Ep 96 | Jewish Space Lasers & Deplatforming 'MAGA Media' | Ben Shapiro | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Do you remember when the New York Times referred to Ben Shapiro as a provocative gladiator, and the left went nuts?

Shapiro goes viral every couple of months, and every time it's a spectacle, anytime anything big happens, suddenly you start seeing screenshots of a Shapiro tweet everywhere.

It is the reason why the New York Times article that I just mentioned went crazy, because they referred to him as the voice of the conservative millennial movement.

And if you need proof of that that claim, you can find hours of Libs Get Wrecked by Ben Shapiro compilations on YouTube.

Most recently, he was asked to write an article for Politico.

We're going to talk to him about it.

The staff went out of their mind.

His crime.

He wrote an article for Politico

at their invitation.

defending Republicans who oppose the second impeachment of Donald Trump, which is somehow more ridiculous than the the first one.

In response, he called the journalists fragile little babies and mocked their phony outrage.

He usually triggers AOC, which isn't that hard to do, but Shapiro does it with style and grace.

Although they almost agreed recently, AOC had to ruin it by accusing Ted Cruz of attempting to murder her.

Ben Shapiro, world-renowned for his ability to expose hypocrisy, call out idiocy,

and to do it at an extraordinarily high rate of words, really fast.

It's why people who are on the deranged left actually wish for Shapiro's death.

That is not an exaggeration.

Last year, a guy was arrested for trying to kill Ben.

Although he has been targeted by the far right,

in 2016, the Anti-Defamation League determined that he was the most most frequent target of anti-Semitic tweets against journalists.

We seem to be living through one of the most chaotic times in human history, and Ben Shapiro will go down as an important person in this insanity.

New York Times was actually right.

Ben Shapiro is really a cultural gladiator, caught in the fight to save our republic, to save America as we know it.

Today, on the Glen Beck podcast, Ben Shapiro.

Ben I know that you have been called a provocative conservative gladiator but I want you to know I'm not afraid of you my friend I'm not afraid of you

because we're on to you Marjorie Taylor Greene has exposed you and she claims a you're Jewish I don't know if that's true or not

but if you are indeed Jewish,

I would like you to explain

her theory on the Jewish space laser that apparently PGE has, they can target California, starts the forest fires, and PGE, of course,

either owned or operated or invested.

I don't know exactly her tie, but the Jews are involved.

Explain.

Well,

I mean, first of all, you should be more afraid of me, not less, if indeed I am in control of the Jewish space laser.

I mean, I don't know what your status is.

All I can say is that with pinpoint precision, we can circumcise all those who wish to circumcise using the Jewish space laser.

Really?

I didn't know that.

It's an amazing thing.

Right.

It's an amazing thing.

And there's the amount of control Jews exert over the world in the minds of anti-Semites.

Sure.

I wish I were that optimistic, to be frank with you.

Very old joke about two Holocaust survivors who are sitting around reading the anti-Semitic newspapers, and one says to the other, oh, why are you laughing?

The other one says, because this newspaper makes me so happy.

We're in control of so many things.

So

you didn't move to Tennessee because you know something that I don't know, that we're like everybody's going to be circumcised or everybody, we're going to have a forest fire because of the Jewish space laser.

And if you're in Tennessee, it's fine.

Well, all I can say is that I've bought an enormous amount of unused desert land right along the Nevada border.

Really?

And I'm not going to say what comes next after that.

Okay, all right.

Ben, good to talk to you.

It is, it is,

it's crazy how different things are since just the last time we sat together in the same room.

America is,

does it exist anymore as we know it?

As we knew it?

Does it really exist?

Well, I mean, I think that all of the problems that were undergirding our last conversation still exist.

I think in many ways they are worse.

And I think that they are going to grow worse over the coming period unless there is a coalition that forms not just the people on the right, but also people who are moderate, people who are traditionally liberal, because the real threat to the Republic is really not even a right-left gap as much as it is a left versus everybody else gap.

I mean, there's a whole side of the aisle that really does seek to destroy fundamental American freedoms in the name of unity.

And, you know, when Joe Biden took office and he gave his speech about unity, I said at the time that there are two ways to interpret unity.

I mean, there are two ways to achieve it.

One is there's unity through we agree on the fundamental principle of tolerance for other people's speech and other people's rights.

We don't have to agree on everything, but we have to agree that you have a right to live your individual life.

And we can have unity that way, which is unity through a certain amount of baseline agreement and then a lot of diversity piled on top of that sort of baseline agreement.

And then there's unity through the purge.

And it seems like the hard left is in the ascendant.

The unity through the purge method seems to be what they prefer at this point.

And that's why you're seeing this sort of full-scale assault on First Amendment freedoms ranging from speech to the press to religion, unfortunately.

Aaron Ross Powell, and

Joe Biden apparently isn't aware of this cycle.

I mean, in Seattle alone,

you know, they had the first lesbian sheriff in King County.

She's gone.

You had the first black

chief of police in Seattle.

She's gone.

Because once you get in, you're not progressive enough.

The left is never happy.

And so they purge and purge and purge.

What is that going to mean to the Biden administration?

You know, the big problem is that the Democratic Party is trying to square a circle here.

And that is that they are really at the heads of revolutionary movement.

And the revolutionary movement requires constant revolution.

And so if you are at the head of a government and your entire movement is suggesting that government does not have the power as the full corrective to American society, in fact, the way that government is constituted is in and of itself a white supremacist institution and a threat to the sort of utopian future that you hold dear.

There's been an attempt by the Democratic Party higher echelon to sort of capture the mood of the woke and capture the passion of the woke and channel that toward systemic change from within.

This is something Barack Obama, I think, tried to do.

But I don't know that that's going to be able to hold over the course of time.

It's just going to be a constant turnover.

It's either going to be turnover within the system or it's going to be attacks from without the system.

And you're seeing some of both of that, right?

You see the violence has not abated in places like Portland.

It's going to continue to sort of foster in places like Portland.

You're going to start, there will be riots during the Biden administration.

It's not going to all go away just because Joe Biden is president of the United States.

At the same time, what you're going to see is an attempt by the Biden administration to sort of either co-opt the rioters and the protesters and use their passion, per se, or to make a deal with them where they say, okay, you know, if you guys just put this off for a little while, we will give you X.

Well, the problem is once you give them X, then they want Y.

Once you give them Y, they want Z.

The revolution is never satisfied.

This is the problem with radicalism.

So, but I think these people,

I mean, I don't know.

Do the people in the administration that are speaking the language of revolutionaries, are they,

is this the Clinton kind of grifter kind of class that is looking at things like the Great Reset and they know they can be in a ruling class and they're just using these revolutionaries as fuel right now?

Or do they actually believe this stuff?

I mean, I think it's sort of halfway in between.

I think the number of people who are so nefariously motivated that they understand their own motivations to be corrupt is pretty small.

Very few people truly believe in sociopathic fashion, that they are willing to do the wrong thing in order to achieve the right result.

And so they sort of buy into the baseline premise of the woke, which is that America is a fundamentally racist institution, that America is white supremacist, the sort of premises of the 1619 project.

And then also that happens to allow them all sorts of fodder to push forward with an agenda they were already going to seek anyway.

This is why you're seeing the language of quote-unquote racial equity, like Ibram X.

Kendi-style racial equity, being pushed into every element of the Biden administration.

It's not just that it is relegated to race policy.

It's being pushed into economics.

It's being pushed into the environmental policy.

It's being pushed into COVID policy.

It is an all-purpose lever in order to achieve things that you already wanted to achieve.

So I think the answer is some of both.

I mean, they are using the woke in order to achieve their goals.

And also, they don't fundamentally disagree with a lot of the premises the woke actually believe in.

Why do we have troops, 6,000 troops, still around the Capitol with razor wire fences now?

I mean, I don't know.

I mean, honestly, it's one of those situations where you hope that the people who are ordering that sort of stuff are not politically motivated and they actually have intelligence that we haven't seen.

But it does make me somewhat suspicious that we are weeks in.

Donald Trump has no access to social media

unless there's an enormous amount of chatter that's happening that you and I just don't know about.

It seems kind of bizarre that we still have thousands of troops in Washington, D.C.

You have the FBI saying they had some chatter, but nothing of significance or anything enough to act upon.

And yet we have these troops.

I mean, nobody wants to see either side

go to Washington and do anything.

I'm just, I just,

you know, we're living in a time where we're fighting conspiracy theories,

but conspiracy theories happen.

It's like chicken and the egg.

The conspiracy theories happen because people aren't telling you the truth.

And so then people start to go, well, wait a minute, let me connect the dots here and here and here.

And that always, usually leads to trouble.

But we're not having any transparency on anything.

So

what do people do

who are really concerned about things and know history?

I mean, it's really obviously concerning, not only because you see the hypocrisy and the sort of double standard, right?

I mean, the same people who are cheering the fact that there are thousands of troops in Washington, D.C., five minutes ago were saying that federal troops in Portland were the cause of rioting in Portland.

But beyond that, there's something that's really ugly that's been happening, which is that the January 6th riot, which was an act of evil, I mean, it was a criminal act of evil,

that riot has been used as an excuse in order to, again, achieve a bunch of purposes that the left has wanted to achieve.

And then when you get suspicious, they say, well, you know, your suspicion is just another form of conspiracy theorizing.

There is this sort of bizarre

circular reasoning that we saw over from an outlet that I very often like, Axios.

Jim Vandehey wrote a piece maybe three, four weeks ago in which he said, blue America is ascendant in every area of American life.

They're ascendant in all the institutions.

They're ascendant in Hollywood.

They're ascendant in corporate America.

They're ascendant in government.

They're ascendant everywhere.

And this means that there's going to be a radical rethinking of everything from speech to freedom of religion.

And then about a week ago, Axios wrote a piece quoting me, quoting Tucker Carlson, saying that the right is coalescing around the idea that the right is being silenced and that the right is going to be essentially cudgeled into quiescence about all of this.

And the angle of the piece was that it was sort of paranoid to think that.

And I literally just clipped his piece from three weeks ago and I said, like, I'm not saying it.

You're saying it.

Right.

There's this gaslighting, this mass gaslighting that is going on that is so incredibly dangerous.

And you see it most often when it comes to the way that people treat the cancel culture and freedom of speech.

There's this idea where you're not allowed to write or say anything that crosses us.

But you know what?

If you go over to your own side of the aisle, you can totally say it over there.

You get this all the time.

Glenn, you've received it.

I've received it.

That if you go on an outlet that is not right-wing, then people on the left cudgel the left-wing outlet or the moderate outlet for even having you.

And they say, well, you know, you can go hear Glenn Beck on Glenn Beck's show.

You can head on over to the Blaze or you can hear Shapiro over at the Daily Way.

That's not a big deal.

And then the next move is, okay, now that they're all in this little area that we've defined for them, now we just air bomb it, right?

Now we just go after the methods of distribution.

We make sure that they can't be reached.

And if you sound off about this, their response is, we're not trying to do that.

That's crazy.

How could you say that we're totally trying to do that?

And then once they do it, they they say, well, of course, you deserved it, right?

So there's this constant sort of moving of the goalpost where if you notice at any point, then they gaslight you.

If you notice what's happening at any point, then they just say it's not happening.

And then once it's already happened, they say, well, of course, you deserve that to happen because you're a conspiratorial thinker.

There's an amazing thing happening over at CNN.

I'd love to hear your opinion on this.

