Well, I'm pleased today to be talking to Ben Shapiro

Ben I think really doesn't need an introduction at least not to most of you who will be there watching or listening to this given

That he's now one of the most recognized individuals on the american political

journalism scene in any case

Ben's an American Lawyer writer journalist and political commentator. He's written 10 books

The latest of which is the right side of history a reason and moral purpose made the West great

Which has become a number one New York Times bestseller. I think it's at number four right now

I

think Ben just mentioned to me that he sold about a hundred and fifty thousand copies since it was released and that was only a

Couple of weeks ago so that's going very well. He became the youngest nationally syndicated column in the u.s. At age 17

he's also one of the most recognized current commentators on the new media YouTube and

Podcasts serves as editor in chief for The Daily wire which he founded and is the host of the Ben Shapiro show

which runs daily on podcast and radio

He's managed to transform himself into a one-man media empire and it's quite the accomplishment done

He's also an extraordinarily interesting person

I think to fall Omaha to watch in his interactions with people publicly because he's an unbelievably sharp debater and one of the

Fastest verbally fastest people that I've ever met. So it's good. We're gonna talk about his book today

That's the right side of history. How reason and moral purpose made the West great and I can tell you right there

there's four reasons for social justice types to be irritated just if the

Just at there

What would you call it the daring of the title? So let's talk about it

Tell me about your book

The reason that I wrote the book is because in 2016, I kind of looked around and

For the record I didn't vote for either of the presidential candidates in 2016

Neither of them met my minimum standard to be President based on the evidence and I looked at

The sort of attitude that had changed in America used to be that we'd have elections and they were really fraught people were angry

Other people were upset each other but the rage seemed almost out of control in the last election cycle in 2016

I was personally receiving enormous number of death threats for my positions on

Politics I was receiving enormous amount of hatred from the the alt-right

I know that there are some of the media like the economists who have falsely labeled me outright

Which is hilarious to me since I've been their most outspoken critic for several years at this point and that year in 2016

I was their number one target according to the anti-defamation league

One of those tricky enough to be part of the alt-right and also their enemy, right? No we Jews man

Various

Yeah

In any case. Yeah, I was receiving all sorts of blowback for that at the same time

I was going on college campuses and being protested to the extent that I was requiring hundreds of police officers to accompany me on

At certain college campuses and I started to think

There is something deeply wrong here and it's not just that we are disagreeing with each other

it's that there's a certain level of hatred and tribalism that's building up in American politics that I hadn't really seen before there was a

feeling like

Even back as late as 2009 that America was moving in the right direction. You post Obama's election

There was a feeling like, okay. Well, we have the same fundamental principles. We're trying to perfect those principles

We may disagree over the ramifications of those principles. Some of us may want more government involved in health care

So must want less some of us may want more regulations in markets

Some of us may want less or redistribution ism or non or non redistribution ISM

But the the fundamental principles things like free speech things like the inherent value of the individual

Things like the idea that I'm supposed to

Generally respect your right to your own labor

these these were all things that we sort of agreed on and then we were trying to broaden that out to encompass further groups and

As time moved on it seemed like we were moving away from a lot of those fundamental assumptions

He started to see rises in the opioid epidemic in suicide rates

He started to see a general level of unhappiness crop up that was reflected in the political tribalism

I was feeling but wasn't reflected more general as more generally in

actual lowered life

Expectancy in the United States for the first time in decades and I started to think there's an actual deeper problem wrong here

Than just we disagree on politics. There's something deeply wrong here. We don't trust our institutions anymore by poll data

Most of us don't know or trust all of our neighbors all of this stuff speaks to a dissolution of the social fabric

So why is that happening? What's and this is nearly unjustifiable. I mean if you look at us just from a material prosperity level

It's unjustifiable. If you look at us from a political freedom level it's unjustifiable

We are the freest most prosperous people in the history of the world and yet we're totally pissed off at each other all the time

and we're filling that that hole with anger and with social mobbing on online and with woke scolding and

And where's all this coming from?

and that led me to to write the book which

essentially argues that

We've forgotten the foundations of our civilization the principles we used to holding calm and have deep roots

and when we forget those roots we tend to move away from the principles themselves, and this is

Manifested in what I think is the great debate over Western civilization right now one side

Which says Western civilization was rooted in good eternal immutable truths that were not always perfectly realized and that over time

We have we have moved toward greater realization of and that's why the West is great

That's why the West has provided material prosperity to the vast majority of the globe

It's why 80 percent of people have been raised from abject poverty since 1980

It's why you've seen this this massive increase in the number of people who are living in decent conditions

It's also why you see a rise in democracy a rise in political liberalism. Small small-l kind of classical liberalism

all of this is the results of the West and so we ought to thank the West and we got to look back to the

roots and see what is there worth preserving and then there's a that seems I would say to be a viewpoint that would have broadly

characterized both

Conservatives and classic liberals as far as I'm concerned no research. That's right

and

then there's the second point of view and the second point of view has cropped up and become very prominent in the West in the

last

couple of decades

Particularly since the 1960s and that perspective is that Western civilization is really just a mask for hierarchy that basically there's a bunch of power

Hierarchies and subjugate sub and not natural hierarchies

forcible oppressive hierarchies white people against black people rich people against poor people

the powerful against the non powerful the 1% against the 99% and all of these institutions things like the

Things like the things like free speech itself things like free markets

These are actually just excuses for domination and subjugation. They're not actual principles. We hold to they're not important principles

in fact

those principles have to be

rooted out so that we can have a better humanity bloom in the wake of all of this now in my perspective this takes for

granted all of the prosperity

It seems to assume that the natural state of man is

Prosperity and freedom when in fact the natural state of man is misery and short life

