The Megyn Kelly Show - Ben Shapiro on DeSantis, Biden, and Our Authoritarian Moment in America ｜ Ep. 134

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00:00:31.000 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.580 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.

00:00:46.840 Today we've got Ben Shapiro, one of my very favorite people.

00:00:50.760 And he has got a new book out called The Authoritarian Moment.

00:00:54.740 Boy, oh boy, is that timely.

00:00:56.840 There's so much to go over.

00:00:57.880 We're going to talk about the day's headlines, including Tucker Carlson attacked, not physically,

00:01:02.440 but on camera with this guy getting in his face with Tucker's daughter there,

00:01:06.060 which I really want to get Ben's take on.

00:01:07.500 It's happened to Ben many times.

00:01:09.220 It's so obnoxious. 0.96

00:01:10.420 I'm so sick of this nonsense.

00:01:11.820 But Ben's got a sort of a master plan for fighting back and sort of putting into perspective what we're seeing right now in this country.

00:01:19.200 We're going to talk about COVID, the Delta variant, the new crackdowns, the new mask mandates popping up in cities from coast to coast.

00:01:27.280 So much to get to.

00:01:28.080 So without further ado, quick ad and then Ben.

00:01:35.740 Let's get right to it because I want to start.

00:01:37.280 There's so much to go over, including your book.

00:01:38.800 But 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.

00:01:48.280 We're seeing mask mandates pop up even for the vaccinated in L.A.

00:01:52.380 I think it was in St. Louis was the other place.

00:01:54.540 Now 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.

00:02:06.480 So even if you try out one of these experimental vaccines on your 12 year old.

00:02:10.520 And by the way, by the fall, it could be available to those as young as infants.

00:02:13.800 So you you go, you vaccinate your kid.

00:02:17.400 Still, this group is saying they should be wearing masks.

00:02:20.800 And then they turn around Ben and say, why can't the people listen to us when we say to get vaccinated?

00:02:25.380 Why? Why?

00:02:26.380 Anyway, your thoughts on dun, dun, dun, Delta.

00:02:29.020 Yeah, no, I mean, this is madness.

00:02:30.460 I mean, if you look at the statistics, the statistics we used to care about were hospitalizations and deaths.

00:02:34.500 And 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.

00:02:40.380 When 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.

00:02:46.020 And 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.

00:02:54.340 So this is not a disease that is killing thousands of people every single day.

00:02:58.540 What's more, we're talking about a disease in which the solution is eminently available to anyone now over the age of 12.

00:03:05.740 If you if you want to get a vaccine, you can.

00:03:07.480 There are going to be people who make the risk reward calculation.

00:03:10.140 They say, OK, I'm 20.

00:03:11.000 If I get it, I'm probably not going to get very sick.

00:03:12.980 If I get the vaccine, I don't know enough about it or I'm uneasy or I don't like needles.

00:03:16.400 You're an individual human being.

00:03:17.840 You get to make that decision.

00:03:18.880 But once I've had the vaccine, I frankly don't care whether other people around me have had a vaccine.

00:03:22.920 And 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.

00:03:33.560 The 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.

00:03:41.780 And 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.

00:03:49.320 It was never going to happen.

00:03:50.700 Everybody in the medical in the medical community knew it was not going to happen.

00:03:53.880 And everyone was suggesting the highest likelihood is that COVID would eventually become seasonal.

00:03:58.000 It would lose some of its steam and it would be, you know, as dangerous as the flu would be quite transmissive.

00:04:03.280 But that's about it.

00:04:04.980 The 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.

00:04:12.920 Well, I don't see that you have a choice because the reality is there are 7 billion people on planet Earth.

00:04:18.600 This virus has hit million.

00:04:20.180 It's killed 4 million people at least.

00:04:22.160 I mean, that is not considering the wild undercount that probably occurred in India.

00:04:25.480 You're probably talking upwards of 5, 6 million people who have been killed by this virus.

00:04:28.840 It is present in every nation on planet Earth.

00:04:31.660 You can either shut down all the borders and do lockdowns and masking forever and still not kill the virus.

00:04:35.660 Or 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.

00:04:42.140 How do we best live with this?

00:04:43.500 And 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.

00:04:50.660 Protect the most vulnerable, shield the most vulnerable, and then let everybody else make their own decisions.

00:04:55.060 Because 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.

00:05:03.980 Oh, that's interesting.

00:05:05.260 And that is reflected in this back and forth we just cut between DeSantis, his take on the masks, and Jen Psaki, spokesperson for Biden.

00:05:14.020 Take a listen.

00:05:14.940 We're not doing that in Florida, OK?

00:05:16.640 We need our kids to breathe.

00:05:19.420 Is it really healthy for them to be muzzled and have their breathing obstructed all day long in school?

00:05:24.720 I don't think it is.

00:05:26.060 And I look to think, yeah, I have a three-year-old son.

00:05:28.560 You got people like Fauci saying he should be muzzled.

00:05:31.940 It's totally unacceptable.

00:05:34.440 Florida, Governor.

00:05:35.260 Sanchez was talking about mask mandates for kids earlier this morning, and he said, we're not doing that in Florida.

00:05:41.620 Is that putting kids in Florida at risk?

00:05:45.640 Well, as a parent myself, and I know you are one, if I were a parent in Florida, that would be greatly concerning to me.

00:05:51.760 We know masks are not the most comfortable thing.

00:05:54.700 I will say my kids are quite adjusted to them, as I know many kids are.

00:05:59.720 OK.

00:06:00.080 So her kids have no problem with it, Ben, so yours shouldn't either.

00:06:03.800 Yeah.

00:06:04.220 I have kids, seven, five, one and a half.

00:06:06.260 They're not wearing masks.

00:06:07.340 So they've been forced to wear masks in school this year.

00:06:09.860 And 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.

00:06:17.500 The 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.

00:06:24.320 That's a subgroup that includes 75 million Americans, fewer than 350 have died.

00:06:29.160 In the same time period, 810, 812 kids died from pneumonia in that same period of time.

00:06:35.260 Kids are not the main vectors of transmission.

00:06:37.460 Kids are not getting seriously ill from this on a large scale.

00:06:41.140 You 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.

00:06:48.360 Which, 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.

00:06:56.380 And most of those kids have some sort of serious preexisting condition.

00:07:00.340 The 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.

00:07:08.400 What they're afraid of is that my seven-year-old will meet a 40-year-old and give the 40-year-old COVID.

00:07:12.120 And my answer to that is, the 40-year-old has every opportunity to head down to the local public.

00:07:16.060 I mean, we're in Florida.

00:07:17.180 They have every opportunity to head down to the local public, any publics in Florida, and get the vaccine right now.

00:07:21.960 There is no wait time.

00:07:23.000 And I'm not going to mask up my seven-year-old because you choose to do differently.

00:07:26.000 And by the way, I'm not seeing a lot of 40-year-olds who are not getting vaccinated who are insisting that my seven-year-old mask up.

00:07:31.080 I'm seeing a lot of vaccinated 40-year-olds insisting that my seven-year-old mask up.

00:07:34.900 So there's this weird dichotomy between how the left treats this stuff and how the right treats this stuff.

00:07:39.960 I had a thread on Twitter this morning where I think what a lot of this is is a deeper issue.

00:07:43.860 And that is, the way the left and the right see empathy in politics is completely different.

00:07:47.520 The right sees empathy as, you're an individual human being.

00:07:50.220 You're fully capable of making your own decisions.

00:07:51.960 I am empathetic to that.

00:07:53.060 And therefore, if you make a decision, you ought to live with that decision.

00:07:55.400 We have to have neutral rules that apply to everyone, like live with the consequences of your decisions.

00:07:59.720 And because you're an individual human being, I'm empathetic enough with that to say, listen, you make that decision.

00:08:04.060 It's a decision I wouldn't make.

00:08:05.420 You live with the consequences.

00:08:06.400 We're good to go.

00:08:06.960 The left's definition of empathy was that I am supposed to respect as policy the subjective feelings of any person.

00:08:14.300 So 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.

00:08:23.840 Well, that's not true empathy.

00:08:25.400 That is a very bizarre version of empathy.

00:08:27.280 But it also allows Democrats to claim that you don't care about kids dying or adults dying if I don't want to mask up my seven-year-old.

00:08:32.120 It's the we're only as strong as our weakest link policy, right?

00:08:35.860 We have to find the most fearful American out there.

00:08:38.660 And then everyone must behave accordingly to make that person feel a little bit better about walking around.

00:08:43.120 It's like, well, that's just not how America works.

00:08:45.980 And we did our part.

00:08:47.040 You know, we wore the mask.

00:08:48.180 We did the national shutdown, which now, I mean, in retrospect, looks deeply problematic as a policy choice.

00:08:54.120 And we refuse to learn.

00:08:55.900 We're going to do it again.

00:08:57.060 You 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.

00:09:05.620 Meanwhile, he can't even do that at the city level because the unions won't agree.

00:09:08.420 So he can't even manage to make it happen at the city.

00:09:10.800 OK, but he wants all the employers to do that.

00:09:12.440 The 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.

00:09:21.200 And it all boils down to Republicans.

00:09:23.880 Why 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.

00:09:32.760 There's there's a hesitancy within the communities.

00:09:35.240 And we're not allowed to talk about that at all.

00:09:36.920 It's all the evil Trump supporters who are ruining the recovery for everyone.

00:09:40.660 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:09:41.740 I 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.

00:09:53.880 Amongst some members of sort of the openly political right and people were listing me in there.

00:09:57.980 And I was like, well, no, I've been recommending vaccinations since literally before COVID existed.

00:10:02.640 I'm very, very big on vaccination.

00:10:04.340 I can back you up on that as a listener to your show.

00:10:06.220 Yeah, exactly.

00:10:06.600 I've been pushing vaccination since the day that this was available.

00:10:09.640 I've been vaccinated.

00:10:10.340 My wife has been vaccinated.

00:10:11.180 My parents have been vaccinated.

00:10:12.440 But 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.

00:10:17.960 It couldn't possibly be people on my own side of the aisle.

00:10:20.460 Or, by the way, it couldn't be people who have serious doubts about the institutional credibility of the folks who are talking to them.

00:10:26.240 It'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.

00:10:34.440 I 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.

00:10:46.360 He's switched on all of these particular areas.

00:10:49.520 And 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.

00:10:57.180 It seems like a power game, not like an actual attempt.

00:10:59.080 This is what I'm really noticing.

00:11:00.160 I'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.

