- 3 minutes ago
The conservative commentator talks with David Remnick about the antisemitism in MAGA media and why he condemns President Trump as corrupt yet sticks with him.
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00:00So you got out of UCLA, went to Harvard Law School, you were a lawyer for a little while at least,
00:04and then you entered the world of what we would call conservative media.
00:08And you were at Breitbart, which was like the Ur publication of the MAGA movement, I think it's fair to say.
00:17You were acquainted with Steve Bannon and all kinds of people.
00:21You look back on your Breitbart days, this is before that you started The Daily Wire.
00:25What do you think was positive about it, and what do you look back on with some regret in terms of the leaders of that?
00:31So, you know, I worked at Talk Radio Network, which was the syndicator for Michael Savage and Laura Ingram,
00:36and then I ended up being hired by Andrew. I'd known Andrew since I was at UCLA.
00:40Andrew Bartbart, the founder of the publication, yeah, who died in his 40s, I think.
00:45Yeah, he was very young, I think he was 41, I believe.
00:48And so, obviously, I'd known Andrew for about 10 years, I think.
00:51He basically came to me and said, will you come on board and join Breitbart this week in February 2012?
00:58So it's the middle of the 2012 election cycle, and he died three, four weeks after I had signed up for Breitbart.
01:04And suddenly the leadership structure was completely upended because Andrew had been sort of a one-man band.
01:09He was obviously a charismatic person.
01:12He was the person from whom all sort of thoughts sprang in terms of the direction of the site.
01:16Obviously, the leadership structure changed pretty dramatically.
01:18Steve Bannon, who'd been kind of hanging around on the fringes of Breitbart universe and making a documentary about Andrew,
01:24was brought in by Larry Solove, who is Andrew's partner, to essentially be president of Breitbart.
01:29Did you have problems with Steve Bannon and the like and their treatment of rhetoric and truth or non-truth and conspiracy theory and all the rest when you first encountered it, or what?
01:40It was never sort of a bed of roses with Steve Bannon.
01:44There are a lot of people in sort of Breitbart infrastructure who are not fond of Steve or the way that he was running things, making editorial decisions and the like.
01:51I think that there were some wonderful things.
01:52But how did you assess what Steve Bannon wanted in this world?
01:55He wasn't just a conservative.
01:56I mean, he was he was and remains a kind of warrior who's willing to say and do what is necessary to push that battle forward.
02:06And I'm gentle about this.
02:08If you look at the coverage of Breitbart, say, circa 2012, 2013, I'd say those are fairly mainstream conservative talking points.
02:16I mean, it was certainly a mainstream conservative website at that time.
02:18I think by the time we hit 2015, 2016, things had started to evolve a fair bit, especially because of the rise of President Trump.
02:26I was not a supporter of President Trump in the 2015, 2016 election cycle.
02:30I was much more supportive of Ted Cruz in the primaries.
02:33And then in the general election, I actually didn't vote in 2016 because I was unhappy with both candidates.
02:37Obviously, post that, I think President Trump did many things that as a conservative, I like.
02:41He is a certainly non-ideological figure, which is why so many people try to sort of claim that MAGA is part of their movement.
02:49You have Reagan conservatives who will say that MAGA is a Reagan conservatism.
02:52You'll have national populists who say that it's a national populist.
02:55Trump is none of those things.
02:56Trump is Trump.
02:58And he has which which means what to you, Ben?
03:00Trump is Trump means what?
03:02His instincts are sort of naturally those of a 1975 conservative.
03:09And that means that he likes a strong America on the world stage, but tempered by a sort of hard nosed realism about non-interventionism.
03:19I think that when it comes to domestic policy, he has sort of a weird mix of not liking the government to be involved in everything, but also wanting to use the government in ways that I don't particularly approve.
03:29He seems to be more about, you know, what is the solution at hand?
03:33Will I try it?
03:34And then if it doesn't work, then he pulls out of it.
03:36So people have termed that taco, right?
03:38Trump always chickens out.
03:39I don't think that's right.
03:40I think that President Trump is a person who is willing to try different things and then will shift on a dime.
03:45Do you think he's honest?
03:46Those things are worth it.
03:47Do you think Trump is honest?
03:48There was an article in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago describing the fishy investments from Abu Dhabi into the Trump family.
04:00Our reporter, David Kirkpatrick, who's extremely conservative in his calculations about how he's assessing this, has said that the Trump family has enriched itself to the tune of $4 billion since taking office again in 2024.
04:15Does this concern you at all?
04:17Of course.
04:17I mean, I've been calling this out, I think, before pretty much anybody else.
04:20I mean, early on in the Trump administration, when World Liberty Financial was pretty clearly making a fair bit of money over in the Middle East, I raised red flags on my show consistently about how I thought this was wrong.
04:31If the name were Biden instead of Trump, people would be screaming bloody murder and how this was not beneficial to President Trump's agenda either.
04:39Well, not beneficial to his agenda or corrupt?
04:42I mean, both, obviously.
04:44I mean, I do think that if you are taking what I perceive to be digital assets that are not particularly worthwhile, and then you have people who are politically interested investing massive amounts of money into those things, that is not a good thing.
04:58You voted for him the second time?
05:00I voted for him in 2020, and then I campaigned for him in 2024.
05:03Why?
05:03Because it was now a binary choice between Trump and Kamala Harris, and I liked a lot of what he did during his first administration.
05:13I felt the guardrails would largely hold, which I believe they have, with regard to President Trump.
05:17I know many on the left believe they've not, but what I would say is that—
05:20You believe the guardrails have held this time?
05:22Yes.
05:23I'm hard-pressed to see—
05:24Help me on that, Ben.
