TRIGGERnometry - Ben Shapiro on Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Zohran Mamdani

00:00:01.000 The success of the Mamdani administration

00:00:03.000 relies on him not being able to do anything

00:00:05.000 that he says he's going to do.

00:00:06.000 You haven't held a real job your entire life.

00:00:09.000 Your entire life.

00:00:10.000 I have a more successful rap career than Zoran Mamdani.

00:00:13.000 Having grown up in the lap of luxury

00:00:16.000 in a country to which his parents immigrate,

00:00:18.000 he's been given the best of America, 1.00

00:00:19.000 and his solution is America sucks and is terrible. 0.99

00:00:22.000 So we've got this increasingly democratic socialist 0.99

00:00:26.000 of America movement on the left.

00:00:28.000 We also now are seeing a civil war on the right.

00:00:30.000 He's hosted a whole number of people

00:00:32.000 that clearly are pushing a particular world view.

00:00:35.000 I think that's fair to say.

00:00:37.000 What do you think he's up to with that?

00:00:38.000 I think that is an easy path to ensuring

00:00:41.000 they quote unquote don't lose people,

00:00:43.000 but I don't think that it's a good path

00:00:44.000 for not losing the country.

00:00:46.000 If you are widely perceived in America

00:00:48.000 as a pro-Nazi party,

00:00:50.000 that actually is not a great electoral approach.

00:00:53.000 The fact that it needs saying.

00:00:54.000 Right, that's where we are.

00:00:57.000 Relax, relax, this is not an ad.

00:01:00.000 If you're not a fan of ads, but love Trigonometry,

00:01:03.000 join the thousands of Trigonometry members

00:01:05.000 who get extended interviews, no ads, early access,

00:01:08.000 and the ability to submit their own questions

00:01:10.000 for upcoming guests.

00:01:12.000 Sign up now at triggerpod.co.uk

00:01:15.000 or click the link in the description of this episode.

00:01:18.000 Every family tree holds extraordinary stories,

00:01:21.000 especially those of the women who shaped who we are.

00:01:24.000 In honor of International Women's Month,

00:01:26.000 Ancestry invites you to shine a light on their legacy.

00:01:29.000 Until March 10th, enjoy free access

00:01:32.000 to over 4 billion family history records

00:01:34.000 and discover where they lived,

00:01:36.000 the journeys they took,

00:01:37.000 and the legacy they left behind.

00:01:39.000 Start with just a name or place

00:01:41.000 and let our intuitive tools guide you.

00:01:43.000 Visit Ancestry.ca to start today.

00:01:46.000 No credit card required.

00:01:47.000 Terms apply.

00:01:48.000 Ben Shapiro, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:50.000 Thanks for having me, guys.

00:01:51.000 There's not a lot going on right now to talk about.

00:01:53.000 No, just boring.

00:01:54.000 Just super boring.

00:01:55.000 We're sitting here in New York

00:01:56.000 on the day after Zoran Mamdani was elected,

00:01:59.000 so let's start with that.

00:02:00.000 Yeah, the purge is outside.

00:02:01.000 Yeah.

00:02:02.000 It's just chaos in the streets.

00:02:03.000 Well, as you know,

00:02:04.000 both France and I have some experience with communism,

00:02:06.000 so it's good to be back.

00:02:07.000 But joking aside,

00:02:09.000 what do you make of the fact that this has happened?

00:02:12.000 I think that there are cycles of history,

00:02:14.000 and people don't remember things that have happened in the past,

00:02:17.000 and so they tend to repeat the same mistakes.

00:02:19.000 I think that we are now in a cycle of politics

00:02:21.000 where perennial dissatisfaction is going to be the mode,

00:02:25.000 meaning that we have an entire political class

00:02:28.000 who are very invested in saying that a thing is the problem

00:02:31.000 and then saying that they are the solution

00:02:33.000 without actually offering any solutions,

00:02:34.000 and then it turns out the thing they said was a problem

00:02:37.000 is still a problem when they're done,

00:02:38.000 and then people say,

00:02:39.000 well, you didn't solve the problem.

00:02:40.000 You didn't solve the problem.

00:02:41.000 I'm going to give the other guy a shot to solve the problem.

00:02:43.000 And I think that you're seeing that particularly with young voters.

00:02:45.000 Yeah.

00:02:46.000 There's been a lot of talk about,

00:02:47.000 this is the most right wing young,

00:02:48.000 and then it'll be like, no,

00:02:49.000 this is the most left wing young generation.

00:02:50.000 And all that can be true

00:02:51.000 if you're just kind of shifting side to side.

00:02:53.000 And so the fact that everyone's flattering Mamdani by saying,

00:02:56.000 well, you know, he did talk a lot about affordability.

00:02:59.000 And what I keep saying to people is,

00:03:00.000 well, affordability is not like Beetlejuice,

00:03:02.000 where if you just say it over and over,

00:03:04.000 it suddenly arrives.

00:03:05.000 You actually have to pursue policies that are likely to alleviate an affordability problem.

00:03:10.000 But if your solution is always give me more power,

00:03:13.000 and it does seem like that is the solution of the day from both sides, actually,

00:03:17.000 then you're likely to just continue penduluming one side to the other.

00:03:21.000 Because people don't want to learn the actual lesson,

00:03:23.000 which is if you actually want affordability,

00:03:25.000 then either you have to change policies or change locations.

00:03:27.000 Those are really the only two things.

00:03:29.000 And also, I think more broadly, it's not about affordability.

00:03:33.000 We have trained an entire generation of people to believe

00:03:36.000 that if their lives are not what they want them to be,

00:03:38.000 it's the fault of systems, as opposed to decisions that are in their own control.

00:03:42.000 And politicians absolutely have a stake in selling that.

00:03:45.000 A lot of people in our industry have a stake in selling that.

00:03:48.000 It makes people feel good about themselves and bad about the world.

00:03:50.000 And the reality is, if you want a better life,

00:03:52.000 you should feel better about the world and worse about yourself

00:03:54.000 until you actually go do the right things.

00:03:56.000 I broadly, generally speaking, as a matter of principle, agree with you.

00:03:59.000 But, I mean, I was looking around at property prices, real estate prices in New York.

00:04:05.000 I'm doing pretty well for myself.

00:04:07.000 I feel kind of poor looking at those things.

00:04:09.000 Oh, no. I'm not saying it's not affordable.

00:04:11.000 It absolutely is unaffordable.

00:04:12.000 And if you wanted to make a political difference,

00:04:14.000 what you would do is you would relieve the building regulations.

00:04:17.000 You would make it easier for people to build, not harder.

00:04:19.000 You wouldn't rent control.

00:04:21.000 Because if you stop rent controlling, then that creates incentive for people to build.

00:04:24.000 You would allow people to build up further.

00:04:26.000 You would get rid of many of the code regulations that are kind of antiquated.

00:04:29.000 There are things you actually could do.

00:04:31.000 And then if you're a young person and you can't afford to live here,

00:04:33.000 then maybe you should not live here.

00:04:35.000 I mean, that is a real thing.

00:04:37.000 I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up.

00:04:42.000 But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that.

00:04:46.000 The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity.

00:04:49.000 And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing,

00:04:52.000 then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.

00:04:57.000 Again, that's not saying that public policy can't change.

00:05:00.000 I think it can.

00:05:01.000 But I think that the solutions being offered are untenable.

00:05:03.000 Well, I sort of see the problem with what you're saying is that really doesn't sound nearly as good as free stuff.

00:05:09.000 Correct.

00:05:10.000 Correct.

00:05:11.000 The third grade presidential campaign continues to win.

00:05:13.000 It's undefeated, right?

00:05:14.000 Free ice cream, free busing, free childcare, and free money paid for by somebody else.

00:05:19.000 Well, what's likely to happen if Mamdani were to get his way? 0.79

00:05:22.000 I think that the success of the Mamdani administration relies on him not being able to do anything that he says he's going to do. 0.91

00:05:28.000 If those things happen that he wants to happen, he's going to empty out the city.

00:05:32.000 It'll destroy the city.

00:05:33.000 If he doesn't get those things, then it'll be really pleasant for him politically.

00:05:36.000 He'll be able to blame the system for not being able to get done what he wants to get done.

00:05:39.000 So the problems will stay the problems, but he'll just rail against the city.

00:05:42.000 He'll be a perennial outsider even as mayor.

00:05:45.000 Isn'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.

00:05:56.000 A hundred percent.

00:05:57.000 Absolutely.

00:05:58.000 I mean, and then you say, if only I were given more power, I could do this.

00:06:01.000 And then you don't do it.

00:06:02.000 And you say, well, because I needed more power.

00:06:04.000 Like if he had just given me more power, that would have been awesome.

00:06:07.000 One of the things I find really amusing about Mamdani in kind of a cynical way is when he does this, the coalition of the dispossessed. 0.99

00:06:14.000 We're all going to come together.

00:06:15.000 Those of us with the bruised knuckles.

00:06:16.000 And it's like, my dude, you haven't held a real job your entire life, your entire life.

00:06:20.000 I have a more successful rap career than Zoran Mamdani.

00:06:24.000 And I'm not even joking.

00:06:25.000 That's true, right?

00:06:26.000 Like Zoran Mamdani is a failed rapper.

00:06:28.000 He was a person who didn't hold a real job.

00:06:30.000 He got elected to the assembly and ditched half of his votes.

00:06:32.000 And now he's mayor of New York, having grown up in the lap of luxury in a country to which his parents immigrated. 0.99

00:06:37.000 Like he's been given the best of America and his solution is America sucks and is terrible.

00:06:41.000 And so now I'm going to quote Eugene Debs and Nehru in my inauguration speech, in my victory speech, which is what he did. 0.97

00:06:49.000 Which, you know, again, that's that's a take.

00:06:52.000 But it just underscores one of the sort of fascinating things about revolutionary movements.

00:06:56.000 They're very rarely led by members of the proletariat.

00:06:58.000 They're very often led by, I would say, unsatisfied members of the bourgeoisie who then decide they must be the vanguard of the proletariat.

00:07:06.000 And 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.

00:07:21.000 And 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. 0.71

00:07:31.000 And until you see the reveal, you ain't going to get the trick and you need to see the reveal.

00:07:37.000 And that's kind of what it's like, isn't it?

00:07:39.000 I think that's right, because it's so unthinkable.

00:07:41.000 Like if you say to people, well, look at Venezuela.

00:07:43.000 So it's not gonna be like Venezuela here. Are you kidding?

00:07:45.000 Like how? Like how? And the reality is, it happens pretty suddenly.

00:07:48.000 It's like the transition from, you know, democratic capitalism to socialism, it does happen very quickly.

00:07:55.000 I mean, once the government has the power to do these things, they do implement them very fast.

00:07:59.000 And so what was unthinkable becomes suddenly just reality.

00:08:03.000 And so most Americans also don't understand how it is that we became wealthy.

00:08:06.000 They don't understand how we became a very prosperous country.

00:08:09.000 They 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.

00:08:17.000 And being able to order things on Amazon.

00:08:20.000 Like 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.

00:08:26.000 Where he's like, you know, we're all complaining.

00:08:27.000 Oh, it's just terrible, the conditions.

00:08:29.000 Like your grandparents would have had to travel for three months to get from point A to point B.

00:08:33.000 And you're doing it in six hours in a magical machine that flies in the sky.

00:08:37.000 And you're sitting here complaining about that.

00:08:39.000 And that's but that's kind of human nature is what you see in your daily life is what you accept as the norm.

00:08:44.000 And we do have these things called, you know, airplanes that actively are time machines.

00:08:48.000 You can fly to other places on Earth that don't have the things that we have.

00:08:51.000 And you can look at the systems they've implemented and you can see why they don't have those things.

00:08:55.000 But everybody who's growing up, you know, listen, we're a spoiled society.

00:08:58.000 Everybody's been growing up, you know, with all of this nice stuff.

00:09:02.000 We think that that's the norm and that there's no way that that norm is ever going to go away.

00:09:06.000 And that's not true.

00:09:07.000 Well, look, I again, I agree with you broadly in principle.

00:09:10.000 However, when you talk about your grandparents, yes, our grandparents would be amazed by the smartphone and all of the other things you talk about.

00:09:17.000 But 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.

00:09:23.000 So I think there are a few things that are that are slightly a misnomer about that.

00:09:27.000 So I think that, number one, your grandparents, depending when they grew up in, say, the 30s, actually couldn't.

00:09:33.000 I mean, your grandparents were dirt poor if they grew up in the Great Depression in the 1930s.

00:09:36.000 That was a very, very bad decade.

00:09:38.000 And 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.

00:09:45.000 So those are rough years, you know, turning those into sort of the golden age of what it was like to live in America.

00:09:50.000 So 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

00:09:58.000 and economically the rise of the rest of the world when the rest of the world is basically in ruins.

00:10:02.000 And 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.

00:10:09.000 They'd all been destroyed by World War II.

00:10:11.000 And then you could work one income and you could still do that.

00:10:13.000 That was actually not the way that virtually all work was done in the United States ever.

00:10:17.000 I mean, if you go back to the 1910s and 1900s when this was largely an agricultural society, mom was working on the farm. 0.52

00:10:23.000 And when you're talking about problems of, for example, industrial labor, women were working in factories. 0.98

00:10:30.000 And 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.

00:10:40.000 Second of all, the housing affordability crisis, the average house in the United States is significantly nicer, significantly larger with central air. 0.98

00:10:48.000 If 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. 0.99

00:10:54.000 And 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.

00:11:04.000 And then you're like, oh, man, I'm really longing for those days of riveting.

00:11:07.000 That is not an easy job.

00:11:09.000 And by the way, it's not because we shipped it overseas because machines do it now.

00:11:12.000 And so, like, again, this is not to say everything is perfect because it isn't.

00:11:16.000 But 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.

00:11:25.000 You make good points.

00:11:26.000 I 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.

00:11:38.000 I 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.

00:11:50.000 And that's great politically. Right. I mean, that's that's that's what makes people magic in a room.

00:11:53.000 But 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?

00:11:59.000 And 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.

00:12:08.000 Because anybody who says they're empathetic toward all humanity is is lying.

00:12:11.000 I mean, that's that's that's usually not true.

00:12:13.000 And you're empathetic toward others. You're like that.

00:12:16.000 It's a little it's a little self serving.

00:12:19.000 And 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. 0.81

00:12:26.000 But I'm not sure why that makes for good policy in any way, shape or form.

00:12:29.000 But 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.

00:12:39.000 They're all, you know, Mamdani is this and he's that. 0.92

00:12:41.000 And I'm like, can we just not accept that as a campaign politician, he is 100 percent undeniable?

00:12:48.000 He's he's he's terrific, particularly in short spurts.

00:12:51.000 So 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.

00:12:57.000 But I don't think debates matter anymore because that's not how anybody consumes information.

00:13:00.000 That's right. Right. The podcast space may be the last space where people consume in long form information.

00:13:04.000 And even there, it's clips from the show that are going to go viral on X.

00:13:07.000 Right. 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. 1.00

00:13:13.000 But the thing that gets clipped out is 30 seconds of you grinning, 30 seconds of grinning isn't smarmy.

00:13:17.000 It's charming. Two hours of grinning is rictus like.

00:13:19.000 And so I think that the shrinking of the attention span and the way people consume information, he's built for that.

00:13:24.000 He's really good at that. You see certain politicians are AOC is terrific at this.

00:13:28.000 Pretending she's not is not going to make her any less terrific at it.

00:13:30.000 She really is very, very good at it. President Trump is really good at it.

00:13:33.000 And 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.

00:13:40.000 But then you watch it on social media and you're like, man, that's hysterically funny.

00:13:43.000 Right. I mean, like those two minutes are amazing.

00:13:46.000 And so, you know, the way people consume information is going to determine, you know, who's capable of of speaking into that medium.

00:13:54.000 Talking 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.

00:14:02.000 That's exactly who this episode sponsors Next Insurance are for.

00:14:06.000 They are 100 percent dedicated to small businesses, the builders, the dreamers and everyone turning ideas into reality.

00:14:15.000 When we started Trigonometry, it was just us, no investors, no safety net, just two guys trying to build something.

00:14:22.000 If you run a small business, you know how much there is to handle budgets, staff, equipment, taxes and yes, insurance.

00:14:30.000 Next makes that last part simple. You can get the right coverage in minutes, buy it online and download your certificate of insurance instantly.

00:14:39.000 No paperwork, no waiting, just peace of mind that what you've built is protected.

00:14:44.000 And you could save up to 30 percent on your business insurance for as little as a dollar a day.

00:14:49.000 Because when small businesses thrive, America thrives.

00:14:52.000 To protect what you've built, visit nextinsurance.com slash trig or click the link in the description of this episode.

00:15:01.000 Got PC optimum points? Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.

00:15:06.000 Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 11th. Valid in-store and online.

00:15:13.000 So we've got this increasingly democratic socialist of America movement on the left.

00:15:20.000 I'm sure we'll see more of that as time goes on.

00:15:23.000 We 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.

00:15:35.000 And 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.

00:15:48.000 Or 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.

00:16:04.000 Give us your perspective on that.

00:16:06.000 Sure. I mean, I've been arguing against this for quite a while.

00:16:09.000 I 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.

00:16:18.000 The problem is not, of course, that Tucker Carlson, it's a free country. He can interview whomever he damn well pleases.

00:16:24.000 It is not, in fact, cancellation to criticize somebody's interview tactics.

00:16:28.000 And it's not even that he interviewed Fuentes. It's that he proceeded to massage Nick Fuentes.

00:16:31.000 I mean, he treated him with kid gloves. He did not ask him a single difficult question.

00:16:34.000 He 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.

00:16:43.000 He simply brought him on and then proceeded to gloss him.

00:16:46.000 And the fact that that was treated in some quarters as sort of normal is, I think, a very serious problem.

00:16:53.000 I 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.

00:17:02.000 And as public figures, I think that people have a responsibility to actually say when bad things are happening on your own side.

00:17:07.000 And 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.

00:17:20.180 And I think that's bad pragmatically. I don't think that's even true.

00:17:22.600 I think that what we've watched here is, yeah, everybody's celebrating Zarmadani winning in New York, in New York.

00:17:27.240 OK, like this place is one hundred and twenty seven percent Democrat.

00:17:30.860 So it's like when people say, oh, AOC is going to be a national camp.

00:17:33.900 Maybe 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. 1.00

00:17:41.080 And Virginia seems to be more representative of the body politic, broadly speaking, across America than New York, which is a pretty, pretty closed circuit.

00:17:48.100 You 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.

00:18:08.520 If 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.

00:18:16.440 I 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.

00:18:30.720 I don't think those laundered views are particularly popular with the American people.

00:18:34.480 And 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.

00:18:42.720 People might say Tucker Carson has got the biggest conservative platform in America.

00:18:48.200 Isn't that proof that actually these views are very popular?

00:18:51.200 I mean, they are popular with a certain segment. Are they popular broad scale across America?

00:18:55.400 I mean, I know many ambulatory psychotics who have very large audiences in the in the online space.

00:19:01.100 I'm not calling Tucker an ambulatory psychotic. I think he's very actually coherent in what he's doing.

00:19:05.080 But 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.

00:19:13.360 The electorate in the United States is generally about one hundred and sixty million people.

00:19:17.360 And so you can find, you know, you get it's a big country. You can find a niche for anything.

00:19:22.960 I think one of the mistakes politicians make is they look at X and they say this is representative of the American body politic.

00:19:27.560 And that is just too online. It's just way too online.

00:19:29.940 I 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.

00:19:38.440 That was a 90 10 proposition in the opposite way for President Trump by all polling data among the Republicans.

00:19:44.880 Republicans were very much pro that. And so like it.

00:19:47.680 But if you'd read Twitter, then you would have gotten precisely the opposite impression.

00:19:51.220 And so I think being too online is one aspect of this for sure.

00:19:54.040 Ben, but we talk about being too online and I take your point.

00:19:57.120 However, what is undeniable is that the the online world bleeds into the real world, which we saw with wokeism.

00:20:04.140 And 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.

00:20:13.020 And nobody was going to say stood up and went, hang on, this is nonsense. Stop doing that.

00:20:17.960 And now I'm seeing the same thing happen on the right with exceptions like people like yourself.

00:20:21.900 And I'm going, are we not just seeing the mirror image of what happened in 2014, 2015?

00:20:26.700 I mean, I think we are. And I and it's very, very concerning to me.

00:20:29.880 I 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.

00:20:38.280 And 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.

00:20:50.620 We instead define it based on what we supposedly oppose. But even then, we don't necessarily oppose the same things.

00:20:56.140 But we kind of broadly just throw up our hands. They're on my side. They're on my side.

00:20:59.840 And that dynamic leads to polarized sides.

00:21:05.060 I 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.

00:21:17.640 Right. 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.

00:21:26.180 And 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.

00:21:34.360 It'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.

00:21:46.260 I 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.

00:21:54.300 But 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.

00:22:01.280 Again, the things that I've fought for, let's put this way, I've been doing this for a very long time.

00:22:05.580 I started writing a syndicated comment when I was 17 years old.

00:22:07.760 I 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.

00:22:14.340 He'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.

00:22:20.560 I mean, I think it's one of the most common questions about Tucker is like, what changed? What happened?

00:22:24.640 And so I think, you know, that's that's a relevant question.

00:22:27.140 And pretending that people haven't morphed or that that shouldn't have any impact on the public discourse.

00:22:31.420 Of course, it does. The things that I mean, that's literally our job is to talk about these issues.

00:22:35.620 And if you talk about the issues in a different way, it seems to me that that earns a different response.

00:22:39.300 One of the people that seems to disagree with, I don't know if this is exactly true,

00:22:42.540 but seems to be based on what I'm reading is Matt Walsh, who, of course, is your colleague at The Daily Wire.

00:22:47.520 How are you going to negotiate that situation?

00:22:51.280 I mean, listen, at The Daily Wire, we have a wide variety of views on a wide variety of subjects.

00:22:56.160 You know, Matt is free to have his opinion. I think he's wrong.

00:22:58.720 I'm sure he thinks I'm wrong. And that is what it is.

00:23:02.120 I also noticed that Matt is not glossing Nick Fuentes.

00:23:05.000 No, he's not. And this is what I was going to ask you about as well.

00:23:07.480 Where does this idea come from? Because, look, I completely agree with you.

00:23:11.520 Anyone is entitled to have anyone on the show that they want.

00:23:13.940 We've invited Nick Fuentes on the show. We would treat him very differently, I think, than Tucker would.

00:23:18.000 We would have a conversation with him and push on some of the things that he's said.

00:23:21.820 We haven't heard anything back.

00:23:23.340 But where does this idea come from that if I say the person you had on your show is someone whose values I don't agree with,

00:23:30.800 and I don't like the way you conducted the interview, that is cancellation.

00:23:36.040 Yeah. I mean, when did that happen?

00:23:37.320 I think it's a really low-resolution response to what probably was a low-resolution description of cancellation in the first place.

00:23:43.760 So I think that if you were going to look at sort of the etymology of what happened here,

00:23:47.400 it seems to me that the left shut the Overton window so unbelievably tight that if you said, for example,

00:23:52.320 a man is not a woman, this meant that you had to be socially ostracized.

00:23:55.800 And I think that's what people mean when they say cancellation.

00:23:58.740 The free speech concerns typically are about being banned from platforms.

00:24:03.020 Cancellation is the idea of social ostracism, that you must be invited to the party.

00:24:06.320 And so for a while, it was like you couldn't be invited to any party,

00:24:09.140 or people would attempt to go after your career if you said things that were kind of baseline normalcy.

00:24:14.580 And the response on the right was not, let's broaden the Overton window.

00:24:18.260 It was, let's eviscerate the Overton window. 0.94

00:24:20.140 Now, almost a morally relativistic response.

00:24:22.600 All views are now to be treated as perfectly equivalent.

00:24:25.940 And if you act with scorn at any view, then that must be a form of cancellation.

00:24:32.280 It must be a form of social ostracization that is unjustifiable.

00:24:35.480 And so what you end up with is this sort of bizarre math where the right has taken to the idea

00:24:42.220 that if you get a lot of flack, it's because you're over the target.

00:24:45.280 And also that if you criticize, then that's a form of cancellation,

00:24:50.360 that that's a form of social ostracization.

00:24:52.420 Well, if you add those two things together, what you come up with is,

00:24:54.580 it is probably better to be a Nazi than to criticize a Nazi. 0.58

00:24:57.320 Because if you're a Nazi, then you're taking a lot of flack,

00:24:59.800 which must mean that you're over the target.

00:25:01.480 And if someone criticizes you, then they're engaging in the same sort of politically correct

00:25:04.720 cancellation that the left was engaging in.

00:25:07.080 You must be right.

00:25:08.020 They must be wrong.

00:25:08.860 And they're canceling you.

00:25:09.820 And they're violative of sort of basic First Amendment principles.

00:25:12.720 So I think that's a really low resolution view.

00:25:14.800 I think the argument about cancellation was not that nobody should ever be socially ostracized.

00:25:18.780 It was that the idea set that was being socially ostracized was a very normie mainstream set of views.

00:25:25.780 And I'm not a moral relativist.

00:25:26.920 I don't believe all views are equivalently moral or decent or worthy of or even worthy of response.

00:25:32.620 I think this idea that you're not allowed to have scorn for views that you believe are damaging

00:25:37.520 or deeply immoral, like truly bad.

00:25:40.320 Like, for example, I don't even, not even arguments, just statements.

00:25:43.020 Like, you know, Nick Flint is calling J.D. Vance's wife a jate.

00:25:47.760 Like, that's not an argument.

00:25:49.200 Or that J.D. or like, how are you supposed to respond to the argument that he has made,

00:25:52.560 for example, that J.D. Vance is a fat gay race traitor who shouldn't be president of the United 1.00

00:25:58.500 States because he's in an intermarriage. 1.00

00:26:00.480 Am I allowed to respond to scorn?

00:26:01.480 I feel like scorn is a pretty good response to that.

00:26:04.120 And that that doesn't actually deserve a debate or a fulsome discussion.

00:26:07.640 And that, in fact, treating that as though that is a rational idea is a disservice to rationality.

00:26:12.560 But if you treat all forms of that response as cancellation, that's probably how you get

00:26:17.000 to this math.

00:26:17.520 And of course, one of the other things that happened, and I think the woke left deserves

00:26:20.480 all the scorn and blame for this, is what they've done to words.

00:26:24.180 I see people now saying, well, how dare you call Nick Fuentes an Nazi?

00:26:28.200 I'm not insulting him.

00:26:30.040 I am describing his views.

00:26:31.960 Correct.

00:26:32.380 I mean, there's been an attempt, because the left has overused all these terms, they've now

00:26:36.260 become meaningless, and that means that when you do that in the rhetorical space, you actually

00:26:40.480 end up destroying the systemic immunity that people have to bad things.

00:26:43.500 Exactly.

00:26:43.800 So if you call everything racist, then the response typically is, okay, nothing's racist.

00:26:48.980 But that's not true.

00:26:49.580 We know that some things are actually racist.

00:26:50.920 If you say that black people are innately inferior, that's racist, right?

00:26:54.480 That's a racist statement. 0.92

00:26:56.040 But if I say racist, there's a group of people who will immediately say, well, no, you're just

00:27:00.380 using racist as a club in order to shut down conversation because the left used it in that

00:27:04.040 way.

00:27:04.260 And so a sort of Pavlovian response has developed, where if you use a term the way it's properly

00:27:09.640 supposed to be used, then it's treated the same as if you were improperly using the term.

00:27:13.940 So the term itself loses all meaning.

00:27:15.460 And then, you know, I guess, what, we have to re-argue that issue?

00:27:19.600 I mean, I guess that's the idea.

00:27:20.780 But again, some of these are not arguments.

00:27:22.780 Some of these are impulses or emotional outbursts or insults or trollery.

00:27:28.640 And so that's not an honest conversation.

00:27:30.260 That's not a discussion.

00:27:30.860 Did you know that the biggest threat to your retirement is not something that's talked about

00:27:35.460 often?

00:27:36.280 The increased longevity of American citizens means default retirement accounts like IRAs,

00:27:41.500 401ks, and TSPs may not suffice.

00:27:44.640 If you have over $50,000 in your retirement account, get instant access to a free two-minute report

00:27:50.820 from Augusta Precious Metals that reveals the one step you can take to secure your financial

00:27:55.600 future.

00:27:56.420 Visit TriggerGold.com or text Trigger to 35052 today.

00:28:01.520 Your full Great Outdoors Comedy Festival lineup is here on September 11th through 13th at

00:28:08.360 Arendale Park.

00:28:09.520 Three nights, five shows, huge laughs.

00:28:12.700 September 11th through 13th.

00:28:14.360 Buy tickets now at GreatOutdoorsComedyFestival.com.

00:28:17.900 We talked about Tucker, and one of the things is quite clear that, as you say, there's been

00:28:24.520 a direction of travel change very significantly since he left Fox and started doing what he's

00:28:29.080 doing.

00:28:29.340 He's hosted a whole number of people that clearly are pushing a particular worldview.

00:28:33.920 I think that's fair to say.

00:28:35.480 What do you think he's up to with that?

00:28:37.780 You know, I don't like to attribute inauthenticity to people, so I will assume that it's reflective

00:28:41.700 of his actual worldviews.

00:28:43.200 And I think that, you know, just looking at the guests that he's had and sort of the views

00:28:47.560 that he has laundered, because that seems to be his mode of doing business, is that he

00:28:51.820 very rarely says the thing that he wants to say out loud.

00:28:54.080 A few times he will.

00:28:54.920 Like, for example, in the Fuentes interview, he'll say that Christian Zionists have a brain 1.00

00:28:57.760 disease, right? 0.99

00:28:58.280 That's him actually saying the thing that he thinks, then sort of trying later to half

00:29:01.520 buy it back as he realized he crossed a politically inconvenient line for him.

00:29:04.980 I mean, all people I know personally who I've seen be seized by this brain virus, and

00:29:11.520 they're not Jewish, and most of them are self-described Christians, and then the Christian

00:29:17.360 Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists. 0.98

00:29:21.260 Like, what is that?

00:29:22.340 Right.

00:29:22.560 And I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody, you know, because like,

00:29:30.420 what?

00:29:31.000 Because it's Christian heresy, and I'm offended by that as a Christian. 1.00

00:29:34.300 But mostly what he does is he has on people, and then he, that's fascinating.

00:29:38.040 That's very interesting.

00:29:38.820 Now, of course, Tucker is perfectly capable of carrying out a very adversarial interview

00:29:42.780 as he did with, for example, Ted Cruz.

00:29:44.780 And so pretending that he's not doing that thing is, I think, insulting to the intelligence.

00:29:49.940 And the right would not accept it in any other context.

00:29:52.060 If a reporter has on Kamala Harris and asks for zero difficult questions except how brat

00:29:55.580 she is, then we are rightly going to assume that that reporter is pro-Kamala Harris, right?

00:29:59.900 And is not doing their actual journalistic job, and you can sort of intuit views that way.

00:30:03.800 Guest selection is definitely a big one.

00:30:05.960 How you treat your guests is a big one.

00:30:07.100 I mean, we can sort of intuit the views.

00:30:08.820 You know, I think that Tucker's general belief from looking at his, the way he has done his

00:30:13.660 sort of foreign policy talk is that it's not just that America is overextended.

00:30:16.840 It's that America is a sort of nefarious force in the world.

00:30:19.160 And wherever American support for allies happens, then it must be the result of domestic manipulations.

00:30:26.520 And that the most important thing right now is to essentially go autarkic, to bring, I think

00:30:36.020 this is the most charitable read, to bring, you know, American resources home, to not be

00:30:39.960 involved in the world in any way.

00:30:42.560 And most importantly, that anybody who opposes this agenda is a tool of a foreign agenda or

00:30:47.900 is, or is a malign actor, which is the thing that differentiates, I think, some of how Tucker

00:30:53.580 does his business from, from others.

00:30:55.220 I think Tucker is very fond of using emotivism where he attributes motive to people in order

00:30:59.400 to, in order to not even debunk the argument, but simply to just say, you know, they're a

00:31:04.120 bad person.

00:31:04.740 They hate you. 0.98

00:31:05.400 They want to hurt your children. 1.00

00:31:06.640 And I despise them. 0.96

00:31:07.880 I despise them comes up a lot on his, on his show, which I've always found kind of strange.

00:31:11.160 Like, I, you know, I don't know why that's an argument that what, why are your feelings

00:31:14.380 even sort of relevant to the point that you're making?

00:31:17.200 It's a sort of strange political take.

00:31:18.860 I despise, who cares?

00:31:20.940 And I despise lots of things.

00:31:22.460 I mean, broccoli is not my favorite.

00:31:23.800 Like what, of what relevance is this?

00:31:25.880 Well, it's interesting that you say that.

00:31:27.580 And whenever I, I hear Tucker, I listen to him.

00:31:30.560 There does seem to be a kind of, it kind of reminds me of like a failed romantic.

00:31:37.240 You know, he had this romanticized idea of America and what America was.

00:31:41.160 He's now fallen out of love.

00:31:42.940 And like a guy who's gone through his first breakup, he looks at his girlfriend and goes, 1.00

00:31:47.560 oh, she's a massive bitch. 1.00

00:31:50.040 I mean, I think that you could, you could, I think that probably he would agree with that 1.00

00:31:53.840 on America's foreign policy.

00:31:55.320 I mean, he, he, right.

00:31:56.740 He talks about this openly about, for example, the war in Iraq.

00:31:59.200 But I think that he, he's been critical of pretty much every American foreign policy

00:32:02.860 decision since World War II, including World War II.

00:32:05.480 I mean, really, including World War II, right?

00:32:07.140 I mean, he has on guests who have said repeatedly, not just one, more, multiple guests who have

00:32:10.620 said that either America took the wrong side in World War II, or the true villain of World

00:32:14.220 War II was Winston Churchill.

00:32:16.040 He himself has said, what did Churchill actually gain?

00:32:18.200 Because now London is a terrible place, which is sort of like saying that there's litter in

00:32:22.900 the streets of New York.

00:32:23.760 Therefore, the enlightenment was bad.

00:32:25.400 I mean, it's like, clearly he thinks something went fundamentally wrong with the West around

00:32:31.620 the time that World War II happened.

00:32:32.880 And, you know, why, why he's saying that and what, what is the viewpoint that defines that?

00:32:38.260 I think he's, he's sort of left that undefined.

00:32:39.760 So I'll leave that undefined.

00:32:40.820 All I'll say is, I think that it's, it's, it's untrue.

00:32:44.860 I think that, that some of the views, many of the views of the people that he, that he

00:32:48.560 brings on run counter to traditional American conservatism at the very, very least.

00:32:52.760 Look, the, the, the brilliant thing about social media and podcasting is that there's

00:32:59.080 no gatekeepers.

00:33:00.040 The terrible thing about social media and podcasting is there's no gatekeepers.

00:33:05.300 And when you look at people like Tucker and you look at people like Candace, when they

00:33:09.500 were in large organizations and they had to report to people, there were guardrails and

00:33:14.300 they couldn't go off the reservation.

00:33:16.360 Whereas now they can go off the reservation and we can, and we've seen what's happened.

00:33:20.560 I mean, again, I think that it's not even a matter of, of gatekeepers as much as it

00:33:25.600 is of a willingness to sort of be checked by people and, and listen to maybe better

00:33:30.920 judgment.

00:33:31.720 Because I think that there's a case to be made that many of the gatekeepers have 0.95

00:33:34.300 sucked and getting rid of some of the gatekeepers was, was good.

00:33:37.120 But I think that what is required of consumers of information now is significantly more than

00:33:42.200 was required of consumers of information 15, 20 years ago.

00:33:44.480 You have to be your own gatekeeper now.

00:33:45.440 Yeah.

00:33:45.720 And, and, and most people are not really good at that.

00:33:48.220 It's not even a matter of qualifications.

00:33:49.500 It's just, they're not very good at it because again, you're, you're consuming information

00:33:52.200 like a fire hose and it's coming at you on social media from an algorithm that I think

00:33:55.500 is quite perverse in places like X, uh, or, or on Reddit or wherever you are, TikTok.

00:34:00.100 Uh, and, and so unless you are a very informed person to begin with, it's very difficult to

00:34:04.880 know what sources to trust.

00:34:06.700 And that's when you get into a bit of confirmation bias.

00:34:09.360 And that's where we get back to sort of the original point that we were making, which

00:34:11.620 is the people who pander most strongly to your sensibilities, which is that you have been

00:34:15.340 wrong by some sort of conspireal coterie of people who are aiming to crush you underfoot

00:34:20.360 that that that's a very flattering idea because then the idea is that you're not responsible

00:34:25.160 for any of your own actions and that all solutions are just simple.

00:34:28.860 If only you had the power to, to implement them.

00:34:31.240 And you also get incentivized to create this type of content because the more of this kind

00:34:36.760 of conspiratorial content, let's just call it that, that you make the more likely people

00:34:41.120 are to engage with it because they're going, they're thinking to themselves, oh, this is

00:34:44.640 interesting.

00:34:45.220 This is dangerous.

00:34:46.100 I want to hear what the secret's being uncovered.

00:34:48.220 Whenever a secret is being uncovered, that's much more interesting than somebody saying,

00:34:50.760 Hey, there's no secret.

00:34:51.440 Everybody's bad at their job, which, which by the way, is actually significantly more accurate

00:34:54.840 in virtually all circumstances.

00:34:56.580 People are just not good at things who think they were going to be good at things.

00:34:59.940 And then the results are bad, but it's much, it's much more sexy.

00:35:02.500 If you say, no, no, there's a nefarious secret. 1.00

00:35:04.360 There's a group that meets in secret and they get together just to fuck you. 1.00

00:35:07.740 Right. 1.00

00:35:08.040 That's, and, and that's, that's flattering to your sense of self.

00:35:10.220 It's flattering to, to your sense of the world.

00:35:12.140 And now you're part of a, now you're part of a, an informed group of people who really

00:35:15.880 know the thing that nobody else knows.

00:35:17.640 Well, that's very true.

00:35:18.320 And I think another piece, and I wrote about this on my sub stack, I don't know if you saw,

00:35:21.260 but it was about what's happened to young men in particular over the last 10, 15 years,

00:35:25.780 where we had this woke period where you, if you were a straight white man, like there 0.99

00:35:31.780 was, like there was, there was dog shit and then straight white men, like a lot of levels 1.00

00:35:35.960 below that. 0.99

00:35:36.580 And particularly for a generation who neither created a system where men may have had some

00:35:42.480 advantage or white people may have had some advantage, nor benefited from that.

00:35:46.060 If you were a 15 year old Zoomer, you were being told the future is female, all men are 1.00

00:35:50.520 trash, et cetera. 0.97

00:35:51.840 While actually your life outcomes and the education system, which was overwhelmingly not favorable

00:35:57.700 to people like you that you were going through, you can kind of see why they're angry and resentful.

00:36:02.600 I mean, I totally agree why they're angry and resentful.

00:36:05.720 And this again, gets back to a point.

00:36:07.460 Diagnosis is easy.

00:36:09.380 Prognosis and cure is hard.

00:36:11.400 Yeah.

00:36:11.620 And so I totally agree that the sort of wokeism of the past 20 years has created, for example,

00:36:16.300 the Fuentes movement.

00:36:17.180 I mean, I talked about that openly on the show on Monday and in the piece that I wrote for

00:36:21.140 the Wall Street Journal is that basically the sort of woke left idea that white Christian

00:36:26.100 men in particular were the scourge of the earth and thus had to be extirpated from public

00:36:30.240 life or at least disadvantaged in public life by the sort of Ibram X.

00:36:34.220 Kendi.

00:36:34.800 The only way to fix the injustices of the past is to engage in injustices in the present.

00:36:38.660 I can see why that would drive a sort of white Christian identitarianism.

00:36:42.400 I think that in order for that identitarianism to take place, it can't really be a Christian 0.82

00:36:45.500 identitarianism because Christianity, you know, last I checked, and again, I'll let others

00:36:50.280 who are more expert in this topic than I speak to this, is a system that distinguishes

00:36:54.680 neither Jew from Greek nor slave from master.

00:36:58.160 I mean, the idea is that all are equal in, like, it's about individual equality was one

00:37:03.280 of the key functions of Christianity.

00:37:04.500 So you have to come up with kind of a pseudo-Christianity where, you know, certain people are superior

00:37:08.700 to other people, and I think that that's a really negative thing, which is why you've

00:37:12.380 seen some systemic immunity to it among more traditional Christian groups, actually.

00:37:16.280 But I think that the move that you see, it is understandable, but the normal curative to woke

00:37:23.840 should be meritocracy, and that's a hard argument to make these days, right?

00:37:28.560 I mean, again, because meritocracy has an inherent suggestion, which is if you don't succeed,

00:37:34.380 maybe it's at least partially or largely your fault, and that's a very hard sell to people.

00:37:38.760 That's a very hard sell.

00:37:40.080 Do you think maybe, I don't know if I believe this, I'm genuine, I'm doing a tucker here,

00:37:45.640 but I don't know, do you think that this might actually be quite a healthy thing for the right,

00:37:53.560 actually, in that you had a kind of anti-woke coalition that included a lot of people that

00:38:00.600 maybe didn't really know what it was for, and what's being negotiated now is what does it mean

00:38:06.500 to be on the right? What does it mean particularly to be a conservative? And what are the principles

00:38:11.300 that you guys actually stand for, and which are the principles that can't be included in that

00:38:17.680 conversation? Yeah, I mean, I think that the conversation has been ongoing as long as I've

00:38:20.560 been alive, right? I mean, these are battles that were had between traditional conservatives or

00:38:24.400 neocons and realists and isolationists. I mean, these are ongoing battles all the time,

00:38:28.480 but I think that what is fascinating about the current moment is that typically, you know,

00:38:34.180 movements tend to follow leaders. If there's a conservative movement, it turned into a Trump

00:38:37.940 movement. President Trump is non-ideological. President Trump contains multitudes. He has

00:38:42.560 sort of instincts and impulses in many cases rather than a thoroughgoing ideology. And so roiling under

00:38:47.160 the surface of the Trump presidency has been a lot of these divisions for a while. And, you know,

00:38:51.600 I think that there are a lot of people who are planning for the post-Trump era, and they're trying to

00:38:54.860 make moves right now in order to sort of consolidate their viewpoints in the post-Trump era. So I think

00:39:01.020 some of this is absolutely natural. But, you know, I think that if we're going to have these

00:39:05.920 conversations, we ought to be at least honest about what it is that we believe.

00:39:10.140 When we launched our first bit of Trigonometry merch, we learned very quickly how important

00:39:15.640 five-star reviews are. We found out the hard way how shipping is so often just as important as a

00:39:22.340 product itself. And if you've ever tried to manage shipping yourself, you know how messy it gets.

00:39:27.780 That's why smart businesses use ShipStation. ShipStation brings all your orders from Amazon,

00:39:33.900 eBay, Etsy, Shopify, or your own site into one easy dashboard. You can compare over 200 carriers,

00:39:41.840 print labels in bulk, and save up to 90% on shipping rates. ShipStation helps you avoid errors,

00:39:47.980 ship faster, and actually earn those five-star reviews. It's why 98% of businesses that try ShipStation

00:39:55.340 stay for life, and some grow up to 40 times faster. Delight your customers and get rave reviews with

00:40:01.640 cheaper, faster, and better shipping. Upgrade to ShipStation today to get a 60-day free trial

00:40:07.820 at ShipStation.com and use code TRIGGER. There's no credit card or contract required,

00:40:13.540 and you can cancel any time. That's ShipStation.com, code TRIGGER.

00:40:18.880 And one of the things that I think that we're not really addressing at the moment, which I find

00:40:24.420 very interesting, is the use of humor. Now, one of the things that wokeism did is they clamped down

00:40:29.720 on humor. Any type of humor that wasn't broadly in their worldview was seen as oppressive, racist,

00:40:35.520 patriarchal. Pick the term, and you were probably accurate. But what people like Fuentes and other

00:40:40.940 people have done so well, in my opinion, is they've tapped into that. Oh, for sure.

00:40:46.940 Where people felt like you couldn't laugh at this joke or that joke. And Fuentes has just opened the

00:40:52.360 door and gone, you know what? Let's say the retard word as many times as we want, and whatever else it 0.97

00:40:58.140 may be, and it's going to be a free-for-all. And when you've been constrained for that long,

00:41:02.340 that feels really invigorating. I do think that there's a transgressive side of the conservative

00:41:06.300 movement right now that's really just enjoying, like, flexing in the new freedom of the Trump era.

00:41:11.380 I think that's for sure true. The danger, I think, is that, you know, Chesterton, I think,

00:41:16.380 talked about the idea that actual authentic belief systems can be destroyed with an ounce

00:41:22.320 of cynicism, and basically trollery is a form of cynicism very often. And so, you know, funny is funny,

00:41:28.860 but it is also true that funny doesn't build things. Funny tends to destroy things. Funny does not

00:41:33.500 tend to build things. And I think that the impulse toward humor can be awesome. We all love to laugh.

00:41:40.720 We all like a good joke. And there are many different types of jokes, right? I mean, there's

00:41:44.720 jokes that poke fun at human frailty, and then there are jokes that are designed to legitimately

00:41:48.700 tear other people down and harm them. And they're not all quite the same. But, you know, I think that

00:41:54.780 one thing that's happened is that terrible views very often are shielded with this sort of like,

00:42:00.280 well, am I joking? Am I trolling? Am I not really trolling? And the answer is, if the outcome

00:42:04.460 is the same, then I'm not sure why I'm supposed to pretend that it's okay, just because you're

00:42:10.700 joking when you sometimes say it and sometimes don't.

00:42:13.500 And that's a really profound point, because we've seen more and more comedians come on

00:42:17.480 and give, you know, public opinions about subjects as complicated as the Middle East and,

00:42:21.720 you know, the war in Russia. 0.92

00:42:24.080 Yeah, there's this clown knows on, clown knows off thing that's been going on with the entire 0.71

00:42:26.320 comedian world, really, since Jon Stewart. And I think that that's really, I think that's

00:42:30.180 bad. I think if comedians want to be comedians, they should be comedians. And then we should

00:42:32.940 stop pretending that they are experts in foreign policy or domestic policy. And if, you know,

00:42:37.700 somebody wants to, like, I make jokes on my show, I'm not a comedian. And so you should

00:42:41.860 take seriously the views that I express as my own views. My problem is when I can't tell

00:42:45.220 what is your view and what isn't. And when you hide behind the humor to say, it's not really

00:42:49.720 my view, it's just humor. And then when you're caught, the clown knows goes back on. Like, 0.89

00:42:54.220 that just seems fundamentally dishonest to me.

00:42:56.680 And do you think as well, like, you know, Trump sort of ushered this in, didn't he? Because

00:43:01.060 the first time we saw him in 2016, I remember watching him in the debates going,

00:43:05.120 this guy's a comedian, because the entire purpose of a comedian really is to be disruptive. It's

00:43:10.000 to disrupt the status quo. And that's very much what Trump did.

00:43:13.560 I think for sure. And I think that that was the problem that many of us who were sort of

00:43:16.380 traditionally in politics had with President Trump during his first presidential run.

00:43:19.400 And then he got to be president. And, you know, you got to see what he did when he was actually

00:43:22.760 president. And so what I used to say during his first term is, well, now that he's president,

00:43:26.360 I can judge him based on the thing that he's doing, not just the thing that he's saying.

00:43:29.440 And I think most Americans came to that conclusion, right? So now, at the beginning of his presidency,

00:43:33.760 do you remember how every evening news broadcast started with a Trump tweet? Like, every single

00:43:38.160 one. It's like, he tweeted this today. And I just can't believe he tweeted this today.

00:43:41.600 And within about six months, everybody's like, okay, so he tweeted a thing. Like, cool.

00:43:44.320 And now we don't even pay attention when he tweets a thing, right? And in fact, he has to

00:43:48.000 have it like a sign off. Thank you for your attention to this matter. So we know that he's not

00:43:50.760 controlling, right? But like, I think that that's because we got to see him in practice.

00:43:55.560 The problem is with people who, you know, are in the business of viewpoint, you don't actually get

00:44:00.380 to see what their practice looks like. All you have is the rhetoric. So now I'm supposed to judge

00:44:03.740 whether when, you know, Nick Fuentes says, Team Hitler, does he actually like Hitler? Or is he just

00:44:07.660 joking about liking Hitler? And what is the practical difference between joking about liking Hitler over

00:44:12.440 and over and over, and also espousing Hitlerian beliefs, and actually just liking Hitler?

00:44:16.640 And at what point does the onus, why is the onus on the viewer as opposed to on him to clarify what

00:44:21.300 it is that he thinks? Well, speaking of judging people on what they're doing, how do you feel

00:44:26.400 about President Trump's term so far? I think it's a mixed bag. I mean, he's done a lot of things that

00:44:31.720 I think are great. I mean, I think that his foreign policy overall has been very, very good. I think

00:44:37.360 that he has justified my faith that he was going to be a peace through strength president and not a

00:44:42.160 full-scale isolationist president, as some people seem to think that he was, which I thought was

00:44:45.540 always projection based on his term one. I think that, you know, when it comes to domestic policy,

00:44:50.700 obviously closing the border is a massive accomplishment. And he did it essentially

00:44:53.980 the first day, thus falsifying all of the talk about how you need a new piece of legislation

00:44:58.040 in order to do that. I've been very critical of the tariffs. I think the tariffs are uncalibrated

00:45:02.100 and poor economic policy that are not truly designed to achieve the effect that either he wants

00:45:08.420 or that he is seeking. And, you know, I think that we can go down the list of issues. Overall,

00:45:13.380 I think he's a very effective president in a way that I think many people didn't think they could

00:45:18.380 be. I mean, he's moving very quickly. He's doing many, many things, whether you like him or you

00:45:23.160 hate him. There's no question that he has been a transformative figure in American politics.

00:45:28.000 And so on an effectiveness level, he's extremely effective on a policy level. I would say I agree

00:45:32.500 with probably 75 percent of what he's doing and there's 25 percent I don't agree with. And then there's

00:45:37.140 stuff that I just don't think that he was ever going to do whenever people like he should

00:45:39.880 rhetorically unify the country where he'd been for 10 years. I mean, like, come on. Or, you know,

00:45:44.000 he should really be more statesmanlike. OK, you know, these are these are now old debates and

00:45:47.980 they're in the past. Do you have any concerns around? I mean, we had Sam Harris on the show

00:45:52.760 recently. That episode hasn't gone out yet, but it will. He talked a lot about the way some of the

00:45:58.600 ICE operations have been conducted, people showing up in masks, not identifying themselves,

00:46:04.260 arresting U.S. citizens, etc. Did you have any concerns about that?

00:46:07.760 I mean, I think that we'd have to look at each individual case and I'm sure I could find cases

00:46:11.380 where I'd have concerns. You know, I think that overall the detention of criminal illegal immigrants,

00:46:17.120 which seems to be largely the people who are being targeted, is a very good thing. I think that

00:46:22.160 you could certainly find cases, I'm sure, where ICE acted badly or where they didn't provide

00:46:26.880 properly for the rights of the people who they are taking into custody or they got it wrong and

00:46:30.720 arrested somebody who's a citizen when they meant to arrest an illegal immigrant non-citizen,

00:46:34.480 for example. And very briefly, because we're running out of time,

00:46:37.220 you have another media engagement you have to run to. We haven't talked about Israel,

00:46:40.520 despite the fact that you're accused of only talking about Israel.

00:46:44.300 Yes, always.

00:46:46.440 I was wondering, we got to a point where I thought President Trump achieved an incredible thing,

00:46:53.240 which is the release of the Israeli hostages. And that was based on the idea of a much broader plan

00:47:00.300 whose objective was to disarm and dismantle Hamas and secure peace in a very complicated structure.

00:47:08.040 That hasn't transpired. Are you optimistic that there will be some kind of long-term solution to

00:47:14.820 the Middle East or is it just going to run for another 70 years?

00:47:17.160 Well, I mean, I think that, you know, conflicts between radical Islamists and others in the Middle

00:47:21.160 East is likely to continue for, you know, the rest of human history. But if you're talking about, 0.59

00:47:25.920 like, the explicit what happened in Gaza issue, I think that the triumph was stage one. Stage two 0.74

00:47:32.600 was always sort of, you know, the maybe phase of the Trump plan. The reality is that what has

00:47:39.620 happened with the freeing of those hostages, it means that now, you know, Israel is not on

00:47:44.320 tenterhooks, obviously, about living people being held in tunnels. And beyond that, there's sort of a

00:47:49.960 yellow line that's essentially been established in the Gaza Strip that's currently being administered by

00:47:53.320 the IDF and that eventually is supposed to be transferred over to the control of some sort

00:47:57.340 of international security force. Presumably, there will be vast humanitarian aid in that area.

00:48:01.940 Rebuilding funds are going in. I know people who are actually actively working on construction in

00:48:06.000 that area right now to build housing and all the rest and maybe turn that into, like, an actual

00:48:09.840 decent place to live. As far as the area that's sort of the interior of the Gaza Strip that is

00:48:13.560 currently essentially a war between Hamas and a wide variety of sort of clans, you know, the thing

00:48:20.600 that's kind of ridiculous about this whole war is that the yelling at the IDF about human rights

00:48:25.560 violations. And the IDF is terrible. It's just awful. Well, I noticed that the minute that the 0.91

00:48:30.460 IDF pulled out of those areas, Hamas just started pulling people out of their houses and shooting

00:48:33.120 them in the head. And everybody went completely silent about all of that. And now they're saying,

00:48:37.460 well, we certainly can't allow the IDF to go back in there. We have to have an international

00:48:41.140 security for it. Well, cool. I mean, I think that the Israelis would love nothing better than for

00:48:44.900 the UAE and the Saudis and the Indonesians to put a security force in there. The question is why

00:48:50.540 precisely those countries would want to do that. Well, they wouldn't because they'd all be killed.

00:48:54.800 Right. Well, not all, but they would end up in the same position as IDF fighting a war.

00:48:57.360 That's right. And so I think that one of the things that's been exposed by the sort of deal at the end

00:49:01.000 of the war is the harsh reality of the Middle East, which is if there is no police force in areas that

00:49:06.000 are governed by terrorists, then terrorists tend to govern those areas. And this bizarre idea that if you

00:49:11.040 just pull out magically, things are going to spring up and replace them, you know, we'll see whether

00:49:15.240 that happens or not. But certainly the Middle East is in a significantly better situation and position

00:49:20.300 than it was before President Trump's late stage intervention in the Gaza war.

00:49:24.380 Have you been surprised, Ben, by the events and what's happened in the UK surrounding the

00:49:30.260 pro-Palestine demonstrations and the just general antisemitism, let's be honest?

00:49:35.140 I mean, I wish I could say that I was surprised. I feel like that's been a long time in exploding.

00:49:40.200 The Islamic population, particularly in areas like London or Manchester, where you have very 0.95

00:49:47.000 high levels of Islamic immigration, the history of Europe tends to show that when you have 1.00

00:49:51.820 very high levels of Islamic immigration in particular areas, those areas tend to become

00:49:55.520 more lawless, more violent, more antisemitic. And that's true across Europe. It's not just

00:49:58.800 true in Britain. It is true in France. It is true in the Netherlands. It's true legitimately

00:50:03.320 everywhere. And the one area where apparently it's safe to be Jewish is Hungary, where they decided 0.97

00:50:07.960 that they weren't going to allow mass Islamic immigration into the country and are currently

00:50:11.540 paying, I believe, a million euros a day in fines to the EU in order to maintain their current border

00:50:16.200 status. So, no, I'm not surprised by that at all. I continue to be, you know, I would say bemused

00:50:23.040 at best by the fellow traveling of the left with this, this sort of red-green alliance that has

00:50:30.820 happened in which it's like, well, you know, we're all on the same side because we oppose the system

00:50:34.080 together. Well, that may be a convenient coalition for the moment, but I promise you that at the end

00:50:37.900 of this road, there's going to be some pretty significant disagreement. Absolutely. Ben,

00:50:42.360 it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing

00:50:46.200 we're not talking about that we really should be? I think we actually talked about it. I think that the

00:50:52.680 generalized lack of political voices speaking to the vast opportunity available to young people in

00:51:01.000 America and in the West and their capacity to actually get ahead if they make good decisions,

00:51:05.680 that lack is being direly felt and it's having its ramifications across all the politics foreign

00:51:09.760 and international. Well, there was one person who did do that very effectively and he was taken from

00:51:16.740 us. Do you see somebody else stepping up? Because I guess Charlie was the person who was holding this

00:51:25.600 whole griping thing at bay in many ways. And he needs to, a new person needs to emerge for that role,

00:51:33.420 surely. I mean, I think a lot of people need to emerge for that role. I think one of the big mistakes

00:51:36.440 is thinking that any one person can replace one for one, any one person, but it's going to require a lot

00:51:40.960 of voices to push back what I think are evil and nefarious views. Ben, thank you very much.

00:51:45.880 Thanks so much, guys. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where you'll see this.

00:51:49.580 I worry that activists have been successful in disguising their anti-Jewish sentiments behind a

00:51:55.900 critique of Zionism. Where should we draw the line between criticism of Israel's policies and anti-Semitism?

00:52:19.580 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick. I like to

00:52:25.320 be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline. It's good to know, just in

00:52:31.660 case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a trained responder, anytime. 988

00:52:38.320 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded by the government of Canada.

TRIGGERnometry - November 09, 2025

Ben Shapiro on Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Zohran Mamdani

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript