The Ben Shapiro Show - The Democratic Socialists of America Prepare for VICTORY!

Oct. 31, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:48

The Democratic Socialists of America Prepare for VICTORY!

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	Zorin Mamdani is about to be elected.
	Is he already in hot water with his left-wing base, or is it all going to be just fine?
	Meanwhile, the government shutdown continues, and Snap is about to cut out.
	We'll get to all of that.
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	Well, the first rule of Marxist revolution is that it must always eat its own.
	And we're beginning to see that even before Zorin Mamdani is elected mayor of New York.
	Very high likelihood that that is going to happen.
	According to the betting markets, it is almost a certainty, actually, that Zor Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York over on Calci, for example.
	He's got a 92% shot of becoming the mayor of New York.
	And barring some sort of cataclysmic event like Curtis Sleewa dropping out in the next five minutes, it is very likely that Mamdani becomes mayor of New York, specifically because the vote splits and he wins with 45% of the vote or something.
	But the heartburn is already setting in because here is the problem.
	Once people begin to govern, it turns out that there are actual rules to governance.
	You actually have to be a person capable of carrying out the office of mayor, and there are obstacles to that.
	And so all of the bizarre radical signaling that you've been doing runs up against reality.
	And make no mistake, Zor Mamdani is as radical as it is possible for a candidate to be.
	The man has embraced Marxism.
	He has embraced jihadism.
	I mean, remember, this is a person whose parents are radical.
	I mean, he's a second-generation radical.
	Here is some tape that just emerged of his father comparing Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler.
	This is in 2022.
	Again, it's very recent footage.
	Abraham Lincoln generalized the solution of reservations.
	They herded American Indians into separate territories.
	For the Nazis, for the Nazis, this was the inspiration.
	Hitler realized two things: one, that genocide was doable.
	It is possible to do genocide.
	That's what Hitler realized.
	Well, again, this is the well from which Zor Mamdani draws.
	He came to America as one of the privileged scions of an immigrant family, his father, a Columbia University, an anti-American professor, his mom, an anti-American producer, both of whom believed in this sort of racial hierarchy of victimhood.
	And now he's the leading candidate for mayor of New York.
	He's going to run up against some problems.
	And this is a point that Politico makes.
	Zor Mamdani and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America will have some relationship issues to iron out if he's elected mayor of the nation's largest metropolis.
	The DSA has been integral to his success.
	And as we discussed on the show, the DSA is a revolutionary movement.
	They're not interested in governance.
	They're interested in revolution.
	They want to overthrow capitalism.
	They want to overthrow the Constitution.
	They hate all of these things.
	But the problem is that once they get people elected to office, those people usually have to operate at least within some boundaries.
	As Politico points out, how the arrangement will work out, should Mamdani win on November 4th, it's uncharted territory.
	Christina Greer of Fordham University, she says one of two things will happen.
	They'll give him a grace period and let him get his sea legs and recognize compromise as a way to get something done, or they become one of his biggest obstacles.
	And if that happens, he'll be fighting people from the right and the left.
	Well, again, it is clear that he is going to, in some areas, moderate because he doesn't want to completely destroy all credibility with the New York population.
	So, for example, he wants to retain the NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, and he has committed to following through with the city's plan to build four new jails to replace Rikers, which is something that both he and the DSA had previously opposed.
	Well, we'll see if they give him any space.
	My theory is that they will give him some space, that they will allow him to be as revolutionary as he wants to be within the formatics that have been provided to him, and then they will gradually hollow out the movement.
	What the DSA is realizing is something that people on, I think, all sides of the political aisle are realizing, is that if you maintain your extremely radical ground, but you operate within the party system, you're able to more quickly take power than if you operate outside the party system and just try to browbeat people.
	That hijacking a party, as it turns out, is way, way, way easier than forming your own.
	That ideologically twisting and turning people or kind of the soft libs into Marxist fellow travelers is incredibly easy because people will go along with it in order to quote unquote stop the other side.
	Tribalism in politics means the death of the normie center.
	That's what it means.
	It means that the DSA, of course, in the end, I think this is all this heartburn, this angst, it's going to be overplayed.
	They know exactly who Zorn Mamdani is.
	They know he's a revolutionary, and they are perfectly happy to fellow travel with him, knowing that his heart is in the revolutionary place.
	Now, maybe he ends up stopping short.
	Maybe they end up turning on him when he's no longer useful to the movement.
	Marxist movements have a real habit of doing this.
	They will turn on absolute butchers like Leon Trotsky if it turns out that he is now inhibiting the next step of the revolution.
	But my inclination would be that they will give Zorin Mamdani an awful lot of rope with which to hang the city of New York before they make those sorts of moves.
	And again, the Democratic Party has now built itself around the radicals, which is why you see Ilhan Omar out there as a chief advocate for Zorin Mamdani on the basis that Zorin Mamdani is being attacked for his Islamic religion, not for the pro-jihadism or the pro-Marxism, or for the fact that he's never held a real day job and that he's one of the great leeches on the butt of American society.
	Now, according to Ilhan Omar, it's all about all the resistance to Zorin Mamdani is about the fact that he's a Muslim.
	Here she was on CNN.
	Well, the tsunami of the anti-Muslim attacks that we are seeing is deeply concerning.
	And I would hope that the Democratic leader in the Senate would recognize that and would offer support, not just to Mamdani, but the million Muslims who live in New York City and the millions who live in New York and in America.
	Now, again, the revolution is the only thing that matters here.
	The truth doesn't matter.
	The revolution is the only thing that matters.
	And apparently that's true even for many voters in New York.
	There's a brand new poll out, according to the UK Daily Mail, done for jail partners, talking about what New Yorkers think is going to happen if Mamdani is elected.
	In that poll, he has a 15-point lead over Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor.
	The poll shows that many New Yorkers who do not support Mamdani are convinced he's going to destroy New York.
	They think that his mayoralty will mark a return to urban decay of the 1980s when the city was blighted by poverty, rampant crime, crumbling infrastructure, and abandoned buildings.
	Even his own supporters think he will make anti-Semitism in New York worse rather than better, which, of course, is obviously true since he really, really, really is an anti-Semite.
	Among voters who have made up their minds, Mamdani was on 46% support according to the poll.
	He has a 35-point lead over Cuomo for voters under the age of 30, according to this new poll.
	The poll finds that New Yorkers expect a huge variety of problems to get worse under Mayor Mamdani.
	47% of New Yorkers think crime and violence will get worse.
	Only 32% believe the city will be safer.
	For voters under 30, 49% believed that safety would improve under Mamdani.
	But among the over 65s, only 26% thought the city would be safer, showing that there's a real problem with prefrontal cortex development among people under the age of 30, obviously.
	Most New Yorkers think that there will either be no change or that affordability of housing will get worse under Zoran Momdani.
	The vast majority of New Yorkers think that the number of businesses will either stay the same or go down.
	43%.
	of New Yorkers, a plurality, think that number of businesses will go down.
	The risk of terrorism will dramatically rise 39 to 18.
	And so again, it's not as though New Yorkers are unaware of what's happening here.
	New Yorkers are perfectly aware.
	It's just that they are willing to risk it.
	They're willing to risk it because they want to make the revolutionary statement.
	They want the revolutionary statement.
	In fact, non-Momdani voters, they say that disaster is like the number one thing about Mom Dani.
	Like there's a word cloud of words that they use when they're polled, how to describe Mom Dani.
	And they said, New York will be a disaster, a bleep poll, destroyed in hell.
	How about the people who like him?
	The people who like him say affordable, improved, equitable.
	Okay, so New York City is split like much of the rest of the country, right down the middle.
	But in the end, the bottom line is that most New Yorkers, a plurality of New Yorkers understand things are going to be bad, but they don't have the strength to stop him.
	That is the real key to this election.
	The key to this election is not that Mom Dani is overwhelmingly popular.
	He is not.
	He's scoring in the mid-40s in every poll.
	The key to the election is no one has the balls to stop him.
	Salilo's not dropping out, which means support can't consolidate around Cuomo.
	Cuomo's attack lines all seem to be directed at Republicans rather than at Momdani, bizarrely, suggesting, well, you know, if Momdani takes over, then Trump is going to attack his, really?
	That's your line?
	Your line isn't that he's going to make crime worse and prices worse and back jihadism and back anti-Semitism and monarchism.
	The moderate, squishy left has given way to the radicals and their silence speaks volumes.
	It is why you've seen so many mainstream Democratic figures swirl and swivel behind Momdani and decide that it's perfectly fine for him to take a leadership position.
	And this is what happens to many parties, the so-called moderates who are more invested in the success of the party than they are in the principles of the party.
	Give way to the people who are more interested in shifting and moving the principles of the party than they are in the success of the party.
	That is sort of the truism on both sides of the aisle when it comes to politics these days.
	Already coming up, the snap cutoff is coming.