I am absolutely convinced that Brian Stelter is like a self-appointed leader of the band to take away everyone's instrument and everyone's sheet music that doesn't play exactly the way he and CNN think.

They are now behind a lot of this movement to get Fox and some of our other allies off of

cable by going after these companies.

And

they are inside trying to go after their competitors.

It's pretty amazing.

So Brian Stelter, maybe it was probably four years ago, five years ago, I was on Stelter's show and and we were talking about bias in the media because I said CNN is a biased source.

And he said, well, if you think CNN is so biased, you should try to come work over here someplace like CNN as opposed to starting your own outlet.

And I said to him, Brian, you offering me a job?

Because I really don't think you are.

And the answer, of course, is no.

CNN doesn't want to offer any conservative a job, right?

You can only be a CNN conservative if you then parrot the sort of anti-Trump, anti-conservative, the Republicans are the bad guys line.

I was making a lot of time.

You don't do that.

You're no longer on CNN anymore, right?

You're supposed to do the Lincoln Project, conservative.

And then they say, okay, well, you go over there and you just go watch Fox News, right?

Fox News is okay.

And then you have Stelter saying, you know what, we need a concerted attempt to take Fox off the air, not just by advertisers, let's go after their advertisers, but also let's tell Comcast to take Fox News off the air.

And it's not just Stelter, unfortunately.

You've seen this repeated on MSNBC.

You've seen this

repeated over and over by Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist of the Washington Post.

This is now her bag.

You've seen, in terms of social media, which is the next step, you've seen Karis Wisher at the New York Times and Kevin Russo at the New York Times pushing this stuff super hard.

The telltale sign, by the way, that somebody is doing this is when they start citing Media Matters as their objective source on what deplatforming means.

And they're doing this.

They're actually doing this.

Margaret Sullivan wrote a column the other day where she said, you know, we shouldn't allow people to write for opposing outlets because it legitimizes them and we should try to deplatform Fox News.

You know, Media Matters says this really isn't cancel culture.

It's like, okay, so now you are literally having, I mean, you are

not

doing the equivalent, you are doing the equivalent of asking O.J.

Simpson for his definition of murder and then using that as the baseline for how we should adjudicate murder cases in the future.

If I'm not mistaken, didn't you write for the Washington Post?

Didn't you write an op-ed for the Post?

So

should we de-platform the Washington Post?

Yeah.

Yeah, in 2016.

But that was okay.

See,

I could write for the Post in 2016 when I opposed Trump, right?

But then I'm not allowed to write for anybody anymore because back in 2010, there was a bad tweet that I've explained a million times and also apologized for.

Even though 2010 is before 2016, the magical thing about how cancel culture works is that the time machine only works sporadically.

2016 was after 2010, but not when I was saying not nice things about Trump.

The minute that I said that people should vote for Trump in 2020, then 2010 was before 2016.

And at that point, you could actually go back and uncover my old tweets.

It's really convenient how the time machine works.

Ben, I got into a lot of trouble here recently because I spoke about digital ghettos

and the ghettoization.

You know, if you were a Jew in Nazi Germany, you were fine.

You could do whatever you want behind the wall.

But if nobody's seeing you, if nobody's hearing you,

whatever you're doing on the other side of the wall or whatever is being done to you on the other side of the wall, nobody sees.

And I got in trouble because I guess I'm a Nazi, but that term was coined by a friend of mine, Edwin Black, who, as you might know, is the leading Holocaust historian who lost members of his own family

in the Holocaust.

He stands by that, as do I.

Would you categorize this as a digital ghettoization of voices and people of different opinion?

Well, I mean, the fact is that the term ghetto goes back long before the Holocaust, right?

Jewish ghettos existed in Europe going back centuries and centuries and centuries.

In fact, the word ghetto comes from ghetto.

It's the Italian.

It actually began in Italy long before the Nazis had ever, you know, anyone had ever dreamed of Nazis or the Nazis had been around.

Jews had been placed in

fenced off areas of major cities.

In fact, one of the, you know, my Rothschild friends who owned the Jewish Space Lasers, one of the ways that they were very instrumental was in opening up the ghettos in the 19th century

in France and other places around Europe.

So I don't think that the term ghetto itself, unless we are specifically referring to the Nazi ghettos, which, again, you weren't free within those areas, right?

You were much more restricted.

If we're talking about just ghetto as a concept, I mean,

there's been talk of ghettos for various groups all over the planet for a very long time.

So I think it's fairly obvious, Glenn, that you're not an anti-Semite, nor was your use of the term digital ghetto

meant to suggest that today's American conservatives are anything like Jews who are being victimized by the Nazis in 1941 in Warsaw.

But

the argument is freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach.

Well,

I guess.

I mean, no one is guaranteeing that when I started with Facebook that I'd have 3 million followers or your billion followers or however many you have.

I mean, we worked for that.

So it wasn't a guarantee of reach.

We've worked for that.

But is there...

I mean, the basic

the basic idea of freedom of speech is not freedom of reach is a bizarre one, and it goes to a sort of behavior that you see more and more commonplace in terms of leftist philosophy, which is that you have rights, but only within the private confines of your home.

Essentially, freedom of religion doesn't exist outside the private confines of your home.

If you're a religious person, you can't be religious in your business dealings.

You can't be religious in your school dealings.

You can't be religious in your social interactions.

Religion is confined to the home.

And freedom of speech, same sort of thing.

You're free to speak.

We're just, I mean, no one is going to allow you to speak on their platforms.

And we're going to make sure that no one does business with you.

And we're going to make sure that nobody ever listens to you.

But sure, you can scream into your pillow at night.

And if that makes you feel better, then I guess that we can call that freedom of speech.

The basic notion,

what's kind of amazing about all of this is that the same people who are currently saying freedom of speech is not freedom of reach are exactly the same people who suggested that we need campaign finance reform because we didn't want people using their money in order to achieve more reach than other people.

