The Ben Shapiro Show - BREAKING: Daily Wire Uncovers MASSIVE Fraud Scandal In Ohio!

00:00:00.000 Money is being stolen out of your pocket and put into the hands of people defrauding you.

00:00:05.000 Not on the margins.

00:00:06.000 This is happening at the highest levels of the American government.

00:00:09.000 Elon Musk and Nick Shirley opened the door, but Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak is now busting through that wall like the Kool Aid man.

00:00:17.000 The Daily Wire is serving up the receipts for widespread fraud, which the president and vice president can wipe out entirely.

00:00:23.000 Billions of dollars of Medicaid stolen from you, the taxpayer.

00:00:26.000 We've seen the quality leering centers and the suspect behavior of thousands taking advantage of state level programs.

00:00:33.000 This is massive fraud that we're uncovering on the federal scale.

00:00:36.000 Conservatives have always stood by the notion that government screws things up.

00:00:39.000 Democrats build systems where waste, fraud, and abuse, that's the feature, not the bug.

00:00:44.000 They love stealing money from some and giving it to others, all to make people more dependent on the government more broadly while blaming the free markets.

00:00:51.000 It's disgusting and it has to end.

00:00:52.000 We'll get into all the receipts in a moment.

00:00:54.000 And speaking of disgusting, Tucker Carlson just did a crazy interview with the New York Times that proves once and for all he is not remotely on the right.

00:01:01.000 And in fact, he now stands with the worst enemies of American ideals.

00:01:05.000 Apparently, there's no daylight between these would be revolutionaries, Tucker Carlson, Bernie Sanders, and Hassan Piker.

00:01:11.000 Welcome back to the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:01:19.000 Well, Daily Wire exists to bring you the truth.

00:01:21.000 We do that in a lot of ways our commentary, our documentaries, our films, and not least with our investigative reporting.

00:01:28.000 So, this week, we have a series of bombshell reports after our reporters spent two months investigating the extent of welfare fraud in Ohio, where billions of dollars have now gone missing down the rat hole of government entitlement programs under the guise of home health care.

00:01:43.000 Our goal at the Daily Wire is to smash the supposedly untouchable pillars of the welfare state.

00:01:47.000 It's time to return to true conservatism.

00:01:49.000 Truth is the only way to get there.

00:01:52.000 So, fraud isn't just happening in the blue cities where you might expect.

00:01:54.000 It's happening right under the nose of Republican governors, too, in Ohio, for example.

00:02:00.000 Think one address 93 companies, no windows, totally empty, billed to you, the American taxpayer, $66 million over the last several years.

00:02:10.000 Shell companies, fake billing, fake services, covered tracks until this very instant.

00:02:16.000 So, Daily Wire has now uncovered, via Luke Rosiak and our investigative team, Medicaid millionaires in a piece titled, Medicaid millionaires, how the feds pay immigrants billions to hang out with their own families.

00:02:28.000 Luke points out Under the guise of healthcare, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid recipients' homes to perform homemaking and chores like cooking and cleaning.

00:02:36.000 The people performing these personal services tasks don't have to be healthcare workers.

00:02:40.000 In 2024, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home healthcare.

00:02:45.000 So they literally pay people Medicaid money to go to other people's houses to perform homemaking and chores. 0.99

00:02:53.000 And as Luke writes, the new welfare queens aren't the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. 0.99

00:02:58.000 They're the companies getting rich off of them.

00:03:01.000 His overall impression that 99% of the facilities I visited had the hallmarks of waste, fraud, or abuse.

00:03:06.000 We are talking about alleged criminality at a breathtaking scale.

00:03:11.000 So, for example, this here is a picture of 93 offices in Columbus, Ohio.

00:03:18.000 It is 6161 Bush Boulevard.

00:03:22.000 So, as you can see, all the windows are covered, which is weird.

00:03:25.000 Typically, You know, if you have an office, you like to have windows because people like there to be some light in their offices.

00:03:31.000 Why would you cover all the windows?

00:03:32.000 Well, because there's nothing there.

00:03:35.000 According to Luke, what's inside is 93 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in Home Health LLC, and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break.

00:03:49.000 And again, this building, this address, billed taxpayers over $66 million over the last several years.

00:03:57.000 And as Luke points out, if you try to track down what exactly is happening at any one of these home healthcare companies, what you will find is an endless rabbit hole.

00:04:06.000 He says you'll find years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they are making from Medicaid are just a side gig.

00:04:18.000 The government is not and cannot be monitoring the people to whom they write million dollar checks.

00:04:23.000 They all share combinations of just a few names like Ahmed Mohammed and Mohammed Ahmed.

00:04:28.000 And the population of Columbus, Ohio, it's the second biggest Somali population outside of Minnesota.

00:04:34.000 They spell their own name multiple different ways within a single document.

00:04:37.000 Many of them have their birthdays listed as January 1 because we don't know when they were born.

00:04:43.000 Pretty much all of them, according to Luke, are registered voters.

00:04:45.000 Wait for it, wait for it.

00:04:46.000 For the Democratic Party.

00:04:48.000 Not a shock.

00:04:48.000 So the business model is apparently simple.

00:04:50.000 A 40 year old Somali gets paid for spending time with and maybe cooking for his own 65 year old mom. 0.97

00:04:56.000 Sitting in the middle is one of these thousands. 0.95

00:04:58.000 Of home health firms that have an NPI number necessary to build Medicaid.

00:05:02.000 And then the 40 year old becomes an employee of that company, but the only patient is mom.

00:05:07.000 There's no way to verify whether he's providing services unless his mom is willing to rat him out.

00:05:13.000 Maybe he even gives a portion of the pay to mommy as a kickback for allowing her social security number to be used. 0.97

00:05:20.000 Virtually, apparently, all of these home health care companies are owned by foreigners. 0.96

00:05:26.000 As Luke writes, when we asked what home health care companies did, one man threatened journalists, who cares? 0.70

00:05:30.000 You guys pay my bills? 0.98

00:05:32.000 I'm going to tell everybody you guys are racist. 0.98

00:05:33.000 Yay, there it is. 0.96

00:05:35.000 Isn't that nice? 0.99

00:05:36.000 See, this is the way the magic works defraud our Medicaid systems, defraud federal taxpayer dollars.

00:05:43.000 And then when somebody comes knocking on the door, you just claim that they are a racist.

00:05:48.000 Now, as Luke points out, this poverty program is different from others like food stamps because it doesn't have a monetary cap.

00:05:54.000 Its extent is not decided by politicians, but by any doctor willing to sign a form saying you could use some help around the home.

00:06:00.000 And one doctor can sign a billion of these forms.

00:06:03.000 You can bankrupt a state this way.

00:06:05.000 Again, this is just part one of our series.

00:06:07.000 What's coming tomorrow is so much worse.

00:06:10.000 I mean, already we're talking $66 million in potential fraud right here from 93 companies at one address.

00:06:10.000 So much worse.

00:06:17.000 Industrial scale alleged fraud happening right here.

00:06:20.000 So, how do we get this information?

00:06:21.000 Well, there was a quiet Doge document drop in February of this year.

00:06:25.000 So, again, people were ripping on Elon Musk over Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency.

00:06:30.000 Well, they had a lot of After Effects, Doge.

00:06:33.000 And one of the things they did is they revealed information into the public that allows journalists like Luke and our team, our investigative journalists here at Daily Wire, which we've been building for a couple of years, to go out and actually dig in.

00:06:45.000 Luke was able to dive in thanks to those Doge documents.

00:06:48.000 For decades, Medicaid billing data was a black box.

00:06:50.000 It's one of the biggest government programs in human history.

00:06:53.000 The public could not see a dime of it.

00:06:55.000 And Doge changed all of that in February with a quiet data release that a lot of people missed.

00:06:59.000 Well, again, this week, we're going to reveal a lot more about what's going on in Ohio.

00:07:03.000 We'll talk about one landlord who owned buildings with 300 different Medicaid companies that billed the federal government $250 million.

00:07:14.000 I mean, this kind of fraud has consequences.

00:07:17.000 And again, it is a feature, not a bug.

