The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 96 ｜ Jewish Space Lasers & Deplatforming 'MAGA Media' ｜ Ben Shapiro ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 Do you remember when the New York Times referred to Ben Shapiro as a provocative gladiator and the left went nuts?

00:00:07.440 Shapiro goes viral every couple of months, and every time it's a spectacle, anytime anything big happens,

00:00:13.720 suddenly you start seeing screenshots of a Shapiro tweet everywhere.

00:00:18.680 It is the reason why the New York Times article that I just mentioned went crazy,

00:00:23.320 because they referred to him as the voice of the conservative millennial movement.

00:00:28.060 And if you need proof of that claim, you can find hours of Libs Get Wrecked by Ben Shapiro compilations on YouTube.

00:00:37.620 Most recently, he was asked to write an article for Politico.

00:00:41.920 We're going to talk to him about it. The staff went out of their mind his crime.

00:00:48.140 He wrote an article for Politico at their invitation defending Republicans who oppose the second impeachment of Donald Trump. 0.83

00:00:58.000 Which is somehow more ridiculous than the first one. 0.95

00:01:01.400 In response, he called the journalists fragile little babies and mocked their phony outrage. 0.96

00:01:07.100 He usually triggers AOC, which isn't that hard to do.

00:01:11.340 But Shapiro does it with style and grace.

00:01:15.260 Although they almost agreed recently, AOC had to ruin it by accusing Ted Cruz of attempting to murder her. 0.96

00:01:23.840 Ben 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. 0.99

00:01:39.000 It's why people who are on the deranged left actually wish for Shapiro's death. 0.99

00:01:44.440 That is not an exaggeration.

00:01:46.000 Last year, a guy was arrested for trying to kill Ben.

00:01:49.860 Although 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.

00:02:04.000 We 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.

00:02:13.140 New York Times was actually right.

00:02:15.280 Ben Shapiro is really a cultural gladiator.

00:02:19.080 Caught in the fight to save our republic, to save America as we know it.

00:02:23.520 Today, on the Glenn Beck Podcast, Ben Shapiro.

00:02:39.320 Ben, 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.

00:02:48.560 I'm not afraid of you, because we're on to you.

00:02:51.780 Marjorie Taylor Greene has exposed you, and she claims, hey, you're Jewish.

00:02:58.600 I 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.

00:03:16.220 They can target California, starts the forest fires, and PG&E, of course, either owned or operated or invested.

00:03:26.440 I don't know exactly her tie, but the Jews are involved.

00:03:31.040 Explain.

00:03:31.440 Well, I mean, first of all, you should be more afraid of me, not less, if indeed I am in control of the Jewish space laser. 0.99

00:03:38.700 Sure.

00:03:39.040 I don't know what your status is.

00:03:40.720 All I can say is that with pinpoint precision, we can circumcise all those who wish to circumcise using the Jewish space laser. 1.00

00:03:48.100 Really?

00:03:49.260 I didn't know that.

00:03:49.940 It's an amazing thing.

00:03:51.100 Right.

00:03:51.400 It's an amazing thing.

00:03:52.360 Now, there is the amount of control Jews exert over the world in the minds of anti-Semites.

00:03:56.680 Sure.

00:03:56.940 I wish I were that optimistic, to be frank with you.

00:03:59.760 There'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?

00:04:06.840 The other one says, because this newspaper makes me so happy.

00:04:09.820 We're in control of so many things.

00:04:11.120 So, 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. 0.97

00:04:28.120 And if you're in Tennessee, it's fine?

00:04:31.660 Well, all I can say is that I bought an enormous amount of unused desert land right along the Nevada border.

00:04:38.520 Really?

00:04:38.900 And I'm not going to say what comes next after that.

00:04:41.320 Okay.

00:04:41.640 All right.

00:04:42.620 Ben, good to talk to you.

00:04:44.100 It is, it is, it's crazy how different things are since just the last time we sat together in the same room.

00:04:54.920 America is, does it exist anymore as we know it, as we knew it?

00:05:01.660 Does it really exist?

00:05:02.780 Well, I mean, I think that all of the problems that were undergirding our last conversation still exist.

00:05:09.700 I think in many ways they are worse.

00:05:12.260 And 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.

00:05:21.300 Because 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.

00:05:28.560 I mean, there's a whole side of the aisle that really does seek to destroy fundamental American freedoms in the name of unity.

00:05:35.660 And, 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.

00:05:42.320 I mean, there are two ways to achieve it.

00:05:43.360 One is there's unity through we agree on the fundamental principle of tolerance for other people's speech and other people's rights.

00:05:49.360 We don't have to agree on everything, but we have to agree that you have a right to live your individual life.

00:05:53.540 And 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.

00:06:01.860 And then there's unity through the purge.

00:06:03.240 And it seems like the hard left is in the ascendant.

00:06:05.740 The unity through the purge method seems to be what they prefer at this point.

00:06:09.840 And 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.

00:06:16.620 And Joe Biden apparently isn't aware of this cycle.

00:06:21.600 I mean, in Seattle alone, you know, they had the first lesbian sheriff in King County. 1.00

00:06:27.520 She's gone.

00:06:28.380 You had the first black chief of police in Seattle.

00:06:33.980 She's gone.

00:06:34.780 Because once you get in, you're not progressive enough.

00:06:39.440 The left is never happy.

00:06:41.540 And so they purge and purge and purge.

00:06:45.540 What is that going to mean to the Biden administration?

00:06:47.580 You know, the big problem is that the Democratic Party is trying to square a circle here.

00:06:54.040 And that is that they are really at the heads of revolutionary movement.

00:06:57.700 And the revolutionary movement requires constant revolution.

00:06:59.580 And 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.

00:07:09.740 In 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.

00:07:18.260 There'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.

00:07:28.060 This is something Barack Obama, I think, tried to do.

00:07:29.940 But I don't know that that's going to be able to hold over the course of time.

00:07:35.540 It's just going to be a constant turnover.

00:07:37.000 It's either going to be turnover within the system or it's going to be attacks from without the system.

00:07:40.680 And you're seeing some of both of that, right?

00:07:41.900 You see the violence is not abated in places like Portland.

00:07:43.900 It's going to continue to sort of foster in places like Portland.

00:07:46.960 You're going to start there will be riots during the Biden administration.

00:07:49.620 It's not going to all go away just because Joe Biden is president of the United States.

00:07:53.600 At 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.

00:08:08.040 Well, the problem is once you give them X, then they want Y.

00:08:10.360 Once you give them Y, they want Z.

00:08:12.040 The revolution is never satisfied.

00:08:13.620 This is the problem with with radicalism.

00:08:16.900 So but I think these people, I mean, I don't know.

00:08:21.720 Do they do the people in the administration that are speaking the language of revolutionaries?

00:08:28.200 Are 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?

00:08:47.000 Or do they actually believe this stuff?

00:08:50.060 I mean, I think it's sort of halfway in between.

00:08:52.980 I think the number of people who are so nefariously motivated that they understand their own motivations to be corrupt is pretty small.

00:08:58.840 Very few people truly believe in sociopathic fashion that they are willing to do the wrong thing in order to achieve the right result.

00:09:05.360 And 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.

00:09:14.640 And then also that happens to allow them all sorts of fodder to push forward with an agenda they were already going to see anyway.

00:09:20.680 This is why you're seeing the language of, quote unquote, racial equity, like Ibram X. 0.71

00:09:24.200 Kendi style racial equity being pushed into every element of the Biden administration.

00:09:27.800 It's not just that it is relegated to race policy.

00:09:31.280 It's being pushed into economics.

00:09:32.920 It's being pushed into the environmental policy.

00:09:34.940 It's being pushed into covid policy.

00:09:36.920 It is it is an all purpose lever in order to achieve things that you already wanted to achieve.

00:09:41.880 So I think the answer is some of both.

00:09:43.140 I mean, they are using the woke in order to achieve their goals.

00:09:45.340 And also, they don't fundamentally disagree with a lot of the premises the woke actually believe in.

00:09:50.240 Why do we have troops, 6000 troops still around the Capitol with razor wire fences now?

00:09:57.860 I mean, I don't know.

00:09:59.280 I 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.

00:10:08.620 But it does make me somewhat suspicious that we are weeks in.

00:10:11.820 Donald 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.

00:10:18.500 It seems kind of bizarre.

00:10:19.700 We still have thousands of troops in Washington, D.C.

00:10:21.520 You have the FBI saying they they had some chatter, but nothing of significance or anything enough to act upon.

00:10:29.700 And yet we have these troops.

00:10:32.180 I mean, nobody wants to see either side go to Washington and do anything.

00:10:38.100 I'm just I just you know, we living in a time where we're fighting conspiracy theories.

00:10:43.560 But conspiracy theories happen.

00:10:47.360 It's like chicken and the egg.

00:10:48.780 The conspiracy theories happen because people aren't telling you the truth.

00:10:53.400 And so then people start to go, well, wait a minute, let me connect the dots here and here and here.

00:10:57.720 And that always usually leads to trouble.

00:11:01.240 But we're not having any transparency on anything.

00:11:05.040 So what do what do what do people do who are really concerned about things and no history?

00:11:14.660 I mean, it's it's really obviously concerning, not only because you see the hypocrisy in the and the sort of double standard.

00:11:21.820 I mean, the same people who are cheering the fact that there are thousands of troops in Washington, D.C.

00:11:25.320 Five minutes ago, we're saying that federal troops in Portland were the cause of rioting.

00:11:29.080 And correct. Correct.

00:11:29.940 But 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.

00:11:37.600 I 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.

00:11:46.220 And then when you get suspicious, they say, well, you know, your suspicion is just another form of conspiracy theorizing.

00:11:51.900 There is this sort of bizarre circular reasoning that we saw over from an outlet that I very often like, Axios.

00:11:58.740 As 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.

00:12:04.980 They're ascendant in all the institutions.

00:12:06.360 They're ascendant in Hollywood.

00:12:07.500 They're ascendant in corporate America.

00:12:09.180 They're ascendant in government.

00:12:10.680 They're ascendant everywhere.

00:12:11.980 And this means that there's going to be a radical rethinking of everything from speech to freedom of religion.

00:12:17.260 And 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.

00:12:30.540 And the angle of the piece was that it was sort of paranoid to think that.

00:12:33.720 And I literally just clipped his piece from three weeks ago.

00:12:36.580 And I said, like, I'm not saying it.

00:12:38.020 You're saying it.

00:12:39.180 Right.

00:12:39.380 You know, there's this there's this gaslighting, this mass gaslighting that is going on that is so incredibly dangerous.

00:12:43.900 And you see it most often when it comes to the way that people treat the cancel culture and freedom of speech.

00:12:50.240 There's this idea where you're not allowed to write or say anything that that crosses us.

00:12:55.300 But, you know what, if you go over to your own side of the aisle, you can totally say it over there.

00:12:58.860 You get this all the time.

00:12:59.680 Glenn, you've received it.

00:13:00.460 I've received it.

00:13:01.240 That 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.

00:13:08.320 And they say, well, you know, you can go here.

00:13:09.600 Glenn Beck on Glenn Beck's show.

00:13:10.620 You can head on over to the blaze or you can hear Shapiro over at the Daily Wire.

00:13:13.320 All right. That's not a big deal.

00:13:14.260 And then the next move is, OK, now that they're all in this little area that we've defined for them, now we just air bomb it.

00:13:19.380 Right now we just go after the methods of distribution.

00:13:21.860 We make sure that they can't be reached.

00:13:23.960 And if you sound off about this, their response is we're not trying to do that.

00:13:26.800 That's crazy.

00:13:27.340 How could you say that we're totally trying to do that?

00:13:29.120 And then once they do it, they say, well, of course, you deserved it.

00:13:31.400 Right.

00:13:31.540 So there's this this constant sort of moving of the goalposts where if you notice at any point, then they gaslight you.

