Is America Rewarding the Wrong Values? Ben Shapiro Thinks So

20:09Coleman Hughes: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 urge of in-group chauvinism, basically. So 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. This is why you'll see people retcon history. Democracy was always part of our history. Going back 5 ,000 years, Well, was it though?

20:51Like, how much was it? Or we used to have trade. We had commerce, right? This place was just glorious beforehand. Was it really? Was it really that great? Because the answer is pretty much every place on earth sucked circa about 1780. It was pretty terrible, pretty much everywhere.

21:04Coleman Hughes: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. 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.

21:47Coleman Hughes: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, certainly. Haiti goes without saying. So the picture, if you actually look at it and detach what I under, 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, you know, that you've thought of as the greatest actually aren't.

22:32Coleman Hughes: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 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 abundance and somehow rebrand them in a way that's palatable for a home population.

23:23And I think that you see certain countries that do try to do that. I have no objection to people 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. We can live with that. But I think that what we cannot live with is the idea of 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. Tell me about your move from California to Florida.

23:53So I lived 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. I mean, 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 know, 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've been saying to my wife for a while, like this is not livable.

24:29We are paying a lot of money to live in a 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 I went to the LAPD station, because you have to apply for a CCW in LA. And they said, make sure that you bring all your death threats. I'm like, okay, you asked for it.

25:02So I walked in and used it with a five-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 that's the purpose of - Do you know what a threat means? Right, I thought that was the purpose of me having it. So if they do, then I can do something. So after they kill me, I can get the gun. Exactly. Exactly. And I said, and they said, well, you know, but I said, well, people have before, like there was 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.

25:28I 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 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 I caught him. Like, okay, now I'm just in like a Kafka novel. Like, this is 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.

25:59So what exactly is the hole in the system where I can get a gun so that if somebody comes to my house, I can shoot them? Or I'm out with my kids and I'm 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 overlook on Mulholland and they blocked off the overlook, which was literally just like a turnout on Mulholland Drive. Like people were gonna go up there and just start having COVID orgies up on Mulholland Drive.

26:35You 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 of Melrose. And we could hear the helicopters over our house, again, in not a terrible area of the valley. And they're hitting the footlocker 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 has made clear that if you are driving a car and rioters surround you and you are concerned that they're going to stop you and do harm to you, you should keep driving.

27:14And 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 did my wife. And we go shooting regularly, and she's better than I am. But that's been helpful. There is a sort of more free and open atmosphere in Florida, despite the fact that, you know, 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.

27:44You actually can have more open conversations in Florida than you could culturally in California. I'm not worried that the, that there's going to be a use of anti-discrimination law to remove nonprofit status from my kid's school. That was something that I was deeply worried about in California. I thought that was the next step of sort of the, you know, anti-discrimination revolution.

28:04Coleman Hughes:Because it was a religious school? Yeah, I sent my kids to an Orthodox Jewish Day school. Right. 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 was 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's quite wonderful. So what is your view on sexual libertinism and its relation to civilizational decay? 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.

28:44This 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 quote unquote patriarchy must be exploded, that 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 the churches themselves need to be destroyed because churches are propagating terrible feeling about the sexually marginalized.

29:22And so, you know, people who I label the Letchers, and this, of course, does not refer to every single person who is, you know, 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.

30:00They 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 the entire West. I think that there are some people who are marching in trans pride parades saying that males should play female sports. They just know somebody who has gender identity disorder, and they feel bad for that person, and they're coming to the wrong conclusion.

30:27And then there are some people who are saying, no, no, no, the entire male-female binary is wrong, evil, and a 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.

31:03Coleman Hughes:So what's the mechanism whereby these kind of ideas spreading leads to the decline of a civilization? Is it just birth rate? Is it a birthright issue primarily, or is it something else? No, I think it's a birthright 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.

31:34Your 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 have 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.

32:09And 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 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 wrong. 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.