00:07:18.000 You would imagine.

00:07:19.000 That there'd be Democrats out there who are upset with this kind of fraud.

00:07:22.000 After all, if you're an advocate for a government program, you should want every dollar of that taxpayer money to go to someone who deserves the taxpayer money.

00:07:31.000 But that's not what's happening.

00:07:32.000 Democrats are irritated by the fact that people are uncovering this stuff.

00:07:36.000 Now, the good news is Ohio is Republican governed.

00:07:39.000 Mike DeWine is the governor of Ohio.

00:07:40.000 Vivek Ramaswamy is very likely to be the next governor of Ohio.

00:07:43.000 And President Trump is on top of this.

00:07:45.000 And Vice President Vance is heading up the waste, fraud, and abuse policing here.

00:07:49.000 So we are very hopeful that there will be action here.

00:07:51.000 And that's what we need.

00:07:52.000 That's what we need.

00:07:53.000 We need you to get involved.

00:07:54.000 Share that story from dailywire.com.

00:07:57.000 It's not paywalled.

00:07:58.000 We need to help spread the word and hold people who are defrauding the American people to account.

00:08:02.000 We need government hearings.

00:08:04.000 We need prosecutions.

00:08:05.000 We need doors kicked down.

00:08:07.000 We need investigations. 0.83

00:08:09.000 And again, Republican governors, federal officials need to fix this.

00:08:13.000 That is what we are working on.

00:08:14.000 That is what we are calling for.

00:08:15.000 Because true change can be effectuated here by criminal justice.

00:08:19.000 And this is a unique time to do it.

00:08:20.000 The Trump administration has made policing waste, fraud, and abuse possible.

00:08:24.000 This was not going to happen under Democrats.

00:08:26.000 It can happen under Republicans, but people need to know about this story and they need to get that out there.

00:08:31.000 So head on over to dailywire.com and help spread that story and be part of the movement that ends welfare fraud in the country.

00:08:38.000 Coming up, Spirit Airlines is now a ghost.

00:08:41.000 And guess what?

00:08:41.000 People are blaming capitalism rather than government.

00:08:43.000 They're getting it wrong.

00:08:44.000 Plus, Tucker Carlson does a very, very long interview with the New York Times, and there's something wrong.

00:08:51.000 We'll get to it.

00:08:51.000 First, getting a wide variety of whole food ingredients into my diet is a priority for me, especially with constant work travel.

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00:10:01.000 Meanwhile, on the economic front, one of the most astonishing features of the way that the left views economics is they block the free markets from working and then they blame the free markets.

00:10:01.000 All right.

00:10:12.000 When something fails.

00:10:13.000 So, over the weekend, Spirit Airlines finally gave up the ghost.

00:10:20.000 Spirit had entered bankruptcy in August of last year for the second time in a year.

00:10:25.000 And its executives, according to the Wall Street Journal, developed a game plan dubbed Plan Charlie in case the company's fortunes could not be turned around.

00:10:33.000 So, they tried to negotiate with the federal government.

00:10:35.000 They were hoping for a $500 million government bailout to the tune of 90% government ownership in Spirit Airlines.

00:10:42.000 Okay, I'm just telling you.

00:10:43.000 You know what I don't need to own?

00:10:44.000 You know what you don't need to own?

00:10:45.000 You know what taxpayers don't need to own?

00:10:46.000 Spirit Airlines.

00:10:48.000 That is not the way that failing companies should be bailed out.

00:10:51.000 In fact, when companies fail, when they are falling down, what should happen is that they find another private buyer.

00:10:56.000 They either go bankrupt, they run it into the ground, or they merge, or they seek outside funding.

00:11:01.000 Because again, when it comes to the risk taking that is necessary in private industry, the next step of failure is you have to go out and you have to demonstrate a turnaround plan.

00:11:12.000 You have to show somebody else that you are willing to make serious changes.

00:11:16.000 And then you can bring in new capital, or maybe you can merge.

00:11:18.000 The problem, of course, is that Democrats are responsible for the death of Spirit Airlines because Spirit Airlines tried to merge with JetBlue last year, and Democrats stopped it.

00:11:30.000 Now, Spirit is trying to blame the jet fuel prices for its bankruptcy.

00:11:36.000 They're trying to declare that the war in Iran is what the real problem was.

00:11:39.000 But that wasn't the real problem because, again, the other airline companies are not going bankrupt right now.

00:11:44.000 Spirit was running on non solid footing.

00:11:47.000 Again, Spirit was famous for very, very cheap.

00:11:49.000 Airline fares.

00:11:52.000 But now, what's happened is competition has actually made airline travel better.

00:11:56.000 I know there are a lot of people right now who are ripping on the airlines.

00:11:58.000 I get it.

00:11:59.000 I travel a lot.

00:12:00.000 I traveled the coach out to LA yesterday.

00:12:04.000 And I got to say, it wasn't the best.

00:12:06.000 I was flying JetBlue.

00:12:07.000 But one thing that's happened, for example, is JetBlue provides free internet.

00:12:11.000 So it used to be, and it still is on some of the airlines, that they make you pay for the internet.

00:12:16.000 And now it seems that more and more airliners are going to move toward the free model.

00:12:20.000 Competition and more competition in this area leads to better results.

00:12:23.000 Well, JetBlue was trying to buy spirit.

00:12:25.000 They were trying to merge with spirit.

00:12:27.000 That was blocked by Democrats because Democrats have a theory.

00:12:30.000 And that theory is if business gets bigger, that is inherently bad.

00:12:35.000 So there are two theories of antitrust.

00:12:36.000 Antitrust is the idea that you can't have a monopoly dominating a market because then it can set prices wherever it wants.

00:12:42.000 So if you had a grocery store monopoly in your neighborhood, theoretically, they could set the price twice what it normally would be because you don't have any other choices.

00:12:50.000 Now, true monopoly is incredibly rare in the market because if the prices tend to skyrocket, somebody else wants to get in on that action.

00:12:57.000 They open up a grocery store across the street.

00:13:00.000 Typically, true monopoly requires government intervention on behalf of the monopoly.

00:13:05.000 But there's a second theory of antitrust that is not about the consumer at all.

00:13:09.000 The first theory of antitrust says you should only police for monopoly when the consumer is harmed.

00:13:16.000 And then there's a second theory of antitrust, the Democrat theory, which is if something is big, it is bad.

00:13:21.000 That is the theory pursued by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

00:13:23.000 So Elizabeth Warren is now blaming President Trump for Spirit's bankruptcy.

00:13:28.000 She put out a tweet saying spiking fuel prices from Trump's war was the nail in the coffin for twice bankrupted Spirit Airline.

00:13:34.000 For what it's worth, JetBlue merger failed because a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan said the deal was illegal.

00:13:39.000 Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher cost hitting families, but that's not true.

00:13:44.000 The reality is there was a block by the Biden administration on the merger between JetBlue and Spirit.

00:13:51.000 In fact, here she was tweeting back in March of 2024, triumphantly, that the JetBlue Spirit merger had been ended I've warned for months that a JetBlue Spirit Airlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares.

00:14:05.000 The Justice Department and the Department of Transportation were right to stand up for consumers and fight against.

00:14:10.000 Runaway airline consolidation.

00:14:12.000 This is a Biden win for flyers.

00:14:13.000 So, do you feel like you're winning now?

00:14:15.000 There are fewer flights available.

00:14:16.000 Do you feel like you're winning?

00:14:18.000 By the way, the ex secretary of transportation, a man who really, really loves choo choo trains, Pete Buttigieg, who for some reason is considered an elite Democratic contender for the presidency after legitimately running the trains off the rails during his tenure at the Department of Transportation.

00:14:34.000 Here is Pete Buttigieg in March 2024 talking about why they blocked the merger that would have saved spirit.

00:14:41.000 Our department, the Department of Transportation, has generally not gotten involved in these merger cases, but that's changing today.

00:14:50.000 It is so important to make sure that passengers have choices, that they have access to low fares, that they have access to competition, and yet we've seen less and less and less of that competition over the years.

00:15:05.000 Okay, again, the lack of competition is not going to be alleviated by things going bankrupt.

00:15:12.000 Ridiculous. 0.96

00:15:14.000 Now, again, this is the Democrat stick. 0.96

00:15:16.000 The Democrat stick always and forever is government gets involved in a thing, government makes the thing worse, blame capitalism.

00:15:23.000 And for people who don't understand free markets and don't understand capitalism, that's always an easy pitch because we live in a very, very prosperous time.

00:15:31.000 We are richer than any human beings in the history of mankind.

00:15:35.000 And so we tend to think that the natural state of things is being rich.

00:15:39.000 Again, if you took a person from 1800 and dropped them into modern American society, They would not know what is going on.

00:15:45.000 They would think that they dropped into materialist heaven because you can get anything you want at the press of a button delivered to your door with a magic device you hold in your hand.

00:15:55.000 And that thing was sourced from 70 different countries.

00:15:57.000 And you can do it affordably.

00:15:59.000 I know people talk about affordability.

00:16:01.000 And again, affordability is a malleable term because no one ever considers anything truly affordable.

00:16:06.000 But let's just put it this way back in 1800, an hour of candlelight might have cost you several hours of work during the day because you had to go get.

00:16:15.000 Wax, or you had to go get whale oil.

00:16:17.000 Okay, today, electricity is free.

00:16:19.000 You flick on a light and it just stays on all day and you don't even think about it.

00:16:23.000 Okay, because capitalism makes things better and it makes things cheaper.

00:16:27.000 But also because of that, we tend to not understand how capitalism works.

00:16:30.000 So when something fails, we blame, quote unquote, the system.

00:16:34.000 But we never allow the system, meaning free markets, credit for the success.

00:16:38.000 You want to know why it is cheap to fly coast to coast?

00:16:42.000 And it is, by the way, comparatively.

00:16:44.000 Look at the percentage of income people had to spend on an air ticket in 1960.

00:16:49.000 Versus the percentage of income that you have to spend on an air ticket today.

00:16:52.000 Way, way, way, way lower.

00:16:53.000 Okay, why?

00:16:55.000 Because of competition.

00:16:56.000 Because of innovation.

00:16:56.000 Why?

00:16:57.000 But if a company goes bankrupt, that must be the evil of capitalism.

00:17:01.000 Okay, so the reason that we have to argue in favor of capitalism is because if capitalism dies, America dies.

00:17:07.000 We lose.

00:17:08.000 We lose to our competitors.

00:17:09.000 Also, because capitalism is in fact moral.

00:17:12.000 And one of the things that I've been railing against in the conservative movement for a long time is this idea that capitalism and free markets can only be defended on a utilitarian basis.

00:17:23.000 That free markets and capitalism are only good because of their products.

00:17:28.000 And the problem with that argument is true.

00:17:30.000 It's true that capitalism does make things better and it does make things cheaper and people innovate and they invent.

00:17:35.000 That's all true.

00:17:36.000 But if you don't defend capitalism and free markets on a moral basis, you leave room for true grifters and demagogues, ranging from Tucker Carlson to Bernie Sanders, to suggest that true morality would be ditching the free markets in favor of a centralized governmental system that is fairer in some way.

00:17:57.000 See, the true Marxist appeal, the appeal of Marxism, was never that Marxism was going to make life better for people, it was that it was going to change men's souls.

00:18:04.000 That was always the religious appeal of the Marxist philosophy.

00:18:07.000 It is not that you're going to have better stuff cheaper, that you're going to be more prosperous.

00:18:12.000 That may have been Marx's original theory, but it was abjectly wrong and clearly wrong.

00:18:18.000 But undergirding that theory was a different theory that true justice for man springs from the idea that a centralized government can provide cosmic justice, that free markets are somehow inherently unfair, that they are immoral.

00:18:32.000 Not that they're not productive, that they are immoral.

00:18:34.000 So you have to make a moral defense of free markets.

00:18:37.000 So here's the moral defense of free markets that conservatives should be making.

00:18:40.000 First, man is made in the image of God.

00:18:43.000 We're all made in the image of God.

00:18:44.000 That means that we are creative, choosing people with autonomy and power.

00:18:49.000 And that means that we have a right to the products of our own labor because we are individuals.

00:18:53.000 So if we make something, we own that thing.

00:18:57.000 Free markets are rooted in that simple recognition.

00:18:59.000 If I own my property, I ought to be able to trade it.

00:19:02.000 I ought to be able to dispense with it.

00:19:04.000 I ought to be able to invest it as I see fit, so long as my decisions are not infringing upon the equal rights of other people.

00:19:10.000 And finally, free markets are just.

00:19:12.000 They are.

00:19:13.000 I understand there are a lot of people who believe that free markets are unjust because some people prosper and some people don't in the same measure.

00:19:20.000 But that is a misinterpretation of the concept of justice.

00:19:23.000 Justice does not mean that we all have the same result.

00:19:25.000 Justice is the proposition, as Aristotle suggested, that equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally.

00:19:32.000 You might be mad at God or at nature for not making the world the way that you would want it.

00:19:36.000 But that's not justice. 1.00

00:19:38.000 It's arrogance and stupidity and childishness. 1.00

00:19:40.000 If you're just mad because some people are better at things than you are, That's the way the world works. 1.00

00:19:45.000 LeBron James is better at basketball than I am.

00:19:47.000 I am better at talking on camera than LeBron James.

00:19:49.000 That's just the way the world is.

00:19:51.000 That is a natural state of the world.

00:19:54.000 We are all provided equal rights by God, but that doesn't mean we all have equal qualities.

00:19:59.000 And there is no way for a centralized government to rectify that absent some sort of Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron burden the people who actually achieve in order to achieve justice.

00:20:11.000 Thomas Sowell points out that justice is usually considered a process, not an outcome.

00:20:15.000 That's why the justice system, for example.

00:20:18.000 We're not God that we should just declare there should be equality or there should be justice.

00:20:23.000 There is a universe, there's a world of real facts, and we have to determine whether we are making things worse or better when we make a specific change in that system.

00:20:33.000 And by the way, free markets actually do promote true freedom because I get to value my labor however I choose.

00:20:38.000 That's what the pricing system is.

00:20:40.000 The pricing system is an aggregation of what I think something is worth and what you think something is worth and what we all collectively think things are worth.

00:20:48.000 Free markets prize diversity in a very, very serious sense.

00:20:51.000 They take account of every individual's needs and wants and desires, and then they allow for that diversity of opinion to emerge on the value of products, goods, and services.

00:20:59.000 So, why am I explaining all of this?

00:21:00.000 Because what we are watching right now, and Spirit Airlines is a great example of this.

00:21:03.000 What we are watching right now is an anti capitalist revolution.

00:21:08.000 Artie, coming up, Tucker Carlson does an entire interview with the New York Times in which it becomes clear that he and Hassan Piker, they're basically the same thing, except that Tucker, you know, does his show out of a cabin and Hassan Piker does his show from Cartier.

00:21:19.000 But other than that, they say kind of the same thing.

00:21:21.000 First, there's been a lot of talk lately about how AI is going to make the world a better place.

00:21:25.000 The answer is that's true, probably, but the real question is better for whom?

00:21:29.000 Well, it's better for your insurance company.

00:21:31.000 Which now has the ability to scrape your data and figure out exactly how to raise your premiums based on what you've been searching for on WebMD.

00:21:37.000 Might be better for the HR department that can quietly filter candidates based on browsing history.

00:21:41.000 Probably better for political campaigns that can target you based on your personality profile, what you do online.

00:21:47.000 Not necessarily better all the way around for you.

00:21:50.000 Now, the reality is that your online activity, that's your business.

00:21:54.000 And you don't want people scraping that data, which is why you need ExpressVPN.

00:21:58.000 Your data is being collected.

00:21:59.000 It's not being used right now, but it will be used later by people you don't know for purposes you didn't agree to.

00:22:04.000 That's why I use ExpressVPN.

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00:22:52.000 Okay.

00:22:53.000 A lot of people have asked over the course of the last several years because I've been highly critical of Tucker Carlson.

00:22:57.000 When I first noticed that Tucker Carlson was going wrong.

00:23:01.000 Okay.

00:23:02.000 So Tucker Carlson, he, um, I will say that Tucker Carlson's dislike of capitalism was the first clue.

00:23:11.000 The reason I'm bringing this up is because Tucker did a very, very long interview with the New York Times over the weekend that has struck a lot of conservatives as odd.

00:23:19.000 Didn't strike me as odd because, of course, I've been watching what Tucker has been doing for a while.

00:23:23.000 And what he's representative of is a demagogic right that despises free markets and meritocracy and believes there need to be special carve out rights for particular groups.

00:23:33.000 It is the mirror of the grievance party left.

00:23:35.000 It's why I have suggested that the horseshoe right and the left are basically on the same page.

00:23:39.000 They just have different groups they're trying to benefit.

00:23:42.000 That essentially their argument is the same.

00:23:44.000 American society is a big conspiracy.

00:23:46.000 Free markets, a gigantic conspiracy.

00:23:48.000 Constitutional government, a gigantic conspiracy.

00:23:50.000 That must be broken through.

00:23:52.000 There must be a revision of how we think about the role of government in our lives.

00:23:57.000 And free markets have to be brought to heal.

00:23:59.000 The meritocracy is a lie.

00:24:01.000 And you're suffering in your life.

00:24:02.000 That's the fault of these vague systems.

00:24:04.000 And there's a conspiratorial elite who are in charge of those systems trying to harm you.

00:24:09.000 Now, a lot of people are saying that right and they are saying that left.

00:24:12.000 But the clues were all there.

00:24:14.000 The clues are all there.

00:24:16.000 So, back in 2018, this is the moment where I first noticed that Tucker was off the rails.

00:24:21.000 So, back in 2018, now eight years ago, I interviewed Tucker Carlson.

00:24:26.000 This is a younger, more innocent Ben Shapiro interviewing Tucker Carlson.

00:24:30.000 And Tucker was still on Fox at the time.

00:24:32.000 And he had written a book in which he really ripped on capitalism in some pretty significant ways.

00:24:37.000 In this interview, by the way, he would endorse the economic proposals of, say, Bernie Sanders openly.

00:24:42.000 And I asked him about self driving cars.

00:24:47.000 And one of the things that he said about self driving cars is that he would ban them.

00:24:50.000 He said he would ban them because it would save trucker jobs in the Midwest.

00:24:56.000 Okay, which again is a Luddite perspective.

00:24:58.000 The reality is self driving cars make things cheaper for people all over the United States.

00:25:03.000 If transportation costs go down, guess what else goes down?

00:25:05.000 Your costs.

00:25:06.000 Productivity decreases cost because it increases supply.

00:25:10.000 So I asked him in this interview about banning self driving cars, and he said he would.

00:25:16.000 But this was the part that really struck me.

00:25:19.000 Look, capitalism is the best economic system I can think of, I think that anyone's ever thought of.

00:25:24.000 But that doesn't mean that it's a religion and everything about it is good. 0.63

00:25:28.000 No, but there's no niacin creed of capitalism that I have to buy into what I care about.

00:25:33.000 Is living in a country where decent people can live happy lives, actually.

00:25:38.000 And so, no, I would say immediately, no, are you joking?

00:25:41.000 And I maybe would make up some pretext for public consumption, like, oh, they're dangerous.

00:25:45.000 The technology is not quite finessed.

00:25:46.000 No, no.

00:25:47.000 But the truth would be, I don't want to put 10 million men out of work because you're going to have 10 million dead families, and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country.

00:25:56.000 And now, you'll notice that Tucker, even then, was doing this game where he would say, I love capitalism.

00:26:01.000 Capitalism is wonderful.

00:26:02.000 I just think that capitalism isn't something we have to adhere to.

00:26:06.000 It's something that we can ditch on behalf of the greater good.

00:26:08.000 Okay, when the exception eats the rule, you don't have a rule.

00:26:13.000 If the idea is that the greater good trumps the individual rights of the market, there is no limit on that.

00:26:18.000 You can use that argument for virtually anything.

00:26:21.000 For virtually anything.

00:26:23.000 Okay, so this was reflected in Tucker's interview with the New York Times.

00:26:30.000 So Tucker was asked if capitalism is evil.

00:26:34.000 And here's what Tucker Carlson had to say about whether capitalism was evil.

00:26:37.000 He said this to the New York Times.

00:26:40.000 The current system, and I don't know what you would call our economic system.

00:26:45.000 I mean, I'm often told it's free market capitalism.

00:26:48.000 It doesn't bear any resemblance to what I thought free market capitalism was.

00:26:53.000 I'm not sure the name is important, except as a way to mislead and bully people into being quiet about it.

00:27:00.000 But any economic system in which the overwhelming majority of the rewards go to an ever shrinking number of people or Or, the proportion of people is a doomed system because it makes people revolutionary.

00:27:16.000 I saw this in Venezuela, which I visited as a child.

00:27:18.000 It was a prosperous kind of first world country, beautiful country, actually. 0.93

00:27:24.000 Okay, so the idea, first of all, that Venezuela was a model of capitalism until Hugo Chavez came around is ridiculous.

00:27:30.000 They had serious corruption problems in Venezuela well before Hugo Chavez.

00:27:34.000 But again, he's not defending capitalism, he is ripping capitalism in precisely the same terms that leftists rip capitalism.

00:27:41.000 Tucker Carlson is not in any way on the right at this point.

00:27:45.000 I mean, here is Hassan Piker with the folks at Trigonometry basically saying the same thing that capitalism will inevitably lead to authoritarianism.

00:27:54.000 My fear is that that is where capitalism inevitably leads.

00:28:00.000 Why?

00:28:00.000 If left unaddressed, because capitalism is always going to deteriorate.

00:28:05.000 It's slowly going to improve material conditions as opposed to feudalism.

00:28:09.000 It's a far better system, for sure.

00:28:10.000 It's far better than monarchies, right?

00:28:12.000 I agree.

00:28:13.000 But there will come a point where it outlives its usefulness, and those who own the capital, the owners of capital, will have to make a decision.

00:28:23.000 There's too much instability.

00:28:24.000 There's too much chaos.

00:28:25.000 We need to restore order.

00:28:30.000 Okay, so again, Tucker Carlson, Hassan Piker saying the exact same thing.

00:28:34.000 Here was Tucker Carlson, again, in this interview with the New York Times, saying that what we are watching right now is a total destruction of economic opportunity.

00:28:41.000 Again, this is demagoguery at the highest level.

00:28:44.000 This is true demagoguery.

00:28:45.000 We have an unemployment rate in this country of under 5%.

00:28:49.000 The notion that nobody can get a job is a lie.

00:28:51.000 It is a lie that is fostered by people who are attempting to destroy free market systems.

00:28:57.000 Here's Tucker Carlson.

00:28:58.000 Again, he and Hassan Piker believe the same things about these issues.

00:29:03.000 Here he was.

00:29:04.000 I had dinner the other night with a bunch of kids from Stanford, really smart.

00:29:09.000 They're at Stanford.

00:29:11.000 And one of them said, Oh, yeah, his best friend just graduated with a degree in computer science last year, has not been able to find a job.

00:29:17.000 Stanford computer science can't find a job.

00:29:19.000 So that's like a window into the total destruction of the economic opportunity for young people. 0.80

00:29:26.000 And what looks to me as a non economist like the true.

00:29:29.000 Hoarding of capital by a tiny group of people, it looks like a very lopsided and unfair economic system that is guaranteed to radicalize young people, not just young people, but especially young people.

00:29:45.000 So, again, this idea that he cites one Stanford student to say that there's a hoarding of capital at the top levels, it's just Marxist claptrap.

00:29:54.000 Okay, yes, AI means that there are obviously transitions in the job market, but this idea that this is therefore somehow.

00:30:01.000 To be laid at the feet of free market capitalism itself.

00:30:04.000 What you really need is government interventionism.

00:30:07.000 It's insanity.

00:30:09.000 Again, Hassan Piker says the exact same thing.

00:30:12.000 Here he was saying that profit seekers criticize him, right?

00:30:15.000 It's the profit seekers, the profiteers, the people who are hoarding the capital.

00:30:20.000 This is just pure Marxist language from Tucker, which is why he and Hassan Piker are again holding hands here.

00:30:27.000 I am the danger.

00:30:28.000 We are the danger.

00:30:30.000 And I need them to understand this.

00:30:32.000 Uh, we're dangerous to the corporate bottom line.

00:30:34.000 We're dangerous to profit seekers.

00:30:36.000 And that's the only thing that our politicians and many in the media care about right now.

00:30:41.000 So in some respects, they are correct.

00:30:44.000 Uh, the danger is, uh, what might happen to, to profit seekers who want to paywall healthcare.

00:30:50.000 And I don't mean like, uh, you know, divine retribution or, or punishment of any sort.

00:30:54.000 I mean the worst punishment of all, uh, where they can no longer, uh, they can no longer justify multi-million dollar salaries.

00:31:03.000 Um, I am a danger to those who seek profit and put the interests of profit over the interests of people.

00:31:08.000 And that's precisely the reason why they attack people like myself.

00:31:14.000 The interests of profit over the interests of people.

00:31:15.000 This is the same thing that Tucker is saying.

00:31:17.000 Here's Tucker in this New York Times interview saying that banks have an incentive to foment conflict. 0.97

00:31:22.000 This is just conspiratorial horseshit.

00:31:24.000 I mean, truly, this idea that the folks at Citibank are sitting there being like, yes, let's do war, let's do war. 0.96

00:31:31.000 Banks have zero incentive to foment conflict.

00:31:34.000 In fact, banks.

00:31:36.000 Lose money typically during wars because it turns out that the government gets very, very into the business of how banks run and then tries to seize their capital.

00:31:45.000 Anyway, here's Tucker.

00:31:47.000 For most Americans, people who are born here, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, doesn't matter of any race, the real concerns are economic.

00:31:54.000 And I do think that certain forces, the banks, people loaning the money, have a real incentive to foment.

00:32:06.000 Dissent within the population against each other.

00:32:08.000 Fight amongst yourselves while we continue to charge you 25% interest on your credit card. 0.99

00:32:14.000 I mean, again, it's indistinguishable from Hassan Piker.

00:32:17.000 The banks have an interest in what? 0.84

00:32:18.000 The BLM riots?

00:32:20.000 The banks have an interest in destruction of property?

00:32:22.000 What the hell is he talking about?

00:32:24.000 Again, the left and the right here are on the same page because in the end, what they hate, what they cannot stand, is the idea of a free market system that rests on individual freedom.

00:32:32.000 They want to restructure it in line with their own preferences.

00:32:37.000 Bernie Sanders' view on AI is basically the same as Tucker Carlson's view on AI, which is the same thing, by the way, as the Chinese view on AI, because China is trying to destroy us on the AI front. 0.52

00:32:47.000 There, trying to outcompete us.

00:32:48.000 Bernie Sanders, over the past couple of weeks, hosted a panel with literal members of Chinese universities on AI safety and governance.

00:32:57.000 And at that panel, he said, The richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes.

00:33:03.000 They acknowledge they don't understand how it works, they don't know where it's headed.

00:33:08.000 We need to cooperate, we need dialogue.

00:33:10.000 Again, the reason that Bernie and all the rest of these characters are ripping on AI is not because they have some sort of principled stand against AI excesses.

00:33:20.000 I think we all agree.

00:33:22.000 That AI is scary because we don't know quite what to make of it.

00:33:24.000 That is not the same thing as what Bernie is doing, which is literally aligning with the Chinese government on this matter.

00:33:33.000 Here is Bernie on the AI moratorium.

00:33:37.000 If scientists who are Nobel Prize winners, guys who've gotten the Turing Award, which is the major award given to Beatle in computer science, if they say to you that humanity is in danger, do you think you might want to do something about it?

00:33:53.000 Or am I missing something?

00:33:54.000 You tell me.

00:33:55.000 So, no, the percentages are also someone's, oh, there's only a 10% chance humanity is destroyed.

00:34:02.000 It's like, well, I don't like those odds.

00:34:04.000 Only a 10% chance.

00:34:06.000 God, I know.

00:34:09.000 The anti capitalists over at Pods of America and Bernie Sanders and Tucker are all on the same page.

00:34:13.000 And where does this end up?

00:34:14.000 This ends up with the grievance party, like a true grievance party, a third party that is rooted in grievance.

00:34:19.000 Here is Tucker Carlson in his interview with the New York Times saying that he wants a new party, basically.

00:34:25.000 A new party that is isolationist on foreign policy, that is restrictionist on immigration, and that is interventionist in the economy.

00:34:32.000 You might call it a national socialist party.

00:34:34.000 Here is Tucker Carlson.

00:34:37.000 You know, you can't just put a new coat of paint or fresh drywall on these structures because they are ridden with rot.

00:34:45.000 Okay.

00:34:45.000 So I would like to see them repaired.

00:34:47.000 That would be the simplest solution.

00:34:49.000 I don't think that's likely to happen.

00:34:51.000 So, of course, I would be thrilled to see the rise of a party that represented the majority of Americans.

00:34:59.000 And again, John Piker saying the same exact thing.

00:35:01.000 Here he was with former Democratic Congresswoman Corey Bush of BLM fame, saying they're not going to vote for the Democrats.

00:35:07.000 Again, it's all the same thing.

00:35:09.000 It's all the same thing.

00:35:09.000 It's an insurgent effort to overthrow American meritocracy.

00:35:13.000 That's all it is.

00:35:15.000 Here we go.

00:35:17.000 For far too long, we've been told you have to vote for harm reduction. 0.99

00:35:21.000 We all know the Republicans are corrupt. 1.00

00:35:24.000 We all know that they're monsters, they're racist, they traffic in hatred. 1.00

00:35:29.000 But we are here to say. 0.98

00:35:31.000 We are no longer going to vote for do nothing Democrats either.

00:35:34.000 We're voting for Democrats with a purpose.

00:35:42.000 Now, again, all of this is rooted in a broader conspiracy theory because here's the thing most Americans understand, because they are not ungrateful, that America is a unique and incredible place, that our free markets make us awesome, that our Constitution means we have freedoms no one else on earth has, that the greatest privilege in life is to be born an American.

00:36:00.000 It's an unbelievable privilege.

00:36:02.000 And so you have to come up with a conspiracy theory that suggests actually.

00:36:06.000 You've been gaslit.

00:36:07.000 Actually, you are a victim of false consciousness.

00:36:09.000 Actually, the institutions have been brainwashing you and are routinely betraying you.

00:36:14.000 And Tucker and Hassan Piker, they're on the same team here.

00:36:18.000 This is why during this New York Times interview, it's insane, by the way, Tucker Carlson, who apparently pretends that he's a friend to TPUSA and Erica Kirk, is literally out there sowing doubts about the FBI's investigation into Charlie Kirk's murder.

00:36:32.000 This is not the activity of a friend.

00:36:33.000 This is an activity of a leech. 0.94

00:36:35.000 Here is Tucker Carlson.

00:36:38.000 My concern more broadly is about the investigation into Charlie's murder, which was short circuited by the FBI.

00:36:45.000 And I'd like to know why.

00:36:47.000 And I don't care to be screamed at for asking that question.

00:36:51.000 It's a legitimate question, and we know that.

00:36:53.000 I know that for a bunch of reasons.

00:36:55.000 But the public knows it because Joe Kent said it out loud and explained it.

00:37:01.000 He's the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, he's an ODI, and he was told by the FBI that he could not investigate it.

00:37:08.000 And as a friend of Charlie's, I'm not going to be intimidated into saying the following, which is on what grounds would you do that?

00:37:16.000 I'm not saying the guy who's been arrested didn't pull the trigger.

00:37:20.000 I'm not, there's been no trial.

00:37:21.000 He was obviously handed over by his father.

00:37:24.000 Do we know that?

00:37:25.000 I don't know what I know because there hasn't been a trial yet.

00:37:29.000 I don't know what I know.

00:37:30.000 I don't know what I know. 0.99

00:37:31.000 This ridiculous game. 0.82

00:37:32.000 I'm not going to go into the tremendous evil of undermining an ongoing prosecution into the murder of Charlie Kirk, which actually is an evil thing to do.

00:37:39.000 I'm just going to point out the point of what Tucker is doing, which of course is to sow doubt in American institutions, even the ones that are currently run by Tucker's supposed erstwhile allies.

00:37:47.000 It's all part of a broader conspiracy theory.

00:37:49.000 That the institutions of America are lying to you.

00:37:52.000 They are aimed at destroying you. 1.00

00:37:55.000 Again, he and the Hassan Pikers of the world are holding hands. 1.00

00:37:58.000 America is inherently corrupt. 1.00

00:37:59.000 America's systems are inherently evil. 1.00

00:38:01.000 America's systems need to be torn to the ground.

00:38:04.000 Here's Hassan Piker saying the same thing from a different angle. 0.95

00:38:08.000 America is, in its foundation, a white supremacist country.

00:38:12.000 This is very frustrating for Republicans to hear.

00:38:14.000 This is even frustrating for liberals to hear sometimes, but it's just the truth.

00:38:19.000 Okay, and then you get to where it's very clear everybody's holding hands.

00:38:24.000 So, if you have a conspiracy theory about the free markets, that truly they're the invention of a corrupt group of people, if your belief is that America's systems are inherently evil, they lie to you on behalf of somebody else, and then you look around and say, who's successful?

00:38:39.000 Who are the beneficiaries of this system?

00:38:42.000 This is how you end up with Tucker Carlson and Hassan Piker and all the rest of the people trafficking in anti Israel, bizarre anti Jewish conspiracy theories in the same group.

00:38:53.000 That is always the outcome of this conspiratorial worldview.

00:38:56.000 It is not a feature.

00:38:57.000 It is not a bug.

00:38:58.000 It is a thing that unifies.

00:38:58.000 It is a feature.

00:39:00.000 It is the glue that holds everybody together, truly holds everybody together.

00:39:05.000 And this is not speculative, right?

00:39:06.000 Mehdi Hassan, who is a wild anti American propagandist, he's out there saying that his relatives love Tucker Carlson now.

00:39:13.000 I can't imagine why. 0.85

00:39:15.000 Would that be because Tucker Carlson is upholding the virtue of Sharia law in cities around the world?

00:39:20.000 Or would it be because he's doing propaganda on behalf of Islam's view of Jesus?

00:39:24.000 Or is it because he is doing propaganda against Israel every single day of the week?

00:39:29.000 Or is it because he is spreading propaganda?

00:39:30.000 Conspiracy theories about how nefarious Zionists are in control of the American government.

00:39:35.000 Here's Mehdi Hassan, again, one of the more despicable people in American public commentary. 1.00

00:39:39.000 I'm going to talk about people who are immigrants to the United States taking advantage of the system. 0.99

00:39:44.000 Here he is praising Tucker Carlson. 1.00

00:39:47.000 For the people watching at home, these days Tucker Carlson has a big fan base amongst the anti war left who see him as saying the right stuff, trying to stop Trump from illegal wars in Iran, and amongst a lot of Muslims and Arab Americans who see him now as this great champion of Palestine.

00:40:03.000 Wherever I go, Literally, wherever I go in this country, I do a lot of live events.

00:40:07.000 I do a lot of public events.

00:40:08.000 People come up to me, when are you going on Tucker Carlson?

00:40:10.000 When are you going to do an event with Tucker Carlson?

00:40:11.000 Why don't you do a collab with Tucker Carlson?

00:40:13.000 We love Tucker Carlson.

00:40:14.000 Wherever I go, people ask me more about Tucker Carlson, even in my own family, than they ask me about my wife and kids.

00:40:19.000 Meanwhile, Chenk Ueger is out there also standing for Tucker Carlson.

00:40:23.000 Quote If your house is on fire and someone comes with a hose, you don't ask him about what his policy is on the carried interest loophole.

00:40:29.000 You thank him for the help. 0.91

00:40:30.000 If you hadn't noticed, Israel lit our house on fire. 0.98

00:40:33.000 And the alliance is very strong and it is based again on this idea. 1.00

00:40:36.000 That somehow a nefarious coterie of outside people, Jews, are running the country. 0.88

00:40:42.000 Here is Tucker Carlson claiming that President Trump is being held hostage by Netanyahu and his advocates in the United States, who presumably would be pro Israel Jews and Christian Zionists, the people he says he despises most. 0.95

00:40:52.000 Here he was talking to the New York Times in terms that are quite familiar to every anti Semite in the right wing and on the left.

00:41:00.000 This was not a normal decision making process, and my strong impression was that Trump was more a hostage than a sovereign decision maker in this.

00:41:10.000 Well, so tell me what you're getting at when you say the President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, had no choice.

00:41:16.000 I don't know what I'm getting at.

00:41:17.000 I'm just telling you what I observed.

00:41:18.000 He seemed, and that's kind of the question.

00:41:21.000 And I'm, what I'm really fascinated by is the lack of curiosity on display into how exactly this happened.

00:41:27.000 What are the mechanisms by which a guy who's supposedly sovereign, in charge, granted this authority by voters, tens of millions of them, can't make a decision in the country's interest or even in his own interest?

00:41:40.000 He knew, and I know he knew because I talked to him about it directly, that.

00:41:44.000 The consequences, potential consequences, were profound and profoundly bad.

00:41:48.000 The end of his presidency to start, which I think it has proven to be, he knew that.

00:41:56.000 I don't even know what I knew.

00:41:57.000 I don't even know what I'm saying.

00:41:57.000 I don't even know what I'm questioning.

00:41:59.000 I'm just asking why people aren't asking the same questions I'm asking when there's no evidence of the questions.

00:42:04.000 Okay, this again is a right left uniting issue, at least on the fringes.

00:42:10.000 Now, the mainstream of the Democratic Party has been doing the same thing. 0.73

00:42:12.000 They've also been claiming that Trump was somehow argued into the war by the nefarious Jews.

00:42:17.000 Now, President Trump, I've noticed, he's kind of a headstrong character.

00:42:19.000 I've noticed he makes a lot of his own decisions.

00:42:21.000 But according to Tucker Carlson and the left, the only way this could have happened is if somebody argued Trump into it, and those people probably had suspiciously evil motives. 0.72

00:42:31.000 He entered a war, got pulled into it by BB Netanyahu.

00:42:36.000 Let's be clear about that.

00:42:37.000 Because people are offended that Netanyahu is bragging that JD Vance, the vice president, is reporting to him.

00:42:45.000 How about reporting to the United States Congress?

00:42:47.000 I mean, this administration has insulted Congress.

00:42:51.000 They're more concerned with reporting to people like Netanyahu than they are to the American people.

00:42:56.000 What are our country leaders doing?

00:42:58.000 They're following Netanyahu. 0.69

00:43:00.000 The timing of this war was dictated by BB Netanyahu. 0.56

00:43:07.000 But we should never, ever be bullied as maybe President Trump was by any other world leader. 0.96

00:43:15.000 Just ridiculous. 0.82

00:43:16.000 And by the way, Tucker goes further than that.

00:43:18.000 He says that Israel decides the future of the American economy and American service members in this interview at the New York Times.

00:43:25.000 Israel has that power in our Congress, not because we have so many Jews.

00:43:30.000 I don't know how many Jews live in the United States, fewer than 10 million, I think, but because we have tens of millions of evangelical Christians who unquestioningly support Israel because they believe it's their theological duty to do so.

00:43:43.000 So on this question hangs the future of the American economy and the lives of American service members.

00:43:51.000 The idea that the American economy hinges on the future of Israel is bizarre. 0.74

00:43:56.000 It's bizarre.

00:43:57.000 Hey, but of course, Tucker also thinks that Citibank is a bigger threat to the United States than Hamas.

00:44:01.000 So here we go.

00:44:05.000 I'm against the idea that Hezbollah and Hamas are at the center of our domestic conversation.

00:44:09.000 Like, they're the big problems we face.

00:44:10.000 They're not.

00:44:12.000 Like, they're not a bigger problem than the behavior of Citibank.

00:44:15.000 I'm sorry. 0.97

00:44:15.000 Credit card debt is a much bigger problem than Hezbollah will ever be. 0.97

00:44:18.000 So stop with this. 0.88

00:44:20.000 Stop with the brainwashing. 0.63

00:44:21.000 This is bonkers.

00:44:22.000 I live here.

00:44:23.000 I'm almost 57.

00:44:24.000 I've lived here a long time.

00:44:25.000 Hamas and Hezbollah, while they're not getting my endorsement, are not relevant to the experience of most Americans.

00:44:34.000 Citibank is a bigger threat to Americans than Hamas or Hezbollah.

00:44:38.000 I mean, first of all, we should start with the question of whether Citibank is actually a threat to Americans, because it turns out tens of millions of Americans actually bank at Citibank, and they could not take out a credit card from Citibank if they so chose.

00:44:50.000 They could do that.

00:44:51.000 That doesn't seem, again, what Tucker is doing here is suggesting that you are being distracted from the evils of American capitalism by foreign threats that don't actually exist on behalf, presumably, of a nefarious coterie of people who are somehow gaming the system.

00:45:06.000 And this is left wing agitprop.

00:45:08.000 That's all it is. 0.99

00:45:09.000 And then Tucker, of course, plays ignorant about everything. 0.99

00:45:12.000 The final point here is that he plays ignorant about literally everything. 0.97

00:45:16.000 So, the New York Times asks Tucker about the Protocols of the Elder's Design.

00:45:19.000 The Protocols of the Elder's Design is a conspiracy tract that was written by the Russian secret police in the early 20th century.

00:45:28.000 It was trafficked around, it became very popular in anti Semitic circles.

00:45:31.000 And it claimed that essentially there were a group of Jews that got together on Friday nights and basically decided to control the world.

00:45:36.000 It is the most famous anti Semitic tract ever written. 0.98

00:45:39.000 Tucker's not a moron, he knows totally what this is. 0.71

00:45:41.000 But of course, Tucker claims he has no idea what it is. 0.98

00:45:43.000 This is always the game.

00:45:45.000 Tucker knows a lot.

00:45:46.000 He knows more than you.

00:45:47.000 He knows what he knows.

00:45:48.000 He doesn't know much, but what he knows.

00:45:50.000 And it's always something that he doesn't actually know.

00:45:52.000 And then when something comes up that he actually does know, his immediate response is, I don't know anything about that.

00:45:56.000 I don't even know what you're talking about.

00:45:58.000 What is a protocol?

00:46:00.000 I don't even know.

00:46:01.000 Here we go. 0.88

00:46:02.000 There is an entire anti Semitic worldview that has been based on the protocols of the elders of Zion, you know, that there is like this cabal of powerful Jews that. controls the world and, you know, that book was written in the early 20th century, but it, you know, helped the Nazis and it really has informed a lot of the views of many people today that there is, you know,

00:46:29.000 this very powerful sect of Jewish people who want global war and global conflict. 0.74

00:46:36.000 People are genuinely concerned that it opens the door to this idea that has been debunked and has been used in, you know, absolutely vicious ways to annihilate an entire people. 0.95

00:46:49.000 I'm not.

00:46:51.000 Quite sure what that means.

00:46:54.000 Let me tell you my concerns.

00:46:56.000 My main concern is the destruction of the United States.

00:46:59.000 And that is in no way to minimize anyone else's concerns.

00:47:02.000 But I have a right to that concern.

00:47:04.000 And I will not have my own concerns hijacked.

00:47:08.000 I will not submit to being told what my concerns should be.

00:47:11.000 I'm an adult man who pays his taxes.

00:47:13.000 I have a right to come up with my own hierarchy of concern.

00:47:18.000 No one is telling him what his concerns should be.

00:47:20.000 He can have whatever concerns he wants.

00:47:22.000 It is indeed a free country.

00:47:23.000 The question is whether his concerns are justified, whether they are based in evidence, or whether they are part of a broader conspiracy theory about the evils of the United States.

00:47:31.000 By the way, he was asked about Nick Fuentes, of course, and he said that Senator Ted Cruz is more morally repulsive than the Nazi standing Nick Fuentes.

00:47:40.000 This guy is supposedly a leader on the right.

00:47:42.000 All right.

00:47:45.000 Who do you think is more morally repulsive?

00:47:47.000 Ted Cruz?

00:47:49.000 Who do you think is more morally repulsive?

00:47:51.000 Ted Cruz.

00:47:53.000 Ted Cruz is a sitting U.S. Senator who has. called for the killing of people who did nothing wrong.

00:48:01.000 Whole populations who advocated for this war.

00:48:04.000 Nick Fuentes is like a kid.

00:48:05.000 He's like 26 or 70.

00:48:07.000 He has no power except his words.

00:48:10.000 Here you have a public official who we pay, who has actual power, who's voting for things, who's making policy decisions.

00:48:18.000 And those decisions would include, in fact, they are focused on the murder of people who did nothing wrong.

00:48:23.000 And yet no one thinks it's a big deal.

00:48:25.000 Well, this is totally fine. 0.99

00:48:27.000 I mean, if there's tape of Nick Fuentes saying we should kill people because we hate their parents, or it's okay to kill children, I would love to see the tape. 0.99

00:48:35.000 Because that's disgusting. 0.99

00:48:36.000 Is there any Ted Cruz saying that?

00:48:38.000 Based on what the entire U.S. Senate does every single day, and no one notices. 0.99

00:48:43.000 Tucker is such a liar. 1.00

00:48:44.000 In the end, he's just a liar. 1.00

00:48:45.000 He's a liar. 1.00

00:48:45.000 But because here's the thing you have to believe in a gigantic lie about the United States in order to propagate this crap. 1.00

00:48:51.000 You have to. 0.99

00:48:51.000 And when I say he's a liar, I mean that in the purest possible sense. 0.99

00:48:54.000 Here was Tucker Carlson literally denying he said a thing that he is on tape saying.

00:48:59.000 So he was asked by this New York Times reporter about that time he suggested that the president was the Antichrist.

00:49:04.000 And he says, I never said that.

00:49:05.000 And she plays him the tape.

00:49:06.000 And then he continues to pretend he never said it.

00:49:08.000 It's unbelievable.

00:49:11.000 But I ask because, you know, you've been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist.

00:49:16.000 I have not said that.

00:49:18.000 On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during his swearing in ceremony as president.

00:49:24.000 You said, and I'm quoting, maybe he didn't put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what's inside that book.

00:49:30.000 And then on a recent show, you went further saying, here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods and exalting himself above them.

00:49:38.000 Could this be the Antichrist?

00:49:41.000 Actually, did not say, could this be the Antichrist?

00:49:43.000 Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exalting himself above them.

00:49:52.000 Could this be the Antichrist?

00:49:54.000 Well, who knows?

00:49:57.000 I don't know where that comes from, but I know that those words never left my lips because I'm not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is.

00:50:04.000 If there's just one, I actually tried to understand it.

00:50:07.000 Another thing he doesn't understand. 0.72

00:50:10.000 And then he hides behind ignorance.

00:50:11.000 The thing he literally said.

00:50:13.000 And that's just one lie.

00:50:15.000 But the bigger lie is the lie that he is propagating.

00:50:17.000 It's a lie that the left is also propagating.

00:50:19.000 It is a lie that America is a terrible place that is filled with nefarious forces beyond your control that are actually in control of your life and wrecking America.

00:50:27.000 And if that view of America prevails, then we are in serious, serious, serious trouble. 0.99

00:50:32.000 Now, meanwhile, the president of the United States continues to be a bulwark against stupidity, particularly when it comes to the war in Iran, the one that Tucker is decrying as the end of America. 0.98

00:50:42.000 By the way, there is no. 0.99

00:50:43.000 Legitimately, no argument that what is happening in Iran is the end of America. 0.73

00:50:48.000 Even if we were to walk away right now, it would not be remotely close to the end of America. 0.90

00:50:52.000 That's insane.

00:50:55.000 Okay, the CENTCOM, United States Central Command, put out a notice this morning that the United States is now forcibly attempting to open the Strait of Hormuz.

00:51:06.000 U.S. Navy guided missile destroyers are currently operating in the Arabian Gulf after transiting the Strait of Hormuz in support of Project Freedom.

00:51:12.000 American forces are actively assisting efforts to restore transit for commercial shipping.

00:51:16.000 As a first step, two U.S. flagged merchant vessels have successfully transited through the Strait of Hormuz and are safely headed on their journey.

00:51:21.000 Okay, so if the United States opens the Strait of Hormuz and the only thing that remains closed is Iran's capacity to ship oil out, they've got a massive problem. 0.81

00:51:30.000 Because again, their leverage point is the idea they could blackmail the United States into basically ending our conflict with them without them giving up anything by shutting off the Strait of Hormuz.

00:51:42.000 President Trump is not having any of it.

00:51:43.000 Here he was saying, listen, if we have to, we'll strike again.

00:51:48.000 What circumstances would you restart military strikes on Turkey?

00:51:52.000 Well, I don't want to say that.

00:51:53.000 I mean, I can't tell that to a reporter.

00:51:55.000 If they misbehave, if they do something bad, but right now, we'll see.

00:52:02.000 But it's a possibility that could happen, certainly.

00:52:08.000 Well, I mean, again, the president, I have to give him extraordinary credit here.

00:52:13.000 What he's doing right now is an act of tremendous political bravery.

00:52:15.000 The polls, by the way, are very negative on the war.

00:52:18.000 Not a shock.

00:52:19.000 The polls are very negative on everything.

00:52:20.000 And this is what happened.

00:52:21.000 When people look at one number in isolation without looking at the other numbers, they think that, for example, the president's approval ratings are low because of the war.

00:52:29.000 The reality is the president's approval ratings are low across the board right now, and that is because of people's dyspepsia with the economy.

00:52:36.000 Right now, he's got a 34% approval rating on the economy.

00:52:38.000 He's got a 33% approval rating on the war.

00:52:40.000 He's got a 45% approval rating on the border.

00:52:42.000 What happens is if a politician starts to hit an unpopular period, everything that he does gets unpopular.

00:52:48.000 But that doesn't mean that what he's doing isn't brave.

00:52:51.000 What he's doing is incredibly brave.

00:52:54.000 His point is that we can blast the hell out of Ron or we can make a deal.

00:52:58.000 He would prefer a deal, but he's not going to walk away with an American L. Which is, again, very different from pretty much all the presidents we've had in recent history.

00:53:10.000 What kind of options?

00:53:11.000 How would it look different?

00:53:12.000 I mean, do we want to go and just blast the hell out of him and finish him forever, or do we want to try and make a deal?

00:53:18.000 I mean, those are the options. 0.96

00:53:20.000 Do you want to go blast the hell out of him? 0.62

00:53:22.000 I prefer not.

00:53:24.000 On a human basis, I prefer not, but that's the option.

00:53:29.000 Okay, meanwhile, the Secretary of the Treasury, who has been operating with Extraordinary precision with regard to the Iranian economy.

00:53:36.000 He points out that they are basically running out of money.

00:53:39.000 They are having to shut down oil refineries because they don't have a way of shipping their oil out of the country.

00:53:44.000 They're running out of money to pay their guys, the IRGC, which means the regime has a serious problem on its hands.

00:53:49.000 And remember, grabbing the Strait of Hormuz was not an exercise of power, it was an exercise of desperation.

00:53:55.000 Shutting off the Strait of Hormuz alienated every country in the region and most of the countries of Asia as well.

00:54:00.000 And if they somehow lose control of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians, if they can no longer control the flow in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, Except that their oil is being stopped, then what leverage do they have left, especially if the United States goes after the remainder of their ballistic missile facility, something that, for example, the UAE and Saudi Arabia would love to see happen?

00:54:19.000 Here's Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant. 0.52

00:54:24.000 And I can tell you that we are suffocating the regime, and they are not able to pay their soldiers.

00:54:32.000 This is a real economic blockade, and it is in all parts of government.

00:54:38.000 All hands on deck.

00:54:39.000 It is the blockade that our great Navy is doing.

00:54:43.000 No ships are getting through, and we have upped the pressure on anyone trying to remit money into Iran to help the IRGC.

00:54:55.000 They are a corrupt institution.

00:54:57.000 They've been stealing from the Iranian people for years. 1.00

00:54:59.000 They have money offshore.

00:55:01.000 We've tracked that down. 0.98

00:55:02.000 We will continue to track that down, and we're going to preserve those assets for the Iranian people on the other side of this conflict.

00:55:11.000 Again, what the president is doing right now is likely to be successful. 0.73

00:55:15.000 Okay, so time for a thing I like and a thing that I hate.

00:55:17.000 So I know that people like Tucker Carlson have suggested that the great villain of World War II was not Adolf Hitler, you know, the person who started World War II and was responsible for the death of legitimately tens of millions of human beings.

00:55:28.000 That actually the great villain of World War II is Winston Churchill, the leader of Great Britain during World War II. 0.97

00:55:34.000 This, of course, is historically ignorant and ridiculous on its face. 0.85

00:55:37.000 So I've been going through and rereading Churchill's six volume history of the Second World War, and there's some good reminders for our time. 0.93

00:55:44.000 Mainly because they are eternal lessons.

00:55:46.000 Quote, delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, genuine love of peace, and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation.

00:55:54.000 The utter devotion of the liberals to sentiment apart from reality, though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries.

00:56:04.000 As Churchill pointed out, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.

00:56:15.000 There may even be a worse case.

00:56:17.000 You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

00:56:21.000 And the point being that starry eyed anti Americanism, anti Westernism is not a solve for people who want to destroy you, ranging from China to Russia to Iran to the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany.

00:56:37.000 And one more thing that I like we'll end on an upbeat note before we get to the subscriber member block.

00:56:44.000 Okay, so it is May the 4th.

00:56:46.000 So may the 4th be with you.

00:56:48.000 As we who like Star Wars are fond of saying, there is a brand new trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is one of the successful spinoff properties under sort of the Kathleen Kennedy universe.

00:56:59.000 This is the Pedro Pascal series that is now being made into a movie about Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian.

00:57:06.000 Here we go.

00:57:11.000 We've all heard stories of the Mandalorian bounty hunter and a child. 0.97

00:57:20.000 I only hunt Imperial war criminals.

00:57:22.000 I'll take out every bad guy in your deck of cards. 0.91

00:57:31.000 This isn't about revenge, it's about preventing another war.

00:57:37.000 Up and video.

00:57:39.000 Okay.

00:57:39.000 Before going into harm's way, check your armor first.

00:57:46.000 We're protecting everything the rebellion fought for.

00:57:48.000 Good luck.

00:57:52.000 Okay, I'm into it.

00:57:59.000 I'll take my kids to watch this.

00:58:06.000 Listen, I'm a Star Wars fan, so this is a thing that I will check out for sure.

00:58:09.000 Okay, we don't have to watch the rest of it, but this is cool.

00:58:11.000 Okay, I'm into it.

00:58:12.000 I like it.

00:58:12.000 Okay, it's got the ATATs, it's got the land speeders.

00:58:17.000 I'm there.

00:58:17.000 So may the fourth be with you.

00:58:20.000 Alrighty, the show continues for our members right now.

00:58:22.000 We're going to get into Zorn Momdani.

00:58:25.000 And his take on protesters clashing with ICE in New York. 0.81

00:58:29.000 Again, third worldism is a real thing.

00:58:30.000 It's happening inside the United States.

00:58:32.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:58:34.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:58:35.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

00:58:38.000 Click that link in the description and join us.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 04, 2026

BREAKING: Daily Wire Uncovers MASSIVE Fraud Scandal In Ohio!

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