TRIGGERnometry - Ben Shapiro： “Israel’s War is a Just War”

00:00:00.840 What was the failure of October 7th was a security failure.

00:00:03.920 That's much more practical than how do you cure the hatred in the hearts of human beings.

00:00:08.440 I find it difficult to believe that anyone would think at least the initiation of the

00:00:11.440 war was not just.

00:00:12.920 That's the one where I'm utterly befuddled.

00:00:15.720 If it were just about Israel and the Palestinians, or if it were just about Arab suffering in

00:00:19.680 general, where were the protests when Assad was killing 500,000 Muslims in Syria?

00:00:24.860 The new isolationism, people like Tucker Carlson.

00:00:27.520 How do you explain that part of it?

00:00:28.920 I think that there is an isolationist sentiment that has set in on the right that is tied

00:00:33.480 to a peculiar horseshoe theory.

00:00:36.840 Has the world gotten better when America pulled out from Iraq? 0.99

00:00:39.060 That's a different question from whether America originally should have gotten involved in Iraq.

00:00:41.920 But one thing that is certainly true is wherever the West seems to regress or pull back, things

00:00:46.280 get markedly worse.

00:00:50.680 What would your advice be to Trump in the run up to the election?

00:00:53.820 Back in 2020, I was like, OK, put him in the basement with some pornography and shark week

00:00:58.120 and just leave him there.

00:00:59.740 And also, I had suggested that the people at the White House construct a fake Twitter app

00:01:04.840 for him on his phone.

00:01:06.040 So he would tweet into his phone, it would read back a bunch of bot replies about how

00:01:09.040 amazing he was.

00:01:10.040 And he'd be in like an amazing mood all day long.

00:01:12.420 And that's what happened.

00:01:13.420 It's called Truth Social.

00:01:14.680 Ben Shapiro, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:16.680 Trigonometry, a third time, I think, having you on the show.

00:01:19.240 One of the things we've been exploring a lot on the show in recent months is what's happening

00:01:23.400 in Israel and Gaza.

00:01:24.680 We've had people from different sides.

00:01:26.740 You know, we had Norman Finkelstein on recently.

00:01:28.780 We've had people who are very pro-Israel as well.

00:01:32.080 I guess you're one of the people out there who has been most strongly articulating the

00:01:37.140 idea that Israel's war is a just war.

00:01:39.480 Can you explain why?

00:01:40.840 Sure.

00:01:41.200 When you are a sovereign country and a terrorist group crosses your border and slaughters

00:01:44.240 1,200 of your citizens and then takes 250 of those citizens captive back into terror

00:01:48.640 tunnels that you've spent 20 years building with billions of dollars in foreign aid while

00:01:53.780 simultaneously tyrannizing your own population and firing rockets every so often into the 0.57

00:01:58.240 neighboring country, then it seems to me the extirpation of your rule is not only just,

00:02:03.300 it is obligatory.

00:02:04.740 And so the idea that Israel is going in to end Hamas's control over this territory is

00:02:09.720 what any self-respecting country would do with a neighboring country that had initiated 0.69

00:02:13.320 a vast, unprecedented terror assault inside its countries, slaughtering men, slaughtering

00:02:19.180 women, slaughtering babies, and then again, retaining hostages, including five Americans

00:02:23.640 right now.

00:02:24.180 I find it difficult to believe that anyone would think at least the initiation of the

00:02:27.160 war was not just.

00:02:28.620 That's the one where I'm utterly befuddled.

00:02:31.040 There are people who somehow seem to believe that the innate justification for the war itself

00:02:35.320 is wrong, which I would need an explanation of that.

00:02:38.500 Then there is the question as to whether the conduct of Israel during the war has been just.

00:02:42.160 I'm of the belief that by all available data, not only has the conduct been just, it has

00:02:46.260 been unprecedentedly so that I've yet to hear a situation in which during a war, the power

00:02:53.780 that is fighting to extirpate a terrorist group or an opposing power is simultaneously also

00:02:59.140 supplying that group, which is what is happening with power, with water, with food, with humanitarian

00:03:06.000 aid, because Hamas is stealing a huge chunk of what's going into the Gaza Strip and everybody

00:03:10.280 knows this, and then simultaneously risking its own soldiers in order to go house by house

00:03:15.820 as opposed to simply taking advantage of its complete air superiority over the entire region,

00:03:20.400 letting people know weeks in advance of any assault in a particular area to allow for a

00:03:24.380 humanitarian movement within these particular areas.

00:03:27.680 All of the, for example, focus on Rafia as a place where Israel is about to commit some

00:03:33.000 sort of human rights atrocity.

00:03:34.080 Over about a million people have already been moved quietly from Rafia out of that area so

00:03:38.900 as to clear that area for the possibility of uncovering terror tunnels, many of which are

00:03:42.380 linked with Egypt, unfortunately.

00:03:44.140 Israel has lost something like 260 soldiers in the process of this.

00:03:48.020 Thousands of people have been wounded in the course of carrying out this combat.

00:03:51.480 Their terrorist to civilian kill ratio is the lowest in the history of urban warfare.

00:03:55.440 And so my question to all the people who are suggesting that Israel is doing something

00:04:00.380 unprecedentedly horrible is, can you suggest an alternative whereby Israel is capable of 1.00

00:04:05.920 extirpating Hamas, getting rid of Hamas's leadership?

00:04:09.900 That is, that is not what they're doing.

00:04:11.700 I've yet to hear anybody actually explain what the alternative would be other than Israel should 1.00

00:04:17.040 not do anything and they should leave Hamas in place. 0.53

00:04:19.120 Well, right.

00:04:19.860 When we had Bassem Yusuf on, and that video has done crazy numbers, because I kept asking him,

00:04:24.860 like, what should Israel have done?

00:04:26.700 But very often people on that side of the argument, their argument is Gaza is a concentration camp

00:04:32.360 and you can't start history on October 7th.

00:04:35.120 Everything that was happening prior to that should not have been happening.

00:04:38.360 What do you expect an oppressed people to do?

00:04:40.760 Okay.

00:04:41.000 So, I mean, the generalized answer is not to walk into a civilian area and slaughter men,

00:04:46.060 women, and children would be typically the answer to that. 1.00

00:04:49.100 As far as the history of the conflict, I mean, we can have arguments about the history of

00:04:53.280 the conflict and go into all the nooks and crannies of what is, for the Jews, a 3,000-year

00:04:58.600 history in the region, and what is, for the Arabs, about a 1,300-year history in the region,

00:05:05.260 if you're talking about Muslim Arabs.

00:05:06.640 And if you're talking about Palestinians, what is about a 70-year history in the region,

00:05:12.040 considering that the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, so 64-year history in the

00:05:18.000 region, if you're talking about the PLO as sort of the consolidation of Palestinian peoples under

00:05:23.180 one banner.

00:05:24.900 And again, I'm distinguishing there because, historically speaking, many of the Palestinians

00:05:29.160 are Egyptian or Lebanese or Turkish or Jordanian or Trans-Palestinian, meaning like from the area

00:05:35.840 of Trans-Jordan or British Mandate Palestine.

00:05:39.400 You know, all of that is interesting and complex.

00:05:42.080 What is not particularly interesting or complex is, does a country have a sovereign right to

00:05:46.480 defend its own citizenry in the face of a terrorist assault?

00:05:49.800 And anybody who would justify, as, for example, Norman Finkelstein has, suggesting that it warmed

00:05:54.060 the fiber of his being, a terror assault like we saw on October 7th, that's insane.

00:05:59.660 I've yet to wonder, I've yet to hear anybody explain why Hamas is justified in its rule. 0.98

00:06:04.160 So even if you're pro-Palestinian, you believe there should be a Palestinian state, Hamas is actually

00:06:08.340 an obstacle to a Palestinian state by every available metric.

00:06:11.040 Hamas is a terrorist group that was elected in 2006 and then proceeded to engage in a

00:06:15.340 civil war with the Palestinian Authority, whereby they killed pretty much everybody in

00:06:18.320 the Palestinian Authority.

00:06:19.460 They're currently a threat in the West Bank, along with Islamic Jihad. 0.84

00:06:22.500 Put aside the Palestinian Authority itself, which is a very radical group that sprang from 1.00

00:06:26.000 the PLO and its military wing, Fatah, has worked hand in glove from time to time with

00:06:30.800 Hamas when they're not fighting one another. 0.89

00:06:33.160 The reality of, you know, the past suffering in this area, in what situation?

00:06:40.680 Would that somehow justify the kind of massacre that we saw on October 7th?

00:06:46.440 And how exactly does that answer the subsequent question that I already asked, which is what

00:06:50.480 is Israel supposed to do in response to that?

00:06:52.120 Is Israel's response to that supposed to be to do nothing?

00:06:54.800 Is Israel's response to that to be sort of, okay, we'll keep the hostages?

00:06:58.280 Is Israel's response should be, okay, well, I guess Hamas should be remaining in place? 0.93

00:07:02.460 Israel has tried with governments both left and right multiple times to come up with what

00:07:06.880 would be a peace partner so that they can delegate power to rule Palestinian Arab areas

00:07:12.360 to Palestinian Arabs.

00:07:15.200 I mean, Israel does not want, I mean, of both parties, Israel really does not want to be

00:07:19.620 in control of these people, which is why the Palestinian Authority was brought in as a

00:07:22.780 last-ditch effort during Oslo in order to rule over these particular areas.

00:07:26.600 It's why even Hamas was walled off, I think irresponsibly, by the Israelis to be allowed to 1.00

00:07:31.720 simply rule that particular area, 8,000 Jews were removed from the Gaza Strip in 2005, forcibly

00:07:36.540 from their homes.

00:07:37.300 Their homes were then bulldozed by the Hamas government there.

00:07:41.500 Many of those people, by the way, ended up moving into the Gaza envelope where they were

00:07:43.940 then subsequently slaughtered on October 7th.

00:07:45.860 So when you look at, it's very easy in all circumstances to look at how history impacts

00:07:52.980 today.

00:07:53.840 And that's true for literally everything.

00:07:55.360 Like there's none of us who aren't impacted by history.

00:07:58.500 And that's going to be true literally forever.

00:07:59.980 But that doesn't solve the question as to, do you then get to run across the border and

00:08:04.440 slaughter 1,200 citizens of a neighboring country and take 250 hostages and expect to

00:08:10.040 be held completely non-responsible for that activity?

00:08:13.440 And then are you supposed to be given extra humanitarian assistance because you're hiding

00:08:18.680 among civilians, which of course creates a perverse incentive structure whereby every

00:08:22.460 terrorist is now going to hide behind a civilian.

00:08:24.000 It's literally the best thing you can do.

00:08:25.960 It's like tagging the tree and saying safe and tag.

00:08:28.900 You just hide behind a child or a woman and now it's not your responsibility if the woman 1.00

00:08:33.080 or the child gets hurt.

00:08:33.780 It's apparently the responsibility of the soldier who's attempting to protect his own

00:08:36.560 citizens to leave you alone. 0.82

00:08:38.960 And the perverse incentive structure that's been set up here, you can misdirect.

00:08:42.260 You can talk about the history.

00:08:43.320 And again, the history is interesting.

00:08:44.820 But that is a completely separate question from what do you do in the here and now.

00:08:48.860 It sort of reminds me of the question that's asked very often when somebody, let's say

00:08:52.960 that there's a black American who does something that's criminal. 0.96

00:08:55.780 And the person gets arrested and goes to jail.

00:08:58.500 And then the question that's asked by many people politically is, well, what's the long

00:09:01.620 story of American racial problems that led to this?

00:09:04.380 Okay, that's an interesting question and it's worth exploring.

00:09:07.300 Also, if a person commits a crime, they should go to jail.

00:09:09.960 Is the solution to not put the person who committed an egregious crime in jail in the name

00:09:14.840 of some sort of systemic...

00:09:16.020 I think people's issue, Ben, is that, and I think I understand it, you know, I went to

00:09:20.800 a bunch of pro-Palestine protests, pro-Israel too, but in London, and we put a video out

00:09:25.560 of that.

00:09:25.940 And you can see that many people are not really familiar with the situation.

00:09:29.980 They haven't thought necessarily that carefully about it.

00:09:31.840 But the one thing that they all feel is, and I guess maybe this is the first war of this

00:09:37.920 kind in the social media age, which is one of the reasons we're having these conversations

00:09:41.320 in this way, because people maybe for the first time in history are confronted with

00:09:47.320 what war looks like.

00:09:48.520 I think that's right.

00:09:49.280 I think that's totally right.

00:09:50.400 Meaning that people don't see ugly pictures of war.

00:09:53.120 And in fact, for most of the media age, governments did not even allow reporters into a position

00:09:59.520 to see the uglinesses of war, or they would censor much of the material that was coming

00:10:02.440 out of wars.

00:10:03.300 In fact, the last time we saw something like this, I'd say on a grand scale, it's probably

00:10:06.360 Vietnam, when you saw a lot of footage that was coming out, pictures in Life magazine,

00:10:09.460 and it totally undermined a lot of American support for the war, because it turns out

00:10:12.560 people don't like seeing ugly things on their TV.

00:10:14.740 We've created sort of this antiseptic feeling about war that is not actually accurate to

00:10:18.460 what war is.

00:10:19.180 When you talk to soldiers in literally any army, they'll tell you that the stuff you

00:10:22.100 see on your TV is not one-tenth of what's going on on the ground.

00:10:26.140 By the way, I think this is true of a huge number of human situations.

00:10:30.300 When we see tape of police officers doing their job, they're like, oh my God, I can't believe

00:10:33.680 the police are doing that.

00:10:34.460 Oh, you mean like roughing up a criminal?

00:10:36.020 Like, yes, that's the sort of thing that police do regularly.

00:10:38.460 They may be ugly, and it may be something you don't want to see, but it is something

00:10:41.520 that does get done a lot.

00:10:42.860 War happens to be really, really ugly, and that's true even when you're doing what Israel 0.99

00:10:47.480 is doing, which is risking its own soldiers and citizens in order to try and pursue some

00:10:52.500 more clean version of a war.

00:10:56.940 And this is also why, by the way, it's much easier to be a war leader who uses drone assaults

00:11:02.360 on people, right?

00:11:02.920 You use drones, and you kill people from afar, and then there are no people on the ground to

00:11:07.460 take the pictures of the results of that sort of stuff.

00:11:10.760 A lot of people were killed during the Obama administration during the drone war, and nobody

00:11:13.840 seemed to care very much.

00:11:15.260 And the reality is that people in the West do not have the attention span to watch suffering

00:11:20.980 on their TV night after night after night after night.

00:11:22.900 Frankly, I think that the Western public does not have the attention span for something

00:11:31.960 like this, and what that means is that what you're likely to get on the one side is terrorists

00:11:36.700 who hide among civilian populations specifically to undermine the war aims of democracies and

00:11:42.320 liberal states that are attempting to preserve their own security because the more they can

00:11:46.460 maximize the ugly—I mean, Hamas has made this perfectly clear.

00:11:48.340 I mean, they say this openly.

00:11:49.320 They'll say, absolutely, we're trying to maximize our own civilian casualties in order

00:11:53.280 so that people in Western countries think that this war is really ugly, and it has to

00:11:56.860 stop, and it's really, really bad.

00:11:58.220 So it's in their interest to do that.

00:12:00.520 And then—so it creates one incentive structure to hide behind civilians.

00:12:04.080 And on the other side, what it actually does create the incentive structure for, weirdly

00:12:07.180 enough, is to go faster, even if it means go uglier, because the longer it lasts on your

00:12:12.340 TV, then the more people start to object to it.

00:12:15.400 I mean, if it's over in a week, it's over in a week.

00:12:16.920 The news cycle is so short right now that anything that ends quickly is, in the rear-view

00:12:21.260 mirror, incredibly fast.

00:12:22.820 Whereas if you do what Israel is doing right now, which is being meticulous, going literally 0.80

00:12:26.100 street by street and neighborhood by neighborhood, and it takes you seven months, and every so

00:12:29.540 often you have a break for a ceasefire negotiation that goes nowhere, people's attention span runs

00:12:34.480 really, really fast.

00:12:36.300 I mean, the attention span is gone.

00:12:38.280 And people are treating—the amount of outrage that it took the American public to realize

00:12:42.400 about Vietnam—what, a decade?—it took them six, seven years minimum between heavy engagement

00:12:46.740 in Vietnam and serious American outrage about Vietnam to a certain level of Western outrage

00:12:52.720 about a war in which no country is actively involved except for Israel.

00:12:56.540 There are no other allied forces involved in this conflict.

00:12:59.520 It's Israel with—there's material support, but there's material support for a bunch of 0.84

00:13:04.300 countries all over the world, foreign aid to a bunch of countries all over the world.

00:13:07.380 Israel is the only country with troops on the ground actually fighting right there.

00:13:11.740 The amount of outrage over that has taken—it really kicked in within about a month, and

00:13:16.880 then it's really kicked up to a high gear within seven months.

00:13:19.920 That's a pretty astonishing turnabout.

00:13:21.520 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:13:28.040 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs

00:13:32.800 you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:13:37.560 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical,

00:13:43.220 A Beautiful Noise, April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:13:49.380 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:13:51.520 How does this get solved, Ben? 0.99

00:13:53.560 Because, let's say you kill all of Hamas. 0.98

00:13:56.280 We know from polling—now, polling from those sorts of places isn't particularly reliable, 0.61

00:14:00.740 but still, the majority of people in Gaza support Hamas.

00:14:04.080 Let's be just honest about that, right?

00:14:06.200 And you might argue, to some extent, understandable, given the civilian casualties and what they're

00:14:13.120 being—

00:14:14.040 Well, they supported Hamas before, so, I mean, even after the blowout, they supported Hamas.

00:14:17.280 But I imagine they're somewhat emboldened by what they're going through now.

00:14:21.520 So, let's say that Israel is successful in destroying tunnels, Hamas infrastructure, 0.90

00:14:28.760 kills, you know, the majority, let's say, of the terrorists.

00:14:32.420 They can't get the leaders because they're living somewhere else, most of them.

00:14:34.840 But let's say that they do that.

00:14:37.640 How does that solve things?

00:14:39.600 How does that situation get resolved, ultimately?

00:14:43.320 So, I think that one of the problems in foreign policy is that, particularly Americans and Westerners, because the big wars that we have in our history

00:14:50.780 had something like a negotiated ending and then a period of peace, or complete victory is in World War II.

00:14:56.860 We're not used to the reality, which is that for the vast history of war, there was no such thing as, like, a war that solved things, where, like, it was just solved for all time.

00:15:04.880 Like, history continues to move.

00:15:05.940 We have this temptation in the Western mind to be like, it's the Francis Fukuyama.

00:15:08.800 It's the end of history.

00:15:09.540 We've reached it.

00:15:10.100 We're here.

00:15:10.340 And that's never the case.

00:15:12.080 That's particularly not the case in the Middle East, where you have religions that are going thousands of years old. 1.00

00:15:16.920 And so, you know, what is likely to happen there in the Gaza Strip is what you currently have in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank.

00:15:24.440 What you currently have there is Israeli military rule and Palestinian civil control.

00:15:28.200 That is likely to be the most durable outcome of this, because...

00:15:32.900 Doesn't that mean there's going to be more October 7th, Ben?

00:15:34.940 No, because there haven't been more October 7th in the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, right?

00:15:39.640 I mean, meaning that October 7th was created by a series of things.

00:15:43.860 It was not primarily created by Palestinian hatred, because that hatred was pre-existing.

00:15:49.120 The desire to extirpate Israel was pre-existing, going all the way back to 1948, when Israel was established, when five Arab armies decided at that time to destroy the nascent state of Israel.

00:15:58.720 It was true in 56.

00:15:59.840 It was true in 67, in 73, in 82.

00:16:01.660 I mean, it's been in the first Intifada, in the second Intifada, in the 2014 war.

00:16:06.940 I mean, like, nothing has changed in terms of enmities and feelings, right?

00:16:10.220 All of that stuff is the constant.

00:16:11.600 By the way, it goes all the way back to the early days of Jewish settlement.

00:16:18.260 There were always Jews in the state of Israel, or in what would become the state of Israel, going all the way back thousands of years.

00:16:22.940 But kind of the renewed population of Israel in terms of population growth.

00:16:26.500 I mean, there were massacres of Jews in 1929 in Hebron.

00:16:29.300 So, I mean, there's nothing new in terms of the enmity, is the point that I'm making.

00:16:32.940 What was the failure of October 7th was a security failure.

00:16:36.640 You know, that's much more practical than how do you cure the hatred in the hearts of human beings.

00:16:42.320 The hatred in the heart of human beings is very hard to cure.

00:16:44.420 Security failures are pragmatically possible to prevent.

00:16:48.860 And Israel made a series of pragmatic failures with regard to the Gaza Strip that they did not make, for example, with regard to the West Bank.

00:16:57.000 And that included allowing the Hamas to cultivate its power in the Gaza Strip.

00:17:03.320 It included mostly there being no real intelligence on the ground in the Gaza Strip.

00:17:07.280 It was basically a black box to Israel. 0.85

00:17:08.940 They built the border there.

00:17:09.800 They thought the border was secure.

00:17:10.720 They thought because of Iron Dome they could shoot down most of what was coming over that border.

00:17:13.520 But they didn't have a lot of intelligence capacity.

00:17:15.500 Israel goes into Janine and Nablus, which are areas of the West Bank, on a routine basis and kills terrorists because they have intelligence resources on the ground over there.

00:17:22.280 Ben, I was going to say, what we are talking about is practical.

00:17:26.300 And you were talking about curing the hatred in people's hearts.

00:17:30.680 I'm looking at what's happening on campuses.

00:17:33.080 I'm looking at how people are discussing it on the streets.

00:17:36.100 Because it seems to me that whilst Israel may be winning the war, what they're doing is they're losing the PR war.

00:17:43.580 So I disagree only in the sense that I don't think the PR war had ever been won by Israel in the recent past.

00:17:49.720 So, I mean, as long as I've been alive, the press have been very largely oriented against Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians.

00:17:55.900 And that's what drove Oslo.

00:17:57.240 It's what drove the Y River Accords.

00:17:59.000 It's what drove the attempts to negotiate in 2000 and 2008.

00:18:01.600 So I don't think anything has really changed there.

00:18:03.760 I think that there's a broadening and deepening of anti-American, anti-Western sentiment that is manifested at a lot of these protests.

00:18:09.860 I think that one thing that's happened here that I think people are misreading is they're treating these protests as though they are solely about Israel and the Palestinians.

00:18:17.720 When in reality, when you listen to what the protesters are saying, it's not just about Israel and the Palestinians.

00:18:21.700 They're talking about decolonialization.

00:18:24.060 They're talking about the evils of the West and how the West is a colonial empire.

00:18:28.220 They're talking about how the West itself is systemically racist.

00:18:31.240 I mean, it's what some people online have called the omni cause, and it's what unifies, you know, queers for Palestine, right? 0.98

00:18:38.560 That's always the big puzzle of this sort of thing, right?

00:18:40.280 Is that you look at that and on its face, it's totally absurd, right?

00:18:43.620 That's chickens for KFC, right?

00:18:45.040 What are you talking about?

00:18:46.300 But it makes perfect sense when you realize that this is just a coalition of people who believe they are oppressed by the Western system.

00:18:51.320 And they're gang-ing together in order to try and destroy that overarching superstructure.

00:18:56.560 And Israel is just a part of that. 0.87

00:18:58.140 The thing about Israel and Jews, and I would say that this is part of kind of the broader intersectional argument, is that there are many types of anti-Semitism manifest in a variety of different ways.

00:19:07.840 Left-wing anti-Semitism, which I think is crossing over with Islamic anti-Semitism right now in a lot of these protests.

00:19:13.000 That argument springs on the left from a not anti-Semitic argument, but an anti-System argument.

00:19:18.920 And that argument goes something like this.

00:19:20.720 Everybody who performs less well in a particular system is a victim of that system.

00:19:26.240 That failure is actually evidence of exploitation and victimization at the hands of a system.

00:19:31.120 And so what that means is that anyone who's successful within the system is an exploiter, is the person who has done something to hurt somebody else.

00:19:37.820 When you take that internationally, then what you end up with is the West is the exploiter of non-Western peoples. 0.82

00:19:42.360 And when you take it to the Middle East, what it looks like is Israel is the exploiter of the Palestinians. 0.69

00:19:46.300 Like Israel got rich at the expense of the Palestinians, despite the fact that Israeli Arabs are, in fact, the richest Arabs in the neighborhood. 0.51

00:19:52.380 And that if you look at – actually, it's a pretty good case study.

00:19:55.500 If you look at GDP per capita, if you're going to look in order at where Arabs have done the best in the region, and you're not talking about like the oil-rich monarchies where they're just kind of redistributing oil income, then you're looking at Israel. 0.61

00:20:07.500 There's not a single Israeli Arab who wants to live in Palestine.

00:20:09.660 They don't want to by polling data because they understand what that would mean.

00:20:13.620 Wherever there's more Israeli control, you have Arabs who are richer because there's more day-to-day maintenance of law and order. 0.98

00:20:22.780 But the argument is that Palestinian failure, and particularly in the Gaza Strip, that is not the result of Hamas.

00:20:29.400 That is the result of the great exploiter that is Israel. 1.00

00:20:32.200 And the proof of that is that Israel is a very successful country, and Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip is a shitshow. 0.97

00:20:38.100 And the reality is that it's a shitshow because when you make an active decision to keep people in quote-unquote refugee camps for 70 years as opposed to integrating them into an economy or as opposed to trying to build things and create foreign relations and build a working government and open your economy and teach people things. 0.97

00:20:53.560 The reality is the Gaza Strip has the same physical capacity or better than a multiplicity of countries that do wildly better than it does in terms of the GDP scale, whether you're talking about Hong Kong, whether you're talking about Singapore.

00:21:06.540 So it has nothing to – as we've learned in terms of modern economies, the natural resources with which a country is endowed, that is not dispositive as to whether a country is economically successful or societally successful.

00:21:19.380 The system is what determines whether a country is societally successful or not.

00:21:23.680 Check West Germany versus East Germany for an amazing example of this, or North Korea versus South Korea.

00:21:28.020 So what that suggests is maybe there are a bunch of decisions made in the Gaza Strip that are really bad and have resulted in some really bad life standards.

00:21:35.040 But again, that violates the scruples of this general moral principle, which is suffering equals victimization at the hands of a higher power.

00:21:43.740 And so that can manifest pretty quickly in anti-Semitism because Jews are disproportionately successful in a wide variety of endeavors.

00:21:50.960 I think mainly because Jews historically have valued education very, very highly, and it's not unique to Jews.

00:21:56.460 Thomas Sowell talks about middlemen Chinese in non-Chinese countries who study very, very hard and do really, really well.

00:22:01.880 You see Asians treated this way at American universities, right?

00:22:04.680 They're an other now because they become white. 0.97

00:22:06.960 They've become part of the system, and so they have to be discriminated against in admissions, for example.

00:22:10.960 And so it can turn into the Jews are at the top of the system because the Jews benefit from the system. 0.98

00:22:16.040 But what makes Jews particularly weird is that Jews are also, by the data, one of the more victimized subgroups, right, in terms of hate crimes, for example, attacks, physical attacks, or the state of Israel, which has been targeted by terror more than any other Western country by far, right?

00:22:30.260 So it kind of violates all the rules, and I think there's a particular ire about that.

00:22:34.620 So if it were just about Israel and the Palestinians, or if it were just about Arab suffering in general, as many people have pointed out, where were the protests when Assad was killing 500,000 Muslims in Syria?

00:22:46.820 Where are the protests right now in Nigeria, where Christians are being killed, or Niger, or Libya, or a wide variety of other countries where people are suffering?

00:22:57.700 I mean, the deportation of Afghans from Pakistan by the hundreds of thousands is happening literally right now.

00:23:03.480 No one cares.

00:23:03.980 And that is, and those are all very good points.

00:23:06.220 But what is really interesting at the moment, Ben, is we've always, we're from the UK, we've seen these tropes time and time again on the fringes of the left, on the fringes of the Labour Party.

00:23:16.540 And we saw it with Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.

00:23:20.480 But now what is very interesting and deeply worrying it is we're now seeing this come up from the right, which is something that I've never seen before in my lifetime, certainly.

00:23:31.480 I mean, I think it was always on the fringes of the right.

00:23:33.360 I think you're right that it's expanded into less fringy areas of the right, for sure.

00:23:38.760 Neil Ferguson, in his book, The War of the World, where he talks about the period World War I, World War II, he suggests that genocidal feeling or attacks on minorities, I think to put it more mildly, attacks on minorities.

00:23:50.040 That tends to spring up at times of high economic uncertainty, when you have empires in collapse, and when you have high levels of minority population. 1.00

00:23:59.020 And what you're seeing right now is a lot of that in the West.

00:24:01.920 You're seeing tremendous economic uncertainty.

00:24:03.560 It feels like we're entering a period of serious economic stagnation in which innovation seems to be petering out other than AI.

00:24:09.440 But I think most people are scared of AI because they don't know quite exactly what the effects of that are going to be, and rightly so.

00:24:14.620 I mean, there are a lot of unknown unknowns about how that's going to affect the economy.

00:24:18.380 Who's going to lose their job?

00:24:19.360 What do you do with your time when your job is gone, right?

00:24:21.980 I mean, these are all serious questions that people are thinking about.

00:24:24.720 And if they're not thinking about that, they're just looking at their bills right now, and the inflation is sky high, and it's very difficult for people to make their payments.

00:24:29.740 And then you have the problem of a receding Western power, and it certainly feels like Western power has been receding over the course of the post-Cold War era, weirdly enough.

00:24:40.260 It feels like there should have been these sort of liberal flowering that Fukuyama wanted, and instead what you actually got was the Samuel Huntington clash of civilizations in which the West was so apologetic about its past that it basically started to recede from the world stage,

00:24:52.660 making room for rising China, making room for a militaristic Russia, making room for a Middle East that is now increasingly being cursed by a tentacle-laden Iranian power with terror proxies all over the region. 0.86

00:25:05.500 And so you have weakening empires if you consider the West to be sort of an empire on its own, which is probably true, whether you consider it a physical empire or an economic empire, that feels like that's withering.

00:25:15.260 And then you have high levels of minority populations, which is going to cause internal stressors because when people don't have a lot in common, 1.00

00:25:21.060 and ethnicity doesn't have to be a proxy for value system, but sometimes it can be.

00:25:24.940 And when that happens, people start to look at each other with distrust, and things start to break down really, really quickly.

00:25:30.020 And so what that's resulted in on the right is this kind of isolationism that there's a traditional American sort of vacillation between interventionism and isolationism.

00:25:40.000 That's been true for all of American history.

00:25:41.480 You go back to the 1920s. It was a very isolationist time.

00:25:44.080 You go to the late 1930s, 40s, you start to see more of an interventionist swing.

00:25:47.900 You go back to the early 1900s under Teddy Roosevelt, you have a very interventionist in America.

00:25:52.220 So this vacillation is very common in American life.

00:25:54.920 What's weird that you're seeing on the right is something different, which is an isolationism that is not rooted in what traditional American isolationism was rooted in.

00:26:02.120 Traditional American isolationism was the rest of the world is really bad.

00:26:05.420 We're not going to get involved in their problems because it's going to poison us here at home.

00:26:08.180 That was the isolationism of the 19th century in the United States, which was like – or George Washington, no foreign entanglements, no permanent allies, which made sense when Britain and France were fighting each other and the United States was at different times allied with both.

00:26:22.460 You know, so when you have a world where things are not very close together and you're separate – you happen to be the luckiest country in the history of mankind, you're located on a continent right now that is bordered by two oceans, Mexico and Canada.

00:26:35.380 That's – with nearly autarkic resources.

00:26:39.120 That's like an amazing thing.

00:26:40.040 But traditional American isolationism was don't get involved with the Europeans.

00:26:43.900 It was the European war they were talking about.

00:26:45.620 They're always fighting their balance of power war problems.

00:26:47.960 We don't want any piece of that.

00:26:48.940 It's going to poison us here at home.

00:26:50.200 It's going to cost us money.

00:26:51.460 It's going to mess up our politics.

00:26:53.000 Just stay away.

00:26:53.920 There's a difference in that and the sort of post-World War II left-wing argument that was largely Soviet-backed, which was that America was a force for bad in the world.

00:27:04.480 Right, the sort of Howard Zinn argument that America has historically been an exploitative, egregiously bad place and wherever we put our beak, things get worse.

00:27:14.020 Can I just pause you there because I accept what you're saying there, Ben, but also as well, we need to mention Vietnam and we need to mention the war in Iraq, which for our generation was that moment where we just went, oh, we were lied to and we were lied to big time.

00:27:29.540 Okay, so I will make the case that the Vietnam War was the first case in point of a bad ideology taking precedence over good ideology with regard to a very messy war.

00:27:42.940 So the reality is that Vietnam would have been better if the United States had stayed and maintained its security. 0.87

00:27:47.520 The United States unilaterally pulling out and subjecting Vietnam to communist rule and the fall of Cambodia was quite bad for the world.

00:27:53.560 That doesn't mean that there may have been, just like Iraq, there may have been an initial bad assessment as to the importance of Vietnam in the grand scheme of Southeast Asia.

00:28:02.420 The domino theory may not have been, even if it was real with regard to Cambodia, for example, that it maybe just didn't matter that much.

00:28:08.300 It was just very far away.

00:28:09.720 But the idea that Vietnam was better ruled over by Ho Chi Minh than it would have been ruled over by something like a Western dictatorship, which is what South Korea was.

00:28:18.280 I mean, we now think of South Korea as a wonderful, blooming democracy.

00:28:20.560 South Korea was a dictatorship until the 80s, and now we all like South Korea.

00:28:24.000 South Korea is great.

00:28:24.820 It's a place where they make all our microchips, right?

00:28:26.480 I mean, like, it's wonderful.

00:28:28.020 And it gave us a sigh.

00:28:29.200 Like, there's so much good stuff.

00:28:29.960 But South Korea is considered, like, a wonderful, blooming Western country.

00:28:35.340 That took, like, a full-scale war in which 50,000 Americans died, and then it took decades of occupation by America to prevent North Korea from walking over that tripwire. 0.55

00:28:43.200 So, again, the idea that the world is better off when America leaves is not true.

00:28:47.860 You can say that we shouldn't have gotten involved there, and that's a good argument, or at least I think a passable argument.

00:28:54.580 What is not a good argument is that the world got better when America left.

00:28:57.720 Has the world gotten better when America pulled out from Iraq? 0.99

00:29:00.020 That's a different question from whether America originally should have gotten involved in Iraq.

00:29:02.720 No, but Francis's point is something else, Ben, which is, you know, the people that you're talking about in terms of the new isolationism, people like Tucker Carlson, who's been having a go at you over many things recently, is I see in him a kind of, you know, I went and I sold the war in Iraq to the people.

00:29:21.040 And then it was all based on a pack of lies, and now America is, you know, his brain sees America differently now.

00:29:29.220 It's quite clear, and that's why he's going over to Russia and having, you know, finding out that, you know, Russian supermarkets have shopping carts with these magnificent mechanisms and all the rest of it, right?

00:29:39.440 So, I guess what we're talking about is…

00:29:42.380 Frankly, I think that said more about his lack of understanding of how supermarkets work than about Russia.

00:29:47.300 That was bizarre.

00:29:48.760 And the idea that food is cheaper in Russia, I mean, it is cheaper for an American, but it's three times or five times or however many times more expensive for the average Russian.

00:29:56.480 So, but this is what happens when people have these ideologies about basically America bad, the rest of the world good.

00:30:03.920 Right, and I think that that is the key, right?

00:30:05.740 I think that there's a difference between America makes mistakes and bad things happen, which is true for literally any country, and America inherently getting involved in things makes that a worse place, that it makes the thing bad, and that that's true for the West generally, that there will be a better place if Western powers were not involved in particular areas.

00:30:23.900 Again, it's impossible to make the case that the West has been completely innocent or that the West has never made mistakes, that every place the West has touched has been amazing.

00:30:32.920 That's obviously not true.

00:30:33.860 But one thing that is certainly true is wherever the West seems to regress or pull back, things get markedly worse.

00:30:40.600 I mean, this seems to be true literally everywhere.

00:30:43.700 The decolonialization project has had some pretty messy consequences, as it turns out. 0.86

00:30:48.200 And again, that's not an argument for colonialism.

00:30:50.240 You can make the argument that the West never shouldn't be involved in those places.

00:30:53.400 But there also are places on the planet where the West was never involved, and those don't seem to be like amazing places either.

00:30:57.580 So when it comes to foreign policy, it turns out that it's a series of bad choices and worse choices.

00:31:03.120 And there are very rarely good choices that have no consequences to anybody in terms of blood, treasure.

00:31:09.360 Like that just doesn't exist because effectively speaking, the international order does not exist.

00:31:13.760 There is no international order.

00:31:15.000 That's why international institutions are a failure and a giant joke.

00:31:17.380 It's a fifth-grade playground, and you hope that the person who's the strongest on the playground is a good person with good intentions, even if they occasionally blunder and hurt somebody innocent, rather than a really, really bad person.

00:31:28.580 But there is no world on a fifth-grade playground where there are no adults present, where somebody doesn't end up as the dominant power.

00:31:35.900 And when those dominant powers are bad, the world becomes a significantly worse place.

00:31:40.280 Well, it's a point I've been making for a long time, which is that when you create a power vacuum, it's not going to be rainbows and unicorns.

00:31:46.880 It's going to be Russia or China stepping into it.

00:31:48.800 But the question I wanted to ask you, Ben, is you and personally on The Daily Wire broadly have paid a price for having this conversation in the way that you've been.

00:32:00.480 You know, people like, I think there was a clip of Andrew Schultz and Patrick Bette-David talking about how it's, you know, if they called it the Israeli wire, then that would be fine and all of this other stuff. 0.94

00:32:11.160 And, you know, I'll be honest, when I look at your Twitter feed, you know, you have been very focused on what's happening in Israel.

00:32:18.880 What do you make of those criticisms?

00:32:20.320 I mean, when it comes to my Twitter feed, that's largely because Twitter is dominated by this conversation.

00:32:24.980 So, I mean, here's the thing.

00:32:27.120 If you look at the vast panoply of episodes that I've done over the course of, I've been doing my podcast since 2015, so almost 10 years.

00:32:33.160 If you look at the vast majority of those episodes, I don't think I mentioned Israel once until October 7th.

00:32:37.620 I mean, that's an exaggeration.

00:32:40.120 I mentioned it, but not very much.

00:32:42.680 The amount of time that I talked about Israel on my podcast was, as a percentage of total time on the podcast, I'd venture to say significantly less than 1%.

00:32:50.740 And then October 7th happens, and of course, there's this weird thing that happens where it's like everybody else talks about Israel, but if I talk about Israel, then it's because I'm peculiarly focused on Israel as opposed to everyone else who's not.

00:33:01.540 I mean, it seems like pretty much everybody's focused on that right now.

00:33:04.540 So when it goes out of the news, I'll be more than happy to not talk about Israel.

00:33:08.240 It's a very contentious and difficult discussion to have with a lot of people, particularly on X, which has turned into a cesspool in a lot of ways.

00:33:15.200 Always has been.

00:33:16.120 Come on.

00:33:18.300 Yes.

00:33:18.860 I mean, yes.

00:33:19.680 But I will say that the changes in X, which again, I'm a big Elon fan.

00:33:25.420 I like that Elon has opened up X.

00:33:26.840 I've even been an advocate of people who I think are absolutely despicable being allowed back on X because I think that his attempt to create a free marketplace of ideas is more important than my personal level of emotional comfort when it comes to X.

00:33:40.520 I will say that the policing there in terms of virality is not very good, that there are a lot of bot accounts.

00:33:46.320 There's a lot of spam.

00:33:47.780 Like I think a lot of those things can be simultaneously true, even while I'm very, very happy that Elon took it over and opened it up.

00:33:52.660 But with that said, as far as the idea that the daily wire is, quote unquote, the Israeli wire or something, we have hosts who completely disagree with me on Israel.

00:34:02.360 Matt Walsh believes, and I've had discussions with him about this, that America should have no business giving foreign aid at all to Israel or pretty much anyone else.

00:34:11.860 I disagree with him.

00:34:12.760 I think that that's a wrong perspective in my viewpoint.

00:34:15.460 That's a different thing from perspectives that have been articulated by other people.

00:34:21.540 I don't think Matt has a lack of moral clarity between, say, Hamas and the democratic state of Israel.

00:34:26.160 That is a slightly different proposition.

00:34:29.120 As far as, again, my personal focus on this, I'm personally focused on this for a couple of reasons.

00:34:34.800 I will freely admit that I have a level of emotional investment in a state that was created for the safety of Jews and is historically tied to my religion.

00:34:45.000 Of course, that's true.

00:34:46.080 And I'd be ridiculous not to simply say that that's the case.

00:34:50.320 I also have a stake in this because, again, I think it's a civilizational question.

00:34:53.300 And it is bewildering to me how so many members of the West seem to have a difficulty in finding moral clarity between an openly genocidal terror group in Hamas and an Israeli government that is currently engaged in a bipartisan war cabinet that is trying to bring humanitarian aid in in the middle of a conflict with an enemy that's stealing the humanitarian aid while risking its own citizens.

00:35:14.980 I mean, that I find absolutely not only bewildering, but dangerous.

00:35:21.680 I mean, I think there's a reason why people are being assaulted for carrying American flags into the center of many of these protests.

00:35:27.500 It would be one thing if people were getting assaulted for carrying Israeli flags, which, again, I've seen throughout my life.

00:35:31.080 That's nothing new.

00:35:31.880 But people getting assaulted for carrying American flags into the center of this sort of stuff betrays, I think, what is the real problem for the West.

00:35:37.780 And I don't think it's a problem for Israel predominantly.

00:35:39.880 Israel is going to be what Israel is going to be. 1.00

00:35:41.460 It's in a region of the world that's incredibly dangerous.

00:35:43.640 It's in the worst neighborhood that it's possible to be in.

00:35:46.380 And it's going to have to pursue its own national self-interest, as every country should pursue its national self-interest.

00:35:52.500 And sometimes those self-interests come into conflict.

00:35:55.480 With that said, the real problem for the West is that you have hundreds of thousands of people who are marching in solidarity with the terrorist group.

00:36:01.460 I mean, that's a problem for the West.

00:36:02.660 That's not a problem for Israel.

00:36:03.460 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:36:10.200 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:36:19.460 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:36:26.280 Now through June 7, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:36:30.180 Get tickets at murbish.com.

00:36:33.460 Ben, is that actually fair?

00:36:35.940 Because, look, there's going to be a lot of these kids, and you'll ask them, and they'll just, they'll say what they showed on our videos.

00:36:41.840 You know, we don't agree with what happened.

00:36:43.560 We thought it was awful, barbaric.

00:36:45.280 Kids are being killed.

00:36:46.560 I'm marching because I want to ceasefire, and I don't want these kids to be killed.

00:36:51.440 And there'll be other people who will say awful, horrible things, and there are jihadis there.

00:36:55.580 I accept all of that.

00:36:57.200 So, I mean, that's true.

00:36:58.360 Also, what got them up to march on this particular subject?

00:37:02.540 It's not just holding the opinion.

00:37:04.380 Lots of people hold lots of opinions where they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

00:37:06.960 That's the nature of democracy, and that's fine.

00:37:09.040 I mean, I wish people would read more, but that's just another question.

00:37:11.960 But as far as the, you know, as far as what gets you up to get your ass off your couch and away from the Cheetos and get up in the streets marching, that's a different thing. 0.96

00:37:22.620 That requires a different level of motivation than simply holding an ignorant view about a thing. 0.99

00:37:26.640 That's a passionately held ignorant view about a thing at the very least.

00:37:30.760 And what it speaks to is a broader worldview that this plugs into. 0.65

00:37:33.480 This has become sort of the issue du jour that plugs into it.

00:37:36.300 And it's not the only one we've seen in the last few years.

00:37:38.260 I mean, we saw massive marches based on the death of George Floyd, and it's a completely different issue.

00:37:42.040 Plugged into the same exact system, largely the same people who are protesting.

00:37:46.540 What's added on top of this is the radical Islamists who have been protesting also.

00:37:49.660 But the rest of the coalition is pretty much intact and looks kind of the same.

00:37:53.260 What's different now is, though, Ben, you are coming under attack not only from the Andrew Tates of the world, but also the Tucker Carsons.

00:37:59.380 How do you explain that part of it?

00:38:00.880 Now, again, I think that there is an isolationist sentiment that has set in on the right that is tied to a peculiar horseshoe theory belief that is very similar to the Bernie Sanders belief,

00:38:12.120 which is that there is a group of people who have been left behind.

00:38:13.960 Those people have been left behind by an oligarchy that is ruled by powerful forces that are in control, and they're trying to keep you down.

00:38:21.040 I don't like that sense of victimhood without evidence.

00:38:23.420 I really don't.

00:38:24.180 And I don't like it on the left.

00:38:25.080 I don't like it on the right.

00:38:25.860 And I see it on both.

00:38:27.100 I do see that as a horseshoe theory thing that's happening.

00:38:29.680 I mean, Tucker, four years ago, was talking about how Elizabeth Warren's economic plans were something that he was in favor of.

00:38:36.200 He liked Elizabeth Warren's economic plans. 0.97

00:38:37.680 He was in that when he was on Fox.

00:38:38.960 Everybody sort of looked past that.

00:38:40.240 But that, to me, again, suggests an interesting worldview that there's a group of people who are left behind in America, and those people are being left behind by the oligarchs of America.

00:38:50.840 And that starts to look a lot like intersectional politics, just with a different victim group.

00:38:55.560 And also, as well, you know, we've seen the rise of people like Andrew Tate, and we've seen what I find very concerning, because I'm not Jewish, but I look Jewish.

00:39:06.000 So, you know, if things go to hell, Ben.

00:39:07.940 Worst combination.

00:39:08.540 The worst combination.

00:39:10.120 Yeah, the looks without the IQ.

00:39:11.540 But anyway, because if, you know, I'm actually genuinely worried about this.

00:39:16.160 You see people who I used to follow on Twitter, and I'd be like, oh, you know, look, they're quite interesting.

00:39:21.140 I'll follow them.

00:39:22.020 And then I see them retweeting clips of Nick Fuentes, and I'm going, what the hell is going on here?

00:39:27.400 And I'm seeing this resurgence of open anti-Semitism.

00:39:31.400 Not just, oh, you know, the people in charge or Zionists or whatever else, but open anti-Semitism.

00:39:38.940 And that is incredibly what happened.

00:39:40.540 I don't know if you saw Rogan was talking about it the other day as well.

00:39:43.180 It was a very good clip from him.

00:39:44.220 So, right, so I think one of the things that's happened here also is that because the left went so far in closing the Overton window,

00:39:51.200 I think the solution for the right was no Overton window ever.

00:39:54.680 And I don't think that's correct, right?

00:39:56.680 Meaning, like, I think the definition of cancel culture has been expanded really, really far.

00:40:01.400 So I think that cancel culture traditionally was the idea that people were getting canceled for views that were well within the Overton window, right?

00:40:08.000 For views that were kind of held by half the population, and people were getting canceled for that.

00:40:12.400 But there was very little argument that if somebody was openly a fan of Hitler, that you had an obligation to hire them at your company.

00:40:21.000 Everybody was sort of like, okay, well, that's outside the Overton window.

00:40:23.160 I don't have an obligation.

00:40:23.920 Like, they have a right to say what they want to say in the United States, but that doesn't mean I have to associate with them.

00:40:28.160 And again, there's a difference between, like, the public square, which is what X is supposed to be, where the idea is you can say whatever you want, even the crazy guy who loves Hitler, or, you know, I have to hire you for – it's cancel culture.

00:40:38.080 If I get fired, if I go on my profile, I start waving a Nazi flag and talking about how much I love Hitler, and then you fire me, that's cancel culture, right? 0.75

00:40:45.440 And I think that that's an expansion of the definition beyond what it traditionally was.

00:40:50.280 The argument of the right with regard to political correctness and cancel culture was that the left had shut the Overton window so tight that very widely held mainstream opinions.

00:41:00.480 Like, for example, men are not women. 0.66

00:41:02.280 These were suddenly cancelable opinions.

00:41:04.340 And a lot of us were like, that's crazy.

00:41:05.920 That's insane.

00:41:07.340 And you saw, you know, very famously in 2015, the sort of intellectual dark web form up around this, where it was people like me and people like Sam Harris and people who radically disagreed on a wide variety of policies, but were like, but we can have discussions about these sorts of topics, and it's totally fine.

00:41:20.000 These are within the Overton window.

00:41:21.020 I think it was important for that purpose.

00:41:22.940 And then there was a – because politics is inherently reactionary, I think the reaction to the Overton window being shut up tight was there is no Overton window.

00:41:31.040 Explode it.

00:41:31.520 And not only that, anything that violates the left's sense of propriety, good or bad, is now valuable.

00:41:38.280 So there was a category error that was made, which was I'm going to say a true thing, and the left hates it, and that just shows how true it is.

00:41:46.660 And I'm going to say a terrible thing, and the left is going to hate us, and therefore it shows how true it is.

00:41:51.900 They're reacting to the left's hatred.

00:41:53.260 They're letting the left actually decide in many cases what not to be offended by.

00:41:57.360 So the answer is if the left is offended by everything, I will be offended by nothing, and not only that, I will embrace.

00:42:02.720 The more people yell at me, the more it shows that I'm over the target, right?

00:42:05.800 There's always this phrase that you hear kind of in right-wing spaces, that you're not taking flack unless you're over the target.

00:42:11.400 Well, I mean, kind of and kind of not, meaning like it is true that sometimes if you're making a good point, it draws a lot of fire. 0.98

00:42:18.580 It's also true sometimes that if you're making an idiotic point, you're drawing a lot of fire. 0.67

00:42:21.400 So, you know, the lack of what you've created is now an unfalsifiable system, right? 0.99

00:42:26.800 Because no matter what you say, if you are taking shit for it, this means that you're saying something valuable. 1.00

00:42:32.480 Well, that's stupid. 1.00

00:42:34.420 I mean, people say a lot of dumb stuff. 1.00

00:42:35.660 I've said dumb stuff that I've taken shit for, and I deserve it. 0.99

00:42:37.680 I've said some stuff that I don't think is dumb that I've taken shit for, and I don't think I deserve it. 0.98

00:42:41.580 I think that's true for literally everyone. 0.96

00:42:43.100 And so because of that, I think there's been a premium put on saying the thing that violates the sensibilities of the broader population.

00:42:51.920 And so saying the thing, right?

00:42:54.320 And the thing in this case doesn't mean the true thing or the evidence thing or the thing that I can make an argument for.

00:42:59.920 It's just saying anything that drives a reaction that is used as an indicator of virtue.

00:43:05.160 If the left hates it, it must be virtuous.

00:43:07.600 If people who historically are too sensitive hate a thing, it's not because I'm saying something that actually is quite bad, which it turns out that even sensitive people can be right.

00:43:17.880 But it doesn't mean they're always right.

00:43:19.980 And so I think that category error has led to a lot of, okay, well, there's no difference between saying I love Hitler and saying that I disagree with how Israel is prosecuting the war.

00:43:30.780 Saying I disagree with how Israel is prosecuting the war is well within the Overton window, saying that it warms the cockles of your heart when Hamas crosses the border and murders 1,200 people seems to be outside the Overton window. 0.73

00:43:40.980 And we're also, we're talking about it.

00:43:43.140 And I think that's actually one of the reasons why we've seen the rise to fame and prominence of Andrew Tate.

00:43:50.380 Because I did a video where I went and talked to the young people in South Beach, Miami, and we were talking about hookup culture and dating culture.

00:43:58.920 And what came across was that people were very miserable.

00:44:01.760 But what was even more worrying is practically every young man that I spoke to, and some of these boys were smart.

00:44:08.840 They were smart kids.

00:44:10.200 And I said to them, what do you think about Andrew Tate?

00:44:12.380 And it was almost uniformly positive.

00:44:15.460 Well, transgressivism has become its own sort of philosophy.

00:44:18.640 If you transgress a line, this means you're brave, right?

00:44:21.680 And that's actually sort of anti-conservative by nature, right?

00:44:25.640 It turns out that it's radical in both directions.

00:44:27.240 It's radical left because you're destroying all the lines in that direction, but can also be transgressivism is anti-conservative in the sense that if you believe, as I believe, that systems and institutions are built up gradually, there's a Hayekian point, they're built up gradually over the course of centuries by tried and true practice.

00:44:42.660 That doesn't mean that every institution that's built is good.

00:44:44.920 It does mean that you should be very careful before you simply destroy them willy-nilly.

00:44:47.520 There are a lot of people who are like, well, no, now that the systems have been hijacked in Toto by the left, destroy the systems, destroy all of the established systems, and then we'll build on the ruins.

00:44:58.700 And I think there are certain systems for which that's true, where the system's been taken over so much that it's not savable, and you're better off just kind of dissociating from it or providing an alternative.

00:45:07.780 But I think that there's a lot of babies getting thrown out with a lot of bathwater right now. 0.80

00:45:12.020 And so what you get is – the game I think that Andrew Tate plays, and he plays it really well actually, is he says one true thing and one absurd thing.

00:45:21.240 And then if you say that's absurd, he says, well, I said this true thing.

00:45:24.700 Why are you attacking me for the true thing?

00:45:26.580 And he'll say men are different from women.

00:45:27.880 I'll be like, that's so true. 0.91

00:45:29.260 They'll be like, and that's why men should bone a thousand women and have a thousand babies. 1.00

00:45:32.660 You'll be like, well, that's not – that doesn't seem like a good lifestyle choice or good for the planet or good for you or good for your soul or anything like that.

00:45:40.140 Like that's because you just don't believe in the first thing.

00:45:41.900 You believe that men are women. 0.57

00:45:42.700 It's like, no, no, that's not a – that is not a corollary of your first statement. 0.97

00:45:47.200 And so, again, I think that people feel so hemmed in that it's – that they are bursting out in a lot of ways, many of which are bad, uninformed, foolish.

00:45:58.900 And because of that, there's this thing that's been happening online a lot that I've spoken out about, which is the sort of just asking questions phenomenon, right?

00:46:06.400 Which is I don't need to provide evidence to my proposition.

00:46:08.340 I'm just asking questions.

00:46:09.860 And that's just – that's for children. 1.00

00:46:11.800 It's a stupid game for children. 1.00

00:46:13.120 Just as being randomly transgressive is a stupid game for children. 1.00

00:46:15.680 I have four kids. 0.99

00:46:16.560 And every so often they'll just say no to something that's perfectly obvious.

00:46:19.120 And like just put on your clothes in the morning so you can go to school.

00:46:22.140 No.

00:46:22.700 Well, okay, you're not saying something brave. 1.00

00:46:24.540 You're being an idiot. 1.00

00:46:25.580 Okay? 1.00

00:46:25.800 And that's also true for adults.

00:46:26.960 In fact, it's more true for adults.

00:46:28.480 At least my kids have the excuse of being children.

00:46:30.440 And when it comes to the just asking questions routine, I feel like it's another form of that.

00:46:33.740 It's like, okay, I'm going to be militantly ignorant about whether the question that I'm asking has the answer that I'm suggesting.

00:46:39.900 But I'm going to rely on that ignorance to just ask the question.

00:46:42.660 Why hasn't anyone checked this out?

00:46:44.380 Has anyone even thought about – I mean, it turns out usually people have spent an awful lot of time thinking about that question.

00:46:49.300 And there may be a variety of different answers of various evidentiary quality.

00:46:52.800 But, you know, we're in a time where there was such a premium put on not asking questions that the next move was ask all the questions and then pretend the answers don't matter.

00:47:04.220 That's an interesting thing that you're saying.

00:47:06.860 What the boys were saying to me when I spoke to them a couple of days ago was we are living in a world where we are openly denigrated against for being male.

00:47:18.240 Where, as a man, we're not respected anymore.

00:47:22.960 We're encouraged to be more feminine.

00:47:25.440 Andrew is the only person standing up for us.

00:47:30.260 Right.

00:47:30.500 And I think that what they mean by that is that he's the only person standing up for them without asking a true obligation of them.

00:47:38.000 Okay?

00:47:38.480 Because – which is a wonderful sales tactic.

00:47:40.880 Right?

00:47:41.260 The sales tactic where I'm standing up for you but I offer you no actual obligation is an amazing sales tactic.

00:47:47.500 It's true for pretty much every politician, by the way.

00:47:49.180 Validation without responsibility.

00:47:49.920 Right.

00:47:50.140 Well, remember victimhood mentality?

00:47:51.900 It's that.

00:47:52.220 So what's not victimhood mentality is it is true that society now values the feminization of men.

00:47:58.840 I agree with that.

00:47:59.640 It is true that men are being treated as an adjunct to society and essentially useless.

00:48:06.540 That women don't need men anymore is sort of the basic idea. 1.00

00:48:09.600 That men don't have a valuable role to play as men.

00:48:12.680 That all human beings are basically just androgynous witches. 0.99

00:48:15.100 Like I think that argument has in fact been made a lot.

00:48:18.820 The answer to that is to be a better man.

00:48:21.020 That is the actual answer to that.

00:48:22.920 It's to be more of a man.

00:48:24.620 And when I say more of a man, Ender Tate's version of being more of a man apparently is strutting around in mansions that he may or may not own, you know, shirtless while smoking a cigar and then knocking up a bunch of women according to him.

00:48:35.540 Right?

00:48:35.980 And lying about his wealth.

00:48:36.840 Like those seem to be like the marks of manhood.

00:48:39.440 It seems to me that the mark of manhood is perform virtuous acts in your community.

00:48:45.580 Prepare a skill set that makes you marketable in the market so that you can actually earn a living.

00:48:50.260 Learn to protect and defend yourself.

00:48:52.780 Have a family.

00:48:53.820 Get married. 0.99

00:48:54.560 Commit to one woman like a man would as opposed to a little pathetic adolescent who's steeped in pornography which incidentally was Ender Tate's prior industry. 0.98

00:49:03.060 Perhaps you should think about having children to whom you can be responsible and passing on eternal values to them.

00:49:09.360 Like these were the marks of being a man for literally all of human history was protect, defend your wife, defend your children, stick around to do those things, inculcate true values in that.

00:49:18.600 Build a community around that that inculcates those values and makes the world a stronger, more secure, better place.

00:49:24.860 Right?

00:49:24.960 That's what being a man is.

00:49:25.940 The answer to the attack on manhood is to be a man. 0.97

00:49:29.720 It is not to be a dumb version of a man that you see on TV like a WWE character. 0.71

00:49:35.360 And I understand why people would find that amusing and interesting and fun to watch.

00:49:38.620 I mean he's very watchable.

00:49:40.240 It's very – and he'll say things again that are transgressive and are on the borderline of true.

00:49:45.460 And then he'll say things that are transgressive and not even on the borderline of true.

00:49:47.760 And that's where the sort of weird danger lies is that he'll go from men are different than women.

00:49:52.440 They have a different sex drive than women. 1.00

00:49:53.920 Right?

00:49:54.280 Like 100% true.

00:49:55.900 And he'll go to – that means that men should – a true successful man is banging as many models as he can.

00:50:02.120 And it's like that's not the corollary of that.

00:50:04.960 That's not.

00:50:05.920 The true successful man is committing to one woman and then building a life with her because that is the fundamental building block of a society. 1.00

00:50:12.900 A selfish asshole is doing what you're talking about. 1.00

00:50:15.320 And that doesn't build society. 1.00

00:50:16.260 That makes you a worse person.

00:50:17.540 It makes you less of a man and, again, more of an adolescent who's playing a video game.

00:50:20.680 Well, this is the thing that I think worries quite a lot of us.

00:50:23.640 And I think rightly so because I think that for our generation, if there was a father figure that was necessary that you didn't have at home, let's say, Jordan Peterson was the guy.

00:50:36.200 Right?

00:50:36.600 And so the millennial father figure on the internet is someone like that who is saying exactly what you're saying, which is the way to be a man is to take responsibility, is to be the strongest person at your father's funeral, whatever that looks like.

00:50:50.500 But we have young guys working for us.

00:50:52.440 And for their generation, I'm not saying for them specifically, but for their generation, their version of masculinity that they see from the internet is Andrew Tate. 0.87

00:51:01.520 And you see, I think when you and I and Francis, when we look at that, because we have a non-internet part of our lives that we live through, to us, we're like, oh, this is clearly moronic. 0.86

00:51:11.880 Right? 0.81

00:51:12.320 This guy is clearly very charismatic, but he's selling something that is crazy, that isn't going to serve men, that's going to make them miserable, that's going to disconnect them from women, that's going to disconnect them from their true purpose, etc.

00:51:24.640 When we had Lauren Southern on recently, and this episode may go out before Lauren, she's had a whole, you know, she went out there and then came back and whatever. 1.00

00:51:33.440 And one of the things she explained to us is, I'd never really thought about it, but to these kids, they don't know a world without the internet.

00:51:40.880 So to them, what they see on the internet is reality.

00:51:44.460 Right?

00:51:45.700 How do we solve that, man? 0.99

00:51:49.220 I mean, for the generation that's currently going through this, I mean, I can't solve it for them, you can only solve problems for yourself, but the answer is turn off your phone and go touch some fucking grass, man. 0.98

00:52:00.760 Like, just go touch some grass. 0.98

00:52:02.000 Go out into the world and touch some grass.

00:52:04.460 But that's not enough, Ben.

00:52:05.400 You don't get a strong core of values from touching grass.

00:52:09.780 No, but when I say that, I mean, that at least can cut off the toxic supply that's entering your bloodstream.

00:52:14.940 But what you actually need to do is you need to go integrate into actually an institution, right?

00:52:18.420 You need to go to church.

00:52:19.520 You actually do need these institutions.

00:52:20.920 You can't walk around as a free radical and hope that the values are suddenly going to hit you in the head.

00:52:24.500 That's not the way that it works.

00:52:25.960 Okay?

00:52:26.180 And the reality is that dating systems are broken and have been broken for a very long time in the United States and I think in Europe as well.

00:52:32.960 That one of the reasons that people are being driven into the arms of people like Andrew Tate is because Andrew Tate's case is that women are out to victimize men. 0.60

00:52:40.360 And therefore, you should retaliate by victimizing women or at least pretending that you have no responsibilities to women since they don't want you to have responsibility for them.

00:52:47.640 You may as well just treat them the way that they seem to say they want to be treated in any way and treat them just like a disposable plaything.

00:52:53.420 And that's wrong.

00:52:55.220 If that's where you're looking for women, you're looking for women in the wrong place. 1.00

00:52:59.180 I mean, again, I live within a religious context.

00:53:01.040 I live in a religious community.

00:53:01.940 It's a very close-knit religious community.

00:53:03.660 Virtually everybody who lives in my religious community, the way that they met their wife is they're fixed up by a friend, right?

00:53:08.240 They're fixed up by a friend who went to synagogue and who knew somebody else who went to a different synagogue and then referred, you know, somebody to somebody.

00:53:14.740 And then they went on a date and then they met and they got married.

00:53:17.360 You know, that is a very different thing than the sort of culture that we've now cultivated, which has no common set of values and in which dating is not oriented toward marriage in the first place.

00:53:26.480 I mean, that's a whole different problem.

00:53:27.860 This is why I say you have to have an institutional upbringing.

00:53:30.040 Like, I'm not super worried about my kids because I'm raising them in an institutional upbringing.

00:53:33.000 The problem is we've now had three generations of people who are being raised outside of any institutional upbringing and treated like Rousseau's Emile, like just go to the forest and free yourself.

00:53:42.520 And it turns out that that sets up a pretty bad set of values.

00:53:46.940 And one of the things that Tate's trying to offer, I think, I think it's a lie, but I think that he's trying to pretend to do this is a feeling of community.

00:53:55.720 It's these weird online communities.

00:53:57.460 And online communities are not real communities.

00:53:59.100 Anybody who's ever spent time in, like, a real community knows that that's not the case.

00:54:02.840 Being in a chat room with people is not the same thing.

00:54:04.960 It's actually what we do every Saturday, which is we turn off computers and phones between Friday night and Saturday night, and you're literally living just in your community.

00:54:12.480 Like, we don't use cars.

00:54:13.740 You're in walking distance.

00:54:14.760 You're seeing friends and family literally 25 hours a week.

00:54:17.780 Now, that's a very, very different thing.

00:54:19.180 But when you set up an AirStats online community, it can make you feel as though you have a community in being one of the people who believes the things that Tate believes.

00:54:25.640 That also sets up, you know, a good possibility of easy and quick kind of cult leadership, which is you see these cultic feelings build up around figures and then dissipate actually rather quickly.

00:54:33.960 Every so often, there will be sort of a cult figure who forms.

00:54:36.000 Something happens.

00:54:36.720 It dissipates.

00:54:37.460 It reforms.

00:54:38.520 Dissipates.

00:54:39.540 The Internet is a crowd in search of a purpose as opposed to typically in life where crowds form around a purpose.

00:54:47.080 It's just kind of a roving mob of free radicals looking for something to coalesce around.

00:54:51.600 So what does this mean for the future, Ben?

00:54:53.560 Because one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot, you mentioned AI earlier.

00:54:57.800 The way that AI learns about humanity is through the online world, right?

00:55:03.000 That's what it's picking up. 0.99

00:55:04.260 And we know the online world's bullshit, but AI doesn't. 0.99

00:55:10.120 So... 1.00

00:55:10.600 Yes.

00:55:11.220 I mean, this is the big problem.

00:55:13.280 I mean, it is a...

00:55:14.560 Online was not...

00:55:17.000 We created a thing in the Internet that we had no idea what the consequences of it were.

00:55:22.860 We literally messed with our own wiring.

00:55:24.660 And you can see it with kids.

00:55:25.600 I mean, Jonathan Height's been making this point, obviously.

00:55:27.380 Like, we have rewired our own brains.

00:55:30.700 And so we are effectively cyborgs, right?

00:55:32.460 Half our brain is walking around in our hand.

00:55:35.080 And that's...

00:55:36.880 And, you know, perhaps in the future, we'll be not outside the body.

00:55:40.920 It'll be inside the body.

00:55:41.560 But whatever the case may be, our mentality has been rewired for this sort of stuff.

00:55:46.120 And you're right, that AI is just going to exacerbate that problem.

00:55:48.620 It's actually creating a weird sort of...

00:55:51.280 Genetic bottleneck is the wrong term, but it's a bottleneck of sorts.

00:55:53.800 It's creating a weird brain bottleneck for a population that's pushing them toward more and more bizarre and extreme forms of community and viewpoint.

00:56:01.880 And, you know, I said touch grass before, but the first thing to do is you have to turn off your phone.

00:56:08.000 You have to turn it off.

00:56:08.920 As somebody who lives in social media, I do not have X on my phone.

00:56:13.560 I do not have Facebook on my phone.

00:56:15.080 I do not have these...

00:56:16.640 I don't.

00:56:17.720 Like, I use them as a way to get out the message that I want to get out.

00:56:21.000 But I don't interact with them all that often because I found that it was poisoning me and making my life significantly worse.

00:56:26.580 And I thought of that five, six years ago.

00:56:28.120 My wife... I didn't think of it.

00:56:29.080 My wife did.

00:56:29.500 She said, like, every time you're on the internet, you get more depressed and more upset and you seem to get sucked into this kind of maw of bad opinion and bad feeling and just turn off your phone.

00:56:38.140 It doesn't exist.

00:56:39.240 And it turns out that was totally right.

00:56:40.360 You walk around the real world and you're trending on Twitter, which happens to me, like, every two weeks.

00:56:44.080 And no one knows you're trending on Twitter, right?

00:56:47.440 It's not a thing.

00:56:48.120 It's not an important thing in the world.

00:56:49.860 And I think that that's true for a huge number of people.

00:56:51.800 The problem is that, again, the only way to do that is within the context of a rules-based order.

00:56:58.700 And that typically has been filled by religion.

00:57:01.060 And as religion declines, I'm not sure how that gets filled again. 1.00

00:57:03.180 I'm not sure that there's a secular replacement for that.

00:57:05.860 I really am not.

00:57:07.020 So what you're saying is, Ben, you don't own a Bugatti?

00:57:09.640 No.

00:57:10.440 I don't own a Bugatti.

00:57:11.700 I own a Honda Odyssey that I can fit all four of my children in because I'm reproductively successful.

00:57:20.360 What a beautiful moment to end the interview.

00:57:23.400 The final question we ask all our guests, Ben, is the same, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

00:57:30.280 I mean, I think that the biggest thing that we're not talking about is the failure to – and we've been talking about it the whole time – the failure to form actual communities centered around values is the biggest factor in the breakdown of everything.

00:57:44.920 And we constantly keep looking at the symptoms of those things and how do we fix the symptom of that?

00:57:48.180 How do we fix the protests in the streets?

00:57:49.900 How do we fix the lack of understanding about foreign policy?

00:57:53.620 Politics is the stuff that plays up at the surface.

00:57:55.380 The stuff that's really happening and that's really been quite bad for society is that we were an iceberg that was rooted to the floor of the ocean bed.

00:58:02.820 And now that has cracked and it's starting to break up underneath the surface.

00:58:06.640 And we're starting to feel the tremors up here.

00:58:09.060 And the tremors are frightening us.

00:58:10.420 And we're like, how do we stop those tremors?

00:58:11.760 But all of the breakup is going on underneath the surface.

00:58:14.580 And it's several generations old.

00:58:16.500 And we were talking about like historic legacies.

00:58:17.820 But it's actually something you can fix in real time.

00:58:19.900 And the way you fix that in real time is by doing a thing that I think people are loathe to do now, which is commit to a community, commit to an institution, commit to a church, sometimes before you even believe in it.

00:58:31.980 So this is something that I think that Westerners are not built for.

00:58:36.040 We tend to think, okay, I got to believe in the thing and then I go to church.

00:58:38.280 I got to believe in this thing and then I involve myself in the institution.

00:58:41.740 Institutions shape you.

00:58:43.180 It's not just the other way around.

00:58:44.860 Doing the act of virtue makes you, this is Aristotelian, doing the act of virtue makes you virtuous, right?

00:58:51.140 Engaging in a community makes you a community-minded person.

00:58:53.960 Going to church, it might not end with you believing the same things the rest of your church going friends believe, but it gives you a set of values that give you a sense of community.

00:59:00.800 You don't do that and you're floating around out here.

00:59:02.580 And, you know, in a world that was very repressive, I can see why that would appeal to people.

00:59:07.000 But, you know, you can say that the center was too powerful and it was sucking in, this is a very Jordan idea, right?

00:59:11.400 You know, the center was too powerful and it was sucking in all of the sort of bodies that were orbiting it.

00:59:17.200 And so, but the solution to that was not to dissolve the center.

00:59:19.800 What's happening is the center.

00:59:20.640 So if you want to reform the center, you have to commit to reforming the center.

00:59:23.700 And that means actually investigating the roots of your civilization, investigating the institutions that formed that civilization.

00:59:28.900 And maybe going back to that.

00:59:29.800 And you are seeing that.

00:59:30.420 You are seeing a reversion, I think, by some people to sort of those traditional values.

00:59:35.260 In some ways good and in some ways bad.

00:59:36.840 But without that, I think that this society is on a quick road to, you know, dissolution.

00:59:45.120 Ben, it's been an absolute pleasure.

00:59:47.340 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:59:49.340 Follow us over to Locals where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask your questions to Ben.

00:59:56.000 What would your advice be to Trump in the run-up to the election?

00:59:59.280 Back in 2020, I was like, okay, put him in the basement with some pornography and Shark Week and just leave him there.

01:00:04.740 And also, I had suggested that the people at the White House construct a fake Twitter app for him on his phone.

01:00:11.880 So he would tweet into his phone.

01:00:13.120 It would read back a bunch of bot replies about how amazing he was.

01:00:15.560 And he'd be in like an amazing mood all day long.

01:00:17.840 And that's what happened.

01:00:18.820 It was called Truth Social.

01:00:34.740 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here.

01:00:41.920 The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

01:00:44.720 April 28th through June 7th, 2026.

01:00:47.740 The Princess of Wales Theatre.

01:00:49.660 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

01:00:51.480 ですね in the.

01:01:03.540 gossip'.

01:01:04.480 Wow.

01:01:05.100 Hey.

01:01:09.640 Hey.

01:01:10.400 Hey.

01:01:12.540 Hey.

01:01:13.120 Hey.

01:01:14.160 Oh.

TRIGGERnometry - May 29, 2024

Ben Shapiro： “Israel’s War is a Just War”

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript