referring to the Nazi ghettos, which, again, you weren't free within those areas, right?
00:18:34.840You were you were much more restricted.
00:18:37.080If we're talking about just ghetto as a concept, I mean, there's been there's been talk of ghettos, you know, for various groups all over the planet for a very long time.
00:18:45.660So I think it's fairly obvious, Glenn, that you're not an anti-Semite, nor was your term a use of the term digital ghetto meant to meant to suggest that today's American conservatives are anything like Jews who are being victimized by the Nazis in 1941 in Warsaw.
00:18:59.300But the the argument is freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach.
00:19:10.040I mean, no one is guaranteeing that when I started with Facebook that I'd have three million followers or your billion followers or however many you have.
00:19:32.900And it goes to a sort of behavior that you see more and more commonplace in terms of leftist philosophy, which is that you have rights, but only within the private confines of your home.
00:19:43.940Essentially, freedom of religion doesn't exist outside the private confines of your home.
00:19:47.260If you're a religious person, you can't be religious in your business dealings.
00:19:50.460You can't be religious in your school dealings.
00:19:52.360You can't be religious in your social interactions.
00:19:58.800We're just I mean, no one is going to allow you to speak on their platforms.
00:20:01.960And we're going to make sure that no one does business with you.
00:20:04.580And we're going to make sure that nobody ever listens to you.
00:20:06.720But sure, you can scream into your pillow at night.
00:20:08.340And if that makes you feel better, then I guess that we can call that freedom of freedom of speech.
00:20:11.860The basic notion that what's kind of amazing about all of this is that the same people who are currently saying freedom of speech is not freedom of reach are exactly the same people who suggested that we need campaign finance reform because we didn't want people using their money in order to achieve more reach than other people.
00:20:27.940Right. The same exact people who have said things like, you know what we should do?
00:20:30.980We should have campaign finance caps so that everybody has an equal amount of access to the to the viewing public.
00:20:37.280Right. They've actually suggested in many cases like Seattle.
00:20:39.500I know they've done this or they've suggested it taxpayer funded campaigns that everybody's spending the same amount of money, sort of like a middle school secretary campaign where you can only put up a certain number of posters because you wouldn't want one person dominating in the freedom of reach.
00:20:50.400So the same people who fully understand that the amount of reach that you have is very impactful are exactly the people who are saying that reach shouldn't matter when it comes to freedom of speech.
00:21:08.780But freedom of speech as a value is not about the government.
00:21:11.580Freedom of religion as a value is not about the government.
00:21:13.900And when we talk about legal rights being protected, your legal rights are protected so long as there are there's a cultural force behind the enforcement of the legal right.
00:21:23.280But the minute that the cultural force goes out of the argument, the legal right is next on the chopping block.
00:21:29.000I mean, if anybody thinks that 20 years from now, the left is going to be just as sanguine about First Amendment protections in their broadest form at the legal level as they supposedly are now isn't watching within.
00:21:39.340I mean, we've already seen members of the Biden administration, people like Richard Stengel, who actually is heading up one of the media wings of the Biden, who I think is the transition guy at the U.S. media group or something like Voice of America.
00:21:51.980Richard Stengel has overtly called for hate speech regulation inside the United States.
00:21:56.440I mean, the definition that they're looking for is a legal one.
00:21:58.940It's just that they can start on the social level and then they can move it into the legal level once the social level has already become sort of a fait accompli.
00:22:07.580Because, you know, I was having an argument earlier this morning about I think the one thing the founders may not have really envisioned or had their arms completely around is the idea that a private corporation could be much bigger and much more powerful than a government.
00:22:29.420And we're seeing this now with Facebook and Google and they're, you know, they're not opposing forces.
00:22:41.180So what do we what do we do with this?
00:22:43.760Because they don't have to pay attention to the Constitution.
00:22:48.280Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things the founders did understand is the power of a corporation that was in bed with the government.
00:22:54.620Yeah, there were all the Boston Tea Party was carried out against a supposedly private organization that had been chartered by the British government and restricted by the British government.
00:23:03.520Right. So the founders certainly understood that the power of of a corporation or a non-corporate form of business in conjunction with government could be extraordinarily powerful.
00:23:16.440It could be something that was threatening to the liberty of Americans.
00:23:19.460And the way that you the way that you fight back against that is you break the linkage.
00:23:23.320This is one of the cases that I've heard made with Section 230 that I think is actually somewhat compelling is that Section 230 has granted both a it was meant as a protection to allow people to go beyond the boundaries of just having completely unfettered comment sections and unfettered platforms.
00:23:40.640And if you're going to remove obscenity, if you're going to remove violence, that was a good thing.
00:23:43.660We didn't want to punish you for that.
00:23:44.660Now, the norm has become that people in government are actively demanding that you censor.
00:23:49.840They are actively demand and they are threatening that if you don't censor, they're going to shut you down.
00:23:53.820Well, at that point, these corporations really are a wing of of the government.
00:23:57.660The government is essentially telling them that they need to use their power in order to compel speech.
00:24:02.820I mean, that's a dangerous, dangerous thing.
00:24:06.220It's a revolving door to between government and Google and government and Facebook.
00:24:11.320The people go from working from one administration into those organizations.
00:24:16.760And then when the administration comes back their way, they leave there.
00:24:20.900And I mean, it's it's a farm team, it seems.
00:24:25.160Well, there's also a real problem, which is that these tech bros and they're not victims, but they are in one sense, which is that they're being battered about.
00:24:32.700You've got members of the government who are telling them that they need to restrict the content available on their platforms.
00:24:37.880And you'll see members of the tech bro contention.
00:25:01.420And government is saying, well, we can't tell you what to do because the minute we tell you what to do, we have violated the First Amendment.
00:25:05.920So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to pressure you into doing what we want you to do.
00:25:09.920And you will, quote unquote, voluntarily take that action in order to restrict speech.
00:25:14.340And then the moment that that people try to build alternatives, then they just go to the next level of people whose services are relied upon.
00:25:20.560And then they cudgel those people into deplatforming folks.
00:25:23.560And this is what the Parler event showed.
00:25:25.320What the Parler event showed is that for a long time, people like me, libertarian minded folks, we were saying, OK, I don't like how Twitter is run.
00:25:31.820I don't like that they de-platform people.
00:25:33.700Some of the people that they've de-platformed are people I despise, but I don't think they should de-platform the way they're de-platforming.
00:25:38.640And people would say, including libertarians like me, OK, well, if you don't like it, you can go to an alternative.
00:25:43.620The next move was go after Amazon Web Services, a neutral service provider that is not allowed to discriminate on anything other, apparently, than politics.
00:25:52.860And so I think the way this is going to go, frankly, is that you're going to start to see states, red states, start to say that we are going to enshrine in our state legislation that anti-discrimination law is not only going to apply to the bevy of categories that the left wants it to apply to, but maybe we'll have to start applying it to politics now.
00:26:08.740Or if you discriminate on the basis of politics, you will be in violation of anti-discrimination law because anti-discrimination law has been used as a weapon to quell freedom of association, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.
00:26:19.740Right. Anti-discrimination law now applies to everything from religion to sexual orientation.
00:26:23.760Now, under the Supreme Court ruling, it applies to gender identity.
00:26:27.160OK, well, if that's the case, then why not apply it also to politics to the point where, OK, well, you're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of politics with the carve out of explicit political companies.
00:26:36.760They will say you can change that. But I make the case I can't. I believe what I believe.
00:26:43.780So there's a better there's an easier case, right, which is you can change your religion.
00:26:47.340Religion is actually protected under the Civil Rights Act.
00:26:50.100And so so for you to I mean, I can convert. I'm not going to.
00:26:53.320But people change their religion all the time in the United States.
00:26:56.280So there is there's a basic I mean, what we know is that, well, you even according to the left, you, quote, unquote, can't change your gender identity.
00:27:02.900You can change how it manifests. That's behavior.
00:27:05.000So that's it. So the the the basic idea from the left that that it's only immutable characteristics that we are protecting here, that it's not really right.
00:27:13.500It's not really correct. So this is nothing that I by the way, I don't like any of this stuff.
00:27:17.280I'm not a fan of legal structures that support the the ability to quell freedom of association on any level.
00:27:23.900But at a certain point, the right is going to be left with no available alternative options if they keep basically being forced to build new infrastructure.
00:27:33.920And then the infrastructure is immediately taken away from them.
00:27:36.220At a certain point, you're going to reach you're going to reach in a point in the market where monopoly really does apply.
00:27:42.020I mean, at what point do you start saying, OK, well, you know, you can build your own parlor and that's fine.
00:27:45.640And then you take away parlor. OK, we can build your own Amazon Web Services.
00:27:48.360OK, we build our own Amazon Web Service. OK, well, you know what?
00:27:51.300You're going to have to build your own fiber optic cable networks to expand the entire United States.
00:27:55.820Like there's no way to keep up parallel fiber optic networks.
00:27:58.520Like what in the world are you talking about at a certain point?
00:28:09.440I said there'd be blood bodies and buildings in the streets of New York City and it'll have Osama bin Laden's name on it.
00:28:14.960When are you going to start taking this guy seriously?
00:28:16.680We I've called the ISIS ISIS killing Christians, the rise of anti-Semitism in 2008, the caliphate, which they mocked me for all of these things.
00:28:33.280The two in 2015, I said there's coming a summer of violence, a summer of just riots and unrest every time they mock me.
00:28:44.320And then when it happens, nobody asks anything about it or nobody talks about it.
00:28:48.300And that's fine, except they should ask because they'll learn a very important question.
00:29:35.340At what point do we at what point do we find ourselves in retrospect being really stupid by saying it can't get any worse than this?
00:29:52.360Well, I mean, I think that we're at that point every single day, every single day, the the the sort of crackdown is getting stronger.
00:30:02.760And I think what what the left likes to do is they like to take the most outlying and outlandish example.
00:30:07.220And then they'll say, OK, well, we're not doing that.
00:30:09.160Right. You saw an entire column by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times saying we're not going to do just note to all our conservative friends.
00:30:15.780We're not going to round you up and put you in reeducation camps.
00:30:17.940All we're really going to do is tell you that you're not allowed to watch the channels that you want to watch.
00:30:21.980And we're also going to make sure you can't visit the websites you want to visit.
00:30:24.660It's like, well, I don't think anybody on the right is is under the impression that we are moments away from the capos arriving at the Gestapo arriving at your door and dragging you off to a fenced area where you can't see a newspaper.
00:30:36.260I'm pretty sure that's not what anybody is talking about here.
00:30:38.500I think what we are talking about is something that is not only clearly going to happen, but is already happening.
00:30:44.000And that is an attempt to siphon off our ability to have access to information that we want to see.
00:30:48.880And that that ability is not being restricted even to the most conspiratorial, insane kind of stuff.
00:30:55.800It's not like the left is saying, you know what, this QAnon thing, it really has to stop.
00:30:58.800We're going to stop QAnon. Instead, it's the entire Republican Party is the party of QAnon.
00:31:02.400And therefore, if you are a Republican, you are in league with QAnon and you believe QAnon and you're forwarding QAnon.
00:31:07.280And in fact, the entire Republican Party is the exclusive preserve of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who Mitch McConnell this week said was a cancer in the Republican Party.
00:31:13.520The entire party is Marjorie Taylor Greene, except for the party leadership saying that this lady says crazy crap on a regular basis.
00:31:19.640Meanwhile, inside the Democratic Party, it's the party of peace, love and joy.
00:31:22.960Well, Nancy Pelosi is appearing on the cover of magazines with Elhan Omar, who's an open anti-Semite.
00:31:27.000I'd like to play Red Rover, Red Rover, send Marjorie Greene Taylor or Taylor Greene over.