The same exact people who have said things like, you know what we should do?

We should have campaign finance caps so that everybody has an equal amount of access to the viewing public.

They've actually suggested in many cases, like Seattle, I know they've done this or they've suggested it, taxpayer-funded campaigns that everybody is spending the same amount of money, sort of like a middle school secretary campaign where you can only put up a certain number of posters because you wouldn't want one person dominating in the freedom of reach.

So the same people who fully understand.

that the amount of reach that you have is very impactful are exactly the people who are saying that reach shouldn't matter when it comes to freedom of speech.

And that, of course, is an absurdity.

I'm also seeing the argument made all the time that freedom of speech is really a First Amendment thing.

It's about the government.

Yes, I agree.

It is about the government.

But freedom of speech as a value is not about the government.

Freedom of religion as a value is not about the government.

And when we talk about legal rights being protected, your legal rights are protected so long as there's a cultural force behind the enforcement of the legal right.

But the minute that the cultural force goes out of the argument, the legal right is next on the chopping block.

And we all know this.

I mean, if anybody thinks that 20 years from now, the left is going to be just as sanguine about First Amendment protections in their broadest form at the legal level as they supposedly are now isn't watching.

Within, I mean, we've already seen members of the Biden administration, people like Richard Stengel, who actually is heading up one of the media wings of the Biden, I think he's the transition guy at the U.S.

media group or something, like Voice of America.

Richard Stengel has overtly called for hate speech regulation inside the United States.

I mean, the definition that they're looking for is a legal one.

It's just that they can start on the social level and then they can move it into the legal level once the social level has already become sort of a fait accompli.

So, how do you solve the social issue?

Because

I was having an argument earlier this morning about

I think the

one thing the founders may not have really envisioned or had their arms completely around is the idea that a private corporation could be much bigger and much more powerful than a government.

And we're seeing this now with Facebook and Google, and

they're not opposing forces.

They're teaming up together now.

So

what do we do with this?

Because they don't have to pay attention to the Constitution.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that one of the things the founders did understand is the power of a corporation that was in bed with the government.

Yes.

The Boston Tea Party was carried out against a supposedly private private organization that had been chartered by the British government and restricted by the British government.

So the founders certainly understood that the power of a corporation or a non-corporate form of business in conjunction with government could be extraordinarily powerful.

It could have monopoly power.

It could be something that was threatening to the liberty of Americans.

And

the way that you fight back against that is you break the linkage.

This is one of the cases that I've heard made with Section 230 that I think is actually somewhat compelling, is that Section 230 has granted both a, it was meant as a protection to allow people to go beyond the boundaries of just having completely unfettered comment sections and unfettered platforms, that if you're going to remove obscenity, if you're going to remove violence, that that was a good thing.

We didn't want to punish you for that.

Now the norm has become that people in government are actively demanding that you censor.

They are actively demanding, and they are threatening that if you don't censor, they're going to shut you down.

Well, at that point, these corporations really are a wing of the government.

The government is essentially telling them that they need to use their power in order to compel speech.

I mean, that's a dangerous, dangerous thing.

And it's not,

it's a revolving door, too, between government and Google and government and Facebook.

The people go from working from one administration into those organizations, and then when the administration comes back their way, they leave there.

I mean,

it's a farm team, it seems.

Well, there's also a real problem, which is that these tech bros, and they're not victims, but they are in one sense, which is that they're being battered about.

You've got members of the government who are telling them that they need to restrict the content available on their platforms.

And you'll see members of the tech bro contingent, right?

You'll see Dorsey.

You'll see Zuckerberg.

You'll see Sheryl Sandberg.

You'll see them actually say, we would love for you to regulate us.

Please regulate us.

They'll openly say this.

They'll say, we want to know what the standard is so that we can just abide by that standard.

After all, we're the biggest players in the space.

We can abide by any standard we want.

Our competitors can't, right?

We'll have market capture at that point.

just tell us what to do.

And government is saying, well, we can't tell you what to do because the minute we tell you what to do, we have violated the First Amendment.

So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to pressure you into doing what we want you to do.

And you will quote unquote voluntarily take that action in order to restrict speech.

And then the moment that people try to build alternatives, then they just go to the next level of people whose services are relied upon, and then they cudgel those people into deplatforming folks.

This is what the parlor event showed, right?

That what the parlor event showed is that for a long time, people like me, right?

Libertarian-minded folks, we were saying, okay, I don't like how Twitter is run.

I don't like that they deplatform people.

Some of the people that they've deplatformed are people I despise, but I don't think that they should de-platform the way they're deplatforming.

And people would say, including libertarians like me, okay, well, if you don't like it, you can go to an alternative.

Parlor was formed.

It was an alternative.

The next move was go after Amazon Web Services, a neutral serviced provider that is not allowed to discriminate on anything other, apparently, than politics.

And so I think the way this is going to go, frankly, is that you're going to start to see states, red states, start to say that we are going to enshrine in our state legislation that anti-discrimination law is not only going to apply to the bevy of categories that the left wants it to apply to, but maybe we'll have to start applying it to politics now.

Where if you discriminate on the basis of politics, you will be in violation of anti-discrimination law, because anti-discrimination law has been used as a weapon to quell freedom of association, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.

Anti-discrimination law now applies to everything from religion to sexual orientation.

Now, under the Supreme Court ruling, it applies to gender identity.

Okay, well, if that's the case, then why not apply it also to politics to the point where, okay, well, you're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of politics with the carve-out of explicit political companies.

They will say you can change that, but I make the case I can't.

I believe what I believe.

I mean, there's a better, there's an easier case, right, which is you can change your religion, right?

Religion is actually protected under the Civil Rights Act.

So free to, I mean, I can convert.

I'm not going to.

But people change their religion all the time in the United States.

So

there's a basic, I mean, what we know is that, well, even according to the left, you quote unquote can't change your gender identity.

You can change how it manifests.

That's behavior.

So that's so the

basic idea from the left that it's only immutable characteristics that we are protecting here,

it's not really right.

It's not really correct.

So this is nothing that I, by the way, I don't like any of this stuff.

I'm not a fan of legal structures that support

the ability to quell freedom of association on any level.

But at a certain point, the right is going to be left with no available alternative options if they keep basically being forced to build new infrastructure, and then the infrastructure is immediately taken away from them.

At a certain point,

you're going to reach

a point in the market where monopoly really does apply.

I mean, at what point are you start saying, okay, well, you know, you can build your own parlor and that's fine.

And then you take away parlor.

Okay, well, you can build your own Amazon web services.

Okay, we build our own Amazon web service.

Okay, well, you know what?

You're going to have to build your own fiber optic cable networks that span the entire United States.

There's no way to keep up.

Parallel fiber optic networks?

Like, what in the world are you talking about at a certain point?

So

I have been mocked by everyone.

9-11, I called in 99.

I said there'd be blood, bodies, and buildings in the streets of New York City, and it'll have Osama bin Laden's name on it.

When are you going to start taking this guy seriously?

I've called

the ISIS, ISIS killing Christians, the rise of anti-Semitism in 2008, the caliphate, which they mocked me for, all of these things.

In 2015, I said there's coming a summer of violence, a summer of just riots and unrest.

Every time

they mock me, and then when it happens, nobody asks anything about it or nobody talks about it.

And that's fine, except they should ask because they'll learn a very important question.

The answer to how do you know that?

Because I take take people at their word.

When they say crazy crap

and they've got some power,

it is incumbent upon you to take them seriously.

I do.

That's how I can see these things coming.

Ben,

we have heard people in real power talk about we have to find a way to re-educate 70 million people.

We have to, maybe, Maybe we have some sort of a re-education kind of camp.

We have to deprogram.

We have to silence.

At what point

do we find ourselves

in retrospect being really stupid by saying, it can't get any worse than this?

Well, I mean, I think that we're at that point every single day.

Every single day,

the sort of crackdown is getting stronger.

And I think what the left likes to do is they like to take the most outlying and outlandish example, and then they'll say, okay, well, we're not doing that, right?

You saw an entire column by Nicholas Christoph in the New York Times saying, we're not going to do re-just note to all our conservative friends, we're not going to round you up and put you in re-education camps.

All we're really going to do is tell you that you're not allowed to watch the channels that you want to watch, and we're also going to make sure you can't visit the websites you want to visit.

It's like, well, I don't think anybody on the right is under the impression that we are moments away from the capos arriving, the gestapo arriving at your door and dragging you off to a fenced area where you can't see a newspaper.

I'm pretty sure that's not what anybody is talking about here.

I think what we are talking about is something that is not only clearly going to happen, but is already happening.

And that is an attempt to siphon off our ability to have access to information that we want to see.

And

that ability is not being restricted even to the most conspiratorial, insane kind of stuff.

It's not like the left is saying, you know what, this QAnon thing, it really has to stop.

We're going to stop QAnon.

Instead, it's the entire Republican Party is the party of QAnon.

And therefore, if you are a Republican, you are in league with QAnon and you believe QAnon and you're forwarding QAnon.

And in fact, the entire Republican Party is the exclusive preserve of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who Mitch McConnell this week said was a cancer in the Republican Party, right?

The entire party is Marjorie Taylor Greene, except for the party leadership saying that this lady says crazy crap on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, inside the Democratic Party, it's the party of peace, love, and joy.

Well, Nancy Pelosi is appearing on the cover of magazines with Elhan Omar, who's an open anti-Semitic.

I'd like to play Red Rover, Red Rover,

send Marjorie Green Taylor Greene over.

Okay, there's one, that's crazy.

Now we get a pick from their side.

It's an insane amount of people that we could pick from that they seem to tolerate all the time.

I don't know if this is a political thing or if they're that really self-unaware.

We started with the joke about the Jewish space laser, which came from Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the things and the origins of what she believes.

But you have on the other side, you have Rashida Tlaib, who is absolutely an anti-Semite.

You have

people riddled through the left that have either

been a revolutionary, are a revolutionary, they don't like the Constitution, they want to end the Constitution.

Are they this self-unaware that

they are

also a little out there?

Or

are they just doing this for politics?

Well, I mean, they're certainly doing this for politics only.

And we're all old enough to remember when it was not Marjorie Hiller Greene and it was Steve King and when it was not Steve King and it was Christine O'Donnell and it was not Christine O'Donnell.

It was Todd Aiken.

I mean, they've been doing this as long as I'm alive as they find some rando Republican who says some crazy thing and then every Republican in America must answer for this crazy thing.

Meanwhile, he got Nancy Pelosi on the cover of magazine with Ilhan Omar, and it's like, well, you know, that's just the way things go.

Five minutes after she was about to censure her for her anti-Semitism.

So it is a deep-rooted ideology on the left and forward.

And you have Mitch McConnell coming out this week and saying that the things that she said are a cancer.

Well, you don't just kind of coexist with cancer.

You got to cut that out.

But

you can't silence people.

And you also, you know, it's not the people of Georgia didn't elect somebody that Mitch McConnell likes or Nancy Pelosi likes.

They hired a representative.

I don't like the, you know, I don't like Warnock that they also sent, but they sent.

So what do you do?

Yeah, I mean, well, there's, again, this is, again, part of the game that's being played here, which is, okay, so you condemn everything that Marjorie Taylor Greene says, all this conspiracy nonsense, the looniness, all of it.

But do you want to expel her from Congress?

And you you say, no, no, there's really not a ground to expel her from Congress until she does something that is corrupt or criminal.

And then you can expel her from Congress.