00:13:36.600 If you notice what's happening at any point, then they just say it's not happening.

00:13:39.600 Right.

00:13:39.700 And then once it's already happened, they say, well, of course, you deserve that to happen because you're conspirators.

00:13:43.320 There's there's an amazing thing happening over at CNN.

00:13:47.140 I'm convinced I'd love to hear your opinion on this.

00:13:49.180 I 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.

00:14:04.500 They 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.

00:14:16.880 And they're they are inside trying to go after their competitors.

00:14:21.620 Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

00:14:24.580 So 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.

00:14:33.800 And 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.

00:14:38.620 And I said to him, Brian, you offering me a job because I really don't think you are.

00:14:42.240 And the and the answer, of course, is no.

00:14:44.780 CNN doesn't want to offer any conservative a job.

00:14:47.420 Right. You can only be a CNN conservative if you then parrot the the sort of anti-Trump, anti-conservative.

00:14:53.120 The Republicans are the bad guys line.

00:14:54.720 I was probably that you're no longer on CNN anymore.

00:14:56.980 Right. You're the Lincoln Project conservative.

00:14:58.960 And then they say, OK, well, you go over there and you just go watch Fox News.

00:15:02.980 Fox 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.

00:15:08.680 Let's go after their advertisers, but also let's tell Comcast to take Fox News off the air.

00:15:13.360 And it's not just Stelter, unfortunately.

00:15:15.180 You've seen this repeated on MSNBC.

00:15:17.140 You've seen this reported repeated over and over by Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist, the Washington Post.

00:15:22.220 This is now her bag.

00:15:23.300 You've seen in terms of social media, which is the next step.

00:15:25.860 You've seen Kara Swisher at The New York Times and Kevin Roos at The New York Times pushing this stuff super hard.

00:15:29.940 The telltale sign, by the way, that somebody is doing this is when they start citing media matters as their objective.

00:15:35.120 I know on what de-platforming means.

00:15:37.040 And they're doing this.

00:15:37.980 They're actually doing this.

00:15:38.800 Margaret 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.

00:15:46.180 And we should try to de-platform Fox News.

00:15:48.320 You know, media matters says this really isn't cancel culture.

00:15:50.280 And it's like, OK, so now you are literally having I mean, you are you're not doing the equivalent.

00:15:57.800 You'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.

00:16:06.960 If I'm not mistaken, didn't you write for The Washington Post?

00:16:11.260 Didn't you write a op ed for The Post?

00:16:13.400 So. Should we de-platform The Washington Post?

00:16:17.460 Yeah. Yeah.

00:16:18.280 In 2016. But that was OK.

00:16:19.560 See, I could I could write for The Post in 2016 when I oppose Trump.

00:16:23.440 Right. 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.

00:16:31.240 Even though 2010 is before 2016, the magical thing about how cancel culture works is that the time machine only works sporadically.

00:16:38.000 Right. 2016 was was after 2010, but not when I was saying not nice things about Trump.

00:16:43.520 The minute that I said that people should vote for Trump in 2020, then 2010 was before 2016.

00:16:49.500 And at that point, you could actually go back and uncover my old tweets.

00:16:52.120 It's really convenient how the time machine works.

00:16:53.920 Ben, I got into a lot of trouble here recently because I spoke about digital ghettos and the ghettoization.

00:17:04.520 You know, if you were a Jew in Nazi Germany, you were fine. 0.92

00:17:08.420 You could do whatever you want behind the wall.

00:17:10.380 But 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.

00:17:20.460 And I got in trouble because I guess I'm a Nazi.

00:17:25.360 But 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.

00:17:40.460 He stands by that, as do I.

00:17:43.140 Do you do you would you categorize this as a digital ghettoization of voices and people of different opinion?

00:17:52.600 Well, I mean, the fact is that the term ghetto goes back long before the Holocaust.

00:17:56.220 Jewish ghettos existed in Europe going back centuries and centuries and centuries.

00:17:59.760 In fact, the word ghetto ghetto comes from ghetto.

00:18:01.980 It's the Italian.

00:18:02.600 It actually began in Italy long before the Nazis had ever, you know, anyone who ever dreamed of Nazis or the Nazis had been around.

00:18:09.640 Jews had been placed in, you know, fenced off areas of major cities.

00:18:14.800 In 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. 0.88

00:18:27.060 So 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?

00:18:34.840 You were you were much more restricted.

00:18:37.080 If 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.

00:18:45.660 So 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.

00:18:59.300 But the the argument is freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach.

00:19:07.700 Well, right, I guess.

00:19:10.040 I 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.

00:19:20.720 I mean, we worked for that.

00:19:22.840 So it wasn't a guarantee of reach.

00:19:25.080 We've worked for that.

00:19:26.240 But I mean, the basic idea of freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

00:19:31.940 It is a bizarre one.

00:19:32.900 And 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.

00:19:43.940 Essentially, freedom of religion doesn't exist outside the private confines of your home.

00:19:47.260 If you're a religious person, you can't be religious in your business dealings. 0.94

00:19:50.460 You can't be religious in your school dealings.

00:19:52.360 You can't be religious in your social interactions. 0.94

00:19:54.480 Religion is confined to the home. 0.98

00:19:55.620 And freedom of speech, same sort of thing.

00:19:57.680 You're free to speak.

00:19:58.800 We're just I mean, no one is going to allow you to speak on their platforms.

00:20:01.960 And we're going to make sure that no one does business with you.

00:20:04.580 And we're going to make sure that nobody ever listens to you.

00:20:06.720 But sure, you can scream into your pillow at night.

00:20:08.340 And if that makes you feel better, then I guess that we can call that freedom of freedom of speech.

00:20:11.860 The 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.

00:20:27.940 Right. The same exact people who have said things like, you know what we should do?

00:20:30.980 We should have campaign finance caps so that everybody has an equal amount of access to the to the viewing public.

00:20:37.280 Right. They've actually suggested in many cases like Seattle.

00:20:39.500 I 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.

