Ben Shapiro's new book, The Authoritarian Moment, is out now, and it's a must-read for anyone who's ever wanted to know what it means to be an American in the 21st century. In this episode, Ben and Megyn talk about COVID, the Delta Variant, the new crackdowns, and the new mask mandates popping up in cities from coast to coast.
00:01:28.080So without further ado, quick ad and then Ben.
00:01:35.740Let's get right to it because I want to start.
00:01:37.280There's so much to go over, including your book.
00:01:38.800But let's start with COVID and Delta, dun, dun, dun, Delta, where they're treating us, you know, like we're back in the middle of the black plague and everybody's got to go back inside.
00:01:48.280We're seeing mask mandates pop up even for the vaccinated in L.A.
00:01:52.380I think it was in St. Louis was the other place.
00:01:54.540Now we're hearing the American Academy of Pediatrics say children, anybody above the age of two has got to wear a mask when they return to school, according to this group, the Pediatrics American Academy, even if they're vaccinated.
00:02:06.480So even if you try out one of these experimental vaccines on your 12 year old.
00:02:10.520And by the way, by the fall, it could be available to those as young as infants.
00:02:13.800So you you go, you vaccinate your kid.
00:02:17.400Still, this group is saying they should be wearing masks.
00:02:20.800And then they turn around Ben and say, why can't the people listen to us when we say to get vaccinated?
00:02:30.460I mean, if you look at the statistics, the statistics we used to care about were hospitalizations and deaths.
00:02:34.500And right now in the United States, according to the latest count, our seven day rolling average death in the United States is still under 300 deaths today.
00:02:40.380When we were back at the height of this thing back in January, we were experiencing 3,200 deaths a day, 3,300 deaths a day.
00:02:46.020And in fact, right now, in terms of sort of number of deaths per day, COVID ranks in terms of causes of death in the United States somewhere between diabetes and Alzheimer's.
00:02:54.340So this is not a disease that is killing thousands of people every single day.
00:02:58.540What's more, we're talking about a disease in which the solution is eminently available to anyone now over the age of 12.
00:03:05.740If you if you want to get a vaccine, you can.
00:03:07.480There are going to be people who make the risk reward calculation.
00:03:18.880But once I've had the vaccine, I frankly don't care whether other people around me have had a vaccine.
00:03:22.920And I think it's more respectful to them to treat them as individual agents capable of assessing risk than to suggest that I have to wear a mask to prevent them from the consequences of what I consider to be their own bad decision making.
00:03:33.560The problem here is that the Democrats and the Biden administration set up a hard binary last year and the hard binary was zero COVID or learn to live with COVID.
00:03:41.780And the problem is that once you set up zero COVID as the goal, you're going to be doing lockdowns and masking for the rest of time because zero COVID is not going to happen.
00:04:04.980The notion that we were going to get down to zero COVID or the warnings that you're now hearing that if we allow this thing to continue to exist, that there will be future variants.
00:04:12.920Well, I don't see that you have a choice because the reality is there are 7 billion people on planet Earth.
00:04:20.180It's killed 4 million people at least.
00:04:22.160I mean, that is not considering the wild undercount that probably occurred in India.
00:04:25.480You're probably talking upwards of 5, 6 million people who have been killed by this virus.
00:04:28.840It is present in every nation on planet Earth.
00:04:31.660You can either shut down all the borders and do lockdowns and masking forever and still not kill the virus.
00:04:35.660Or you can do what Democrats never were willing to even engage with back last summer and say, OK, we're going to have to learn to live with this.
00:04:43.500And because Democrats drew that hard divide between the Andrew Cuomo approach, which was lock everything down, mask forever, and the Ron DeSantis approach, which was very much like Sweden.
00:04:50.660Protect the most vulnerable, shield the most vulnerable, and then let everybody else make their own decisions.
00:04:55.060Because Democrats took the wrong side of that, they cannot now allow people to go back to regular life because to do so would be to admit that the rubric they used last year was totally wrong.
00:06:07.340So they've been forced to wear masks in school this year.
00:06:09.860And presumably, I mean, I'm fighting very hard right now to make it as much influence as I could possibly wield to say that kids should not be masked.
00:06:17.500The reality is, in the United States, people under the age of 18, fewer than 350 people under the age of 18 total in the United States.
00:06:24.320That's a subgroup that includes 75 million Americans, fewer than 350 have died.
00:06:29.160In the same time period, 810, 812 kids died from pneumonia in that same period of time.
00:06:35.260Kids are not the main vectors of transmission.