00:31:34.040OK, there's one. That's crazy. Now we get a pick from their side.
00:31:38.360It's an insane amount of people that we could pick from that they seem to tolerate all the time.
00:31:47.100I don't know if this is a political thing or if they're that really self-unaware.
00:31:52.580We started with the joke about the Jewish space laser, which came from Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:31:58.980And I want to talk a little bit about some of the things and the origins of what she believes.
00:32:05.260But you have on the other side, you have Rashida Tlaib, who is absolutely an anti-Semite.
00:32:13.740You have you have people riddled through the left that have either, you know, been a revolutionary, are a revolutionary.
00:32:24.720They don't like the Constitution. They want to end the Constitution.
00:32:29.000Are they this self-unaware that that they are also a little out there?
00:32:37.260Or do they do they just are they just doing this for politics?
00:32:40.820Well, I mean, they're certainly doing this for politics only.
00:32:44.400And we're all old enough to remember when it was not Marjorie Taylor Greene and it was Steve King.
00:32:49.640And when it was not Steve King and it was Christine O'Donnell and it was not Christine O'Donnell, it was Todd Akin.
00:32:53.240I mean, they've been doing this as long as I'm alive is they find some rando Republican who says some crazy thing.
00:32:58.500And then every Republican in America must answer for this crazy thing.
00:33:01.600Meanwhile, I got Nancy Pelosi on the cover of magazine with Ilhan Omar.
00:33:04.260And it's like, well, you know, that's just the way things go.
00:33:06.700Five minutes after she was about to censure her for her anti-Semitism.
00:33:09.760So it is a deep rooted ideology on the left.
00:33:13.740And you have Mitch McConnell coming out this week and saying that the things that she said are are a cancer.
00:33:21.840Well, you don't just kind of coexist with cancer.
00:33:48.640Yeah, I mean, well, there's again, this is, again, part of the game that's being played here, which is, OK, so you condemn everything that Marjorie Taylor Greene says, all this conspiracy nonsense, the luniness, all of it.
00:33:58.040But do you want to expel her from Congress?
00:33:59.640And you say, no, no, there's really not a ground to expel her from Congress until she does something that is corrupt or criminal.
00:34:05.420And then you can expel her from Congress.
00:34:07.080Then they say, well, that must mean you agree with her in the same way where you can say, I don't like what Trump was doing for months after the election.
00:34:12.660And I don't like the January 6th riot.
00:34:14.400But you can't impeach Trump for saying inflammatory things because that's politics.
00:34:18.240Lots of people say inflammatory things.
00:34:19.520Well, if you're not going to vote to impeach him, that must mean that you like the January 6th riot.
00:34:25.840If you don't give me exactly the thing that I want, then you're on the side of my opponents.
00:34:30.120And then once you give them what they want, then they go on to the next thing that they want, in which case you become a villain again.
00:34:34.660Right. Mitt Romney finds this out every three months or so when he does something that they love and he's the champion of the greatest guy ever.
00:34:40.400And then two months later, he does something they don't like.
00:34:42.100And he's back to being horrible old Mitt Romney from Bain Capital with the dog straps at the top of his car.
00:35:43.380What what what where do these conspiracies come from and how do we how do we disassemble those bombs?
00:35:51.580I mean, I think that it's all of the above.
00:35:53.860But I think if you have to chalk it up to one thing above all else, this is something that both Arthur Brooks and Yvonne have talked about.
00:35:58.820Just that the complete disruption of social capital in the United States over the course of my lifetime is incredible to watch.
00:36:33.080Now you've got Black Lives Matter painted on the sidelines.
00:36:35.700There's literally no way not to talk about politics when everything gets politicized.
00:36:39.560When you kill our ability to even get together with one another physically, when you kill the church, which was the number one way in the United States for people to meet each other and discuss things across partisan boundaries, when you get rid of all of those things.
00:36:51.860And what we are left with is a sort of airsats social capital where you're just online and you're sort of looking for a place to belong.
00:36:58.320And then you find a mob and they're part of the mob and it feels good.
00:37:01.240And you get that endorphin rush of being part of the mob.
00:37:26.340Online has made it possible for a nut in California to find a nut in New York and then for them to form a social bond in a way that they just would not have been able to do before.
00:37:33.740And when you have all other avenues of meeting people and hanging out with people and getting to know people that are foreclosed for you, and that's been more true at this time in history than any other time in modern history, then you're going to see a radical rise in that sort of thing, for sure.
00:37:46.540So here we are sitting here and we are being shut up with with covid.
00:37:56.000I mean, I see what's happening with Cuomo.
00:37:59.920The the unbelievable madness that is Andrew Cuomo.
00:38:27.860Is there a point to where the average Democrat that the or do they even exist anymore, that the average person that, you know, really doesn't like fascism might wake up and go, wait a minute, we might be on the wrong side here.
00:38:44.300Because there's this weird marriage going on now with with people who never thought that they would ever have anything in common politically.
00:39:17.260And who now are forced to a particular choice.
00:39:19.580And that is people who are politically liberal agree with a lot of the policy prescriptions of the left, but don't agree with the fundamental way in which the left is approaching how to get those policy prescriptions done.
00:39:29.000And so if you are a liberal and you believe in bigger government, universal health care and you believe in a smaller military and all the things that the hard left wants, right, deep defunding the police, all these things.
00:39:36.320You actually believe in those things, but you also believe in freedom of speech and you believe in freedom of religion and you believe we should basically leave each other alone.
00:39:43.160You just want the government involved in certain areas to rectify certain imbalances.
00:39:48.040Are you going to side with the left, which might arrive at utopia sooner but run over more people?
00:39:51.760Or are you going to side with conservatives who have a different vision of the future of the country than you do, but who are also believers in some of the same fundamental values that you believe in?
00:40:02.240So you're going to have to choose between the policy preferences that you have, which maybe you'll be able to convince conservatives eventually that you'll get a victory that way, but it's going to take a lot longer.
00:40:09.420Or do you just go along with the people who are willing to basically run directly over anybody in their way?
00:40:15.780And you're seeing that battle play out right now.
00:40:17.900I mean, you saw that in the Harper's Weekly letter where you saw 150 liberals saying cancel culture is bad.
00:40:22.240It's like, OK, well, here's the thing.
00:40:23.540If cancel culture is bad, I'm going to need you to every once in a while stand up for a conservative being canceled.
00:40:28.660Like that's what I'm going to need from you.
00:40:29.800It's not that it's not because what I get from so many members of sort of the traditional liberal side is, yes, cancel culture is bad and I hate it when it happens to me.
00:40:36.640It's like, well, yes, I would imagine that you hate it when it happens to you.
00:40:39.420The difference between you and me is that I will defend you when it happens to you and you won't defend me when it happens to me.
00:41:44.880And then she turns around and she's like, yeah, you know what?
00:41:46.860Politico definitely should not have allowed Shapiro to write this.
00:41:48.940Like, this is the way that this this sort of stuff works, unfortunately, is that folks on the right are trying to defend the principle a lot of the time and folks on the left are not.
00:42:14.360For for sort of the body politic and also just for the media generally.
00:42:17.600And so I agree to do it the Friday before I call up Politico and I was like, you know what, guys, things have gotten kind of out of control.
00:42:23.300I think that I'm kind of busy this week and they're like, no, no, no, we've got our schedule set.
00:43:27.380And in fact, the reports from the Daily Beast were that there were people who disagreed with the staff on this and who thought, you know, it's kind of good that they allowed Shapiro to do this, and it's good that we reach out this way.
00:43:36.860And they said in the Daily Beast piece that people were afraid to sound off on the phone call in defense of Politico's decision to run the piece and then defend it because they were afraid that they would then be shouted down by their colleagues.
00:43:49.140How many of these crazy zealots that want to shut down and how many are just silently standing by as more and more people get eaten?
00:43:59.960So I think you're watching a renormalization of the Democratic Party.
