← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Ben Shapiro. Most of you will be familiar with Ben. Ben's a writer, political commentator, co founder of the Daily Wire, and host of the Ben Shapiro Show. Ben has a new book out called Lions and Scavengers, which is the topic of today's conversation. So without further ado, Ben Shapiro, I want to tell you about a podcast I can't recommend enough. It's called Boundless Insights, hosted by Aviva Klumpas. Aviva is sharp, fearless, and deeply informed, the kind of host who challenges assumptions without turning up the volume on boundless insights. She sits down with diplomats, military leaders, and legal scholars, people who actually know what they're talking about to make sense of the chaos in the Middle east and beyond. No hot takes, no tribal echo chambers. Just smart, honest conversations about the biggest stories shaping Jewish life, Israeli politics, and their global impact. If you're tired of the noise and ready for something deeper, check out Boundless Insights. You'll come away with new insights and a deeper understanding of the issues. Find Boundless Insights available wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Ben Shapiro, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [01:32]
B
Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
- [01:35]
A
So you've got a new book out. Can you tell us the title of the book and tell us why you wrote it at this time?
- [01:41]
B
Sure. It's called Lions and Scavengers. The basic premise of the book is that are breaking down as a civilization into people who wish to build, who wish to create social fabric, who wish to innovate and risk, take and defend the civilization, and people who are predominantly driven by envy, who want to rip away all those systems, tear them down to the ground. They don't really care what comes next. A coalition of people who disagree internally with each other about nearly everything except that fundamental desire to destroy all of those systems. And what drove this book? Unlike most of the books that I've written, I think it's my 12th. Most of the books that I've written kind of starts with an idea, and then I develop that idea over time. And then I sit and I read and I research. And, you know, the writing takes anywhere from a couple months to even, you know, on the short end, like three, four weeks. This one was almost written contemporaneously with events happening. And so the seedbed of this one was a trip that I took to London, or rather Oxford, in November of 2023. So it was about a month and a half after the October 7th attacks, and I was supposed to debate at Oxford University about this. And my security told me, you can't stay in London. It's too unsafe. There'd been a march the weekend before with some 300,000 people marching across, you know, London Bridge in favor of Hamas. And so I stayed about an hour outside of London, and then I went to Oxford University. And it was probably the most fraught kind of personal safety situation that I've been in, certainly in a long time. It was very close quarters. There were people there who were clearly very, very angry, kind of borderline violence in their mien. And it occurred to me that many of those people who really despised Israel and also despised America, despised the very institution that they were attending. Many of them were at Oxford, but they believe that Oxford is sort of the tip of the spear of a civilization that is historically exploitative and oppressive and terrible. And so what the hell has gone wrong? And that was kind of the thought that kept flashing through my head. What has gone wrong here than the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on Jews since World War II? They have hundreds of thousands of people of a wide variety of sort of key perspectives agglomerating together in order to attack the civilization. And that was kind of the root of where the book came from.
- [03:50]
A
So a lot of people, I imagine, in those protests would defend themselves by saying, we were really just protesting what we viewed as an overzealous bombing with too many civilian casualties. So what would you say to that?
- [04:03]
B
What I'd say to that is that many of these protests started literally before Israel began, began actually retaliating. And put aside the fact that I think that that is a wildly wrong view of the facts, given the fact that Israel has been actually extraordinarily meticulous in the pursuit of an incredibly difficult urban war situation. Obviously, I've spent a lot of time over in Israel. I've been to their air bases. I've seen how they actually perform drone attacks, for example. I've met with an enormous number of wounded soldiers, people who are literally wounded because they are going house to house. Israel had complete air superiority in the Gaza Strip. If Israel had wished to reduce the entire place to rubble with the people inside the rubble, they certainly could have done so, and they did not. They decided on a very meticulous and slow war plan that has resulted in the death of hundreds of Israeli soldiers on the ground and the wounding of multiple thousand others. And so, you know, put aside the fact that people might just get the facts wrong and be overzealous. Some of those people surely are. But the kind of ringleaders of these movements, the people who know better, what they're really protesting against is not what's going on in the Gaza Strip, because why queers for Palestine? What exactly is the thing that is being upheld? There are human rights violations all over the place. If what you believe is a human rights violation is taking place in Gaza, there's plenty happening everywhere. Why specifically this cause? And why this very bizarre melange of people who disagree with each other? I mean, again, the joke of queers for Palestine is that if you are queer and in Palestine, you are dead, you are not living.
- [05:24]
A
I think it was. Was it the comic Judy Goldberg who had the joke, what are queers for Palestine' pronouns? Was. Were.
- [05:31]
B
Yeah, exactly. And. And. And so that. That is sort of a mystery until you understand that it has nothing to do with Palestine or the Gaza Strip. That what it really has to do with is this generalized view that the world is split between oppressors and oppressed, between the marginalized and the centered, and that anybody who is successful, any nation that's successful, any civilization that's successful, must have necessarily exploited someone else, oppressed someone else, turned somebody else into a victim. And. And the only solution to that is to just rip things down. And it almost doesn't matter what comes in the wake. The important thing is that you gain back your humanity by ripping this down. I quote Frantz Fanon pretty, pretty extensively in the book to this effect. You can at least make the case for Fanon that the Algerian occupation by the French was pretty brutal. But the fact that you had Jean Paul Sartre, who was writing the introduction to his book, saying, we might want to import this into France. In fact, the only way to expiate our guilt is for Western civilization to import this idea into our own borders. That. That's just suicidal.
- [06:24]
A
Okay, so lions and scavengers. Is this a coded way of saying right and left, or are there lions on the left and scavengers on the right as well?
- [06:35]
B
I mean, I think that there can be lions and scavengers, you know, within the human heart. Meaning that. That one of the things I say in the book is that every single person can decide in the morning to wake up and be a proactive part of their own life, make good decisions, not root themselves in envy, root themselves in a belief that they can actually do a dutiful and useful thing in the world. That's the lion mentality. Or you can be a sc. Scavenger waking up in the morning looking at your Problems blaming shadowy forces in society for it and then trying to rip down those institutions so it can even be reduced to the individual level. But when we're talking about the political, one of the things that I strenuously avoided in the book were the terms right and left. And what you'll see if you read the book is I'm not sure that I refer to the right maybe a little bit and maybe once. The left I think I refer to once. But it's certainly not a stark division. There are certainly people who would consider themselves politically right leaning, people who vote Republican, who are enmeshed in a grievance culture against the United States, against the civilization, who believe that, that their personal grievances are the result of systems that need to be torn down without providing evidence that that's in fact the case. And there are people who disagree with me politically on taxes and gay marriage, who are actually quite proactive, who believe that, that institutions have to be strengthened, rebuilt, fixed. And so I really do not think that it is purely a political thing. I think that, you know, grievance culture tends to adhere more closely to left wing ideology. But I certainly think that there's a part of the new populist right that is horseshoed around to join this.
- [07:57]
A
Yeah. So if you think of someone like Elon Musk in the year, say 2010, clearly he's a lion because he's a builder, but he's not really on the right at that time. Right, correct. So, so, so that would be an example. And then people on, on the, what is called the woke, right by some now that like to blame everything on, you know, the military industrial complex or, or global Jewry, this kind of thing. These are people that have a fundamentally grievance based relationship to Western society. It's just that the enemies are different than the enemies.
