TRIGGERnometry - Ben Shapiro: “Israel’s War is a Just War”

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Ben Shapiro is an American political commentator, columnist, author, attorney and businessman. He is editor emeritus for The Daily Wire, a media company he co-founded, and the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show. He is the author of 16 books. Find Ben on X: https://x.com/benshapiro Find Ben on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BenShapiro  Check out the Daily Wire: https://dailywire.com/ Buy gold and earn interest on it! https://monetary-metals.com/triggernometry/ Watch the Munk Debate: Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism? Live June 17th. Join today to live stream: https://bit.ly/munk_debate. Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What was the failure of October 7th was a security failure. That's much more practical than how do you cure the hatred in the hearts of human beings? I find it difficult to believe that anyone would think at least the initiation of the war was not just. That's the one where I'm utterly befuddled. If it were just about Israel and the Palestinians, or if it were just about Arab suffering in general, where were the protests when Assad was killing 500,000 Muslims in Syria? The new isolationism, people like Tucker Carson. How do you explain that part of it?

I think that there is an isolation. sentiment that has set in on the right that is tied to a peculiar horseshoe theory. Has the world gotten better when America pulled out from Iraq? That's a different question from whether America originally should have gotten involved in Iraq. But one thing that is certainly true is wherever the West seems to regress or pull back, things get markedly worse. What would your advice be to Trump in the run-up to the election? Back in 2020, I was like, okay, put him in the basement with some pornography in Shark Week,

and just leave him there. And also, I had suggested that the people at the White House construct a fake Twitter app for him on his phone. So he would tweet into his phone, it would read back a bunch of bot replies about how amazing he was. And he'd been like an amazing mood all day long. And that's what happened. It's called Truth Social. Ben Shapiro, welcome back to Trigonometry.

A third time, I think, having you on the show. One of the things we've been exploring a lot on the show in recent months is what's happening in Israel and Gaza. We've had people from different sides. You know, we had Norman Finkelstein on recently. We've had people who are very pro-Israel as well. I guess you're one of the people out there who has been most strongly articulating the idea that Israel's war is a just war. Can you explain why? Sure. When you are a sovereign country and a terrorist group crosses your border and slaughters 1,200 of your citizens and then takes 250 of those citizens captive back into terror tunnels that you've spent 20 years building with billions of dollars in foreign aid while simultaneously tyrannizing your own population and firing rockets every so often into the neighboring country, then it seems to me the extirpation of your rule.

is not only just, it is obligatory. And so the idea that Israel is going into end Hamas's control over this territory is what any self-respecting country would do with a neighboring country that had initiated a vast, unprecedented terror assault inside its countries, slaughtering men, slaughtering women, slaughtering babies. And then again, retaining hostages, including five Americans right now. I find it difficult to believe that anyone would think at least the initiation of the war was not just. That's the one where I'm utterly befuddled. There are people who somehow seem to believe that the innate justification for the war itself is wrong, which I would need an explanation of that. Then there is the question as to whether the conduct of Israel during the war

has been just. I'm of the belief that by all available data, not only has the conduct been just, it has been unprecedentedly so, that I've yet to hear a situation in which during a war, the power that is fighting to extirpate a terrorist group or an opposing power is simultaneously also supplying that group, which is what is happening, with power, with water, with food, with humanitarian aid, because Khamas is stealing a huge chunk of what's going into the Gaza Strip, and everybody knows this. And then simultaneously risking its own soldiers in order to go house by house, as opposed to simply taking advantage of its complete air superiority over the entire region, letting people know weeks in advance of any assault in a particular area to allow for a

humanitarian movement within these particular areas, all of the, for example, focus on Rafia as a place where Israel is about to commit some sort of human rights atrocity. Over about a million people have already been moved quietly from Rafia out of that area, so as to clear that area for the possibility of uncovering terror tunnels, many of which are linked with Egypt, unfortunately. Israel has lost something like 260 soldiers in the process of this. Thousands of people have been wounded in the course of carrying out this combat. Their terrorist-to-civilian kill ratio is the lowest in the history of urban warfare. And so my question to all the people who are suggesting that Israel is doing something unprecedentedly horrible is can you suggest an alternative

whereby Israel is capable of extirpating Hamas, getting rid of Hamas's leadership, that is not what they're doing. I've yet to hear anybody actually explain what the alternative would be other than Israel should not do anything and they should leave Hamas in place. Well, right. When we had Basim Yusuf on, and that video has done crazy numbers, because I kept asking him, like, what should Israel have done? But very often people on that side of the argument, their argument is Gaza is a concentration camp and you can't start history at October 7th. Everything that was happening prior to that should not have been happening. What do you expect and oppress people to do? Okay. So, I mean, the generalized answer is not to walk into a civilian

area and slaughter men, women, and children. It would be typically the answer to that. As far as the history of the conflict, I mean, we can have arguments about the history of the conflict and go into all the nooks and crannies of what is for the Jews, a 3,000-year history in the region, and what is for the Arabs, about a 1,300-year history in the region. If you're talking about Muslim Arabs, and if you're talking about Palestinians, what is about a 70-year history in the region, considering that the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, so 64-year history in the region, if you're talking about the PLO as sort of the consolidation of Palestinian peoples under one banner.

And again, I'm distinguishing there because, historically speaking, many of the Palestinians are Egyptian or Lebanese or Turkish or Jordanian or trans-Palestinian, meaning like from the area of Transjordan or British Mandate Palestine. You know, all of that is interesting and complex. What is not particularly interesting or complex is, does a country have a sovereign right to defend its own citizenry in the face of a terrorist assault? and anybody who would justify, as for example, Norman Finkelstein has suggesting that it warmed the fiber of his being,

a terror assault like we saw on October 7th, that's insane. I've yet to hear anybody explain why Hamas is justified in its rule. So even if you're pro-Palestinian, you believe there should be a Palestinian state. Hamas is actually an obstacle to a Palestinian state by every available metric. Hamas is a terrorist group that was elected in 2006 and then proceeded to engage in a civil war with the Palestinian Authority, whereby they killed pretty much everybody in the Palestinian Authority. They're currently a threat in the West Bank, along with Islamic jihad, put aside the

Palestinian Authority itself, which is a very radical group that sprang from the PLO, and its military wing, Fatah, has worked hand and glove from time to time with Hamas when they're not fighting one another. The reality of, you know, the past suffering in this area, in what situation would that somehow justify the kind of massacre that we saw on October 7th and, how? how exactly does that answer the subsequent question that I already asked, which is what is Israel supposed to do in response to that? Is Israel's response to that supposed to be to do nothing? Is Israel's response to that to be sort of, okay, well, keep the hostages? Is Israel's response

should be, okay, well, I guess Hamas should be remaining in place? Israel has tried with governments both left and right multiple times to come up with what would be a peace partner so that they can delegate power to rule Palestinian Arab areas to Palestinian Arabs. I mean, Israel does not want, I mean, of both parties, Israel really does not want to be in control of these people, which is why the Palestinian Authority was brought in its last-stitch effort during Oslo in order to rule over these particular areas. It's why even Hamas was walled off, I think, irresponsibly, by the Israelis to be allowed to simply rule that particular area. 8,000 Jews were removed from the Gaza Strip in 2005, forcibly from their homes. Their homes were then bulldozed

by the, by the Hamas government there. Many of those people, by the way, ended up moving into the Gaza envelope where they were then subsequently slaughtered in October 7th. So, When you look at, it's very easy in all circumstances to look at how history impacts today. And that's true for literally everything. Like there's none of us who aren't impacted by history. And that's going to be true literally forever. But that doesn't solve the question as to, do you then get to run across the border and slaughter 1,200 citizens of a neighboring country and take 250 hostages and expect to be held completely non-responsible for that activity? and then are you supposed to be given extra humanitarian assistance

because you're hiding among civilians, which of course creates a perverse incentive structure whereby every terrorist is now going to hide behind a civilian. It's literally the best thing you can do. It's like tagging the tree and saying safe and tag. You just hide behind a child or a woman, and now it's not your responsibility if the woman or the child gets hurt. It's apparently the responsibility of the soldier

who's attempting to protect his own citizens to leave you alone. And the perverse incentive structure that's been set up here, you can misdirect. You can talk about the history. and again, the history is interesting. But that is a completely separate question from what do you do in the here and now? It sort of reminds me of the question

that's asked very often when somebody, let's say that there's a black American who does something that's criminal and a person gets arrested and goes to jail. And then the question that's asked by many people politically is, well, what's the long story of American racial problems that led to this?

Okay, that's an interesting question and it's worth exploring. Also, if a person commits a crime, they should go to jail. Is the solution to not put the person who committed an egregious crime in jail in the name of some sort of systemic. I think people's issue, Ben, is that, and I think I understand it, you know, I went to a bunch

of pro-Palestine protest, pro-Israel too, but in London, and we put a video out of that, and you can see that many people are not really familiar with the situation. They haven't thought necessarily that carefully about it, but the one thing that they all feel is, and I guess maybe this is the first war of this kind in the social media age, which is one of the reasons we're having these conversations in this way, because people may for the first time in history are confronted with what war looks like. I think that's right. I mean it's totally right, meaning that people don't see ugly pictures of war.

And in fact, for most of the media age, governments did not even allow reporters into a position to see the uglinesses of war, or they would censor much of the material that was coming out of wars. In fact, the last time we saw something like this out of town of Grand Scales, probably Vietnam, when you saw a lot of footage that was coming out pictures in Life magazine and it totally undermined a lot of American support for the war, because it turns out people don't like ugly things on their TV. We've created sort of this antiseptic feeling about war that it's not actually accurate to what war is. When you talk to soldiers in literally any army, they'll tell you

that the stuff you see on your TV is not one-tenth of what's going on on the ground. By the way, I think this is true of a huge number of human situations. When we see tape of police officers doing their job, it was like, oh, my God, I can't believe the police are doing that. Oh, you mean like roughing up a criminal? Like, yes, that's the sort of thing that police do regularly. They may be ugly and it may be something you don't want to see, but it is something that does get done a lot. War happens to be really, really ugly. And that's true even when you're doing what Israel is doing, which is risking its own soldiers and citizens in order to try and pursue some more clean version of a war. And this is also why, by the way, it's much easier to be a war leader

who uses drone assaults on people, right? You use drones and you kill people from afar. And then there are no people on the ground to take the pictures of the results of that sort of stuff. A lot of people killed during the Obama administration during the drone war, and nobody seemed to care very much. And the reality is that the people in the West do not have the attention span to watch suffering on their TV night after night after night after night. Frankly, I think that the Western public does not have the attention span for something like this. And what that means is that what you're likely to get on the one side is terrorists who hide among civilian population specifically to undermine the war aims. of democracies and liberal states that are attempting to preserve their own security, because the more they can maximize the ugly, I mean, Hamas has made this perfectly clear.

I mean, they say this openly. They'll say, absolutely, we're trying to maximize our own civilian casualties in order so that people in Western countries think that this war is really ugly and it has to stop, and it's really, really bad. So it's in their interest to do that. And then, so it creates one incentive structure to hide behind civilians. And on the other side, what it actually does create the incentive structure for, weirdly enough, is to go faster, even if it means go uglier.

because the longer it lasts on your TV, then the more people start to object to it. Meaning if it's over in a week, it's over in a week. The new cycle is so short right now that anything that ends quickly is in the rearview mirror incredibly fast, whereas if you do what Israel is doing right now, which is being meticulous,

going literally street by street and neighborhood by neighborhood, and it takes you seven months. And ever so often you have a break for a ceasefire negotiation that goes nowhere. People's attention span runs really, really fast. I mean, the attention span is gone. And people are treating the amount of outrage

that it took the American public to realize about Vietnam, what a decade. It took them six, seven years, minimum, between heavy engagement in Vietnam and serious American outrage about Vietnam to a certain level of Western outrage about a war in which no country is actively involved except for Israel. There are no other allied forces involved in this conflict.

It's Israel with fight, there's material support, but there's material support for a bunch of countries all over the world, foreign aid to a bunch of countries all over the world. Israel is the only country with troops on the ground, actually fighting right there, the amount of outrage over that has taken, it really kicked in within about a month, and then it's really kicked up to a high gear within seven months. That's a pretty astonishing turnabout.

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but still, the majority of people in Gaza support Hamas. Let's be just honest about that, right? And you might argue, to some extent, understandable, given that, you know, the civilian casualties and what they're being... Well, they supported Hamas before, so I mean, even after the blowout, they support a But I imagine they're somewhat emboldened by what they're going through now. So let's say that Israel is successful in destroying tunnels, Hamas infrastructure, kills the majority, let's say, of the terrorists. They can't get the leaders because they're living somewhere else, most of them.

But let's say that they do that. How does that solve things? How does that situation get... resolved. So there, I think that one of the problems in foreign policy is that particularly Americans and Westerners, because the big wars that we have in our history had something like a negotiated ending and then a period of peace, or complete victory is in World War too. We're not used to the reality, which is that for the vast history of war, there was no such thing as like a war that solved things where like it was just solved for all time. Like history continues

to move. We have this temptation in the Western mind to be like, it's the Francis Fouquetam. It's the end of history. We reached it. We're here. And that's never the case. That's particularly not the case, in the Middle East, where you have religions that are going thousands of years old. And so, you know, what is likely to happen there in the Gaza Strip is what you currently have in Judean Samaria, the West Bank. What you currently have there is Israeli military rule in Palestinian civil control. That is likely to be the most durable outcome of this because doesn't that mean there's going to be more October 7th, Ben? No, because there haven't been more October 7th in the West Bank or Judean Samaria.

