The Ben Shapiro Show - Here’s How China SPIES on the US

00:00:00.000 China is not just America's geopolitical opponent. 0.98

00:00:03.000 They are our geopolitical enemy. 0.90

00:00:06.000 They have been our geopolitical enemy since the establishment of the Chinese communist regime in 1949.

00:00:12.000 Now, you may have spent some decades pretending that this isn't true.

00:00:15.000 Richard Nixon famously moved to open China as a way of separating China from the Soviet Union at the time.

00:00:21.000 And some neoliberals may have opened our markets to Chinese goods, hoping that free markets would lead to political moderation. 0.76

00:00:28.000 But all that time, China was still our enemy. 0.88

00:00:30.000 The People's Republic of China is a historically mass murdering, currently terror supporting surveillance state of unprecedented proportions, directed at destroying America's global hegemony. 0.90

00:00:40.000 And they're taking the long view. 0.94

00:00:41.000 They can wait us out.

00:00:43.000 And they are taking advantage of our openness to defeat us. 0.88

00:00:45.000 Whether it's stealing literally tens of billions of dollars in IP, stacking American universities with Chinese operatives, or infiltrating our political system, China is, in fact, our geopolitical enemy. 0.84

00:00:55.000 And it's time to fight back. 0.62

00:00:57.000 Today, we'll discuss how to do so.

00:00:59.000 Plus, we'll get to the legacy media doing the work of the West's enemies.

00:01:02.000 The new inflation report showing the impact of President Trump's Iran operation and also why Americans are not having babies.

00:01:08.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:01:18.000 So this week, President Trump is headed on over to China.

00:01:21.000 He is bringing with him many of the tech leaders, some of his diplomats and top cabinet officials.

00:01:26.000 While that is happening, it has now been revealed that the mayor of Arcadia, California, which is sort of a mid-major city, a person named Eileen Wang, has now resigned because it turns out that she was a foreign agent, allegedly, of China.

00:01:38.000 According to the Los Angeles Times, Wang served as mayor of the San Gabriel Valley suburb and entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors over charges she acted under the control of the PRC.

00:01:50.000 To promote propaganda in the United States between 2020 and 2022.

00:01:55.000 From late 2020 through at least 2022, Wang worked with a person named Yaoning Mike Sun.

00:02:01.000 That would be her former fiance to run a website called US News Center that branded itself as a news source for Chinese Americans.

00:02:07.000 Both Wang and Sun executed directives from Chinese government officials, posted, posting requested articles, reporting back with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories according to the plea agreement.

00:02:18.000 They did propaganda on behalf of the Chinese government is basically what happened.

00:02:24.000 Turns out that she was mayor of Arcadia.

00:02:26.000 And well, if only this was an isolated incident, but it absolutely is not. 0.76

00:02:31.000 We actually have Chinese agents who are honeycombed throughout the American government at all levels. 0.60

00:02:35.000 Back in 2024, a person named Linda Sun, who is the deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, and previously an aide to Andrew Cuomo, it was alleged that she used her position to block Taiwanese representatives from meeting with governors, alter messaging, and obtain state proclamations on behalf of Chinese officials.

00:02:53.000 She was prosecuted by the DOJ.

00:02:54.000 You all remember Fang Fang, that'd be Christine Fang. 1.00

00:02:57.000 This would be the honeypot Chinese agent who is shtupping Eric Swalwell. 0.97

00:03:02.000 And Eric Swalwell, of course, being a dullard, didn't recognize what was going on at the time. 0.98

00:03:06.000 Supposedly, Victor Davis Hansen actually hilariously pointed out that Fang Fang had tried to hit him up, but he's smart enough to realize that random, decent looking 20 year old Chinese women don't just run up to professors at Cal State Fresno. 0.98

00:03:19.000 In any case, she fled the United States in 2015.

00:03:23.000 In 2013, you'll recall that there's Dianne Feinstein, top staffer, who had been there for 20 years, a staffer and driver.

00:03:29.000 In Feinstein's San Francisco office, who is reporting back to the secret services of the Chinese government.

00:03:36.000 There's an activist named Xu Zhenwang, who founded an organization in New York that collected information on the Chinese diaspora and reported it back to the Chinese secret services.

00:03:45.000 He was convicted of this activity in 2024.

00:03:48.000 There's a donor named Cindy Yang in 2019, who founded the National Committee of Asian American Republicans, who was accused of selling access to President Trump and his family and was being investigated by the FBI.

00:03:59.000 A Harvard professor of chemistry and chemical biology named Dr. Charles Lieber apparently had a contract.

00:04:03.000 With the Wuhan University of Technology that paid him handsomely.

00:04:06.000 He did not report that income to the IRS.

00:04:08.000 And he was also involved, allegedly, with the Thousand Talents Plan, which sought to bring foreign scientific expertise to China.

00:04:14.000 He ended up relocating to China in 2025.

00:04:17.000 By the way, good indicator that you're working for China is you end up living there because ain't nobody who really, really, really wants to move to China full time.

00:04:24.000 Not an amazing place to live unless you are receiving benefits from the Chinese government.

00:04:28.000 In 2019, Harvard researcher Xiaozhong Zhang was arrested at Logan Airport for trying to smuggle 21 vials of biological research in a sock, and he ended up.

00:04:38.000 Being deported.

00:04:39.000 And of course, just last this week, actually, a man identifying himself as Chris Chen, according to the New York Times, came armed with a lucrative offer when he reached out to an aide to a House committee focused on threats from China.

00:04:56.000 The staff member, according to the report from the New York Times, was offered $10,000 or more by barely lifting a finger.

00:05:04.000 All he needed to do was agree to phone calls every other week to share information about the committee's work and U.S. foreign policy about China.

00:05:12.000 So, Chen, it appears, was essentially acting as a cutout for the Chinese.

00:05:17.000 The aide, instead of accepting the deal, reported it to his bosses on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and the panel concluded Chen was not a Singapore based business consultant, but instead likely a Chinese intelligence officer or a contractor seeking a new recruit. 0.61

00:05:31.000 And as we know, China's technological development has been largely based on stealing American IP. 0.76

00:05:36.000 We are talking about not tens of billions, hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in American IP stolen by the Chinese. 0.91

00:05:43.000 We know. 0.98

00:05:44.000 That China sends exchange students to the United States to learn about our technologies, to make connections, and then to act as Chinese operatives. 0.80

00:05:54.000 China is, in fact, trying to eat our lunch by using the power of being able to cram down suffering on their people in order to challenge us geopolitically. 0.76

00:06:03.000 Well, all of this leads up to President Trump heading on over to China. 0.91

00:06:06.000 There have been some rumors that President Trump is going to make overtures to China by not selling as many weapons to Taiwan.

00:06:14.000 Or by allowing China to invest in data centers or manufacturing centers in the United States, both of which would be terrible ideas.

00:06:20.000 President Trump is traveling with a lot of our business leaders, and this speaks to some of the big challenges.

00:06:25.000 Already coming up, more on President Trump's trip to China and what we can do to fight back against China's opposition to the United States. 0.94

00:06:32.000 I mean, they're infiltrating pretty much every area of American life. 0.98

00:06:35.000 We'll get to it in a moment.

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00:07:42.000 Again, over the past few decades, there's been this perception that if we became intertangled, Economically speaking, with the Chinese government, somehow this would liberalize the Chinese government.

00:07:52.000 Precisely the opposite has happened.

00:07:54.000 And so there are a number of massive industries in the United States that have their supply chains chiefly based in China.

00:07:59.000 That is true for Apple.

00:08:01.000 It is true for Tesla.

00:08:02.000 It is true for an enormous number of American businesses.

00:08:05.000 And so a lot of big business people are traveling with President Trump to China.

00:08:09.000 That includes Elon Musk as well as Tim Cook, according to the New York Post.

00:08:13.000 Meta President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick, BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink, Boeing President and CEO Kelly Ortberg are also part of the U.S. delegation.

00:08:21.000 Now, again, President Trump is trying to right the U.S. trade imbalance with Beijing by having the Chinese buy a bunch of stuff from us, including soybeans and planes and other goods. 0.53

00:08:29.000 The reality is, what we actually should be trying to do is box China in.

00:08:33.000 We should not be looking for China to buy more of our products. 0.78

00:08:36.000 We should be trying to buy less of China's product.

00:08:38.000 The president was right about that.

00:08:41.000 And of course, the idea that China wants to coordinate with us on AI is total nonsense.

00:08:46.000 So there's apparently a conflict inside the Trump administration over cooperation with China on AI.

00:08:52.000 According to the Washington Post, as President Trump prepares to travel to a summit in China, his administration is sharply split over a plan to give U.S. intelligence agencies a bigger role in evaluating AI models.

00:09:03.000 According to two people familiar with the matter, the White House is grappling with new cybersecurity threats posed by mythos and similarly advanced models.

00:09:11.000 So, again, there are a lot of people in the administration who are saying that the federal government should take a sharper eye with regard to AI and their models. 0.85

00:09:18.000 And then there are people who say, well, hey, hey, if you use the federal government, particularly if it ends up being turned over to Democrats, to basically crack down on AI, you're giving China an advantage, which pretty clearly happens to be true. 0.78

00:09:29.000 So, what should we be doing about China? 0.96

00:09:32.000 Because this has implications for our foreign policy.

00:09:32.000 What should we be doing about China?

00:09:35.000 In a wide variety of other spheres. 0.98

00:09:36.000 I've been making the argument for a very long time that what we actually need to do with regard to China is cut them off at the knees. 0.99

00:09:43.000 The best way to do that is to economically isolate them. 0.96

00:09:45.000 This took the four in 2020 when China unleashed the Wuhan virus on the rest of humanity by lying, by pretending that it was not transmissible human to human, by fibbing to the WHO, which was basically a Chinese front organization at that point. 0.92

00:10:01.000 And a lot of folks correctly pointed out that we have manufacturing chains leading back to China and we need to find ways. 0.93

00:10:07.000 To actually decouple from China. 0.99

00:10:09.000 This is right. 0.98

00:10:10.000 So, what should we be doing? 0.85

00:10:12.000 Well, if we actually want to isolate ourselves from China, if we wish to decouple from China without China eating our lunch with other countries, we need to use both carrot and stick.

00:10:20.000 That means we need to cut good trade deals with, for example, Canada. 0.83

00:10:25.000 And one of the reasons that I was opposed to President Trump's trade war with Canada is because it would push that government into the arms of the Chinese. 0.81

00:10:31.000 In fact, Pierre Poliev, who was the conservative party candidate in Canada, was slated to win the prime ministerial election over there.

00:10:38.000 He ended up losing because of the trade war, and the person who replaced Justin Trudeau ended up being Mark Carney, who is perfectly warm toward making common cause with the Chinese.

00:10:48.000 We need to cut better trade deals with all of the people who are in the in between, who might move toward China and might move toward us.

00:10:54.000 We need to offer them carrots. 0.55

00:10:55.000 That's better trade deals with Canada, better trade deals with the Europeans, better trade deals with Japan and South Korea and Indonesia and Malaysia and Australia. 0.87

00:11:04.000 We need, in other words, to isolate China by demonstrating, by flexing our economic power. 0.70

00:11:09.000 And the way you flex your economic power is not purely. 0.81

00:11:11.000 By telling people they can't have access to our markets unless we get better access to theirs.

00:11:15.000 The way that you flex your economic power is by cutting deals that isolate China. 0.85

00:11:21.000 Pick between us. 0.71

00:11:22.000 You can either have access to American markets or you can have access to Chinese manufacturing.

00:11:26.000 Those are your choices. 0.94

00:11:28.000 And if we actually utilized our power in this way, we could isolate China. 0.83

00:11:32.000 We needed to do that before we decided that we were going to heavily tariff China. 0.96

00:11:36.000 We also can cut off their sources of revenue and power. 0.51

00:11:38.000 And this President Trump has been doing with alacrity. 0.51

00:11:40.000 Again, as I mentioned yesterday on the program, if you look at Trump's foreign policy and what he has been doing, Much of what he has been doing is directed at minimizing Chinese power and influence.

00:11:50.000 The operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela was designed to cut off a chief source of oil revenue for China.

00:11:57.000 Something like 4 to 5 percent of all Chinese oil imports were coming from Venezuela before.

00:12:01.000 That is not the case now.

00:12:02.000 Venezuela was a geopolitical ally of the Chinese.

00:12:06.000 Now, Venezuela is under the American dump.

00:12:08.000 The same thing, as we'll discuss in a little bit, is happening in Iran.

00:12:10.000 Much of what is directed against Iran is actually directed against China.

00:12:14.000 China receives 10 to 15 percent of their entire oil importation from Iran.

00:12:20.000 And now it turns out that Iran is actually harming China by shutting off the Strait of Hormuz.

00:12:24.000 When it comes to the Strait of Hormuz, yes, it's not having an amazing impact on the American economy, but it is hurting China much worse than it is hurting us.

00:12:30.000 China receives 54% of their entire oil imports from the Middle Eastern region.

00:12:37.000 And Iran right now isn't just cutting off its own oil to China because of the embargo that we have on their oil exports, it is also literally attacking Chinese shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

00:12:47.000 It is preventing those ships from moving from Qatar, from Iraq, from UAE, from Saudi.

00:12:54.000 So, us isolating Iran is, in fact, cutting off a source of power and revenue for China. 0.69

00:13:00.000 Us helping Ukraine to defeat Russia in Ukraine is a way of cutting off a support base for China because, of course, Russia is basically a giant gas station for China at this point.

00:13:09.000 What else can we do?

00:13:10.000 Well, we can obviously strengthen our own economy.

00:13:12.000 One of the big problems that we have is massive dependency here in the United States on China buying our debt.

00:13:18.000 China owns trillions of dollars in American debt at this point.

00:13:21.000 They buy American bonds, and then the tacit threat in doing so is that at a certain strategic point, they could flood the market with those American bonds.

00:13:29.000 They could take a loss.

00:13:30.000 They could cram that down on their own citizens, just make their own citizens poorer.

00:13:33.000 They don't really care about their citizens.

00:13:35.000 Obviously, they live in an authoritarian communist state.

00:13:38.000 So, what they could do is flood the market with cheap American bonds, making it difficult for us to raise more debt in order to pay our bills.

00:13:46.000 Well, this again goes to the fact that if you wish to be a world power, you cannot be a bloated welfare state.

00:13:52.000 Being a bloated welfare state is a choice.

00:13:55.000 I know that there's a third rail of American politics, and that third rail of American politics is all of the entitlement programs.

00:14:01.000 I understand that President Trump has taken the position, and many Republicans, JD Vance, have taken the position, Marco Rubio, they've all taken the position that the entitlement programs in the United States require no systemic changes.

00:14:13.000 The problem with that perspective is when you bloat your own economy, when you create enormous anchors on the American ship of state, it is very difficult to move in the ways you need to move.

00:14:27.000 Us being dependent on the Chinese to float us our debt is a huge problem. 0.76

00:14:31.000 What we should be doing is we should be getting lean and mean in terms of how we actually run our ship of state.

00:14:37.000 We should be making our economy not only more innovative, but lower on taxes.

00:14:41.000 We should be cutting down the bloated welfare state, not building it up.

00:14:46.000 Because the better shape we are in, the less we have to sell our debt to our geopolitical enemies who could use that as leverage against us.

00:14:51.000 And finally, we really, really need to cut off China's avenues for stealing our IP and destroying our institutions. 0.96

00:14:57.000 One easy way to do that zero Chinese foreign exchange students. 1.00

00:15:01.000 Zero. 1.00

00:15:03.000 I understand.

00:15:04.000 That there's a lot of incentive for our university systems to bring in Chinese foreign exchange students because foreign students pay full freight while American students pay a discounted freight. 0.59

00:15:13.000 We should not be importing students from places that hate the United States in order to study at our universities, period.

00:15:20.000 End of story. 1.00

00:15:20.000 I do not care whether those are students from Iran. 1.00

00:15:23.000 I do not care whether those are students from Sub Saharan Africa. 0.52

00:15:26.000 I do not care whether those are students from China. 0.87

00:15:28.000 It does not matter. 1.00

00:15:29.000 Bringing people to the United States in order to access our systems and then go back to their home countries. Is a gigantic mistake. 1.00

00:15:38.000 There is no upside for us.

00:15:40.000 It is all downside. 1.00

00:15:42.000 And I guarantee you that stacking Chinese students at a bunch of top American research institutions is one of the ways that our IP is being stolen by the Chinese government. 0.99

00:15:52.000 So there are lots of things that we can do. 0.99

00:15:55.000 And again, on the international stage, let's get back to what is going on in Iran right now.

00:15:59.000 As President Trump prepares to go to China, one of the top issues is what is going on in Iran.

00:16:04.000 And President Trump has an enormous amount of leverage that he ought to use with the Chinese.

00:16:07.000 The Chinese have been supporting the Iranians throughout this process.

00:16:12.000 There is a report that is out today with regard to Iran that the Pakistanis, for example, have actually been hosting, at the behest of the Chinese, Iranian planes in Pakistan.

00:16:24.000 Pakistan and China are closely tied.

00:16:27.000 Pakistan has been acting as a Chinese cutout.

00:16:29.000 Qatar and China are also closely tied.

00:16:32.000 China's interest when it comes to Iran is in ensuring its own oil supply and in building up an anti American base in the Middle East.

00:16:40.000 In the same way that back during the 60s and 70s, the Soviet Union wanted to build up an anti American base in the Middle East.

00:16:45.000 So, they started pushing Arabist propaganda and trying to ally with, for example, the Egyptian dictator Nasser.

00:16:51.000 That was the goal.

00:16:53.000 The goal of the Soviet Union was to infiltrate the Middle East and create geopolitical connections there.

00:16:57.000 The Chinese are trying to do the same in the Middle East right now.

00:16:59.000 The problem they are facing is that the most powerful countries in the Middle East, Israel, increasingly the UAE, those countries are very strongly allied with the United States.

00:17:09.000 Saudi is sort of playing at halvesies.

00:17:11.000 Saudi wants to ally more strongly with the United States.

00:17:13.000 They are afraid of a Democrat being elected and them going back to bad relations with a democratic government, sort of like they had under Joe Biden.

00:17:20.000 And so they've been triangulating with the Chinese.

00:17:23.000 The bottom line, though, is that the base of operations for China in the Middle East is Iran.

00:17:28.000 And the fact that the president of the United States.

00:17:30.000 Is working strongly in order to hamper the ability of the Iranian government to spread its tentacles across the Middle East.

00:17:39.000 That is a major move by the president.

00:17:41.000 It is not just directed at the Iranian government, it is directed at China.

00:17:43.000 The president is expected to tell China to cut off their support for the Iranian government.

00:17:48.000 By the way, there's a very easy way for the president to achieve this.

00:17:51.000 The best way for the president to achieve a Chinese cut off in support for Iran is to bomb the Iranian oil facilities. 0.52

00:17:56.000 If Iran no longer has energy to offer to China, China's interest in Iran declines markedly.

00:18:03.000 It declines even more markedly if Iran not only has no oil to export, but they are holding up all the other oil that China needs in order to power its economy. 0.95

00:18:11.000 At that point, does China really, really feel like upholding the Iranian mollocracy for the fun of it? 0.93

00:18:17.000 The president has an enormous number of levers that he can pull right there. 0.81

00:18:22.000 Well, the president is, it appears, getting more militant with the Iranians because I think that there's sort of a weird catch 22 that exists in foreign policy thought with regard to Iran right now.

00:18:34.000 On the one hand, there's the idea that there can be a deal, that the nuclear dust will be turned over in a deal.

00:18:39.000 And on the other hand, the idea is that the United States can stage some sort of operation to go get the nuclear dust.

00:18:47.000 There will be a deal or there will be no deal, and we'll have to put boots on the ground. 0.91

00:18:50.000 There is, in fact, a third option here, and that is to chop off the arms of the Iranian regime, to chop them off and basically leave them like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as I say. 0.93

00:19:01.000 You cut off their entire economic future, barring a reintegration into the world economy and an end to sanctions. 0.94

00:19:07.000 Which could only come through a deal.

00:19:08.000 And suddenly, the math changes pretty radically.

00:19:12.000 It seems the president may be thinking in this direction increasingly.

00:19:14.000 Yesterday, he talked about negotiating with the moderates versus the lunatics in Iran.

00:19:19.000 Here's what he had to say. 0.98

00:19:23.000 You have the moderates and you have the lunatics. 0.93

00:19:26.000 And I think the moderates are more respected. 0.99

00:19:30.000 The lunatics want to fight till the end. 0.88

00:19:32.000 It'll be a very quick fight. 1.00

00:19:35.000 But I call them, you have, just like our country, we have lunatics too. 1.00

00:19:42.000 I call them lunatics. 1.00

00:19:43.000 I call them stupid people, too. 1.00

00:19:45.000 But in Iran, they have the moderates that are dying to make a deal, and then you have the lunatics. 1.00

00:19:49.000 And I guess they're a little bit afraid of the lunatics, but, and why not? 0.90

00:19:56.000 The level of ferocity for protests, you know, the people are watching it.

00:20:01.000 They want to go out on the streets.

00:20:02.000 They have no weapons, they have no guns.

00:20:07.000 Well, President Trump also pointed out that the ceasefire is on life support at this point, which, of course, It is. 0.95

00:20:12.000 I mean, the Iranians are still firing and chipping in the Strait of Hormuz. 0.97

00:20:17.000 For the time being, the ceasefire remains in place?

00:20:19.000 It's unbelievably weak, I would say.

00:20:24.000 I would call it the weakest right now. 0.99

00:20:27.000 After reading that piece of garbage they sent us, I didn't even finish reading it. 0.98

00:20:31.000 They said, I'm going to waste my time reading it. 0.99

00:20:34.000 I would say it's one of the weakest right now.

00:20:37.000 It's on life support.

00:20:38.000 These are all medical people.

00:20:38.000 They understand.

00:20:41.000 Dr. Oz, life support is not a good thing.

00:20:43.000 Do you agree?

00:20:44.000 Bad prognostic.

00:20:45.000 I would say the ceasefire is on.

00:20:47.000 Massive life support, where the doctor walks in and says, Sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living.

00:20:59.000 Well, again, the president is not wrong about this. 0.98

00:21:01.000 And as I say, this has impacts for China.

00:21:04.000 According to CBS News, Pakistan is quietly allowing Iranian military aircraft to park on its airfields, potentially shielding them from American airstrikes.

00:21:12.000 Iran also sent civilian aircraft to park in neighboring Afghanistan.

00:21:16.000 Pakistan's reliance on China for military assistance has risen dramatically over the past decade.

00:21:20.000 A Stockholm International Peace Research Institute study showed that China supplied about 80% of Pakistan's major arms between 2020 and 2024.

00:21:28.000 So, this entire negotiation with Pakistan, in which Iran and China are aligned, again, what President Trump is doing in Iran is, in fact, largely directed at China.

00:21:38.000 In fact, yesterday, the U.S. Treasury cut off some 12 entities that were enabling IRGC sales to China.

00:21:45.000 According to the Treasury Department on X quote today, Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control is designating 12 individuals and entities.

00:21:52.000 For their role in enabling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' sale and shipment of Iranian oil to the People's Republic of China.

00:21:58.000 The IRGC relies on front companies in permissive economic jurisdictions to obfuscate its role in oil sales and funnel the revenue to the Iranian regime.

00:22:05.000 Instead of using this revenue to support the struggling Iranian people, the regime directs it toward weapons development, backing terrorist proxies, and funding security forces that suppress citizens' freedoms freedoms. 0.78

00:22:15.000 So, again, that is correct. 0.70

00:22:19.000 So, recognize what the president is doing in the Middle East is directed. 0.66

00:22:22.000 Against China.

00:22:23.000 It is part of a broader plan that is depriving China of its oil supplies and its allies.

00:22:27.000 Now, again, what the president is doing here obviously requires sacrifice on the part of the American people.

00:22:34.000 And people have said the president should explain that more clearly.

00:22:36.000 The biggest sacrifice right now is, again, inflation when it comes to the gas prices.

00:22:40.000 That's very real.

00:22:41.000 People are experiencing it.

00:22:42.000 And we can't pretend that away.

00:22:43.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, consumer prices rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier.

00:22:49.000 That is a clear impact of higher gas prices since the start of the war in Iran.

00:22:52.000 If you exclude food and energy, Then inflation is up year over year at a 2.8% rate, which again is not wildly high.

00:23:00.000 3.8% is pretty high, and that is because, of course, of the surge in the oil prices.

00:23:04.000 Now, when we hit the end of the war, those prices are going to drop precipitously.

00:23:07.000 All the conditions are there.

00:23:09.000 When the Strait of Hormuz opens again, UAE is no longer a part of OPEC. 0.96

00:23:13.000 They are going to pump like crazy. 0.96

00:23:15.000 Iraq needs to make up for lost time. 0.96

00:23:16.000 They're going to pump like crazy. 1.00

00:23:18.000 The same is true of Qatar. 0.99

00:23:19.000 The same is true for Saudi.

00:23:20.000 So the price will decline markedly in the aftermath of the war in Iran. 0.66

00:23:24.000 But all of this is directed, again, against China. 0.77

00:23:28.000 So, what is China's hope? 1.00

00:23:29.000 Well, China's hope is that we remain stupid. 0.99

00:23:33.000 There's a reason why China has been operating algorithms like the TikTok algorithm that are, in fact, directed at Americans. 1.00

00:23:40.000 That's really funny.

00:23:41.000 There are a lot of people who are very skeptical of American efforts abroad.

00:23:44.000 They'll talk about American caused color revolutions or American propaganda abroad, how terrible all that is.

00:23:49.000 Now, I'm of the opinion that some color revolutions are good and some color revolutions are bad.

00:23:53.000 And many are not actually color revolutions.

00:23:55.000 Some of them are legitimately revolutions in countries, and we support those revolutions that were going to exist anyway.

00:24:01.000 But To pretend that our geopolitical enemies do not take advantage of our openness here in the United States in order to harm us is nonsense.

00:24:08.000 They absolutely do. 0.91

00:24:10.000 Much of what we see online is a controlled op run by the Chinese, run by the Iranians, run by the Russians. 0.92

00:24:16.000 That is why there are so many anti American messages that seem to pick up extraordinary steam.

00:24:21.000 Because every poll of American citizens shows that Americans are generally reasonable and rational people who live well within the realm of reality.

00:24:29.000 But that is increasingly untrue.

00:24:31.000 And the reason it's increasingly untrue is because people spend an awful lot of time online.

00:24:37.000 Now, there are a lot of psychological phenomena that show that individuals tend to follow the herd.

00:24:41.000 It's a very real thing.

00:24:42.000 So, one psychological experiment, for example, will place a person, a normie, in a room with a bunch of other people.

00:24:49.000 And it turns out everybody else in the room, except for the normie, is an actor.

00:24:53.000 And the experimenters will go to the normie and they will show them a line of a particular length.

00:25:00.000 And then they will show them three comparative lines one that's longer, one that's the same length, one that's shorter.

00:25:06.000 And they will ask them which line matches up.

00:25:09.000 Now, if you ask the person in isolation, they'll get the answer right every time.

00:25:12.000 It's a very easy question.

00:25:13.000 However, What the experiment shows is that if all the actors around the normie start saying that the longer line matches the normal line, then the normie will start to mirror that out of fear of standing out from the herd, out of fear of exercising psychological independence.

00:25:28.000 Well, the online arena is built for this.

00:25:32.000 It's built for this.

00:25:33.000 The number of likes on an ex post, people think that is reflective of reality, even if it is not.

00:25:37.000 And so if you can generate a bot network or an echo chamber that radically increases the belief that many people are actually supporting a thing, you will get normies to start following.

00:25:47.000 That particular perspective.

00:25:48.000 And that is how you end up mainstreaming delusion and conspiracism.

00:25:52.000 That is it. 1.00

00:25:53.000 To pretend that foreign operations have nothing to do with that is really stupid. 1.00

00:25:56.000 They clearly, clearly do. 1.00

00:25:59.000 And you can see it in the polling.

00:26:01.000 Coming up, we'll be joined by the former ambassador to China, Sam Brownback Plus.

00:26:04.000 We'll get to Iran and the latest there, what's going on with the inflation report.

00:26:08.000 A lot going on today.

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00:28:48.000 Joining me on the line to discuss all of this is former ambassador to China and the Office of International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback.

00:28:56.000 He has a brand new book out titled China's War on Faith, talking about the CCP carrying out systemic global campaigns against.

00:29:05.000 Religion and what CCP is doing to infiltrate America.

00:29:08.000 Ambassador, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:29:09.000 Really appreciate it.

00:29:11.000 Hey, thank you for having me on the show and highlighting this.

00:29:14.000 I think this is just a critical topic.

00:29:15.000 And now the president's headed to Beijing.

00:29:18.000 We need to be talking about this stuff. 0.72

00:29:21.000 So, Ambassador, I want to talk about the extent to which China has infiltrated our systems.

00:29:26.000 It's trying to use our own systems against us. 0.85

00:29:29.000 I've been saying for a long time that China is not just a geopolitical opponent, they are, in fact, a geopolitical enemy of the United States. 0.56

00:29:33.000 They seek to subvert American global hegemony, they are seeking to make alliances with America's enemies. 0.66

00:29:39.000 This is what they do. 0.79

00:29:40.000 Why don't you talk a little bit, and you do in your book, about exactly what China has been doing in terms of infiltrating our economic institutions and our other institutions? 0.82

00:29:50.000 Well, thank you for putting it just that way, because that was the thing that Ronald Reagan had to convince this country of on the Soviet Union.

00:29:58.000 We had a detente period beforehand.

00:30:00.000 They are over there, we're over here, you know, just we'll fight over some areas, but it was detente.

00:30:04.000 And Reagan said, no, this is an evil empire, and we are going against it.

00:30:09.000 And we win, you lose.

00:30:11.000 That's the nature of what communism is.

00:30:13.000 It seeks this hegemony to be able to take over the entire world.

00:30:17.000 They're seeking to push out the United States.

00:30:19.000 They've been at war with us, whether we realize they are at war with us or not, and whether we declare and push back against that.

00:30:26.000 That's what I think we've got to do. 0.83

00:30:29.000 What I point out in the book is that one of their key groups that they track and they push against and they can't stand is religion, all religions.

00:30:38.000 It's the Tibetan Buddhists, it's the Muslim Uyghurs, it's Falun Gong, it's Christians. 0.76

00:30:43.000 All of them, because it answers to a higher authority than the government, the Communist Party. 1.00

00:30:48.000 And that's something they just cannot tolerate, will not tolerate.

00:30:52.000 And they do it not only in their own country, they push their satellite countries to do something quite similar.

00:31:00.000 Ambassador, one of the things that they obviously have done is infiltrated our economic institutions.

00:31:03.000 I've talked about how they've infiltrated our universities.

00:31:05.000 They've turned American businesses into essentially operatives on their own behalf by us trying to open up China politically, by opening them economically.

00:31:15.000 We ended up Locating an enormous number of critical supply chains in China. 0.60

00:31:19.000 And that has allowed them to basically leverage the United States into kinder treatment as they steal our IP. 0.55

00:31:25.000 What are the kinds of things that you saw as ambassador to China that made you say, wow, China really does not have some sort of cooperative interest at heart?

00:31:33.000 What I saw that really turned me on this was the concentration camps in Xinjiang or East Turkestan, whatever you want to really refer to it as.

00:31:41.000 It's never been a part of China until the Chinese Communist Party took it over.

00:31:45.000 But when they put in place concentration camps, And this is in 2018 that I first started to notice this.

00:31:53.000 You're going, what?

00:31:54.000 In 2018, we have concentration camps in the world?

00:31:58.000 And then, if you get out of the concentration camps, you have this digital police state that's around you with cameras everywhere and tracking devices on your phone and keyword searches. 0.68

00:32:09.000 They were putting in a beta test of how you mollify a religious population.

00:32:15.000 And they were doing that.

00:32:16.000 And then they export that technology to other authoritarians and dictators around the world to make them better dictators to build up.

00:32:23.000 Their side of the aisle, if you will, their side of the camp of the communists, the authoritarians, and the totalitarians.

00:32:31.000 That's what I saw.

00:32:33.000 And that's when I sounded the alarm in 2019 in Hong Kong. 0.96

00:32:37.000 I gave the speech China is at war with faith. 0.95

00:32:39.000 It is a war they will not win. 0.97

00:32:41.000 But we've got to stand up and push back against that.

00:32:44.000 And thankfully, President Trump has done more on religious freedom than any modern president, arguably more than any president since Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the original religious freedom charter in Virginia. 0.59

00:32:57.000 He's a guy that really can and should be in a position to push back against what China is doing.

00:33:05.000 Ambassador, you mentioned obviously their attacks on faith.

00:33:08.000 A large part of that is not just communism.

00:33:10.000 It's also an attack on America because America, of course, is a faith based country. 0.95

00:33:14.000 And one of the things that they have been attempting to do is basically infiltrate pretty much all of our systems. 0.98

00:33:19.000 You mentioned digital authoritarianism.

00:33:21.000 But obviously, algorithms like TikTok that were designed for American consumption are designed in order to undermine America's belief in her own principles.

00:33:30.000 You see China trying to spread its tentacles abroad via places like Iran, places like Venezuela.

00:33:35.000 The president's been fighting back against a lot of that.

00:33:37.000 What are the best strategies the United States should be using in order to curb Chinese influence operations?

00:33:43.000 Number one, we need to realize we're at war.

00:33:46.000 I think that's the first step we got to say, and need to go to the American public look, this is a system that's diametrically opposed to us.

00:33:55.000 On this foundational issue of religious freedom, we look at it as a cornerstone human right.

00:33:59.000 They look at it as an existential threat.

00:34:02.000 Then I think we need to start bringing into the White House, the vice president, the secretary of state, Chinese dissidents that have been persecuted for their faith.

00:34:10.000 Have them tell their story to the American public, to our leaders.

00:34:14.000 We should convene a leadership summit of world religious leaders and talk with them about religious freedom for everybody, everywhere, including in China.

00:34:23.000 Because China fears religious freedom more than they fear our aircraft carriers or our nuclear weapons.

00:34:31.000 I think as we start pushing on our principles, remember religious freedom 250 years ago, this is a foundational principle that allows the United States to form.

00:34:41.000 And it's really what people first came here for.

00:34:44.000 So, this is us in principle standing on our principles at a time we're under attack by a regime that wants to remove us from global leadership. 0.95

00:34:53.000 I think these are some effective ways we can start to effectively push back against this Chinese communism, authoritarianism growth around the world. 0.92

00:35:04.000 Well, that is Sam Brownback, the former governor of Kansas and former ambassador to China. 0.94

00:35:08.000 His book is China's War on Faith.

00:35:10.000 Go check it out right now.

00:35:11.000 Ambassador, thanks so much for the time.

00:35:12.000 Really appreciate it.

00:35:14.000 My pleasure, Ben.

00:35:15.000 Thank you.

00:35:17.000 So, Apparently, 30% of Americans believe that at least one in three Trump assassination attempts may be staged.

00:35:28.000 And again, if you look at White House Correspondents' Dinner, a majority of Americans apparently believed it was staged or were unsure.

00:35:36.000 56% of Americans.

00:35:37.000 That's true.

00:35:38.000 53% of Americans believe that Butler, Pennsylvania, was either staged or they were unsure about it.

00:35:42.000 The Trump International Golf Club assassination attempt.

00:35:45.000 Again, a majority of Americans say it was staged or they were unsure.

00:35:48.000 This does break down by party.

00:35:51.000 So, by party idea, again, people tend to believe the things that they find it emotionally resonant to believe.

00:35:58.000 It turns out the Democrats and independents, people who don't love Trump, are significantly more likely to believe that particular events were staged.

00:35:58.000 So, again, not a shock.

00:36:06.000 34% of Americans who are Democrats believe that the White House Correspondence Dinner assassination attempt was staged.

00:36:13.000 42%, 4 in 10 Democrats believe that the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt was staged.

00:36:19.000 That compares to 13% of Republicans on the White House Correspondents' Dinner and just 7% on the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting.

00:36:27.000 Independents are somewhere in between.

00:36:29.000 Again, the question is why this conspiracism has cropped up.

00:36:32.000 The answer is, of course, our mainstream legacy institutions have failed us.

00:36:37.000 I spoke about this at the University of Austin a couple of weeks ago.

00:36:40.000 When people don't believe places that were supposed to tell them the truth, they start believing everything and anything.

00:36:47.000 And typically, they resonate to things that are one, popular, and two, filter with their priors.

00:36:53.000 And so, what you end up with is a wide variety of Americans who side with America's enemies because they don't like Trump, so they side with America's enemies, or they don't like what's going on in their life.

00:37:02.000 So, they buy the lie that there's some conspiratorial elite who is making bad things happen in their life.

00:37:08.000 Our enemies know this.

00:37:09.000 Alexander Dugan's been writing about this for 30 years.

00:37:11.000 The Chinese Communist Party writes about this sort of stuff.

00:37:14.000 It is not as though they are hiding the ball.

00:37:16.000 What they say to their own intelligence apparatus is that they are attempting to turn American opinion against itself, and it is working.

00:37:23.000 And there are some people on the left who have acknowledged that it's working.

00:37:26.000 Sam Harris, I have huge disagreements with Sam Harris about, for example, President Trump. 0.71

00:37:30.000 But he is not wrong when he tells Winston Marshall that the left is increasingly allying with, for example, Islamist enemies of the United States and the West. 0.68

00:37:36.000 The left has been successfully manipulated by Islamists and apologists for Islamists. 0.70

00:37:43.000 In certain cases, this is a knowing alliance, and in certain cases, just frank manipulation, and people on the left are morally confused.

00:37:50.000 I don't think someone like Hassan Piker is confused.

00:37:52.000 I think he knows exactly what sort of alliance he has, and I think that's true of Mamdani, too. 0.60

00:37:57.000 Do you think Mamdani is an Islamist? 0.93

00:37:58.000 Certainly an apologist for Islamists. 0.78

00:37:59.000 The fact that he can't quite figure out what's wrong with the phrase globalized intifada and that the worst he'll say of it is that he doesn't use that language. 1.00

00:38:08.000 Nor does he encourage it, but he's not going to condemn it.

00:38:11.000 He's a proud DSA member. 0.78

00:38:12.000 They were out on October 8th supporting Hamas. 0.76

00:38:16.000 There's just no way that should be possible.

00:38:18.000 And there's no way that anyone who's got that level of callousness and confusion, confusion being charitable, should be running a major American city, right?

00:38:26.000 Much less being the poster boy for the future of democratic politics.

00:38:29.000 So, I mean, there's something very sinister about the way Islamists have spread their ideology through the West and targeted liberals. 0.78

00:38:35.000 Well, again, you can see the impact of that last night in Brooklyn. 0.86

00:38:40.000 So, last night in Brooklyn, there was yet another. anti-Israel anti-Semitic march.

00:38:44.000 And you can't call it an anti-Israel march when people are flying Hezbollah flags.

00:38:47.000 They're literally flying Hezbollah flags and attacking Jews outside the synagogue.

00:38:51.000 This is in Brooklyn.

00:38:52.000 Apparently they marched by a bunch of houses in Brooklyn as well in an attempt to intimidate Jews.

00:38:56.000 Here is some of the video of that New York City anti-Israel march.

00:38:59.000 Again, the guy with the Hezbollah flag is not just in the crowd.

00:39:03.000 He is literally leading the march.

00:39:04.000 Hezbollah, for those who don't understand, is an Iranian-backed terror organization responsible for the murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of actual Americans, not just attacks on Israelis. 0.61

00:39:13.000 Or the destruction of Lebanon, which they've also done. 0.62

00:39:16.000 The Christian Lebanese government destroyed in large part by Hezbollah and its allies. 0.63

00:39:20.000 Again, these are people who are marching in American streets.

00:39:22.000 If you don't think this is a foreign op, I don't know what to tell you.

00:39:26.000 It obviously is. 0.59

00:39:27.000 It is people who sympathize with foreign powers who hate America and the West.

00:39:30.000 Here you go.

00:39:31.000 Here's what it looked like in New York last night.

00:39:40.000 Again, these are people in Islamic garb waving Hezbollah flags.

00:39:46.000 And there's a map right behind this liberation and return. 0.62

00:39:49.000 And the liberation, by the way, is like the entirety of the state of Israel. 0.86

00:39:53.000 Like Israel should disappear.

00:39:55.000 So these people, according to Zorhan Mamdani, are just exercising their, you know, generic right to protest, you know, outside a Brooklyn synagogue.

00:40:01.000 So these protesters showed up right outside a Brooklyn synagogue, a place of worship.

00:40:07.000 Here's what it looked like.

00:40:11.000 Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.

00:40:15.000 Doing full Islamic prayer rituals outside a synagogue.

00:40:19.000 Which, again, I feel like if they wanted to pray, then there are many mosques, as it turns out, in New York City. 0.67

00:40:24.000 The only reason that you go and you pray right outside the synagogue and start yelling at people, with your face covered like a terrorist, by the way. 0.97

00:40:28.000 I mean, many of these people are covering their faces with kafiyas like you would see in the Middle East. 0.98

00:40:33.000 And this is the third world brought to the United States pretty clearly. 0.85

00:40:37.000 This required something like 400 police officers to prevent the assault of Jews who went to a synagogue. 0.99

00:40:43.000 Here's some of that footage as well. 0.79

00:40:56.000 So now that Amdani's New York has turned into a hotbed of Islamist activities, we literally have Jews having to be protected by hundreds of police officers for the great crime of being Jewish and being pro Israel in New York.

00:41:09.000 And again, when I hear people suggest over and over, well, they're not being attacked for being Jews, they're just being attacked for being pro Israel. 0.54

00:41:15.000 I'd just like to point out that if you said that black people who are being attacked at a civil rights protest were not being attacked for being black, they're being attacked because they're pro civil rights, that might raise a few questions.

00:41:26.000 All of this, again, is part and parcel of a broader attempt by international powers to attack the West.

00:41:33.000 There's a report from the U.S. State Department about how the U.N. aided mass migration.

00:41:39.000 The report is pretty stunning.

00:41:42.000 The report suggests last week the United States refused to participate in the U.N.'s review of the Global Compact on Migration.

00:41:48.000 The United States objects to the Global Compact on Migration and U.N. efforts to facilitate replacement migration to the United States and our Western allies.

00:41:56.000 Well, it turns out.

00:41:56.000 Why?

00:41:57.000 That UN agencies, working with the non governmental organizations they fund, established a migration corridor through Central America and to the U.S. border.

00:42:07.000 As the American people suffered under an unprecedented wave of mass migration, the U.N. was on the ground pipelining migrants to our southern border.

00:42:13.000 UN officials greeted migrants along the route through the deadly Darien Gap.

00:42:17.000 UN funded NGOs handed out maps to migrants en route to the United States.

00:42:21.000 After facilitating mass migration to the U.S., UN agencies condemned the deportation of illegal immigrants.

00:42:28.000 They did the same thing with regard to Europe.

00:42:30.000 UN officials staffed all ends of the Mediterranean migration route into Europe.

00:42:34.000 Then UN agencies condemned frontline states who refused to open their borders.

00:42:38.000 The Global Compact on Migration claims to support safe migration.

00:42:42.000 But again, mass migration was a strategy fostered by the UN. 0.99

00:42:45.000 The UN is a trash organization. 1.00

00:42:48.000 A trash organization. 0.99

00:42:50.000 And when you have the UN Secretary General, the abhorrent Antonio Guterres, calling for global institutions that reflect the world today, understand he is doing the work of the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians. 0.97

00:43:01.000 This is what the UN is.

00:43:02.000 There are entire institutions dedicated to the submission of the West to foreign powers.

00:43:10.000 The continent has enormous potential, but that potential is being constrained by an unfair international system.

00:43:19.000 Too many African countries face egregious borrowing costs.

00:43:24.000 Too many climate vulnerable countries are still waiting for the support they were promised.

00:43:30.000 And too often, African countries are expected to live with decisions made in institutions In which they have no equal voice.

00:43:42.000 That must change.

00:43:44.000 We need deeper reforms of the international financial architecture, greater investment on terms that allow countries to build, grow and transform, and global institutions that reflect the world as it is today, not as it was 80 years ago.

00:44:02.000 Again, 80 years ago, he means the dominance of the United States.

00:44:06.000 That's what he's talking about.

00:44:07.000 And he is saying that we need to basically Submit.

00:44:10.000 The United States must submit our global power to foreign institutions.

00:44:14.000 The good news is for the UN and for China and for Russia and for Iran, they have an enormous amount of members of the left in the United States who are willing to do their dirty work for them. 0.78

00:44:22.000 Not just the left, by the way, in the US, you also have the left in the UK, in France, many other places that are willing to submit to all of this.

00:44:29.000 Well, one of the institutions in the United States that is extraordinarily warm toward anti Westernism is, of course, the New York Times.

00:44:35.000 Nicholas Kristof has a truly egregiously reported piece today that is making all sorts of waves in which he claims.

00:44:42.000 That Israel is performing sexual violence on Palestinian prisoners.

00:44:47.000 And it's making huge waves because he makes extraordinary claims. 0.98

00:44:51.000 He claims that Israel has been training dogs to rape people.

00:44:55.000 He provides zero actual evidence of this. 0.95

00:44:58.000 He claims that Israel is employing, quote unquote, systematic sexual violence.

00:45:04.000 Again, the evidence that he provides of this is rooted in the testimony of people who are open advocates for Hamas.

00:45:12.000 And then he makes the suggestion that Israel is doing 10 7 sexual violence every single day.

00:45:16.000 Here was Nicholas Kristof, truly either a gullible dupe or one of the most terrible people in American journalism.

00:45:22.000 Again, the New York Times put this piece in the op ed section.

00:45:25.000 Because there's no way it would have cut muster when it came to the actual news section.

00:45:29.000 So they had to stack it in the op ed section because of the poor sourcing here, because of the lack of investigative rigor.

00:45:37.000 Here is Nicholas Kristoff saying something insane. 0.58

00:45:41.000 Look, whether you consider yourself pro Israeli or pro Palestinian, here's one thing we should be able to agree on we're anti rape.

00:45:50.000 The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7th now happens. 0.72

00:45:55.000 To Palestinians day after day after day.

00:46:02.000 And do you understand what he's doing there?

00:46:03.000 He is saying that what happened on October 7th, which was in fact mass rape, and there's another report out today with actual data, which we'll get into in a moment.

00:46:12.000 And it is not a coincidence that Christoph dropped this report literally the day before that massive report came out about Hamas's practice of systematic rape on October 7th.

00:46:20.000 And then he's saying it's happening every single day.

00:46:22.000 The report is essentially sourced directly from advocates for Hamas.

00:46:29.000 So he claims.

00:46:31.000 That he's reporting based on conversations with 14 men and women who had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. 0.81

00:46:39.000 And then he says, This is pretty great. 0.85

00:46:41.000 He says, Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. 0.93

00:46:46.000 Yeah, some might wonder that, considering that that is a routine practice in the Middle East where people legitimately make things up, including entire allegations of genocide, mass starvation, manufacture allegations of the shooting of children, all of it. 0.83

00:47:01.000 But he says, no, no, no, no.

00:47:02.000 That to me seems far fetched.

00:47:03.000 Well, if Nick Kristoff says it's far fetched, then probably it's not far fetched.

00:47:07.000 Who does he quote, by the way?

00:47:08.000 Again, I would be shocked if there is no sexual abuse of anyone in Israeli prisons.

00:47:14.000 In the same way, I'd be shocked if somebody said there was no sexual abuse of American prisoners in American prisons or in the UK or France.

00:47:23.000 It is a staple of literally every prison movie ever that there is sexual abuse in prisons.

00:47:28.000 But that is not what Kristoff is alleging.

00:47:31.000 That there is systemic sexual abuse in Israeli prisons.

00:47:33.000 Who is he counting on?

00:47:35.000 A freelance journalist, this is how he characterizes him, named Sami Al Sai.

00:47:39.000 This would be the same Sami Al Sai who posted on October 8th that, quote, the green flag of Hamas fluttered over the occupiers' camps and tanks and adorned the foreheads of the heroic fighters.

00:47:49.000 Long live the heroes.

00:47:50.000 Al Sai works for the Qatari propaganda outlet Al Jazeera.

00:47:54.000 The article relies on reporting from a place called Euromed Human Rights Monitor, which sounds, you know, anodyne.

00:48:00.000 There's only one problem.

00:48:02.000 It is an actual NGO supporting training to develop storytelling journalists in Palestine whose leadership are linked with Hamas.

00:48:10.000 As for that bizarre claim that Israel trained rape dogs, Kristoff cites a nut job named Shail Ben Ephraim.

00:48:18.000 This person was a teacher at UCLA who had to leave after multiple sexual harassment allegations involving inappropriate conduct toward minors.

00:48:25.000 And then he tried to rebrand himself and then just put out that rumor.

00:48:28.000 And then the UN picked up on the rumor, printed it, and then it was laundered into Nick Kristoff's columns.

00:48:33.000 Other sources.

00:48:34.000 One Issa Amro, whom Kristoff describes as a nonviolent activist called the Palestinian Gandhi.

00:48:40.000 Well, it turns out that in 2014, AMRO suggested Israeli occupation is killing our lives, and he accused Israel of a genocide operation in Gaza, not now, like years before October 7th.

00:48:55.000 These are the people that he is quoting as the unbiased sources demonstrating the level of sexual assault.

00:49:02.000 Tons of anonymous sources, entirely unverifiable.

00:49:05.000 He quotes a bunch of left wing Israeli groups that would basically be the equivalent of BLM in the United States.

00:49:12.000 Hey, all of this was designed to obscure an actual gigantic report that came out from the Civil Commission, an Israeli women's rights organization that was not rooted in random people who were unnamed.

00:49:23.000 Instead, that report relied on evidence of 10,000 photos, more than 1,800 hours of video, 430 plus interviews and testimonies from survivors, witnesses, and medical staff, and materials from multiple sites of the October 7th attack, including kibbutzim, the Nova Music Festival, shelters, morgues, and hostage locations.

00:49:43.000 Much of the evidence in that particular report was rooted in, you know, the dead bodies of the people who were raped or who were shot in the genitals.

00:49:51.000 That report, quote, each case cited has been corroborated by witnesses, including first responders who attended the scene.

00:49:59.000 The report, comprising some 25 experts and contributors, had worked with a group of researchers who geolocated photos and videos from the scene, pinpointing the location of each victim and cross referencing it with other evidence.

00:50:11.000 Many of the victims' bodies were mutilated on October 7th.

00:50:14.000 The repeated nature of the violence, including sexual torture, killings following sexual violence, forced nudity, restraint to victims, threats of forced marriage, filming and disseminating imagery of sexual violence, indicates this was an integral part of the attack.

00:50:25.000 So it is not a gigantic shock that the New York Times would, hours before that story dropped, put a Nick Kristof op ed based on the thinnest sourcing imaginable out there suggesting mass rape by these.

00:50:40.000 Again, always count on the legacy media to do the work of America's enemies.

00:50:43.000 Always count on them.

00:50:44.000 They always will.

00:50:45.000 And again, none of that is to deny.

00:50:47.000 That sexual violence takes place in prisons.

00:50:50.000 Obviously, it does, but that's not what Nick Kristoff is arguing.

00:50:52.000 He's arguing it's October 7th every day in Israeli prisons because he's doing propaganda work on behalf of some of the people who hate the West the absolute most.

00:51:00.000 And this is part and parcel of a left in the West that really kind of despises the state of the West.

00:51:07.000 Graham Plattner, who is the Senate candidate in Maine, you know, the guy with the Totenkopf tattoo, right?

00:51:14.000 You know, like the actual death's head tattoo from the SS.

00:51:17.000 And a person who is warm toward neo Nazi podcasts, he says a revolution is necessary in America.

00:51:24.000 I do 100% believe that a political revolution is entirely necessary.

00:51:29.000 Yeah.

00:51:30.000 Bernie does too.

00:51:33.000 Oh, well.

00:51:34.000 I mean, a political revolution is necessary.

00:51:35.000 Why would it be necessary?

00:51:36.000 Because America is so terrible.

00:51:37.000 Meanwhile, Senator Raphael Warnock, who again is a senator from Georgia, he says that a moral rot is eating away at the fabric of our country.

00:51:44.000 What is that moral rot?

00:51:45.000 Well, it's people he disagrees with.

00:51:48.000 There's a kind of moral rot that's.

00:51:52.000 Eating away at our, at our, at the fabric of our country.

00:51:55.000 It's all the way from the White House on down.

00:52:00.000 And you're seeing this infection and its impact in negative ways. 0.97

00:52:08.000 According to Warnock, any black man voting for Trump is too many. 0.59

00:52:12.000 Here he is with the positive America bros.

00:52:16.000 Everyday people know that the system is stacked against them.

00:52:20.000 They know it in their bones.

00:52:22.000 And they, They don't always have the words, you know, that we want to use.

00:52:25.000 They know it.

00:52:26.000 Do they feel like they can change it?

00:52:28.000 They feel it.

00:52:30.000 Yeah, I think that's the thing.

00:52:32.000 Do people feel empowered to change it?

00:52:34.000 And I do think that there are a lot of people who feel powerless, which is why they signed up for Donald Trump.

00:52:41.000 There are people, and I do think it's overstated.

00:52:42.000 Donald Trump didn't have this whole huge slew of black men voting for them.

00:52:46.000 I think part of that was a game they played during the election in 24.

00:52:50.000 I think they were trying to create a permission structure, a bandwagon, so people would jump on it.

00:52:57.000 But there were no overwhelming numbers.

00:52:59.000 One is too many, but there were overwhelming numbers of black men voting for Donald Trump.

00:53:04.000 Again, Warnock saying there, the key there is when he says, That the system is stacked against them. 0.92

00:53:08.000 This is the thing foreign powers rely on.

00:53:10.000 They rely on Americans to say the system is stacked against the common American. 0.59

00:53:10.000 They do. 0.59

00:53:14.000 And I understand this is also how politicians make bank.

00:53:17.000 This is how politicians get popular by telling you that your grievances, your problems in life are not your fault.

00:53:23.000 They're somebody else's fault.

00:53:25.000 But the reality is that in the freest country in the history of the world, it's time for Americans to grow up, generally speaking.

00:53:30.000 Yes, there are huge problems in America.

00:53:33.000 Sure, there are systems that are sometimes stacked against you, but we ought to be able to name those systems.

00:53:38.000 We ought to be able to correct the problems in front of us.

00:53:41.000 The idea that there are insuperable problems buried within the American systems, evil cadres of elites manipulating, that what we need, in the words of Graham Plattner, is a revolution.

00:53:51.000 That is the kind of stuff that foreign enemies are loving.

00:53:54.000 They love every element of it, they love it.

00:53:57.000 It is their favorite thing.

00:53:59.000 And this is why, when you see Democrats, for example, trying to claim that what just happened in Virginia and what is a fairly generic voting rights case is somehow yet another racist attack, it's just nonsense.

00:54:11.000 It's a conspiracy theory.

00:54:14.000 So, we didn't talk at length about this last week, but on Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court, which the way that Virginia judges are selected, they're basically selected by the legislature.

00:54:26.000 Those judges, I believe there's seven of them.

00:54:29.000 One was selected by an entirely Democratic legislature, three were selected by a Republican legislature, three were selected by a mixed legislature.

00:54:35.000 So, there's not like a wildly right wing Virginia Supreme Court.

00:54:38.000 They found that the referendum passed in Virginia to redistrict Republicans out of existence in Congress.

00:54:43.000 That was unconstitutional.

00:54:45.000 There are a couple of reasons.

00:54:46.000 One, because the referendum itself was mislabeled.

00:54:49.000 It said it was restoring fairness.

00:54:51.000 It's very difficult to claim that you're restoring fairness when you write 45% of the voting population out of Congress.

00:54:57.000 Second, they said that there's a specific process under the Constitution of Virginia to lawfully adopt a constitutional amendment, and that was violated in the way that this process worked.

00:55:07.000 So it was a procedural issue, bottom line.

00:55:09.000 Well, Democrats claimed instead that this was yet another attempt by the elites.

00:55:14.000 To grind under boot heel the American public.

00:55:17.000 Here, for example, was AOC saying that the Virginia Supreme Court was overturning elections.

00:55:21.000 The systems are broken.

00:55:24.000 Virginia was an election of three million Americans.

00:55:29.000 This court did not overturn a map, it overturned an election.

00:55:36.000 An election.

00:55:37.000 And when we talk about the balance of power and a system of checks and balances, It's one thing for a court to check a legislature or an executive, but the end all and be all of power in America should be the people, elections.

00:55:57.000 It should, and the result was clear.

00:56:02.000 And so I think it was close, it actually was pretty close.

00:56:04.000 It was close, but it was clear.

00:56:07.000 The fact that David Axelrod has to correct AOC on this again, there's this conspiracism that has driven pretty much all politics in the United States for decades at this point.

00:56:17.000 The idea that if you don't get what you want, it's because there's a conspiratorial elite willing to overthrow your life and harm you.

00:56:23.000 And that is a massive problem for the United States.

00:56:25.000 By the way, it extends all the way down to marriage.

00:56:27.000 There's a new piece in the trash publication, the New York Times, talking about why we are having so few babies.

00:56:35.000 And again, the answer as to why we are having so few babies is actually quite clear.

00:56:38.000 Why are we having so few babies?

00:56:39.000 Fewer people are getting married and fewer people are religious. 1.00

00:56:41.000 That's the answer. 1.00

00:56:43.000 Those are all the answers.

00:56:43.000 And there are no more answers.

00:56:44.000 This idea that it's rooted in sort of economic turmoil is nonsense.

00:56:48.000 There are lots of poor countries all over the world where people have tons of babies. 1.00

00:56:52.000 The notion that this is rooted in the inability of people to get married is total crap. 0.98

00:56:56.000 It is easier to get married now in 2026. 0.94

00:56:59.000 Then pretty much any time in human history, you have more freedoms, you have more rights, you have more abilities, you have more economic capacity. 0.98

00:57:06.000 The idea that there's some sort of gigantic conspiracy to stop you from getting married is total trash. 0.99

00:57:10.000 It is nonsense. 0.96

00:57:12.000 Nonetheless, the New York Times ran a piece called Anna Louise by a woman named Anna Louise Sussman called Inconceivable, the impossibility of family in an age of uncertainty.

00:57:22.000 And basically, the case that she makes is the reason that people are not having babies is young people's inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood.

00:57:33.000 Called the vibes theory of demographic decline.

00:57:35.000 I would just note at this point that we had a lot more certainty about, you know, where things were economically speaking in, say, 2006.

00:57:42.000 And guess what?

00:57:43.000 The birth rates were still really low.

00:57:44.000 It turns out that when people are irreligious and rich, they don't have lots of babies. 0.73

00:57:49.000 That's it. 0.83

00:57:50.000 That's the whole thing.

00:57:52.000 I mean, again, I hate to break it to you, but if you want to have lots of babies, if you want to get married, you can still do those things.

00:57:58.000 You can still do the fact that people who speak common basic virtues, Those are some of the people who are hated the most in the online world, demonstrates, I think, where we're at.

00:58:07.000 It is much easier to get rich in the online world, in a world that is not real, by claiming it is impossible for you to get married.

00:58:14.000 You're a young dude, you're having trouble getting a date. 0.99

00:58:16.000 It's because women suck, it's because women are terrible, and it's impossible to find a good woman. 1.00

00:58:20.000 You don't have to go to church. 1.00

00:58:21.000 Even if you went to church, would you find a good woman? 1.00

00:58:24.000 Women are really just venal and terrible OnlyFans girls. 1.00

00:58:27.000 That's all women are. 1.00

00:58:29.000 That feels better for a lot of young men than, hey, you know what you might want to do? 1.00

00:58:32.000 Get a job, work out, look decent, go to church, find a girl.

00:58:37.000 Again, one of those things puts the responsibility on you and says you can do it.

00:58:41.000 I find that to be an empowering message.

00:58:42.000 A lot of people would prefer the grievance. 0.99

00:58:45.000 Erica Kirk, who's been raked over the coals for the great sin of being the wife of a man who was shot to death.

00:58:52.000 Again, I will never get over the fact that we are now eight months into the period after Charlie's death, and there are still people who are supposedly her allies who will allow the mockery of Erica Kirk and who will continue to uphold the people who are doing that sort of mockery.

00:59:09.000 It's insane.

00:59:10.000 So she gave a speech at Hillsdale in which she talked about getting married and raising a family.

00:59:13.000 Again, this should be basic common sense stuff to conservatives. 0.92

00:59:16.000 And yet she is being overlooked and attacked in favor of conspiracy theorists who will tell you that your problems are insuperable.

00:59:24.000 Charlie would often encourage people, like Dr. Arn said, to get married young, not rushed, not rushed, but young.

00:59:35.000 But I just want to encourage all of you to the men you are called to provide.

00:59:41.000 You are called to lead, to anchor your families in strength and consistency.

00:59:47.000 To the women you are called to nurture, to build, to shape lives with wisdom and endurance.

00:59:55.000 This used to be just a normal thing to say, and somehow it has become even sort of looked down upon on the right.

01:00:01.000 Why? 1.00

01:00:01.000 Because there's conspiracism and idiocy that has rotted brains, full scale rotted brains. 1.00

01:00:06.000 And if you think that's a coincidence, it is not. 1.00

01:00:08.000 It is not.

01:00:09.000 It is not just because of social media.

01:00:12.000 And the value of grievance and conspiracism, it is because, in fact, there are people all over the world who are happy to watch America tear itself apart.

01:00:18.000 It's a thing that they would like to do.

01:00:20.000 So don't let them do it.

01:00:21.000 Instead, be a good American citizen who considers the actual facts. 1.00

01:00:25.000 Don't be the moron who looks at the crowd and says, this line is the same as the much longer line just because a crowd's telling me that. 0.98

01:00:31.000 Instead, why don't you look at the evidence of your eyes and ears as opposed to whatever people are telling you is the most clickable and the most approved opinion? 1.00

01:00:39.000 Are you coming up?

01:00:40.000 We'll get to the president unleashing a housing policy that I think is kind of problematic.

01:00:44.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:00:45.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - May 12, 2026

Here’s How China SPIES on the US

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