Name: Religious Belief and the Enlightenment with Ben Shapiro
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:11:25.000Z
Duration: 1 h 10 min 29 s
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Well, I'm pleased today to be talking to Ben Shapiro

Adverbs of degree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 that led me to to write the book which

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

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

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

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

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

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