- [08:31]
B
That's exactly right. I mean, on the right it manifests as a lot of conspiracy theorizing. One of the things I talk about, I think manifests everywhere as a sort of conspiracy theory. And traditional biblical religion is actually in many ways sort of the anti conspiracy theory. So if you think about paganism in its original form, it was the idea that as Gloucester says in King Lear, that the gods, you know, strike us down like flies for, for their sport. That is sort of the, the pagan ideology. And, and I would say the post God ideology is that things happen randomly, bad things happen to good people. You can't control any of that. And then that is then projected into a conspiratorial idea that there Must be forces beyond your reckoning who are out to get you. And you can see that on both right and left, the biblical worldview is, is actually quite harsh. It basically says that if you fail, it's probably your fault. There's a God centered ordered universe and if you do the right things, good things will likely happen. If you do the wrong things, bad things will likely happen. Right. It's the entire book of Deuteronomy. And so the, the, the movement away from kind of personal responsibility and, and duty that, that results in this very conspiratorial view of society in which again, shadowy forces are out there and they're manipulating you. And if you don't understand that, it's because you now have almost a Marxist false consciousness that, that, that has to be, that has to be, you know, opened up. You need to be, you need to be black pilled, you need to be awoken to the, to the, to the problems in society that you never spotted before. It turns out maybe America was on the wrong side of World War II. Maybe the moon landing never happened. Because the normal kind of response to this nonsense is to say, well, America seems like pretty awesome. You have all these grievances against America, but I mean, let's face it, America kind of kicks ass. I mean we defeated the Nazis, we defeated the Soviets without firing a direct shot. We have created the single most prosperous era in the history of humanity with the broadest spread of wealth in the history of human like we're kind of great. And so the answer to that from both sides is no, no, no, you're totally misapprehending history. For, for one side it's the 1619 project. And then as some folks at Free Press have written, for others it's the 1939 project.
- [10:28]
A
Right. So can you be aligned without being religious or do you have to be grounded in a biblical or other, other otherwise monotheistic morality so you absolutely can.
- [10:37]
B
Be aligned without being religious? I think that the, the behavior, its on certain assumptions that are religious in nature. But I think that most lions don't actually go around thinking about their philosophy. Right. This is something that I make clear in the book. I think that most lions don't sit around thinking about what are kind of the roots of what they think. Most people don't, generally speaking, scavenger. Same thing. I don't think that people sit around like, oh, I read Sartre today, so now I'm a scavenger. Or you know, I was sitting around, I was reading FA Hayek and now and I've decided to be a lion. Or I was studying my Bible and now I'm. Now I'm going to be a lion. I think it's more sort of the premises that I'm talking about that most people act upon are inherently non provable by science and have to be assumed and those are generally religious principles. It's almost the argument that I'm making. It's almost a Richard Dawson esque, you know, like he likes the soft Christian messaging without the God. I think that, that that's quite possible. You can live that way. I don't think it's scalable. I think that at a certain point you end up with, with what one writer called cut flower syndrome, where if you separate the flower from its roots, it can live in the water for a bit, but eventually it's going to die. It does need the constant feeding from certain religious premises, but for individuals, sure. And I think even for civilizations for a time, you could probably get away with it.
- [11:48]
A
Right. What about without the tradition of the Western canon in general? Like if your heritage is Hindu or Confucian, can a whole civilization orient itself towards the lion mindset or is it required to be sort of Western in root?
- [12:08]
B
I mean, I do think that historically, historically speaking, it has been Western root. Historically speaking, there's a reason that the west has been successful and there's a reason why when you graft Western institutions into soil that is particularly conducive, you can end up with a Japan that is highly successful. I think that to pretend that it kind of arises everywhere equally would be to be historically inaccurate. So I'd be open to a counter, but I don't see a tremendous historical counter.
- [12:41]
A
So to go back to what you were saying earlier, this book started out in London and you're noticing that there are people who either move to London or their parents or at most probably their grandparents moved to London or America, have chosen to basically root themselves here and have enjoyed the fruits of the west, but nevertheless claim to hate everything the west stands for. In a normal situation this would be viewed as a contradiction. Right. If we were talking about a non political issue like what town in New Jersey you want to live in. I'm from New Jersey. Right. Like we lived in Montclair because we liked Montclair. If we hated Montclair, we would have probably moved somewhere else. And with many options, if we chose to live in Montclair, it would be fair for someone to point out, well, you claim you really hate this town, but you've chosen to live here for 20 years and you have the means to move elsewhere. Right. So that would be like a common sense, valid objection. But if you make that objection in the political domain, it's considered like akin to a slur, right? If you say, okay, well, if you hate this country so much, people move all the time, like there are other options in the world. Obviously you can say this with like spittle coming out of your mouth and hatred. But you can also just make it as an observation, like, if America is so bad, why don't you move elsewhere? Because there's plenty of other options yet. This is, this comes across to people or has been really like branded as essentially like an anti, like bigotry essentially to suggest this. But something is going on with people that are moving to, you know, all of these countries, Western Europe, America, and simultaneously hating on them. What is going on psychologically that solves that cognitive dissonance?
- [14:30]
B
Well, I think for those people or for the civilization that's accepting them, for those people.
- [14:35]
A
Let's start with those people.
- [14:36]
B
I mean, so for many of those people, they'll just say that they are seeking a better economic life. Many of them will just be open about the idea they're coming there for jobs or for opportunity. But they don't believe that there is, I think, a normal human inability to understand that you're, that you didn't hit a triple and that you were born on third base. And so there's sort of a generalized capacity for human beings to believe that the natural state of things is, I'm in Denmark or America or England, a job is available and I get it. And so it's like, I just came here for the job and it's like, well, I'm not going to think about the system that provided me the job. That same system is oppressing my brothers, you know, back home. And so that system is bad and I have to tear it down. And so the job is sort of the natural state of things. You see this in the west with a lot of kind of homegrown young people who are like, well, you know, I deserve an apartment at X number of dollars per year in rent and I deserve a job. The job pre exists. We can change all the systems and the job is the natural state of things. And so I think that that is sort of a natural human failing. And so I would assume that they're not really thinking about it. I don't think they're thinking, oh my gosh, when I attack the free markets, I'm really attacking my own job. I came here for the job. I shouldn't be attacking free markets. I think that what they're thinking is, for some reason this place has jobs. I don't know why it has jobs, but it has jobs. I came here to get a job for my family. I can send money home to my family. And simultaneously that same system is oppressing me and my relatives back home. So maybe I can use my new perch here to attack the system that's oppressing. And so I don't think most people have to solve cognitive dissonance, because I don't think most people think that deeply about things.
- [16:07]
A
Right. It's also possible one of the implicit arguments that people believe, I think this is true, is that most poor countries around the world are poor because of Western colonialism. And so if you believe the default state of the world is like good economies with jobs, then you explain why countries in Latin America and Africa and South Asia have such terrible economies because they happen to experience this harm of Western colonialism. Otherwise they would be somewhere at the default. Right. And if that's your background assumption, you're.
- [16:43]
B
Owed a job by the west, then you're owed. And you should tear down the situation. Yeah, absolutely right. That's certainly true.
- [16:48]
A
How would you address that? Like, how would you actually persuade someone that's just assumed that their whole lives that that's not actually how the world has worked?
- [16:55]
B
I mean, if they're open to the argument. Yeah. And they're open to history and they're open to fact.
- [17:01]
A
Yeah.
- [17:01]
B
I mean, the fact is that the default state of humanity was extraordinary poverty for the vast majority of human history. And then Starting in about 1800, there was a massive increase in innovation, human wealth. It began in the west, it was spread elsewhere by the West. Countries that have institutions that work in terms of private property and free markets, those were institutions that were largely grafted on by European countries through the process of colonialism. I mean, the attempt to treat colonialism as a pure evil without any sort of upsides at all is ignorant. India is a democracy because of British colonialism. That's just a reality. And you can make the argument that British colonialism was wrong. You can try to make a moral argument that the Brits never should have been there. But to pretend that colonialism didn't have some beneficial effects for the people who are now living in those countries. Right. Especially who are now living. At the time, the people who are there were feeling the upside and the downside. Now colonialism has ended. And so what you're really now feeling is mostly the upside because the idea is those people are no longer there. So you're going to have to answer why British colonialism is responsible for whatever failings you're experiencing in a former British colony. Algeria is going to have to explain why 50 years after the French left, Algeria is still an impoverished mess. Is that because of French colonialism?
- [18:17]
A
They would say it's the legacy.
- [18:18]
B
Well, I mean, and that's always the easiest argument, but the question is going to be how do you fix it? So how do you fix it? You going to go attack France? What exactly is the. Let's assume for a second that that's even true. Okay, I don't think it's true, but let's assume that's true. Let's assume that it's all the legacy of history and bad things happening in the past. What is your mechanism for self correcting now? Again, this is where the false diagnosis ends with a sort of bad medicine. If the false diagnosis is the west is responsible for all these problems, then the medicine is that we should basically sack the west and take all their stuff. Right, but that obviously is why the diagnosis is wrong.
- [18:55]
A
Yeah, or the diagnosis among many post colonial nations has been the west is evil, therefore we're going to do anything that's the opposite of the west, whether that's communism or Islamic theocracy. But in practice, you know, the, the, their case studies, you know, look at Meiji Restoration era Japan, right? You have Japan, which was a third world country. Everyone was a peasant, you know, as late as the 1850s. And then there was a coup and the people in charge made a decision to just replicate everything that Germany and Britain were doing. And by 1890 they're a powerhouse in Asia. And this is what enables them to conquer half of Asia a few, a few decades later is just by copying Western institutions.
- [19:37]
B
Essentially you see that particularly in the economic sphere in Southeast Asia where you have countries that were dictatorships and backwaters and they copied American style capitalism as much as they could. This particularly true in places like Singapore. And suddenly they're just generating, I mean Singapore has no natural resources, like none of the. And suddenly they're generating extraordinary GDP per capita. Well, that's not for no reason. I mean, that's because if you just as in real life for individuals, if you find people who are successful and then you actually mimic what they do to become successful, you are likely to become more successful. That's also true for countries and civilizations.
- [20:10]
A
Right, but it requires something that's difficult for a lot of people. Which is admitting that foreigners have a better system in any way than they do. It just goes against the natural human urgent of in group chauvinism, basically. But if so it's kind of a, it's a bit of a puzzle and a trap for the post colonial nations of the world to find a way essentially to frame Western institutions, rebrand them so that they're palatable to a home audience. But what in essence you're doing is copying. That's really the only way.
- [20:44]
B
This is why you'll see people kind of retcon history. Democracy was always part of our, of our history going back 5,000 years. Well, was it though? Like, like how much was it, you know, or, or we used to have trade, we had commerce. Right. This place was just glorious before. Was it really. Was really that great? Because the answer is pretty much every place on earth sucked circa about 1780. It was pretty terrible. Pretty much everywhere.
- [21:05]
A
Yeah. And I think people assume that just like everywhere was conquered or made a colony by the West. It's actually not true. So there are, you know, if you actually want to be rational about looking at history, you could look at a place like Ethiopia. Never colonized by a western country, I mean briefly occupied by the Italians during World War II. But throughout its whole thousands of years of history, it was never made a colony either by Arabs or by Europeans. And yet it suffers the same kind of third world poverty and dysfunction that we see in the neighboring countries. And then if you look at the Caribbean, the longest standing colony in the world is Puerto Rico, technically a commonwealth, which is really a rebrand of colony. But Puerto Rico, and I'm half Puerto Rican, I know this is controversial to say from an emotional point of view, but factually, it's not controversial to say that Puerto Rico, by any measure of human well being, did better than all of the similar countries that were given independence. Cuba's a mess, Dominican Republic was a mess and so forth. Haiti is certainly Haiti, goes without saying. So the picture, if you actually look at it and detach what I understand the humiliation of having foreigners come into your country and foreigners that are more advanced than you technologically and having to absorb the humiliation that your people that you've thought of as the greatest actually aren't. I mean, this is an incredibly difficult thing for most human beings to take in. But if you're actually being rational about the historical evidence, the truth is that you really can't blame colonialism anymore for the dysfunction of many countries around the world. And you're not actually doing any favors to people in those countries by giving them the easy out. Because no one is coming to save those countries, really. I mean, there's foreign aid we could talk about, but no one is coming to save those countries systematically, except for from within. And the only way to do that is again to find some way to rebrand the Western institutions of free markets, honest government, property rights, all these things that have brought the west into, into abundance and somehow rebrand them in a way that's palatable for a home population.
- [23:23]
B
And, and I think that you see certain countries that do try to do that. Again, I have no objection to people kind of doing a bit of myth making in order to get the institutions. Exactly. If that's what it requires to make people's lives better and to get those institutions put in place, that's all right. I mean, we can live with that.
- [23:37]
A
Yeah.
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B
But I think that what we cannot live with is the idea that the institutions themselves, things like free markets and constitutional republicanism and those sorts of things, are inherently bad and responsible for all the world's ills, because that's just a load of crap.
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A
Tell me about your move from California to Florida.
- [23:54]
B
So I live my entire life in California with the exception of three years at Harvard Law. And then it just got worse and worse in terms of the sort of living situation we lived in a fairly decent area. When we went out in the mornings to take our kids to school, we'd go out on the street, there'd be people with needles in their arms, literally lying in the gutter. You couldn't take your kids on the walk in the neighborhood without being concerned that somebody who was schizophrenic or a drug addict might confront you. There are high rates of break ins in our neighborhood. And then I'd been saying to my wife for a while, this is not livable. We are paying a lot of money to live in a state, state that really does not care about us very much. And so one of the things, I mean, one factor in that actually was that I wanted to get a concealed carry permit. I get a lot of death threats. I have 24. 7 security. I've had 24. 7 security effectively for the last 10 years or so. So my kids, I don't think my kids have ever known a time when we didn't have 24. 7 security because my oldest is 11. And you know, I went to the LAPD station because you have to like apply for a CCW in la and they said, you know, make sure that you bring all your death Threats. Okay, you asked for it. So I walked in, use it with like a 5 inch binder that was just filled with death threats. And they said, well, but nobody's acted on any of these. And I was like, well, I thought.
- [25:09]
A
You know what means, right?
- [25:11]
B
Like, I thought that was the purpose of me having, like, so if they do, then I can do something after.
- [25:15]
A
They kill me, I can get the gun.
- [25:16]
B
Yeah, exactly. And I said. And they said, well, you know, but I said, well, people have before. Like, there was the. The FBI literally arrested a guy who was, I think, up in Oregon who was threatening me. He ended up sending a threat, thank God, to Donald Trump Jr. I say thank God because that's when the Secret Service got involved and the guy got arrested. He went to jail for like three years. But he, when they arrested him in his house, he had, aside from pictures of Hitler and copies of Mein Kampf, he had like body armor. He had, he had a rifle, he had a map that was like down to California. He was like, pretty ready to go. And so I said this to the lap. I said, yeah, right. But the FBI caught him. Like, okay, now I'm just in like a Kafka novel. Like, it's ridiculous. So if you threaten me, I can't do anything because it's just a threat. And if I tell you that there was a person who legitimately was going to try to kill me and my family, you tell me it's okay because he got caught. So what exactly is the. Is the hole in the system where I can get a gun so that if somebody comes to my house, I can shoot them like that, or I'm out with my, my kids and confronted. I can defend myself. So, you know, all of that kind of came to a head in 2020 with the multiple whammy of COVID which was psychotic in California. I mean, totally crazy. You could not go to the beach. You couldn't go to like an. I remember we drove past like Mulholland overpass, The, the overlook on Mulholland. And they blocked off the Overlook, which was literally just like a turnout on Mulholland Drive. Like, people are going to go up there and just start having Covid orgies up on, up on Mulholland Drive. You can take your kids to the park. So it was that. And then I think the breaking point for my wife was when they were like, but if you're rioting, it's fine. Because then the riots broke out. They burned half a Melrose and the. And we could hear the helicopters over, over Our house again, in not a terrible area of the Valley. And they're hitting the Foot Locker and people were hitting the cvs and my wife was like, okay, we might be able to visit Florida now. And so we moved to Florida and Florida has been much better. Florida does not tolerate this sort of bullshit. I mean, Florida Governor DeSantis, you know, has made clear that if. If you are driving a car and rioters around you and you are concerned that they're going to stop you and do harm to you, you should keep driving. And guess what? Riders don't surround people in cars anymore because that would be a very stupid move. And it turns out that I don't even need a ccw. It turns out it's a constitutional carry state, so I did get a CCW in Florida. So with my wife and we go shooting regularly and she's better than I am, but, you know, that's been helpful. There is a sort of more free and open atmosphere in Florida, despite the fact that obviously the politics are very different. But I have a lot of Democrat friends in Florida and they don't feel as though it's like, oh, my God, we're living in a fascist state here in Florida. You actually can have more open conversations in Florida than you could culturally in California. I'm not worried that there's going to be a use of anti discrimination law to remove nonprofit status from my kids school. That was something that I was deeply worried about in California. I thought that was the next step of sort of the anti discrimination revolution.
- [28:04]
A
It was a religious school.
- [28:05]
B
Yeah. I sent my kids to an orthodox Jewish day school. So also Florida has universal school vouchers, which means that, you know, they're subsidizing religious education in the state of Florida, which meant that my sisters could move, which, which is great. So we went from, you know, being us, my parents in la, to us, my parents, my wife's parents, two of my sisters and their kids all in like a mile and a half radius in Florida. So that. That's quite wonderful.
- [28:29]
A
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- [29:39]
B
So my view on this is that it is one thing to say that there are people who are not going to abide by the statistical norm with regard to sexual behavior. This has been true for literally all of human history. People who feel sexually marginalized by, say, the family structure by male, female, child. It is another thing to say that the sort of patriarchy must be exploded, the traditional family structure must be laid low. And we have to treat all of this with a certain level of moral relativism, that every family structure is equivalently utilitarian, useful in sort of traditional religious parlance, moral. That is where things run into headwinds, or that churches themselves need to be destroyed because churches are propagating terrible feeling about the sexually marginalized. And so people who I label the lechers, and this, of course, does not refer to every single person who is of an alternative sexual orientation. It's people who really believe that family structure is inherently demeaning, that family structure is inherently an indoctrinative institution, that the churches themselves are promoting a sort of sexual indoctrination that is crippling to the human spirit. When you do that, what you're doing is destroying the fundamental institution for all of human society. And I think that there are a lot of people who have decided to join that movement without actually understanding what it is that they're joining. They think they're arguing for one thing. And actually the leaders of the movement are arguing for something quite different. Again, I think that's true for a lot of these movements. As you mentioned, some of the people who are protesting Gaza think they're protesting Gaza. And some of the people who are protesting Gaza think that they're protesting, you know, the entire West. I think that there are some people who are marching in, you know, trans pride parades saying that males should play female sports, who they just know somebody who has gender identity disorder, and they feel bad for that person, and they're coming to the wrong conclusion. And then there are some people who are saying, no, no, no, the entire male, female binary is Wrong evil in a straight structure that is an evolutionary overhang and needs to be completely laid waste. And that's what I'm talking about when I talk about people who threaten the system. It's one thing to say we're marginalized, there's a center. There shouldn't be restrictions on our behavior here on the marginalized kind of orbit. But we don't want to destroy the center of gravity. If you destroy the center of gravity, then you get complete anarchy and atomism. And then there are the people who actually want to destroy the center of gravity and create atomism.
- [32:06]
A
So what's the mechanism whereby this, these kind of ideas spreading leads to the decline of a civilization? Is it just birth rate? Is it a birth rate issue primarily, or is it something else?
- [32:17]
B
No, I think it's a birthrate issue, but I think it's also a sense of identity itself. So Carl Truman, who's a philosopher at University of Utah, he has a great book called the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. And what he argues is that the traditional way that people in the west, and largely all over the world considered themselves in relation to the rest of the world is that your identity was not purely internal. Your identity was a mix of what you feel internally and also how you behave in the world and how people react to you. That what you are is a mix of individual and also communal being. And so that means that you abide by certain rules, you perform certain duties. How you are in the world is what you do in the world, and that's part of you. And gradually, as we have sort of reduced the individual to the feelings that we have inside, we've now demanded that the world conform to our expectations of what it ought to be. And that has some broader scale ramifications. If you believe that you are. If you're a man, you believe that you're a woman, and the rest of the world won't mirror your prescriptions, then that means the rest of the world is evil. And it might mean that you're being quote, unquote, erased. And that means that people are actually trying to, quote, unquote, genocide you. And that means that you might be justified in doing violence to them. If, if you take that sort of model and you apply it across the board, I feel that on the inside I am a brilliant, rich person and society is not conforming to my internal desires. That means society has done something deeply wr. You can see how that goes directly to an envious scavenger mentality. Because the idea is that society has Done me the wrong. It is not that, you know, everybody struggles with challenges. It's not that most of those challenges can be addressed by my personal behavior or by coming to some sort of agreement with the people around me. It turns into the systems have to be destroyed because they disagree with the thing that I feel inside.
- [33:55]
A
Right. The way someone once put it is that like your identity is a negotiation between what you want to be and what the world will let you be. I think that's right, which I think in practice is true. But your examples, it seems they're mostly to do with the kind of trans person that would make the maximal kind of demand on his or her social or their social world, but wouldn't necessarily apply to like an average gay or lesbian person that wants to be able to get married and have that stamp of appropriate stamp of approval and the privileges that come with that.
- [34:32]
B
So I do think that it applies with regard to whether the state grants a stamp of approval. So I've never objected to the idea that people should be able to arrange their lives in the way that they want without the government intervening. The question of whether the society itself grants a kind of special imprimatur for male, female, child, that is the core, that is the core of all civilization. If you're not granting some special recognition that that is the thing that people generally should be aspiring to, it doesn't mean every person is going to achieve that aspiration or is capable of achieving that aspir or even wants to achieve that aspiration. But if that's not the norm, then you end up with a civilization that does have declining birth rates and people who do not believe it is their duty to get married and have kids, or that it is better morally to, to actually do their duty and have kids. And this, this actually does have extraordinary ramifications in societies that are wealthy. So in non wealthy societies, people get married and have kids or just have a lot of kids because it is actually an economic necessity to have a lot of kids. And what we have seen now over the course of the last century is that as countries get richer, people have fewer kids. And the reason for that is because kids no longer are an economic asset. They're a massive economic drain. They cost a lot of money. They are a giant pain in the ass. Listen, they're wonderful. I have four of them. But the only people in America who are having kids these days at above replacement rates are people who feel a religious duty to actually have kids. And in fact, the only country in the west that has above Replacement level rates of fertility is Israel. Right. And the reason for that is because there is a. An actual real norm in Israel that people have lots of kids, and that means that it is embedded in sort of every cultural institution of Israeli society. You can go to Tel Aviv, which is as secular as San Francisco, and.
- [36:07]
A
It might be gayer than San Francisco.
- [36:08]
B
It may. And Tel Aviv, the average number of children per household is three. Right. They are well above replacement rates in Tel Aviv. Why? Well, because the norm is that people get married and have kids.
- [36:21]
A
But these two things, they seem separate issues. Right. Because in Tel Aviv, presumably the, the gay population of Tel Aviv, which is substantial, I presume they're not having kids.
- [36:31]
B
Right. I mean, some are adopting kids, some are artificially inseminating. But the ivf. But is it. But yes.
- [36:37]
A
I mean, the heterosexual majority are having lots of kids.
- [36:40]
B
Yes.
- [36:40]
A
And that's where you get that replacement rate from. So these two.
- [36:45]
B
But I'm saying they can, they can live in, in coherent harmony so long as you recognize that the societal aspiration should be male, female, child. That's, again, that does not mean not.
- [36:56]
A
A matter of aspiration, but orientation. Right. Because if you're, if you're gay, you're oriented, you're oriented that way, what does it matter whether you aspire to. Not to have kids with a woman? Like. Well, I mean, we're not going to enjoy that.
- [37:09]
B
So here we get into sort of the complicated reality of sexual behavior. The complicated reality of sexual behavior is that it's not all black and white. There's a lot of gray. And what I mean by that is that the amount of change in sexual orientation for this generation is wild.
- [37:25]
A
Right.
- [37:25]
B
By pulling out of.
- [37:27]
A
Of change measured by what people say.
- [37:30]
B
Yes. Self reporting. Yes.
- [37:32]
A
Self reporting measured by what people do. I. I don't think so.
- [37:35]
B
I mean, I agree with you, but.
- [37:36]
A
What people, especially for men, sexuality, is fairly black and white.
- [37:38]
B
I mean, I agree with you on that. And that's what the statistics show. However, the question is, if you have people who are not gay who are experimenting with these other forms of identity rather than aspiring to man, woman, child and taking up your duty, that does make a difference. If you have 20%, 25% of your population that is now identifying as LGBTQ, that is going to be a very different society as far as childbearing and rearing than a society that identifies as 2% LGBTQ. And so that, again, goes back to that core sense of identity.
- [38:07]
A
Yeah. In a way, I translate what you're talking about in My language as just the status, the social status of being married declining. Yes, Essentially the social status of aspiring to marriage and kids, which is like, for me, it's a very important thing. But the status of that has declined. It's become an optional capstone at the end of what life is really about, which is like your single career. Whereas it used to be the starting block from which you build your life. Right. You get married young and you and your, your wife basically figure it out together.
- [38:46]
B
Yes.
- [38:47]
A
Right now it's like I got to figure it out all before I even.
- [38:50]
B
Think about what society celebrates and upholds is a thing that more people are going. I mean, if you subsidize the thing, you get more of it. If you don't subsidize the thing, you get less of it. Right. And so societal standards do matter in this respect, which is why, for example, again, I've never been in favor of any regulation on consensual sexual activity between adults. But I do believe that if the state has an interest in childbearing and child rearing, then there should be a special status reserved to male, female child.
- [39:15]
A
So what would you say to the argument, though, that the societies around the world, which go pedal to the metal in that direction, namely like Islamic societies, are by and large not doing better than we are, but there's a huge social norm around marriage and kids and conservative.
- [39:33]
B
We're using the wrong measure, right? So I mean, it depends on what measure we're using. If the problem that we're talking about is fertility, right? I mean, you're saying like the whole package. Whole. Maybe it's a package, right? Maybe, maybe the whole thing. Maybe it's either your society that is highly economically advanced with, you know, a lot of rights and no kids and you're dead within two generations, or the alternative is a society that doesn't accept any of those things, but has eight kids, a family. And I'm rejecting that. I don't think that's actually true. I think that, I think that you can in fact have, if not all of it, most of it. I think that there, Israel being a good example of this, you can have a society that is extraordinarily highly productive, very innovative, rights based, but also has lots of kids. And that's why I'm using Tel Aviv as the example and not say Beit Shemesh, right? Which is a very orthodox area where everybody's having 12 kids. Because what I'm saying is that in a society that values children and that values having lots of kids as Part of your cultural heritage. And that says that your life aspiration should be to have lots of kids. And that's a really important thing. And we all orient. Now, it's possible that in the west, one of the reasons possibly that you're seeing this in Israel also is because of the constant sense of threat, meaning that societies that feel that they are under threat want to preserve themselves.
- [40:44]
A
Yeah. And I'm sure, I mean, I've talked to many Jewish friends over the years. There's a sense of my grandparents, they almost exterminated all Jews in the camps. How are we going to let ourselves dwindle as a result?
- [40:55]
B
I mean, I'll tell you that in my community that the pregnancy rate certainly went up after October 7th. There was a lot of families saying, like, there's an obligation to make sure that the light is carried forward. And so you have to do that.
- [41:06]
A
So how do you recreate that? Or an equivalently strong force in America where we fear, we feel no real threat outside of 9, 11.
- [41:14]
B
Right. Well, I mean, I think that part of this is us being ignorant about foreign affairs. I mean, the reality is that we are living, Americans live free of history. We've been living free of history basically since the end of World War II. Right. We felt an indirect impact of the Cold War, but domestically, not particularly a lot. You know, our soldiers felt it, obviously overseas, our allies felt it. But I think that you are going to see a revivification of birthrights in place that really are under threat because they're going to realize that if they don't have babies, then it's going to be a massive problem. And maybe that's one of the things that I can awaken people to, hopefully with the book, which is that the threat isn't always just a gigantic, you know, threat like the USSR that's on your borders and or that's threatening you, that actually, if you don't do it right, the threat is internal. That actually drops in fertility rate, combined with an inability to pass on your values to your kids means that this all goes away. But that's definitely a harder argument than being able to look across a hill and see people who are coming to kill you and your family.
- [42:12]
A
There have been some cases I might be getting the facts wrong here, but I think it was Mongolia where the leader instituted this policy of giving any woman that had more than four children or something got to visit the palace and got like an order of esteem and this kind of thing just to try to raise this social status of having lots of children. I don't know how much it worked and certainly not really something.
- [42:41]
B
They're trying to do something like that in Hungary. Right. They're saying if you have more than four kids, then you're tax free. Which by the way, sounds amazing. My wife and I will have kid number five immediately if we can do that. But the truth is that again, I don't think that people in the west are having or not having kids mainly for economic reasons. I think one of the things that's being purveyed that I think is false is the idea that, well, you know, if we just had broader welfare systems, people would have more kids like that. There is zero evidence to adduce to that effect. One of the things I thought that was interesting along these lines, I saw that Singapore actually has a policy where they subsidize grandparents to live near grandkids, which I think is actually quite an interesting idea. That again, having kids is hard. Having a strong social fabric to support families, make it easier to have kids is actually really important. I mean, that's something we've done in our life. And we have both sets of grandparents live within a mile of us.
- [43:30]
A
Yeah, they're nature's babysitters, right?
- [43:32]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [43:32]
A
And the fact that we know so few people live by their grandparents, I think it. Was it Ross Douthat or was it. Maybe it was.
- [43:40]
B
Could have been Tim Carney maybe.
- [43:41]
A
Yeah. That did a whole article in the Atlantic which is about the numbers of how few people live around their grandparents anymore. And. But you go to places like Japan, it's very normal for houses to be constructed with the grandparents house outside. Now, obviously those countries have massive and worse birth rate issues too. Which is something I wanted to ask you is like, what. What advice would you have for those countries? The countries that are just experiencing a. A birth rate crater but are more hostile to immigration than America is so plausible. Can't really plausibly solve their issues by immigration either. Are they just screwed?
- [44:17]
B
I mean. Yes. I mean, you're going to have more babies or you're going to radically cut your welfare state or you're going to be screwed. I mean, there really are no third choices. There's no easy way out of that. Either you're going to have to become significantly more austere in your fiscal capacity or you're going to have to have more babies. You're going to have to import people. Those are really the only three choices. There's no fourth choice.
- [44:38]
A
So let's talk about Trump a little bit. You've described yourself in the past as sometimes Trump as opposed to never Trump. Is there anything Trump has done in the past few months that has crossed a line for you? And is there anything that he might do or could do in the next three years where you would say, I just, I can't support him anymore?
- [45:02]
B
I mean, it's kind of a weird thing to, you know, be in a position we only get to support or not support a president, you know, once every four years. And so what. What difference does it make whether I support or don't support him, you know, except rhetorically between elections? Right. It's not like every day we have a referendum on the president. Polling numbers don't actually matter, especially for a second term president. There are things that I've talked about every day on the show that I disapprove of him doing. I've been very critical of his tariff regime. I think tariffs are terrible economics. I think that he does not have the emergency powers to do them. I think it's bad foreign policy. I think he's making himself incredibly vulnerable on the basis of what he has done with tariffs, economically speaking. And the great danger to the success of his administration is economic stagnation or recession or depression. I've been somewhat critical of the way that he has used executive power, barring further developments, removing Mike Pompeo security team, for example, those sorts of things seem petty to me.
- [46:00]
A
Irresponsible. Beyond petty.
- [46:01]
B
Yes.
- [46:02]
A
Given that Iran wants to kill all these people.
- [46:04]
B
Yeah, agreed. I think that, you know, one thing about Trump, the way I've described Trump before, is that Trump is heterodox, but responsive. And what I mean is that he pushes up until he, until he hits his limits, and then the limits push back and he adjusts. So people have described this in the markets as taco. Right. That it's Trump always chickens out. And I don't think that's right. I think that it's most like Trump tries a thing and if it doesn't work or he hits a wall, then he untries the thing. And I think that you will see that with regard to some of the tariffs. He's already done that a lot with the tariffs. But I think that you're seeing that with regard to his use of the National Guard, for example. So this week he shifted his rhetoric about where he was going to put the National Guard. Right. He said that he was going to first put it in Chicago, and then he ran into a fairly significant legal issue, which is the Posse Comitatus Act. You're really not supposed to use the National Guard to perform state level or local level law enforcement without the activation of the governor of the state as a sort of permission structure. Otherwise it's the federal government enforcing local law. You don't want that. So he, instead of going to a blue state where the governor is saying no, he's not talking about going to New Orleans and Shreveport where the governor is going to say yes, which I think is actually quite smart because it wrong foots all of his political opponents. Right. There's a much more solid legal basis if the governor calls out the National Guard in coordination with Trump to actually go and stand on street corners to prevent crime through a sort of broken windows theory. If, if he does that, then it's going to be very difficult for Democrats to claim he's only doing this in blue states where he's only doing this because he wants a military takeover of areas he doesn't control. And so I think that that's quite smart. But the best way the guardrails for Trump have held, I will say that I think that the, the guardrails over time are bending. I don't think that's because of Trump purely. I think they bent under Obama, I think they bent more under Trump, I think they bent way more under Biden, and I think they're continuing to bend under Trump again. And by that I mean the extraordinary expansion of executive power at the expense of the legislative branch, that just continues apace. And it seems to me the only way to solve that new rules have to be set and need to be agreed to by both sides. My friend Jeremy Boreing made a suggestion that I think is quite brilliant, actually. So right now, Republicans hate the filibuster. Right? They hate it because it's preventing them from doing the things they want. With a pure 53 seat majority in the Senate, when Democrats are in charge, they hate the filibuster and they threaten to nuke it.
- [48:24]
A
Yeah.
- [48:24]
B
And so what you get is this sort of gentleman's agreement not to kill the filibuster. But in every election cycle, the threat of the other side killing the filibuster is the reason you have to get out and vote.
- [48:33]
A
The most hilarious thing is that when Democrats don't benefit from the filibuster, they remind everyone of its racial origins, of its racist history, and then when they benefit from it, they use it as.
- [48:44]
B
Much as possible, 100%. And so what Jeremy suggested, and I think this is right, is that the Senate Majority Leader should go to the Democrats, he should say we need a constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster permanently in the Constitution of the United States. And you have 12 months to do this. And if you do not do this in 12 months, I'm nuking it, because incentives. And if we are going to actually abide by these rules, one thing has become clear, the gentleman's agreement that sort of existed for much of our lives in the United States, that we're not going to use Chekhov's gun, even though it's hanging right there over the mantelpiece. That's going away very, very quickly. And now it's just a matter of time until somebody pulls down the gun, and then the other side will, well, if you're using the gun, I'm certainly going to use the gun. And all it took was Barack Obama saying pen and phone for everybody to just start scribbling executive orders. It took, you know, people talking about national emergencies for racism, for Donald Trump to be like, hey, national emergency for. For trade deficits. And so, you know, that. That is absolutely concerning. I don't think that the Supreme. I think we're also one. Chekhov's gone away from somebody saying of either party to the Supreme Court, you know, do something about it. Like, okay, you said it, now do something about it. Trump has abided by the Supreme Court's opinions thus far. And again, I think that that actually, for all the talk about Trump is a rule breaker and a rule violator. It's. It's actually harder to name things that he's explicitly violated that a court has told him that he is not allowed to do after they told him he's not allowed to do it, than cases in which Joe Biden did that. Right. Joe Biden was told, you can't relieve student loan debt. And Joe Biden was like, well, you know, I'm just going to find seven new ways to relieve student loan debt. But somebody eventually is going to breach that, and that's kind of the last barrier. And then things get kind of hellish.
- [50:19]
A
If you think about the difference between Trump's first term and Trump's second, it seems to me that basically the worry and the critique was more or less true, namely that in Trump's first term, he had all these people around him. Obviously, the media, which was biased against him, called all of them terrible Trump cronies. And, you know, people like H.R. mcMaster, Jared Kushner, John Bolton, on and on, were.
- [50:46]
B
On the legal side, it was really like Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr. Right. Bill Barb.
- [50:50]
A
No, they were all abused in the media. But in fact, they were all pretty responsible people. And I think they told Trump quite frequently, no, you can't do that, or here's a reason you shouldn't. I think that that's just a fact and, and it was a media mis portrayal. But I do think the people he surrounded himself this with this time are one or two notches, at minimum, more conciliatory towards him and more like yes men and yes women. Do you agree with that and do you think that that's had consequences for the output of policy between Trump 1 and Trump 2?
- [51:25]
B
Yes, I mean, I definitely agree with that. I think that's true. I think that President Trump saw those people, you know, in the interim period as obstacles. And so he decided that he just wasn't going to have that anymore. And so he was going to put people in place who are mostly going to figure out what is the best way to effectuate what I want, as opposed to coming back and saying, maybe what you want is not good for you or good for the country or good legally. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that it's clear that that's happening and that's why everything has been ending up in the courts lately. But no one, thus far, neither he nor his advisors, has just said to the court, okay, you've told me not that I can't do a thing. I'm just going to continue to do it.
- [52:00]
A
What would you count as Trump's biggest policy win thus far?
- [52:05]
B
Well, I think the wiping out of DEI at the, @ the federal level has been an extraordinary policy win. I think that the shutting of the southern border obviously is a quick and easy policy win for him. And we went from a national crisis to basically zero at the southern border overnight, thus destroying the entire narrative that you need a new piece of legislation in order to shut the southern border. I think it was a triumph for him to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities. I think that that was a ringing endorsement of a peace through strength foreign policy that many of the people who believed that they were speaking for Trump thought that he wouldn't do. And the sort of isolationist side of the Trumpling. So I think those would be kind of my top three achievements by President Trump.
- [52:44]
A
Have we reached peak wokeness?
- [52:49]
B
For the moment, yes. But I think the next form of wokeness is going to come in a different form. I think we reached peak. We certainly reached peak. Call it Black Lives Matter wokeness. I think that that's over and I think it's going to be very hard to Put that back in that genie back in the bottle. I think that when it comes to the trans issue, I think that we've reached peak that I think that the next form of wokeness that's going to be virulent is what might be termed economic wokeness, the sort of grievance culture that says that I'm poor, I have affordability problems. Zoran Mamdani is the solution. Kill the billionaires, people who are getting shot on the streets. If they're a healthcare executive, they deserve it. And that's going to cross a lot of party lines because there is a real horseshoe thing going on between the populist right and the populist left on this particular matter. And you are seeing a sort of weird racialist wokeness that's happening in response on the right, a sort of grievance culture that's been happening on the right where a grain of truth is magnified into an entire silo of falsehood. The grain of truth being that there have been laws on the books that have discriminated in effect against white people or against Christians. I think that there's a lot of truth to that. That's not a grand truth, that's actually true. I mean, if you have a zero sum game with regards to college admissions, for example, and it's benefiting certain races over others, then white people suffer from that. Or if the Obama administration is going after the little sisters of the poor, that's religious discrimination and that's a problem. But the jump from that to sort of the entire system, all systems are oriented in this way and are irredeemable and must be fundamentally torn down to the ground. That's, you know, again, I think an aspect that is a problem.
- [54:32]
A
Okay, I want to talk to you a little bit about an area where I anticipate we might disagree, although I'm not. I've never heard you speak about it or read what you have to say about it. What is your view on the Second Amendment and its importance?
- [54:46]
B
I'm a big Second Amendment supporter.
- [54:47]
A
Okay. So if I were to give my perspective on this, here's what I would say. I would say if you look at the origins of the first and the Second Amendment and there's a great book on, on this called the, the. What's it called? To Keep. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Yeah. Origins of an Anglo American Right. And he looks back at 1600s England and he says, basically what you had in the English Civil wars is the factions, Protestant and Catholic, when each one came to power they did two things immediately started putting the other people in jail for political speech and started taking their guns. And then the whole thing would reverse and it was incredibly bloody. It was a total mess. The founding fathers see this and they say, okay, well, if we're making a New England, we're not going to repeat all those mistakes. Rule number one, can't put people in jail for what they say. Rule number two, you can't take people's guns.
- [55:41]
B
Right.
- [55:42]
A
Now, if I look around the world today, it's just so obvious that the First Amendment is highly relevant. Like, you can just open the newspaper any day in the UK and they're literally putting Grandma, like, in. They're taking her to the police station for a rude Facebook post. And it's so obvious that our societies are. Those societies are suffering for a lack of a First Amendment. It's really not obvious to me that they're suffering for a lack of a Second Amendment. Because the way state capacity has changed over the past several hundred years, governments don't actually fear their citizens, like getting a bunch of guns and overthrowing them in the west anymore. And so it seems like the real consequence of the Second Amendment is just those very tragic incidents where a mentally ill person walks into a Walmart, buys a gun and like shoots something up. That to me is like a more obvious consequence of the Second Amendment than anything I can point to going wrong in, like, in our peer countries. And so from my point of view, it's become obsolete and it should be a state's issue.
- [56:47]
B
Okay, so as far as the. Well, if it were a state's issue, I mean, it effectively is kind of a state's issue. Meaning that the Second Amendment was written to prevent Congress from legislating on this matter. And so the federal government has, through the incorporation clause, essentially taken the ability of states to regulate on all these matters. The First Amendment was originally a federal matter too. And you actually had some fairly significant speech and religious restrictions in all the states at the very beginning. And then it was all federalized via the 14th Amendment, which again, I think is legally dubious. But if you're going to talk about, like, the importance from. There's kind of the practical perspective and the de novo perspective. So on a practical perspective, there's some 300 million guns in the United States. They're not going away, people are not surrendering.
- [57:31]
A
I don't disagree with that.
- [57:32]
B
And so all the talk about, you know, we can regulate them out of existence. They couldn't even regulate them out of existence in Australia. Right. They Had a full gun buyback program. And I think one third of the guns ended up being turned in or bought back. And so that is what it is. So the question is now what do you do? So those guns are in circulation. And I'll get to sort of the philosophical perspective in a second. But the pragmatic perspective is you have all these guns in circulation. Can people defend themselves? Because bad guys are going to get guns. With all those guns in circulation, can people defend themselves from bad guys? This is obviously a very highly relevant issue in my Jewish community where pretty much everybody in my sh. Knows how to shoot and carries. Right. We're down in Florida, great state. And so, you know, we, we are all walking around armed virtually all the time. And I'm not worried that any of us are going to shoot each other because none of us are crazy. You know. Should there be restrictions with regard to mental health checks and background checks? Yes. I mean with regard to if somebody's had in a severe mental illness, that person should not be able to buy a gun from a federally licensed firearms dealer, for example. I'm not saying that I want everyone to be equally capable of buying a gun. And then we get into specific gun policies like the so called gun show loophole, what that means, should the government have a giant gun registry, is that a danger? But on a pragmatic level, it seems to me that the gun control legislation that has been attempted across the country has been overwhelmingly failed. It has not actually succeeded in either stopping mass shootings or even stopping individual acts of murder and violence. The number one correlative between crime and guns is crime, meaning that areas that are low crime and have lots of guns. It ain't the guns. Guns don't shoot themselves. Vermont has extremely high levels of gun ownership and very, very low levels of crime. Chicago has significant gun laws and obviously very, very significant levels of crime. And so, you know, on a pregnant.
- [59:24]
A
They're all illegal guns anyway, right?
- [59:26]
B
Exactly. I mean you can. Again, so if you start from the premise of these things are already in existence, then the issue almost becomes. Is weirdly moot. In the same way that if you acknowledge that the climate is already changing, that this kind of idea that let's just go back to pre industrialized England and it'll stop all climate change. It's like, that's stupid. We're not doing any of that. We can argue over how to mitigate. Right. We can't really and how to adapt. But it's very difficult to argue that we should like just eviscerate everything. We don't have a time machine. Okay? So that's sort of the pragmatic side of this. And so many of the gun laws that come up, it seems to me, are, are poorly thought out, do not achieve what they seek to achieve, and have downstream effects that are negative. Then there is the sort of de novo argument, right? So like we are coming up with the Constitution today in the United States. Should there be a Second Amendment, which is kind of a fun philosophical exercise with no actual real relevance? Because it ain't, as we just discussed, it ain't happening. The, the original basis for the Second Amendment is indeed twofold. One is self defense, like personal self defense, which is they're bad guys coming over the hill, you want to be able to shoot them. I think that, you know, exists for pretty much everybody. And you can see that countries that have very strict gun control, this actually becomes quite a problem. So in the aftermath of October 7, just to pick an example that I know pretty well, there's been significant loosening of gun control restrictions in Israel in order to make sure that citizens actually are armed because there are people who live nearby who want to kill them. And so the self defense actually becomes a major priority right there. And then there is the sort of original argument that, that Akhil Rita Maher is making, and I think that Jefferson made, which is that you're trying to deter government tyranny and the first move of any tyrannical government is to seize your guns. And again, I've made the argument that, I don't think that that argument is irrelevant at all, actually. I think that as we in this country start to delegate more and more and more power to the federal government, as we start to have stronger and stronger arguments that, that end in sort of violent rhetoric, you could, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a lot of Americans who believe that sometime in the next, say, five decades that there wouldn't be a government that might come to them at night with a gun and ask them to do something or force them to do something that is actually immoral. What we would consider to be unconstitutional, and one of the great deterrents is in our population for that. When people say, like Joe Biden used to say, well, we'll just send an F35, we'll just nuke it, say, well, or maybe what will actually happen is what has typically happened in situations like this, which is a negotiated settlement between an armed population and a government that wishes to cram down its policies on them.
- [61:58]
A
Are there any Positions that you have that you sense are unpopular with your fans but you stick to.
- [62:05]
B
I mean, sure. I mean, yeah.
- [62:07]
A
I mean, any ones that kind of piss off your audience when you mention them a little bit?
- [62:11]
B
Well, I mean, they're opinions that I think are, you know, very fraught on the right right now. Obviously, I'm extremely pro Israel. That one's come up a lot in the online space. My audience, I mean, they've been with me for 10 years. I don't think that they think any differently. So I don't think that's pissing off my audience. But there are certain parts of the right that are pissed. I've taken the position that we ought to keep funding Ukraine and its war against Russia. That was, for a time unpopular. And then President Trump came around to the same position. Now it's a more popular position. I continue to maintain an anti tariff position. It sort of depends on where the President is. If I'm at odds with the president, then the base is very much with the president. And so there's a good shot that I'm crossing the base in certain ways. You know, I, I've taken on a lot of people who are on, theoretically my side of the aisle. Some of those people have crossover with my audience. And so, you know, maybe my audience doesn't like that. Maybe my audience likes their opinion better than mine. But you can't, you can't really, the, the reason I think people listen is because it's an authentic viewpoint. I'm going to tell you what I think, and if you don't like what I think, that's certainly your prerogative. And you know, you can listen to more than one show or you cannot listen to my show, but I think that the mistake that too many people make is trying to follow wherever the crowd leads because, you know, the crowd can lead you to some pretty bad places.
- [63:27]
A
Exhibit A. Candace Owens.
- [63:30]
B
So, no comment.
- [63:36]
A
The Trump Ukraine topic is interesting because to me it solidifies the case that Putin really is a dangerous dictator. Because what are the odds that three of the past four US Presidents all tried to start off their term being friendly with Vladimir Putin? Bush went on the famous walk with him and Putin talked about his eyes.
- [64:04]
B
And saw his soul.
- [64:05]
A
Nelson talked about the little cross that his mother gave him or whatever. And by the end of Bush's term, Bush was like, this guy's a freaking maniac.
- [64:13]
B
He invaded Georgia.
- [64:14]
A
Yeah, yeah. Obama tries to start out with the reset button and that whole thing. By the end of Obama's term, Obama thinks he's a maniac. Trump. You know, we don't have to go into the history of Trump and Russia and everything that went along with that, but there was a widespread perception certain things just totally based on nothing and other things based on things.
- [64:37]
B
Trump said, well, he certainly wanted a friendlier relationship with.
- [64:40]
A
Clearly, he wanted a friendlier relationship with Putin. And now he's. He's like, this guy's a maniac. Like. And so what are the odds that it's, you know. Well, the. What's the common denominator here? The common denominator here is Putin can't be trusted and he's a dangerous dictator. Right. Like, what are the odds that just three different presidents of just nearly everything. Yeah.
- [65:01]
B
Yes.
- [65:01]
A
Right. So I think that in a way, the whole. And, you know, and no one thinks that Trump has an irrational bias against Putin. People only think it's the opposite. So if he's sour on Putin, clearly Putin's the problem. So I think, in a way, that the whole saga has solidified something for rational historians to cement as a fact, if it wasn't already obvious. Okay, final question. What do you think critics of you, and perhaps your book most misunderstand about what you're about? What critique of you strikes you as, like, the most common misconception of who Ben Shapiro is?
- [65:45]
B
So I think there are a few. I mean, the biggest one is that I'm a robot, right? Which is, if you ask my kids, I'm only half robot. I'm more like a cyborg than a robot. But it's, you know, this sort of idea that it's all mechanistic, that there's no feeling, that it's all. No empathy.
- [66:01]
A
That when your kids ask if you love them, you say, well, I've got oxytocin toast and firing.
- [66:05]
B
Right, right, exactly. That I actually have, like, job checklists at the end of the day, and if they haven't hit their marks, then they're expendable, that sort of thing. I think that one's up there. I think that there's a tendency on the part of people who are on the left who kind of have never listened to the show to lump everybody on the right together. So I remember that there was a. There's a movie called Zero Day, I believe the one with Robert De Niro on Netflix, and there's a commentator who is. Who's played by. Who's the guy from Downton Abbey. Dan. Anyway, the guy. Dan Stevens. Thank you. From Dan Stevens, from. From Fountain, from Downton Abbey. And that. That Character Dan. He, Dan Stevens described that character as Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro. And it's like, well, I mean that's like very different. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think it's pretty clear that he was modeling him on Tucker. I mean he was like wearing a flannel shirt and he's up against like a wooden wall and all these kind.
- [66:58]
A
Of claim to be models called by demons while sleeping in bed with his dogs and claim that UFOs are supernatural entities that have been here for 50,000 years. Under the.
- [67:08]
B
Yeah, I mean, but the sort of conflation of all right wing hosts are the same, right. Is deeply irritating to me because there are pretty significant differences. So that one irritates me because that's just rooted in a sort of baseline ignorance. And I will say similarly, the kind of Ben Shapiro destroys like he. And they read the sort of, you know, the headlines that will be. Be put out on YouTube or that we will, you know, the algorithm works in a certain way. We'll put those headlines out on YouTube. But they don't watch the video. And it's like, well, he must be just being, you know, nasty and cruel to people. I'm not aware of a single video actually in which I'm nasty or cruel to anybody. If you watch the quote unquote destroys videos, they're, they're actually quite conciliatory. They're usually generally decent discussions. I really try not to be insulting to anybody when I'm, when I'm talking to them. You know, I. So that, that one, that one kind of bothers me. But you know, overall, people are going to think what they're, they're going to think and you know, I'll deal with it. It's all right.
- [68:05]
A
All right. Ben Shapiro. The book is Lions and Scavengers, available everywhere. Thank you so much for coming on my show.
- [68:10]
B
Thanks for having me.