00:20:50.400 So 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.

00:20:59.820 And that, of course, is an absurdity.

00:21:01.640 I'm also seeing the argument made all the time that freedom of speech is really a First Amendment thing.

00:21:05.560 It's about the government.

00:21:07.120 Yes, I agree.

00:21:08.100 It is about the government.

00:21:08.780 But freedom of speech as a value is not about the government.

00:21:11.580 Freedom of religion as a value is not about the government.

00:21:13.900 And 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.

00:21:23.280 But the minute that the cultural force goes out of the argument, the legal right is next on the chopping block.

00:21:28.200 And we all know this.

00:21:29.000 I 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.

00:21:39.340 I 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.

00:21:51.980 Richard Stengel has overtly called for hate speech regulation inside the United States.

00:21:56.440 I mean, the definition that they're looking for is a legal one.

00:21:58.940 It'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.

00:22:05.020 So how do you solve the social issue?

00:22:07.580 Because, 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.

00:22:29.420 And we're seeing this now with Facebook and Google and they're, you know, they're not opposing forces.

00:22:38.620 They're teaming up together now.

00:22:41.180 So what do we what do we do with this?

00:22:43.760 Because they don't have to pay attention to the Constitution.

00:22:48.280 Yeah, 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.

00:22:54.620 Yeah, 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.

00:23:03.520 Right. 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.

00:23:14.980 It could have monopoly power.

00:23:16.440 It could be something that was threatening to the liberty of Americans.

00:23:19.460 And the way that you the way that you fight back against that is you break the linkage.

00:23:23.320 This 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.

00:23:40.640 And if you're going to remove obscenity, if you're going to remove violence, that was a good thing.

00:23:43.660 We didn't want to punish you for that.

00:23:44.660 Now, the norm has become that people in government are actively demanding that you censor.

00:23:49.840 They are actively demand and they are threatening that if you don't censor, they're going to shut you down.

00:23:53.820 Well, at that point, these corporations really are a wing of of the government.

00:23:57.660 The government is essentially telling them that they need to use their power in order to compel speech.

00:24:02.820 I mean, that's a dangerous, dangerous thing.

00:24:04.600 And it's not there.

00:24:06.220 It's a revolving door to between government and Google and government and Facebook.

00:24:11.320 The people go from working from one administration into those organizations.

00:24:16.760 And then when the administration comes back their way, they leave there.

00:24:20.900 And I mean, it's it's a farm team, it seems.

00:24:25.160 Well, 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.

00:24:32.700 You've got members of the government who are telling them that they need to restrict the content available on their platforms.

00:24:37.880 And you'll see members of the tech bro contention.

00:24:40.600 Right. You'll see Dorsey.

00:24:41.440 You'll see Zuckerberg.

00:24:42.520 You'll see Sheryl Sandberg.

00:24:43.680 You'll see them actually say, we would love for you to regulate us.

00:24:46.840 Please regulate us.

00:24:47.800 They will openly say this.

00:24:49.280 They'll say, we want to know what the standard is that we can just abide by that standard.

00:24:52.540 After all, we're the biggest players in the space.

00:24:53.840 We can abide by any any standard you want.

00:24:56.480 Our competitors can't.

00:24:57.700 Right.

00:24:57.800 We'll have market capture at that point.

00:24:59.320 So.

00:24:59.780 So just tell us what to do.

00:25:01.420 And 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.

00:25:05.920 So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to pressure you into doing what we want you to do.

00:25:09.920 And you will, quote unquote, voluntarily take that action in order to restrict speech.

00:25:14.340 And 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.

00:25:20.560 And then they cudgel those people into deplatforming folks.

00:25:23.560 And this is what the Parler event showed.

00:25:25.320 What 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.

00:25:31.820 I don't like that they de-platform people.

00:25:33.700 Some 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.

00:25:38.640 And people would say, including libertarians like me, OK, well, if you don't like it, you can go to an alternative.

00:25:42.460 Parler was formed.

00:25:43.060 It was an alternative.

00:25:43.620 The next move was go after Amazon Web Services, a neutral service provider that is not allowed to discriminate on anything other, apparently, than politics.

00:25:52.860 And 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.

00:26:08.740 Or 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.

00:26:19.740 Right. Anti-discrimination law now applies to everything from religion to sexual orientation.

00:26:23.760 Now, under the Supreme Court ruling, it applies to gender identity.

00:26:27.160 OK, 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.

00:26:36.760 They will say you can change that. But I make the case I can't. I believe what I believe.

00:26:43.780 So there's a better there's an easier case, right, which is you can change your religion.

00:26:47.340 Religion is actually protected under the Civil Rights Act.

00:26:50.100 And so so for you to I mean, I can convert. I'm not going to.

00:26:53.320 But people change their religion all the time in the United States.

00:26:56.280 So 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.

00:27:02.900 You can change how it manifests. That's behavior.

00:27:05.000 So 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.

00:27:13.500 It's not really correct. So this is nothing that I by the way, I don't like any of this stuff.

00:27:17.280 I'm not a fan of legal structures that support the the ability to quell freedom of association on any level.

00:27:23.900 But 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.

00:27:33.920 And then the infrastructure is immediately taken away from them.

00:27:36.220 At a certain point, you're going to reach you're going to reach in a point in the market where monopoly really does apply.

00:27:42.020 I mean, at what point do you start saying, OK, well, you know, you can build your own parlor and that's fine.

00:27:45.640 And then you take away parlor. OK, we can build your own Amazon Web Services.

00:27:48.360 OK, we build our own Amazon Web Service. OK, well, you know what?

00:27:51.300 You're going to have to build your own fiber optic cable networks to expand the entire United States.

00:27:55.820 Like there's no way to keep up parallel fiber optic networks.

00:27:58.520 Like what in the world are you talking about at a certain point?

00:28:01.740 So.

00:28:04.500 I have been mocked by everyone.

00:28:06.700 9-11, I called in 99.

00:28:09.440 I 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.

00:28:14.960 When are you going to start taking this guy seriously?

00:28:16.680 We 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.

00:28:33.280 The two in 2015, I said there's coming a summer of violence, a summer of just riots and unrest every time they mock me.

00:28:44.320 And then when it happens, nobody asks anything about it or nobody talks about it.

00:28:48.300 And that's fine, except they should ask because they'll learn a very important question.

00:28:55.540 The answer to how do you know that? 0.97

00:28:58.320 Because I take people at their word when they say crazy crap and they've got some power, it is incumbent upon you to take them seriously. 0.98

00:29:13.940 I do. 0.98

00:29:15.460 That's how I can see these things coming.

00:29:17.880 Ben, we have we have we have heard people in real power talk about we have to find a way to reeducate 70 million people.

00:29:28.600 We have to maybe maybe we have some sort of a reeducation kind of camp.

00:29:32.740 We have to deprogram.

00:29:34.240 We have to silence. 0.99

00:29:35.340 At 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? 0.94

00:29:52.360 Well, 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. 0.95

00:30:02.760 And I think what what the left likes to do is they like to take the most outlying and outlandish example.

00:30:07.220 And then they'll say, OK, well, we're not doing that.

00:30:09.160 Right. 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.

00:30:15.780 We're not going to round you up and put you in reeducation camps.

00:30:17.940 All we're really going to do is tell you that you're not allowed to watch the channels that you want to watch.

00:30:21.980 And we're also going to make sure you can't visit the websites you want to visit.

00:30:24.660 It'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.

00:30:36.260 I'm pretty sure that's not what anybody is talking about here.

00:30:38.500 I think what we are talking about is something that is not only clearly going to happen, but is already happening.

00:30:44.000 And that is an attempt to siphon off our ability to have access to information that we want to see.

00:30:48.880 And that that ability is not being restricted even to the most conspiratorial, insane kind of stuff.

00:30:55.800 It's not like the left is saying, you know what, this QAnon thing, it really has to stop. 0.90

00:30:58.800 We're going to stop QAnon. Instead, it's the entire Republican Party is the party of QAnon. 0.98

00:31:02.400 And therefore, if you are a Republican, you are in league with QAnon and you believe QAnon and you're forwarding QAnon.

00:31:07.280 And 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. 1.00

00:31:13.520 The entire party is Marjorie Taylor Greene, except for the party leadership saying that this lady says crazy crap on a regular basis. 1.00

00:31:19.640 Meanwhile, inside the Democratic Party, it's the party of peace, love and joy. 0.98

00:31:22.960 Well, Nancy Pelosi is appearing on the cover of magazines with Elhan Omar, who's an open anti-Semite.

00:31:27.000 I'd like to play Red Rover, Red Rover, send Marjorie Greene Taylor or Taylor Greene over. 0.99

00:31:34.040 OK, there's one. That's crazy. Now we get a pick from their side.

00:31:38.360 It's an insane amount of people that we could pick from that they seem to tolerate all the time.

00:31:47.100 I don't know if this is a political thing or if they're that really self-unaware.

00:31:52.580 We started with the joke about the Jewish space laser, which came from Marjorie Taylor Greene. 0.67

00:31:58.980 And I want to talk a little bit about some of the things and the origins of what she believes.

00:32:05.260 But you have on the other side, you have Rashida Tlaib, who is absolutely an anti-Semite.

00:32:13.740 You have you have people riddled through the left that have either, you know, been a revolutionary, are a revolutionary.

00:32:24.720 They don't like the Constitution. They want to end the Constitution.

00:32:29.000 Are they this self-unaware that that they are also a little out there?

00:32:37.260 Or do they do they just are they just doing this for politics?

00:32:40.820 Well, I mean, they're certainly doing this for politics only.

00:32:44.400 And we're all old enough to remember when it was not Marjorie Taylor Greene and it was Steve King.

00:32:49.640 And when it was not Steve King and it was Christine O'Donnell and it was not Christine O'Donnell, it was Todd Akin.

00:32:53.240 I mean, they've been doing this as long as I'm alive is they find some rando Republican who says some crazy thing.

00:32:58.500 And then every Republican in America must answer for this crazy thing.

00:33:01.600 Meanwhile, I got Nancy Pelosi on the cover of magazine with Ilhan Omar.

00:33:04.260 And it's like, well, you know, that's just the way things go.

00:33:06.700 Five minutes after she was about to censure her for her anti-Semitism.

00:33:09.760 So it is a deep rooted ideology on the left.

00:33:13.740 And you have Mitch McConnell coming out this week and saying that the things that she said are are a cancer.

00:33:21.840 Well, you don't just kind of coexist with cancer.

00:33:24.860 You've got to cut that out.

00:33:26.080 But you you can't silence people.

00:33:31.060 And you also you know, it's not the people of Georgia didn't elect somebody that Mitch McConnell likes or Nancy Pelosi likes.

00:33:37.920 They hired a representative.

00:33:40.100 I don't like the you know, I don't like Warnock that they also sent.

00:33:44.500 But they sent.

00:33:46.000 So what do you do?

00:33:48.640 Yeah, 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.

00:33:58.040 But do you want to expel her from Congress? 0.87

00:33:59.640 And you say, no, no, there's really not a ground to expel her from Congress until she does something that is corrupt or criminal. 1.00

00:34:05.420 And then you can expel her from Congress. 1.00

00:34:07.080 Then 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.

00:34:12.660 And I don't like the January 6th riot.

00:34:14.400 But you can't impeach Trump for saying inflammatory things because that's politics.

00:34:18.240 Lots of people say inflammatory things.

00:34:19.520 Well, if you're not going to vote to impeach him, that must mean that you like the January 6th riot.

00:34:24.520 This is always the game.

00:34:25.660 Right.

00:34:25.840 If you don't give me exactly the thing that I want, then you're on the side of my opponents.

00:34:30.120 And 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.

00:34:34.660 Right. 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.

00:34:40.400 And then two months later, he does something they don't like.

00:34:42.100 And he's back to being horrible old Mitt Romney from Bain Capital with the dog straps at the top of his car.

00:34:47.560 Tell me.

00:34:49.660 I mean, I don't know much about QAnon other than just, you know, I don't have to go too deep to go. 0.93

00:34:57.240 Well, that's ridiculous.

00:34:58.160 I'm not going to spend my time here. 0.60

00:35:01.680 But QAnon and things like this.

00:35:04.000 I mean, Bush knew about 9-11.

00:35:06.200 I think it was like 70 percent of Democrats actually believed that when he was in office.

00:35:11.000 I don't know what the number is now.

00:35:12.640 Is this is this because of just a political agenda?

00:35:18.920 We do this to each other or is it the lack of transparency?

00:35:23.240 Something doesn't feel right.

00:35:25.140 You know, and, you know, we had planes that were flying people back to Saudi Arabia, you know, on 9-11.

00:35:31.400 Everything else is shut down.

00:35:32.600 So people just kind of look at that and say, well, it's got to be something.

00:35:36.420 And because nobody's coming forth and really being transparent, we just make this up.

00:35:41.400 Is this social media?

00:35:43.380 What what what where do these conspiracies come from and how do we how do we disassemble those bombs?

00:35:51.580 I mean, I think that it's all of the above.

00:35:53.860 But 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.

00:35:58.820 Just that the complete disruption of social capital in the United States over the course of my lifetime is incredible to watch.

00:36:05.240 Nobody knows their neighbors.

00:36:06.360 Nobody talks to anybody who disagrees with them.

00:36:08.880 We have these online silos where we talk only to each other.

00:36:11.420 Now you have the left clubbing people back into their into their arena.

00:36:15.780 Right.

00:36:15.980 If you venture out, then you're a bad guy and we have to club you back into place.

00:36:19.700 And as that happens and as I think COVID has made this enormously worse because you can't spend any time with anybody.

00:36:25.100 The politicization of everything in America has made this enormously worse.

00:36:27.880 It used to be you could you could be at a ballgame and you're meeting somebody new and you're talking about sports.

00:36:32.120 You never talk about politics.

00:36:33.080 Now you've got Black Lives Matter painted on the sidelines. 0.63

00:36:35.700 There's literally no way not to talk about politics when everything gets politicized.

00:36:39.560 When 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.

00:36:51.860 And 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.

00:36:58.320 And then you find a mob and they're part of the mob and it feels good.

00:37:01.240 And you get that endorphin rush of being part of the mob.

00:37:03.200 You see this on Twitter all the time.

00:37:04.620 Once you find your mob, it's very difficult to leave your mob.

00:37:06.940 And the thing about conspiracy theories is they do create this enormous level of solidarity.

00:37:12.340 It requires social buy in in order for you to believe in a conspiracy theory.

00:37:15.880 And the crazier the theory, the more social buy in it requires.

00:37:19.120 Right. The more loyalty there are between the members and each other.

00:37:22.140 Right. Cults are very, very loyal to one another.

00:37:24.560 And so you see this online.

00:37:26.340 Online 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.

00:37:33.740 And 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.

00:37:46.540 So here we are sitting here and we are being shut up with with covid.

00:37:56.000 I mean, I see what's happening with Cuomo.

00:37:59.920 The the unbelievable madness that is Andrew Cuomo.

00:38:05.460 And same with Gavin Newsom.

00:38:08.920 Now we have Joe Biden doing executive order after executive order.

00:38:14.260 I they are going to attempt to make Washington, D.C.

00:38:18.580 a 51st state.

00:38:19.660 They are going to pack the courts.

00:38:22.620 They are going to do these things that everybody went.

00:38:25.160 Now, they're not going to do that.

00:38:26.900 They're going to do them.

00:38:27.860 Is 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.

00:38:44.300 Because there's this weird marriage going on now with with people who never thought that they would ever have anything in common politically.

00:38:53.980 And we can talk.

00:38:55.800 We're fine.

00:38:56.820 We're fine.

00:38:58.940 It's this it's the people who actually believe in the Bill of Rights.

00:39:03.300 Do those people exist as the average Democratic voter?

00:39:08.480 I mean, I think they do, but I think they're going to have to make a choice.

00:39:10.960 I don't think that the future of America relies on conservatives nearly as much as it relies on people that conservatives disagree with.

00:39:17.020 Yeah.

00:39:17.260 And who now are forced to a particular choice.

00:39:19.580 And 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.

00:39:29.000 And 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.

00:39:36.320 You 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.

00:39:43.160 You just want the government involved in certain areas to rectify certain imbalances.

00:39:46.380 You have a choice to make.

00:39:47.320 And the choice is this.

00:39:48.040 Are you going to side with the left, which might arrive at utopia sooner but run over more people?

00:39:51.760 Or 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?

00:40:02.240 So 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.

00:40:09.420 Or do you just go along with the people who are willing to basically run directly over anybody in their way?

00:40:15.780 And you're seeing that battle play out right now.

00:40:17.900 I mean, you saw that in the Harper's Weekly letter where you saw 150 liberals saying cancel culture is bad.

00:40:22.240 It's like, OK, well, here's the thing.

00:40:23.540 If cancel culture is bad, I'm going to need you to every once in a while stand up for a conservative being canceled.

00:40:28.380 Yes.

00:40:28.660 Like that's what I'm going to need from you.

00:40:29.800 It'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.

00:40:36.640 It's like, well, yes, I would imagine that you hate it when it happens to you.

00:40:39.420 The 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.

00:40:44.220 Right.

00:40:44.640 Right.

00:40:44.960 It's an amazing thing.

00:40:46.460 And obviously, do you remember when they tried to cancel who is the director work?

00:40:53.440 James Gunn.

00:40:54.020 Yeah, James Gunn.

00:40:54.880 Guardians of the Galaxy.

00:40:55.780 OK, yeah.

00:40:56.580 I believe you stood up for him.

00:40:57.980 I stood up for him.

00:40:59.580 That shouldn't have happened to him, even though we radically disagree.