00:11:09.780 And the overt viciousness is not designed to get those people to vaccinate.

00:11:13.580 It's not designed to get those people to make a different risk reward calculation.

00:11:17.120 If 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?

00:11:24.080 Not particularly high.

00:11:25.060 You have a shot like one in a thousand people who get it when you're 25 years old are going to die of COVID.

00:11:29.120 The 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.

00:11:34.740 So just by risk reward, you probably should get the vaccine, right?

00:11:37.500 Instead 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.

00:11:43.860 Instead of doing that, it's you're a bad person. 0.99

00:11:45.840 You're terrible. 1.00

00:11:46.300 You don't care about grandma. 0.98

00:11:47.180 You 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.

00:11:59.060 And I'm seeing it wherever I go.

00:12:02.040 I feel like I'm vaccinated, too, and I believe in the vaccines and I hope people get them.

00:12:05.860 But I don't believe in shaming the people who have chosen not to do it.

00:12:08.880 And 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.

00:12:17.920 I mean, especially those who have had COVID and then refuse to get the vaccine.

00:12:22.840 They have natural immunity.

00:12:24.060 I 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.

00:12:32.960 And 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.

00:12:39.920 It's not true.

00:12:41.460 Yeah, by the way, the data tend to support the notion that natural immunity may be actually much more durable than vaccine driven immunity.

00:12:47.480 There's some data from Israel that have supported that idea.

00:12:49.420 So, listen, again, I'm I'm I think that a few things can be true at once.

00:12:53.180 One, I think the vaccines work.

00:12:54.680 I think that it is a good idea to get them, particularly if you're above the age of 21 or above the age of 18.

00:12:59.760 I don't know about the data between 12 and 18.

00:13:01.640 I just know that the risk of death 12 to 18 is very, very low.

00:13:04.600 I also understand that individual human beings are going to make different decisions.

00:13:08.820 I also understand that there was no world in which we went to zero COVID.

00:13:12.500 And if you understand those three things, what you end up with is everybody's got to make a decision on their own.

00:13:16.880 Thank God we have these vaccines because the math would be different if we did not.

00:13:20.060 Right.

00:13:20.160 If we didn't have the vaccines, then the math becomes slightly different.

00:13:22.900 Because then probably what we'd be talking about is what we were talking about last summer.

00:13:26.580 Do we tranche people who are less vulnerable back into the workforce more easily?

00:13:30.220 But with the vaccine available, you now have the ability to protect yourself.

00:13:33.900 So why are you trying to push somebody else in ways that they are uncomfortable with or they don't want to do into getting the vaccine?

00:13:40.600 When again, that is their call.

00:13:42.800 That is it is literally their call.

00:13:44.380 I don't I'm bewildered, frankly, by people who get the vaccine.

00:13:47.580 And then they're going around saying to other people, well, I'm uncomfortable being in a room with you if you're unvaccinated.

00:13:51.460 The 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.

00:13:59.660 That's from the CDC.

00:14:01.080 So I'm not sure exactly what people are.

00:14:03.080 It seems like a lot more of this is about an almost paganistic adherence to ideas like COVID is a differentiator between good and evil.

00:14:11.980 And that's not what COVID is.

00:14:13.700 COVID is a disease.

00:14:14.780 You make rational decisions.

00:14:15.960 Those decisions have consequences.

00:14:17.700 If you're willing to live with those consequences, so be it.

00:14:19.460 That's a free country.

00:14:20.860 Yep.

00:14:21.200 And 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.

00:14:29.060 They counted kids who died with COVID as opposed to from COVID.

00:14:33.480 And 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.

00:14:42.320 Let me switch gears with you and just talk quickly about the Olympics.

00:14:45.120 I'm kind of interested in what's happening here.

00:14:46.900 Um, you've got it's, uh, let me see.

00:14:50.040 I'm pulling up my numbers, a 33 year low in the opening ceremony, uh, 16.7, uh, million.

00:14:57.960 And, uh, that's unprecedentedly.

00:15:00.660 No, no.

00:15:01.100 The people in the United States are not interested in the Olympics, even though some 58% of them wanted the Olympics to go forward.

00:15:06.780 They didn't want them to be canceled because of COVID.

00:15:08.460 Whereas in Japan, they wanted 70% of the people did not want the Olympics to go forward because they're hosting.

00:15:12.520 And they only have, I think, a 30% vaccination rate.

00:15:15.420 So I, I feel it.

00:15:17.200 Do you feel it?

00:15:17.820 I feel a general apathy when it comes to these Olympics.

00:15:19.780 I don't see anybody really excited about them.

00:15:21.600 And I'm wondering why.

00:15:23.220 Yeah.

00:15:23.320 I mean, I think there are two factors.

00:15:24.480 I think one is that all live sports took a major hit during the pandemic.

00:15:27.100 And one of the reasons for that is because watching people play in empty rooms, uh, is, is really not pleasant.

00:15:34.220 It'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.

00:15:39.260 The 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.

00:15:45.680 It's just, it's not exciting to watch.

00:15:47.320 Uh, the crowd is a part of the spectacle.

00:15:48.900 Um, but beyond that, again, the, the, uh, when the U S women's national soccer team lost to Sweden, I was not sad.

00:15:57.500 I'll be honest with you.

00:15:58.480 I, I, frankly, they deserve it.

00:15:59.800 I confess, you know, like I'm, I'm, I'm, I like the American flag.

00:16:02.400 They like the American flag less than I do.

00:16:04.260 If you're going to kneel for the American flag, first of all, I'm not sure why you should be wearing it.

00:16:08.440 It's like saying I play for the New York Yankees, but I hate the Yankees.

00:16:10.720 And I, I'm going to kneel every time to show much.

00:16:12.560 I hate the Yankees.

00:16:13.140 Like that's not the way any of that works. 0.93

00:16:14.780 And, 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.

00:16:22.580 Like, I'm not interested in watching them win.

00:16:24.420 Frankly, I'm kind of interested in watching them lose.

00:16:26.220 So 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?

00:16:36.460 It's miracle on ice kind of stuff, typically speaking, you know, that there are always exceptions to that rule, right?

00:16:41.300 There 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.

00:16:50.660 But that's, that's more of an outlier than I think more why people in real time watch the Olympics.

00:16:55.120 That's exactly right.

00:16:55.720 It's supposed to be a patriotic moment.

00:16:57.040 It's not really because I care who's the best person at badminton.

00:17:00.340 You know, it's like, I want to feel good about America.

00:17:02.080 And I feel like a lot of these athletes are taking away the very reason.

00:17:05.740 And in, in many cases, the only reason we watch the Olympics, which is to feel that great sense of national pride.

00:17:11.300 I 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. 0.94

00:17:18.020 And I bet she will do that if she wins, because it's a PR moment for her, right?

00:17:22.640 She's looking for, to advance her own name, not to advance any good feeling about America.

00:17:27.020 So 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.

00:17:34.300 They've gotten a hint that these athletes over there may or may not be representing our values.

00:17:38.900 Well, 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.

00:17:48.760 And 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.

00:17:59.760 Like, 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.

00:18:06.820 Now, 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.

00:18:12.780 Up 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?

00:18:19.680 Don't miss that. One minute away.

00:18:20.700 Don't miss that.

00:18:50.700 I'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.

00:18:59.420 And the question is whether or not we should be in a position where you are, why can't the experts say,

00:19:09.880 we 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.

00:19:23.400 That's underway, too. I expect that to occur quickly.

00:19:26.220 OMG.

00:19:26.660 Yeah, man. That is not good stuff.

00:19:32.020 And 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.

00:19:38.840 The 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.

00:19:44.740 So that's good news.

00:19:47.060 Your one and a half year old could have done better than that.

00:19:49.300 Oh, 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.

00:20:00.440 One 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.

00:20:07.340 The other was that he was going to be dead. And on the one hand, he sort of is, right?

00:20:11.900 Like every time you ask him to answer a question, it's an adventure in perverse.

00:20:17.440 It's sort of like watching a really bad episode of British The Office, like the awkward cringe humor.

00:20:22.580 Am I allowed to laugh at this? Like, it's so awkward.

00:20:26.740 But at the same time, his agenda is not dead, right? His agenda is extremely radical.

00:20:31.020 Like the promise of him not being an alive person was that he was basically just going to come in and be inanimate.

00:20:35.200 And then we would all just relax for a couple of years.

00:20:37.140 We'd get back to our center and then we would start fighting with each other again, but in sort of more rational ways.

00:20:42.120 Instead, he comes in. He is there to basically just be this, a non-threatening old man who can't put together sentences.

00:20:48.800 But at the same time, he's pushing this unbelievably radical agenda.

00:20:51.880 And so you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds, which is an inarticulate president pushing an extraordinarily radical agenda.

00:20:56.840 And you can see it in his approval ratings, which have dropped pretty significantly over the course of the last couple of months.

00:21:01.500 The 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.

00:21:08.460 We 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.

00:21:17.540 Around like 36% of Americans are optimistic about the direction the country is going to go over the next 10 years.

00:21:23.320 And I think that is largely attributable to the fact that we now have a senior class.

00:21:28.560 And it's not just him, right? I mean, it's Pelosi. It's Schumer.

00:21:31.020 I 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.

00:21:41.540 That is a disquieting phenomenon.

00:21:44.400 Well, and the American people don't want it.

00:21:45.660 And in the same way that they've started pushing back against the defund the police movement, which now Biden is like, what?

00:21:50.580 No one's ever pushing for that. What are you talking about?

00:21:52.720 I 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.

00:21:59.860 Because, I mean, you saw the Biden Department of Education.

00:22:02.380 They 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.

00:22:14.340 Whiteness is a form of oppression, and that's what they want our children to be taught. 1.00

00:22:17.720 And they came out and said, oh, well, that was that was a mistake.

00:22:20.080 We didn't actually mean to promote that through the Department of Education.

00:22:23.360 And Betsy DeVos, former education secretary, came out and said, bull, the notion that this was a mistake is an absolute falsehood.

00:22:30.540 She said this is another reflection of the true nature of the Biden Department of Ed.

00:22:33.560 We've seen earlier this year the grant process that they just had to reverse trying to reward 1619 Project and Ibram X.

00:22:39.520 Kendi's thoughts being taught in history classes.

00:22:41.500 And 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.

00:22:52.440 They'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.

00:23:03.220 Right. 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.

00:23:10.680 But 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.

00:23:30.740 Once that's been boiled down that far, I don't think that they can walk away from that.