32:40It's not that most of those challenges can be addressed by my personal behavior or by coming to some sort of agreement with people around me. It turns into the systems have to be destroyed because they disagree with the thing that I feel inside. Right.

32:52Coleman Hughes: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 approval and the privileges that come with that. So I do think that it applies with regard to whether the state grants a stamp of approval.

33:32So 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 or 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 aspiration 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 actually do their duty and have kids.

34:10This 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.

34:44And in fact, the only country in the West that has above replacement level rates of fertility is Israel. And the reason for that is because there is 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. It might be gayer than San Francisco. It may. In Tel Aviv, the average number of children per household is three. They are well above replacement rates in Tel Aviv. Why? Well, because the norm is that people get married and have kids.

35:17Coleman Hughes:But these two things, they seem separate issues, right? Because in Tel Aviv, presumably, the gay population of Tel Aviv, which is substantial, I presume they're not having kids. I mean, some are adopting kids. Some are artificially inseminating. But yes, I mean— The heterosexual majority are having lots of kids. Yes, correct. And that's where you get that replacement rate from. So these two— But I'm saying they can live in coherent harmony, so long as you recognize that the societal aspiration should be male-female child. But what if it's not a matter of aspiration but orientation, right? Because if you're gay, you're oriented that way.

36:00Coleman Hughes:What does it matter whether you aspire to have kids with a woman? You're not going to enjoy that. Here we get into 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. The amount of change measured by what people say. Yes, self-reporting. Self-reporting measured by what people do? I don't think so. I agree with you. Especially for men, sexuality is fairly black and white. I mean, I agree with you on that, and that's what the statistics show.

36:38However, 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.

37:03Coleman Hughes:Yeah. 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. 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 wife basically figure it out together, right? Now it's like, I got to figure it out all before I even think about proposing to someone.

37:48What society celebrates and upholds is a thing that more people are going to—I mean, if you subsidize a thing, you get more of it. If you don't subsidize a 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 childrearing, then there should be a special status reserved to male-female child.

38:12Coleman Hughes: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 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. 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 the whole thing. Maybe it's either you're a society that is highly economically advanced with a lot of rights and no kids and you're dead within two generations.

38:46Or the alternative is a society that doesn't accept any of those things but has eight kids and family. And I'm rejecting that. I don't think that's actually true. I think that you can, in fact, have, if not all of it, most of it. I think that 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 Chamesh, 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, you know, your life aspiration should be to have lots of kids and that's a really important thing.

39:26And we all orient to it. Now it's possible that in the West, that 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. Yeah, and I'm sure you're,

39:41Coleman Hughes:I mean, I've talked to many Jewish friends over the years. There's a sense of my grandparent, they almost exterminated all Jews in the camps. How are we going to let ourselves dwindle as a result of not wanting to have kids. I mean, I'll tell you that in my community, the pregnancy rate certainly went up after October 7th. There was a lot of families who decided - As a way of getting back at all. Well, saying like, there's an obligation to make sure that the light is carried forward. And so you have to do that. So how do you recreate that or an equivalently strong force in America where we feel no real threat outside of 9-11?

40:11Right. 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. We've felt an indirect impact of the Cold War, but domestically not particularly a lot. 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.

40:41And 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 threat like the USSR that's on your borders 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.

41:09Coleman Hughes: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 like any woman that had like more than four children or something like 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 we would do in America. 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.

41:43My 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 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.

42:13that, 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. We have both sets of grandparents living within a mile of us. Yeah, they're nature's babysitters, right?

42:28Coleman Hughes:Oh, yeah. And the fact that we know so few people live by their grandparents. I think, was it Ross Douthat or was it, maybe it was... Could have been Tim Carney, maybe? Yeah, that did a whole article in The Atlantic, which is about the numbers of how few people live around their grandparents anymore. 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. It's like, what advice would you have for those countries? The countries that are just experiencing a birth rate crater, but are more hostile to immigration than America is.

43:08Coleman Hughes:So can't really plausibly solve their issues by immigration either. Are they just screwed? 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 or you're going to have to import people. Those are really the only three choices. There's no fourth choice. So let's talk about Trump a little bit. You've described yourself in the past as sometimes Trump, as opposed to never Trump.

43:43Coleman Hughes: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? I mean, it's kind of a weird thing to be in a position, we only get to support or not support a president once every four years. And so 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.

44:16There 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's security team, for example.

44:51Those sorts of things seem petty to me. And irresponsible beyond petty.

44:57Coleman Hughes:Yes. Given that Iran wants to kill Mike Pompeo. Yes. Agreed. I think that 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 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 mostly 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.

45:28He'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 gonna 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.

45:58So 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 wrongfoots 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 he does that, then it's going to be very difficult for Democrats to claim he's only doing this in blue states, or he's only doing this because he wants a military takeover of areas he doesn't control.

46:29And so I think that that's quite smart. But the best way that the guardrails for Trump have held, I will say that I think that 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 to pace. 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.

47:06My friend Jeremy Boring 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. 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.

47:30Coleman Hughes:The most hilarious thing is that when Democrats don't benefit from the filibuster, they remind everyone of its racist history. And then when they benefit from it, they use it as 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, you know, incentives. And if we are going to actually abide by these rules, one thing has become clear.

48:03The 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 say, 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 people talking about national emergencies for racism for Donald Trump to be like, hey, national emergency for trade deficits.

48:30And so that is absolutely concerning. I don't think that the Supreme, I think we're also one Chekhov's gun away from somebody saying of either party to the Supreme Court, 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 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?

49:03Joe Biden was told you can't relieve student loan debt. And Joe Biden was like, well, you know, I'm just gonna find seven new ways to relieve student loan debt. But somebody eventually is gonna breach that. And that's kind of the last barrier. And then things get kind of hellish.

49:15Coleman Hughes: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 trump cronies and you know people like hr mcmaster jared kushner john bolton on and on were... On the legal side, it was really like John Sessions, Bill Barr. 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.

49:56Coleman Hughes:I think that that's just a fact. And it was a media misportrayal. But I do think the people he surrounded himself 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 one and Trump two? 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.

50:42And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's clear that that's happening. And that's why everything has been ending up in the course lately. But no one thus far, neither he nor his advisors, has just said to the court, okay, you've told me that I can't do a thing. I'm just going to continue to do it. What would you count as Trump's biggest policy win thus far? Well, I think the wiping out of DEI at the federal level has been an extraordinary policy win. I I think that the shutting of the southern border obviously was 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.

51:19I 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, the sort of isolationist side of the Trump wing. so I think those would be kind of my top three achievements by President Trump. Have we reached peak wokeness? 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, we'll call it Black Lives Matter wokeness.

51:59I think that that's over. And I think it's going to be very hard to put that back in the, that you need back in the bottle. I think that when it comes to the trans issue, I think that we've reached, peaked out. 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.

52:38And 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 grain of truth. That's actually true. I mean, if you have a zero-sum game with regard to college admissions, for example, and it's benefiting certain races over others, then white people suffer from that.

53:08Or 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, again, I think an aspect that is a problem. Okay.

53:30Coleman Hughes:I want to talk to you a little bit about an area where I anticipate we might disagree, although 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? I'm a big Second Amendment supporter. 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 this called the what's it called? The Right to Keep and Bear Arms. To Keep and Bear. 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, Protestants and Catholic, when each one came to power they did two things immediately.

54:19Coleman Hughes: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, right? Now, if I look around the world today, it's just so obvious that the First Amendment is highly relevant. Like you could 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.

54:55Coleman Hughes:And it's so obvious that 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 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 shoots something up. That, to me, is a more obvious consequence of the Second Amendment than anything I can point to going wrong in our peer countries.

55:38And so, from my point of view, it's become obsolete,

55:42Coleman Hughes:and it should be a state's issue. 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.

