The Ben Shapiro Show - June 12, 2026


The Left’s Dangerous Scheme to Control Your Life


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

190.68

Word count

1,821

Sentence count

132

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

I don't want rich people to control the government any more than anyone else, but the problem isn't who controls the government, the problem is the nature of government power itself. Bernie Sanders is a leech on the ass of American society because his fix for wealth concentration is to put all of the power in the hands of Bernie Sanders.

Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 I don't want rich people to control the government any more than anyone else.
00:00:03.000 But the problem isn't who controls the government.
00:00:06.000 The problem is the nature of government power itself. 0.93
00:00:08.000 The reason Bernie Sanders is a leech on the ass of American society is because Bernie's fix for wealth concentration is to put all of the power in the hands of Bernie Sanders. 0.95
00:00:18.000 But as always, the most fruitful path in politics is to channel your envy toward a convenient scapegoat. 0.98
00:00:23.000 President Trump's most populist tendencies are nothing compared to the grievance culture that has eaten the Democratic Party whole.
00:00:28.000 They've never met a seizure of wealth or property they did not like.
00:00:31.000 They say, all right, we're not concerned.
00:00:33.000 We know capitalism is fine, free markets are good, but what we are really concerned with is centralization of wealth, because with centralization of wealth comes outsized political power, right?
00:00:42.000 This is Bernie's backup envy argument.
00:00:44.000 He has a few arguments.
00:00:46.000 One is rich people are bad, they're just terrible, they become evil.
00:00:50.000 And second is the rich people are stealing from the poor people. 1.00
00:00:52.000 And then, once you debunk both of those, because they're stupid, he gets to the third argument the rich people are going to take over the government. 0.99
00:00:58.000 The rich people have an outsized impact on regulation and legal. 0.98
00:01:03.000 Okay, so some people are making the argument that Elon being a trillionaire will be dangerous because then he'll control the government.
00:01:10.000 So we should point out at this point that America has never been more evenly divided politically.
00:01:15.000 That Democrats, who Elon does not support, are favored to take Congress and perhaps even the Senate.
00:01:20.000 That Elon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on politics, but so have the Soros family and Tom Steyer and the public sector unions.
00:01:27.000 So here's my thing I also don't want rich people controlling the government.
00:01:31.000 But mainly, I don't want the government controlling my life.
00:01:35.000 It turns out that the problem. isn't which rich person controls the government.
00:01:39.000 The problem is the government power in the first place.
00:01:41.000 So let me suggest a fix.
00:01:44.000 In fact, some people have thought of this in the past.
00:01:46.000 What if, thought experiment, what if we had constructed a system of checks and balances designed precisely to avoid capture of our legal and regulatory system by any one player by say, I don't know, disseminating power among multiple branches and multiple levels of government and restricting the powers of the government to a list of delegated powers.
00:02:05.000 I don't know.
00:02:06.000 It's a thought.
00:02:07.000 It's called the Constitution.
00:02:10.000 And then it turns out that the people most concerned with wealth concentration decided that to target wealth concentration, they would destroy the checks and balances and turn the American government into a regulatory top down centralized state.
00:02:21.000 Great job, everyone.
00:02:22.000 You did great.
00:02:24.000 Bernie's fix for wealth concentration is power concentration in Bernie.
00:02:28.000 That is not a fix, that is significantly worse.
00:02:32.000 It's terrible.
00:02:34.000 So, what should we do here?
00:02:37.000 The answer is we need to preserve the things that make America awesome.
00:02:42.000 The things that bring people like Elon Musk to the United States, or say Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, or say the adoptive father of Jeff Bezos, who came from Cuba in 1962.
00:02:54.000 It turns out that what makes America awesome is the same thing that has always made America awesome private property rights and equal rights before the law, and limited government powers.
00:03:04.000 Free markets, these are great.
00:03:06.000 Now, President Trump, on a sort of instinctive level, does understand this.
00:03:09.000 Here he was yesterday talking about complainers.
00:03:12.000 He's saying they're not the ones who built the country.
00:03:15.000 These people built the country.
00:03:17.000 Not the complainers.
00:03:18.000 The complainers didn't build the country.
00:03:20.000 These people built the country.
00:03:22.000 Whether it's fishermen or farmers or anything else.
00:03:26.000 Me, guys like me, they built the country.
00:03:29.000 You know, I watch all these ingrates.
00:03:31.000 They're always complaining, complaining.
00:03:33.000 They didn't build anything.
00:03:34.000 They couldn't build anything.
00:03:37.000 He's not wrong about that, obviously, but there is always a political temptation.
00:03:41.000 The political temptation will exist for all time.
00:03:43.000 It always has existed.
00:03:44.000 And populism is a version of this political temptation.
00:03:47.000 As we say, Envy is a universal human emotion.
00:03:50.000 It is something we all feel.
00:03:52.000 There is no one immune from it.
00:03:54.000 And you have to fight it by relying on self control and willpower, right?
00:03:58.000 Right back to Genesis.
00:04:01.000 If you control it, you have the power to control it.
00:04:02.000 You do.
00:04:03.000 You have the power to channel your envy into a positive direction.
00:04:06.000 I want to do more risk taking things.
00:04:08.000 I want to be more innovative.
00:04:09.000 I want to work harder.
00:04:09.000 But the most fruitful path in politics is to channel envy toward the idea that actually people who have earned wealth, people who have created companies, who have innovated, they don't deserve it.
00:04:23.000 And what we really need is for those people to, quote unquote, give back.
00:04:26.000 Give back.
00:04:28.000 Now, again, This is a very cheap way of channeling envy toward political gain.
00:04:34.000 The president yesterday was praising the AI industry for its innovation, which is great.
00:04:38.000 But then he said he wanted a meeting to discuss, quote unquote, giving back to the public.
00:04:42.000 Now, the way in a free market system that you give back to the public is you engage in a robust exchange of goods and services.
00:04:50.000 That is how you give back.
00:04:52.000 I've described capitalism before as forced altruism, reality, not government forced altruism, reality forced altruism.
00:04:59.000 Because it turns out that no matter how greedy I am, I can't have what you have unless I make a trade.
00:05:05.000 With you.
00:05:07.000 This is the part that's so funny.
00:05:08.000 You go back to that Kimmel clip at the top.
00:05:09.000 He says, You know, Elon, with all that money, he could buy every team in the MLB and every team in the NBA and every football team and all the rest of it.
00:05:18.000 And then he would have to have a willing seller, right?
00:05:18.000 Okay.
00:05:22.000 Somebody would have to be on the other side of that transaction.
00:05:26.000 The companies founded by people like Bill Gates, by people like Elon Musk, will do far more for humanity than any amount of charity they plan to give because they employ people, because they create new products and services that make people's lives better.
00:05:39.000 But the language of they have to give back to the public, as though when you engage in the robust free market, you are somehow taking from the public wheel.
00:05:49.000 This kind of language I object to.
00:05:53.000 When are you meeting with tech executives about the government taking stake in AI companies?
00:05:58.000 And what could this partnership look like?
00:06:00.000 About AI?
00:06:02.000 Well, I can say this we're having a meeting with them.
00:06:06.000 It's an amazing industry, it's bigger than any industry anyone's ever seen.
00:06:12.000 We are leading China by a lot.
00:06:15.000 And, you know, whoever leads that is going to really lead the world to a large extent.
00:06:19.000 That's how big it is.
00:06:21.000 And I'm going to have meetings with the top 12 or 15 executives very shortly.
00:06:28.000 And we're talking about giving back something to the public.
00:06:32.000 And if we do that, the public will become very rich, the people in our country, because that's the kind of money we're talking about.
00:06:40.000 And I think they'll do that, and I think it'll make it very popular.
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00:07:50.000 Okay, again, this idea, and I think that you see billionaires do this too.
00:07:53.000 What if we just throw money at people?
00:07:56.000 What if we subsidize public works projects?
00:07:58.000 You can do it.
00:07:58.000 That's all fine.
00:07:58.000 Okay.
00:07:59.000 But if you think that you're going to buy your way out of envy by giving people money, that is not the way envy works.
00:08:05.000 In fact, it turns out that very often the recipients of largesse are angrier about receiving the largesse.
00:08:10.000 They're angrier at the people who gave it to them than they would be otherwise.
00:08:14.000 By the way, what Trump is saying there is mild compared to all of the stuff that's being preached by the far left, like Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, who is increasingly unhinged.
00:08:22.000 Here he was with Ajaha Ali talking about his plans were Democrats to take back power.
00:08:29.000 This is what the agenda should be in 2028. 0.97
00:08:32.000 We should be for calling it a Dred Scott court and having Supreme Court term limits and expanding the court from 9 to 13.
00:08:39.000 We should be for abolishing ICE and replacing it with an immigration enforcement office that actually follows human rights and that focuses on sex trafficking, child trafficking, drug offenders, not conducting raids in places like Minneapolis, going after undocumented immigrants or working and paying taxes.
00:09:00.000 We should be for A billionaire's tax, a tax on billionaires.
00:09:05.000 Again, the goal of the billionaire tax would not be to actually make America's economy more robust.
00:09:10.000 It would be to punish success.
00:09:11.000 That's the whole thing.
00:09:13.000 And of course, Chan Kueger, who has never met a seizure of wealth that he does not like, put out a tweet saying, I want to be the first to say it.
00:09:20.000 I think there's a chance Ro Khanna saves the country.
00:09:23.000 All right, dude.
00:09:24.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:09:26.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:09:27.000 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.