The Ben Shapiro Show - Pro-Jihadist Marxist TAKES NEW YORK!

00:00:00.000 Well, we're here.

00:00:02.000 Zorhan Mamdani, the new mayor of New York, Abigail Spanberger, the governor-elect of Virginia, Mikey Sherrill, the governor-elect in New Jersey.

00:00:09.000 We'll go through all the results, what it means for the country, and that shocking socialist speech from Zorhan Mamdani last night.

00:00:17.000 First, you may know here at the Daily Wire, we don't always agree, actually.

00:00:20.000 Friendly Fire is the show where Matt Walsh, Michael Moles, Andrew Clavin, and I get together to disagree live for the entire internet to see and comment on what could possibly go wrong.

00:00:29.000 Well, a new episode of Friendly Fire premieres in two weeks on Daily Wire Plus.

00:00:32.000 And this time, we're also going to world premiere the official trailer for the Penn Dragon cycle, the rise of the Merlin, only on Friendly Fire, November 19th, 7 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire Plus.

00:00:43.000 You did it! 0.95

00:00:44.000 You really finally did it, you maniacs! 1.00

00:00:47.000 You blew it up! 1.00

00:00:49.000 Damn you! 1.00

00:00:51.000 Well, I mean, the Statue of Liberty, we're in New York, and the Statue of Liberty is half buried in sand now, and Charlton Heston is just yelling at it because of what New York City just decided to do, which was by an overwhelming margin, actually, hand over the financial center of planet Earth to a Marxist pro-jihadist named Zorhan Mamdani, who has never held a real job. 1.00

00:01:14.000 And, you know, it's a bold move, Cotton.

00:01:17.000 We'll see how it works out for them.

00:01:19.000 According to the New York Times, Momdani, riding a historic surge of enthusiasm as the nation's largest city, embraced a generational and ideological change.

00:01:29.000 Well done, New York Times, was elected in New York's 111th mayor.

00:01:34.000 The results were evident very early on in the night.

00:01:36.000 It's about 35 minutes for the AP to call the race.

00:01:39.000 Momdani received 1.1 million people, I believe, voting for him.

00:01:45.000 The turnout yesterday was extraordinarily high.

00:01:50.000 His nearest competitor, Andrew Cuomo, who ran, at best, a somnambulant race, sleepwalking his way through the race, it seems to be a sense of entitlement for Andrew Cuomo, running in the primaries, then running in the general.

00:02:00.000 He was unable to win the race because of enthusiasm for Momdani, yes, but also because of wild lack of enthusiasm for Andrew Cuomo, which was quite real.

00:02:09.000 The anti-Momdani vote was not enough to overcome the pro-Momdani vote, given the shortcomings of the other candidates ranging from Eric Adams to Curtis Saliwa.

00:02:18.000 Momdani's coalition, which we'll get to in a little bit here, was an unusual coalition, to say the least.

00:02:24.000 And he is not hiding the ball.

00:02:27.000 He intends on major change in America's financial center and indeed the financial center of planet Earth.

00:02:32.000 He intends a new system that is going to destroy capitalism.

00:02:37.000 Now, will he actually be able to accomplish that?

00:02:39.000 You know, there are some checks on him.

00:02:40.000 He's got a 51-member city council that he has to run things by.

00:02:44.000 And many of the promises that he has made are third grade running for school president promises.

00:02:48.000 Free ice cream for everybody and no homework was basically his campaign.

00:02:52.000 That if he said affordability over and over and over, and then if he just threw out a bunch of random things that he will never be able to do, then he would be elected mayor.

00:03:00.000 And it worked.

00:03:01.000 It worked.

00:03:02.000 We now live in a political era characterized on both sides by people accurately diagnosing problems and then not accurately diagnosing any solutions and saying, if you give me ultimate power, I will solve it for you.

00:03:14.000 And it never works.

00:03:14.000 And then we swivel to the other side and then we swivel back to the first side.

00:03:17.000 And that seems to be the cycle that we are in currently.

00:03:20.000 I'm going to get more into Momdani in a moment, but I first want to explain to you the rest of the news that happened last night.

00:03:26.000 Abigail Spanberger also won in Virginia.

00:03:29.000 She won by a large margin in this race over the current lieutenant governor of Virginia, Winsom Earl Sears. 0.97

00:03:38.000 She ended up winning by over 10 percentage points.

00:03:41.000 Because that race was not particularly close, she was also able to drag Jay Jones over the line.

00:03:45.000 There's sort of a fascinating contrast between Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, who is considered what would have been called the Blue Dog Democrat.

00:03:52.000 She's not particularly conservative, but she is certainly more moderate than, say, Zorin Momdani.

00:03:57.000 Her pitch yesterday after she won was that pragmatism was the order of the day.

00:04:01.000 Here's what Abigail Spanberger, the governor of the elect of Virginia, had to say.

00:04:06.000 We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship.

00:04:22.000 We chose our Commonwealth over chaos.

00:04:28.000 Okay, so she is also a candidate who in the past has called out Democratic focus on issues like, for example, the trans issue or on racial issues saying like this sort of stuff does not win elections.

00:04:38.000 And so it'll be fascinating to see the internecine warfare in the Democratic Party between a moderate victor like Abigail Spanberger, comparatively moderate, versus the Zorhan Mamdani where all the enthusiasm and media coverage is going to go.

00:04:50.000 As said, she dragged Jay Jones over the finish line. 1.00

00:04:54.000 He ended up winning by about seven percentage points over Jason Mieres in that attorney general race in Virginia, despite the fact that Jay Jones, of course, had this very extraordinary texting scandal in which he had apparently texted a Republican that he wanted to kill the Speaker of the House of Delegates in Virginia and then labeled that speaker's children little fascists.

00:05:14.000 That apparently did not inhibit his election.

00:05:16.000 Here he was yesterday.

00:05:18.000 To everyone who didn't give up on this campaign, I say thank you.

00:05:25.000 I will protect our jobs, our health care, and our economy from Donald Trump's attacks.

00:05:33.000 Both Spanberger and Jones, Mamdani, too, they focused a lot on President Trump.

00:05:37.000 This is being taken as a repudiation of President Trump.

00:05:40.000 To be fair, President Trump is, in fact, the president of the United States.

00:05:43.000 These are Democratic states.

00:05:44.000 I think it would have been kind of a shocker if Republicans had won or even been competitive, seriously competitive in any of these states, which brings us to the third state that was up for election last night.

00:05:54.000 And that, of course, was New Jersey.

00:05:56.000 More on these shocking election results.

00:05:59.000 Are they that shocking?

00:06:00.000 What does it mean for the country?

00:06:01.000 I'll get into all that in just a moment.

00:06:03.000 First, let's talk about something that actually matters at a sort of deeper level, honoring American veterans on Veterans Day.

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00:08:18.000 Unfortunately, Jack Chitterelli lost to Mikey Sherrill.

00:08:23.000 Chitterelli had come close in his last election cycle, but that was more of a surprise.

00:08:27.000 I think people saw him coming this time if they're Democrats.

00:08:30.000 And so she ended up winning by, again, a fairly significant margin in New Jersey.

00:08:36.000 Not a gigantic shock because there are almost 900,000 more registered Democrats in New Jersey than registered Republicans.

00:08:43.000 Chitterelli ran a sort of traditionally conservative campaign.

00:08:46.000 And because he almost surprised Phil Murphy in the last election cycle, I think that Democrats showed up en masse to stop that this time.

00:08:55.000 She, of course, is not particularly moderate.

00:08:57.000 She tries to make up that she is moderate.

00:09:00.000 But it's, again, fascinating to see the sort of ideological diversity inside the Democratic Party.

00:09:04.000 So long as you're anti-Trump, then you can have Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill, and of course, Zorhan Mamdani, which brings us to Zorhan Mamdani.

00:09:11.000 And it'll be fascinating, as I say, to see whether the Democratic Party decides to engage in the glossing of Zorhan Mamdani as sort of the future of the party.

00:09:21.000 Democrats are resistant.

00:09:22.000 Hakeem Jeffries just yesterday suggested that he was not the face of the party.

00:09:26.000 Of course, I'm old enough to remember when Democrats said AOC was not the face of the party or Ilhan Omar or Shita Talib.

00:09:31.000 They are all faces of the party.

00:09:33.000 And it'll be fascinating, again, to see how the Democratic Party treats him.

00:09:38.000 Do they treat him as a sort of outsider?

00:09:40.000 Do they say that he's sort of quirky the way they treated Bill de Blasio?

00:09:44.000 Or do they embrace him and try to draft off of the energy that he obviously captured in the middle of this campaign?

00:09:51.000 Now, if you look at the polling results, the sort of exit polls from NBC, for example, his coalition is really interesting.

00:09:58.000 So one of the lies that is constantly told about socialist candidates like Zorhan Mamdani is that they are the people who get blue-collar voters.

00:10:06.000 They excite the blue-collar voters.

00:10:08.000 One of the things that is different between America and Europe is that historically speaking, European blue-collar workers tend towards socialism very often.

00:10:15.000 That does not happen in America.

00:10:17.000 In America, blue-collar workers have always been fond of capitalism because it is what provides their jobs.

00:10:23.000 Even in the early union days of the United States, the unions were actually quite actively anti-communist in the United States in a way that they simply were not.

00:10:31.000 They were sort of the vanguard of the proletariat, actually, in much of Europe.

00:10:36.000 That was not the case in the United States, and that remains true today. 0.96

00:10:40.000 In fact, Zorhan Mamdani's base here was immigrant, extremely progressive, college-educated, and female.

00:10:48.000 Those were the things that drove Zorhan Mamdani to victory here.

00:10:51.000 The exit poll, 81% of women under 30 voted for Mamdani.

00:10:55.000 81% of women under the age of 30 voted for Zorhan Mamdani. 0.95

00:11:00.000 Now, again, some of that has to do with the fact that Zorn Mamdani, on a personal level, because of the smarmy grin and the inability to bench press 135 pounds, seems particularly non-threatening, as opposed to Andrew Cuomo, of course, was ousted from office over his inability to keep his hands off the asses of others.

00:11:17.000 And so I can't imagine that that really helped Andrew Cuomo in this race, particularly among women.

00:11:23.000 Young men voted 64% for Zorhan Mamdani.

00:11:28.000 Older men above the age of 65 voted 48% for Cuomo.

00:11:33.000 Men between the ages of 45 and 64 voted for Mamtani by 1%, which is basically a dead heat.

00:11:40.000 Women overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani, but as you got older, it trended toward Cuomo.

00:11:47.000 When you look at sort of the racial polarization, there wasn't tons of racial polarization here, actually.

00:11:53.000 The white voters in New York City voted basically dead even between Momdani and Cuomo according to these exit polls.

00:11:59.000 Black voters voted 55 to 40 in favor of Momdani.

00:12:02.000 Hispanic voters voted 49 to 42 in favor of Mamdani.

00:12:06.000 Asian voters, which would largely be South Asian, meaning Muslim voters, voted overwhelmingly for Mamdani.

00:12:12.000 And as I say, on an educational level, this idea that it was like blue-collar voters who put Mamdani over the top, that's not true.

00:12:18.000 Actually, 20% of the electorate never attended college, apparently.

00:12:22.000 39% voted Mamdani.

00:12:24.000 47% voted for Andrew Cuomo.

00:12:28.000 If you attended college but didn't graduate with a degree, 48 to 40 in favor of Cuomo.

00:12:32.000 Associate's degree, 48 to 45 in favor of Cuomo.

00:12:36.000 If you have a bachelor's, 57 to 37.

00:12:39.000 If you have an advanced degree, 57 to 37.

00:12:42.000 So these are elite belief systems, elite belief systems, and his sort of appeal to foreign populations or foreign-born populations was sort of the Zorin-Mamdani model.

00:12:52.000 And that's not a shock.

00:12:52.000 DSA openly acknowledged this in the primary against Cuomo.

00:12:56.000 They said they went into progressive areas and drove out turnout there.

00:12:59.000 And then they went into ethnic enclaves and Muslim areas and drove out turnout over there.

00:13:04.000 And that was the model.

00:13:05.000 And then he sort of broadened out that coalition to include a lot of white college-educated women in particular.

00:13:11.000 When it came to faith, a plurality of Protestants or other Christians voted 4942 in favor of Cuomo.

00:13:18.000 Catholics voted 5333 in favor of Cuomo.

00:13:21.000 Jews voted 633 in favor of Cuomo.

00:13:26.000 And again, that is largely driven by the Orthodox Jewish population.

00:13:29.000 Even some conservative Jews were very, very not pro-Mamdani.

00:13:33.000 The 33% of Jews who voted for Zorhan Mamdani, I would guarantee you that these are people who do not regularly attend synagogue, keep kosher in any way, or have any relationship truly with their religion in a very serious way.

00:13:46.000 Other, there was no Muslim category here, other, which I assume means Muslim, voted 70 to 25 in favor of Mamdani.

00:13:53.000 Straight people in this election voted 4646.

00:13:57.000 LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign voted 82 to 15 in favor of Zorhan Mamdani.

00:14:04.000 So, again, a fascinating breakdown there.

00:14:07.000 But one of the things that it shows is that Zorhan Mamdani pretending to be a sort of person of the people, against the rich, against the college education, against the elite.

00:14:17.000 There is an elite class in New York City who work for government or nonprofits, who make a good living, who graduated from college, have college degrees, or are people who he explicitly appealed to as quote-unquote outsiders to the system, suggesting that basically it was immigrant populations versus everybody else.

00:14:38.000 And that was his victory speech.

00:14:39.000 So last night, Mamdani wins, and then he delivers what is an extraordinary victory speech, truly extraordinary, because he just says all the quiet parts out loud.

00:14:47.000 If this is the future of the Democratic Party, you know, go for it, guys, that it's playing with fire.

00:14:51.000 I mean, New York City, by the way, New York City is playing with fire. 0.99

00:14:53.000 His policy proposals are trash. 0.98

00:14:55.000 If he implements any of them, they are in serious trouble. 0.99

00:14:57.000 The best thing that can happen to Zorhan Mamdani is he can do this communist happy talk. 0.92

00:15:03.000 He can do his sort of pro-jihadist happy talk, and nothing that he says actually gets done.

00:15:09.000 That is the best thing that can happen to him because, again, there are systemic checks and balances that prevent Mamdani from sort of single-handedly destroying the city. 0.93

00:15:17.000 And so he should not get credit for not destroying the city because of things he was not allowed to do.

00:15:23.000 It turns out that if he wants to raise taxes, he has to go to the state level, and the state legislature is very unlikely to want to increase taxes again.

00:15:31.000 He says that he wants to make all the buses free.

00:15:33.000 How's he going to pay for it?

00:15:34.000 How's he going to do any of this stuff?

00:15:36.000 Mostly, he won't be able to get any of that stuff done.

00:15:38.000 And then he will rail against the system, presumably.

00:15:41.000 And that's if he wants to win re-election, how he will win re-election.

00:15:44.000 Nothing will change, but he'll rail against the system that didn't allow him to do all of the worst things.

00:15:49.000 I can say that the number of people from whom I have received texts who run businesses in New York openly talking about moving their businesses is extraordinary.

00:15:59.000 I'm happy on a personal level to help facilitate the move of anyone who wants to get out of New York City to Nashville or to Florida to a zero tax state that is friendly to business.

00:16:10.000 I think we're going to set up some sort of portal for people who want to do that because Mamdani will make the business climate here disastrous.

00:16:17.000 Crime will go up. 0.98

00:16:19.000 His proposals are foolish in the extreme. 0.67

00:16:22.000 Alrighty, coming up, Zaran Mamdani makes a full mask off bane from the Dark Knight Rises speech upon his victory. 0.97

00:16:29.000 We'll get to all that in a moment.

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00:18:56.000 Last night, he gives this speech.

00:18:58.000 In this speech, he does not quote any of the American founders.

00:19:02.000 Typically, when you win, you tend to quote the founding ideals of the country.

00:19:05.000 He doesn't pay lip service to the founding ideals of the country. 0.61

00:19:08.000 In fact, his entire speech is about how America historically is trash and how all of the fundamental principles of America are trash and how he's here to change things on a radical, fundamental level. 0.86

00:19:18.000 That was his entire speech yesterday. 0.97

00:19:19.000 It's a deeply radical speech.

00:19:20.000 The people that he quoted in this speech are Eugene V. Debs, a socialist candidate from the 1910s, and Nehru, the socialist leader of the non-aligned India in the post-partition era.

00:19:35.000 Those are the people he quoted.

00:19:37.000 There was no Washington.

00:19:38.000 There was no Jefferson.

00:19:39.000 There was no Lincoln.

00:19:41.000 The only other person he quoted mainly because he really hates Andrew Cuomo and wanted to stab him is at one point he quoted Mario Cuomo, Andrew's father.

00:19:48.000 Those are the people he quoted.

00:19:50.000 That is not a coincidence.

00:19:52.000 So I'm going to go through this speech in a little bit of detail because it shows you where the vanguard of the Democratic Party, the progressive wing of the Democrats, where they think we are, and how much they truly, truly despise the status quo of America and America historically.

00:20:06.000 So here he was, leading off with a quote from, again, a socialist, Eugene B. Debs.

00:20:14.000 Thank you, my friends.

00:20:22.000 The sun may have set over our city this evening.

00:20:28.000 But as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.

00:20:40.000 Okay, so a dawn for a better day for humanity.

00:20:43.000 Again, there's that Marxist language right off the bat.

00:20:45.000 So Barack Obama also had this transformational language as though the hearts of man were going to be changed, like the prophets.

00:20:51.000 We're going to remove the heart of stone and replace it with the heart of flesh.

00:20:54.000 Okay, this has always been the Marxist idea.

00:20:56.000 The Marxist idea is that humanity is fundamentally changeable if you change the economic system.

00:21:01.000 The sort of religious, traditional biblical idea is that, nope, humanity is what humanity is.

00:21:06.000 Humanity is what humanity was.

00:21:07.000 Humanity does not fundamentally change.

00:21:09.000 You can change yourself if you take on certain actions or if you accept certain things into your life, but humanity itself is not changing.

00:21:18.000 The Marxist idea is that all the evils of humanity are created by the economic system.

00:21:22.000 And so if you change your systems, then there will be a better day for humanity.

00:21:28.000 Not just for New York, but humans will change.

00:21:31.000 Okay, he then continues by posing a false dichotomy in which he suggests that the wealthy and powerful in New York have been controlling.

00:21:38.000 I just have a question for a moment.

00:21:40.000 Just one question.

00:21:43.000 The mayor of New York was Bill de Blasio, who was basically a communist not very long ago.

00:21:49.000 Eric Adams can hardly be said to be a scion of Milton Friedman or Frederick von Hayek.

00:21:57.000 New York City has not been the preserve of the dominant elite financial class in terms of governance for quite a while here.

00:22:06.000 And in fact, the history of New York City is very much a sort of class warfare zone.

00:22:11.000 The 60s and 70s, under, for example, John Lindsay, they turned into a class warfare zone.

00:22:17.000 That's just a reality.

00:22:19.000 So Zor Mamdani is saying something deeply ahistorical and also untrue.

00:22:23.000 And it is all about this idea that there is some sort of perverse, manipulative class that is interested in stealing money from the pockets of the working folks.

00:22:31.000 Again, he wasn't hiding the ball here.

00:22:36.000 For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands.

00:22:48.000 Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery by candlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns.

00:23:01.000 These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.

00:23:05.000 And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.

00:23:15.000 Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.

00:23:24.000 The future is in our hands.

00:23:30.000 My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.

00:23:36.000 Again, this is the kind of stuff that excites progressives.

00:23:38.000 Also, is almost a direct quote from Bain in The Dark Knight Rises, which was half the speech.

00:23:42.000 It belongs to you, the people.

00:23:45.000 And then he went on to basically stab Andrew Cuomo in the face.

00:23:51.000 Again, typically in politics, magnanimity in victory is a pretty nice traditional way of doing things.

00:23:58.000 No magnanimity happening right here from Zor Mamdani toward Andrew Cuomo.

00:24:04.000 I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life.

00:24:12.000 But let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.

00:24:30.000 New York, tonight you have delivered a mandate for change.

00:24:40.000 A mandate for a new kind of politics.

00:24:45.000 A mandate for a city we can afford.

00:24:50.000 And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.

00:24:55.000 I mean, first of all, put aside the absolute kind of jackassery of let this be the final time we utter the name Andrew.

00:25:02.000 May he be banished to the forbidden zone. 0.98

00:25:06.000 Ridiculous kind of stuff.

00:25:07.000 But then when he says that there's a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city we can afford, a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.

00:25:13.000 This is the thing that drives me absolutely up a wall about the way that we do politics in this country again. 0.98

00:25:18.000 All of his plans are trash. 0.99

00:25:20.000 I mean, really bad. 0.99

00:25:21.000 He says that there's a mandate for change.

00:25:23.000 There's always a mandate for change.

00:25:24.000 That's literally what elections are.

00:25:26.000 They are a mandate for change.

00:25:28.000 When there's a party change, when there's a person who changes, it's a mandate for change.

00:25:31.000 But the question is a mandate for what?

00:25:34.000 If the idea is there's a mandate in New York City for him to hem in the police in favor of social workers or for free buses, as I said on CNN's live stream last night, I'm very much looking forward to never having to pay for a hotel again in New York City.

00:25:49.000 I'm just going to ride the buses around.

00:25:50.000 I'll just get on.

00:25:51.000 They're free.

00:25:52.000 They can't kick me off.

00:25:53.000 Why the hell not?

00:25:54.000 As long as I don't get stabbed in the face, which may very well happen in a city of New York governed by Zorhan Mamdani, who thinks that the police are inhibitors of human freedom.

00:26:05.000 It's pretty incredible.

00:26:06.000 Okay, he continued by talking about the people he thinks were forgotten.

00:26:10.000 And you'll notice the coalition again.

00:26:11.000 Zorhan Mamdani believes that his coalition is immigrants, new immigrants, to New York City who have been culturally dispossessed in some way by, I suppose, the great white superstructure.

00:26:26.000 You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership.

00:26:36.000 We will fight for you because we are you.

00:26:41.000 Or as we say on Steinway, anaminkum wa'ileikum.

00:26:45.000 Those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own.

00:27:00.000 I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.

00:27:19.000 Yes, aunties.

00:27:23.000 And yes, Auntie's line was a nod to the fact that he said that his auntie, who is not in fact his aunt, was victimized by 9-11 because people gave her nasty looks on the subway, supposedly in a completely non-confirmable story.

00:27:34.000 Notice the litany there.

00:27:35.000 Again, who's not included?

00:27:37.000 Who's not included?

00:27:38.000 Native-born New Yorkers, right? 0.68

00:27:41.000 That's not included.

00:27:42.000 White people of any stripe, not included.

00:27:45.000 And that's the coalition that he sees as his coalition, pretty clearly.

00:27:50.000 And again, the sort of drama with which he infuses his own candidacy, that basically this is the dispossessed of the earth.

00:27:57.000 Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth were now taking power in New York.

00:27:59.000 I mean, it infuses everything that he is saying here.

00:28:02.000 He continued.

00:28:06.000 Now I know that I have asked for much from you over this last year.

00:28:13.000 Time and again, you have answered my calls.

00:28:18.000 But I have one final request: New York City, breathe this moment in.

00:28:29.000 We have held our breath for longer than we know.

00:28:34.000 Again, that's a reference, I assume, to BLM and the idea that we can't breathe and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

00:28:39.000 Again, the idea is that there is a perennial underclass in America, and now he has liberated them.

00:28:44.000 We have liberated them to take over the city. 0.70

00:28:47.000 If you're a business owner, man, you should be running for the hills.

00:28:50.000 If you're a person who pays taxes in the city, you should be scared out of your mind, truly.

00:28:54.000 In fact, I asked our friends and sponsors at Comet, which is a project of perplexity, please provide me a chart of percentage of total taxes in New York City paid by tax bracket.

00:29:04.000 And here is the answer: here's an up-to-date chart showing the percentage of total personal income tax paid in New York City by tax bracket for the 2021 tax year.

00:29:12.000 They did it illustrate how the highest earners pay a disproportionately large share of total city taxes, with the top 1% contributing nearly half, and the top 0.1% alone contributing about a quarter of the total.

00:29:25.000 The lowest 50% of earners, less than $50,000 AGI, paid about 4% of total New York City personal income taxes.

00:29:34.000 Households in the 50 to 90% bracket, which is 50,000 to 250,000, paid about 20%.

00:29:39.000 The 90 to 99% group, which is up to a million bucks, contributed approximately 27%.

00:29:45.000 Those in the top 0.9%, 99 to 99.9% paid 24%.

00:29:52.000 And the top 0.1% of filers, over $25 million AGI, which is annual gross income, contributed one quarter of New York City's total personal income tax receipt.

00:30:06.000 And Zora Mamdani's idea is: what if we squeeze them even harder?

00:30:10.000 Surely they won't go anywhere.

00:30:11.000 I mean, after all, they don't have the money.

00:30:14.000 And they certainly don't have the assets to actually just, you know, take, well, good luck, my dude, because he is a full-scale demagogic communist.

00:30:23.000 I mean, that is what Zora Mamdani is.

00:30:24.000 It's truly, truly amazing.

00:30:26.000 Of course, he says that he speaks in the language of hope because, again, the jackboots always come first with the smiley face.

00:30:34.000 And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together.

00:30:42.000 Hope over tyranny.

00:30:44.000 Hope over big money and small ideas.

00:30:48.000 Hope over despair.

00:30:52.000 We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.

00:31:01.000 And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us.

00:31:08.000 Now it is something that we do.

00:31:13.000 Okay, so again, the idea is that you're a passive victim, politics was happening to you.

00:31:16.000 Again, New York has elections all the time.

00:31:18.000 And in fact, Democrats have won many of those elections.

00:31:21.000 But he's not a Democrat.

00:31:22.000 He's a Democrat socialist.

00:31:25.000 And then he talks about his agenda and he lists out a bunch of things that are not going to happen.

00:31:30.000 Now, I know, I was on CNN, the live stream last night with Anna Kasparian, and we were on with Charlemagne and Harry Anson.

00:31:39.000 There's a lot of talk about how you said affordability over and over.

00:31:41.000 Yeah, I too can say affordability.

00:31:43.000 In fact, my two-year-old can say affordability if you say it to him slowly and have it repeat it.

00:31:47.000 But I'm not sure why saying affordability over and over is a solution to affordability.

00:31:51.000 It is not like Betelgeuse.

00:31:53.000 You do not say affordability three times and magically the rents are lowered.

00:31:57.000 Well, he seems to think that you do.

00:31:59.000 So here he was talking about his magical agenda.

00:32:02.000 And New Yorkers, you can only hope none of this happens.

00:32:06.000 This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt.

00:32:21.000 Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis that this city has seen since the days of fear of an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent stabilized tenants.

00:32:45.000 Make buses fast and free.

00:32:50.000 And deliver universal child care across our city.

00:32:54.000 And again, free ice cream for everyone.

00:32:57.000 Yes.

00:32:58.000 And if you believe this, then I guess I have a radical jihadi supporter, Marxist, for you for mayor. 0.74

00:33:05.000 I mean, I guess that's what you guys wanted.

00:33:07.000 Okay, then he talked, of course, about Donald Trump, because undergirding a lot of this is the idea that he is a backlash to Donald Trump.

00:33:14.000 And so Donald Trump was made the bugaboo here.

00:33:17.000 Here he went after President Trump, again, listing off all of the supposed victims of President Trump, the multi-ethnic, multi-sexual coalition against President Trump.

00:33:26.000 In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light.

00:33:35.000 Here, we believe in standing up for those we love.

00:33:40.000 Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall.

00:34:03.000 Your struggle is ours too.

00:34:08.000 Well, I mean, again, he is not hiding the ball.

00:34:11.000 He did try to pay lip service to fighting anti-Semitism.

00:34:14.000 Even there, he could not stop, but paid much more attention to supposed Islamophobia in New York, a city where they just elected a man to the mayoralty who posed alongside an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and refused to say Hamas should be disarmed.

00:34:31.000 That guy was just elected mayor of New York, and he's talking about the scourge of Islamophobia.

00:34:35.000 If you are a Jew in New York City, prepare for some pretty hard times.

00:34:40.000 Because if you believe Zor Mamdani is going to fight anti-Semitism while simultaneously celebrating globalized Intifada and saying that the Prime Minister of Israel ought to be arrested, and also he has no thoughts on Hamas disarming, prepare to be surprised.

00:34:52.000 That is not going to go the way that I think some of you think it's going to go.

00:34:57.000 And we will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-Semitism.

00:35:10.000 Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong. 0.99

00:35:18.000 Not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.

00:35:26.000 No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

00:35:34.000 Meanwhile, he did sum up by saying, basically, government is great for everything.

00:35:38.000 There are zero things government can't do.

00:35:40.000 It's all just been a matter of will.

00:35:42.000 It's not a matter of competence.

00:35:43.000 It's not a matter of your rights.

00:35:44.000 It's a matter of will.

00:35:46.000 If you just have the will, the Nietzschean will, government can do literally anything.

00:35:51.000 Government is magic.

00:35:54.000 This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another.

00:36:03.000 We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.

00:36:12.000 Okay, now, again, Mamdani's entire shtick here is that he's sort of representative of the proletariat, which is incredible. 0.88

00:36:18.000 The dude grew up in wealth.

00:36:20.000 He was given every benefit it is possible to have.

00:36:22.000 He's never held a real job until now.

00:36:26.000 And yet somehow he is the person who is going to unite the people earning $20 an hour with the people earning $30 an hour.

00:36:32.000 One of the sort of gigantic lies of Marxism is that the way capitalism works is pitting people who are poor against one another so that they don't eat the rich.

00:36:40.000 No, that's not how capitalism works.

00:36:42.000 Capitalism, the reason it's successful, is because it raises all the boats.

00:36:46.000 That is the reason.

00:36:47.000 It doesn't mean everybody's boat is going to be equally well placed in the water.

00:36:52.000 But as the water rises, it rises for everyone.

00:36:55.000 And all the boats float.

00:36:56.000 That's the basic idea of capitalism.

00:36:57.000 But again, it's all class warfare for Zorhan Mamdani.

00:37:01.000 And then, of course, he goes back to Trump.

00:37:04.000 And he says that President Trump has betrayed the nation.

00:37:07.000 He's going to usher in a generation of change.

00:37:10.000 Guys, if you don't find this frightening and this is actually kind of like a sexy pitch to you, well, I really, really hope that you get used to breadlines.

00:37:20.000 Together, we will usher in a generation of change.

00:37:24.000 And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.

00:37:42.000 After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.

00:37:56.000 And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

00:38:08.000 This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one.

00:38:17.000 So Donald Trump, since I know you're watching, I have four words for you.

00:38:26.000 Turn the volume up.

00:38:31.000 And again, I'm sure this is catnip for a lot of progressives, but dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

00:38:37.000 So I assume here you're talking about capitalism and democracy, which were the two things that allowed Donald Trump to accumulate power.

00:38:42.000 He was elected president twice, and he became much richer because of capitalism.

00:38:48.000 Mamdani concluded by saying that he is unapologetically himself, which is certainly true.

00:38:56.000 It's certainly true.

00:38:57.000 He says he's charting a new path, a non-conventional path.

00:39:02.000 I mean, again, true, but there are many paths in life, and some of them lead off cliffs.

00:39:09.000 And we must chart a new path as bold as the one we have already traveled.

00:39:15.000 After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate.

00:39:22.000 I am young despite my best efforts to grow older.

00:39:26.000 I am Muslim.

00:39:31.000 I am a democratic socialist.

00:39:38.000 And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.

00:39:45.000 Well, I mean, okay.

00:39:48.000 Okay.

00:39:49.000 H.L. Mencken, the famous columnist from the early 20th century, once said that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

00:39:56.000 Well, hope you enjoy.

00:39:58.000 Really, New Yorkers, and I'm glad that I have some Florida real estate that is available at a fetching price for those of you who wish to escape a city that is likely to go down the tubes over the course of the next several years, if, in fact, Zara Mamdani gets his way.

00:40:13.000 Already coming up, Hassan Piker has some interesting comments about the victory of Zarin Mamdani, mask off moment for Hassan Piker, but the mask is usually off with Hassan and a bizarre theory about why Democrats did well yesterday.

00:40:25.000 Apparently, Republicans must embrace interviews that gloss Nick Fuentes if they want to defeat Zarin Mamdani or something.

00:40:34.000 And we'll try to make our way through whatever that is.

00:40:36.000 First, look, I'm on the road constantly, like right now, covering news stories, political events, you name it, between flights and hotel rooms.

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00:42:36.000 Well, as if it weren't clear enough what Zora Mamdani is saying, one of the people he hosted at his election night party was one Hassan Piker, with whom he had posed, you know, a person who said that America deserved 9-11.

00:42:45.000 And just in case he wasn't saying it loud enough, last night, about a couple minutes after hugging AOC, Hassan Piker then declared it a tragedy that the United States defeated the Soviet Union.

00:42:56.000 What do you think it means that this guy right as a socialist and anti-communism did it work to stop him?

00:43:01.000 That's what it is.

00:43:03.000 Yeah, I think we are in the heart of the Imperial Corps.

00:43:08.000 This is the country that defeated the USSR, unfortunately.

00:43:12.000 And the reality of the matter is, there's a lot of antagonism.

00:43:16.000 There's no class consciousness in the United States of America.

00:43:19.000 One of the things I try to address every day with my commentary.

00:43:22.000 And I will say this: the conditions have deteriorated so much that everyday Americans, in spite of their lack of class consciousness, are finally arriving at the conclusion that perhaps there is an alternative out there.

00:43:37.000 There is an alternative that focuses on them as opposed to the interests of the billionaires and the millionaires, as opposed to the interests of the capital owners.

00:43:45.000 And I mean, you can't help but notice that.

00:43:48.000 You can't help but feel at least a little bit of excitement around that.

00:43:53.000 I mean, anybody who thinks that it was unfortunate that the Soviet Union, which is responsible for the murder of legitimately tens of millions of human beings, and then given their involvement with the establishment of the Chinese autocracy, more tens of millions of human beings, you know, at least they're saying the quiet part out loud now before they shock their dog in their $3 million mansion. 1.00

00:44:12.000 Well, meanwhile, the dumb takes come hot and heavy these days, truly stupid takes. 0.97

00:44:17.000 The dumb take from the right is that the reason that Zorhan Mamdani is now mayor of New York, or that Mikey Sherrill won in New Jersey, or that Abigail Spanberger won in Virginia, is because people were critical of Tucker Carlson's interview with a neo-Nazi last week. 0.99

00:44:34.000 A few things about this. 0.95

00:44:35.000 Well, one Jack Pesobiak tweeted, thank goodness so many conservative pundits spent the last few weeks focusing on e-drama and cancellation efforts instead of working to get out the vote.

00:44:43.000 That was very helpful to the movement.

00:44:46.000 And I will point out at this point that Tucker Carlson, who has come under absolutely deserved fire for glossing Nick Fuentes last week, the infighting did not begin with people critical of Tucker Carlson.

00:45:02.000 It began with Tucker Carlson, who has spent precisely zero time, zero effective time attacking Zaran Mamdani.

00:45:11.000 I have before me a list of the times that Tucker Carlson mentioned Zorhan Mamdani.

00:45:18.000 And the answer is he mentioned Zor Mamdani on episodes three times in the last two years.

00:45:27.000 Two years.

00:45:29.000 And he did mention Zor Mamdani one time in the past month.

00:45:33.000 It was with Marjorie Taylor Green praising him on October 22nd.

00:45:41.000 That guy was the only person in the New York City mayor's debate to say he wanted to focus on New York City.

00:45:48.000 They were all the candidates were asked, if you could visit a foreign country, what would it be?

00:45:51.000 And they, of course, all had an answer.

00:45:53.000 I think most said Israel.

00:45:54.000 Great.

00:45:55.000 And he said, I wouldn't go anywhere.

00:45:56.000 I'd stay in New York.

00:45:57.000 And like, if I want to meet Jewish constituents, I'd go to their synagogues, their homes, or whatever, but I'd be here in New York because that's what I'm doing.

00:46:03.000 I'm running New York.

00:46:04.000 That's my job.

00:46:05.000 Well, he gave the right answer.

00:46:06.000 I gave the right answer.

00:46:09.000 I mean, with that kind of critique, I can't imagine how Zarin Mamdani won.

00:46:13.000 I mean, that sort of fiery critique of Zorhan Mamdani's pro-jihadism and Marxism.

00:46:18.000 I mean, wow.

00:46:19.000 Stellar stuff.

00:46:20.000 By the way, just by way of comparison, I had my staff count up how many times I have covered Zorhan Mamdani at length on this program since just June.

00:46:30.000 The answer is 64.

00:46:32.000 Since October 5th, the answer is 17 times since October 5th.

00:46:37.000 In the last week, I did four separate episodes, four separate episodes about Zarin Mamdani.

00:46:44.000 By the way, we also cut a get out the vote ad basically for Jack Chitterelli in New Jersey.

00:46:50.000 And you may have noticed where we got, we're in New York.

00:46:52.000 Like my entire team came to New York to cover this particular story.

00:46:57.000 So if we're talking about who is directing fire against the left, which seems to be the question, I think it is pretty obvious who is not directing fire against the left.

00:47:06.000 In fact, in fact, that Marjorie Taylor Greene, beloved of Tucker Carlson's program, and a person who is earning strange new respect from the left, she had the opportunity yesterday to appear on The View.

00:47:18.000 Now, that's kind of an unusual opportunity for people on the right.

00:47:20.000 Typically, you're not given an opportunity to appear on The View, specifically because they don't want anybody right-wing on.

00:47:25.000 But the good news is that The View, which used to consider Marjorie Taylor Greene a low IQ Republican worried about Jewish space lasers, now they consider her a low IQ Republican concerned about Jewish space leaders, but also who agrees with them. 0.55

00:47:41.000 And that means she gets on the view.

00:47:43.000 So yesterday, she definitely focused in on Zor Mamdani.

00:47:47.000 It was election day.

00:47:48.000 She focused in, you know, really where it mattered on Zarin Mamdani by blaming the Republicans for the government shutdown.

00:47:54.000 Just slow clap for these no fighting inside the.

00:47:59.000 Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, doing the hard work of fighting the left by, you know, never fighting the left. 0.70

00:48:06.000 When I ran for Congress in 2020, I ran criticizing Republicans and Democrats equally because I come from a working class family, ran a construction company for over 20 years, and I feel like the government has failed all of us.

00:48:22.000 And it purely disgusts me.

00:48:24.000 It really does.

00:48:25.000 And I represent a district that is rural manufacturing district, blue-collar workers, and people have been crushed by decades of failure in Washington, D.C.

00:48:36.000 And so I have no problem pointing fingers at everyone.

00:48:41.000 And just to be clear, she also ripped on MAGA explicitly as well as the Republican leadership.

00:48:48.000 But really, the reason that Zor Mamdani won is because some of us were critical of people glossing white supremacists.

00:48:54.000 That's probably why Zarin Mamdani won.

00:48:56.000 In fact, what we probably should do is unite with white supremacists to defeat Zarin Mamdani while the white supremacists try to drag down the entire conservative movement.

00:49:03.000 That's probably the way we ought to do it.

00:49:05.000 You know, here was MTG again, you know, doing the hard work of fighting Zarin Mamdani by ripping on MAGA and Republican leadership.

00:49:10.000 Just well done as always.

00:49:12.000 You know, I think there's a lot of paid social media influencers.

00:49:17.000 And I found it very interesting that they were the MAGA accounts, but they're all paid.

00:49:22.000 And they all attacked me when I announced I was coming to join you ladies on the view. 0.98

00:49:27.000 And I think that's very weak and pathetic. 0.97

00:49:29.000 But when I talk about weak Republican men, I'm pretty much talking oftentimes about the leadership in the House and the Senate. 0.98

00:49:37.000 And they're just not getting our agenda done.

00:49:43.000 Again, with this kind of cogent defense of conservative principles there from Marjorie Taylor Greene or from Tucker Carlson, who has spent the last several years demoralizing conservatives by siding with and glossing some of the worst people on planet Earth.

00:49:59.000 And then we're told that unless there's unit, like I need an explainer.

00:50:05.000 Truly, I need an explainer, like a statistical explainer on how unifying with people who are actively anti-conservative is going to somehow grow the conservative coalition against the left.

00:50:20.000 I want an explainer because it doesn't add up logically or mathematically.

00:50:25.000 And if you want Zarin Mamdani, not just to be mayor of New York, but governor of New York and people like Zorhan Mamdani to be president of the United States, then Republicans could definitely do the thing that some seem to want to do, which is fringe out their own party by unifying with a wing that is fundamentally anti-conservative that disagrees with Donald Trump on many of the key issues of Donald Trump's actual platform.

00:50:52.000 That's not a theory.

00:50:53.000 That's an impulse.

00:50:55.000 It's not a well-thought-out logical idea.

00:50:57.000 It is an act of ideological pusillanimity.

00:51:03.000 Well, on a more positive note, after all that terrible political news, I'm joined on the line by Leland Vitert.

00:51:08.000 He's host of On Balance with Leland Vittert.

00:51:10.000 He serves as News Nation's chief Washington anchor.

00:51:13.000 He's also the author of a brand new book, a really tremendously inspiring book titled Born Lucky, A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.

00:51:21.000 Leland Vitter, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:51:23.000 I really appreciate it.

00:51:24.000 Ben, good to be with you.

00:51:27.000 So, your book is really inspiring.

00:51:29.000 It's an amazing story.

00:51:30.000 So, why don't you sort of spell out what the book is about and why you wrote it?

00:51:37.000 Yeah, so born lucky is hope for every parent of a kid who's having a hard time, not just with autism like I did, but ADHD, anxiety, bullying, the difficulties growing up.

00:51:48.000 It's to give parents the hope that my parents didn't have.

00:51:51.000 When I was about six years old, they were told I needed to be evaluated.

00:51:55.000 Worst thing any parent can ever hear.

00:51:57.000 Ben, your father, you know what that would be like.

00:52:00.000 And they take me to one of those medical testing centers, old magazines, stale coffee.

00:52:05.000 They wait a couple of hours.

00:52:06.000 The woman brings me back and says, it's very difficult to understand what's going on inside his head.

00:52:12.000 He's got serious behavioral issues.

00:52:15.000 So play dates, birthday parties, none of that was going to happen. 0.67

00:52:18.000 But even if a kid would just touch me in a way I didn't like, I'd turn around and slug them.

00:52:22.000 Big sensory issues.

00:52:24.000 If I had a jacket on I didn't like or socks, anything like that, I would just melt down.

00:52:30.000 And terrible learning disabilities.

00:52:32.000 So IQ is two halves of a test averaged together.

00:52:35.000 A 20-point spread between the two halves is a learning disability.

00:52:39.000 I had a 70-point spread.

00:52:40.000 They said it was the biggest spread they'd ever seen.

00:52:42.000 So my dad, like any father, asks, what do we do?

00:52:45.000 And she says, there's not much you can do.

00:52:47.000 And he goes, is there anything we can do?

00:52:48.000 And she said, generally, not.

00:52:51.000 And my dad, with that, said that he felt as though that I, in my current form at that point, would not really have an opportunity for a happy or productive normal life.

00:53:02.000 And he said, so at that point, he decided I am going to adapt Lucky, which was my nickname, to the world rather than the world to Lucky.

00:53:12.000 And Born Lucky is the story of him adapting me up for the world and teaching me the social and emotional fabric that comes so naturally to most people, trying to find a way to give a kid who wasn't going to be good at school and wasn't going to have friends self-esteem.

00:53:29.000 That's the born lucky story.

00:53:32.000 I mean, that's an amazing thing because the medicalization of a lot of these problems has led parents to believe that if there is not a drug that sort of fixes it, that if the medical community doesn't have an answer, that basically you despair or you have to, as you say in reverse, sort of change the world to fit the kid.

00:53:49.000 And so the idea is that the world has to make adjustments.

00:53:52.000 And instead, it sounds like your father recognized the reality, which is that if you were going to be successful in the world, then it was going to have to be a very hard road to train you to be ready for that world.

00:54:01.000 So what are the kinds of things that your dad would have you do given all of those challenges?

00:54:07.000 Yeah, look, starting when I was about five or six years old, he figured he needed to teach me self-esteem.

00:54:12.000 Self-esteem to him is earned, not given.

00:54:14.000 So it started with push-ups, 200 push-ups a day, five days a week for three or four months, and then you got some kind of reward.

00:54:20.000 And the idea was to teach me that hard work would yield results.

00:54:25.000 Character.

00:54:26.000 He said there's two things you can control, your character and your hard work.

00:54:30.000 And then he would start taking me out with his friends.

00:54:33.000 He said that he knew I wasn't going to have any friends.

00:54:35.000 You know, he never told anybody about my diagnosis or anything.

00:54:39.000 No teachers, no counselors, none of his friends.

00:54:40.000 He and my mom suffered silently as it was.

00:54:43.000 But he would take me out to a lunch with his friends.

00:54:46.000 And when I would start talking too much or interrupt or ask a question that was off-rhythm, he would tap his watch.

00:54:51.000 And that was my signal to stop talking.

00:54:54.000 And then to sort of bookmark that moment.

00:54:57.000 And later we would post-game it, right?

00:54:59.000 We would go through, okay, so when Mr. Shapiro was talking about his kids, why'd you interrupt and ask him about how he gets sponsors at the Daily Wire?

00:55:07.000 Well, I don't know, Dad.

00:55:08.000 That was kind of interesting to me.

00:55:09.000 Okay, what could you have asked Mr. Shapiro about?

00:55:12.000 And then we would role play that conversation.

00:55:16.000 And then the flip side was, you know, I was severely bullied, ended up being taken out of three or four different schools.

00:55:22.000 One scene in Born Lucky, my dad comes to find me in fifth grade at, I think, my third elementary school.

00:55:28.000 And for the past month, they had put me with the girls.

00:55:32.000 So you can imagine a father looking out at PE fields, asking the PE teacher, how's his kid doing, and realize that they put me with the girls to protect me from the bullying.

00:55:41.000 It was also the flip side of that was he became sort of my only person and my only protector and friend.

00:55:48.000 So every night he and I'd spend a couple of hours together and he was sort of putting me back together from the emotional torture and isolation and bullying that happened every day.

00:56:00.000 So now obviously you're grown, you're a successful person, which is an unbelievable story.

00:56:05.000 Do you still struggle with some of those same issues that you did when you were a kid?

00:56:09.000 How much of this were you able to sort of train out of?

00:56:12.000 Oh, it's a great point, Ben.

00:56:14.000 And, you know, born lucky is not a prescription.

00:56:16.000 It's not a cure.

00:56:17.000 And in the book, I equate autism a little bit like alcoholism.

00:56:20.000 You got to work at it every day.

00:56:22.000 It's a discipline.

00:56:23.000 Just a couple of months ago, I was playing golf with my father-in-law.

00:56:26.000 I was trying to get ready after the golf game to leave.

00:56:29.000 We were late.

00:56:30.000 One thing about autism, you become really task-focused.

00:56:33.000 So I was trying to get my golf bag into the travel bag to leave.

00:56:36.000 And this older gentleman comes over to say hello to me.

00:56:40.000 I met him earlier in the day.

00:56:42.000 And he's trying to talk to me.

00:56:43.000 And autism, you become so task-focused, you block everything out. 0.54

00:56:47.000 And that's what I was doing while I was packing my golf bag.

00:56:49.000 So at 43 years old, it was like I was eight years old again.

00:56:52.000 And I could hear the voice of my dad, Lucky, you know, you need to stop.

00:56:55.000 You need to stand up, look Mr. So-and-so in the eye, talk to him.

00:56:59.000 And I could not do it.

00:57:00.000 It was sort of stunning to me.

00:57:02.000 And it just was soul crushing.

00:57:04.000 And I sent him a note later.

00:57:06.000 I found his phone number and just wrote a note.

00:57:07.000 I said, I just want to apologize for being so rude to you.

00:57:10.000 He eventually just walked away from me because I wouldn't talk to him.

00:57:14.000 And in that note, I never once said, oh, by the way, I have autism.

00:57:19.000 And that's sort of the message that my dad taught me, which is that you can never use your diagnosis either as an excuse or allow it to define you.

00:57:29.000 And that's why he didn't tell me or anybody else until I was in my 20s.

00:57:35.000 Now, Leland, one of the most amazing things about what you're saying right here is that all of these lessons are broadly applicable to kids who don't have autism.

00:57:42.000 I have four kids, thank God, all healthy as far as we know.

00:57:45.000 And everything that you're saying, these are just good parenting tactics, period.

00:57:50.000 And yet parents will treat kids who don't even have autism, don't have some sort of condition.

00:57:54.000 They will treat them as though the world ought to adapt to their needs, as though the world is somehow wronging them.

00:58:00.000 I feel like we've trained an entire generation of people to be unable to cope, despite the fact that they don't even have the challenges that you grew up with.

00:58:09.000 Well, I think that's why Born Lucky has resonated in the way it has been.

00:58:12.000 You know, you're a best-selling author.

00:58:14.000 And oftentimes when people say, how's the book doing?

00:58:17.000 People want to know how the sales are for us.

00:58:20.000 In Born Lucky, what I've been most sort of unbelievably humbled by is the hundreds, if not thousands of emails I've gotten from parents of kids who aren't on the spectrum saying this has changed my perspective on parenting because born lucky is the proof of the power and agency every parent has to help their kids be more.

00:58:40.000 And you point out rightly, and I've always been inspired watching your show and listening to you how dedicated you are to your kids.

00:58:46.000 This is proof of what really involved parents can do.

00:58:51.000 And you're right.

00:58:52.000 It is almost an anti-coddling manifesto.

00:58:54.000 We didn't write it as that.

00:58:56.000 I didn't write it as that.

00:58:57.000 I just wrote it to sort of say thank you to my dad.

00:59:00.000 But I think you're right that it's hit this nerve that it's telling parents something that they're not being told.

00:59:07.000 And they're not being told really how much they can do to help their kids and to prepare their kids.

00:59:14.000 And again, I think the book is radically inspiring because you're an inspiring person.

00:59:18.000 You've become successful despite all of this, and maybe because of the parenting that you received, because you had this in the first place.

00:59:25.000 And that should be a hope for a lot of parents who have kids who are suffering from this sort of stuff or who have kids who they just need to change and they need to figure out how to do that.

00:59:34.000 The book is Born Lucky, a Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.

00:59:38.000 Leland, thanks so much for the time.

00:59:40.000 Congrats on the book.

00:59:41.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:59:43.000 All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.

00:59:46.000 Interestingly, there are some members of the Hollywood contingent who are beginning to realize that maybe only aiming at the far left is a bad business strategy.

00:59:53.000 We'll get to that in a moment.

00:59:54.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:59:56.000 If you are not a member, become a member.

00:59:57.000 Use code Shapiro checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 05, 2025

Pro-Jihadist Marxist TAKES NEW YORK!

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