The Ben Shapiro Show - Dave Portnoy, Shiloh Hendrix, and Cancel Culture

00:00:00.000 Already, tons coming up on today's show.

00:00:02.000 Dave Portnoy is featured in the biggest internet story of the moment, which raises questions about cancel culture and answerability for doing bad things.

00:00:10.000 Plus, we get to war looming between India and Pakistan.

00:00:14.000 President Trump declaring a ceasefire with the Houthis in Yemen.

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00:00:42.000 Alrighty, folks, the big online story of the day, the story that has exploded across the interwebs, is a controversy involving Dave Portnoy.

00:00:49.000 Dave Portnoy is, of course, the founder and owner of Barstool Sports.

00:00:53.000 He also owns a series of bars, restaurants around the country that are labeled with Barstool.

00:00:57.000 And the reason that he's in the news today is because of a controversy that broke into the open when a person who is a student, apparently at Temple University, named Mo Khan, went to a Barstool bar and proceeded to order From the back room, some sort of dish.

00:01:13.000 And one of the things they do, I guess, at these bars is they have a sort of letter board.

00:01:16.000 And you can ask the waiter or waitress to change the letters on the letter boards.

00:01:20.000 You can say, break up with him on the letter board.

00:01:22.000 Or you can say, go Eagles on the letter board.

00:01:25.000 Well, this guy asked for a very specific thing on the letter board. 0.98

00:01:29.000 F the Jews. 1.00

00:01:30.000 And then he proceeded to post that video online. 0.97

00:01:32.000 And here's what it looked like.

00:01:38.000 So you can see there are a bunch of girls who are laughing, thinking it's hilarious. 0.98

00:01:45.000 As a waiter holds up a sign that says, F the Jews. 0.94

00:01:51.000 A lot of celebration in the club.

00:01:52.000 So that's always wonderful.

00:01:54.000 That's just delightful.

00:01:55.000 All these people seem like just delightful, transgressive, wonderful human beings.

00:01:59.000 In any case, Dave Portnoy is the owner of Barstool Sansom Street.

00:02:04.000 The bar put out a statement saying that it involved a customer whose actions were deplorable.

00:02:09.000 And Portnoy said that two customers were involved.

00:02:12.000 The bar blamed misguided employees who ignored the company's training and their zero-tolerance policy for discrimination and hate.

00:02:18.000 And again, private companies can have those sorts of policies.

00:02:21.000 If you are an employee and you are asked to say the N-word on a sign or screw whitey or whatever it is, and you say no, that is what you are supposed to do as an employee of Barstool. 0.94

00:02:30.000 Well, the president of Temple University, John Fry, announced that a student believed to have been involved in the incident had been suspended.

00:02:36.000 That would be the person who posted this in celebratory fashion.

00:02:40.000 Okay, well, then, apparently, Portnoy reached out to this person, whose name is Mocon.

00:02:48.000 Originally, he said he was very angry and it happened at his bar.

00:02:50.000 He himself is Jewish.

00:02:51.000 He was upset about it. 0.98

00:02:53.000 And he said that he was going to make it his life mission to ruin these people like I'm coming for your throat.

00:02:57.000 And then he backed off of that.

00:02:58.000 He put out another statement.

00:02:59.000 Saying that he wanted to reconsider his approach and instead he was going to send the people responsible for the sign on an all expenses paid tour to Auschwitz.

00:03:06.000 Which by the way I think is actually quite the wrong approach.

00:03:09.000 I actually don't think that the right approach for people who don't like Jews is to send them to a place where Jews were killed in the hope that this is somehow going to make them better human beings.

00:03:17.000 I just don't think that is a great approach to education in this way.

00:03:22.000 I think that basically throwing up the middle finger is the proper response.

00:03:25.000 And we'll get to how we ought to respond as a society.

00:03:28.000 To bad things said publicly, which is what this is.

00:03:30.000 A bad thing said publicly.

00:03:33.000 Okay, well, he offered to pay this and apparently he then had a call with this person, Mocon.

00:03:39.000 He said, let's try to turn a hideous incident into maybe a learning experience.

00:03:44.000 Adding the offer was cliche and very unlike me.

00:03:48.000 And apparently, he then revoked the offer for Mocon. 0.57

00:03:51.000 Why?

00:03:52.000 Well, because Mocon then put up another video.

00:03:54.000 So remember, this whole thing became public.

00:03:56.000 Because this person put up the video himself.

00:03:58.000 This is not somebody who was outed by a third party. 0.99

00:04:01.000 This is somebody who was posting in celebratory fashion on his Instagram publicly a sign saying, F the Jews. 0.73

00:04:07.000 And then putting up a video begging for money. 0.93

00:04:10.000 So here he was begging for money saying now he was the victim.

00:04:13.000 So I guess that the logic here is you do something crappy, you publicly post it, you get called out on it, and then you ask for money.

00:04:20.000 Which doesn't seem like a wonderful thing to do.

00:04:23.000 Here is Mocon. 0.74

00:04:26.000 Dave Portnoy owes me restitutions and an apology for everything that he has done and caused for me in these past few days.

00:04:35.000 In an attempt to expose me, he exposed himself as almost a total fraud, going back on anything he stands for.

00:04:44.000 Please, I'm imploring you.

00:04:46.000 I'm asking you for help to pay for these attacks, to pay for any possible legal restitution, any relocation expenses.

00:04:55.000 Any educational expenses and show the founders of cancel culture that their reign of tyranny is over.

00:05:04.000 Okay, so this is the new game, obviously.

00:05:07.000 Obviously, this is the new game, right?

00:05:08.000 This follows hot on the heels of the Shiloh Hendricks story, which we talked about yesterday on the show.

00:05:13.000 That was the woman who allegedly called a child the N-word at a playground and then was caught on video, basically.

00:05:19.000 Dumbling down on that, and that was posted by a third party, and then people came after her, and then people raised like $500,000 for her.

00:05:26.000 Now, just to be clear, this person, Mo Khan, he never denies the allegation that he was the person who put up the sign saying F the Jews. 0.92

00:05:32.000 In fact, he then went on the show of a person who was extraordinarily and publicly anti-Semitic on X, where the host said that Portnoy is a filthy Jew. 0.76

00:05:43.000 And Mo Khan basically just said, of course, because Mo Khan is a person who does not like Jews, clearly. 0.92

00:05:49.000 This guy's not a good, good guy.

00:05:52.000 He just utterly destroyed my life.

00:05:55.000 No, he's not a good guy. 1.00

00:05:57.000 He's a filthy Jew. 1.00

00:06:00.000 So that's, that's delightful. 1.00

00:06:01.000 Sounds great. 0.99

00:06:02.000 So Portnoy then responded and he said, well, Mo Khan is a liar and a piece of belief. 0.98

00:06:08.000 So here was Portnoy's response. 0.96

00:06:10.000 Mo Khan is the guy who went to the Barstool bar in Philly and uploaded the the Jews sign to Instagram.

00:06:20.000 All hell broke loose.

00:06:21.000 Went super viral.

00:06:22.000 Everyone's sending it to me. 0.97

00:06:23.000 Temple suspended his ass basically before I was even involved because, hey, you uploaded it to your personal Instagram. 1.00

00:06:32.000 What do you think was going to happen, you brain-dead moron? 1.00

00:06:36.000 Well, anyways, I was so mad. 1.00

00:06:38.000 Everyone saw that.

00:06:39.000 I calmed down.

00:06:40.000 I'm like, I'm going to try to make this a teachable moment.

00:06:41.000 This kid's crying. 0.91

00:06:42.000 He's like, I'm not anti-Semitic, blah, blah, blah, all this shit, even though there's past incidents that came to light. 0.94

00:06:49.000 And then he does a 180, and he's like, oh, I was a citizen journalist. 0.97

00:06:52.000 I don't know who did it.

00:06:53.000 I have nothing to do it. 1.00

00:06:54.000 He's just a flat liar coward with no responsibility. 0.99

00:06:57.000 But this was about being a Jew in America. 1.00

00:07:00.000 Other Jews in the bar.

00:07:01.000 I'm a Jew.

00:07:02.000 My parents are a Jew.

00:07:04.000 American Jews.

00:07:05.000 Jews.

00:07:06.000 That's what you said. 1.00

00:07:07.000 You anti-Semitic piece of shit. 1.00

00:07:09.000 And I tried to show grace. 1.00

00:07:12.000 I tried to.

00:07:13.000 You put your name out there.

00:07:14.000 I tried to actually. 0.61

00:07:16.000 Now I feel dumb to make it right.

00:07:20.000 Okay, so let's be clear about this. 0.97

00:07:23.000 It's okay for black people to feel offended and correct for them to be offended if somebody calls them the N-word. 0.93

00:07:29.000 And it's okay for Jews to feel offended if people say F the Jews. 0.98

00:07:32.000 And it's okay for white people to be offended if somebody says F whitey. 0.96

00:07:35.000 All of these things are bad things to say.

00:07:38.000 The fact that this even needs to be said is indicative of a breakdown in the social fabric that is pretty catastrophic inside the United States.

00:07:45.000 Portnoy put out a letter where he said, This, unfortunately, is the real world. 0.99

00:08:10.000 A world where Mo Khan is an anti-Semitic grifting piece of bleep who deserves an awful life. 0.99

00:08:14.000 A world where hate has no place. 0.99

00:08:16.000 A world where Portnoy is a great man.

00:08:18.000 Team Portnoy.

00:08:18.000 So again, Portnoy is who Portnoy is.

00:08:22.000 He is a person who obviously is self-aggrandizing and very grand on the world stage.

00:08:28.000 All this kind of stuff.

00:08:29.000 Okay, but there are some deeper points to be made here.

00:08:32.000 And it speaks to where we are as a culture.

00:08:35.000 We'll get some more on this in a moment.

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00:10:57.000 So, let's talk about cancel culture for a second.

00:11:00.000 There are three perspectives on cancel culture.

00:11:02.000 Okay, so I wanted to find cancel culture here because I think people are equating many different things that are not actually cancel culture.

00:11:12.000 If you cancel somebody or if you criticize somebody, for example, that is not a legal ban on their behavior.

00:11:17.000 And that is social ostracization.

00:11:19.000 So let's talk about social ostracization or sanction for behavior or opinion.

00:11:23.000 Not legal sanction.

00:11:24.000 Not banning people.

00:11:26.000 Not trying to jail people.

00:11:27.000 Just people not wanting to hang out with you.

00:11:30.000 Or it can be a whole range of activity.

00:11:32.000 Cancellation can range from people criticizing you, theoretically, to people wanting to not hang out with you, to people firing you, to people deciding no one can hire you, right?

00:11:40.000 It's a whole range of activity.

00:11:41.000 So there are basically three generalized perspectives on cancel culture.

00:11:45.000 One.

00:11:46.000 Any violation of any taboo ought to be treated with the harshest possible measure of cancellation.

00:11:51.000 That's perspective number one, which is like the cancel everyone perspective and use like the harshest, most brutal methods of quote-unquote ruining people's lives for any level of rhetorical transgression.

00:12:01.000 Perspective number two is that no one should ever be canceled for any reason.

00:12:05.000 So no criticism, no social ostracization, no calling out, nothing.

00:12:10.000 That you can say...

00:12:11.000 Whatever you want, and there will be no consequences, socially even, attendant on you saying those things.

00:12:16.000 And then there's perspective number three, which is, I think, the sort of more moderate, complex, and true perspective, which is some behaviors or opinions are actually disgusting and do, in the real world, receive social sanction, and other behavior should not.

00:12:31.000 And the level of forgiveness and social sanction ought to vary, which is complex, right?

00:12:35.000 Because you might be talking about, do you want to have dinner with somebody?

00:12:38.000 Or you might be talking about...

00:12:40.000 Should somebody be able to, quote-unquote, hold a job?

00:12:42.000 Which is much, much harsher.

00:12:43.000 Or you might be talking about, do you want somebody in your school or not?

00:12:46.000 These are all different methods of dealing with behavior that people find unacceptable in the social world.

00:12:52.000 So, the problem with the first perspective, that all violations and all taboos ought to receive the social death penalty, is that it is censorious.

00:13:00.000 It prevents useful conversations from happening.

00:13:03.000 It's unforgiving.

00:13:04.000 It's uncharitable.

00:13:06.000 So, we ended up, for...

00:13:08.000 Probably 20 years in this country, with people being cancelled, meaning socially ostracized, losing jobs, losing career opportunities, being destroyed for correct opinions like men are not women, or for saying a word in Mandarin that sort of sounds like the N-word.

00:13:21.000 Social media mobs were activated in order to destroy people who violated literally any taboo.

00:13:26.000 The lines were bright, and if you crossed the line, you were destroyed.

00:13:28.000 And this led to a reactionary right, which then moved to perspective number two.

00:13:33.000 Cancellation should never happen.

00:13:35.000 There shouldn't even be criticism.

00:13:36.000 Social sanction, even criticism, is never ever the answer.

00:13:40.000 In fact, it's the problem.

00:13:41.000 Now, the problem with this perspective is that if there is never any social sanction or criticism or ostracization for bad behavior or terrible opinion, that's just called moral relativism, in which the ugliest opinions and expressions are supposed to be given equal credibility with decent or even controversial but useful opinions.

00:13:59.000 So the real answer in a normal society would be number three.

00:14:02.000 Sometimes people deserve the social consequences for what they do.

00:14:05.000 Not always, but sometimes.

00:14:06.000 And the social consequences can vary.

00:14:08.000 They aren't irrevocable in certain circumstances.

00:14:10.000 Forgiveness could be possible.

00:14:12.000 So, just for example, in the normal world, you don't have a duty as a business owner to hire or have over to dinner somebody who shouts the N-word at children or who says that white people are colonizers and evil.

00:14:23.000 But...

00:14:24.000 Also in the real world, it would be a bad thing to do to post that person's address online so people can then go to their house and harass them.

00:14:30.000 In the real world, you have every right to avoid buying a Bud Light because they claim that men can be women.

00:14:35.000 And you also have every right to decide you don't want to engage with a company that says, for example, that the police are systemically racist.

00:14:41.000 You also shouldn't go to the home of the CEO and threaten to burn down his house.

00:14:45.000 Now, we all used to know this.

00:14:46.000 In your daily life, we know this.

00:14:48.000 If there's some kooky guy, some guy who's... 0.95

00:14:51.000 Kind of a yucky guy who everyone knows sits around like marinating about the Jews or the whites or the blacks or whatever. 0.75

00:14:57.000 We all just kind of avoid that guy. 0.96

00:14:59.000 And that's not a bad thing.

00:15:01.000 That's okay.

00:15:02.000 The sort of emergent informal standards of the social fabric used to work just fine because most issues remained personal.

00:15:09.000 So for example, in the pre-social media era, if Shiloh Hendricks existed in that era before cell phones, she might have said something awful to a kid and everybody in the neighborhood would have known that she was being crazy and everybody Would have basically stayed away.

00:15:22.000 And the same thing would have happened with this Mo Khan character.

00:15:24.000 He'd have done something ugly and nasty at a restaurant.

00:15:26.000 The employees probably would have lost their jobs for involving themselves. 0.80

00:15:29.000 And everybody just kind of would have stayed away from that dude.

00:15:32.000 Social media has made pretty much everything worse.

00:15:35.000 Because now there's a mob waiting to form.

00:15:37.000 Always.

00:15:37.000 Basically, that's all social media is.

00:15:39.000 It is a mob waiting to form around an issue.

00:15:41.000 Just like kind of white blood cells in your immune system waiting for something to attack.

00:15:46.000 Now, mobs form to destroy people, and so we are all forced to decide on the spot whether we think a person is bad or good, hero or villain, deserving of shame or support, what level of shame, what level of support.

00:15:59.000 But the biggest thing is that in this country, because we have lost the boundaries of what is sort of informal, acceptable debate, not legal bans again, what is sort of the acceptable range of argumentation, the Overton window, as it's called.

00:16:11.000 We no longer even agree on the big outlines of an Overton window.

00:16:14.000 We're descending into a world.

00:16:15.000 of either total cancellation for everyone with whom we disagree or total support for bad behavior in order to fight total cancellation.

00:16:22.000 And the thing is that these two perspectives are mutually reinforcing.

00:16:26.000 The moral relativism of there should be no social consequences or criticism for anything leads people who don't like the stuff that's now being said to call for more social consequences, which leads to more reactionary moral relativism, which leads to more social consequences and back and forth until the end of time.

00:16:43.000 I said Monday on the program that people should stop giving money to bad people because I think people should stop giving money to bad people.

00:16:49.000 But there is another argument, and it's a pragmatic argument, a counterargument.

00:16:55.000 It's pragmatic.

00:16:56.000 Sure, it's unpleasant that we have to give money to people like, say, Shiloh Hendricks, who say and do bad things.

00:17:01.000 But if we don't, the social media mob will have incentive to continue targeting people in evil and nasty ways.

00:17:07.000 And even targeting people who aren't even doing bad things, like Justine Sacco or something.

00:17:11.000 Sort of a bad joke.

00:17:13.000 To stop cancel culture, we need to uncancel not just the people who don't deserve cancellation, but even the worst offenders.

00:17:20.000 So my friend Matt Walsh on Monday made this argument.

00:17:23.000 It's an interesting, I think fascinating, and colorable argument.

00:17:26.000 Sometimes you do have to fight fire with fire.

00:17:29.000 It's a pragmatic argument, right?

00:17:31.000 That if you want to get rid of cancellation of people who shouldn't be canceled, then you have to basically stop the social media mob.

00:17:36.000 The problem is I don't think that this tactic is going to work pragmatically.

00:17:40.000 In fact, I think it's going to fail.

00:17:42.000 It's one thing to declare a sort of mutually assured destruction in a case where the parties involved are responsive and responsible.

00:17:49.000 So, for example, I have argued in favor of a sort of mutually assured destruction to stop secondary corporate boycott tactics that the left enjoyed for decades.

00:17:57.000 So I, along with Matt, agree that sometimes we ought to boycott Bud Light because that teaches corporations to stop pandering to the woke.

00:18:04.000 Even if, generally speaking, we don't like boycotts.

00:18:07.000 But that only works for one reason.

00:18:09.000 Corporations are responsive to the market.

00:18:11.000 They are responsible to their shareholders.

00:18:13.000 You know who's not responsive or responsible?

00:18:15.000 Social media mobs, by definition.

00:18:18.000 So the idea that if you make a person who does a bad thing rich, then the even worse people targeting her will stop targeting her.

00:18:25.000 That's not going to happen on an actual practical level.

00:18:28.000 What actually will happen is that each side is going to continue to fund and support its own worst offenders.

00:18:33.000 Thus leading to even further general degradation of the social fabric.

00:18:37.000 Social media mobs will be so outraged by the funding of the cancelled person that then they will seek to support even worse people on their own side.

00:18:45.000 Meanwhile, criticism of bad behavior and speech, which, again, that is sort of a normal part of a moral life.

00:18:51.000 It says in the Bible that you're not supposed to put a stumbling block before a blind person.

00:18:55.000 What that means is that you are not supposed to let people go without warning if they are engaging in bad behavior.

00:19:00.000 And if they're engaging in evil opinions, because there are, in fact, opinions that are quite evil.

00:19:04.000 If you believe in the mass murder of entire populations, for example, that's kind of an evil opinion.

00:19:10.000 Criticism of that, if you get rid of it, if you say that that sort of criticism is cancellation, that it's a sort of puritanical thought crime, this leads to a bizarre logic where it is actually worse to criticize a Nazi than to actually be a Nazi.

00:19:26.000 Or where it is worse to actually criticize.

00:19:30.000 The woke insanity than to be a woke insane person.

00:19:34.000 Mobs in general are not dissuaded by the failure of their cause. 1.00

00:19:38.000 In fact, they're very often emboldened by it.

00:19:40.000 The only thing that actually will stop a mob is the judicious application of countermeasures.

00:19:44.000 You rob them of their initiative.

00:19:46.000 So, for example, the equal application of law.

00:19:48.000 If somebody is being doxxed, physically threatened, those people should be tracked down by law enforcement and go to jail because they're violating the law.

00:19:55.000 We should support people whose social sanction Whose cancellation far outweighs the supposed social crime.

00:20:02.000 We should support them, not as sort of a moral matter because what they said is great, but because if the punishment outweighs the crime, if it's way too extreme for the crime, that is a bad thing for the system.

00:20:15.000 We should totally oppose, obviously, inappropriate cancellation.

00:20:18.000 When people are canceled for dumb reasons, that should be complete support.

00:20:21.000 And we should allow forgiveness where appropriate.

00:20:23.000 People should, in fact, ask for forgiveness, and we should give it to them.

00:20:26.000 One of the reasons forgiveness has gone out of style is because people feel like they're going to be dunked on the moment that they actually ask for forgiveness by the social media mob.

00:20:35.000 But the bottom line is this.

00:20:36.000 If we are going to share a society together, a social fabric does require a more nuanced view of how we treat these sorts of things that we don't like.

00:20:48.000 And that nuanced view can't just be cancel everyone or cancel no one.

00:20:53.000 And cancellation itself has to be actually really defined.

00:20:56.000 What does it mean?

00:20:57.000 Because if we now define cancellation as just being criticized by somebody, you've actually shut down free speech, you haven't exacerbated or made better free speech.

00:21:05.000 These are things we have to think through as a society.

00:21:07.000 Social media has made this necessary, and as our common moral standards degrade, the society is going to continue to fall apart through a sort of reactionary cycling between the cancel everyone and cancel no one sides of this particular argument.

00:21:22.000 We'll get to more on this in just a moment.

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00:23:37.000 Alrighty, meanwhile, in world news, that is slightly more important, it appears that India and Pakistan may be on the brink of war.

00:23:43.000 These are both nuclear armed powers.

00:23:44.000 This should be a reminder, by the way, that a world in which many, many countries are nuclear is a supremely risky world.

00:23:51.000 So, just to illustrate how dangerous the world could become, let's talk for a moment about who has nuclear weapons and who is a nuclear country, meaning they have nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons, because the threshold for developing nuclear weapons is much higher than for just developing civilian nuclear energy.

00:24:06.000 So right now, According to our friends over at Perplexity and sponsors over at Perplexity, there are nine countries that have nuclear weapons.

00:24:12.000 Russia, the United States, China, France, the UK, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea.

00:24:17.000 Okay, so, there are also a bunch of countries that host foreign nuclear weapons.

00:24:22.000 That includes Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, and Belarus.

00:24:25.000 Belarus has been hosting Russian nuclear weapons since 2023.

00:24:30.000 Okay, now, imagine that all those countries decided they were going to develop nuclear weapons of their own.

00:24:35.000 So Turkey right now is hosting...

00:24:39.000 There are a bunch of countries that are planning civilian nuclear energy, like Jordan, Egypt, Poland, Kazakhstan, and several others in Africa, Asia, and South America.

00:24:56.000 Do we think that this would be a good thing?

00:24:59.000 Do we think that the world would become a safer place because of massive nuclear proliferation?

00:25:04.000 Well, the reality is that in the absence, Of the sort of American global overwatch in the absence of a feeling of security by America's allies.

00:25:12.000 And with the growth of America's enemies, more and more countries are going to feel that the guarantee of their security is nuclear armament.

00:25:19.000 If you're enjoying having to care about India and Pakistan right now, let me recommend that you allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. 0.99

00:25:25.000 Seriously, if India and Pakistan were just having like a little border dispute and firing at each other right now, people across the world would not be watching this conflict.

00:25:34.000 They are watching this conflict.

00:25:35.000 Because both of these countries are nuclear-armed, and people are concerned that if this were to escalate, you would end up with nuclear war.

00:25:42.000 And in that nuclear war, that could drag in China, which is a border country, and it could theoretically drag in other surrounding powers and possibly even the United States if this thing were to escalate.

00:25:51.000 This is why people care about things like global thermonuclear war.

00:25:55.000 Well, India yesterday launched military strikes on targets in Pakistan, both countries said on Wednesday.

00:26:00.000 Pakistan claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets.

00:26:03.000 An escalation that has pushed the two nations to the brink of wider conflict, according to CNN.

00:26:08.000 India's missile strikes were targeting terrorist infrastructure, they said, across nine sites in Pakistan's densely populated Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

00:26:16.000 That came in response to a massive terror assault by terrorists in India and administered Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists.

00:26:24.000 Pakistan, of course, does operate in cahoots with terrorist groups. 0.96

00:26:28.000 Pakistan is extraordinarily radical. 1.00

00:26:30.000 This is why they were housing, for example, Osama bin Laden for years in Pakistan.

00:26:35.000 Pakistan said at least 26 people were killed in Wednesday's strikes.

00:26:38.000 The country's prime minister, Shabazz Sharif, described the strikes as an act of war.

00:26:42.000 Islamabad has now vowed to retaliate.

00:26:44.000 Now, the United States and China are sort of the powers sponsoring each side.

00:26:48.000 So the United States does have a relationship with Pakistan because supposedly Pakistan helps us with counterterrorism.

00:26:54.000 Let's just say that that support is incredibly intermittent.

00:26:57.000 And the United States also supports India, which is a democratic ally of the United States, and is an incredibly important country geopolitically, very fast increasing economy, very fast increasing population.

00:27:09.000 A border country, again, with China, if you wish to build a sort of geopolitical wall against Chinese interventionism, then India is a key part of that.

00:27:19.000 Both sides, China and the United States, are urging weapons down.

00:27:22.000 They're saying that...

00:27:24.000 They don't want this escalating any further.

00:27:26.000 They're trying to encourage India to say that they've done enough at this point in response to the terror attack.

00:27:30.000 And China's trying to encourage Pakistan to step down.

00:27:33.000 Again, I don't think this escalates much from here because I don't think that either country has an incentive to drive a vastly larger war in which the end could actually be mutual nuclear destruction.

00:27:45.000 Both India and Pakistan claim all of Kashmir, but the truth is that it's kind of divvied up.

00:27:50.000 The last clash in the region happened in 2019.

00:27:52.000 Something similar happened.

00:27:53.000 A suicide bomber killed 40 Indian paramilitary police officers in Kashmir in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:27:59.000 And then the attacker claimed that he was a member of an Islamic militant group in Pakistan.

00:28:05.000 Nice people.

00:28:06.000 India then retaliated with airstrikes and Pakistani forces shot down a warplane captured an Indian pilot and then a negotiated release happened.

00:28:12.000 This will probably be something similar.

00:28:15.000 So again, the panic that this is going to leap into nuclear war is likely...

00:28:21.000 Unwarranted.

00:28:22.000 With that said, the reason everybody is worried about this sort of stuff is that a larger nuclear-armed world is incredibly dangerous because everything gets put on the brink of disaster immediately.

00:28:32.000 It is the reason why, for example, the war in Ukraine has lasted so long.

00:28:36.000 If Russia were not armed with nuclear weapons, then presumably Western support for Ukraine would have been significantly larger and significantly more powerful, and there would have been a possibility of Ukraine literally pushing Russia out of their country.

00:28:47.000 But that couldn't happen because of the possibility that Putin might actually unleash nuclear weapons were he to be pushed out of Donbass and Crimea.

00:28:55.000 And so that war has just sort of continued for years on end.

00:29:00.000 And geopolitics requires, it requires some sort of stability.

00:29:05.000 The United States has been the guarantor of stability since World War II.

00:29:09.000 As the United States recedes from the world scene, the world is going to become significantly less stable.

00:29:14.000 And that chaotic and unstable world is going to lead to problems for the United States because the world is extraordinarily interconnected.

00:29:20.000 Our economies are interconnected at this point.

00:29:23.000 This is why you see sort of a drive from the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party to move simultaneously toward foreign policy isolationism and economic autarky.

00:29:33.000 Now, the consequences of that are lower living standards in the United States.

00:29:36.000 Everything is more expensive.

00:29:38.000 Jobs are fewer in number.

00:29:41.000 Autarky in the modern economy.

00:29:43.000 It's a great way to reduce your footprint and also to reduce your living standards.

00:29:47.000 But as the world becomes more multipolar, as the United States withdraws from its hegemony since World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the globe is going to get more unstable, not less.

00:29:58.000 Speaking of which, yesterday, President Trump declared that there was a truce with the Houthis.

00:30:03.000 Now, the Houthis, again, is a terrorist group in Yemen.

00:30:06.000 They've been holding up shipping in the Red Sea.

00:30:09.000 They've been firing in a wide variety of ships in the Red Sea.

00:30:12.000 Basically destroying that trade route, so everybody now has to go around the Horn of Africa in order to ship things from east to west.

00:30:19.000 Well, the United States has been bombing the Houthis, and the Houthis apparently came back to the United States and said, we'll stop bombing American ships.

00:30:26.000 We'll stop going after American ships. 0.97

00:30:27.000 In fact, the Houthis said they'll stop going after everything except Israeli ships.

00:30:31.000 Now, the problem with that, of course, is that the Houthis have attacked a number of ships that they claim are Israeli that are not actually Israeli.

00:30:37.000 The other problem with that is that the Houthis should not be firing at anybody in the Red Sea.

00:30:41.000 Because if the idea is they get to pick off boats one by one, and there's no collective response, well, they're going to start picking off more and more boats from more and more enemies.

00:30:51.000 But President Trump, and again, there's a broader geopolitical context to this, what this really appears to be is a setup for a bad nuclear deal cut by the Trump administration.

00:31:01.000 Now, President Trump has been saying that the Obama-Iran deal is the worst deal in history.

00:31:04.000 He's been saying that since 2015.

00:31:06.000 And President Trump has also said, steadfastly and repeatedly, That Iran cannot be allowed nuclearization.

00:31:13.000 They have to be completely denuclearized.

00:31:15.000 Let's be clear what is happening with the Houthis.

00:31:18.000 Yes, the strikes mattered on the Houthis by the United States.

00:31:21.000 And by the Israelis, by the way.

00:31:22.000 Yesterday, Israel basically blew up the Sana 'a airport.

00:31:25.000 But not just that.

00:31:27.000 What this really is, is a predicate.

00:31:30.000 And the Middle East is reading this way.

00:31:31.000 It's reading it as a predicate to a United States deal with Iran that will essentially allow an Obama 2.0 deal.

00:31:38.000 A path toward nuclearization, opening up of the Iranian economy that will allow funding of terrorism and ballistic missiles. 0.94

00:31:43.000 The Houthis are a proxy group for the Iranian government.

00:31:46.000 And this is being read this way by the entire Middle East.

00:31:48.000 You can look at the cartoons that are coming out in the newspapers from Iran to Qatar to Saudi Arabia.

00:31:53.000 This is exactly how it's being read.

00:31:55.000 So, President Trump, yesterday, he explained that the Houthis have said that they are not going to bomb our ships, which of course is a good thing. 0.88

00:32:03.000 And again, the suggestion here is not that the United States needs to, quote-unquote, keep bombing the Houthis on behalf of Israel or something like that.

00:32:10.000 We don't.

00:32:10.000 The Israelis, it turns out, have extraordinary firepower and have been bombing the Houthis themselves.

00:32:16.000 However, we have to be clear as to what Iran is doing here.

00:32:19.000 Again, I'm not saying that Trump is doing the wrong thing here.

00:32:21.000 What I'm saying is that Iran is attempting to play him. 0.96

00:32:23.000 And so the Trump administration must be very careful as to what they are doing.

00:32:27.000 Here's President Trump yesterday.

00:32:29.000 Can you tell us a bit more about the deal that you've reached with the Houthis?

00:32:33.000 No, it's not a deal.

00:32:34.000 They've said, please don't bomb us anymore.

00:32:37.000 We're not going to attack your ships.

00:32:39.000 And where did you hear about that?

00:32:41.000 It doesn't matter where I hear it.

00:32:42.000 A very good source, I can tell you.

00:32:44.000 A very, very good source.

00:32:45.000 Would you say Marco?

00:32:46.000 I would say pretty good.

00:32:47.000 Right, JD?

00:32:48.000 A very good source.

00:32:51.000 Okay, so Stephen Miller, who of course is a top advisor to President Trump, senior advisor, he says the Houthis will no longer be firing on U.S. ships.

00:32:58.000 Now the question is whether that means U.S. ships, all ships, or what this means.

00:33:02.000 Just today, President Trump announced that the Houthis have said that they will not shoot at American ships, they will not shoot at American military, as a result of the bombardment campaign that President Trump authorized and led.

00:33:17.000 A major victory for U.S. foreign policy.

00:33:21.000 Okay, so, if that's the extent of it, then sure, great.

00:33:25.000 You know, the fact that the Houthis will stop firing on shipping in the Red Sea is great, although, again, if they're firing on ships that they consider quote-unquote Israelis, they have fired on a bunch of ships that are not Israeli in orientation while claiming that they are, in fact, Israeli.

00:33:37.000 However, this is part of a broader gambit by Iran.

00:33:40.000 Let's be very clear what is happening now.

00:33:41.000 It's not that the United States bombed the Houthis into submission, and so the Houthis are stopping their activity.

00:33:45.000 What the Houthis are attempting to do at the behest of Iran is basically carve off the United States from Israel in the Iranian nuclear negotiations. 0.77

00:33:52.000 That is the goal.

00:33:54.000 According to a report from the New York Times, two Iranian officials said that Iran had persuaded the Houthis to stop their attacks on U.S. assets as part of the Omani mediation efforts.

00:34:04.000 CNN cited people familiar with the matter as saying that Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, Again, his supposed negotiator extraordinaire, who has yet to negotiate a good deal, had worked with the Omanis over the past week to broker the U.S. Houthi ceasefire.

00:34:16.000 The sources said the ceasefire was also meant to help build momentum in the Iran nuclear talks, which Koff is leading.

00:34:21.000 So again, the goal here for Iran is to basically say, okay, the Houthis will stop attacking U.S. ships in the Red Sea, and in return, you guys cut a bad Iran nuclear deal and wash your hands of the whole region. 0.79

00:34:33.000 That is the goal.

00:34:34.000 Now, of course, Iran is not going to stop developing nuclear weapons. 0.80

00:34:37.000 Particularly if the Trump administration cuts a bad deal.

00:34:40.000 And what is the predictable result of all that going to be?

00:34:43.000 The predictable result is going to be something very much like what just happened in Yemen, meaning the Israelis took it upon themselves to destroy the entire airport in Sana 'a. 0.72

00:34:50.000 So if you want Israel bombing Iran, actually the best way to ensure that Israel is going to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities is to cut a bad Obama nuclear deal.

00:34:58.000 Because Israel will then have no choice but to go ahead and do that. 0.92

00:35:02.000 So if what you're seeking to avoid is escalation, then stronger peace through strength.

00:35:07.000 Stronger strangling of the Iranian economy. 0.69

00:35:09.000 Stronger demands upon Iran would be the way to actually do that. 0.71

00:35:13.000 It's not possible to see the Houthi deal outside of the context of the broader Iranian issue.

00:35:19.000 I mean, President Trump said that back in March.

00:35:21.000 He literally put out a statement in March saying that the Houthis are just an Iranian proxy state.

00:35:26.000 So the reason, again, that the Houthis are doing this is to try and suggest that if Iran basically goes after Israel on its own, that the United States will...

00:35:35.000 Sort of disappear.

00:35:36.000 That it won't matter at all to the United States.

00:35:38.000 And they're hoping the United States will buy into that.

00:35:40.000 Of course, that's not actually true factually.

00:35:42.000 If Iran were to gain a nuclear weapon, they wouldn't just be threatening Israel. 0.89

00:35:45.000 They would also be threatening, presumably, the UAE. 0.89

00:35:47.000 They'd be threatening Saudi Arabia.

00:35:49.000 They'd be threatening other areas in the Middle East, ranging from parts of Syria, presumably, to Iraq, to places like Azerbaijan. 0.94

00:36:00.000 An Iranian nuclear weapon creates geopolitical instability for sure. 0.87

00:36:03.000 And so if this is an attempt to basically say to the Trump administration, get an easy win with a headline, and then we get to go nuclear, and after all, we don't care about you, we just care about the Israelis.

00:36:13.000 First of all, the Iranians are good at this. 1.00

00:36:15.000 They know the game that they are playing.

00:36:17.000 And if the United States shows that it is uninterested in the region, the Iranians are not going to stop being interested in the region.

00:36:24.000 And that will lead to more conflict.

00:36:25.000 Again, when the United States recedes from the world scene, it is not that what fills the gap is something better and more peaceful and more wonderful.

00:36:31.000 What fills the gap is usually something significantly worse, significantly more chaotic.

00:36:36.000 And as I said before, with regards to India and Pakistan, if the world is a more chaotic place that has an impact on the United States economically, it has an impact on the United States in terms of security.

00:36:46.000 Now again, that is not a call for full-scale American war in the Middle East.

00:36:50.000 No one is calling for that. 0.88

00:36:52.000 I think there's a strong case to be made that Iran, being absolutely dishonorable, a country that is led by Islamic maniacs, I mean, that really is what the country is. 1.00

00:37:04.000 It's an Islamic dictatorship, a revolutionary dictatorship, that they are untrustworthy in the extreme when it comes to foreign policy. 1.00

00:37:12.000 They've killed thousands of American soldiers on Iraqi soil and all the rest. 0.96

00:37:15.000 It seems to me that there's a strong case, not an impregnable case, but a strong case to be made.

00:37:21.000 That a single B2 sortie involving the United States to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities would greatly reset the region.

00:37:28.000 But, at the very least, the United States should not be engaging in some sort of SOP to Iran that titularly allows us to escape responsibility for things going on in the Middle East while dramatically increasing the possibilities of chaos in the Middle East, which could be what is happening. 0.54

00:37:43.000 President Trump, by the way, teased that he has a very big announcement ahead of his Middle East trip.

00:37:47.000 It is unclear exactly what this means.

00:37:49.000 Of course, it could just be a Bitcoin announcement.

00:37:51.000 He's done that before.

00:37:52.000 But we don't actually know at this point.

00:37:55.000 We're going to UAE and Qatar.

00:37:59.000 And that'll be, I guess, Monday night.

00:38:01.000 Some of you are coming with us.

00:38:03.000 I think before then, we're going to have a very, very big announcement to make.

00:38:07.000 Like, as big as it gets.

00:38:09.000 And I won't tell you on what.

00:38:11.000 And it's very positive.

00:38:13.000 I'd also tell you if it was negative or positive.

00:38:15.000 I can't keep that out.

00:38:17.000 It is...

00:38:18.000 Really, really positive.

00:38:19.000 And that announcement will be made either Thursday or Friday or Monday before we leave.

00:38:25.000 But it'll be one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject.

00:38:32.000 Very important subject.

00:38:35.000 Okay, so, you know, again, President Trump pitches like nobody else.

00:38:39.000 So we're all on the edge of our seats about that.

00:38:41.000 Meanwhile, by the way, the...

00:38:43.000 Again, unstable world that is being created as America basically recedes and tries to move into a more multipolar age.

00:38:51.000 That's having impact on Eastern Europe as well.

00:38:53.000 Apparently, Poland is now feeling some anxiety because, of course, they are bordering Ukraine if the idea is that the United States is sort of withdrawing from the Ukraine war, which appears to be quasi-happening, kind of happening, not really clear what's happening.

00:39:06.000 Poland is getting nervous as well.

00:39:08.000 The possibility of serious...

00:39:11.000 Nuclear development in pretty much every country that borders with a Russia or a China or a Pakistan or an Iran is very, very real. 0.85

00:39:18.000 And a universal nuclear weapon world is going to be a very, very dangerous place.

00:39:24.000 Meanwhile, the markets are actually on the rise thanks to the fact that President Trump now seems to be looking for an off-ramp in his trade talks with the Chinese.

00:39:34.000 Now, again, there is a good way to box in China when it comes to trade. 0.93

00:39:37.000 Bill Ackman, the investor, put out a statement yesterday that I think is totally correct.

00:39:40.000 He said, what if President Trump were to announce that China tariffs would immediately be reduced to 20% and then escalate thereafter by 0.5% per month for the next 12 months and then by 1% per month for the next 12 months and 1.5% per month for the next 12 months and so on, which would mean like a 6% increase for a year.

00:39:58.000 So by end of year one, you're at 26%.

00:40:01.000 And then 12% the year after that.

00:40:02.000 So after that, you're now 38%.

00:40:04.000 This approach, he says, would incentivize companies to relocate their supply chains from China while enabling them to continue to operate profitably during the transition.

00:40:12.000 China would be incentivized to make a good deal with President Trump as promptly as practicable, while the risk of a dramatic shock to the U.S. and global economies would be greatly reduced if not eliminated.

00:40:20.000 And this is right.

00:40:21.000 He's totally right about this.

00:40:23.000 As I've said many times on the show at this point, doing a trade war with China is not a bad idea if you do the preconditional work.

00:40:29.000 The preconditional work involves better trade deals with everybody else on earth that is not China and with whom you can ally to box China in.

00:40:37.000 Part three would be to find other supply lines for key national security-based industries, like rare earth metals, for example.

00:40:50.000 And four would be to rapidly build up the United States' naval capacity so that if China, feeling in a box, tried to go for Taiwan, the United States could dissuade them.

00:40:57.000 Those are all preconditions to really going after China on the trade route.

00:41:00.000 And this is exactly what Ackman is saying.

00:41:04.000 President Trump yesterday said that China wants a deal.

00:41:08.000 China wants to, very much wants to make a deal.

00:41:11.000 They all do.

00:41:12.000 But yeah, I would say that every country wants to make a deal and not the ones they had in the past where we were like, look, we were being ripped off.

00:41:23.000 By every country practically without exception in the entire world.

00:41:28.000 And those days are over.

00:41:31.000 Okay, so again, that's fine.

00:41:33.000 The question is, what are the deals going to look like?

00:41:35.000 So President Trump says that he could be announcing 50 or 100 deals.

00:41:38.000 And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessence has said that those deals, they take a long time to negotiate, by the way.

00:41:44.000 A typical trade deal might take a year to negotiate.

00:41:46.000 You'll probably have some term sheets, basically one or two page rough outline that will allow the United States to at least temporarily lower tariffs as the rest of the negotiation goes on.

00:41:55.000 Here's President Trump talking about announcing further trade deals.

00:41:58.000 Well, I can announce all of them now.

00:42:01.000 I could announce 50 to 100 deals right now because, you know, I'm the shopkeeper and I keep the store.

00:42:07.000 And, you know, I know what countries are looking for and I know what we're looking for and I can just set those terms and they can go shopping or they don't have to go shopping because everybody wants to shop here.

00:42:18.000 This is like a beautiful store.

00:42:22.000 Okay, so we'll see what those trade deals look like.

00:42:25.000 Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary.

00:42:27.000 Again, simple rule for the Trump administration.

00:42:29.000 When Secretary Besson talks, markets are quieted.

00:42:32.000 When Howard Glutnik or Peter Navarro talk, markets freak out.

00:42:35.000 There's a good reason for this.

00:42:37.000 Here's the Treasury Secretary.

00:42:39.000 Well, Laura, in game theory, it's called strategic uncertainty, what you're talking about.

00:42:43.000 Nobody does it better than President Trump, and it can be unsettling for the markets, but why are they unsettled?

00:42:51.000 Because they have a lack of information.

00:42:54.000 I have President Trump has asymmetric information for what he's willing to do.

00:42:59.000 We don't disclose it.

00:43:01.000 And again, with President Trump, the strategic uncertainty will make sure that we get the best deal possible.

00:43:08.000 That's what's happening with the trading partners who are coming to us.

00:43:13.000 Okay, now, again, I think that's the best possible and plausible defense of Trump's approach on trade.

00:43:17.000 The reality is you don't need strategic uncertainty when you have the cards in your pocket.

00:43:21.000 The reality is that if you're playing poker and you hold four aces, you don't need to act as though you are bluffing because you have the cards.

00:43:30.000 The United States does have the cards when it comes to these trade deals.

00:43:33.000 If we went to Vietnam behind the scenes, like, guys, we need you to lower your non-tariff... 0.87

00:43:37.000 Trade barriers. 0.54

00:43:38.000 We need you to do that right now or we're going to slap you. 0.96

00:43:40.000 And you don't do it publicly. 0.52

00:43:41.000 Just do it privately.

00:43:42.000 They'll lower it because we have all the leverage in that relationship.

00:43:46.000 And one of the big problems for the administration and the reason why the economy continues to sort of be held in advance, investors are still waiting to put their money back in, is because President Trump says things and then Besant basically has to fill in the gap.

00:43:59.000 He has to backfill it.

00:44:00.000 So President Trump, of course, said that...

00:44:02.000 Kids don't need dirty dolls. 1.00

00:44:04.000 They only need two dolls, which is a very bad approach to this particular issue.

00:44:07.000 And Scott Besson is out there trying to defend it because that's his job.

00:44:11.000 Look, the other thing, too, is this reporter behind me was quite snarky the other day when President Trump talked about the girl having two dolls.

00:44:22.000 And he said, well, what...

00:44:23.000 The president didn't take the question, but he said, what would you tell that girl?

00:44:26.000 I said, I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents, that you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents, which working-class Americans had abandoned that idea.

00:44:42.000 Your family will own a home.

00:44:43.000 You will be able to advance.

00:44:46.000 You will have a good education.

00:44:48.000 You will have economic freedom.

00:44:50.000 That's what we are advancing.

00:44:54.000 Okay, now, again, if you can explain to me why you need to own two dollars instead of 30 in order to own a home, like, the relationship between the two should be made clearer by the administration.

00:45:04.000 Let's just put it that way.

00:45:05.000 Yesterday, Mark Carney, the freshly elected liberal prime minister of Canada who should not have been elected, Pierre Polyev, should have been the prime minister of Canada.

00:45:12.000 At this point, Mark Carney showed up, and President Trump basically acknowledged that his intervention in the Canadian election helped swing the election to Carney.

00:45:22.000 Here he's saying he can't take full credit for Carney's win.

00:45:27.000 It's a great honor to have Prime Minister Mark Carney with us.

00:45:31.000 As you know, just a few days ago, he won a very big election in Canada.

00:45:35.000 And I think I was probably the greatest thing that happened to him, but I can't take full credit.

00:45:41.000 His party was losing by a lot, and he ended up winning.

00:45:46.000 So I really want to congratulate him.

00:45:48.000 It was probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics.

00:45:51.000 Maybe even greater than mine.

00:45:54.000 But I want to just congratulate you.

00:45:56.000 That was a great election, actually.

00:45:59.000 Yeah, you know, it would have been a better election if President Trump hadn't declared trade war on Canada and then talked about annexing their country.

00:46:05.000 Carney, for his part, had a grand old time in the Oval, basically shellacking Trump to his face.

00:46:10.000 So here's Mark Carney saying that Canada will not be bought, which of course gives him a lot of street cred with his people back home.

00:46:17.000 As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale.

00:46:22.000 That's true.

00:46:22.000 We're sitting in one right now, Buckingham Palace, and you visited as well.

00:46:26.000 That's true.

00:46:27.000 And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign last several months, it's not for sale, won't be for sale ever.

00:46:36.000 But the opportunity is in the partnership and what we can build together.

00:46:42.000 We have done that in the past.

00:46:45.000 And then Carney went on to fact-check Trump in the middle of the Oval Office meeting.

00:46:49.000 And you know who wouldn't have done any of this?

00:46:51.000 Pierre Polyev.

00:46:52.000 Would have been much better if you were Prime Minister.

00:46:53.000 Here was Carney.

00:46:56.000 Yes, go ahead.

00:46:56.000 Yeah, if I may.

00:46:57.000 Well, respectfully, Canadians' view on this is not going to change on the 51st state.

00:47:05.000 Secondly, we are the largest client of the United States in the totality of all the goods.

00:47:12.000 So we are the largest client of the United States.

00:47:14.000 We have a tremendous auto sector between the two of us and the changes that made have been helpful.

00:47:19.000 You know, 50% of a car that comes from Canada is American.

00:47:23.000 That's not like anywhere else in the world.

00:47:27.000 So he's fact-checking Trump on Trump saying that we actually don't need Canada.

00:47:32.000 We don't have a big trade relationship.

00:47:33.000 And Carney happens to be correct there.

00:47:34.000 We actually do sell billions, as in upward of $350 billion of stuff in Canada.

00:47:40.000 They are our largest single trade partner, actually.

00:47:43.000 President Trump, for his part, refused to give up on Canadian annexation.

00:47:47.000 This is what he had to say in the Oval yesterday.

00:47:50.000 I must say, Canada is stepping up the military participation because Mark knew, you know, they were low and now they're stepping it up and that's a very important thing.

00:48:01.000 But never say never.

00:48:02.000 Never say never.

00:48:05.000 Okay, well Carney was asked later, afterward, what he was thinking when President Trump was talking about annexing Canada.

00:48:11.000 And here's what he had to say.

00:48:13.000 I was watching your face through the meeting in the Oval Office and I wondered what was going through your mind when the president talked about re-erasing the artificial border and how he criticized your predecessor and Madam Freeland.

00:48:29.000 Well, thank you for, I guess, for your question.

00:48:32.000 I'm glad that you couldn't tell what was going through my mind as that was going through.

00:48:37.000 Look, with respect to the first point, the President has made known his wish about that issue for some time.

00:48:52.000 I've been careful always to distinguish between wish and reality.

00:48:56.000 I was clear there.

00:48:57.000 In the Oval Office, as I've been clear throughout on behalf of Canadians, that this is never going to happen.

00:49:03.000 Canada is not for sale.

00:49:04.000 It never will be for sale.

00:49:08.000 So, again, you know what would have been better than this?

00:49:11.000 Pierre Polyev.

00:49:12.000 I can't say that enough because there are some members of the right who seem to believe that it's like a big win to dunk on Pierre Polyev, who lost because, again, the Trump administration decided to Leroy Jenkins some sort of trade war with Canada.

00:49:26.000 Again, I just don't see the purpose of that.

00:49:28.000 I don't see why that had to happen.

00:49:29.000 And I hope that Mark Carney, who is not going to be a good prime minister, I hope that the Canadian people see that and that his tenure as prime minister is short-lived.

00:49:40.000 Well, folks, the show continues in just a moment with a piece of good news for the Trump administration.

00:49:44.000 The Supreme Court has made a ruling as to whether trans people can be banned from the military, at least for the moment.

00:49:50.000 First, you have to become a member.

00:49:52.000 We have all sorts of great stuff.

00:49:53.000 We've got Matt Walsh's movies.

00:49:54.000 We've got series with Jordan Peterson.

00:49:56.000 We've got All Access Live.

00:49:57.000 We have Run, Hide, Fight.

00:49:58.000 All sorts of good stuff.

00:49:59.000 In order to watch, though, you have to be a member.

00:50:00.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - May 07, 2025

Dave Portnoy, Shiloh Hendrix, and Cancel Culture

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