Best of The Program | Guests: Ben Shapiro & Brendan Carr | 7/28/21

You're tuned into Auto Intelligence live from Auto Trader, where data, tools, and your preferences sync to make your car shopping smooth.

They're searching inventory.

Oh, yeah.

They find what you need.

They're gonna find it.

Can make a budget for you, Palette, to help you succeed.

Pricing's precise and true.

So true.

Getting smart at car shopping.

Just for you.

Oh, it's just for you.

Find your next ride at auto trader.com, powered by Auto Intelligence.

Hey, Stu.

Hi, Glenn.

What a great show today for the podcast.

Don't you think?

That is very, very true.

Yeah, yeah.

Can you tell me one thing that happened on the podcast that you're excited about, Stu?

You talked about...

It was kind of a threat.

It was incredible.

The whole show.

Do you even listen to this show?

I listen to a show.

Yes, I have my headphones on listening to a different person.

Just as you're doing a show.

Well,

your

very little involvement today, it fits, strangely.

Wow.

We were talking about authoritarianism, and it is growing out of control.

Tonight at 9 o'clock on Blaze TV, I'm doing a special on

something that's coming out of the White House now.

It came from the

National Security Council, and it is how to combat extremism.

And it is terrifying.

Terrifying.

But we talked to Tom Fitton, who has been looking into January 6th, what is going on.

Wait a minute.

The FBI used the airlines.

They used Bank of America.

They got information on thousands of Americans just because they were in Washington, D.C.

that day?

That's absolutely unconstitutional.

But wait, there's more.

Also, today is the day that Ben Shapiro's book, The Authoritarian Moment,

has come out, and we have Ben Shapiro to talk about it.

All authoritarianism all the time on on today's podcast.

And do you have a program coming up tonight, Glenn?

I do.

I bet it's going to be pretty good.

People should watch it, huh?

Right after a brand new Studos America.

That's Bolly says I'll show today.

I pretty much plays TV.com/slash Glenn.

Promo code is Glenn.

You'll save 10 bucks.

Get New Students America, new Glenn TV.

It's going to be great.

Check it out.

You're listening to

the best of the Blenbeck program.

Welcome to Mr.

Pat Gray.

We want to talk a little bit about the hearing yesterday in Washington, D.C.,

which

I have a really very difficult time.

Could we please play Adam Schiff?

I have a problem with Adam Schiff even being on this committee or even being in Congress at this point.

But here he is with all of the credibility on what January 6th was really all about.

Better the next time.

God help us.

And if we're so driven by bigotry and hate that we attack our fellow citizens as traitors,

Pat.

If they're born in another country or they don't look like us.

Sorry, I'm

so emotional.

He's actually crying here.

Is he?

Yeah.

Is he squeezing out the tears?

God help us.

God help us.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I have faith.

Because of folks like you.

Yeah.

Okay.

So he has faith because of

people like that are testifying yesterday.

Are you okay, Pat?

I'm not.

I got it.

Pat's does not look okay.

It's too emotional.

So, do you know that they actually moved barricades?

Okay, okay.

Hang on just a second.

A podium.

A podium was taken.

Don't take our podiums, please.

By all that is good, right, and holy,

don't abscond with the podium.

There was a lot of absconding going on.

Here's the thing.

First of all, I think both sides are in a state of delusion.

And I think because everybody has whipped everybody up into a frenzy, and it's not when I say everybody's whipped up.

No, really only the media and the politicians in Washington have whipped everybody up.

By calling this the worst attack on

American institutions since the Civil War

is so ridiculous.

We all, I was horrified.

My wife was horrified.

Everyone I know was horrified while this was going on.

We were horrified that we're like, where's the president?

Where's the president?

Why isn't the president coming out?

We were horrified that he didn't immediately get on and say, stop it.

We don't do this.

Stop it.

Okay.

That's true.

Now, this is from the group of people who also were horrified.

that nobody in Seattle, nobody in Portland, nobody in the rest of the country, it seems, actually stood up in their own cities and said, stop it right now when it comes to Antifa.

Now they're trying to prosecute and persecute anyone, anyone who voted for Trump because of what, honestly, maybe,

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe 200 people did.

I think there were probably 50 that were committed to it.

And the rest were hapless dupes that just followed in and got tied into it.

And some people just, you know, caught up in the emotion, got very angry and committed crimes.

Committed crimes.

doesn't.

And they should go to jail.

Yeah.

Or be fined.

I mean, a lot of them were, again, absconding with a podium.

I'm sorry, Pat.

I didn't mean to bring you back to that place.

Wow.

That dark, dark place.

All I can think of is the guy with the podium under his arm walking through the rotunda.

You know, the reason why these guys care so much is because it happened to them for the first time.

Right.

It happened to them.

They're not small business owners.

They're not worried about the police being defunded.

Nobody's defunding the police in Washington, D.C.

Imagine if those people did that to the Capitol and then

the rest of America said, you know what we need to do?

Defund the police in Washington, D.C.

