New polling shows how successful disintegrationists have become an American thinking.

A prosecutor brings charges against a Missouri couple defending themselves from rioters,

and is coronavirus starting to flatten?

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

Today's Ben Shapiro show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Your online activity should not be public. Protect yourself at ExpressVPN.com. A little bit later on in the program, we're going to get to all of the coronavirus-related issues that are cropping up around the country. What is the proper strategy? Why is it that people keep claiming they have the strategy to stop this thing? And then they actually don't present a strategy to stop the thing. We'll get to all of that. It's actually possible that we've actually seen the peak already in some places like Arizona and Texas, which would be great news. So we'll get to all of that. But first, got to remind you, today is the day. Finally, the long-awaited book that I've been talking about for months at this point, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps. It's now available. You can go over to Amazon.com or anywhere else books are sold and pick it up right now. I could not think of a time when it would be more relevant. It is extraordinarily relevant. The reason it is so relevant should be obvious from a brand new poll. It is out today from the Wall Street Journal. It is a devastating poll for the country. A devastating poll for the country. Because what it really says is that Americans don't believe that we share much anymore. The only thing that we share, apparently, is a desire to virtue signal the pollsters. But when it comes to what we actually share as a country, the answer is not much. So the premise of my book, as I've talked about before, is that there are essentially two visions of American society.

One vision of American society is the unionist vision. This is a vision that suggests that in order for a nation to survive, you have to have a common philosophy, culture, and history.

The common American philosophy is expressed beautifully in the Declaration of Independence, that we are endowed by nature and nature's God with certain inalienable rights, that government is instituted to protect those rights, and that violation of those rights makes the government lose its reason for being. That we are all endowed with reason, we are all equal before the law. These are the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, and we cherish them and we hold them dear, that our natural rights are what we call negative rights, rights against other people. They're not positive

rights, meaning entitlements from other people, entitlements from government. These were the

principles of the Declaration of Independence. And those principles are good. Those principles have

brought about the flowering of American freedom. They've brought about the insane levels of

prosperity that not only Americans enjoy, but the rest of the world enjoys as well. Those They've brought about the insane levels of prosperity that not only Americans

enjoy, but the rest of the world enjoys as well. Those principles have brought about the end of

Nazism and communism. Those principles were instrumental, were the key principles in overthrowing

the dominance of racism and white supremacy in American life. That is the common American philosophy.

Then there's the common American culture. American culture was built on a series of beliefs about

the way the world works and a series of attitudes toward the world. And those attitudes include

things like a feeling of entrepreneurship and adventure. The spirit of Americanism was the spirit

of adventure. When you read to Tocqueville, he's constantly talking about where America can be found. What he says is America can essentially be found on the frontier. That when you look at the nature of Americans, they are constantly striving, they are constantly building, they are constantly moving, and they are constantly seeking. The spirit of adventure and entrepreneurship is what characterizes Americans, as opposed to de Tocqueville's picture of Europeans, which was much more sedentary. Americans were constantly

on the move, constantly on the go, embracing the journey, embracing the adventure, not

asking for anything, but being granted the freedom to do with their lives what they would do.

It was a spirit of adventure. Also, there was a culture of tolerance for other people's rights and understanding that rights mean that other people may not use their rights in ways that you like. So the right to free speech isn't just your right to speak as you see fit. It is, it relies on a cultural underpinning that you understand that other people may not agree with you and they have a right to free speech too. Freedom of association means not only that you have a right to associate freely, but that others may choose not to associate with you based on their right to associate freely. You have to have tolerance for other people's rights. That is a culture of rights. Also, the culture of the United States was built on the value of social institutions, that rights were going to be balanced by duties, that every right came with a consonant duty, that a free country relied, as John Adams suggested, on a moral and religious

people, and that you required social institutions to undergird that. You required things like

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