Office Hours: Interviewing Ben Shapiro about Woke, Inc. | Interviews

Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Georgia Howe with The Daily Wire. Today we sit down with New York Times bestselling author, co-founder of The Daily Wire, and host of the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, Ben Shapiro. His new PragerU video is titled Taking On Woke Inc., where he highlights how a very loud woke minority now holds top companies across the United States hostage, as well as how a quiet majority can find its voice and jump right in. Ben, thank you so much for joining me. No, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Woke capitalism is, frankly, a really bizarre phenomenon, and it's kind of overwhelming to me personally. I mean, I'm glad we have our best guy on it, but is this something that you really actually think we can make a dent in? I do. So I think the first thing you have to understand about corporations and all these companies, people tend to think of these companies as free-market oriented. They're not free-market oriented. They're profit-oriented. There's a difference. If you're a company and you want to make a profit, very often the best way to make a profit is to work hand-in-glove with the government, do what government actors want you to do, or work with interest groups who are the most likely to hurt you. Because you're not interested in making sure that you have the widest possible distribution to the most possible consumers. You want to make sure that you are sort of answering the needs of the loudest and most intransigent consumers, and you hope that everybody else sort of goes along with that. Well, corporations are specifically vulnerable to this in a couple of ways. One is they're vulnerable from the outside because media coverage can generate outsized attention. So if the media decide that you are an unwoke corporation, you'll get a bevy of phone calls about what a terrible corporation you are to get people bothering your HR staff. You will get a bunch of stories that take your stock price down. And so you may as well just buy into the diversity training nonsense and promulgate a couple of black squares on your Instagram page, and then people will leave you alone. So there's the outside pressure. That's one form of pressure. Then there's the inside the company pressure, and that comes from your woke staff. So you have a small intransigent minority of woke staffers who have decided they are not going to play by the normal rules of the game, namely leave politics outside the office and you just show up and you do their job. Instead, they're going to demand that the company mirror their own priorities in terms of politics, or they're going to leak to the media or proclaim that they are somehow being victimized inside the company. And so the people at the top of the pyramid, again, look at that and they say, OK, well, I could just give them what they want and it'll be OK because everybody else is kind of going to go along to get along. All of this relies on there being both inside the management structures and also inside the company, a group of people who are too scared to speak up or who are who don't care enough to speak up or too apathetic to speak up. And the only way to fight back against that is to use exactly the same strategy that these groups from outside and inside have been using, namely the strategy of renormalization. You become intransigent, you become very, very loud, you refuse to go along to get along, and then the company is forced to that binary choice. Do they please the people who are the loudest and also the rudest and the wokest, or do they please the sort of silent majority that's no longer silent? So I'm glad you brought up renormalization because I wanted to ask you about that. And actually, I'm going to play a quick clip of it because I think you explain it really well in your video. And then I want to ask you another question, OK? Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses the process of renormalization in his book Skin in the Game. Let's say you have a family of four, including one daughter who only eats vegan. Mom now has a choice. She can cook two meals, one for the non-vegan family members and one for her daughter, or she can cook one meal with only vegan ingredients. She decides to cook only one meal. This is renormalization of the family unit, which has converted from majority non-vegan to vegan. Now, says Taleb, have the family attend a barbecue with three other families. The host has to make the same choice mom did, make one meal or make two. This process of renormalization, the new normal, continues until broader and broader numbers have been moved by one inflexible person. The same holds true in corporations. All it takes, according to physicist Serge Gallim, is a tipping point, a certain percentage of the population joining an inflexible movement and demanding change from a less than motivated majority. Gallim puts that number at approximately 20 percent. So here's the good news. Renormalization can work in reverse, too. So you suggest that the exact same tactic that the left used to kind of get politics into business can be used to get it out. But there's an asymmetry in terms of the cultural capital that each side has and what resources they have. So, for example, the media is kind of in the barrel for the left. Do you think that same exact strategy would work for the right, even with sort of divergent advantages? So I think that it would. I do think that there are more people who disagree with the woke strategy than agree with woke strategy. So while there's asymmetry in terms of the media, because the media does mirror the woke, it is not true that most Americans mirror the woke. That is a small minority of people. So you might say that 10, 15, 20 percent of a company might be woke. And then you have 80 percent of the company that isn't. And maybe 30 percent of the company is actively anti-woke. And then you have that 50 percent in the middle there who just don't care one way or the other and just kind of, you know, leave us alone. Well, if you can get 30 percent who are very loud and they can somehow mobilize even half of that other 50 percent, suddenly you're looking at a much bigger number inside the company. As in a case that I've made with regard to, for example, The New York Times, you saw a couple of hundred New York Times staffers get very angry at Donald McNeil, who is their science reporter, for using the N-word to explain when using the N-word is wrong. They got him fired. Well, the number of Times staffers who are members of The New York Times Guild is something like 1,500, 1,400, 1,500. And apparently there was some support inside the newsroom for McNeil. What if 500 of those people had written a similar letter to the management and said, listen, we're not going to go along with this. McNeil shouldn't be fired. That would put the entire newspaper in a different situation. So there is an asymmetry for in terms of media coverage and people who control institutions who are sort of sympathetic to the woke. But there's also a tremendous asymmetry in terms of the number of Americans who actually like this stuff. And you're starting to see that Democrats are realizing this and it's scaring them a little bit. So to take a perfect example, Stacey Abrams in Georgia was very actively promoting the idea that boycotts of Georgia businesses in the aftermath of their voter ID law might be a good idea. Then the voter ID law passed and Georgia businesses got boycotted by members of the left. All of these major corporations announced they weren't going to do business in Georgia. They came out and they condemned the voter law. And it turns out the people of Georgia didn't like this at all. It turned out that the intransigent minority had gone too far and the people of Georgia started sounding off. And suddenly Stacey Abrams reversed herself, said, oh, no, I think boycotts are a terrible idea. If you get loud and if you push back on the other side, yes, there's certain systemic disadvantages you have in terms of the media. But those can be overcome by the fact that the woke agenda is really garbage and people don't like it. So basically, it comes down to having people on the right get loud, which isn't traditionally their skill, but you're saying that's a skill that you're going to need to develop. That's kind of the end of it. Yeah, I mean, it's both getting loud and organizing. So these are both things that people on the right don't like to do. Right. We like to be polite. And also we don't like to organize. We like to be treated as individuals who like to treat others as individuals who don't spend our off hours getting together in chat rooms on Zoom and figuring out how to victimize our corporation the way that the woke staffers do. That's just not something that conservatives tend to do. They're going to have to change that. They're going to have to say, OK, there's a unified block on the other side. We are going to be a unified block on this side. And we're going to say straight out to our employers, if you do this, there will be stories in the media about how you are doing this. And now you have two choices, right? You don't have to side with us. You don't have to side with them. You could just shut up. And you're starting to see corporations do this. You're starting to see corporations say, you know what? What if we just don't get involved? And yeah, the woke will shout for a while and the right will shout for a while, but we won't get involved. See, this is where the right also has an advantage, because there are two options that cut in favor of the right. One is that they could mirror the priorities of conservatives. They could theoretically do that, although that's rare. But second, they could just shut the hell up. And the right would be like, that's fine. The left refuses to allow these corporations to shut the hell up. They say silence is violence. So they actively need the organization to mirror what they are saying in order to win. Conservatives don't. We don't have to have the organization mirror what we're saying. All we have to do is have the corporations go back to doing what they normally do, you know, providing goods and services to the broadest number of people. So I was going to ask you about the Basecamp example. So I'm assuming you follow that. Do you think that's a that seemed like a very expensive way of confronting this? But would you say that's a viable strategy? You can maybe tell people a little about what happened there. So it seemed like it was a viable strategy until the heads of the company decided that it was no longer a viable strategy. So basically, a huge number of staffers at Basecamp, which is this venture capital tech firm, they they they had the executives had decided the staffers were obnoxious. They were abusing each other in these in these Zoom meeting rooms and on the Slack channels. And so they put out a statement. They said, we're not doing politics inside the company anymore. You want to do politics. There are plenty of places to do it inside. The company is not the place. And a bunch of woke staffers got very, very angry. And some 30 of them quit. And there were only like 60 people working at Basecamp at the time. So like half their staff quit. Well, that is one good way to get rid of woke staffers to say, listen, we're just not going to talk politics. And if you don't like that, you can go elsewhere. If Basecamp had stuck with that, that would have been great. Instead, Basecamp basically decided that they were going to suspend one of their upper echelon executives for not mirroring woke priorities. And then he ended up quitting. So maybe some of those people will unquit. But you never you can't as an executive, you cannot show your neck to the woke because they are the ones with the guillotine. That is just a foolish move. And it is incredible to me how many executives seem to believe that if they keep feeding the alligator somebody else, they will be eaten last. Well, maybe they will be, but they're still going to get eaten. So in your video, you talked about how we kind of need to get to about this 20 percent threshold of people speaking up. Do you sense that we're kind of like inching our way towards that? And if so, are there any sort of proof points of where it's been successful? Sure. I think we are inching our way toward that. It's hard to see it inside corporations because typically the corporations that actually do what conservatives want them to do are not vocally mirroring the priorities of conservatives. They're just doing what you would think corporations would do and not sounding off. So it's sort of the dog that didn't bark. It's the hound of the Baskervilles. The dog that didn't bark is the clue. But I will say that you are starting to see an inordinate number of states coming out against, for example, critical race theory. I think that you are going to see a bunch of lawsuits filed in the near future against corporations that are trying to cram down diversity training that violates basic precepts under the Civil Rights Act of 65. So I think that it's easier to see the signs of backlash in terms of how Democrats are reacting. You're starting to see more and more prominent Democrats and members of media saying, maybe this stuff is a little overwrought, maybe this thing isn't such a good idea. But I think, frankly, it's not going to really materialize until 2022. I think that if the Republicans fail to take the House in 2022, it's the greatest political blunder of my lifetime. Do you have any predictions for 2022? Have there been any kind of bellwethers that have given you some hints about it? So I think Republicans are going to do incredibly well in 2022. I think they're just going to blow out the Democrats in the House. Right now, it's a very narrow gap for the Democrats. They have about a seven-seat majority in the House. I think Republicans emerge with at least a 10-seat majority in the House. And I think that, not just because of the census numbers, but also because there are a bunch of Democratic retirements. I think that the early indicators that inflation is kicking in, the economy is not going to be as robust as everybody thought it was going to be going into 2022. A lot of Joe Biden's big spending programs are not going to be super popular. You can see the opposition to Biden's program beginning to form in real time. And as far as the Senate, there are a bunch of vulnerable seats for Republicans, but there are also a bunch of vulnerable seats for Democrats. I'd put it at least 50-50 that Republicans take the Senate back in 2022. If they don't take back the House, it's a political sin. Are there specific states that you think are going to be shifting specifically, or do you think this is going to be nationwide? I think you're going to see Georgia shift back red. I think Georgia is going to shift back pretty strongly red. I think that Florida is going to remain red. Ohio is going to remain red. North Carolina is going to remain red. I think there's a possibility that Arizona shifts red a little bit. It depends on whether the Arizona Republican Party can move away from some of its Trump-centric thinking and toward actively opposing the Democrats who are now in power. That would seem to be a prerequisite, but it's very early there. I think Wisconsin could have a shocking shift back to red. I was predicting that Wisconsin was moving more toward blue, but you could certainly see Wisconsin moving back in that direction, or Michigan, because manufacturing is down again. So I think Democrats are making themselves shockingly vulnerable, given the fact that Joe Biden is the luckiest person ever to assume the presidency. I mean, not only is he barely inanimate, but also Joe Biden has inherited a natural economic upturn because of the end of COVID. This massive vaccine program that he's taking credit for but had nothing to do with developing, and yet somehow he's going to blow all of that because he's not competent and his agenda stinks. One more question for you, and you may or may not have any thoughts on this, but we had that huge CEO exodus in 2019 that was right before the onset of COVID, and it was sort of right on the eve of the crazy black squares everywhere corporate takeover. Do you think there's any connection between the CEO exodus and the rise of woke capitalism? Absolutely. I mean, I think that more and more CEOs are saying, why would I found a company in a place where my employees are going to abuse me, and the state is going to back that abuse, and then regulate me and tax me up the wazoo? It used to be that the place that you had to locate your business if you wanted to find the best talent was Silicon Valley, but as people are staying home more and being able to work from home, as people are able to work from various areas of the country, it is less vital that you locate in Silicon Valley to find talent. You might be able to find talent in Texas, for example, and locate in Austin, as so many of these tech CEOs are doing, or in Nashville like we did. And I also wanted to ask you, you have a new book coming out. Do you want to tell us a little about that? So it's all about this. The book is called The Authoritarian Moment, and the basic premise of the book is that the left keeps calling the right authoritarian, specifically using January 6th as the sort of lever, but the reality is that January 6th is a bunch of droogs and morons invading the Capitol building and doing stupid things and then summarily being arrested over the course of the next few weeks and the government going on as normal. The authoritarian backlash is really what we ought to be talking about. The takeover of all of America's institutions, including corporate America, by authoritarian leftists who are focused in on radically shifting the nature of American life and radically invading core American rights. That is the real authoritarian takeover that we should be worried about right now. The book's called The Authoritarian Moment. Ben, thank you so much. Folks, make sure to go out and pre-order a copy of Ben's new book. It's out on July 27th, The Authoritarian Moment, How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent. And that's the end of today's Office Hours. Make sure to tune in next week for our conversation with a new PragerU presenter. I'm Georgia Howe. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching this episode of Office Hours. If you'd like to watch more interviews with PragerU presenters, head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and become a member today.