00:41:04.380 You know what he said was was nonsense.

00:41:06.340 But should he be fired for that?

00:41:09.360 No, no.

00:41:11.360 Right.

00:41:12.040 Right.

00:41:12.300 They don't do that on the other side.

00:41:14.320 That's right.

00:41:14.920 People on the right routinely do this.

00:41:16.440 Right.

00:41:16.700 If I see how often have you tweeted that somebody shouldn't be canceled who you disagree with in really serious ways.

00:41:22.740 Yeah.

00:41:22.980 I do it, I would say, at least once a week, at least once a week.

00:41:25.540 There's somebody who gets canceled.

00:41:26.640 And I say, I disagree with this person on virtually everything.

00:41:29.040 And this person should not be canceled for that.

00:41:31.080 I mean, I've done it for folks who I think are just awful, like Sarah Zhang at The New York Times.

00:41:34.500 Right.

00:41:34.740 There are a bunch of old tweets that she wrote that were pretty racist.

00:41:37.060 And I thought, OK, well, they're old tweets.

00:41:39.160 Number one.

00:41:39.540 Number two, The New York Times knew it was getting.

00:41:40.820 They shouldn't be firing her for old tweets. 0.97

00:41:42.400 That's not a good thing.

00:41:43.320 It's a bad practice generally.

00:41:44.880 And then she turns around and she's like, yeah, you know what?

00:41:46.860 Politico definitely should not have allowed Shapiro to write this.

00:41:48.940 Like, 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.

00:41:57.640 Tell me the Politico story.

00:42:00.000 OK, so Politico asked me to write their playbook.

00:42:03.960 And so I consider it and I think, OK, maybe it would be a fun thing to do.

00:42:07.720 Right.

00:42:07.860 It's a little bit across the aisle sort of stuff in the waning days of the administration.

00:42:11.860 Might not be a bad idea.

00:42:13.120 Might not be the worst thing.

00:42:14.360 For for sort of the body politic and also just for the media generally.

00:42:17.600 And 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.

00:42:23.300 I think that I'm kind of busy this week and they're like, no, no, no, we've got our schedule set.

00:42:26.720 We desperately want you to do this.

00:42:27.920 Please do it.

00:42:28.440 OK, fine.

00:42:29.240 So I say I'll do it.

00:42:30.300 So I write Politico's playbook, which, again, is sort of this insidery newsletter.

00:42:34.260 And the entire world goes nuts, particularly inside Politico's.

00:42:37.220 The entire media declares that it's very bad that Politico has even asked me to do this.

00:42:41.360 Politico has an internal phone call with 225 members of staff, which is insane.

00:42:46.180 It's 225 members of staff.

00:42:47.560 Now, here's the thing.

00:42:48.700 There are a bunch of liberals, like good hearted liberals with whom I am friends at Politico who are on the call.

00:42:53.640 And they were telling me that on the call, people were saying that I was akin to David Duke.

00:42:57.280 One of them said, you know what?

00:42:58.260 Right now, I'm actually researching a piece on the alt-right and the white supremacist, and I'm looking at their message boards.

00:43:02.800 And there is no one these people hate more than you.

00:43:04.980 Like I'm simultaneously looking at their message boards, and you are like public enemy number one over on those message boards.

00:43:09.660 While they're calling you a white supremacist, I'm looking at those message boards like full time.

00:43:14.180 And I said, you know what would be really helpful is if you would tweet that out.

00:43:17.000 I'll think about it.

00:43:18.460 That's the way this tends to work if you're a liberal.

00:43:20.880 Did that person even bring it up on the internal call?

00:43:26.140 Not so far as I'm aware.

00:43:27.380 And 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.

00:43:36.860 And 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.

00:43:46.780 So how many are there really?

00:43:49.140 How 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? 0.69

00:43:59.960 So I think you're watching a renormalization of the Democratic Party.

00:44:02.740 I 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.

00:44:17.740 And I think that there's still 60 percent of Democrats, particularly older Democrats, who are not super fond of that particular direction.

00:44:23.800 But the question is, do they hate Republicans more than they hate the woke left shutting down those rights?

00:44:29.740 And 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.

00:44:41.840 And 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.

00:44:55.240 I 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.

00:45:00.840 And 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.

00:45:11.580 The communism is just, you know, enforced by the government.

00:45:15.300 But 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?

00:45:28.160 This is the thing that, you know, I think people are missing. What would those things be?

00:45:33.660 So 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.

00:45:39.320 I 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.

00:45:43.760 Right. The Noah concept is get everything in the ark, board up the doors, the floods come in.

00:45:48.700 And then there is the Abraham concept, which is bring outsiders into the tent, talk with them, convert them, add to the flock.

00:45:54.960 I think we're going to have to pursue both simultaneously. I think I think we've always gone after one or the other.

00:45:59.320 I think the first thing that has to be done is people who are conservative need to be subscribing to places like Blaze TV.

00:46:04.860 They 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.

00:46:09.740 The way that we survive is by people who can't cut us off. Right.

00:46:13.720 We're not going to cut us off. We need to we need to consolidate our own forces and back each other.

00:46:18.800 And you and I have talked about this a thousand times.

00:46:20.300 Glenn, nothing has changed along those lines. It's just we're going to need to build more infrastructure.

00:46:24.660 We'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.

00:46:32.020 That's one thing. The other thing we're going to need to do is we're going to need to continue to reach out.

00:46:35.480 And, 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.

00:46:49.180 The 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.

00:46:56.520 Liberals are going to get upset when people who look and act exactly like them start getting canceled.

00:47:00.620 And so reaching out to liberals actually has the effect of of achieving that purpose in some ways.

00:47:06.020 And 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.

00:47:11.980 Not only was I not unaware of it, I warned all the editors of Politico was about to happen and they didn't believe me.

00:47:16.960 But the that is it's it's weird.

00:47:19.640 They haven't actually lived it when they say, oh, there doesn't exist because they haven't lived it.

00:47:24.720 This happens to me all the time.