56:16But if you're going to talk about 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 them. I don't disagree with that. 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, you know, that is what it is. So the question is now, what do you do?

56:44Okay. 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 shul knows how to shoot and carries. We're down in Florida, great state. And so 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.

57:17Should there be restrictions with regard to mental health checks and background checks? Yes. I mean, with regard to if somebody's had 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.

57:50It 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 - They're all illegal guns anyway. Right, 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 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.

58:39It's like, that's stupid. We're not doing any of that. We can argue over how to mitigate and how to adapt, but it's very difficult to argue that we should 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 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 were 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 as we just discussed, it ain't happening.

59:13The original basis for the Second Amendment is indeed twofold. One is self-defense, like personal self-defense, which is there are bad guys coming over the hill. You want to be able to shoot them. I think that 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 7th, 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.

59:42And so the self-defense actually becomes a major priority right there. And then there is the sort of original argument 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 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 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.

1:00:35And one of the great deterrents is an armed population for that. And people say, like Joe Biden used to say, well, we'll just send that 35, we'll just nuke it. And 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.

1:00:54Coleman Hughes:Are there any positions that you have that you sense are unpopular with your fans, but you stick to EVP? I mean, sure. I mean, yeah, I mean. Any ones that kind of piss off your audience when you mention them a little bit? Well, I mean, they're opinions that I think are 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 it's a war against Russia.

1:01:29that 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. 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 maybe my audience doesn't like that. Maybe my audience likes their opinion better than mine.

1:01:59But you can't really—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 can listen to more than one show, or you can not listen to my show. But I think that the mistake that too many people make is trying to follow wherever the crowd leads. Because the crowd can lead you to some pretty bad places. Exhibit A, Candace Owens. so no comment

1:02:32Coleman Hughes:the Trump Ukraine topic is interesting because it to me it solidifies the case that Putin really is a dangerous dictator right because what are the odds that three of the past four US presidents all try to start off their term being friendly with Vladimir Putin. Bush went on the famous walk with him and Putin talked about his... Looked into his eyes and saw his soul. Yes, and 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. He invaded Georgia, yeah. Yeah. Obama tries to start out with the reset button and that whole thing.

1:03:16Coleman Hughes:By the end of Obama's term, Obama thinks he's a maniac. Trump, you know, the leg... 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 Trump said. Well, he certainly wanted a friendlier relationship with Putin. Clearly he wanted a friendlier relationship with Putin. And now he's like, this guy's a maniac. And so what are the odds that it's, what's the common denominator here? The common denominator here is Putin can't be trusted and he's a dangerous dictator, right?

1:03:52Coleman Hughes:What are the odds that just three different presidents of two different parties— Who've just ran nearly everything. Yeah. Right. So I think that in a way, the whole— 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, 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 the most common misconception of who Ben Shapiro is?

1:04:41So 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 this sort of idea that it's all mechanistic, that there's no feeling, that it's all no empathy. That when your kids ask if you love them, you say, well, I've got oxytocin firing. Right, exactly. That I actually have 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.

1:05:20So 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's played by, who's the guy from Downton Abbey? Dan, anyway, the guy, Dan Stevens, thank you. From Dan Stevens from Downton Abbey. And that character, 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

1:05:54Coleman Hughes:and all this kind of stuff. Did he claim to be mauled 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, yeah, I mean. But the sort of conflation of all right-wing hosts are the same 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, and they read the sort of, you know, the headlines that will be put out on YouTube, or that we will, you know, the algorithm works in a certain way.

1:06:29We'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 actually quite conciliatory. They're usually generally decent discussions. I really try not to be insulting to anybody when I'm talking to them. So that one kind of bothers me. But overall, people are going to think what they're going to think,

1:07:00Coleman Hughes:and I'll deal with it. It's all right. All right, Ben Shapiro. The book is Lions and Scavengers, available everywhere. Thank you so much for coming on my show. Thanks for having me.