00:44:02.740I think that right now, if I had to ballpark it, and of course, this is based on very little data, I would say that about 40 percent of the Democratic Party is very much in favor of the shut everybody down, the new college graduates, the woke leftists, the people who have decided that the right is not worth even having a debate with.
00:44:17.740And I think that there's still 60 percent of Democrats, particularly older Democrats, who are not super fond of that particular direction.
00:44:23.800But the question is, do they hate Republicans more than they hate the woke left shutting down those rights?
00:44:29.740And I think for a lot of them, the answer is yes. Once you have a solid core of Democrats who are who are intransigent and willing to to basically withhold their support from Democratic programs, they can basically take control of the party.
00:44:41.840And I think that's what you're seeing happen right now. So unless unless those militant, moderate Democrats start to sound off in fairly dramatic order, I think that the Democratic Party is in real trouble and then the country is in real trouble.
00:44:55.240I mean, I thought Biden was supposed to be that guy. Biden clearly is not that guy. He's got Susan Rice out there talking about equity day after day after day.
00:45:00.840And when she says equity, she means Ibram X. Kendi equity. Yeah, she it's it's even outcome, even outcome, which is socialism is communism at the barrel of a gun.
00:45:11.580The communism is just, you know, enforced by the government.
00:45:15.300But then what should we be concentrating on? What is the one thing if you talk to people and say, this is what you should be doing?
00:45:28.160This is the thing that, you know, I think people are missing. What would those things be?
00:45:33.660So I think there are there are a couple of things that we can be doing right now, and one is what I'm going to term.
00:45:39.320I make this up right now, so we'll see how this goes. I think there is the Noah concept and there's the Abraham concept.
00:45:43.760Right. The Noah concept is get everything in the ark, board up the doors, the floods come in.
00:45:48.700And then there is the Abraham concept, which is bring outsiders into the tent, talk with them, convert them, add to the flock.
00:45:54.960I think we're going to have to pursue both simultaneously. I think I think we've always gone after one or the other.
00:45:59.320I think the first thing that has to be done is people who are conservative need to be subscribing to places like Blaze TV.
00:46:04.860They need to be subscribing to places like Daily Wire because the way that we survive and it's self-serving, but it's it's true.
00:46:09.740The way that we survive is by people who can't cut us off. Right.
00:46:13.720We're not going to cut us off. We need to we need to consolidate our own forces and back each other.
00:46:18.800And you and I have talked about this a thousand times.
00:46:20.300Glenn, nothing has changed along those lines. It's just we're going to need to build more infrastructure.
00:46:24.660We're going to need to do all that stuff and we're going to need to build alternatives in a wide variety of areas that the left has been completely controlling.
00:46:32.020That's one thing. The other thing we're going to need to do is we're going to need to continue to reach out.
00:46:35.480And, yeah, we get slapped in the face a lot. We're going to continue to need to reach out, try to find people who are liberals, who will have conversations with us, try to broaden it out and force the left to disown the liberals, because that's the area where you might see a backlash from the liberals.
00:46:49.180The liberals are not going to get upset when Glenn Beck gets, quote unquote, canceled or I get, quote unquote, canceled or even Bob down the hall gets, quote unquote, canceled.
00:46:56.520Liberals are going to get upset when people who look and act exactly like them start getting canceled.
00:47:00.620And so reaching out to liberals actually has the effect of of achieving that purpose in some ways.
00:47:06.020And I think I will admit that when I wrote for Politico, I was not unaware that the that what happened was entirely likely to happen.
00:47:11.980Not only was I not unaware of it, I warned all the editors of Politico was about to happen and they didn't believe me.
00:47:46.000Right now, the cancel culture for them only exists when they are canceled.
00:47:49.580And I mean, this is the modern version of conservatives, a liberal who's mugged by reality.
00:47:55.020Right now, an anti leftist is a person who's mugged by the left.
00:47:58.020And if you're never mugged by the left, then you have no reason to think that the left is a threat to you or the things you hold dear.