Imagine how those people in the Capitol would feel.

That's exactly what they have been encouraging encouraging for the rest of America.

Yeah.

If there's a defund the Capitol police movement right now, maybe we could take them seriously on their other claims.

But they don't care if people in Minneapolis die because the new police don't show up.

They don't care.

It's got nothing to do with it.

They don't care at all.

And, you know, this, remember, during the George Floyd riots, places all over Washington, D.C.

were on fire.

Like, there was all sorts of violence that happened

when that was going on.

It was a safe place.

It wasn't.

It wasn't aimed directly at them, so so they didn't care about it.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Absolutely every time.

There was one guy

that actually

said the truth.

I don't think he noticed that he was saying the truth.

Can you play the

police officer?

I don't remember which one he is.

Yeah, that one.

Listen to this.

They had marching orders, so to say.

He's saying for me.

When people feel emboldened by people in power,

they assume that they're right.

Like,

one of the scariest things about January 6th is that the people that were there, even to this day, think that they were right.

They think that they were right.

And that makes for a scary recipe for the future of this country.

I know.

Ask Seattle.

Ask Portland.

Ask Chicago.

Ask any place in America where D-fund the police.

Ask the people in Minneapolis.

Do they feel that they were wrong?

They were emboldened by the system,

by the local community, by the mayors, by the city council, now by the president.

They were emboldened when they were being bailed out by our now vice president.

I mean, think of that.

Think of that.

Donald Trump hasn't provided bail for any of these people.

Kamala Harris provided bail.

for people in Antifa and Minneapolis and all over the country.

And some of whom were attacking federal buildings.

Yes.

So, yeah, I don't think that police officer really understood what he said.

And from the beginning of the hearing yesterday, Benny Thompson,

I guess he's the chair of the committee,

started out by saying, we are here to deal only in fact.

We will only deal in fact.

And the first thing he did was lie about how many people died.

Seven people off the bat.

Seven people.

Seven people.

Seven people.

That's sick Nick.

We know Sick Nick died.

And they lied about that as well.

What do you mean?

He was beaten to death.

Well, he died as a result of the injuries incurred in the riot.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah, he must have.

The day after, he must have.

He had two strokes.

He had two strokes.

Yeah, but doctors say that those strokes were certainly caused by the people caught on by the

tied to the events, right?

No, they didn't.

No, they came out and said that.

The coroner did not say that.

He said the opposite.

This says a ticking time bomb would have happened anyway.

I thought in the report they said that while it was a stroke, it was.

Look it up.

Look it up.

I think I remember the coroner was positive.

I am too.

The coroner did not blame.

But regardless, it was not a traditional, how you think of a traditional.

Like, you know, David, was it David Dorn who died in the riots, the police officer, retired police officer?

He was shot.

That's how you think of the death

in a riot, right?

Like, beat over the head with a fire extra.

Yeah, there were no injuries that caused Sick Nick's death.

Maybe blood pressure.

I mean, he had high blood pressure because of the event.

That's about as good as you can get.

That's about as good as you can get.

Then two officers died by suicide afterward.

In the following week.

Yeah.

Okay.

You can't blame that on the.

You can't blame that on the riot.

How do you blame that on the riot?

Right.

A protester was shot by police.

Two protesters suffered fatal heart attacks.

And another

died of a suspected suspected drug overdose.

Yeah.

The only person actually killed as a result of what was going on was a protester, Ashley Babbitt.

Yeah.

That's it.

Yeah.

Yep.

And she shouldn't have been there.

She shouldn't have been there.

That's right.

But I, and I feel bad for her.

I feel bad for her family, but she shouldn't have been there.

And, you know, she knew a gun was pointed at her and climbed through a barricaded building.

I mean, like, that's true.

So go through the,

you know,

the justified shootings that have happened and we've talked about on the air from police officers to African Americans and communities.

Like this one was worse,

by her actions, was worse than many of those that were justified.

I mean, like, this is, I don't know how that became this, like, cause celeb among some conservatives where we're supposed to say that police officers are not allowed to shoot people who are going through barricades in the middle of an ongoing riot inside the Capitol building.

Like,

I don't understand that particular particular point of view all that well, especially when we have, I think, correctly argued over and over again, if you go and you're charging at an officer,

they have the right to shoot you, right?

Like, we've, how many, how many videos have we talked about where the left is coming out and saying, no, they should have just let that girl stab the other girl and they shouldn't have done anything.

I mean, that's the left's arguments constantly.

And for whatever reason, that has surrounded this particular case.

They did, you know, look, she did something that

I feel bad about because I don't want people to die.

But that is the officer in that case, I believe, acted in a justifiable manner.

That being said, it's tragic,

but it also supports what conservatives say, which is like,

this was the one death that occurred in this riot.

There's another, like, there's a woman, and it's terrible, a woman who's in the middle of all this, wound up having health problems.

collapsed on the ground and was basically trampled while she was having some sort of heart

attack.

That's a terrible, terrible story.

However, it is not justifiable.

