GLENN: Joined by Ben Shapiro, who is the editor-in-chief of -- of The Daily Wire. Also, the most-listened to conservative podcast in the world.

Welcome, Ben Shapiro.

BEN: Hey. Good to see you.

GLENN: How are you? So what books would you like to ban today?

BEN: Wow. I mean, after that list, I don't know what's left.

GLENN: Yeah, I know.

BEN: I mean, I got to go with the children's books since I'm separating those in the middle of the night.

GLENN: You go to these college campuses all the time. And you speak. When I went to college -- I spent more time in the parking lot than in the actual classroom. But you were taught how to think. How to find answers.

I mean, I was -- the professor that I learned so much from, I had no idea where he stood on any issue. Because he would argue so hard on one side. And then flip it around and argue on the other side. And you believed both of them.

BEN: Uh-huh.

GLENN: Nobody is doing that anymore. In fact, that's frowned upon.

BEN: Yeah, that's usually reserved for law school. Really. Like, when you go to law school, that's what they say. They're going to teach you how to think like a lawyer. But when you're in undergrad, they don't bother with that anymore. They're teaching you how to think, but it's how they want you to think. So they're teaching you what to think, more than how to think.

GLENN: So what are you seeing when you go to college campuses?

BEN: I think there's a lot of pent-up energy. I think there's a lot of pent-up anger. Because I think people there are largely bored. I think there's a reason that if you show up on a Wednesday night to hear me talk, in the middle of the week, you know, in the middle of the brutal cold and a thousand people show up -- and I don't think it's because I'm that great a speaker. I mean, I'm fine. But I think it has more to do with the fact that there is some hole that's being left intellectually on these campuses.

And anyone who even attempts to fill that hole on campuses is being treated with a certain amount and reverence, simply because the colleges have left the field wide open. You don't even have to be that good at this stuff, in order to be seen as somebody who has something valuable to say, I think.

GLENN: You're pretty good at this stuff.

BEN: You're allowed to say it. I'm not.

GLENN: Yeah. You're pretty good at this stuff. You and Jordan Peterson are probably the best thinkers, I think on the right, right now.

BEN: Well, thanks. That's high compliment because Jordan is fantastic.

GLENN: Yeah. Jordan is amazing.

And he's having the same kind of success that you are, where he's -- and he's a guy who wasn't looking for it.

BEN: Right. Right. That's one of the things -- it's really fascinating. There's a whole group of people who have really come to prominence in the last three or four years. They're really disparate politically. You're talking about people like Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris or Brett Weinstein. Or me. And all these people disagree with each other on a huge variety of matters. But there's two things they seem to have in common: One is that they actually purport to care about data. And they won't just dismiss data, if it disagrees with their position. And the other is that they seem to be willing to say no to things.

And there's something that I have started terming the Bartleby effect. Which is, there's this short story by Herman Melville called the Bartleby, the Scrivener.

GLENN: I'm not sure if that's on the list -- the approved list from GQ.

BEN: Yeah, I'm not sure either. But the short story is about this guy who is -- he's a scribe at a Wall Street law firm. And one day his bosses come in and they ask him to do something. He says, I prefer not to. And they don't know what to do with him because he's not actively saying no, but he's not saying yes. He just says, I prefer not to.

They leave him alone. Eventually, after saying, I'd prefer not to, to everything, he ends up dying basically alone and in prison.

But the purpose of the story is to say that society cannot tolerate people who refuse to kind of go along to get along. Well, that's true. But if you look at all the people who have risen to prominence, people like Jordan, Jordan rose to prominence not based on his latest book -- which is actually a pretty late development.

He rose to prominence because in Canada, there's Bill C-16, which essentially mandated that you use transgender pronouns.

And Jordan, a couple of years ago, said, I'm not doing that. That doesn't accord with the realities of psychological development. So I'm just not going to do that.

And people lost their minds. And suddenly, he was this major figure in Canada just for saying no. Sam Harris has become a major figure because he was on Bill Maher's show, and he said, Islam might be more dangerous religion as a general matter than Christianity.

Because the facts bear out that there are more violent Muslims worldwide than violent Christians. And he was run out on the rail by the left. Suddenly, he had this new following, that people were saying, listen, this guy's willing to undergo a certain amount of pressure, in order to say what he wants to say.

For Brett Weinstein, it was the same thing. So saying no, I think gives a lot of college students a feeling. Like, if you're willing to say no and take a risk to say no, then you must have some sort of rooted, eternal values to which you are subject. And this means that you have some sort of gloss on life that is more than what my professors are saying is possible out there.

STU: But it's not just saying no. It's saying no because of logic and reason.

GLENN: Right.

STU: You know, that's why everybody is famous now, of saying no.

No. I'm not male or female.

GLENN: Right.

STU: That's not the same. And it's -- and we are -- have disconnected from all logic, all reason, all science.

BEN: Yes.

GLENN: And just -- and because everybody is just saying, no, well, I don't have to take that. I have different facts.

BEN: It's a really fascinating development to watch, as all these people on the left, who proclaim that they were so pro-science are throwing people out of the ranks.

Like, I don't know if you saw this conversation between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. Sam Harris is on the left. I mean, Sam is a real Democrat. And Ezra Klein went on his show and called Sam Harris a racist because Sam Harris looked at actual data about IQ differentiation among groups.

He actually read Charles Murray's book and had Charles Murray on his program. And said, listen, Charles Murray is not attributing all of this to biology, but there's some pretty clear evidence that there's at least a biological component to IQ. And Ezra Klein went on Sam Harris' show, and without any data at all, called him a racist. That's because there's this newfangled philosophy that says that all reality is subjective. All reality is what you feel about the reality.

And so science is not subjective. Science is what science is. And that means scientists are surprised when they find themselves out on their ear for the first time.

GLENN: Well, I don't think people really took postmodernism really seriously.

BEN: Yep.

GLENN: And that's what -- we are living in the post-modern world. And if you don't know what postmodernism is -- modern -- the modern lifestyle is the age of reason. Enlightenment. The idea that we take science and facts and we look at all of it. That was modern thinking. We've now thrown that away. We're postmodernism. And instead of now being ruled by a church, we're ruled by some other religious doctrine. I just don't know what it is.

BEN: Yes.

GLENN: But it is a religious -- it's dogma.

BEN: So I'm writing a book about this right now. And I think what's happened here is the culmination of essentially a 300-year process, where what originally happened was, there was -- postmodernism is the rejection of values on behalf the subjective.

So where it makes a certain amount of sense, where people logically resonate to postmodernism is they say postmodernism applies when it comes to morality. That your morality is not objective. Right? We all have our own morality. That life is a series of power political struggles. And what you say as morality, you're only saying that, because it benefits you to say that that's morality. And so a lot of people buy into that.

Well, that though was an outgrowth of the rejection of postmodern -- postmodern value rejection was an outgrowth of the rejection of religion. The idea was, if there's no objective religion out there, then what defines values in here?

And so people said, okay. Fine. Well, we can deal with the postmodern values struggle. Because we'll make our own values. We'll make our own value systems. But they forgot that science is a value. Reason is a value. Rationality is a value.

And so a lot of the folks who were very reasonable and very interested in reason, enlightenment thinkers, were some of the biggest people promoting postmodern values. And then they were surprised when -- when the Frankenstein monster turned on its master. All of a sudden, all these people who are promoting postmodern values said, well, science is a value too. So why exactly should we take science seriously?

If you're saying that reason and rationality is the highest values, but you're only saying that because you're a reasonable, rational, intelligent person. You're only saying that because of your high IQ. You're only saying that because you benefit from the scientific consensus.

Like, there are papers that are now being written on the postmodern left saying things like, science is a creation of the white male, heterosexual patriarchy.

I mean, there was this fascinating thing. I talked to Jordan about this other day. This Google memo that came out, from -- that was revealed in the James Damore lawsuit against Google, where they put out a paper saying, white values versus non-white values.

And among white values were things like rationality. Things like winning and losing. Things like scientific progress. These things were actually listed as white views of the universe, as opposed to objective views of the universe. What I said about it on my show is that, if Google lived by the values that it purports to hate, it would be out of business in five minutes, obviously, right? Google bases its own business on all of these values that it purports to think are white, heterosexual, patriarchal norms. But that's the value system that has built the West. And we're rejecting that now.

Because we thought that we could separate religion from science. And that that break could be clean. And instead, it turns out, that by rejecting religion, by rejecting the idea that there's an objective truth about morality in the world, we're also going to reject the idea of objective truths generally.

And you see some people struggling to put that back together. I'm struggling to put that back together. I think Jordan is struggling to put that back together. I think there are people like Steven Pinker or like Sam -- Sam Harris, who are trying to keep the religion out of it. And trying to restore the Enlightenment vision of science. But I'm not sure how can you do that.

GLENN: It doesn't work.

BEN: I'm not sure how you can remove the base of the science.

There's this weird idea -- you were saying this earlier. You know, there's this weird idea that history began today.

Well, a lot of Enlightenment advocates think that history began in 1750. That's when history began. There's no history to science. That science started in 1750. That good thought began in 1750. There's a rooted philosophy of the West that goes all the way back to Sinai and that carries forward through the sermon on the mount, and then all the way forward, through Lot.

GLENN: There is no way you can understand the West without understanding the Bible.

You don't have to believe --

BEN: This is right.

GLENN: -- in the angels and the magic tricks and the fire and all of that. You don't have to. But you do have to read it and go, what is this trying to teach, and how did this form what we have?

BEN: Exactly.

GLENN: And everybody is trying to throw that out.

Without that, you've completely taken all the cornerstones out. You've taken the cornerstone and all of the foundation of the house out. You've got nothing left.

BEN: This is right. I think the history of this 19th and 20th centuries are enough to prove this.

I mean, mass chaos and the bloody slaughter of an enormous portion of the globe, on the basis of rationality, should be enough to show you that rationality unmoored to some sort of higher value system is pretty dangerous stuff.

GLENN: Back with Ben Shapiro in a minute.

GLENN: Welcome back to the program. Joining us, Ben Shapiro.

STU: Glenn, I hope Ben is -- he understands what's happening in DC. With a very -- very interested guy in the DC city council. If you remember, his name is, let's see, Trayon White, and he initially talked about the big conspiracy that a lot of people are not discussing about how Jews are controlling the weather.

GLENN: Damn you. Notice Ben lives out here in Los Angeles. And it's beautiful all the time.

STU: It is.

GLENN: Coincidence, I don't think so.

STU: Do we have the initial clip of him driving in his car, watching like three snowflakes falling and blaming it on the Jews --

VOICE: It's just snowing out of nowhere this morning, man.

Y'all better pay attention to this climate control, man. This climate manipulation. And DC keep talking about we're a resilient city. And that's a model based off the Rothschild controlling the climate, to create natural disasters. They can pay for it on the cities. Be careful.

BEN: Wow.

GLENN: So the Rothschild. How deeply connected to the Rothschild, are you?

BEN: We really don't talk about this, except in our Friday night meetings. We really try to keep this under wraps. But I will say, the last time I traveled to Atlanta, I brought a tornado with me. Then that big snowstorm in DC was the next day because I traveled to DC.

GLENN: Holy cow. There it is. He has admitted it. Now, there's an update to this story, I don't know if, you know, Ben.

STU: Yeah, it's pretty exciting. I guess he was doing a tour to -- a little penance for his previous comments. And he went to the Holocaust museum. And, you know, this is going to turn out well obviously.

BEN: Oh, good. This is a sitcom here.

GLENN: He did not find the weather machine.

(laughter)

GLENN: He did not find it there.

STU: He did examine a picture of a girl walking through a crowd, surrounded by German soldiers. And the girl was wearing a sign. The sign said, I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew.

White, this councilman, then asked the tour guide, are they protecting her?

Meaning, are the Germans, Nazi soldiers protecting this girl? No, the guide said. They're marching her through.

Marching through is protecting, White responded.

Of course, the guide pointed out they thought that maybe they were humiliating her.

Now, White then decided halfway through the tour to just bolt. He just leaves the tour and goes outside and waits outside on the street. Once he leaves, a member of his staff suggests that a picture of the Warsaw ghetto resembles a, quote, gated community. The rabbi doing the tour points out, yeah, I wouldn't call it a gated community, more like a prison.

So it's not going well for this particular gentleman.

GLENN: I want to get Ben's view as one of the most hated Jews in America, perhaps the world. I would like to get his view on this gated community and what I think was probably a condominium complex of Auschwitz. When we -- when we come back.

GLENN: So back with Ben Shapiro, who has been following Kanye West and Shania Twain for some strange reason.

BEN: They're both in the news.

GLENN: Yeah, I know.

BEN: Kanye came out with a bunch of kind of bizarrely conservative tweets. He tweeted his support for Candice Owens, the other day, who is a compatriot of Charlie Kirk over at Turning Point USA and a black woman who is a supporter of Trump. Then he tweeted also something about how self-victimization is a disease. And all these conservatives are like, oh, my God. Kanye is on our side, man. Kanye is here.

GLENN: I don't know if I want Kanye on our side.

BEN: So this is my take.

GLENN: Can we remember who Kanye is.

BEN: It's so amazing that we on the right have this scorn for the people on the left. Because we're like, look at how they worship celebrity. Look at how they worship celebrity. First of all, Donald Trump is the president of the United States now. Also Kanye West is -- the only reason you care about what Kanye West thinks and he's just not muttering to himself on a corner somewhere, is because he's a big celebrity.

And this bizarre notion that somebody whom the cameras have focused in on has been conferred with a greater-than-average wisdom is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

As someone who grew up in Hollywood and knows a lot of people the cameras have focused in on, let me just say the folks in the music industry, the folks in Hollywood, they don't know anything. There are a few writers who are somewhat smart. You're talking about these musicians. You're talking about the actors.

GLENN: Oh, come on. Ben, I don't believe that at all.

Of course, they're dolts. A lot of them are just dolts. A lot -- I think there are a lot of people in powerful or public positions, that are as dumb as the city councilmen in Washington, DC.

BEN: Oh, yeah. No question.

GLENN: Have no idea. Never read a book. Don't know history. Have no idea what they're talking about.

BEN: Keith Ellison was almost the head of the DNC. And I'm not sure he's wildly smarter than Trayon White. They both give money, apparently, to the same nation of Islam event. So it's one of the greatest disappointments of life, is Adam Corolla, is that when you're a kid, you look around. You look at the adults. You see they all have houses. And they have cars. And they have nice stuff, and they can do what they want at night. And it looks great. And you figure, they must be so smart. I mean, they've got all these nice things. They've got houses and cars.

And then you grow up and you realize, all the same people who are stupid when you're a kid, they're still stupid when you're adults.

And so that means they all have houses and cars too. And that's not the same thing -- there's a guy who Josh Groban did one of the great routines ever. If you haven't seen it, go to YouTube and look it up. It's so funny. It's him singing the tweets of Kanye west.

And it's him singing things like, fur pillows are hard to sleep on. And it's -- how he wants a giant fish tank. He's looking for a giant dancing fish tank. The same guy who is tweeting about how he needs a giant dancing fish tank is the same guy tweeting deep thoughts about self-realization.

And we're like, yeah, man. Because we're so hungry for any sort of legitimacy on the right. We are so hungry for anyone who is famous, to say we're not the worst people in the world and we're not crazy.

And, particularly, if that person happens to be a minority like Kanye, that we are just willing to glom on to anything. It's an amazing thing.

GLENN: So how do we fare? How do we get through this?

BEN: Do we?

GLENN: Do we, really?

BEN: I don't know. Again, I think we've lost so much of the idea that what validates us is the community that we live in or the God to whom we are subject. And instead, what validates us is a famous person saying something that makes us feel good about ourselves. And that's not a very good thing.

GLENN: So I have to tell you, I am -- I drove to the studios today. We're in Los Angeles. I drove to the studios today. And I turned on the radio. And I heard about a doctor talking about how she's doing regression therapy. But not just for this time line. But all of your alternative time lines.

BEN: Whoa.

GLENN: Yeah. So I don't know if she uses the flux capacitor to do that, I don't know how that works.

But I heard that, and at the top of my lungs, alone in the car today, how does anyone live here? How do you live here?

It's this weird thing that there is this little group of --

BEN: Yes. It's pretty alive intellectually. Right? Peter Thiel just moved down here, from San José. Jordan Peterson is out here a lot. Dave Rubin is out here. Dennis Prager is out here. The Claremont Institute is out here. There's a lot out here actually. And I think one of the reasons is, because when you're constantly balancing off the crazy of the other side, it is intellectually stimulating. I mean, you actually had to hear about that crazy regression thing, and now you can use it on the air. I mean, if you're back home now, you would be maybe talking about normal stuff on the radio.

GLENN: No, I wouldn't be talking about normal stuff, but I wouldn't be talking about Texas.

BEN: Right. Exactly. That's what I mean. If you're tuning into the radio on your way into the station, it wouldn't be talking about regression therapy.

GLENN: No.

BEN: The thing is that all of the crazy that's happening in LA, all the crazy that's happening in San Francisco, there are roots to that too. So we on the right tend to think of that as being just the latest craze, the latest fad. But there are some pretty pagan roots to all this. And I think what's really going on right now, is a battle between Judeo-Christian monotheism a reversion to a certain level of paganism. Because that's just witchcraft, right? I mean, regression therapy for alternative time lines, that's just witchcraft kind of stuff.

I'm not saying we should burden you or anything. But I am saying that --

GLENN: It is.

BEN: -- you guaranteeing me that you'll make my life better by talking about a life that I have never lived, is a form of you trying to guarantee a level of control in the universe to human beings. That human beings simply do not have over the universe. And that we can't exercise over the universe.

GLENN: I wrote a book. A novel, I don't know, eight years ago or so, called the Eye of Moloch. And it's Biblical in its nature.

Because if you look at -- if you look at how people were worshiping and -- and who Moloch is, he -- he wants you to have, you know, orgies. Crazy sex. Do whatever you want.

BEN: Yep.

GLENN: Destroy everything. And then sacrifice the baby of -- of that union. I mean, we're worshiping Moloch. We just don't know it.

BEN: I think that's right. It's under the guise of pantheism, which sounds a whole lot nicer. And it's also being concealed by the fact that we're still living -- your car runs out of gas, and you're running on the fumes. We're still living on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian value system.

So all the same people in Hollywood, who are promoting these sorts of values, same people who will use that regression technique, most of them are married. Most of them have kids. Most of them still have not been divorced. Right? The fact is, we see the high-profile divorces in Hollywood. But the truth is, most of the people who live in Hollywood are fairly normal human beings, or at least they live fairly normal lifestyles.

This is Charles Murray's point in Coming Apart, right? He says that upper-class white folks who live on the coast and are the, quote, unquote, thought leaders about single motherhood. They don't live those lifestyles. They're not single mothers. They're not living impoverished lifestyles. They're basically doing what everybody else does, with maybe the exception of going to church.

So they're living off the fumes of this Judeo-Christian history. But they're promoting this new lifestyle to a bunch of people, who are being suckered by it. Because they think, oh, this is what the successful people do.

What the successful people do is they're all members of sex cults. And out here in LA, that's really not what's going on. The face they put forward to the world is everyone is depraved because we're all experimenting and this is our thing.

But you the truth is that I find it a high point of amusement that all of the people who are so open about their promiscuity -- you know, the starlets who are so open about their promiscuity when they're 17, 18 years old. By the time they're 30, they're settling down, they're married. They have kids. Right?

They're living the same lifestyle as somebody living out in Oklahoma and Texas. They just won't tell you that. Right? The stuff that the media want to focus on, the stuff they want you to focus on is the sexy stuff. The stuff when they're 19. They're dancing naked with members of the same sex.

That's the -- by the time when they're 30 -- look at Miley Cyrus' new videos. And they basically look like Shania Twain videos. Right? All of a sudden, she's doing videos on the beach with her boyfriend. Looks like they're going to settle down. Looks like they're going to have kids. Because it turns out that the human drive for solidity and the human drive for some sort of value system is stronger even than the human drive for depravity or at least it is when you realize you're going to die at some point and depravity is going to catch up with you.

GLENN: Yeah, talk to me about Shania Twain. Your opinion on Shania Twain, a Canadian. Asked who she would have voted for. So she couldn't vote. What a ridiculous question to even ask her. She shouldn't have answered the question.

But the way she answered the question was, based on the values of the people who voted for him, which is her audience --

BEN: Right.

GLENN: -- I would say I would have probably voted for Donald Trump.

BEN: Right.

And now she's apologized in a long Twitter storm apology about, you know, I'm not a racist. I'm not a sexist. I don't believe in a lot of the same things that President Trump does. I was just trying to answer the question. But really I shouldn't have spoken out. Really?

First of all, this may be the most Canadian thing ever. Like, speaking out about an election that you couldn't take part, and then apologizing for a vote you could never cast. That's pretty Canadian.

GLENN: Michael Buble, I'm in New York -- and I walk into a hotel lobby. Michael is there. He sees me. He calls across the lobby. It's like 1 o'clock in the morning. He's like, Glenn! I turn around. I walk up. And he's like, I want you to know. I was just in a fist fight over you.

I said, what?

He said, I was at a hockey game someplace in Canada. And somebody said, I can't believe you're friends with Glenn Beck, and you go on the air with Glenn Beck.

And he's like, dude, he's a nice guy.

His politics?

We're Canadian. Why do you care about his politics?

And he said, he actually -- the guy threw a blow. They were throwing punches.

BEN: First of all, I want to see Michael Buble in a fight. I'll bet --

GLENN: I'll bet he's good.

BEN: Shockingly good. That's the only time he loosens the tie completely. Takes off the skinny tie, unbuttons that top button, just goes to work.

Yeah, I think that it is incredible. The level of intellectual bullying to which people are being subjected at this point. Where, you even say you voted for Trump or you say, hey, I support some of the things that Trump is doing.

The fact that so many people -- this goes to my generalized theory of the media. Everybody is seeing -- we live -- so to go back to scientific models, we live in a pre-Copernican era, as far as the media is concerned. They think that the world revolves around Donald Trump. Right? Donald Trump is the center of the universe, and everything revolves around Donald Trump.

This is a lie. The world revolves around the media. Right? The media has decided Donald Trump is the sun in this universe. But the sun and the universe are the media.

That's why Donald Trump is president right now. Is because the media cares so much about Donald Trump. So the fact that people are even asking Shania Twain about Donald Trump is because the media cares so much about Trump.

It's not Trump who is asking Shania Twain about Trump. It's the media asking Shania Twain about Trump, because Trump is the only thing that matters in the universe.

Because to the media, he is the only thing that matters in the universe.

GLENN: How long do you think the media has? Bill O'Reilly has said to me, the media is on its last legs.

BEN: You know, I think that they still have so much power, especially through the reinstitution of gatekeeping in the social media. That, I'm more skeptical than that.

I remember after 2004, after Bush won reelection, the line from the right was, well, the old media is dead. Right? We just defeated the old media. If the old media had its way, John Kerry would have been reelected.

That was 14 years ago. And they're still going, and they're still having a pretty major impact.

GLENN: So how do -- with the new gate keeping -- do you know who Edwin Black is?

BEN: Yeah, yeah.

GLENN: Okay. Had Edwin Black on last week. Fascinating. Need to talk to him about his theory of analytical ghettos.

STU: Algorithmic ghettos.

GLENN: Sorry. Algorithmic ghettos. And he said, we're all being -- we're all being put in a ghetto. And it's just an algorithm that's doing it this time. But the walls are being built.

How do businesses like The Daily Wire, TheBlaze, your voice, my voice, how do we stay on the other side of the wall?

BEN: So I think it's really a matter of, there will have to be new neutral platforms that are built. And I think people will find them.

So the fact that my podcast is so popular, is not because iTunes favors my podcast. Right? It's because people can go to a variety of different podcasting sources and seek it out, which is what they've done. Right? It was really more organic than anything else.

So I think people -- people still want to hear different perspectives. If they try to reinstall the gates, I think they'll find there are a lot of people that will want to tear those walls down again.

And it's going to take a while. It's going to take a while for that to happen. Because, again, it took Facebook ten years to build the sort of dominance. Fifteen years to build this sort of dominance. But I think they are fighting a losing battle. But it's going to take a little more time than I think people think it's going to take.

GLENN: Yeah. Ben Shapiro from The Daily Wire, and the Ben Shapiro Show. You can watch him online at The Daily Wire. You can also get his podcast at iTunes, wherever else you go to find your podcast. Ben, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Ben will be joining us, I believe today. You coming on the show today? For TV. We're going to spend an hour. Talk a little bit about Los Angeles and what's happening here. And the -- the different -- the thinking that you don't hear about in Los Angeles.

Nobody is paying attention to it. But there is something happening here. We'll talk a little bit more about that tonight on TheBlaze at 5 o'clock.