Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 23, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

53:03

At Auschwitz With Elon Musk

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	We are broadcasting today here from Krakow, Poland.
	Flew in here on Saturday night, arrived on Sunday night so we could visit Auschwitz with Elon Musk.
	We were invited by the European Jewish Association.
	Every year they do an event here at Auschwitz around the liberation of Auschwitz.
	This is the time of year that Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.
	And I have to say, Auschwitz is an insane experience.
	I've never been there before.
	I know that Elon hasn't been there before either, and we were walking the grounds together, obviously being given a tour by a tour guide.
	And, you know, for those who have seen images of the Holocaust, which I would assume is pretty much everyone, although my poll number is apparently not, for those who have seen movies about the Holocaust, seeing the actual structures where mass death was brought upon the Jewish people, As well as Roma, homosexuals, Russian soldiers.
	It's an astonishing demonstration of the darkness that is present and possible inside the human soul.
	And just first general impressions of what it's like there.
	And for those who have not visited, it is worth a visit because I think that we tend to live very easy lives, thank God, in the West.
	In the modern era, we tend to, you know, look around us and see people who are generally good, people who generally believe in non-evil things.
	And then you go to a place like Auschwitz and you realize that it actually is not all that unthinkable for the unthinkable to happen.
	So first we visited Auschwitz, which is a much smaller area.
	of the actual death camps than the death camp footprint actually is. The death camp footprint
	includes the Auschwitz complex, includes some 40 different camps around work camps, death camps.
	The Auschwitz complex, the center of it, where you see that famous fence, the Arbeit macht frei,
	the work will make free, which of course was a lie, the freedom was murder. You see that when
	you walk in and then you walk into various buildings, brick structures that had originally
	been built as actual barracks and that were then turned into these hell holes where they
	would hold a thousand people in a space that was maybe meant to hold a hundred.
	A couple hundred at best.
	22 toilets for a thousand people.
	Where the death rate in the early days, before they were turned into full-scale death camps, was already 25%.
	You walk into the areas where prisoners were executed.
	You see the basement structures where Zyklon B was first tried against Russian POWs.
	Before it was then turned into a tool of mass extermination against predominantly the Jews.
	960,000 Jews killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II.
	You're walking all this, and it is the lowest of what humanity has to offer, obviously.
	Then you go over to Birkenau, which is even more astonishing, because Birkenau is the actual camp complex that was meant to hold tens of thousands of human beings, and it expands for what must be hundreds of acres.
	It's an extraordinarily large complex.
	They've preserved many of the structures.
	Most of the death camps were blown up by the Nazis, destroyed by the Nazis, and plowed under by the Nazis in an attempt to hide up what they had done.
	Auschwitz-Birkenau obviously survived when it was liberated.
	And so these structures are now 80 years old and they are basically brick hovels in which
	you see bunks stacked one on top of another that are incredibly small.
	We're originally designed by the evil architects of the Holocaust to hold three people at a time, and then were eventually expanded to hold six, seven people at a time.
	I had the privilege when I was younger of helping to write the memoirs of a Holocaust survivor who'd actually gone through Auschwitz-Birkenau.
	And the stories obviously are horrifying.
	Now you walk it and it's empty, obviously.
	And you can feel the darkness of the place.
	Pretty clearly and I think that, you know, I think that Elon obviously saw it as well because I don't think that you can walk through that place and not see the darkness inherent there.
	And I think that there are a bunch of important things to be gained from doing something like walking Auschwitz-Birkenau.
	I think the first is to realize that People can be made to believe nearly anything, and this holds true on the side of both the evil people and the people who are victimized by those who are evil.
	One of the things that you see when you walk through Auschwitz itself, the actual complex, is you see a room that's just filled with suitcases, and every person who brought a suitcase Two Auschwitz thought they were going to end up unpacking that suitcase.
	Step by step by step, European Jewry thought that whatever was next couldn't be this all the way until the final step into the gas chambers.
	And so when we criticize people for not having fought back, at what point were they supposed to believe that the unthinkable was now thinkable?
	Because the unthinkable is unthinkable until precisely the moment that it becomes real.
	It's a cautionary note to people who don't take the world seriously, don't take politics seriously, that we all ought to be, at a certain level, attempting to read tea leaves.
	Now, you can read too deeply, you can be too catastrophic about politics, and I think it's very easy to fall into that when you doomscroll.
	on various social media services. But it is also important to recognize that as we're flying to
	Poland, I was reading the memoirs of Viktor Klemper, who's a German Jew who lived in Dresden,
	actually. And he kept these memoirs all the way through World War II. He ended up living past
	World War II and into the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. And every step of the way
	in his memoirs, he seems to think, well, maybe things are going to be okay.
	Maybe, maybe this will reverse itself.
	And even when he becomes despairing, he never thinks that it's going to turn to this.
	And there is very little limit to the evil that can be created in the human heart.
	That evil can only be masked by ideology.
	Ideology absolutely matters.
	It absolutely matters.
	To truly understand what happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau, you have to understand German history and European history.
	You have to understand European antisemitism.
	And the first and most fundamental thing to understand about antisemitism in the modern era, which again, if you're at Auschwitz-Birkenau, that's what you have to talk about, The first and most fundamental thing to understand about anti-semitism is that at root, it is a conspiracy theory about power.
	When you read the writings of Hitler, when you read writings that precede Hitler by 50, 60, 70 years, anti-semitic writings, when you read these writings, what you see is that there's a conspiracy theory about Jews.
	This conspiracy theory is that the powerful in every industry are Jewish, that they are part of an evil conspiracy, and that the only reason that they have gained power is through some sort of perverse machination.
	And that therefore, they must be extirpated.
	They must be destroyed.
	Now, there's a recognition that it can't be religious Jewry because it turns out that the people at the head of many industries in pre-war Europe are not religious Jews.
	They're Jewish by ethnicity, but they're not practicing.
	Many of them were converts to Protestantism or even Catholicism.
	But because Jews were disproportionately represented at the top of so many major industries, particularly in major cities around Europe, they represent a heavy percentage of places like Berlin, like Warsaw.