I mean, meaning that October 7th was created. by a series of things. It was not primarily created by Palestinian hatred because that hatred was pre-existing. The desire to extirpate Israel was pre-existing going all the way back to 1948 when Israel was established when five Arab armies decided at that time to destroy the nascent state of Israel. It was true in 56. It's true in 67, in 73, in 82. I mean, it's in the first intifada, in the second intifada, in the 2014 war. I mean, like, nothing has changed in terms of enmities and feelings, right? All of that stuff is the constant. By the way, it goes all the way back to the early days of Jewish settlement,

there were always Jews in the state of Israel or in what would become the state of Israel going all the way back thousands of years, but kind of the renewed population of Israel in terms of population growth, I mean, there were massacres of Jews in 1929 in Hebron. So, I mean, there's nothing new in terms of the enmity is the point that I'm making.

What was the failure of October 7th was a security failure? You know, that is much more practical than how do you cure the hatred in the hearts of human beings? The hatred in the heart of human beings is very hard to cure. Security failures are pragmatically possible to prevent. And Israel made a series of pragmatic failures with regard to the Gaza Strip that they did not make, for example, with regard to the West Bank. And that included allowing the Hamas to cultivate its power in the Gaza Strip.

It included mostly there being no real intelligence on the ground in the Gaza Strip. It was basically a black box to Israel. They built the border there. They thought the border was secure. They thought because of Iron Dome they could shoot down to. most of what was coming over that border, but they didn't have a lot of intelligence capacity. Israel goes into Janine and Nablus, which are areas of the West Bank on a routine basis, and kills terrorists because they have intelligence resources on the ground over there.

Ben, I was going to say, what we are talking about is practical, and you were talking about curing the hatred in people's hearts. I'm looking at what's happening on campuses. I'm looking at how people are discussing it on the streets. It seems to me that whilst Israel may be winning the war, what they're doing is they're losing the PR war? So I disagree only in the sense that I don't think the PR war had ever been won by Israel in the recent past.

So I mean, as long as I've been alive, the press have been very largely oriented against Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. And that's what drove Oslo. It's what drove the Y River Accords is what drove the attempts to negotiate in 2000 and 2008. So I don't think anything has really changed there. I think that there's a broadening and deepening of anti-American anti-Western sentiment that has manifested at a lot of these protests. I think that one thing that's happened here that I think people are misreading is they're treating these protests as though they are solely about Israel and the Palestinians when in reality when you listen to what the protesters are saying, it's not just about Israel or the Palestinians.

They're talking about decolonialization. They're talking about the evils of the West and how the West is a colonial empire. They're talking about how the West itself is systemically racist. I mean, it's what some people online have called the Omni Cause and it's what unifies, you know, queers for Palestine, right? That's always the big puzzle of this sort of. sort of thing, right? Is that you look at that and on its face, it's totally absurd, right? That's chickens for KFC, right? What are you talking about? But it makes perfect sense when you realize that this is just a coalition of people who believe they are oppressed by the Western system and they're gangging together in order to try and destroy that overarching superstructure. And Israel is just a part of that. The thing about Israel and Jews, and I would say that this is part of kind of the broader intersectional argument is that there are many types of anti-Semitism manifest in a variety of different ways. Left-wing anti-Semitism,

which I think is crossing over with Islamic anti-Semitism right now in a lot of these protests, that argument springs on the left from a not anti-Semitic argument, but an anti-system argument. And that argument goes something like this. Everybody who performs less well in a particular system is a victim of that system. That failure is actually evidence of exploitation and victimization at the hands of a system. And so what that means that anyone who's successful within the system is an exploiter, is the person who has done something to hurt somebody else. When you take that internationally, then what you end up with is the West is the exploiter of non-Western peoples.

And when you take it to the Middle East, what it looks like is Israel is the exploiter of the Palestinians. Like Israel got rich at the expense of the Palestinians, despite the fact that Israeli Arabs are, in fact, the richest Arabs in the neighborhood. And that if you look at actually, it's a pretty good case study. If you look at GDP per capita, if you're going to look in order at where Arabs have done the best in the region, and you're not talking about like the oil-rich monarchies where they're just kind of redistributing oil income, then you're looking at Israel. There's not a single Israeli Arab who wants to live in Palestine. They don't want to by polling data because they understand what that would mean.

Wherever there's more Israeli control, you have Arabs who are richer because there's more day-to-day maintenance of law and order. But the argument is that Palestinian failure, in particular in the Gaza Strip, that is not the result of Hamas. That is the result of the great exploiter that is Israel. And the proof of that is that Israel is a very successful country. and Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip is a shit show. And the reality is that it's a shit show

because when you make an active decision to keep people in quote-un-unquote refugee camps for 70 years as opposed to integrating them into an economy, or as opposed to trying to build things and create foreign relations and build a working government and open your economy and teach people things, the reality is the Gaza Strip has the same physical capacity

or better than a multiplicity of countries that do wildly better than it does in terms of the GDP scale, whether you're talking about Hong Kong, what are you talking about Singapore. So it has nothing to, as we've learned in terms of modern economies, the natural resources with which a country is endowed, that is not dispositive as to whether a country is economically successful or societally successful. The system is what determines whether a country is societally successful or not. Check West Germany versus East Germany for an amazing example of this, or North Korea versus South Korea. So what that suggests is maybe there are a bunch of decisions made in the Gaza Strip

that are really bad and have resulted in some really bad life standards. But again, that violates the scruples of these general moral principle, which is suffering equals victimization at the hands of a higher power. And so that can manifest pretty quickly in anti-Semitism because Jews are disproportionately successful in a wide variety of endeavors, I think mainly because Jews historically have valued education very, very highly. And it's not unique to Jews. Thomas Seoul talks about middlemen Chinese in non-Chinese countries

who study very, very hard and do really, really really well. You see Asians treated this way at American universities, right? They're an other now because they become white. They've become part of the system. And so they have to be discriminated against in admissions, for example. And so it can turn into, the Jews are at the top of the system because the Jews benefit from the system. But what makes Jews particularly weird is that Jews are also, by the data, one of the more victimized subgroups, right, in terms of hate crimes, for example, attacks, physical attacks, or the state of Israel, which has been targeted by terror more than any other Western country by far. Right. So it kind of violates

kind of violates all the rules, and I think there's a particular ire about that. So if it were just about Israel and the Palestinians, or if it were just about Arab suffering in general, as many people have pointed out, where were the protests when Assad was killing 500,000 Muslims in Syria, where the protests right now in Nigeria, where Christians are being killed, or Niger, or Libya, or, you know, a wide variety of other countries where people are suffering, I mean, the deportation of Afghans from Pakistan by the hundreds of thousands. It's happening literally right now. No one cares.

And those are all very good points. But what is really interesting at the moment, Ben, is look, we've always, we're from the UK, we've seen these tropes time and time again on the fringes of the left, on the fringes of the Labor Party. And we saw it with Corbyn's leadership of the Labor Party. But now what is very interesting and deeply worrying it is we're now seeing this come up from the right, which is something that I've never seen. before, in my lifetime, certainly.

I mean, I think it was always on the fringes of the right. I think you're right that it's expanded into less fringy areas of the right, for sure. Neil Ferguson in his book, The War of the World War of the World War, where he talks about the period of World War I and World War II, he suggests that genocidal feeling or attacks on minorities, I think to put it more mildly, attacks on minorities, that tends to spring up at times of high economic uncertainty when you have empires in collapse and when you have high levels of minority population. And what you're seeing right now is a lot of that in the West.

You're seeing tremendous economic uncertainty. It feels like we're entering a period of serious economic stagnation in which innovation seems to be peering out other than AI. But I think most people are scared of AI because they don't know quite exactly what the effects of that are going to be. And rightly so. I mean, there are a lot of unknown unknowns about how that's going to affect the economy. Who's going to lose their job? What do you do with their time when your job is gone?

Right. I mean, these are all serious questions that people are thinking about. And if they're not thinking about that, they're just looking at their bills right now, the inflation is sky high, and it's very difficult for people to make their payments. Then you have the problem of a receding Western power. And it certainly feels like Western power has been receding over the course of the post-Cold war era, weirdly enough. It feels like there should have been, you know, these sort of liberal flowering that Fukuyama

wanted. Instead, what you actually got was the Samuel Huntington clash of civilizations in which the West was so apologetic about its past that it basically started to recede from the world stage, making room for rising China, making room for a militaristic Russia, making room for a Middle East that is now increasingly being cursed by a tentacle-laden Iranian power with terror proxies all over the region. So you have weakening empires if you consider the West to be sort of an empire on its own, which is probably true, whether you consider it a physical empire or an economic empire. That feels like that's withering. And then you have high levels of

minority populations, which is going to cause internal stressors, because when people don't have a lot in common, and ethnicity doesn't have to be a proxy for value system, but sometimes it can be. And when that happens, people start to look at each other with distrust and things start to break down really, really quickly. And so what that's resulted in on the right is this kind of isolationism that there's a traditional American sort of vacillation between interventionism and isolationism. That's been true for all of American history. You go back to the 1920s. It's very isolationist time. You go to the 1930s, late 1930s, 40s starts seeing more an interventionist swing.

You go back to the early 1900s under Teddy Roosevelt. You have very interventionist America. So this vacillation is very common in American life. What's weird that you're seeing on the right is something different, which is an isolationism that is not rooted in what traditional American isolationism was rooted in. Traditional American isolationism was the rest of the world is really bad. We're not going to get involved in their problems because it's going to poison us here at home. That was the isolationism of the 19th century in the United States, which was like, or George Washington, no foreign entanglements, no permanent allies, which made sense when Britain and France were fighting each other and the United States was at different times allied with both. You know, so when you have a world where things are not very close together and you're separate,

you happen to be the luckiest country in the history of mankind, you're located on a continent right now that is bordered by two oceans, Mexico and Canada. That's with nearly autarkic resources. That's like an amazing thing. But traditional American isolationism was don't get involved with the Europeans. It was European war they were talking about. They're always fighting their balance of power war problems. We don't want any piece of that.

It's going to poison us here at home. It's going to cost us money. it's going to mess up our politics, just stay away. There's a difference in that, and the sort of post-World War II left-wing argument that was largely Soviet-backed, which was that America was a force for bad in the world, the sort of Howard's-in argument,

that America has historically been an exploitative, egregiously bad place, and wherever we put our beak, things get worse. Can I just pause you there? Because I accept what you're saying there, Ben, but also as well, we need to mention Vietnam, and we need to mention the war in Iraq, which for our generation was that moment where we just went, oh, we were lied to, and we were lied to big time.

Okay, so I will make the case that the Vietnam War was the first case and point of a bad ideology taking precedence over good ideology with regard to a very messy war. So the reality is that Vietnam would have been better if the United States had stayed and maintained its security. the United States unilaterally pulling out and subjecting Vietnam to communist rule and the fall of Cambodia was quite bad for the world. That doesn't mean that there may have been just like Iraq, there may have been an initial bad assessment as to the importance of Vietnam in the grand scheme of Southeast Asia. The domino theory may not have been, even if it was real with regard to Cambodia, for example, that it maybe it just didn't matter that much. It was just very far away. But the idea that Vietnam was better ruled over by Ho Chi Minh than it would have been ruled over by something like a Western Diction.

which is what South Korea was. I mean, we now think of South Korea as a wonderful blooming democracy. South Korea was a dictatorship until the 80s. And now we all like South Korea. It's great. It's a place where to make all our microchips, right? I mean, like, it's wonderful. And it gave a sigh. Like, there's so much good stuff. But South Korea is considered like a wonderful blooming Western country. That took like a full-scale war in which 50,000 Americans died. And then it took decades of occupation by America to prevent North Korea from walking over that tripwire. So again, the idea that the world is better off when America leaves is not true. You can say that we shouldn't have gotten involved there, and that's a good argument, or at least I think a passable argument.

What is not a good argument is that the world got better when America left. Has the world gotten better when America pulled out from Iraq? That's a different question from whether America originally should have gotten involved in Iraq. No, but Francis's point is something else, Ben, which is, you know, the people that you're talking about in terms of the new isolationism, people like Tucker Carlson, who's been having a go over many things recently, is I see in him a kind of, you know, I went and I sold the war in Iraq to the people. And then it was all based on a pack of lies. And now America is, you know, his brain sees America differently now.

It's quite clear. And that's why he's going over to Russia and finding out that, you know, Russian supermarkets have shopping carts with these magnificent mechanisms and all the rest of it. Right. So I guess what we're talking about is, frankly, I think that said more about, his lack of understanding of how supermarkets work than about Russia. That was bizarre. And the idea that food is cheaper in Russia, I mean, it is cheaper for an American,

but it's three times or five times, or however many times more expensive for the average Russian. So, but this is what happens when people have these ideologies about basically America bad the rest of the world good. Right. And I think that that is the key, right? I think that there's a difference between America makes mistakes and bad things happen, which is true for literally any country and America inherently getting involved in things. makes that a worse place, that it makes the thing bad,

and that that's true for the West generally, that the world will be a better place if Western powers were not involved in particular areas. Again, it's impossible to make the case that the West has been completely innocent or that the West has never made mistakes, that every place the West has touched has been amazing. That's obviously not true.

