Battling For The Heart of Western Civilization - Ben Shapiro @ CPAC Hungary

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It is amazing to be here in Budapest. I want to talk today about the battle for the heart of Western civilization. But to do that, we have to start with a definition of what Western civilization actually is. Western civilization, rooted in man's individual liberty and his collective duty, in his freedom of speech and in his duty to act virtuously, in his property rights and in his familial obligations, in the right to the equal application of the law, Western civilization is unique. It is the wellspring of virtually all human prosperity and all human progress. And Western civilization did not come from nowhere. It came from biblical wisdom, the wisdom of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition. It came from the Bible's admonition that we ought to seek truth through the light of reason. When we cut ourselves off from the sources of our own civilization, our civilization decays. And make no mistake, our civilization is now in the midst of decay. We can see that decay in the anarchic marchers in the streets, chanting on behalf of radical Islamic terror groups by the hundreds of thousands. We can see it in the push by intellectual elitists for a bizarre alternative morality that suggests the fundamental free-flowing nature of sexual identity, where boys can be girls and behavior ought to be separated utterly from the realm of morality. We can see it in the push for an ever-growing domination of a powerful governmental infrastructure, crowding out familial bonds, crowding out church in favor of a faceless state that offers money rather than virtue. We can see it in that crusade against churches that refuse to jettison their values in favor of moral relativism flying rainbow flags. What are these forces that have mobilized against our civilization? Well, the key force is the force of Western postmodern leftism. Sure, we can look at the radical Islamists who have invaded Europe, who support terrorism, who use Western governments to impose effective fatwas against Westerners who speak out against them, people who target Jews and Christians who openly chant for the downfall of the civilization that they leech upon. But the question really isn't radical Islamists. They, after all, are doing just what they have always done, invading and conquering. The question is, why the West allowed them in? And the answer is that the West, thanks to that postmodern left, bears a peculiar and self-defeating blood guilt, a guilt that says that because the West is too successful, it owes it to the rest of the world to destroy itself. Maybe the most colorful champion of this philosophy was the Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1961, a Francophone rebel named Frantz Fanon wrote a shockingly violent book titled The Wretched of the Earth, in which he posited that colonized peoples had a moral duty to kill their colonizers, that they ought to unleash, in his words, red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. Frantz Fanon expressed that the colonized man was right to want to rape the wife of his colonizer, to murder him, to take what he had. And Sartre, just a western leftist, agreed. The West, Sartre said, was an inherent colonizer. Its very success in the world, whether through war or through markets, was a sign of its uniquely rapacious and exploitative nature. Thus, Sartre argued, Europeans had to die at the hands of their victims. He said, quote, to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time. Then there remains a dead man and a free man. In other words, Sartre advocated civilizational suicide. And the West largely complied. But why did the West comply? Now, part of the answer to that lies in the West's pathological and religiously based adherence to the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance. Our culture, Western culture, is a guilt culture, a culture that focuses on the reality of absolute morality and says that when we fail, we are guilty. This means that we feel bad when we sin. That's actually one of our virtues. But there are lots of other cultures, shame cultures, like, say, the Islamic cultures or pre-World War II culture of Imperial Japan or, say, the modern left, that focuses not on any absolute standard of morality or conscience, but on the evil of being humiliated. For these folks, admitting fault is the weakness. Well, because we in the West reflexively look to our own sins before those of others, we fall prey to civilizationally suicidal impulses. Our enemies don't. They're happy to blame us for their problems. And unfortunately, we're all too happy to blame ourselves. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, quote, The duty to repent forbids the Western bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions. Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths closed. Our only right is to remain silent. But why should we feel uniquely guilty? The West seems to bear a unique amount of guilt because we have come to believe a giant lie, a great giant lie about ourselves. And that lie is that we, the West, are uniquely evil. And we hear this lie all the time. Just a couple of days ago, for example, King Charles visited Canada, a country with a parliament, only because it was once a dominion of the British crown, and then read a land acknowledgement to the Algonquin Indians as though the British Empire ought to repent its establishment of the country of Canada. The very concept is ridiculous. Watching King Charles sit there in all of his royal regalia, lamenting his own empire, is insane. And yet this kind of nonsense is imitated at nearly every college event across the West. But that's the lie, that the West is uniquely evil. And that lie gained an enormous amount of credibility due to the horrors of the 20th century. We were told, often by Marxists like Sartre, that imperialism was a uniquely Western phenomenon, despite the fact that human beings have conquered other people for as long as human beings have existed. We were told that the Nazis and their allies were natural outgrowths of Western civilization, rather than perversions of it. We were told that if we abandoned biblical values in favor of a sort of Namby-Pamby secularism, we could avoid all the terrible atrocities of the past, even though it was the pagan dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, the secular dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, not their biblical adherents, that led to their assault on humanity. We were told that if we mitigated our cultural honor, if we discarded it, we could then expunge our sins, even though it was craving cowardice in the face of transnational left-wing movements like Nazism and communism that led to their domination of the European continent, and proud resurgent patriotism that stopped it. We were told that if we abandoned our borders, we could alleviate our guilt, even though obviously the Nazis and the Soviets had no respect for borders and sought to obliterate them themselves. It was not Western civilization. It was not adherence to biblical values, rule of law, free speech, and private property rights that led to the tragedies and horrors of the 20th century. It was the rejection of the West's core values that led to those horrors. But too many in the West believed the lie, that the horrors were the result of Western civilization rather than a perversion of it. And in believing that lie, we surrendered our own civilization to people who would destroy it. We turned over our nations to consortiums of international elitists who sought to rule us from above and from without. We opened our nations to groups that sought to destroy our history and our unity. Well, now it is time to reverse that process. We have to, in all humility, recognize that Western civilization, like all civilizations, has of course committed sordid wrongs and egregious evils. But the truth, the real truth, something we have known for a very long time, like since the Garden of Eden, is that all human beings have a capacity for evil. Human evil is a universal truth. But the glories of Western civilization are not universal. They come from a particular philosophy, a particular history, a particular culture. Western civilization isn't uniquely evil. Western civilization is uniquely good. Slavery was a human universal. It was Western civilization that ended it. Poverty is a human universal. It was Western civilization that has exponentially mitigated it. War is a human universal. Western civilization has wildly reduced it. And the secular postmodern leftists who refuse to admit this, they are engaging in evil of their own. This country, the very country these secular postmodern leftists seem to despise, a country they label Nazi-esque, is the only country in Europe, perhaps, that is not currently overrun by Islamic radicals. This supposedly Nazi-esque country is the only country in Europe where I, an Orthodox Jew, can walk in safety and comfort down the street wearing a yarmulke. It is a country where children don't actually have to fear that their innocence will be robbed by a perverse anti-biblical left seeking the spiritual destruction of those children. Hungary, like the rest of the West, isn't perfect because no country is. But Hungarians are trying to stand up for their civilization, our shared Western heritage and civilization. And that is a thing that is worth fighting for. And if we fight for it, we will emerge victorious against the forces that seek to destroy our civilization from outside and inside as well. Thanks so much. Happy to take your questions. Pure Talk, my wireless company, a veteran-led company, believes every man and woman who has faithfully served this country deserves to proudly fly an American flag made in America. That's why Pure Talk is on a mission to give an allegiance flag, the highest quality American flag, period, to 1,000 U.S. veterans in time for the patriotic holidays. There's a lot coming up. We've got Flag Day, the U.S. Army Birthday on June 14th, National PTSD Awareness Day, Independence Day. Just switch your cell phone service over to Pure Talk this month. A portion of every single sale goes to providing these high quality flags to deserving veterans. With plans from just 25 bucks a month for unlimited talk, text, and plenty of data, you can enjoy America's most dependable 5G network while cutting your cell phone bill in half. The average family saves over $1,000 a year. I've been using Pure Talk again for years. My coverage is excellent, and I'm spending less money. You got nothing to lose. Just go to puretalk.com slash Shapiro to switch hassle-free in as little as 10 minutes. Again, that's puretalk.com slash Shapiro to support veterans and to switch to America's wireless company, Pure Talk. It's good enough for my very important phone calls. It's good enough for you as well. It's awesome. Go check them out, puretalk.com slash Shapiro. Hello, Mr. Shapiro. Thank you so much for your speech. I have a question regarding the national identity. Although President Trump took office in Washington, D.C., here, globalist elites in Europe are actually trying to erode our national sovereignty by mass migration and by open border policies. My question to you is, what is the best way for European conservatives to reassert our national identities? Thank you so much in advance. It's a great question. I think, number one, one place where Hungary clearly has led Europe is in reasserting its national identity, specifically with regard to rejecting mass migration from areas that absolutely reject Western civilization as a whole. You guys are paying, I believe, something like a million euros a day for the privilege right now, thanks to the predations of the European Union. I think that you are starting to see a rising tide that is going to reject mass migration. That rising tide is happening in France. It's obviously happening in Germany. It's actually happened in Denmark, where a left-wing party has radically restricted immigration. I think that the era of open migration is over. There's one area where the prime minister, he was ahead of his time. He took an enormous amount of flack for doing what Hungary did. Time has proved him right. Nations that refuse to protect their own border are nations that are going to suffer for it. The populations of those nations know it. Now, obviously, there are people in a variety of powerful roles who are attempting to stop democracy from actually working in many of these countries. You'll see an upsurge in right-wing or conservative or anti-mass immigration sentiment. Then it will be shoveled off to the side because no one really wants to talk about it, but you can only suppress that for so long. That situation for supposedly center-right or center-left parties that are siding with the radical left on these issues, eventually, the lid is going to blow off of that jar. What's going to come out is going to be the sentiment of Europeans that they do not actually wish to have their cultures discarded in favor of a failed multiculturalism that has destroyed every state it's touched. Hi, Ben. I'm here. It's an honor to ask you. My name is Balazs, and my question is the following. Secularism has hollowed out the spiritual core of the Western civilization. How can conservatism survive in such conditions in a godless culture, and how can we actively reintroduce the Judeo-Christian values set to our societies to preserve order and the real meaning? The answer is that Western civilization cannot survive full-scale secularism and godlessness, and that's what we've been watching. The restoration of church is the fundamental basis of a restoration of the West. I say this as a Jew. Everybody who grew up in a Christian household and whose grandparents were Christian needs to go to church. Everyone. It is deeply, deeply important that they go to church and re-engage with their religious heritage and re-engage with God and re-engage with an absolute morality that suggests that there is a right and that there is a wrong because, again, all the things that I just talked about spring from those biblical values, and there is no substitute for it. I think that's why you're seeing, actually, in the United States, an increase in religious adherence among young people. For the first time in my lifetime, it was going in one direction. It was going down and to the right, and now it's moving up again, and the reason is because it turns out that a life that's filled with secular secularism eventually becomes hollow. Not for everybody. There are some people who can lead fulfilled lives of their own making, but the reality is that for a broad population, finding meaning in a meaningless universe is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. For a civilization, it's actually just impossible because to slide from secularism to nihilism is not much of a slide, but if you actually want to, for example, have a civilization that has children, I mean, this is what every statistic shows. Religious adherence and having lots of kids go hand in hand. You're not going to restore natalism in the West without having people go to church. It's just not going to happen. You have to have a national mission. You have to have a godly mission. It's why the only country, actually, in the West that currently has above replacement rates of population growth is Israel because it's a country that is largely religious. Even the secular people in Israel have some semblance of religion, and also because they're surrounded by enemies on all sides, and that means that they feel the actual patriotic necessity to have kids. That sort of thing can be restored, but you have to have civilizational pride, and that civilizational pride is rooted in a belief in a higher power that demands something of you. Also, the success of Western civilization rests on a very simple principle, which is if you fail, it's probably your own fault. Every failed civilization is rooted in the opposite, that if you fail, it's somebody else's fault. But successes in life and successful civilizations say that freedom exists so that if you fail, you're the one to blame. That's what religion says. What the Bible says, all over the Bible, is if you fail, that's not God's fault. That's your fault. You did it, and that means you need to take responsibility for your life and make it better. Without that, it's very easy to slide into the morass. I think there's a reason why people are going back to church, thank God. I think that there's a God-shaped hole in people's hearts that was opened up by secularism. People tried to fill that hole with everything from pornography to chatbots to just the internet itself or to rage and political polarization. None of that fills the God-shaped hole. The only thing that fills the God-shaped hole is God. Hello. Mr. Shapiro, allow me to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said that the strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand. Mr. Shapiro, we all see the efforts of the Trump administration, which you support, to improve the industrial and governmental structure of the United States. However, is equally as much being done to reinvigorate the more important spiritual energies of the West, and if so, what? This is a great question. It goes to the heart of what government can actually do in concert with religious institutions. The truth is that religious institutions are what we would call intermediary institutions in life. You have you and your family, and then you have the government, which you vote for but you have no actual relationship. Then you have these intermediate institutions that you deal with, these informal societal institutions where you really form all of your social bonds. The question is, what can government do to prop those up and strengthen them? By the way, I totally agree with you that everybody who's looking for reindustrialization to fill the God-shaped hole, again, the only thing that fills the God-shaped hole is God, not a factory job. If you're trying to actually fill that God-shaped hole with God again, then what you actually need to do is foster, for example, school choice, religious school choice. That's something that we in the state of Florida, in Florida we do this. We actually have stipends for everybody who wants to go to school, and religious schools are really filling the gap. We have huge vouchers for every kid in the state of Florida. My kids, for example, are recipients. They go to a Jewish day school. They have a lot of friends who go to Christian schools specifically because of this. That is a big one, obviously. We also need to get government out of the business of crowding out churches. It used to be that many of the social services that were provided in your community were provided by your church. In my community, for example, I'll take mine as an example just because I know it the best. If somebody loses their job, the first move is to go to members of the community and say, does anybody know who has a job for this person? How do we help this person get a job? If there needs to be a meal train, everybody needs to get together and help fund this person to get through hard times, people in the community do it. When government fulfills that role, when government comes in and just hands you a check, it breaks the bonds that you actually have with the people in your church and in your society, that level of mutual dependence that exists at the intermediate level, that comes along with spiritual obligations. If you want to be part of that social club that represents my synagogue, that comes along with certain duties to God. You have to keep Sabbath. You have to send your kids to Jewish day school, probably. You have to keep kosher. That was true for literally all churches for all of time. To be part of the social club, there were obligations that attached as well, which is also how you knew that your neighbor wasn't mooching off of you. You knew that your neighbor wasn't just taking money out of your pocket because they had to fulfill religious obligations and show skin in the game. The increase in the size and scope of government has crowded out a lot of the social functions of churches and intermediate institutions. I would number one suggest that government does have an active role to play in allowing people to send their kids to more expensive religious schools in the United States, for example, because that's good. But I also think that the government should get out of a lot of these realms and allow that social gap to be filled by what it used to be filled by, namely the people that you live next to and with and with whom you share a religious belief system. We'll get to more on that in a moment. First, when you're covering breaking news and political developments the way that we do, you can't always stick to a normal nine to five schedule. Stories break at all hours. Having the flexibility to manage my time effectively is not a luxury. It's a necessity. That's why I appreciate all the tools that let me handle business tasks on my own schedule, not someone else's. Well, take shipping, for example. The post office only works certain hours, but if you use stamps.com, it changes everything. It's revolutionized how you and your business can handle all mailing and shipping needs. Whether you're sending out important documents, promotional materials, packages, you can do it all right from your computer or phone any time of day or night. No lines, no traffic, no waiting. Plus, if you sell products online, stamps.com seamlessly connects with every major marketplace and shopping cart. Here's what makes it even better. Stamps.com's rate advisor takes all the guesswork out of shipping costs. It automatically calculates the best shipping rates and shows you options you won't find anywhere else, including up to 88% off USPS and UPS services. All you need is a computer and printer. They'll even send you a free scale to get started. Have more flexibility in your life with stamps.com. Sign up at stamps.com. Use code Shapiro for a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and free digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, promo code Shapiro. Also, what does the future hold for your business? Ask nine experts. You'll get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market, inflation up or down. We need a crystal ball. But until then, over 41,000 businesses have found a way to future-proof their operations with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP. Imagine having your accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR all seamlessly integrated into one fluid platform. That's NetSuite. With this unified business management suite, you're not just juggling numbers. You're wielding a powerful tool that gives you the visibility and control to make quick, informed decisions, like having a map in a maze of market uncertainties. Real-time insights and forecasting? Check. It's like peering into the future with actionable data at your fingertips. Here's a game changer. You'll be closing your books in days, not weeks. That means less time drowning in paperwork, more time focusing on the stuff that truly matters, steering your business toward success. At The Daily Wire, we're proud to partner with NetSuite because they're leading the way in future-proofing operations for businesses around the world. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, NetSuite adapts to your needs, helps you respond to immediate challenges, and helps you seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash Shapiro. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash Shapiro. Hi, Ben. Welcome to Hungary. My question is regarding JD Wenz's Naval Academy speech that you also covered on your show earlier this week, I think. What do you think is the meaning behind the sort of strategic shift of US foreign policy and diplomacy that he spoke in length about? Thank you. So the question is about the shift in American foreign policy and what it represents right now. I will say that I think there are multiple strains of foreign policy that are playing out simultaneously inside the Trump administration, and the result is a lot of uncertainty. I'm not sure that anyone has sort of a solid read on what the next move from the Trump administration will be in, say, Ukraine, or with regard to Israel, with regard to Iran, with regard to China. There are a bunch of strains that are competing. So the speech that you mentioned, JD Wenz's speech at the Naval Academy, what he was rejecting was, I think, a straw man that's been burned 20 years ago, essentially. He's saying that we will no longer engage in the sort of interventionist, Wilsonian philosophy that led to the war in Iraq. I'm not sure how many Americans at this point raise their hand when you say, if you know then what you know now, would you go to war in Iraq? Like, how many hands go up? The answer is probably zero. So he's fighting against an impulse that no longer exists in the American body politic. The question is, what does he mean practically? And so I've always believed that President Trump understands peace through strength, which was sort of Trump 1.0, which was, we don't have interests in every conflict all along the globe. We don't have to get involved in every conflict. But where we do have interests, we have to muscularly defend those interests. And the only thing, in some cases, that defends those interests is the credible threat of use of force. And that's why, for example, when it comes to Ukraine, I've taken the position that President Trump is right that he wants to get to an off-ramp. I've been calling for an off-ramp in Ukraine since August of 2022. But if you actually want to get Vladimir Putin to an off-ramp, you actually need to up the pressure on Putin, because Zelensky right now is actually giving Trump everything he wants. He gave him a 30-day ceasefire. He's giving him the rare earth minerals deal. He's giving him the possibility of a face-to-face negotiation with Putin, no preconditions. And Putin, meanwhile, is doing none of those things. And so the only way to get Putin to the table, presumably, is to up the ante on the pressure with an eye toward an off-ramp. Now, is that something that J.D. Vance wants? I have no idea. I have no idea what J.D. Vance wants. I'm not sure what the president's foreign policy is with regard to Ukraine. It seems to shift fairly frequently. And again, there's something to strategic ambiguity. But there's a point where strategic ambiguity, like, you don't know what he's going to do next, so don't screw with this guy. There's a point where strategic ambiguity shifts over into just pure uncertainty. And America's enemies can take uncertainty as a sign of weakness. And that's one of my concerns. Hi, Ben. Malka, a fellow Orthodox Jew. And my question was, we have 10 kids and we moved out of the States because of how intense and invasive the woke culture has gotten in the States. And my question is, how do you think Donald Trump, if he can stall this decline in the US, if he can reinstate conservative values, what do you think? What is your opinion on this? So I do think that woke culture is on kind of its last legs in the United States. By this, I mean that 10 years ago, when I was saying that boys are not girls, I was nearly kicked off of every social media platform. Now, that is actual government policy from the White House on down. And I think that there's been a very harsh reaction to the woke philosophy, which essentially suggests, in essence, that every disparity in outcome is due to discrimination. That if one group does worse than another group, it must be because the system is designed in order to harm that group. I think the American people are tired of that. I think that's why some of the most popular stuff that President Trump has done is taking on, for example, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is just wokeness, or taking on the trans agenda in the United States, which, again, is really unpopular in the United States. I think that wokeness has a real problem on its hands. Now, the thing that I'm fearful of is that all the good that President Trump is doing, how long does it last? Is there a back to woke in the aftermath of President Trump? And the answer there is going to be determined by how successful President Trump is on the baseline governance things. If the economy remains very strong, I think wokeness is in serious trouble for the long haul. If the economy were to tank, and now it's a package deal where you get a left-wing populism that surges along with the wokeness, you could get a package deal where wokeness rears its ugly head all over again. So I don't think you can wipe out wokeness in a single moment. I think the attempt to do so is laudable, but I think that a movement that took decades to build is usually not destroyed inside of a couple of years. It's going to take a more long-term vision of how to keep that at bay. But I do think the American people are very, very tired of it. So let's put it this way. I'm significantly more optimistic about the death of wokeness than I was, say, three years ago. Hi, Ben. You often emphasize facts and logic, and you've already mentioned in your speech that many of our opponents operate purely on an emotional and pseudo-moralistic level. So do you think that the right should embrace moral and emotional arguments more strategically in order to win the cultural war? Thank you. I mean, I think that's a great question. So I frequently say facts don't care about your feelings, but the response very frequently is, feelings don't care about your facts, which is very often true. People are making emotional arguments. You cite a fact at them. They ignore the fact because they feel a particular way about a particular issue. Should we be making more emotionally-laden arguments? I mean, the answer is absolutely sometimes. I mean, my hope would be that the emotional argument comes atop a layer of facts. It's sort of a pie in which the crust of the pie, the base of the pie, is going to be the facts. And then you do have to put in some emotional content that appeals to the heartstrings if you hope to actually foster a positive agenda sometimes because, of course, people are emotional creatures, and ignoring that would be a strategic mistake. So I agree with that. I think that when the emotions substitute for the facts, that's where I start to lose it. And again, I'm not sure that that's only a left-wing phenomenon. I think it's a universal human phenomenon. You sometimes see this on the right, which is why the right will drift into sort of conspiracy theories. They'll say, I don't care about the facts. There must be somebody who's attempting to screw me. It's probably the small cadre of people. And if there's no facts to back that, I'm very uninterested in that take. If there are facts to back it, now you're talking about something completely different. So again, I think you're right. The foundation has to be facts. But yeah, sure, you're going to have to build some sort of emotional superstructure atop that if you hope to be convincing. Hi, Ben. I'm Shalom, a big fan. And my question is about what people like to call lately the woke right. So as we all see and all observe in the last, like, two years since the war begun in Israel, that more and more pretty prominent conservative voices in America started to say sometimes subtle, sometimes not as subtle and quite explicit anti-Semitic stuff. And for me as an Israeli Jew, that's pretty worrying because I always saw the conservative movement in America as a natural ally. So my question is, how much of a percentage does that represent of conservatives in America? How much are you worried about it? And how do you think we should reply or we should deal with this new phenomenon? So first of all, I'm not a huge fan of the term woke right, because I think that it obscures more than it illuminates. And so I'll try to be very specific about who I think you're talking about. And you tell me if I'm wrong. I think that the philosophy of the people that you are referring to essentially says that there is, just like the left, a group of people who are put upon. And that group of people who are put upon are put upon by an elite cadre of people. Here they're often name-check Jews or Israelis or Israeli foreign aid. And that's what's making their life bad. So in the same way that the left will argue that every disparity is in fact discrimination, that everything that is unequal between two parties must be because someone is harming the other party, the right is doing some of that same stuff, but their victim group is different. So the left might say that it's blacks in America. The right might say that it's white Appalachian people in America. But the similarity is in the idea that there is a victim group and a victimizer group, and success is an indicator of victimizer status. And so is that a problem on the right? Absolutely. I mean, you can see sort of a populist right that edges toward that and veers directly into it more than a little these days. I don't like that along any lines. I think that it's very bad. How popular is it? I think some of it is being bolstered, frankly, by algorithmic problems at places like TikTok, which is a Chinese spy app, or certainly X is being gamed by malign actors. There's no question that's the case. So how popular is it in reality? Not particularly popular with the American people generally. It is increasingly popular with young people who are being told after years and years of being lied to by the elite that the elites can never be trusted, and the only people you can trust are people who posit conspiracy theories. And the logic goes something like, the elitists told us something was false, and they were lying. And I told you the truth because I said they were lying. That means I'm telling you the truth about literally everything, and there's a conspiracy behind everything that I am also uncovering. That sort of conspiracy theorizing that just asking questions that I've criticized so frequently, the purpose of a question should be to elicit a fact. If you're just asking questions because what you actually hope to do is see doubt about people in the minds of other people, not based on fact, but based on sort of a malignant hatred, then yeah, I'm obviously very much worried about that. I think you see it very often. I mean, I spoke about this at length last week, actually, when people suggest that Israel is committing a genocide, for example, in the Gaza Strip, which is an absurdity on every level. There is literally no definition of a genocide that fits what's going on in the Gaza Strip right now. There has never been a genocide in which the supposedly genocidal party somehow increases the population of the group that it's genociding. That has never happened in human history. It has not fed that group to the tune of hundreds of trucks per day, while that group is holding hostages. It makes no sense. If you're participating in that lie, there must be some sort of ulterior motive that is not factually driven. So good evening, Mr. Shapiro. Thank you for joining us for this session. My question would be about that both Europe and America is facing with a cultural crisis, which is pressured by cultural wokeism. So what do you think, what could be the cornerstone of a transatlantic conservative alliance? I think that, as we've been talking about, the cornerstone of any transatlantic conservative alliance will actually have to be shared traditional values, which is amazing, because 20 years ago, the right was totally disunified about traditional values, and I think that's why you had the subsequent 20 years. If you went back to the year 2000, and you said, what unifies the right? What you would say is there's actually a lot of social debate over everything from sort of abortion to same-sex marriage, but there's pretty good coincidence on foreign policy and on economics, and now it's kind of the opposite. If you were to talk about the things that unite the right, the thing that unites the right is opposition to wokeness, so opposition to transgender philosophy, for example, opposition to the idea that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was a genius move. There's actually pretty wide consensus across the entire right on those particular issues, and what I really mean here is that in the fundamentals, church, religion, God, I mean, we keep coming back to that, but if you're going to build from anything, that's the most solid basis from which human beings have ever built anything, so that seems like the best basis from which to build. Everything else can be argued. People can make arguments on either side with regard to the free market. I think the arguments stack up very strongly in favor of the free market, but you can hear people who will suggest particular governmental interventions that they think are more salutary or not, but when it comes to actually building a civilization, the only fundamental basis of a civilization that has ever truly lasted the test of time is one that is built on the notion that there is a right and there is a wrong, and that that is divine in origin, and that human beings are made in the image of God, given both rights and duties, because they're freely choosing creatures that God put on earth to serve him. That seems like a pretty good basis for a shared civilization. Hi, Ben. Great speech. I really liked what you said, especially about the resurgence and the revival of the church. It was great to hear you say that from the podium there. My name is Daniel Cohen. I'm with The Real Life Network. It's pro-God, pro-Israel, pro-Bible, pro-family. I actually live in Israel. I'm American and Israeli, and I was horrified, as I think most people, most common-sense people, were by the murder of the Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C., and as shocking as that was, it was shocking, but I have to say I wasn't surprised after 18 months to two years of free Palestine, and from the river to the sea, and the calls for intifada, which literally are to murder and to kill Jews. The left is going to do what the left is going to do, but how do you, how do we engage conservatives, people on the right, to become more vocal, to become more active, and just engage in this fight to support Israel? Well, I mean, I think that the first thing that people on the right, and generally in Western civilization, should understand is that the people that Israel are fighting are fighting the entire West. I mean, that's something that this country actually really understands, which is why they closed their borders to migrants who were coming from especially those areas, and the notion that Hamas has a hatred for Jews, but they love Christians, it's insane. I mean, it's patently insane. The notion that Hamas, they really, all the people shouting from the river to the sea, and wearing on the one hand a rainbow flag, and on the other a Hamas armband, like that these people are friends to the sort of traditional people of Western civilization, they're not friends, they're enemies. There's a reason why the enemies of Israel are constantly talking about how they wish to not only kill Jews, but also to free all Andalus, which is Spain, right? Like this bizarre notion that all of the hatred of the radical Islamic world is directed against Jews is so historically ignorant. The reality is that for about a thousand years there, for significantly more than a thousand years, the main target of radical Islamists was Christians. I mean, Istanbul used to be called Constantinople. Lebanon used to be a Christian country. Coptic Christians used to be a major demographic group in Egypt. Actually, I was talking, as I got off the plane today, with a nun from Syria, and she was talking to me about the threats that now exist to Christians in Syria and Lebanon, have existed there for a while, and she was pointing out the solidarity between Jews and Christians along these lines. The absolute willingness to ignore that in favor of bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish power, I wish I could say that I understand it beyond the simple conspiratorial desire for somebody to blame for your own problems, but again, this seems to be a perfectly clear civilizational conflict, and pretending otherwise is a great way to commit societal suicide, as we're finding out from France and the UK right now. Hello, Mr. Shapiro. My question is about how, across all of the West, art, literature, and history are constantly being rewritten in the name of decolonization, and what can we conservatives personally do to protect our culture without being called a racist or a bigot? I mean, so, I've said this for a long time, I think my entire career. The proper response, very often, you know, I'll go to a campus, somebody will call me a racist, or I'm on a show, and somebody calls you a racist. The proper response to, you're a racist, is not, let me explain to you 10 reasons why I'm not a racist. That's a losing argument. The proper response is, right, that's the actual proper response. If somebody calls you a racist, the proper response is to flip them the bird, or to tell them to F off, like that, and the reason for that is because what they are doing there is maligning, that's not an argument, that's a character assassination, and you can't fight back against a character assassination by legitimizing the person who's actually making the argument. The minute that you start defending yourself, oh, I'm not a racist, and let me tell you all the reasons why I'm not a racist, what you're actually saying is, you're a reasonable person who's calling me a racist, which means that it's reasonable for you to call me a racist, or to think that I'm a racist, which means that maybe I'm a racist. There's no reason to even humor the argument, so I think the first thing that the West has to do, when it comes to many of these arguments, is to throw the bird, and say, you have no evidence of this. Not only do you have no evidence of this, it makes you a schmuck to actually make this argument, and to character assassinate people that you know nothing about, and against all available fact patterns. It is okay to simply reject out of, you do not have to make a logical retort to an insult. In fact, a logical retort to an insult is typically ineffective. The only actual appropriate response to an insult is to take umbrage, and to either walk away, or to engage on the same level that somebody's insulting you. All right, one more question. Hi, Mr. Shapiro. I have a question regarding the relationship of Israel and Germany. The new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who is a conservative, says he does no longer understand what Israel is doing in Gaza, and that the war cannot be explained with a fight against Hamas anymore. I wonder how dangerous is this for Israel, and are Europe, and especially Germany, still on Israel's side? I mean, obviously it's not good for Israel that so many of the European powers have decided that basically they are fine with Hamas regaining control of the Gaza Strip, and I'd recommend to the Chancellor that if he has a good plan for Gaza, he should table it right now. Because I've heard zero plans from anyone that are actually practical or practicable in the Gaza Strip. There's a reason that no country in the region will take the Palestinians. There is a reason for that, and it is because the Palestinian population, by polling data, by literally all polling data, is heavily terror-supportive. And many countries don't want that in their country, and I think rightly so. The notion that Israel is supposed to sort of leave and then leave Hamas as the governing power in the Gaza Strip is insane. Obviously, no one is positing any other solutions, including the Chancellor. So my response to that is always the same. The minute that you posit an actual practical plan that doesn't involve Hamas actually running the place again, redeveloping all of its terror tunnels, firing rockets into Israel, attacking its neighbors, and oppressing its own people, while, by the way, still holding Israeli hostages, the minute you come up with that plan, I'm happy to hear it. Otherwise, you should shut up. All right, bye. Everybody, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. John Vickley here, Daily Wire editor-in-chief. Wake up every morning with our show, Morning Wire, where we bring you all the news that you need to know in 15 minutes or less. Join me and my co-host Georgia Howell for daily coverage of all the biggest stories on Morning Wire.