The Ben Shapiro Show - September 29, 2026


The VMAs Were Genuinely Embarrassing

Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Madonna Abdul El-Sayed Troy Jackson James Tallarico Foursquare Charlie XCX Obama White House Zoran Mamdani Sherrod Brown Jeffrey Soros Chuck Schumer Susan Collins Julia Garner George Soros Mike Rogers Ken Paxton Ben Rhodes John Wayne Gacy Robert De Niro Sabrina Carpenter James Tallarico and 11 more
The Real AI Problem Nobody's Talking About

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

177.05

Word count

1,921

Sentence count

169

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The VMAs, they're a disaster area everywhere.
00:00:02.000 You kind of forgot about them.
00:00:03.000 They feel old and tired.
00:00:05.000 Maybe time passed them by.
00:00:06.000 Well, if you feel like that, you probably should because the star of the VMAs this year was, wait for it, Madonna.
00:00:10.000 She has a new album out.
00:00:11.000 She is 68 years old.
00:00:14.000 She is 68 years old, Madonna, which means that she is approximately the same age as Estelle Getty was in Golden Girls at this point.
00:00:24.000 And she performed with Charlie XCX.
00:00:30.000 With a bathroom stall set, because nothing says class and decency like bathroom stalls.
00:00:37.000 Because again, the idea is that people are engaging.
00:00:39.000 When I say the left has no actual language to condemn promiscuity and degrading behavior and all that, not only do they not have the language for it, they uphold it.
00:00:49.000 It's an aspect of freedom.
00:00:52.000 The only language they have is consent.
00:00:54.000 It brings us back to the Cornell University case.
00:00:57.000 And it's astonishing that the left, the same left, will say that degrading behavior becomes not degrading when you consent to it.
00:01:03.000 I mean, it turns out that actually degrading behavior remains degrading, even if you consent to it.
00:01:09.000 So, here was some of Madonna, who can barely move at this point. 0.94
00:01:12.000 Honestly, it's ridiculous.
00:01:14.000 She won a bunch of awards last night, which is truly incredible. 0.66
00:01:17.000 We have frozen our culture in time because the left had no place to go beyond what if we just say everything is wonderful and transgressive?
00:01:24.000 Once you transgress all the rules, there are no more rules to transgress.
00:01:27.000 How much further could you go sexually than men are women and women are men? 0.66
00:01:29.000 There's no place you can go from there. 0.99
00:01:31.000 So, they've just frozen in amber.
00:01:34.000 Their own culture.
00:01:35.000 There's nothing for them to even rebel against.
00:01:37.000 So, Madonna and Charlie XCS and Sabrina Carpenter, here was some of their VMA performance.
00:01:46.000 Okay, so it's people riding around on stage. 0.89
00:01:50.000 There's Madonna. 0.92
00:01:58.000 So, she is, you can't call this dancing.
00:01:59.000 She's kind of walking around with very young men. 1.00
00:02:04.000 And then simulating sex acts, presumably, in bathroom stalls. 0.99
00:02:11.000 And yeah, so we see the bathroom stalls and people gripping the bathroom stalls to have sex, presumably, while Madonna gyrates in sexual position with a large man of color. 0.99
00:02:23.000 And now she's gyrating alongside, I believe, Charlie XCX herself. 0.98
00:02:28.000 This is what a culture we've created for ourselves here, gang.
00:02:32.000 It's just incredible.
00:02:33.000 And Madonna's doing this at 68 years old because, again, we have not progressed as a culture one iota.
00:02:37.000 Not one iota.
00:02:38.000 Madonna used to be a person who is transgressing all the rules back in 1980, and now she's a person who is the rules in 2026.
00:02:45.000 And then afterward, Madonna, Charlie XTX, and Julia Garner rolled around in bed.
00:02:50.000 She had 13 nominations, by the way, took home seven awards, including for Best Dance.
00:02:55.000 I can guarantee you, Madonna did not win Best Dance.
00:02:57.000 She's staggering around out there. 1.00
00:02:58.000 She looks like she needs a walker.
00:03:00.000 And then they all gyrated around in bed together, which, I mean, again, Madonna is 68 years old.
00:03:08.000 And, Julia Garner, the actress, is 32.
00:03:14.000 So, yeah, it's all going great, gang.
00:03:19.000 You want to talk about Madonna and Charlie?
00:03:25.000 Oh, no.
00:03:26.000 That is stuff that you don't want.
00:03:28.000 Oh, no.
00:03:34.000 There it's. 1.00
00:03:36.000 These women gyrating around in bed, including a woman who is 800 years old. 1.00
00:03:41.000 Great job. 1.00
00:03:41.000 So. 1.00
00:03:43.000 I mean, I wish I had more to say about it than just we have done wonders with our culture.
00:03:46.000 But this has been the state of our culture, and it feels old.
00:03:48.000 Doesn't it feel hackneyed?
00:03:50.000 I mean, at this point, doesn't it just feel like played out?
00:03:55.000 It feels like the same song played over and over and over and over.
00:03:58.000 But, you know, again, that's what leftism is.
00:03:59.000 When you transgress all the rules and there are no rules left, where will you hide, Roper, the forest being flat?
00:04:05.000 Like, there's nothing left to feel transgressive or even mildly interesting or even mildly titillating about this.
00:04:10.000 Because, again, titillation is largely based on violation of norms.
00:04:13.000 If there are no norms, then it just feels like people gyrating around on stage.
00:04:17.000 It's a point not made by me.
00:04:18.000 It's a point made by the lesbian sexual theorist, Camille Paglia.
00:04:22.000 But this is where we are in our culture Madonna as a sex symbol at the age of 68. 0.62
00:04:27.000 And we'll get an enormous number of pieces, think pieces, about how this is liberating for the boomers.
00:04:32.000 It's liberating for the elderly.
00:04:33.000 I don't know.
00:04:34.000 I prefer a society in which people who are my parents' age are having wonderful, fulfilling, joyous lives with their grandchildren and families.
00:04:44.000 Now, call me crazy, but I think that was a better society and is for many people a better society today.
00:04:50.000 We'll get to more on that in just a moment.
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00:05:52.000 Meanwhile, James Tallarico right now running neck and neck with Ken Paxton.
00:05:57.000 Ken Paxton was speaking at the U.S. Hispanic Business Council.
00:05:59.000 He correctly pointed out that Tallarico is now trying to campaign as a moderate after being the most left leaning figure in probably Texas public life.
00:06:07.000 My opponent says that.
00:06:08.000 Capitalism is oppressive.
00:06:11.000 He says that we should dismantle it.
00:06:12.000 He says the oil and gas industry tried to pass a bill that would have destroyed the oil and gas industry in the state.
00:06:18.000 He's voted for a state income tax.
00:06:19.000 He voted against everything that we talked about on the word secure the border.
00:06:22.000 He voted against all of it.
00:06:24.000 Helping law enforcement, cross state lines, work with the feds, building detention centers, building a wall, all of it.
00:06:31.000 And of course, you have to switch your views to run in a general election.
00:06:35.000 I have not switched a single view.
00:06:37.000 His views have all switched to mine.
00:06:38.000 But the reality is I tell people this all the time.
00:06:41.000 Don't listen to the rhetoric.
00:06:43.000 Look at the record.
00:06:45.000 Okay, of course, that is right.
00:06:46.000 And it turns out that the radical left is, of course, behind James Tallarico Foursquare.
00:06:51.000 Allies of Zorhan Mamdani and Robert De Niro hosted a New York City fundraiser for James Tallarico as well as Sherrod Brown.
00:06:57.000 According to the New York Post, the host committee includes controversial jeweler Alexis Bitar, a Mamdani fundraiser and transition bundler, who also co hosted a fundraiser last week for Michigan Democratic senatorial candidate Abdul El Sayed and once referred to America as a bleep hole.
00:07:12.000 Other host committee members included a marketing executive who co hosted a December 2025 fundraiser for Mamdani's mayoral transition, as well as Shafali Puri, the wife of Daily Show comedian Asif Manvi.
00:07:26.000 So lots of wonderful people behind James Tellerico and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
00:07:30.000 Meanwhile, over in Michigan, speaking of Abdul El Sayed, Abdul El Sayed is having a fundraiser at the house of George Soros's nephew.
00:07:39.000 Unsurprising because the Soros network is a left leaning anti American network.
00:07:44.000 It is hosted by Catherine and Jeffrey Soros, as well as, of course, Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes and other members of the Obama administration who are more than happy to join in.
00:07:53.000 Ben Rhodes' literal nickname in the Obama White House was Hamas.
00:07:57.000 So, not a shock at all.
00:07:59.000 Mike Rogers has cut an ad highlighting the Soros money that is now being poured into Abdul El Sayed's campaign.
00:08:05.000 Abdul's number one campaign promise is get money out of politics.
00:08:09.000 We got a simple goal money out of politics, money out of politics, money out of politics.
00:08:15.000 But the facts tell a very different story.
00:08:18.000 Let's break this down.
00:08:19.000 Abdul flew to Washington, D.C., snuck through the back door of Chuck Schumer's office to beg for a handout.
00:08:27.000 Then suddenly, Schumer dropped $10 million into this race for Abdul.
00:08:32.000 Where does all that money come from?
00:08:34.000 Well, you guessed it George Soros, billionaire hedge fund managers, and $61 million in undisclosed contributions.
00:08:42.000 The same dark money groups Abdul has spent his entire campaign rallying against.
00:08:48.000 Who's the money from, Abdul?
00:08:50.000 Okay, he is.
00:08:51.000 This is right.
00:08:53.000 Do I think that that's going to play particularly well in Michigan?
00:08:55.000 Again, I think that Mike Rogers just needs to be playing flips of Abdul El Sayed saying all the terrible things Abdul El Sayed has said.
00:09:02.000 Just highlight all of it.
00:09:03.000 Talking in complex terms about where he's getting his money, I'm not sure that's going to do the trick.
00:09:07.000 Meanwhile, Troy Jackson is running neck and neck with Susan Collins in Maine.
00:09:11.000 I think Susan Collins pulls out that race because she's a pro.
00:09:13.000 His ads are unbelievably cringe, Troy Jackson.
00:09:17.000 Somehow, I don't know where Maine Democrats come up with their candidates.
00:09:20.000 Perhaps the asylum, but they're not great.
00:09:30.000 That is a video of Troy Jackson wearing sunglasses.
00:09:34.000 Oh my God, this dude.
00:09:37.000 What the F?
00:09:40.000 It just says, like, it's a reflection in his sunglasses as though he is cool.
00:09:45.000 What is even happening now? 0.88
00:09:46.000 Here is this weirdo drinking boba tea, this gigantic weirdo. 1.00
00:09:51.000 He looks like a Mr. Bean character.
00:09:53.000 If they spend $46 million on these TV ads, who's going to be convinced by that? 0.99
00:10:02.000 Just the one percenters. 0.99
00:10:10.000 What the is this? 1.00
00:10:11.000 What are people?
00:10:12.000 I feel like I know people from Maine who are not like this.
00:10:15.000 What is the crowd that is very into this?
00:10:18.000 Who are these people who are like, man, we need more Troy Jackson?
00:10:23.000 The guy, his mannerism is the same as John Wayne Gacy.
00:10:28.000 I'm not saying he's got bodies hidden under his house, I'm not saying that he's got bodies hidden under his house, but what the ever loving what now?
00:10:38.000 The Democrats, they can pick them.
00:10:40.000 They're doing great, the Democrats.
00:10:42.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:10:44.000 Wasn't that amazing?
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