Ben Shapiro joins me to talk about the new president, Zoran Mamdani, and why he might not be the best choice for the job of president of the United States. He also talks about why it s a good idea to have more power.
00:05:33.000If he doesn't get those things, then it'll be really pleasant for him politically.
00:05:36.000He'll be able to blame the system for not being able to get done what he wants to get done.
00:05:39.000So the problems will stay the problems, but he'll just rail against the city.
00:05:42.000He'll be a perennial outsider even as mayor.
00:05:45.000Isn't that the kind of the default position of populism where if you can't get, if you're saying that the problem are the elites and you can't get things done because of the elites, that just strengthens your position.
00:06:26.000Like Zoran Mamdani is a failed rapper.
00:06:28.000He was a person who didn't hold a real job.
00:06:30.000He got elected to the assembly and ditched half of his votes.
00:06:32.000And now he's mayor of New York, having grown up in the lap of luxury in a country to which his parents immigrated.
00:06:37.000Like he's been given the best of America and his solution is America sucks and is terrible.
00:06:41.000And so now I'm going to quote Eugene Debs and Nehru in my inauguration speech, in my victory speech, which is what he did.
00:06:49.000Which, you know, again, that's that's a take.
00:06:52.000But it just underscores one of the sort of fascinating things about revolutionary movements.
00:06:56.000They're very rarely led by members of the proletariat.
00:06:58.000They're very often led by, I would say, unsatisfied members of the bourgeoisie who then decide they must be the vanguard of the proletariat.
00:07:06.000And it's so interesting, the young people's obsession with socialism, having seen socialism be implemented in Venezuela and then it being championed and lionized by particularly people of the British left, the Jeremy Corbyns of the world, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:21.000And I've given up trying to explain the evils of socialism and communism to young people because I had a friend, a Cuban friend who said, Francis, it's like a magic trick.
00:07:31.000And until you see the reveal, you ain't going to get the trick and you need to see the reveal.
00:07:37.000And that's kind of what it's like, isn't it?
00:07:39.000I think that's right, because it's so unthinkable.
00:07:41.000Like if you say to people, well, look at Venezuela.
00:07:43.000So it's not gonna be like Venezuela here. Are you kidding?
00:07:45.000Like how? Like how? And the reality is, it happens pretty suddenly.
00:07:48.000It's like the transition from, you know, democratic capitalism to socialism, it does happen very quickly.
00:07:55.000I mean, once the government has the power to do these things, they do implement them very fast.
00:07:59.000And so what was unthinkable becomes suddenly just reality.
00:08:03.000And so most Americans also don't understand how it is that we became wealthy.
00:08:06.000They don't understand how we became a very prosperous country.
00:08:09.000They tend to think that how things are is the natural state of being, that wealth and prosperity and the nice things we have and these great new products every year.
00:08:17.000And being able to order things on Amazon.
00:08:20.000Like that's why, you know, one of my favorite comedy routines is Louis C.K. has this whole comedy routine about people complaining about flying in planes.
00:08:26.000Where he's like, you know, we're all complaining.
00:08:27.000Oh, it's just terrible, the conditions.
00:08:29.000Like your grandparents would have had to travel for three months to get from point A to point B.
00:08:33.000And you're doing it in six hours in a magical machine that flies in the sky.
00:08:37.000And you're sitting here complaining about that.
00:08:39.000And that's but that's kind of human nature is what you see in your daily life is what you accept as the norm.
00:08:44.000And we do have these things called, you know, airplanes that actively are time machines.
00:08:48.000You can fly to other places on Earth that don't have the things that we have.
00:08:51.000And you can look at the systems they've implemented and you can see why they don't have those things.
00:08:55.000But everybody who's growing up, you know, listen, we're a spoiled society.
00:08:58.000Everybody's been growing up, you know, with all of this nice stuff.
00:09:02.000We think that that's the norm and that there's no way that that norm is ever going to go away.
00:09:07.000Well, look, I again, I agree with you broadly in principle.
00:09:10.000However, when you talk about your grandparents, yes, our grandparents would be amazed by the smartphone and all of the other things you talk about.
00:09:17.000But our grandparents also could raise a family of four in a single income, have a house, have a car and have a middle class life.
00:09:23.000So I think there are a few things that are that are slightly a misnomer about that.
00:09:27.000So I think that, number one, your grandparents, depending when they grew up in, say, the 30s, actually couldn't.
00:09:33.000I mean, your grandparents were dirt poor if they grew up in the Great Depression in the 1930s.
00:09:38.000And then if they lived from 1941 to 45 in this country, then your grandfather was likely to be being shot at in either Europe or the Pacific.
00:09:45.000So those are rough years, you know, turning those into sort of the golden age of what it was like to live in America.
00:09:50.000So when people talk about this, what they're really talking about is a fairly short period of American history that existed essentially between the end of World War II
00:09:58.000and economically the rise of the rest of the world when the rest of the world is basically in ruins.
00:10:02.000And so America could send a bunch of money to Europe and then produce all the products here because literally there was no industrial base anywhere else on planet Earth.
00:10:09.000They'd all been destroyed by World War II.
00:10:11.000And then you could work one income and you could still do that.
00:10:13.000That was actually not the way that virtually all work was done in the United States ever.
00:10:17.000I mean, if you go back to the 1910s and 1900s when this was largely an agricultural society, mom was working on the farm.
00:10:23.000And when you're talking about problems of, for example, industrial labor, women were working in factories.
00:10:30.000And so this kind of brief period in American history, which was actually sort of an outlier in terms of all world history and treating that as like the norm is not true.
00:10:40.000Second of all, the housing affordability crisis, the average house in the United States is significantly nicer, significantly larger with central air.
00:10:48.000If you looked at the house that your grandparents were living in in 1952, you would say this place is a shit box. This place is bad.
00:10:54.000And if you look at the job that your grandparents were working in 1953 at the Ford factory, you sitting in your comfortable office, your air conditioned office, you know, complaining about your sciatica from your uncomfortable office chair.
00:11:04.000And then you're like, oh, man, I'm really longing for those days of riveting.
00:11:09.000And by the way, it's not because we shipped it overseas because machines do it now.
00:11:12.000And so, like, again, this is not to say everything is perfect because it isn't.
00:11:16.000But I think that having a false picture of the economic past leads to bad conclusions about the economic present that are not supportable by the actual by the actual data.
00:11:26.000I guess what I'm saying as well is, like, if you look at the other candidates in this election that Mamdani's just won, you did not have the same level of speaking to people's concerns about some of those issues.
00:11:38.000I agree. I mean, empathy sells in politics and also makes a very bad policy because, as many people have noted, empathy is about the person in front of you and feeling what that person feels.
00:11:50.000And that's great politically. Right. I mean, that's that's that's what makes people magic in a room.
00:11:53.000But when it comes to making a broad public policy, then it's really what is the most effective policy for the greatest number of people?
00:11:59.000And if you get empathetic about like this individual, you're very likely to make a bad policy that is specifically designated to help this individual at the expense of many other individuals.
00:12:08.000Because anybody who says they're empathetic toward all humanity is is lying.
00:12:11.000I mean, that's that's that's usually not true.
00:12:13.000And you're empathetic toward others. You're like that.
00:12:16.000It's a little it's a little self serving.
00:12:19.000And so, again, I'll give Mamdani credit for magically shaking the hands of cab drivers and kissing babies and being very, very good at that.
00:12:26.000But I'm not sure why that makes for good policy in any way, shape or form.
00:12:29.000But what it does show is the importance of charisma and how if somebody is charismatic, you know, we've had people on the right and I talk to people on the right person.
00:12:39.000They're all, you know, Mamdani is this and he's that.
00:12:41.000And I'm like, can we just not accept that as a campaign politician, he is 100 percent undeniable?
00:12:48.000He's he's he's terrific, particularly in short spurts.
00:12:51.000So I think the debates, the last couple of debates, I don't think they need a great because they're, you know, he was asked questions and he really couldn't defend himself.
00:12:57.000But I don't think debates matter anymore because that's not how anybody consumes information.
00:13:00.000That's right. Right. The podcast space may be the last space where people consume in long form information.
00:13:04.000And even there, it's clips from the show that are going to go viral on X.
00:13:07.000Right. And so if you're Zoram, I'm Donnie and you're and you put on, you know, what I think is kind of a smarmy grin for two hours.
00:13:13.000But the thing that gets clipped out is 30 seconds of you grinning, 30 seconds of grinning isn't smarmy.
00:13:17.000It's charming. Two hours of grinning is rictus like.
00:13:19.000And so I think that the shrinking of the attention span and the way people consume information, he's built for that.
00:13:24.000He's really good at that. You see certain politicians are AOC is terrific at this.
00:13:28.000Pretending she's not is not going to make her any less terrific at it.
00:13:30.000She really is very, very good at it. President Trump is really good at it.
00:13:33.000And if you go to a President Trump rally for like 90 minutes or two hours and he's kind of rambling by the end, everybody's like, oh, man, this is taking a while.
00:13:40.000But then you watch it on social media and you're like, man, that's hysterically funny.
00:13:43.000Right. I mean, like those two minutes are amazing.
00:13:46.000And so, you know, the way people consume information is going to determine, you know, who's capable of of speaking into that medium.
00:13:54.000Talking to Ben Shapiro, you can't help but be reminded that America was built by people who take risks, people who build things from the ground up.
00:14:02.000That's exactly who this episode sponsors Next Insurance are for.
00:14:06.000They are 100 percent dedicated to small businesses, the builders, the dreamers and everyone turning ideas into reality.
00:14:15.000When we started Trigonometry, it was just us, no investors, no safety net, just two guys trying to build something.
00:14:22.000If you run a small business, you know how much there is to handle budgets, staff, equipment, taxes and yes, insurance.
00:14:30.000Next makes that last part simple. You can get the right coverage in minutes, buy it online and download your certificate of insurance instantly.
00:14:39.000No paperwork, no waiting, just peace of mind that what you've built is protected.
00:14:44.000And you could save up to 30 percent on your business insurance for as little as a dollar a day.
00:14:49.000Because when small businesses thrive, America thrives.
00:14:52.000To protect what you've built, visit nextinsurance.com slash trig or click the link in the description of this episode.
00:15:01.000Got PC optimum points? Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.
00:15:06.000Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 11th. Valid in-store and online.
00:15:13.000So we've got this increasingly democratic socialist of America movement on the left.
00:15:20.000I'm sure we'll see more of that as time goes on.
00:15:23.000We also now are seeing a civil war on the right, which exploded last week in particular over the fact that Tucker Carlson had this white nationalist called Nick Fuentes on a show.
00:15:35.000And then there is a big debate now going on in which you are one of the participants about whether the right should turn a blind eye to the fact that its fringe is becoming increasingly naughty-ish.
00:15:48.000Or whether there's a break that needs to be made to prevent what happened on the woke left or rather because of the woke left on the left where the extremists took over, wore the skin of the entire thing and then were punished very severely electorally over a period of time.
00:16:06.000Sure. I mean, I've been arguing against this for quite a while.
00:16:09.000I think that last week was a pretty good sort of indicator that there is a bleed over from a series of terrible ideas into the more mainstream area.
00:16:18.000The problem is not, of course, that Tucker Carlson, it's a free country. He can interview whomever he damn well pleases.
00:16:24.000It is not, in fact, cancellation to criticize somebody's interview tactics.
00:16:28.000And it's not even that he interviewed Fuentes. It's that he proceeded to massage Nick Fuentes.
00:16:31.000I mean, he treated him with kid gloves. He did not ask him a single difficult question.
00:16:34.000He did not press him on any of his extraordinary statements about, for example, Tucker's friend Charlie Kirk or Tucker's friend J.D. Vance or his wife or any of that.
00:16:43.000He simply brought him on and then proceeded to gloss him.
00:16:46.000And the fact that that was treated in some quarters as sort of normal is, I think, a very serious problem.
00:16:53.000I think that it's a moral problem because, frankly, I do not think that you ought to be glossing people with terrible views, whether or not they are your friends or whether or not you go fishing together.
00:17:02.000And as public figures, I think that people have a responsibility to actually say when bad things are happening on your own side.
00:17:07.000And I also think that, you know, there is an attempt to not only pretend it away, but in some cases embrace it with this sort of no enemies to my right or our coalition, our coalition must stand together or we'll lose.
00:17:20.180And I think that's bad pragmatically. I don't think that's even true.
00:17:22.600I think that what we've watched here is, yeah, everybody's celebrating Zarmadani winning in New York, in New York.
00:17:27.240OK, like this place is one hundred and twenty seven percent Democrat.
00:17:30.860So it's like when people say, oh, AOC is going to be a national camp.
00:17:33.900Maybe she will be or maybe she won in Brooklyn and maybe Abigail Spanberger is going to be a better candidate for the Democrats because she ran in Virginia and won.
00:17:41.080And Virginia seems to be more representative of the body politic, broadly speaking, across America than New York, which is a pretty, pretty closed circuit.
00:17:48.100You know, the the idea on the right that if you you must you must gloss Nazis in order to win if they start to become if the face of the Republican Party continues to move in a direction that is racialist, that is that is religiously exclusivist to the extent that that it seems to be moving.
00:18:08.520If that is if that is the way that the Republican Party decides to play it, that is not an electorally sound strategy just on a pragmatic level.
00:18:16.440I don't see like these are these are not the American people do not like the politics of, say, Nick Fuentes and the the attempt to launder his ideas into the public view, which is what I think Tucker has been doing with a wide variety of rather nefarious characters over the course of the last two years.
00:18:30.720I don't think those laundered views are particularly popular with the American people.
00:18:34.480And so if the right wants to pretend like, you know, moving in that direction is going to win them additional votes, not the number of votes you're going to lose by moving in this particular direction.
00:18:42.720People might say Tucker Carson has got the biggest conservative platform in America.
00:18:48.200Isn't that proof that actually these views are very popular?
00:18:51.200I mean, they are popular with a certain segment. Are they popular broad scale across America?
00:18:55.400I mean, I know many ambulatory psychotics who have very large audiences in the in the online space.
00:19:01.100I'm not calling Tucker an ambulatory psychotic. I think he's very actually coherent in what he's doing.
00:19:05.080But the I know a lot of people who have a big audience, we should know that every big audience in the media, you're talking about three, four million people.
00:19:13.360The electorate in the United States is generally about one hundred and sixty million people.
00:19:17.360And so you can find, you know, you get it's a big country. You can find a niche for anything.
00:19:22.960I think one of the mistakes politicians make is they look at X and they say this is representative of the American body politic.
00:19:27.560And that is just too online. It's just way too online.
00:19:29.940I mean, just to take one obvious example, Tucker Carlson was very much opposed to President Trump's strike on the Iranian nuclear facility and said that it was going to break MAGA.
00:19:38.440That was a 90 10 proposition in the opposite way for President Trump by all polling data among the Republicans.
00:19:44.880Republicans were very much pro that. And so like it.
00:19:47.680But if you'd read Twitter, then you would have gotten precisely the opposite impression.
00:19:51.220And so I think being too online is one aspect of this for sure.
00:19:54.040Ben, but we talk about being too online and I take your point.
00:19:57.120However, what is undeniable is that the the online world bleeds into the real world, which we saw with wokeism.
00:20:04.140And partly the reason that wokeism grew so powerful, in my opinion, is a dearth of courage and integrity on the left where they saw the extremists run rampant.
00:20:13.020And nobody was going to say stood up and went, hang on, this is nonsense. Stop doing that.
00:20:17.960And now I'm seeing the same thing happen on the right with exceptions like people like yourself.
00:20:21.900And I'm going, are we not just seeing the mirror image of what happened in 2014, 2015?
00:20:26.700I mean, I think we are. And I and it's very, very concerning to me.
00:20:29.880I mean, I'm encouraged that I think there are a lot of people who have been coming out and saying that this is not appropriate, that this is not something that you can, quote unquote, side with or unify with.
00:20:38.280And I think that's good. But but I do agree that one of the polar polarized aspects of American politics is this idea that as long as you are, quote unquote, on my side, we don't actually define what on my side means based on, say, principle.
00:20:50.620We instead define it based on what we supposedly oppose. But even then, we don't necessarily oppose the same things.
00:20:56.140But we kind of broadly just throw up our hands. They're on my side. They're on my side.
00:20:59.840And that dynamic leads to polarized sides.
00:21:05.060I mean, the future of this, if if the more radical wings were to win on the right and the more radical wing wing continues to win on the left, you end up with an electoral future that looks essentially red versus brown.
00:21:17.640Right. And that's not an electoral future. I think that's good for for any American, especially because the vast majority, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of Americans are neither of those things and don't like either of those things.
00:21:26.180And look, we think we can dress it up. Oh, they're on my side. But let's talk about what it really is. It's about you not wanting to be ostracized by your own team.
00:21:34.360It's about you not wanting to lose viewers, followers, influence. So you take the path that is easy for you, but ultimately destructive, not only for the conservative movement, but America as a whole.
00:21:46.260I mean, I think that that is right. I do. And I think that that is an easy path to ensuring they, quote unquote, don't lose people.
00:21:54.300But I don't think that it's a good path for not losing the country. And I think that if you if you lose your soul, then you end up losing the country.
00:22:01.280Again, the things that I've fought for, let's put this way, I've been doing this for a very long time.
00:22:05.580I started writing a syndicated comment when I was 17 years old.
00:22:07.760I don't know that there's anybody who's been following me for any period of time who's ever said whatever happened to the views that bench grew, he's really morphed.
00:22:14.340He's really changed. Well, what what happened? Like, I don't get that question ever, but I don't think you could say the same about Tucker.
00:22:20.560I mean, I think it's one of the most common questions about Tucker is like, what changed? What happened?
00:22:24.640And so I think, you know, that's that's a relevant question.
00:22:27.140And pretending that people haven't morphed or that that shouldn't have any impact on the public discourse.
00:22:31.420Of course, it does. The things that I mean, that's literally our job is to talk about these issues.
00:22:35.620And if you talk about the issues in a different way, it seems to me that that earns a different response.
00:22:39.300One of the people that seems to disagree with, I don't know if this is exactly true,
00:22:42.540but seems to be based on what I'm reading is Matt Walsh, who, of course, is your colleague at The Daily Wire.
00:22:47.520How are you going to negotiate that situation?
00:22:51.280I mean, listen, at The Daily Wire, we have a wide variety of views on a wide variety of subjects.
00:22:56.160You know, Matt is free to have his opinion. I think he's wrong.
00:22:58.720I'm sure he thinks I'm wrong. And that is what it is.
00:23:02.120I also noticed that Matt is not glossing Nick Fuentes.
00:23:05.000No, he's not. And this is what I was going to ask you about as well.
00:23:07.480Where does this idea come from? Because, look, I completely agree with you.
00:23:11.520Anyone is entitled to have anyone on the show that they want.
00:23:13.940We've invited Nick Fuentes on the show. We would treat him very differently, I think, than Tucker would.
00:23:18.000We would have a conversation with him and push on some of the things that he's said.