	Because of that, there was a theory of power, and the theory of power suggested they were the exploiters, that they had rigged the system on their own behalf, and that therefore they had to be destroyed.
	And that ideology, a self-justifying ideology, whereby the people you're about to kill are actually the true victimizers, which is why, of course, they have to be killed.
	And that particular ideology is so seductive and it's so easy to replicate.
	It doesn't mean the Holocaust is going to be replicated tomorrow.
	I don't think anybody thinks that the Holocaust is going to be replicated tomorrow, God forbid.
	But the ideology that breeds The victimization of Jews among other subgroups, that ideology is very much alive well and with us.
	And I think one of the things that we tend to see when we see places like Auschwitz-Birkenau is the extent of the horror is so unthinkable and so unimaginable that it means that we tend to cut it off from the rest of sort of human relations.
	We tend to think, okay, this is an outlier.
	It's just this crazy statistical outlier.
	When in reality, it is just the culmination of a continuum of theory that has been present on Earth for literally thousands of years, going all the way back to the Book of Exodus.
	The same things that Pharaoh is saying about the Jews, that they're rising in numbers and power, that they're a threat to us.
	That same stuff is being repeated by Hitler in 1935.
	And it's being repeated by some people today.
	Ideology absolutely matters, and to understand what happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau, you have to understand the ideology, to understand the threats to the West, you have to understand ideologies that are pernicious, wrong, and yes, evil.
	So, Elon and I visit Auschwitz, we visit Birkenau, and then we end up going over to the local Doubletree Hotel, which is where the EJA actual event is taking place, and I had the privilege of interviewing Elon on stage.
	Now, first of all, I should tell you, I think that Elon is an incredibly good-hearted person.
	Having met him, this is the first time I've met him in person, but we've spoken before, obviously.
	Having dealt with him, Elon is, by nature, a problem-solving engineer.
	It's the thing that he does.
	It's what's made him world-famous.
	He's a person who solves problems.
	So he sees things through a very analytic frame.
	And that analytic frame means that he's both a risk taker and also somebody who I think is pretty clear-eyed about when a problem is a problem and how to solve that problem.
	That leads him to a shocking level of moral clarity.
	Truly, I think that Elon's understanding of morality is instinctively quite good.
	Which is obviously very different than what the media is telling you.
	What the media are telling you about Elon, the legacy media, they have a stake in degrading Elon as a human being, largely because Elon threatens their frame.
	Elon is obviously both a product and a creator of the free market.
	Elon is rich, which, according to many of the media, makes him inherently bad.
	Elon is somebody who's a free speech advocate, which, according to the media, again, makes him bad because he doesn't gatekeep the way they would like for him to gatekeep, or the way that they gatekeep.
	And so they've been targeting him on a wide variety of issues, nearly all of which I think are fully specious.
	I'm gonna get to the discussion that I had with Elon in just one second.
	First, let's talk about something lighter, how you hire.
	So, obviously, we have a company here at Daily Wire.
	We are very concerned with finding the best people.
	On Planet Earth, to work at our company.
	It's a meritocracy here.
	Well, one of the best ways that we have found to actually fill all of our employment positions is through ZipRecruiter.
	According to Forbes, January is the hottest month for hiring.
	Business owners and hiring managers are on the hunt for top talent, which is no easy task if you're currently hiring.
	You can probably relate.
	It's challenging to find qualified candidates.
	That's why you need ZipRecruiter.
	ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds the right people for your roles fast.
	And right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
	Immediately after you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology will start showing you candidates whose skills and experience match it.
	To encourage top candidates to respond to your job post even sooner, ZipRecruiter will let you send them a personal invite to apply.
	As you rate candidates, ZipRecruiter sends you more of the ones you like from the thousands of new job seekers who joined the site.
	This month, find the talent you need to fill all of your roles with ZipRecruiter.
	See for yourself why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.
	Just go to this exclusive web address right now.
	Try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com.
	Again, ZipRecruiter.com.
	ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire.
	Back to this visit, we sat down together and we had a wide-ranging conversation about various topics, including some of the ideologies that lead to evil action.
	One of the things that we discussed at fair length was diversity, equity, and inclusion.
	And DEI, which of course sounds very happy face, DEI is the basic thesis that, again, the world is driven by power dynamics, that virtually every system is a power dynamic system.
	That free speech is actually just a stand-in for power.
	That free markets are a stand-in for power.
	That those who are successful in these systems are actually perpetuators of the system for their own exploitative power.
	That is a dangerous theory.
	By the way, that theory, not diversity, equity, and inclusion, but the idea that power lies behind all systems, exists on the right as well.
	It's not unique to the left.
	It materializes in racial ways on the left.
	It materializes in sort of bizarre populist class ways on the right.
	The idea that, for example, capitalism is a tool of the globalist rich, right?
	That sort of nonsense exists on all sides of the political aisle.
	But DEI, which is the most threatening version of this form, particularly on the political left, it helps explain why, for example, you see a giant coalition of people who are pro-Hamas.
	And one of the things that I asked Elon about was the fact that In the aftermath of October 7th, and Elon of course visited Israel after October 7th, he visited the areas in which mass slaughter of Jews, left-wing Jews by the way, took place in Israel by Hamas.
	He still wears the necklace in honor of the people who were kidnapped by Hamas and who are still being held in captivity.
	And you see people in the West marching on behalf of members of Hamas.
	And so I asked him about that because obviously the only rationale for queers for Palestine, for example, LGBT people who are suggesting that they have solidarity with people who would literally murder them, first chance they got in the Gaza Strip, is this DEI theory that there's a system of power that must be torn to the ground.
	And that crosses streams very strongly with anti-Semitism.
	Because after all, if you're making the case that there is a group of people with disproportionate power along racial lines, ethnic lines, religious lines, and that they are therefore the oppressors and the exploiters, that crosses streams very quickly with anti-Semitism, which is why, by the way, a Harvard-Harris poll that we discussed last year found that 67% of those aged between 18 and 24 called Jews an oppressor class.
	And ideology matters, folks, and it has deadly consequences.
	We'll get to the actual discussion with Elon in just one second.
	First, if you're like me, there's not a day that goes by that you don't call or text somebody that you actually care about.
	My friends at Pure Talk are making it easier and more affordable to connect with the most important people in your life.
	Pure Talk gives you phenomenal coverage on America's most dependable 5G network.
	It's the same coverage you know and love, but for half the price of the other guys.
	With unlimited plans starting at just $20 a month, The average family will save almost $1,000 a year.
	As a veteran-owned company, Pure Talk raises $10 million toward veterans' debt last year alone.
	What's more, Pure Talk's customer service team is located right here in the United States and can help you make the switch in as little as 10 minutes.
	I made the switch years ago at this point, and I gotta tell you, my coverage is excellent.
	Pure Talk, make sure that I'm getting it at the best possible price.
	And not only that, they actually don't hate my guts in terms of values.
	I challenge you to stand with a company that actually likes you and champions your values.
	Go to puretalk.com slash Shapiro right now.
	You'll save an additional 50% off your very first month of coverage.
	That's puretalk.com slash Shapiro.
	Save on wireless, the company you can be proud to spend your money with.
	Again, that's puretalk.com slash Shapiro, puretalk.com slash Shapiro.
	Switch over that phone coverage to a company that actually likes you.
	Okay, so.
	We sat down together and we started by discussing DEI.
	here's what it sounded like.
	The diversity, equity, inclusion ideology that basically suggests that all of society is a vast pyramid of group
	identity, and that at the very top are the people who are successful,
	and that those people are exploiting everybody else.
	And we can tell who's successful by their group identity, not by their level of success, by their group identity.
	That matches up incredibly.
	It syncs up almost a Venn diagram with anti-Semitism.
	Absolutely.
	The diversity and equity and inclusion.
	We should always be wary of any name that sounds like it could come out of a George Orwell book.
	That's never a good sign.
	Because it sounds like, sure, diversity, equity, inclusion.
	These all sound like nice words.
	But what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation, and it's against merit.
	and thus I think is fundamentally anti-Semitic.
	So, yeah.
	You know, the...
	I think the whole, all of the sort of, all of the riots that were in the major cities
	and college campuses, I think was a shocking wake-up call to, I think, any kind of political movement
	and any sort of civilization or civil-minded person, really.
	a reasonable minded person, really.
	Now, obviously, I think Elon's take on DEI is exactly right.
	And it is dangerous, because again, any theory that suggests that principle is really just a mask for guises of power, and that there is a coterie of elite people who are standing behind that system, when you're talking about a free market system, when you're talking about a free system, for example, or a free speech system, when you make that suggestion, what you're really suggesting is that anyone who is successful is a victimizer.
	And as a victimizer, they therefore ought to pay some sort of price.
	This is why you see All these streams crossing in the DEI left.
	This is why you see Black Lives Matter protesting for quote-unquote Palestine.
	This is why you see people who are socialists who are protesting on behalf of some of the least socially responsible people on planet Earth.
	Now, Elon talked in those terms more broadly with regard to, for example, this sort of reversal of morality when it comes to weakness versus strength.
	One of the things that we've been seeing in the modern world is this attempt to read strength as evil and weakness as virtue.
	That is a despicable morality because it's not moral at all.
	In fact, it's directly anti-biblical.
	The Bible specifically says that if you're a judge, you are not allowed to favor either the poor or the rich.
	Why does the Bible suggest that you're not allowed to favor the poor?
	When the suggestion by the left is that you'll never favor the poor after all they're poor and powerless.
	The answer is because virtue and wealth are not necessarily connected.
	I know very virtuous people who are poor.
	I know very virtuous people who are rich.
	And I know many people who are not virtuous who are both poor and rich as well.
	And that makes a difference when it comes to world politics and it makes a difference when it comes to the sorts of things that you stand... If you believe that the weak are inherently virtuous, then what that means is that the system itself has made them weak and the system must be torn down and the people who purport to uphold the system must be destroyed.
	That's how all of this connects to visiting places like Auschwitz-Birkenau.
	That conspiracy theory is very much alive and well.
	Here is Elon talking about weakness versus strength and morality.
	Well, I think we really need to stop this principle that the weaker Normally, weaker party is always right.
	This is simply not true.
	If you are, in quotes, oppressed or the weaker party, it doesn't mean you're right.
	Because if some of those weaker groups want to annihilate you, that does not make them good.
	We have to get rid of the rule that if you're weaker, you're automatically good.
	That obviously makes no sense.
	You know, it often makes sense where it's like, okay, you don't want to beat up on someone smaller and weaker than you.
	But if that smaller group wants to kill you, they're bad.
	Okay.
	I mean, I'm a big believer in moral absolutism, not moral relativism.
	There's good and bad in the absolute, and you judge any group or individual against Absolute moral standards, not whether they're the so-called oppressed or oppressor, just on absolute moral terms.
	Are they doing good things?
	Do they want to murder innocent people?
	That's bad.
	It doesn't matter who they are.
	In just a second, I'm gonna get to Elon's perspective when it comes to free speech and acts, which of course has been used as a rationale by the media to attack Elon, among others.
	First, I've been talking about Helix Mattress for years.
	I gotta be honest with you, I am missing my Helix Sleep Mattress right now because I'm abroad.
	I'm on the road.
	I need the Helix Sleep mattress to get a good night's sleep.
	It's just that simple.
	I've had my Helix Sleep mattress for, I don't know, a decade at this point.
	It is excellent.
	It's the gift that keeps on giving because it was made just for me.
	I took that two-minute Helix Sleep quiz and it matched me with a mattress that was firm but breathable, which is exactly what I need and it's exactly what I'm missing when I'm on the road.
	Well, Helix Elite is their newest, most high-end collection and harnesses years of extensive mattress expertise to offer a truly elevated sleep experience.
	That Helix Elite collection includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences.
	Head on over to HelixSleep.com slash men, check out the new collection today.
	If you're nervous about buying a mattress online, well, you don't have to be because Helix has a sleep quiz that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress.
