OUT TODAY: The Authoritarian Moment

I was literally about to say that the only radio show where you come back from break to Mars. That's a new one.

That's correct. Sometimes, Ben, I feel like I am on Mars, or let's put it this way, much of my fellow Americans and others. So Ben Shapiro has just published, actually literally tomorrow it comes out, and it is The Authoritarian Moment. Which unfortunately we are living in now. The left has weaponized America's institutions against dissent. You were talking about— we were talking about sports, then you were going to the corporations. I want— I'll go to the corporations in a moment. I'd just like you to react to something I tell my audience on almost a daily basis. There is no example, and if you differ, you know, it's totally a non-issue. Differ. But I don't know, and, and this has been my field oddly enough, the left since graduate school. And I don't know of an example of the left, not liberals, but of the left taking power in any country or in any institutions and allowing dissent.

Yeah, it's very difficult for me to come up with one. I can't come up with one.

Okay, that's very important for people to understand. All right, talk. So go to corporations.

So I think that conservatives, because corporations operate off the profit motive, they believe that the corporations were congenitally predisposed toward being conservative, right? They have to preserve the profit motive. All they care about is making money. So why would they allow the woke to sort of take over the place? But that mistakes what corporations essentially are, which are risk mitigation machines. So there are people at the top of corporations who initially take the risk to create the business. But then once the business is running, they have to mitigate risks and those risks from without and risks from within. And so if you are a corporate head, take the risk from without first. What you wanna avoid is the media blowing back on you and making you an issue and tanking your stock price. You don't wanna be in a headline. And so if you have a woke left inside your company who's leaking to the New York Times, you have a couple of choices. You can either please the woke left and then it never becomes a national issue, or you can fight the woke left. In which case you end up being on the front pages of the New York Times, and that has some pretty significant downstream effects because the left is not tolerant when it comes to consumption of products. There's a study from Harvard Business School recently where they took a poll of people across the political spectrum, their opinions on a generic corporation that they made up. The corporation is called Jones Corp. If people perceived that Jones Corp was apolitical, it ranks pretty highly. People said, oh, it's probably a pretty good corporation. If it ranks— if people thought it was liberal, it ranked exactly the same as if it was thought apolitical. If it ranked conservative, it dropped 30% in the approval ratings, all from people on the left who said this corporation is no longer worthy of my business because it doesn't think like me. And so if you're a corporate head and you know that there's this intransigent minority of consumers and of staffers who can damage your business by that much, what you end up doing is basically just conceding to them, particularly if they take it incrementally. If they don't ask to take over all the auspices of the corporation, all they want is just a little diversity training. All they really want is Robin DiAngelo to lecture you on your whiteness. All they really want is to make sure that you have a scholarship fund for particular races of people, but not other races of people. Corporate heads will say, okay, well, you know what? I'd rather be on the side of the angels and maintain my position than have to go to war with people inside my own company. And you can see this play out in real life. I mean, there was a company called Coinbase recently in Silicon Valley where the head of the company, which was great credit, Dennis Prager put out a statement to his employees saying, I don't want anybody at the company talking politics on our internal Slack channel because all it does is create conflict. And 60 of his employees quit. 60 of his employees said, that's not woke enough. That's not appropriate. You're telling me that my politics are offensive. I'm leaving. And it became a national story. It was covered in the New York Times, et cetera. So unless you are a corporate head with the wherewithal to just say no to these folks, you tend to cave. And corporations are not famous for their courage.

That's an amazing story you just told. I did not know of it. What was the name of the company?

The company's called Coinbase. And so the credit of the guy who ran it, a guy named Brian Anderson, he stuck by it.

So what is happening? Is Coinbase hurting financially as a result of this position?

Nope, now they're fine because they actually probably got rid of a bunch of Bitcoin.

All right, so wait a minute. So the fact is they're risk-averse, but they may be paranoid.

Yes, so this is correct. And Dennis, you know this because of the advertising business, right? Every time you trend on Twitter, everybody's afraid that advertisers are gonna pull their money. I mean, I have this issue on my show as well. And the reality is the number of people who actively carry through things like boycotts is very, very low. But everybody is so risk-averse that they're scared of their own shadow. All it would take is some corporate head saying, listen, we advertise on a wide variety of programming, stick it. For all of this to end. But, you know, again, that would take a little bit of wherewithal and a little courage.

Right. So the issue really isn't, I'm going to hurt my company, it's, I'm pretty much a coward.

Yes. I mean, I think that's exactly the issue. I think corporate cowardice is endemic. And I think that that sort of cowardice carries, you know, all the way across the spectrum. I think that that's true in sports also. I mean, it was the NBA that you mentioned that was basically telling Daryl Morey, the GM of the Houston Rockets, that he wasn't allowed to tweet about freeing Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the NBA is explaining to Americans how racist and terrible we are.

So what happened in Cleveland, the vast majority of people in Cleveland did not want the Indians name dropped. It's 105 years old. It's a tradition. If nothing else, it does zero in terms of insulting the Native American. It honors them. They're Indians. So what was the thinking of the president of the Cleveland Indians to drop the name?

I mean, I think that the thinking was simply, I'm gonna get credit from the left, and I don't want them coming after me every season. What's amazing about that, by the way, is that the Indians supposedly were named after a Native American player named Lewis Sockalexis, because the team was originally called the Cleveland Spiders. And then between 1866 and 1869, they had a player named Lewis Sockalexis who was Native American, who was pretty popular, and people started calling the team the Indians. And then when they sought to rename the team, that sort of came up again. But they thought that they were gonna get a win from the left. There's no such thing as a win from the left. There's just avoiding the temporary loss, right? What the left is doing right now is just the perfect, perfect example of the old Winston Churchill line that these are people who are feeding the alligator, hoping that it'll eat them last. And I think And that's exactly what you see here. There was no mass outcry. But Dennis, I think the key point in all of this is that it is the changing lines that is the point. I don't really like people on the right. We spend all of our time trying to say, well, what's the through line to what the left wants? What exactly are they shooting for? And the answer is there is no through line. You're fond of saying that untruth is sort of an element of the left, that they don't care about truth. But it's not just they don't care about truth. It's that standards must be malleable because then they can force you to abide by whatever standard it is today. The standards literally change on a dime, and if you're not in consonance with those standards, you'll be forced to atone. So it's this constantly shifting definition of what's right and what's wrong and what allows you to get off the hook, and you have to constantly be going and bringing sacrifices to sort of the pagan gods of the radical left here in order to keep them off your case. And so it really operates more like a philosophical cult than it does like any sort of coherent political philosophy.

All right, let's do one more segment. I mean, obviously we could talk for hours, and we have. Ben Shapiro, co-founder of The Daily Wire, book is coming out tomorrow, The Authoritarian Moment. We'll be back on Dennis Prager.