Speaker 1We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, you know, 20 years ago, man, a lot has happened in my life. I was 22 years old. I was not yet married. And now just think back over the past 20 years, wife, five kids, big business, all of it. Well, 20 years is a long time. SimpliSafe is now celebrating 20 years again. Most companies don't make it that long unless they're actually solving a real problem. When you're picking a security system for your home, what you're looking for is peace of mind. The goal is not to obsess over your security. The goal is to never have to think about it again. And that's what I like about SimpliSafe. Most home security systems are designed for after something goes wrong, after the window breaks, after someone gets inside, after your phone buzzes. SimpliSafe's approach is different. It's designed to help stop a break-in before it happens. Their AI-powered outdoor cameras detect suspicious activity around your home, alert live US-based agents. Those agents can actually speak through the camera to scare off trespassers and, if necessary, request 911 dispatch. Prevention beats reaction. SimpliSafe has been protecting your world for 20 years. Celebrate their anniversary with us and save 60% on your new SimpliSafe system at simplisafe.com slash Shapiro. That's 60% off at simplisafe.com slash Shapiro Plus when you order right in our show name in the how-did-you-hear-about-us survey to let them know we sent you. There is no safe like SimpliSafe. America's birth rate is too low, just like that of the rest of the West. Now we're being told the solution to all of this is, you won't believe it, more government involvement. I will explain why this is a foolish idea in just a moment. Plus, Germany's AFD breaks through, Milo Yiannopoulos goes native, and we bring you the single stupidest clip in the entire history of the internet. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. So America's birth rate is too low. That is obvious. We are well below replacement rates in the United States. We're doing better than most of Europe, by the way, and it's still too low. The birth rate of pretty much all industrialized countries is below replacement rate. There is one exception. We'll get to that exception in just a little while. All of this, because we are not producing enough humans, has led to a migration crisis because you need people to fill the air. The jobs and pay your future taxes. And of course, it has led to national bankruptcy. We spent all of the money borrowing on a future that doesn't exist. And then we re-migrated entire swaths of humans from other parts of the world where they don't have fertility rate problems. So how do we reverse that precise problem? Well, according to many people on both the right and the left, the answer is you'll never believe it. You won't believe it. You'll believe it. It's the government. Never mind that government policies have exacerbated the problems of family non-formation and the lack of childbearing. At pretty much every step imaginable, the federal government has promoted birth control, abortion, disincentivized marriage at pretty much every turn, removed all economic benefits of being involved in social fabric building activities like church, promoted broken kinship networks. And pretty much all government policies have done is to break apart the systems that cause people to actually have children. The answer to people not having babies, apparently, according to these folks, is the government needs to pay you to have more babies. Now. Some of the people who are pushing this are on the right. And they are trying to walk in the path trod by Hungary, which we'll get to in a little bit. So over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President J.D. Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions. The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents who stay home and raise their kids. So where is the money coming from? Apparently, they're going to use an HHS fund created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could go to work or go to school. Under the new draft rule, parents who stay home with their kids could benefit from the program, typically providing about $9,000 per child each year. So again, the idea would be that you're paying stay-at-home moms to stay at home. Now, this is very much part and parcel of stuff that J.D. Vance has been preaching for a long time. He said back in April 2021 on Twitter, it turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more freedom in the paid labor force. Again, this is a plausible argument, and it turns out that according to the statistics, the plurality of mothers of young children don't actually want to work full-time. According to the Institute of Family Studies poll from March 2025, about 42% of mothers of young children want to work full-time. 39% want to work part-time, and 19% would prefer to work not at all. Now, those numbers change pretty rapidly, by the way, when you get to unmarried moms. It turns out that unmarried moms actually do want to work full-time, which is kind of interesting. They don't want to be at home, presumably, with the kids. Only 35% say they want to work part-time. But when you get to married moms, then actually the vast majority would prefer to work part-time, which is my personal experience. My wife, the doctor, she prefers working part-time because she wants to spend a lot of time at home with the kids. We can afford to do that, which is great. Okay, so let's agree that we need more married couples having more babies in America because we very clearly do. We should then ask a couple of questions. Is the role of the government to promote this? And second, are these policies actually going to work? So let's start with the basics. Not all forms of government are the same. The job of the federal government and your local government are not the same. Everyone likes to ignore this. The Constitution is written the way that it is for a reason. Every amendment to the Constitution is a restriction on the power of the federal government. It doesn't have to do. It's state government. So just to take an example, the First Amendment to the Constitution says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. It says nothing about what state or local governments can do. It says here's what Congress should not be able to do because the founders very well understood their Montesquieu and they understood that there's a lot of stuff that you can do at the local community level. They shouldn't be doing at the federal level. This is why, by the way, criminal law is typically local in nature. But if you commit a murder, you will be prosecuted by the state, not by the federal government because it's not the job of the federal government. To be involved in things. Now, again, that doesn't mean that we want murder to be OK. What we're saying is that different levels of government do different things, which is important when it comes to policies like this one. So if you in your neighborhood want to facilitate the common good by voting for subsidies to new moms, I don't see any problem with that at all. In fact, I know a lot of communities that do this sort of stuff, even on a private level. For example, in my own Jewish community, there are cities where, for example, there will be a quasi tax as part of your. Synagogue membership that goes to subsidize childhood education for kids. And that's all consensual. It makes perfect sense. People are buying into it. But again, local government, local community is not the same as the federal government. The federal government was designed in order to protect particular rights and prevent particular abuses. It is a government of enumerated powers and limited jurisdiction. It was never instituted for the purpose of generally promoting, quote unquote, the common good, because here's the problem. The bigger the policy. Everybody gets the bigger the area and population you're governing, the less agreement there is on what the common good actually constitutes, which is why the federal government, traditionally speaking, handled things like border policy. Federal. Federal defense policy. National debt issues. Those are things the federal government was designed to do. But when it came to local stuff, you could actually have a lot more government that was a lot more intrusive on the local level. You just didn't need it as much. Right. This is the paradox of government where social fabric is. High government is more appropriate because there's broader agreement, but also government is significantly less necessary because everybody sort of agrees on the standard without the government being involved. The more you abstract up the chain, the higher the level of government, the less agreement there is, the heavier the hand of government would be necessary to promote a particular vision of the common good, the less legitimate it is because the fewer people even agree on this. Now, again, this actually comes from Catholic ideology. I mean, you got probably go back to the original Bible or you go to the Old Testament and the tribes actually have their own sort. Government systems. But the Catholic idea for this is subsidiarity, right? This is like a basic idea in Catholicism. Now, many of the people in government, ranging from Marco Rubio to J.D. Vance, seem to think the federal government has the generalized capacity to promote the common good. Now, the problem there is that there is no actual limiting principle here in a democracy with regard to this. Once you say that the federal government is here to promote the common good without defining the common good at the left, promoting its version of the common good with the gigantic government gun. This is why using Rerum Novarum, the Pope's take on economics, as a guide to national politics is a very, very, very poor idea. Furthermore, many of the people pushing this policy are, as we will discuss, making a category error. They think that people are not having babies. That can be fixed by material circumstance, that if they point the government gun at you or the money hose of the government at you, this will make things better. But the problem, as religious people should know, is in fact not lack of government subsidies. It is. It is a lack of social fabric, patriotism, and spiritual preparedness for having kids. That is the reason fewer people are having kids. In religious communities, people still having kids. Religious Catholics still having tons of kids. Mormons having tons of kids. Orthodox Jews having tons of kids. Evangelical Protestants having a lot of kids. That is the big problem. It will not be solved by shooting money at people from a t-shirt cannon. Now, again, the best argument that's being made right now for a policy that promotes childbearing and rearing from the federal government is the argument made by Kevin Roberts over at the White House. At the Heritage Foundation, basically, the argument is that this is the best we can do. That we're not going to be able to dismantle the welfare state, so we should use the power of the ring for our own good. It is a gift. We should wield it. As Kevin Roberts tweeted out, Vice President Vance's proposal to redirect existing subsidies toward married families is the kind of strategic policy conservatives should embrace. The welfare state already exists. The subsidies already exist. Conservatives do not have the votes to dismantle either. Until that changes, taxpayer dollars should reward family formation, not subsidize its decline. That is the conservative option. Again, that is the best argument it is. is because it's basically saying we're not getting rid of the slush funds. You may as well use the slush fund to direct it toward particular better ideas. Now, again, what's funny about this is many of the same people who are promoting a pragmatism in government here are utterly unpragmatic about how government actually works and where the votes are right now. They're also utterly unpragmatic about the fact that when you maximize the size and scope of government, eventually you will lose and all the people you hate will control that government. But again, they're really doing it because they think it's a good idea. And it isn't actually a good idea because when you expand the size and scope of the federal government, again, if you think that you can wield the ring of power, usually the next thing to wield it is Gollum. Coming up, we'll get to whether this policy really even will work or not. The answer, spoiler alert, kind of no, but I'll explain why. First, I don't think you need to predict the future to understand the appeal of gold. You just have to look at what's happening right this moment. The national debt, it keeps going up. Central banks are buying gold. Major Wall Street institutions themselves are putting increasingly bullish rates on gold. And that's because they're not targets on precious metals. When all these institutions start doing the exact same thing, you should probably think why they are doing that. Here's what we know about physical gold and silver. Washington cannot actually print those things. The Fed can't create more of them at a meeting. You actually own the asset. This is why I recommend diversification through golden crest metals. They're boutique precious metals formed with transparent pricing, widely recognized, highly liquid coins, and zero buyback fees. 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If my nieces and nephews step out of line, I'll tell them to cut it out. And the same thing is true of my kids, for their uncles and aunts, and certainly for my parents and my wife's parents, right? Both of whom live nearby. We built our own kinship network that provides a social... safety net on the private level. All of the government's policies have been designed to eviscerate that kinship network in favor of the government doing the job, and the government can't do the job. So for example, it used to be that grandparents typically, as they aged, moved in with the kids. And the purpose of that was not just to take care of grandpa and grandma. It was also because grandpa and grandma helped take care of the grandkids. Well, social security basically got rid of that. So now, grandma and grandma, grandpa and grandma, they have money coming from the government, and they're able to take care of their grandkids. So now, they have money coming from the government. And mom and dad, because they don't feel the necessity to take care of grandma and grandpa, they shuttle grandma and grandpa off to a retirement community, or off to a retirement home. And so the entire kinship network breaks down, right? Welfare undermined marriage, right? The entire welfare state was designed to alleviate the consequences of making poor life decisions. So you would get pregnant out of wedlock. We're not talking, obviously, about cases of involuntarism or rape or something, but large scale. Welfare was designed to alleviate the consequences of single motherhood. So single motherhood shut up, right? People were having babies because the consequences of having a baby were not as dire, economically speaking. Subsidies for things like college and birth control delayed both marriage and childbearing. Government subsidies for things like childcare drove the cost of childcare up because you are artificially expanding the demand without driving up the supply. But the real issue of why people are not having babies, okay, this is the real thing. In every country that is currently not having babies, there is a magic formula for not having babies. There is a magic formula for not having babies. There is a magic formula for not having babies. One, high use of birth control, right? Birth control is the one medical intervention that has achieved many left-wing goals because, again, the birth control pill was designed to separate off sex from childbearing. Now, again, this is not a case that no one should ever use the birth control pill or that people should never be on birth control or anything like that, right? That is, in my opinion, your business, right? We live in a free country. I'm not somebody who is anti-birth control, even on a total religious level, right? There's some controversy in Orthodox Judaism about various types of birth control and all that. As a societal matter, and this is true for lots of things in society that are useful on an individual level, but when applied at scale have some pretty interesting downstream effects, the birth control pill, which separated off sex from childbearing, which means sex and marriage were no longer connected, separated all this stuff. So now people could have their fun and there'd be no consequences to the fun. Again, you can say that's a good thing, but one of the consequences of that is fewer marriages, fewer kids. Just a reality. Because you go back to the 1940s, for example, when people were having lots of seven-month babies, people would have sex, they'd get pregnant, and there were a lot of preemies happening, right? They'd get married while a lot of shotgun weddings happening. And that wasn't like the worst thing in the world. I understand everybody now pretends that was like a horrible, terrible thing. That's the way that pretty much all human society worked for several hundred years there, for several thousand years, actually. And it was not the end of the world. As societies get richer, kids move from becoming an asset class to becoming an economic detriment. So if you go to very poor countries, and again, this is good, right? You don't want kids to have to work at the factory. But if you are living in a poor society, or let's say America 150 years ago, you're living on a farm. Your kids come home and they work, right? They're part of the labor unit. They come home and they are expected to earn, right? There are a lot of stories for a large chunk of American history about 17-year-olds entering the workforce to help support the family. And so the idea was have lots of kids because number one, some of them will die when they're young. And number two, the ones who are left over are going to help work the farm. Well, as countries develop economically, you don't want your kids having to do all of that. So now they are not actually contributing to your household economically speaking. They're now a net cost, which of course is very true of kids today. Kids are very expensive, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise your kids. And so now they go from being a net economic benefit to a net economic cost. So that changes the economic structure. And then finally, most importantly, a decline in religion and or civic nationalism. So when people believe that there is a religious duty to have kids, they have kids. When people believe that part of your patriotic duty is to provide a next generation to be patriots, people have kids. Now, notice something common to all these factors and why people are having used to have kids and now no longer have kids. There are necessities. There are reasons you must have kids, right? You used to have kids because you couldn't stop it. Because again, sex equals babies. You used to have kids because again, you needed labor and you used to have kids because God said so and because your country needed it. These were all necessities. And then it turns out that we got rid of the necessities and people decided not to have kids, right? People don't have kids because they don't have to have kids. In fact, they're not even getting married today. Now, statistically, what we actually have here in the United States and across the West is not even a childbearing crisis. It is a marriage crisis. One of the fascinating things that's happening here is that married people are getting married later. But as we'll explore in just a second, married couples are still having kids. It's just that fewer people are getting married, generally speaking. And we have great stats on this. The National Bureau of Economic Research did a study a few years back, a couple of years ago, and they found that across high income countries and increasingly elsewhere, birth rates have fallen to historically low levels. Total fertility rates are now below replacement rate in nearly all OECD countries. And that's because many countries are experiencing sustained fertility rates below 1.5, including Japan, Canada, Greece, and Italy. Some countries in East Asia, including South Korea, Singapore, and China, now have a total fertility rate at below one, right? Which means their population is going to have. Now, look at this chart, right? You can see this chart. Not a single OECD country, not one, is above replacement rate. Replacement rate is two, except for Israel, which is near three. Israel is the one exception. I said I'd mention the exception. Israel is the exception. There are a lot of reasons for that, which we'll get into in just a second. Now, again, they say, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the broad-based decline in fertility across the industrialized world, reflected in both higher childlessness and lower completed fertility, is less a response to period-specific costs or policies and a widespread deprioritization of parenthood in people's adult lives. This deprioritization reflects a complex interplay of changing norms around work, parenting, gender roles, and leisure, shaped by evolving social and economic influences and an expanded set of social and economic influences. This is a broad-based decline in fertility across of non-child activities and consumption. In other words, people aren't having fewer kids because they can't afford it. They're having fewer kids because they don't want as many kids. They say, we refer to this set of dynamics as shifting priorities. It does not reflect a simple change in preferences or a direct response to prices or constraints, but rather a deeper transformation in how successive cohorts are choosing to orient their lives. And again, look at the radical decline from the 60s to now in terms of total fertility rate. And again, the United States is not an outlier here. We're actually slightly higher than a lot of these other countries like Canada, Norway, Portugal, and the United States. And again, the United States has trashed all of the factors that have led historically to high fertility rates. So as you can see, when you look at U.S. fertility rates starting in 1800 to 2025, what you can see here is that total fertility rate is in sort of steady decline up until you hit about 1925. It boosts into 1950 and then it totally dumps after the birth control. pill. Again, not a gigantic shock. As societies become richer, then you have fewer kids. This is just a normal thing that happens. The reversal that happens because of the birth control pill is pretty obvious on this chart. You hit 1960, birth control pill hits, and you start to see a radical decline, and then it basically sticks around at just below two for a while. The bigger issue right now in the United States and across the West is that the percentage of never getting married is rising rapidly, rapidly, rapidly. In fact, there was a decline in the number of pregnancies completed for married women, but it's been basically stagnant in the United States since the 1980s. Married women are still having babies. It's just that fewer women are getting married. According to the Institute for Family Studies, both marital and non-marital first birth rates have declined on the whole. Marital first birth rates remain very similar to where any point between the 70s and today. A whopping 75% of the total fertility decline since 2007 is attributable to the shifting likelihood that people are married. When Americans today get married, they have babies just like married people at their ages did in the past. Explanations for falling fertility that place the blame on couples choosing not to have kids probably can't explain much about declining fertility since changes within couple behavior are not the main story. In other words, much of the policy that is currently being developed, the policy that says you're a married couple, we want you to be able to stay home, we want you to be able to stay home, we want you to stay home with your kids, now you'll have more kids, you're going to have those kids anyway. The biggest problem in Western societies is that women are not getting married, men are not getting married, fewer babies. And as you see, the second argument is that children stopped being an economic asset. They became a cost, as we've discussed. And people don't have to, so they're not. And third, religious observance across the U.S. and across the West has declined precipitously. So again, all the reasons why people had to have kids or felt the necessity to have kids, all of those are basically gone. And you can see every cultural indicator of this. All right, coming up, we'll get to just another indicator that religion is falling apart here in the West. First, you have to be prepared for the future. And you know, the thing that is definitely going to happen in the future, I know it's going to get dark real fast. You're going to die. We're all going to die. Now, how's that for a Tuesday? But here is the thing. You can prepare so that at least your family is taken care of in case, God forbid, something happens to you. You'll feel better about your life if you have life insurance. Policy Genius makes that easier. Policy Genius makes that easier. You can prepare so that at least your family is taken care of in case, God forbid, something happens to you. You'll feel better about your life if you have life insurance. Policy Genius makes that easier. 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So over the weekend, a big story is that over in Britain, St. Paul's Cathedral signed a four-year deal with the London nightclub Fabric to stage music events inside St. Paul's Cathedral. Under the partnership, Fabric will be the cathedral's exclusive partner for such events until 2030. Silent Discos held at Canterbury Cathedral in 2024 were dubbed a rave in the nave by critics. Its organizer said at the time such events would not bring young people closer to Christ and would instead suggest entertainment deserves our attention more than God. Fabric in Farringdon had its license revoked in 2016 after Islington Council found what it described as a culture of drug use at the venue. Two 18-year-olds had died of drug overdoses and now they're playing gigs at St. Paul's Cathedral. Naturally, Sadiq Khan, the Muslim, mayor of London, is super happy about this. Quote, Fabric, St. Paul's Cathedral, name a more iconic duo. Bringing together these two institutions will create a one-of-a-kind experience pairing world-class music with one of our most special landmarks. Is it just a special landmark? Is that what the cathedral is for? Is it, um, is it just a landmark? Is it? Bishop Robert Barron, frequent guest on our program, he says, word has just come down that St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the second most important church in the Anglican world, has imitated Canterbury Cathedral in permitting raves. Nightclub-like entertainments take place in its confines. The usual reasons for acquiescing to this have been trotted out, reaching out to the young, trying to get with the times, etc. But this development simply shows that the leadership of the Church of England has lost any sense of the crucial distinction between the sacred and the secular. Across the centuries and across the cultures, our ancestors seem to have intuitively grasped the importance of this demarcation. Whereas the secular is the arena of ordinary experience and activity, the sacred is another realm, a different dimension. Accordingly, in the properly sacred space, one is lifted out of luminous. This is why Christian cathedrals are filled with images of the saints and angels, and why their interiors are meant to first disorient us and then to reorient us toward the divine. It is also why in the initiation rituals of primal peoples, a young person is purposely ripped out of the ordinary and introduced into the mythic and mystic dimension. And it is why throughout the Bible, sacred spaces are carefully set apart from common spaces. This, of course, is totally true. He says the contemporary West is quite literally the first culture in human history that is in danger of collapsing the sacred into the secular, or better, losing any sense of the difference between the two. Now, again, I think that's actually being kind of flattering to the secular. I think what you actually have is a merger of the pagan and the religious, which has happened over human history and doesn't end well. He said this is doing enormous damage, especially to young people whose lives have been flattened into a preoccupation with money, worldly success, and material things. I mean, honestly, I actually don't think that's why people are going to raves. I think they're going there for the sex and the drugs. The church, indeed, should go out into the secular space to find those who have wandered away from God, but it should then lead those wanderers back to the holy. Having raves in the nave of one of the most sacred spaces in the Christian world is, I'm sad to say, another sign of our pitiful surrender to ideological secularism. I mean, that last part is certainly true. Douglas Murray made a point, and he said, London Central Mosque is also an iconic venue. When's the rave? In other words, Muslims aren't doing this, so why exactly are Christians? And this is an excellent question. Now, again, once your society has fewer kids, for all the reasons mentioned above, ranging from religious decline to economic reasons to birth control, delayed marriage, once your society has fewer kids, you get a social death spiral. Having lots of kids, or almost no kids, is a social thing. So, I mentioned earlier Israel. Israel is the only developed country on planet Earth with higher than replacement fertility rates, like significantly higher than replacement fertility rates, and those rates are going up, not down. There are a bunch of reasons for that. One, the country is basically built around kids. Extended kinship networks, family, friends. The social fabric favors large families. The isolation that you see in the rest of the West does not. So, if you ever walk around in Jerusalem, you will see kids just getting on buses at the age of five and just riding around because the bus driver will take care of them. It's like a real thing. The entire public space is built around children. Nobody gets offended if you bring your kids to a restaurant and people make noise. It's just not the way, like there are certain fancy restaurants where obviously it's not a thing, but the spaces in Israel are filled with kids and everybody gets it and nobody's upset about it. And again, a large part of that is sort of religious principle. One principle in Judaism is that, for example, even if your religious observance, particularly you have to hear something, right? So, quick word on the last Bible portion. It's the last Bible portion that we just read from the book of Deuteronomy talks about the idea that once every seven years, the leader of the Jewish people has to get up and do something called Hechol, which is you read out the entire Torah. And they still do this, by the way, in Israel once every seven years, the president of the country, Buzi Herzog, Isaac Herzog, we'll get up and do this. And one of the commandments in the Torah is that everyone has to attend, women, children, men. And so the question is, well, if the kids come, aren't people going to be distracted? And the answer is that you want the kids to be present because the kids have to learn the ways, even if people are slightly distracted from the actual thing that's happening. And so again, a culture built around kids is a real thing. And that's not unique to Judaism, right? Their culture is built around kids in the United States. If you go to deeply Catholic communities, lots of kids running around, deeply Protestant communities, lots of kids running around. Okay. Israel is in fact built on religious principles. It is not a state that is ruled by Jewish law. It certainly is not. But even the secular, very secular in Tel Aviv, where the politics are similar to San Francisco, has a relative who is religious. Secular people in Israel still very often light candles on Friday night, even if they then go on to do things that violate the laws of Sabbath. When Yom Kippur happens, Tel Aviv shuts down. It is a secular city. It shuts down. People will ride bicycles around rather than taking cars. People still celebrate Passover. Like secular people in Israel are very often more religious than the reformed Jews in the United States by a fair margin. Not only that, there's a civic nationalism that applies in Israel because Israel is under continuous fire, obviously. And that means that every single Israeli has a national commitment to the future of the state and to the Jewish people, which is why a line that you will very often hear in Israel and in the Jewish community more broadly, but mostly in Israel, is the best revenge against Hitler is to have lots of kids. Only you'll hear people say. And so, again, all the elements of having lots of kids are there and could be there for Americans, right? Because civic nationalism is a thing. We're a more religious country than Europe. Right. And we have those social spaces. It's possible to have kinship networks again. But all of those things are non-governmental in origin. Vanishingly few Americans believe the survival of America is dependent on them having kids. Pretty much all the Israelis do, even the ones who aren't religious. So we could do those things. But again, what you'll what you'll notice in that entire litany, what you'll notice is that there is no talk of the government. It is not government policy in Israel that is causing people to have children. It is social fabric that is causing people to have kids. And I'm not the only one saying this. Tim Carney, a Catholic writer who's literally written the book on declining birth rates in the West, points this out. Okay, so how about these policies? Back to the policy that's being proposed. When we say that we're going to pay people to stay at home with kids, and now maybe they'll have more kids, we are trying to solve a problem with a tool it is not designed to do. We're trying to fix a broken light bulb with a fly swatter. And we have good evidence of this. So Hungary, beloved of sort of the NatCon right, and a lot of people in the nationalist conservative movement very fond of Hungary because they love government-promoted quote-unquote common good. Well, Hungary tried this and it totally didn't work. As the American Enterprise Institute reported back in November of 2025, Hungary spends around five percent of GDP on family subsidies. The OECD ranks Hungary among the top five OECD countries overall in public spending benefits. Victor Orban said in 2017, the country's objective was to raise the total fertility rate to replacement level, which is 2.1 by 2030. Fertility instead has been trending down. Hungary is further from meeting its 2030 fertility objective. They go way further than anything being promoted by J.D. Vance and the rest of the federal government under President Trump right now. So here we're talking about like $9,000 subsidies to stay home, which frankly is not that much money. Orban's government in Hungary introduced lifetime tax exemptions for women with four or more kids. If you had four more kids, no taxes, none. And then later they expanded that to include moms with three and eventually even two kids. So if you had two kids, no income taxes. Now you would think that would lead to a birth explosion, right? Well, actually not really. What happened is that people who were already planning on having lots of kids just had those kids faster. They accelerated the baby making. They ended up with the same number of kids total, but they accelerated the baby making. That strategy, by the way, from the government also included zero interest baby expecting loans forgiven after the birth of three kids, huge housing subsidies and a car purchase grant for big families. So what happened? So the fertility rate saw a rise from 1.25 in 2010 to a peak of about 1.6 in 2020, 2021, which is large, right? But then it turns out that everybody who's going to have the babies, they hit the two and they didn't want to have three or they hit the three and they didn't want to have four. And the momentum fizzled out. By 2025, the fertility rate was back down to 1.31, which is back where it was when we started. So again, this just shows you that governmental subsidies are not the thing that's happening right now. You actually have to change the entire mindset of society. And this is something conservatives have historically understood. And we're hearing a lot from the common good concern. Government is a teacher. Government is a teacher. Usually the government only has two tools to teach. It has a money hose and has a gun. Those are the two tools that it has to teach. The money hose is not going to teach you. The gun is going to teach you not to commit a crime. But unless you are going to force people to have more kids at point of gun, that ain't going to work either. What you actually need to do is rebuild a social fabric. And that starts at the local level. This is where conservatives should be putting their efforts, at the local level in rebuilding all of this, not at the federal. The government is not the solution. In other words, if it were that easy, I'd be in favor of it. It ain't. It ain't. Well, to take the other side of this debate, because we do disagree a fair bit here at Daily Wire. Actually, this is the second time in like three years that we've had a debate on this. Three shows that we've taken opposite sides of the same question is Michael Mull's host of the Michael Mull show. So, Michael, we've been discussing the proposed family policy put forward by the Trump administration with regard to subsidies for, you know, moms to stay at home with their kids. The best argument that I heard was Kevin Roberts's argument at Heritage that basically we're not getting rid of all these welfare programs, so we may as well use the money for a better cause. That seems to me the best argument. The overall argument I sort of have two problems with, and I want to get your take on it. One is that if you're going to pursue family policies like this, this should not be done by the federal government on an ideological level. It should be done by state and local governments if you're going to do it at all, because subsidiarity suggests you're going to get a better policy and better agreement on what the policy ought to be at the local level. And then question number two is more of an efficacy one. Hungary tried this and it just didn't work because what you're trying to do is use material circumstance as a substitute for the real problem, which is spiritual and social fabric lack, and that can't be filled in by government. What do you make of those arguments?
Speaker 2Yeah, OK, the Hungary one is a really good point because Hungary did have this concerted effort on family policy broadly. And we should make a distinction between family policy broadly and what the Trump administration is proposing here, because I think it's being misrepresented. It's much narrower than the broader debate, but I'm interested in the broader debate. When it comes to Hungary, yes, the Hungary policy failed to increase birth rates to replacement levels, and it failed spectacularly at that. However, we should remember there were some wins to the Hungary policy. There were some wins to the Hungary policy. There were some wins to the Hungarian policy. There were some wins to the Hungarian policy. There were some wins to the Hungary policy. There were some wins to the Hungarian policy. There were some wins to the Hungarian family policy. It did increase in the short run. It increased the fertility rate by about 30 percent. Marriages doubled. Divorce plummeted. There were big wins. Now, there were lots of other problems in Hungary, and there remain big problems in Hungary. Obviously, Orban was ousted out of office. Strong headwinds from Brussels. I agree, though, that, yes, trying to get people to have kids just by giving them money is ultimately not going to work. The greatest predictor of increasing the fertility rate is religiosity. It's not just money. But money plays a little bit of a role, too. So then, of course, there's a lot of money. There's a lot of money Then we get to this specific aspect of family policy. And I think in many ways, conservatives are talking past each other here because I agree with many of the arguments that are being made against the policy that Trump is not doing. In other words, I agree with many of the arguments against creating a new welfare program or expanding the spending on this welfare program or this, that or the other. Yeah, I agree with a lot of those arguments. That isn't what's happening here, according to reporting from The New York Times. So take it with a grain of salt. There is a welfare program, which is the Child Care and Development Fund, which has existed for 30 years. It's a Clinton era program. And the fund says that if you're a single mother, a single parent, but the vast majority of the money is going to single mothers. If you're a single mother below a certain income threshold, you can get the money and you can pay it to a daycare and then you can go work in the widget factory. OK, all well and good. The Trump administration comes in and says, you know what? We should actually open up the pool of eligibility here and say that if you are a stay at home mother, if you're a stay at home mother, you should actually open up the pool of eligibility if you want to care for your own kid rather than just sending this government cheese to the daycare center so you can work for Dr. McGillicuddy. If you want to care for your own kid, you can be eligible for that money as well. So in other words, it takes the preexisting program already has mandatory spending, doesn't add a penny and just says rather than only incentivizing single parenthood, we're also going to incentivize people to be able to stay at home and give the care to their kids they deserve. This, to me, seems exactly the same as the argument for school choice, which was a little bit controversial on the right. Even some of my fellow Tennessee Republicans, they were kind of opposed to it because they supported the public schools. But generally, this is a very popular policy. It says we're going to get direct payments from the government to help you raise your kids in the way that you see fit. Yes, it's unsatisfying because we're not abolishing the welfare state. Yes, it's unsatisfying because we're not we don't have a perfect subsidiarity here where the decisions are being made at the most competent local levels. But all in all, I really don't get much of the opposition to a broader ideology, but I don't get an opposition to this policy.
Speaker 1No, I mean, I tend to I mean, we're supposed to disagree, but I'm tending to agree with you. The policy itself, as I say, is not wildly objectionable as it currently stands. I'm afraid that it does open the door to a bunch of waste and fraud and abuse because it's a government program and people will find ways to stay home, take the money, go work on the side anyway, and then just, you know, take the difference because that's what people do when government grab bags of cash are made available to them. But yeah, it's the broader debate that I find kind of in the one that you and I've been having continuously for years at this point, which is sort of what is that what is the goal of government in promoting, quote unquote, the common good? Because some of the language that's being used to defend this policy to me never had any limiting principle. And it is very difficult for me to see how that doesn't end up kind of coming back around and biting conservatives in very sensitive spots. And also, again, when you when you examine the evidence, you and I, I think, agree on the main things that actually drive people to have kids. What Hungary actually showed is that if you subsidize certain things, you get a speed up. So if people wanted to have three kids and they were thinking they were going to do it in four years instead, they basically were like, you know, I'm sneaking under the wire and get free of income tax. So didn't end up generally increasing fertility rate. They ended up accelerating fertility rate temporarily. And then it went back down. The real crisis in the West actually is not how many kids people are having within marriage. It's been basically stable since the 70s. It's that no one in the West is even getting married. And that is a function of the birth control pill. That is a function of a society that teaches people that marriage is not worthwhile. It's a function of lack of religiosity in society. And it is also a function of lack of civic nationalism. And the reason that I cite all of these things is because there is only one country. And I wish it weren't this country because it always gets awkward when I say this. But there's only one country that is developed that has fertility rates that are above replacement. And it's Israel by leaps and bounds. Israel has a fertility rate that that is at like three. And that's true, not just in the very religious areas where if you're in the so-called settlements, those settlements, the people they're having, I believe, on average, six kids. If you go to the areas, people are having on average eight kids. But if you go to Tel Aviv and Tel Aviv has the politics of San Francisco, people on average have three kids in Tel Aviv. And the reason for that is because there is an extraordinary level of civic nationalism in Israel where people are saying, listen, our country just does not survive if we don't have kids. And one of the phrases that's frequently used in Israel is the best revenge against Hitler is have kids. He wants to wipe out the Jews. So we're going to just make more Jews. And so that's that is that is taken for granted. There's also because of that, a very child centric society. If you ever go to Israel, And what you see is that there are kids kind of running around everywhere and kids are given enormous levels of responsibility You would never see in America. There's no there's no kind of drone parenting in Israel. If you have a seven year old kid, your kid is taking the bus by himself from the time he's like six, seven years old because the bus driver will protect the kid. Like it's a real it's a real thing that that stuff could happen in America, but it requires a renewed sense of religiosity and civic nationalism, both of which are in absent.
Speaker 2And I think it's deeper even than civic nationalism. I mean, obviously, in the United States, civic nationalism is kind of our go to because we're a historically strange country that is now extremely multi ethnic and multi religious and all the rest. But but with Israel, you know, many 20th century liberals will say America is just an idea. Israel is not just an idea. Israel is an historic nation. Some would say it's the historic nation and in fact, the type of all of the other nations. And so, yeah, I think there are a lot of lessons to learn from Israel. I mean, you have a largely. Homogeneous population with a deep sense of, you know, intragroup loyalty and history, you have a religion, even though, to your point, Tel Aviv is about as secular a city as exists. But nevertheless, there is the sense that the religion is in the air. There is a common religion to the state of Israel. And it's even if you personally don't practice it, it's just there. You kind of get it in by osmosis, which is very, very helpful for these issues. There is a strong, obviously, biblical moral foundation of. How people are supposed to act, and it happens to be pretty conducive to virtue. There is a sense of common enemies, you know, so we could use a lot more of that in the United States. I think that's actually a very good model. And so it gets down to, OK, what's the government supposed to do? You know, the government for most of American history, we don't have a church establishment, we don't have a confessional state, certainly, but the government did promote religion all the time. You know, we had blue laws, stores closed on Sunday, prayer in schools, Bible in schools. Yoram Hazoni. A great Israeli philosopher points out you can't have education without Bible in schools, much less have a, you know, a robust, virtuous population. So you could put all of those things back in. That would help increase the fertility rate in terms of marriage. Yeah, we've because of liberalism, we've just totally weakened marriage. We've liberalized divorce. Don't forget, the state of New York didn't fully liberalize divorce until like 15 years ago. You know, this was a relatively new event coming out of the 60s and 70s, along with the supposed constitutional right to abortion. And contraception and all all the rest of it, whatever you think about the individual issues, all of this leads into this problem. So so then my response, getting back to the original question on this policy debate, but even tying it into the bigger issue, I think you got some people who come out and they say, I don't want this policy reform, even if it doesn't expand the welfare state, even if it doesn't make a new program, even if it doesn't add a penny of spending, because it would be better to abolish the welfare system. It would be better to just cut taxes and send the money. And I'd say. Yeah, sure. There are a lot of things that would be better. But my question is, are we going to take these incremental wins, even in modest ways, where we can find them to just nudge people in the right direction, nudge the incentives in the right direction? I want incentives to tell people to go to church and to their broadly to their religious services once a week, at least. I want policies that broadly say, read the Bible in schools. I want the RSVC or the do a reams. Someone else wants the KJV. But I just I want these wins. That are nudging people in the right direction that discourage divorce. The one really big success of the Hungarian family policy is it did encourage marriage, which is something, you know, it's not everything they wanted, but it's something. And so I guess the question for the GOP is, are we going to take these incremental wins and deal in the political reality that we find ourselves in right now? Or are we going to say, no, I want the perfect solution. I want to go back to, you know, pre welfare state 1934. And in that case, I think we're just ceding political power to the left that is only going to make the problems worse. And so I think the question is, are we going to take these incremental wins and deal in the political reality that we find ourselves in right now?