00:23:33.600 It'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.

00:23:44.040 Right. All of these sort of anti-whiteness studies nonsense things that you see in the education department or General Milley recommending Ibram X.

00:23:50.120 Kendi in the in the Navy reading list or something. Right. It's not just walking away from that stuff.

00:23:54.780 In 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.

00:23:59.560 Right. 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.

00:24:07.560 Equality is the basic idea that we're supposed to treat people neutrally.

00:24:11.000 Every individual is supposed to be equal before the law. You have equality of rights.

00:24:15.460 But equity is the suggestion that all outcomes are supposed to be equal, which is precisely the opposite of equality.

00:24:21.400 So equity and the same thing, by the way, that Democrats have done with the move from disinformation to misinformation in the informational sphere.

00:24:27.340 They went from four years ago, six years ago. They went basically after Trump was elected in 2016.

00:24:31.600 They went to Russian disinformation is the reason that Trump got elected to its misinformation is the reason that everything has gone wrong.

00:24:38.020 By disinformation, we mean the Russians actually promulgating false information in the election to help Donald Trump.

00:24:43.200 By misinformation, we mean anything we don't like. They shifted one letter in the entire meeting of the word.

00:24:47.420 Same 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.

00:24:53.420 It doesn't mean anything remotely like it. It's a linguistic and semantic trick.

00:24:56.400 So 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.

00:25:05.680 It is a theory that is a holdover from the Obama years.

00:25:08.000 And 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.

00:25:14.700 And it was going to win forever.

00:25:16.440 That 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.

00:25:25.260 And they were going to remake America in their mold. 0.93

00:25:28.220 And they were never going to lose again.

00:25:29.380 It was going to be the intersectional coalition along with the people who were willing to work with them along with the allies.

00:25:33.880 And they were going to just run roughshod over the rest of American politics.

00:25:36.600 And when that didn't work in 2016, I think a lot of people on the left lost their minds.

00:25:40.780 And 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.

00:25:47.740 They 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.

00:25:52.260 And 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.

00:26:08.160 I 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.

00:26:16.040 Do you stand by that?

00:26:17.360 Yes.

00:26:17.720 I think that if the Republicans don't win back the House in 2022, the entire leadership team needs to go.

00:26:22.180 They 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.

00:26:33.480 They have a lot of factors running against them.

00:26:35.260 I think that it's going to be a red wave for Republicans in 2022.

00:26:38.620 And in the Senate, right now, Republicans are on the verge of winning back that New Hampshire Senate seat.

00:26:43.760 If Sununu runs in New Hampshire, I think he wins that seat because I think that the polls tend to systematically underrepresent Republicans.

00:26:49.320 So I think that Republicans win New Hampshire.

00:26:51.060 I think Republicans win that Georgia seat that's up again.

00:26:53.240 I think that depending on whether Ron Johnson runs again in Wisconsin, he seems like he's leaning toward not.

00:26:58.280 And I think Wisconsin trends red again.

00:26:59.860 So 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.

00:27:07.000 But there are several Democratic seats that are up.

00:27:10.220 And I think that – listen, Republicans only need to pick up one and suddenly they're in control of the Senate again.

00:27:14.440 I'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.

00:27:20.980 You 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.

00:27:26.180 And it's just like this drunken spend fest in Washington.

00:27:29.220 No one seems to care.

00:27:30.160 I 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.

00:27:41.760 In 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.

00:27:51.300 So now you're over $4.5 trillion of our money that's about to be spent.

00:27:55.660 And Charlie Cook of National Review was just pointing out the entire budget for all 20 years of the Afghanistan war was $2 trillion.

00:28:02.980 We spent $2 trillion over 20 years of war.

00:28:06.180 And we're about to just roll off checks for $4 plus trillion.

00:28:10.380 How is this not the headline in every major newspaper and newscast in the country, Ben?

00:28:14.960 And the thing is, they're going to get it.

00:28:16.940 The 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.

00:28:23.660 And who's paying for that?

00:28:24.840 Yeah, well, numbers have no meaning anymore.

00:28:26.920 I mean, this is what's progressively happened.

00:28:28.900 I'm old enough to remember, because I'm not that old.

00:28:31.640 I'm old enough to remember when the yearly budget in the United States was like $2 trillion, $3 trillion.

00:28:36.380 And now, after Barack Obama, it was $4 trillion every single year.

00:28:39.340 And now we're going to be up to like $6 trillion.

00:28:40.840 It's going to be like $6, $7 trillion of spending every single year from here on out, because there is no reverse ratchet.

00:28:45.100 It just doesn't work that way.

00:28:46.520 Once the spending ramps up, because the American people, they're of divided mind.

00:28:50.600 If you ask them, should we cut spending, they will always say yes.

00:28:52.500 And 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.

00:28:58.100 And because we've been able to have our cake and eat it, too, right?

00:29:00.280 We'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.

00:29:07.160 And when the central bank takes control, they can literally make money up out of thin air.

00:29:11.500 And then because the United States is comparatively the world's strongest economy, that means that we can always still sell bonds.

00:29:16.960 I 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.

00:29:22.120 Obviously, we'll still be able to do that.

00:29:23.600 I mean, we can always raise taxes later.

00:29:25.360 There's only one problem.

00:29:26.460 This 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?

00:29:33.940 And the guy says, so far, so good, right?

00:29:35.460 This is not one of these things where we gradually screech to a halt.

00:29:38.440 This is one of those things where there's just a clip and then we're over it, right?

00:29:40.600 I 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.

00:29:48.360 It's not like we sort of ease into the crash.

00:29:50.420 When 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.

00:30:03.340 The 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.

00:30:12.500 It does not mean that you're going to be able to take more of Jeff Bezos' money and pay for all of this.

00:30:16.180 That's not the way any of this works.

00:30:18.240 Once that starts to hit home, people are going to feel it, but it doesn't hit home until it hits home.

00:30:22.660 And 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.

00:30:28.240 Why can't we do more in Washington?

00:30:29.940 Why can't we just get things done?

00:30:31.080 I don't want things done in Washington.

00:30:32.320 The 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.

00:30:40.200 It's a point of great irritation to me.

00:30:42.800 I 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.

00:30:50.240 And 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?

00:30:55.300 FDR, by far the most important.

00:30:57.860 Woodrow Wilson, very important president.

00:30:59.920 LBJ, super important president.

00:31:01.800 Bill Clinton, not so much.

00:31:02.580 Barack Obama, super important president.

00:31:04.540 And then you look at the periods of American history where we had, you know, like, incredible growth.

00:31:08.840 Like, for example, the entire 1920s, which was a period of unbelievable growth in the U.S. economy. 0.87

00:31:12.740 Every president is derided as a do-nothing, useless president.

00:31:16.060 How is it that we have a booming economy from 1920 to 1929, and all the presidents during that period are considered awful?

00:31:22.220 And 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.

00:31:30.980 It just demonstrates human beings have an inability to understand that sometimes the thing not done is more important than the thing done.

00:31:43.340 Well, by this standard, we should be seeing statues of President Trump go up any day now because he was also a big spender.

00:31:49.580 But somehow, oddly, the rule doesn't apply to him, Ben.

00:31:52.580 Yeah, 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,

00:31:58.860 I think in 15 years, you actually would see some of that from the left.

00:32:01.480 I think you would start seeing, like, is it time for a second look?

00:32:04.640 Because you're getting some of this with George W. Bush, right?

00:32:06.700 Bush was a big spender, too.

00:32:08.140 I mean, George W. Bush did not cut the spending.

00:32:10.080 And so you started to get the, well, you know, the good old days of Bush.

00:32:13.640 It's like, I was there for that.

00:32:14.760 You guys hated him.

00:32:15.700 But 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.

00:32:23.860 Although you started to see even a little bit of that, right?

00:32:25.920 You started to see it like, well, at least he's not Ron DeSantis.

00:32:28.220 And you knew that was coming. 0.55

00:32:30.080 You know, it was like, well, at least Trump was terrible, but Ron DeSantis is so much worse.

00:32:34.060 It's always the same game.

00:32:35.860 Well, speaking of DeSantis, your governor, what do you think the odds are he's the nominee?

00:32:41.240 So there's a bit of runway between here and the election.

00:32:44.440 I think that he is by far the strongest candidate in the Republican field at this point.

00:32:47.840 He is excellent at handling media, which is a requirement for people who are on the right, particularly in primaries,

00:32:53.240 because the real opponent in a primary is not the other Republicans, it's the media.

00:32:56.000 And DeSantis is great at handling them.

00:32:58.820 The Democrats made a very large-scale mistake when they chose him as their bet noire, because by doing that, they elevated him to prominence.

00:33:04.920 And DeSantis is a smart guy.

00:33:06.600 He's a very good governor.

00:33:07.860 He's very popular in the state of Florida.

00:33:09.320 I think he's going to beat Nicky Freed pretty handily in the state of Florida in his reelect effort. 0.96

00:33:12.760 He 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. 0.96

00:33:22.040 It's kind of amazing. 0.94

00:33:23.140 But DeSantis has been an excellent governor.

00:33:24.620 We probably already had that.

00:33:25.220 That might not have even been a first.

00:33:26.640 We don't know.

00:33:27.340 The media hasn't been as interested in the private lives of the politicians as it is now.

00:33:31.660 That's quite fair.

00:33:33.060 But DeSantis is popular with both sides of the aisle.

00:33:35.740 I think he wins going away.

00:33:36.740 The biggest danger to DeSantis is that DeSantis gets so – he's prominent so early.

00:33:41.680 And we've seen this before, right?

00:33:42.480 We 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.

00:33:49.480 You start to see a little bit of nitpicking from other Republicans who would like to run for president.

00:33:53.920 Things can be a little harder with DeSantis because he is pretty combative.

00:33:56.740 But I think that the bigger issue that – the issue that waits in the wings is President Trump, right?

00:34:01.200 If Trump wants to run again, and honestly, he seems bored.

00:34:03.960 And that really – like, isn't it unbelievable that this is sort of the main consideration, is whether President Trump has something to do?

00:34:09.820 If President Trump were busy, then I think that he would be busy.

00:34:12.840 And since he is bored, there's a lot of speculation that he wants to run again.

00:34:15.900 And if there's one thing that Trump cannot handle in any way, shape, or form, it's anyone else getting a headline.

00:34:20.240 And 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.

00:34:28.100 And Trump – I do not think that Trump has the capacity to build, but I do think he has the capacity to destroy.