But one thing that is certainly true is wherever the West seems to regress or pull back, things get markedly worse. I mean, this seems to be true literally everywhere. It would be the decolonialization project has had some pretty messy consequences as it turns out. And again, that's not an argument for colonialism. You can make the argument that the West never should be involved in those places. But there are also our places on the planet where the West was never involved.

And those don't seem to be like amazing places either. So when it comes to foreign policy, it turns out that it's a series of bad choices and worse choices. And there are very rarely good choices that have no consequences to anybody in terms of blood, treasure. Like, that just doesn't exist. because effectively speaking, the international order does not exist. There is no international order. That's why international institutions are a failure and a giant joke. It's a fifth grade playground,

and you hope that the person who's the strongest on the playground is a good person with good intentions, even if they occasionally blunder and hurt somebody innocent, rather than a really, really bad person. But there is no world on a fifth grade playground where there are no adults present, where somebody doesn't end up as the dominant power. And when those dominant powers are bad,

the world becomes a significantly worse place. it's the point I've been making for a long time, which is that when you create a power vacuum, it's not going to be rainbows and unicorns. It's going to be Russia or China stepping into it. But the question I wanted to ask you, Ben, is you and personally on the Daily Wire broadly, have paid a price for having this conversation in the way that you've been. You know, people like, I think there was a clip of Andrew Shultz and Patrick Bed David talking about how it's, you know, if they called it the Israeli Wire, then that would be fine. of this other stuff.

And, you know, I'll be honest, when I look at your Twitter feed, you know, you have been very focused on what's happening in Israel. What do you make of those criticisms? I mean, when it comes to my Twitter feed, that's largely because Twitter is dominated by this conversation. So, I mean, here's the thing. If you look at the vast panoply of episodes that I've done over the course of I'm doing my podcast since 2015, it's almost 10 years, if you look at the vast majority of those episodes,

I don't think I mentioned Israel once until October 7th. I mean, I, that's an exaggeration. mention it, but not very much. The amount of time that I talked about Israel on my podcast was, as a percentage of total time on the podcast, I'd venture to say significantly less than 1%. And then October 7th happens. And of course, there's this weird thing that happens where it's like everybody else talks about Israel, but if I talk about Israel, then it's because I'm peculiarly focused on Israel, as opposed to everyone else who's not. I mean, it seems like pretty much everybody's focused on that right now. So when it goes out of the news, I'll be more than happy

to not talk about Israel. It's a very contentious and difficult discussion to have with a lot of people, particularly on X, which has turned into a cesspool in a lot of ways. Always has been.

Come on. Yes. I mean, yes. But I will say that the changes in X, which again, I'm a big Elon fan. I like that Elon has opened up X. I've even been an advocate of people who I think are absolutely despicable

being allowed back on X because I think that his attempt to create a free marketplace of ideas is more important than my personal level of emotional comfort when it comes to it when it comes to X. I will say that the policing there in terms of virality is not very good, that there are a lot of body accounts, there's a lot of spam. Like, I think a lot of those things can be simultaneously true, even while I'm very, very happy that Yilan took it over and opened it up. With that said, you know, as far as the idea that, you know, the daily wire is, quote unquote, the Israeli wire

or something, we have hosts who completely disagree with me in Israel, right? Matt Walsh, right, believes, and I've had discussions with him about this, that America should have no business giving foreign aid at all to Israel or pretty much anyone else. I disagree with them. I think that that's a wrong perspective in my viewpoint. That's a different thing from perspectives that have been articulated by other people. I don't think Matt has a lack of moral clarity between, say, Hamas and the democratic state of Israel. That is a slightly different proposition. As far as, again, my personal focus on this, I'm personally focused on this. for a couple of reasons. I will freely admit that I have a level of emotional investment in

a state that was created for the safety of Jews and is historically tied to my religion. Of course, that's true. And I'd be ridiculous not to simply say that that's the case. I also have a stake in this because, again, I think it's a civilizational question. And it is bewildering to me how so many members of the West seem to have a difficulty in finding moral clarity between an openly genocidal terror group in Hamas and an Israeli government that is currently engaged in a bipartisan war cabinet that is trying to bring humanitarian aid in in the middle of a conflict with an enemy that's stealing the humanitarian aid while risking its own citizen soldiers in that combat. I mean, that I find absolutely not only bewildering but dangerous. I mean, I think there's a reason

why people are being assaulted for carrying American flags into the center of many of these protests. It would be one thing if people are getting assaulted for carrying Israeli flags, which again I've seen throughout my life. That's nothing new. But people getting assaulted for carrying American flags into the center of this sort of stuff betrays, I think, what is the real problem for the West. And I don't think it's a problem for Israel predominantly. Israel's going to be what Israel's going to be. It's in a region of the world that's incredibly dangerous. It's in the worst neighborhood that it's possible to be in. And it's going to have to pursue its own national self-interest, as every country should pursue its national self-interest.

And sometimes the self-interest come into conflict. with that said, the real problem for the West is that you have hundreds of thousands of people who are marching in solidarity with the terrorist group. I mean, that's a problem for the West. That's not a problem for Israel. Ben, is that actually fair? Because look, there's going to be a lot of these kids, and you'll ask him, and they'll just, they'll say what they showed on our videos. You know, we don't agree with what happened. We thought it was awful barbaric. Kids are being killed. I'm marching because I want a ceasefire, and then I don't want these kids to be killed. And there'll be other people who will say awful, horrible things. And there are jihad.

Addie's there, I accept all of that. So, I mean, that's true. Also, what got them up to March on this particular subject? It's not just holding the opinion. Lots of people hold lots of opinions where they don't know what the hell they're talking about. That's the nature of democracy, and that's fine. I mean, I wish people would read more, but that's just another question. But as far as the, you know, as far as what gets you up to get your ass off your couch

and away from the Cheetos and get up in the streets marching, that's a different thing. That requires a different level of motivation than simply holding you. an ignorant view about a thing. That's a passionately held ignorant view about a thing at the very least. And what it speaks to is a broader worldview that this plugs into. This has become sort of the issue du jour that plugs into it. And it's not the only one we've seen in the last few years. I mean, we saw massive marches based on the death of George Floyd. And it's a completely different issue. Plugged into the same exact system, largely the same people who are protesting. What's added on top of this is the radical Islamists who have been protesting also. But the rest of

the coalition is pretty much intact and looks kind of the same. What's different now is, though, Ben, coming under attack not only from the Andrew Tates of the world, but also the Tucker Carson's. How do you explain that part of it? Now, again, I think that there is an isolationist sentiment that has set in on the right that is tied to a peculiar horseshoe theory belief that is very similar to the Bernie Sanders belief, which is that there is a group of people who have been left behind. Those people have been left behind by an oligarchy that is ruled by powerful forces that are in control, and they're trying to keep you down.

I don't like that sense of victimhood without evidence. I really don't. And I don't like it on the left, I don't like it on the right. And I see it on both. I do see that as a horseshoe theory thing that's happening. I mean, Tucker four years ago was talking about how Elizabeth Warren's economic plans were something that he was in favor of. He liked Elizabeth Warren's economic.

He was something that when he was on Fox. Everybody sort of looked past that. But that to me, again, suggests an interesting worldview that there's a group of people who are left behind in America. And those people are being left behind by the oligarchs of America. And that starts to look a lot like intersectional politics just with a different victim group. And also as well, you know, we've seen the rise of people like Andrew Tate. And we've seen what I find very concerning, because I'm not Jewish, but

I look Jewish. So, you know, if things got to help, Ben, the worst combination. Yeah, the looks without the IQ. But anyway, because if, you know, I'm actually genuinely worried about this, you see people who I used to follow on Twitter and I'd be like, oh, you know, look, they're quite interesting. I'll follow them. And then I see them retweeting clips of Nick And I'm going, what the hell is going on here? And I'm seeing this resurgence of open anti-Semitism, not just, oh, you know, the people in charge or Zionists or whatever else, but open anti-Semitism. And that is incredibly well. I don't know if you saw Rogan was talking about the other day as well, it was a very good clip from here.

So, right. So I think one of the things that's happened here also is that because the left went so far in closing the Overton window, I think the solution for the right was no Overton window ever. and I don't think that's correct, right? Meaning, like, there, I think the definition of cancel culture has been expanded really, really far. So I think that cancel culture traditionally was the idea that people were getting canceled for views that were well within the Overton window, right? For views that were kind of held by half the population and people were getting canceled

for that. But there was very little argument that if somebody was openly a fan of Hitler, that you had an obligation to hire them at your company. Everybody was sort of like, okay, well, that's outside the Overton window. I don't have an obligate. Like, they have a right to say what they want to say in the United States. But that doesn't mean I have to associate with them. And again, there's a difference between like the public square, which is what X is supposed to be,

where the idea is you can say whatever you want, even the crazy guy who loves Hitler. Or, you know, I have to hire you for, it's cancel culture. If I get fired, if I go on my profile, I start waving a Nazi flag and talking about how much I love Hitler, and then you fire me, that's cancel culture. Right. And I think that that's an expansion of the definition beyond what it traditionally was. The argument of the right with regard to political correctness, and cancel culture was that the left had shut the Overton window so tight that very widely held mainstream opinions.

Like, for example, men are not women. These were suddenly cancelable opinions. And a lot of us were like, that's crazy. That's insane. And you saw, you know, very famously in 2015, the sort of intellectual dark web form up around this where it was people like me and people like Sam Harris, people who radically disagree on a wide variety of policies, but we're like, but we can have discussions about these sorts of topics. And it's totally fine. These are within the Overton window.

I think it was important for that purpose. and then there was a because politics is inherently a reactionary. I think the reaction to the Overton window being shut up tight was there is no Overton window, explode it. And not only that, anything that violates the left's sense of propriety, good or bad, is now valuable. So there was a category error that was made, which was, I'm going to say a true thing and the left hates it, and that just shows how true it is.

And I'm going to say a terrible thing, and the left is going to hate us, and therefore it shows how true it is. They're reacting to the left's hatred. They're letting the left actually decide in many cases what not to be offended by. So the answer is if the left is offended by everything, I will be offended by nothing. And not only that, I will embrace. The more people yell at me, the more it shows that I'm over the target, right? There's always this phrase that you hear kind of in right-wing spaces that you're not taking flack unless you're over the target.

Well, I mean, kind of and kind of not, meaning like it is true that sometimes if you're making a good point, it draws a lot of fire. It's also true sometimes that if you're making an idiotic point, you're drawing a lot of fire. So, you know, the lack of what you've created is now an unfalsifiable system, right? Because no matter what you say, if you are taking shit for it, this means that you're saying something valuable. Well, that's stupid. I mean, people say a lot of dumb stuff. I've said dumb stuff that I've taken shit for, and I deserve it. And I've said some stuff that I don't think is dumb that I've taken shit for, and I don't think I deserve it.

I think that's true for literally everyone. And so because of that, I think there's been a premium put on saying the thing, that violates the sensibilities of the broader population. And so saying the thing, right? And the thing in this case doesn't mean the true thing. It just, or the evidence thing, or the thing that I can make an argument for, it's just saying anything that drives a reaction. That is used as an indicator of virtue.

If the left hates it, it must be virtuous. If people who historically are too sensitive hate a thing, it's not because I'm saying something that actually is quite bad, which it turns out that even sensitive people can be right. But it doesn't mean they're always right. And so I think that category error has led to a lot of, okay, well, you know, there's no difference between saying, I love Hitler and saying that I disagree with how Israel is prosecuting the war, right?

Saying I disagree with how Israel is prosecuting the war is well within the Overton window, saying that it warms the cockles of your heart when Hamas crosses the border and murders, 1,200 people seems to be outside the Overton window. And we're also, we're talking about it. And I think that's actually one of the reasons why we've seen the rise to fame and prominence of Andrew Tate. Because I did a video where I went and talked to the young people in South Beach, Miami, and we were talking about hookup culture and dating culture.

And what came across was that people were very miserable. But what was even more worrying is practically every young man that I spoke to. And some of these boys were smart. They were smart kids. And I said to him, what do you think about Andrew Tate? And it was almost uniformly positive. Well, transgressivism has become its own sort of philosophy. If you transgress a line, this means you're brave.

And that's actually sort of anti-conservative by nature. It turns out that it's radical in both directions. It's radical left because you're destroying all the lines in that direction, but can also be transgressivism is anti-conservative in the sense that if you believe, as I believe, that systems of and institutions are built up as a Hayekin point, they're built up gradually over the course of centuries by tried and true practice. That doesn't mean that every institution that's built is good.

It does mean that you should be very careful before you simply destroy them willy-nilly. There are a lot of people who are like, well, no, now that the systems have been hijacked in totoe by the left, destroy the systems, destroy all of the established systems, and then we'll build on the ruins. And I think there are certain systems for which that's true, right, where the system's been taken over so much that it's not savable and you're better off just kind of dissociating from it or providing an alternative. But I think that there's a lot of babies getting thrown out with a lot of bathwater right now. And so what you get is the game I think that Andrew Tate plays, and he plays it really well, actually, is he says one true thing and one absurd thing. And then if you say, that's absurd, he says, well, I said this true thing. Why are you attacking me for the true thing?

And he'll say, men are different from women. It'll be like, that's so true. And that's why men should bone a thousand women and have a thousand babies. You're like, well, that's not, that doesn't seem like a good lifestyle choice or good for the planet or good for you or good for your soul or anything like that. Like, that's because you just don't believe in the first thing. You believe that men are women. It's like, no, no, that's not a corral. That is not a corollary of your first statement.

And so, again, I think that people feel so hemmed in that it's, that they're bursting out in a lot of ways, many of which are bad, uninformed, foolish. And because of that, there's this thing that's been happening online a lot that I've spoken out about, which is the sort of just asking questions phenomenon, right? Which is, I don't need to provide evidence to my proposition. I'm just asking questions. And that's just, that's for children. It's a stupid game for children.

Just as being randomly transgressive is a stupid game for children. I have four kids. And every so often they'll just say no to something that's perfectly obvious. And like, just put on your clothes in the morning so you go to school. No. Well, okay, you're not saying something brave. You're being an idiot. Okay, and that's also true for adults.

In fact, it's more true for adults. At least my kids have the excuse of being children. And when it comes to the just asking questions routine, I feel like it's another form of that. It's like, okay, I'm going to be militantly ignorant about whether the question that I'm asking has the answer that I'm suggesting. But I'm going to rely on that ignorance to just ask the question. Why hasn't anyone checked this out? Has anyone even thought about it? I mean, it turns out usually people have spent an awful lot of time thinking about that question

and there may be a variety of different answers of various evidentiary equality. But we're in a time where there was such a premium put on not asking questions that the next move was, ask all the questions and then pretend the answers don't matter. That's an interesting thing that you were saying. What the boys were saying to me when I spoke to them a couple of days ago was we are living in a world where we are openly denigrated against for being male, where as a man, we're not respected anymore, we're encouraged to be more feminine. Andrew is the only person standing up for us. Right. And I think that what they mean by that is that he's the only person standing up for them without asking a true obligation. of them. Okay, because

which is a wonderful sales tactic. The sales tactic where I'm standing up for you, but I offer you no actual obligation is an amazing sales tactic. It's true for pretty much every policy. Validation without responsibility. Right, well, the member victimhood mentality, it's that. So what's not victimhood mentality

is it is true that society now values the feminization of men. I agree with that. It is true that men are being treated as an adjunct to society and essentially useless. That it women don't need men anymore is sort of the basic idea, that men don't have a valuable role to play as men, that all human beings are basically just androgynous witches.

Like, I think that argument has, in fact, been made a lot. The answer to that is to be a better man. That is the actual answer to that. It's to be more of a man. And when I say more of a man, enter tates a version of being more of man, and apparently is strutting around in mansions that he may or may not own, you know, shirtless while smoking a cigar, and then knocking up a bunch of women, according to him, right? and lying about as well.

Like, those seem to be like the marks of manhood. It seems to me that the mark of manhood is perform virtuous acts in your community. Prepare a skill set that makes you marketable in the market so that you can actually earn a living. Learn to protect and defend yourself. Have a family. Get married. Commit to one woman like a man would, as opposed to a little pathetic adolescent who's

steeped in pornography, which incidentally was Andrew Tate's prior industry. perhaps you should think about having children to whom you can be responsible and passing on eternal values to them. Like these were the marks of being a man for literally all of human history was protect, defend your wife, defend your children, stick around to do those things, inculcate true values in that, build a community around that that inculcates those values and makes the world a stronger, more secure, better place. That's what being a man is. The answer to the attack on manhood is to be a man. It is not to be a dumb version of a man that you see on TV. like a WWE character. And I understand why people would find that amusing

and interesting and fun to watch. I mean, he's very watchable. And he'll say things again that are transgressive and are on the borderline of true. And then he'll say things that are transgressive and not even on the borderline of true. And that's where the sort of weird danger lies

is that he'll go from, men are different than women. They have a different sex drive than women, right? 100% true. And he'll go to, that means that men should, if a true successful man

is banging as many models as he can. And it's like, That's not the corollary of that. That's not. The true successful man is committing to one woman and then building a life with her because that is the fundamental building block of a society. A selfish asshole is doing what you're talking about. And that doesn't build society.

That makes you a worse person. It makes you less of a man. And again, more of an adolescent who's playing a video game. Well, this is the thing that I think worries quite a lot of us, and I think rightly so, because I think that for our generation, if there was a father figure that was necessary, that you didn't have at home, let's say, Jordan Peterson was the guy, right?

And so the millennial father figure on the internet is someone like that, who is saying exactly what you're saying, which is the way to be a man is to take responsibility, is to be the strongest person of your father's funeral, whatever that looks like. But we have young guys working for us, and for their generation,

I'm not saying for them specifically, but for their generation, their version of masculinity that they see from the internet is Andrew Tate. And you see, I think when you and I and Francis, when we look at that, because we have a non-internet part of our lives that we live through, to us, we're like, oh, this is clearly moronic, right? This guy's clearly very charismatic, but he's selling something that is crazy that isn't going to serve men that's going to make them miserable. It's going to disconnect them from women. It's going to disconnect them from the true purpose, et cetera.

When we had Lauren Southern on recently, and this episode may go out before Lauren, she's had a whole, you know, she went out there and then came back and whatever. And one of the things she explained to us is, I'd never really thought about it. But to these kids, they don't know a world without the internet. So to them, what they see on the internet is reality, right? How do we, how do we solve that, man? I mean, if you're a QuickBooks customer looking to grow your business without the growing pains, you need the Intuit ERP.

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Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. For the generation that's currently going through this, I mean, I can't solve it for then. You can only solve problems for yourself. But the answer is turn off your phone and go touch some fucking grass, man.

Like just go touch some grass. Go out into the world and touch some grass. But that's not enough, Ben. You don't get a strong core of values from touching grass. No, but when I say that, I mean, that at least can cut off the toxic supply that's entering your bloodstream. But what you actually need to do is you need to go integrate into actually an institution, right? You need to go to church.

You actually do need these institutions. You can't walk around as a free radical and hope that the values are suddenly going to hit you in the head. That's not the way that it works. Okay. And the reality is that dating systems are broken and have been broken for a very long time in the United States. And I think in Europe as well. Yeah. That one of the reasons that people are being driven into the arms of people like Andrew Tate is because Andrew Tate's case is that women are out to victimize men.

And therefore you should retaliate by victimizing women or at least pretending that you have no responsibility. responsibilities to women, since they don't want you to have responsibility for them, you may as well just treat them the way that they seem to say they want to be treated anyway and treat them just like a disposable play thing. And that's wrong. If that's where you're looking for women, you're looking for women in the wrong place. I mean, again, I live within a religious context. I live in a religious community. It's a very close-knit religious community. Virtually everybody who lives in my religious community, the way that they met their wife, is they're fixed up by a friend. They're fixed up by a friend who went to synagogue and who knew somebody else who went to a different synagogue and then referred, you know,

somebody to somebody and they went on a date and then they met and they got married. You know, that is a very different thing than the sort of culture that we've now cultivated, which has no common set of values and in which dating is not oriented toward marriage in the first place. I mean, that's a whole different problem. This is why I say you have to have an institutional upbringing. Like, I'm not super worried about my kids because I'm raising them in an institutional upbringing. The problem is we've now had three generations of people who are being raised outside of any institutional upbringing and treated like Rousseau's a meal. Like just go to the forest and free yourself. And it turns out that that that

sets up a pretty bad set of values. And one of the things that Tate's trying to offer, I think, I think it's a lie, but I think that he's trying to pretend to do this is a feeling of community. It's these weird online communities. And online communities are not real communities. Anybody's ever spent time in like a real community knows that that's not the case. Being in a chat room with people is not the same thing. It's actually what we do every Saturday, which is we turn off computers and phones between Friday night and Saturday night, and you're literally living just in your community. Like, we don't use cars. You're in walking distance. You're seeing friends and family literally 25 hours a week. Now, that's a very, very different thing. But when you set up an airsats online community, it can make you feel as though you have a community in being one of the people who believes the things that tape believes. That also sets up a good possibility of easy and quick kind of cult leadership, which is you see these cultic feelings build up around figures and then dissipate actually rather quickly. Every so often there'll be sort of a cult figure who forms. Something happens. It dissipates. It reforms. Disciates. The internet is a crowd in search of a purpose.

opposed to typically in life where crowds form around a purpose, it's just kind of a roving mob of free radicals looking for something to coalesce around. So what does this mean for the future, Ben? Because one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot, you mentioned AI earlier. The way that AI learns about humanity is through the online world, right? That's what it's picking up. And we know the online world's bullshit, but AI doesn't. So...

Yes. I mean, this is the big problem. I mean, it is a math. Online was not, we created a thing in the internet that we had no idea what the consequences of it were. We literally messed with our own wiring. And you can see it with kids. I mean, Jonathan Haidt's been making this point, obviously. Like, we have rewired our own brains.

And so we are effectively cyborgs, right? Half our brain is walking around in our hand. And that's, you know, perhaps in the future will be not outside the body. It'll be inside the body. But whatever the case may be, our mentality is being rewired for this sort of stuff. And you're right that AI is just going to exacerbate that problem. It's actually creating a weird sort of genetic bottleneck is the wrong term, but it's a bottleneck of sorts. It's creating a weird brain bottleneck for a population that's pushing them toward more and more bizarre and extreme forms of community and viewpoint.

And I said touch grass before, but the first thing to do is you have to turn off your phone. You have to turn it off. as somebody who lives in social media, I do not have X on my phone. I do not have Facebook on my phone. I do not have these, I don't. I use them as a way to get out the message that I want to get out, but I don't interact with them all that often because I found that it was poisoning me and making my life significantly worse. And I thought of that five, six years ago, my wife, I didn't think of my wife did. She said, like, every time you're on the internet, you get more depressed and more upset and you seem to get sucked into this kind of maw of bad opinion and bad feeling and just turn off your phone. It doesn't exist. And it turns out that was totally right. You walk around the real world and you're trending on Twitter, which happens to me like every two weeks, and no one knows you're trending on Twitter. It's not a thing. It's not an important thing in the world. And I think that that's true for a huge number of people. The problem is that, again, the only way to do that is within the context of a rules-based order. And that typically has been filled by religion. And as religion declines, I'm not sure how that gets filled again. I'm not sure that there's a secular replacement for that. I really am not. So what you're saying is, Ben, you don't own a bagatti. No. I don't own a Bugatti. I own a Honda Odyssey.

I can fit all four of my children in because I'm reproductively successful. What a beautiful moment to end the interview. The final question we ask, all our guests, Ben, is the same, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I mean, I think that the biggest thing that we're not talking about is the failure to, I mean we've been talking about the whole time. The failure to form actual communities centered around values is the biggest factor in the breakdown of everything. And we constantly keep looking at the symptoms of those things and how do we fix the symptom of that? How do we fix the protests in the

streets? How do we fix the lack of understanding about foreign policy? How do we, politics is the stuff that plays up at the surface. The stuff that's really happening and that's really been quite bad for society is that we were an iceberg that was rooted to the floor of the ocean bed. And now that has cracked and it's starting to break up underneath the surface. And we're starting to feel the tremors up here. And the tremors are frightening us. And we're like, how do we stop those tremors? But all of the breakup is going on underneath the surface.

And it's several generations old. We're talking about like historic legacies, but it's actually something you can fix in real time. And the way you fix that in real time is by doing a thing that I think people are loath to do now, which is commit to a community, commit to an institution, commit to a church, sometimes before you even believe in it. Right. So this is a, this is something that I think that Westerners are not built for. We tend to think, okay, I got to believe in the thing and then I go to church. I got to believe in this thing and then I involve myself in the institution. Institutions shape you. It's not just the other way around. Doing the act of virtue makes you, this is Aristotelian,

doing the act of virtue makes you virtuous, right? Engaging in a community, makes you a community-minded person. Going to church, it might not end with you believing the same things the rest of your church-going friends believe, but it gives you a set of values that give you a sense of community. You don't do that, and you're floating around out here. And, you know, in a world that was very repressive, I can see why that would appeal to people. But, you know, you can say that the center was too powerful and it was sucking in, this is a very Jordan idea, right?

The center was too powerful, and it was sucking in all of the sort of bodies that were orbiting it. And so, but the solution to that was not to dissolve the center. What's happening is the center. So if you want to reform the center, you have to commit to reforming the center. And that means actually investigating the roots of your civilization,

investigating the institutions that formed that civilization, and maybe going back to that. And you are seeing that. You are seeing a reversion, I think, by some people to serve those traditional values in some ways good and in some ways bad. But without that, I think that the society is on a quick road to dissolution. Ben, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Follow us over to locals, where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask your questions to Ben. What would your advice be to Trump in the run-up to the election? Back in 2020, I was like, okay, put him in the basement with some pornography and shark week and just leave him there.

And also, I had suggested that the people at the White House construct a fake Twitter app for him on his phone. So he would tweet into his phone. It would read back a bunch of bot replies about how amazing he was. And he'd been like an amazing mood all day long. And that's what happened. It was called Truth Social.