Tucker Carlson reacts to Ben Shapiro telling viewers that your parents would consider a $ 4.50 taco at Del Taco a “gourmet meal” given the large number of choices and how food costs make up less of your disposable income. Carlson mocks Shapiro’s argument, saying young Americans were promised the opportunity to have a better life than their parents and asking, “How dare you want what your parents had?”

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s wrong with you? Complaining about food prices? We’re gonna play you a clip from someone from whom we try to play a lot of clips. It’s Ben Shapiro. We’re gonna play it in just a sec, but before we do, just a caveat, we’re not playing this to suggest that Ben Shapiro is like a shaper of history, a mover in American politics. He’s not. He’s an employee, like most everybody else. He’s doing what he’s told. He represents larger interests, obviously. So why bother to replay and then rebut something that Ben Shapiro said? Well in an effort to speak to the people who put him up to it. So the whole point of Ben Shapiro, and there is a point to Ben Shapiro, this is not like some organic phenomenon, like Ben Shapiro was just so charming and brilliant that he somehow got into Harvard Law School and then eyebrows and all emerged as a social media titan. No, of course not. Ben Shapiro had a deal with Facebook, a deal no one else got. And so the point of Ben Shapiro was, here’s a way to send a very specific message to outline and sell a very specific worldview to young people. Ben Shapiro is an old person’s idea of a young person. He is a spokesman for a group of older people aimed at younger people. I have an idea. Let’s get Ben Shapiro, this guy Ben Shapiro, he’s brilliant. He’s a really promising young kid. And we’ll get him to sell free market economics and a robust Reaganite foreign policy to the young folks. And by the way, it kind of worked for a while, thanks to the trans movement, which you suspect they also kind of concocted, this same group, but whatever, wherever that came from. For a while, Ben Shapiro seemed like he was on the side of common sense and he’s for free speech and he’s against the trans lunacy, et cetera, et cetera. But always from day one, the point was Ben Shapiro was going to sell this very specific version of economics, not capitalism, bears no resemblance to anything Adam Smith advocated for, but the kind of modern American monopoly arrangement where six countries, companies can behave like countries, have sovereignty, unlike our own nation, and control every part of your life through debt, which is kind of broad, but fairly accurate definition of our current economic system. So sell that and then sell the even harder to pitch idea that it’s unpatriotic to oppose wars for Israel. Like first of all, it’s obviously anti-Semitic. I mean, it’s just an expression of hate. If you don’t want to regime change some country, you can’t find on a map. Obviously, you’re a bigot. You’re basically a Nazi. In fact, you must be for Hitler. You probably are opposed to the Second World War, too. Probably have problems with Churchill. It’s literally immoral to oppose Ben Shapiro’s employer’s foreign policy, but it’s also un-American. Like this country was founded to fight wars for Israel. That’s why we’re here. I mean, our founders said explicitly America exists as a Judeo-Christian country to support Israel. Okay? So whatever, whatever prime minister of that country wants, we’re doing. I mean, that’s why we’re here. So if you’re against it, you don’t believe in America. You’re against America. Why don’t you just leave? Maybe we’ll revoke your green card. Oh, do I have a green card? We’ll strip you of your citizenship. And that’s what ICE exists to do now. In any case, you should know watching this that these are not just Ben Shapiro’s opinions to the extent he actually has opinions, who knows? But these are the opinions of the people who prop up Ben Shapiro, who created Ben Shapiro. And this is what they think, this is the argument they sincerely believe apparently is going to appeal to young people who are worried about the price of burritos. Watch this. BEN SHAPIRO: Unfortunately, this has become the mode for a lot of young people. Why can’t I afford what my parents could afford when they were my age? Spoiler alert. When it comes to groceries, you can. And in areas, by the way, for housing, where deregulation has been the rule, you still can. In fact, you have today more restaurant options, your food costs less of your disposable income, and it is probably significantly better. But here in the United States of America, we are fatter, richer, have nicer houses, nicer cars, and the food we eat is much, much better than it was for our parents in general. Our parents probably would have considered a $ 4.50 burrito at Del Taco a gourmet meal. CARLSON: Your parents would have considered a $ 4.50 taco at Del Taco a deal because your parents were proles. They were pathetic. They were disgusting people, and anything was enough for them. You don’t want to use the term goyslop, but it does seem kind of appropriate in this specific instance. They would be grateful for a Del Taco. What are you complaining about? It’s hilarious, but it’s the first line that really does catch your attention. He says it is fashionable, this mode among young people to complain that life is more expensive than it was for their parents. So here you have this whole new generation, this entitled, fat, lazy, tattooed, drug addicted, screen mesmerized generation that has no idea what’s good for itself, but is all about entitlement, whining and entitlement. And the main thing they think they’re entitled to is a life as good as the life their parents led. Who gave them that idea? Of course, that used to be, I think it was referred to euphemistically as the American dream and the American dream was the idea that your children might have a better life than you had. And yes, not just spiritually, but materially, they might have the things that you wanted, but couldn’t have. That’s why you work hard to give them opportunities. But Ben Shapiro was telling you, what? We never said that. Who told you that was a real promise? How dare you want what your parents had? Who do you think you are? Eat your Del Taco and be happy. $ 4.50 for a Del Taco? What a deal. And you know how we know it’s a good deal? You know how you know America’s thriving? Because it’s fatter. By the way, if you live in China during one of the recent famines during the Cultural Revolution, obesity was a sign of affluence. But of course, we don’t live in China during a famine. We live in late stage empire in the United States where obesity is not a sign of affluence, but instead a sign of discouragement and poverty. That’s the truth. It’s a sign most of the time of sadness, not of a thyroid condition, but of depression. So people who are depressed get fat. So if you want to know how your population is doing, measure their BMI. So a little weird for Ben Shapiro to say, we’re doing great, we’re fat. But what is actually going on here is what is happening across our society on so many different issues, which is a rewriting of history in real time. You just saw something happen. You saw, I don’t know, let’s just pick an example. Israel pushed Donald Trump into a war that hurts the United States that we cannot possibly win that is all downside for us, but potentially upside for Israel. That would be the war with Iran, the regime change war that no one in America supported. And you watch that happen at the end of February of this year, but within days they were telling you, what, are you an anti-Semite? That didn’t happen. Israel didn’t push Trump to war with Iran. Were you saying Trump has no agency? Are you saying Trump’s weak? Well, obviously Trump is weak. That’s why he allowed the Israelis to push him to war. I mean, who doesn’t know that? Of course he’s weak, but it doesn’t matter weak or strong. That’s what happened. And they admitted it happened and we saw it happen. And anyone who paid any attention at all had no doubt at all, because it was true that that’s what happened. Israel pushed Trump to war with Iran. It’s not like there were critical American interests at stake. There weren’t. There are now. But what’s interesting is that almost immediately after, every big news organization in the United States started telling you what you just saw is not what you just saw. And if you thought you just saw that, the problem is you. There’s something wrong with your brain and with your heart. You’re a hater. You must hate Jews. Well, no, we don’t hate Jews at all. But that just happened. Shut up. And by the way, we haven’t seen polling on it, but it’s probably been pretty successful. If you scream at people long enough and persistently enough and tell them lies consistently enough, after a while, they kind of give up and believe those lies. You can change the collective memory about an event pretty quickly after that event occurred. And then you can encode it forever in what we used to call the history books, and we now refer to as AI, which is our collective consciousness. And forever after, something that didn’t happen will be recorded as historical truth. That can happen. We’re watching it right now. So one of the things that Ben Shapiro’s employers are trying to tell you is that actually your life is way better than previous generations. You’ve got it so good, you don’t know how good you’ve got it. And if you can’t see that, the problem is you. So stop complaining, bitch. You little whiner. Get to work. Retirement? What? That’s for ungrateful people. Get back to work. Eat your Del Taco. They’re only $ 4.50. Your parents would have been grateful for a $ 4.50 Del Taco. Getting out after 18 hours in the spinning mill. They were only nine years old. They didn’t have Del Taco then. That’s what they’re trying to tell you your parents’ generation lived through. But did it? You know, we could make a detailed case based on the statistics, which are still publicly available from, say, two generations ago. Let’s just pick the biggest generation in American history, the baby boom. And we could tell you everything about their lives. You know the average age at which people had babies? In let’s just pick a year. I’ll pick the year I was born, 1969. Women had babies in the United States on average the age of 20. Twenty years old. How’d they do that? How could you afford a baby at 20? You can’t afford a baby at 20. Childcare is so expensive. Do you know how much it costs to hire someone from Central America to watch your child while you work as a bank teller? It doesn’t make any sense. That couldn’t have happened. Oh, but it did. It did happen. And it’s provable. But maybe a more telling picture of what life was like in, let’s just pick that same year, 1969, is an actual picture from 1969. Let’s pick the biggest event that year in the United States, certainly the most celebrated and lovingly cataloged event, not simply of that year, the summer of 1969, the same year as the moon landing, but of that entire generation, the baby boom, the famous baby boom that everyone loves to despise, and for good reason. People born between 1946 and 1964, right smack in the middle, 1969 was the year of the Woodstock Music Festival in Woodstock, New York. And numbers kind of vary about how many people went, 400,000, 600,000, hundreds of thousands of Americans went to that event. And there are a lot of pictures of it, and they’re all on the internet. We’ve got a couple not great pictures of it, but take 10 minutes tonight and look at the pictures. None of the performers, Sly and the Family Stone and the Grateful Dead and Ritchie Havens and all the rest, most of them long dead. But take a look at the crowd. There it is right there. That’s the crowd at Woodstock. That’s a far away shot. So you kind of get a sense of the scale of it, but you kind of get a sense of the demographic composition of it. So in 1969, this country was about 90% white, 89, 88, 89% white, about 10 or 11% black. And interestingly, or maybe not surprisingly, the crowd at this massive event is about that. It’s probably a little more than 90% white, maybe 95% white, but then it was at least 5% black. So it was on some basic level representative of the American population, 90% white, 10% black. But zoom in a little bit. What do you notice? That’s not a great shot. They’re more on the internet, and you should definitely look them up, but those are shirtless people. And if you look carefully, then they’re leaned over. The first thing you notice, what’s the first thing you notice? Well, the complexion of the skin, again, 90% white. But after that, the first thing you notice is you can see the ribs on almost every single person at that event. These are thin fit people with muscle definition and not a single hint of what we call now a love handle. These are people like triathletes, and this is a broad cross section. In fact, it’s probably not even the healthiest cross section of American society in 1969. These were the drug users of 1969. These were the party people. They’re sleeping outside for three days in a field in upstate New York. I mean, these are not probably the captain of every track team on the Eastern Seaboard. These are like the stoners. And yet even the stoners in 1969 looked, well, fit, trim, and happy. Of course, they were dippy, and they had stupid ideas, and they were running around naked in the field. And it doesn’t sound entirely bad, but they were misguided and dumb and probably had opinions that were maybe even malicious. But they certainly looked happy. They looked cheerful. They looked like they thought the future was going to be great, better than today. They had not been lectured by their leaders to be grateful for a Del Taco. In fact, they weren’t eating Del Tacos. And you can tell by the way they look. And so you can’t look at those pictures and thousands more like them on the internet of this country before this era that we’re living in now and say the people are better off. They’re gravely worse off. And you can see it in their faces and in their tattoos and in their piercings and in their demeanor. And they’re not all failing, of course. They’re amazing young people who are bright-eyed and hopeful, optimistic, on it, so impressive. But you can’t say they’re more confident about their future than their parents were, because they’re not, and they’re right not to be. So if you cared about them, you would consider that a tragedy. As a matter of public policy, you would consider it a disaster. It’s exactly the opposite of what you’re charged with doing. Your job, if you run the American government or if you seek to influence the running of the American government, your job is really simple. Help the people thrive. That’s it. And by the way, once again, if you don’t do it, someone else will. Maybe someone with an economic program that doesn’t work. Maybe someone with deep racial animus that’s going to split the country along racial lines. Maybe someone who hates white people or thinks that men can become women or something crazy. That person’s going to win anyway. Why? One reason, because he at least pretends to care about the people who live here. And not just their material well-being, but their spiritual well-being. Are they happy? Can you imagine four or 500,000 American 18-year-olds plucked at random from cities across the country in a field this summer, this month, August, 57 years after Woodstock, can you imagine what they would look like with their shirts off? Which is not to make fun of their lumpy physiques. That happens to a lot of us over time. But can you imagine what their faces would look like? Would they look as cheerful as the kids you see in the pictures of Woodstock? You hope so. Probably not. So maybe the last thing they need is to be lectured by people who are clearly the beneficiaries of unearned privilege, like Ben Shapiro, who somehow got into Harvard Law School despite a middling IQ. How did that happen? Never asked. People like that have no standing at all to lecture the rest of America’s young people about whether or not they complain about their clearly declining standard of living and their future prospects. They have no standing at all. But they do it anyway. Now why do they do it? Well, there are two reasons they do it. First because they feel it.

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