00:06:37.460Kids are not getting seriously ill from this on a large scale.
00:06:41.140You have to always be very specific in your language so that YouTube doesn't demonetize you or take you down if you say things like, kids are not getting sick from this.
00:06:48.360Which, on a statistical level, kids are, when I say they're not getting sick from this, I mean a very, very tiny, vanishingly small percentage of kids are getting seriously ill from COVID.
00:06:56.380And most of those kids have some sort of serious preexisting condition.
00:07:00.340The notion that I'm supposed to mask up my seven-year-old, the real reason they're saying this, by the way, is because they're not afraid that my seven-year-old, God forbid, is going to get sick and die from COVID.
00:07:08.400What they're afraid of is that my seven-year-old will meet a 40-year-old and give the 40-year-old COVID.
00:07:12.120And my answer to that is, the 40-year-old has every opportunity to head down to the local public.
00:08:06.960The left's definition of empathy was that I am supposed to respect as policy the subjective feelings of any person.
00:08:14.300So if you are 40 and you feel, and you're vaccinated and you feel at risk, I'm supposed to change all of public policy in order to rectify that problem for you.
00:08:57.060You know, you look at just in New York City, you've got de Blasio saying that he thinks we need employers to mandate the COVID vaccine for all of their employees.
00:09:05.620Meanwhile, he can't even do that at the city level because the unions won't agree.
00:09:08.420So he can't even manage to make it happen at the city.
00:09:10.800OK, but he wants all the employers to do that.
00:09:12.440The Biden officials are now saying that they expect vulnerable Americans to get booster shots of the COVID vaccine, which is also questionable about whether they need that.
00:09:23.880Why won't Republicans get the vaccines, completely ignoring the fact that you've got black and Latino Americans who continue to lag behind whites when it comes to vaccinations.
00:09:32.760There's there's a hesitancy within the communities.
00:09:35.240And we're not allowed to talk about that at all.
00:09:36.920It's all the evil Trump supporters who are ruining the recovery for everyone.
00:09:41.740I mean, the part that drives me nuts on sort of a personal level is there were two articles last week that both had to be corrected, both of which were sort of listing the Republicans who had switched over the vaccine because there has been sort of this newfound enthusiasm for vaccination.
00:09:53.880Amongst some members of sort of the openly political right and people were listing me in there.
00:09:57.980And I was like, well, no, I've been recommending vaccinations since literally before COVID existed.
00:10:12.440But the assumption from the left is that if something is bad in the country, it must be those evil people who are on the other side of the aisle.
00:10:17.960It couldn't possibly be people on my own side of the aisle.
00:10:20.460Or, by the way, it couldn't be people who have serious doubts about the institutional credibility of the folks who are talking to them.
00:10:26.240It's amazing to me to see the Biden administration continue to try out Anthony Fauci, who's been wrong six ways from Sunday, as the face of the COVID outreach plan.
00:10:34.440I mean, he has switched on every major topic in this pandemic, from whether schools should be open to whether masks are necessary, to whether after you're vaccinated, you should have masks or not, to, by the way, whether there was American funding for COVID research in Wuhan.
00:10:46.360He's switched on all of these particular areas.
00:10:49.520And yet, they're saying that if you have doubts about any of these institutional players, that that's your fault, that that's your problem.
00:10:57.180It seems like a power game, not like an actual attempt.
00:11:00.160I'm noticing that there's an overt viciousness with the way that people are talking about people on the right who are unvaccinated that doesn't apply to people on the left.
00:11:09.780And the overt viciousness is not designed to get those people to vaccinate.
00:11:13.580It's not designed to get those people to make a different risk reward calculation.
00:11:17.120If you want to convince somebody to actually get vaccinated, what you say is, look, here are the statistical risks to you if you're 25 years old, right?
00:11:25.060You have a shot like one in a thousand people who get it when you're 25 years old are going to die of COVID.
00:11:29.120The risks of you getting a serious side effect from the vaccine by all available data are much, much lower than the one in 1,000.
00:11:34.740So just by risk reward, you probably should get the vaccine, right?
00:11:37.500Instead of saying that and then saying, look, you're a free individual, you might regret it if you get sick and you didn't get the vaccine, but that's up to you.
00:11:43.860Instead of doing that, it's you're a bad person.
00:11:47.180You don't care about like none of that is designed to actually elicit a response where people get a vaccine that is designed to create a dichotomy between the people who are good, the elect, and the people who are not good, the unelect.
00:12:02.040I feel like I'm vaccinated, too, and I believe in the vaccines and I hope people get them.
00:12:05.860But I don't believe in shaming the people who have chosen not to do it.
00:12:08.880And I'm getting a little uncomfortable with this this division between those who have gotten it and believe in it and those who just feel hesitant about it as if they're bad people.
00:12:17.920I mean, especially those who have had COVID and then refuse to get the vaccine.
00:12:24.060I don't know why we went from accepting that as, you know, we used to understand that if you had COVID, you didn't need a vaccine and to switching over to you still must get the vaccine.
00:12:32.960And if you don't get the vaccine, you're running around as sort of this purveyor of a deadly, deadly virus in a reckless, reckless way.
00:12:41.460Yeah, by the way, the data tend to support the notion that natural immunity may be actually much more durable than vaccine driven immunity.
00:12:47.480There's some data from Israel that have supported that idea.
00:12:49.420So, listen, again, I'm I'm I think that a few things can be true at once.
00:13:44.380I don't I'm bewildered, frankly, by people who get the vaccine.
00:13:47.580And then they're going around saying to other people, well, I'm uncomfortable being in a room with you if you're unvaccinated.
00:13:51.460The CDC itself said that if you're vaccinated and you're in a room with a person with COVID, if you are not symptomatic, you do not have to test.
00:14:21.200And on the on the numbers of children who have died from COVID, we're already seeing some hospitals come out and revise their numbers, saying they overcounted.
00:14:29.060They counted kids who died with COVID as opposed to from COVID.
00:14:33.480And so you can probably put an asterisk on the numbers that you just hit as having a healthy amount of overstated numbers for the reasons I just discussed.
00:14:42.320Let me switch gears with you and just talk quickly about the Olympics.
00:14:45.120I'm kind of interested in what's happening here.
00:15:23.320I mean, I think there are two factors.
00:15:24.480I think one is that all live sports took a major hit during the pandemic.
00:15:27.100And one of the reasons for that is because watching people play in empty rooms, uh, is, is really not pleasant.
00:15:34.220It's just, it's, it's weird and awkward because we've all been conditioned to watch people play in front of giant stadiums and people cheering them on.
00:15:39.260The excitement of a live event is just gone when you're watching people play in what looks frankly like a high school rec room with like a couple of parents in the stands.
00:15:45.680It's just, it's not exciting to watch.
00:15:47.320Uh, the crowd is a part of the spectacle.
00:15:48.900Um, but beyond that, again, the, the, uh, when the U S women's national soccer team lost to Sweden, I was not sad.
00:16:13.140Like that's not the way any of that works.
00:16:14.780And, and when you see all of these members of the Olympic team who have basically been granted the opportunity to represent their country, only to go over there and crap all over the country.
00:16:22.580Like, I'm not interested in watching them win.
00:16:24.420Frankly, I'm kind of interested in watching them lose.
00:16:26.220So it's, yeah, I think there are a lot of people who have said, like, if you think of great Olympic moments, all those Olympic moments are pride in America, not pride in people who are crapping all over America, right?
00:16:36.460It's miracle on ice kind of stuff, typically speaking, you know, that there are always exceptions to that rule, right?
00:16:41.300There are sort of moments that in the moment were really controversial, and later we treat them as kind of great American moments, like the sprinters raising the fist in the middle of the, of the civil rights movement at the Olympics.
00:16:50.660But that's, that's more of an outlier than I think more why people in real time watch the Olympics.
00:16:55.720It's supposed to be a patriotic moment.
00:16:57.040It's not really because I care who's the best person at badminton.
00:17:00.340You know, it's like, I want to feel good about America.
00:17:02.080And I feel like a lot of these athletes are taking away the very reason.
00:17:05.740And in, in many cases, the only reason we watch the Olympics, which is to feel that great sense of national pride.
00:17:11.300I don't want to tune in and see Gwen Berry win anything when it comes to the hammer throw, and then turn her back on the American flag.
00:17:18.020And I bet she will do that if she wins, because it's a PR moment for her, right?
00:17:22.640She's looking for, to advance her own name, not to advance any good feeling about America.
00:17:27.020So I feel like Americans have gotten a hint through the NBA and all these other, and by the way, we lost, the men's basketball team lost for the first time in a long time.
00:17:34.300They've gotten a hint that these athletes over there may or may not be representing our values.
00:17:38.900Well, this is the part that's so incredible about what the United States has sort of become, is that it used to be that the marketing for the Olympics was you win, and then you get on the cover of Wheaties box, and you talk about how great America is.
