The Megyn Kelly Show - Ben Shapiro on DeSantis, Biden, and Our Authoritarian Moment in America | Ep. 134

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Ben Shapiro, author of "The Authoritarian Moment," co-founder of The Daily Wire, to talk about COVID mask mandates and vaccine shaming, Dr. Fauci's latest media tour, President Biden's effectiveness, Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Trump running in 2024, why our cultural moment is "authoritarian" in America in 2021, the obsession with titles, the Olympics, how best to fight the cultural battles, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, and happy Monday. Today, we've got Ben Shapiro, one of my very favorite people, and he has got a new book out called The Authoritarian Moment. Boy, oh boy, is that timely. There's so much to go over. We're going to talk about the day's headlines, including Tucker Carlson attacked, not physically, but on camera with this guy getting in his face with Tucker's daughter there, which I really want to get Ben's take on.

It's happened to Ben many times. It's so obnoxious. I'm so sick of this nonsense. But Ben's got a sort of a master plan for fighting back and sort of putting into perspective what we're seeing right now in this country. We're going to talk about COVID, the Delta variant, the new crackdowns, the new mask mandates popping up in cities from coast to coast. So much to get to. So without further ado, quick ad and then Ben. Let's get right to it because I want to start. There's so much to go over, including your book,

but let's start with COVID and Delta, Delta, where they're treating us, you know, like we're back in the middle of the Black Plague and everybody's got to go back inside. We're seeing mask mandates pop up even for the vaccinated in L.A. I think it was in St. Louis was the other place. Now we're hearing the American Academy of Pediatrics say children, anybody above the age of two has got to wear a mask when they return to school, according to this group, the Pediatrics American Academy, even if they're vaccinated. So even if you try out one of these experimental vaccines on your 12 year old and by the way, by the fall, it could be available to those as young as infants. So you go, you vaccinate your kid. Still, this group is saying they should be wearing masks. And then they turn around Ben

and say, why can't the people listen to us when we say to get vaccinated? Why? Why? Anyway, your thoughts on Delta? Yeah, no, I mean, this is madness. I mean, if you look at the statistics, the statistics we used to care about were hospitalizations and deaths. And right now in the United States, according to the latest count, our seven-day rolling average death in the United States is still under 300 deaths today. When we were back at the height of this thing back in January, we were experiencing 3,200 deaths a day, 3,300 deaths a day. And in fact, right now, in terms of number of deaths per day, COVID ranks, in terms of

causes of death in the United States, somewhere between diabetes and Alzheimer's. So this is not a disease that is killing thousands of people every single day. What's more, we're talking about a disease in which the solution is eminently available to anyone now over the age of 12. If you want to get a vaccine, you can. There are going to be people who make the risk reward calculation. They say, okay, I'm 20. If I get it, I'm probably not going to get very sick. If I get the vaccine, I don't know enough about it, or I I'm uneasy or I don't like needles. You're an individual human being. You get to make that decision.

But once I've had the vaccine, I frankly don't care whether other people around me have had a vaccine. And I think it's more respectful to them to treat them as individual agents capable of assessing risk than to suggest that I have to wear a mask to prevent them from the consequences of what I consider to be their own bad decision making. The problem here is that the Democrats and the Biden administration set up a hard binary last year. And the hard binary was zero COVID or learn to live with COVID. And the problem is that once you set up zero COVID as the goal, you're going to be doing lockdowns

and masking for the rest of time because zero COVID is not going to happen. It was never going to happen. Everybody in the medical community knew it was not going to happen. Everyone was suggesting the highest likelihood is that COVID would eventually become seasonal. It would lose some of its steam and it would be, you know, as dangerous as the flu would be. Quite transmissive, but that's about it.

The notion that we were going to get down to zero COVID or the warnings that you're now hearing, that if we allow this thing to continue to exist, that there will be future variants. Well, I don't see that you have a choice because the reality is there are 7 billion people on planet earth. This virus has hit million. It's killed 4 million people at least, right? I mean, that is not considering the wild undercount that probably occurred in India. You're probably talking upwards of five, 6 million people who've been killed by this virus. It is present in every nation on planet earth. You can either shut down all the borders and do lockdowns and masking forever and still not kill the virus, or you can do what Democrats never were willing to even engage with

back last summer and say, OK, we're going to have to learn to live with this. How do we best live with this? And because Democrats drew that hard divide between the Andrew Cuomo approach, which was lock everything down, mask forever, and the Ron DeSantis approach, which was very much like Sweden, protect the most vulnerable, shield the most vulnerable, and then let everybody else make their own decisions. Because Democrats took the wrong side of that, they cannot now allow people to go back to regular life because to do so would be to admit that the rubric they used last year was totally wrong.

Oh, that's interesting. And that is reflected in this back and forth we just caught between DeSantis, his take on the masks, and Jen Psaki, spokesperson for Biden. Take a listen. We're not doing that in Florida, OK? We need our kids to breathe. Is it really healthy for them to be muzzled and have their breathing obstructed all day long in

school? I don't think it is. And I look to think, yeah, I have a three-year-old son. You got people like Fauci saying he should be muzzled. It's totally unacceptable. Florida Governor DeSantis was talking about mask mandates for kids earlier this morning, and he said, we're not doing that in Florida. Is that putting kids in Florida at risk? Well, as a parent myself, and I know you are one, if I were a parent in Florida, that would be greatly concerning to me. We know masks are not the most comfortable thing. I will say my kids are quite adjusted to them, as I know many kids are. OK, so her kids have no problem with it, Ben. So yours shouldn't

either. Yeah, I have kids seven, five, one and a half. They're not wearing masks. So they've been forced to wear masks in school this year. And presumably, I mean, I'm fighting very hard right now to make it as much influence as I could possibly will to say that kids should not be masked. The reality is in the United States, people under the age of 18, fewer than 350 people under the age of 18 total in the United States. That's a subgroup that includes 75 million Americans. Fewer than 350 have died. In the same time period, 810, 812 kids died from pneumonia in that same period of time. Kids are not the main vectors of transmission. Kids are not getting seriously ill from this on a large scale. Okay. You always

have to, you have to always be very specific in your language so that YouTube doesn't demonetize you or take you down. If you say things like kids are not getting sick from this, which on a statistical level, kids are, when I say they're not getting sick from this, I mean, a very, very tiny, vanishingly small percentage of kids are getting seriously ill from COVID. And most of those kids have some sort of serious preexisting condition. The notion that I'm supposed to mask up my seven-year-old, the real reason they're saying this, by the way, is because they're not afraid that my seven-year-old, God forbid, is going to get sick and die from COVID.

What they're afraid of is that my seven-year-old will meet a 40-year-old and give the 40-year-old COVID. And my answer to that is the 40-year-old has every opportunity to head down to the local public. I mean, we're in we're in Florida. They have every opportunity to head down to the local public, any public in Florida and get the vaccine right now. There is no wait time. And I'm not going to mask up my seven year old because you choose to do differently. And by the way, I'm not seeing a lot of 40 year olds who are not getting vaccinated, who are insisting that my seven year old mask up. I'm seeing a lot of vaccinated 40 year olds insisting that my seven year old mask up. So this weird dichotomy between how the left treats this stuff and how the right treats this

stuff. I had a thread on Twitter this morning where I think what a lot of this is is a deeper issue. And that is the way the left and the right see empathy in politics is completely different. The right sees empathy as you're an individual human being. You're fully capable of making your own decisions. I am empathetic to that. And therefore, if you make a decision, you ought to live with that decision. We have to have neutral rules that apply to everyone, like live with the consequences of your decisions. And because you're an individual human being, I'm empathetic enough with that to say, listen, you make that decision. It's a decision I wouldn't make. You live with the consequences. We're good to go. The left's definition of empathy

was that I am supposed to respect as policy, the subjective feelings of any person. So if you are 40 and you feel and you're vaccinated and you feel at risk, I'm supposed to change all of public policy in order to in order to rectify that problem for you. Well, that's not true empathy. That is a very bizarre version of empathy. But it also allows Democrats to claim that you don't care about kids dying or adults dying if I don't want to mask up my seven year old. It's it's the we're only as strong as our weakest link policy, right? We have to find the most fearful American out there. And then everyone must behave accordingly to make that person feel a little bit better about walking around. It's like, well,

that's just not how America works. And we did our part. You know, we wore the mask. We did the national shutdown, which now, I mean, in retrospect, looks deeply problematic as a policy choice. And we refuse to learn. We're going to do it again. You know, you look at just in New York City, you've got de Blasio saying that he thinks we need employers to mandate the COVID vaccine for all of their employees. Meanwhile, he can't even do that at the city level because the unions won't agree. So he can't even manage to make it happen at the city. OK, but he wants all the employers to do that. The Biden officials are now saying that they expect vulnerable Americans to get booster shots of the covid vaccine, which is also questionable about whether they need that.

And all it's all boils down to Republicans. Why won't Republicans get the vaccines? Completely ignoring the fact that you've got black and Latino Americans who continue to lag behind whites when it comes to vaccinations. There's there's a hesitancy within the communities and we're not allowed to talk about that at all. It's all the evil Trump supporters who are ruining the recovery for everyone. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the part that drives me nuts on sort of a personal level is there were two articles last week that both had to be corrected, both of which were sort of listing the Republicans who had switched over the vaccine because there has been sort of this newfound enthusiasm for vaccination among some members of sort of the openly political right. And people were listing me in there. And I was like, well, no, I've been

recommending vaccination since literally before COVID existed. I'm very, very big on vaccination. I can back you up on that as a listener to your show. Yeah, exactly. I've been pushing vaccination since the day that this was available. I've been vaccinated. My wife has been vaccinated. My parents have been vaccinated. But the assumption from the left is that if something is bad in the country, it must be those evil people who are on the other side of the aisle. It couldn't possibly be people on my own side of the aisle. Or by the way, it couldn't be people who have serious doubts about the institutional credibility of the folks who are talking to them. It's amazing to me to see the Biden administration continue to try out Anthony Fauci,

who's been wrong six ways from Sunday, as the face of the COVID outreach plan. I mean, he has switched on every major topic in this pandemic from whether schools should be open to other masks are necessary to whether after you're vaccinated, you should have masks or not to, by the way, whether there was American funding for COVID research in Wuhan. He's switched on like all of these particular areas. And yet they're saying that if you have doubts about any of these institutional players, that that's your fault, that that's that's your problem. It seems like a power game, not like an actual attempt. This is what I'm really noticing. I'm noticing that there's an overt viciousness with the way that

people are talking about people on the right who are who are unvaccinated. That doesn't apply to people on the left. And the overt viciousness is not designed to get those people to vaccinate. It's not designed to get those people to make a different risk-reward calculation. If you want to convince somebody to actually get vaccinated, what you say is, look, here are the statistical risks to you if you're 25 years old, right?

Not particularly high. You have a shot like one in a thousand people who get it when you're 25 years old are going to die of COVID. The risks of you getting a serious side effect from the vaccine by all available data are much, much lower than the one in 1,000. So just by risk-reward, you probably should get the vaccine, right? Instead of saying that, and then saying

you're a free individual, you might regret it if you get sick and you didn't get the vaccine, but that's up to you. Instead of doing that, it's you're a bad person, you're terrible, you don't care about grandma, you don't care about... None of that is designed to actually elicit a response where people get a vaccine. That is designed to create a dichotomy between the people who are good, the elect and the people who are not good, the unelect. And I'm seeing it wherever I go. I feel like I'm vaccinated, too, and I believe in the vaccines and I hope people get them. But I don't believe in shaming the people who have chosen not to do it. And I'm getting a little uncomfortable with this this division between those who have gotten it and believe in it and

those who just feel hesitant about it as if they're bad people. I mean, especially those who have had COVID and then refused to get the vaccine. They have natural immunity. I don't know why we went from accepting that as, you know, we used to understand that if you had COVID, you didn't need a vaccine and to switching over to you still must get the vaccine. And if you don't get the vaccine, you're running around as, you know, sort of this purveyor of a deadly, deadly virus in a reckless, reckless way. It's not true. Yeah. By the way, the data tend to support the notion that natural immunity may be actually much more durable than vaccine-driven immunity. And there's some data from Israel that have supported that idea. So listen, again, I think that a few things can be true at once. One,

I think the vaccines work. I think that it is a good idea to get them, particularly if you're above the age of 21 or above the age of 18. I don't know about the data between 12 and 18. I just know that the risk of death 12 to 18 is very, very low. I also understand that individual human beings are going to make different decisions. I also understand that there was no world in which we went to zero COVID. And if you understand those three things, what you end up with is everybody's got to make a decision on their own. Thank God we have these vaccines, because the math would be different if we did not, right? If we didn't have the vaccines, then the math becomes slightly different. Because then probably what we'd be talking about is what we were talking about last summer. Do we tranche people who are less vulnerable

back into the workforce more easily? But with the vaccine available, you now have the ability to protect yourself. So why are you trying to push somebody else in ways that they are uncomfortable with or they don't want to do into getting the vaccine? Again, that is their call. It is literally their call. I'm bewildered, frankly, by people who get the vaccine, and then they're going around saying to other people, well, I'm uncomfortable being in a room with you if you're unvaccinated. The CDC itself said that if you're vaccinated and you're in a room with a person with COVID, if you are not symptomatic, you do not have to test. That's from the CDC. So I'm not sure exactly what people are.

It seems like a lot more of this is about an almost paganistic adherence to ideas like COVID is a differentiator between good and evil. And that's not what COVID is. COVID is a disease. You make rational decisions. Those decisions have consequences. If you're willing to live with those consequences, so be it. That's a free country. Yep. And on the numbers of children who have died from COVID, we're already seeing some hospitals come out and revise their numbers saying they overcounted. They counted kids who died with COVID as opposed to from COVID. And so you can probably put an asterisk on the numbers that you just hit as having a healthy amount of overstated numbers for the reasons I just 16.7 million. And that's unprecedentedly no,

no. The people in the United States are not interested in the Olympics, even though some 58 percent of them wanted the Olympics to go forward. They didn't want them to be canceled because of covid. Whereas in Japan, they wanted 70 percent of the people did not want the Olympics to go forward because they're hosting and they only have, I think, a 30 percent vaccination rate. So I I feel it. Do you feel it? I feel a general apathy when it comes to these Olympics. I don't see anybody really excited about them. And I'm wondering why. Yeah, I mean, I think there are two factors. I think one is that all live sports took a major hit during the pandemic. And one of the reasons for that is because watching people play in empty rooms

is really not pleasant. It's just it's weird and awkward because we've all been conditioned to watch people play in front of giant stadiums and people cheering them on. The excitement of a live event is just gone when you're watching people play in what looks frankly like a high school rec room with like a couple of parents in the stands. It's just, it's not exciting to watch.

The crowd is a part of the spectacle. But beyond that, again, when the US women's national soccer team lost to Sweden, I was not sad. I'll be honest with you. Frankly, they deserve it. I confess. I like the American flag. They like the American flag less than I do. If you're going to kneel for the American flag, first of all, I'm not sure why you should be wearing it. It's like saying I play for the New York Yankees, but I hate the Yankees. And I'm going to kneel every time to show how much I hate the Yankees. That's not the way any of that works. And when you see all of these members of the Olympic team who have basically been granted

the opportunity to represent their country only to go over there and crap all over the country, like, I'm not interested in watching them win. Frankly, I'm kind of interested in watching them lose. So it's, yeah, I think there are a lot of people who have said, like, if you think of great Olympic moments, all those Olympic moments are pride in America, not pride in people who are crapping all over America, right? It's a miracle on ice kind of stuff, typically speaking. There are always exceptions to that rule, right? There are sort of moments that in the moment were really controversial and later we treat them as kind of great American moments like the sprinters raising

the fist in the middle of the civil rights movement at the Olympics. But that's more of an outlier than I think more why people in real time watch the Olympics. That's exactly right. It's supposed to be a patriotic moment. It's not really because I care who's the best person at badminton. You know, it's like I want to feel good about America. And I feel like a lot of these athletes are taking away the very reason. And in many cases, the only reason we watch the Olympics, which is to feel that great sense of national pride. I don't want to tune in and see Gwen Berry win anything when it comes to the hammer throw and then turn her back on the American flag. And I bet she will do that if she wins because

it's a PR moment for her, right? She's looking to advance her own name, not to advance any good feeling about America. So I feel like Americans have gotten a hint through the NBA and all these other, and by the way, we lost, the men's basketball team lost for the first time in a long time. They've gotten a hint that these athletes over there may or may not be representing our values. Well, this is the part that's so incredible about what the United States has sort of become, is that it used to be that the marketing for the Olympics was you win, and then you get on the cover of Wheaties box, and you talk about how great America is. And now the way that you market is you win, and you talk about how crappy America is, and Nike signs you to a million-dollar contract to talk about how crappy

America is. It shows you how motivated the woke crowd is in the United States, how much market power the corporations think they have. Like if you were an Olympian and you wanted to make money after the Olympics, it used to be that you'd be pretty patriotic and just go and perform for the country. Now, if you want to make serious money after the Olympics, you can come in third. But as long as you kneel for the flag, you're going to make money. Up next, I'm going to ask Ben what he thinks of Ron DeSantis as the 2024 nominee for the Republicans. And would he be better than Trump? Don't miss that one minute away. Let's talk about President Joe Biden, who seemed pretty shaky to me on a couple of those answers

last week at that CNN town hall with Don Lemon. When Don Lemon emerges looking like the smart one, you've done something wrong. Something's gone wrong in the presentation. And he you tell me whether you thought he was coherent. Here's just one soundbite that's been making the news when he was asked by Lemon whether children under 12 are going to be able to get vaccinated. Listen, I've heard you speak about it because you're I'm not being solicitous, but you're always straight up about what you're doing. And the question is whether or not we should be in a position where you are. Why can't the experts say we know that this virus is in fact it's going going to be, or excuse me, we know why all the drugs approved are not temporarily approved, but permanently approved. That's underway too. I expect that to occur quickly. OMG. Yeah, man, that is, that is, that is not good stuff. And the good news is

that, you know, we've always suggested that, you know, America might be ethnocentric because there's so many people who want English to be the official language. The good news is that we've now had a couple of presidents and Joe Biden is the most notable who literally does not speak English. So that's that's good news. You're one and a half year old could have done better than that. Oh, clearly. I mean, clearly. Here's the thing. Joe Biden was elected on the basis of basically two promises, one of which he is sort was elected on the basis of basically two promises, one of which he is sort of keeping and the other of which he's utterly unable to keep. One is that he was not going to be Donald Trump, which by dint of the fact that he is not Donald Trump, he is fulfilling. The other was that he was going to be dead. And on the one hand,

he sort of is right. Like every time you ask him to answer a question, it's an adventure in perverse. It's sort of like watching a really bad episode of British The Office, like the awkward, cringe humor. Am I allowed to laugh at this? Like it's so awkward. But at the same time,

his agenda is not dead, right? His agenda is extremely radical. Like the promise of him not being an alive person was that he was basically just going to come in and be inanimate. And then we would all just relax for a couple of years.

We'd get back to our center and then we would start fighting with each other again, but in sort of more rational ways. Instead, he comes in. He is there to basically just be this, a non-threatening old man who can't put together sentences. But at the same time, he's pushing this unbelievably radical agenda. And so you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds, which is an inarticulate president pushing an extraordinarily radical agenda. And so you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds, which is an inarticulate president pushing an extraordinarily radical agenda. And you can see it in his approval ratings, which have dropped pretty significantly over the course of the last couple of months. The more important polling data that I've seen over the past couple of days is the massive drop in the number of Americans who are positive about the direction of the country. We went from

well into 60s, like 64% of Americans being optimistic about the state of the country and how it's going to go over the next 10 years, a couple of months ago, we're not like 36% of Americans are optimistic about the direction the country is going to go over the next 10 years. And I think that is largely attributable to the fact that we now have a senior class. And it's not just him, right? I mean, it's Pelosi, it's Schumer. I mean, we don't have anyone in control of the levers of government in this country who's under the age of 70, who are not particularly good at their jobs, presiding over a mass takeover of huge swaths of American life.

That is a disquieting phenomenon. Well, and the American people don't want it. And in the same way that they've started pushing back against the defund the police movement, which now Biden is like, what? No one's ever pushing for that. What are you talking about? I wonder whether they're going to get to the same place on critical race theory and, you know, it's related tentacles that are in our school systems, because, I mean, you saw the Biden Department of Education. They promoted a CRT book, a book called basically it was they were promoting something from the Abolitionist

Teaching Network handbook that wants to disrupt whiteness and, quote, other forms of oppression. Whiteness is a form of oppression, and that's what they want our children to be taught. And they came out and said, oh, well, that was that was a mistake. We didn't actually mean to promote that through the Department of Education. And Betsy DeVos, former education secretary, came out and said, bull, the notion that this was a mistake is an absolute falsehood. She said this is another reflection of the true nature of the Biden Department of Ed. We've seen earlier this year the grant process that they just had to reverse, trying to reward 1619 Project and Ibram X. Kendi's thoughts being taught in history classes.

And so you tell me whether you think it was a mistake for them to push books, asking teachers to disrupt whiteness, and whether there's any chance they're going to have to reverse that as they did with Defund the Police because the people are not on board. They're going to have a much more difficult time walking back from from critical race theory than they are from defund the police, because defund the police, you can at least separate off the policy from the sort of underlying critique. Right. You can still have Joe Biden out there saying, well, yeah, sure, the police are systemically racist and they're systemically terrible treatment of black Americans

by the law enforcement system. But defunding the police is not the solution. You can see him saying that the problem with CRT is because the CRT theory has now been boiled down to and sort of demystified into a basic take, which is that equity has to rule all and that we have to shape all government policy around group benefits and group detriments. Once that's been boiled down that far, I don't think that they can walk away from that.

It's much more coherent inside all of the policies. But to walk away from critical race theory does not just mean walking away from the most overtly ridiculous aspects of CRT, right? All of these sort of anti-whiteness studies nonsense things that you see in the education department or General Milley recommending Ibram X. Kendi in the Navy reading list or something, right? It's not just walking away from that stuff. In order for them to truly walk away from it, they would have to walk away from what they've declared to

be the core of their agenda, which is equity, right? Every single major member of this administration has said that the guiding principle of this administration is equity, which sounds a lot like equality, but it's completely opposed to it. Equality is the basic idea that we're supposed to treat people neutrally, right? Every individual is supposed to be equal before the law. You have the equality of rights, but equity is the suggestion that all outcomes are supposed to be equal, which is precisely the opposite of equality. So equity and equality, the same thing, by the way, that Democrats have done with the move from disinformation is the reason that Trump got elected to its misinformation is the reason that everything has gone wrong by disinformation. We mean the Russians actually promulgating false information in the election to help Donald Trump by misinformation. We mean anything we don't like. They shifted one letter in the entire meeting of the word. Same thing with equality and equity. They just took out a couple of letters and then they just

were like, well, you know, means the same thing. It doesn't mean anything remotely like it. It's a linguistic and semantic trick. So them doing that, I think they're going to have a very difficult time separating off from that, especially because there is an underlying theory of this administration and of the entire establishment left at this point. It is a theory that is a holdover from the Obama years. And that theory is that there was a demographic majority minority that was going to build into a majority with the help of college educated white liberals. And it was going to win forever. That after Barack Obama won in 2012, Democrats would never lose another election because there was this growing contingent of black and brown people accompanied

by college educated white people. And they were going to remake America in their mold. And they were never going to lose again. It was going to be the intersectional coalition along with the people who are willing to work with them along with the allies. And they were going to just run roughshod over the rest of American politics. And when that didn't work in 2016, I think a lot of people on the left lost their minds. And I think now that it seems to have worked again with Joe Biden, right, or at least they can convince themselves that it has, they cannot break that coalition. They can't go back to the well and be like, well, yeah, you know, we actually don't think

that's the governing theory here. And they're going to be surprised in 2022 when they learn once again that that theory is a bad theory, that treating Americans as members of groups as opposed to individuals is bad electoral politics and is not going to end with them in some sort of permanent position of control over the auspices of American government. I heard you say the other day on your show, you think that the Democrats are in danger of losing both houses, the House and the Senate in the midterm elections. Do you stand by that? Yes. I think that if the Republicans don't win back the House in 2022, the entire leadership team needs to go. They have every systemic advantage going into 2022, from redistricting to the fact that it's an off-year election to the fact that the Democratic

policies are not popular and that Nancy Pelosi is doing a terrible job in leadership of the House. They have a lot of factors running against them. I think that it's going to be a red wave for Republicans in 2022. And in the Senate, right now, Republicans are on the verge of winning back that New Hampshire Senate seat. If Sununu runs in New Hampshire, I think he wins that seat because I think that the polls tend to systematically underrepresent Republicans. So I think that Republicans win New Hampshire. I think Republicans win that Georgia seat that's up again. I think that depending on whether Ron Johnson runs again in Wisconsin, he seems like he's leaning toward not that. I think Wisconsin trends red again. So I think there's a very solid. I think that the one seat that looks the diciest for Republicans in the Senate is Pennsylvania with Pat Toomey retiring. But there

are several Democratic seats that are up. And I think that, listen, Republicans only need to pick up one and suddenly they're in control of the Senate again. I've got to ask you about the spending because I know it's not sexy to talk about, but I've been watching these numbers. You know, it's like one of those cartoons where the number on the cash register just keeps going and then they have dollar signs in their eyes. And it's just like this drunken spend fest in Washington. No one seems to care. I don't totally understand the deal that's being made right now by Republicans on Capitol Hill and why they're even dealing with the Biden administration on the infrastructure, quote, quote, infrastructure bill, which is one point two trillion. In addition to this,

this spending bill that the Democrats are going to push through anyway via reconciliation without Republican support, that's supposedly three point five trillion. So now you're over four and a half trillion dollars of our money that's about to be spent. Charlie Cook of National Review was just pointing out the entire budget for all 20 years of the Afghanistan war was two trillion. We spent two trillion over 20 years of war and we're about to just roll off checks for four plus trillion dollars. How is this not the headline in every major newspaper and newscast in the country, Ben? And the thing is, they're going to get it. The Republicans are going to give the $1.2 trillion to them in the, quote, infrastructure bill, and they can't stop the $3.5 trillion. And who's paying for that?

Yeah, well, numbers have no meaning anymore. I mean, this is what's progressively happened. I'm old enough to remember, because I'm not that old. I'm old enough to remember when the yearly budget in the United States was like $2 trillion, $3 trillion. And now, after Barack Obama, it was $4 trillion every single year. And now we're going to be up to like $6 trillion. It's going to be like $6, $7 trillion of spending every single year from here on out because there is no reverse ratchet. It just doesn't work that way. Once the spending ramps up, because the American people, they're of divided mind. If you

ask them, should we cut spending? They will always say yes. And then if you ask them, what would you like to cut? They never have an answer to that because that would actually involve cutting spending. And because we've been able to have our cake and eat it too, right? We've had the central bank controlling monetary policy in the United States, not only monetary, but fiscal policy in the United States largely for the last 20 years. And when the central bank takes control, they can literally make money up out of thin air. And then because the United States is comparatively the world's strongest economy, that means that we can always still sell bonds. I mean, there will never come a point in the future where we won't be able to sell bonds and be able to monetize American debt. Obviously,

we'll still be able to do that. I mean, we can always raise taxes later. There's only one problem. This stuff, as people have said before, it is the metaphor of the man who jumps from the 100th story and somebody sticks their head out at story 50 and says, how are things going? Guy says, so far, so good. This is not one of these things where we gradually screech to a halt. This is one of those things where there's just a clip and then we're over it. When it comes to fiscal and monetary policy, just like it was with the 07-08 crash, when there's a crash, there's a crash. It's not like we sort of ease into the crash. When people start around the world realizing they're not getting their money back except in inflated dollars, or when Americans start to realize that all of the debts that we've accrued are now going

to be paid for by ratcheting up taxes on the middle class, which by the way, is the only way you pay for any of this. The only way you can have a Scandinavian-style social welfare system is by taxing people at Scandinavian rates. And that means kicking in 60% tax rates at 60 grand a year. It does not mean that you're going to be able to take more of Jeff Bezos' money and pay for all of this. That's not the way any of this works. Once that starts to hit home, people are going to feel it, but it doesn't hit home until it hits home. And we have an unfortunate tendency here, which is the intelligentsia, first of all, loves spending and they love action. And you hear it from people all the time. Why can't we do more in Washington? Why can't we just get things done? I don't want things done in Washington.

The entire system of the government was set up by the founders to never get anything done in Washington. And we have completely reversed that in the United States. It's a point of great irritation to me. I was thinking the other day about even how historians, you know, kind of the traditional historians view the history of the United States and which presidents were good and which presidents were bad. And if you look at the 20th century, what you will see is that the presidents who spent the most are considered the most important, right? FDR, by far the most important. Woodrow Wilson, very important president. LBJ, super important president. Bill Clinton, not so much. Barack Obama, super important president. And then you look at the periods of American history where we had incredible growth. For

example, the entire 1920s, which was a period of unbelievable growth in the US economy, every president is derided as a do-nothing, useless president. How is it that we have a booming economy from 1920 to 1929, and all the presidents during that period are considered awful? And FDR presides over the longest depression in the history of the United States, exacerbates it by probably eight years, and he's considered probably the most powerful and most special president of the 20th century. It just it demonstrates human beings have a have a inability to understand that sometimes the thing not done is more important than the thing done. Well, by this standard, we should be seeing statues of President Trump go up any day now because he was also a big spender. But somehow, oddly, the rule doesn't apply to him, Ben. Yeah, well, again, I think that the reality is I think

that if it were not for the way that Trump wore on Twitter and the easy target that he presented that way, I think in 15 years, you actually would see some of that from the left. I think you would start seeing like, is it time for a second look? Because you're getting some of this with George W. Bush, right? Bush was a big spender, too. I mean, George W. Bush did not cut the spending. And so you started to get the well, you know, the good old days of Bush. It's like I was there for that. You guys hated him. But I think that you would get that with Trump, except that he's such a convenient target. And he says so many things that really get their goat that they're never going to allow the quote unquote rethink. Although you started to see even a little bit of that,

right? You started to see it with like, well, at least he's not Ron DeSantis. And you knew that was coming. You know, it was like, well, at least Trump was terrible, but Ron DeSantis is so much worse. It's always the same game. Well, speaking of DeSantis, your governor, what do you think the odds are he's the nominee? So there's a bit of runway between here and the election. I think that he is by far the strongest candidate in the Republican field at this point. He is excellent at handling media, which is a requirement for for people who are on the right, particularly in primaries, because the real opponent in a primary is not the other Republicans. It's the media. And DeSantis is great at handling them. The Democrats made a very large scale mistake when they chose him as their bet. Noir, because by doing that,

they elevated him to prominence. And DeSantis is a smart guy. He's a very good governor. He's very popular in the state of Florida. I think he's going to beat Nikki Freed pretty handily in the state of Florida in his reelect effort in a way like he very narrowly beat Andrew Gillum, which just shows you how close the United States came to having a meth addict with male prostitutes as the governor of a major state. It's kind of amazing. But DeSantis has been. We probably already had that. That might not have even been a first. We just we don't know. The media hasn't been as interested in the private lives of the politicians as it is now. That's quite fair. But DeSantis is a is popular with both sides of the aisle. I think he wins

going away. The biggest danger to DeSantis is that DeSantis gets so he's prominent so early. We've seen this before. We saw this actually a little bit with Scott Walker in Wisconsin, for example, that when when somebody gets prominent early, then all the guns sort of focus in on them. You start to see a little bit of nitpicking from other Republicans who would like to run for president. Things can be a little harder with DeSantis because he is pretty combative. But I think that the bigger issue, the issue that waits in the wings is President Trump, right? If Trump wants to run again, and honestly, he seems bored. And that really, like, isn't it unbelievable that this is sort of the main consideration is whether President Trump has something to do? If President Trump

were busy, then I think that he would be busy. And since he is bored, there's a lot of speculation that he wants to run again. And if there's one thing that Trump cannot handle in any way, shape, or form, it's anyone else getting a headline. And so if DeSantis starts to be spoken of as sort of like the de facto nominee, you could see Trump start to club him a little bit or beat him up a little bit. And Trump, I do not think that Trump has the capacity to build, but I do think he has the capacity to destroy. And I think you see this in virtually every race he's ever intervened in. He can't actually boost someone in a primary to victory, but he can destroy somebody in a primary,

or he can work hard to get a Republican nominee not elected, as we saw for two separate Republicans in Georgia. So if he started to, like, my worst nightmare here is that DeSantis goes into 2024 looking very strong, Trump declares, and then Trump having declared after DeSantis declares, he's like, DeSantis declares 2024 looking very strong. Trump declares. And then Trump having declared after DeSantis declares, he's like DeSantis declares, he says he's in. And at that point, Trump says, you know what? I don't want him getting all the headlines I'm in. And then he proceeds to spend the rest of the primaries ripping down DeSantis and then doing that beyond

that. Right. I never lost any primaries to Ron DeSantis. How could I lose? And then DeSantis loses because Trump's like Trump is, as always, a benefit and he is also a detriment. And when it comes to national electoral politics, I'm not sure that he is not more of a detriment than a benefit, especially would have had a very different message about Georgia. So I don't know. You'd like to think that he wouldn't do that to DeSantis, right? But he would. It's pretty clear he would. Right. So only time will tell. Yeah. I mean, I remain skeptical that President Trump sees the long game. I don't think there's a long game. Should he? Do you think he should? Like if you if you want the Republicans to win back the White House, who do you think the strongest person is? Is it Trump or is it DeSantis? Oh, it's clearly DeSantis.

I mean, if you want DeSantis, if you want somebody to win, like all of this, of course, is predicated on the notion that you believe that that Trump lost the first time. And if you think that Trump lost the first time, then you are more likely to think that he lost that he will lose going forward. If you think that it was all fraud and ballot harvesting and all these various things, then you think, okay, well, maybe he'll win this time around, or as Trump said, the third straight time. But I'm not a big believer in the theory that Trump did not lose the last election. I frankly am somewhat puzzled.

It seems like a lot of people who live in red states who seem wildly puzzled at the fact that Trump lost last time around because they're surrounded by people who voted for Trump. I get it. But I lived in L.A. And let me just tell you, the hatred for Trump is so unbelievably strong that no one voted for Joe Biden. Joe Biden was literally not an alive person during that last election cycle. And all he had to be was a not alive person that was driven entirely by by Trump. And Trump is amazing at getting out the boat on both sides of the aisle. Yeah, that's exactly right. And DeSantis is less polarizing. I mean, they'll try to make him into a Trump. DeSantis, again, he has pretty wide bipartisan support in Florida. Democrats here,

a lot of them think that he has done a pretty incredible job in Florida. He does not make many of the sort of boo-boos that Trump makes. I mean, let's just put it in pure electoral terms. Ron DeSantis does not alienate suburban women in the same way that Trump does. Period. End of story. DeSantis, like a lot of suburban soccer moms, love Ron DeSantis in Florida because he's making sure their schools are open. We've got people who are coming from all over the country to Florida to make sure their kids can go to school. DeSantis is not threatening in nearly the same way. And so that is, and he's got the same combativeness. So if you like the combativeness of Trump, but you also want somebody who has the capacity to not alienate huge swaths of people,

like just on a pure polling level, put aside personal love or hatred. Trump is a weaker candidate than Ron DeSantis is nationally. Yeah, he's not he's not a tweeter, too. He's not going to be out there, you know, he's disciplined. He has a message discipline. Ron DeSantis has messages. I mean, like, again, I'm a I'm a believer and a wisher that if Twitter did not exist, I think Trump would still be president. Like it was Trump's lack of message discipline that really doomed his presidency. And it drove me insane. Right. As somebody who loved many of the things that Donald Trump was doing as president of the United States. I think it's I think that it was it was in many ways a betrayal of his own legacy and of his own agenda to not be more message disciplined. Yeah. And obviously it all came to a head with with what happened leading up to January 6th and his you know, he just couldn't let it go and the cracking and the stuff about Mike Pence and all that stuff, which did help her his legacy. I mean, that was not helpful to him personally, nor to the Republican Party, nor to Georgia. And on and on it goes with the Democrats obsession with this commission and so on. Up next, Ben talks about his book. And in particular, we're going to get into his chapter

on how the left has managed to silence a majority and how that majority can speak up. That's one minute away. But first, I want to bring you a segment we have here in the MK program called Real Talk, where we talk about really whatever we want. It's really unlike, I mean, it's just exactly like the rest of the show, frankly. This is what I've been dying to bring to you. So this summer, I decided that I was going to go all out for two important and special events happening in my family. My mom turned 80 on July 11th, Linda, and Doug's mom turned 85 just this past week. And so those are big birthdays. We love our moms. Neither one of us has our dads in the picture anymore. They both passed.

And I just really wanted to celebrate these milestone birthdays. And so we're down at the beach for the summer, as you know, down in New Jersey. We have a cute little backyard here, unlike our New York City apartment, right, which has nothing. And so kind of decided to go all out. And we put lanterns up hanging over the pool. I have white lights on the backyard. And I have to tell you, it was totally magical. Almost all of my family came in for the first time in years. My mom, my brother, my sister,

and I were together. And we just, we never are. My brother moved to Atlanta 20 plus years ago. And it's just tough. Both know, both of his boys came up to, which is just great. My sister was there. My mom came and my mom was beside herself. She loves being the bell of the ball. She just loves attention. I don't know where I get it. And we decided to do a 1940s themed costume party because she was born in 1941. So everybody had to wear 1940s type stuff. We went into the 50s a little too, because it's hard to find that many costumes from the 1940s. I was in sort of one of these old classic dresses with a wig that had the pin curls on the top. I think they're called, I don't know, barrel curls right at the top. My mom was in sort of a 1950s dress. My sister wore the outfit from beauty school drop out

from Greece. You remember that my brother was in an old time. I get looked like a Yankees uniform, although it said be on it. And I was like, is that Bronx Bombers? Is that Boston plus Yankees? Isn't that a sin? I don't know. Anywho, everyone looked amazing. And I have to tell you, we had, we put up all these Casablanca posters and, um, framed little pictures of what was happening in 1941. You know, those old things like how much a loaf of bread costs and what the number one movie was, all that stuff. It was just so festive. And my mom was so happy. We hired a little 1940s swing band, um, just a few guys. It wasn't a huge thing, but they added so much to it. They were wonderful. And we danced the night away and it wasn't huge. You know, we didn't have that many

people as my immediate family. And, you know, as I said, some of the kids and a couple of our neighbors, I have to tell you, I don't know how we could have done anything better. Just being together, having music, having a couple of drinks. They made it, the bartender made a drink called the Linda Rita, which my mom loved. Another one called the 1941. And I will never forget that night as long as I live and neither will my mom. So just getting together with family, right? It's like, we always talk about how do you deal with the haters? How do you deal with your detractors, whatever it is. And we've talked about how the things that matter in life are within 20 feet of you, you know, maybe a hundred feet of you and meaning the people it's,

it's your family, it's your friends, it's the people who you choose to spend this life with. And I felt that acutely that night. And, and then again, with Doug's mom, we decided to add again, because the costumes were so fun to the production by adding costumes. And so for her, we did a Victorian tea, which was something I had done with my girlfriends years costumes. And so for her, we did a Victorian tea, which is something I had done with my girlfriends years ago. And we decided to do it again with, you know, the little cucumber sandwiches and little cakes. And we all dressed up as sort of turn of the century, Victorian, Victorian era, 1900 era. The women had the corsets and the dresses and those big pillows on the top of your bottom

to make you look like Kim Kardashian in the back. She was ahead of her time or they were ahead of theirs. And the guys all had like the suits with the with the vests and velvet suits and the big top hats looked amazing, looked amazing. We had a little string trio play so look you could recreate this in your own life the reason i'm telling you about it is because i think dressing up and doing a theme really adds something to a party but it's about just being with friends and family and the joy that you feel and seeing people look different and i don't know the formality of it i just think took it next level um so just remember that and involve your kids in it too. Cause if you get them get going on things like this early, then they remember the importance of

family get togethers, celebrating the big moments, reminding yourself of who and what matters in your life and who and what does not. Right. Uh, and here's the capper to the whole thing. My mom, who you may or may not know from my NBC show, because she came on occasionally, everybody loved her. She's just hysterical. My mother is just a piece of work. She texts me after it's all done. I'll read you the text. Not to be a maudlin, but if I were to bite the dust this week, she writes, I would be on the light path to anywhere meeting dad to tell him how great our kids are and how wonderful I was as a mother. True to form, Linda's got a great perspective on life, on herself. Her sense of humor is what's gotten her through a lot of challenges over her 80 years.

And frankly, it's gotten me through too. She's passed that along. And I don't know. I've just been dying to share it with you guys. And maybe we'll put this out as a video clip. And I'll throw in some pictures. So you guys can see some of the evidence for yourselves. If you want that go to youtube.com forward slash Megan Kelly. All right, now back to Ben in one sec. All right, I want to get to your book, because I'm genuinely interested in this. This is not like, oh, let's promote Ben's book. I actually want to talk about this because it's an important one. I can't believe it's your 12th. It's crazy because you actually did start writing them when you were,

I think, still in your teens. But so you're on book number 12. And as usual, you timed it perfectly. It's called The Authoritarian Moment. And chapter one is how to silence a majority, which is what's happening right now. I mean, the left, it may be it may boggle, you know, certain certain policies and so on. And it may not be doing a great job when it comes to defunding the police and all that. But they know how to shame people out of speaking their genuinely held beliefs. And you're seeing so many millions of Americans hold their tongue right now. And you talk about how the first step is win the emotional argument. The second step is renormalize the institutions. And the third step is locking all the doors. I don't know, what does that mean? Because you hear renormalize the institutions, it gives people hope. What does

that mean? So what are they doing? How have they done it? So winning the emotional argument is basically a three-step process. The first is that you use people's sense of civility against them. You see this a lot with sort of traditional conservatives or people on the left said a while ago, you know, if you just wouldn't speak about these particular issues in this particular way, like that would just be more civil. It'd be nicer. We could have nice conversations and people on the right went, oh, okay, that's kind of fair. Okay. I mean, I guess I'll be civil, you know, niceness, like being nice was taken by conservatives to mean, I guess I shouldn't talk about the things that I want to talk about. And the left was happy to take that and consolidate that. That moved immediately into silence is required, right? Which just speech is violence,

right? When I was speaking at Berkeley, for example, people were literally outside chanting speech is violence. So if you speak, you're committing an act of violence against me. You have attacked my identity and therefore you need to shut up. And a lot of conservatives, and by the way, people in the middle kind of went along with that too. It's like, okay, well, I don't want to offend my speech. I see why you could take it that way. So I guess I just, I guess I'll shut up. And now that has morphed into silences violence, which is you have to mirror exactly what we are saying, or you are part of the problem, right? You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem. And so you need to be anti-racist today. And that

means mirroring every word that I say to you and repeating it in Maoist mantra-like fashion. You see this in the intelligentsia. You see it on college campuses. You see it in the media all the time. Okay, so winning the emotional argument is not about per se actually convincing people that you're right.

It's about convincing people that the penalties for being wrong are really, really high. Okay, that is tied into the renormalization of the institutions. So the way that you renormalize an institution, let's say that you have an institution of 100 people and there are only 20 of you that actually believe in a particular thing.

You have to be very loud and very aggressive. And so the way that this works, Nicholas Nassim Taleb has talked about this with regard to, for example, he uses the example of a small family. You got a family of four and the daughter decides one day that she's a vegan. And so she comes home from school. She says, I'm a vegan. I don't want to eat meat anymore.

Mom now has a choice for dinner. She can make two meals, one meat for everybody else and one for vegan daughter. Or she can say, you know what? For tonight, we're all eating vegan. We're all going to eat vegan right now because I'm just, I don't have enough time. I'm not making two meals. I'm making one meal. Let's all eat vegan for Jessica. Fine. Now you have the family go to a block party. It's like three other families. And the family says, listen, we've been keeping vegan for our daughter. You don't have to make vegan just for, you don't have to keep vegan for the rest of you, but if we're going to come, we need vegan food. And so the person who's now in charge of the block party has the exact same sort of decision to make. What do I do? Do I make two separate meals or do I make

one meal for everyone? Right? Because that one meal for everyone can eat the vegan. They may not enjoy it as much, but everybody can eat the vegan. Okay. So this sort of thing happens inside institutions with very small groups of people who are intransigent and loud and radical saying that they will not sit down and they will not shut up. And they are the captain now, right? They are in control. And a bunch of people who are sort of in the middle going, well, you know, is it really worth the hassle? Is it really worth the hassle? And usually it starts with something pretty small. It'll start with something like, well, shouldn't we have some diversity training? I mean, diversity is like fine. I mean, isn't diversity good? Are you anti-diversity? And everybody in the middle goes, well, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not anti-diversity. I guess I'll go along with that. And then it turns into, well,

you have to hire based on racial quotas. You have to hire based on diversity. And you say, well, I really don't want to be considered racist. I mean, these people here, they're saying I'm a racist if I don't do this. And it seems easier to kind of go along. It doesn't threaten my job per se, but, you know, shouldn't we fix problems in American society? And you can see how step by step you end up renormalizing the entire institution to the point where the heads of the institution are so afraid of this core of staff that they will do anything they say. You see this at the New York Times where the radicals rule the roost. You see this at the New York Times where the radicals rule the roost.

You see this at companies. I mean, for example, there's a company called Coinbase out of Silicon Valley, right? They're a trading platform for cryptocurrency. Yeah, and the head of the corporation said, we're just not going to talk politics at work. They said, we don't want to alienate anybody. We don't want anybody fighting at work.

So there's no politics on the internal Slack team, on the Slack thread. Like 20% of the company got up and walked out and they got up and they were like, well, I guess we're, I guess we're leaving now. It was like 60 employees said we're leaving now because even taking a neutral position is considered to be antipathetic to the people who are the loudest and the, and the most vocal. What this means is that if you're in the middle and you just want to avoid conflict, which most, most people are conflict avoidance, if you want to avoid conflict, you just go along with the most radical and the loudest people. Okay. And then once you've done that, once you've renormalized the institution, and once you've made clear to the leaders of the institution,

that the easiest thing to do is to give in to that aggressive base and ignore everybody else because everybody else is just too weak to do anything about it. Once that's been made clear, then you lock all the doors. Then you say, well, we can't hire anybody who comes in here and doesn't agree with our corporate principles. We can't have anybody teaching at this university who doesn't agree with the baseline diversity notions that we've been pushing.

And this has happened in institution after institution. I mean, the main theme of authoritarian moment is that every major institution in American life has now been taken over by the left or by people who are at least not unsympathetic to the left and are willing to allow the left control over key elements of the institutions. This is why it's been so bewildering to me. Like I watched after January 6th as all the talk about authoritarianism for the last five years has been about Trump. And then after January

6th, they really ratcheted into high gear. They all have the talk of a coup and an insurrection. Two things can be true as always at once. The people who decided to invade the Capitol buildings are idiots, droogs, criminals should go to jail. Also, the notion that we were on the verge of democracy being overthrown is insane. And if you're going to suggest that the great authoritarian threat to the United States is people in buffalo horns wandering the halls of Congress versus every major institution in American society now weaponized against individual ability to participate in society itself. I don't know what you're talking about.

And particularly when that's being taken, that mantle is now being taken up by Democrats to the level of government where they're openly talking about subverting constitutional rights, if in if in sort of end around ways like pressure on social media, for example. Yeah, I mean, well, even just look at Ibram X. Kendi, who wants to create this constitutional amendment that would create a department of racism that's going to spy on what everybody says and chastise anybody who has even just a racist thought. You're just not allowed to be an independent thinker. And you know that the left characterizes everything is racist. I mean, everything. And so you'd be you'd be on quicksand all day, every day. Um, but to your first point

about what you were talking about, um, you know, sort of silencing thought and then, and then making you speak up with their words. I'm thinking of Paul Rossi, the math teacher, um, at this New York private school downtown, uh, who came out and spoke about what he was seeing in his classrooms. And he talked about how the white students would sit there as they were being shamed just for the color of their skin. And they would just be quiet. You know, I'm sure they didn't agree, but they just would be quiet. And the teachers would say to them, we really need to hear from you. We need to hear from you. It wasn't enough that they just kept their mouth shut because they knew what they would get. They had to at least fake sign on to the divisive

messaging there. And that's so alienating and so deeply wrong. And the power is the point. And you mentioned before how the lines shift and it's always moving. And this is exactly right. There is this whole thing that's happened in the discourse in which everything that we say and how we say it is treated as a membership card to the elect. I think this is what so much of college education has become if you're not in the STEM fields, right? If you're in the STEM fields, you're actually learning something. But if like right now, look on Twitter, you can tell right away somebody's political affiliation by whether they put their pronouns in their title, right? You can tell right away.

Now, is that designed to actually make a serious political point? Of course not. That's designed to suggest, I am a member of the right thinking elite who have sympathy for an unfortunate group of people and you are not. Now, did we really need to know that this person who is very obviously a female thinks of themselves

as a female? When we're talking about people who identify as members of other genders, we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percentage. But now everybody in society is expected to use the virtue signaling terms in order to signify solidarity, and not just solidarity with folks who consider themselves transgender, but solidarity with the broader leftist rubric. And so there's so much of that in American society. You speak the lingo. I talk about this in the book. You're taught in college how to speak the lingo.

If you talked the way that people talk in college classrooms, like on Main Street, of most places in the middle of the country, no one would know what in the hell you are talking about. Because these sentences do not make sense in English. They will tell you that American society is cis normative and you'll be like, I don't know what, what are you talking about right now? They'll say American society is patriarchal and heteronormative and cis normative. And that true transphobia is if you will not date a member of the opposite gender who is only identified as a member of the opposite

gender subjectively, but is biologically a member of the opposite gender subjectively, but is biologically a member of your same sex. Okay. Does any of that make sense? Did what I, like that makes perfect sense in the leftist lexicon, because again, it is not even about the political endpoint. It's about the changing of the rules. It's why you can see like literally the rules will change on a moment's notice and people will then be so socially ostracized based on it. It's madness. It's crazy. I mean, perfect example. Amy Coney Barrett says in Congress, right, she's talking to Maisie Hirono and she's talking about sexual orientation or sexual preference. She's the term sexual preference, right? And Maisie Hirono says the term sexual preference is offensive. Now, the term sexual

preference has been used by every major publication in the United States. It itself is a euphemism that's been used over time, generally to refer to somebody's sexual orientation, what kind of sexual partner they prefer. Okay. Sexual preference is now determined by Mazie Hirono to be discriminatory because it suggests that it's voluntary. That preference is voluntary. So it's discriminatory. Within a day, dictionary.com adds a note at the end of the term sexual preference to suggest that it is found offensive by some. So you watch the language change in real time. And then she like berates Amy Coney Barrett about it.

This kind of stuff happens all the time. The lingo changes and stuff that was not offensive five seconds ago, because it is literally not offensive, is now found to be highly offensive. The purpose is not to make American society better. The purpose is that you must follow your rulers. And if your rulers shift the line, you must follow the line. The arbitrariness of it is the point. People on the right are constantly looking at like, what's the unifying principle here? There's so many self-contradictory notions in so much of left-wing ideology, particularly around identity issues. Race is both a social construct, but it's also essential to who

you are. I mean, these are both premises that are held by the left. The notion is that gender is both entirely a social construct, but also completely non-malleable, but also disconnected completely from sex, right? These are all self-contradictory, but it is the self-contradictory notion of them that is the point, because it's not about whether what they're saying is true or false in any sort of logical, coherent sense. The point is, if you don't mirror what they are saying, then you are not one of the elect. You are bad and you ought to be socially ostracized. Yes. Oh, my gosh. This is like you're preaching my language.

And speaking of the elect, I know I heard you say the other day, this is why the Dr. Jill Biden thing became a thing. Right. She's telegraphing with her Dr. Jill Biden that she's a member of the elect, that the University of Delaware, no offense, but it's not like Harvard where you went, that her doctorate from there is somehow meaningful, gets her into the club of the elite slash elect. As John McWhorter says, he likes that term, the elect too. Yeah. I mean, titles are all that matter. So what colleges have basically become for people, again, I accept people who are in STEM fields because they actually learn actual content. Like my wife went to the same college that I did. She was what we call a South campus major in math and science. So she learned things. I was a North

campus major. So I learned a bunch of useless nonsense in poli sci and the English department. And the, and what you typically are there for in college, if you're not there to become, you know, an actual professional in one of these fields, you're what you are actually there for is the credentialing. And part of the credentialing process is learning the language. This actually is a very serious problem that the left refuses. The solution to the left, by the way, for the serious problem of credentialing, which actually has some pretty significant downstream economic effects, like the fact that there are a bunch of positions you really shouldn't need a college degree for, and now you need a college degree for. To manage a CVS, you should not require a

college degree. You shouldn't. But now, because everybody has a college degree, it's required. So a bunch of people who don't have college degrees are sort of forced out of the workforce. Like this has significant downstream effects. The left, instead of saying, on behalf of blue collar people everywhere, you don't need a college degree

to do these jobs right here. Instead, the left says, ah, no, no, no. The solution is everyone should have a college degree. Everyone should go to college. Everybody should have the title. And they should also learn the lingo. And they should all be part of the elect, right? This is the whole goal.

Whereas the real solution to this would be probably apprenticeship programs and fewer people going to college because let's face it, how many people do you know from college who actually use their college degree for the chosen profession that they are in? The answer is probably not all that high.

I can't remember a damn thing I learned in college. I remember what I learned in law school. Everything before that is just a blur. Thanks for staying with us. is probably not all that high. I can't remember a damn thing I learned in college. I remember what I learned in law school. Right, exactly. Everything before that is just a blur. Thanks for staying with us this far. The end of the episode and who's coming up on our next show is right after this quick break.

When I read you, you wrote as follows. Every offense to particularly, quote, vulnerable groups, meaning groups defined as vulnerable by the left in a kaleidoscopically changing hierarchy of victimhood represents the possibility of profound offense. Those who engage in such offense must be silenced. And I've seen them. I mean, they've, they've done that to you. They've done that to

me. And I was actually thinking about the whole Naomi Osaka thing through this lens, because, you know what, so what happens? She came out. She said she didn't want to do the press conferences because she found the press annoying. They kept asking the same questions over and over. And she didn't want to do it because they got in her head and made her think that she was not good on clay when she knew she was. And the sister backed that up and said, she's not depressed. It's about keeping negative people out of her head. And then the tennis world rained down on her. All the athletes came out and said, too bad. You don't get special treatment. What do you think you are? We all have to go out there and do it. The press is the

people's representatives. All four of the Grand Slam tournaments came out and said, we're all going to fine you if that's how you feel. Too bad. You don't get it. And so it's not pleasant for everybody. But they'd suck it up and do as part of the job. Then she stumbled on it's mental. It's true mental health. I actually when I said mental health, I met my social anxiety, severe social anxiety when I speak to the media. Now, I didn't believe it at the time. It was clearly a fallback position, right? Because she'd gotten hammered for her on, you know, on the record statements initially. And then she came out on the cover of Vogue and on the cover of Sports Illustrated and on the cover of Time Magazine and her Netflix documentary that she orchestrated about herself

and her Barbie and blah, blah, blah, blah. So Clay Travis tweets out something to the effect of, oh, you know, since she said she's too introverted to deal with the media, this is the number of magazine covers she's done. And I tweet out saying, oh, don't forget these two. The shit storm that rained down, right? I don't care. It's fine. I'm happy to be opposed to these lunatics who are coming after me. However, I think it says something about society, right? So what, why? Why? Because I tweeted that out. And then Naomi responded and said, oh, I shot those magazine covers before, which by the way, isn't true.

She shot the Time Magazine one very recently. It was post Roland Garros because it was, she's on the cover of July. Time is more timely. They went on the attack, right? You, because you, why? Because you are not allowed as a white woman who worked at Fox News for 14 years to quote attack, right?

I'm a member of the media. I comment on the news. She's a public figure. She's the number one female paid athlete in the world. I'm allowed to comment on her. She put herself in the media. She wants us to talk about her. She just doesn't want to say negative things about her. Well, too bad. That's not how it works about a young mixed race, clearly liberal. She's wearing the Black Lives Matter masks all last summer. Woman who uses the term mental health. And I just think it's so damaging because I have my own microphone. I have my own platform, Ben, like you. I can say what I want. Thank God. And I did. And I will continue to. And I don't give a shit what they say about me. But think of all the people who don't have what

you and I have, who also would like to say, I don't believe her or something lesser. Take a smaller thing, you know, in their own life involving somebody who's got all of the sort of liberal pieties around them. They can't for the reasons you write in this book. Yeah, I mean, this is you saw the same thing happen with Meghan Markle, right? After Meghan Markle did this very self sort of self bearing, it was all self-focused. This obsessed interview with with Oprah, right? To avoid publicity, of course, because that's how you avoid publicity. And a lot of people said, yeah, I don't really believe a lot of these stories.

I don't think some of these things are true. I don't see substantiation for this. And it was like, how dare you attack Meghan Markle? Our class of victims in America has grown pretty large and pretty expansive when it includes people like Meghan Markle, an actual honest to God princess. And as far as Naomi Osaka and all that, listen, when people speak out about mental, like actual mental illness, I have tremendous sympathy for that. I have mental illness runs in my family. I have people I'm very close to who suffer from, from severe anxiety disorders.

I get it. I do. But I, knowing people with severe anxiety disorders, I don't think it's a terrible question to ask whether a person who's appearing on the cover of massive national magazines and doing tremendous documentaries for Netflix and all this, whether if I don't want to do a specific set of interviews with this specific set of people, that really counts as social anxiety disorder writ large. I mean, that seems at the very best like, you know, something that we should be allowed to ask questions about. She is, in fact, a celebrity. And then but it's really not even that it's the tie from that to, it has to be because she's black and female. It has to be because she's mixed race and female. That's why you did this, right? That movie. No, people were calling me a racist and a misogynist. I'm like, what are you talking about? You're so infantilizing. Screw you for trying to make everything. Like my message to women is you're strong. You can handle this. Like

her lady parts have nothing to do with any of this, right? Like she is strong. She is a 23 year old superhero on the tennis court. So let's treat her accordingly to pretend that she can't take criticism or we know the after that Meghan Markle thing that Oprah can't take any critical feedback on how she could have done better is absurd and so diminishing. That's what's racist. That's what's misogynist, treating women or black women like these delicate little flowers who we can never criticize because they'll just crumble and be gone. I mean, I listen, people have agency. And one of the goals of the left is to treat people as though they do not have agency so that they can either use them as sort of stand in

victims and then claim you are the victimizer or so they can control them or both. And that's a really, really bad thing. It's bad for the discourse. It makes things worse. And it provides an easy out for people who just don't want to answer tough questions. And frankly, that's no good. It's hard to think of like if Tom Brady did that, right? If Tom Brady came out and said, listen, I'm not doing interviews anymore. I've been doing interviews for 20 years. I'm not doing interviews anymore. People would say like, what now? Why? And he said, listen, I've been suffering with social anxiety disorder for 20 years. And only now I'm coming out.

And I'm saying people would be like, well, I mean, and then what? He's a white man, right? So apparently that would be OK. But but it's like the sort of as you say, the sort of Mott and Bailey arguments where it goes from you attacks, you question something that somebody says based on the available evidence, which seems to be pretty good that this person is not somebody who shines, who shuns the spotlight. And then it moves to, oh, you must truly be attacking her identity is pretty amazing. And the transformation from action to identity, which is really, I think the hallmark of what we're

talking about in general here, which is that you can't criticize anybody's specific activity or what they do in their life because it's an aspect of their identity. Once you do that, all political discourses, in fact, all discourse period is over because of everything you do is just your identity and no one's allowed to speak up about that. What exactly are we going to talk about? My laugh is something more like she is a child. You're a 50 year old woman attacking a child. I'm like a child. What? And by the way, it didn't seem to give the media any pause when they tried to ruin the life of Nick Sandman, right? Did they care that he was a child?

Well, I mean, according to the left, everybody on the left, everybody on the left is a child up until they declare them not a child, right? Hunter Biden is 51 years old and he's still a child, right? Hunter Biden is like 14 years older than I am. And Hunter is still a poor child, a wayward child who's wandering around snorting Parmesan cheese off the carpet. He's a child. Don't criticize him. He's a child. Oh, hey, but now he's selling his art and we're not supposed to believe that anybody's paying $75,000 a picture of Hunter Biden's art just to have access to Joe Biden. That's all on the up

and up, according to Jen Psaki. Don't worry, they got it covered. So here's my question for you, because I know I've heard you say I know Andrew Breitbart was your mentor, that politics is downstream of culture. And that's why it's important to fight the culture battles. And of course, you get shamed out of that, too. If you focus on any of the cultural stuff that the left is doing, and they're like, you're obsessed, you're obsessed with culture, you're obsessed, like Republicans bounce. So the point is, you we have to fight. I mean, I'm not a Republican, I'm an independent, but I'm I'm way in on this cultural war, because I have kids, and I care, I'm not a Republican. I'm an independent. But I'm way in on this cultural war because I have kids and I care about my country and I see what they're doing.

So how do you fight, Ben? I mean, I saw you get brutally attacked by NPR. I want to get to the Tucker thing because Tucker just got Tucker Carlson got attacked in Montana, not physically, but the guy did lay hands on him to try to publicly humiliate him. I would play the tape for you, but it's hard to hear it even when you're watching it. But the guy gets in his face in a Montana bait shop and says, like, I think you're disgusting. You're the most despicable man ever. And Tucker's with his daughter. The guy goes, I don't care. I don't care. How how do you fight NPR? How do I fight

these lunatics who think, you know, everything I say is is racist or sexist if it's about a woman who happens to be of color? How does Tucker fight back against the bait guy when he's so outspoken about his opinions? And how does Joe Schmo fight back against every single institution being controlled by these leftists who don't want you to speak your true opinion? So I think that the answer for people who are in the public eye like you or me or Tucker is and Tucker and you do a great job of this. You just laugh at them, frankly, because it is silly and you make yourself uncancellable, right? You make You give yourself a platform where people can find you and the left can't really cancel you. And that really is a solution for a lot of us who are in the public eye, right?

And NPR can criticize me as much as they want. We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of subscribers at Daily Wire, and they can yell at me as much as they want, but they really can't do all that much other than try and presumably get some of my employees canned by cutting down our traffic from Facebook, which is ugly enough. And we can fight back in the public eye that way, but that's literally our job, right? We get paid to do that. For people, I'm really worried about the guy who just is working a low-level position at a corporation. And now the mandate goes out that we are all going to have a day of reflection on our whiteness at work, right?

Or I'm worried about the kid who's in school who has to deal with a teacher who has declared that the United States is systemically racist and we're going to do an entire curriculum about the 1619 Project in order to demonstrate this. The answer there is to take a page from the book of the left, which is in the US,

conservatives do not think institutionally, we think individually, and that is great in terms of politics and it is terrible in terms of actually winning because one of the things that we actually have to do is organize. So one of the things I point out is, for example, Donald McNeil, who was the science writer over at the New York Times, he said on some sort of children's trip to Peru, he was like a bunch of high school students,

he said the N-word in explaining when you're not allowed to use the N-word. And the New York Times had like 150 members of the News Guild who wrote a letter and said, this is really bad and he should be fired. And they ended up firing him. It was ridiculous. There are 1,400 members of the News Guild. What would have happened if 400 members of the News Guild had gotten a hold of that letter and said, you know what? No, we're going to write a letter to the heads of the New York Times saying you're not allowed

to fire him because this is absurd and ridiculous. The answer is there has to, the people who are in the middle are going to have to make a choice. Do they wish to be renormalized along with the left? Or do they wish to go back to status quo ante, which was people get to basically talk or not talk at all in the workplace, but at least we get to either express our opinions or there'll be no opinions in the workplace. And those are the two normal standards, not the left gets to say what it wants and everybody else has to shut up. That takes organization. That means finding

all the people who are like-minded or friendly to your position and getting them to actively take collective action, right? to say to the boss, listen, there are 150 of us and we don't like the training that you're proposing. And so we're just not going to do it. And you can fire all of us or you can fire none of us. It's going to take that sort of concerted action because the only other alternative, frankly,

is to build alternatives, right, in every business. And that's the alternative that I don't prefer. I mean, listen, I'll make a lot of money off of it. Really. If there's going to be like a right wing razor company, then I'm happy to found it. And I'm happy to take everybody's money to do that. But I'd prefer that you just be able to buy whatever razor you want without having to think about whether the razor company scorns you for believing that boys are boys and girls are girls. So I think that we can renormalize the institutions. But what it does require is for us to be just as hard and intransigent and aggressive on the right as they are on the radical left and

recognize that those people in the middle are much more likely to agree with the position of neutrality or mild conservatism than to the radical leftist schtick that's now being pushed inside corporations. And don't believe what you read on social media anyway. Again, back to the, you know, listen to the 20 people who are right around you, the people who are within 20 feet of you, because that's what's real. And if you happen to live in a very, very blue state, don't even listen to those people. Get on the phone and call your relatives who are in blue states and more, more reasonable places in red states and more reasonable places. Because I'll tell you, even when I take, take in the fire, I love talking to people who are outside of media or outside of social media because they'll remind me like we're with you.

We're with you. This is nonsense. And it's important to feel supported even though people aren't doing it online. Megan, my favorite thing is honestly, like I took Twitter off my phone two years ago. So I have Twitter on my computer. And when I want to tweet something, I literally have to. I like force myself. I have barriers now.

I have to take out my computer. I have to fire it up. And then I tweet something and then I turn it off because Twitter is just an ego machine. Uh, and not being on Twitter is like the greatest godsend. Not being checking my foot, not checking my, my notifications every five seconds is really, really nice. Like very often I don't find out what I trend usually about every three weeks. I've found the algorithm trends me every three weeks or so. Uh, and, um, and very often now I don't even find out that I am trending or was trending until after the thing was over.

But one of the things that I love most is you'll walk around and you'll just talk to people and they'll say, what's going on in your life? And you'll mention that you're trending. They're like, what? Like they literally have no idea what you're talking about. Like things that are consuming your life and that you're obsessed with and you think everybody is thinking about, no one is thinking about. First key rule of life is that very few people think or care about you.

And that's actually quite liberating. Yeah, it's wonderful. And by the way, you can go into your apps and you can limit the time that you can spend on any of these social media apps. You can say, I'm only spending 20 minutes a day on Facebook or 15 minutes a day on Twitter, whatever. So if you can't trust yourself to govern that, you trust your handy iPhone, which is monitoring everything you do anyway. Ben Shapiro, I love it. The authoritarian moment. It's well-timed as always. Love talking to you. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Megan. Don't forget to join us tomorrow because we've got the news coverage for you, including an update on all this COVID Delta madness. We got Dr. Joel Zinberg, who has written a piece recently about

just stop the madness. Just stop it over the Delta variant. I meaninberg, who has written a piece recently about just stop the madness. Just stop it over the Delta variant. I mean, honestly, you would think that the bubonic plague has returned to America the way people are talking about this. And so we're going to have some facts for you, some hardcore facts to arm you before you go back to these schools, which are, you know, engaging in madness as we speak and beyond. So we're going to arm you with information tomorrow. Don't miss it. Go ahead and subscribe to the show now so you don't. Download. Give us a five-star review and we'd love to hear your thoughts. So if you go on there and just fill out the review, the comment section,

I read them all. Yes, I have. We're inching toward 20,000. I've read every single one. So we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures. Thank you.