Then they say, well, that must mean you agree with her.

In the same way where you can say, I don't like what Trump was doing for months after the election.

And I don't like the January 6th riot.

But you can't impeach Trump for saying inflammatory things because that's politics.

Lots of people say inflammatory things.

They say, well, if you're not going to vote to impeach him, that must mean that you like the January 6th.

riot.

This is always the game, right?

If you don't give me exactly the thing that I want, then you're on the side of my opponents.

And then once you give them what they want, then they go on to the next thing that they want, in which case you become a villain again, right?

Mitt Romney finds this out every three months or so when he does something that they love and he's the champion of the greatest guy ever.

And then two months later, he does something they don't like, and he's back to being horrible old Mitt Romney from Bain Capital with the dog strapped to the top of his car.

Tell me,

I mean, I don't know much about QAnon other than just, you know, I don't have to go too deep to go, well, that's ridiculous.

I'm not going to spend my time here.

But QAnon and things like this, I mean, Bush knew about 9-11.

I think it was like 70% of Democrats actually believed that when he was in office.

I don't know what the number is now.

Is this because

of

just a political agenda?

We do this to each other, or is it the lack of transparency?

Something doesn't feel right, you know, and we had planes that were flying people back to Saudi Arabia, you know on 9-11 everything else is shut down so people just kind of look at that and say well it's got to be something and because nobody's coming forth and really being transparent we just make this up is this social media what what what where do these conspiracies come from and how do we how do we disassemble those bombs

I mean, I think that it's all of the above, but I think if you have to chalk it up to one thing above all else, this is something that both Arthur Brooks and Yvalovin have talked about, just the complete complete disruption of social capital in the United States over the course of my lifetime is incredible to watch.

Nobody knows their neighbors.

Nobody talks to anybody who disagrees with them.

We have these online silos where we talk only to each other.

Now you have the left clubbing people back into their arena, right?

If you venture out, then you're a bad guy and we have to club you back into place.

And as that happens, and as I think COVID has made this enormously worse because you can't spend any time with anybody, the politicization of everything in America has made this enormously worse.

It used to be, you could, you could be at a ball game and you're meeting somebody new and you're just talking about sports.

You never talk about politics.

Now you've got Black Lives Matter painted on the sidelines.

There's literally no way not to talk about politics.

When everything gets politicized, when you kill our ability to even get together with one another physically, when you kill the church, which was the number one way in the United States for people to meet each other and discuss things across partisan boundaries, when you get rid of all of those things, and what we are left with is a sort of air sat social capital where you're just online and you're sort of looking for a place to belong.

And then you find a mob and now you're part of the mob and it feels good and you get that endorphin rush of being part of the mob you see this on Twitter all the time.

Once you find your mob, it's very difficult to leave your mob.

And the thing about conspiracy theories is they do create this enormous level of solidarity.

It requires social buy-in in order for you to believe in a conspiracy theory.

And the crazier the theory, the more social buy-in it requires, right?

The more loyalty there are between the members and each other, right?

Cults are very, very loyal to one another.

And so you see this online.

Online has made it possible for a nut in California to find a nut in New York and then for them to form a social bond in a way that they just would not have been able to do before.

And when you have all other avenues of meeting people and hanging out with people and getting to know people that are foreclosed for you, and that's been more true at this time in history than any other time in modern history, then you're going to see a radical rise in that sort of thing for sure.

So

here we are sitting here

and we are being shut up with COVID.

I mean, I see what's happening with Cuomo,

the unbelievable madness that is Andrew Cuomo.

And same with Gavin Newsom.

Now we have Joe Biden doing executive order after executive order.

They are going to attempt to make Washington, D.C., a 51st state.

They are going to pack the courts.

They are going to do these things that everybody went, nah, they're not going to do that.

They're going to do them.

Is there a point to where the average Democrat, that the, or do they even exist anymore, that the average person that, you know, really doesn't like fascism might wake up and go, wait a minute, we might be on the wrong side here because there's this weird marriage going on now with

people who never thought that they would ever have anything in common politically.

And we can talk, we're fine, we're fine.

It's this, It's the people who actually believe in the Bill of Rights.

Do those people exist as the average Democratic voter?

I mean, I think they do, but I think they're going to have to make a choice.

I don't think that the future of America relies on conservatives nearly as much as it relies on people that conservatives disagree with and who now are forced to a particular choice.

And that is people who are politically liberal, agree with a lot of the policy prescriptions of the left, but don't agree with the fundamental way in which the left is approaching how to get those policy prescriptions done.

And so if you're a liberal and you believe in bigger government, universal health care, and you believe in a smaller military and all the things that the hard left wants, right?

Defunding the police, all these things, you actually believe in those things, but you also believe in freedom of speech and you believe in freedom of religion and you believe we should basically leave each other alone.

You just want the government involved in certain areas to rectify certain imbalances.

You have a choice to make.

And the choice is this.

Are you going to side with the left, which might arrive at utopia sooner, but run over more people?

Or are you going to side with conservatives who have a different vision of the future of the country than you do, but who are also believers in some of the same fundamental values that you believe in.

So you're going to have to choose between the policy preferences that you have, which maybe you'll be able to convince conservatives eventually that you'll get a victory that way, but it's going to take a lot longer, or you just go along with the people who are willing to basically run directly over anybody in their way.

And you're seeing that battle play out right now.

I mean, you saw that in the Harper's Weekly letter where you saw 150 liberals saying, cancel culture is bad.

Say, okay, well, here's the thing.

If cancel culture is bad, I'm going to need you to every once in a while stand up for a conservative being canceled.

Yes.

Like that's what I'm going to need from you.