00:48:04.140But the left is is on a mugging spree right now and they will go after pretty much anybody who crosses them in any way.
00:48:10.040So I think that both as a strategic matter and as a moral matter, we should be reaching out to people who are traditionally liberal, who disagree with us on on politics.
00:48:16.220We should do it because it's always good to have those open conversations and make some friends with whom we disagree.
00:48:20.640And on a strategic level, if those people then get canceled because they've had a conversation with us, then maybe reality will set in and they'll realize how much of a threat their left flank is.
00:48:28.080And I think it's, you know, what you said, start reaching out to those people.
00:48:31.820I think it's important to not talk about policies, but talk about the principles that we have in common.
00:48:43.500And I think if we can start relaying some of those lines that, you know, our parents had, our grandparents had, where there was certain fundamental principles that pretty much everybody was for.
00:48:56.380I don't think people are that different when it comes to the principles, although they are drifting.
00:49:37.800I mean, I think that that is what is likely to happen in both directions, by the way.
00:49:41.300I think that if a Republican wins high office again, you're likely to see the Democrats do exactly what they've done over and over again, which is create sanctuary cities, ignore federal policy.
00:49:50.520Suddenly they fall in love with federalism when Trump is president.
00:49:53.020And then immediately upon Biden acceding to the office, suddenly it's, oh, look, federalism is bad.
00:49:59.820Some of us are fine with federalism all the way across the board.
00:50:01.980So I think that states are going to have to resist a lot of these encroachments.
00:50:06.600And that is likely to fragment the country.
00:50:10.160Again, federalism can exist so long as people understand that the federal government can't do everything.
00:50:15.240I think the problem here is that you have one side of the aisle that believes the federal government literally should do all of the things.
00:50:20.240And every element of the Democratic policy agenda right now is unification at the federal level.
00:50:24.760Everything from their supposed voting rights bill, which is all about federalizing the election processes all across the United States, to the Equality Act, which is about federalizing anti-discrimination policy against states that have not adopted California-style anti-discrimination law.
00:50:41.460And states at a certain point are going to have to say, listen, you want to enforce an unconstitutional law.
00:50:46.180You're going to have to come do it because we're not going to do it.
00:50:47.960Any way to argue taxation without representation when we start to bail out Illinois, New York, California for stupid laws that their people pass that we don't live in?
00:51:01.880I didn't live in California for a reason.
00:51:03.880You know, I love California, but it was insane.
00:51:10.220I love New York City, but it was insane.
00:51:13.560We all knew it was going to fall apart.
00:51:16.260Why do I in Texas or in, you know, in any other state, why am I required now to pay for their madness?
00:51:25.500Yeah, I mean, that is the question of the hour.
00:51:30.100Again, the country would be a lot better off if we weren't subsidizing each other across state lines.
00:51:35.180The argument the left will use is that, you know, it's red states that are disproportionately poverty stricken.
00:51:39.180And so if you look at the net outflow of tax dollars from places like New York, they're very often going to red states where there are military bases or where there are more poor people.
00:51:46.980Yeah, that's called a federal program, right?
00:51:48.580There's a federal anti-poverty program, and that applies equally to everybody across all of America.
00:51:54.040And so if there are more people in one state than another, then people in one state might receive more net dollars.
00:51:58.240But if you're talking about bailing out governments for bad decisions, that's a completely different thing.
00:52:02.060And the idea that the federal government should be bailing out California's debt because California decided to take on billions of dollars in debts to teachers unions, they can't pay back.
00:52:09.580And Texas now is supposed to pay that back.
00:52:11.500I literally left California, so I did not have to pay taxes to the teachers unions in California.
00:52:16.440And now you've got the federal government following me to Florida so they can take my money away from me and pay it back to California.
00:52:25.060I mean, the only way, presumably, to fight that would be to have a complete rethink in terms of how much power the federal government has to collect taxes.
00:52:35.940Because once the federal law is passed, then it's very difficult to say that the IRS can't come and grab your tax money.