	Because why would you buy a mattress made for somebody else?
	Go to HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
	You should take that two minute sleep quiz and get a mattress made for you.
	Helix is offering 25% off all mattress orders, two free pillows for our listeners.
	Start the year off right.
	Upgrade your sleep at HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
	It's their best offer yet.
	It's not going to last long.
	That's HelixSleep.com slash Ben with Helix.
	Better sleep starts right now.
	Okay.
	So then Elon and I discussed freedom of speech.
	So one of the critiques of Elon and X is that when Elon bought X, he opened it up.
	He broadened the so-called Overton window, the window of acceptable speech, and Elon The broadest possible speech that he believes is legal, right?
	Which makes sense because Twitter was originally founded to be a sort of town square and then it became instead the preserve of a select group of self-appointed moral police officers who would not allow you to say true things.
	And so I asked him, one of the critiques of that has been, well, aren't you going to allow more bad speech as well as good speech on X?
	And that includes, theoretically, more anti-Semitic commentary.
	On X. And so I asked Elon about this, and here's what he had to say.
	How do you balance the necessity for free speech with all these critiques about, you know, what is hate speech?
	What is anti-Semitism?
	And how do you balance that?
	Well, the general bias of the platform is in favor of free speech.
	And I think at the end of the day, free speech wins in that if somebody says something that's false, Especially on our platform, you can then reply to it with a correction.
	And then, I'm a huge fan of community notes.
	We've put maximum resources and attention behind community notes.
	So if somebody tries to push a falsehood, like Holocaust denial or something like that, they can immediately be corrected.
	Again, it's Elon's perspective on free speech that has made him a persona non grata in many of the halls of power with regard to, for example, government and legacy media.
	If you look back for three even years at Elon's public profile, Elon's public profile was very much beloved in the media.
	And for insanely good reason.
	This is a person who has not built one or two, but three of the biggest companies in world history.
	He helped build PayPal.
	He actually created a company called X.com that ended up merging with PayPal, which was at the time run by Peter Thiel.
	So that was a huge company.
	And then he founded, on the back of that, he invested his money into SpaceX and Tesla.
	A rocket company with the goal of creating human colonization on Mars in order to broaden the scope of human survival and to make provision for the possibility of something bad happening on this planet, which is just an amazingly audacious concept, obviously.
	And he actually has materialized that in the form of a profitable company that now carries 90% of global payload into space, which is just amazing and insane.
	That's crazy.
	Of course, that's genius level stuff.
	And Elon, if you know anything about him, has been deeply involved in every aspect of the engineering process.
	I mean, down to like what materials ought to be used in the rockets and all the rest.
	So he builds that.
	And then, He builds Tesla, right?
	He works with somebody to start Tesla, and then he ends up taking it over and turning it into the most profitable car company in the history of man, actually, because it is largely based on the tech, not just based on the sales of the car, right?
	The AI that's being generated in order to do things like self-driving is just insane.
	It makes life better and easier for tons and tons of people.
	And so the media loved him, right?
	He's this entrepreneurial figure who had come out of Basically, nowhere.
	And then he buys X. And by buying X, he threatens the structures.
	He threatens the people who were the gatekeepers.
	In a second, I'm going to bring you Elon's answers to questions about what was going on with the legacy media, why they've reversed course on him, and why he's now the villain in their little morality play.
	In just one second.
	Think about your favorite childhood memory that you caught on film or videotape.
	There's really not a great way to share that.
	You've got that in the garage somewhere, you got a bunch of film reels from your grandparents.
	Do you have like a film projector in your house?
	And forget that, when I was growing up, we used to take everything on camcorder.
	So you have like a VHS tape, you had the little tapes, you put it in like the bigger tape block
	and then you had to like mess around with it and put it in the VHS.
	You don't have any of those things anymore.
	Why not get all those memories preserved in a form you can actually use?
	This is why you should go check out Legacy Box right now.
	Simply send Legacy Box filled with camcorder tapes, film reels and pictures.
	We get back digital copies that can be easily enjoyed, shared and organized.
	It's like magic.
	I've done it myself for my family several times at this point, did it for my parents, did it for my in-laws.
	And it's amazing.
	I mean, it just brings the past to life again.
	Legacy Box is the world's largest digitizer.
	It helped over 1 million families relive their wedding days, chaotic childhood Christmases,
	even road trips to Yellowstone by going to legacybox.com slash Shapiro.
	You can enjoy 50% off when you get started with Legacybox today.
	Kick off the year by rescuing your family's most cherished memories that haven't been watched or enjoyed in years.
	Head on over to Legacybox.com slash Shapiro.
	Save 50% by today.
	Send it in when you're ready.
	Go to Legacybox.com slash Shapiro.
	That's Legacybox.com slash Shapiro.
	Hey, so I asked Elon yesterday, Legacy Media has spent an awful lot of ink on you.
	There's been a lot of attempts to paint you as anti-semitic or paint X as anti-semitic.
	Where do you think that's coming from?
	Why does the Legacy Media seem to have you, particularly in the last year and a half, in the crosshairs so much?
	Well, I mean, the reality is that X is competition for the Legacy Media.
	X is where people go to get the most current news and learn about the world.
	So the legacy media is our direct competitors.
	So they're really going to find every angle to try to cancel X. I mean, if you want to know why things are happening, look at the incentives.
	And legacy media has had a tough time with respect to usage.
	The numbers I saw was that The sort of traditional print cable television viewership went down something like 20-30% last year.
	On the other hand, X went up roughly the same, roughly 20-30%.
	So it's a direct competition for people's attention.
	Now flow of information matters and one thing that Elon I think is very clear on and was focused in I know specifically yesterday when we visited Auschwitz was how free flow of information when cut off actually leads to the Multiplication of evil.
	That when you actually cut off the sources of information, you can make room for misinformation that both misleads the public, as far as the bad things that are happening in the world, and also allows truly powerful people to manipulate the narrative.
	And that's incredibly dangerous.
	I asked him about this in the context of what's going on right now in the Gaza Strip.
	Because, as I say, Elon, I think in morally righteous fashion,
	visited the villages that had been burned out by Hamas, where 1,200 people were killed,
	240 people were taken prisoner, still almost 100 people being kept in captivity.
	That is an ongoing war.
	And I asked Elon about the fact that there is no informational flow
	in places like the Gaza Strip, that in fact indoctrination and miseducation
	of young people can lead to a significantly worse world.
	Here's what he had to say about education in the Gaza Strip.
	The education of kids in Gaza, the indoctrination of hate into kids in Gaza has to stop.
	So it's, you know...
	When I was in Israel, that was my top recommendation.
	You've got to make sure... I understand the need to invade Gaza and unfortunately some innocent people will die.
	There's no way around it.
	But the most important thing is to ensure that afterwards, I'm still processing the day to be honest with you.
	kids are taught from as soon as they can understand language that their goal is
	to kill Israelis and if you're told that from when you're a toddler well you're
	gonna believe it and that needs to stop. Overall it was just I'm still processing
	the day to be honest with you it's it was heavy going in you know I again I've
	never been to this particular part of the world I've spent years reading about it.
	A lot of my extended family, like every Jew, a lot of my extended family lost their lives in this part of the world during the Holocaust.
	We have letters to my grandmother, my dad's mom, from members of her family from Eastern Europe in the lead up to the Holocaust.
	And, you know, she lost large segments of her extended family over here.
	And so, even flying into the area is emotional and difficult.
	Visiting Auschwitz, obviously, is emotional and difficult and terrifying and all the things.
	I mean, it's all the things.
	And then doing that with Elon Musk, again, in a modern era, looking at a world that sometimes can seem unbelievably dark.
	I think it was an inspirational thing for Elon to go to Auschwitz.
	I think that the conversation that we had was important.
	I think, again, that When we talk about the true dangers to the world, particularly in the West right now, the ideological dangers to the West are greater than they have been at any time in my lifetime.
	I'm relatively young.
	I just turned 40.
	And in my lifetime, I've been privileged to live in the freest society in world history.
	America is an unbelievable place.
	It's an unbelievable Tolerant, open place where people have the freedom to succeed, where meritocracy is the rule of the day.
	And as that is quashed, and as people oppose that, as people try to craft weird and bizarre left and right conspiracy theories about the inability of people to get ahead, to blame the people who are successful in the free market, not by manipulating the levers of government.
	Successful in the free market, to blame the free market itself, to blame the meritocracy, to suggest that there are exploitative groups that are a threat to the population.
	That's something that I haven't experienced in my lifetime.
	And so coming here, being reminded of the wages of evil ideologies, and coming here, again, with Elon, I think, good for Elon.
	And it was an honor to be asked to come and do this event.
	Okay, in just one second, I'm gonna get to the New Hampshire primaries.
	Those, of course, are happening today.
	I think the end of this road is a foregone conclusion.
	I'll explain in just one second.
	First, The Ben Shapiro Show is supported by Grand Canyon University, an affordable private Christian university with a vibrant campus in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona.
	Ranked top 20 in the country by Niche.com, GCU is a missional, Christ-centered university that strives to foster a culture of community, giving, and impact.
	GCU's goal is to help you develop into a servant leader who makes a difference through finding your purpose.
	With 330 academic programs, over 270 online as of June 2023, GCU integrates the free market system with a welcoming Christian worldview into your bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree.
	Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University.
	Private, Christian, affordable.
	Visit gcu.edu today.
	Also, it's the signature razor from Jeremy's Razors, the Precision 5.
	You can get one handle plus one blade cartridge kit, just $14.99.
	It's a magical razor.
	It's crafted with a luxurious tungsten handle, five welded steel blades, a precision trimmer for a close, smooth shave around hairlines and hard-to-reach places.
	But remember, that Precision 5 is not just a razor, it's also a sword in the battle for beliefs.
	It's a banner to wave into a new economy, and also it's a razor that you can shave with.
	The Precision 5 starts at $14.99 with a price so low, it has never been easier to stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate your guts.
	Join over 200,000 customers who've ditched those woke razors and switched to Jeremy's.
	Head on over to Jeremy'sRazors.com today.
	Meanwhile, today marks the New Hampshire primary and this is basically Nikki Haley's last shot.
	Nikki Haley has to win this outright.
	If Nikki Haley finishes second to Donald Trump in New Hampshire, then the race is over for her because they're going to head down to South Carolina and she's probably going to lose her home state to Trump.
	By all available polling data, Trump is well ahead of her in South Carolina.
	But he also happens to be ahead of her in New Hampshire.
	There are some polls, usually badly rated polls, that have Nikki Haley competitive in New Hampshire.
	The latest polls that I've seen, the ones that RealClearPolitics takes seriously enough to put in their average, all those have Trump up pretty well ahead of Nikki Haley.
	The latest Trafalgar poll has Trump up 58-36 over Nikki Haley.
	The Boston Globe-Suffolk poll has him up 57-38 over Nikki Haley.
	Insider Advantage has him at 62-35 over Nikki Haley.
	And again, Let's just be clear about this.
	The Republican Party wants Trump.
	I mean, it's just that simple.
	Now, I may wish that things had gone differently.
	I supported Ron DeSantis as a voter.
	If I'd had a vote in the primaries, I would have voted for Governor DeSantis.
	As I said, he is the best governor in America.
	I moved to Florida, at least in part, because Ron DeSantis had kept the state open.
	Because Ron DeSantis helped make Florida awesome.
	And so, having that level of governance extended to the federal government, I think would have been great.
	I think he would have been the best president of anybody in the PAC.
	Republican voters did not agree and do not agree by polling data.
	Republican voters want season nine of the Trump show.
	They want to see Trump run again.
	They want to see Trump beat Joe Biden.
	They're looking at the polling data and what they are currently seeing is that Donald Trump is actually leading Joe Biden in a statistically significant way.
	The latest Harvard-Harris poll has Donald Trump up 53-47 over Joe Biden, which is mostly fascinating because it means that Trump is actually breaking 50% in more than one poll at this point.
	And by the way, in their general sort of Republican primary polls, and those ones are the ones that are being released after DeSantis dropped out of the race.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	Those polls had Trump up in the Republican national primary by 60 plus points over DeSantis in second and Haley in third.
	The national polling numbers for Trump continue to be durable.
	That is the reason why Trump is the nominee.
	If Donald Trump were trailing Joe Biden by 10 points in all the polls, and if Ron DeSantis were beating Joe Biden by 3 points in all the polls, I think this race looks totally different.
	But basically, since March, the Republican base has been brought into line on Trump because of the unjust cases that are being brought against him in a wide variety of jurisdictions.
	It feels like legal espionage against the Trump campaign.
	And Republicans get that.
	And the way that they are fighting back against that is by saying, let's give him the nomination.
	I get that, and you can see that in the polling data.
	Beyond that, the fact that Trump has been durable against Biden takes away the chief baton that fellow Republicans could use against him.
	For a brief moment in time, November 2022, it seemed as though the Republican Party was finally declaring that Donald Trump was likely to make them lose, that he had lost in 2020, he had lost in 2021 in Georgia Senate races, 2022 went really poorly, and so 2024, why do this thing again?
	And then, as Joe Biden began to sink slowly into the mire, It became clear to Republicans that actually Trump could win.
	And if Trump can win, there's no reason to nominate somebody else.
	Not only that, a wide swath of Republicans believe that, for good reasons and ill, that the 2020 election Was not, was not correctly decided that in fact Trump won or should have won or that the rules were changed in order to make Joe Biden win, which actually is somewhat true.
	Some people believe what I think is not true proposition that it was just pure electoral fraud.
	Whatever it is, Republicans are basically treating Donald Trump as an incumbent in this race.
	And because he's an incumbent in this race, he's getting incumbent type numbers in this race.
	Well, that was made clear by the fact that Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race over the weekend.
	Here's Governor DeSantis dropping out.
	By the way, this is the right move.
	He did not have a path forward.
	He did not have a path in New Hampshire.
	He did not have a path in South Carolina.
	Getting out now makes sense.
	Now, he's getting a lot of flack, which we'll get to in a second, for his campaign in the first place.
	I think a lot of that flack is entirely misguided.
	Meaning that the theory of the campaign, which is that Republicans had basically gotten tired of all the antics from Trump and were ready to move to the next thing, that wasn't false in January, February.
	It became false as Democrats targeted Trump for destruction and Republicans rallied around Trump.
	And so the fact that he ran against Trump, I don't think that there's anything wrong with running against Donald Trump in the primaries.
	And all the kind of Trump fans were angry at other people for running against Trump.
	Why?
	Why?
	Especially because, again, it was a referendum.
	Trump won the referendum.
	That's the end of the story.
	But the fact that DeSantis would have made, I think, a better president, a more effective president, than Trump was in his first term or would be in his second term... Again, you can reject that.
	That's fine.
	But that doesn't mean that DeSantis did anything wrong by running.
	I also... There are mistakes that DeSantis' campaign made, for sure.
	You can say that about literally every non-victorious campaign.
	But were those mistakes the telling factor, or was it just that by polling data, 70% of Republicans really love Trump?
	Period.
	End of story.
	In any case, here was DeSantis dropping out.
	In doing so, he endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency over Nikki Haley, who has sort of become the— because she's the only non-Trump candidate left in the race, she has become sort of the quote-unquote candidate of the establishment, which, again, is a little strange only in the sense that Nikki Haley was Donald Trump's U.N.
	ambassador.
	It's not like she's some sort of stranger to Trumpism.
	She may be more in line with, I would say, Bush-era conservatism.
	She's softer in affect.
	So much of Republican politics, by the way, is affect.
	Nikki Haley is actually to Donald Trump's right when it comes to economic matters, right?
	She tends to be a little bit more free trade.
	She tends to be more interested in reforming entitlements, for example.
	She's to his left, maybe on social issues, although unclear, because Donald Trump himself has not made himself clear on social issues when it comes to, say, abortion or same-sex marriage.
	She just is more squishy in affect.
	Because she's more squishy in affect, that means that she's been tagged with the establishment label.
	But DeSantis, I think, endorses Trump for good reason here, and that is Trump is going to be the nominee.
	So why would you endorse the candidate who's not going to be the nominee in the face of that?
	Here is Governor DeSantis.
	Now following our second place finish in Iowa, we've prayed and deliberated on the way forward.
	If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome, more campaign stops, more interviews, I would do it.
	But I can't ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don't have a clear path to victory.
	Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign.
	I'm proud to have delivered on 100% of my promises, and I will not stop now.
	It's clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance.
	They watch his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance, and they see Democrats using lawfare this day to attack him.
	While I've had disagreements with Donald Trump, such as on the coronavirus pandemic and his elevation of Anthony Fauci, Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden.
	That is clear.
	I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee and I will honor that pledge.
	This is my endorsement because we can't go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear.
	Now, again, the sort of old Republican guard talk is something, I don't know who this old Republican guard is per se, like some names would be useful whenever people talk about the old Republican guard versus the new Republican guard.
	I'm just, I mean, Donald Trump was the president, so he is the current Republican guard.
	I mean, period.
	It's not as though Donald Trump is the wave of the future.
	Donald Trump is the president and also the past a little bit because he was the president just a few years ago.
	And that was like 2016.
	Before we begin, I'd like to take time to congratulate Ron DeSantis and, of course, a really terrific person who I've gotten to know, his wife, Casey, for having run a great campaign for president.
	Before we begin, I'd like to take time to congratulate Ron DeSantis and, of course,
	a really terrific person who I've gotten to know, his wife Casey, for having run a great
	campaign for president.
	He did.
	He ran a really good campaign, I will tell you.
	It's not easy.
	They think it's easy doing this stuff, right?
	It's not easy.
	But as you know, he left the campaign trail today at 3 p.m., and in so doing, he was very gracious and he endorsed me, so I appreciate it.
	Again, it is amazing how Trump, again, what Trump thinks in the moment is what Trump thinks in the moment, but he switches from Casey DeSantis is terrible and Ron DeSantis is terrible, everybody's terrible, Ron DeSanctimonious and all that too.
	He ran a great campaign and like this fast, but that's what Trump has to do.
	So Trump does need to consolidate the party behind him.
	I think the party is consolidating behind him.
	I think that's what's likely to happen in the New Hampshire primary today.
	Again, the polling shows that he is well out ahead.
	And if he were not to be the nominee, that would be an act of God, frankly, at this point.
	There would have to be an act of God for him not to be the nominee.
	So the Republican Party is going to consolidate, as they should, behind Donald Trump to be the person against Joe Biden.
	We're going to run this thing back and we're going to do it all over again.
	Now, there's one thing that's worth noting here in the media coverage of DeSantis dropping out.
	There's a lot of scornful media coverage that's being dropped on DeSantis today.
	For example, Ayman Maheldin, just a terrible commentator, over on MSNBC, but I repeat myself because again MSNBC is
	filled with terrible commentators.
	It's like a giant bread basket filled with terrible commentators.
	Here's Ayman Maheldin ripping on Ron DeSantis and his campaign.
	Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the man once heralded as the future of the Republican Party,
	the so-called heir apparent to the MAGA movement, bowing out of the race for president.
	He suspended his campaign a short time ago, bringing an end to one of the most embarrassing and disastrous GOP primary showings in modern American political history.
	The move comes just two days I mean, they couldn't be happier.
	So on the one hand, I think this is a cautionary note for Republicans.
	We'll see in a second.
	Democrats are prepared to roll out their anti-Trump strategy.
	It's been their entire strategy for the past several years.
	Get Trump to be the nominee again, then run against Trump.
	And again, be careful what you wish for.
	Politics is the monkey's paw.
	What you wish for very often ends up being the curse against you.
	The amount of scorn they're pouring on DeSantis is demonstrative of the fact that they actually don't believe all the crap that they say about Trump.
	When they say that Trump is the most threatening political figure in American history, when they say that he's a Hitlerian, Mussolini-esque figure, when they say this sort of stuff, they don't believe that thing.
	If they believed that thing, then presumably, they would have been a lot more supportive of the chief rivals to Donald Trump.
	But they weren't.
	They're more than happy to watch those people go down in flames for fun, profit, and political motivation.
	Because to them, all Republicans are the same.
	And this is the thing that's so funny about Trump.
	With all of the talk about how Donald Trump is out of the box and crazy and does wild stuff, and he does.
	He does wild, crazy stuff, particularly on Twitter.
	When he does those things, he is treated in the polling like generic R. He is treated like generic Republican, which is why his polling is non-differentiatable from DeSantis.
	In terms of, like, against Joe Biden, he runs kind of the same as DeSantis.
	Haley runs a little bit ahead.
	Because I think the American public isn't as familiar with Haley.
	And again, she has that softer affect than Trump or DeSantis.
	But if you look at Donald Trump's poll numbers in, for example, 2016, when he ran against Hillary, they look almost exactly the same as Mitt Romney's poll numbers in 2012.
	When you look at his poll numbers in 2020, he performs like generic Republican, maybe a little better in the rural areas.
	And that is because the left treats him as generic Republican.
	Or, to put it another way, whoever the Republican nominee was, he was going to be treated, or she, as the ultimate form of the destroyer, as the evil destroyer, because that's every election cycle with regards to the legacy media and with the Democrats.
	Okay, so, speaking of the strategy that is going to be rolled out here, By the Democrats.
	One of the things they're going to try to do is jujitsu a lot of critiques of Joe Biden into critiques of Donald Trump.
	So the number one obvious critique of there really two critiques of Joe Biden.
	One is that he's barely alive and the other is that he's a bad president.
	It's very hard to argue with he's a bad president because he really is a very bad president.
	He has been terrible domestically.
	He has been pretty awful in terms of foreign policy and worse in terms of foreign policy than he has domestically.
	And so what the Democrats are going to focus on is try to defang the other prong of the attack, right?
	The senile and bad at the job.
	They can't really argue bad at the job.
	Because he's not good at the job.
	They can argue senile.
	So you say to yourself, wait, how can they argue that?
	Joe Biden is clearly non compos mentis.
	He's not functional anymore.
	He just isn't.
	I mean, you watch him in public.
	It's sad.
	As an American, I would like for our president to at least be able to speak full sentences without running the risk of having a full-on physical collapse.
	So Democrats have their response.
	Their response is, yeah, Trump is too.
	That's going to be the response.
	The response is that Trump is also somebody who is non-composementous.
	So they're basing this, this week, on an event that Trump was doing.
	And Trump, at least, is doing events.
	I mean, Joe Biden's schedule looks like this.
	Wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning, meeting at 10, security briefing at 10, noon, One, pre-planned event.
	Two, lid for the day.
	That's what a day looks like for Joe Biden.
	And then presumably it's back to the old age home for a little bit of water aerobics and then some Matlock before they put him to sleep.
	Trump's doing events.
	But the other day Trump was doing a speech and he mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi for whatever reason.
	Here's what it sounded like.
	By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th.
	You know, Nikki Haley... Nikki Haley... Nikki Haley... You know they... Do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything?
	Deleted and destroyed all of it.
	All of it.
	Because of lots of things.
	Like, Nikki Haley is in charge of security.
	We offered her 10,000 people.
	Okay, so this is what we call a brain fart.
	It doesn't mean he's insane.
	It doesn't mean he doesn't know the difference between Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley.
	That's a brain fart.
	And it happens all the time.
	I mean, again, like, you want to say that Donald Trump is in a state of decline, you'd have to show me a market difference between Donald Trump 2016 and Donald Trump 2024.
	I don't actually see a giant market difference.
	If I played you back-to-back tape of Trump 2016 and Trump 2024, they look very similar.
	If I played you back-to-back tape of Joe Biden 2016 and Joe Biden 2024, they are radically different.
	As much as I am not a Joe Biden fan, Joe Biden at least used to be a person who was fluent with human verbiage.
	He did not look as frail and as tenuous as he does right now.
	That's just a brain fart.
	But the media decide that this is evidence that he's just as off his rocker and losing it, just as in a state of decline as Joe Biden is.
	Here is John Carl trying to make that case.
	That moment, which by the way, the Biden campaign has already cut into an ad, is really something.
	Donald Trump is truly confused about who Nikki Haley is.
	Thinks somehow that she was in charge of security at the Capitol on January 6th, clearly confusing her with Nancy Pelosi.
	But we've seen him confuse Joe Biden with Barack Obama.
	He thinks that he beat Obama.
	We saw at one point he talked about how Biden was going to get us into World War II.
	So there has been You know, there have been moments and there have been several moments on the campaign trail where he has seemed quite frankly out of it.
	Again, this attempt now to reverse polarity with regard to who's CNN and who's not, I don't think that's going to play, but this is what they have to do.
	They're going to have to attack Trump on that and presumably they're going to attack him on the criminal front.
	Now, again, I think that's baked into the cake.
	So CNN's Manu Raju He spends his day very often tracking down Republicans to comment on other Republicans.
	It's a game that doesn't seem to be replicated with Democrats very often.
	So when Ilhan Omar says something deeply anti-Semitic, you don't see Manu Raju or members of the media tracking down every Democrat senator and asking for their opinion.
	When Joe Biden does something truly awe-inspiringly stupid, you don't see a rush to Capitol Hill to get comment from every Democratic senator.
	Manaraju decided to go ask a bunch of Republican senators if they would still vote for Trump if he were convicted criminally.
	And there are sort of various answers to this.
	The most obvious answer is, well, yes, he's the Republican nominee against Joe Biden.
	A criminal conviction would not change the underlying opinion as to what he did or did not do.
	I can think all the things I think about Donald Trump and his shortcomings in terms of character and still recognize, for example, that the Fannie Willis case is crap, that it doesn't make any sense, that the Jack Smith January 6th case is a legal stretch beyond nearly all imagination.
	But in any case, this is, you know, this is the campaign.
	The campaign is going to be for the Democrats about how Trump is really kind of losing it and also is a criminal.
	I mean, good luck with this pitch.
	I don't think it's going to work all that well.
	If he could be convicted before November, would you still support him then?
	Well, is his opponent still Joe Biden?
	Yes, I would absolutely support him before that.
	Even if he's convicted?
	I mean, if it's a convicted felon, you'd support.
	Listen, though, on totally trumped-up charges... I will support the nominee, yes.
	Including President Trump.
	What if he gets convicted?
	Would you still support him?
	We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
	Facts matter.
	I mean, I think you need to look at, what are the charges?
	If he's convicted, what was he convicted of?
	I think these things matter.
	Okay, now all of those are the right answer, but Democrats seem to believe that if they can grab a criminal conviction, I mean, that's going to be their deus ex machina, is if there is a hand of God coming down into the story, it's going to be Trump being criminally convicted.
	First of all, I'm not sure the timeline allows for that.
	It's not clear that any of these cases are going to come to a conclusion before the actual election takes place.
	The only real possibility is the Jack Smith case.
	Jack Smith is trying to accelerate that.
	Trump is trying to slow that down post the election.
	It looks like those Georgia charges are going to last too long for them to materialize before the election.
	It looks like the Florida case is going to be delayed beyond the election.
	So really the only shot they have is that Jack Smith case.
	And that one is really legally tenuous.
	Not only is it legally tenuous, it does raise the January 6th questions all over again, which I think is what Democrats want.
	They'd love to discuss January 6th endlessly.
	But, I mean, let's be real about this.
	There are still some unanswered questions about January 6th.
	So, for example, there is now tape outside the DNC that is at least somewhat strange.
	I mean, it raises questions.
	Let's put it that way.
	One of the big things that happened on January 6th, apparently, is that there were a couple of pipe bombs that were put outside the DNC and the RNC.
	And we haven't heard a lot about that since January 6th.
	Not quite as spectacular on video as those giant scenes of riots outside the Capitol building or people breaking windows or whatever.
	But more dangerous, by the way.
	Like, pipe bombs are meant to kill people.
	And the story on the pipe bombs seems to be getting weirder and weirder.
	Representative Thomas Massey of Kentucky, he's accusing the government of a cover-up He says, if there were indeed two operable pipe bombs, that would be the biggest threat that existed on January 6th.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Why they wouldn't be promoting that threat to advance the narrative, unless they had something to do with the pipe bombs and they're trying to memory hole the whole thing to avoid embarrassment.
	So apparently there's video that's been identified by Massey, showing officers reacting nonchalantly after being notified of the pipe bomb, milling slowly around the area, even letting kids walk in the area.
	Vice President Kamala Harris was in the building at the time.
	The DOJ didn't really let that be known at the time.
	Massey says, you'd think they'd be focused on these pipe bombs, but they are not.
	And I mean, they really aren't.
	I mean, the last time you heard about the pipe bombs is from Massey.
	You're not hearing about it from Democrats, like, at all.
	Not only that, the bomb planter apparently is using a cell phone, but data from a cell phone company was deemed corrupted.
	The FBI wasn't able to find any records for the suspect.
	I mean, they've locked down, like, who every person was who was in the Capitol building.
	They're arresting them and putting them in jail for years on end.
	But, like, you plant a pipe bomb outside the DNC or RNC, that's, like, actual deadly threat of violence.
	And we still can't find who exactly did that?
	Like, that's weird.
	Again, those sorts of questions are going to be asked during this campaign because this will be at the center of the campaign yet again.
	Now, is that good for Trump?
	I don't think it's an amazing thing if this campaign is held over January 6th.
	I think that that probably damages Trump politically.
	Does it damage him enough to overcome the fact that Joe Biden is bad at the president thing?
	I have serious, serious doubts.
	Alrighty, in just one second.
	We're going to jump into a Supreme Court ruling on the border.
	Pretty wild ruling by the Supreme Court.
	If you're not a member, become a member.
	Use code Shapiro.
	Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

▲