It's a terrible thing to say, oh, well, this many people died.

Like, okay, yes, she did die in the incident.

But it had nothing to do with it.

But it was not like murderous people came up and tried to kill.

Like, that was not what happened here.

Was it not?

In the way they mean it.

Yes, exactly.

No one died in the way they mean it.

Yeah, I think

that's an appropriate thing.

Yeah, because Ashley Babbitt,

that's not their example of what went wrong.

One of the protesters that they didn't like that shouldn't have been there died.

So

nobody died defending it.

Nobody died in Congress.

Nothing happened in that way.

Like, if you were to say a mass shooting occurred and one person died, it was the shooter.

Yeah, right.

That's not how they would summarize that story.

That's how they're summarizing it here.

They would have said injured.

and only one fatality and it was the shooter.

Right.

And so look, look, again, was it a good incident?

No.

But like, you know, as we were talking about this a little bit before we went on the air, there are some people on the right, very few, who are basically saying it was nothing.

It was just a.

I think this is honestly, this is where I started.

That's coming from.

It's pushback.

It's pushback.

Because how

dare you say that?

Because on the other side, the media has been telling us for a very long time that this was the Civil War.

Just like with the voting stuff, they say it's Jim Crow 2.0.

Everything's the most extreme thing that's ever happened.

And it's like, it is closer to nothing than it is to the Civil War.

No question.

This is not a controversial

thing.

People are just sick of this.

Romney, Romney,

might have been Genghis Khan.

Romney was the worst ever.

He was going to be so draconian.

He would be so anti-Democrat.

Are you kidding me?

He practically is.

He is a Democrat.

He is a Democrat.

Everybody, everybody, they play this nuclear card every time.

Every single time.

Let me tell you, this is how this is going to end.

It's going to end with nothing except an impression.

Going to be a big impression, but it will be played again.

There's going to be something because

history is not, you know, people say history always repeats itself.

Let me say it differently.

History is repeating itself.

This is exactly like the Black Tom event,

which

pierced and broke every window in lower Manhattan.

It's the reason we can't go up into the torch anymore of the Statue of Liberty, because the explosion was so big, it actually broke the arm of the Statue of Liberty.

And Woodrow Wilson...

knew exactly what it was.

Everybody who was involved knew what it was.

It was German terrorism.

They came over here to blow up the munitions that we were sending to the Allies for World War I.

They couldn't have those munitions come.

So they blew them up just in New Jersey.

It destroyed so much.

It was a big, big deal.

Woodrow Wilson said it was the capitalists that did it.

And then it was just brushed aside for a while.

And we're looking into it.

We're looking into it.

But nothing really happened.

And then when FDR needed to round up the Japanese, he used that fear and said, we've just found out what happened in like 1916.

We just found out what happened with Black Tom and it was the Germans.

And if the Germans can do that, the Japanese will do it here.

So we've got to act on this now.

This is just the predecessor of something bigger that is coming.

And they are building the foundation.

Thank you so much.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Axios calls this guy the FCC's 5G Crusader.

He has led the FCC's work to modernize the infrastructure rules and accelerate the build out of high-speed networks.

His reforms have cut billions of dollars in red tape and enabled the private sector to build these high-speed networks in

communities all across the country and extend America's global leadership in 5G.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot of people in in Washington, at least with this administration, that want to see America win the 5G race.

That's a topic for another broadcast.

His name is Brendan Carr, and he is an FCC commissioner.

And

we need good commissioners on the FCC.

Ajit Pai has left.

Brendan, how are you?

I'm doing great.

Really good to join you.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You are suggesting something, and I think this, I don't know if it started with you or who it started with.

I know that

Marco Rubio has been talking about restoring the internet to Cuba.

And there is a way we can do this, but it requires the government and Google to participate, correct?

Yeah, some of that is right.

So, you know, look, in Cuba, we're seeing unprecedented protests.

And what we see around the globe now is the first thing people do when they take to the street to fight for liberty is they take out their smartphone.

They take pictures.

They take video.

Because the thing that brutal dictatorships like least is the attention of of the world,

the spotlight on their brutality.

So, we've seen this in Iran, we've seen it in Venezuela, we've seen it in Myanmar.

So, the first thing that people do is they take their phone out.

The first thing the dictators do is they shut down the internet.

Now, they don't cut the internet entirely because that would cut off their own communications.

They block access to WhatsApp and Facebook and messaging services.

So, those pictures and videos can't get out there.

So, what I said, what others have said, like you mentioned, Senator Rubio, Governor DeSantis, is we should look for ways to restore internet services to Cuba, which would help to accelerate the ultimate destination of the brutal Cuban regime, which is its end.

And there's two ways we can do it.

We can introduce new services, new internet services from off-island.

That can take some time, and there's some logistical challenges, to be sure, but we have the technical capacity to do that.

And track two is we should bolster support.

for circumvention tools so that people can continue to use the internet services on the island and just get around the filtering, which, by the way, the filtering has all the digital fingerprints of the communist regime of China.

So they are very much involved in helping Cuba shut down internet services.

And didn't Facebook and everybody else, they did this in Egypt.

They did this for the Arab Spring.

They actually helped foment that revolution

and

made sure that people knew how to use it and gain access to it.

Now it doesn't seem, is anybody, have you heard of any high-tech, I mean, the big high-tech, are any of them saying we got to join in and help these people?

It's been pretty quiet from what I've seen.

And, you know, former Secretary Pompeo sent out a tweet a week or so ago saying that the government and others went in in Iran and helped bolster internet services during the protests.

There, I mean, we have the technical capacity to do it.

And it's simply a question of do we have the political will at the highest levels of this administration to green light these efforts.

If we do that, American enterprises can deliver these solutions to the Cuban people and show our support for them.

And President Biden initially came out with some positive words.

We're going to look at this, but it's over two weeks, and we haven't seen any action at this point.

And, you know, I'm very concerned that we're not going to see action.

So, you know, this is just a question of political will.

It's not a question of

capacity.

Yeah.

And is Project Loon, which was a Google project, I believe, in Kenya,

which sends this like,

you know,

tennis court-sized

tower up over the country, way above where airplanes are flying.

And it just kind of hovers there and kind of acts as a receiver to pass that message along.

Easily, we could probably do it with two of these things because Florida is so close.

Do I have that right?

You're exactly right.

So this is what I call that track one idea, which is how do we introduce new services into Cuba from off-island?

And there's a variety of technological ways you can do it, and you put your finger on one of them.

Google Loon had this operation where they put up stratospheric balloons.

These go 60 to 75,000 feet above the air.

You can actually keep them relatively static over a geographic area, given the way that the winds circulate.

at those levels.

I've been to Kenya myself to see this technology in action.

It works.

We at the FCC authorized this technology in 2017.

After a hurricane wiped out communications in Puerto Rico, seven to eight of these balloons went up, circled around Puerto Rico, and helped beam services into

that community.

And we saw it in Peru after some natural disasters, these balloons went up.

There's other technologies.

We could beam Wi-Fi off of the U.S.

Embassy in Havana.

Previously, we had inserted

satellite-powered internet devices into Cuba.

The advantage of these high-altitude balloons, as you point out, is you can stay in international airspace and beam directly from the balloon to a handset, back from the handset to the balloon.

Then to your point, given the geographic distance to Marathon or the Keys, you can beam right from the balloon back to the internet in the U.S.

So that's the advantage of the balloon.

And frankly, we need it now in Cuba, but we also need this, I think, as a strategic capability for this country.

We've always had Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti that broadcast into Cuba, The modern-day equivalent of broadcasting information into countries that aren't free is to enable the free, unfiltered use of the internet in those countries.

So I think we need this as a long-term strategic capability as well.

It's a lot better than obviously putting troops on the ground as well.

Sure.

And it's, I mean, with the way things are going, quite honestly, we might need one for

suppression here in America.

What is being done is craziness.

Craziness.

This is amazing.

I mean, look, we cannot be speaking out of both sides of our mouth.

At the one point, we're saying brutal regimes like Cuba, you can't filter, you can't censor the Internet.

At the same time that we have this White House, Jen Socky, out there saying, oh, yeah, we've been coordinating with big tech to censor American speech.

We can't do that.

We need to be very clear that we believe in a free, open, uncensored Internet for our own American people here and for other people abroad.

And so I think we should go forward, and whether it's through legislation or otherwise, make very clear that government officials should not be calling up big tech companies and asking them to put a thumb on the scale against speech they don't like.

Because let's get real, it's not about misinformation.

It's not about disinformation.

It's about political speech that doesn't fit the narrative of the people that are bombing in with these phone calls.

Is it possible to privately do this?

I mean, you know, we can just this audience, and that's not involving the Cuban population in America.

We could fund that privately.

I doubt Google would take our check, but is there a way to do this privately?

Well, on the track one stuff, so Google shuttered Loon at the beginning of the year because it wasn't a great commercial product.

People weren't going to drop Verizon or AT ⁇ T for these balloon services.

But I think as a strategic capability for the country, the commercial viability is less of a concern.

But the track two stuff we talked about, which is the circumvention tools, there's a lot of open source applications out there that the Cuban people are using right now.

Those technologies need additional funding.

And we're not talking billions of dollars.

We're talking one to three to six million dollars.

So there are some efforts underway to try to use private sector funding to bolster these technologies.

I can't endorse any one particular company or direct people towards those crowdfunding sites given limits on me as a government official, but there are private sector ways that people could donate money so that these circumvention tools continue to work and the people of Cuba can continue to get those pictures and videos out to the world.

You know, I loved Ajit Pie, and I've done this.

I've done broadcasts for 45 years and I can't even remember a name of

an FCC chairman before.

Maybe I did during Reagan, but Ajit was amazing.

And I thought we were headed in the right direction with the FCC under Donald Trump.

And now it looks like you guys are the only ones standing between

real freedom of the internet

and

net neutrality, because it's back, isn't it?

It is.

You know, look,

President Biden issued a quote-unquote competition executive order a week or so ago, and it included a direction basically to us at the FCC to go back to Obama-era net neutrality rules.

The reality is, you know, 2015, 2016,

America had flatlined in terms of our build out of high-speed internet infrastructure, including cell sites.

In 2016, we had something like 708 new cell sites go up in this country.

After we engaged in reforms under Ajit's leadership and me working with him,

we had 46,000 new cell sites go in in 2019.

So a 65-fold increase because we got all of that regulatory red tape.

out of the way.

So I am very concerned that we're going to go back to this Obama-era approach.

And it's as if they don't understand the real threat to a free and open internet.

It's not coming from the ISPs.

We don't have net neutrality today, at least under their conception of it.

And we don't see blocking and throbbing by ISPs.

What we do see is blocking and censorship by big tech.

And so if you really care about a free and open internet, the problem you need to tackle today is a censorship happening by Facebook, by Twitter, by these providers, not by the ISP.

How

close are we to really being a leader in 5G compared to, I can't remember the name of Huawei.

I mean, we are in the fight of our life with Huawei.

You know, we made, we were behind.

Again, 2015, 2016, people were basically counting the U.S.

out.

But when we modernized our infrastructure rules, because it had been costing too much and took too long to build infrastructure for the internet here, things boomed and we leapfrogged.

ahead of many, many countries.

And we now have the strongest 5G platform in the world.

If you don't have it in your particular community, the data may be meaningless to you, but the data does show us that we're doing well.

But I am concerned that we are not going to continue to keep the pedal down when it comes to allowing new internet infrastructure bills, when it comes to getting the spectrum out there that we need to power these 5G services.

So the good news is we made great progress.

We're in good shape right now, but I'm worried that we're going to let off the gas and then China's going to take advantage of that.

Elon Musk's satellite service is amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

Is this

what do you think of that business?

Does that have a future as far as

litigation?

Is there anything that can shut him down on this?

This is a really interesting technology.

And I was just out in Washington state visiting the manufacturing plant where they make these low Earth orbit satellites.

And the idea is that you can put these satellites up, hundreds of them, and they're going to get you almost sort of fiber-like speeds anywhere, almost anywhere in the globe.

And we are pretty hopeful.

We're not putting all our eggs in that basket.

We're looking at other technologies, other ways to bridge the digital divide.

But we think this could be a good technology.

We've authorized them.

We've funded them in terms of building out in areas where they're sort of rural and remote.

So

it could be a game changer.

We'll see.

It hasn't quite gone to scale yet.

It just isn't there as a timeline.

They're still building it out.

But we're hopeful that it's going to be a key part of bridging the digital divide.

Brendan Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner,

it's good to talk to you.

And please let us know about any threats to our constitutional protected rights to free speech and petitioning our government.

We need good guys on the inside that are alerting because there's just so much going on that nobody can pay attention.

to all of it.

Thank you so much, Brendan.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Blen.

You bet.

You can follow him at Brendan Carr FCC or find him at FCC.gov.

Brendan Carr, the FCC Commissioner.

I think this is something that we really need to pursue.

I think the Project Loon is a really, really,

I don't know why.

I mean, I think we should be speaking up and asking

congressmen and senators like Rubio, how can we help you?

What do we need to do to get the government to approve that?

We've already done it before.

Why are we not doing it for Cuba?

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

Mr.

Ben Shapiro is joining us.

He is

He is the intellectual powerhouse of the right now and been a friend for many, many years.

and I respect him and he is the one guy who writes a lot of books that I will always read his books because they are always really well thought out

intellectually solid and never go for cheap shots mr.

Ben Shapiro how are you sir hey June okay how are you I'm good I'm good I'm excited I haven't read your new book but I've heard you talk about it an awful lot I listened to your podcast when was it last night when you were doing the book signings?

And I want to actually take you through some of the things that you played, some of these authoritarian moments as we go.

But first, give the setup of the book.

What are you talking about in it?

So basically, the book begins with looking at January 6th, which the left has declared is the authoritarian moment in modern American history, that the democracy is on the verge of being overthrown, that Donald Trump is this great authoritarian figure, and that the right is the true threat to American freedom.

And then I asked people to analyze what exactly happened on January 6th and beyond.

Because what really happened is that a breakaway group, a much larger group, committed criminal activity.

They were all arrested.

They're all going to go to jail.

And within three hours, order had been restored and the government went on as though nothing had happened.

Then in the immediate aftermath of that, AWS, Amazon web services, deplatformed parlor completely.

Most major Democrats started calling for significant curbs on First Amendment freedoms.

You started to see neutral service providers providers talking about cracking down on quote-unquote extremism.

Donald Trump was thrown off all the social media platforms.

Corporations started to put out statements basically suggesting that you had to mirror particular political viewpoints on January 6th.

Or corporations said, we're just not going to give donations to anybody who questioned the results of the election, even though they would certainly not do the same with Democrats.

So the question is, if you're talking about actual authoritarian threats, then who's actually threatening, right?

Who are the institutions that are threatening?

And I think most Americans instinctively know the answer.

And the answer is not, you know, the idiots who invaded the Capitol building.

The people who are a true threat to your way of life right now are the people at the head of every major institution, ranging from the scientific institutions to the educational institutions to your corporate bosses.

And they have the power to really wreck your life in some pretty significant ways, even outside of the offices of government.

You know, we have been pretty close to this point before with Woodrow Wilson, but you can excuse the American people at the time to some degree because authoritarianism was this new idea.

And

with the progressives using science and saying, look, it's a whole new age.

You know, we came from farmers and now we're in the scientific age and anything is possible.

You can kind of dismiss it.

But what Joe Biden is doing right now, a lot of this really comes from the Woodrow Wilson playbook.

And I think it's just as racist and just as nasty as when he was doing it.

I mean, I think that when Joe Biden goes around saying, knowing full well that he's lying, that voter ID laws are akin to Jim Crow racism, or that what happened on January 6th is the worst insurrection that we've seen in the United States since the Civil War, or that Republicans broad red are just trying to return us to the days of the Civil War.

I mean, this kind of stuff is extremely ugly.

It's extremely divisive.

It is the opposite of what he promised that he was going to be when he became president, right?

Which is this sort of unifying moderate figure.

He's not been any of those things.

I think what makes makes what's going on truly unjustifiable is not just that we've seen the consequences of this sort of activity before.

It's that at least you can say that during Woodrow Wilson's administration, we were in the middle of a world war.

And during FDR's administration, we were in the middle of another world war.

Right now, we are involved in zero major wars anywhere around the world.

We're the unchallenged global hegemon, and yet we're tearing ourselves apart internally, going after dissenters, which is kind of a unique thing.

Oh, I think we are at war.

America is at war, but it's at war with itself.

I mean, it's completely lost its way

because we've had people teaching our children for a while now that we're a horrible, horrible place.

And I don't know if people are buying it or not.

I mean, they usually buy these things.

I want to take you to one of the authoritarian moments.

This is from 1933.

It's a parade.

Tell me why this is important.

In September 1933,

the government sponsored a spectacular parade up New York's Fifth Avenue to promote an unprecedented federal effort, the National Recovery Administration.

Roosevelt called the NRA a partnership in planning between government and industry.

Its goal to speed recovery by establishing profit levels for business and wage levels for labor.

In a show of national solidarity, more than two million employers across the country promised to abide by the NRA codes.

Russia hails victory in Moscow's Red Square during her May Day Day parade.

We'll get to that other clip in a minute.

So, tell me why that parade was important.

So, Jordan Goldberg talks a lot about this in liberal fascism, but the sort of economically fascist system was reliant on private businesses being overseen and working in cahoots with big government.

And big government would essentially charter these industries and then tell them what to do.

And industrial magnets said, Well, I guess it's better than the communists.

And then they would go along with it.

Well, the National Recovery Administration was an effort overtly by the federal government to force businesses into doing what they wanted.

You were supposed to put a symbol up in your window, the blue eagle.

You were supposed to put it up in your window, and Americans were literally supposed to boycott businesses that didn't put the blue eagle in their window.

Well, I think that we can see some pretty resonant echoes of that today in modern American politics when you have the government, members of the Democratic Party, calling on corporations, social media companies, for example, to do their bidding.

and then suggesting that perhaps, you know, maybe there needs to be an AstroTurf boycott of particular businesses if they refuse to do that bidding.

We saw the results of this when Major League Baseball just pulled out of Georgia, for example.

We're talking to Ben Shapiro, author of the brand new book that's out today, The Authoritarian Moment.

I think it's even more clear

with ESG scores.

I mean, this is the government getting into bed with global corporations, banks now providing a ESG score.

And if you're not playing ball with the government and with, you know, the environmentalist and social justice members, your score will go down.

And in Europe, they're now proposing that you cannot do business with any business that has a lower ESG score than you do.

Yeah.

I mean, you see it also in places like California that have attempted to actually pass laws leveraging people onto boards of corporations.

If your corporation is large enough, then we now have to put a certain number of people of particular races or sexual orientations on the board of the corporation.

I mean, this is truly totalitarian stuff.

And what's even more totalitarian in effect is that the corporations then shovel this this garbage down on the people who work for the corporations.

So it's easy, you know, Glenn, you're able to speak freely because that's what you do for a living.

I'm able to do it because that's what I do for a living.

They can threaten our livings, but they're never going to be able to take away all of our living.

We have too many people who are interested in hearing what we have to say.

But if you're just a guy working in a corporation, it's very easy for the corporation to get you to mirror their prescriptions because you got to put food on the table for your family.

Well, that's the thing that I like about this book: you're not just coming with the problems, you actually have the solution.

And

I think the way you have phrased this is really appealing.

I've been talking about Martin Luther King.

I hate boycotts, and I know you do too.

Stu does.

But Martin Luther King says, if we wouldn't have done the boycott, if we wouldn't have had the teeth, it wouldn't have worked.

We wouldn't have had the Civil Rights Act passed.

And they are coming after us, and we just keep taking it, and we don't come after any of the companies that are shoveling this crap.

Explain your position on this.

So I'm with you.

I hate boycotts.

I mean, mean, I'm in an industry where you and I are routinely hit by people trying to go after our advertisers.

But here's the reality.

There has to be a mutually assured destruction here.

If these corporations are only caving to one side, there's a tremendous asymmetry.

You'll see a corporation that receives 10 tweets, and then you'll get a call from your ad broker saying, well, they've removed their advertising because they got 10 tweets.

And the answer to that isn't, oh, well, you know, they're private business.

They can do what they want.

They can.

But they can also feel the blowback from the other side.

And so what we've done at our company, for example, is we've said to advertisers openly, quite openly, that if you want to advertise on our show,

you can pull your advertising anytime you want, but you're not allowed to announce it publicly.

If you do announce it publicly, you're going to have to pay us out.

And not only that, you understand that if you make a public statement about our shows or our audience, we'll go to war with you.

I mean,

we cannot take our brand value in dealing with advertisers that we believe in.

And you don't get to just undercut us that way with our own audience without us blowing back on you.

And I think that broadly speaking, that's what the right needs to do at this point.

If you're going to see MLB pull out of Atlanta, then they need to feel it in the ratings.

If the NFL starts to go woke, they need to feel it in the ratings because I would prefer that we go back to neutrality, but we're never getting back to neutrality unless the left learns that this stuff is bad.

And this really is important.

You talk about this with

offices.

You know, so many people just feel they're alone and they're not alone.

They're in the majority, but nobody's afraid, everybody's afraid to say something and you don't know who to trust.

And so they just go go in and they abide by these stupid things that they have to do, you know, examine their whiteness at Coca-Cola, et cetera, et cetera.

And you're suggesting that they form a coalition.

Right.

I mean, this is what we have to understand about how these institutions weren't left in the first place.

It wasn't because a broad majority of these institutions is in favor of these radical left policies.

It's because you have maybe 10, 15, 20% of the people at any given corporation who are very loud and very intransigent.

And then you have a bunch of people in the middle who just say, well, it's easier to give in to them than to fight them.

And do we really want the headache?

Well, you can do the same thing from the opposite point of view.

You can renormalize an institution.

If you have 20% of the corporation that says, listen, we just want to be neutral here, and it won't be 20%, it'll be more like 50.

And you get those people to sign a letter to the corporate head saying, listen, we're not doing this whiteness is bad, diversity training with Robin D'Angelo dot sense.

We're not going to do it.

We think that it's bad, and we're not willing to do it.

Then the corporation has to decide between the 50% and the 20%.

Right now, the corporation is deciding between the 20% and the 0% if people don't get mobilized and unified.

Explain your theory on veganism, because I think this is a great example.

Yeah, so I mean, to give full credit to the person who kind of gives this metaphor, Nissan Nicholas Taleb, his metaphor is basically, let's say that you have a family of four and one of the members of the family, usually the daughter, comes home and says, I'm a vegan today.

And because I'm a vegan, mom, I need you to make me a vegan meal.

And so mom now has a decision.

She can make a meat meal for the rest of the family and a vegan vegan meal for the daughter, or she can say to the whole family, listen, I don't have time.

We're all eating vegan tonight.

Well, now the daughter has successfully renormalized the family.

The entire family is now eating vegan because you had one intransigent person who just refused to budge.

Now you can take that entire family.

There's a block party that night.

There's maybe three other families there.

They go to the people throwing the block party.

They say, listen, we're all eating vegan because our daughter is eating vegan.

You can give us a separate meal.

That's fine, but we're just not going to eat the meat.

Now the person who's the head of the block party has to decide whether to make a couple of separate meals.

And maybe she says, well, you know, it's probably not worth the hassle.

It's one night.

Who cares?

People can go vegan for one night.

And now you've got 16, 20 people who are all eating vegan because one person was intransigent about eating vegan.

The same thing holds true in politics, and you see this all the time.

This is true in corporations.

This is tyranny of the minority.

It is.

And it can only work under a couple of conditions.

One, you do need sort of a baseline level of support for the thing, usually about 15, 20% inside an organization.

Two, you need to have them asking for incremental, non-supremely radical things.

So this is what the left does.

They don't go right away to, we need Robin D'Angelo teaching you the whiteness is bad.

They start with, we need diversity training.

Are you against diversity?

Why don't you like diversity?

Diversity is good.

Are you racist?

And then it moves on to, well, you know, diversity training really has to encompass teaching about the systemic racism of the American system.

And don't you think that systems have histories?

And then they move from systemic racism to, well, you know, if we're going to acknowledge systemic racism, we certainly have to acknowledge that you are a beneficiary of white privilege.

And if you're a beneficiary of white privilege, this means you suffer from whiteness.

You can see the sort of step-by-step encroachment.

But the key is you don't go 0 to 100 all at once.

You start by slowly pushing the pedal.

And eventually the pedal gets to the metal.

Most people have to be acclimated to it.

And if every concession seems like a minor concession, pretty soon you've moved a really long way.

And this is true for virtually every social issue in the United States.

I mean, how do we go from

a time when Americans were thinking that no fault of wars was controversial to men can be women and women can be men.

I mean, that doesn't happen overnight.

That takes a while, but it takes a lot of conciliation.

It takes a lot of cowardice, and it takes a lot of incrementalism.

Robert Reich just tweeted out in November 1923, Hitler's attempted coup failed, but no one was held accountable.

Yeah, they were.

He went to prison.

Ten years later, he took over Germany.

Trump's January 21 coup failed, but six and a half months later, Trump faces no consequences, and his co-conspirators are still in Congress.

Is Trump an authoritarian?

I mean, Trump certainly didn't behave like an authoritarian in terms of what he was actually able to get done.

I think that Trump,

he tends to use some strongman rhetoric because that's just how he talks.

But, you know, in terms of what did he actually do, the answer, of course, is no.

I mean, this is why it was hysterically funny and pathetic when General Milley was talking about how this was like a Reichstag fire situation and he's a Hitlerian figure.

It's like, what?

I mean, you know how historically ignorant you have to be in order to come up with that?

First of all, it doesn't even make any internal sense.

The Reichstag fire was set by a deranged communist and then used as an excuse by the Nazis in order to pass the Enabling Act.

So what was Trump's theory there?

I'm going to send some of my friends over to set the Capitol on fire so I can then, what, declare myself total dictator?

That doesn't even work internally.

Beyond that, there was no institutional support for anything that Trump was saying or doing.

And beyond that, this is not Nazi Germany circa 1932.

I mean, the reality of Hitler's rise is so wildly misunderstood by people who have never read a book that it's kind of insane.

I mean, people have to understand that when it comes to Hitler's rise, the key factor in Hitler's rise, there were two major key factors in Hitler's rise that people tend to ignore.

One is that Hitler was pushing against the Communists at the time, and so there were a lot of people who felt the necessity to choose between one and the other.

And the other is that the power of the German government had already been centralized.

Hitler

was a late-term dictator.

They'd already been operating under the auspices of minority governments with nearly dictatorial powers several years by the time Hitler took power.

That is not the case with regard to President Trump in any way, shape, or form.

So

the historical analogy just doesn't work in any way.

But I guess if you say Hitler and over and over, then a president who was attempting to cut regulations and lower taxes suddenly looks like the guy who was trying to imprison every Jew and gasp them and invade half of Europe.

I mean,

it's amazing how

with it's the godliness argument.

You know you've lost when you start invoking Hitler.

I want to take you to the Old Testament here for a second.

And when God wants to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, two angels go in.

And the amazing thing about this story is

they're taken in for shelter and the mob doesn't the mob is insisting, not that they come out and say everything is okay, what you're doing.

Instead, they must participate in what Gomorrah and Sodom and Gomorrah are doing.

And we're at that point now.

It's no longer, hey, just let's be good to each other.

Hey, that kind of hurts my feelings.

Maybe don't say that.

Now it's, you must say the things I believe and you must participate in it.

Yeah, that's one of the more disturbing things that's happened is that the way the left has won here is, again, a sort of incremental three-step process.

Step one was saying to people, you know, you need to be civil.

Just be civil.

You know, like when we have a political conversation, don't mention this inconvenient fact because it really insults me and I feel bad about it so just don't do that and people on the right and Americans generally tend to want to be civil and so be like okay I guess I just don't say this quote-unquote offensive thing then it turned into well speech itself is violence if you go ahead and you say that it's not just that I'm offended it's that you have done an act of violence against me and you must be shut up you must be silenced and then that turned even further into it says silence is violence this is this nonsensical ridiculous thing that you heard during the Black Lives Matter protest last year.

If you don't mirror exactly what I am saying word for word, and I can change it it on its own, by the way, right?

It doesn't have to be consistent.

There doesn't have to be an internal logic.

If you don't mirror that word for word, you have committed an act of violence.

So in other words, if you're not part of the mob, then you ought to be targeted by the mob because you're performing an act of violence.

I think one of the ways that the right completely misses the boat is that we're constantly looking for the through line for the left.

We're constantly saying, look, what's their internal logic?

What are they trying to accomplish?

And the answer is power.

There is no internal logic.

Yeah.

Ben Shapiro, thank you so much.

I'd love to have you on for a podcast about the book when we have more time.

I know you're busy today.

The book comes out today, The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro.

Ben, thanks so much.

God bless.

Thanks, Wednesday.

You.

Bye-bye.

Really good book.

The things that I've learned just from hearing him talk about it.

And he goes into history in the book.

Pick it up today.