Ben Shapiro: How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps

Ben has a brand new book out, which I am in the middle of, How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps. It's a depressing title. Would you agree with that?

Oh yeah. I mean, but as we all know, bad news sells better than good news. So fortunately for me, there's a lot of bad news out there. Unfortunately for the country and unfortunately for me as a citizen. I will say that when I wrote it, I thought that things were not great in America. This is December, January. And then when the pandemic hit, I thought, okay, well, at least, you know, we should be able to come together around, you know, a giant disease that is killing a lot of people. And now I feel like the book is kind of half prophecy, unfortunately. I wish it weren't.

That's correct. So are you actually surprised at the disunity even now?

You know, I will say I am surprised at the extent of it. I thought that what I was talking about in the book was something that was simmering very barely under the surface. But the fact that it's broken out in such obvious and clear ways about every single thing, that is astonishing to me. I mean, I did not think that there was a way that you could polarize politics around a pandemic, and yet we've somehow managed to do it. Mainly the media had managed to do it by ignoring all data and all evidence. It's pretty insane. And then when you have people literally rioting and looting in the streets over nothing, tearing down statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Frederick Douglass, I figured, okay, well, At least that we should be able to get around and say, "You know, that's probably a bad idea." Nope. So the extent to which this is really— the sense that America is on the wrong track and that we are in serious trouble, that is a serious sense held by a wide variety of people. That may be the only thing we have in common is the belief that maybe we shouldn't share the country together anymore, and that's the most dangerous thing. I mean, I talk in the book about the difference between not left and right, but unionism and disintegrationism. Unionism being— a belief that the union should actually maintain, we should share a country together, and disintegrationism being the belief that we have nothing that binds us, that effectively we should fall apart. And it seems like the disintegrationists are pretty clearly winning at this point in time.

That's right. That's exactly, as my listeners know, what I suspect. You're much younger than I. How do you psychologically react to possibility of a dark future for this country?

Um, you know, all I can say is that the fight doesn't stop being worth fighting even if the future doesn't look good. I'll say there's one point, a couple points about it. One is other countries have gone through these sort of crises where it seems like they lose their thread and start eating themselves. This actually happened to Israel in the post-Zionist part of its history, probably between Oslo and maybe the mid-2000s. and then it turns out that Israel was sort of jogged back into reality by the fact that there are existential enemies who want to destroy it, and suddenly all of Israel, including the left, is center-right. Like, the left just doesn't exist there anymore. Reality has a way of clubbing people back into, uh, into some semblance of, of sanity. So there's that possibility, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to go through a real ugly period here. So I'm hopeful that we can either pull ourselves out by our bootstraps by relearning what it was that was supposed to unify us. I mean, the book really isn't just supposed to be me complaining about what's going on in the country. It really is supposed to be a one-stop shop as a sort of prophylactic against what's happening. It's really a reeducation in the stuff that's supposed to tie us together. And I'm hopeful that there are some liberals, not leftists, there's a distinction you always make, Dennis, and frankly I think I learned it from you, the distinction between left and liberal. I think there are some liberals out there who still agree with some of the fundamental principles of the book. If they don't make common cause with conservatives, then the country is in for a very, very dark future. I think the possibility of a common cause is still in the offing. But that's going to require a simple mind shift, and it's going to require a lot of people, for liberals, to get beyond the simple Trump of it all. So many of them have become obsessed with the idea that Trump is the be-all end-all in politics. He's the Big Bang of politics, that they're failing to recognize that whatever you think of Trump, Trump is a symptom of the times we live in. He is not the cause.

He certainly is not the cause. Talking about that, what do you foresee— and I don't like to ask predictive questions, but It has to be asked. What do you foresee if the Democrats win the presidency and add to that Congress?

Well, I think that things will get quite ugly quite quickly in a couple of ways. In one way, there will be an alleviation. I think that the media will immediately stop talking about COVID I think the riots will basically stop because I think what we're watching right now is the sort of pressure politics the Democrats brought to bear in the '60s. In the '60s, Democrats across the country, mayors like John Lindsay in New York, people like, like Marion Barry, actually pushed the idea that riots were good public policy because you could force law-abiding citizens to do stuff they otherwise wouldn't by essentially threatening them. And so I think that if Democrats take power nationally, then they will have achieved their goal right now, which is getting rid of Trump. I think that you will see people stop talking about COVID because the great lie here is that Trump has completely botched COVID. And every place else has done great. So Andrew Cuomo just doesn't exist in this vision of the world. Italy and Spain don't exist. The second wave that's currently happening in France doesn't exist in this vision of the world. So I think the media will have achieved its goal and they will simply allow COVID to sort of fade into the background if Biden is elected. That's, you know, that may be stupid and awful and dishonest, but at least, you know, there'll be some semblance of normalcy that is returned. Where things will get really ugly is in terms of policy. So Democrats are going to completely remake American foreign policy. They're going to cut the military again. They're going to retreat on the world stage from China. They're going to try to sign another nuclear deal with the evil Iranian government. And domestically, I think you're going to watch a serious threat to a wide variety of American rights. Particularly, I'm concerned about religious liberty. It's pretty obvious that a Biden administration would target religious liberty federally and suggest that nonprofit status ought to be removed for churches and synagogues that refuse to abide by social justice activism ranging from same-sex marriage to transgenderism. I think he'll threaten gun rights. I think that there will be a move to curb free speech rights. I think you'll start to see a state and local move by Democrats as more and more judges are appointed to curb free speech by citing diversity and citing anti-discrimination law. I think that you'll see the Democrats radically raise taxes and regulations, which will really hamper any sort of economic recovery in this very dark time. Again, the one piece of optimism I have here is that if American politics shows us one thing, it's that politicians after winning, tend to believe there's a mandate for their policies, and generally that's not true. Generally, the reason the politicians win is because people don't like the other guy. And so if Biden wins and if Democrats sweep into Congress, I think they're going to overreach. And I think within 2 years Republicans will be in charge of Congress again. And the reason I say this is because this is exactly what Barack Obama did in 2008. He overreached with the stimulus package. He overreached with cash for clunkers. He overreached with, with the bailouts and many overreached with Obamacare. Within 2 years, Republicans had retaken the House of Representatives. So I think that there's a pattern to that. I think that Biden is likely to try and interpret a victory for him as a sort of endorsement of a Bernie Sanders platform. I think that's idiotic. I think it's wrong, and I think there will be a backlash to it.

The book that Ben Shapiro has just written, just out, How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps, and I'm in the middle of it, and what it does so well, it explains America. I mean, that's really important. I have to say, I think that, like separation of powers, something obviously you mentioned, how many 12th graders can define that term?

I mean, nearly none, I would assume. And more importantly, even if they can define the term, they don't understand why it exists. And what folks have failed to recognize, and Dennis, you've done yeoman's work in trying to remind people of it, in books like your own talking about the American Trinity and basic principles of Americanism, is that the Declaration and the Constitution work not because in a utilitarian fashion they work. They work because they're founded on truths about human nature. That is why also they are good, because they're founded on truths about human nature and how to vitiate the sinfulness of human nature as it impacts other people. The point of separation of powers is, of course, as the Founders saw it, to curb the excesses of man. Because if one person has too much power, men can be— men are not angels, men are not devils, it's Federalist 51 by Madison. And so you have to check and balance people so that they aren't able to simply run roughshod over other people. The left believes that human beings are innately malleable, and so if you get rid of capitalism and you put in a new system, great men will come to the fore who are innately incapable of sin, and then they can rule from above without any checks and balances. In fact, checks and balances prevent us from reaching this utopian world. So even if people understand why checks and balances do exist, They don't understand why it should exist. Increasingly, by the way, this is true even for people on the right. They sort of understand what checks and balances are, but then—

All right, hold on, we're going to want to tell everybody the book, How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps. It is up at DennisPrager.com.