Okay, so that's an interesting thing right there that I've been thinking about quite a bit. It's as if the radical left I

mean there's denial on the radical left of let's say

Biological differences between men and women right? Everything's socio-culturally constructed that seems to me to be rooted in an even deeper

denial of biology and nature in a more fundamental sense

I mean the left worships nature as something intrinsically positive

you see that reflected in the more radical forms of

environmentalism and some of the more toxic anti humanism that goes along with that like the idea that

We're a cancer on the face of the planet or that the world would be better off if there weren't human beings on it

but what seems to not be part of that which is quite surprising to me is any recognition that although

Nature is let's call it at least or inspiring

Which also includes the positive it's also now unbelievably deadly force and the the truth of the matter

is that the natural state of human beings is privation and want right from birth and

to blame

What and what seems to happen so often on the radical left is that that's ignored entirely

it's as if the natural state of human beings is

Plenty and delight delight in existence and that all of

The terrible things that happen to people in their lives are actually can be laid at the feet of faulty social institutions

it's like three is such a strange position given that the

evidence that nature is trying to do us in on a regular basis is

Overwhelming I don't know if the if the left is so

positively inclined in a romantic manner

towards the idea of nature because that strengthens their position that all of the pathology that

characterizes the world can be laid at the feet of

institutions and particularly capitalist institutions

But it still seems to me to be

It's a strange phenomenon. Well, it's it's strange and it's and it's obviously

Ignorant, but I think there's something else that that really is going on here. The Marxist of today are

Arguing many of them are arguing that what they're really wanting is greater shared material prosperity

I don't think that that's actually what's capturing the minds of people right now

I think what's actually capturing the lines of people was the spiritual promise of Marxism the idea that Marx lays out

even in the communist manifesto

When he is talking about the transformation of man in his initial argument is that markets war people that people who have become?

Meaner and cruder and ruder and more terrible because of markets because they are self-interested in that the markets emphasize

Self-interest as opposed to altruism and therefore if you got rid of markets

Then you could exist in greater peace and prosperity and plenty

Because human beings themselves would transform so it's not that the system itself would create greater material prosperity

It's that in the initial run. It probably would create more privation

It's that in the long run

Human beings would be transformed in their souls by all of this and then they would feel greater

Bonds to the people around them. That was the spiritual promise of Marxism

I think that that's I at root what a lot of people in the West are resonating

ok, so that's that's a hope for something like

Well, it's almost like a religious Redemption. Yes

It's a strange thing to you know, I'm preparing for this debate that I'm going to have with Slava g-shock on April 19th

and I've been trying to think it through and one of the things that's really struck me is that

Not only are the solutions that Marxist

Marxism offers

Error ridden to say the least given the historical evidence and and I just don't see how anybody can deny that

Although people certainly do but that the problem that the Marxists originally identified seems to actually to be vanishing

I mean as you already pointed out

There's unparalleled increase in material prosperity among

Not only among the rich which you could complain about if you were concerned about inequality

but among the poorest people in the world like we have

absolute material privation based on UN standards by 50% between the year 2000 and

2012 and the cynics say that's because we set the standard for material privation too low, which is dollar ninety a day

But if you look at the curves

that you can generate at

Levels of three dollars and 80 cents a day or seven dollars and sixty cents a day

You see exactly the same thing happening and you see rapid increases in

Economic growth in sub-saharan Africa, like, you know 7% growth rates

which are more typically characteristic say of China or India and and

And that's manifested in

unbelievably positive

statistical evidence such as not suggesting that now the

Child mortality rate in Africa is the same as it was in Europe in 1952

And so the Marxists original complaint was that you know

the rich were going to get richer and the poor were going to get poorer and

that that would that could be laid at the feet of

capitalism just like the fact of hierarchy itself could be laid at the feet of capitalism and a

It's clear that capitalism although it does produce

Hierarchical inequality just like every other system that we know of it also produces wealth and that wealth is actually being very effectively

distributed to the people

You know, perhaps not primarily to the people who most need it

But to the people who most need it in ways that are truly mattering and so to me the entire the entire

Structure of Marxism is is it's it's an anachronistic. The problem is no longer

appropriately formulated and the solution tends to be deadly if

Counterproductive if not deadly. So it's it's

Maybe here here's something I've been thinking about too. You tell me what you think about this

You know

Some of it still has to do with the

Innate human emotional response to inequality, you know

When you walk down the street, you see a runed alcoholic schizophrenic who's obviously suffering in 50 different dimensions

It's very difficult to feel positive about the state of humanity in the world, and it's very easy for a reflexive

Compassion to take over and say well wouldn't it be something if we could just retool society so that none of that was necessary

It must be someone's fault

It must be something that we're not doing right and you know

There's some truth in that because of course our systems could be better than they are and and it seems to me to be that

unreflective

Compassion that drives whatever residual attractiveness that Marxism still has apart also from the darker

possibility which is that it really does appeal to the jealousy that's characteristic of people in the envy and

Which manifests itself as hatred for hierarchy on the basis that some people are doing better than me

You know

so I

think there's also there's also a

Failure on the part of advocates of the free-market to point out that free markets are good for what they are good for meaning that

the two things that are important to recognize about free markets 1

Free markets are there to create a generalized level of cheaper goods and better products at cheaper prices more widely available

That's what markets do and they do it brilliantly

Well, that doesn't mean that that that markets are there to take care of the person who is unable to work

I mean that's not something that markets are there to do it's something I talked about in the book the need for a social fabric

If you want a free market

You also have to have a social fabric that helps pick people up

Now people on the Left have said the government should be the air SATs social fabric

the government should pick those people up and in large-scale cases, maybe that needs to be the case, but