Ben Shapiro
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So again, I'm gonna quibble with the premise of the question because I think that when it comes to, for example, food insecurity, school food programs, again, you can always pour money into any program and at the margins create change. I mean, there's no doubt that pouring money onto anything will create change in a marginal way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement, right? So the Delta is what I'm looking at. And so I think that the, you're, you're starting at a second order question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
which is what if we ignore what I would think are the big primary questions of education, namely family structure, value of education at home, how much you have parents who are capable or willing to help with homework. What are the incentive structures we can set up for a society that actually facilitate that? How local communities take ownership of their schools is a big one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
All of these issues we're ignoring in favor of, say, air conditioning or lunch programs. And so in a vacuum, if you say air conditioning and lunch programs, sounds great in a vacuum. In terms of prioritization of values and cost structure, are those the things that I think are going to move the needle in a major way in terms of public policy? I do not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And in fact, I think that many of them end up being disproportionate wastes of money. I mean, I've talked before pretty controversially about the fact that an enormous amount of school lunch programs are thrown out, like an enormous amount of that food ends up in the garbage can. Is there a better way to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If there is a better way to do it, then I'm perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it. But it seems to me that one of the big flaws in the way that many people of the left approach government is what if we hit every gnat with a hammer? And my question is, what if the gnat isn't even the problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What if there is a much bigger substructure problem that needs to be solved in order to, if you're shifting deck chairs on the Titanic, sure, you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented. But the real question is the water that's gaping into the Titanic, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then they used to get married. The vast majority of people in this country with kids used to be married. The vast majority of people with kids in this country now are not married increasingly. That is obviously a societal change. Something changed. It wasn't human evolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do you have the money- People are worse off now than they were 50, 60 years ago when the marriage rates were higher?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So in other words, people are richer now and they have more education now, and yet they're having more babies out of wedlock now because they're richer and have more education?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture, meaning that everyone, poor, rich, and in between, used to get married.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
By the way, a huge percentage of marriages in the United States used to be what they would call shotgun marriages, meaning that somebody knocked somebody up, and because they did not want the baby to be born outside of a two-parent household, they would then get married. Do we think that shotgun marriages, though, are a way to bring back equilibrium to education? Yes. Yes. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure. Because that is the basis for all of this, including education.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yes, it was the reasonable direction for nearly all of modern history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
People don't think that. In what way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's weird. The entire left right now is arguing that we regress social standards by rejecting Roe versus Wade. So that's obviously not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The notion of the arc of history constantly moves in one direction is belied by nearly all of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the first half of the 20th century is filled with barbarism, communism, Nazism. All of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century. In what way? Nazism and communism weren't a regression from what was going on in 1905?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I consider that a regression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
A moral regression, which is what we are talking about now, moral regression. And you're suggesting that moral regression – I wouldn't term a return to traditional values a moral regression. You would. But your suggestion is that history only moves in one direction, and I'm suggesting that history does not only move in one direction. It tends to move actually – back and forth. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
First of all, what the data tend to show is that actually more highly educated people, as you were saying, tend to get married more. So the idea is that women getting an education somehow throws them off marriage. It's the opposite. Usually it's women who are not educated who are not getting married.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Those women aren't having children. Now you're shifting the topic. My topic was how to get more people married. And then you suggested that higher levels of education are delaying marriage and making it less probable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And what I'm telling you, because this is what the data suggests, is that actually as you raise up the educational ladder, people tend to be married more than they are lower down on the educational ladder. If you're a high school graduate, you're less likely to be married than if you're a postdoc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's another confound there. I mean, the confound is that people in stable marriages tend to be the children of stable marriages. And there's only one way to break that cycle, which is to create a stable marriage. And that is something that is in everyone's hands. Again, this notion that it is somehow an unbreakable, unshatterable barrier to get married and have kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I don't understand where this is coming from. Why is that such a challenge? It's not a challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I am fine within my local community. We all vote. Again, I've suggested that there's a difference between local community and federal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches or air conditioning or whatever it is that we all agree to do, because the more local you get, the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest and the more interest you have in your neighbors. All of that's fine. I'm part of a very, very solid community in our community. We give to each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We have minimum standards of helping one another. All that's wonderful. When it comes to the actual problem of education, what I object to in the political sphere, and this happens all the time, is everybody is arguing on top of the iceberg about how we can move the needle forward. 0.5 percentage points, as opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them. And we just ignore that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We pretend that that's just, you know, sort of the natural consequence of thing. The arc of history suggests that people are never going to get married again. Well, I mean, actually, what the arc of history suggests, realistically speaking, is that the people who are not getting married are not going to be having kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And what it also suggests, the people who are married are going to be having kids. And so the demographic profile actually over time is rather going to shift toward people who are having lots and lots of kids. I'm married. I have four kids. Everyone in my community is married. That's like minimum buy-in in my community is four kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so what's happening actually in terms of demographics is that the people who are more religious and getting married are having more kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so if you're talking about the arc of history shifting toward marriage, I would suggest that actually demographically over time, long periods of time, not over one generation, over long periods of time, the only cure for low birth rate is going to be the people who get married and have lots of kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I literally just told you that on the local level, I'm fine for people voting for air conditioning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the idea there would be that presumably if the society, meaning the state, and I generally don't mean the federal state. I mean, like the state of California, for example, decides that everybody ought to have air conditioning, people will vote for air conditioning, and that's perfectly legal. And I don't think there's anything morally objectionable about that per se.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I also don't think that that's going to heal anything remotely like the central problem. And I think that what tends to happen in terms of government is people love arguing about the problems that can be solved by opening a wallet, and nobody likes to solve a problem by...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
you know, closing their sex life to one person, for example, or having kids within a stable religious community, like the things that actually build society. I'm fine with arguing about each of these policies and whether we apply them or not is a matter generally of pragmatism. Not morality. It's a matter of incentive structures, not per se morality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because incentive structures do have moral underpinnings. There's such a thing as, for example, if you're going to use a welfare program, you have to decide how effective it is, to what crowd it applies, where the cutoffs are. Does it disincentivize work? Does it not? All of these are pragmatic concerns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But on a moral level, the generalized objection that I have to people on the left side of the aisle is that they like to focus... In these conversations, very often it feels as though it's a conversation with people who are drunk searching under the lamp for their keys. The problems they want to look at are the problems that are solvable by government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then all the problems they don't want to look at, which are the actual giant monsters lurking in the dark and not particularly solvable by government, are the ones they want to ignore and assume are just the natural state of things. And I don't think that's correct at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And it's actually not the solution to education depending on the kind of solutions that you're talking about. Some solutions, yeah. Some solutions, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think these are all pragmatic discussions. Sure, of course. Actually, this is what we used to hash out in legislatures before they turned into platforms for people grandstanding, but yes. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure. So in terms of actual job performance, you have to separate it into a few categories. In terms of actual performance in foreign policy, I think Trump's foreign policy record is significantly better than Biden's, the world being on fire right now, being a fairly good example of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And we can get into each aspect of the world being on fire and where the incentive structures came from and how all of that happened in a moment. When it comes to the economy, I think that Trump's economic record was better than Biden's. Doesn't mean he didn't overspend. He did. He wildly overspent. But he also had a very solid record of job creation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
A huge percentage of the gains in the economy went to people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Actually, the gross income to the average American was about $6,000 during his term. The unemployment rates were very, very low before COVID.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that you almost have to separate the Trump administration into sort of before COVID and during COVID, because COVID obviously is sort of a black swan event, the most signal event change in politics in our lifetime. Governance during COVID is almost its own category, which we can discuss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic policy, I think that Trump was significantly better than Biden has been. That's on the upside for Trump. On the downside for Biden, obviously, you're talking 40-year highs in inflation. You're talking about savings being eaten away. You're talking about everything being 20% to 30% more expensive. You're talking about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
massive increases to the deficit, even at a rate that was unknown under Trump. The deficit under Trump raised by about a little under a trillion dollars every year up until 2020. Again, 2020 was COVID year, so everybody decided that we're going to fire hose money at things. But then Joe Biden continued to fire hose money at things in 21, 22, and 23.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That obviously is, in my opinion, bad economic policy. And then you get to the rhetoric and you get to the stuff that Donald Trump says. And as I've said before, My view is that on Donald Trump's epitaph, on his gravestone, it will say Donald Trump, he's had a lot of shit. I think that Donald Trump does say a lot of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that that is basically baked into the cake, which is why everyone who's bewildered by the polls is ignoring human nature, which is at the beginning, when you see something very shocking, it's very shocking. And then if you see it over and over and over and over for years on end, it is no longer shocking. It is just part of the background noise like tinnitus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It just becomes something that your brain adjusts for. And so do I like a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric? No, and I never have. Do I think that that is dispositive as to his presidency? No, I do not. When it comes to Biden, again, I think he's underperforming economically. I think that his foreign policy has been really a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Even the things I think he's done right are, I think, band-aids for things that he created by doing wrong. And when it comes to his own rhetoric... You can argue that it's grading on a curve because Trump was coming in with such wild rhetoric that just a maintenance of that wild rhetoric doesn't really change, again, the baseline. For Biden, he came in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In the same way that Obama did on the sort of soaring rhetoric of American unity. I'm the president for all. Like Trump came in. He's like, listen, I'm the president for what I am. And, you know, I'm going to say the things I want to say. I'm beyond the toilet. I'm tweeting. We're like, OK, you know, that's what it is with Biden. He came in with I'm the president for all Americans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I'm trying to unify everybody. And that pretty quickly broke down into a lot of oppositional language about his political opponents in particular, an attempt to lump in, for example. huge swaths of the conservative movement with the people who participated, for example, in January 6th or who are fans of January 6th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And, you know, the sort of lumping in of everybody into MAGA Republicans who wasn't personally signed on to an infrastructure bill with him. That sort of stuff, I think, has been truly terrible. I thought his Philadelphia speech was truly terrible. And again, I think that you do have the problem of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He is no longer capable of certainly rhetorically unifying the country when every speech from him feels like watching Nick Wallenda walk across a volcano on a tightrope. It really is like you're just sort of waiting for him to follow. I mean, it's sad to say. I mean, the other day he was speaking for what was in effect his campaign kickoff. And this is in Valley Forge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I mean, Jill rushed up there like off that off. As soon as he was done, Jill rushed up there, you know, like she'd been shot out of a cannon to come and try and guide him away. So he didn't become the Shane Gillis Roomba. And, you know, that's not really, you know, let's put it this way. It does not quiet the soul to watch Joe Biden rhetorically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Again, it's a different problem than Trump's problem. But that's my analysis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, there's a lot. So, I mean, I want to ask a few questions on each one of these. Yeah, sure. So, let's talk about divisiveness for a second. So... There's no one who can make the case that Donald Trump is not divisive. Of course, he's incredibly divisive. It's a given. Do you treat Biden's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness that you treat Trump's rhetoric?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Or I should probably put that the other way around. Should we treat Trump's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness as Joe Biden or, say, Barack Obama's rhetoric?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. So my feeling is – and this is one area where, for clarification, we're going to have a division – is that I, of course, don't treat Trump's rhetoric in the same way that I treat Biden's or Obama's. He's utterly uncalibrated. He says whatever he wants to at any given time, and it doesn't even match up with his policy very often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the answer would be yes. And now I've been given a choice between a person who I think in calibrated ways says things that are divisive and a person who in uncalibrated ways says things that are divisive. And so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive is every poll taken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
since essentially august of 2021 he he is by all available metrics incredibly divisive a huge percentage of americans are deeply unhappy not only with his performance but don't believe his uniter they're that's just the reality and that may just be a reflection i mean honestly we may be putting too much on trump or biden personally it may just be that the american people themselves are rhetorically divided because of social media and social media can in fact be assessable
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, the reason I would say that Biden is, in fact, historically divisive is because Republicans felt much more strongly about Barack Obama than Joe Biden, actually. But they didn't feel as strongly about Trump as they did about like Romney or McCain. Right. In what way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Oh, no, there's certainly more allegiance to Trump than there is to Romney or McCain, largely because Trump won in 2016. But beyond that, the point that I'm making is that if you're looking at the stats in terms of divisiveness, Republicans always find the Democratic president divisive. The question is where the rest of the country is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And right now, there are a lot of Democrats who either don't agree with Biden or find him divisive. There are a lot of independents who find him divisive. So when we're comparing these things, I don't think they're leagues apart in terms of the divisive effects of what they say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I'm separating that off from like the inherent content of what they say, because obviously what Trump says is is more divisive just on like the raw level. I mean, if he's insulting people as opposed to Joe Biden doing MAGA Republicans, like if I were to just if I're an alien come down from space and look at these two statements, I'd say this one's more divisive than this one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But then there's the reality of being a human being in the world. And that is everyone has baked Donald Trump into the cake. And Joe Biden, again, started off with a patina of being non-divisive and now has emerged as divisive. If you don't mind, I actually want to get to the foreign policy questions because this one is actually slightly less interesting to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, yes, his Republican base was not in favor of mass spending on infrastructure and neither am I. So there's that. I think that's mostly a state and local.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's not a spending. I mean... I mean, effectively it is, right? Effectively, it's not. Well, if you're cutting tax receipts, but you're not changing the level of spending, like Biden did with the IRA... Again, we have a fundamental philosophical difference here. I think that when the government takes my money, that is not the government... somehow being more fiscally responsible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And when the government allows me to keep my money, I don't see that as the government spending. I see that as my money and the government is taking less of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. We have a spending problem. It's not a receipts problem is the case that I'm making. The problem with Donald Trump is not that he lowered taxes. The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems on the planet. And in fact, if you wish to have a European style social welfare state, what you actually need is to tax the middle class to death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the reality is the top 20% of the American population pays literally all net taxes in the United States after state benefits and all of this. So if you actually wanted to have the kind of social welfare state that many liberals seem to want to have, like Northern Europe, for example, you'd actually have to tax people who make $40,000, $50,000, $60,000. And I don't want that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I agree with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, if he's like such a uniter. Because I think the Republican Party itself is quite divided. And I think that Trump's- But isn't that his job?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, again, I don't think that Joe Biden has passed wildly historic legislation. The infrastructure bill was the largest. So here's the problem. If you're a Republican, the only bills that you can get consensus on tend to be bills that either – let's be real about this – that are tax cuts because –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As you would, I think, agree with, when it comes to polling data, Americans constantly say they want to cut the government. And then the minute you ask them which program, they have no idea what they're... Right, exactly. And so it's much harder to come up with a bill to cut things than it is to come up with a bill to add things, which is why spending was out of control under Trump as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But there are some Republicans who still don't want to spend on those things, right? So inherently, the task that... This goes back to the first question. The task that Republicans think government is there to do is different than the task that Democrats think that government is there to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So the way that the very metric of success for a Democratic president versus a Republican president, namely, for example, pieces of legislation passed. As a Republican, one of my goals is to pass nearly no legislation because I don't actually want the government involved in more areas of our life. I want to ask a couple questions on the foreign policy issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. Like, why are there not bills where Donald Trump could take? Well, I mean, first of all, I think that whenever the government says something is spending neutral, it rarely materializes that way. That is not going to be a spending neutral bill. Sure. But there's a difference between like at least they say it's spending neutral versus this is a 500 billion dollar bill over like 10 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, well, but again, I don't see a tax cut as a matter of spending neutrality. The big problem is they keep spending, not that they are allowing me to keep the money that I earned and they did not earn, but.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, the opposite. I would consider it a wild overspending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the deficit spending, by the way, under Biden is way worse than it was under Trump. Of course, but we're in post-COVID, right? Yeah. COVID ended effectively. I mean, you live in Florida. COVID effectively ended in the state of Florida by the middle of 2021.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, even if you're a vaccine fan, by April, May of 2021, there was wide availability of vaccines, whether or not you like the vaccines. And at that point, we were done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. So pouring more money on top of that makes for more inflation. That's what it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So here's the thing. I don't think that the economy was actually headed for a recession. In fact, if you look at the economic statistics – Every economist said it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
They're still saying that there's like a recession coming, right? Right, but that was largely because of the aftereffects of inflation, meaning if you inflate the economy, what you're going to end up doing is bursting a bubble – And then when that bubble bursts, you'll get a recession. I mean, that was the basic idea, right? The question was whether you're going to get a soft landing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But if you actually look at, for example, the employment statistics or the economic growth statistics in the United States, what they look like under the last year's Obama and then Trump, I mean, this is what the chart looks like. It looks like this. And then it hits March of 2020. It goes like that. And then by like September, it bounces back up, right? It's a V-shaped recovery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then it starts to peter out. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yeah, no, I don't, I'm not going to attribute it to that because the rates of growth in, in job growth from September, October, November were actually very similar to the rates of job growth after Joe Biden took office. Well, you see, it's actually kind of a straight line. I mean, what the chart looks like in any case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So on the foreign policy stuff, this is getting abstruse, but on the, on the, on the foreign policy stuff. Um, so the, the questions that I have with regard to, to Biden on foreign policy, uh, Very, very simple question. Do you think that the situation in the Middle East is better now than it was under Donald Trump?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yes. Why did it end up being essentially a client state of Russia? I know that Putin enjoys access to the ports down there. I don't know. I mean, the reason is because Barack Obama suggested that there was a red line that would be drawn in the face of chemical weapons use. Bashar al-Assad then used chemical weapons in Syria.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And Barack Obama was unwilling to then essentially create consequences for Syria in the form of any sort of Western strike. And so instead, he outsourced it to Russia. This is 2013, 2014. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Who was president during Libya?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The point that I'm making is that actually the Middle East, just historically speaking, was historically good under Donald Trump. It's very difficult to make the case that either before or after Trump were better than during Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He didn't wreck ISIS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's a spike in violence. And then the Trump, I mean, you get credit for when you're president, presumably. I mean, things got better with ISIS under Trump. I mean, yeah, they did. I mean, things got worse with ISIS under Obama. Yeah. For sure. He called them the JV squad. Sure. And then they became not the JV squad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, exactly. the opposite, especially given the fact that after the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords continued to sign and actually expand. And that if Donald Trump had been elected, I have no doubt in my mind that Saudi Arabia would now be a part of the Abraham Accords. In fact, that was basically pre-negotiated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then when Joe Biden took office, Joe Biden took a very anti-Saudi stance on a wide variety of issues. The biggest single effect in the Middle East of Joe Biden's presidency, and again, I agree with you that not every foreign policy issue can be laid at the hands of a president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Joe Biden's main approach to the Middle East was very similar to the Obama approach, which is why the Middle East was chaotic under Obama and chaotic under Biden. And that was to alienate allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, and instead to try to make common cause or cut deals with Iran. What that did is incentivize terrorism from Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What we're watching in the Middle East is Iran attempting to use every one of its terror proxies in the Middle East, and it was specifically launched in an attempt to avoid what Biden actually was trying to do, which was good, which was After two years of failure with Saudi Arabia, try to bring them into the Abraham Accords, right? That was what was burgeoning at the end of last year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And Iran saw that, and Iran decided that they were going to throw a grenade into the middle of those negotiations by essentially activating Hamas. Hamas activates, Hamas commits October 7th. Israel, as a sovereign nation state, has to respond to the murder of 1,200 of its citizens and the taken kidnapping of 240.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Israel has to do that not only to go after its own hostages and try to restore them, but also to reestablish military deterrence in the most violent region of the world. He's below gets active on Israel's northern border. He's below is an Iranian proxy. They get active on the northern border. The Houthis in Yemen get active.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
These are all the only reason all this is happening at the same time is because Iran is doing this right. But not just that. They are threatening global shipping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You're talking about the effects of global supply lines, which I totally agree had a major inflationary effect on the economy thanks to covid. Mm hmm. Right now, the cost of shipping is nearly double what it was just a few weeks ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that is because a ragtag group of Houthi barbarians are attacking international shipping and forcing everybody to stop using the Bab el-Mandib's freight instead of going around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. All of that is the result of the fact that Joe Biden reoriented the United States in the very early days in favor of a more pro-Iranian stance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He appointed Robert Malley to negotiate the Iran deal, who, as it turns out, was using proxies. Many of his aides were actually taking money from Iran. The Biden administration, literally one of their first acts was to delist the Houthis as a terror organization and end sanctions against the Houthis. These are all moves that Biden made very early on. They were disastrous moves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But when it comes to domestic policy, I think he hasn't been nearly as damaging on domestic policy as he has been on foreign policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That means that we're on a road to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s. We do in the, wait, what? That we're on a road to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I find that very difficult to believe, and I don't see a lot of evidence. I mean, we can just disagree on that. Sure. Okay. Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But I know that the after effects, just quick note, the after effect of the Iraq war that was the most devastating was the increase in power of Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Originally, it was a Sunni government. Disbanding the Sunni army was one of the worst things that the Bush administration did. Probably, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Pretty sectarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
UAE and Morocco.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, to pretend that anybody even 15 years ago would have been talking about normalization in Saudi Arabia and Israel is insane. I mean, that's insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
They had already been collaborating and doing things. That's a wild claim that Israel and Saudi Arabia were going to normalize 15 years ago. 15 years ago might have been a wild claim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Those were the first steps toward obviously the formation of a new Middle East in which economics would predominate over sectarian conflict. The chief obstacle to that is Iran. The notion that negotiations with the Ayatollah were going to be a solution to any of this is absolutely benign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran, which was what was taking place with the increased normalization with the Sunni Arab world and Israel combined with significant economic sanctions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The notion that there's this far-fetched notion in foreign policy circles that diplomacy can sort of be wish cast out of thin air, that if you sit around a table that you can always come to an agreement with somebody. The Ayatollahs do not have common interests with the United States. They do not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And this idea that they are willing to take money in exchange for, for example, some sort of peaceful acquiescence to Israel's existence is obviously untrue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The economy – the economic gains – Well, I mean – And the same thing with Jordan, same thing with – Not to get into Turkish politics, but the situation with Turkey was actually quite warm between Israel and Turkey in the 90s when you had the sort of –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
secular muslim regime in the 90s but they signed in place and and now erdogan is has joined in the fray and erdogan is significantly more radical sure than what i'm so sorry um if i said turkey i'm in egypt my bad In terms of Egypt and Jordan, we're the first two big ones. Here's the thing. Is it possible that you could theoretically come to a deal with Iran only with a new leadership crew?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This is true for every peace agreement in the region. Israel could not have made peace with... Well, they made peace with Egypt, and Sadat was the leader for Yom Kippur. They did not make peace with Nasser. The point is that this is a different regime. You need a different regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, that's true. It is also true that that is a relationship that could be cultivated specifically because It was Sadat who made clear he was going to come to the table. Have the Iranians ever made clear that they would come to the table over, for example, the existence of the state of Israel? No. That is not a thing that's going to happen. But I think people probably felt the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Every single one of their proxy groups, every one of them, not only calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, they also call for the destruction of America. I mean, this is literally the Houthi slogan. They're busy hitting ships, and their slogan is literally, Allahu Akbar, death to America, death to the Jews, death to Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, and it's not all that catchy, but that is, in fact, their slogan. The notion that the regime that propagates that is going to be approached with diplomacy is not only wrong. The problem is that it's easy to say that the stakes of diplomacy are, okay, so we try to talk, right? Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure, the only problem is that in the Middle East, weakness is taken as a sign that aggression might be an appropriate response. That is how things work in the Middle East. And the fact that Barack, that Joe Biden rather,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
came into office with an orientation toward continuing the Obama policies in Iran has led to conflagrations, these sort of brush fires breaking out everywhere that Iran has borders with either the West or Israel or both, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Any place that's happening, it's leading to brush fires because again, the logic of violence in the Middle East is not quite the logic of violence in other places in the world. By the way, I think the logic of violence in the Middle East is actually closer to what most international politics looks like than we wish that it were. I mean, I think that's part of what's happening in Ukraine as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Which brings me, by the way, here's my question about Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, frankly, I think that what Israel's doing wrong is if I were Israel, okay, like again, America's interests are not coincident with Israel's interests. If I were an Israeli leader- I would have sloved up and I would have knocked the bleep out of Hezbollah early. What does that mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yoav Galant, who was the defense minister of Israel, was encouraging Netanyahu, who was the prime minister, and the war cabinet, including Benny Gantz. So whenever people talk about the Netanyahu government, that's not what's in place right now. There's a unity war government in place that includes the political opposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The reason I point that out is because there are a lot of people politically who will suggest that the actions Israel is currently taking are somehow the... manifestation of a right-wing government. Israel currently does not have a quote-unquote right-wing government. They have a unity government that includes the opposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In any case, Yoav Galant was urging in the very early days of the war that Israel should turn north and instead of hitting Hamas, they should actually take the opportunity to knock Hezbollah out because Hezbollah is significantly more dangerous to the existence of the state of Israel than Hamas. I actually agree with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As far as what Israel has been doing wrong in the actual war, I mean, I think that Again, from an American perspective, I think that Israel is doing pretty well. From an Israeli perspective, if I were Israeli, I would actually want Israel to be less loose about sending its soldiers in on the ground level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So Israel's attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and the cost of that has been the highest military death toll that Israel has had since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I mean, I personally know through one degree of separation, three separate people have been killed in Gaza. And that's because they're going in door to door. It's because they're attempting to minimize civilian casualties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And they're losing a lot of guys in this particular war. You know, the problem that Israel has had, historically speaking, is that Israel got very complacent about its own security situation. They believed the technology was going to somehow correct for the hatred on the other side of the wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Okay, so our people have to live underground for two weeks at a time while some rockets fall, but at least it's not a war. And that complacence, you know, bred hatred.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
what happened on october 7th so to me what israel did wrong was years and years and years of complacence and belief in an oslo system that is at root a failure because you cannot make a peace agreement with people who do not want to make peace with you so that that's what i think israel is doing wrong i have a feeling there's gonna be wide divergence on this point
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, I mean, I think Israel would love nothing better than that. But that is for sure. One of the big problems in the Middle East is literally no one wants to preside over the Palestinians. Yes. No one. So Arab states, Israel, no one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I will argue with that. The idea that Israel does not want to end the conflict is belied by the history of what just happened with the Gaza Strip. So when we talk about settlements, for example, Israel did have settlements inside the Gaza Strip. There were 8,000 Jews who were living inside the Gaza Strip in Gush Katif up until 2005. They withdrew all of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, took them literally out of their homes. And the result was not the burgeoning of a better attitude toward the state of Israel with regard to, for example, you know, the Palestinian population in Gaza. In fact, it was more radical in Gaza than it was in the West Bank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The result was obviously the election of Hamas, the October 7th attacks, in which unfortunately many civilians took place, took part in the October 7th attacks. There's video of people rushing who are civilians and dressed in civilian clothing into the Israeli villages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's Area B, which is mixed Israeli-Palestinian control, where Israel provides some level of military security and control. And then there's Area C. And Area C was like to be decided later. It was left up for possible concessions to the Palestinian Authority if the Oslo Accords had moved forward. Those are disputed territories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There is building taking place in Area C by both actually, no one talks about this, but by Palestinians as well as Israelis. And the the question as to whether if Israel stopped building. There have been many settlement freezes in the past, including some undertaken by Netanyahu. And it actually has not done one iota of good in moving the ball forward in terms of actual negotiations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Again, the biggest problem is that the leadership for Palestinians has spent every day since really 67.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's not even 48, because between 48 and 67, Jordan was in charge of the West Bank, and Egypt was in charge of the Gaza Strip, and at no point did either of those powers say, hey, maybe we ought to hand this over to an independent Palestinian state, which was originally the division that was promoted by the UN Partition Plan in 47.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because of that, the leadership post 67 and really starting in 64, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 64 and it called for the liberation of the land in 64. They had the West Bank and they had the Gaza Strip. So they're talking about Tel Aviv when it was founded in 64. The basic idea, as kind of indicated by that, was Israel will not exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that was a promise that's been made by pretty much every Palestinian leader in Arabic to the people that they are talking to. Yasser Arafat famously would do this sort of thing. He'd speak in English and talk about how he wanted a two-state solution, and then he'd go back to his own people and say, this is a Trojan horse, and we're going to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If Israel could, if you think that Israeli parents want to send their kids at the age of 18 to go and monitor Janine and Nablus and be in Hanuneth, you're out of your mind. You're out of your mind. Israelis do not want that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In fact, Israelis didn't want that so much that they allowed rockets to fall in their cities for full on 18 years in order to avoid sending soldiers en masse back into the Gaza Strip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, East Jerusalem has already been annexed. So East Jerusalem is, according to Israel, a part of Israel. That's not a settlement. Okay, so there's that. With regard to, you know, does Israel have an interest in expanding settlements in the West Bank? Why would they not until there's a peace partner? Sure, that's what I mean.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But I'm saying as long as the conflict continues, like, because even when you talk about the— No, but your suggestion is that they're incentivizing the conflict to continue so they can grab more land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think there'd be very, let's put it this way. If suddenly there arose among the Palestinians a deep and abiding desire for peace approved by a vast majority of the population with serious security guarantees, I think you'd be very hard pressed to find Israelis who would not be willing to at least consider that I feel like we're not expanding bathrooms in a fraud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, but the point I'm making is that Israelis now realize that the entire peace process was a sham, meaning the people who are on the other side of the table were using it as a Trojan horse in the first place. The death of Oslo is not the death of Israeli hopefulness. It's the death of the illusion that on the other side of the table was anyone worth bargaining with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's what's happening, and that's why you have this sort of insane disconnect right now between the United States and the Israeli government. Again, it's a unity government. No one in Israel is talking about making concessions to the Palestinian Authority for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah continues to pay actual families of terrorists who kill Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure, the Mark Fund, yeah. Right? Which is from the moderate West Bank. Right, exactly. So, again, the taste in Israel for this is – Even the people who are the Chilonim, right? Those are the most secular people in Israel, which was, by the way, the place that was attacked on October 7th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, what people should understand is that October 7th was not an attack against settlements in the West Bank. It was an attack on peace villages that were essentially disarmed. And many of these people who were killed were peace activists, were literally trying to work with people in Gaza to get them jobs. I mean, it's just, it's mind-boggling. That's why you've had this ground shift in Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The next 20 years in Israel is going to be about security and economic development, period, end of story. Everything else goes second, third place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
They involved bilateral peace. mentality. And this is why what I'm seeing right now, this is why, listen, I think that Biden has done better than I certainly expected him to do in terms of support for Israel. Like Obama was way less supportive of Israel than Biden by every metric.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
With that said, the rhetoric that he's been using recently and that Blinken had been using recently about Israel needs to make painful concessions for peace. Re-centering this issue at the center of relations in the Middle East is doomed to failure. The magic, magic is a strong word, the benefit of the Abraham Accords was proof that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Of what you're saying, which is true, which is that all of the surrounding countries in reality have abandoned the idea that there is a centrality to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. That is not the central conflict in the Middle East. And by the way, one of the reasons it's not the central conflict in the Middle East is because actually, ironically, because of the rise of Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's Sunni states that are largely signing up with Israel because they're realizing they need some sort of counterweight to a burgeoning nuclear power in Iran. Can we talk about Ukraine? Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
My main problem with Biden's policy with regard to Ukraine is that he outsourced the end goal of the war to Zelensky early on. Now, that might make sense if that goal were something that he was willing to fund to the point of achievement or if Zelensky could have achieved it on his own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But right now – and this has been true since pretty early on in the war, this point Henry Kissinger made – that pretty early on in the war, it was very clear that, for example – Crimea was going nowhere. The Russians had control of Crimea, barring the United States giving permission to fly F-16s over Crimea. Nothing was going to change over there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The same thing was true in most of the Donbass, right, in Luhansk and Donetsk. That was not going to change. Zelensky stated goal, and you understand it, he's the leader of Ukraine, right, is that there was a predation on his territory in 2014, and that the Russians sent their little green men across the border, and then they took all of these areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so he is the leader of Ukraine is saying, okay, I want all of that back. Now, the reality is that the U.S. 's interests had largely been achieved in the first few months of the war, meaning the revocation of the ability of Russia to take Ukraine and just ingest it, and two, the devastation of Russia's military capability. I mean, Russia has just been wrecked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, their military is in serious... straits because of the war in Ukraine. From an American perspective, I'm very much pro all of that. I think that we have an interest in Ukraine maintaining the buffer status against a territorially aggressive Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that the United States does have an interest in degrading the Russian military to the extent that it can't threaten the Baltic states or threaten Kazakhstan or other countries in the region. The problem I have with Biden's strategy is the As always, I think that it's a muddle. And I think muddles tend to end with misperceptions. War tends to break out and maintain because of misperception.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Misperception of the other side's strength, the other side's intentions, and all of the rest. People misperceive what's going to happen. They say, I'll cross that line and nothing will happen, right? This is what Putin thought. He thought, I'll cross that line. They'll greet me as a liberator. And because the United States just surrendered in Afghanistan, essentially, they won't do anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the West is fragmenting because NATO's fragmenting and all the rest of this. And obviously, he was wrong on all of those scores. As with virtually every war, no end line was set.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so it became out recently that it was widely reported that actually there was a peace deal that was on the table in the first few months that Putin was on board with that basically would have ceded Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea to Russia in return for solidification of those lines, American and Western security guarantees to Ukraine, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ukraine wouldn't formally join NATO, but there would be security guarantees to Ukraine. We're ending up there anyway. It's just taking a lot more money and a lot more time to get there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yes, and I think that Biden actually did Zelensky a bit of a disservice because Zelensky knows where this war is going to end, and it's not going to end with Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea in Ukrainian hands. It's just not going to, and he knows that. What actually, in my opinion, Zelensky...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
needed was for Joe Biden to be the person who foisted that deal upon him so that he could then go back to his own people and say, listen, guys, I wanted all those things, but the Americans weren't willing to allow me to have all those things. And so we did an amazing job. We did a heroic job in defending our own land. We devastated the Russian military, even though no one expected us to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But we can't get back those things because it's unrealistic to get back those things because America, basically, they're a big funder and they're the ones who want the deal. Instead, what Biden said, and this was reported in the Washington Post last year, the Biden administration said, We're going to fight for as long as it takes with as much as it takes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And when they were asked until when, they said, whatever Zelensky says. And that's not a policy. That's just a recipe for a frozen conflict with endless funding. Now, it may be that Putin has walked away from the table and that deal is no longer available. If that deal is available right now, I certainly hope that's being pursued behind closed doors. My main critique, again, of Biden is that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
When you outsource the end goal to another country without stating what America's interest is, that's a problem. I also think that Biden did really quite a poor job of sort of explaining what America's realistic interests are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I don't like it when American leaders – it's weird for me to say this, but I'm not a huge fan of the we're in it to protect democracy kind of rhetoric because, frankly, we are allied with many, many countries that are not democracies, and that's not actually how foreign policy works. We should, as an overall – 30,000-foot goal, advance democracy and rights where we can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But the reason that we were fighting in favor of Ukraine, and when I say fighting, I mean giving them money and giving them weaponry. The reason that we were doing that in favor of Ukraine is not because of Ukraine's long history of clean voting and non-corruption. The reason that we were doing that is to counter Russian interests in the region. I mean, it was a pure, real politic play.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that real politic play is hard to deny no matter what side of the aisle you're on. I think that what many Americans are going to, are reverting to is, we have no interest there. Why are we spending money there and not spending money here? And that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that argument can always be applied unless you actually articulate the reason why it is good for Americans beyond simply the ideological for the United States to be involved in a thing. So for example, I think right now, When when Biden is taught, I think that what Biden just did is the United States, as we speak, is striking the Houthis. I think that that's a really, really good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that's a necessary thing. I think American people should understand why that is happening. It's not because of, quote unquote, ideology. It is, I mean, on a very root level. But really, it's because. you're screwing up the straights. I mean, you can't do that. You can't screw up free trade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And Americans have an interest in not seeing all of our prices at the grocery store double and triple because a bunch of ragtag pirates, you know, akin to the Barbary pirates from 1800, are bothering everyone, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We tried that under Obama with Afghanistan. It was terrible. We'll escalate the troop levels to X, but only for six months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do you think Biden should cut this deal on the funding? Meaning there's this $105 billion deal that's been held up by debate between Republicans and Democrats. over border, right? So basically it contains $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, another several billion dollars for Taiwanese defense against China, and then include some border funding and some border provisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Republicans want the border funding and the border provisions because we can get into the illegal immigration issue, but that's a pretty serious issue. And Biden and Democrats have been unwilling to hold that up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that seems to me like just from, put aside Republican, Democrat, it seems like political malpractice, meaning there's a widespread perception in the United States that the border is a disaster area. Joe Biden wants these things. Many Republicans don't want these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If he caves on the border stuff, he gets all the things that he wants, and he's going to be able to go back to the moderates in the country and say, I did something about the border. It seems like such an obvious win. If he caves on the border stuff, you mean on the Ukraine stuff? Yes, because then he gets the whole package.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He can go back to his own base and he can say, listen, guys, I wanted to be easy on the border. The Republicans forced me to it, but we needed the Ukraine aid. We needed the Taiwan aid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So first of all, I'm glad that Destiny, you're already coming out as a Republican. That's exciting. I mean, we hold a lot in common in terms of the basic idea that people ought to have as much opportunity as possible, and also insofar as the government should do the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people's lives in order to pursue certain functions, particularly at the local level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I'm glad you're excited. It's always fun. So there are two elements to incitement of insurrection. One is incitement. The other is insurrection. So incitement has a legal standard. So does insurrection. Neither of those standards are met. So if you're asking me, morally speaking, did Donald Trump do the right thing between November 4th and January 6th?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I said I will continue to say no, he did not. I think he was saying things that are false with just factually false about his theories with regard to the election, about the election being stolen, about fraud. This is all adjudicated in court. He did not even bring many of the claims that he has brought publicly and all the rest of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If we're talking about incitement of insurrection as a legal standard, it doesn't meet any of those standards. When it comes to incitement, it has to be incitement to immediate lawless action. That's the standard for incitement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I'm very meticulous in how I use this because I happen to speak publicly a lot, and that means there are lots of people who listen to me, which means some of those people are probably crazy. And some of them may go and do a crazy thing. Did I incite them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The media tends to use the word incitement very loosely with regard to this sort of stuff in the same way that Bernie Sanders, quote unquote, incited the congressional baseball shooting. He did not. Bernie Sanders has a lot of things I disagree with. I think Bernie's a schmuck. Doesn't matter. He did not incite that. So saying bad things is not the same thing as inciting violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Inciting violence, the legal standard in the United States is I want you to go punch that guy in the face. That's that's inciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
With regard to insurrection, typically in insurrection, and there are some descriptions in case law, though none in statutory law as far as I'm aware, the typical description in case law is the replacement of one legitimate government of the United States with another by violent means. The notion that Donald Trump coordinated any such insurrection is belied by the FBI itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The FBI put out a report in, I believe it was August of 2021, suggesting that there was no well-coordinated insurrectionist attempt coordinated by the White House. In fact, what you had was Donald Trump thrashing around like that weird alien in the movie Life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level end up being discussions about where government ought to be involved, but also at what level government ought to be involved. And I have an incredibly subsidiary view of government. I think that local governments, because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent, are capable of doing more things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I don't know if you ever saw it with Jake Gyllenhaal where he's like kind of thrashing up against this glass box, just an alien just thrashing up against the glass box. That I think is more what you were seeing from November 4th to January 6th. And then, again, the claim that January 6th itself was an insurrection. So virtually, I'm not aware that anyone was charged with actual insurrection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There were some people who were charged with seditious conspiracy. There are insurrection statutes that do exist. No one was charged under those particular statutes. There were some people who you could say informally had insurrectionist ideas. Those would be the people who wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi or kill Mike Pence. And those people are in jail right now. And the election went forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The election was certified. Mike Pence presided over the certification. Mitch McConnell presided over the certification. Joe Biden has been the president for the last three years. So Donald Trump, by the way, was still president at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If he had actively wanted to do what other people who have actually launched coups have done, he would have theoretically called the National Guard not to put down the riot, but to actually depose the sitting government of the United States in the name of a specious legal theory. He did not do that. He did not attempt that. Nobody working for him did that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The most you can say, I think, about what everybody was doing is that, you know, and I want to say everybody. We can talk about Trump because this is really about Trump. used a phrase that Trump was disseminating knowingly false information. The word that's carrying a lot of weight there is the word knowingly. So knowingly implies a knower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do I think the information he was disseminating was false? Yes. Do I think that Donald Trump has a unique capacity to convince himself of nearly anything that is to his own benefit? Absolutely. And I think that that's actually what Absolutely. Absolutely. So I don't, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Would a reasonable person have known that they were? No, it depends on the mens rea standard. So it's not the same in every case. If you have to establish individual intent, then it's not enough to say a reasonable person should have known. That would be enough for a negligence statute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Usually when you're talking about reasonable people, person statutes, just legally speaking, a reasonable person statute is should a reasonable person have known that's when you get to like manslaughter. You can't do a reasonable person standard on like first degree murder. So you have to establish actual motive in first degree murder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And as you abstract up the chain, it becomes more and more impractical and more and more divisive to do more things. In my view, government is basically there to preserve democracy. certain key liberties. Those key liberties pre-exist the government insofar as they are more important than what priorities the government has. The job of government is to maintain, for example, national defense,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You're reverting to, should a reasonable person have known? Yeah. Yes, a reasonable person should have known. Did Donald Trump know? That's a different question. And so conflating those two questions is going to get you into some message here. By the way, this is why Jack Smith charged the way Jack Smith charged. Yeah, which wasn't – Jack Smith did not charge conspiracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Jack Smith did not charge insurrection. He did not charge seditious conspiracy, right? If he – the reason is because Jack Smith is a good lawyer. What he's doing is he's actually – broadly, I would say, pretty obviously expanding statutory coverage in weird areas in order to cover a thing that doesn't quite fit into any of these legal categories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But the point that I'm making is that Jack Smith is on my side of this. He doesn't think that he can actually establish the intent necessary to convict under a seditious conspiracy or an insurrection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I'm sorry that I don't have the memorization. I believe one's a fraud charge that generally does not apply to cases like this. Generally, the fraud charge is like you're trying to steal money from the government. Sure, fraud has been used pretty broadly in the past, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. So the default of civil rights is usually somebody standing in the actual like voting house door and preventing you from voting. Not you have a specious legal theory that you espouse in court about whether those votes should be thrown out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, If you're talking about the legal cases, I mean, that's not true, but Gore sued in 2000, right? I mean, so if you're talking about the legal cases, right? Well, if this is comparable to Gore, if this is comparable to Gore, then... I'm not saying it's comparable to Gore. I'm saying that if the idea is that espousing a legal theory in court amounts to de facto some form of election...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
denial or interference in some way that that can't that that's not as a general principle. It's over inclusive. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. And Donald Trump had a bunch of legal challenges and then he had a rally and then there was a riot and then he left power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I think what I want to get to here actually, so we can be more specific, is why are these terms important? We agree on, largely speaking, what happened. I think the characterization of the term, are we kind of bouncing around between two different categories here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We're not looking at incitement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. So prevent the peaceful transfer of power with all means or using means that are inappropriate, not quite the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Okay. Okay, so illegal, I don't think so. I don't think that these charges actually meet the criteria for the various charges, and we can discuss each case if you want. Sure. As far as inappropriate, sure, I think tons of inappropriate stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I'll concede that he's more inappropriate than others. I just don't see that. The most inappropriate. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
protection of property rights, protection of religious freedom. These are the key focuses of government as generally expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And I agree with the general philosophy of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean— The question to me is the bigger question that I think the Democrats are trying to promote in this election cycle, which is this means he is a threat to democracy sufficient that if he were to win the election, there would not be another. But he tried to do that last time. Could he not try it next time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, he could try to do whatever he wants, presumably, and he would fail the same way that he did last time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because he failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Now, that doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't do more on a governmental level, again, as you get closer to the ground, which, by the way, is also embedded in the Constitution. People forget the Constitution was originally applied to the federal government, not to local and state government. But, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I believe in the checks and balances of American government. I believe they worked on January 6th. So if you're asking me, do I think that Trump has bad intent or could have bad intent with that sort of stuff? Sure. Do I believe that the guardrails held and will continue to hold? Also, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You know, if I promise that day one, as Donald Trump has pledged to do, that he's going to deport literally every illegal immigrant into the country, do I think he's actually going to do that? I mean, I really highly doubt it. He didn't do it last time he was in office. There are many examples of this. I agree. Here's my question. Do you think the guardrails are going to fail to hold?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think that one of the one of the things that happened in 2022 is Democrats ran directly on this platform and a bunch of Republicans lost were running on this platform. Literally every secretary of state ran on the Donald Trump. We should deny elections platform lost in every state. Sure, but other Republicans that have been – A great way to lose local office is this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
like all of US politics. People who were not born voted against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If I were going to define conservatism, it would actually be a little broader than that, because I think to understand how people interact with government, you have to go to kind of core values. And so for me, there are a couple of premises. One, human beings have a nature. That nature is neither good nor bad. We have aspects of goodness and we have aspects of badness. Human beings are sinful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I doubt that he would do that, but theoretically he could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What is all this in service of? What's the generalized argument that you're making? Do you believe... I'll go back to my question. Do you think that if Trump wins, there will be no more elections? Put a percentage on it. What percentage do you think that that's a reality?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I can guarantee you he will not do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because he's in his second term and he's no longer eligible and he will believe he won and he will leave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What has Donald Trump not joked about? I mean, for God's sake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Hold on. If you want to prevent him from creating a revolution, you probably should actually just appoint him president and then he can't run again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Oh no, I totally grade Trump. No, I 100% grade presidents on a curve. Are you kidding? Oh, okay. I grade pretty much everybody on the card. I don't treat my seven-year-old the same way that I treat my nine-year-old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Let's throw him in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We have temptations. And what that means is that we have to be careful not to incentivize the bad and that we should incentivize the good. Human beings do have agency and are capable of making decisions in the vast majority of circumstances. And it is better for society if we act as though they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You're talking about threats to democracy. That would be a pretty serious one applied across the board, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think that the the unprecedented legal theory that a state can simply bar somebody from the ballot on the basis of in an informal way, believing that he is, quote unquote, an insurrectionist is is pretty wild. I mean, that's that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If we're getting into constitutional law, I mean, there are a number of provisions that suggest that this is, number one, not self-executing. Minority opinions in the Colorado Supreme Court case are pretty thorough. The number one contention, which is that this is not self-executing because other elements are not self-executing, that ignores subsequent actual... law that happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the Congress passed a law, for example, in 1872, defining who was an insurrectionist, who was not an insurrectionist for purposes of elections. In 1994, Congress passed a law that specifically defined insurrection as a criminal activity so that somebody could theoretically be convicted of insurrection and therefore ineligible to run for office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It is unlike, say, the analogs that are used by the obviously this is not the same thing. We can all tell what somebody's age is by looking at their birth certificate. I can't tell whether somebody is an insurrectionist without any reference to a legal statute or a definition of the term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I thought that was dumb at the time. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Are you kidding? He would want to. Trump's going to walk around hands up high. He's going to be like, I'm a two-term president. I'm the only president since Grover Cleveland. He wouldn't know. But since Grover Cleveland, who served two non-consecutive terms, I kicked Joe Biden out of office and I kicked Hillary Clinton out of office. Dude would be like, he'd be living large. Are you kidding?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He doesn't want the presidency anymore after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He didn't. He didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Second, the basic idea of human nature, there is an idea, in my view, that all human beings have equal value before the law. I'm a religious person, so I'd say equal value before God, but I think that's also sort of a key tenet of Western civilization being non-religious or religious, that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
OK, so that's a slightly different topic because now you're getting into all the election shenanigans and all this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's not beyond the pale for him, right? It's not beyond the pale for him to order them to do it, and then it's not beyond the pale for them to reject him doing that, which is the story of his entire administration. Whereas Joe Biden orders his DOJ to do things, and then they just do them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This is one of the big problems that I have with, I mean, for example, all the talk about Trump tyrant, Trump executive power. I mean, Joe Biden has used executive power in ways that far outstrip anything that Donald Trump has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Joe Biden is going like... Joe Biden has gone well beyond anything Trump even remotely attempted to maintain via just pure executive power. And actually, Trump's use of executive power is nowhere near even what Obama's was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean... I mean, Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down VAX mandates on 80 million Americans. That's insane. He literally said, I cannot relieve student loan debt and then tried to relieve... hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt. Yeah, but what happened to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It got struck down by the Supreme Court, and then they still did it. They still did it. Biden brags about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, so here's the way I would think of this. think of the guardrails holding as the filter. Okay. Meaning like the, the coffee is in the filter. Some of it's, you know, what, what you want is going to get through and all the stuff that are the guardrails prevent the other stuff from getting through. Now the question becomes what liquid are you pouring into the filter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Meaning, so if I'm if the filter exists, if the guardrails hold and if Donald Trump can't steal elections, what's the policy that comes through the other end of the filter? The policy I get from Donald Trump on the other end of the filter is a bunch of stuff that I like. The policy that I get from Joe Biden on the other end of the filter is a bunch of bullshit I don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So that's the basic calculation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I told you he's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because he won't be eligible to be on the ballot in, I mean, by the way, you want to talk about 14th Amendment? That's where the 14th Amendment applies. Okay, that's where it actually applies. Meaning you cannot, he is not qualified to be on the ballot in 2028 if he is the president of the United States. States can literally, in self-executing fashion, take him off the ballot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Just like he's past the age of 35. Once you have been president two times, you're no longer eligible to be president of the United States. Then you actually have a strong location.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
when he's not on the ballot? So now your theory is that he's going to get reelected. And then in 2028, he's not even going to be on the ballot. And he's going to direct his new vice president, Kerry Lake, to simply declare him president of the United States when he has not been on a ballot? I don't know what the scheme would be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But that does not necessarily mean that every person is equally equipped to do everything equally well. And so it is not the job of government to rectify every imbalance of life. The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell suggests, is something that government is generally incapable of doing and more often than not botches and makes things worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But I think that- Macho, like with the machine gun, he's going to walk into the-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I'll make you the case that if you want him not to make election trouble, you should elect him president in the next election cycle. And then he will be ineligible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So obviously I'm going to say it's a huge threat. The reason that I think there's a huge threat, I want to give a definition of wokeism because people are very often accused of not using wokeism properly or believing that it's sort of a catch-all phrase. I don't think it's a catch-all term. I think that wokeism has its roots in...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
postmodernism, which essentially suggests that every principle is a reflection of underlying structures of power, and that therefore any inequality that emerges under such a system is a reflection, again, of that structure of power. That used to be applied in Marxist ways, the suggestion being that economic inequality was the result of misallocation of power in the structure of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
preserved by an upper crust of people who wanted to cram down exploitation on people. That was sort of the Marxist version of postmodernism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then it got transmuted into sort of a racial version of postmodernism, in which the systems of the United States are white supremacists in orientation and are perpetuated by a group of people who are, in fact, in favor of the preservation of white power and white supremacy. That is the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
generalized theory of critical race theory, as proposed by, for example, Gene Stefanczyk and Richard Delgado in their book on critical race theory, that has taken a softer form that we refer to as DEI. The key in DEI is the E, meaning equity. So equity is a term that does not mean equality. People mix it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Equality is the idea that we all ought to have equal rights, that we all ought to be treated equally by the law. Equity is the idea that if there is an inequality that emerges from any system, it is therefore due to discrimination. And the best way to tell whether somebody has been victimized is by dint of their race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So those are a few key tenets, and that tends to materialize in a variety of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And we can tell whether you're a member of an oppressed group or an oppressor group by the intersectional identity that you carry and by the nature of your group's success or failure predominantly along economic and power lines in American life. This means that if one group is predominantly successful economically, they must be a member of the victimizing class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the only corrective for that would be, as Ibram X. Kennedy likes to suggest, effectively, anti-racist policy is racism in the service of destroying racism, that you're going to have to discriminate on the basis of race in order to correct for discrimination that's baked into the system. that's incredibly dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The easiest way to sum that up would – the traditional kind of three legs of the conservative stool, although now obviously there's a very fragmented conservative movement in the United States, would be a socially conservative view in which family is the chief institution of society, like the little platoons of society, as Edmund Burke suggested, in which –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It leads to a victim-victimizer narrative that is unhealthy for individuals and terrible for societies. It relieves people of individual responsibility, and it destroys the very notion of an objective metric by which we can decide meritocracy. And meritocracy is the only system human beings have ever devised that has positive externalities in literally any area of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Every other distribution of wealth, power, done along other lines that is not having to do with merit has negative externalities. Every system having to do with merit has positive externalities because presumably the most effective and useful people are going to succeed under those systems. That's the very basis of a meritocracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the externalities of that mean that other people benefit from the meritorious and excellent performance of those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think she should have been fired not over the plagiarism allegations. I think she should have been fired based on her performance just at that congressional hearing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If the word black had been substituted for Jew in that statement by Elise Stefanik that she was asking about, or trans, or literally any other minority in America, maybe with the exception of Asian, then the answer would have been very different coming from Cloudy and Gay. With that said, I don't think the firing of Cloudy and Gay really accomplishes very much. Did she get what she deserved? Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Does that mean that the underlying DEI equity-based system has been in any way severely damaged? No, I think that this is a way for
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
universities, as truthful as McGillipent also, to basically throw somebody overboard as the sacrifice to maintain the underlying system that continues to predominate at American universities, where they spend literally billions of dollars every year on DEI initiatives and diversity hires and diversity administrators and all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, one of the costs of education escalating is in the massive administrative function that is now undertaken by universities, as opposed to teaching and, you know, cost of dorms and such.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Free market and property rights are extraordinarily valuable and necessary because every individual has the ability to be creative with their property and to freely alienate that property. And finally, I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy that suggests that the world is not filled with wonderful people who all agree with us and think like us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Certainly when you look at certain institutions, I think that one of the things that people on both sides of the aisle are constantly looking at is, has the institution suffered such capture that there is just no capacity to fix it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And when you talk about the universities, I'm not going to blame conservatives for the failure of the universities because they haven't been present in major positions at universities since effectively the late 1960s. And you can go read Shelby Steele's work on this where he talks about how he used to be – he's now a conservative – black person. He was a liberal black person at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He was actually quite a radical black activist at the time in the 60s. And he talks about walking into the office of liberal administrators who are largely on his side with regard to civil rights and being a radical, him claiming that the systems of the university were inherently broken, were inherently wrong, unfixable. And he talks about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's a very evocative episode where he's talking about how he's smoking. And as he's smoking, the ash is growing more and more and the ash falls down on this very expensive carpet. And the president of the university who's listening to him rant and rave, Shelby Steele says, I thought he was going to say something about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And those people will pursue adversarial interests if we do not protect our own interests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I was wrecking like a thousand dollar carpet in his office being a jackass. And instead, I could see him wilt inside. I could see him collapse. He didn't have the institutional credibility or the intellect or sort of the spiritual strength to just say, listen, I agree with you on some of these things, but you're acting like a jackass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And what you see in the late 1960s and early 1970s is, in fact, the collapse of these institutions to the point where, by the time I was going to college, there was this radical disproportion between conservatives and liberals. And the problem is that when it comes to a system like the universities, basically, you have to separate the universities off into two separate categories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
One is STEM, where the universities are still pretty damn good. American universities, when it comes to STEM, are still leading universities in the world. Harvard's main creations these days are coming from actual hard science fields. Then you have the liberal arts field in which you basically have a self-perpetuating elite because that's actually how dissertations work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If you have somebody who's very far to the left and you decide that you're going to write a dissertation on the history of American gun rights, the chances that that is going to be approved by your dissertation advisor are much lower than if you happen to write something that tends to agree with the political positions of your dissertation advisor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Now, listen, I think there are open and tolerant professors even in the liberal arts at these universities. I went to these universities. I went to UCLA. I went to Harvard Law School. When I was at Harvard Law School, one of my favorite professors was Lani Guinier. Lani Guinier, they tried to appoint her, I believe, Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and she was too liberal, and she got rejected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So she was like a full-on communist. By the time I went there, she was great. We had debates every day. It was wonderful. She used to write me recommendations for my legal jobs after we left. Randall Kennedy, I don't agree with him very much. Randall Kennedy was a terrific professor. There are some professors who are like this. Unfortunately –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
there tends to be in these echo chambers more and more ideological conformity that is rigorously enforced, and it is by left on left. So for example, when I was at Harvard Law School, the president of the university was another president who ended up being ousted, Larry Summers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Larry Summers had been the secretary of treasury under Bill Clinton, and he made the critical error of suggesting that perhaps the dearth of women in hard sciences in prestigious positions was due to possibly two factors that people were refusing to talk about. One was the possibility that women actually didn't want to be in hard sciences at nearly the rates that men do, which happens to be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And two was the distribution of STEM IQ, right? Which is something that you certainly were not allowed to talk about. The idea that the men's bell curve when it comes to IQ, particularly on STEM subjects, tends to be shallower than women's bell curves. When you get to the very end of the bell curve, what you tend to see is a lot of really dumb guys and a lot of really smart guys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so when you're talking about the top universities, maybe that has something to do with the disproportion. And he's trying to explain that to say that our systems are not discriminating. If we end up with more men than women, maybe more men are applying and more men are qualified. He was ousted for that by a left-wing faculty and general alum network at Harvard University.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's a lot to blame conservatives for, for surrendering the playing field. I totally agree that conservatives should not have surrendered the playing field in some institutions. Colleges were surrendered a lot earlier than 20 years ago. They were surrendered in the late 1960s, early 1970s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I think that the alternative to that is that you are seeing on the right a growth of, for example, alternative universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, I don't think so at all. I think competition is a great way of incentivizing some change on behalf of universities that may have forgotten that there's an entire other side of the aisle in the United States. No, no shot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So first of all, let me make clear. I think the entire educational system at the upper levels, if you're not in STEM, is a complete scam. I think it's a complete waste of money. I think it's a complete waste of time. And I think that it's all, all it is, is a formalized, very expensive sorting mechanism for people of IQ. That's all it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
People take an SAT, you go to a good school, you take four years of bullshit. I know I did at UCLA. And then we analyze based on your degree, where you should go to law school. I could have gone directly from high school to law school with maybe one year of training and then done one year of law school and been done. Okay. The reality is that this is a giant scam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And this, again, is a bipartisan problem, but it's just a generalized problem. You want to talk about things that hurt the lower classes in the United States? The bleeding of degrees up is so wild and crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's so many jobs in the United States that should not require a college degree that we now require a college degree to do because there was this weird idea that came over Americans where they mistook correlation for causation. They would say, oh, look, people who go to college are making more money than people who don't go to college. Therefore, everyone should go to college.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, maybe the reason is because people who are going to college were better qualified for particular jobs because on average, not all the time, but on average, a lot of those people were smarter and making more money because of that. And so all you've done is you've now created these additional layers of stratification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So a person who used to be able to get a job with a college degree now has to have a postdoc degree in order to go get that degree. A person who used to be able to just graduate high school, now it's de facto, you got to go to JUCO and then you got to go to college. or nobody's going to look at your resume. It's really, really terrible for people who can't afford all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's led to this massive increase in educational cost that is inexplicable other than this particular sort of bleed up, and by the way, federal subsidies for higher education. Again, one of my problems with federal subsidies for higher education, I'd love for everyone to be able to go to college if qualified to do so and if it is productive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But one of the things I did when I went to law school is I took loans because a bank said I was going to get my money back if I got a law degree from Harvard. But you know when you're not going to get your money back? If you're a bank, you're not going to lend to some dude who wants to major in art theory because is that a good bet? There's no collateral, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If I give a loan for a house, I can go repossess the house. How do I repossess your garbage college degree from UCLA? There's no way to do that. So this is the broader conversation about education in general. I think the educational system is cruising for a bruising, and I think all that's necessary for it to completely collapse on the non-STEM side where you actually learn things is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
for people who employ to simply say, give me your SAT score and I will hire you for an apprenticeship directly out of high school. It would cut out so much of the middleman. But as far as the general point that you're making about institutions, I may disagree on the education and how far it's gone, In general, I agree with you. So in general, I agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I get to use my favorite longest word in the English language here. I would consider myself in many cases an anti-disestablishmentarianist. Nice. See, I like to drop that. Because if you're an establishmentarian, it means you like the establishment. Disestablishmentarianism, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There you go. Longest word in the dictionary. And so he is also. Oh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We know long words, and he streams on the internet, and I talk for a living. So anyway, but the point is that I don't disagree that there is a general populist tendency on all sides of the aisle to look at the institutions and then throw them overboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that some of that is earned by people who are in positions of power at institutions who have completely undermined the faith and credibility of those institutions. I think you have to examine institution by institutions, which ones are salvageable and which ones are not. So I'm not a full anti-disestablishmentarianism. I'd be partially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There are certain institutions like higher education in the liberal arts that I think we may be better off without. And then there are certain institutions like, say, participation in American government, where when people talk about we need a revolution, like, no, we don't. That's not a thing. We need an evolution. We need change. We can use the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And, you know, but I think you have to establish you have to look at it industry by industry differently. you know, institution by institution. On that position on institutions, do you think Biden or Trump would side with you more? As far as the institutions? Yeah. I think the institutions in the United States at the governmental level are robust. I think the social institutions are fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think that in rhetoric, Biden would. And then I think that he would tear out the face of the institution, wear it around like a mask, like Hannibal Lecter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And yes, because I think that his use of executive power was greater than that of Donald Trump. The power that he had, he used to greater effect than Donald Trump. Donald Trump, again, thrashed up against the sides of the box, but could not get out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Listen, I think a classically liberal idea for many schools would not be a bad thing. I think it would be a good thing. I just wonder if that's salvageable. And if it's not salvageable, then the answer to that—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I totally agree with that. Certainly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben? Yeah. Marriages are the single most important thing that people can do in the United States because the things within your control are easier to control than things outside your control. People tend to think about big political change, obviously, about things they can do to change the entire system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But the reality is the thing that you can do that best changes society is to get married and have kids and raise your kids responsibly. That is the single best thing that you can do. Can an open marriage work? I mean, I think that it depends on your definition of work. So in my version of work, the answer is no, because what you actually need in order to facilitate the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
healthy growing of a child. It's a father and mother who are committed to each other. All ideas about there being no emotional component to sexual activity are completely specious. It's truer for men than it is for women, but it's not true for either. The idea of a full commitment to a human being
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
with whom you genetically create children, which is typically how we've done it throughout human existence, is in fact the fundamental basis for any functional civilization. It allows for the transmission of culture and values. It allows for the transmission of beliefs and responsibility. And it gives the great lie to both the communitarian lie and the atomistic individualist lie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The communitarian lie is that you belong to the giant community of man, which is not true because you have a family, uh, and your allegiance should be and is naturally to the members of your family first. That's how we learn. And then we expound that out, uh, And it also is a lie to the notion that we are all atomistic individuals with no responsibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We are born into a world of responsibilities. Everyone is born into a world of responsibilities and rules and roles, and those are good. And if we do not actually socialize our children that way, there will be, number one, no children. Number one, there will be no healthy children. Number two, there will be no healthy children.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Number three, there will be not the foundation for either social fabric, which is the real glue that holds together society, or for a functional government. So yes, yes, monogamous marriage. I'm a fan. 15 years married. Four kids. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If you could do it, yes. there is no benefit to pornography. It's a waste of time and destructive to the human soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's destructive to even the ones who are making a lot of money because when you degrade yourself to being just a set of human body characteristics that other people jack off to, it's bad for you and it's bad for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Have I evolved on this? So... again, I'm going to go to what's the definition of music. My original argument about rap was that music involves the following three elements, rhythm, melody, harmony. Rap typically involves maybe one of those. There may be a melody, maybe, sometimes. So it depends on the kind of rap. With that said, I could be convinced on this issue, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Listen, I'm a classical violinist. I mean, that's how I was raised. I listened to Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart, like in the car with my kids. So is it comparable? Is it in the same category as Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart? I have a very hard time sticking it in the same category as that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben? So, I mean, I agree with a lot of that. I think that the easiest practical guide is read a bunch of different things from a bunch of different sources, and where they cross is probably the set of facts, and then everything else is extrapolated opinion from different premises. That's sort of the short story. So read the New York Times and Breitbart, and they're going to disagree on a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But if the core of the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Certainly read the Daily Wire. If you read the Daily Wire and you read the Washington Post and there's a nexus of the same thing, then you can pretty well guarantee that at least, you know, if we're all blind men feeling the elephant, at least if we're all feeling the trunk, we know that there's a trunk there. You may not know what the elephant is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I think that on the list of priorities, when it comes to education, the availability of technology is actually fairly low on the list of priorities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
A lot of the same sorts of things, but it's really fun to see how you do your process. That is a cool thing. That is a cool thing. And it's a gift to the audience because honestly, doing what we do, so much of what we do is sitting and reading and being behind closed doors and educating yourself and talking with people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The two things I've heard are food availability and I think air conditioning, I think are the two biggest ones that I hear about. Sure. I mean, the biggest thing in terms of education itself, not just the physical facilities that we're talking about, would actually be two parent family households. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But getting to watch you do it in real time is a really cool window into how people think and how people learn. So that's a really neat thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Communities that have fathers in them is actually the number one decisor, according to Roland Fryer and many studies done on this particular topic. And the idea that money alone, that investment of resources is the top priority in schooling is belied by the fact that LAUSD, which is where I went to school when I was younger- They pour an enormous amount of money into LAUSD.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars very often per student, and it does not result in better schooling outcomes. And so when you say, if we could give every kid an iPad, would you give every kid an iPad? The question is not... if I had a replicator machine from Star Trek, would I give everybody an enormous amount of stuff? Sure, I would. Every resource is finite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Every resource is limited. And you have to prioritize what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means with which you are seeking them. And so, again, I think that the question is, I quibble with the premise of the question, which is that Again, the chief injustice when it comes to education on the list of injustices is lack of availability to technology or that it's a funding problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I just don't think that's the case. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I totally agree with you. So that's why I think that the fundamental educational problem is not, in fact, a schooling problem. I think that it preexists that.
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
A commitment to free speech by social media needs to last longer than whomever is in the office. And that has not been the case. That has not been the case. Zuckerberg acknowledges as much. He acknowledges that Facebook literally changed its standards because of Joe Biden and Democrats in office.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Confirmation Hearing & Israel-Hamas Deal Nears | 1.15.25
I think the deal is not good, but that is because my belief is that if Israel does not, in fact, make the strip quiescent, if Israel does not retain control over the Gaza Strip, then they are setting themselves up for further failure.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Confirmation Hearing & Israel-Hamas Deal Nears | 1.15.25
I also think that the generalized math in which Israel has participated, and this is Israel's own fault, for decades, which basically says they will trade terrorists, like living, actual, murderous terrorists for innocent people who are taken hostage, leads Israel's enemies to take hostages.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Tell me about the wall. This is all exterior wall. That is, you can see by the side of the rock, that it's Ottoman era, right? It's smaller stones. The whole city's built out of this rock. Jerusalem stone, yeah. It's Jerusalem stone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
It's so pathetic. No, the geography here is great. It's a gorgeous city. It's beautiful. One of the coolest things about walking through Jerusalem is that you can see the progress over time. It's almost like walking forward through time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
You start off on the Temple Mount, which is fully 3,000 years old, and then you walk through the Old City of Jerusalem, which is somewhere between 1,000 and 500 years old, and then you walk directly into the Mele Mal, which is about 20 years old. They all use the same basic building material.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
There's building restrictions in Jerusalem that you have to build out of Jerusalem stones, that there's sort of architectural similarity and continuity of aesthetics. And more American cities should do this. I mean, one of the big problems in American architecture is that it's just basically a hodgepodge of whatever people felt like that day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
But there is nothing worse than when you see an old Gothic cathedral, and then right next door somebody's built like a modern monstrosity. And there is nothing, I think, more beautiful than walking through a city that recognizes its past while simultaneously reaching for the future. Jordan and I walked past this model of the old city of Jerusalem, and you can see what it looked like in the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And all of Jerusalem is built around this idea that the ancients and the modern are all of one piece.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The British brought in the cats to kill all the snakes. They killed all the snakes. The cats killed the snakes? The cats killed the snakes. But they proceeded to take over.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
In the Jewish community, you can have a lot of free-feeling conversations about God and then border on heresy and you're basically okay. Mainly because the skin in the game elements of religion, which is here's a bunch of things you do to demonstrate you're part of the... Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
If you're doing all that stuff, then whatever doctrinal issues you have, you've already proved that's the skin in the game. Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The British in the game had rituals, right? So now the doctrine is the rituals. You better abide by the doctrine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Exactly. You also see it in any area that becomes completely propositional. you see an inability to tolerate diversity of thought at all. And that's why the objections to nationalism, which is like, well, you know... Yeah, that's a nice general principle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Right, exactly. What destroys the ability to have propositional conversation is a feeling of bad faith. The reason you're doing this is to avoid the responsibility. The reason that you're saying this is because you want to destroy the system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Exactly. So I was thinking that, you know, what's kind of fascinating is that if you see Judaism as an attempt to concretize the spiritual, this is why everything is focused on minutia and legalistic minutia. So, for example, they'll take a commandment. We'll take a commandment, like, in Hebrew, you're supposed to love your brother as yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And we'll say, okay, what this means is when your brother is poor, you have to give him some money. It means that when you are, it means that when somebody dies, you have to visit a house of mourning. It concretizes into specific commandments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Jordan and I are at the Shrine of the Book. This is where you'll find the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were the most ancient versions of the biblical text discovered in 1947. So we're going to look at some texts that are well over 2,000 years old that contain direct quotations from the Bible that we all know. Well, that was quite the discovery. Right, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So this is straight from the Book of Isaiah. One day there's a little Arab kid who's throwing rocks. He throws a rock into a cave and hears a shattering noise and he runs in there and there are just these urns. These urns are filled with 2,000-year-old script. And these scrolls show continuity of biblical text because they're 200 B.C. and they contain... verbatim phraseology from the Bible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And so the idea that the Bible is completely sort of a made-up construct and it's not a preservation of older material is debunked by some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, for sure. The idea that people have been writing down the Bible for thousands of years and, you know, hundreds of years before Christ at the very least, that obviously is true, and that's true from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those are the oldest extant remnants, but that doesn't mean that it was made up in that generation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
I mean, the presumption is that hundreds of years beforehand people were doing that as well. the old city of Jerusalem. It's old, but it's not that old. So some of it's Ottoman era, some of it is before. But 2,000 years old in Jerusalem is like kind of old. Then there's like the really old stuff, which is what we're about to see at City of David, which is fully 3,300 years old.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
For hundreds of years, thousands of years, people saw in the Bible this historical document.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
One of the things that's really amazing about looking at all the archaeological digs in Jerusalem and seeing as piece by piece they verify details in the Bible is that as they uncover pieces of that historical truth, not only does it reunify you with the history, but it also reunifies you with the idea that things that are ancient in origin and have tended to stand the test of time might be kind of valuable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And so you dispense with the importance of that sort of stuff at your own peril. The City of David is located just below what is now traditionally known as the Old City of Jerusalem. The City of David is the original location of Jerusalem, actually. Archaeologists think that this site is the Palace of King David.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
You understand the story of David and Bathsheba very clearly when you look at the geography. You have David looking out from his palace, and he sees onto the roof of Uriah, and Bathsheba is bathing up there. He sins with Bathsheba, and then the prophet Nathan comes and chastises and tells him that he's done a grave evil and a grave wrong, and he's forced to atone for that wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
You can see the geography there, right? Because the palace is sort of on top of a hill, and there's a valley, and then on the other side of the valley is Silwan. So presumably, Bathsheba's house would have been somewhere in Silwan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
If there's a window right there, this is where David is looking out and seeing Bathsheba bathing naked on the roof, which is always... If you know that the king is sitting up there with his window, you know, bathing on the roof seems like a risky proposition, you know? Here you start to see the beginnings of the idea of a constitutional monarchy. So there are even hints of this in Deuteronomy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
One of the laws in Deuteronomy is that the king is supposed to carry around his own Sefer Torah. He's subject to the law. The king is not above the law. So Judaism is very clear about that, and so is Christianity. And henceforth, the idea of limitations on absolute government are part and parcel of the whole system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's definitely one of the things in favor of biblical narrative is that when you show all the warts, it suggests that you're not propagandizing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's the entire Exodus story, right? The idea is that you have an absolute monarch in Pharaoh, and he is a god, and so everything he says goes. And then people are brought forth from slavery to freedom, but the freedom requires subjugation to God, right? You're still a servant, but you're not a servant of a person anymore. Now you're servants of an ideal. You're servants of a higher power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And that means inherently limiting the power of human beings. Looks like this is a massive cistern.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Both the Judaic side of government and the Greek side of government are predicated on the idea that there are limitations to what government can do. You can make the case that the biblically-based system is more of a limited monarchy, where the powers of the king are fairly limited. but the kingship is derived not from the people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And the Greek system is that authority is derived from the people and is almost unlimited. When Aristotle talks about how there are three types of governments and all have the capacity to devolve into tyranny, that's what he's talking about. You can have a benevolent monarch, which is more like the biblical system, but even the Bible is pretty divided over whether kings are good or necessary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Samuel gives a whole speech before the appointment of King Saul about you guys are really gonna hate this king thing. You probably shouldn't do it. And people are like, well, no, we want it anyway. And God says, okay, fine. If they want it, they're gonna get it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
This goes down several stories as they uncover additional layers of history over the course of 3,000 years. We were just told up there that this above our heads would have been a Roman mansion, actually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
This is Mount of Olives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
It's also amazing because the suffering which, you know, Jews commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem till this day, you know, the suffering which is temporary and then you see, you know, there's a famous story in the Talmud about rabbis visiting the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
a place where they're overlooking the Temple Mount, and they see all the destruction, and there are three rabbis, and two of them are crying, and one, Rabbi Akiva, is laughing, and they ask him, why are you laughing? And he says, well, you know, it says in the prophets that it's going to be rubble, and there are going to be foxes wandering on the holiest places.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And he says, I'm seeing that happen right now, which means that the other part is going to come true. And one of the things about being here in the modern age is that you get to see the destruction in the rearview mirror and then you get to, you know, you look almost straight up and you can see the rebuilding of Jerusalem. It's an amazing, amazing thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
587 BCE is the year that the Babylonians invade Israel and they destroy the first temple. And you would imagine that this would have been the end of Judaism and therefore no Christianity and no further Western civilization, right? Typically in the olden days, when a civilization was destroyed and its chief city burned to the ground, They kind of dissipate into history.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
You never hear of them again. That's not what happens here. Judaism exists in exile for thousands of years, that Judaism can survive that and then revivify itself, not once but twice. And then they come back to the land of Israel in 1948 and reestablish a thriving state. I mean, it's an unbelievable story of heroic perseverance, but also of the presence of God in history.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
This pilgrimage road is the road that hundreds of thousands of people would use every single year, several times a year, in order to bring their sacrifices to the Temple Mount. It's in pretty good condition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's here. Where the church is. Yeah, this whole area is the Gardens of Gethsemane. Jerusalem is the birthplace of Western civilization. It's the first place where people seriously start to think in a communal way about the idea that there is a set of godly values that rest above human authority.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
One of the things that's really cool about the pilgrimage road is that for Christians, there is 100% certainty this is where Jesus walked. There may be a lot of questions about where Jesus was at different times in the Bible. There's no question that Jesus walked the pilgrimage road because all the Jews did. There's a rock there where speakers would stand and they'd make political statements.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Probably Jesus was the guy on the side yelling at people, stop worrying so much about the specifics of your sacrifice and start worrying about your closeness with God. And everybody's probably looking at Jesus and like, who's that in that job? Like, nothing will come of him. They move on with their day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
It's not going to work exactly. That's the thing about Jerusalem is that when stuff gets destroyed, it doesn't get fully destroyed. It just gets kind of built on top of, which is the story of civilization in a lot of ways, right? We like to pretend that when we level things, they're completely leveled. Nothing is completely leveled. It's mostly leveled.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's also the nature of human beings. We don't really want to clear all the debris. You've got to have something to build on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
If Jerusalem is the idea of man meeting God, and this is where Revelation becomes reality, then the question becomes, how does man deal with Revelation? How do we actually work in a world in which values are discoverable, in which they're important? And that requires that reason come to the fore and reason become a paramount concern for human beings.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
How does man respond to a universe that is knowable? What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe? That other half, that rational component, is really cultivated to the utmost in Greece. Well, you might ask, what's wrong with being a populist? If the people want it, then it must be good. But that obviously is not true. Yeah, you just look at Twitter. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Is it wrong because people voted it so?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
We stop by the shrine of the book. We find it astonishing that texts are preserved for this long or that ideas are preserved for this long. But it's sort of the natural state of things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
In order to truly understand the modern-day conflict in the Middle East, this is a great view, because what you see is that everything is right on top of each other. And so when you look across the landscape, you can see the Temple Mount up and to the left, and then you move toward the Mount of Olives, and you're looking at Jewish graves going back centuries, and then you move a little bit
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
to your right and you're going to see an Arab village that used to be a Jewish village. They have very small pockets of places where Jews are living protected by barbed wire. Everything is right on top of each other. And so whenever people suggest, well, you know, just a quick population separation and you're done. It's not quite that simple.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
When you say high resolution, it's also just, everything is just geographically incredibly close together. When people say East Jerusalem, they mean like this, is that. Right. Like, here's the old city, and here's David, and that's East Jerusalem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Exactly. except here everything's 3,000 years old.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
You don't realize how new America and Western civilization is in the Anglo-American history is so new compared to biblical history. It's amazing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
In America, the entire history of the country, it's like, oh, my gosh, I visited Plymouth Rock. Wow, that's 400 years old. Like, well, over here that's like a house that somebody built five seconds ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
They did map out the biblical road that the fathers in the Bible travel, like where Abraham came and he's like wandered down in this direction, ended up up there with the sacrifice of Isaac. I took Jordan Peterson to the Temple Mount because it's perceived as the foundation stone for the building of the world, according to Jewish theology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So we're now at the holiest site on Earth for Jews. The third holiest site for Muslims is al-Aqsa, which is this mosque right here. This is certainly the most contentious area on planet Earth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So if you go back about 3,000 years, the Temple Mount is created by flattening part of the top of the mountain and then building retaining walls and filling all of that with dirt, which is how you end up with this about three-football-field-size giant area. And that's where the original first temple stood. It was destroyed in 576 BCE.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And then it was rebuilt about 70 years later, and that stands for about half a millennium. And then that is destroyed in 70 CE. Approximately a thousand years later or so, the Dome of the Rock is built directly on top of where the Holy of Holies would have been and where the foundation stone is located. This is where Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven in his dream.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
He used this rock as sort of the launching off point, ascending to heaven, and that foundation stone is visible. You can walk into the Dome of the Rock and you can actually see that. In sort of Jewish theology, the foundation stone is the idea that God used this stone as the basis for all creation. It's called in Latin the Axis Mundi.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The idea that there is a spiritual center to the world, that's what we mean when we say this is the foundation stone. So there are a couple of ideas that this place is the actual mountain on which Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac, which of course is sort of a seminal point in the Bible. Also Jacob's Ladder.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Jacob lies down, he puts his head on the stone, where he has the dream about the angels going up and down the ladder. There is an idea in Jewish commentary and Christian commentary as well that this is the location of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
This is about as close as we'll get on this particular side to the Dome of the Rock. This was the second temple platform. I mean, this was like, it's slightly elevated probably over time because it's been 2,000 years. But then they built the dome directly on top of it. Here's a supervisor from the walk coming over. I'm checking this out for what purposes? To make sure that I'm not praying.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Does that count? As long as it's in your head, it's probably okay. If I were to whip out a sitter right now, a prayer book, and start saying psalms, it would be a problem. I assume this is why you wanted me to have the hat on for this part of the journey. So Jordan and I go up to the Temple Mount and we're walking around. That's literally all we are doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
We're walking the perimeter of the Temple Mount under guard because that's what you do according to the law. You're not allowed to carry up, if you're a Jew or a Christian, any religious items. If you're a Muslim, you can do whatever you want. You're not allowed to pray up there openly if you're a Jew or if you're a Christian. If you're a Muslim, you can do whatever you want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The simple fact that Jordan and I are walking around up there gets caught on tape and people who are, I would say, malicious in intent decide that they are going to characterize this as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro invade the Temple Mount.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
People are literally paid to be up there pretty much every day, ready to jump on any incident that they can turn into some sort of narrative about predations on Islamic rights up there, which is an absurdity. The only people who actually have the full rights of movement and prayer on the Temple Mount on a daily basis are Muslims. This is the origin of Western civilization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
If you believe that it's Jerusalem and Athens, which is sort of the typical structure that people use to discuss, then this is the center of Jerusalem. This is the Axis Mundi, and we're walking through it right now. You're walking through not just history, but the foundation for the entire modern world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Western civilization, traditionally speaking, has been thought of as the marriage of Jerusalem and Athens. Jerusalem is the foundation of a godly morality. Human beings who are bound by a higher power in an understandable universe where they can discover God through the process of reason and revelation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And then that has to be balanced with Athens, which is traditionally seen as human rationality and human reason. So if the idea is revelation is religion and reason is... science, then essentially the marriage of those two things is Western civilization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
When people sort of mock faith, which is what they try to say that Jerusalem is, and Jerusalem is really sort of, I would say, informed faith, meaning that it's not sort of principles that are taken from nowhere, but you do need the ratification of a revelatory structure in order to just say these are things that are inarguable.
The Matt Walsh Show
Ep. 1524 - Selena Gomez Should Deport Herself In Solidarity With 'Her People'
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, China releases a competitive new AI at a fraction of the cost of the American companies. Democrats launch resistance on Trump's illegal immigration crackdown, and Trump signs an order to ban gender dysphoric people from the U.S. military. That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show. Give it a listen.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I mean, once again, for the FBI, the immediate response, which is we know the motive and the motive is uncomfortable. So we're going to pretend that that's not really the motive or the motive. I mean, it was the least mysterious motive of all time. He literally had an ISIS flag attached to the back of his Ford F-150.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
He said, here's my motive on a giant flag that I don't even know where you get an ISIS flag. Can you buy that off Amazon? In any case. This person had put out tapes of himself talking to his family about how he had joined ISIS.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And honestly, the reason why this should earn more media attention than the terrible case of what happened in Las Vegas, which seems to be a member of the military who had his life breaking down, seemed to have some mental problems. The reason that this one is more noteworthy is because it is ideological in nature, not only ideological in nature.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
One of the stories that we reported at Daily Wire, actually, was that the local mosque was being contacted by the FBI. Members of that mosque were being contacted by the FBI, the mosque where this person attended, the terrorist and the alleged terrorist.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And the mosque apparently put out a public message like on their own Instagram saying, if you are contacted by the FBI, you should contact the Council on American Islamic Relations. You should contact groups that are not the FBI, right? Not cooperate with the FBI.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
You should call the Council on American Islamic Relations, which by the way, was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial in the 2000s. The Council on American Islamic Relations original foundation was by people who are closely associated with Hamas. Like there are actual real systemic problems in the United States with radical Islam.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And that's something that people really don't want to talk about, which of course is the same sort of thematic that you're seeing in the UK right now, right? You're seeing this sort of break, into the open because Elon Musk is going after Keir Starmer quite properly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
But I think that so much of what you're seeing in the West right now is revolt against the assault on common sense that we've been seeing for legitimately decades here in the West. The revolt on common sense that says that, for example, mass migration without assimilation is a wonderful idea.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The revolt on common sense that says that everyone should be forced to take a vaccine, even if the vaccine is not totally vetted out yet. The assault on common sense that says men can be women. What we're watching right now across the board is this revolt against that thing. And it's happening everywhere. It's happening in the UK. It's happening in France. It's happening in Germany.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
It's already happened in Argentina. It's happened in the United States already. It's obviously happening up in Canada where the conservative party, if the election were held today, would absolutely wipe out the liberal party where Justin Trudeau just resigned as the head of the liberal party, if not prime minister today. Again, something is happening.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And that thing is that people across the board in the West are tired of, to use your word, being bullshitted. And I think that now they're starting to fight back in a wide variety of ways, mostly politically.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Well, what's amazing about it is that people are denying what it's about. So if you actually look at the history of the scandal, this started to break out into the open in a place called Rochdale in the UK back in 2003. And that was because a 15-year-old girl died when there was an investigation into why she died. It turns out that she had been one of the girls who was groomed by these gangs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
For folks who don't know the story, basically over the course of literally decades, And there are allegations of this going all the way back to the 1970s. Basically, over the course of decades, white girls were preyed on by Muslim men in gangs. They were rape gangs. They're not grooming. They treat them. They call them grooming gangs. They weren't grooming gangs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
They were rape gangs because these are all underage girls who are being traded around by these Muslim rape gangs. And that's what they are. And the media knew full well about this back in 2003, 2004. They knew completely about this. The police knew about it. They knew about all these cases. These were already being brought up in Rochdale, in places like Rotherham, in places like Oldham.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
It was happening in a wide variety of cities. And as it turns out, the police basically decided that because this would be politically unhelpful, they were going to bury these cases. And so they started blaming the girls, claiming it was the girls' own fault, that they had quote unquote consented, even though obviously a 13, 14, 15-year-old girl can't consent.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Some of these girls got pregnant by their rapist, 13, 14, 15 years old, and the system totally ignored them. One of the journalists in this case, Andrew Norfolk, who reported for The Telegraph in 2010, he's the one who wrote this big cover story for the UK Telegraph talking specifically about the extent of the scandal in Rochdale. He knew about the case.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
He's admitted he knew about the cases back in 2003. And the reason that he did not actually report those cases, and again, these are his words, not mine.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
is he was afraid that it played into quote-unquote right-wing narratives that were going to talk about the difficulties of multiculturalism and the problems with importing vast numbers of immigrants from Muslim countries who were not integrating into British national life and not assimilating.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
They were afraid that the British National Party, the right-wing party, was going to start increasingly winning elections, that the English Defense League, led by Tommy Robinson, was going to increase its popularity. And so they literally just buried the story. They said for a decade that We are not going to even prosecute these cases.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And it took a full-scale decade and more and more of these cases piling up for there to be any prosecutions at all. The first prosecutions, I believe, happened in 2013. That led to a government study that was finally released in 2014, finding that in Rotherham alone, there were 1,400 girls who'd been preyed on in just that city, in just that city.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
You're talking about thousands of girls who were raped white girls were raped by Muslim men, and the reason it wasn't reported is because it was white girls and because it was Muslim men. Now, again, that would be reported, and talk about reportorial malpractice. Okay, so Keir Starmer was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service for a large part of this period, from 2008 to 2013.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Keir Starmer, of course, is now the prime minister of Great Britain, is head of the Labour Party. And there was a call for the Labour Party as the head of the government to now lead a national investigation into these cases. And they denied it. They said, we're not going to do it. Now, to be fair, the Conservative Party had said the same thing. They said this is all regional.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The regional investigations should go on. But Elon went after Keir Starmer for it and deservedly so, because Keir Starmer has been part of the system the entire time. And I played tape on my show earlier today of Keir Starmer with the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, talking about the real problems of the UK in 2024, which include a radical uptick since October 7th in Islamophobia.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, asking Keir Starmer what could be done to prosecute people who are actually engaged in Islamophobia. Right. This sort of conspiracy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
That's exactly correct. And all of Europe is reacting to this, but in ways that the political establishment doesn't particularly like. So in Germany, that means that the AFD, which is a very right wing party that has always been sort of called Nazi-esque, but the reason people oppose them is not because of their original roots. The reason they're opposed now is because they're anti-immigrant.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The AFD is picking up steam. Obviously, Elon is lending some of his sort of loudspeaker to the AFD and Alice Weidel, who's the head of the AFD. You're seeing the same thing happen in France with Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party, which has been gaining steam in every single election and keeps being blocked by the quote unquote centrist party of Emmanuel Macron.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
You're seeing the same thing in Germany, by the way, where the CDU, which is the centrist party, says we won't sit with the AFD. Okay, guys, you keep trying to keep a lid on the biggest issue in Europe in generations, and it will blow.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I mean, this idea that you can just tell the people to sit down and shut up and ignore the fact that their countries are being overrun with people coming from places that hate the country, that really hate the country and hate the civilization.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
People are only going to take that for so long before it really starts to come out and support for parties that are not within your deemed establishment purview.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I mean, either it will or they won't have any power anymore. I mean, in the country that Ayan came from, Gerd Wilders is now leading the largest party. Right. And Gerd Wilders is a very right wing anti-immigrant and anti-Islam leader. in the Netherlands. So again, these are the natural consequences.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
She was originally from Somalia and then she went to Amsterdam and now is- Was essentially exiled because they wouldn't give her immigration status because of her perspective. I mean, they essentially decided that she was a persona non grata because of her perspective on immigration, being an ex-Muslim from Africa. who had immigrated to the Netherlands.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I mean, Ayaan's story is sort of ahead of its time, but that is the reality that is now besetting, I think, an enormous part of the West. And again, reality is having its way here because reality always has its way. And when it comes to immigration, I mean, so many things have changed about the way the West does immigration.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
So it used to be that because we didn't have a welfare system and because it actually was a risk to come to places like the United States, you left everything behind, you came here with nothing, and then you were expected to assimilate and make your own way without a welfare system to back you. Because of that,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
America acted as a magnet to a bunch of different groups who usually were sort of the most risk-seeking members of the Irish population or the Swedish, like we've had many waves of immigration in the United States, Irish, German, Italian, Swedish, Jewish, Russian, a huge number of immigrants in the United States. But once you change that system,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
to make it so that you are neither expected to assimilate or you're expected to earn, right? You're not expected to do either of those things. We have welfare systems that pick you up and you're not expected to assimilate, which is the sort of immigration that the left apparently loves.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Well, yeah, I mean, the consequences are going to be pretty dire for any civilization that attempts that particular two-step. And those civilizational consequences have been quite dire and pretty terrible.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I mean, I think that obviously it's great. I think that the person they're attempting to block from the prime ministership with all of this is Pierre Polievre, who is phenomenal. I mean, truly tremendous. He's fantastic. I mean, one of the things that you're seeing is this crop of new leaders all over the world, ranging from Millet to-
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
to Polievre in Canada, to Maloney in Italy, to Wilders in Netherlands. You're seeing like a whole spate of new leaders come to fruition. And that's really wonderful. And Trudeau going, again, he's hanging on through basically parliamentary maneuvering.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The way that it works in Canada is that in order for there to be a new election called the snap election, you actually have to have a vote of no confidence. Right now, there are 338 seats in the House of of Commons in Canada. The Liberal Party controls 153 of them, I believe, so they have just short of a majority, so they need some outside help from some of the other smaller parties.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The Conservatives only have 120 seats. If the election were to be held today, the Conservatives would be expected to win an overwhelming majority of seats in the House of Commons, something like 230 seats in the House of Commons, and then Polievre would enter the government with a huge majority that requires no coalitional help in order to govern.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And so that's basically everybody who's in the current coalition does not want the coalition to fall because the minute that happens, then the election takes place. Polievre wins. He walks in with a vast conservative majority. So the idea here is it's sort of like a Biden stepping down in favor of Harris idea here.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Basically, Trudeau is planning to step down in favor of a new liberal leader who will be selected. And that way, Polievre has to run against not Justin Trudeau, but against Randall McPhace over here, who's going to be the new liberal leader. I don't think it makes much of a difference.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The mistakes that Trudeau has made ranging from the authoritarian take on COVID, which led to the trucker freedom convoy, to the treatment of immigration. He's been an open borders immigration guy the whole time. The cost of housing in Canada have increased rapidly. And Polly Everett makes the point, hey guys, you know one thing we have in Canada? Very few people. You know what we have?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Tons of land. Really, housing should not be all that expensive. He's right about that. The fact that Trudeau has been bad on energy policy in a country that really could be rich in energy. It's truly amazing. And then add on top of that all the woke crap from from trans to indigenous peoples, all the stuff that Trudeau has done.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
It's like watching a laboratory experiment with all the left's worst policies put into Bunsen burger and then boiled until they boil over. And it turns out that people really, really hate this stuff. And it doesn't matter if you're the good looking likely son of Fidel Castro. People still really don't like this policy at all.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Well, I mean, they'll narrowly avoid President Trump's invasion if that happens. I mean, I'm wondering, you know, if we're going to invade, now's the moment, right? We got to do it before they have an election up there and make Canada our 51st state. Right now, we'll be greeted as liberators. But if if Polly Evra is the prime minister, then they might we might actually have to fight them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And last time we fought the Canadians, it went surprisingly poorly. So now's the window of opportunity. Greenland, Canada, the Greater America Project is still on the table, but only for a few more weeks.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I mean, that's what the polls show right now. I mean, right now, the polls, according to CBC up there, have Poliev running at something like 44 percent, while the Liberal Party is now running at 20 percent. And that's how much the Liberal Party has fallen off.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
So and it goes to show you that, you know, actually just being a steadfast conservative in a place, even in a place like Canada, will win you some points. This is what's so amazing about Great Britain is that they can't find anybody to just do that. Right. Well, just do that. It doesn't look that hard. I mean, granted, Karapolyev appears to have a resting heart rate of 35.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
But with that said, he is like the fact is that it actually does not seem that difficult to find somebody who has some basic common sense. That, of course, is the thing that I think is underappreciated about President Trump. The media kept playing up the fact that he says wild things on Twitter.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
But the reality is that most of the stuff that Trump says is very commonsensical because he always shoots from the hip. And when people like Trump shoot from the hip, it tends to be kind of like the common sense thing that you would say. And the same thing is true of Polyab. The same thing is true of Mele. The same thing is true of Maloney. The same thing is true of Wilder.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Saying common sense thing has become illegal in many countries at this point. People are more likely to be arrested in Britain at this point, it seems, for saying a common sense thing than for raping someone possibly. And I think that the blowback to that is dramatic and international. And so it's shaping up to be a really interesting year.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Now, in the United States, obviously, that means that now that you have power, this is all about gaining the power. Once you have the power, you have to do the thing. This is where the pedal is going to meet the metal and the rubber is going to hit the road when it comes to President Trump and the Republican Congress. What can they actually get done this year?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And there, I think, you know, there are some outsized expectations that I think that we should temper and we should recognize the reality of a fractious coalition in Congress where you have maybe a one to two vote majority in the House. But I do think things can get done if people keep their heads screwed on straight.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Okay, so I love a vague. And the truth is that when it comes to H-1B visas, I think that there are some things you can do with H-1B visas, like increasing the income limit before you let people in. That's an interesting conversation. I think there's a lot more to be said about sort of the variation in terms of what actually went on in this argument.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
That was very, it was sort of a bizarre argument to be had. But when it comes to the cultural analysis, I have to say, it's just, it's not actually true. Okay, I promise you that Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, all, I mean, Elon Musk is a very culturally savvy guy and he was not participating in the math Olympics.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Okay, so it turns out, by the way, that's also a very bad read, I have to say, on Boy Meets World. Okay, so as a Boy Meets World stan, I will say that if you ever watch an episode of Boy Meets World, the entire moral center of the Boy Meets World universe, not to get too abstruse here,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
is Mr. Feeney, who is the high school teacher who tells the kids that they need to study harder and take history seriously, right? That's actually the theme of Boy Meets World. And by the way, the same holds true of like, you're picking all of the shows from the 1990s that actually had parental figures who actually pushed education.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
If you think to any of the shows that he names right there, those are all like the ones that had sort of the Sunday evening special that would have like a talk with the kids about how you actually need to take your schoolwork seriously.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Listen, I understand that for a lot of people, particularly from countries that are not the United States, the way that you rise in those countries is to do really, really well on your exams. So you study super, super hard in South Korea. They have a very programmatic approach to how to train kids. When it comes to American innovation, which is where most of the innovators are coming from,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The problem is not that people are watching Boy Meets World. If you want to talk about like systemic problems in the United States with regard to education, those exist. There are public schools, right? That's why we need school vouchers. You can talk about broken families that need to be healed. You talk about lack of social structure.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
But this is the weird take, which is that you have to be a person training for the spelling bee in order to be a top level engineer at Google. That's just not true. I mean, just on any sort of relevant level, that's not true.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I was definitely not the prom king, okay? Like I skipped two grades and graduated high school when I was 16 and went to UCLA as the smallest, shrimpiest kid at UCLA, right? I was not like the toast of the town, but even I recognize that like watching Saturday morning cartoons is not the thing that's preventing people from staffing up Silicon Valley engineering jobs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
That's not like the chief problem in the United States.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Again, listen, I really like Vivek and I even agree with some of his immigration takes. This one I don't think was the best cultural analysis. I'll put it that way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
The biggest nerds in the world, right? Dungeons and Dragons, some of them actually, you know, actually work out. Many of them are the people who are playing video games at night, right? They're not like culturally non-savvy. This idea that nerds are somehow, they've never watched TV. Have you met a nerd? Like spend some time with the nerds. The nerds watch some TV.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
So I actually don't think it's going to work. And the reason I don't think it's going to work is in the interim, since Trump was in office, there was an overruling of Chevron deference, which means that administrative decisions that are overruled, but they kind of get caught up in this internal procedure, now will go before the judiciary. So it may be that the doctrine has changed in the meantime.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
So maybe Trump actually has a shot at reversing this in a way he didn't back in 2019. Whatever the case, it is very clear who Joe Biden is, right? Now that everything has been sort of All the chains have been unleashed, right? He is free and he's running naked through the streets in all of his horrifying glory. And it's terrible.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
I mean, in every way from the drilling to the pardons of the murderers to whatever he's going to do on foreign policy, which I think is going to be quite bad in his last couple of weeks. I mean, we are blessed that he is leaving office and we are blessed that his party will have no power. Thank God for the American people, man, because that bleep needs to go.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Great to see you. Happy New Year. You too.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Hey, you too. Glad you're back from vacation.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Well, I mean, I think that they have to, because I think that what they've demonstrated over the course of the last several years is their complete inability to govern or to be in any way aligned with the agenda of the American people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And so all they've had for years, and this is true going back to 2021, when Joe Biden gave that awful address in Philadelphia, where he basically labeled everyone who is Republican, his political enemy and an enemy of the republic. The only thing they can keep saying over and over is that Donald Trump is, in fact, an incipient dictator and authoritarian.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
None of it has the same ring after Trump won. I mean, he won the popular vote and he won the Electoral College overwhelmingly. And so the sort of idea that he attempted a coup and that we narrowly averted the rising tyranny in the United States, that particular narrative was always stupid. But it has died a horrible death.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
at the hands of the American people who themselves voted by majority for Donald Trump in the last election. And so it just, it brings super hollow this year. It always was hollow, but it brings particularly hollow this year, given the fact that again, Democrats didn't just lose the presidency. They also lost control of the Senate. They don't have control. of the House.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And so what exactly is the thing that we are supposed to be commemorating on January 6th?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Is it the idea that all Trump voters are akin to the small coterie of Trump supporters, not even the small coterie of Trump supporters generally, the small coterie of the people who were even at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally, who then committed some criminal acts, which again, that's a subset of people who are even at the sort of more riotous portion of the day.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
It really is an incredible stretch for them. The fact they can't let it go is, again, a demonstration. This is a party devoid of ideals. It's a party devoid of ideas. And it's a party devoid of any connection with the American people whatsoever. Like, who really is spending today thinking about January 6th, 2021?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
It's an absurdity. It's a true absurdity. And what makes it even more absurd is you mentioned all the cops who were injured during the BLM riots. The cops that have been demonized since 2014 in this country, since really the Ferguson riots of 2014, the number of cops.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
who have been destroyed as human beings, the number of cops who have failed to do their jobs because they were afraid that if they did their jobs, they would then be dragged through the court of public opinion in the ways the Democrats like to do this sort of stuff. That number of cops is incredibly high.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And the same week that Joe Biden is doing this routine, crying crocodile tears over January 6th, and we must remember, and the cost to the cops and all this, he gave a Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
to George Soros, who's the number one funder of left-wing prosecutors who have spent their entire careers trying to undermine the cops in every city in America and make it easier for criminals to do their business. This same president who just a few weeks ago, I mean, during the break, he had a very busy break, Joe Biden.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
This is the most alive he's been for years is just before he's leaving the presidency. And now he's doing things like commuting the sentences of 37 out of 40 people on death row because only three of those murderers apparently deserve to die. People who rape and murder little girls, they don't deserve to die.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Only the Tree of Life shooter and the Black Church shooter and the Boston bomber, those people deserve to die. The other 37 who committed atrocities, those people don't deserve to die, according to Joe Biden. I mean, he's letting it all hang out at this point.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And again, I think it underscores the reason why Joe Biden was so unpopular with the American people, which was they kept trying to sell us the line that he was a kind-hearted, decent old man. And he was never a kind-hearted, decent old man. He was just an old man. He was never kind-hearted. He was never decent. He was always corrupt. He was always venal. He was always bloviating.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
None of his values ever meant anything at all. And this attempt to sort of retcon his own history and retcon what the Democratic Party has done over the course of the last few years into something benevolent is... an utter failure. It's a total failure.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And I can't imagine that there are many people who are reading that op-ed or hearing you read it, Megan, who aren't rolling their eyes so hard they fall out of their head.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
shook the foundations of American democracy. By the way, I love their respect for the property damage that may have numbered in the tens of dollars at the Capitol building. They did $2 billion in property damage during the BLM riots. The enthusiasm for remembering January 6th is matched only by the enthusiasm of the media in forgetting September 11th, actually.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
You're not allowed to show images of September 11th lest we actually remember what happened and who did it on September 11th. The media have already moved on. You mentioned earlier on the New Orleans terror attack. The media are already very steadily moving on from that one.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
They really are not going to cover that one for very much longer because, of course, they can't tie that into some sort of narrative about broader American white supremacy and about domestic homegrown white terrorism or any of the rest of that sort of thing. And so they're going to move right past that sort of thing. But they definitely have to focus in on January 6th.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
And the media, by the way, I'm not sure who took it on the chin harder this past year. The Democratic Party or the media? I mean, they're appendages of one another. I've called them the human centipede because that's what they are. But, you know, at this point, I'm not sure that has anyone. That's the first time anyone actually heard John Meacham saying that thing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Media Obsessed with January 6 To Smear Trump Supporters, and Biden's Bizarre Outburst, with Ben Shapiro and Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 976
Megan, was you playing it on your show? Because no one is left to watch MSNBC. No one actually has seen Keith Olbermann say that except on your show. So congratulations, Keith Olbermann, for making your show, I suppose.
We Might Be Drunk
Ep 202: Kyle Dunnigan & Blair Socci
But it can't be defined in words. It's the darkest heart of soulless man. It's a note on the piano that mustn't be bled. It's a naughty little piggy handing you a hot dog. It's a paparazzo. Not getting out of your face when you call him a cocksucking asshole. I'm way more confused now. It's a... You take a swing at a stewardess, but it doesn't taste as good.