The Ben Shapiro Show - DOJ Catches Libs Funding The KKK

00:00:00.000 So, one of the most powerful liberal charities in the world has been donating money to the Ku Klux Klan.

00:00:07.000 Yep, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left wing agitprop organization that raises something like $100 million every year, has been handing money to white supremacists.

00:00:16.000 Why in the world would they do that?

00:00:17.000 And what the hell is going on?

00:00:19.000 I will explain.

00:00:19.000 Plus, Virginia Democrats ram through an insane congressional map that basically makes Republican voters irrelevant, and President Trump makes a mysterious move on Iran.

00:00:27.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:36.000 Alrighty.

00:00:37.000 So let's begin with this premise.

00:00:38.000 The demand for white supremacy on the left outstrips the supply.

00:00:42.000 What do I mean by this? 0.99

00:00:43.000 I mean that people on the left think, broadly speaking, that Americans are a set of horrible racists. 0.73

00:00:49.000 And then they look around in the world and it turns out that Americans are some of the least racist people in world history. 0.90

00:00:55.000 Like on the planet right now, Americans rank basically dead last in racism.

00:01:01.000 If you go to any other country on planet Earth, what you will notice is that there is significantly more racism than there is in the United States.

00:01:07.000 If you go to Japan, fair bit of racism in Japan.

00:01:10.000 Go to South Korea, fair bit of racism in South Korea.

00:01:12.000 Go to India, they've got some racism problems.

00:01:14.000 You come to the United States, and the poll statistics suggest that, for example, the vast majority of Americans are fine with living next to people of different races.

00:01:22.000 They are fine with intermarrying with people of other races.

00:01:25.000 We have very high rates in the United States of ethnic intermarriage.

00:01:29.000 All of that with America, like we are an extraordinarily tolerant and diverse people.

00:01:34.000 But in order for the left to make its play, For a sort of communitarian centralized government, they have to constantly suggest that the government must be there in order to ram down the throats of those evil racists, or the vast majority of Americans, according to the left.

00:01:49.000 They have to ram down their throat decency and goodness.

00:01:53.000 And the only way that you can sell that proposition is to create an airstat, a false supply of racism.

00:02:01.000 So this brings us to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

00:02:04.000 So you've probably heard of it, maybe you haven't.

00:02:06.000 The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the most powerful left wing groups in America.

00:02:09.000 It's a supposedly civil rights nonprofit that was originally founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama.

00:02:16.000 And originally, they built their reputation on using litigation and research.

00:02:21.000 And I say research here because the research is pretty shoddy to combat what they called white supremacists and other domestic extremist groups and advocate for marginalized communities.

00:02:29.000 That was their stated purpose.

00:02:31.000 And then over time, that turned into monitoring so called extremist movements.

00:02:35.000 They published a hate group list and a hate map, and they pushed programs on bias and intolerance.

00:02:41.000 And this was used.

00:02:43.000 To mainline their intel into everything from media to education to law enforcement.

00:02:50.000 The FBI, up until October 2025, was using inputs from the SPLC to determine the kinds of people to monitor.

00:02:56.000 And even in the private sector, SPLC data was being used.

00:03:00.000 So, Amazon under Jeff Bezos said that it used SPLC data to decide who to exclude from its Amazon Smile charity program.

00:03:08.000 So, there's a program on Amazon where if you want to give a little bit of charity, when you buy a book, for example, If you're a charity and you want to get that money, you have to be made eligible via the Amazon Smile program.

00:03:18.000 But Amazon would not accept you if you were on the SPLC list.

00:03:21.000 PayPal was working with the SPLC to identify accounts to borrow from its payment services.

00:03:28.000 How prominent was the SPLC and is the SPLC?

00:03:32.000 Well, since 2010, a search of the New York Times pulls up 711 instances where the SPLC is cited as an authority on hate or discrimination statistics.

00:03:44.000 So they are like the go to.

00:03:45.000 The New York Times sees a Jussie Smollett story and they call up somebody from the SPLC to talk about it.

00:03:49.000 There's a Nick Fuentes story.

00:03:51.000 They call the SPLC to talk about it.

00:03:52.000 There's a Charlie Kirk story, as it turns out, and they call up the SPLC to talk about it.

00:03:57.000 The New York Times.

00:03:58.000 And this will become relevant in just one moment, by the way.

00:04:01.000 Repeatedly quoted the SPLC's data in its coverage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

00:04:08.000 That is the one where the media routinely claimed that President Trump said there were fine people on both sides, which was not what he actually said.

00:04:14.000 They lied about that.

00:04:15.000 But that Unite the Right rally has been the calling card for entire swaths of the left for a very, very long time.

00:04:21.000 And the New York Times repeatedly quoted the SPLC in its coverage of that Unite the Right rally.

00:04:27.000 And of course, they quoted the SPLC leadership to provide.

00:04:30.000 Historical context for the rise of the alt right.

00:04:34.000 In fact, a Google Gemini search of the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today shows that 20 to 25 percent of all analytical pieces on the Unite the Right rally referenced data or quoted directly from the SPLC.

00:04:47.000 Why is this relevant?

00:04:49.000 It turns out that some of the people funding the Unite the Right rally were allegedly the SPLC.

00:04:55.000 So yesterday, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanch, announced criminal charges for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

00:05:01.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:05:03.000 Today, a few minutes ago, in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11 count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

00:05:23.000 According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist.

00:05:34.000 Groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups.

00:05:41.000 As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups.

00:05:46.000 It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.

00:05:57.000 Okay.

00:05:57.000 So the basic charge here is pretty simple.

00:06:00.000 So what they are saying, the, the DOJ is that the Southern Poverty Law Center was basically paying all sorts of white supremacists and extremists in order to generate more white supremacy.

00:06:00.000 Fraud.

00:06:15.000 So then they could go fundraise.

00:06:16.000 See, here's the thing about the 501c3 world, meaning the nonprofit world.

00:06:21.000 And it's true pretty much everywhere.

00:06:23.000 Nonprofits exist theoretically to solve problems.

00:06:26.000 You give money to a nonprofit to solve a problem.

00:06:29.000 If the problem goes away, you no longer give to that nonprofit.

00:06:32.000 So let's say that you are the leader of a nonprofit or you're the leadership class of a nonprofit.

00:06:36.000 And it turns out the thing you're trying to solve has actually been pretty well and truly solved in the United States.

00:06:42.000 Like, for example, the racism of the American population.

00:06:45.000 That when you launched in 1971, racism was a very, very real and ever present part of American life.

00:06:50.000 And today, racism is not even a blip on most Americans' radar.

00:06:54.000 It's just not the way that most Americans think at this point.

00:06:56.000 But you're the Southern Poverty Law Center and you need to raise some money.

00:06:59.000 So what do you do?

00:07:00.000 You create a fake supply of white supremacy so you can go back to your donors and say the problem is worse than ever.

00:07:07.000 That's what you are doing.

00:07:09.000 So, if your donors are addicted to the fentanyl of the problem and the fentanyl is in short supply, what you do is you create Trank, a more viral version of the fentanyl that's more damaging, and then you go back to your donors in order to fund the methadone clinic to solve the problem.

00:07:24.000 So, the SPLC was, in this case, allegedly literally generating the white supremacy so they could fight the white supremacy.

00:07:33.000 Which is crazy.

00:07:34.000 And then the media were playing along with this.

00:07:37.000 The media were treating the Southern Poverty Law Center as the tip of the spear in fighting racism while the Southern Poverty Law Center was taking its donor money and paying actual white supremacists allegedly. 0.69

00:07:49.000 It's totally insane.

00:07:50.000 So, according to the press release from the Justice Department, quote, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, National Socialist Party of America, that's the American Nazi Party, and Unite the Right.

00:08:10.000 And again, Unite the Right happens to be one that kind of leaps off the page at you because the SPLC and the left made bank off the Unite the Right rally for years and years and years.

00:08:19.000 It was, again, the key example they used over and over and over again about how the right happened to be racist, even though, again, the right did not associate with the Unite the Right rally.

00:08:30.000 The full indictment says The SPLC's paid informant, quote, field sources engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time.

00:08:37.000 The SPLC was denouncing the same groups on his website.

00:08:40.000 The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia.

00:08:47.000 That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.

00:08:54.000 So again, the SPLC supposedly against Unite the Right, they were literally paying a guy who was in the online leadership chat group and was making racist postings and was coordinating transportation to the event for other attendees.

00:09:08.000 According to the indictment, starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of informants who were either associated with violent extremist groups such as the KKK or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC's direction.

00:09:22.000 These informants were referred to by some individuals within the SPLC as field sources or the Fs.

00:09:27.000 Between at least 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid their Fs in a clandestine manner.

00:09:32.000 Doing so hid the fact that while the SPLC received donation money under the auspices that the funds would be used to dismantle violent extremist groups, This donation money was instead being used in part by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within these same violent extremist groups.

00:09:46.000 That money was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups.

00:09:50.000 Okay, so presumably the defense from the SPLC would be listen, we're like James O'Keefe.

00:09:54.000 We were just paying people to infiltrate these organizations and get us information, and then we would make that.

00:09:59.000 But the information that they had apparently was never really made public, or at least there's no evidence that it was.

00:10:05.000 Instead, it looks like they were helping to gin up the racism so they could fight the racism.

00:10:10.000 That is what it looks like.

00:10:12.000 Again, we have a list of the people they funded.

00:10:15.000 One membership, one member of the leadership team, according to the indictment, who planned that 2017 Unite the Right event, was paid $270,000 by the SPLC.

00:10:25.000 There's a member of a neo Nazi group called National Alliance who worked for the SPLC for more than 20 years and was paid more than a million dollars.

00:10:32.000 What did they get for that money, by the way?

00:10:33.000 What did donors get for that money?

00:10:35.000 Did they get some sort of grand inside information?

00:10:37.000 Did it help them build out their hate map?

00:10:40.000 Or.

00:10:41.000 Was this all part of a larger sort of attempt to build out white supremacist organizations so you could then fight the white supremacist organizations?

00:10:51.000 So you set the fire in order to put out the fire.

00:10:53.000 They also paid an imperial wizard of the United Clans of America.

00:10:56.000 That's the KKK.

00:10:58.000 There's an officer of the American Nazi Party who secretly paid more than 300 grand by the SPLC between 2014 and 2020, allegedly.

00:11:05.000 And a former chairman of National Alliance was secretly paid 140 grand between 2016 and 2023.

00:11:11.000 That is the same period of time during which that same person Was featured on the SPLC's extremist file webpage from which it solicited donations, which is insane.

00:11:20.000 Okay, so they have listed on their website this person as an extremist and they were paying him at the same exact time.

00:11:30.000 Totally crazy stuff.

00:11:31.000 Crazy.

00:11:32.000 So the acting attorney general, Todd Blanch, was on Laura Ingram's show last night on Fox News and he explains that the Biden administration opened this investigation and then they closed this investigation.

00:11:41.000 I wonder why.

00:11:44.000 How did they get away with this for so long?

00:11:47.000 I mean, it's a great question.

00:11:48.000 I said today during the press conference that we know that this investigation was opened during the Biden administration and then mysteriously closed.

00:11:54.000 I really don't have any information about why it was closed.

00:11:57.000 And then we started again last year.

00:11:59.000 The FBI did, working with the U.S. Attorney in Alabama.

00:12:02.000 And it's extraordinarily egregious.

00:12:04.000 You just talked about it. 0.74

00:12:05.000 But imagine a donor to the SPLC if they were told, by the way, we're going to give the money you're giving us to the Ku Klux Klan.

00:12:13.000 Okay?

00:12:14.000 Like, in some cases, over a million dollars.

00:12:16.000 I mean, it's incredible.

00:12:19.000 Okay, so again, pretty astonishing stuff.

00:12:21.000 And we should remember the SPLC's game was to label anyone remotely conservative and extremist.

00:12:27.000 Matt Walsh points out that the SPLC had a whole section of their website devoted to him.

00:12:31.000 He says, they never offered me any money as part of their scheme.

00:12:33.000 I'm starting to feel a bit offended.

00:12:35.000 Other things that were in the SPLC extremist files Turning Point USA, Prager University, Chaya Reichick at Libs of TikTok, Moms for Liberty, the Center for Immigration Studies, Alliance Defending Freedom, and David Horowitz, none of whom are extremists.

00:12:51.000 So, this is the game.

00:12:53.000 And I will say that it does lend itself to the idea that much of what we consume in the media and in sort of the social media world and in politics generally is just not true.

00:13:04.000 A lot of it is ginned up.

00:13:06.000 That the hatred that a lot of Americans feel for other Americans and their recent poll statistics showing that a majority of Americans have negative feelings about other Americans, so much of that is ginned up by groups like the SPLC labeling huge swaths of Americans white supremacists.

00:13:24.000 I mean, the fakery here is quite real.

00:13:26.000 And people make money off of it because the algorithm favors it.

00:13:31.000 In the modern era, this can be done algorithmically.

00:13:34.000 The algorithm favors amygdala friendly responses.

00:13:38.000 So, to greatly simplify brain structures, the amygdala is the emotional center of your brain.

00:13:45.000 It's kind of your lizard brain, it is the thing that responds to fear signals, for example.

00:13:49.000 And the prefrontal cortex is the reasoning center of your brain.

00:13:52.000 That is the part of your brain that says that fear is not truly the thing that you should be worried about, it's not real.

00:13:57.000 The internet.

00:13:58.000 And virality are designed to appeal to your amygdala.

00:14:00.000 That is what they are designed to do.

00:14:02.000 And so, if you're the SPLC, what you say is white supremacy is a threat to you and your family. 0.90

00:14:07.000 It's virulent, it's violent, and it's racist.

00:14:10.000 Pretty much that whole pitch goes directly to the amygdala because at no point does the prefrontal cortex kick in and go, wait, hold on.

00:14:16.000 I know that I know from all my neighbors, none of my neighbors are racist.

00:14:19.000 They don't like racism, they think it's bad, they think white supremacy is bad.

00:14:24.000 And because the amygdala has kicked in, you now think worse of your neighbors, even though you have never really thought about the issue using the reasoning part of your brain.

00:14:32.000 Well, the same thing is true in the algorithmic space online.

00:14:36.000 In a moment, we're going to get to a crazy story about how people are being scammed online by influencers who may not exist.

00:14:43.000 Plus, the Virginia Democrats just drew the craziest gerrymandering map that you've ever seen.

00:14:48.000 And Republicans talking about killing the filibuster, even while Democrats seem to be gaining an advantage in the polls.

00:14:54.000 Is that a good idea?

00:14:54.000 We'll get to all of it first.

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00:16:07.000 There are a lot of accounts that go extremely viral because they use extraordinarily charged language.

00:16:12.000 Extraordinarily charged language, by the way, tends to feature second person pronouns.

00:16:16.000 You.

00:16:17.000 If I speak directly to you, the minute I say you, it's probably firing up the centers in your brain that are more emotionally resonant.

00:16:24.000 If I use words like evil or wicked or soulless, those are words that are much more likely to fire up the emotional centers of your brain than appeal to your prefrontal cortex.

00:16:35.000 And it's a shortcut for politicians, for influencers, and for groups like the SPLC.

00:16:39.000 The more that you can use, Emotionally charged language that is second person directed, the better you will do.

00:16:48.000 And that's why we all seem to be living in a world that is totally different from reality these days.

00:16:52.000 The more time you spend online, the more you are, you are given this sort of stuff.

00:16:55.000 The stuff you see on X, the stuff that is, that is routinely retweeted and reposted is always the same kind of stuff.

00:17:03.000 Emotionally charged, deeply emotionally charged stuff.

00:17:07.000 That is the entire shtick here.

00:17:09.000 That is the entire game.

00:17:12.000 And that's why you feel alienated.

00:17:13.000 It's why I've said a thousand times on the show, and I will say it a thousand times more, that you ought to go talk to your neighbors in person.

00:17:20.000 Because when you talk with your neighbors, your prefrontal cortex will kick in, as opposed to your fear centers, your amygdala.

00:17:26.000 And you might learn that the neighbor who you disagree with about tax rates actually is not a racist.

00:17:31.000 I gave a speech last week at the University of Pennsylvania, and there's a guy who got up, and he, in the middle of the speech, in the question and answer session, he started asking about Obamacare.

00:17:44.000 And listen, healthcare in America is a very complex topic.

00:17:47.000 Trying to unwind the American healthcare system and rebuild it is a very, very difficult thing to do, obviously.

00:17:53.000 But what he said was, why do Republicans just want tens of thousands of people to die by restructuring Obamacare?

00:17:59.000 Well, Democrats want those same people to live.

00:18:01.000 And I stopped him and I said, Do you really believe that I want people to die because I want a different healthcare system?

00:18:06.000 I don't believe that Barack Obama wants people to die because he wanted a different healthcare system.

00:18:12.000 But the thing that appeals to the emotional center is the thing that is politically resonant.

00:18:16.000 And that's true on the right, just as it's true on the left.

00:18:19.000 And that's how you can have scam artists making bank online, true bank.

00:18:24.000 There's another story today.

00:18:26.000 It sort of fits in with this pattern.

00:18:28.000 This is from Wired.com.

00:18:30.000 Apparently, there was a top MAGA influencer who's now been revealed to be AI.

00:18:36.000 This top MAGA influencer was called Emily Hart, a registered nurse and a Jennifer Lawrence lookalike. 0.69

00:18:43.000 And according to this story on Wired, on an Instagram account for Emily, Emily Hart Nurse, there were photos of her ice fishing, drinking Coors Light, shooting off a few rounds at the rifle range with emoji laden captions like, if you want a reason to unfollow, Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported.

00:19:01.000 And point of view. 0.97

00:19:02.000 You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as liberal clown emoji.

00:19:07.000 Okay, when this account was launched within one month, this Emily Hart account had more than 10,000 Instagram followers.

00:19:14.000 And then they were upsold to an AI generated OnlyFans page on a competitor called FanView.

00:19:23.000 And this generated thousands of dollars a month.

00:19:26.000 There's only one problem.

00:19:27.000 This person wasn't real.

00:19:28.000 This person was created by a 22 year old aspiring orthopedic surgeon named Sam from Northern India.

00:19:35.000 It is very easy to game the amygdala of human beings.

00:19:39.000 Very, very easy indeed.

00:19:40.000 It's why it is our job constantly to try to look through the headlines and the self interest of people who are trying to appeal to emotions and get to the facts.

00:19:51.000 Because as I've frequently said, facts don't care about your feelings.

00:19:54.000 But as it turns out, feelings Do not care about your facts or any facts, as it turns out.

00:20:00.000 And so, trying to get past that is going to be the only way to save the country.

00:20:05.000 And that's why it's quite good that scam groups like the SPLC are being brought to heel for apparently allegedly generating white supremacy just to fight it and to appeal to those emotional centers.

00:20:18.000 And it's why when you go online, you should really consider whether the thing you're reading that is setting you off emotionally is actually true or not.

00:20:26.000 Or reflective of reality or not, reflective of what your fellow Americans actually think.

00:20:30.000 Alrighty, meanwhile, Virginia Democrats last night won a major victory in Virginia.

00:20:37.000 According to the New York Times, Virginia voters approved a plan on Tuesday to gerrymander the state's congressional map to significantly favor Democrats, according to the AP.

00:20:45.000 That new map could eliminate four of the state's five Republican held seats for the 2026 midterm elections, giving Democrats a significant boost in their quest to regain control of the House.

00:20:54.000 So you remember that Republicans had made a mid census redistricting.

00:21:00.000 In Texas and in California, there's an ongoing attempt to redistrict as well by Gavin Newsom.

00:21:07.000 Same thing with regard to Virginia.

00:21:11.000 So, Virginia, which was a 6 5 Democratic advantage in congressional districts, in a state that's like 55 45 Democrat, so that's a pretty fair map.

00:21:20.000 They decided to go all the way the other way. 0.64

00:21:22.000 They drew a 10 1 Democratic map, which is totally unfair and ridiculous. 0.86

00:21:28.000 Now, is it illegal?

00:21:29.000 This will be challenged in court.

00:21:32.000 The court in Virginia tends to be Democrat leaning.

00:21:36.000 It is, in fact, a massive power grab.

00:21:39.000 As the Daily Wire reports, a legal challenge is currently pending before the Virginia State Supreme Court.

00:21:46.000 But Democrats pulled out all the stops in favor of this thing. 0.96

00:21:51.000 Barack Obama, who has been very active lately, he's trying to retake control of his party by steering it further into Momdani land. 0.89

00:21:58.000 He filmed television advertisements for the Yes campaign, and he said it was a way to repudiate the White House and congressional Republicans.

00:22:06.000 He said by voting yes, you can push back against the Republicans trying to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterm.

00:22:11.000 So disenfranchise.

00:22:13.000 45% of your population in order to fight the Republicans.

00:22:17.000 California voters, of course, have done the same thing.

00:22:19.000 They passed a ballot referendum and gained five blue seats in California.

00:22:23.000 North Carolina, Missouri redrew their maps for partisan purposes as well.

00:22:27.000 It may be that Florida does the same thing.

00:22:30.000 That's on the table as well.

00:22:31.000 Barack Obama put out a tweet saying, Congratulations, Virginia.

00:22:35.000 Republicans are trying to tilt the midterm elections in their favor, but they haven't done it yet.

00:22:39.000 Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.

00:22:43.000 And again, if you take a look at the actual voting map in Virginia, what you see is that basically the entire state voted against this, except for a couple of extremely Democrat counties.

00:22:57.000 And this thing passed 51 to 49.

00:23:00.000 Democrats, of course, are claiming that this is some form of enfranchisement as opposed to disenfranchisement.

00:23:05.000 Kamala Harris tweeted out that the power is with the people.

00:23:09.000 The power is not with the people who vote, you know, in like congressional elections.

00:23:12.000 The power is with a referendum that disenfranchises vast numbers of those people.

00:23:17.000 Glenn Youngkin.

00:23:18.000 The former governor of Virginia put out a statement.

00:23:21.000 Thank you to all the voters who turned out to vote against this egregious power grab.

00:23:24.000 The race was much closer than the left expected because Virginians know a 10 1 map is not Virginia.

00:23:28.000 I urge the Virginia Supreme Court to rule against the unconstitutional process that will disenfranchise millions of Virginians.

00:23:34.000 Now, there are a lot of Republicans who are saying that the National Republican Party really blew it here.

00:23:39.000 This is a close race.

00:23:40.000 Basically, if you look at the amount of money spent per vote, Democrats spent something like 40 bucks per vote in the state to push this thing, Republicans spent 13 bucks per vote.

00:23:49.000 And so, if they'd spent even a little bit of money, real money, then Republicans probably would have been able to prevent this from happening.

00:23:59.000 Apparently, according to Politico, Democrats outspent Republicans by a roughly three to one margin.

00:24:04.000 Virginians for fair elections, which led the yes effort, raised $64 million, boosted by nearly $38 million in support from the House majority forward, that is the House Democratic caucus leadership.

00:24:16.000 So there was not a lot of investment by Republicans.

00:24:18.000 Obviously, they should have done more.

00:24:20.000 This does speak to a problem.

00:24:23.000 Here's the problem Republicans very frequently get frustrated.

00:24:27.000 We get frustrated because we want things to happen and they don't happen in the fashion we want them to happen.

00:24:31.000 And so, what we do is we take the first available baton and we wield it.

00:24:35.000 And then, pretty predictably, that baton is turned back.

00:24:37.000 And this happens for both sides.

00:24:39.000 Harry Reid blew up the judicial filibuster because he was upset that Republicans were holding up federal judicial appointees under Barack Obama.

00:24:46.000 And Mitch McConnell warned him at the time if you blow up the judicial filibuster, that will be used against you.

00:24:52.000 And Harry Reid said, I don't care.

00:24:54.000 And he blew it up.

00:24:55.000 And pretty soon, Merrick Garland was up for the Supreme Court.

00:25:00.000 And the Republicans basically just held out because they had the majority.

00:25:03.000 And then.

00:25:04.000 Without the judicial filibuster in play, they put into place a bunch of Republicans or Republican appointees, rather, onto the Supreme Court.

00:25:12.000 So, any tool that you unsheathe from your arsenal will be used by the other side.

00:25:16.000 That is the nature of American politics.

00:25:18.000 It's one of the good things about American politics because if only one side were allowed to do it, you really would have a Democratic problem.

00:25:24.000 What is likely to happen from here?

00:25:25.000 What is likely to happen is redistricting in nearly every state, in which states that are slightly blue turn almost entirely blue congressionally, states that are slightly red turn almost entirely red.

00:25:38.000 Congressionally, where population movements mirror that, because let's say you're a frustrated Virginia Republican living in an outlying area, and now you're disenfranchised.

00:25:48.000 It doesn't matter how you vote in a congressional election.

00:25:50.000 So you don't bother to vote, and Democrats keep winning additional majorities in state races and in gubernatorial races and in all the rest.

00:25:57.000 And the only time you vote is for president.

00:25:58.000 And even then, you're like, you know what?

00:26:00.000 There are more and more Democrats here.

00:26:01.000 The big sort that has been happening in the United States is likely to exacerbate.

00:26:06.000 Now, in the long run, that may harm Democrats, because the reality is that people are leaving blue states at a faster rate than they are leaving red states.

00:26:12.000 People like living in In red states that are freer and increasingly more prosperous, and where business likes to be.

00:26:19.000 However, what we are watching is the bifurcation of the country.

00:26:23.000 And that's one of the big problems here.

00:26:25.000 All righty, coming up, we'll get to anger in the Republican camp at John Thune, the Senate majority leader.

00:26:30.000 Plus, we'll get to the latest on Iran and what is happening there, the president making mysterious moves.

00:26:36.000 First, let's talk about when you start something new.

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00:26:42.000 Starting a business is rough, but there are things that can make it easier and more profitable.

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00:27:54.000 Again, that's shopify.com slash Shapiro.

00:27:56.000 Shopify.com slash Shapiro.

00:27:59.000 And that brings us to the Save Act.

00:28:01.000 So, yesterday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who I believe to be a competent majority leader, he is good at his job.

00:28:11.000 There's a lot of angst on the Republican side of the aisle over his failure to ram through the so called Save Act.

00:28:16.000 The Save Act is a good act.

00:28:18.000 It says that if your name is not legally on the voter rolls, you should be purged, and also that you should have to show a citizenship document at the first time that you register to vote.

00:28:28.000 That's fine. 1.00

00:28:29.000 Honestly, I'm all for it.

00:28:31.000 But.

00:28:32.000 But it is not a reconciliation bill.

00:28:34.000 It has nothing to do with budgeting.

00:28:36.000 And because it's not a reconciliation bill, that means that the Senate parliamentarian would be likely to strip it out of any reconciliation bill.

00:28:43.000 And not only that, you're going to then need a filibuster proof majority in order to pass it.

00:28:49.000 And so a lot of Republicans have been saying, okay, we're not going to pass anything until we pass the Save Act, which is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

00:28:55.000 So John Thune said, okay, you know what we're going to do?

00:28:57.000 We're going to table the Save Act because we don't have the votes for it.

00:29:00.000 And we also don't have the votes to kill the filibuster.

00:29:02.000 And instead, we're going to move forward.

00:29:03.000 With funding, for example, ICE and Border Patrol.

00:29:05.000 We'll separate that off.

00:29:06.000 We'll fund it for three years.

00:29:08.000 So that takes us forward in time.

00:29:10.000 Here was Jonathan announcing that yesterday.

00:29:13.000 What we have been forced to do, and frankly, this is not my preference, but it is a reality, we are going to use the reconciliation process to fund those two important agencies.

00:29:25.000 And so we will be getting on a bill later today, a budget resolution that will be the unlock the next step, which is budget reconciliation that will enable us to ensure that those who carry out law enforcement. responsibilities in this country are actually funded.

00:29:43.000 Okay, so a lot of Republicans are very, very upset about all this.

00:29:46.000 They're very upset about this.

00:29:47.000 They think that he should kill the filibuster on behalf of the SAVE Act.

00:29:50.000 So, for example, Representative Ana Paulina Luna, she's out there claiming that this is a thing he must do, that we should kill the filibuster in order to promote the SAVE Act.

00:29:59.000 Here's what she had to say to Catherine Herridge.

00:30:02.000 John Thune is a problem.

00:30:05.000 I do not like what he's done because he has every ability, and really it's him that's blocking voter ID.

00:30:12.000 He has every ability to embrace the standing filibuster or remove the Filibuster.

00:30:16.000 Democrats are going to do it anyways.

00:30:17.000 And by the way, the current form of the filibuster is a perversion of what it initially was.

00:30:22.000 Okay, so when she says the Democrats are going to do it anyway, maybe and maybe not.

00:30:27.000 But just as with the judicial filibuster, you take that tool out of the sheath, it is not going back in the sheath.

00:30:34.000 Democrats will certainly do it if they don't have to restore the filibuster, obviously.

00:30:40.000 And this goes to, again, part of the problem with the way that our politics is done.

00:30:44.000 I agree.

00:30:45.000 Voter fraud is not only a problem, it could be a major problem.

00:30:50.000 If we do not actually put in place restrictions.

00:30:52.000 Now, voting illegally in the United States is a federal crime.

00:30:55.000 It is, in fact, a federal crime.

00:30:57.000 And there is no evidence of gigantic number voter fraud in the United States.

00:31:04.000 Now, you can say that it's happening, we just haven't detected it.

00:31:07.000 That's fair, maybe.

00:31:09.000 But just on an evidentiary basis, the notion that tens of thousands of Americans every election cycle are voting fraudulently, that evidence does not exist.

00:31:18.000 Again, that doesn't mean that it's not out, that maybe it's there and we haven't found it yet, or maybe.

00:31:22.000 You think that you've seen a sign of it, but it hasn't been fully evidenced yet.

00:31:26.000 We do have statistics on the number of convictions for voter fraud in the United States since 1982.

00:31:33.000 It's kept up by the Heritage Foundation.

00:31:35.000 And this is a map of where voter fraud has taken place, documented voter fraud in the United States since 1982.

00:31:41.000 And what you will notice here is that the scale goes from zero cases of documented voter fraud in states like Oklahoma and Louisiana and South Carolina to the upper end of this.

00:31:51.000 Again, this is over the course of the last 34 years.

00:31:55.000 Is 138 cases in Minnesota.

00:31:58.000 That is the upper end.

00:31:59.000 Now, that can make a difference, right?

00:32:01.000 Elections matter.

00:32:02.000 And obviously, some elections are really, really, really tight.

00:32:04.000 And I'm quite suspicious of some election results, say, like Al Franken over Norm Coleman, where someone discovers a box of ballots five seconds after the necessity for Al Franken to become a senator.

00:32:15.000 Man, I think a lot of suspicious things happen.

00:32:17.000 Would the current voter bill actually stop that?

00:32:20.000 Not really.

00:32:22.000 I mean, I, I, the current, again, I'm in favor of it.

00:32:25.000 I think it's good.

00:32:25.000 I think that we should.

00:32:26.000 But if the idea is, number one, that you're going to kill the filibuster, which, by the way, I'm just going to point this out.

00:32:33.000 There is a very, very good shot that sometime in the next six years, Democrats will be in control of the House and the Senate.

00:32:39.000 And maybe the presidency.

00:32:40.000 You don't know.

00:32:41.000 28 could go the wrong way.

00:32:43.000 How would you like a Democratic Congress where the Republicans have already killed the filibuster?

00:32:47.000 They don't even have to make the argument.

00:32:48.000 They already have killed the filibuster and Democrats just waltz right in and do whatever they want. 0.77

00:32:51.000 Now, again, Democrats might do that.

00:32:53.000 themselves, which is why I have recommended to Senator Thune that what Republicans should propose is a constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster permanently.

00:33:02.000 And if Democrats won't do it, then you nuke the filibuster.

00:33:05.000 That seems to me a useful tool.

00:33:09.000 However, when we talk about voter fraud, one of the reasons why we distrust the stuff that goes directly to, again, your amygdala is the idea your vote is threatened.

00:33:20.000 Your vote is threatened by millions of people who wish to falsely vote in the election.

00:33:23.000 And to thwart your capacity to elect your officials, the government doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the fraudulent.

00:33:28.000 Right?

00:33:29.000 Okay, that pitch is an amygdala pitch.

00:33:32.000 And then on the left, there's a parallel amygdala pitch.

00:33:35.000 Any attempt, any attempt to require further documentation for voting is an attempt to stop you and your friends from voting and your family from voting.

00:33:43.000 Your wife won't be able to vote if the voter suppression bill is passed.

00:33:46.000 Here's Cory Booker, for example, making that case in March. 0.97

00:33:51.000 Massive voter suppression bill that would make it very difficult for millions of Americans, especially women.

00:33:58.000 Who have changed their name, their name on their birth certificate, no longer matches the name on their real ID or driver's license.

00:34:05.000 It would cause chaos to voting and really shrink the voting rolls 5 or 10 percent, given the effect it would have.

00:34:14.000 Okay, so again, the idea is it's voter suppression.

00:34:16.000 So Democrats are constantly claiming voter suppression, and Republicans are constantly claiming voter fraud.

00:34:20.000 And the answer is there is no voter suppression.

00:34:22.000 And the evidence of voter fraud on a mass scale again, yes, there are absolutely individual cases of voter fraud.

00:34:27.000 They are illegal.

00:34:28.000 We should prosecute them.

00:34:29.000 And yes, of course, we should pass the SAVE Act.

00:34:31.000 But if the idea, the reason I'm objecting to this is not because I think there might not be individual cases of voter fraud or even the possibility of LART.

00:34:38.000 The problem is if the case that is currently being made, that's being made on large slots of the left, is that every election that is lost is the result of voter suppression.

00:34:47.000 And if on the case on the right is every election that is lost is based on voter fraud, you cannot have a well respected election ever again.

00:34:55.000 And that is a trust issue.

00:34:57.000 That is a fundamental trust issue.

00:34:59.000 If Democrats are trying to blow up the filibuster for the so called Equality Act, so as to cram down ballot harvesting, That's terrible on two levels. 0.83

00:35:07.000 The Equality Act is trash, and also blowing up the filibuster is a terrible idea.

00:35:12.000 And there's this notion out there that is put forward by people on all sides that Congress is there to do things. 0.89

00:35:17.000 Wrong.

00:35:18.000 Congress is not there to do things.

00:35:19.000 Congress is there to do things that are widely approved by the American people.

00:35:24.000 That is why there are checks and balances.

00:35:26.000 The founders wanted it that way.

00:35:27.000 Why?

00:35:28.000 Because in order to manufacture popular legislation, they wanted you to have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get to a true majoritarian position.

00:35:37.000 If the United States starts to look like parliamentary democracies in other parts of the world where a coalition just rams through whatever it wants, and then the next four years, a new coalition comes in and rams through whatever it wants, there is no sense of stability.

00:35:51.000 There is no sense of trust.

00:35:54.000 That is the kind of stuff that is being eroded.

00:35:55.000 So in short, yes, the Save Act is a good thing.

00:35:58.000 It should be pushed.

00:35:59.000 Should we blow up the filibuster?

00:36:01.000 Should that be blown up?

00:36:02.000 That would be a large scale mistake.

00:36:04.000 Okay, meanwhile, a lot of focus obviously on the midterms.

00:36:07.000 I should remind you that whatever we say right now will largely be irrelevant by the time we hit the midterms because it is currently April and the midterms are in November.

00:36:17.000 Nate Silver has a chart showing sort of where things were in terms of the generic ballot and the presidential approval rating in mid April in past election cycles.

00:36:28.000 So the president's approval rating right now is 39.3%, according to Nate Silver's sort of average.

00:36:35.000 And Democrats in the generic congressional ballot have about a 5.7%.

00:36:39.000 Advantage.

00:36:41.000 So if you go back to the last time, this was kind of true.

00:36:43.000 Go back to 2018, the president at that point had a 40.7% approval rating, so pretty close to right now.

00:36:50.000 Democrats had a much larger generic ballot advantage.

00:36:53.000 It turned out they had a 7.6% generic ballot advantage.

00:36:57.000 And in the House popular vote, they ended up with about an 8.6% popular vote advantage.

00:37:04.000 And if you go back to 2006, same kind of thing.

00:37:08.000 2006, George W. Bush is president.

00:37:10.000 He's unpopular because of the The Iraq war turning into a counterinsurgency effort.

00:37:14.000 His approval rating is at 35.6%.

00:37:16.000 The generic ballot is up at 11.4% for Democrats.

00:37:20.000 And the House popular vote ends up being an 8% advantage.

00:37:24.000 So, listen, are Republicans in trouble in the House?

00:37:28.000 Of course.

00:37:29.000 Have they been in trouble this entire presidential election cycle?

00:37:31.000 Of course.

00:37:32.000 And the president's approval rating dived originally, not because of the Iran war, it dived because of Liberation Day.

00:37:38.000 This is a point made by Harry Enton on CNN. 0.99

00:37:40.000 Of course, this is just true.

00:37:43.000 Dude, just take the L, man.

00:37:45.000 Just take the L. Tariffs were the biggest unforced political error that I can recall in a long period of time.

00:37:51.000 Because if you're looking for just one turning point in terms of when Donald Trump went underwater, it was right around Liberation Day, man.

00:37:59.000 Just take a look here.

00:38:00.000 Trump's negative net approval rating.

00:38:02.000 Every poll since March 29, 2025, right?

00:38:06.000 Liberation Day was just a few days later.

00:38:08.000 That means that Donald Trump, there hasn't been a single poll that meets CNN's standards for reporting in which he has had Anything but a negative net approval rating for 389 days. 0.78

00:38:19.000 As I said, dude, just take the altarists, they are a terrible political thing for you, my man. 0.71

00:38:27.000 Okay, so the reason I point this out is because there is now an attempt to suggest that the Iran war uniquely is what is driving down congressional approval ratings for Republicans. 0.98

00:38:34.000 That is not true.

00:38:36.000 The generic congressional ballot for Republicans has been fairly stable and steady for the last multiple months, and it mirrors the president's approval rating, of course, of course.

00:38:46.000 And if the outcome of the war in Iran is good, then presumably there'll be a bit of a rebound.

00:38:50.000 And if the outcome of the war happens sometime in the next few weeks, nobody is going to be thinking about that come November.

00:38:56.000 Okay, however, when it comes to the outcome of the midterms, this is why I say don't unsheath weapons the other side is going to use once you've unsheathed them.

00:39:05.000 You can't unbreak the glass.

00:39:06.000 Once the glass is broken, it just stays broken. 0.99

00:39:09.000 Okay, so now the latest on Iran.

00:39:11.000 So last night, the president put out a truth in which he said that he was going to hold off attacking.

00:39:18.000 Iran.

00:39:18.000 That was the deadline, right?

00:39:19.000 There was a two week ceasefire deadline.

00:39:21.000 And the president put out a statement on Truth Social.

00:39:26.000 Quote Based on the fact that the government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so, and upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shabazz Sharif of Pakistan, we've been asked to hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.

00:39:41.000 I have therefore directed our military to continue the blockade and, in all other respects, remain steady and able, and will therefore extend the ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted and discussions are concluded one way or the other.

00:39:52.000 Now, there are a couple of ways to read this sort of mysterious move because a lot of people are saying, they didn't even send a team to Pakistan to negotiate.

00:40:01.000 They didn't even send a team to Pakistan at all.

00:40:04.000 So, what exactly are you waiting for?

00:40:05.000 So, Trump is saying, listen, they're not sending a team because part of their team wants to make a deal and part of their team is the IRGC and they don't want to make a deal.

00:40:13.000 And, of course, Iran is treating this as a sign of weakness.

00:40:16.000 They're trying to suggest that the president is extending the so called ceasefire.

00:40:19.000 It's not really a ceasefire, as we'll talk about in a moment, in order to avoid having to restart.

00:40:25.000 Military action.

00:40:27.000 Okay, let's get real.

00:40:28.000 Here is the reason the president is doing this. 0.99

00:40:30.000 The Iranians believe they have one chief weapon left in their arsenal. 0.89

00:40:34.000 It is not their ballistic missile capacity, it is not even their capacity to shut the Strait of Hormuz. 0.98

00:40:39.000 It's time.

00:40:40.000 They believe that so long as this lasts, President Trump's clock is ticking.

00:40:44.000 Now, President Trump has spent the entire week, the entire week, talking about how the clock is not ticking for him.

00:40:50.000 He says it over and over and over on Truth Social.

00:40:52.000 You guys keep trying to rush me, you keep trying to say time is running out.

00:40:55.000 I'm president for three more years.

00:40:57.000 Which is going to last longer?

00:40:59.000 Donald Trump's presidency or the Iranian economy, which is bleeding at the rate of $440 million every day, and they don't have an economy to start with.

00:41:09.000 So that's what's actually happening here.

00:41:10.000 The actual thing that's happening here is President Trump is perfectly happy to sit there and strangle the Iranian economy with the blockade on Iranian product.

00:41:17.000 It is the rest of the world that has a clock.

00:41:19.000 It's China that has a clock because they need the oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz.

00:41:24.000 It is Japan that has a clock. 0.69

00:41:25.000 It's Europe that has a clock.

00:41:27.000 But President Trump is like, listen, you want to, you want to take your time?

00:41:31.000 Take all the time you need because you don't have an economy and it's getting worse every single day.

00:41:36.000 This is a point that was made by Scott Besant on Twitter, the Treasury Secretary.

00:41:40.000 Letting sort of the cat out of the bag on the strategy here.

00:41:44.000 He said, as the president has made clear, the United States Navy will continue the blockade of Iranian ports.

00:41:48.000 In a matter of days, Karg Island storage will be full and the fragile Iranian oil wells will be shut in.

00:41:53.000 Constraining Iran's maritime trade directly targets the regime's primary revenue lifelines.

00:41:57.000 The U.S. Treasury will continue to apply maximum pressure through economic theory to systematically degrade Tehran's ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds.

00:42:05.000 Any person or vessel facilitating these flows through covert trade and finance risks exposure to U.S. sanctions. 0.75

00:42:11.000 We continue to freeze the funds stolen by the corrupt leadership on behalf. 0.99

00:42:14.000 Of the people of Iran. 0.93

00:42:15.000 Now, again, the idea here is their economy is toast and it's getting toastier every single second.

00:42:21.000 It is getting burned.

00:42:24.000 Well, President Trump then put out another truth socialist. 0.52

00:42:26.000 He says, listen, Iran is trying to save face here.

00:42:29.000 He posted this after the extension of the ceasefire, which again is not really an extension.

00:42:33.000 He says, Iran doesn't want the Strait of Hormuz closed.

00:42:35.000 They want it open so they can make $500 million a day, which is therefore what they are losing if it is closed.

00:42:40.000 They only say they want it closed because I have it totally blockaded and closed, so they merely want to save face.

00:42:45.000 People approached me four days ago saying, Sir, Iran wants to open up the strait immediately. 0.75

00:42:49.000 But if we do that, there can never be a deal with Iran unless we blow up the rest of their country, their leaders included. 0.99

00:42:53.000 Okay, that's the whole thing. 1.00

00:42:54.000 But he's saying, Our chief leverage now is their economy.

00:42:57.000 And if you want me to open up the strait, then I'm going to blow up.

00:43:01.000 Those are the two choices.

00:43:03.000 And that is right. 1.00

00:43:04.000 And this is why the Iranians are thrashing against the box, just thrashing against the box.

00:43:09.000 The foreign minister, Abbas Arahi, put out a statement blockading Iranian ports is an act of war and thus a violation of the ceasefire.

00:43:15.000 So he's calling for an end to the ceasefire.

00:43:17.000 The Iranians are saying the ceasefire is over, not President Trump.

00:43:20.000 Not President Trump, who's seeking an off ramp in the form of a peace deal here. 0.93

00:43:25.000 And the Iranians are like, no, no, no, this is an act of war. 0.98

00:43:28.000 That's pretty pathetic stuff here. 1.00

00:43:30.000 They're blockading the entire Strait of Hormuz except for their own product. 0.97

00:43:33.000 Trump blockades their product and they say, hey, that's an act of war.

00:43:36.000 That's a step too far.

00:43:38.000 And this was shortly before, apparently, the Iranian Navy fired upon multiple ships.

00:43:48.000 They seized, the IRGC said it seized two ships, according to NBC News.

00:43:52.000 And then targeted a third.

00:43:53.000 Quote, three ships have been targeted this morning by Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the semi official news agency Fars has reported.

00:43:59.000 A Greek owned ship named Euphoria is now stranded on Iran's shores, Fars reported in a telegram post.

00:44:04.000 Fars reported that the IRGC had also targeted two other violating ships, the MSC Francesca and Apimanandes, which it said belonged to the shipping giant MSC and had been attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

00:44:15.000 So they are the ones who continue to blockade and fire on the ships.

00:44:18.000 And again, this entire time during the so called ceasefire where the Strait of Hormuz was supposed to be open, it has not in fact been open.

00:44:24.000 They have been continuing to close it.

00:44:27.000 It's just the president realized that, hey, it hurts them significantly worse than it hurts us.

00:44:31.000 See, as I say, Tehran is losing $500 million a day.

00:44:35.000 The United States, we could lose $500 million a day.

00:44:39.000 And our federal budget alone, at the tune of $500 million a day, it would take like 1,500 days for the federal budget to be paid for by that amount of money. 0.62

00:44:49.000 That's how big we are compared to the Tehran government. 0.60

00:44:55.000 So, again, they're basically thrashing against the box.

00:44:57.000 They're trying to generate angst inside the United States, anger inside the United States.

00:45:03.000 The United States is also taking measures to sanction individuals, entities, and aircraft based in Iran, Turkey, and the UAE for involvement in procuring or transporting weapons or weapons components on behalf of the Iranian regime.

00:45:13.000 So, we're strangling them economically.

00:45:14.000 We are also strangling them in terms of what can be shipped in and out. 0.92

00:45:20.000 And the reality is that this is also hurting China, right?

00:45:23.000 China wants this to come to an end.

00:45:24.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, An opinion piece?

00:45:29.000 China, according to multiple reports, has provided Iran with satellite imagery, components, and intelligence needed to attack infrastructure and shipping, as well as U.S. targets in Gulf countries.

00:45:40.000 But all this means is that Gulf countries are now realigning with the United States.

00:45:44.000 In 2024, Saudi supplied 14% of China's crude, Iraq 10%, Oman 7%, UAE 6%.

00:45:50.000 Those four Gulf states accounted for about 37% of China's oil imports.

00:45:55.000 China's enabling of Iranian aggression endangers suppliers that collectively matter more than three times as much to the Chinese economy. 0.75

00:46:01.000 As Iran does.

00:46:04.000 So, again, this idea that Trump is doing something totally un. 0.84

00:46:07.000 We don't understand what he's doing.

00:46:09.000 What he's doing is perfectly obvious if you have the eyes to see it.

00:46:13.000 He is strangling the Iranian economy.

00:46:15.000 And as he says, if we opened up the strait, we'd have to bomb him. 0.99

00:46:19.000 So, their choice.

00:46:21.000 Their choice.

00:46:22.000 Or they can just come to the table. 1.00

00:46:23.000 Their economy is totally bleeding out.

00:46:26.000 They're fracturing because their economy is bleeding out.

00:46:30.000 Meanwhile, there's a lot of talk about the possibility that Samuel Alito.

00:46:35.000 Justice on the Supreme Court, one of the best justices on the Supreme Court, might step down before the midterm elections in an attempt to ensure that a good, solid textualist fills his slot at the Supreme Court.

00:46:45.000 Joining me on the line is Molly Hemingway.

00:46:46.000 She's editor in chief of The Federalist, a senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College, and a Fox News contributor.

00:46:51.000 And her latest book is titled Alito, the Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.

00:46:56.000 Molly, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:46:57.000 Really appreciate it.

00:46:58.000 Ben, it's great to be here with you.

00:47:02.000 So let's talk about Justice Alito.

00:47:04.000 I, of course, am a huge fan of Justice Alito's.

00:47:06.000 There's been a lot of talk.

00:47:07.000 About the possibility that he's going to step down from the Supreme Court in the near future.

00:47:11.000 What do you think is the case for?

00:47:12.000 Do you think he's going to do that?

00:47:14.000 Well, a lot of people are pushing him to retire because they think that Trump would be able to appoint someone much younger.

00:47:21.000 They don't push Justice Thomas, who's our longest serving and oldest justice on the court, because Justice Thomas has said he's going out feet first.

00:47:30.000 So people just know not to pressure him.

00:47:32.000 But both Thomas and Alito, they kind of let it be known they're not retiring at the end of this term.

00:47:38.000 That matches my understanding, particularly with the Alito chambers.

00:47:43.000 But I do think there's a possibility that there will be a retirement still.

00:47:47.000 We have three Republican appointed justices in their seventies.

00:47:51.000 Uh, and one of them, it's the Chief Justice, who's the second longest serving member currently on the court.

00:47:58.000 But we'll have to wait and see, I guess.

00:48:02.000 So, your book about Samuel Alito, for a lot of people who aren't court watchers and who are constantly kind of watching the more colorful justices in terms of their opinions, and right now, Chief Justice Roberts gets a lot of attention.

00:48:13.000 Clarence Thomas has gotten an extraordinary amount of attention since Justice Scalia's passing.

00:48:17.000 But Justice Alito has been perfectly consistently textualist and originalist in his interpretations for a long time.

00:48:23.000 You say that he's the one who reshaped the Supreme Court.

00:48:25.000 What do you mean by that?

00:48:27.000 Well, people have rightly given Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia a lot of due for what they have done on the court.

00:48:36.000 When Kerry Severino and I were writing our bestselling book on Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation, so many of the people on the court or near the court kept saying, you know, Alito is kind of this giant on the court and nobody ever talks about him.

00:48:50.000 And nobody ever talks about him because he's extremely reserved.

00:48:54.000 He does not seek celebrity in any way.

00:48:56.000 And yet he's kind of the workhorse on the court, the guy who agrees maybe with Thomas.

00:49:02.000 Although just now we got a rare issue from the Supreme Court where Thomas wrote, The opinion with the liberal justices, and Alito wrote the dissent with many of the conservative justices.

00:49:13.000 But they almost always agree.

00:49:15.000 But Thomas will have this really big philosophical position, and he'll say, I think we should be over here.

00:49:21.000 And Alito might disagree, or I'm sorry, Alito might agree with that, but he thinks, okay, how are we going to get there?

00:49:28.000 And he puts that work in, that incrementalist work to get the court to where it should be on religious liberty or on protecting the speech rights of laborers who are not in unions.

00:49:38.000 And it can be a slow, laborious process, which is also less.

00:49:41.000 Dramatic, and yet it's so significant.

00:49:44.000 I think by the time he authored the Dobbs decision and kept the five justices together, at that point, people realized oh, the guy who did the landmark decision, the thing that the conservative legal movement had been hoping for for 50 years, maybe we should be paying some more attention to him.

00:50:01.000 And so I knew I wanted to write the book and tell the inside story of who he is and what's happening on the court and what his peers think of him.

00:50:11.000 So, Molly, one of the things that you talk about at length in the book is obviously the Dobbs decision, as you say, the seminal Supreme Court decision of our lifetimes.

00:50:18.000 And there was so much that went into that, the negotiations behind the scenes, but also that extraordinary, insane leak of the Dobbs opinion early and the supposition that we still have no idea who did it.

00:50:29.000 One of the great mysteries in modern American legal history who leaked the Dobbs decision.

00:50:33.000 You have a fair bit of coverage of that in the book.

00:50:35.000 So, why don't you talk about that a little bit?

00:50:37.000 Well, one of the things I found most interesting in my research for Alito was that.

00:50:42.000 After the leak happened, if you remember, the lives of the justices who signed on to the Dobbs decision were immediately under threat.

00:50:50.000 They had to be moved to secure locations.

00:50:52.000 They had to wear bulletproof vests.

00:50:55.000 The Kavanaugh family had to face down an assassin on their street.

00:50:59.000 I mean, it was a very bad situation firebombings of churches and pro life centers.

00:51:04.000 The situation was fraught.

00:51:05.000 And yet, when they go to meet in conference to kind of find out, like, when is the decision going to come out?

00:51:11.000 And it needed to come out because until a decision is issued by the court, publicly, it's not official.

00:51:17.000 So if one of those justices had been killed, then Roe v. Wade would not have been overturned.

00:51:22.000 And so they find out from their liberal colleagues that they, the liberal colleagues claimed, oh, we're nowhere near being done with our dissent.

00:51:30.000 Even though they'd had like 50 years to work on it and the oral arguments had been in December of the previous year and they'd had the majority opinion since early February, they then proceeded to slow walk it.

00:51:41.000 They said, we can't possibly get it done till June.

00:51:44.000 And then even when they got that done, They put a little note in there, a reference to a decision that really wasn't near being written up, so that it delayed it another three plus weeks.

00:51:59.000 So even though they knew their colleagues were fighting for their lives and were in complete distress and their kids and their spouses, they slow walked the dissent from coming out in order to keep that decision delayed as long as possible.

00:52:12.000 It is actually amazing that there's as much collegiality on the court as there is, given that these types of antics are being used.

00:52:21.000 So let's talk about the collegiality on the court for just a second, Molly.

00:52:23.000 So, obviously, there's this sort of famous relationship between Justice Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who are on completely polar ends of the spectrum when it came to Supreme Court jurisprudence.

00:52:32.000 What is the situation at the Supreme Court right now in terms of collegiality?

00:52:36.000 Again, that's been sort of a famous aspect of the court for a long time.

00:52:40.000 People have focused on it for a long time.

00:52:42.000 Chief Justices, they used to all live together when they were in session in a house near Capitol Hill.

00:52:48.000 They, Rehnquist famously said it was difficult because they're all as independent as.

00:52:53.000 Nine hogs on ice. 1.00

00:52:56.000 They all have their strongly held opinions. 1.00

00:52:58.000 But previously, they used to keep their problems with each other confined to what they wrote.

00:53:04.000 So they might write a decision or dissent where they complain about each other.

00:53:09.000 Justice Scalia once said that Clarence Thomas had crafted a freedom destroying cocktail with a certain opinion he had.

00:53:18.000 So the next time they went out for drinks, Clarence Thomas ordered a freedom destroying cocktail.

00:53:24.000 The idea being they didn't take it personally.

00:53:26.000 What we've seen more recently is that the liberal justices are publicly going after some of their colleagues and publicly undermining the integrity of the court itself.

00:53:37.000 This is a longstanding norm that has been broken in recent years.

00:53:42.000 And I think it also is adding to the trouble, even as they genuinely do try to get along and keep things civil.

00:53:50.000 They only have their eight colleagues, they have to, and they've got lifetime appointments, so they try to keep things civil.

00:53:58.000 Well, the book is a must read about Samuel Leto, again, one of the great justices in American history.

00:54:01.000 It's called The Leto, the Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.

00:54:05.000 Molly Hemingway is the author.

00:54:06.000 Molly, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:54:07.000 Really appreciate it.

00:54:08.000 Thank you, Ben.

00:54:11.000 Well, meanwhile, there is a new episode of Be a Man with Me with Pavel Widowski out right now.

00:54:16.000 You should go check it out over at Daily Wire Plus.

00:54:18.000 It's awesome and it's hilarious.

00:54:19.000 Pavel's, he's just great.

00:54:23.000 Fire needs three things to exist air.

00:54:25.000 Yep. 0.88

00:54:26.000 Fire.

00:54:28.000 You want me to?

00:54:28.000 What is this, by the way?

00:54:29.000 It's kind of.

00:54:31.000 Let's say you're driving on the highway and the worst possible thing happens nuclear explosion. 0.99

00:54:38.000 E M P. Your car doesn't work, you're alone, you're in the woods, you have no water, no food, you need to survive long enough to get back to civilization. 0.99

00:54:47.000 What are you going to do?

00:54:48.000 Come with me if you want to live.

00:54:50.000 This is Mitch Vayouf.

00:54:52.000 Mitch knows everything and he can do anything to show me how to survive.

00:54:58.000 What am I doing here?

00:54:59.000 That's a great question.

00:55:00.000 We're going to try to make sure you don't die.

00:55:02.000 Okay.

00:55:03.000 We're going to be building what's called a debris shelter.

00:55:05.000 We're going to have to find the water.

00:55:06.000 We're going to have to clean the water.

00:55:08.000 So we're building fire right here.

00:55:09.000 Yep.

00:55:10.000 We need to split this down into all of our kindling.

00:55:17.000 Why men are meant to struggle?

00:55:19.000 It's because good things worth doing are hard to do.

00:55:24.000 I love that you did it all just using your hands when you have that sweet pocket knife with a saw in the back of it.

00:55:30.000 That is a valid point.

00:55:31.000 It's okay.

00:55:35.000 When you see something. living, just throw something at it.

00:55:46.000 That's great.

00:55:47.000 Go check it out right now over at Daily Wire Plus.

00:55:49.000 And by the way, I'm going to watch that because I feel like I need some survival tips.

00:55:53.000 I mean, I'm like a fast talking Jew who lives in urban areas.

00:55:56.000 So if there were an EMP, I'd be the first to go.

00:55:59.000 All righty, coming up, we'll get to the latest on the economy calls to basically seize property from older Americans from a columnist over at the New York Times.

00:56:09.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:56:10.000 If you're not a member, become one, use code Shapiro.

00:56:13.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

00:56:14.000 Click that link in the description and join us.

The Ben Shapiro Show - April 22, 2026

DOJ Catches Libs Funding The KKK

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