00:17:48.760And now the way that you market is you win, and you talk about how crappy America is, and Nike signs you to a million-dollar contract to talk about how crappy America is, which shows you how motivated the woke crowd is in the United States, how much market power the corporations think they have.
00:17:59.760Like, if you were an Olympian, and you wanted to make money after the Olympics, it used to be that you'd be, you know, pretty patriotic and just go and perform for the country.
00:18:06.820Now, if you want to make serious money after the Olympics, you can come in third, but as long as you kneel for the flag, you're going to make money.
00:18:12.780Up next, I'm going to ask Ben what he thinks of Ron DeSantis as the 2024 nominee for the Republicans, and would he be better than Trump?
00:18:50.700I've heard you speak about it, because you always, I'm not being solicitous, but you're always straight up about what you're doing.
00:18:59.420And the question is whether or not we should be in a position where you are, why can't the experts say,
00:19:09.880we know that this virus is, in fact, it's going to be, or excuse me, we know why all the drugs approved are not temporarily approved, but permanently approved.
00:19:23.400That's underway, too. I expect that to occur quickly.
00:19:32.020And the good news is that, you know, we've always suggested that, you know, America might be ethnocentric because there's so many people who want English to be the official language.
00:19:38.840The good news is that we've now had a couple of presidents, and Joe Biden is the most notable, who literally does not speak English.
00:19:47.060Your one and a half year old could have done better than that.
00:19:49.300Oh, clearly. I mean, clearly. Here's the thing. Joe Biden was elected on the basis of basically two promises, one of which he is sort of keeping and the other of which he's utterly unable to keep.
00:20:00.440One is that he was not going to be Donald Trump, which by dint of the fact that he is not Donald Trump, he is fulfilling.
00:20:07.340The other was that he was going to be dead. And on the one hand, he sort of is, right?
00:20:11.900Like every time you ask him to answer a question, it's an adventure in perverse.
00:20:17.440It's sort of like watching a really bad episode of British The Office, like the awkward cringe humor.
00:20:22.580Am I allowed to laugh at this? Like, it's so awkward.
00:20:26.740But at the same time, his agenda is not dead, right? His agenda is extremely radical.
00:20:31.020Like the promise of him not being an alive person was that he was basically just going to come in and be inanimate.
00:20:35.200And then we would all just relax for a couple of years.
00:20:37.140We'd get back to our center and then we would start fighting with each other again, but in sort of more rational ways.
00:20:42.120Instead, he comes in. He is there to basically just be this, a non-threatening old man who can't put together sentences.
00:20:48.800But at the same time, he's pushing this unbelievably radical agenda.
00:20:51.880And so you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds, which is an inarticulate president pushing an extraordinarily radical agenda.
00:20:56.840And you can see it in his approval ratings, which have dropped pretty significantly over the course of the last couple of months.
00:21:01.500The more important polling data that I've seen over the past couple of days is the massive drop in the number of Americans who are positive about the direction of the country.
00:21:08.460We went from well into 60s, like 64% of Americans being optimistic about the state of the country and how it's going to go over the next 10 years a couple of months ago.
00:21:17.540Around like 36% of Americans are optimistic about the direction the country is going to go over the next 10 years.
00:21:23.320And I think that is largely attributable to the fact that we now have a senior class.
00:21:28.560And it's not just him, right? I mean, it's Pelosi. It's Schumer.
00:21:31.020I mean, we don't have anyone in control of the levers of government in this country who's under the age of 70 who are not particularly good at their jobs presiding over a mass takeover of huge swaths of American life.
00:21:44.400Well, and the American people don't want it.
00:21:45.660And in the same way that they've started pushing back against the defund the police movement, which now Biden is like, what?
00:21:50.580No one's ever pushing for that. What are you talking about?
00:21:52.720I wonder whether they're going to get to the same place on critical race theory and, you know, its related tentacles that are in our school systems.
00:21:59.860Because, I mean, you saw the Biden Department of Education.
00:22:02.380They promoted a CRT book, a book called basically it was they were promoting something from the abolitionist teaching network handbook that wants to disrupt whiteness and, quote, other forms of oppression.
00:22:14.340Whiteness is a form of oppression, and that's what they want our children to be taught.
00:22:17.720And they came out and said, oh, well, that was that was a mistake.
00:22:20.080We didn't actually mean to promote that through the Department of Education.
00:22:23.360And Betsy DeVos, former education secretary, came out and said, bull, the notion that this was a mistake is an absolute falsehood.
00:22:30.540She said this is another reflection of the true nature of the Biden Department of Ed.
00:22:33.560We've seen earlier this year the grant process that they just had to reverse trying to reward 1619 Project and Ibram X.
