{"id":1343313,"date":"2022-02-25T12:09:59","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T17:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1343313"},"modified":"2022-02-25T17:24:31","modified_gmt":"2022-02-25T22:24:31","slug":"were-closer-to-a-really-big-war-than-most-civilians-want-to-face-historian-niall-ferguson-delivers-timely-predictions-on-ukraine-in-new-episode-of-the-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/were-closer-to-a-really-big-war-than-most-civilians-want-to-face-historian-niall-ferguson-delivers-timely-predictions-on-ukraine-in-new-episode-of-the-search\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We\u2019re Closer To A Really Big War Than Most Civilians Want To Face\u2019: Historian Niall Ferguson Delivers Timely Predictions On Ukraine In New Episode Of \u2018The Search\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">54<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwere-closer-to-a-really-big-war-than-most-civilians-want-to-face-historian-niall-ferguson-delivers-timely-predictions-on-ukraine-in-new-episode-of-the-search%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1343313&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2022\/02\/The-Search-Ep.-2-e1645826113245.jpeg?w=1200&#038;h=800&#038;ixlib=react-9.3.0\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p><span>When they sat down over coffee for the new Daily Wire series, \u201cThe Search,\u201d podcaster Ben Shapiro and renowned historian Niall Ferguson couldn\u2019t have known just how timely their interview would prove to be. During a roving discussion taped in late January in Palm Beach, the pair dissected the United States\u2019 inability to properly weigh risk when it comes to foreign policy and what that fecklessness might mean to China and Russia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>With a now-eerie prescience, the Hoover Institute fellow tells Shapiro that, based on his knowledge of world skirmishes over the last 100 years, the Biden administration\u2019s weakness on the international stage will undoubtedly lead Russia to launch an attack on Ukraine. \u201cThe threat of sanctions is not going to stop Putin invading Ukraine,\u201d he says with surety. \u201cI still think it\u2019s quite likely that he will increase his military aggression towards Ukraine because financial sanctions are not an effective deterrent, and I don\u2019t think they\u2019re an effective deterrent against the Chinese, either.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Weeks later, bombs began to fall in Kyiv.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The West\u2019s bizarre overreaction to the marginal danger posed by COVID-19 compared to its apathy toward the serious threats China and Russia present dominates much of the 90-minute dialogue, available to Daily Wire subscribers. \u201cThis is one of the odd things about safetyism \u2014 the cult of treating all risks as incredibly high,\u201d Ferguson points out. \u201cOddly enough, it desensitizes you to the real risks. And I think the U.S. has become pathologically incapable of thinking realistically about risk.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>How this has manifested, he explains, is with federal authorities pushing to mask children and force vaccines on young people who face almost no danger from the coronavirus while blithely ignoring the fact that the world\u2019s most powerful authoritarian regimes have suddenly begun behaving as allies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cWe\u2019re closer to a really big war than most civilians want to face,\u201d he concludes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Legacies Over Risk<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span>The looming reality of seismic geopolitical events leads the friends to reflect on just how endemic distorted perspectives have become in America.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Ferguson says working on his last book, \u201cDoom: The Politics of Catastrophe,\u201d made him realize that, while fear of a virus might have highlighted the problem, defective public choice has been around for at least 20 years. Generations ago, he explains, both the public and the federal government were better at assessing risk because they had no choice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI mean, coming out of the 1930s and 40s, you confronted some very profound risks, nuclear war being the biggest,\u201d he says. \u201cBut my sense is that the further away we got from World War II, the less good our elites have been at assessing risk and the more inclined they have been to say, \u2018Why worry about probabilities? Let\u2019s assume that everything is a huge risk. And then let\u2019s design extraordinarily complex regulations to prevent risk.\u2019\u201d The unrealistic goal, he argues, appears to be to prevent death.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>For Shapiro, this shallowness that views the mere preservation of life as the greatest objective also explains our current national obsession with identity, as well as the epidemic of mental health issues plaguing younger generations. He points out with a bit of gallows humor that such a value structure can\u2019t help but breed a culture-wide sense of meaninglessness and unfulfillment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cLike if [assassins] get me in the Everglades, honestly, they deserve it,\u201d he jokes about a recent vacation with his family, where it dawned on him that if his haters were to successfully gun him down (as online trolls have threatened to do over the years), he\u2019d have to give them credit for their marksmanship. \u201cLike if they get that shot and they nail me and I\u2019m floating among the mangroves and alligators,\u201d he laughs, \u201cI\u2019ll just have to give them credit. Like, really, that\u2019s an excellent hit.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>What\u2019s clear a moment later is Shapiro\u2019s dark amusement comes from his deep sense of mission, his conviction that his life has a greater purpose than merely preserving his heart-beat. Like the men who founded the nation, he says he cares more about building something of lasting value than in being physically safe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cMy dad used to be kind of paranoid about [me voicing my political opinions],\u201d Shapiro reveals, \u201cand he used to say, \u2018Are you sure you want to say this about Islamists or are you sure you want to say this about the Chinese?\u2019 Shapiro\u2019s answer: \u201cYeah, I am. I mean, at a certain point, you\u2019ve got to say what you\u2019re going to say.\u201d Because that\u2019s what it takes, he argues, to build institutions that have the potential to transform a society from one in which happiness is found in the arbitrary notion of feeling personally \u201caffirmed\u201d to one in which meaning is derived from accomplishment.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cIf the ages have taught us anything,\u201d Shapiro says, \u201cit\u2019s that your happiness has very little to do with how you sit on a given day and has a lot more to do with whether you\u2019re building things of consequence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Building Institutions<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span>Though their critics often like to pretend otherwise, over the course of the discussion both Ferguson and Shapiro are clear that their hope for the future doesn\u2019t lie solely in winning elections or \u201cowning\u201d libs, but in creating organizations that leave legacies for the future.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>When Ferguson reflects on the attitudes of Millennials and Gen Z today, histrionic as they are over thought-crimes and emotional offense, he admits the situation looks bleak. But he finds hope in what he calls \u201cGeneration T \u2014 kids who began to develop societal awareness during the presidency of Donald Trump. There, he already sees what he believes is a sense that \u201cwokeness is boring and counterintuitive.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But he doesn\u2019t believe their tendency to think in more levelheaded, fact-based terms than the generation just ahead of them will flourish without help. They need, he argues, new institutions dedicated to developing an active and well-organized citizenry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThere needs to be a strong sense of the citizens\u2019 ability to organize outside the structures of the State,\u201d Ferguson says. \u201cPart of the answer is to build institutions. We have to be better organized. People who thought of themselves as conservatives or classical liberals were terribly badly organized and basically lost control of the universities. It wasn\u2019t even that hard for the Left to take over the universities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It\u2019s for this reason, that, though he\u2019s personally an atheist, Ferguson believes so deeply in the power of religious community to breed civic responsibility. Part of the Left\u2019s interest in destroying the influence of faith in something beyond government, he argues, is that it destroys the impulse to band together to protect individual freedoms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It\u2019s also what inspired him to join Bari Weiss, Steven Pinker, Larry Summers, and other independent thinkers to found The University of Austin \u2014 a new academic institution dedicated to a \u201cfearless pursuit of the truth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI\u2019m quite interested in this challenge of institution building,\u201d Ferguson tells Shapiro, \u201cYou\u2019ve done that [with The Daily Wire]. And that\u2019s one of the things about you that I find most impressive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Near the end, Ferguson returns to Shapiro\u2019s point that he\u2019s not worried about dying so much as he\u2019s worried about leaving such work unfinished.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI\u2019d like to be able to die knowing I\u2019ve started a bunch of things,\u201d he says. \u201cInstitutions that will keep going.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span>The Daily Wire is one of America\u2019s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a\u00a0<\/span><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/subscribe\"><i><span>member<\/span><\/i><\/a><i><span>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When they sat down over coffee for the new Daily Wire series, \u201cThe Search,\u201d podcaster Ben Shapiro and renowned historian Niall Ferguson couldn\u2019t have known just how timely their interview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1343313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1343313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1343313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1343313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1343313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}