Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 463 | It's Time to Push Back (While We Still Can) | Guest: Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

We're excited to be talking to Ben Shapiro, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" and author of the new book, "The Authoritarian Moment." There's a lot to discuss in today's polarized political and cultural spheres, and we start with one of the most contentious topics: vaccines. Just as concerning as the virus itself is the constant misinformation and flip-flopping done by the media; if anything, they have only themselves to blame for vaccine hesitancy in America. Unfortunately, this issue, like so many others, has been weaponized by the Left to push their authoritarian agenda. Shapiro's new book deals with the topic of authoritarianism, plainly laying out the problem facing America. But what solutions are there? Should conservatives consider some sort of collective action to resist the behemoth of leftist ideology, or is a more libertarian approach the way to go? Either way, it seems like more and more Americans are seeing the red flags, and the time for complacency is over. --- Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers products are individually wrapped, vacuum sealed, & ready to grill (which helps eliminate waste!). Know where your meat comes from — go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE to get $20 off & FREE express shipping. ExpressVPN: stop letting strangers invade your online privacy! Protect yourself at ExpressVPN.com/ALLIE & get 3 extra months free! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone is having a great day, a great week so far. Today, we've got a treat for you. We've got a little known up-and-coming commentator that you've probably never heard of before. His name is Ben Shapiro. And I just feel. I just feel fortunate enough to, you know, share my platform with him and the hope that his star will rise. So I'm super excited for you to listen to this conversation. He's got a lot of wisdom for us. He's got a new book out. And he really articulates so well the moment that we're in. And the

obligation that all of us have as freedom-loving Americans, and I think, especially as Christians, to speak up for our rights, to speak up for liberty and to stand for the future of this country, which really is without hyperbole at stake right now. So he's going to talk to us all about that. And I have a few minutes or maybe a couple minutes to talk to you about something out to the end of this episode. But for now, without further ado, here is Ben Shapiro. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

Listening to your recent episodes, looking at your recent tweets, I feel that one thing that you have really been trying to make clear is that you are a proponent of not taking the vaccine or any vaccines. Is that correct? You're one of the most infamous anti-vaxxers. Do I have that information right? Totally right. I mean, so I believe the Daily Beast printed a piece where they suggested that and I forced them to retract it. And then there was a piece in the week where they said that.

And then I also forced them to retract that. As you know and have known for a long time, I'm like the most provis. vaccination guy on the right. I've been really pro-vaccination long before COVID. Oh, I'm so glad that you corrected that. Because I told everyone before you got on that you said that it was the mark of the beast. So that's not right. Yeah. That's not right. Listen, I'm just happy to be, honestly, like, I'm just happy to be microchips. Right. If I'm kidnapped, Bill Gates knows where I am now, so we're good. Yes. And you're magnetic and all that. I don't know what superpower that gives us. I've heard that when you get vaccinated,

you're magnetic too. So that's pretty cool. I go in the dark. Wow. Wow. So that's why you're so pro-vaccine. That makes sense. Okay, let's talk about vaccine for just a second. I know you've been talking about it a lot, but I get questions about this every day from people saying, okay, you know, I've done the calculations for me, for my family, don't want to get the vaccine. Some people are saying, and yet they're mandating it at my work or I'm a federal employee and I don't know what to do. I mean, what do you tell those people? I know you want them to get vaccinated, but say they don't want to. What's your advice for those people? So, I mean, if you don't want to get vaccinated, it's still a free country. And that means that, you know, you can push back against your employer. The truth is your employer does have a broad level of legal protection in making you get vaccinated. I mean, that's just the truth of private employment in the United States. It's also true under public health statutes.

There's not a lot you can do legally speaking. Yeah. But if you choose not to get a vaccine, certainly I think you should be able to make that sort of choice. And frankly, you know, and my colleagues. company, we don't mandate that everybody get a vaccine because you're an adult. And one of the beautiful things about the vaccines is that they're so effective that now that I'm vaccinated, frankly, it's none of my business, whether you're vaccinated at this point. And if you get COVID and you get seriously ill, that one's on you, frankly. You're an individual human being. You have the

capacity to make your own decisions. I think that if you're above a certain age, it is very, very stupid not to get vaccinated. I think that if you're below a certain age, I think that it's more of a question. But, you know, everybody is an individual. You all get to make your own decisions. And I can't live your life for you. What do you make of a lot of the messaging that we are seeing that seems to actually disincentivize people to get the vaccine? People who are already hesitant, but maybe they were thinking about getting it. But then they saw the CDC saying, you know, we're only a few variants away from the vaccine not working. And they're like, well, why the heck would I, why the heck would I even get it?

What's with it back and forth and the waffling from people who say that everyone absolutely has to get vaccinated? They're insane. They're insane. The public health bureaucracy is completely out of its mom. The latest advice, which is that vaccinated people are supposed to mask up, is predicated on such abject nonsense that it makes the head spin. I mean, the Washington Post had an entire piece today talking about how they haven't presented no data. The CDC has presented no data. And now even the Washington Post is asking questions about that.

So, you know, what I frequently like to do when I'm looking for data on the efficacy of the vaccines is I go to this place called the CDC. And then I look at their actual stats. And you know what those stats show me? They show me that of the 161 million people who have been vaccinated in the United States, a grand total of less than 6,000 have been hospitalized with COVID-related symptoms and many, many fewer have died, which means that if you get the vaccine, your chances of ending up in the hospital with COVID are something like one in 27,223 last time I checked. Those are not bad odds, right?

I mean, the risk factors are wildly lowered. And beyond that, why am I supposed to mask up in order to protect a bunch of people who have the option to get vaccinated at any point. Why am I supposed to mask my kids in order to make that happen for people who choose not to get vaccinated? In fact, the message should be pretty simple. The vaccines are very effective. If you choose not to get the vaccine, that's your choice. You can live with that. But nobody is going to baby you and no one is going to protect you from getting COVID from the highly infectious delta variant because you don't wish to get the vaccine. That would be an incentive for people to actually go out and get the vaccine at this point. But the CDC is just like, and what they're saying about

the vaccine too is just not rooted in data. So for example, we're Shal Wolensky, the head of the CDC, she said on national TV yesterday that the reason that vaccinated people ought to mask up when they go into public places is because out of every 20 people who have the vaccine, maybe one or two of those people are going to get a breakthrough case. That's just a lie. It's not true. The CDC itself says that the rate of breakthrough cases, symptomatic breakthrough cases in the United States for the vaccinated is not one in 10, which would be 10%. It's not two in 10, certainly, which would be 20%. the rate is 0.098%, which is approximately one in every 10,000 people get vaccinated will get some sort of breakthrough case that's symptomatic, according to the CDC.

So they're actually down talking the vaccine. Like I'm much more pro-vaccine than the CDC or the NIH. It's unbelievable. Which is so bizarre because you can't simultaneously bully people into getting something that maybe they don't want to get and tell them while it might not be worth actually getting it. That just doesn't make sense. It's almost like they don't want those people to get the vaccine so they can continue making this some kind of political thing. I mean, headline after headline says it's only white, evangelical Calvinist Trump supporters that are not getting the vaccine. When that's not even true,

it's almost like they want to keep writing those headlines. And so they're encouraging people, at least implicitly, not to get the vaccine. I don't know. That seems like a conspiracy theory, but I'm just trying to make sense of all of the contradictory messages. No, I agree with you. I mean, I think that if you wish to convince somebody to get the vaccine, and I, like, I convinced somebody in my personal life to get vaccine yesterday. It was a 63-year-old guy. He was a hadn't gotten the vaccine. And I said, well, why haven't you gotten the vaccine? And he said, well, I feel like I'm going to wait a year and see what the long-term effects are. And so, well, in that year, there's a good shot that you're going to get infected. Here are your

risk factors, right? He gave me sort of his health. So here are your risk factors. Your odds of dying from COVID are significantly higher than any of the risk we're currently talking about with regard to the vaccine. And now you're going to say, here's the risk, here's the reward. And he went and you got the the vaccine. The way that the public health establishment talks to people is not this. They're not like, let me give you all the information. Let me explain to you why your risk of getting sick. from the vaccine in a serious way is lower than your risk of getting sick in a serious way from COVID based on age stratification and prior health condition. Instead of treating people like rational human beings, instead, they just want to yell at you. And what that says to me is not that they want to get people vaccinated at this point, is that they wish to yell at people.

They wish to say that you are stupid. I mean, literally Nancy Pelosi says this, that you're a moron, you're an idiot if you don't get the vaccine, and we're just going to yell at you. Well, you're not convincing anybody by doing any of that. All you're really doing is creating a group of unpersens who don't really even deserve the vaccine, frankly. I have to say, I'm amused, highly amused by there a bunch of people on the left who are now saying things like, well, you know, if you don't get the vaccine and then you get sick from COVID, we shouldn't cover your medical bills. Yeah. And I thought, welcome to the privatized medical system that we have all been arguing for in which you own your own health here on the right. Like, welcome to the libertarian right gang, but they only become

libertarians when it comes to people who they hate, apparently. Yeah. Let's talk about a little bit more about, I mean, maybe it has a connection to libertarianism. We'll get into that in just a second. But talking about all of this and just the incompetence of the government and the left's hypocrisy, I want to transition into talking about your book. Can you tell us what it is, why you wrote it, especially at a time like this when people are talking a lot about authoritarianism? So on the left, the story goes like this. January 6th was the high point of authoritarianism in modern American history. The true authoritarian threat to the country came from Trump and his band of 75 million droogs who are going to overthrow democracy and all of this.

And that's just not the lived reality of Americans. The real authoritarian threat to the country right now is largely coming in the form of non-governmental sources. It's coming from the takeover of every major institution and the weaponization of those institutions against you. And yeah, some of that is happening within the government, like with mask mandates. But a huge percentage of this is happening when your corporation tells you, if you don't post a black square, you're going to get fired.

Or when your educational establishments are trying to indoctrinate your kids with critical race theory, and then they yell at you and they try to other you if you say, I don't want you doing that? Or when the scientific institutions declare completely anti-scientific conclusions, like that men can be women and women can be men. And if you disagree with this, then you are treated as outside the realm of rational debate. Americans feel this by polling data, nearly every political group in the United States, with the exception of the radical left, feels they can't say what they want to say in public for fear of blowback. We are living in a moment where everyone is at risk of being declared outside the Overton window at any given time and then essentially turned into a

wanderer within society wished out into the cornfield, that's a dangerous thing. It will bleed up into government policy. You're seeing the country basically polarized because the radical left has taken what were neutral institutions and now turned them into weapons for itself. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Alley, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave,

even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Do you think that it's been too much, too fast. That they've tried to do too much too fast on the left and that there's going to be a significant backlash on the right, either by people just resisting, you know, within the private sphere or come midterms? Do you see that or do you see, you know, a lot of complacency so that the left can just keep on dominating? I think the apathy and the complacency are fading away pretty

quickly, and I'm pretty excited about that. I think that the pushback on critical race theory is just one symptom of that. The pushback on defund the police is another symptom of that. And a lot of us who consider ourselves fairly libertarian when it comes to governmental policy, a lot of us are beginning to say, well, listen, if you guys are going to weaponize the institutions this way, we better come up with some solutions other than sit here and fret. And those solutions may involve retaliatory boycotts and mutually sure destruction. Some of those solutions may involve starting our own businesses that cater to the neutral

and cater to the other side of the aisle. And some of those solutions may actually be legal in nature. You might have to, for example, pass state laws that barred the teaching of praxis critical race theory. You might have to pass state laws or federal laws that curb Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if all of these organizations are going to be turned into arms of the federal government, restricting freedom of speech. You know, you've got to be very careful with this sort of stuff, obviously. You never want to grant more power to the government that can then be used against you.

But I think that the blowback is coming, and it's going to be pretty strong. The left for a long time has relied on the sort of apathy and cowardice of the people in the middle. People basically saying, well, you know, if we just give them this little thing, they'll probably leave us alone. I think that inclination has been drilled out of a lot of Americans by this point. Yeah. You know, I used to be kind of tepid when people would ask me, okay, do I say something to my employer about this training that I don't agree with? Or do I speak up in class? And, you know, it's hard to give people specific advice because you don't know their particular situation.

but, you know, I feel like a few years ago, conservatives were saying, you know, you have to be really careful about that. If you just need to get the good grade, get the good grade and don't say anything. But now it seems like it's a different moment where really the risk of not speaking up seems to be bigger than the risk of speaking up. Do you think that you've kind of shifted on that for people who are saying, okay, do I say something? Do I stand up? Do I talk to my school board? I'm scared of backlash. I'm scared of being docks. What do you say to those people? Like, is the moment now for people to finally speak up? So I think that one of the important things to do here is to act collectively, right?

The right doesn't like to act collectively. So I still say to individual students, you're in a class with the professor, the professor hates your guts, they're going to give you an F. You're not going to change any mind. So why do you write on the final what you want to write? There's really no point in doing that. To give the professor what they want, speak up in class if you can convince other students, that's fine, right?

It's always ends driven, I would say, as opposed to just, you know, running directly into the face of the, directly into the face of a fire that's likely to burn you. There is something tactical here. But when it comes to, for example, the corporate world, I think that it is very important, you're unlikely to succeed if you just write an individual email to your boss saying, this critical race theory nonsense says nonsense. You're much more likely to succeed. If you go to 10, 20% of the employees of the company and you have them all sign a letter

saying we're not doing this. Because this is what the left is done, right? The left doesn't act alone. It's not one lefty writing it pissed off email to a professor. It's the entire left mobilizing as a group. And what we've seen from the left, and it's been very successful, is the process of what I term renormalization in the book. It's not my term. It's a term that's been used in social science.

20% of any organization, if they are intransigent and aggressive and loud, can shift the other 80% of an organization so long as they refuse to budge. But it takes 20%. You can't be the only person in the room. Yeah. So you have to start by convincing other people or being the first person to speak up, at least in private conversation, like with. fellow students or employees just to see if you can get kind of a coalition of people to speak up about this kind of thing. You've talked about libertarian or you've mentioned libertarianism a couple of times in this conversation. And there seems to be a debate right now within conservatism

about the future of conservatism, especially with that whole TPUSA, Brandy Love thing. A lot of people were talking about, okay, is there a moral, a necessary moral biblical component to conservatism? Or is it really just this kind of libertarian live? and let-live small government, people just do what they want to. I think I know where you land on that, but can you explain your position and what you think the position of most conservatives actually is on that? So I think that the answer is the conservative position is kind of a combo. I think that on the one hand, I don't think that there are tons of conservatives who believe

that every conservative value needs to be enshrined in law and then rammed down by the top levels of the federal government. At the same time, I don't think that there are a lot of conservatives and libertarians even who believe that their local communities ought to be governed by a porn shop goes next door. So I think that there is some complexity to this. I think that the closer you are to the local level, the more you probably want, the local and state government that reflects a more homogenous community reflecting your values. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

That's why we have a federalist system. The founders contemplated explicitly this. They wanted a fairly weak centralized federal government. But state and local governments were expected to engage in a lot more of this sort of stuff. That's actually been a fairly consistent position of mine for quite a while. Again, I live in a community. I want my community to be governed by certain rules that make it easier for me to raise my child. But if you're going to acknowledge that we are a country of 330 million people,

and if you'd like that country to remain together, you're also going to have to recognize that San Francisco is not going to be governed very much like Birmingham, Alabama. And that's got to be something you're okay with, aside from certain sort of basic fundamental precepts like freedom of speech. I think one area, obviously where this comes to the fore is in the protection of the unborn, in which I think ought to be a federal issue because that is an issue of literally life and death. As far as, I think one other distinction needs to be made here.

And that is the distinction between libertarianism on a governmental level and libertarianism on a cultural level. So I've never been a cultural libertarian. I tend toward governmental libertarianism, the bigger you're talking about, the more centralized government, more federalized government you're talking about. I tend to be more libertarian because I think the federal government cramming down one set of rules, that's very unlikely to end up in a conservative direction. It seems to usually cut in the opposite direction. So for both pragmatic and ideological reasons, I think that's a problem. But when it comes to cultural libertarianism, there I'm very much against it.

So I think that most of the major institutions in our society that vitiate the problems of libertarianism are conservative institutions. I think the failures of governmental libertarianism can mainly be laid at the death of social institutions, meaning as churches decline, as people start acting in less virtuous ways, as people stop having local communities to whom they are answerable, then you do need more government compulsion at the top level. And so I'm not ready to surrender in the social sphere yet. I think what I see from some nationalist conservatives is this, okay, you're right, the social institutions have declined. They're not coming back unless we use the federal government in order to compel.

And I just don't think that that's a successful strategy. I think the rebuilding of social institutions has to be done ground up, not top down. Yeah. So do you fear what seems to be like a growing populist faction? among conservatives, especially those that maybe are economically to the left. They're still socially conservative, and they do believe in harnessing the power of the federal government to kind of do what conservatives want it to do. The view of economics of some of the nationalist populist sort of right, I think is wrongheaded, and I think that it fails to

acknowledge what markets are. So whenever I hear people talk about, you know, we don't have to organize markets in this way. The market works for us. We don't work for the market. I think that's a fundamental failure to understand what free markets are, which are an acknowledgement that you are an individual, rational human being capable of running your own affairs. Markets are an outgrowth of individual rights. Markets are not a way of in utopian fashion shaping the society that you wish to see. And so you either recognize that you have a right to property, like a fundamental right to the things that you create and right to alienate that property to sell it or to rent it, or you don't. And if you believe that the community's right to

invade your right to property is that great. I think that it has some really negative correlative effects. I think that that's true whether the right or the left runs it, frankly, I think that all of the great benefits of capitalism, which has been linked pretty generously to human rights over the past couple of centuries, all of the great benefits of capitalism, both economically speaking and in terms of human rights, go by the wayside if you fail to recognize those fundamental individual rights that undergird the free market in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. Something that you talk about in your book and the introduction actually that I thought was really interesting is you talk about ancient Israelites and how they wanted a king. They didn't want God as their king. They

wanted a judge. They wanted a warrior king to kind of go before them and help them fight their battles. And within that, the Lord said, you know, you've rejected God. You get what you want. Do you see today, and really just throughout modern history, a correlation between godlessness in a nation and the rise of authoritarianism? And if so, why do you think that is? I mean, that's certainly true in the modern era. For sure, for sure. And the reason is because human beings have a need

to feel like they are in control of the world. And if you don't feel like God is in control of the world, then it is now incumbent on you and the people around you to control the world around you. And the only way you can control people around you is by having a centralized power that can cram down some form of order on society. So that sort of God-shaped hole in the human heart

is going to be filled by something. Very often it's filled. by I need a thing with God-like powers in order to make sure that other people do what I want them to do. I don't think it's any coincidence at all that the most authoritarian regimes tend to be the most atheistic regimes. Again, if you recognize that God is in control of the universe in the end, that's more likely to lead you to also believe that human beings are made in the image of God with individual

rights. I mean, this all springs from Genesis, if you don't believe that there is something beyond you, with a different set of morals than you, by the way, that is in control of what is going, on, generally speaking, then you're more likely to want to grip things very tight and then put somebody in charge of that sort of power who agrees with you. Yeah. You dedicated this book to your kids, which I really appreciate because I think that's what you articulated just in the beginning of the book is the concern that a lot of parents have, that our kids aren't going to grow up in a free country or in a country that is as free as the one that we grew up in.

can you give us a pessimistic look of the next 20 to 25 years if the left gets its way and the right doesn't do anything about it? And then can you give us a more positive look of what the next 25 plus years could look like if things swing in the other direction? So the pessimistic view comes easily and naturally to me. So here's the pessimistic view of what things that look like over the next couple of decades. You start to see cram downs at the state level, particularly in blue states, in which CPS shows up at your door if you don't teach the proper left-wing social values.

You've already started to see this in places like Canada. You're seeing it occasionally in the United States. Your kid goes to school one day. Your kid says, I feel like a girl is a boy. The teacher doesn't tell you. The kid comes home and you say, well, you know, you're not a girl. You're a boy. And then your kid tells the teacher, the teacher sends CPS to your house and removes the child from your home.

I think that we are moving in that direction very, very quickly. And I think that within the next five to ten years, you're actually going to see that sort of stuff occurring on a fairly common level. in places like California. I think that you're going to start seeing, and you already have seen, children being indoctrinated with the idea that race is an essential characteristic and that they are guilty or victimized by pure nature of their race. They're going to be indoctrinated in the idea that America's systems are bad, and the only way to rectify America's systems is to hand enormous power over to a centralized government

to achieve what Thomas Oll called cosmic justice. So you see major centralization of power in the federal government. the only kickback from this on a national scale is going to be at the state level. And then that's when the pedal hits the metal. How hard is the federal government going to be willing to push in order to effectuate these top-down mandates in order to effectuate California policy on Florida or Texas or Tennessee? And that's when things could really come to a head. And what you're likely to see is a sort of fractious EU style of governance in which states really do resist the federal government. It doesn't come down, I think, to physical war because I don't think anybody has taste for that or should.

but it depends on what the federal government does. So that's the pessimistic version. Higher taxes, stagnant economy on the economic level because it takes a lot of money to pay for all of the sort of societal reshaping that the left seeks. Much worse race relations. The destruction of the nuclear family as we start to pretend that men can be women and women can be men and children are merely malleable widgets who get to self-identify however they want.

That is the ugly version of what society looks like in the next 20, 25 years. And the United States obviously losing its position as a global leader on the basis. of all this because no nation can do this and then survive as the global leader. The more optimistic version is that people come to their sentences and say to the woke left, enough is enough. And this really relies on sort of centrist, Democrats, moderate liberals to say, we agree with the left on a lot of fundamental kind of utopian notions, but we are not willing to sacrifice individual rights, free speech, open debate, people raising their kids.

We're not willing to sacrifice those things on the altar of utopia. And so you get a pushback. and states continue to resist, you know, the federal government's encroachment. And instead of the federal government responding by gripping tighter, people at the federal government level say, okay, well, you know what? Maybe the only way we can live as a country is to allow more devolution of authority down to the state or local level. Now, that's the more optimistic version.

I don't think that is entirely unplausible. I think that that pushback could definitely happen. But I do think that we are balanced right now on the razor's edge between one and the other. Yeah, I absolutely think that's true. And we haven't even talked about the foreign powers at play. We haven't even talked about what China wants. We haven't even talked about big tax in the major corporations and how they would ever relinquish power.

There's just a lot that goes into all of this. I know a lot of people are anxious about it. But one of the things that they can do to fight back is buy your book. So can you tell people where they can buy it and how they can support you and all that good stuff. You can head on over to dailywire.com right now. I believe we're still selling signed copies over there

or head on over to Amazon or wherever books are sold before this book is banned. Go check out the authoritarian moment available everywhere right now. Okay, last question. Cardi B has a new song out. I'm guessing that you know it, you've memorized it. I am looking forward to some kind of music video from you. Is that correct?

I actually haven't seen the new Cardi B song. Wow. Believe it or not, this is not my, I mean, despite my record as a platinum award-winning rap artist, I don't keep up on the trends with the kids too often. But I guess I will have to check it out because I have been reliably informed that Cardi B is the modern Shakespeare. and that her control of verbiage, her extensive vocabulary, her incredible rhyming and also twerking skill mandate that every rational and thinking person take a look at her work and take it very

seriously. Yes, not just a brilliant artist, but also a moral example for us all. So thank you for reminding us of that. I appreciate it. And thanks so much for taking the time to come on. Thanks, All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed that. I know that you did.

I mean, I could just listen to him talk all day. Now, you might have to put it on one half time in order to really understand what is being said. But I just always appreciate his wisdom and his insight so much. I am so continually amazed. Let me just say this on the back of that conversation. I'm amazed, disappointed by a lot of the evangelicals who during the Trump era felt that we were in an authoritarian moment and that they had to speak out that they were obligated to stand for justice and stand for truth and speak truth to power and push back against Trumpism, especially when it comes to immigration and some of the things that he said, who have literally nothing to say now, who have nothing to say about abortion policy, who have nothing to say about the mistreatment of migrants at the border and the importation of

thousands of migrants from the border into the interior of the United States, who have nothing to say about Biden policy that allows boys into girls' locker rooms who have nothing to say about massive inflation that is working as a tax on the middle class and it's further burdening people financially after we've had one of the hardest economic seasons in American history who all of a sudden just don't care about politics anymore. They don't care about speaking truth to power. They don't care about the things that are going on. They still only really care about politics insofar as they can criticize conservatives in Donald Trump. Guys, wake up.

Wake up. Know where the threat is coming from when it comes to liberty, especially religious liberty. When it comes to the people who want to attack the church, I promise you it's not coming from the right. That doesn't mean there aren't heretics on the right. That doesn't mean that there aren't dangerous and, you know, fallacious theologies on the right because there absolutely are. but the hatred and the angst and the desire for destruction of the church is coming from the left. Now, we know that Jesus promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. So I'm not worried about the actual destruction of the church.

But do I worry about the future that my kids are going to walk into where there may not be religious liberty, where there may not be the constitutional rights that have made this country so great and have taken us from a country that enslaved people to a country that now allows for equal opportunity and where people of all backgrounds have been able to thrive. Yes, I am worried about that. And you should be concerned about that too. And the fact that you aren't means that you are just an opportunistic grifter who wanted to, I don't know, go viral a few times for dunking on Trump.

This is a lot bigger than Trump. I've always said that. That's why I didn't bother quite as much with constantly, you know, arguing about Trump, not because I agreed with everything that he did and said, but because this moment that we're in is so much bigger than Donald Trump, that talking about Donald Trump at this point is really just a distraction from the overhaul of our country that is coming from the left. And so you just need to wake up.

You need to open your eyes. doesn't mean that you have to agree with the Republican Party on everything. But you need to see where the threats are coming from. I hope that this episode kind of open your eyes to at least some of those things. All right, that's all we've got time for. We will be back here soon. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Alley, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.