I would not be here if I thought it was going to destroy my career forever.

So I think sometimes the amount of bravery people suggest it takes pundits to wander around and have conversations in the current era

is amplified by a kind of desire to make things all seem a little bit more dangerous and polarized

and make the other side seem more unreasonable than they are.

Before co-founding vox.com, Ezra Klein started his career in political media, working for mainstream

publications like The Washington Post and Bloomberg News, along with frequent appearances on primetime

MSNBC. In 2014, Klein and his co-founders teamed up with Vox Media, a massive media

enterprise with influence in all aspects of the culture through brands like The Verge, Polygon,

Vulture, and more. Since then, Vox.com has become a widely influential presence, with tens of millions of website page views, 7.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and a collection of successful podcasts. Box.com builds itself as explanatory journalism. Though, as we'll discuss, conservatives tend to think of Vox.com as opinion journalism of the political left.

No matter what you think of Ezra's politics, there's no question. He's one of the most important

voices on today's political scene. We'll discuss his new book, Why We're polarized, our disagreements

on the value of identity politics and the role of government, as well as the internet-breaking

controversy between Stephen Crowder and former Vox.com explanatory journalist Carlos Mazzo.

Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special. Today we have joining us Ezra Klein.

Ezra is the editor-at-large and founder of Vox. First, just a reminder, we will be doing some bonus questions with Ezra. The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a subscriber. So head on over to dailywire.com. Become a subscriber. You'll have access to all of the full conversations with everyone of our awesome guests. Ezra, thanks so much for joining the show and welcome to the show and welcome to the end of your career since you're on the show. I'm canceled.

Yeah, you are.

I hope that you've enjoyed all of your illustrious success so far. Honestly, it'll be good to get a rest. So the book, Why We're Polarized, I want to get into that. First, I want to ask a little bit about Vox.com, the foundations of Vox.com. So one of the things that's great in the book is you talk a little bit about your own political point of view.

Obviously, you're of the book is you talk a little bit out,

your own political point of view. Obviously, you're of the left, you're a liberal. You know, you're drinking ironically from our leftist-tierist tumbler. I'm drinking excitedly from the leftist's tears tumbler. This is my whole reason for coming here today. I've always made a distinction between sort of leftists and liberals. The difference being that liberals are people I disagree with on taxes and government interventionism, and leftists are people who are interested in going after

my advertisers and deplatforming me and ensuring that I am unable to make a living on the other

side of the aisle and or utter things on the other side of the aisle. In the book, you call yourself

a liberal. So how do you define liberal just to kind of get that out there? So I wouldn't cut leftist and liberal that way, by the way, number one. So liberals, I think, tricky to define, and particularly because it's become under attack. So now there's this distinction between neoliberal and leftists. You have a moderate lane, the democratic primary more left lane. I think of liberalism is fundamentally about a mixture of equality with a relative high level

...