The Ben Shapiro Show - November 11, 2026


Is America Headed for Civil War? | Brian Kilmeade

The Medical Establishment Just Struck Back Against MAHA

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

206.86

Word count

3,265

Sentence count

250


Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Joining me on the line is Brian Kilmeade.
00:00:02.000 He's co host of Fox and Friends, host of the nationally syndicated Brian Kilmeade show on Fox News Talk.
00:00:07.000 Of course, number one New York Times bestselling author of a bajillion books at this point.
00:00:10.000 His newest one, destined again for the New York Times bestseller list, is Uniting the States, Six Crucial Moments That Forge the American Miracle.
00:00:17.000 Brian, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:00:18.000 Really appreciate it.
00:00:20.000 And Ben, we're number five right now on the list.
00:00:21.000 But after the power of the Ben Shapiro show, I sense I could really knock Sylvester Stallone down a notch because he really hasn't had much success in life.
00:00:29.000 So I feel guilty about that.
00:00:31.000 But if I could, I don't mind beating Michael Douglas, but I do, but I would actually feel bad about being Svetch Stallone.
00:00:38.000 But that's the power you have, Ben.
00:00:40.000 Right.
00:00:41.000 Well, you know, when you're in your next movie, I play Brian Kilmeade, then that will probably happen.
00:00:46.000 I'd be flattered.
00:00:49.000 Let's talk about, you know, the book generally is about how the country has been able to come together after fractious moments.
00:00:55.000 Obviously, right now, we are in maybe the most fractious moment of the modern era, politically speaking.
00:01:00.000 It feels like things are sort of coming apart.
00:01:02.000 Centrifugally, there are a bunch of breaks on the right, there are a bunch of breaks on the left.
00:01:08.000 When you look at the results of last week's election, what do you feel are you optimistic about the possibility the country can come back together again and around what principles?
00:01:19.000 I mean, I think you're right.
00:01:20.000 There's these factions.
00:01:21.000 It used to be right or left.
00:01:23.000 Who's hot?
00:01:23.000 What do we used to debate?
00:01:25.000 How much money for defense?
00:01:26.000 What do we do about health care?
00:01:28.000 Social programs?
00:01:29.000 How are you going to bail out Social Security?
00:01:30.000 That used to be the Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush debate, right?
00:01:34.000 Persian Gulf War was a mistake.
00:01:36.000 Those are the good old days.
00:01:37.000 Now we have a situation where did you see some of the comments from El Said since he got elected?
00:01:42.000 He could not, even getting elected, disseminate between Iran and Israel on who's more of an enemy of the U.S.
00:01:50.000 And then you got this guy, Congressman-elect Hamoui, who is a former aide to the blind sheikh, says, Yeah, he can't really decide if we're worse than Iran.
00:01:59.000 We say death to Iran, they say death to America.
00:02:01.000 There's really no difference.
00:02:02.000 We should just talk diplomatically.
00:02:04.000 This guy won an election.
00:02:06.000 So my hope is that people realize the whack jobs that they voted.
00:02:10.000 For and understand the people on the right that have those beliefs aren't really running for office right now, they're the ones that JD Vance is soliciting in order to get their approval.
00:02:20.000 But the left is putting them in office, they got the block and they got the squad.
00:02:26.000 But there's such a gap right now because the Republicans did so horrendously in the house that they don't really need either one of them to pass anything.
00:02:35.000 So, hopefully, America will realize as these people speak out who they elected, and this will be a two year gap.
00:02:42.000 But maybe people have to see it to understand.
00:02:45.000 What they actually put into office.
00:02:47.000 So I am optimistic we'll eventually come together.
00:02:50.000 I do think this Democrats have absolutely no plan for affordability, and it's going to become abundantly clear soon.
00:02:56.000 They have no plan.
00:02:58.000 It's not a bad plan, it is no plan.
00:03:00.000 So that's the thing you should give Republicans hope as they continue to bring an end to the Iran war the right way.
00:03:06.000 How about this thing called winning it?
00:03:08.000 I would like to try that.
00:03:10.000 And then you'll watch everything level out with what Trump has been able to do.
00:03:15.000 Brian, one of the things that I think is also sort of astonishing is I'm sure you talk about it in your book as well.
00:03:21.000 But historically, the United States, the people of the United States, have been able to identify their foreign enemies.
00:03:25.000 And now it seems like there's a widespread inability to do so.
00:03:28.000 As you mentioned, many members of the Democratic Party no longer consider radical Islam an enemy.
00:03:33.000 A lot of them actually consider it openly an ally.
00:03:36.000 And meanwhile, I think you and I might be the only two people left in the Republican Party who actually understand that Russia is a geopolitical threat to the United States because it has become a sort of bizarre threat.
00:03:47.000 Talking point on the right that Russia actually isn't so bad.
00:03:50.000 Russia actually is our friend.
00:03:51.000 Now, what do you think is happening?
00:03:53.000 Is that a failure to self define and that's reflected in our inability to define who our enemies are?
00:03:59.000 Tell that to Latvia.
00:04:00.000 I think it was last night.
00:04:01.000 They all had to run into shelter because it looks like the Russians were breaching their border again.
00:04:06.000 So the Baltic nations get it, Eastern Europeans get it.
00:04:09.000 I do not know what is going on with Republicans and certain people in the podcast world who believe that it's our fault that NATO expanded.
00:04:16.000 Excuse me.
00:04:17.000 These people wanted a shot at freedom.
00:04:19.000 They were scared to death of the reformation of the Soviet Union.
00:04:23.000 They reached out to NATO.
00:04:24.000 And just so everybody knows, NATO is not an offensive threat.
00:04:28.000 They're a defensive alliance to prevent anything happening where Russia wants to reclaim territory.
00:04:34.000 Like, for example, what they're doing, what they did in Georgia, what they've kept those two provinces, and now what they did for the second time in Ukraine.
00:04:44.000 They've gotten, and did you see the stat, Ben?
00:04:47.000 Some Belarus people who are anti Russian published a stat 426,000 casualties in four and a half years.
00:04:57.000 That's what they're willing to absorb, and let alone, excuse me, deaths.
00:05:01.000 Those are death certificates.
00:05:02.000 So, casualties near 1.5 million.
00:05:06.000 That's what they're willing to absorb in order to please Vladimir Putin.
00:05:11.000 That guy is as evil as he gets.
00:05:13.000 I understand you can't get a deal done if you just say, I hate the Russians and I love the Ukrainians.
00:05:19.000 But I think the president's totally overdone it with giving leeway to Vladimir Putin.
00:05:24.000 And I just think at some point, Putin, I think, embarrassed the president in Alaska, the way he did absolutely nothing after the president took great political risk in having that meeting.
00:05:35.000 And I think there's a danger of him doing it again in the UAE with these meetings again.
00:05:41.000 So I hope they realize that they're going to lose all the refineries in about two months if they continue.
00:05:50.000 But I'm not sure they will.
00:05:51.000 And I just was watching tape roll out just saying that Yelton was promised that we wouldn't move past a certain level.
00:05:59.000 We're not moving on anything.
00:06:01.000 We're giving people freedom.
00:06:02.000 That's all that's happening.
00:06:03.000 People have free governments.
00:06:06.000 We're not moving for a spear of influence.
00:06:09.000 That's all.
00:06:10.000 The minute they become a democracy or move that way, they become an alliance.
00:06:14.000 They don't become a military partnership.
00:06:17.000 There's a lot of important stuff in your life.
00:06:19.000 Some of it right now, I hate to tell you, is moldering out there in the garage, right?
00:06:22.000 It's all of your family memories, the old film reels and the old pictures and all those VHS tapes.
00:06:27.000 Do you have a VCR still?
00:06:28.000 Do you?
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00:06:57.000 Again, I've used Legacy Box myself, did this for my parents as well.
00:07:00.000 And there's Something truly incredible about accessing memories that you haven't seen for 20, 30 years, seeing what your parents were like 20 years ago, what you were like 20 years ago, seeing your grandparents.
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00:07:18.000 You know, Brian, in your book, Uniting the States, Six Crucial Moments That Forged the American Miracle, obviously one of the major themes is political leadership.
00:07:26.000 And so when we look at sort of what's lacking right now, is this a problem of our education?
00:07:31.000 Is this a problem at the population level?
00:07:32.000 Like, what do you think is happening?
00:07:34.000 Or is this just that, Our leadership class is not producing the kinds of people at the top level who are capable of uniting the country.
00:07:41.000 And maybe that's because we spend so much of our time these days discussing kind of hard nosed interests as opposed to actual American values.
00:07:47.000 Maybe because we don't even agree on what those values are.
00:07:49.000 But I mean, if you look back at the American presidents who are most successful of either party, they're people who spoke in the name of not just American interests, but also in the name of American values.
00:07:58.000 And it's very difficult, I think, to identify at this point from either the right or the left the last politician, major politician who spoke in sort of raw terms about what it meant for America to have values and what those look like.
00:08:12.000 I think you brought up the key point.
00:08:14.000 And I'll give you an example.
00:08:16.000 So I don't just, in the six moments, crucial moments that made our country, I don't just do war.
00:08:20.000 Wars easy.
00:08:21.000 And also, we all know win battle.
00:08:24.000 Why do they fought?
00:08:25.000 So I include Louisiana Purchase in it.
00:08:25.000 I got it.
00:08:28.000 So everyone agreed that New Orleans had to be ours, the mouth of the Mississippi.
00:08:32.000 But the country was divided on whether we should be a big country or not.
00:08:36.000 Jefferson said, I want the whole thing.
00:08:37.000 I want to double the size of the country.
00:08:39.000 I want to go as far west as we can.
00:08:41.000 You know who didn't?
00:08:42.000 Hamilton.
00:08:43.000 Does that mean Hamilton's a bad person?
00:08:45.000 Does that mean Jefferson's a genius or vice versa?
00:08:48.000 They fought about it.
00:08:48.000 No.
00:08:49.000 They wanted to make sure we didn't pull off this $15 million purchase.
00:08:53.000 But when it was done, It was done.
00:08:56.000 Over.
00:08:57.000 That's it.
00:08:58.000 We became this country, and thank goodness that Jefferson won out and we were fortuitous in our timing.
00:09:03.000 So we should continue to fight for things right and left.
00:09:07.000 But when you get things done, you move on.
00:09:10.000 For example, I was watching a debate last night with Laura Ingram and Mark Wayne Moan on her show, and she's for total deportation of every illegal in our country.
00:09:21.000 And maybe you do too in the ideal world.
00:09:24.000 And then I come back to this world and I know it's not possible.
00:09:27.000 And then you see some of the exit polling in the Hispanics, and whether you like it or not, they misinterpreted or didn't like when you go and pulling people off the back of landscaping trucks and out of restaurants where they have not committed a crime and threw them out.
00:09:41.000 Now, should they be citizens?
00:09:42.000 No.
00:09:43.000 But is there a compromise there where they get extended work visas and a sponsor in order to finish off the wall and keep the deportation policies set and maybe have unanimity when it comes to people who do get asylum and who don't?
00:10:00.000 In this thing called immigration reform, because Trump's going to leave in two years.
00:10:05.000 50 50 chances, and I'm going to be no Republican.
00:10:07.000 Everything that he did is going to be undone.
00:10:10.000 So, is it okay for conservatives to say, This is what I want?
00:10:14.000 Is it okay for liberals to say, This is what I want, or whatever is on the left these days?
00:10:18.000 And this is the best we could get.
00:10:20.000 And my analogy is my other background is sports.
00:10:23.000 You know what the coolest thing to debate was?
00:10:25.000 They lit up the phones?
00:10:26.000 Trades.
00:10:27.000 So, when you do a trade, well, you got three guys and two draft picks.
00:10:31.000 What do they get in the long run?
00:10:32.000 Well, it didn't really.
00:10:33.000 Pan out for the Vikings and Cowboys, famously, with the Herschel Walker trade, but it was great for sports radio.
00:10:39.000 So, would we go back to making our shows more about, wow, they did a deal on immigration, they did a deal on the deficit, they did a deal on Social Security?
00:10:48.000 Man, the Republicans gave too much on this.
00:10:50.000 Man, the Democrats, I can't believe they caved like that.
00:10:53.000 That's what I hope we get to.
00:10:55.000 But as conservatives, are people going to say, my guy needs to be primaried?
00:10:59.000 He didn't get everything he wanted, he didn't get what I put him in there for.
00:11:04.000 Well, are we going to get four more tea parties on the right?
00:11:07.000 Are you going to get six more DSAs on the left?
00:11:11.000 So that's what I ask you.
00:11:12.000 Is there enough people that say, okay, I'm here for a short time to get things done?
00:11:17.000 Like Social Security is a five alarm fire, right?
00:11:19.000 Do we agree on that?
00:11:20.000 Someone's got to come up with a way to fix it.
00:11:22.000 So are you going to get primaried, Ben Shapiro, if you have a deal where you don't get everything you want?
00:11:30.000 Yeah.
00:11:31.000 And Brian, I've talked about this with legislators and I've also talked about this with audiences because the truth is that.
00:11:36.000 People who are sort of in our industry, in the talking head industry, there's a great incentive to kind of fib to the audience about what's possible.
00:11:43.000 And then the idea is that everyone who doesn't achieve magic is somehow a complete failure and must be ousted.
00:11:49.000 And I'm the purest.
00:11:50.000 If only they had been stronger in their convictions, then magically we would have gotten everything that we could possibly want.
00:11:55.000 And it turns out what that's a recipe for, and this is true on the other side of the aisle as well, that's a recipe for massive disillusionment by the American public.
00:12:01.000 Because if you keep telling people that what you want is just around the corner, but you just don't have people in power with sufficient will to do it, and what you need is a more willpower driven political class, well, The system is not built for that.
00:12:15.000 The system was built directly to create consensus.
00:12:18.000 I mean, I'm sure you talk about it in your brand new book, Uniting the States.
00:12:22.000 But again, one of the ways that the founders decided to unite the states was to make it so the national government could only act when there was cohesive and widely approved policy among the states.
00:12:32.000 The whole point of having a House and also a Senate and having a balance of power between the executive and the legislative and the judicial, the whole point was to make it hard to do things absent a gigantic consensus.
00:12:41.000 And instead, because again, people have sort of been convinced, I don't need a consensus, I need 50 plus one.
00:12:45.000 If I get my 50 plus one, I should be able to run just roughshod over the other guys to the furthest extent.
00:12:51.000 And if you won't give me that, then it must be because you're some sort of coward or intellectual traitor.
00:12:55.000 If you keep telling people that over and over and over again, what you're going to end up with is disillusionment of the people in power.
00:13:01.000 And then you'll swing all the way over to the other side.
00:13:03.000 And then you'll be disillusioned with them, too.
00:13:04.000 So, again, for a lot of Republicans who are having a Pepto Bismol moment about the election, I just think it's worthwhile recognizing Democrats are going to disappoint everybody over the course of the next years, too, because they have made a bunch of promises they cannot fulfill.
00:13:18.000 You know, it's interesting, and I know I'm biased because I think Trump's done a lot of good things, even though I disagree on Russia, obviously.
00:13:26.000 And I think that he should finish the job, should have finished the job in May.
00:13:29.000 And I do think Iran was a move that had to be done by one president until it was an emergency.
00:13:34.000 Then, before it became obviously, we had to do it.
00:13:37.000 But having said all that, the thing is, he has put the economic programs in place.
00:13:41.000 Yeah, did he over tariff?
00:13:42.000 Yes, but some of the tariffs did work.
00:13:44.000 They led to trade deals.
00:13:45.000 He's done 20 trade deals.
00:13:47.000 He's about to land Canada.
00:13:49.000 He's about to land Mexico probably within the next three months.
00:13:52.000 Some people think in the next two weeks.
00:13:54.000 So that'll bring all these tariffs, eliminate these tariffs.
00:13:57.000 He uses them as a hedge.
00:13:59.000 He blasts you with tariffs, gets your attention, and he's starting to realign and bring manufacturing back 10 straight months.
00:14:06.000 That's not by accident.
00:14:08.000 So he's doing it.
00:14:09.000 He's drilling where he can.
00:14:11.000 We have broke the fever, that green fever that said if we drive a gas powered car, the world's going to end.
00:14:17.000 Al Gore should be embarrassed.
00:14:19.000 AOC should be more embarrassed about.
00:14:20.000 What they pledged and what didn't come out.
00:14:22.000 So I think that as soon as he gets through the Iraq war, Iran war the right way, you're going to see a lot of these economic policies fall into place quickly.
00:14:32.000 And then people are going to look around and say, who's responsible for it?
00:14:35.000 And it's going to be very clear shortly.
00:14:38.000 What I did not expect is the vice president to jump ship and really separate himself in year two of a four year administration the way he did.
00:14:49.000 And contrast that with Marco Rubio's done over the weekend.
00:14:52.000 When asked impromptu, About the midterm elections, he said, I knew it's not popular, but it doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
00:14:59.000 And he just went over the danger of Iran.
00:15:03.000 That's what was missing.
00:15:03.000 JD could be against it, and that's fine.
00:15:06.000 That's what you're there for, to give a counter opinion.
00:15:08.000 But to not go and qualify it with this has been a 37 year enemy that this president had the strength to address, that's what I couldn't believe.
00:15:19.000 Yeah, well, again, I think that your book is a necessary read at this point Uniting the States, Six Crucial Moments That Forged the American Miracle.
00:15:26.000 It's a reminder that America can come together.
00:15:28.000 If we actually come together around some semblance of reality and shared principle.
00:15:32.000 Brian Kilmey, congrats on the book.
00:15:34.000 Thanks so much for the time.
00:15:35.000 All right, go get him, Ben Shapiro.
00:15:36.000 Thanks so much.
00:15:37.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:15:39.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:15:40.000 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.