Speaker 1Yeah. And this may turn out to be a sort of politically pragmatic argument, because, again, the question is going to be whether you are now entering into a sweepstakes in which will always be outbid. Because no matter how many benefits you give, the other side will always give more benefits and to people with with fewer restrictions or whether, as you say, you basically have to cede some ground in order to achieve victory. And that really is sort of one of the big questions. Well, Michael, really appreciate the time. We didn't argue as much as I thought we were going to. I'm disappointed. But there'll be plenty of time for that so long as you remain employed. Yeah, I appreciate it. It's like a 50-50 offer, at least, you know. Good to see you, sir. Well, that was Michael Knowles. The power we have here at DW is that we as conservatives can very often disagree and still win together. This is why Daily Wire is taking over the RNC this week, September 9th and 10th. We're taking over a bar, to be fair. It's the Bar NC, the premier hangout inside of the perimeter at the convention. The road to the midterms begins in Dallas. And now, again, all of this, frankly, seems to me to be a distraction. The Republican Party is in pretty. Bad shape heading into the midterm elections. The cashier markets basically have it today. They're a sponsor of ours as a toss up between the Republicans and the Democrats. Fifty three percent think Republican. Forty seven percent think Democrats are basically a toss up at this point. And again, maybe there's an idea that talking about subsidies is going to gain a few votes. I have I have some doubts. OK, now, again, this is not just an American problem. When societies do not have enough children, as mentioned, they tend to import a gigantic labor base. This leads us to the backlash. This leads us to what happened over the weekend in Germany. So Germany's alternative for Deutschland, AFD, had a huge breakthrough in a key state election, according to NPR. It declared victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt after more than doubling their share of the vote in the first of several regional elections this fall. According to the preliminary final results, AFD won forty three point eight percent of the vote. That is the strongest performance in any German state election. The CDU, which is the center right governing party, originally the party of Angela Merkel, in more than half their share of the vote, they fell to a historic low of 17.2 percent. The center left Social Democrats got nine point three. The Greens eight point nine. The left eight point six. No one will sit with AFD. This, of course, is just promoting more people to vote for AFD. Because, again, if you won't sit with AFD and take their concerns seriously, people will just turn to them because they don't like the alternative. In Saxony-Anhalt, the leader of the party is a guy named Ulrich Sigmund, who is thirty five. And, again, he was doing a lot of Tick Tock campaign appearances. He's upbeat. Again, one of the things that's weird about AFD is that the widespread perception in the media is that AFD is some sort of Nazi party. Again, the evidence for that is scant. That doesn't mean that there haven't been people who are Nazi or Nazi adjacent to have tried to join AFD. But AFD is led by a lesbian woman with a partner who is Sri Lankan. So here is Alice. Vidal is the leader of AFD laying out her first 100 day plan. And as you'll notice, it is entirely and 100 percent about migration. The entire AFD platform is migration. She's basic. Again, it's very much like the Le Pen party. It's like National Front in France. Here's Alice Vidal.
Speaker 3It is a historic result. We have 44 percent of the vote, which clearly gives us a mandate to govern. We'll also govern at the federal level, and the German people are simply fed up with the politics that we're encountering to Germany's interests. We're not on a clear platform of representing the interests of our country, whether those of Ukraine or any other country.
Speaker 1And I can tell you what happens when we receive the mandate to govern at the federal level.
Speaker 3I assume governmental responsibility, and we will cut all unnecessary spending. We will control our borders. We'll control our borders. We'll deport all those required to leave the country, and all criminals. We'll close the borders.
Speaker 1We'll pursue sensible policies for our country.
Speaker 3Because our country has simply been completely ruined in recent years. And the CDU, Angela Merkel, and now Friedrich Merz, it's a disaster.
Speaker 1People can't stand to see this anymore. They can't tolerate it anymore. Again, it's all border policy. It's all border policy. Now, people on the other side were protested. Protesting AFD's win. Here's what that looked like over the weekend. There's a protest, presumably in Berlin. Now, again, one of the things that's sort of fascinating about AFD is that there's broad-based agreement in Germany that they need to close their borders and deport illegal migrants. And then this broad scale. Angela Merkel has been completely repudiated, including by her own party, the CDU. Now, AFD comes along with baggage. The baggage that it comes along with is a pretty pro-Russian stance with regards to Ukraine. Germany has historically been very anti-Russian, for very solid reason, if you can read a history book. And so AFD has basically said that they want to go hands-off with Ukraine. AFD also has a pretty strong relationship with China. So, again, it's not all roses. But it is the migration policy. It is driving the success of AFD. It's the reason why you have the success of National Front in France. And it is why the Reform Party has been surging in the UK. Over the weekend, there are a bunch of UK protesters. Small boat migrants have been getting off in Portsmouth. Most of these people are from North Africa. And the UK protesters were very, very unhappy.
Speaker 4Stop us! Stop us! Stop us! Stop us! Stop us! Stop us! That's enough!
Speaker 1Now, again, a lot of this is downstream from countries that have declining populations. And so there's a... hunger for a labor force, but the solution, it turns out, is not importing gigantic numbers of people from foreign cultures to help destroy your social fabric. According to the BBC, 625 people were brought to shore at Dover and unusually Portsmouth yesterday. They made the journey in eight boats. More than 17,000 people have reached the UK on small boats so far this year. That is down significantly from past periods. But again, the government is not concerned about all of this stuff. They are meanwhile concerned about sanctioning Israel over settlements in Judea and Samaria or some such nonsense. Can you see why that is Pepsia in the UK? Why that is Pepsia in Germany or in France? Well, the good news, I suppose, is that some of the migrants in Britain are assimilating to the local culture. Milo Yiannopoulos, immediately upon being deported from the United States, went to mosque where he started quoting Muhammad. He put on the whole the whole outfit and quoted, the prophet said, the best of you in the time of ignorance are the ones who are the best of you in the time of ignorance. The best of you in Islam, if they gain understanding. So he went to mosque. He's running out of religions or alternatively, he or alternatively, he learned about the practice of Baha Bazi in Afghanistan and perhaps wants in. In any case, things are going well for the Brits, obviously, and lest we leave America behind. Things are going well for America, too. It turns out that importing vast numbers of people to American shores who hate the country was a this week, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. Those of us who are old enough to remember, remember it was the worst day in modern American history by a long shot, no close second. And the mayor of New York is now pro-jihadi, which is just awesome. Great job, New Yorkers. You did an amazing job. We've all raised a generation of people who hate our country, and they're electing people who are migrants to America who hate our country. So Mamdani, who hates America, is out there proclaiming actually he loves America. But I have some proof that that's not the case. I'm proud to be the
Speaker 5mayor of this city. I love this city. I love this country. And what I want this week to be a focus on is on the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11th, and a focus also on the first responders who gave everything they could to this city and to the people who came together to try and help their fellow New Yorkers. And so in the days to come, my focus will be on attending events that memorializes that incredible courage, and I will be there on Friday at the memorial just as I was last year.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, the families aren't going to want him there. So, I mean, just as proof of who he is, this is insane. I mean, it's truly insane. New Yorkers, what have you done? What the F did you do? Seriously, what did you do? What the hell is wrong with the people who voted for this guy? He's signing a 9-11 remembrance, and you'll see he hands a pen to a person, right? He has a bunch of ceremonial pens. And one of the people he hands a pen to is a person named Ramzi Qasim. All right, here it goes to Ramzi Qasim. Ramzi Qasim accepts the pen, and there he is signing a 9-11 memorial. Okay. So, according to the New York Post, the symbolic pen was given to Ramzi Qasim. Ramzi Qasim is a controversial aide who once represented an Al-Qaeda terrorist named Ahmed al-Darby. Al-Darby was sent to Gitmo after he was convicted of terrorism in the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker in the Middle East, part of an Al-Qaeda plot to hijack the global oil trade after 9-11. His sister married Khalid al-Mindhar, one of the 9-11 hijackers of play, and they crashed into the Pentagon. So, he signs the 9-11 memorial bill or whatever it is, and then he hands the pen to the lawyer for Al-Qaeda. Yeah, guys, you did a great job. Great job, New York. Awesome job. You've done great. Importing all these people to the country was such a boon. It's been so awesome. Other people we have imported are just as awesome, including, of course, Hassan Piker, beloved of the Democratic Party these days. So, over the weekend, there was a socialism conference in Chicago. A socialism conference in Chicago, which sounds like a terrible place to be. While there, Hassan Piker acknowledged that the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, is heavily white. But he said, don't worry, we're going to change that.
Speaker 6The demographic makeup of the organization is still heavily white. This is true. But I think it's important for us to continue making inroads to address the material inequities that black communities face. And I know for a fact, from my experience, going all around the country at this point, and speaking to voters that ended up voting for DSA candidates, like Donovan McKinney, and also Chris Rabb, of course, in Philadelphia.
Speaker 7Shout out to Chris Rabb. Come on. Donovan. All of them, really, even Angie.
Speaker 6That there is a real appetite for this change, and that appetite, especially exists in the black community as well.
Speaker 1So, yeah, the black community is definitely into the DSA, despite the fact that by every poll, they're definitely not into the DSA. But don't worry. There are a wide variety of diverse peoples with enormous numbers of bumper stickers on their laptop. And here's my rule about bumper stickers. If you've got a bunch of them on your car or on your laptop, you're doing life wrong. Here is one of these socialists named Raven Schwamm Curtis, who says, you know what? It's not enough to say things are settler-colonialist. We have to say white settler-colonialism. Well, that's what we have to say. White settler-colonialism, because if we actually started talking about settler-colonialism, we might have to talk about, you know, the spread of Islam, which is uncomfortable. It started in Arabia, and then it kind of settled a lot of different places by the sword. But OK.
Speaker 8And so I think that that querying, right, what do we mean when we say settler-colonialism? Do we mean settler-colonialism or do we mean white settler-colonialism? I guess this is really the core question I'm inviting us into. So I think that that precision is also how we we enact care towards one another. Right. Because if we can't be precise in our analysis, how can we be precise in diagnosing what the problems are and remedying them?
Speaker 1Yeah, you have to be precise because it turns out that settler-colonialism is only bad when white people do it. When non-white people do it, it's apparently good or OK. OK, that's that's the standard. Meanwhile, one panelist at this socialism conference. And again, these are these are your future leaders, folks. So get used to seeing them and hearing from them. Yes, Lord. Here is a panelist, Beatrice Adler Bolton, saying the left must become more dysgenic.
Speaker 9Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism. Our task is not to become less disposable, to become more useful to the ruling order. What we all need to be doing is rejecting disposability in all of its forms. The point is not to beat the fascists. At their own game, it is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter, more eugenic. In fact, the more dysgenic, the better, I think.
Speaker 1So this crazy person wearing a mask in the year 2026 is literally saying that in order to defeat capitalism, you should be fat and ugly. We'll see how this works out for them. She wasn't the only one. First of all, she actually went on to make the claim, believe it or not, that. That we need people who are dysgenic and disabled because those are our revolutionaries. And then she proceeds to cite a series of revolutionaries who she calls disabled.
Speaker 9Ahmed Yassin, who was an important revolutionary Palestinian leader and one of the founders and early leaders of Hamas, was paralyzed at 16. He was quadriplegic. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. He died in a car accident. Mao had ALS, Fanon had terminal myeloid leukemia, and he wrote some of his best work under the knowledge that that diagnosis was hanging over his head.
Speaker 1Asthma? Really? I mean, listen, I hope they all take our advice. I hope they all become as humanly possible to defeat the man. I mean, I feel like that's not going to work out well for them either personally or politically, but I mean, I suppose she wasn't the only one saying this. A person named Deshaun Harrison, also masked, said that borders are body fascism.
Speaker 10Diet culture has always linked food to morality, framing restraint as virtue and pleasure as danger through language like guilty pleasure. Abstaining from pleasure becomes a way to train obedience, to train self-denial, and to train discipline in service of a broader political order. Body fascism is not some relic of the past. It's an active feature of modern imperial regimes. Every time a government decides whose body must be protected and whose bodies must be erased for the sake of national imagery, this is body fascism. Every time there is a call for sovereignty by state powers with the intent to maintain borders, this is body fascism.
Speaker 1So all I'm hearing is somebody paid $200,000 for a degree to make excuses for the fact he really, really, really wants to eat that last donut. That's all this is. These are your future leaders. These are your future leaders, folks. These are the people. Now, what is this really about in the end? PSA, what is all of this really about? It's about the same. It all comes back to the same thing. It comes back to why we are not having kids in our society or getting married in our society, why people are following complete dullers and crazies. And the answer is because people are trying to fill a spiritual hole with literally anything and failing. Here's one of the panelists basically admitting as much.
Speaker 11I believe there are aspects of the divine that are experienced in every part of life, right? Like in being in water, in cooking food, in song. And so it must be so that there is expressions of the divine emerging from movement work that is not experienceable anywhere else. Like we get a taste of ultimate meaning and mystery and a face of the divine through organizing. And if we don't give language to it, it will go unexpressed.
Speaker 1You know, at least a point of honesty, lack of spirituality being filled with this kind of... And their leadership class, of course, is people who hate America, are fond of terrorism, but their children belong to you. Here's Abdullah Syed saying, he's not a socialist, but every child is our child. No, mother, my child is not your child. In fact, I have a feeling that if somebody, if some of your friends drew a truck into my kid's preschool, you'd be making excuses for them. So no on that one. I'm going to go no on this.
Speaker 12You know, the number of times people debate whether I'm a socialist or not, whether I'm a socialist or a capitalist. I'm not a socialist. I'm a scientist. I'm a doctor. But if I have one political philosophy, right, it's that I want us to build what we would build if we took seriously the idea that all of our kids were all of our kids. If we started with that idea, every child is our child, we would build incredible public schools. We would guarantee everybody healthcare. We would guarantee childcare. We would stop putting money in bombs and tanks that kill kids. And we would start investing them in infrastructure and opportunity for kids.
Speaker 1I don't want this America-hating person defining my kid's life. I don't think that's his job. And I don't want him anywhere near my children. Well, folks, speaking of terrible, terrible ideas and people, I promised you, I promised you the dumbest clip I may have ever seen on the internet. And Tucker Carlson, man, that man is a font of just wonder when it comes to internet clips. He really is. So he had on, a human on his show. I will admit that the identity of this human was not known to me. It's a person named Jess Ellefson, who is a welder, which is great. Welders are awesome. And as part of this discussion, because he is apparently an artiste, is what Tucker says, artistes are the source of truth because truth is beauty. They got into a conversation about the math. The math. And, um, and things got every, every day, every day, new levels of retardation are reached. Behold.
Speaker 13I've yet to encounter a single person in my life that uses algebra. Actually, I don't know if you.
Speaker 14So like you, but you would know. Yeah, but I mean, I live in a fake world.
Speaker 13Um, that's why you use fake math with letters. Congratulations. To everybody out there in the matrix. Good job. You're good little goy slaves.
Speaker 14Oh, that's amazing. So you, you didn't get an answer because I've never considered this, by the way, never even entered my mind. I was too dyslexic to take any math. So I got a pass on math, but, um, or the, whatever they said, I didn't have to take math. So I never took math, but I didn't get to the point where I wasn't reflective or open-minded enough to ask the obvious question. Why are there letters? And nobody took that question seriously.
Speaker 1Why, why are there letters? I mean, I'm not saying there shouldn't be letters. I mean, there shouldn't be letters. Why, why are there letters at all? Why do letters exist in math? I mean, like they say it's a variable, but what, what is variable? What, what is math? Why, why does math exist? Why were you, why, why would you use letters? Has anyone ever thought? Well, they like, they won't even let you ask. You, you ask and they say you're stupid. You're stupid. But what, what, what even, I mean, who, who, who is behind this crusade? And it is a crusade. It's a crusade to put letters in our math problems, in our precious math problems. Who is doing this? Why, why are there letters in words even? Why do we even write? Why do we write? I mean, words are made of sounds. I know, I know that. You know that. I mean, we all know that. I mean, I can't, I can't prove it, but words are made of sounds. Why do we even write them down? Isn't that, isn't that just a perversion? Isn't that getting us away from truth? Who would do that? Who would do that? And you're right. When we say that's goy slop, it is letters in math. It's just, it's, it's goy slop. I mean, I'm not saying it's the Jews. I'm just saying that why would there be letters in our precious numbers? And those, those numbers, you know, they come from Arabia. What's that? Which is why I love numbers. I love numbers because they come from, but letters, letters, letters. I mean, I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that letters are bad. Things are going great. Things are going great. Tucker also suggested, and I don't know, he's got to be in his bonnet about the idea that I got into Harvard law through nefarious means. Now I will admit that I am not bright enough to have ever asked the question because it's a question for retarded people. Why are there letters in our precious algebra problems? It has never occurred to me because a letter is just a substitution for a quantity we don't know. That's what the variable is. I mean, I, I guess I'm just not smart enough for that. But according to Tucker, who hasn't washed his hair in a good long while, apparently I, I didn't get into Harvard law on my IQ points and he would know since he never took math. He would know that, I mean, first of all, why, why is IQ? Why are we using letters like I and Q? Why aren't we, why are we talking about IQ? Shouldn't we be talking about the JQ? Here we go. Here we go.
Speaker 14One of my many theories, but the one I believe in most fervently is that the meritocracy as practiced in the United States is not a meritocracy. The promise is, you know, the system is going to locate the smartest people in the 50 states, funnel them through a certain number of approved schools and then into a certain number of approved businesses or government. And we're going to get good governance and a good country as a result. And in fact, the opposite has happened. The system is designed to exclude rather than include, exclude Christians, people with an independent cast of mind, creativity, you know, an awakened spirit, all of them, genius. All of them are excluded in favor of hyper-aggressive, selfish, small-minded, cruel, compliant people. And that's how you wind up with a system where Ben Shapiro gets into Harvard. Like how could Ben Shapiro, I'm just like on IQ points, it's not possible.
Speaker 1Okay, now me not be good at the math, but me think that it might've had something to do with the fact that I skipped two grades, have an IQ over 150, graduated from Harvard Law School, come loud, UCLA summa, come loud, the 3.85 GPA and a 176 LSAT score and a published book by the time I was 20 and a syndicated now. Maybe it was those things. I mean, come on, I know, okay, fine. Look, I'm being a jerk. I get it. But like, it is a mystery. It is a mystery wrapped in enigma. And it will only be uncovered by a man who dips his head in lard every morning and then goes and does a show where he explains that Harvard Law isn't letting in our great artists and geniuses who don't know why there are the letters in the letters. And then he goes and does a show where he explains that Harvard Law isn't letting in our great artists and geniuses who don't know why there are the letters in the letters. In the numbers. Why are there the letters in the numbers? Maybe I'm underestimating, Tucker. Maybe the goal here is a revolution of the idiots. Maybe that's the actual goal. If you unite all the idiots about you and then you charge the castle, then perhaps there are more idiots than there are smart people. All right, coming up, we'll get to other stupid people doing stupid things. You haven't heard of Macklemore in years, right? He's that guy who sang Thrift Shop back when you were a kid. Well, now he's back. And like Tucker Carlson, he is not fond of the Uden. He had some things to do at an Ed Sheeran concert. First of all, you should be ashamed if you're at an Ed Sheeran concert, but apparently he showed up too. Okay, we'll get to all of that. Plus, if you're a Daily Wire member, you get even more analysis, more news coverage, and access to my mailbag right this very second. If you are not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click the link in the description and join us. Thank you.
Speaker 15We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 16Assalamu alaikum.
Speaker 15Are we paying attention?
Speaker 9They've taken over the building. They're downstairs and they've blocked the doors.
Speaker 16I seek forgiveness from Allah the Almighty
Speaker 15We cannot run and hide
Speaker 16Mohammed is the messenger of God There is no God but Allah
Speaker 15What do you say we turn those SOBs into a fine red mist?
Speaker 7As we move, one man will cover while the other guys go They call that leap project Stretch them out and listen
Speaker 10You need a course in safe weapons handling
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