#336 Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War

[Joe Biden's] approval rating sank from 60% when he entered office to low 40s or high 30s today, unlike President Trump who never had a high approval rating ... Biden went from being a very popular guy coming in to a very unpopular guy right now, and if you're Joe Biden, you should be looking in the mirror and wondering exactly why.

Most good people die mourned by their family and friends, and two generations later, they're forgotten. But those are the people who incrementally move the ball forward in the world—sometimes much more than the people who are considered great.

His account should be restored—and this is coming from somebody who really dislikes an enormous number of Donald Trump's tweets.

It seems as though when a story gets killed preemptively like this, it is almost universally a story that negatively affects one side of the political aisle. I can't remember the last time there was a story on the right that was disinformation or misinformation where social media stepped in and they went, 'We cannot have this. This cannot be distributed. We're going to all conclude so that this information is not distributed.'

When you're single, your boundaries of happiness and unhappiness—you can be a 0 in terms of happiness, you can be like a 10 in terms of happiness. And then you get married, and it goes up to like a 20 and a negative 20 ... Then you have kids, and all limits are removed.

For years and years, I've believed that climate change was a reality ... The notion that climate change is just not happening or that human beings have not contributed to climate change I find doubtful. The question is to what extent human beings are contributing to climate change. Is it 50%? Is it 70%? Is it 90%?

This is like a litmus test question as to whether you take climate change seriously. If you're on right or left and you take climate change seriously, you should be in favor of nuclear energy. If you are not, I know that.. you have other priorities.

I think one of the mistakes that we make in politics is trying to substitute love for respect and respect for love, and I think that's a big mistake. So, I do not bear tremendous love in the same sense that I do for my family for random strangers ... Anybody who tells you they love your kid as much as you love your kid is lying to you; it's not true.

The role of love is important in binding together human beings who ought to be bound together, and the role of respect is even more important in binding together broader groups of people.

If you believe, as I do, that unborn and pre-born lives deserve protection, then the slaughter of just under a million of them every year for the last almost 50 years is a historic tragedy on par with a holocaust.

Twitter is a place to smack and be smacked ... Anybody who uses Twitter for an intellectual conversation, I think, is engaging in category error.

I'm very hopeful about Elon buying Twitter. I think that Elon is significantly more transparent than what has taken place up till now. He seems committed to the idea that he's going to broaden the Overton window to allow for conversations that simply were banned before—everything ranging from efficacy of masks with regard to COVID to whether men can become women and all the rest.

Biden seems to be a very good father ... He seems like a really good dad. Like, the stuff that he's saying to his son is stuff that, God forbid if that were happening with my kid, I'd be saying to my kid.

When we were, apparently, a more terrible society, we used to say that people should wait until they get married to have sex—a position that I still hold.

Live out the values that you think are really important, and seek those values in others ... Second piece of advice: Don't go on Twitter until you're 26... because your brain is fully developed at that point.

Unlike a lot of other forms of racism, which are not really conspiracy theory, anti-semitism tends to be a conspiracy theory about the levers of power being controlled by a shadowy cadre of people who are getting together behind closed doors to control things.

The general rule of politics is that everyone is a moron unless proven otherwise, that virtually everything is done out of stupidity rather than malice, and that if you actually watch politics as a comedy, you'll have a lot more fun.

This is why the message that I most commonly say to young men is it's time for you to grow up, mature, get a job, get married, have a family, take care of the people around you, become a useful part of your community.

You have to surround yourself with a group of people who you trust enough to make serious critiques of you when you're doing something wrong but also you know that they have your best interest at heart.

I'd rather have people on the left also being able to put out stuff that I disagree with then for there to be anybody who's sort of in charge of these social media platforms and using them as editorial sites.

The downside of Trump is that... there's no filter between brain and mouth. Whatever happens in his brain is the thing that comes out of his mouth.

I find that, I don't say 100% of the time, but 94% of the time, the conspiracy theory turns out just to be people being dumb and then other people reacting in dumb ways to the original people being dumb.

Well, my favorite thing about Candace [Owens] is that she will say things that nobody else will say. My least favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things that nobody else will say.

What I tend to read is mostly not news; what I tend to read is mostly books ... That's the icing on the cake, but the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in history, econ, geography... social science that I'm reading every week.

The strongest case for pro-life is that, from conception, a human life has been created. It is a human life with potential. That human life with potential now has an independent interest in its own existence.

I think that the meaning of life is to fulfill what God made you to do, and that is a series of roles.

I don't think it's ever going to be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I think it's a natural human condition to want to be with people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs. And I think trying to obliterate that in the name of universalism likely leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences.

The best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over.

The super positive thing about Trump is that because he has no preconceived views that are establishmentarian, he's sometimes willing to go out of the box and do things that haven't been tried before.

The last few years have done more to undermine institutional trust than any time in probably American history. It's pretty amazing.