It's not that it's not because what what i get from so many members of sort of the traditional liberal side is yes cancel culture is bad and i hate it when it happens to me it's like well yes i would imagine that you hate it when it happens to you the difference between you and me is that i will defend you when it happens to you and you won't defend me when it happens to me right right it's it's an amazing thing and do you remember when they did not obviously do you remember when they tried to cancel um who is the uh director um work for james gunner james gunned guardians of the galaxy yeah okay yeah i believe you stood up for him i stood up for him that shouldn't have happened to him, even though we radically disagree.

You know, what he said was nonsense, but should he be fired for that?

No.

No.

Right.

Right.

But they don't do that on the other side.

That's right.

People on the right routinely do this, right?

If I see, how often have you tweeted that somebody shouldn't be canceled who you disagree with?

In really serious ways.

I do it.

I would say at least once a week.

At least once a week, there's somebody who gets canceled.

And I say, I disagree with this person on virtually everything.

And this person should not be canceled for that.

I mean, I've done it for folks who I think are just awful.

Like Sarah Jong at the New York Times, right?

There were a bunch of old tweets that she wrote that were pretty racist.

And I thought, okay, well, they're old tweets, number one.

Number two, the New York Times knew it was getting.

They shouldn't be firing her for old tweets.

That's not a good thing.

It's a bad practice generally.

And then she turns around and she's like, yeah, you know what?

Politico definitely should not have allowed Shapiro to write this.

Like, this is the way that this sort of stuff works, unfortunately, is that folks on the right are trying to defend the principle a lot of the time, and folks on the left are not.

Tell me the Politico story.

Okay, so Politico asked me to write their playbook.

And so I consider it and I think, okay, maybe it'll be a fun thing to do, right?

It's a little bit across the aisle sort of stuff in the waning days of the administration.

Might not be a bad idea.

It might not be the worst thing for sort of the body politic and also just for the media generally.

And so I agree to do it.

The Friday before, I call up Politico and I was like, you know what, guys, things have gotten kind of out of control.

I think that I'm kind of busy this week.

And they're like, no, no, no, we've got our schedule set.

We desperately want you to do this.

Please do it.

Okay, fine.

So I say, I'll I'll do it.

So I write Politico's playbook, which again is sort of this insider-y newsletter.

And the entire world goes nuts, particularly inside Politico.

So the entire media declares that it's very bad that Politico has even asked me to do this.

Politico has an internal phone call with 225 members of staff, which is insane.

Okay, 225 members of staff.

Now, here's the thing.

There are a bunch of liberals, like good-hearted liberals, with whom I am friends at Politico, who are on the call.

And they were telling me that on the call, people were saying that I was akin to David Duke.

One of them said, you know what, right now I'm actually researching a piece on the alt-right and the white supremacists and I'm looking at their message boards and there is no one these people hate more than you.

Like I'm simultaneously looking at their message boards and you are like public enemy number one over on those message boards.

While they're calling you a white supremacist, I'm looking at those message boards like full time.

And I said, you know what'd be really helpful is if you would tweet that out.

I'll think about it.

That's the way this tends to work.

Did he even

did that person even bring it up

on the internal call?

Not so far as I'm aware.

And in fact, the reports from the Daily Beast were that there were people who disagreed with the staff on this and who thought, you know, it's kind of good that they allowed Shapiro to do this and it's good that we reach out this way.

And they said in the Daily Beast piece that people were afraid to sound off on the phone call in defense of Politico's decision to run the piece and then defend it because they were afraid that they would then be shouted down by their colleagues.

So how many are there, really?

How many of these crazy zealots that want to shut down, and how many are just silently standing by as more and more people get eaten?

So I think they're watching a renormalization of the Democratic Party.

I think that right now, if I had to ballpark it, and of course this is based on very little data, I would say that about 40% of the Democratic Party is very much in favor of the shut everybody down, the new college graduates, the woke leftists, the people who have decided that the right is not worth even having a debate with.

And I think that there's still 60% of Democrats, particularly older Democrats, who are not super fond of that particular direction.

But the question is, do they hate Republicans

more than they hate the woke left shutting down those rights?

And I think for a lot of them, the answer is yes.

Once you have a solid core of Democrats who are intransigent and willing to basically withhold their support from Democratic programs, they can basically take control of the party.

And I think that's what you're seeing happen right now.

So unless those militant, moderate Democrats start to sound off in fairly dramatic order, I think that the Democratic Party is in real trouble and then the country is in real trouble.

I mean, I thought Biden was supposed to be that guy.

Biden clearly is not that guy.

He's got Susan Rice out there talking about equity day after day after day.

And when she says equity, she means Ibrahim X.

Kenzie equity.

Yeah.

It's even outcome, even outcome, which is socialism, is communism at the barrel of the gun.

Communism is just, you know, enforced by the government.

Ben, what should we be concentrating on?

What is the one thing, if you could talk to people and say, this is what you should be doing,

this is the thing that, you know, I think people are missing.

What would those things be?

So I think there are a couple of things that we can be doing right now.

And one is what I'm going to term, I'll make this up right now, so we'll see how this goes.

I think there's the Noah concept and there's the Abraham concept, right?

The Noah concept is get everything in the ark, board up the doors, the flood's coming.

And then there is the Abraham concept, which is bring outsiders into the tent, talk with them, convert them, add to the flock.

I think we're going to have to pursue both simultaneously.

I think we've always gone after one or the other.

I think the first thing that has to be done is people who are conservative need to be subscribing to places like Blaze TV.

They need to be subscribing to places like Daily Wire because the way that we survive, and it's self-serving, but it's true, the way that we survive is by people who can't cut us off, right?

Who are not going to cut us off.

We need to consolidate our own forces and back each other.

And you and I have talked about this a thousand times, Glenn.

So nothing has changed along those lines.

It's just we're going to need to build more infrastructure.

We're going to need to do all that stuff.

And we're going to need to build alternatives in a wide variety of areas that the left has been completely controlling.

That's one thing.

The other thing we're going to need to do is we're going to need to continue to reach out.

And yeah, we get slapped in the face a lot.

We're going to continue to need to reach out, try to find people who are liberals who will have conversations with us, try to broaden it out and force the left to disown the liberals, because that's the area where you might see a backlash from the liberals.

The liberals are not going to get upset when Glenn Beck gets quote unquote canceled, or I get quote unquote canceled, or even Bob down the hall gets quote unquote canceled.

Liberals are going to get upset when people who look and act exactly like them start getting canceled.

And so reaching out to liberals actually has the effect of achieving that purpose in some ways.

And I think

I will admit that when I wrote for Politico, I was not unaware that what happened was entirely likely to happen.

Not only was I not unaware of it, I warned all the editors of Politico it was about to happen, and they didn't believe me.

But

that is

weird.

They haven't actually lived it.

When they say, oh, there it doesn't exist, because they haven't lived it.

This happens to me all the time.

I'll talk to somebody who's mainstream liberal, and I'll say, no, you don't want to do that.

You have no idea the hell that is going to come down around you.

And they're always shocked.

They're always shocked.

It happens exactly the way we say and they're like, I can't believe this.

Yeah, because you don't live it.

Right.

Now, the cancel culture for them only exists when they are canceled.

And I mean, this is the modern version of a conservative is a liberal who's mugged by reality.

Right now, an anti-leftist is a person who's mugged by the left.

And if you're never mugged by the left, then you have no reason to think that the left is a threat to you or the things you hold dear.

But the left is on a mugging spree right now, and they will go after pretty much anybody who crosses them in any way.

So I think that both as a strategic matter and as a moral matter, we should be reaching out to people who are traditionally liberal, who disagree with us on politics.

We should do it because it's always good to have those open conversations and make some friends with whom we disagree.

And on a strategic level, if those people then get canceled because they've had a conversation with us, then maybe reality will set in and they'll realize how much of a threat their left flank is.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And I think it's, you know, what you said,

start reaching out to those people.

I think it's important to not talk about policies, but talk about the principles that we have in common.

Freedom of speech, you know, come on, man.

Can you give me the Bill of Rights?

If you agree with the Bill of Rights, then we're good.

We're good.

And I think if we can start relaying some of those lines that, you know, our parents had, our grandparents had, where there was certain fundamental principles that pretty much everybody was for.

I don't think people are that different when it comes to the principles, although they are drifting.

Let me go to the NOAA concept.

You mentioned earlier about states.

I really think I'm all for secession myself, not for us, but for them.

I mean, we've got all the document.

We haven't left America.

They want to leave America.

But, you know, our states have to draw the line and say, look,

The Constitution guarantees these rights.

And if you start screwing with those rights, we're not going with you.

We're

a sanctuary state for the amendments.

What do you think of that?

I mean, I think that that is what is likely to happen in both directions, by the way.

I think that if a Republican wins high office again, you're likely to see the Democrats do exactly what they've done over and over again, which is create sanctuary cities, ignore federal policy.

Suddenly, they fall in love with federalism when Trump is president.

And then immediately upon Biden acceding to the office, suddenly it's, oh, look, federalism is bad.

I don't like federalism anymore.

Federalism is terrible.

Some of of us are fine with federalism all the way across the board.

So if, you know, I think that states are going to have to resist a lot of these encroachments.

And that is likely to fragment the country.

Again, federalism can exist so long as people understand that the federal government can't do everything.

I think the problem here is that you have one side of the aisle that believes the federal government literally should do all of the things.

And every element of the democratic policy agenda right now is unification at the federal level.

Everything from their supposed voting rights bill, which is all about federalizing the election processes all across across the United States, to the Equality Act, which is about federalizing anti-discrimination policy against states that have not adopted California-style anti-discrimination law.

They want to federalize everything.

They want top-down control.

And states at a certain point are going to have to say, listen, you want to enforce an unconstitutional law.

You're going to have to come do it because we're not going to do it.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Any way to argue taxation without representation when we start to bail out Illinois, New York, California for stupid laws that their people passed that we don't live in.

I didn't live in California for a reason.

You know, I love California, but it was insane.

Same thing with New York.

I love New York City, but it was insane.

We all knew it was going to fall apart.

Why do I, in Texas or in, you know, in any other state, why am I required now to pay for their madness?

Yeah, I mean, that is the question of the hour.

Again, the country would be a lot better off if we weren't subsidizing each other across state lines.

The argument the left will use is that, you know, it's red states that are disproportionately poverty-stricken.

And so, if you look at the net outflow of tax dollars from places like New York, they're very often going to red states where there are military bases or where there are more poor people.

Yeah, that's called a federal program, right?

There's a federal anti-poverty program, and that applies equally to everybody across all of America.

And so, if there are more people in one state than another, then people in one state might receive more net dollars.

But if you're talking about bailing out governments for bad bad decisions, that's a completely different thing.

And the idea that the federal government should be bailing out California's debt because California decided to take on billions of dollars in debts to teachers' unions they can't pay back, and Texas now is supposed to pay that back.

I literally left California so I did not have to pay taxes to the teachers' unions in California.

And now you've got the federal government following me to Florida so they can take my money away from me and pay it back to California.

It's absurd.

So,

what do we do?

How do you fight that?

I mean, the only way, presumably, to fight that would be to have a complete rethink in terms of

how much power the federal government has to collect taxes.

Because once the federal law is passed, then it's very difficult to say that the IRS can't come and grab your tax money.

Ben Shapiro, thank you so much.

You can find him at The Daily Wire.

Please subscribe to The Daily Wire.

They've got great shows.

They're entering into entertainment.

And of course, you can get Ben's show on Daily Wire.

You can get it at the podcast.

You can also get it on radio as well.

Ben Shapiro, thank you very much.

Thanks, Glenn.

Great to talk to you.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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