Transcript: Ben Shapiro on Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Zohran Mamdani

He’ll be a perennial outsider even as mayor.

The Default Position of Populism

FRANCIS FOSTER: Isn’t that the kind of the default position of populism, where if you can’t get things done because of the elites, that just strengthens your position?

BEN SHAPIRO: Absolutely. I mean, and then you say, “If only I were given more power, I could do this.” And then you don’t do it. You say, “Well, because I need more power.” If you’d just given me more power, that would have been awesome.

One of the things I find really amusing about Mamdani in kind of a cynical way is when he does this “the coalition of the dispossessed, we’re all going to come together. Those of us with the bruised knuckles.” And it’s like, my dude, you haven’t held a real job your entire life. Your entire life. I have a more successful rap career than Zohran Mamdani. And I’m not even joking.

FRANCIS FOSTER: That’s true.

BEN SHAPIRO: Right? Zohran Mamdani is a failed rapper. He was a person who didn’t hold a real job. He got elected to the assembly and ditched half of his votes. And now he’s mayor of New York, having grown up in the lap of luxury in a country to which his parents immigrated.

He’s been given the best of America. And his solution is, “America sucks and is terrible.” And so now I’m going to quote Eugene Debs and Nehru in my victory speech, which is what he did. Which, you know, again, that’s a take.

But it just underscores one of the sort of fascinating things about revolutionary movements. They are very rarely led by members of the proletariat. They’re very often led by, I would say, unsatisfied members of the bourgeoisie who then decide they must be the vanguard of the proletariat.

Young People’s Obsession with Socialism

FRANCIS FOSTER: And it’s so interesting, the young people’s obsession with socialism, having seen socialism be implemented in Venezuela and then it being championed in lionized by particularly people of the British left, the Jeremy Corbyns of the world.

And I’ve given up trying to explain the evils of socialism and communism to young people because I had a friend, a Cuban friend, who said, “Francis, it’s like a magic trick. And until you see the reveal, you ain’t going to get the trick. And you need to see the reveal.” And that’s kind of what it’s like, isn’t it?

BEN SHAPIRO: I think that’s right. Because it’s so unthinkable. If you say to people, “Well, look at Venezuela,” they say, “It’s not going to be like Venezuela here. Are you kidding?”

And the reality is it happens pretty suddenly. The transition from democratic capitalism to socialism, it does happen very quickly. I mean, once the government has the power to do these things, they do implement them very fast. And so what was unthinkable becomes suddenly just reality.

And so most Americans also don’t understand how it is that we became wealthy. They don’t understand how we became a very prosperous country. They tend to think that how things are is the natural state of being, that wealth and prosperity and the nice things we have and these great new products every year and being able to order things on Amazon.

You know, one of my favorite comedy routines, Louis CK has this whole comedy routine about people complaining about flying in planes. He’s like, “You know, we’re all complaining. It’s just terrible. The conditions.” Your grandparents would have had to travel for three months to get from point A to point B. And you’re doing it in six hours in a magical machine that flies in the sky. And you’re sitting here complaining about that.

But that’s kind of human nature. What you see in your daily life is what you accept as the norm. And we do have these things called airplanes that actively are time machines. You can fly to other places on Earth that don’t have the things that we have. And you can look at the systems they’ve implemented and you can see why they don’t have those things.

But everybody who’s growing up, listen, we’re a spoiled society. Everybody who’s been growing up with all of this nice stuff, we think that that’s the norm and that there’s no way that that norm is ever going to go away. And that’s not true.

The Myth of the Golden Age

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, look, I, again, I agree with you broadly in principle. However, when you talk about your grandparents, yes, our grandparents would be amazed by the smartphone and all of the other things you talk about. But our grandparents also could raise a family of four on a single income, have a house, have a car and have a middle class life.

BEN SHAPIRO: So I think there are a few things that are slightly a misnomer. Number one, your grandparents, depending on when they grew up, in say the 30s, actually couldn’t. I mean, your grandparents were dirt poor if they grew up in the Great Depression in the 1930s. That was a very, very bad decade.

And then if they lived from 1941 to 1945 in this country, then your grandfather was likely to be being shot at in either Europe or the Pacific. So those are rough years, turning those into sort of the golden age of what it was like to live in.

So when people talk about this, what they’re really talking about is a fairly short period of American history that existed essentially between the end of World War II and economically the rise of the rest of the world, when the rest of the world was basically in ruins. And so America could send a bunch of money to Europe and then produce all the products here because literally there was no industrial base anywhere else on planet Earth. They’d all been destroyed by World War II.

And then you could work one income and you could still do that. That was actually not the way that virtually all work was done in the United States ever. I mean, if you go back to the 1910s and 1900s, when this was largely an agricultural society, mom was working on the farm. And when you’re talking about problems of, for example, industrial labor, women were working in factories.

And so this kind of brief period in American history, which was actually sort of an outlier in terms of all world history and treating that as the norm is not true.

Second of all, the housing affordability crisis. The average house in the United States is significantly nicer, significantly larger with central air. If you looked at the house that your grandparents were living in in 1952, you would say, “This place sucks, this place is bad.”

And if you look at the job that your grandparents were working in 1953 at the Ford factory, you sitting in your comfortable office, your air conditioned office, you know, complaining about your sciatica from your uncomfortable office chair, and then you’re like, “Oh man, I’m really longing for those days of riveting.” That is not an easy job.

And by the way, it’s not because we shipped it overseas, because machines do it now. And so, again, this is not to say everything is perfect, because it isn’t. But I think that having a false picture of the economic past leads to bad conclusions about the economic present that are not supportable by the actual data.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You make good points. I guess what I’m saying as well is if you look at the other candidates in this election that Mamdani has just won, you did not have the same level of speaking to people’s concerns about some of those issues. I agree.

The Problem with Empathy in Politics

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, empathy sells in politics and also makes a very bad policy because as many people have noted, empathy is about the person in front of you and feeling what that person feels. And that’s great politically, right? I mean, that’s what makes people magic in a room.

But when it comes to making a broad public policy, then it’s really what is the most effective policy for the greatest number of people. And if you get empathetic about this individual, you’re very likely to make a bad policy that is specifically designated to help this individual at the expense of many other individuals.

Because anybody who says they’re empathetic toward all humanity is lying. I mean, that’s usually not true. You’re empathetic toward others. It’s a little self-serving. And so again, I’ll give Mamdani credit for magically shaking the hands of cab drivers and kissing babies and being very, very good at that. But I’m not sure why that makes for good policy in any way, shape or form.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But what it does show is the importance of charisma and how if somebody is charismatic, you know, we’ve had people on the right and I talk to people on the right person, they’re like, oh, you know, Mamdani’s this and he’s that. And I’m like, can we just not accept that as a campaign politician, he is 100% undeniable.

BEN SHAPIRO: He’s terrific, particularly in short spurts. So I think the debates, the last couple debates, I didn’t think they needed great because there he was asked questions and he really couldn’t defend himself. But I don’t think debates matter anymore because that’s not how anybody consumes information.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right.

The Age of Clips and Short-Form Content

BEN SHAPIRO: The podcast space may be the last space where people consume in long form information. And even there it’s clips from the show that are going to go viral on X. Right? And so if you’re Zohran Mamdani and you put on, you know what I think is kind of a smarmy grin for two hours. But the thing that gets clipped out is 30 seconds of you grinning. 30 seconds of grinning isn’t smarmy, it’s charming. Two hours of grinning is rictus-like.

And so I think that the shrinking of the attention span and the way people consume information, he’s built for that. He’s really good at that. You see certain politicians, AOC is terrific at this. Pretending she’s not is not going to make her any less terrific at it. She really is very, very good at it.

President Trump is really good at it, right? If you go to a President Trump rally for 90 minutes or two hours and he’s kind of rambling by the end, everybody’s like, oh man, this is taking a while. But then you watch it on social media and you’re like, man, that’s hysterically funny, right? I mean, those two minutes are amazing. And so, you know, the way people consume information is going to determine who’s capable of speaking into that medium.

The Civil War on the Right

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So we’ve got this increasingly Democratic Socialist of America movement on the left. I’m sure we’ll see more of that as time goes on. We also now are seeing a civil war on the right which exploded last week in particular over the fact that Tucker Carlson had this white nationalist called Nick Fuentes on his show.

And then there is a big debate now going on in which you are one of the participants, about whether the right should turn a blind eye to the fact that its fringe is becoming increasingly Nazi-ish, or whether there’s a break that needs to be made to prevent what happened on the woke left, or rather because of the woke left on the left where the extremists took over, wore the skin of the entire thing, and then were punished very severely electorally over a period of time. Give us your perspective on that.

BEN SHAPIRO: Sure. I mean, I’ve been arguing against this for quite a while. I think that last week was a pretty good sort of indicator that there is a bleed over from a series of terrible ideas into the more mainstream area.

The problem is not, of course, that Tucker Carl, it’s a free country. He can interview whomever he damn well pleases. It is not in fact cancellation to criticize somebody’s interview tactics. And it’s not even that he interviewed Fuentes. It’s that he proceeded to massage. I mean, he treated him with kid gloves. He did not ask him a single difficult question.

He did not press him on any of his extraordinary statements about, for example, Tucker’s friend Charlie Kirk or Tucker’s friend J.D. Vance or his wife or any of that. He simply brought him on and then proceeded to gloss him. And the fact that that was treated in some quarters as sort of normal is, I think, a very serious problem.

I think that it’s a moral problem because frankly, I do not think that you ought to be glossing people with terrible views, whether or not they are your friends or whether or not you go fishing together. And as public figures, I think that people have a responsibility to actually say when bad things are happening on your own side.

The Electoral Consequences

And I also think that, you know, there is an attempt to not only pretend it away, but in some cases embrace it with this sort of “no enemies to my right” or “our coalition.” Our coalition must stand together or we’ll lose. And I think that’s bad. Pragmatically, I don’t think that’s even true.

I think that what we’ve watched here is, yeah, everybody’s celebrating Zohran Mamdani winning in New York. In New York, okay. This place is 127% Democrat. So it’s like when people say, oh, AOC is going to be a national, maybe she will be. Or maybe she won in Brooklyn, and maybe Abigail Spanberger is going to be a better candidate for the Democrats because she ran in Virginia and won. And Virginia seems to be more representative of the body politic, broadly speaking, across America than New York, which is a pretty, pretty closed circuit.

You know, the idea on the right that you must gloss Nazis in order to win. If they start to become, if the face of the Republican Party continues to move in a direction that is racialist, that is religiously exclusivist to the extent that it seems to be moving, if that is the way that the Republican Party decides to play it, that is not an electorally sound strategy.

Just on a pragmatic level, I don’t see, these are not. The American people do not like the politics of, say, Nick Fuentes and the attempt to launder his ideas into the public view, which is what I think Tucker has been doing with a wide variety of rather nefarious characters over the course of the last two years. I don’t think those laundered views are particularly popular with the American people.

And so if the right wants to pretend that moving in that direction is going to win them additional votes, not the number of votes you’re going to lose by moving in this particular direction.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: People might say Tucker Carlson has got the biggest conservative platform in America. Isn’t that proof that actually these views are very popular?

The Danger of Being “Too Online”

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, they are popular with a certain segment. Are they popular broad scale across America? I mean, I know many ambulatory psychotics who have very large audiences in the online space. I’m not calling Tucker an ambulatory psychotic. I think he’s very, actually coherent in what he’s doing.

But I know a lot of people who have a big audience. We should note that every big audience in the media, you’re talking about 3, 4 million people. The electorate in the United States is generally about 160 million people. And so you can find, you know, it’s a big country. You can find a niche for anything.

I think one of the mistakes politicians make is they look at X and they say, this is representative of the American body politic. And that is just too online. It’s just way too online. I mean, just to take one obvious example, Tucker Carlson was very much opposed to President Trump’s strike on the Iranian nuclear facility and said that it was going to break MAGA. That was a 90:10 proposition in the opposite way for President Trump.

By all polling data among the Republicans, Republicans were very much pro that. And so, but if you’d read Twitter, then you would have gotten precisely the opposite impression. And so I think being too online is one aspect of this for sure.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But we talk about being too online, and I take your point. However, what is undeniable is that the online world bleeds into the real world.

BEN SHAPIRO: Absolutely.

The Mirror Image of Wokeism

FRANCIS FOSTER: Which we saw with wokeism. And partly the reason that wokeism grew so powerful, in my opinion, is a dearth of courage and integrity on the left, where they saw the extremists run rampant and nobody was going to say, stood up and went, hang on, this is nonsense, stop doing that. And now I’m seeing the same thing happen on the right, with exceptions like people like yourself. And I’m going, are we not just seeing the mirror image of what happened in 2014, 2015?

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I think we are, and it’s very, very concerning to me. I mean, I’m encouraged that I think there are a lot of people who have been coming out and saying that this is not appropriate, that this is not something that you can, quote unquote, side with or unify with. And I think that’s good.

But I do agree that one of the polarized aspects of American politics is this idea that as long as you are, quote unquote, on my side, and we don’t actually define what “on my side” means based on, say, principle, we instead define it based on what we supposedly oppose. But even then, we don’t necessarily oppose the same things, but we kind of broadly just throw up our hands. They’re on my side, they’re on my side.

And that dynamic leads to polarized sides. I mean, the future of this, if the more radical wings were to win on the right and the more radical wing continues to win on the left, you end up with an electoral future that looks essentially red versus brown. Right. And that’s not an electoral future. I think that’s good for any American, especially because the vast, vast, vast majority of Americans are neither of those things and don’t like either of those things.

The Easy Path vs. The Right Path

FRANCIS FOSTER: And look, we did. We can dress it up. Oh, they’re on my side. But let’s talk about what it really is. It’s about you not wanting to be ostracized by your own team. It’s about you not wanting to lose viewers, followers, influence. So you take the path that is easy for you, but ultimately destructive, not only for the conservative movement, but America as a whole.

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I think that that is right. I do. And I think that is an easy path to ensuring they don’t lose people. But I don’t think that it’s a good path for not losing the country. And I think that if you lose your soul, then you end up losing the country again.

The things that I’ve fought for. Let’s put it this way. I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I started writing a syndicated comment. I was 17 years old. I don’t know that there’s anybody who’s been following me for any period of time who’s ever said, whatever happened to the views that Ben Shapiro? He’s really morphed. He’s really changed. What happened? I don’t get that question ever.

But I don’t think you could say the same about. I mean, I think that’s one of the most common questions about Tucker is what changed? What happened? And so I think, you know, that’s a relevant question. And pretending that people haven’t morphed or that that shouldn’t have any impact on the public discourse. Of course it does. The things that. I mean, that’s literally our job is to talk about these issues. And if you talk about the issues in a different way, it seems to me that that earns a different response.

Disagreement Within the Daily Wire

KONSTANTIN KISIN: One of the people that seems to disagree with, I don’t know if this is exactly true, but seems to be, based on what I’m reading, is Matt Walsh, who, of course, is your colleague at the Daily Wire. How are you going to negotiate that situation?

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, listen, at the Daily Wire, we have a wide variety of views on a wide variety of subjects. You know, Matt is free to have his opinion. I think he’s wrong. I’m sure he thinks I’m wrong. And that is what it is. I also noticed that Matt is not glossing Nick Fuentes.

The Problem with Modern Cancellation Culture

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, he’s not. And this is what I was going to ask you about as well. Where does this idea come from? Because, look, I completely agree with you. Anyone is entitled to have anyone on the show that they want. We’ve invited Nick Fuentes on the show. We would treat him very differently, I think, than Tucker would. We would have a conversation and push on some of the things that he’s said and we haven’t heard anything back.

But where does this idea come from that if I say the person you had on your show is someone whose values I don’t agree with and I don’t like the way you conducted the interview, that is cancellation?

BEN SHAPIRO: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, when did that happen?

BEN SHAPIRO: I think it’s a really low resolution response to what probably was a low resolution description of cancellation in the first place. I think that if you were going to look at the etymology of what happened here, it seems to me that the left shut the Overton window so unbelievably tight that if you said, for example, a man is not a woman, this meant that you had to be socially ostracized. And I think that’s what people mean when they say cancellation.

The free speech concerns typically are about being banned from platforms. Cancellation is the idea of social ostracism, that you must be invited to the party. And so for a while it was like you couldn’t be invited to any party or people would attempt to go after your career if you said things that were kind of baseline normalcy.

And the response on the right was not let’s broaden the Overton window, it was let’s eviscerate the Overton window. Now, almost a morally relativistic response. All views are now to be treated as perfectly equivalent. And if you act with scorn at any view, then that must be a form of cancellation. It must be a form of social ostracization that is unjustifiable.

And so what you end up with is this bizarre math where the right has taken to the idea that if you get a lot of flak, it’s because you’re over the target. And also that if you criticize, then that’s a form of cancellation. That’s a form of social ostracization.

Well, if you add those two things together, what you come up with is it is probably better to be a Nazi than to criticize a Nazi, because if you’re a Nazi, then you’re taking a lot of flack, which must mean that you’re over the target. And if someone criticizes you, then they’re engaging in the same sort of politically correct cancellation that the left was engaging in. You must be right, they must be wrong, and they’re canceling you and they’re violative of basic First Amendment principles.

So I think that’s a really low resolution view. I think the argument about cancellation was not that nobody should ever be socially ostracized. It was that the idea set that was being socially ostracized was a very normie, mainstream set of views.

And I’m not a moral relativist. I don’t believe all views are equivalently moral or decent or worthy of, or even worthy of response. I think this idea that you’re not allowed to have scorn for views that you believe are damaging or deeply immoral, truly bad, for example, I don’t even—not even arguments, just statements like Nick Fuentes calling J.D. Vance’s wife a jade. That’s not an argument.

Or how are you supposed to respond to the argument that he has made, for example, that J.D. Vance is a fat, gay race traitor who shouldn’t be President of the United States because he’s in an intermarriage? Am I allowed to respond to scorn? I feel like scorn is a pretty good response to that and that that doesn’t actually deserve a debate or a fulsome discussion.

And that in fact, treating that as though that is a rational idea is a disservice to rationality. But if you treat all forms of that response as cancellation, that’s probably how you get to this math.

The Destruction of Language and Meaning

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And of course, one of the other things that happened, and I think the woke left deserves all the scorn and blame for this is what they’ve done to words. I see people now saying, well, how dare you call Nick Fuentes a Nazi. I’m going, well, I’m insulting him. I am describing his views.

BEN SHAPIRO: Correct. I mean, there’s been an attempt because the left has overused all these terms. They’ve now become meaningless. And that means that when you do that in the rhetorical space, you actually end up destroying the systemic immunity that people have to bad things.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Exactly.

BEN SHAPIRO: So if you call everything racist, then the response typically is, okay, nothing’s racist. But that’s not true. We know that some things are actually racist. If you say that black people are innately inferior, that’s racist. Right? That’s a racist statement.

But if I say racist, there’s a group of people who will immediately say, well, no, you’re just using racist as a club in order to shut down conversation because the left used it in that way. And so a Pavlovian response is developed where if you use a term the way it’s properly supposed to be used, then it’s treated the same as if you were improperly using the terms. The term itself loses all meaning.

And then I guess what we have to re-argue that issue. I mean, I guess that’s the idea. But again, some of these are not arguments. Some of these are impulses or emotional outbursts or insults or trollery. And so that’s not an honest conversation. It’s not a discussion.

Tucker Carlson’s Direction of Travel

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We talked about Tucker and one of the things is quite clear that as you say, there’s been a direction of travel change very significantly since he left Fox and started doing what he’s doing. He’s hosted a whole number of people that clearly are pushing a particular worldview. I think that’s fair to say. What do you think he’s up to with that?

BEN SHAPIRO: You know, I don’t like to attribute inauthenticity to people, so I will assume that it’s reflective of his actual worldviews. I think that just looking at the guests that he’s had and the views that he has laundered, because that seems to be his mode of doing business, is that he very rarely says the thing that he wants to say out loud.

A few times he will. For example in the Fuentes interview he’ll say that Christian Zionists have a brain disease, right? That’s him actually saying the thing that he thinks then sort of trying later to half bite back as he realized he crossed a politically inconvenient line for him. I mean all people I know personally who I’ve seen be seized by this brain virus and they’re not Jewish, most of them are self-described Christians. And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists, what is that? I could just say for myself I dislike them more than anybody because it’s Christian heresy and I’m offended by that as a Christian.

But mostly what he does is he has on people. And then he says, “That’s fascinating. It’s very interesting.” Now, of course, Tucker is perfectly capable of carrying out a very adversarial interview, as he did with, for example, Ted Cruz. And so pretending that he’s not doing that thing is, I think, insulting to the intelligence.

And the right would not accept in any other context. If a reporter has on Kamala Harris and asks her zero difficult questions except how brat she is, then we are rightly going to assume that that reporter is pro-Kamala Harris, is not doing their actual journalistic job. And you can intuit views that way. Guest selection is definitely a big one. How you treat your guests is a big one. We can intuit the views.

I think that Tucker’s general belief, from looking at the way he has done his foreign policy talk, is that it’s not just that America’s overextended. It’s America is a nefarious force in the world. And wherever American support for allies happens, then it must be the result of domestic manipulations. And that the most important thing right now is to essentially go autarkic, to bring American resources home, to not be involved in the world in any way.

And most importantly, that anybody who opposes this agenda is a tool of a foreign agenda or is a malign actor, which is the thing that differentiates, I think, some of how Tucker does his business from others. I think Tucker is very fond of using emotivism, where he attributes motive to people in order to not even debunk the argument, but simply to just say, they’re a bad person, they hate you, they want to hurt your children, and I despise them.

“I despise them” comes up a lot on his show, which I’ve always found kind of strange. I don’t know why that’s an argument. Why are your feelings even relevant to the point that you’re making? It’s a strange political take. I despise—who cares? I despise lots of things. I mean, broccoli is not my favorite. Of what relevance is this?

A Failed Romance with America

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, it’s interesting that you say that. And whenever I hear Tucker, I listen to him. There does seem to be a kind of—it kind of reminds me of a failed romantic. You know, he had this romanticized idea of America and what America was. He’s now fallen out of love. And like a guy who’s gone through his first breakup, he looks at his girlfriend and goes, oh, she’s a massive b.

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I think that you could—I think that probably he would agree with that on America’s foreign policy. He talks about this openly about, for example, the war in Iraq. But I think that he’s been critical of pretty much every American foreign policy decision since World War II, including World War II. I mean, really, including World War II.

He has on guests who have said repeatedly, not just one more, multiple guests who have said that either America took the wrong side in World War II, or the true villain of World War II was Winston Churchill. He himself has said, what did Churchill actually gain? Because now London is a terrible place, which is sort of like saying that there’s litter in the streets of New York, therefore the Enlightenment was bad.

Clearly, he thinks something went fundamentally wrong with the west around the time that World War II happened. And why he’s saying that and what is the viewpoint that defines that, I think he’s left that undefined. So I’ll leave that undefined. All I’ll say is I think that it’s untrue. I think that some of the views, many of the views of the people that he brings on run counter to traditional American conservatism, at the very, very least.

The Problem with No Gatekeepers

FRANCIS FOSTER: Look, the brilliant thing about social media and podcasting is that there’s no gatekeepers. The terrible thing about social media and podcasting is there’s no gatekeepers. And when you look at people like Tucker and you look at people like Candace, when they were in large organizations and they had to report to people there were guardrails and they couldn’t go off the reservation. Whereas now they can go off the reservation, and we’ve seen what’s happened.

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, again, I think that it’s not even a matter of gatekeepers as much as it is of a willingness to be checked by people and listen to maybe better judgment. Because I think that there’s a case to be made that many of the gatekeepers have stopped. And getting rid of some of the gatekeepers was good, but I think that what is required of consumers of information now is significantly more than was required of consumers of information 15, 20 years ago.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You have to be your own gatekeeper now.

BEN SHAPIRO: Yeah. And most people are not really good at that. It’s not even a matter of qualifications. They’re not very good at it, because again, you’re consuming information like a fire hose, and it’s coming at you on social media from an algorithm that I think is quite perverse in places like X or on Reddit or wherever you are, TikTok.

And so unless you are a very informed person to begin with, it’s very difficult to know what sources to trust. And that’s when you get into a bit of confirmation bias. And that’s where we get back to the original point that we were making, which is the people who pander most strongly to your sensibilities, which is that you have been wronged by some conspirial coterie of people who are aiming to crush you underfoot.

That’s a very flattering idea because then the idea is that you’re not responsible for any of your own actions and that all solutions are just simple if only you had the power to implement them.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you also get incentivized to create this type of content because the more of this kind of conspiratorial content, let’s just call it that, that you make, the more likely people are to engage with it because they’re going, they’re thinking to themselves, oh, this is interesting. This is dangerous. I want to hear what secrets being uncovered.

BEN SHAPIRO: Whenever a secret is being uncovered, that’s much more interesting than somebody saying, hey, there’s no secret, everybody’s bad at their job. Which by the way, is actually significantly more accurate in virtually all circumstances. People are just not good at things who think they were going to be good at things, and then the results are bad.

But it’s much more sexy if you say, no, no, there’s a nefarious secret. There’s a group that meets in secret and they get together just to f* you, right? And that’s flattering to your sense of self, it’s flattering to your sense of the world. And now you’re part of an informed group of people who really know the thing that nobody else knows.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s very true. And I think another piece, and I wrote about this on my substack, I don’t know if you saw, but it was about what’s happened to young men in particular over the last 10, 15 years where we had this woke period where if you were a straight white man, there was doctor and then straight white men, a lot of levels below that.

And particularly for a generation who neither created a system where men may have had some advantage or white people may have had some advantage nor benefited from that. If you were a 15-year-old Zoomer, you were being told the future is female, all men are trash, et cetera. While actually your life outcomes and the education system which was overwhelmingly not favorable to people like you that you were going through, you can kind of see why they’re angry and resentful.

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I totally agree why they’re angry and resentful. And this again gets back to a point. Diagnosis is easy, prognosis and cure is hard. Yeah, and so I totally agree that the sort of Wokeism of the past 20 years has created, for example, the Fuentes movement.

I mean I talked about that openly on the show on Monday and in the piece that I wrote for the Wall Street Journal is that basically this sort of woke left idea that white Christian men in particular were the scourge of the earth and thus had to be extirpated from public life or at least disadvantaged in public life by the sort of Ibram X Kendi. The only way to fix the injustices of the past is to engage in injustices in the present. I can see why that would drive a sort of white Christian identitarianism.

I think that in order for that identitarianism to take place, it can’t really be a Christian identitarianism because Christianity, last I checked, and again I’ll let others who are more expert in this topic than I speak to, this is a system that distinguishes neither Jew from Greek nor slave from master. I mean, the idea is that all are equal in, it’s about individual equality was one of the key functions of Christianity.

So you have to come up with kind of a pseudo Christianity where certain people are superior to other people. And I think that that’s a really negative thing, which is why you’ve seen some systemic immunity to it among more traditional Christian groups actually.

But I think that the move that you see it is understandable. But the normal curative to WOKE should be meritocracy. And that’s a hard argument to make these days. I mean, again, because meritocracy has an inherent suggestion which is if you don’t succeed, maybe it’s at least partially or largely your fault. And that’s a very hard sell to people. That’s a very hard sell.

Negotiating Conservative Principles

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you think maybe, I don’t know if I believe this, I’m doing a Tucker here, but do you think that this might actually be quite a healthy thing for the right actually, in that you had a kind of anti-woke coalition that included a lot of people that maybe didn’t really know what it was for. And what’s being negotiated now is what does it mean to be on the right? What does it mean particularly to be a conservative? And what are the principles that you guys actually stand for and which are the principles that can’t be included in that?

BEN SHAPIRO: Yeah, I mean, I think that the conversation has been ongoing as long as I’ve been alive. Right. I mean, these are battles that have had between traditional conservatives or neocons and realists and isolationists. I mean, these are ongoing battles all the time.

But I think that what is fascinating about the current moment is that typically movements tend to follow leaders. If there is a conservative movement, it turned into a Trump movement. President Trump is non-ideological. President Trump contains multitudes. He has sort of instincts and impulses in many cases, rather than a thoroughgoing ideology.

And so roiling under the surface of the Trump presidency has been a lot of these divisions for a while. And you know, I think that there are a lot of people who are planning for the post-Trump era and they’re trying to make moves right now in order to sort of consolidate their viewpoints in the post-Trump era.

So I think some of this is absolutely natural. But I think that if we’re going to have these conversations, we ought to be at least honest about what it is that we believe.

The Role of Humor and Transgression

FRANCIS FOSTER: When we launched our first bit of trigonometry merch, we learned very quickly how important five-star reviews are. We found out the hard way how shipping is so often just as important as a product itself. And if you’ve ever tried to manage shipping yourself, you know how messy it gets.

And one of the things that I think that we’re not really addressing at the moment, which I find very interesting, is the use of humor. Now, one of the things that Wokeism did is they clamped down on humor. Any type of humor that wasn’t broadly in their worldview was seen as oppressive, racist, patriarchal. Pick the term. And it was probably accurate.

But what people like Fuentes and other people have done so, so well, in my opinion, is they’ve tapped into that where people felt like, you couldn’t laugh at this joke or that joke, and Fuentes has just opened the door and gone, you know what? Let’s say the retard word as many times as we want and whatever else it may be, and it’s going to be a free for all. And when you’ve been constrained for that long, that feels really invigorating.

BEN SHAPIRO: I do think that there’s a transgressive side of the conservative movement right now that’s really just enjoying, flexing in the new freedom of the Trump era. I think that that’s for sure true.

The danger, I think, is that Chesterton, I think, talked about the idea that actual authentic belief systems can be destroyed with an ounce of cynicism. And basically trollery is a form of cynicism very often. And so funny is funny. But it is also true that funny doesn’t build things. Funny tends to destroy things. Funny does not tend to build things.

And I think that the impulse toward humor is, it can be awesome. We all love to laugh. We all like a good joke. And there are many different types of jokes, right? I mean, there’s jokes that poke fun at human frailty, and then there are jokes that are designed to legitimately tear other people down and harm them and they’re not all quite the same.

But I think that one thing that’s happened is that terrible views very often are shielded with this sort of, well, am I joking? Am I trolling? Am I not really trolling? And the answer is, if the outcome is the same, then I’m not sure why I’m supposed to pretend that it’s okay just because you’re joking when you sometimes say it and sometimes don’t.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And that’s a really profound point because we’ve seen more and more comedians come on and give, you know, public opinions about subjects as complicated as the Middle East and other, and you know, the war.

BEN SHAPIRO: Clown nose on, clown nose off thing that’s been going on with the entire comedian world, really, since Jon Stewart. And I think that that’s really, I think that’s bad. I think if comedians want to be comedians, they should be comedians. And then we should stop pretending that they are experts in foreign policy or domestic policy.

And if, you know, somebody wants to, I make jokes on my show. I’m not a comedian. And so you should take seriously the views that I express as my own views. My problem is when I can’t tell what is your view and what isn’t, and when you hide behind the humor to say, it’s not really my view, it’s just humor. And then when you’re caught, the clown nose goes back on. That just seems fundamentally dishonest to me.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And do you think as well, you know, Trump sort of ushered this in, didn’t he? Because the first time we saw him in 2016, I remember watching him in the debates going, this guy’s a comedian. Because the entire purpose of a comedian really, is to be disruptive. It’s to disrupt the status quo. And that’s very much what Trump did.

Trump’s Communication Style

BEN SHAPIRO: I think, for sure. And I think that that was the problem that many of us who were sort of traditionally in politics had with President Trump during his first presidential run. And then he got to be president, and you know, you got to see what he did when he was actually president.

And so what I used to say during his first term is, well, now that he’s president, I can judge him based on the thing that he’s doing, not just the thing that he’s saying. And I think most Americans came to that conclusion. Right. So now, at the beginning of his presidency, do you remember how every evening news broadcast started with a Trump tweet? Every single one. It’s like, he tweeted this today. And I just can’t believe he tweeted this today.

And within about six months, everybody’s like, okay, so he tweeted a thing. Cool. And now we don’t even pay attention when he tweets a thing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

BEN SHAPIRO: In fact, he has to have a sign off. Thank you for your attention to this matter. So we know that he’s not trolling, right?

But I think that that’s because we got to see him in practice. The problem is with people who, you know, are in the business of viewpoint, you don’t actually get to see what their practice looks like. All you have is the rhetoric.

So now I’m supposed to judge whether when, you know, Nick Fuentes has Team Hitler, does he actually like Hitler, or is he just joking about liking Hitler? And what is the practical difference between joking about liking Hitler over and over and over and also espousing Hitlerian beliefs? And actually just liking Hitler?

And at what point does the onus, why is the onus on the viewer as opposed to on him, to clarify what it is that he thinks?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, speaking of judging people on what they’re doing, how do you feel about President Trump’s term so far?

Trump’s Presidential Performance

BEN SHAPIRO: I think it’s a mixed bag. I mean, he’s done a lot of things that I think are great. I mean, I think that his foreign policy overall has been very, very good. I think that he has justified my faith that he was going to be a peace through strength president and not a full scale isolationist president, as some people seem to think that he was, which I thought was always projection based on his term one.

I think that when it comes to domestic policy, obviously closing the border is a massive accomplishment. And he did it essentially the first day, thus falsifying all of the talk about how you need a new piece of legislation in order to do that. I’ve been very critical of the tariffs. I think the tariffs are uncalibrated and poor economic policy that are not truly designed to achieve the effect that either he wants or that he is seeking.

And I think that we can go down the list of issues. Overall, I think he’s a very effective president in a way that I think many people didn’t think that he could be. I mean, he’s moving very quickly. He’s doing many, many things. Whether you like him or you hate him, there’s no question that he has been a transformative figure in American politics.

And so on an effectiveness level, he’s extremely effective. On a policy level, I would say I agree with probably 75% of what he’s doing, and there’s 25% I don’t agree with. And then there’s stuff that I just don’t think that he was ever going to do. Whenever, like, he should rhetorically unify the country. Where have you been for 10 years? I mean, like, come on. Or, you know, he should really be more statesmanlike. Like, okay, you know, like, these are now old debates and they’re in the past.

ICE Operations and Enforcement Concerns

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you have any concerns around—I mean, we had Sam Harris on the show recently. That episode hasn’t gone out yet, but it will. He talked a lot about the way some of the ICE operations have been conducted. People showing up in mosques not identifying themselves, arresting US citizens, et cetera. Did you have any concerns about that?

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I think that we’d have to look at each individual case, and I’m sure I could find cases where I would have concerns. You know, I think that overall the detention of criminal illegal immigrants, which seems to be largely the people who are being targeted, is a very good thing.

I think that you could certainly find cases, I’m sure, where ICE acted badly or where they didn’t provide properly for the rights of the people who they are taking into custody, or they got it wrong and arrested somebody who was a citizen when they meant to arrest an illegal immigrant non-citizen, for example.

The Israel-Gaza Situation

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And very briefly, because we’re running out of time, you have another media engagement we have to run to. We haven’t talked about Israel, despite the fact that you’re accused of only talking about Israel. Yes, always.

BEN SHAPIRO: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I was wondering, we got to a point where I thought President Trump achieved an incredible thing, which is the release of the Israeli hostages. And that was based on the idea a much broader plan whose objective was to disarm and dismantle Hamas and secure peace in a very complicated structure that hasn’t transpired. Are you optimistic that there will be some kind of long term solution to the Middle East or is it just going to run for another 70 years?

BEN SHAPIRO: Well, I mean, I think that, you know, conflicts between radical Islamists and others in the Middle East is likely to continue for, you know, the rest of human history. But if you’re talking about like the explicit what happened in Gaza issue, I think that the triumph was stage one. Stage two was always sort of, you know, the maybe phase of the Trump plan.

The reality is that what has happened with the freeing of those hostages, it means that now, you know, Israel is not on tenterhooks, obviously, about living people being held in tunnels. And beyond that, there’s sort of a yellow line that’s essentially been established in the Gaza Strip that’s currently being administered by the IDF and that eventually is supposed to be transferred over to the control of some sort of international security force.

Presumably there will be vast humanitarian aid in that area. Rebuilding funds are going in. I know people who are actually actively working on construction in that area right now to build housing and all the rest and maybe turn that into like an actual decent place to live.

As far as the area that’s sort of the interior of the Gaza Strip, that is currently essentially a war between Hamas and a wide variety of sort of clans. You know, the thing that’s kind of ridiculous about this whole war is that the yelling at the IDF about human rights violations and the IDF is terrible. It’s just awful.

Well, I noticed that the minute that the IDF pulled out of those areas, Hamas just started pulling people out of their houses and shooting them in the head. And everybody went completely silent about all of that. And now they’re saying, well, we certainly can’t allow the IDF to go back in there. We have to have an international security force. Well, cool.

I mean, I think that the Israelis would love nothing better than for the UAE and the Saudis and the Indonesians to put a security force in there. The question is why precisely those countries would want to do that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, they wouldn’t. Because they’d all be killed, right? Not all, but they would. They would end up in the same position as Israel.

BEN SHAPIRO: That’s right. So I think that one of the things that’s been exposed by the sort of deal at the end of the war is the harsh reality of the Middle East, which is if there is no police force in areas that are governed by terrorists, then terrorists tend to govern those areas. And this bizarre idea that if you just pull out magically, things are going to spring up and replace them.

So we’ll see whether that happens or not. But certainly the Middle East is in a significantly better situation and position than it was before President Trump’s late stage intervention in the Gaza war.

Anti-Semitism in the UK

FRANCIS FOSTER: Have you been surprised, Ben, by the events and what’s happened in the UK surrounding the pro-Palestine demonstrations and the just general anti-Semitism? Let’s be honest.

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I wish I could say that I was surprised. I feel like that’s been a long time in exploding the Islamic population, particularly in areas like London or Manchester where you have very high levels of Islamic immigration.

The history of Europe tends to show that when you have very high levels of Islamic immigration in particular areas, those areas tend to become more lawless, more violent, more anti-Semitic. And that’s true across Europe. It’s not just true in Britain, it is true in France, it is true in the Netherlands, it’s true legitimately everywhere.

And the one area where apparently it’s safe to be Jewish is Hungary, where they decided that they weren’t going to allow mass Islamic immigration into the country and are currently paying, I believe, a million euros a day in fines to the EU in order to maintain their current border status.

So, no, I’m not surprised by that at all. I continue to be, you know, I would say bemused at best by the fellow traveling of the left with this, this sort of red-green alliance that has happened in which it’s like, well, you know, we’re all on the same side because we oppose the system together. And while that may be a convenient coalition for the moment, but I promise you that at the end of this road, there’s going to be some pretty significant disagreement.

Opportunity and the Future

FRANCIS FOSTER: Absolutely. Ben, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Final question is always the same. What’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we really should be?

BEN SHAPIRO: I think we actually talked about it. I think that the generalized lack of political voices speaking to the vast opportunity available to young people in America and in the West and their capacity to actually get ahead if they make good decisions, that lack is being direly felt and it’s having its ramifications across all of politics, foreign and international.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, there was one person who did do that very effectively and he was taken from us. Do you see somebody else stepping up? Because I guess Charlie was—Charlie was the person who was holding this whole groping thing at bay in many ways. And he needs to—a new person needs to emerge for that role, surely.

BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I think a lot of people need to emerge for that role. I think one of the big mistakes is thinking that any one person can replace one for one, any one person. But it’s going to require a lot of voices to push back what I think are evil and nefarious views.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Ben, thank you very much.

BEN SHAPIRO: Thanks so much.

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