00:47:26.440 I'll talk to somebody who's mainstream liberal and I'll say, no, you don't want to do that.

00:47:31.880 You have no idea the hell that is going to come down around you.

00:47:35.160 And they're always shocked.

00:47:37.200 They're always shocked.

00:47:38.420 It happens exactly the way we say.

00:47:40.240 And they're like, I can't believe this.

00:47:42.460 Yeah, because you don't live it.

00:47:46.000 Right now, the cancel culture for them only exists when they are canceled.

00:47:49.580 And I mean, this is the modern version of conservatives, a liberal who's mugged by reality.

00:47:55.020 Right now, an anti leftist is a person who's mugged by the left.

00:47:58.020 And 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.

00:48:04.140 But the left is is on a mugging spree right now and they will go after pretty much anybody who crosses them in any way.

00:48:10.040 So 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.

00:48:16.220 We should do it because it's always good to have those open conversations and make some friends with whom we disagree.

00:48:20.640 And 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.

00:48:28.080 And I think it's, you know, what you said, start reaching out to those people.

00:48:31.820 I think it's important to not talk about policies, but talk about the principles that we have in common.

00:48:37.000 Freedom of speech.

00:48:37.740 You know, come on, man.

00:48:39.280 Can you give me the Bill of Rights?

00:48:40.440 If you agree with the Bill of Rights, then we're good.

00:48:42.820 We're good.

00:48:43.500 And 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.

00:48:56.380 I don't think people are that different when it comes to the principles, although they are drifting.

00:49:01.600 Let me go to the NOAA concept.

00:49:03.560 You mentioned earlier about states.

00:49:07.600 I really think I'm all for secession myself, not for us, but for them.

00:49:13.580 I mean, we've got all the documents.

00:49:15.220 We haven't left America.

00:49:16.740 They want to leave America. 0.67

00:49:18.160 But, you know, our states have to draw the line and say, look, the Constitution guarantees these rights.

00:49:27.460 And if you start screwing with those rights, we're not going with you.

00:49:31.200 We're a sanctuary state for the amendments.

00:49:36.440 What do you think of that?

00:49:37.800 I mean, I think that that is what is likely to happen in both directions, by the way.

00:49:41.300 I 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.

00:49:50.520 Suddenly they fall in love with federalism when Trump is president.

00:49:53.020 And then immediately upon Biden acceding to the office, suddenly it's, oh, look, federalism is bad.

00:49:57.680 I don't like federalism anymore.

00:49:58.780 Federalism is terrible.

00:49:59.820 Some of us are fine with federalism all the way across the board.

00:50:01.980 So I think that states are going to have to resist a lot of these encroachments.

00:50:06.600 And that is likely to fragment the country.

00:50:10.160 Again, federalism can exist so long as people understand that the federal government can't do everything.

00:50:15.240 I 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.

00:50:20.240 And every element of the Democratic policy agenda right now is unification at the federal level.

00:50:24.760 Everything 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.

00:50:38.440 They want to federalize everything.

00:50:40.360 They want top-down control.

00:50:41.460 And states at a certain point are going to have to say, listen, you want to enforce an unconstitutional law.

00:50:46.180 You're going to have to come do it because we're not going to do it. 0.96

00:50:47.960 Any 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? 0.97

00:51:01.880 I didn't live in California for a reason. 0.99

00:51:03.880 You know, I love California, but it was insane.

00:51:08.860 Same thing with New York.

00:51:10.220 I love New York City, but it was insane.

00:51:13.560 We all knew it was going to fall apart.

00:51:16.260 Why do I in Texas or in, you know, in any other state, why am I required now to pay for their madness?

00:51:25.500 Yeah, I mean, that is the question of the hour.

00:51:30.100 Again, the country would be a lot better off if we weren't subsidizing each other across state lines.

00:51:35.180 The argument the left will use is that, you know, it's red states that are disproportionately poverty stricken.

00:51:39.180 And 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.

00:51:46.980 Yeah, that's called a federal program, right?

00:51:48.580 There's a federal anti-poverty program, and that applies equally to everybody across all of America.

00:51:54.040 And so if there are more people in one state than another, then people in one state might receive more net dollars.

00:51:58.240 But if you're talking about bailing out governments for bad decisions, that's a completely different thing.

00:52:02.060 And 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.

00:52:09.580 And Texas now is supposed to pay that back.

00:52:11.500 I literally left California, so I did not have to pay taxes to the teachers unions in California.

00:52:16.440 And 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.

00:52:21.040 It's absurd.

00:52:22.520 So what do we do?

00:52:24.280 How do you fight that?

00:52:25.060 I 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.

00:52:35.940 Because once the federal law is passed, then it's very difficult to say that the IRS can't come and grab your tax money.

00:52:41.980 Ben Shapiro, thank you so much.

00:52:44.060 You can find him at The Daily Wire.

00:52:46.500 Please subscribe to The Daily Wire.

00:52:48.820 They've got great shows.

00:52:50.180 They're entering into entertainment.

00:52:52.480 And, of course, you can get Ben's show on Daily Wire.

00:52:55.860 You can get the podcast.

00:52:57.640 You can also get it on radio as well.

00:52:59.820 Ben Shapiro, thank you very much.

00:53:01.560 Thanks, Glenn.

00:53:01.920 Great to talk to you.

00:53:08.080 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

00:53:22.480 Bye-bye.

00:53:28.860 Bye.

00:53:29.140 Bye-bye.

00:53:31.560 Bye-bye.

00:53:32.240 Bye-bye.

00:53:33.200 Bye-bye.

00:53:33.580 Bye-bye.

00:53:34.000 Bye-bye.

00:53:34.240 Bye-bye.

00:53:35.680 Bye-bye.

00:53:36.140 Bye-bye.

00:53:36.560 Bye-bye.

00:53:49.960 Bye.

00:53:50.400 Bye-bye.

The Glenn Beck Program - February 06, 2021

Ep 96 ｜ Jewish Space Lasers & Deplatforming 'MAGA Media' ｜ Ben Shapiro ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript