Burning Man gets hit by biblical flooding, and we examine the cultural fallout. The polls get

uglier for Joe Biden and Elon Musk goes up against the anti-deformation league. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shepiro show.

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slash Ben. So it's rare to see actual biblical level events taking place in, you know, normal everyday life.

But that is exactly apparently what is happening over at Burning Man.

Now, I've ignored Burning Man successfully for several decades at this point because, frankly,

it seemed like a bunch of weirdos out in the desert being weird with each other.

And that's pretty much what it is.

Apparently, for those who haven't been following, Burning Man was founded back in 1986. This is according to The Richest.com, when a small group of friends gathered to burn a nine-foot-tall statue on the beach in San Francisco. So, as you might imagine, you know, weird people. Each year, more and more people attended the bonfire, and then they actually moved it over to the Nevada desert. And so now it's held in Black Rock City, a temporary community erected by the thousands of attendees who construct the gatherings infrastructure using nothing but their own tools and equipment. Nothing apparently is sold at Burning Man. This is one of the sort of communistic properties of it. Instead, they sell it coffee and water and everything else. they barter or gift. So first of all, you have to ask why they're selling the coffee or water. And the answer is because you can't provide supply unless there is actual monetary demand. It turns out capitalism is great at getting things from place A to place B for an affordable price. And communism sucks at pretty much everything. For many attendees, known as burners, the event is about providing a space for countercultural expression.

As we're going to examine, however, one of the weird elements of the United States is that

the counterculture is no longer a counterculture. It's just the culture. In the counterculture

in the 1960s, the weirdos from the 1980s who are gathering on beaches and building giant burning men and all

the rest of this those people who we all used to consider strange now if you say that they are

weirdos who are participating in weird paganistic behavior you are considered strange you are

considered part of the problem you are intolerant the counterculture is no longer the counterculture

it is in fact just the culture which is for example, you see so many rich and famous people now going to Burning Man. It used to be that if you were a rich, famous person, you took yourself seriously enough that you didn't show up in the middle of the desert with nothing but a hammer and then expect to basically just go to the orgy dome all day. It used to be that the serious people in our culture or, you know, actual serious people in our culture. They go way back to the age of the tycoons.

When you were looking at John Rockefeller and you were looking at Vanderbilt, these were people

who were at least pretty serious about their own lives. But the reality is the counterculture

has now become the culture and the way that you win cultural cachet is by participating in a paganistic set of values that actually is in complete

contradistinction to the actual values you live out. It's a point that Charles Murray made in his

great book coming apart, which is that all of the tech billionaires who show up at Burning Man

and then proclaim that they have allegiance to these sorts of principles, actually in their own lives reject these sorts of principles. It's just everybody else who picks up the principles and then it becomes the culture in which they swim. And it's really, really bad. It's true whether you're talking about sort of paganistic versions of communism that you're seeing at Burning Man or whether you're talking about single motherhood, which is practiced by nearly no one in the Tech Bay Area, but given the moral green light by everyone in the Tech Bay Area.

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