The Ben Shapiro Show - October 22, 2026


Hasan Piker Is Melting Down Over My Take. The Irony Is Insane.

Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Amy Acton Hassan Piker Vivek Ramaswamy Scott Galloway Abdul El-Sayed Ilhan Omar Mamdani
A Pollster Got Caught Faking the Data — and the NYT Ran With It 15 Times.

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

178.97

Word count

1,390

Sentence count

95


Transcript

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Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So, we are now in day three of the Vivek Ramaswamy ad gate.
00:00:05.000 Now, you'll recall that over the weekend, Ramaswamy put out a brutal ad against Amy Acton featuring Amy Acton's mom.
00:00:13.000 Now, again, the ad is, as I literally said yesterday, dicey at best.
00:00:17.000 In fact, here is a clip of me saying that yesterday for those who have short term memory loss.
00:00:21.000 The pushback on the ad is that it's not Amy Acton who has a problem, it's Amy Acton's mom who has the problem.
00:00:26.000 And Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign are jumping right into the middle of all of this, which, of course, is dicey business for sure.
00:00:34.000 Okay, it's dicey because, as I also said yesterday, the history of the family is really ugly and messy and disputed.
00:00:41.000 Amy Acton alleges that as a child, she was sexually assaulted by her stepfather.
00:00:45.000 Her mother did lose custody of her when she was 12.
00:00:47.000 Her stepfather fled the state.
00:00:49.000 Again, I talked at length about this yesterday.
00:00:50.000 This is nothing new.
00:00:51.000 I'm not going to replay that because it was literally yesterday's show.
00:00:53.000 You can just listen to it from yesterday.
00:00:55.000 So, yeah, that is a horrible story from her childhood.
00:00:59.000 And assuming her stepfather did any of that, I hope he is burning in the fiery pits of hell right now.
00:01:03.000 And if her mother was complicit in a cover up of all of that, Which again is the tacit allegation and sometimes explicit allegation being made by pretty much all the people who are going nuts over the ad.
00:01:14.000 She should be tracked down even at her age and punished by force of law.
00:01:17.000 By the way, if those people want to make that direct allegation against Amy Acton's mom, they're free to do so and maybe she'll sue them.
00:01:22.000 Maybe she won't.
00:01:24.000 So then there's the politics of this.
00:01:27.000 I can think this ad is dicey and bad and also immoral in that it is using a disputed family circumstance in which the mom by the available evidence appears to be At least part of the problem, or the entire problem, and in which the only legal allegations had been made were against the stepdad, and he fled the state and all of that.
00:01:46.000 Like, that's gross and bad.
00:01:48.000 We can also recognize, as I also said yesterday, that politics is filled with immoral, dicey, and bad ads, and that many of the people putting on their shocked faces are famously enthusiastic about terrible attacks on political opponents featuring family members, which again, I don't want to replay all of yesterday's show.
00:02:02.000 I said it yesterday.
00:02:03.000 You can just listen to yesterday's show.
00:02:05.000 But some people are very offended about what I said yesterday.
00:02:09.000 These people have no right to be offended about anything.
00:02:11.000 Say, like, Hassan Piker.
00:02:14.000 This is supposed to be the smart and educated Republican.
00:02:17.000 And if this is the best they have to offer, I say we do away with all of it.
00:02:28.000 Even the most well read, well educated, sane Republican ends up defending an attack ad that disparages a child rape victim.
00:02:40.000 Okay, so just to be clear, he's arguing that because I supposedly defended the Ramaswamy ad, which I didn't, I said it was dicey, I said it wasn't smart politics.
00:02:49.000 I merely pointed out that Democrats are happy to dig into the dirt at every available opportunity, say the worst possible things about their opponents, and now are putting on their shocked faces, that somehow I'm defending what allegedly happened to Amy Acton, according to Hassan Piker.
00:03:01.000 Like that's crazy, truly crazy.
00:03:04.000 The facts are the things that you should care about.
00:03:06.000 Now, when it comes to the American dream, the facts matter as well.
00:03:10.000 Everybody has an opinion about the American dream, whether it's alive, whether it's dying, whether the government is helping people achieve it or making it harder.
00:03:15.000 Before we argue about the answers, we should probably understand the numbers.
00:03:19.000 Income inequality, entitlements, housing costs.
00:03:21.000 What is the government actually doing?
00:03:23.000 What does it cost?
00:03:23.000 Who's benefiting?
00:03:24.000 Those are the questions behind my debate on the American dream with left of center Scott Galloway.
00:03:29.000 The debate is framed by an informative set of government facts from USA Facts.
00:03:33.000 Then Scott and I get into what those numbers mean, where we think the country should go from here.
00:03:37.000 Because agreeing on the facts doesn't mean agreeing on the policy.
00:03:40.000 You can look at the same data and reach very different conclusions.
00:03:42.000 And that's where the debate gets interesting.
00:03:44.000 There are sharp differences, common ground, and actual discussion beyond the usual political sound bites and rehearsed talking points.
00:03:49.000 Watch it.
00:03:50.000 Way the arguments come away knowing more.
00:03:52.000 Check out the full debate right now on USA Facts YouTube channel.
00:03:57.000 Already has several million views.
00:03:59.000 Be one of them.
00:03:59.000 Go check it out, USA Facts YouTube channel.
00:04:02.000 And listening to us on Piker on this is, dude, you openly defend and advocate for actual rape.
00:04:11.000 You're not talking about ads or what's appropriate or what's immoral or what's decent or politically smart.
00:04:17.000 This is a human who has defended honest to God actual rape.
00:04:22.000 Doesn't matter.
00:04:23.000 Doesn't matter if rapes happen on October 7th.
00:04:25.000 Like, that doesn't change the dynamic for me even this much.
00:04:29.000 So, that's the other part of this problem.
00:04:31.000 If you have these.
00:04:33.000 Millionaire, billionaire, wasp, fail sons, at least taking them out of other colleges so they can only do date rape to other billionaire, millionaire, fail daughters is like, in some respects, you know, from a utilitarian perspective, of course, a little bit better.
00:04:50.000 These are horrifying atrocities that they did, right?
00:04:54.000 But that it is not coming out of a place of, you know, this antiquated anti Semitic tendencies or that they wanted to go out and like do mass rapes.
00:05:04.000 What rapes did Hezbollah do?
00:05:05.000 Bro, what rapes did Hamas do?
00:05:07.000 What are you talking about?
00:05:10.000 I'm not going to be lectured by Hassan Piker on all of this.
00:05:15.000 All of which brings us back to the issue at hand in elections who you ought to vote for.
00:05:19.000 Who you ought to vote for.
00:05:21.000 As I said yesterday, this is what a huge bulk of the early show was about.
00:05:26.000 The question of the ad is secondary to the question of who ought to be the governor of Ohio.
00:05:30.000 I think there are a lot of reasons why Amy Acton ought not to be governor of Ohio.
00:05:34.000 In fact, I said that it was a bad campaign strategy to put out an ad featuring her mom under at best disputed circumstances.
00:05:42.000 That in fact, the ad should have just been about how Amy Acton, if Vivek thinks she's a liar, that she's a liar and provide all the evidence that she's a liar.
00:05:48.000 For his part, Vivek Ramaswamy is defending that ad.
00:05:51.000 He is saying that as long as Amy Acton won't even debate the merits of the ad, won't get into the ring with him, won't debate, won't talk about anything, he's going to basically put out whatever he wants to put out.
00:06:00.000 And it's true that Amy Acton has rejected a debate with Vivek Ramaswamy at this point, that she's basically been avoiding the cameras in a lot of ways.
00:06:07.000 All that's true.
00:06:08.000 Again, I think that's what Vivek should have probably focused on in the first place.
00:06:13.000 Clearly, it'll be interesting to see where the Ohio governor's race goes.
00:06:16.000 Is, is the ad going to be more effective or will the blowback actually hurt Vivek?
00:06:20.000 Now, with all of that said, putting the ad to the side, the question is, who ought to be the governor?
00:06:24.000 So here is my advice.
00:06:26.000 Don't elect the people who are allied with Hassan Piker or Abdul El Sayed or Zaran Mamdani or Ilhan Omar.
00:06:34.000 Don't do it.
00:06:35.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:06:37.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:06:38.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.
00:07:19.000 Professor you sit there and shake because you're dependent on drink your sick is all over you have you Have you ever seen a child starve to death, Professor?
00:07:44.000 No. I have.