00:22:39.520Kendi's thoughts being taught in history classes.
00:22:41.500And so you tell me whether you think it was a mistake for them to push books asking teachers to disrupt whiteness and whether there's any chance they're going to have to reverse that as they did with defund the police because the people are not on board.
00:22:52.440They're going to have a much more difficult time walking back from from critical race theory than they are from defund the police, because defund the police, you can at least separate off the policy from the sort of underlying critique.
00:23:03.220Right. You can still have Joe Biden out there saying, well, yeah, sure, the police are systemically racist and they're systemically terrible treatment of black Americans by the law enforcement system.
00:23:10.680But defunding the police is not the solution. I can see him saying that the problem with CRT is because the CRT theory has now been boiled down to and sort of D, you know, demystified into a basic take, which is that equity has to rule all and that we have to shape all government policy around group benefits and group detriments.
00:23:30.740Once that's been boiled down that far, I don't think that they can walk away from that.
00:23:33.600It's much more coherent inside all of the policies. But like to walk away from critical race theory does not just mean walking away from the most overtly ridiculous aspects of CRT.
00:23:44.040Right. All of these sort of anti-whiteness studies nonsense things that you see in the education department or General Milley recommending Ibram X.
00:23:50.120Kendi in the in the Navy reading list or something. Right. It's not just walking away from that stuff.
00:23:54.780In order for them to truly walk away from it, they would have to walk away from what they've declared to be the core of their agenda, which is equity.
00:23:59.560Right. Every single major member of this administration has said that the guiding principle of this administration is equity, which sounds a lot like equality, but it's completely opposed to it.
00:24:07.560Equality is the basic idea that we're supposed to treat people neutrally.
00:24:11.000Every individual is supposed to be equal before the law. You have equality of rights.
00:24:15.460But equity is the suggestion that all outcomes are supposed to be equal, which is precisely the opposite of equality.
00:24:21.400So equity and the same thing, by the way, that Democrats have done with the move from disinformation to misinformation in the informational sphere.
00:24:27.340They went from four years ago, six years ago. They went basically after Trump was elected in 2016.
00:24:31.600They went to Russian disinformation is the reason that Trump got elected to its misinformation is the reason that everything has gone wrong.
00:24:38.020By disinformation, we mean the Russians actually promulgating false information in the election to help Donald Trump.
00:24:43.200By misinformation, we mean anything we don't like. They shifted one letter in the entire meeting of the word.
00:24:47.420Same thing with equality and equity. They just took out a couple of letters and then they just were like, well, you know, means the same thing.
00:24:53.420It doesn't mean anything remotely like it. It's a linguistic and semantic trick.
00:24:56.400So them doing that, I think they're going to have a very difficult time separating off from that, especially because there is an underlying theory of this administration and of the entire establishment left at this point.
00:25:05.680It is a theory that is a holdover from the Obama years.
00:25:08.000And that theory is that there was a demographic minority that was going to build into a majority with the help of college-educated white liberals.
00:25:16.440That after Barack Obama won in 2012, Democrats would never lose another election because there was this growing contingent of black and brown people accompanied by college-educated white people.
00:25:25.260And they were going to remake America in their mold.
00:25:28.220And they were never going to lose again.
00:25:29.380It was going to be the intersectional coalition along with the people who were willing to work with them along with the allies.
00:25:33.880And they were going to just run roughshod over the rest of American politics.
00:25:36.600And when that didn't work in 2016, I think a lot of people on the left lost their minds.
00:25:40.780And I think now that it seems to have worked again with Joe Biden, right, or at least they can convince themselves that it has, they cannot break that coalition.
00:25:47.740They can't go back to the well and be like, well, yeah, you know, we actually don't think that's the governing theory here.
00:25:52.260And they're going to be surprised in 2022 when they learn, once again, that that theory is a bad theory, that treating Americans as members of groups as opposed to individuals is bad electoral politics and is not going to end with them in some sort of permanent position of control over the auspices of American government.
00:26:08.160I heard you say the other day on your show, you think that the Democrats are in danger of losing both houses, the House and the Senate in the midterm elections.
00:26:17.720I think that if the Republicans don't win back the House in 2022, the entire leadership team needs to go.
00:26:22.180They have every systemic advantage going into 2022 from redistricting to the fact that it's an off-year election to the fact that the Democratic policies are not popular and that Nancy Pelosi is doing a terrible job in leadership of the House.
00:26:33.480They have a lot of factors running against them.
00:26:35.260I think that it's going to be a red wave for Republicans in 2022.
00:26:38.620And in the Senate, right now, Republicans are on the verge of winning back that New Hampshire Senate seat.
00:26:43.760If Sununu runs in New Hampshire, I think he wins that seat because I think that the polls tend to systematically underrepresent Republicans.
00:26:49.320So I think that Republicans win New Hampshire.
00:26:51.060I think Republicans win that Georgia seat that's up again.
00:26:53.240I think that depending on whether Ron Johnson runs again in Wisconsin, he seems like he's leaning toward not.
00:26:58.280And I think Wisconsin trends red again.
00:26:59.860So I think that there's a very solid – like I think that the one seat that looks the diciest for Republicans in the Senate is Pennsylvania with Pat Toomey retiring.
00:27:07.000But there are several Democratic seats that are up.
00:27:10.220And I think that – listen, Republicans only need to pick up one and suddenly they're in control of the Senate again.
00:27:14.440I've got to ask you about the spending because I know it's not sexy to talk about, but I've been watching these numbers.
00:27:20.980You know, it's like one of those cartoons where the number on the cash register just keeps going and then they have dollar signs in their eyes.
00:27:26.180And it's just like this drunken spend fest in Washington.
00:27:30.160I don't totally understand the deal that's being made right now by Republicans on Capitol Hill and why they're even dealing with the Biden administration on the infrastructure, quote, quote, infrastructure bill, which is $1.2 trillion.
00:27:41.760In addition to this spending bill that the Democrats are going to push through anyway via reconciliation without Republican support, that's supposedly $3.5 trillion.
00:27:51.300So now you're over $4.5 trillion of our money that's about to be spent.
00:27:55.660And Charlie Cook of National Review was just pointing out the entire budget for all 20 years of the Afghanistan war was $2 trillion.
00:28:02.980We spent $2 trillion over 20 years of war.
00:28:06.180And we're about to just roll off checks for $4 plus trillion.
00:28:10.380How is this not the headline in every major newspaper and newscast in the country, Ben?
00:28:14.960And the thing is, they're going to get it.
00:28:16.940The Republicans are going to give the $1.2 trillion to them in the, quote, infrastructure bill, and they can't stop the $3.5 trillion.
00:28:46.520Once the spending ramps up, because the American people, they're of divided mind.
00:28:50.600If you ask them, should we cut spending, they will always say yes.
00:28:52.500And then if you ask them, what would you like to cut, they never have an answer to that, because that would actually involve cutting spending.
00:28:58.100And because we've been able to have our cake and eat it, too, right?
00:29:00.280We've had the central bank controlling monetary policy in the United States, not only monetary, but fiscal policy in the United States, largely, for the last 20 years.
00:29:07.160And when the central bank takes control, they can literally make money up out of thin air.
00:29:11.500And then because the United States is comparatively the world's strongest economy, that means that we can always still sell bonds.
00:29:16.960I mean, there will never come a point in the future where we won't be able to sell bonds and be able to monetize American debt.
00:29:22.120Obviously, we'll still be able to do that.
00:29:23.600I mean, we can always raise taxes later.
00:29:26.460This stuff, as people have said before, it is the metaphor of the man who jumps from the 100th story and somebody sticks their head out at story 50 and says, how are things going?
00:29:33.940And the guy says, so far, so good, right?
00:29:35.460This is not one of these things where we gradually screech to a halt.
00:29:38.440This is one of those things where there's just a clip and then we're over it, right?
00:29:40.600I mean, when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy, just like it was with the 07-08 crash, when there's a crash, there's a crash.
00:29:48.360It's not like we sort of ease into the crash.
00:29:50.420When people start around the world realizing they're not getting their money back except in inflated dollars, or when Americans start to realize that all of the debts that we've accrued are now going to be paid for by ratcheting up taxes on the middle class, which, by the way, is the only way you pay for any of this.
00:30:03.340The only way you can have a Scandinavian-style social welfare system is by taxing people at Scandinavian rates, and that means kicking in 60% tax rates at 60 grand a year.
00:30:12.500It does not mean that you're going to be able to take more of Jeff Bezos' money and pay for all of this.
00:30:18.240Once that starts to hit home, people are going to feel it, but it doesn't hit home until it hits home.
00:30:22.660And we have an unfortunate tendency here, which is the intelligentsia, first of all, loves spending, and they love action, and you hear it from people all the time.
00:30:31.080I don't want things done in Washington.
00:30:32.320The entire system of the government was set up by the founders to never get anything done in Washington, and we have completely reversed that in the United States.
00:30:40.200It's a point of great irritation to me.
00:30:42.800I was thinking the other day about even how historians, you know, kind of the traditional historians view the history of the United States and which presidents were good and which presidents were bad.
00:30:50.240And if you look at the 20th century, what you will see is that the presidents who spent the most are considered the most important, right?
00:31:02.580Barack Obama, super important president.
00:31:04.540And then you look at the periods of American history where we had, you know, like, incredible growth.
00:31:08.840Like, for example, the entire 1920s, which was a period of unbelievable growth in the U.S. economy.
00:31:12.740Every president is derided as a do-nothing, useless president.
00:31:16.060How is it that we have a booming economy from 1920 to 1929, and all the presidents during that period are considered awful?
00:31:22.220And FDR presides over the longest depression in the history of the United States, exacerbates it by probably eight years, and he's considered probably the most powerful and most special president of the 20th century.
00:31:30.980It just demonstrates human beings have an inability to understand that sometimes the thing not done is more important than the thing done.
00:31:43.340Well, by this standard, we should be seeing statues of President Trump go up any day now because he was also a big spender.
00:31:49.580But somehow, oddly, the rule doesn't apply to him, Ben.
00:31:52.580Yeah, well, again, I think that the reality is I think that if it were not for the way that Trump were on Twitter and the easy target that he presented that way,
00:31:58.860I think in 15 years, you actually would see some of that from the left.
00:32:01.480I think you would start seeing, like, is it time for a second look?
00:32:04.640Because you're getting some of this with George W. Bush, right?
00:32:15.700But I think that you would get that with Trump, except that he's such a convenient target, and he says so many things that really get their goat that they're never going to allow the quote-unquote rethink.
00:32:23.860Although you started to see even a little bit of that, right?
00:32:25.920You started to see it like, well, at least he's not Ron DeSantis.
00:32:35.860Well, speaking of DeSantis, your governor, what do you think the odds are he's the nominee?
00:32:41.240So there's a bit of runway between here and the election.
00:32:44.440I think that he is by far the strongest candidate in the Republican field at this point.
00:32:47.840He is excellent at handling media, which is a requirement for people who are on the right, particularly in primaries,
00:32:53.240because the real opponent in a primary is not the other Republicans, it's the media.
00:32:56.000And DeSantis is great at handling them.
00:32:58.820The Democrats made a very large-scale mistake when they chose him as their bet noire, because by doing that, they elevated him to prominence.
00:33:07.860He's very popular in the state of Florida.
00:33:09.320I think he's going to beat Nicky Freed pretty handily in the state of Florida in his reelect effort.
00:33:12.760He very narrowly beat Andrew Gillum, which just shows you how close the United States came to having a meth addict with male prostitutes as the governor of a major state.
00:33:42.480We saw this actually a little bit with Scott Walker in Wisconsin, for example, that when somebody gets prominent early, then all the guns sort of focus in on them.
00:33:49.480You start to see a little bit of nitpicking from other Republicans who would like to run for president.
00:33:53.920Things can be a little harder with DeSantis because he is pretty combative.
00:33:56.740But I think that the bigger issue that – the issue that waits in the wings is President Trump, right?
00:34:01.200If Trump wants to run again, and honestly, he seems bored.
00:34:03.960And that really – like, isn't it unbelievable that this is sort of the main consideration, is whether President Trump has something to do?
00:34:09.820If President Trump were busy, then I think that he would be busy.
00:34:12.840And since he is bored, there's a lot of speculation that he wants to run again.
00:34:15.900And if there's one thing that Trump cannot handle in any way, shape, or form, it's anyone else getting a headline.
00:34:20.240And so if DeSantis starts to be spoken of as sort of like the de facto nominee, you could see Trump start to, you know, club him a little bit or beat him up a little bit.
00:34:28.100And Trump – I do not think that Trump has the capacity to build, but I do think he has the capacity to destroy.
00:34:32.380And I think you see this in virtually every race he's ever intervened in.
00:34:35.640He can't actually boost someone in a primary to victory, but he can destroy somebody in a primary.
00:34:40.300Or he can work hard to get a Republican nominee not elected, as we saw for two separate Republicans in Georgia.
00:34:48.020So if he started to – like, my worst nightmare here is that DeSantis goes into 2024 looking very strong.
00:35:10.940And then DeSantis loses because Trump's – like, Trump is, as always, a benefit, and he is also a detriment.
00:35:17.020And when it comes to national electoral politics, I am not sure that he is not more of a detriment than a benefit, especially if he turns his guns on people inside the tent.
00:35:59.400I mean, if you want DeSantis to – if you want somebody to win – like, all of this, of course, is predicated on the notion that you believe that Trump lost the first time.
00:36:08.420And if you think that Trump lost the first time, then you are more likely to think that he lost – that he will lose going forward.
00:36:13.380If you think that it was all fraud and ballot harvesting and all these various things, then you think, okay, well, maybe he'll win this time around or, as Trump said, the third straight time.
00:36:23.060But, you know, I'm not a big believer in the theory that Trump did not lose the last election.
00:36:28.940But it seems like a lot of people who live in red states who seem wildly puzzled at the fact that Trump lost last time around because they're surrounded by people who voted for Trump.
00:37:19.240DeSantis, like a lot of suburban soccer moms, love Ron DeSantis in Florida because he's making sure their schools are open.
00:37:24.680We've got people who are coming from all over the country to Florida to make sure their kids can go to school.
00:37:29.100DeSantis is not threatening in nearly the same way.
00:37:31.000And so that is – and he's got the same combativeness.
00:37:34.020So if you like the combativeness of Trump, but you also want somebody who has the capacity to not alienate huge swaths of people, like just on a pure polling level, put aside personal love or hatred, Trump is a weaker candidate than Ron DeSantis is nationally.
00:38:06.180As somebody who loved many of the things that Donald Trump was doing as president of the United States, I think it's – I think that it was in many ways a betrayal of his own legacy and of his own agenda to not be more message disciplined.
00:38:16.120Yeah, and obviously it all came to a head with what happened leading up to January 6th and his – you know, he just couldn't let it go and the cracking and the stuff about Mike Pence and all that stuff, which did help tar his legacy.
00:38:27.500I mean, that was not helpful to him personally, nor to the Republican Party, nor to Georgia, and on and on it goes with the Democrats' obsession with his commission and so on.
00:38:34.180Up next, Ben talks about his book, and in particular, we're going to get into his chapter on how the left has managed to silence a majority and how that majority can speak up.
00:42:27.460It's sort of turn of the century, Victorian era, 1900 era.
00:42:31.300And the women had the corsets and the dresses and those big pillows on the top of your bottom to make you look like Kim Kardashian in the back.
00:42:38.740She was ahead of her time or they were ahead of theirs.
00:42:41.740And the guys all had like the suits with the with the vests and velvet suits and the big top hats.
00:42:54.440So, look, you could recreate this in your own life.
00:42:57.400The reason I'm telling you about it is because I think dressing up and doing a theme really adds something to a party.
00:43:02.620But it's about just being with friends and family.
00:43:04.940And the joy that you feel and seeing people look different and the formality of it, I just think took it next level.
00:43:13.620So just remember that and involve your kids in it, too, because if you get them going on things like this early,
00:43:18.620then they remember the importance of family get togethers, celebrating the big moments, reminding yourself of who and what matters in your life and who and what does not.
00:43:43.100Not to be a maudlin, but if I were to bite the dust this week, she writes, I would be on the light path to anywhere meeting dad to tell him how great our kids are and how wonderful I was as a mother.
00:43:59.260True to form, Linda's got a great perspective on life, on herself.
00:44:04.760Her sense of humor is what's gotten her through a lot of challenges over her 80 years.
00:44:09.340And frankly, it's gotten me through, too.
00:44:10.680She's passed that along and I don't know.
00:44:13.720I just been dying to share it with you guys and maybe we'll put this out as a video clip and I'll throw in some pictures so you guys can see some of the evidence for yourselves.
00:44:21.900If you want that, go to youtube.com forward slash Megan Kelly.
00:46:42.640OK, so winning the emotional argument is not about, per se, actually convincing people that you're right.
00:46:48.180It's about convincing people that the penalties for being wrong are really, really high.
00:46:52.260OK, that is tied into the renormalization of the institutions.
00:46:54.900So the way that you renormalize an institution, let's say that you have an institution of 100 people.
00:46:59.020And there are only 20 of you that actually believe in a particular thing is to be very loud and very aggressive.
00:47:04.440And so the way that this works, Nicholas Nassim Talib has talked about this with regard to, for example, he uses the example of a small family.
00:47:12.280You got a family of four and the daughter decides one day that she's a vegan.
00:47:53.720Because that one meal for everyone can eat the vegan.
00:47:55.640They may not enjoy it as much, but everybody can eat the vegan.
00:47:57.520OK, so this sort of thing happens inside institutions with very small groups of people who are intransigent and loud and radical saying that they will not sit down.