05:26Sure.
05:27Because I don't see it even remotely the case, so let me hear your point of view on that.
05:32The Trump administration has not bucked the judiciary to the tune of simply saying that if an appellate court or the Supreme Court rules in a particular way, they will just go ahead and do whatever it is that they want to do.
05:43The president does cite legal authority for the things that he is doing.
05:47So you're confident that the Justice Department will pursue corruption charges against the Trump family because it's independent?
05:53Oh, no, I'm confident that the president will likely pardon himself and his children in the same way that Joe Biden did on his way out.
06:01But you're laughing, but that's radically corrupt, is it not?
06:05Again, I think that it was radically corrupt when the DOJ did not pursue, you know, with alacrity a lot of the issues surrounding the Biden family, too.
06:12I think one of the things—so the answer is yes, and it applies to all parties.
06:15What I hear from the left is a constant drumbeat of accusation about President Trump, to which I acquiesce in part, but I find them utterly unconcerned with the same sorts of issues arising on their side of the aisle.
06:27They see President Trump as the person who's constantly violating the standard, the person who's constantly setting the new standard.
06:33And as I've said publicly before, I think President Trump stumbled on the prone body of American politics and said, this is a dead body.
06:40I see him much more as a coroner than as a murderer.
06:43Now, that doesn't mean that there's not some of both, meaning I think things can get worse under President Trump than they were heretofore, and I'm not going to deny that he's done things that I think are bad and wrong.
06:53I was very critical of his rhetoric, for example, between the election of 2020 and January 6th, but I do think that to ignore the fact—
07:02Were any of these things disqualifying in a moral political sense like election—well, January 6th, for example.
07:09Right, so I don't know what disqualifying means in the sense that I did not support him in the primaries.
07:13That he would lose your faith and vote and support forever.
07:18Well, I mean, the only way to lose my faith and support and vote forever would be for there to be an alternative that I find superior to him.
07:27This is the problem.
07:28When you're making voting decisions, would I want Donald Trump marrying into my family?
07:33Probably not.
07:33When it comes to my politicians, the problem is that once you say that the candidate is, quote-unquote, disqualified, then you either have to sit out the election, which I did in 2016.
07:45I found both candidates to be insufficient, and then whatever damage President Trump, I thought, had done by being elected in 2016, I thought that he did a bunch of things I liked between 2016 and 2020.
07:55And then I did not like what he did with regard to the election of 2020 and what I think are falsehoods that he told about winning that election and the idea that he was the actual victor and all that.
08:06And I didn't like what he said leading up to January 6th.
08:10Again, I'm very, very critical of that.
08:12And then I didn't support him in the primaries, and then he ended up winning the nomination.
08:15He was running against Kamala Harris.
08:16So I can either sit out the election again, which doesn't really achieve purposes.
08:20So in other words, what you're saying is that the potential of Kamala Harris, in your view politically, outweighs the support for what, in essence, was an insurrection on Capitol Hill.
08:32Well, that's hard for me, to say the least, even for any conservative.
08:37I think that's – first of all, I think that that's a pretty poor way of putting it because that's not the way that we assess candidates in the real world.
08:42The way that we assess candidates in the real world is who is more likely to perform the agenda that I see as important versus who is more likely to inhibit that agenda.
08:52And so I can fully disapprove of what happened on January 6th and think it was quite terrible and still acknowledge that Donald Trump as president from 2017 to 2021 did a better job than I think Joe Biden did.
09:02There are many people who consider themselves never Trumpers in the Republican Party.
09:07Not a decisive amount, certainly, but there is certainly a number of people in the Republican Party who see his moral transgressions as so serious that they make a very different calculation than you do.
09:20I mean, sure, and they're entitled to that calculation.
09:23The question to me is always one of iteration.
09:27Voting is one decision and then supporting every – just because you vote for someone doesn't mean that you support everything that they do.
09:33Ben, I think a lot of people know your voice.
09:36They know about a lot of your opinions and points of view, but I don't know that they know a hell of a lot about you.
09:41You had your first syndicated column, as most 17-year-olds do, when you were a teenager.
09:47How did that happen?
09:49So when I went to UCLA, I'd skipped a couple of grades.
09:51I went to UCLA when I was 16, and I walked onto campus.
09:55I picked up a copy of the UCLA Daily Bruin.
09:57I saw an editorial that I thought was pretty terrible.
10:00What did it say?
10:01What was the –
10:02I believe that the editorial at the time was comparing Ariel Sharon, then prime minister of Israel, to Adolf Eichmann, the creator of the Nazi concentration camp system.
10:11And so I went in and I asked if I could write a counterpoint.
10:13And they said sure.
10:14So I wrote a counterpoint.
10:15And then they said we need somebody.
10:17We can't find anybody who's on the other side to write a sort of point-counterpoint on a rock.
10:22And I said, okay, I can think about doing that.
10:23So I did that.
10:24So I wrote a point-counterpoint column for the Daily Bruin for a while, and then that turned into just a regular column.
10:29After about a year of doing that, I was talking with my father, and I said, do you think that my stuff is good enough to be printed in like a normal newspaper?
10:36And so let me do some research.
10:37And he came up with a place called Creator Syndicate.
10:40So I printed out some of my columns from the Daily Bruin.
10:42I sent them in.
10:43And about three weeks later, I got a call from them asking if I would write a syndicated weekly column for them.
10:49But you were fully formed as a conservative at age 17.
10:53How did that happen?
10:54So, I mean, I was always very into history.
10:56I was always very into politics.
10:58I read a lot.
10:59I still do, obviously.
11:01And so I had, you know, I think pretty strong opinions on a lot of subjects.
11:04I won't say that they were as well-informed as I would hope they are 25 years later.
11:09You know, in the era prior to kind of full-scale social media, I was unlucky enough to have a syndicated column at the age of 17,
11:15meaning that many of my dumbest thoughts from ages 18 to 25 are on record.
11:19What were your dumbest thoughts that you now regret?
11:22There's like a whole list of them.
11:23I mean, I actually put up a list on our website over at Daily Wire.
11:27There were some thoughts about, for example, civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war that were poorly articulated.
11:32There were some thoughts about Israel and Palestinian issue that were poorly articulated or wrong that I rejected later.
11:40When you're young and in this field, one of the ways you get attention is by saying overtly provocative things.
11:46That has not changed.
11:47And so a lot of the ways that I would articulate things at the age of 19 are not the ways that I would articulate them today.
11:53Would you say that you do that now, that you, you know, push the boundaries of what you really think to get attention?
11:58I know, I would say that I would say that I really don't do that very much now.
12:02So let's talk about the college campus that you came on to, because we hear a lot about this.
12:06That's that somehow the environment of a place like UCLA is completely left leaning.
12:11And then we have the evidence of you walking into the newspaper offices and you had a column right away.
12:16So what was it like UCLA when you came there?
12:19I would never say that it was terrible for me to go to a left leaning college.
12:22There's no question that UCLA was a left leaning university.
12:25It wasn't a place where I felt as though I couldn't express my opinions.
12:29I will admit that when it came time for taking tests, depending on how restrictive I thought the professor was,
12:35I think that the best way to get an A in a class is to write what the professor would like you to write as opposed to what you what you would like to write.
12:42But you didn't you didn't do that.
12:43And you got into Harvard Law School.
12:45You made your you made your opinions conform to the professor.
12:49I'm shocked in the blue book, in the blue book.
12:52Right. I mean, so the blue books were the way you would handwrite your essays.
12:55And so if I had a professor who I thought was very much to the left and intolerant of particular opinions, then I would do that.
13:02And that wasn't every left wing professor that I had.
13:04Some were, you know, quite eager or welcoming of differing opinions.
13:08But I won't say that every single professor was equally welcoming of differing opinions.
13:12Ben, what initially attracted you to conservatism?
13:16I grew up in a household with two Reagan Republicans.
13:19Obviously, my parents are pretty conservative.
13:21The basic idea that I think lies behind a good conservatism is personal responsibility, duty, a requirement that you do the right thing,
13:34a basic moral stance about how individuals should act in a free country.
13:38And I think that's still largely what drives my conservatism today.
13:42But do you find do you find that that's antithetical to liberalism?
13:46It doesn't have to be.
13:47But I think that liberalism very often is a way of shielding people from the consequences of their own decisions or an attempt to shift individual responsibility onto systems in a way that I think is frequently unjustified.
14:00The right acknowledges that when people fail because human nature is fallible, very often that is your own responsibility.
14:07And the best way to actually treat with that is to self-correct.
14:11And I think that for the left, because they have, I think, a rosier view of what human nature is,
14:15they tend to attribute to systems that which I think more properly lies in responsibility in the individual.
14:21How much did religion influence your becoming a conservative?
14:25You were raised an Orthodox Jew.
14:26I think you're still a practicing Orthodox Jew.
14:28Am I correct?
14:29Yes, that's right.
14:30We became Orthodox when I was 11.
14:32So I remember eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I was fairly young when we became Orthodox.
14:39My mom and dad started going to a synagogue down in Venice Beach, actually, and they were very taken with the rabbi, and I think that they got more and more interested in that.
14:48They decided that they wanted to send me to a Jewish day school, and so I'd go to the Jewish day school.
14:51It was an Orthodox school, and I'd come home and say,
14:53Mom and Dad, I don't understand why we're doing X, Y, and Z when at school they're teaching me that this is what we're supposed to be doing.
14:58And my parents were, I think, smart enough to see the inherent conflict, and instead of saying your school is doing it wrong or you're doing it wrong or they're teaching the wrong thing, they said, well, we're probably doing it wrong, and so probably we need to actually rectify that breach.
15:11Okay, then let's talk about the debate that you're having inside MAGA.
15:14You're at the center of a fight, a feud that's developing in the conservative movement, and it has to do with anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories related to anti-Semitism.
15:25Not long after Charlie Kirk died, you spoke at the Turning Point Conference, AmericaFest, and you called out Candace Owens and attendees like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson.
15:38These are very influential figures now on the right and the media of the MAGA movement.
15:46Talk to me a little bit about this divide, how it's developed, what it's done to your relationships as well inside the MAGA movement.
15:53So, I mean, first of all, as people may suspect, I'm not particularly interested in my sort of personal relationships with others in the political sphere.
16:02I have a family that's very tight-knit.
16:04I have four children going on five.
16:06I have a dog.
16:06I have plenty of things going on in my social calendar, and I don't see it as particularly important to hang out with people who are in sort of the same career milieu.
16:14Well, then tell me about your decision to make that speech, and we'll play a clip from it too.
16:18There were two speeches that I gave back-to-back. One was a speech that I gave at the Heritage Foundation the night before, and one was the TPUSA speech that I gave that night.
16:26The Heritage Foundation speech was specifically directed at Tucker Carlson because I believe that Tucker Carlson is not a conservative in any real market way that I can identify, and I was pointing that out at the Heritage Foundation.
16:37How would you describe his politics?
16:39Conspiratorial populism.
16:40I try not to speculate on motivations of people because I just don't have a window into their head.
16:44All I can say is that the stuff that he has been promoting for the past several years is very much in line with the philosophies of people like Alexander Dugin.
16:52It is very much in line.
16:54The Russian nationalist philosopher said to be close to at least the thinking of Vladimir Putin.
17:00Yes, his view of America in the world is a view that is actually closer to Howard Zinn than I think to that of sort of traditional conservatives.
17:10This idea that America is a nefarious and terrible force in the world that has committed myriad sins and must withdraw from the world both for its own good and for the good of the world.
17:18His belief that a conspiracy, a conspiratorial coterie of people is manipulating American policy.
17:25Those people very often happen to have crossover with Jews, according to his guests, that he routinely launders onto the air.
17:31In the aftermath of Charlie's death, Candace Owens in particular had started speculating openly that people at TPUSA up to and including in my interpretation, Erica Kirk, Charlie's wife, had been complicit in his murder or at least complicit in a cover up of his murder.
17:47Unless it is true that there was a big, big, big payday that was on the line.
17:53And if Charlie radically stated that he was done with Israel, if Charlie said he had no choice but to abandon the pro-Israel cause because of, and I quote, Jewish donors, the behavior of Jewish donors.
18:06If he said that, yes or no, well then, I don't know, maybe, maybe some people didn't want to take that risk that he was kind of what, become Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson?
18:17Her bizarre conspiratorial rantings had been treated as legitimate and worthwhile by people ranging from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly.
18:27And so I felt that this was a necessary speech to make about the gap that has emerged on the right between a conspiratorial view of politics promoted by commentators who seem to bear less responsibility for truth-telling than I think they do.
18:46And that sort of conspiratorialism has taken over large parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
18:53Were you surprised by it?
18:54Candace Owen, I believe, is somebody that you worked with at The Daily Wire.
18:57Yeah, we hired her in 2021.
19:00What did you see in that?
19:01And we fired her in 2023.
19:02So in 2021, what we saw was a fairly, I would say, mainstream conservative who said inflammatory things, obviously, and who had been telling us that she was-
19:14Inflammatory things that you liked?
19:16Some that I, I would say most of them that I liked, some of them not as much.
19:20But, you know, as, as people who hired her, we thought that she was going to develop in sort of, you know, intellectual directions.
19:26She had said that she was learning with Shelby Steele, for example, and reading the works of Thomas Sowell and all this kind of thing.
19:31By 2022, it was apparent that she was moving in another direction.
19:35And then it took until 2023 for that direction to come to full fruition, which was fairly open anti-Semitism.
19:41What was the direction in 2023?
19:43Forgive me.
19:43She was spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, among other conspiracy theories, including the idea that Emmanuel Macron's wife is actually a man and all this sort of stuff.
19:53And so at that point-
19:54So that was your limit with her?
19:56To be fair, I am not an officer of my company.
19:59The people who made that decision were Jeremy Boring and Caleb Robinson, the co-CEOs of the company.
20:03But that was the collective management decision, yes.
20:06Now, you specifically criticized Tucker Carlson for a really soft interview he did with a guy named Nick Fuentes, who's, I think it's fair to say, a Nazi apologist.
20:15If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes, if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.
20:26You point out how outrageous he is, but is that exactly what Carlson wants in his guest, just attention?
20:35I mean, I think that probably, you know, the attention doesn't hurt.
20:38But at the same time, I think that probably there is some ideological overlap between some of the things that he believes about America and the conspiratorial forces controlling it and some of the stuff that Nick Fuentes believes.
20:48What Tucker has a habit of doing is bringing on guests who spout the most conspiratorial form of the theory, and then he sort of buys it back about 5%, and then he allows those views to be predominant in the public discourse while talking about what wonderful people these folks are.
21:05Okay, but I get that, and I can't help but agree with that, obviously, but then you have Donald Trump.
21:12He hasn't had dinner with me, but he's had dinner with Nick Fuentes.
21:15Nice, and how does that affect your feeling about Donald Trump?
21:19So, obviously, I mean, I condemn that at the time.
21:20When it comes to his dinner with Fuentes, and I believe it was Kanye West.
21:24That's right.
21:24It was Kanye West and Fuentes at the time.
21:26The president of the United States, and people say that I grade on a curve, but I think I grade realistically here.
21:30I am not surprised by what President Trump does.
21:33He likes being with famous people.
21:34He very often does not know who they are.
21:36He will throw them out.
21:37He will say bad things about them five minutes later.
21:39He will like Steve Bannon until he calls him sloppy.
21:41Stephen fires him, whereupon he will welcome him back into his orbit and like him again.
21:45But Ben, Ben, Ben, but he's having, but maybe, I think, you're taking this too casually.
21:51He's having dinner with a Nazi apologist.
21:53And I didn't take that casually.
21:55And then really doesn't go off and blast him.
21:58He just kind of says, oh, I kind of didn't know who it was, and Kanye brought him along.
22:02First of all, that's bad staff work, to say the least.
22:04Terrible staff work.
22:05And it's bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States, no?
22:09I agree that it's bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States.
22:13I mean, what's the equivalent of Kamala Harris or Joe Biden?
22:17I don't think that's quite the same thing as Tucker Carlson legitimately using his forum
22:21to provide Nick Fuentes a way to speak to the public.
22:25Fair enough, but that's a pretty low bar.
22:28No, I agree, but those are the two things you're comparing.
22:30Now, at America Fest, the vice president said this.
22:33President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics
22:38by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.
22:43I didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform,
22:48and I don't really care if some people out there, I'm sure will have the fake news media,
22:53denounce me after this speech.
22:55He was kind of attacking you, wasn't he?
22:57I mean, I assume that he was disagreeing with the thing that I had said, sure.
23:00And I will point out that I don't think the vice president is being very accurate
23:04about his own approach to various conservatives and other people online.
23:08He's quite fond of attacking people online from time to time.
23:11Totally.
23:12And, you know, I remember when a bunch of, I think it was young Republican leaders
23:16had their signal chat exposed, and they were making all kinds of anti-Semitic remarks on that,
23:22and the vice president didn't denounce that either.
23:24In fact, he just kind of thought it was, you know, kids being kids.
23:28Right. And again, I highly disagree with this as both a matter of morality and as a matter of tactics.
23:34I think tactically it's foolish.
23:35I think it's immoral.
23:36What's going on?
23:38What's going on that this is so prevalent and excused at the top end of at least part of the conservative media sphere
23:47and the White House?
23:50I mean, I think it's a mirror image of what's going on on the left.
23:53I think to pretend that anti-Semitism is not rising on both the right and the left is to be whistling past the graveyard.
23:58But fair enough.
23:59But stick to the right.
24:01Let's anatomize that.
24:03Anatomize that, too.
24:04But the reason they're in office, I understand.
24:07But Democrats would like to be in office.
24:09And so, again, to go back to sort of the original point with regard to President Trump
24:12and voting for him and not voting for him.
24:14And if the question is binary choice, then you're going to have to make a decision between one of these parties
24:19because these are the two major parties.
24:21And so that's why I think it's important to bring into perspective what's happening in both parties.
24:25But, Ben, do you see anti-Semitism in the mouths of leading Democratic contenders for the presidency?
24:31I see anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party apparatus's willingness to not only humor but to promote everybody ranging from New York Mayor Zahran Mamdani
24:41to Rashida Tlaib, congresswoman from Michigan, to Ohana Omar, congresswoman from Minnesota,
24:46to the bizarre attempt to mirror all of the excesses of the anti-Israel movement.
24:52And I don't just mean anti-Nitanyahu.
24:55I mean anti-Israel.
24:56Listen, I asked Gavin Newsom about this.
24:58I was on Gavin's podcast, the governor of California.
25:00And he acknowledged that this sort of stuff has become quite prevalent in sort of Democratic circles.
25:05So the reason that I'm pointing this out is, number one, because I think it's important just as a matter of description
25:10to be realistic about the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States period.
25:15And then I'm happy to discuss the problems on my own side of the political aisle, which I have repeatedly.
25:19And you have talked about the anti-Semitism on the left, and we can discuss that as well.
25:24And on the right.
25:25But, well, yes, you have.
25:26But did the degree of it on the right take you by surprise?
25:30Sure.
25:31First of all, to understand what's happening, I think we first have to understand what anti-Semitism actually is,
25:36because I think that when people mischaracterize the definition, that allows their particular side to escape.
25:42So what people tend to do is they will define anti-Semitism in a way that excuses their side,
25:46and that throws all of the blame on the other side.
25:48The definition of anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism at its root, is a conspiracy theory about the power of Jews as a group in the world.
25:56And that can be channeled into an anti-Zionism that says that Israel is controlling American foreign policy,
26:01and that Israel has befuddled the world, and it's all about the Benjamins,
26:04which is the kind of thing that Elhan Omar says.
26:07Or it can be channeled into Jews in America are too powerful in the media,
26:12and they are cliquish, and they are controlling the circumstances of my life.
26:16And yet, Ben, as somebody who's written from Israel and Palestine for years and years,
26:25and the reaction to some of the things I write is that I'm an anti-Semite, which is, I've got to say, news to me.
26:32But I'm no more anti-Semitic than you are, and to get attacked like that is hideous.
26:41Okay, so this is why I'm trying to be more precise about the definition.
26:44Being critical of Israeli policy is not the same thing as saying, for example,
26:48that Israel's government designed and implemented a genocide, which is a lie.
26:52Okay, and that is a lie that can be chalked up to a nefarious view of what Jews are doing in the world,
26:59because it is also part and parcel of a broader lie,
27:01which is that Jews have then sold the idea that they are capable of doing whatever they want
27:05under the guise of America's banner, and they've done so because of their inordinate power.
27:10It's part of a broader conspiracy theory.
27:11One of the things that's happened is, in much the same way that the right said for a long time,
27:15you keep calling everybody racist, therefore nobody's a racist, which is untrue, right?
27:19There are actual racists out there.
27:20There are.
27:21But the idea is that if you over-apply a category, then it starts losing its power and its effectiveness,
27:27and that actually opens the door to the thing.
27:29I think the same thing has happened with anti-Semitism.
27:31And so what I've said before is, instead of talking in categories of anti-Semitism or Jew hatred or the rest of it,
27:37why don't we talk about what's true and what's false and what's moral and what's not moral?
27:41Because that's easier for people to get their head around.
27:42Ben, let me ask you about another extremely potent issue, not just in the Republican Party, and that's the Epstein files.
27:48You've been following this.
27:49What do you think it proves or doesn't prove, other than the absolute hideous nature of the subject himself?
27:57Let's put it to the virality of the narrative around the Epstein files is different from what the evidence shows in the Epstein files.
28:04What the evidence shows in the Epstein files is that you have a number of very high-profile people who are in close contact with Jeffrey Epstein,
28:13who was a convicted sex offender with minors.
28:16The indictments against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell suggest that the trafficking of minors was about Jeffrey Epstein.
28:23There's no one else who's been indicted in terms of trafficking of minors except for Jeffrey Epstein.
28:28And according to the FBI under President Trump, there is no one who is going to be,
28:32because they do not have evidence sufficient that he was trafficking young girls to other people.
28:35The narrative that has been drawn from the Epstein story, because presumably people don't know where his money comes from,
28:41although there was a very, very deep dive, I believe, in New York Times Magazine looking into where his money came from.
28:46The narrative is a broader narrative that goes back to kind of the heart of conspiracy theorizing
28:51that has taken over, I think, large swaths of both parties, but it is very, very potent on the right.
28:56And that is that there is a cadre of people who are preying upon children, who manipulate everything in your life,
29:04who may be doing so because they have been honeypotted or because they are being manipulated by a foreign intelligence service.
29:10Typically on the right, on the far right, this is treated as Mossad, even though there is zero evidence that that is the case.
29:15And then Ehud Barak's name is brought up in this context.
29:18As you might imagine, I'm not a fan of Ehud Barak, but there is no evidence that on behalf of Mossad,
29:22he was running Jeffrey Epstein as a sex trafficking agent.
29:26By the way, it would be a pretty terrible statecraft considering he was already a convicted sex offender.
29:30I think that the broader theory here, which goes well beyond the evidence and the virality of that theory,
29:36speaks to people's belief that they are not in control of their own lives and that conspiratorial forces who prey on children,
29:41which is obviously the best way to, you know, if you wish to have the most nefarious form of the most nefarious theory that you've got,
29:50making them pedophiles is a great way to do it.
29:51But the attempt to kind of draw out a gigantic pedophilic conspiracy ring that was running all of America's foreign policy
29:58and domestic policy and culture, I think that goes to people's desire to abdicate control over their own lives,
30:04which I think gets back to some of my original politics, right?
30:06Which is where I was saying that I think individual responsibility is the lodestar of a successful society.
30:12And when you have conspiratorialism take over, as Karl Popper suggested, it's a massive problem.
30:16Is Donald Trump and the MAGA movement healthy for this country,
30:21or would you rather see the Republican Party return to its, the roots that you started out as a conservative and a Republican?
30:29Do you see promise in the people that have been put forward as successors to Donald Trump?
30:36J.D. Vance among them.
30:38So, you know, I have differential opinions on a wide variety of these people, right?
30:42The president obviously picked Vance for his vice president.
30:45If vice president were in a primary with Marco Rubio, I would be likely to support Marco Rubio in that primary over J.D. Vance, for example.
30:53Are there options that I like better than others? Sure.
30:55Are there things about the Trump movement that I think have been good and salutary? Sure.
30:59Do I think that, is he my ideal?
31:02If I could construct in my head the ideal Republican candidate or president, would it look exactly like Donald Trump?
31:08No, but I'm not sure that he's claiming to be that, nor do I have that magical power.
31:12Try as I might to manifest that in real life.
31:15What do you think Donald Trump cares about?
31:17Again, I try not to get into motivations because I'm not a psychiatrist.
31:20But when you asked if he was honest before, I said in some ways, yes, in some ways, no.
31:23And we got to the ways in no, but we never got to the ways in yes.
31:26The way in yes is that whatever is in his head is going to come out his mouth in the next 2.7 seconds.
31:31There is no brain-mouth barrier for President Trump.
31:34That's not so much honesty as impulsivity, no?
31:36Well, I mean, it's honesty in the sense that you are getting his honest take on what he thinks in that moment.
31:41In that moment.
31:42It may be an impulsive approach to honesty, but it is definitely – there is a definition of honesty by which it –
31:47It's revealing. I'll give you that.
31:49It is revealing. It is authentic. If you want to call it authentic, it's authentic.
31:53Is that what authenticity means now?
31:55What is sort of the core of his sort of political belief?
31:57Again, I think he has an instinct that he wants America to be great and powerful in the world.
32:01He likes the symbolism of America being great and powerful in the world.
32:04America is strong. America is virile.
32:07These are things that clearly he does believe.
32:09And so the way that manifests in policy may be grabbing Nicolas Maduro and taking him back to New York for trial or it may be an industrial policy that is more reminiscent of a 1937 FDR policy than it is of a traditional sort of Reagan Republican policy.
32:24We're finding more to be sympathetic about with Vladimir Putin than Zelensky.
32:30It's pretty slippery slope.
32:32Right. When it comes to Putin and Zelensky, again, that one I cannot explain from a sort of America great perspective.
32:39I think that the president –
32:40Can't you explain it?
32:41I mean, can't you explain it in terms of he is impressed by, taken with the kind of authoritarian impulses and behavior of Putin rather than Zelensky?
32:54Same with Xi Jinping.
32:55I think that he is attracted by powerful people for sure.
33:00But I – yeah, again, I'm not going to – he has sort of varied fairly widely actually over the course of the last year and a half in terms of the things that he's been saying.
33:09Sometimes he'll say –
33:09From day to day and hour to hour.
33:11Yes, on Russia, Ukraine.
33:12And again, I've been very consistent that I think that we ought to be supporting Ukraine sufficient to deter the Russian threat and to force Putin to the table.
33:19I want to ask you about Minneapolis, which is still going on.
33:23But just from a free speech point of view, from a First Amendment point of view, should somebody like Don Lemon be prosecuted?
33:31I mean, obviously, if what he was doing was performing an act of journalism, the answer is no.
33:35I mean, the question is going to be whether they can prove in court that he was actually a conspirator in the violation of the FACE Act.
33:41Are you worried about Donald Trump's regard for journalists?
33:44He's obviously infatuated them.
33:46He loves to talk to them, but he refers to them as enemies of the people.
33:51And you know as a student of history, that's a phrase that comes from Robespierre.
33:55It comes from Stalin.
33:57And it has consequences.
33:59I mean, again, he's been doing that for 10 years.
34:02And you seem to have a robust audience and the ability to speak freely every day.
34:05And I don't think that you're sitting in your studio right now waiting for the FBI to break down your door.
34:08You think he's just kidding around.
34:09Well, the FBI had no problem breaking down the door of the Washington Post reporter and taking all her devices recently.
34:15And if you go back to the Obama administration, James Rosen was treated quite similarly when he was working for Fox News.
34:21And then the Associated Press, I think, had some situations with the Obama administration as well.
34:25Like this, again, this is why I go back to is Trump breaking new ground here or is he using tools that were that were left over from other administrations in ways that other people don't like?
34:35And I don't like it either.
34:36I mean, him suing various outlets I think is wrong and bad.
34:39Do I think that we are now at grave threat that the First Amendment has ended in the United States because Don Lemon was picked up by the DOJ?
34:46But, Ben, sooner or later, he's not going to like what you say.
34:49And your turn is going to come.
34:51And you're going to be deposed.
34:52And you're going to be sued.
34:53And will that change your view of this?
34:55Not particularly.
34:56I mean, I'm not – if he – again, I think that it's wrong for him to do the suing of these outlets.
35:02So I'm not sure what would change about my opinion given that I've said already that I think that it's wrong.
35:06It might hurt more if he did it to me.
35:08Let me get a little inside about –
35:10You've noticed that I'm not excusing any of the things that I think he's doing that are wrong.
35:14And this is why one of the things that I think that if people on the opposite side of the aisle actually wanted to be shooting for a better future here, which is I think what we would all like, it's not enough to simply rail against Trump and say this is not normal.
35:28It's why I think the people on the left should do some of the same with their own side.
35:32Much of what we've talked about here is me criticizing my own side.
35:34I'd say 90 percent of what we've talked about is me criticizing my own side.
35:38But I find an extraordinary dearth of that, unfortunately, on the left.
35:42And because of that, I think people do react by supporting the right.
35:46And this is one of the things that I think is a huge mistake on the part of media is to sort of play this game where Trump does a thing.
35:55Therefore, it is a bad thing.
35:56People on the left do the same thing.
35:58They are opposing Trump.
35:59Therefore, it's a good thing.
36:00And that seems to me completely problematic.
36:02I'm perfectly willing, Tom, each of these specific problems say if the evidence shows that Donald Trump is targeting Donald Trump.
36:07There's no question that every president, and I'll just say it unequivocally, every president sooner or later lies.
36:15Every president sooner or later misbehaves.
36:19We're talking, though, about radical difference in degree.
36:23Are we not?
36:24I mean, I really do not think so.
36:25That's where we disagree.
36:26We definitely disagree on this.
36:29We definitely disagree on this.
36:30I think that the left routinely underestimates what's done by the left.
36:33Whereas I think I'm being pretty accurate in that I think both sides are routinely violating the rules.
36:37And that's why we are in sort of a political death spiral to a certain extent.
36:40When you look at immigration policy, I think we can agree that there was no immigration policy, certainly no effective immigration policy when it came to the southern border for far too long.
36:52And we can argue about the reasons for that and what bill didn't get passed and so on.
36:57How do you feel about the way it's being done as dramatized by ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere and mass deportations and people being shipped off to El Salvador and this kind of thing?
37:09So these are really sort of two separate questions, right?
37:12Trump's border policy is incredibly popular because the border was sealed day one.
37:16And it turns out that you didn't need a piece of legislation to do that.
37:18Joe Biden could have always done that.
37:19And in fact, even in the last couple of months while he was president, he sort of started to do that.
37:23But as far as internal policing of illegal immigration, I think that the approach taken by Tom Homan, the borders are, has been significantly better than the approach taken by the DHS secretary or Stephen Miller, the president's top advisor on these issues, which is hone in on the criminal illegal immigrants, many of which are in the system.
37:45I think that Democrats are actually making a major mistake by not having local law enforcement cooperate with ICE in taking people who are in jail and deporting those people or reporting them to ICE for deportation.
37:57I think that's a huge mistake by Democrats politically and just in terms of policy.
38:01Well, as we're constantly reminded, Obama deported many, many people.
38:05It's not as if this was this is some unique thing.
38:08That's true.
38:09I mean, I think the numbers.
38:11Yeah, that's right.
38:12I mean, I think that, you know, not to get into the numbers, some of that's turnaways at the border.
38:15But you're right.
38:16And that's been a consistent policy in the United States for a while is to deport criminal illegal immigrants.
38:21Ramping that up, I think, is both smart policy and good policy.
38:24I think that the Trump administration's reaction, which has been, you know, what if we set up quotas or what if we decide that we're going to radically ramp up and going after non-criminal illegal immigrants, by which I mean people who have not committed an additional crime other than crossing the border illegally.
38:39That that is a political mistake and that that's been redounding not to the benefit of the Trump administration.
38:48I think that there are better ways to do it than they've been.
38:50But Democrats are playing with fire in a lot of the stuff that they've been doing in places like Minneapolis.
38:54I think the idea that ICE agents are state-sponsored terrorism.
38:56I confronted the California governor about that and he backed off of that.
39:00Rhetorically.
39:01Yes.
39:02When people suggest that ICE is Gestapo, when people are likening this to the Holocaust, I think it's a massive, massive, not only mistake.
39:10Separate that, the rhetoric from the behavior.
39:12What do you think of the behavior of ICE?
39:14When people in the government, the highest levels of government, call, you know, refer to people who are like Alex Preddy as not just, well, they refer to him as a terrorist.
39:24Yes, I thought that, I literally came out that day and I said that that was a complete misapprehension of the situation so far as I could tell on the tape.
39:32And I said the same thing about the characterization of Renee Good as somebody who's trying to mow down immigration officers by the bushel.
39:38I mean, it was stated by Gregory Bovino, I believe, that Alex Preddy wanted to kill as many ICE agents as possible or Border Patrol as possible.
39:45And I said that that's not true and I think that that's wrong, which is why I'm very happy that Tom Homan, who seems to be more of an adult, has been put in charge of implementation of border policy in Minnesota.
39:54I do want to focus on one thing.
39:56You said, and I think quite rightly earlier, that the left and the right keep, these aren't your words, but mine, just building their, you know, digging their trenches deeper and deeper and deeper.
40:08Who do you see on your side of things in the conservative world who's a potential leader that would not have these tremendous moral failings that you've described?
40:21Who would do without the kind of rhetorical ugliness that you have denounced?
40:27Who would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging?
40:34Who do you see as a potential leader on the Republican side that would make you a great deal more comfortable?
40:40I mean, again, I think there are a number of them.
40:41I think ranging from Glenn Youngkin, former governor of Virginia, to Brian Kemp, former governor of Georgia.
40:47I think the governor DeSantis in Florida has done an excellent job.
40:49I think that Senator Ted Cruz has spoken out very clearly against people like, for example, Tucker Carlson and his predations.
40:58I think Secretary of State Rubio would be really good.
41:00I'd like to see Vice President Vance change tack on a lot of this.
41:03I hope that he will.
41:05This is actually a systemic problem on both the left and the right is the primary system is very, very difficult for people who are not deliberately inflammatory to navigate because primary voters tend to be the most passionate voters.
41:15And that means that the people who tend to elevate are the people who are sometimes the most provocative.
41:20I mean, you know, you've spent time in the United States Senate.
41:23If you go and you talk to some of the most passionate advocates on both sides of the aisle in the Senate, they actually do still do the kind of Tip O'Neill, Ronald Reagan thing.
41:30Like they still mow each other.
41:31A lot of them still like each other.
41:32A lot of them still do lunch together.
41:35And the kind of story that's sold, I think, in the commentariat particularly is that you must hate the person on the other side in order for you to win great victory.
41:46You shouldn't be able to do things with 51 percent.
41:47You should have to have 70 percent to do it.
41:49That's why the system was built the way it is with all of the gridlock between the branches and between the states and the federal government.
41:55And I think that, you know, the way that both the political parties as vehicles for political victory and also the commentariat in search of clicks and giggles have mobilized is in opposition to that.
42:06I'm not interested in clicks, much less giggles, even though we do have cartoons.
42:12I my concern is with the sustenance of democracy and democratic institutions.
42:20And I wonder if we share or we don't share a concern that the period that we're in now is potentially lays waste to those institutions.
42:32I mean, I'm worried about it for sure, but I think that that we may be worried about it from different angles.
42:37One of the things that I notice about democracies that sort of fall into crisis is, number one, obviously, lack of institutional trust.
42:45But if you believe that if the other side wins, it's literally the end of the democracy, that is incredibly dangerous.
42:52That really is a problem because then it suggests that if the other side wins, you're never going to get to vote again.
42:56Tyranny is upon you.
42:57And perhaps the only solution is a solution that sort of breaks the system.
43:02But Ben, when the president of the United States tries to threaten people in Georgia to give him some votes or he starts to talk about nationalizing the elections, all these things, whether it's January 6th, aren't these legitimate concerns?
43:16Is the worrier the problem or the actual situation the problem?
43:20Well, I mean, no, I think in some situations, the worrier is the problem.
43:22In some situations, it depends on the conclusion you're drawing.
43:24I think the worry about January 6th was justified because obviously I think that the behavior of the president between the election and January 6th was morally wrong and also legally wrong.
43:34But I also think that the guardrails held.
43:36And I think that, you know, the notion that Democrats are sitting around worrying that there will never be another clean election, that's not true.
43:43And when Republicans say the same thing, Democrats are right to pounce on that.
43:47Democrats will say, President Trump will say, if we don't win this election, it's because it was stolen.
43:50But then I'll hear Democrats turn around and say very much the same thing about Republicans.
43:55And once both sides believe that if the other side wins, the election was stolen, then how are we supposed to ever share a polity together?
44:02That is a massive problem.
44:04And so it's something, again, I pressed Governor Newsom on this when I sat with him and say, you're out there saying that it's the death of democracy.
44:10We're at the end of democracy.
44:11You're trying to run in 2028.
44:12So you don't believe that.
44:13And one of the things that when the president says he wants to federalize elections, I say that he shouldn't say that.
44:19He's wrong.
44:20You know what else was wrong?
44:21When the House of Representatives under Democrats tried to push H.R.1, which was a federalization of elections.
44:26It was an attempt to use the power of the federal government to cram down particular election rules on states, including things like ballot harvesting.
44:33What it leads to is a place that actually Vice President Vance has said.
44:37He said you shouldn't refrain from using the tool because you believe the other side won't use it.
44:41They will use it.
44:42So you should preemptively use it.
44:43Once we get to the point in American politics where one side basically says the other side will do whatever it can to cheat, steal, lie, change election results, destroy the country.
44:53Therefore, we must do that to stop them from doing that.
44:56Then you are really at sort of the end of a thing.
44:59And that thing is the American experiment.
45:01But the reality is that our system is very much still functional.
45:05And last I checked, Democrats are slated to win the House and possibly the Senate.
45:08So they don't feel like this is the end of the road.
45:11Ben Shapiro, thank you.
45:12Thanks so much.
45:13Thanks so much.
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