Ben Shapiro joins me on the show to explain why he thinks that Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 7 was a just war, and why we should all be grateful that Israel attacked Hamas in the first place.
00:14:39.600How does that situation get resolved, ultimately?
00:14:43.320So, I think that one of the problems in foreign policy is that, particularly Americans and Westerners, because the big wars that we have in our history
00:14:50.780had something like a negotiated ending and then a period of peace, or complete victory is in World War II.
00:14:56.860We're not used to the reality, which is that for the vast history of war, there was no such thing as, like, a war that solved things, where, like, it was just solved for all time.
00:15:12.080That's particularly not the case in the Middle East, where you have religions that are going thousands of years old.
00:15:16.920And so, you know, what is likely to happen there in the Gaza Strip is what you currently have in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank.
00:15:24.440What you currently have there is Israeli military rule and Palestinian civil control.
00:15:28.200That is likely to be the most durable outcome of this, because...
00:15:32.900Doesn't that mean there's going to be more October 7th, Ben?
00:15:34.940No, because there haven't been more October 7th in the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, right?
00:15:39.640I mean, meaning that October 7th was created by a series of things.
00:15:43.860It was not primarily created by Palestinian hatred, because that hatred was pre-existing.
00:15:49.120The desire to extirpate Israel was pre-existing, going all the way back to 1948, when Israel was established, when five Arab armies decided at that time to destroy the nascent state of Israel.
00:16:11.600By the way, it goes all the way back to the early days of Jewish settlement.
00:16:18.260There were always Jews in the state of Israel, or in what would become the state of Israel, going all the way back thousands of years.
00:16:22.940But kind of the renewed population of Israel in terms of population growth.
00:16:26.500I mean, there were massacres of Jews in 1929 in Hebron.
00:16:29.300So, I mean, there's nothing new in terms of the enmity, is the point that I'm making.
00:16:32.940What was the failure of October 7th was a security failure.
00:16:36.640You know, that's much more practical than how do you cure the hatred in the hearts of human beings.
00:16:42.320The hatred in the heart of human beings is very hard to cure.
00:16:44.420Security failures are pragmatically possible to prevent.
00:16:48.860And Israel made a series of pragmatic failures with regard to the Gaza Strip that they did not make, for example, with regard to the West Bank.
00:16:57.000And that included allowing the Hamas to cultivate its power in the Gaza Strip.
00:17:03.320It included mostly there being no real intelligence on the ground in the Gaza Strip.
00:17:07.280It was basically a black box to Israel.
00:17:10.720They thought because of Iron Dome they could shoot down most of what was coming over that border.
00:17:13.520But they didn't have a lot of intelligence capacity.
00:17:15.500Israel goes into Janine and Nablus, which are areas of the West Bank, on a routine basis and kills terrorists because they have intelligence resources on the ground over there.
00:17:22.280Ben, I was going to say, what we are talking about is practical.
00:17:26.300And you were talking about curing the hatred in people's hearts.
00:17:30.680I'm looking at what's happening on campuses.
00:17:33.080I'm looking at how people are discussing it on the streets.
00:17:36.100Because it seems to me that whilst Israel may be winning the war, what they're doing is they're losing the PR war.
00:17:43.580So I disagree only in the sense that I don't think the PR war had ever been won by Israel in the recent past.
00:17:49.720So, I mean, as long as I've been alive, the press have been very largely oriented against Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians.
00:17:59.000It's what drove the attempts to negotiate in 2000 and 2008.
00:18:01.600So I don't think anything has really changed there.
00:18:03.760I think that there's a broadening and deepening of anti-American, anti-Western sentiment that is manifested at a lot of these protests.
00:18:09.860I think that one thing that's happened here that I think people are misreading is they're treating these protests as though they are solely about Israel and the Palestinians.
00:18:17.720When in reality, when you listen to what the protesters are saying, it's not just about Israel and the Palestinians.
00:18:21.700They're talking about decolonialization.
00:18:24.060They're talking about the evils of the West and how the West is a colonial empire.
00:18:28.220They're talking about how the West itself is systemically racist.
00:18:31.240I mean, it's what some people online have called the omni cause, and it's what unifies, you know, queers for Palestine, right?
00:18:38.560That's always the big puzzle of this sort of thing, right?
00:18:40.280Is that you look at that and on its face, it's totally absurd, right?
00:18:58.140The thing about Israel and Jews, and I would say that this is part of kind of the broader intersectional argument, is that there are many types of anti-Semitism manifest in a variety of different ways.
00:19:07.840Left-wing anti-Semitism, which I think is crossing over with Islamic anti-Semitism right now in a lot of these protests.
00:19:13.000That argument springs on the left from a not anti-Semitic argument, but an anti-System argument.
00:19:18.920And that argument goes something like this.
00:19:20.720Everybody who performs less well in a particular system is a victim of that system.
00:19:26.240That failure is actually evidence of exploitation and victimization at the hands of a system.
00:19:31.120And so what that means is that anyone who's successful within the system is an exploiter, is the person who has done something to hurt somebody else.
00:19:37.820When you take that internationally, then what you end up with is the West is the exploiter of non-Western peoples.
00:19:42.360And when you take it to the Middle East, what it looks like is Israel is the exploiter of the Palestinians.
00:19:46.300Like Israel got rich at the expense of the Palestinians, despite the fact that Israeli Arabs are, in fact, the richest Arabs in the neighborhood.
00:19:52.380And that if you look at â actually, it's a pretty good case study.
00:19:55.500If you look at GDP per capita, if you're going to look in order at where Arabs have done the best in the region, and you're not talking about like the oil-rich monarchies where they're just kind of redistributing oil income, then you're looking at Israel.
00:20:07.500There's not a single Israeli Arab who wants to live in Palestine.
00:20:09.660They don't want to by polling data because they understand what that would mean.
00:20:13.620Wherever there's more Israeli control, you have Arabs who are richer because there's more day-to-day maintenance of law and order.
00:20:22.780But the argument is that Palestinian failure, and particularly in the Gaza Strip, that is not the result of Hamas.
00:20:29.400That is the result of the great exploiter that is Israel.
00:20:32.200And the proof of that is that Israel is a very successful country, and Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip is a shitshow.
00:20:38.100And the reality is that it's a shitshow because when you make an active decision to keep people in quote-unquote refugee camps for 70 years as opposed to integrating them into an economy or as opposed to trying to build things and create foreign relations and build a working government and open your economy and teach people things.
00:20:53.560The reality is the Gaza Strip has the same physical capacity or better than a multiplicity of countries that do wildly better than it does in terms of the GDP scale, whether you're talking about Hong Kong, whether you're talking about Singapore.
00:21:06.540So it has nothing to â as we've learned in terms of modern economies, the natural resources with which a country is endowed, that is not dispositive as to whether a country is economically successful or societally successful.
00:21:19.380The system is what determines whether a country is societally successful or not.
00:21:23.680Check West Germany versus East Germany for an amazing example of this, or North Korea versus South Korea.
00:21:28.020So what that suggests is maybe there are a bunch of decisions made in the Gaza Strip that are really bad and have resulted in some really bad life standards.
00:21:35.040But again, that violates the scruples of this general moral principle, which is suffering equals victimization at the hands of a higher power.
00:21:43.740And so that can manifest pretty quickly in anti-Semitism because Jews are disproportionately successful in a wide variety of endeavors.
00:21:50.960I think mainly because Jews historically have valued education very, very highly, and it's not unique to Jews.
00:21:56.460Thomas Sowell talks about middlemen Chinese in non-Chinese countries who study very, very hard and do really, really well.
00:22:01.880You see Asians treated this way at American universities, right?
00:22:04.680They're an other now because they become white.
00:22:06.960They've become part of the system, and so they have to be discriminated against in admissions, for example.
00:22:10.960And so it can turn into the Jews are at the top of the system because the Jews benefit from the system.
00:22:16.040But what makes Jews particularly weird is that Jews are also, by the data, one of the more victimized subgroups, right, in terms of hate crimes, for example, attacks, physical attacks, or the state of Israel, which has been targeted by terror more than any other Western country by far, right?
00:22:30.260So it kind of violates all the rules, and I think there's a particular ire about that.
00:22:34.620So if it were just about Israel and the Palestinians, or if it were just about Arab suffering in general, as many people have pointed out, where were the protests when Assad was killing 500,000 Muslims in Syria?
00:22:46.820Where are the protests right now in Nigeria, where Christians are being killed, or Niger, or Libya, or a wide variety of other countries where people are suffering?
00:22:57.700I mean, the deportation of Afghans from Pakistan by the hundreds of thousands is happening literally right now.
00:23:03.980And that is, and those are all very good points.
00:23:06.220But what is really interesting at the moment, Ben, is we've always, we're from the UK, we've seen these tropes time and time again on the fringes of the left, on the fringes of the Labour Party.
00:23:16.540And we saw it with Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.
00:23:20.480But now what is very interesting and deeply worrying it is we're now seeing this come up from the right, which is something that I've never seen before in my lifetime, certainly.
00:23:31.480I mean, I think it was always on the fringes of the right.
00:23:33.360I think you're right that it's expanded into less fringy areas of the right, for sure.
00:23:38.760Neil Ferguson, in his book, The War of the World, where he talks about the period World War I, World War II, he suggests that genocidal feeling or attacks on minorities, I think to put it more mildly, attacks on minorities.
00:23:50.040That tends to spring up at times of high economic uncertainty, when you have empires in collapse, and when you have high levels of minority population.
00:23:59.020And what you're seeing right now is a lot of that in the West.
00:24:19.360What do you do with your time when your job is gone, right?
00:24:21.980I mean, these are all serious questions that people are thinking about.
00:24:24.720And if they're not thinking about that, they're just looking at their bills right now, and the inflation is sky high, and it's very difficult for people to make their payments.
00:24:29.740And then you have the problem of a receding Western power, and it certainly feels like Western power has been receding over the course of the post-Cold War era, weirdly enough.
00:24:40.260It feels like there should have been these sort of liberal flowering that Fukuyama wanted, and instead what you actually got was the Samuel Huntington clash of civilizations in which the West was so apologetic about its past that it basically started to recede from the world stage,
00:24:52.660making room for rising China, making room for a militaristic Russia, making room for a Middle East that is now increasingly being cursed by a tentacle-laden Iranian power with terror proxies all over the region.
00:25:05.500And so you have weakening empires if you consider the West to be sort of an empire on its own, which is probably true, whether you consider it a physical empire or an economic empire, that feels like that's withering.
00:25:15.260And then you have high levels of minority populations, which is going to cause internal stressors because when people don't have a lot in common,
00:25:21.060and ethnicity doesn't have to be a proxy for value system, but sometimes it can be.
00:25:24.940And when that happens, people start to look at each other with distrust, and things start to break down really, really quickly.
00:25:30.020And so what that's resulted in on the right is this kind of isolationism that there's a traditional American sort of vacillation between interventionism and isolationism.
00:25:40.000That's been true for all of American history.
00:25:41.480You go back to the 1920s. It was a very isolationist time.
00:25:44.080You go to the late 1930s, 40s, you start to see more of an interventionist swing.
00:25:47.900You go back to the early 1900s under Teddy Roosevelt, you have a very interventionist in America.
00:25:52.220So this vacillation is very common in American life.
00:25:54.920What's weird that you're seeing on the right is something different, which is an isolationism that is not rooted in what traditional American isolationism was rooted in.
00:26:02.120Traditional American isolationism was the rest of the world is really bad.
00:26:05.420We're not going to get involved in their problems because it's going to poison us here at home.
00:26:08.180That was the isolationism of the 19th century in the United States, which was like â or George Washington, no foreign entanglements, no permanent allies, which made sense when Britain and France were fighting each other and the United States was at different times allied with both.
00:26:22.460You know, so when you have a world where things are not very close together and you're separate â you happen to be the luckiest country in the history of mankind, you're located on a continent right now that is bordered by two oceans, Mexico and Canada.
00:26:35.380That's â with nearly autarkic resources.
00:26:53.920There's a difference in that and the sort of post-World War II left-wing argument that was largely Soviet-backed, which was that America was a force for bad in the world.
00:27:04.480Right, the sort of Howard Zinn argument that America has historically been an exploitative, egregiously bad place and wherever we put our beak, things get worse.
00:27:14.020Can I just pause you there because I accept what you're saying there, Ben, but also as well, we need to mention Vietnam and we need to mention the war in Iraq, which for our generation was that moment where we just went, oh, we were lied to and we were lied to big time.
00:27:29.540Okay, so I will make the case that the Vietnam War was the first case in point of a bad ideology taking precedence over good ideology with regard to a very messy war.
00:27:42.940So the reality is that Vietnam would have been better if the United States had stayed and maintained its security.
00:27:47.520The United States unilaterally pulling out and subjecting Vietnam to communist rule and the fall of Cambodia was quite bad for the world.
00:27:53.560That doesn't mean that there may have been, just like Iraq, there may have been an initial bad assessment as to the importance of Vietnam in the grand scheme of Southeast Asia.
00:28:02.420The domino theory may not have been, even if it was real with regard to Cambodia, for example, that it maybe just didn't matter that much.
00:28:09.720But the idea that Vietnam was better ruled over by Ho Chi Minh than it would have been ruled over by something like a Western dictatorship, which is what South Korea was.
00:28:18.280I mean, we now think of South Korea as a wonderful, blooming democracy.
00:28:20.560South Korea was a dictatorship until the 80s, and now we all like South Korea.
00:28:29.960But South Korea is considered, like, a wonderful, blooming Western country.
00:28:35.340That took, like, a full-scale war in which 50,000 Americans died, and then it took decades of occupation by America to prevent North Korea from walking over that tripwire.
00:28:43.200So, again, the idea that the world is better off when America leaves is not true.
00:28:47.860You can say that we shouldn't have gotten involved there, and that's a good argument, or at least I think a passable argument.
00:28:54.580What is not a good argument is that the world got better when America left.
00:28:57.720Has the world gotten better when America pulled out from Iraq?
00:29:00.020That's a different question from whether America originally should have gotten involved in Iraq.
00:29:02.720No, but Francis's point is something else, Ben, which is, you know, the people that you're talking about in terms of the new isolationism, people like Tucker Carlson, who's been having a go at you over many things recently, is I see in him a kind of, you know, I went and I sold the war in Iraq to the people.
00:29:21.040And then it was all based on a pack of lies, and now America is, you know, his brain sees America differently now.
00:29:29.220It's quite clear, and that's why he's going over to Russia and having, you know, finding out that, you know, Russian supermarkets have shopping carts with these magnificent mechanisms and all the rest of it, right?
00:29:39.440So, I guess what we're talking about isâŚ
00:29:42.380Frankly, I think that said more about his lack of understanding of how supermarkets work than about Russia.
00:29:48.760And the idea that food is cheaper in Russia, I mean, it is cheaper for an American, but it's three times or five times or however many times more expensive for the average Russian.
00:29:56.480So, but this is what happens when people have these ideologies about basically America bad, the rest of the world good.
00:30:03.920Right, and I think that that is the key, right?
00:30:05.740I think that there's a difference between America makes mistakes and bad things happen, which is true for literally any country, and America inherently getting involved in things makes that a worse place, that it makes the thing bad, and that that's true for the West generally, that there will be a better place if Western powers were not involved in particular areas.
00:30:23.900Again, it's impossible to make the case that the West has been completely innocent or that the West has never made mistakes, that every place the West has touched has been amazing.
00:31:15.000That's why international institutions are a failure and a giant joke.
00:31:17.380It's a fifth-grade playground, and you hope that the person who's the strongest on the playground is a good person with good intentions, even if they occasionally blunder and hurt somebody innocent, rather than a really, really bad person.
00:31:28.580But there is no world on a fifth-grade playground where there are no adults present, where somebody doesn't end up as the dominant power.
00:31:35.900And when those dominant powers are bad, the world becomes a significantly worse place.
00:31:40.280Well, it's a point I've been making for a long time, which is that when you create a power vacuum, it's not going to be rainbows and unicorns.
00:31:46.880It's going to be Russia or China stepping into it.
00:31:48.800But the question I wanted to ask you, Ben, is you and personally on The Daily Wire broadly have paid a price for having this conversation in the way that you've been.
00:32:00.480You know, people like, I think there was a clip of Andrew Schultz and Patrick Bette-David talking about how it's, you know, if they called it the Israeli wire, then that would be fine and all of this other stuff.
00:32:11.160And, you know, I'll be honest, when I look at your Twitter feed, you know, you have been very focused on what's happening in Israel.
00:32:42.680The amount of time that I talked about Israel on my podcast was, as a percentage of total time on the podcast, I'd venture to say significantly less than 1%.
00:32:50.740And then October 7th happens, and of course, there's this weird thing that happens where it's like everybody else talks about Israel, but if I talk about Israel, then it's because I'm peculiarly focused on Israel as opposed to everyone else who's not.
00:33:01.540I mean, it seems like pretty much everybody's focused on that right now.
00:33:04.540So when it goes out of the news, I'll be more than happy to not talk about Israel.
00:33:08.240It's a very contentious and difficult discussion to have with a lot of people, particularly on X, which has turned into a cesspool in a lot of ways.
00:33:26.840I've even been an advocate of people who I think are absolutely despicable being allowed back on X because I think that his attempt to create a free marketplace of ideas is more important than my personal level of emotional comfort when it comes to X.
00:33:40.520I will say that the policing there in terms of virality is not very good, that there are a lot of bot accounts.
00:33:47.780Like I think a lot of those things can be simultaneously true, even while I'm very, very happy that Elon took it over and opened it up.
00:33:52.660But with that said, as far as the idea that the daily wire is, quote unquote, the Israeli wire or something, we have hosts who completely disagree with me on Israel.
00:34:02.360Matt Walsh believes, and I've had discussions with him about this, that America should have no business giving foreign aid at all to Israel or pretty much anyone else.
00:34:12.760I think that that's a wrong perspective in my viewpoint.
00:34:15.460That's a different thing from perspectives that have been articulated by other people.
00:34:21.540I don't think Matt has a lack of moral clarity between, say, Hamas and the democratic state of Israel.
00:34:26.160That is a slightly different proposition.
00:34:29.120As far as, again, my personal focus on this, I'm personally focused on this for a couple of reasons.
00:34:34.800I will freely admit that I have a level of emotional investment in a state that was created for the safety of Jews and is historically tied to my religion.
00:34:46.080And I'd be ridiculous not to simply say that that's the case.
00:34:50.320I also have a stake in this because, again, I think it's a civilizational question.
00:34:53.300And it is bewildering to me how so many members of the West seem to have a difficulty in finding moral clarity between an openly genocidal terror group in Hamas and an Israeli government that is currently engaged in a bipartisan war cabinet that is trying to bring humanitarian aid in in the middle of a conflict with an enemy that's stealing the humanitarian aid while risking its own citizens.
00:35:14.980I mean, that I find absolutely not only bewildering, but dangerous.
00:35:21.680I mean, I think there's a reason why people are being assaulted for carrying American flags into the center of many of these protests.
00:35:27.500It would be one thing if people were getting assaulted for carrying Israeli flags, which, again, I've seen throughout my life.
00:35:31.880But people getting assaulted for carrying American flags into the center of this sort of stuff betrays, I think, what is the real problem for the West.
00:35:37.780And I don't think it's a problem for Israel predominantly.
00:35:39.880Israel is going to be what Israel is going to be.
00:35:41.460It's in a region of the world that's incredibly dangerous.
00:35:43.640It's in the worst neighborhood that it's possible to be in.
00:35:46.380And it's going to have to pursue its own national self-interest, as every country should pursue its national self-interest.
00:35:52.500And sometimes those self-interests come into conflict.
00:35:55.480With that said, the real problem for the West is that you have hundreds of thousands of people who are marching in solidarity with the terrorist group.
00:36:01.460I mean, that's a problem for the West.
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00:37:04.380Lots of people hold lots of opinions where they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
00:37:06.960That's the nature of democracy, and that's fine.
00:37:09.040I mean, I wish people would read more, but that's just another question.
00:37:11.960But as far as the, you know, as far as what gets you up to get your ass off your couch and away from the Cheetos and get up in the streets marching, that's a different thing.
00:37:22.620That requires a different level of motivation than simply holding an ignorant view about a thing.
00:37:26.640That's a passionately held ignorant view about a thing at the very least.
00:37:30.760And what it speaks to is a broader worldview that this plugs into.
00:37:33.480This has become sort of the issue du jour that plugs into it.
00:37:36.300And it's not the only one we've seen in the last few years.
00:37:38.260I mean, we saw massive marches based on the death of George Floyd, and it's a completely different issue.
00:37:42.040Plugged into the same exact system, largely the same people who are protesting.
00:37:46.540What's added on top of this is the radical Islamists who have been protesting also.
00:37:49.660But the rest of the coalition is pretty much intact and looks kind of the same.
00:37:53.260What's different now is, though, Ben, you are coming under attack not only from the Andrew Tates of the world, but also the Tucker Carsons.
00:38:00.880Now, again, I think that there is an isolationist sentiment that has set in on the right that is tied to a peculiar horseshoe theory belief that is very similar to the Bernie Sanders belief,
00:38:12.120which is that there is a group of people who have been left behind.
00:38:13.960Those people have been left behind by an oligarchy that is ruled by powerful forces that are in control, and they're trying to keep you down.
00:38:21.040I don't like that sense of victimhood without evidence.
00:38:40.240But that, to me, again, suggests an interesting worldview that there's a group of people who are left behind in America, and those people are being left behind by the oligarchs of America.
00:38:50.840And that starts to look a lot like intersectional politics, just with a different victim group.
00:38:55.560And also, as well, you know, we've seen the rise of people like Andrew Tate, and we've seen what I find very concerning, because I'm not Jewish, but I look Jewish.
00:39:06.000So, you know, if things go to hell, Ben.
00:39:44.220So, right, so I think one of the things that's happened here also is that because the left went so far in closing the Overton window,
00:39:51.200I think the solution for the right was no Overton window ever.
00:39:54.680And I don't think that's correct, right?
00:39:56.680Meaning, like, I think the definition of cancel culture has been expanded really, really far.
00:40:01.400So I think that cancel culture traditionally was the idea that people were getting canceled for views that were well within the Overton window, right?
00:40:08.000For views that were kind of held by half the population, and people were getting canceled for that.
00:40:12.400But there was very little argument that if somebody was openly a fan of Hitler, that you had an obligation to hire them at your company.
00:40:21.000Everybody was sort of like, okay, well, that's outside the Overton window.
00:40:23.920Like, they have a right to say what they want to say in the United States, but that doesn't mean I have to associate with them.
00:40:28.160And again, there's a difference between, like, the public square, which is what X is supposed to be, where the idea is you can say whatever you want, even the crazy guy who loves Hitler, or, you know, I have to hire you for â it's cancel culture.
00:40:38.080If I get fired, if I go on my profile, I start waving a Nazi flag and talking about how much I love Hitler, and then you fire me, that's cancel culture, right?
00:40:45.440And I think that that's an expansion of the definition beyond what it traditionally was.
00:40:50.280The argument of the right with regard to political correctness and cancel culture was that the left had shut the Overton window so tight that very widely held mainstream opinions.
00:41:07.340And you saw, you know, very famously in 2015, the sort of intellectual dark web form up around this, where it was people like me and people like Sam Harris and people who radically disagreed on a wide variety of policies, but were like, but we can have discussions about these sorts of topics, and it's totally fine.
00:41:21.020I think it was important for that purpose.
00:41:22.940And then there was a â because politics is inherently reactionary, I think the reaction to the Overton window being shut up tight was there is no Overton window.
00:41:31.520And not only that, anything that violates the left's sense of propriety, good or bad, is now valuable.
00:41:38.280So there was a category error that was made, which was I'm going to say a true thing, and the left hates it, and that just shows how true it is.
00:41:46.660And I'm going to say a terrible thing, and the left is going to hate us, and therefore it shows how true it is.
00:41:51.900They're reacting to the left's hatred.
00:41:53.260They're letting the left actually decide in many cases what not to be offended by.
00:41:57.360So the answer is if the left is offended by everything, I will be offended by nothing, and not only that, I will embrace.
00:42:02.720The more people yell at me, the more it shows that I'm over the target, right?
00:42:05.800There's always this phrase that you hear kind of in right-wing spaces, that you're not taking flack unless you're over the target.
00:42:11.400Well, I mean, kind of and kind of not, meaning like it is true that sometimes if you're making a good point, it draws a lot of fire.
00:42:18.580It's also true sometimes that if you're making an idiotic point, you're drawing a lot of fire.
00:42:21.400So, you know, the lack of what you've created is now an unfalsifiable system, right?
00:42:26.800Because no matter what you say, if you are taking shit for it, this means that you're saying something valuable.
00:42:54.320And the thing in this case doesn't mean the true thing or the evidence thing or the thing that I can make an argument for.
00:42:59.920It's just saying anything that drives a reaction that is used as an indicator of virtue.
00:43:05.160If the left hates it, it must be virtuous.
00:43:07.600If people who historically are too sensitive hate a thing, it's not because I'm saying something that actually is quite bad, which it turns out that even sensitive people can be right.
00:43:17.880But it doesn't mean they're always right.
00:43:19.980And so I think that category error has led to a lot of, okay, well, there's no difference between saying I love Hitler and saying that I disagree with how Israel is prosecuting the war.
00:43:30.780Saying I disagree with how Israel is prosecuting the war is well within the Overton window, saying that it warms the cockles of your heart when Hamas crosses the border and murders 1,200 people seems to be outside the Overton window.
00:43:40.980And we're also, we're talking about it.
00:43:43.140And I think that's actually one of the reasons why we've seen the rise to fame and prominence of Andrew Tate.
00:43:50.380Because I did a video where I went and talked to the young people in South Beach, Miami, and we were talking about hookup culture and dating culture.
00:43:58.920And what came across was that people were very miserable.
00:44:01.760But what was even more worrying is practically every young man that I spoke to, and some of these boys were smart.
00:44:15.460Well, transgressivism has become its own sort of philosophy.
00:44:18.640If you transgress a line, this means you're brave, right?
00:44:21.680And that's actually sort of anti-conservative by nature, right?
00:44:25.640It turns out that it's radical in both directions.
00:44:27.240It's radical left because you're destroying all the lines in that direction, but can also be transgressivism is anti-conservative in the sense that if you believe, as I believe, that systems and institutions are built up gradually, there's a Hayekian point, they're built up gradually over the course of centuries by tried and true practice.
00:44:42.660That doesn't mean that every institution that's built is good.
00:44:44.920It does mean that you should be very careful before you simply destroy them willy-nilly.
00:44:47.520There are a lot of people who are like, well, no, now that the systems have been hijacked in Toto by the left, destroy the systems, destroy all of the established systems, and then we'll build on the ruins.
00:44:58.700And I think there are certain systems for which that's true, where the system's been taken over so much that it's not savable, and you're better off just kind of dissociating from it or providing an alternative.
00:45:07.780But I think that there's a lot of babies getting thrown out with a lot of bathwater right now.
00:45:12.020And so what you get is â the game I think that Andrew Tate plays, and he plays it really well actually, is he says one true thing and one absurd thing.
00:45:21.240And then if you say that's absurd, he says, well, I said this true thing.
00:45:24.700Why are you attacking me for the true thing?
00:45:26.580And he'll say men are different from women.
00:45:29.260They'll be like, and that's why men should bone a thousand women and have a thousand babies.
00:45:32.660You'll be like, well, that's not â that doesn't seem like a good lifestyle choice or good for the planet or good for you or good for your soul or anything like that.
00:45:40.140Like that's because you just don't believe in the first thing.
00:45:42.700It's like, no, no, that's not a â that is not a corollary of your first statement.
00:45:47.200And so, again, I think that people feel so hemmed in that it's â that they are bursting out in a lot of ways, many of which are bad, uninformed, foolish.
00:45:58.900And because of that, there's this thing that's been happening online a lot that I've spoken out about, which is the sort of just asking questions phenomenon, right?
00:46:06.400Which is I don't need to provide evidence to my proposition.
00:46:44.380Has anyone even thought about â I mean, it turns out usually people have spent an awful lot of time thinking about that question.
00:46:49.300And there may be a variety of different answers of various evidentiary quality.
00:46:52.800But, you know, we're in a time where there was such a premium put on not asking questions that the next move was ask all the questions and then pretend the answers don't matter.
00:47:04.220That's an interesting thing that you're saying.
00:47:06.860What the boys were saying to me when I spoke to them a couple of days ago was we are living in a world where we are openly denigrated against for being male.
00:47:18.240Where, as a man, we're not respected anymore.
00:48:24.620And when I say more of a man, Ender Tate's version of being more of a man apparently is strutting around in mansions that he may or may not own, you know, shirtless while smoking a cigar and then knocking up a bunch of women according to him.
00:48:54.560Commit to one woman like a man would as opposed to a little pathetic adolescent who's steeped in pornography which incidentally was Ender Tate's prior industry.
00:49:03.060Perhaps you should think about having children to whom you can be responsible and passing on eternal values to them.
00:49:09.360Like these were the marks of being a man for literally all of human history was protect, defend your wife, defend your children, stick around to do those things, inculcate true values in that.
00:49:18.600Build a community around that that inculcates those values and makes the world a stronger, more secure, better place.
00:50:05.920The true successful man is committing to one woman and then building a life with her because that is the fundamental building block of a society.
00:50:12.900A selfish asshole is doing what you're talking about.
00:50:17.540It makes you less of a man and, again, more of an adolescent who's playing a video game.
00:50:20.680Well, this is the thing that I think worries quite a lot of us.
00:50:23.640And I think rightly so because I think that for our generation, if there was a father figure that was necessary that you didn't have at home, let's say, Jordan Peterson was the guy.
00:50:36.600And so the millennial father figure on the internet is someone like that who is saying exactly what you're saying, which is the way to be a man is to take responsibility, is to be the strongest person at your father's funeral, whatever that looks like.
00:50:50.500But we have young guys working for us.
00:50:52.440And for their generation, I'm not saying for them specifically, but for their generation, their version of masculinity that they see from the internet is Andrew Tate.
00:51:01.520And you see, I think when you and I and Francis, when we look at that, because we have a non-internet part of our lives that we live through, to us, we're like, oh, this is clearly moronic.
00:51:12.320This guy is clearly very charismatic, but he's selling something that is crazy, that isn't going to serve men, that's going to make them miserable, that's going to disconnect them from women, that's going to disconnect them from their true purpose, etc.
00:51:24.640When we had Lauren Southern on recently, and this episode may go out before Lauren, she's had a whole, you know, she went out there and then came back and whatever.
00:51:33.440And one of the things she explained to us is, I'd never really thought about it, but to these kids, they don't know a world without the internet.
00:51:40.880So to them, what they see on the internet is reality.
00:51:49.220I mean, for the generation that's currently going through this, I mean, I can't solve it for them, you can only solve problems for yourself, but the answer is turn off your phone and go touch some fucking grass, man.
00:52:26.180And the reality is that dating systems are broken and have been broken for a very long time in the United States and I think in Europe as well.
00:52:32.960That one of the reasons that people are being driven into the arms of people like Andrew Tate is because Andrew Tate's case is that women are out to victimize men.
00:52:40.360And therefore, you should retaliate by victimizing women or at least pretending that you have no responsibilities to women since they don't want you to have responsibility for them.
00:52:47.640You may as well just treat them the way that they seem to say they want to be treated in any way and treat them just like a disposable plaything.
00:53:01.940It's a very close-knit religious community.
00:53:03.660Virtually everybody who lives in my religious community, the way that they met their wife is they're fixed up by a friend, right?
00:53:08.240They're fixed up by a friend who went to synagogue and who knew somebody else who went to a different synagogue and then referred, you know, somebody to somebody.
00:53:14.740And then they went on a date and then they met and they got married.
00:53:17.360You know, that is a very different thing than the sort of culture that we've now cultivated, which has no common set of values and in which dating is not oriented toward marriage in the first place.
00:53:26.480I mean, that's a whole different problem.
00:53:27.860This is why I say you have to have an institutional upbringing.
00:53:30.040Like, I'm not super worried about my kids because I'm raising them in an institutional upbringing.
00:53:33.000The problem is we've now had three generations of people who are being raised outside of any institutional upbringing and treated like Rousseau's Emile, like just go to the forest and free yourself.
00:53:42.520And it turns out that that sets up a pretty bad set of values.
00:53:46.940And one of the things that Tate's trying to offer, I think, I think it's a lie, but I think that he's trying to pretend to do this is a feeling of community.
00:53:57.460And online communities are not real communities.
00:53:59.100Anybody who's ever spent time in, like, a real community knows that that's not the case.
00:54:02.840Being in a chat room with people is not the same thing.
00:54:04.960It's actually what we do every Saturday, which is we turn off computers and phones between Friday night and Saturday night, and you're literally living just in your community.
00:54:14.760You're seeing friends and family literally 25 hours a week.
00:54:17.780Now, that's a very, very different thing.
00:54:19.180But when you set up an AirStats online community, it can make you feel as though you have a community in being one of the people who believes the things that Tate believes.
00:54:25.640That also sets up, you know, a good possibility of easy and quick kind of cult leadership, which is you see these cultic feelings build up around figures and then dissipate actually rather quickly.
00:54:33.960Every so often, there will be sort of a cult figure who forms.
00:55:41.560But whatever the case may be, our mentality has been rewired for this sort of stuff.
00:55:46.120And you're right, that AI is just going to exacerbate that problem.
00:55:48.620It's actually creating a weird sort of...
00:55:51.280Genetic bottleneck is the wrong term, but it's a bottleneck of sorts.
00:55:53.800It's creating a weird brain bottleneck for a population that's pushing them toward more and more bizarre and extreme forms of community and viewpoint.
00:56:01.880And, you know, I said touch grass before, but the first thing to do is you have to turn off your phone.
00:56:29.500She said, like, every time you're on the internet, you get more depressed and more upset and you seem to get sucked into this kind of maw of bad opinion and bad feeling and just turn off your phone.
00:57:11.700I own a Honda Odyssey that I can fit all four of my children in because I'm reproductively successful.
00:57:20.360What a beautiful moment to end the interview.
00:57:23.400The final question we ask all our guests, Ben, is the same, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
00:57:30.280I mean, I think that the biggest thing that we're not talking about is the failure to â and we've been talking about it the whole time â the failure to form actual communities centered around values is the biggest factor in the breakdown of everything.
00:57:44.920And we constantly keep looking at the symptoms of those things and how do we fix the symptom of that?
00:57:48.180How do we fix the protests in the streets?
00:57:49.900How do we fix the lack of understanding about foreign policy?
00:57:53.620Politics is the stuff that plays up at the surface.
00:57:55.380The stuff that's really happening and that's really been quite bad for society is that we were an iceberg that was rooted to the floor of the ocean bed.
00:58:02.820And now that has cracked and it's starting to break up underneath the surface.
00:58:06.640And we're starting to feel the tremors up here.
00:58:16.500And we were talking about like historic legacies.
00:58:17.820But it's actually something you can fix in real time.
00:58:19.900And the way you fix that in real time is by doing a thing that I think people are loathe to do now, which is commit to a community, commit to an institution, commit to a church, sometimes before you even believe in it.
00:58:31.980So this is something that I think that Westerners are not built for.
00:58:36.040We tend to think, okay, I got to believe in the thing and then I go to church.
00:58:38.280I got to believe in this thing and then I involve myself in the institution.
00:58:44.860Doing the act of virtue makes you, this is Aristotelian, doing the act of virtue makes you virtuous, right?
00:58:51.140Engaging in a community makes you a community-minded person.
00:58:53.960Going to church, it might not end with you believing the same things the rest of your church going friends believe, but it gives you a set of values that give you a sense of community.
00:59:00.800You don't do that and you're floating around out here.
00:59:02.580And, you know, in a world that was very repressive, I can see why that would appeal to people.
00:59:07.000But, you know, you can say that the center was too powerful and it was sucking in, this is a very Jordan idea, right?
00:59:11.400You know, the center was too powerful and it was sucking in all of the sort of bodies that were orbiting it.
00:59:17.200And so, but the solution to that was not to dissolve the center.