00:34:32.380 And I think you see this in virtually every race he's ever intervened in.

00:34:35.640 He can't actually boost someone in a primary to victory, but he can destroy somebody in a primary.

00:34:40.300 Or he can work hard to get a Republican nominee not elected, as we saw for two separate Republicans in Georgia.

00:34:48.020 So if he started to – like, my worst nightmare here is that DeSantis goes into 2024 looking very strong.

00:34:54.680 Trump declares.

00:34:55.700 And then Trump having declared after DeSantis declares.

00:34:59.020 He's like – DeSantis declares.

00:35:00.020 He says he's in.

00:35:00.580 And at that point, Trump says, you know what, I don't want him getting all the headlines I'm in.

00:35:03.640 And then he proceeds to spend the rest of the primaries ripping down DeSantis and then doing that beyond that, right?

00:35:07.960 I never lost any primaries to Ron DeSantis.

00:35:09.780 How could I lose?

00:35:10.940 And then DeSantis loses because Trump's – like, Trump is, as always, a benefit, and he is also a detriment.

00:35:17.020 And 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.

00:35:24.660 Well, hello.

00:35:25.280 That's how the Republicans lost Georgia, right?

00:35:27.120 It's like Trump doesn't care about the National Party, and he clearly didn't care about the preservation of his own legacy.

00:35:32.380 Otherwise, he would have had a very different message about Georgia.

00:35:35.120 So I don't know.

00:35:35.720 You'd like to think that he wouldn't do that to DeSantis, right?

00:35:38.760 But he would.

00:35:40.280 It's pretty clear he would, right?

00:35:42.000 So only time will tell.

00:35:43.280 Yeah, I mean, I remain skeptical that President Trump sees the long game.

00:35:49.260 I don't think there's a long game.

00:35:50.400 Should he?

00:35:50.720 Do you think he should?

00:35:51.580 Like, if you want the Republicans to win back the White House, who do you think the strongest person is?

00:35:56.520 Is it Trump or is it DeSantis?

00:35:58.280 Oh, it's clearly DeSantis.

00:35:59.400 I 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.

00:36:08.420 And 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.

00:36:13.380 If 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.

00:36:23.060 But, you know, I'm not a big believer in the theory that Trump did not lose the last election.

00:36:26.620 I, frankly, am somewhat puzzled.

00:36:28.940 But 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.

00:36:36.240 I get it, but I lived in L.A.

00:36:38.680 And let me just tell you, the hatred for Trump is so unbelievably strong that no one voted for Joe Biden.

00:36:43.780 Joe Biden was literally not an alive person during that last election cycle, and all he had to be was a not-alive person.

00:36:49.340 That was driven entirely by Trump.

00:36:52.000 And Trump is amazing at getting out the boat on both sides of the aisle.

00:36:55.020 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:36:56.160 So – and DeSantis is less polarizing.

00:36:57.920 I mean, they'll try to make him into a Trump.

00:36:59.040 DeSantis, again, he has pretty wide bipartisan support in Florida.

00:37:03.440 Democrats here, a lot of them think that he has done a pretty incredible job in Florida.

00:37:07.540 He does not make many of the sort of boo-boos that Trump makes.

00:37:12.280 He doesn't – I mean, let's just put it in pure electoral terms.

00:37:14.740 Ron DeSantis does not alienate suburban women in the same way that Trump does.

00:37:17.800 Period.

00:37:18.240 End of story.

00:37:19.240 DeSantis, like a lot of suburban soccer moms, love Ron DeSantis in Florida because he's making sure their schools are open.

00:37:24.680 We've got people who are coming from all over the country to Florida to make sure their kids can go to school.

00:37:29.100 DeSantis is not threatening in nearly the same way.

00:37:31.000 And so that is – and he's got the same combativeness.

00:37:34.020 So 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.

00:37:47.680 Yeah, he's not a tweeter, too.

00:37:49.420 He's not going to be out there, you know, doing all the things that got Trump.

00:37:51.680 He has a message discipline.

00:37:53.000 Ron DeSantis has messages.

00:37:53.940 I mean, like, again, I'm a believer and a wisher that if Twitter did not exist, I think Trump would still be president.

00:38:00.980 Like, it was Trump's lack of message discipline that really doomed his presidency.

00:38:04.680 And it drove me insane, right?

00:38:06.180 As 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.

00:38:16.120 Yeah, 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.

00:38:27.500 I 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.

00:38:34.180 Up 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.

00:38:47.200 That's one minute away.

00:38:48.320 But first, I want to bring you a segment we have here in the MK program called Real Talk, where we talk about really whatever we want.

00:38:54.580 It's really unlike – I mean, it's just exactly like the rest of the show, frankly.

00:38:58.880 This is one I've been dying to bring to you.

00:39:00.460 So this summer, I decided that I was going to go all out for two important and special events happening in my family.

00:39:07.040 My mom turned 80 on July 11th, Linda, and Doug's mom turned 85 just this past week.

00:39:14.480 And so those are big birthdays.

00:39:15.700 We love our moms. 0.76

00:39:16.720 Neither one of us has our dads in the picture anymore.

00:39:18.980 They both passed.

00:39:20.420 And I just really wanted to celebrate these milestone birthdays.

00:39:24.260 And so we're down at the beach for the summers, you know, down in New Jersey.

00:39:27.680 And we have a cute little backyard here, unlike our New York City apartment, right, which has nothing.

00:39:32.280 And so kind of decided to go all out.

00:39:35.700 And we put lanterns up, hanging over the pool.

00:39:38.680 I have white lights on the backyard.

00:39:41.120 And I have to tell you, it was totally magical.

00:39:44.280 Almost all of my family came in for the first time in years.

00:39:47.000 My mom, my brother, my sister, and I were together.

00:39:49.120 And we just – we never are.

00:39:50.640 My brother moved to Atlanta 20-plus years ago.

00:39:53.940 And it's just tough.

00:39:54.580 You know, both of his boys came up, too, which is just great.

00:39:58.080 My sister was there.

00:39:59.140 My mom came.

00:40:00.220 And my mom was beside herself. 0.84

00:40:02.840 She loves being the belle of the ball.

00:40:05.160 She just loves attention. 0.99

00:40:06.820 I don't know where I get it.

00:40:08.740 And we decided to do a 1940s-themed costume party because she was born in 1941.

00:40:15.360 So everybody had to wear 1940s-type stuff.

00:40:18.940 We went into the 50s a little, too, because it's hard to find that many costumes from the 1940s.

00:40:22.620 I was in sort of one of these old classic dresses with a wig that had the pink curls on the top.

00:40:29.000 I think they're called – I don't know – barrel curls right at the top. 0.99

00:40:31.600 My mom was in sort of a 1950s dress. 0.80

00:40:34.700 My sister wore the outfit from beauty school dropout from Greece. 0.98

00:40:40.100 You remember that?

00:40:40.860 My brother was in an old-time – it looked like a Yankees uniform, although it said B on it.

00:40:45.780 And I was like, is that Bronx Bombers?

00:40:47.220 Is that Boston Plus Yankees?

00:40:48.700 Isn't that a sin?

00:40:49.340 I don't know.

00:40:50.320 Anywho, everyone looked amazing.

00:40:53.320 And I have to tell you, we put up all these Casablanca posters and framed little pictures of what was happening in 1941.

00:41:01.220 You know, those little things like how much a loaf of bread costs and what the number one movie was, all that stuff.

00:41:06.940 It was just so festive.

00:41:08.660 And my mom was so happy.

00:41:10.000 We hired a little 1940s swing band, just a few guys.

00:41:13.980 It wasn't a huge thing, but they added so much to it.

00:41:16.500 They were wonderful.

00:41:18.160 And we danced the night away.

00:41:19.880 And it wasn't huge.

00:41:21.100 You know, we didn't have that many people.

00:41:22.120 It was my immediate family and, you know, as I said, some of the kids and a couple of our neighbors.

00:41:27.420 I have to tell you, I don't know how we could have done anything better.

00:41:31.240 Just being together, having music, having a couple of drinks.

00:41:35.280 The bartender made a drink called the Linda Rita, which my mom loved.

00:41:38.640 Another one called the 1941.

00:41:39.980 And I will never forget that night as long as I live.

00:41:44.100 And neither will my mom.

00:41:46.340 So just getting together with family, right?

00:41:48.200 It's like we always talk about how do you deal with the haters?

00:41:50.200 How do you deal with your detractors, whatever it is?

00:41:53.520 And we've talked about how the things that matter in life are within 20 feet of you.

00:41:57.280 You know, maybe 100 feet of you.

00:41:58.920 And meaning the people.

00:42:00.440 It's your family.

00:42:01.320 It's your friends.

00:42:01.880 It's the people who you choose to spend this life with.

00:42:04.420 And I felt that acutely that night.

00:42:07.020 And then again with Doug's mom, we decided to add again because the costumes were so fun to the production by adding costumes.

00:42:13.800 And so for her, we did a Victorian tea, which was something I had done with my girlfriends years ago.

00:42:19.160 And we decided to do it again with, you know, the little cucumber sandwiches and little cakes.

00:42:25.340 And we all dressed up.

00:42:27.460 It's sort of turn of the century, Victorian era, 1900 era.

00:42:31.300 And 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. 1.00

00:42:38.740 She was ahead of her time or they were ahead of theirs.

00:42:41.740 And the guys all had like the suits with the with the vests and velvet suits and the big top hats.

00:42:49.940 Looked amazing.

00:42:51.340 Looked amazing.

00:42:52.060 We had a little string trio play.

00:42:54.440 So, look, you could recreate this in your own life.

00:42:57.400 The reason I'm telling you about it is because I think dressing up and doing a theme really adds something to a party.

00:43:02.620 But it's about just being with friends and family.

00:43:04.940 And the joy that you feel and seeing people look different and the formality of it, I just think took it next level.

00:43:13.620 So just remember that and involve your kids in it, too, because if you get them going on things like this early,

00:43:18.620 then 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.

00:43:27.820 Right.

00:43:28.840 And here's the capper to the whole thing.

00:43:31.540 My mom, who you may or may not know from my NBC show because she came on occasionally.

00:43:36.280 Everybody loved her.

00:43:36.980 She's just hysterical.

00:43:37.940 My mother is just a piece of work. 1.00

00:43:40.200 She texts me after it's all done.

00:43:42.320 I'll read you the text.

00:43:43.100 Not 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.

00:43:59.260 True to form, Linda's got a great perspective on life, on herself.

00:44:04.760 Her sense of humor is what's gotten her through a lot of challenges over her 80 years.

00:44:09.340 And frankly, it's gotten me through, too.

00:44:10.680 She's passed that along and I don't know.

00:44:13.720 I 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.

00:44:21.900 If you want that, go to youtube.com forward slash Megan Kelly.

00:44:26.560 All right.

00:44:26.980 Now back to Ben in one sec.

00:44:33.600 All right.

00:44:34.040 I want to get to your book because I'm genuinely interested in this.

00:44:36.460 This is not like, oh, let's promote Ben's book.

00:44:38.160 I actually want to talk about this because it's an important one.

00:44:40.780 I can't believe it's your 12th.

00:44:41.920 It's crazy because you actually did start writing them when you were, I think, still in your teens.

00:44:46.200 But so you're on book number 12.

00:44:48.520 And as usual, you timed it perfectly.

00:44:50.460 It's called The Authoritarian Moment.

00:44:52.100 And chapter one is how to silence a majority, which is what's happening right now.

00:44:57.980 I mean, the left, it may be it may boggle, you know, certain certain policies and so on.

00:45:03.500 And it may not be doing a great job when it comes to defunding the police and all that.

00:45:06.380 But they know how to shame people out of speaking their genuinely held beliefs.

00:45:12.700 And you're seeing so many millions of Americans hold their tongue right now.

00:45:16.040 And you talk about how the first step is win the emotional argument.

00:45:20.180 The second step is renormalize the institutions.

00:45:22.980 And the third step is locking all the doors.

00:45:24.840 I know what does that mean?

00:45:25.600 Because you hear renormalize the institutions.

00:45:27.420 It gives people hope.

00:45:28.180 What does that mean?

00:45:28.900 So what what are they doing?

00:45:30.060 How are they how have they done it?

00:45:31.880 So winning the emotional argument is basically a three step process.

00:45:34.220 The first is that you use people's sense of civility against them.

00:45:37.060 You see this a lot with sort of traditional conservatives or people on the left said a while ago,

00:45:40.860 you know, if you just wouldn't speak about these particular issues in this particular way,

00:45:44.780 like that would just be more civil.

00:45:45.820 It'd be nicer.

00:45:46.340 We could have nice conversations.

00:45:47.380 And people on the right went, oh, OK, that's kind of fair.

00:45:49.760 OK, I mean, I guess I'll be civil.

00:45:51.360 You know, niceness, like being nice was taken by conservatives to mean,

00:45:54.960 I guess I shouldn't talk about the things that I want to talk about.

00:45:57.480 And the left was happy to take that and consolidate that.

00:45:59.640 That moved immediately into silence is required, right?

00:46:02.880 Which is just speech is violence, right?

00:46:04.620 When I was speaking at Berkeley, for example, people were literally outside chanting speech is violence.

00:46:08.140 So if you speak, you're committing an act of violence against me.

00:46:10.940 You have attacked my identity and therefore you need to shut up. 0.94

00:46:13.280 And a lot of conservatives and by the way, people in the middle kind of went along with that, too.

00:46:17.180 It's like, OK, well, I don't want to offend my speech.

00:46:20.200 I see why you could take it that way.

00:46:21.800 So I guess I just I guess I'll shut up.

00:46:23.280 And now that has morphed into silence is violence, which is you have to mirror exactly what we are saying.

00:46:27.680 Or you are part of the problem, right?

00:46:29.840 You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.

00:46:31.800 And so you need to be anti-racist today.

00:46:33.880 And that means mirroring every word that I say to you and repeating it in Maoist mantra-like fashion.

00:46:38.700 You see this in the intelligentsia.

00:46:40.180 You see it on college campuses.

00:46:41.100 You see it in the media all the time.

00:46:42.640 OK, so winning the emotional argument is not about, per se, actually convincing people that you're right.

00:46:48.180 It's about convincing people that the penalties for being wrong are really, really high.

00:46:52.260 OK, that is tied into the renormalization of the institutions.

00:46:54.900 So the way that you renormalize an institution, let's say that you have an institution of 100 people.

00:46:59.020 And there are only 20 of you that actually believe in a particular thing is to be very loud and very aggressive.

00:47:04.440 And 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.

00:47:12.280 You got a family of four and the daughter decides one day that she's a vegan. 0.81

00:47:15.740 And so she comes home from school.

00:47:16.780 She says, I'm a vegan.

00:47:17.620 I don't want to eat meat anymore.

00:47:18.920 Mom now has a choice for dinner. 0.96

00:47:20.260 She can make two meals, one meat for everybody else and one for a vegan daughter. 1.00

00:47:23.320 Or she can say, you know what?

00:47:24.820 For tonight, we're all eating vegan.

00:47:26.040 We're all going to eat vegan right now because I'm just I don't have enough time.

00:47:28.560 I'm not making two meals.

00:47:29.560 I'm making one meal.

00:47:30.840 Let's all eat vegan for Jessica.

00:47:32.440 Fine.

00:47:33.040 Now you have the family go to a block party.

00:47:35.040 It's like three other families.

00:47:36.280 And the family says, listen, we've been keeping vegan for our daughter.

00:47:38.960 You don't have to make vegan just for you don't have to keep vegan for the rest of you.

00:47:43.100 But if we're going to come, we need vegan food.

00:47:45.560 And so the person who's now in charge of the block party has the exact same sort of decision to make.

00:47:49.620 What do I do?

00:47:50.120 Do I make two separate meals or do I make one meal for everyone?

00:47:53.580 Right.

00:47:53.720 Because that one meal for everyone can eat the vegan.

00:47:55.640 They may not enjoy it as much, but everybody can eat the vegan.

00:47:57.520 OK, 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.

00:48:06.520 They will not shut up.

00:48:07.500 And they are the captain now, right?

00:48:08.880 They are in control.

00:48:09.680 And a bunch of people who are sort of in the middle going, well, you know, is it really worth the hassle?

00:48:13.780 Is it really worth the hassle?

00:48:14.940 And usually it starts with something pretty small.

00:48:16.980 It'll start with something like, well, shouldn't we have some diversity training?

00:48:19.640 I mean, diversity is like fine.

00:48:20.720 I mean, isn't diversity good?

00:48:21.960 Are you anti-diversity?

00:48:22.940 And everybody in the middle goes, well, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not anti-diversity.

00:48:26.740 I guess I'll go along with that.

00:48:28.380 And then it turns into, well, you have to hire based on racial quotas.

00:48:31.060 You have to hire based on diversity.

00:48:32.160 And you say, well, I really don't want to be considered racist.

00:48:34.500 I mean, these people here, they're saying I'm a racist if I don't do this.

00:48:36.860 And it seems easier to kind of go along.

00:48:38.700 It doesn't threaten my job per se.

00:48:40.200 But, you know, shouldn't we fix problems in American society?

00:48:43.400 And you can see how step by step you end up re-normalizing the entire institution to the

00:48:47.360 point where the heads of the institution are so afraid of this core of staff that they

00:48:51.280 will do anything they say.

00:48:52.460 You see this at the New York Times where the radicals rule the roots.

00:48:55.880 You see this at companies where, I mean, for example, there's a company called Coinbase

00:48:59.600 out of Silicon Valley, right?

00:49:00.660 They're a trading platform for cryptocurrency.

00:49:02.060 This is a crazy story.

00:49:02.580 I saw this in your book.

00:49:04.040 Yeah.

00:49:04.320 And the head of the corporation said, we're just not going to talk politics at work.

00:49:09.200 They said, we don't want to alienate anybody.

00:49:11.020 We don't want anybody fighting at work.

00:49:12.040 So there's no politics on the internal Slack team, on the Slack thread.

00:49:16.680 Like 20% of the company got up and walked out.

00:49:19.320 And they got up and they were like, well, I guess we're leaving now.

00:49:21.460 It's like 60 employees said, we're leaving now.

00:49:23.420 Because even taking a neutral position is considered to be antipathetic to the people

00:49:28.800 who are the loudest and the most vocal.

00:49:31.740 What this means is that if you're in the middle and you just want to avoid conflict, which most

00:49:35.300 people are conflict avoidant.

00:49:36.880 If you want to avoid conflict, you just go along with the most radical and the loudest people.

00:49:40.640 OK, and then once you've done that, once you've renormalized the institution and once you've

00:49:44.680 made clear to the leaders of the institution that the easiest thing to do is to give in

00:49:48.200 to those that that aggressive base and ignore everybody else because everybody else is just

00:49:51.840 too weak to do anything about it.

00:49:53.260 Once that's been made clear, then you lock all the doors.

00:49:55.220 Then you say, we can't hire anybody who comes in here and doesn't agree without corporate

00:49:58.900 principles.

00:49:59.420 We can't have anybody teaching at this university who doesn't agree with the baseline diversity

00:50:03.360 notions that we've been pushing.

00:50:04.840 And this has happened in institution after institution.

00:50:07.760 I mean, the main theme of authoritarian moment is that every major institution in American

00:50:11.840 life has now been taken over by the left or by people who are at least not unsympathetic

00:50:17.140 to the left and are willing to allow the left control over key elements of the institutions.

00:50:22.200 This is why it's been so bewildering to me.

00:50:24.420 Like I watched after January 6th as all the talk about authoritarianism for the last five years

00:50:28.720 has been about Trump.

00:50:29.460 And then after January 6th, they really ratcheted into high gear.

00:50:31.960 All the talk of a coup and an insurrection, two things can be true as always at once. 1.00

00:50:36.700 The people who decided to invade the Capitol buildings are idiots, drugs, criminals should 1.00

00:50:39.540 go to jail. 1.00

00:50:40.360 Also, the notion that we were on the verge of democracy being overthrown is insane.

00:50:43.980 And if you're going to suggest that the great authoritarian threat to the United States is

00:50:48.620 people in buffalo horns wandering the halls of Congress versus every major institution in

00:50:54.760 American society now weaponized against individual ability to participate in society itself.

00:51:00.840 I don't know what you're talking about.

00:51:03.160 And particularly when that's being taken, that mantle is now being taken up by Democrats

00:51:06.040 to the level of government where they're openly talking about subverting constitutional

00:51:09.640 rights if in if in sort of end around ways like pressure on social media, for example.

00:51:14.860 Yeah.

00:51:15.140 I mean, even just look at Ibram X.

00:51:16.920 Kendi, who wants to create this constitutional amendment that would create a department of

00:51:20.100 racism that's going to spy on what everybody says and chastise anybody who has even just a

00:51:24.880 racist thought.

00:51:25.520 You're just not allowed to be an independent thinker.

00:51:28.080 And, you know, that the left characterizes everything is racist.

00:51:30.520 I mean, everything is so you'd be you'd be on quicksand all day, every day.

00:51:35.520 But to your first point about what you were talking about, you know, sort of silencing

00:51:39.360 thought and then and then making you speak up with their words.

00:51:42.600 I'm thinking of Paul Rossi, the math teacher at this New York private school downtown who

00:51:48.880 came out and spoke about what he was seeing in his classrooms.

00:51:51.280 And he talked about how the white students would sit there as they were being shamed just

00:51:54.860 for the color of their skin.

00:51:55.920 And they would just be quiet.

00:51:57.260 You know, I'm sure they didn't agree, but they just would be quiet.

00:52:00.300 And the teachers would say to them, we really need to hear from you.

00:52:03.540 We need to hear from you.

00:52:05.220 It wasn't enough that they just kept their mouths shut because they knew what they would

00:52:07.940 get.

00:52:08.180 But they had to at least fake sign on to the divisive messaging there.

00:52:12.420 And that's so alienating and so deeply wrong.

00:52:15.680 And the power is the point.

00:52:17.180 And you mentioned before how the lines shift and it's always moving.

00:52:19.700 And this is exactly right.

00:52:20.940 There is this whole thing that's happened in the discourse in which everything that we

00:52:25.020 say and how we say it is treated as a as a membership cards of the elect.

00:52:29.180 And I think this is what so much of college education has become if you're has become if

00:52:32.400 you're not in the STEM fields, right?

00:52:33.640 If you're in the STEM fields, you're actually learning something.

00:52:35.140 But if like right now, look on Twitter, you can tell right away somebody's political affiliation

00:52:41.040 by whether they put their pronouns in their title, right?

00:52:43.400 You can tell right away.

00:52:44.440 Now, is that designed to actually make a serious political point?

00:52:48.100 Of course not.

00:52:48.840 That's designed to suggest I am a member of the right thinking elite who have sympathy

00:52:52.660 for an unfortunate group of people.

00:52:54.240 And you are not.

00:52:55.680 Now, did we really need to know that this person who is very obviously a female thinks 1.00

00:52:58.560 of themselves as a female?

00:53:00.000 Like when we're talking about people who identify as members of other genders, we're talking

00:53:02.680 about a fraction of a fraction of a percentage.

00:53:04.760 But now everybody in society is expected to use the virtue signaling terms in order to

00:53:09.340 signify solidarity and not just solidarity with folks who consider themselves transgender,

00:53:14.340 but solidarity with the broader leftist rubric.

00:53:17.300 And so there's so much of that in American society.

00:53:19.220 You speak the lingo.

00:53:20.440 I talk about this in the book.

00:53:21.900 You're taught in college how to speak the lingo.

00:53:23.940 Like if you used, if you talked the way that people talk in college classrooms, like on

00:53:28.680 main street of most places in the middle of the country, no one would know what in the

00:53:32.560 hell you are talking about because these sentences do not make sense in English.

00:53:36.180 They will tell you that American society is cis-normative and you'll be like, I don't

00:53:40.220 know what, what are you talking about right now?

00:53:42.020 They'll say American society is patriarchal and hetero-normative and cis-normative.

00:53:45.680 And that true transphobia is if you will not date a member of the opposite gender who is

00:53:53.400 only identified as a member of the opposite gender subjectively, but is biologically a

00:53:56.860 member of your same sex.

00:53:58.100 Okay.

00:53:58.280 Does any of that make sense?

00:53:59.560 Did what I like, that makes perfect sense in the leftist lexicon, because again, it is

00:54:03.740 not even about the political endpoint.

00:54:05.960 It's about the changing of the rules.

00:54:07.520 It's why you can see like literally the rules will change on a moment's notice and people

00:54:11.860 will then be so socially ostracized based on it.

00:54:14.040 It's madness.

00:54:14.480 It's crazy.

00:54:15.300 I mean, perfect example.

00:54:17.080 Amy Coney Barrett says in Congress, right?

00:54:19.480 She's talking to Maisie Hirono and she's talking about sexual orientation or sexual preference.

00:54:24.480 She's the term sexual preference, right?

00:54:26.120 And Maisie Hirono says the term sexual preference is offensive.

00:54:30.180 Now, the term sexual preference has been used by every major publication in the United States.

00:54:34.120 It itself is a euphemism that's been used over time, generally to refer to somebody's sexual

00:54:39.720 orientation, what kind of sexual partner they prefer.

00:54:42.080 Okay.

00:54:42.600 Sexual preference is now determined by Maisie Hirono to be discriminatory because it suggests

00:54:47.220 that it's voluntary, that preference is voluntary, so it's discriminatory.

00:54:50.740 Within a day, dictionary.com adds a note at the end of the term sexual preference to suggest

00:54:57.000 that it is found offensive by some.

00:54:58.260 So you watch the language change in real time, and then she berates Amy Coney Barrett about

00:55:02.480 it.

00:55:02.780 This kind of stuff happens all the time.

00:55:04.980 The lingo changes, and stuff that was not offensive five seconds ago, because it is literally

00:55:08.920 not offensive, is now found to be highly offensive.

00:55:11.600 The purpose is not to make American society better.

00:55:14.140 The purpose is that you must follow your rulers.

00:55:17.320 And if your rulers shift the line, you must follow the line.

00:55:20.560 The arbitrariness of it is the point.

00:55:22.260 People on the right are constantly looking at, what's the unifying principle here?

00:55:26.020 There are so many self-contradictory notions in so much of left-wing ideology, particularly

00:55:30.760 around identity issues.

00:55:33.020 Race is both a social construct, but it's also essential to who you are.

00:55:36.760 I mean, these are both premises that are held by the left.

00:55:39.140 The notion is that gender is both entirely a social construct, but also completely non-malleable,

00:55:45.320 but also disconnected completely from sex.

00:55:47.460 These are all self-contradictory, but it is the self-contradictory notion of them that is

00:55:51.340 the point, because it's not about whether what they're saying is true or false in any

00:55:55.740 sort of logical, coherent sense.

00:55:57.320 The point is, if you don't mirror what they are saying, then you are not one of the elect,

00:56:01.020 you are bad, and you ought to be socially ostracized.

00:56:03.720 Yes. 0.99

00:56:04.100 Oh, my gosh.

00:56:04.500 This is like, you're preaching my language.

00:56:06.520 And speaking of the elect, I know I heard you say the other day, this is why the Dr.

00:56:09.820 Jill Biden thing became a thing, right? 0.99

00:56:11.440 She's telegraphing with her Dr.

00:56:14.020 Jill Biden that she's a member of the elect, that the University of Delaware, no offense, but

00:56:18.060 you know, it's not like Harvard where you went, that her doctorate from there is somehow

00:56:22.220 meaningful, gets her into the club of the elite slash elect.

00:56:26.140 As John McWhorter says, he likes that term, the elect too.

00:56:28.580 Yeah.

00:56:28.760 I mean, titles are all that matter.

00:56:30.600 So what colleges have basically become for people, again, I accept people who are in STEM

00:56:34.380 fields because they actually learn actual content.

00:56:36.140 Like my wife went to the same college that I did. 0.97

00:56:38.380 She was what we call a South Campus major in math and science.

00:56:41.020 So she learned things.

00:56:41.640 I was a North Campus major.

00:56:42.580 So I learned a bunch of useless nonsense in poli sci and the English department.

00:56:47.020 And what you typically are there for in college, if you're not there to become, you know, an

00:56:51.380 actual professional in one of these fields, what you are actually there for is the credentialing.

00:56:55.860 And part of the credentialing process is learning a language.

00:56:58.480 This actually is a very serious problem that the left refuses, the solution to the left,

00:57:02.320 by the way, for the serious problem of credentialing, which actually has some pretty significant

00:57:06.280 downstream economic effects, like the fact that there are a bunch of positions that

00:57:09.320 you really shouldn't need a college degree for, and now you need a college degree for.

00:57:12.580 To manage a CVS, you should not require a college degree.

00:57:14.880 You shouldn't.

00:57:15.520 But now, because everybody has a college degree, it's required.

00:57:18.580 So a bunch of people who don't have college degrees are sort of forced out of the workforce.

00:57:21.680 Like this has significant downstream effects.

00:57:23.540 The left, instead of saying, on behalf of blue collar people everywhere, you don't need

00:57:26.520 a college degree to do these jobs right here.

00:57:29.000 Instead, the left says, ah, no, no, no.

00:57:30.280 The solution is everyone should have a college degree.

00:57:33.420 Everyone should go to college.

00:57:34.780 Everybody should have the title.

00:57:35.880 And they should also learn the lingo.

00:57:37.180 And they should all be part of the elect, right?

00:57:39.200 This is the whole goal.

00:57:39.920 Whereas the real solution to this would be probably apprenticeship programs and fewer

00:57:43.440 people going to college because, let's face it, how many people do you know from college

00:57:46.640 who actually use their college degree for the chosen profession that they are in?

00:57:50.440 The answer is probably not all that high. 0.74

00:57:52.240 I can't remember a damn thing I learned in college.

00:57:53.780 I remember what I learned in law school. 0.87

00:57:55.320 Everything before that is just a blur.

00:57:57.560 Thanks for staying with us this far.

00:58:01.140 The end of the episode and who's coming up on our next show is right after this quick break.

00:58:09.500 When I read you, you wrote, you wrote as follows.

00:58:11.880 Every offense to particularly, quote, vulnerable groups, meaning groups defined as vulnerable

00:58:16.240 by the left in a kaleidoscopically changing hierarchy of victimhood represents the possibility

00:58:22.000 of profound offense.

00:58:23.480 Those who engage in such offense must be silenced.

00:58:26.380 And I've seen them.

00:58:27.260 I mean, they've done that to you.

00:58:28.720 They've done that to me.

00:58:29.340 And I was actually thinking about the whole Naomi Osaka thing through this lens because,

00:58:33.000 you know what?

00:58:33.940 So what happens?

00:58:34.680 She she came out.

00:58:35.920 She said she didn't want to do the press conferences because she found the press annoying.

00:58:39.040 They kept asking the same questions over and over.

00:58:41.500 And she didn't want to do it because they got in her head and made her think that she

00:58:43.920 was not good on clay when she knew she was.

00:58:45.960 And the sister backed that up and said she's not depressed.

00:58:47.940 It's about keeping negative people out of her head.

00:58:50.220 And then the tennis world rained down on her.

00:58:52.160 All the athletes came out and said, too bad.

00:58:53.660 You don't get special treatment.

00:58:54.840 What do you think you are?

00:58:55.800 We all have to go out there and do it.

00:58:56.960 The press is the people's representatives.

00:58:58.620 All four of the Grand Slam tournaments came out and said, we're all going to find you

00:59:01.360 if that's how you feel.

00:59:02.220 Too bad you don't get it.

00:59:03.060 And so it's not pleasant for everybody, but they'd suck it up and do as part of the job.

00:59:07.780 Then she stumbled on.

00:59:09.400 It's mental.

00:59:09.940 It's true mental health.

00:59:11.480 I actually when I said mental health, I meant my social anxiety, severe social anxiety when

00:59:15.260 I speak to the media.

00:59:16.800 Now, I didn't believe it at the time.

00:59:17.840 It was clearly a fallback position, right, because she'd gotten hammered for her on, you 1.00

00:59:23.120 know, on the record statements initially.

00:59:25.520 And then she came out on the cover of Vogue and on the cover of Sports Illustrated and

00:59:28.980 on the cover of Time magazine and her Netflix documentary that she orchestrated about herself

00:59:32.900 and her Barbie and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:59:34.980 So Clay Travis tweets out something to the effect of, oh, you know, since she said she's too

00:59:38.940 introverted to deal with the media, this is the number of magazine covers she's done.

00:59:41.500 And I tweet out saying, oh, don't forget these two. 0.99

00:59:43.440 The shit storm that rained down, right? 1.00

00:59:45.900 I don't care. 1.00

00:59:46.420 It's fine. 0.97

00:59:46.780 I'm happy to be opposed to these lunatics who are coming after me.

00:59:50.080 However, I think it says something about society, right? 0.66

00:59:52.820 So what?

00:59:53.540 Why?

00:59:53.800 Why?

00:59:54.460 Because I tweeted that out and then Naomi responded and said, oh, I shot those magazine

00:59:58.660 covers before, which, by the way, isn't true.

01:00:00.320 She shot the Time magazine one very recently.

01:00:02.300 It was post Roland Garros because it was on the cover of July.

01:00:05.420 Time is more timely.

01:00:06.580 They went on the attack, right?

01:00:07.820 You because why?

01:00:08.720 Because you are not allowed as a white woman who worked at Fox News for 14 years to, quote,

01:00:14.500 attack.

01:00:15.360 Right.

01:00:15.540 I'm a member of the media.

01:00:16.340 I comment on the news.

01:00:17.460 She's a public figure.

01:00:18.420 She's the number one female paid athlete in the world.

01:00:21.320 I'm allowed to comment on her.

01:00:22.240 She put herself in the media.

01:00:23.180 She wants us to talk about her.

01:00:24.440 She just doesn't want us to say negative things about her. 0.74

01:00:26.140 Well, too bad.

01:00:26.620 That's not how it works about a young, mixed race, clearly liberal. 0.98

01:00:31.200 She's wearing the Black Lives Matter, you know, masks all last summer woman who uses 1.00

01:00:34.940 the term mental health.

01:00:36.640 And I, I just think it's so damaging because I have my own microphone.

01:00:41.220 I have my own platform, Ben, like you.

01:00:42.620 I can say what I want.

01:00:43.400 Thank God.

01:00:44.160 And I did.

01:00:45.060 And I will continue to. 0.99

01:00:46.220 And I don't give a shit what they say about me. 0.98

01:00:47.840 But think of all the people who don't have what you and I have, who also would like to 0.98

01:00:52.320 say, I don't believe her or something lesser.

01:00:55.000 Take a smaller thing, you know, in their own life involving somebody who's got all of the

01:00:58.040 sort of liberal pieties around them.

01:01:00.160 They can't for the reasons you write in this book.

01:01:03.380 Yeah.

01:01:03.780 I mean, this is you saw the same thing happen with Meghan Markle, right?

01:01:06.900 After Meghan Markle did this very self sort of self bearing.

01:01:11.580 It was all self focused, this obsessed interview with Oprah, right?

01:01:16.400 To avoid publicity, of course, because that's that's how you avoid publicity.

01:01:19.040 And a lot of people said, yeah, I don't really believe a lot of these stories.

01:01:21.580 I don't think some of these things are true.

01:01:23.040 I don't see substantiation for this.

01:01:24.580 And it was like, how dare you attack Meghan Markle?

01:01:27.280 Our class of victims in America has grown pretty large and pretty expansive when it includes

01:01:31.780 people like Meghan Markle, an actual honest to God princess.

01:01:34.460 Like and as far as Naomi Osaka and all that, listen, when people speak out about mental

01:01:40.140 like actual mental illness, I have tremendous sympathy for that. 0.99

01:01:43.400 I have mental illness runs in my family.

01:01:44.920 I have people I'm very close to who suffer from from severe anxiety disorders.

01:01:48.520 I get it.

01:01:49.140 I do.

01:01:49.840 But I knowing people with severe anxiety disorders, I don't think it's a terrible question to

01:01:55.080 ask whether a person who's appearing on the cover of massive national magazines and doing

01:01:58.900 tremendous documentaries for Netflix and all this, whether whether if I don't want to do

01:02:03.540 a specific set of interviews with this specific set of people that really counts as social

01:02:07.620 anxiety disorder writ large.

01:02:09.400 I mean, that that seems at the very best, like, you know, something that we should be

01:02:13.440 allowed to ask questions about.

01:02:14.580 She is, in fact, a celebrity.

01:02:15.520 And then but it's really not even that it's the tie from that to it has to be because she's

01:02:19.940 black and female.

01:02:21.140 It has to be because she's mixed race and female. 1.00

01:02:22.780 That's why you did this.

01:02:24.000 Right.

01:02:24.200 That you know, people are calling me a racist and a misogynist.

01:02:27.080 I'm like, what are you talking about?

01:02:28.000 You're so infantilizing. 0.96

01:02:29.220 Screw you for trying to make everything like my message to women is you're strong. 1.00

01:02:33.620 You can handle this. 0.98

01:02:34.440 Like her lady parts have nothing to do with any of this. 1.00

01:02:37.360 Right.

01:02:37.480 Like she is strong.

01:02:38.360 She is a 23 year old superhero on the tennis court. 0.99

01:02:41.020 So let's treat her accordingly to pretend that she can't take criticism or we know the 0.69

01:02:44.800 after after that Meghan Markle thing that Oprah can't take any critical feedback on how she 1.00

01:02:49.780 could have done better is absurd and so diminishing.

01:02:52.740 That's what's racist.

01:02:53.900 That's what's misogynist.

01:02:55.080 Treating women or black women like these delicate little flowers who we can never criticize because 1.00

01:03:00.080 they'll just crumble and be gone.

01:03:01.600 I mean, I listen, people have agency and one of the goals of the left is to treat people

01:03:06.500 as though they do not have agency so that they can either use them as sort of stand in

01:03:10.220 victims and then claim you are the victimizer or so they can control them or both.

01:03:13.500 And that's a really, really bad thing.

01:03:15.440 It's bad for the discourse.

01:03:16.660 It makes things worse.

01:03:17.400 And it provides an easy out for people who just don't want to answer tough questions.

01:03:21.080 And frankly, that's no good.

01:03:22.600 It's hard to think of like if Tom Brady did that, right?

01:03:26.180 If Tom Brady came out and said, listen, I'm not doing interviews anymore.

01:03:28.700 I've been doing interviews for 20 years.

01:03:29.740 I'm not doing interviews anymore.

01:03:30.740 People would say like, what now?

01:03:32.380 Why?

01:03:33.000 And he said, listen, I've been suffering with social anxiety disorder for 20 years and

01:03:36.300 only now I'm coming out.

01:03:37.280 And I'm saying people would be like, well, I mean, and then what?

01:03:42.580 He's a white man, right?

01:03:43.340 So apparently that would be OK.

01:03:45.560 But it's like the sort of, as you say, the sort of Mott and Bailey arguments where it

01:03:50.140 goes from you attack, you question something that somebody says based on the available

01:03:54.760 evidence, which seems to be pretty good that this person is not somebody who shines

01:03:58.360 and who shuns the spotlight.

01:04:00.060 And then it moves to, oh, you must truly be attacking her identity is pretty amazing.

01:04:04.240 And the transformation from action to identity, which is really, I think, the hallmark of what

01:04:08.160 we're talking about in general here, which is that you can't criticize anybody's specific

01:04:11.540 activity or what they do in their life because it's an aspect of their identity.

01:04:15.100 Once you do that, all political discourse, in fact, all discourse, period, is over because

01:04:19.700 if everything you do is just your identity and no one's allowed to speak up about that,

01:04:23.880 what exactly are we going to talk about?

01:04:26.520 My laugh because some people were like, she is a child.

01:04:29.100 You're a 50 year old woman attacking a child. 0.99

01:04:31.020 I'm like, a child? 0.91

01:04:33.160 What?

01:04:33.700 And by the way, it didn't seem to give the media any pause when they try to ruin the

01:04:37.440 life of Nick Sandman, right?

01:04:38.880 Did they care that he was a child?

01:04:40.560 Well, I mean, according to everybody, everybody on the left, everybody on the left is a child

01:04:44.320 up until they declare them not a child.

01:04:45.720 Hunter Biden is 51 years old and he's and he's still a child.

01:04:49.080 Hunter Biden is like 14 years older than I am and Hunter is still a poor child, a wayward

01:04:55.280 child who's wandering around snorting Parmesan cheese off the car.

01:04:58.440 But he's a child.

01:04:59.060 Don't criticize him.

01:04:59.720 He's a child.

01:05:00.300 Oh, hey, but now he's selling his art and we're not supposed to believe that anybody's

01:05:03.820 paying seventy five thousand dollars a picture of Hunter Biden's art just to have access to

01:05:08.640 Joe Biden.

01:05:09.160 That's all on the up and up, according to Jen Psaki.

01:05:11.100 Don't worry.

01:05:11.560 They got it covered.

01:05:12.740 So here's my question for you, because I know I've heard you say I know Andrew Breitbart was

01:05:17.080 your mentor, that politics is downstream of culture, and that's why it's important to

01:05:21.540 fight the culture battles.

01:05:22.380 And of course, you get shamed out of that, too.

01:05:23.740 If you focus on any of the cultural stuff that the left is doing and they're like, you're

01:05:26.460 obsessed, you're obsessed with culture, you're obsessed with Republicans bounce.

01:05:30.400 So the point is, you we have to fight.

01:05:32.600 I mean, I'm not a Republican.

01:05:33.620 I'm an independent, but I'm I'm way in on this cultural war because I have kids and I

01:05:37.700 care about my country and I see what they're doing.

01:05:39.820 So how do you fight, Ben?

01:05:41.540 I mean, I saw you get brutally attacked by NPR.

01:05:44.040 I want to get to the Tucker thing, because Tucker who just got Tucker Carlson got attacked

01:05:48.080 in Montana, not physically, but the guy did lay hands on him to try to publicly humiliate

01:05:52.120 him.

01:05:52.600 I would play the tape for you, but it's hard to hear it even when you're watching it.

01:05:56.140 But the guy gets in his face in a Montana bait shop and says, like, I think you're 0.98

01:05:59.020 disgusting. 1.00

01:05:59.620 You're the most despicable man ever. 1.00

01:06:01.100 And Tucker's with his daughter. 1.00

01:06:02.380 The guy goes, I don't care.

01:06:03.860 I don't care.

01:06:05.000 How how do you fight NPR? 0.96

01:06:06.740 How do I fight these lunatics who think, you know, everything I say is is racist or sexist if 0.91

01:06:11.500 it's about a woman who happens to be of color. 0.98

01:06:13.260 How does Tucker fight back against the bait guy when he's so outspoken about his opinions?

01:06:16.700 And how does Joe Schmo fight back against every single institution being controlled by

01:06:21.600 these leftists who don't want you to speak your true opinion?

01:06:25.240 So I think that the answer for people who are in the public eye like you or me or Tucker

01:06:28.880 is and Tucker and you do a great job of this.

01:06:31.020 You just laugh at them, frankly, because it is silly and you make yourself uncancellable,

01:06:34.860 right?

01:06:35.000 You make you give yourself a platform where people can find you and the left can't really

01:06:38.340 cancel you.

01:06:38.920 And that really is a solution for a lot of us who are in the public eye, right?

01:06:42.220 And NPR can criticize me as much as they want.

01:06:44.780 We have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of subscribers at Daily Wire and

01:06:48.580 they can they can yell at me as much as they want, but they really can't do all that much

01:06:52.520 other than, you know, try and presumably get some of my employees can by by cutting down

01:06:56.780 our traffic from Facebook, which is ugly enough.

01:06:58.420 And we can fight back in the public eye that way.

01:06:59.880 But that's literally our job, right?

01:07:00.900 We get paid to do that for people.

01:07:02.660 I'm really worried about the guy who just is working a low level position at a corporation.

01:07:06.000 And now that the mandate goes out that we are all going to have a day of reflection on

01:07:11.400 our whiteness at work, right?

01:07:13.020 Or I'm worried about the kid who's in school who has to deal with a teacher who has declared

01:07:16.920 that the United States is systemically racist.

01:07:18.480 And we're going to do an entire curriculum about the 1619 project in order to demonstrate

01:07:22.200 this.

01:07:22.860 The answer there is to take a page from the book of the left, which is the United in

01:07:27.460 the US conservatives do not think institutionally.

01:07:29.720 We think individually.

01:07:30.380 And that is great in terms of politics.

01:07:32.120 And it is terrible in terms of actually winning, because one of the things that we actually

01:07:35.600 have to do is organize.

01:07:36.800 So one of the things I point out is, for example, Donald McNeil, who was the science writer over

01:07:42.620 at the New York Times, he said on some sort of children's trip to Peru, like a bunch of

01:07:47.020 high school students, he said the N-word in explaining when you're not allowed to use

01:07:50.060 the N-word.

01:07:50.880 And the New York Times had like 150 members of the News Guild who wrote a letter and said,

01:07:55.140 this is really bad.

01:07:55.700 He should be fired.

01:07:56.260 And they ended up firing him. 0.99

01:07:57.440 It was ridiculous. 0.71

01:07:58.320 There are 1,400 members of the News Guild.

01:07:59.740 So what would have happened if 400 members of the News Guild had gotten a hold of that

01:08:03.000 letter and said, you know what?

01:08:03.700 No, we're going to write a letter to the heads of the New York Times saying you're not allowed 0.98

01:08:06.680 to fire him because this is absurd and ridiculous.

01:08:09.240 The answer is there has to the people who are in the middle are going to have to make 0.92

01:08:11.820 a choice.

01:08:12.460 Do they wish to be renormalized along with the left or do they wish to go back to status

01:08:16.560 quo ante, which was people get to basically talk or not talk at all in the workplace?

01:08:20.400 But at least we get to either express our opinions or there will be no opinions in the

01:08:23.440 workplace.

01:08:23.860 And those are the two normal standards, not the left gets to say what it wants and everybody else

01:08:28.000 has to shut up. 0.94

01:08:28.600 That takes organization.

01:08:29.320 That means finding all the people who are like-minded or friendly to your position and

01:08:32.700 getting them to actively take collective action, right?

01:08:35.620 To say to the boss, listen, there are 150 of us and we don't like the training that you're

01:08:40.300 proposing.

01:08:41.000 And so we're just not going to do it.

01:08:42.840 And you can fire all of us or you can fire none of us.

01:08:45.360 It's going to take that sort of concerted action because the only other alternative,

01:08:49.580 frankly, is to build alternatives, right?

01:08:52.140 In every business.

01:08:53.180 And that's the alternative that I don't prefer.

01:08:55.060 I mean, listen, I'll make a lot of money off of it.

01:08:57.160 Really?

01:08:57.480 If there's going to be like a right wing razor company, then I'm happy to found it and I'm

01:09:01.700 happy to take everybody's money to do that.

01:09:03.380 But I'd prefer that you just be able to buy whatever razor you want without having to think

01:09:06.680 about whether the razor company scorns you for believing that boys are boys and girls

01:09:10.540 are girls.

01:09:10.920 So I think that we can renormalize the institutions.

01:09:14.140 But what it does require is for us to be just as hard and intransigent and aggressive on

01:09:17.980 the right as they are on the radical left and recognize that those people in the middle

01:09:21.440 are much more likely to agree with the position of neutrality or mild conservatism than to

01:09:25.980 the radical leftist schtick that's now being pushed inside corporations.

01:09:29.140 Mm hmm.

01:09:29.520 And don't believe what you read on social media anyway.

01:09:31.700 Again, back now, you know, listen to the 20 people who are who are right around you,

01:09:35.520 the people who are within 20 feet of you, because that's what's real.

01:09:38.460 And if you happen to live in a very, very blue state, don't even listen to those people.

01:09:42.020 Get on the phone and call your relatives who are in blue states and more more reasonable

01:09:45.700 places and red states and more reasonable places.

01:09:47.700 Because I'll tell you, even when I take take in the fire, I love talking to people who

01:09:52.120 are outside of media or outside of social media because they'll remind me like, we're

01:09:56.760 with you.

01:09:57.260 We're with you. 0.91

01:09:57.680 This is nonsense.

01:09:58.560 And it's important to feel supported even if people aren't doing it online.

01:10:03.340 Megan, my favorite thing is honestly, like I took Twitter off my phone two years ago.

01:10:06.940 So I have Twitter on my computer.

01:10:08.280 And when I want to tweet something, I literally have to I like force myself.

01:10:11.140 I have barriers now.

01:10:11.760 I have to take out my computer.

01:10:12.880 I have to fire it up.

01:10:13.920 And then I tweet something and then I turn it off because Twitter is just an ego machine.

01:10:17.700 And not being on Twitter is like the greatest godsend.

01:10:20.420 Not being checking my not checking my my notifications every five seconds is really, really nice.

01:10:24.860 Like very often, I don't find out what I trend usually about every three weeks.

01:10:27.880 I found the algorithm trends me every three weeks or so.

01:10:30.500 And and very often now, I don't even find out that I am trending or was trending until

01:10:35.400 after the thing was over.

01:10:37.120 But one of the things that I love most is you'll walk around and you'll just talk to people

01:10:39.860 and they'll say, what's going on in your life?

01:10:41.540 And you'll mention that you're trending.

01:10:42.460 They're like, what?

01:10:43.540 Like they literally have no idea what you're talking about, like things that are consuming your

01:10:46.600 life and that you're obsessed with and you think everybody is thinking about.

01:10:49.480 No one is thinking about first key rule of life is that very few people think or care

01:10:54.260 about you.

01:10:54.880 And that's actually quite liberating.

01:10:56.740 Yeah, it's wonderful.

01:10:57.680 And by the way, you can go into your apps and you can limit the time that you can spend

01:11:00.820 on any of these social media apps.

01:11:02.160 You can you can say I can I'm only spending 20 minutes a day on Facebook or, you know,

01:11:05.540 15 minutes a day on Twitter, whatever.

01:11:07.240 So you if you can't trust yourself to govern that you trust your little your your handy

01:11:11.160 iPhone, which is monitoring everything you do anyway.

01:11:13.560 Ben Shapiro.

01:11:14.080 I love it.

01:11:14.840 The authoritarian moment.

01:11:16.260 It's well-timed as always.

01:11:17.460 Love talking to you.

01:11:19.180 Thanks for being here.

01:11:20.380 Thanks, Megan.

01:11:24.880 Don't forget to join us tomorrow because we've got the news coverage for you, including an

01:11:28.140 update on all this COVID Delta madness.

01:11:30.740 We got Dr. Joel Zinberg, who has written a piece recently about just stop the madness,

01:11:35.920 just stop it over the Delta variant.

01:11:37.540 I mean, honestly, you would think that the bubonic plague has returned to America the way people 1.00

01:11:41.060 are talking about this.

01:11:41.980 And so we're going to have some facts for you, some hardcore facts to arm you before

01:11:46.100 you go back to these schools, which are, you know, engaging in madness as we speak and

01:11:51.060 beyond.

01:11:51.600 So we're going to arm you with information tomorrow.

01:11:53.760 Don't miss it.

01:11:54.360 Go ahead and subscribe to the show now.

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01:11:57.420 Give us a five star review and would love to hear your thoughts.

01:12:00.460 So go on there and just fill out the review, the comment section.

01:12:03.960 I read them all.

01:12:04.860 Yes, I have.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - July 26, 2021

Ben Shapiro on DeSantis, Biden, and Our Authoritarian Moment in America ｜ Ep. 134

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