	What does that mean for the government to shut down?
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	Also, all right, folks, let's talk about something that actually matters.
	Honoring American veterans on Veterans Day.
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	Okay, meanwhile, the government shutdown continues apace.
	We're about to hit the snap cutoff tomorrow.
	That is when federal funding of snap is set to expire.
	This, of course, is dangerous political territory for everybody involved.
	A brand new poll shows that independents actually hold Trump and Republicans responsible for the shutdown.
	According to the latest polling data from Washington Post, ABC News Ipsos, 45% say Trump and the GOP are mainly responsible for the shutdown.
	But 30% actually, which is what they used to say, Democrats were at 30%, 33% believe the shutdown is Democrats' fault in the latest poll.
	And among registered voters, 37% blame Democrats and 46% blame the Republicans.
	Three-quarters of American adults say they are very or somewhat concerned about the shutdown.
	Concern is now growing.
	I mean, let's be real about this.
	Obviously, a huge number of Americans are dependent on SNAP.
	That's the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
	A huge number of Americans.
	I mean, in my own community, the call for private charity has gone out to replace that.
	We're giving because we want to make sure that people have food.
	And the story of SNAP really is the story of increased dependency in the United States and how government crowds out charity and generates poverty.
	I mean, the fact that there are 42 million Americans on SNAP is totally insane.
	One in eight Americans is currently on SNAP.
	In 2023, we spent $145 billion on SNAP programs.
	And it's not just going to people who are abjectly poor.
	Something like four in 10 SNAP households have at least one working adult, meaning a large portion of people who are getting it already have jobs.
	Snap has become actually what it actually is: a corporate subsidy in many ways.
	Snap is basically a way to make sure that people who are making minimum wage at McDonald's have enough food on the table.
	If you got rid of SNAP, what would actually happen is a competition for workers that would require an increase in wages.
	So actually, corporations are very happy with SNAP.
	They don't bear most of the burden.
	The taxpayers pay most of the burden.
	And then they get to pay their workers less because SNAP is there to sort of fill in the gaps.
	And the roles are not just ballooning because of economic hardship, but because eligibility over the years has exploded.
	A bunch of different states use something called broad-based categorical eligibility, which is a sort of loophole.
	And it actually allows people with incomes up to 200% of the poverty line qualify.
	And then sometimes it even waives asset tests entirely.
	So you can theoretically have a decent income and a nice car and even money in the bank and still qualify for SNAP.
	Millions of people have been invited onto the rolls.
	There's waste.
	There's abuse.
	Every time somebody tries to cut it or change it, people then claim that millions of people will go starving.
	And then there's a problem, which is illegal immigration.
	Federal law says that non-citizens aren't eligible for SNAP, but there are a bunch of loopholes and tax lax verification status that means benefits can actually flow to people in mixed status households.
	So, for example, illegal immigrants come to the United States, they drop a baby, the baby is eligible for SNAP, now the whole household is eligible for SNAP.
	So, a lot of the time, taxpayer money is covering families who are here not lawfully.
	There are certain conservative groups that estimate billions in benefits are indirectly supporting households with at least one illegal immigrant member.
	Well, it turns out all these numbers add up.
	I asked our friends and sponsors at Comet, a project of perplexity, since the LBJ era, how much have food stamps and the subsequent SNAP program cost American taxpayers?
	The answer: since the introduction of the food stamp program during the LBJ administration and its evolution into SNAP, the total cost to American taxpayers has exceeded a trillion dollars, a trillion dollars.
	And you can see how it's elevated.
	And particularly in this period, it has elevated radically in terms of estimated annual spending in billions.
	There's a chart that's provided by Comet here.
	In the 70s and 80s, it was $10 to $20 billion annually.
	Today, it is somewhere between $90 and $130 billion every single year and is only growing.
	And just like every other program, to understand SNAP, you have to understand that it started off as a fairly tiny program and then it just expanded into this gargantuan program that eats up giant chunks of our budget.
	Now, again, none of this is to argue that we could immediately cut off SNAP or should immediately cut off SNAP.
	The reality is what we probably should do is push it back on the states, which is where the authority really should lie for helping out people in dire poverty.
	The idea that the federal government ought to take the predominant role in determining who gets food stamps in Mississippi is kind of ridiculous, frankly.
	And these are local issues.
	And the Constitution was written without the power of the federal government to do any of this sort of stuff.
	The federal government does not have the power to do this.
	It is a violation of the Constitution.
	That does not mean that localities, cities, states, churches shouldn't do something.
	But this is just another example of how things that start off as small programs end up just eating the entire budget of the federal government.
	If you want to talk about the expansion of the national debt, you can't do that without talking about these entitlement programs.
	This thing, like Social Security, started off under FDR and it started off small.
	In 1939, FDR launched the first food stamp program.
	The goal at the time was sort of dual.
	One was to help people who are poor afford food, and the other was to boost the price of crops because the Great Depression involved a shortage of money supply.
	And so one of the things that happened is prices dropped dramatically.
	And because prices dropped dramatically, farmers felt that they could not actually unload their crops.
	So the way that it worked originally is that people who are on relief, which is what they used to call welfare, could buy orange stamps that were equal to their normal food budget.
	They'd spend a buck and then they'd get 50 cents of blue stamps to buy surplus foods.
	Over about four years, 20 million Americans used that first food stamp program.
	At the very, very top of it, at the very top of the peak of the food stamp program, they had like 4 million enrollees.
	And then it ended during World War II.
	And then in 1960, it was sort of reinstated in 1961 because there was a bit of a rough economic bump.
	And there was a pilot program that basically let people buy stamps just to get more regular groceries as opposed to having a separate blue stamp.
	It was still a small program.
	In 1964, there were 380,000 recipients.
	Then came the LBJ era.
	And just like everything else in American life, the Constitution was ritually debased under LBJ.
	And LBJ expanded the food stamp program under the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which led to, by 1970, 10 million Americans on food stamps.
	And by 1974, 15 million Americans on food stamps.
	Reagan tried to cut it back a little bit.
	Then it was expanded again back in the early 1990s, late 1980s, early 1990s.
	And then it was cut back a little bit in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.
	And then George W. Bush really expanded the food stamp program.
	It expanded eligibility, for example, for legal immigrants after five years in the United States.
	One of the 1996 restrictions was that legal immigrants were not eligible for food stamps.
	And so now legal immigrants were eligible after some five years.
	Also, everybody started using EBT cards.
	So one of the things that food stamps used to be was sort of stigmatizing.
	Now, of course, it's not.
	It just swipes like a debit card.
	In 2008, Congress passed another farm bill that increased funding by $10 billion over 10 years and officially changed the name from food stamps to SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
	And the reason they did that is because they were afraid of the stigma attached to the idea of food stamps.
	Then the Great Recession hit.
	Snap enrollment started to really climb.
	By 2008, 28.2 million people were on food stamps.
	And then Barack Obama never let a good crisis go to waste, immediately, radically increased the size and scope of food stamps.
	A family of four got about 80 bucks extra in SNAP every month as a recession boost.
	And the federal government started pouring in money and money and money and money.
	And enrollment skyrocketed.
	It went from 28 million in 2008 to 48 million in 2013.
	So nearly a doubling of the number of people on food assistance under Barack Obama.
	And then under Donald Trump, it dropped a little bit.
	And then COVID-19 and it exploded again to the point where now 41, 42 million people are on food stamps.
	Okay, so that is a good object lesson in how small programs end up eating entire federal budgets.
	And there's waste and there's fraud and there's abuse and there are ways to rein that in.
	But of course, everyone will demagogue the issue and that will never happen.
	Okay.
	With that said, SNAP is the funding is set to end tomorrow.
	When that happens, the pressure to end the government shutdown is really going to ratchet up.
	And Democrats know this.
	This is why, presumably, this is what Democrats have been holding out for.
	Corey Booker, one of our more demagogic senators, he went on to the floor of the Senate yesterday and he said we shouldn't have to choose between feeding families, namely food stamps, and giving families health insurance.
	Now, the thing is, Republicans are perfectly willing to sign off on SNAP.
	The CR would fund SNAP.
	It would not restore Obamacare benefits that Joe Biden put into place as a massive supposed temporary extension during COVID.
	But Corey Booker wants both, and he's going to hold up the people on food stamps in order to get it.
	November 1st, most Americans will now know that their health insurance will rise astronomically.
	And as a result of that, millions will lose health insurance.
	And what that means is, as I've talked to families in New Jersey, I talked to a dad of a special needs daughter who said him and his wife are going to have to give up their health insurance to keep their child covered.
	These are real stories of real people.
	And so don't tell me we as the United States of America have to choose between feeding families and giving families health insurance.
	We can do both.
	Okay, well, I mean, here's the thing.
	We cannot afford to do everything that Democrats say we can afford to do.
	This is how we end up with $38 trillion in debt and massive deficits.
	That was the entire reason for things like the one big beautiful bill, by the way.
	Corey Booker also said he doesn't understand this level of cruelty.
	Madud, it is your party that has held up a clean CR every time it's been presented.
	And so I don't understand this level of cruelty from the Republican Party right now, especially because when I talk to New Jerseyans and I've been meeting with people from hospital boards to people who run our food banks, many of them Republicans, actually, who can't understand why we as a country would cause this much intentional pain to about half of our country that are struggling right now to make it.
	So, yeah, again, this sort of projection is pretty astonishing.
	Speaker Johnson, for his party, says, I'm not the one who's been drawing this line.
	Democrats have been drawing this line.
	But why are you drawing the line now on 40 million Americans who literally will not be able to eat without government assistance?
	Why not help them in the short term?
	And why are they?
	Wait a minute.
	Wait, I reject the premise of the question.
	I'm not drawing the line.
	The Democrats are drawing the line.
	If we had a contingency fund that we could use, that would be done.
	The White House has demonstrated over and over, the executive branch.
	All the cabinet secretaries are doing everything they can to mitigate and reduce the pain.
	Again, we'll have to see how all this plays out.
	My guess is that as the pain grows, you're going to see more Democrats drop off because if you're in a purple state, you don't want to go home and explain why you keep voting against a clean CR.
	And as the country has sort of polarized politically, what that means is that the red state senators in this upcoming election are fairly safe.
	There are a lot of purple state senators who are blue who are in a little bit of trouble, actually, in this upcoming election.
	Coming up, Kamala Harris just won't go away.
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	All righty, it's time for some fast facts.
	We begin with the fact that Kamala Harris is not president.
	Thank God.
	Thank God.
	But that doesn't mean that she is not making the rounds.
	And she, the fact that she still has presidential ambitions speaks to the wonderful nature of America, where apparently literally anyone can fail upward and succeed.
	She has spent the last several weeks lamenting her downfall, talking about how terrible it is for Kamala Harris.
	Here she was just yesterday, lamenting the fact that her staff downplayed her accomplishments, which would be nearly impossible.
	I'm not sure how you downplay zero.
	She had no accomplishments.
	I'm not sure how you downplay those accomplishments.
	Apparently, she's pissed off her staff, downplayed her non-existent accomplishments.
	What wasn't being said?
	The accomplishments, the credibility of my leadership.
	They thought that you say this on page 51.
	If you were shining, then Joe Biden was dimmed.
	So it was very much in their interests to make sure you were dimmed.
	One could argue then so that Joe Biden was shining.
	Yeah, and that was again, it was very short-sighted.
	So according to Kamala Harris, it's because everybody was trying to boost Joe Biden, but not Kamala Harris.
	Well, I'm old enough to remember because I'm more than one year old when the entire media decided that she was brat and she was cool and she was uber competent.
	Ninth look at Kamala Harris.
	Remember all this?
	I mean, do we all have short-term memory loss around here?
	Have we turned into Joe Biden with the Alzheimer's and everything?
	Like, what are we talking about here?
	Seriously.
	Like, the gaslighting here is so strong.
	And then she, at the same exact time, by the way, that she says that people were downplaying her in order to upplay Biden.
	She'll go on Jon Stewart's show and call Joe Biden competent, which stuns even Jon Stewart.
	Yo, I'm not talking about competence.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	No, I'm not talking about competence at all.
	No, I believe he was fully competent to serve.
	Do you really?
	Yeah, I do.
	That surprises me, actually.
	No, I do.
	That's a little bit awkward.
	That's a little bit awkward.
	Yeah, that Jon Stewart paused right there.
	And then she was asked by Jon Stewart about the Democratic establishment.
	She says, I don't know who that was.
	I have no idea who.
	You are the vice president of the United States.
	It was you.
	That would be you, lady.
	Do you think that the Democratic establishment would agree with that?
	I don't know who the establishment is at this point.
	Right.
	Oh, God.
	That's a whole different problem, isn't it?
	Yeah, isn't it?
	The Democratic establishment, those are the people who decided to make room for the nut jobs.
	And now, you know, Kamala Harris is left out in the cold because she's uninspiring and terrible.
	She will go away.
	She's not going to run for president again.
	It would be foolhardy for her to do so.
	Even when she tries to do the thing that apparently animates Democrats, she's bad at it.
	Here she was ripping on Donald Trump's ballroom on Jon Stewart as though this is a great issue of import.
	Are you kidding me?
	This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the snap benefits end in just hours from now?
	Come on.
	So what I'm not going to be distracted by, oh, does the guy have a big hammer?
	What about those babies?
	Oh, really?
	She's so bad at this, truly.
	Well, good riddance to bad rubbish.
	I can't imagine many Democrats are going to be inspired by her latest book tour to want to bring her back around for another attempt.
	Meanwhile, ICE is now vowing that they are going to increase the number of raids up to and including during Halloween.
	According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam on Thursday swiftly denied Governor J.B. Pritzker's request to halt immigration enforcement operations throughout Chicago for three days so children could safely celebrate Halloween.
	Noam said no.
	She said, we're not willing to put on pause any work.
	We do to keep communities safe.
	The fact that Governor Pritzker is asking for that is shameful.
	I think unfortunately he doesn't recognize how important the work is that we do to make sure we're bringing criminals to justice and bringing them off the streets.
	Now, Pritzker is arguing that she's arresting legal citizens and it's terrifying people and kids can't go out and collect candy in Chicago.
	And she says, no, that is not what's happening.
	He's just not telling the truth.
	He's lying.
	And, you know, it's hard to fight constant lies and attacks from this governor, but we will constantly stand up for the truth and for those people that live in those neighborhoods who want peace, they want safety, and they want these criminals out.
	Every day we're on the streets of Chicago arresting people who have committed murders, rapists, those who are trafficking drugs and have been victimizing that city for years.
	We finally have a president in the White House who wants to make this a safe environment for every single American citizen.
	And no matter what Governor Pritzker says, we're going to do our job.
	We're going to protect the people of Chicago.
	Again, I'm bewildered as to why Democrats want to take this position.
	You want to talk about radical, idiotic positions.
	This is the equivalent of saying the police should stop enforcing crime for three days during Halloween because they might pick up potential criminals in areas that harm children or something.
	Like, what are you talking about here?
	People committing crimes should be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, regardless of the day of the week or the year.
	That's really silly.
	Pritzker said he was respectfully requesting the pause from Friday to Sunday in and around home schools, hospitals, parks, houses of worship, and other community gatherings where Halloween celebrations are taking place.
	And he said it was based on a desire to protect communities throughout Chicago.
	Again, the idea being that ICE are the predators and that criminals are somehow the victims.
	That's the idea.
	Well, it's that kind of logic that Christy Noam says is putting ICE agents at risk, which is probably true.
	Here she was talking about it.
	By what Mayor Johnson's doing, by what Governor Pritzker is doing, it's endangering lives and they need to stop.
	They need to stop because there's consequences to it.
	Their words have consequences and we're seeing that.
	An 8,000% increase in death threats against law enforcement, that's horrific.
	That shouldn't be happening in America.
	That shouldn't happen anywhere in the world.
	And I blame them.
	Again, I don't think she's wrong about all of this.
	Okay, meanwhile, in other big news, the president has now called to resume nuclear testing.
	And the reason he is doing that is because Russia's doing nuclear testing.
	China's doing nuclear testing.
	And the idea is, guys, if you are trying to demonstrate your readiness, if you're trying to demonstrate your upgraded nuclear capacity, we can do the same thing.
	According to the New York Times, President Trump's unexpected declaration on Thursday that he was ordering the U.S. military to resume nuclear testing prompted visions of a return to the worst days of the Cold War when the U.S., Russia, and China were regularly detonating new weapons, first in the atmosphere in outer space and then underground.
	It was an era of terrifying threats and counter threats, of dark visions of Armageddon and theories of deterrence by mutually assured destruction.
	Well, I mean, that wasn't a theory.
	That was a reality.
	That's why there wasn't a giant nuclear war, actually.
	That age supposedly ended with the arrival of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty nations agreed to in the mid-1990s.
	But not enough of the signatories ratified it for the treaty to come fully into force.
	President Trump said, we halted it many years ago, but with others doing testing, I think it's appropriate we do it also.
	Now, the only nation that's been regularly testing over the past quarter century is North Korea.
	They last conducted an explosive test in September of 2017.
	Russia made a declaration that they had tested two exotic delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.
	So it's quite possible that what President Trump means is not that we're going to test nuclear weapons, but that we're going to test other weapons, missiles and such, because that's what Russia is doing.
	The last explosive test for China was 29 years ago.
	Now, again, do I think that Trump is actually going to revive nuclear testing for no reason because Pyongyang did something in 2016?
	I do not.
	But I think that the president is saying to Russia and China, guys, back off, back off.
	Like, if you do this, we're going to do the same thing.
	We're not going to sit by and watch you revivify your nuclear programs while we don't update, while we don't prepare.
	Mutually assured destruction, which was a successful theory, rested on the assumption that you could, in fact, and would, in fact, destroy the opposite side if they fired on you.
	And if that threat goes away, so does the mutually assured destruction.
	And if that happens, the nuclear likelihood actually becomes higher, not lower.
	So frankly, I'm fine with the president articulating this.
	Do I think the United States should unilaterally lead off a new round of nuclear testing before Russia and China doing it?
	I don't.
	But if Russia and China make moves to do this sort of stuff, of course we should signal.
	I don't see a choice but to counter signal, actually.
	And the sort of bizarre outrage that has erupted over this is though President Trump is ushering us into a new world of nuclear warfare.
	No, Russia and China are very, very aggressive right now and both have threatened nuclear conflagration over the course of the last several years, Russia most particularly.
	Okay, meanwhile, I do want to point out one critic of the president of the United States.
	It's going to be Marjorie Taylor Greene.
	If you ever wonder how the media works, this is how the media works.
	It's pretty astonishing.
	The media are perfectly happy to promote and prop up people who oppose President Trump, even if they hate them on all other fronts.
	The strange new respect, strange, strange new respect happening here for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a double-digit IQ conspiracy theorist who got herself elected to a Georgia congressional seat and now seems to think she's an ideological thought leader of the Republican Party because she hangs around with famous podcast hosts.
	Well, apparently now she gets to go on the view.
	Isn't that exciting?
	Isn't that wonderful?
	Here's Whoopi Goldberg announcing excitedly that Marjorie Taylor Greene has earned the ticket to the big show.
	That's why when you said Marjorie Taylor Greene, I'm happy to say that she's going to be here on Tuesday.
	Oh yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's election day because what happens to the election.
	And you know, she, I don't know how many things we agree on, but I know the one thing that she and I and all of us at this table agree on is this should not be affecting the American people.
	Wow.
	That's how I know that she's a good person is because she agrees with Whoopi Goldberg.
	But don't worry.
	Don't worry.
	Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't dividing the right.
	It's just anybody who notes that Marjorie Greene is, Marjorie Taylor Green is dividing.
	If you note that, if you notice that, you're dividing the right, apparently.
	Okay, meanwhile, our country is getting stupider.
	Idiocracy was a documentary.
	Kim Kardashian has become yet another famous person to suggest that the moon landing was faked, which, I mean, good Lord.
	This is so stupid.
	I understand that we are now a country rife with conspiratorial nonsense, distrusting of all authorities, including the authority of actual honesty, God history.
	But perhaps we should not listen to people who say dumb crap all the time.
	I don't know, just an idea.
	I'm sending you, like, so far, a million interviews with both Buzz Aldrin and the other one.
	Do it.
	Ms. Girl says, what was the scariest moment?
	And he goes, there was no scary moment because it didn't happen.
	It could have been scary, but it wasn't because it didn't happen.
	So he's gotten old and now he like slurs on his thing.
	Dude.
	Yeah.
	So I think it didn't happen.
	I'm going to go on a massive deep dive.
	Okay.
	I'm going to go on a serious deep dive.
	I center conspiracies all the time.
	Because you're not a smart person.
	Because you're not a smart person.
	I mean, like, that's the whole thing.
	And yet somehow there are people who believe that people who make them more unintelligent and less capable of understanding the world ought to be admitted to positions of high cultural authority.
	Actually, NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy fought back against this nonsense.
	He said, yes, Kim Kardashian, we've been to the moon before six times.
	And even better, Artemis is going back under the leadership of the president.
	We won the last space race.
	We'll win this one too.
	Yes, we've been to the moon.
	Just stop with this crap.
	Alrighty, coming up, Cabot Phillips from Morning Wire stops by.
	So does Andrew Clavin to talk about his new book first?
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	Okay, now speaking of anti-scientific positions, I noted weeks ago that when the Department of Health and Human Services decided to make a gigantic announcement with President Trump that Tylenol was driving autism in the unborn, that there was not enough evidence to support this position.
	And people got upset because if you point out that actual science did not support the position being taken, then this was some kind of betrayal of the cause or something, that Maha couldn't survive unless you admitted that Tylenol causes autism, which again, the evidence is extremely scanty on that front.
	Well, now, RFK has had to admit that the evidence is not sufficient to say that Tylenol causes autism, which I mean, duh.
	The causative association with Tylenol, between Tylenol given in pregnancy and the perital periods, is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism, but it is very suggestive.
	And it's suggestive in animal studies and core blood studies and observational studies from nation to nation.
	And so there should be a cautious approach to it.
	And that's why our message to patients, to mothers, to people who are pregnant, and to the mothers of young children is consult your physician.
	Okay, but that wasn't the way that it was laid out.
	And in fact, there are now gigantic lawsuits happening against Tylenol claiming that Tylenol causes autism.
	So yeah, I don't know, just an idea.
	Maybe you should go only as far as the science actually is capable of supporting without jumping to the conclusion that you have solved the autism crisis by going after Tylenol or something.
	Joining us online is Cabot Phillips of our Morning Wire podcast, who recently made his New York Times debut, which we'll get to in a moment since it is, of course, Halloween.
	But first, Cabot, I want to talk to you about your speech at the University of Iowa.
	Things got pretty heated over there.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I've been going to a lot of college campuses, been to about a dozen college campuses this semester since Charlie Kirk's murder.
	This was a YAF event at the University of Iowa.
	And there were a lot of very angry leftist students that did not want me there.
	That happens at every campus.
	You know better than anyone how that happens when a conservative dares to show their face on a college campus.
	But there was one particular incident that happened at the University of Iowa that went very viral online.
	The students were out tabling, trying to advertise for the event, and a student came up, I believe you guys have the video, and was flipping the table, flipping people off, threatening them, and saying some obscene things to them as well.
	And I do have breaking news for the people that are watching that video.
	This was actually, I know this is going to shock people.
	This was, from what I've been told, a transgender student that was engaging in this activity.
	And I know it's hard to believe that a transgender college student could be capable of acting so irrationally, so illogically, so violently, but that is the situation.
	And during that event at the University of Iowa, during the week leading up to it, there were all sorts of students cheering this activity on, which makes sense when you know that this is how people feel about conservative ideas coming to campus.
	But most importantly, was the response of people accusing me of doxing the liberal, allegedly transgender student that was flipping the table and threatening the YAF kids.
	I was doxing them for doing that, is what they accused, which is very ironic because the student was smiling to the camera, giving them the middle finger.
	The student was clearly very proud.
	They walked away and gave this dorky high five to one of the other leftist creeps that was standing behind, cheering it on.
	So I don't know if doxing is the right accusation there.
	And then there were the number of kids saying they were going to come to the event, or the number of kids cheering on this student.
	And Ben, there were a good number of conservative students there.
	There were a good number of nice, politically agnostic kids in the middle.
	Not a single one of these crazy leftist students showed up.
	Not one of them came to debate.
	I would like to think that they were terrified of getting owned with facts and logic by Cabot Phillips.
	Maybe they were terrified that you would make a cameo appearance and that you would step in and smack them around logically speaking.
	But none of them came, which, again, is not surprising.
	We see this kind of thing all around the country, but also we're seeing it more and more from administrations now too, trying to keep these conservative ideas from campus.
	I'll give you another example of this.
	The week before I was at Iowa, I was at the University of Maryland speaking to a Turning Point USA chapter there.
	The students put in the request, the university approved it.
	And then, right before the event, the university said, Hey, this is kind of dangerous speech.
	This is a controversial speaker from the Daily Wire that's coming.
	We're going to need to slap a private security fee on.
	So they told the Turning Point group, you guys have to pay for a private security company to come in and search people's bags and have metal detectors.
	You have to pay because of threats from the left.
	They put it on the students.
	Now, the Turning Point group was great.
	They said, We're not going to pay this.
	This is unconstitutional.
	FIRE stepped in and sent legal letters to the school saying that this was a violation of the First Amendment because they were forcing the students to deal and have the onus because of threats from the left.
	And thankfully, ultimately, the Leadership Institute, a great conservative nonprofit, they stepped in and paid the security fees on behalf of Turning Point.
	But it didn't end there.
	Once the event started, I get to the campus.
	I actually thought that I was walking into the green room for the event because it was so tiny.
	It felt like the old closet I had in my Manhattan apartment.
	And I said, This is kind of a tiny room.
	This is weird.
	I guess there's something going on.
	The room quickly fills up with 40 conservative students.
	And then once they hit 40, the campus police made their appearance.
	They come in and they say, Hey, the room is full for security reasons.
	We didn't give you guys the lecture hall.
	We had to have a small contained space for security.
	So the room is full at 40.
	Everyone else who was in the audience trying to get in, out in line, what appeared to be the vast majority of the audience, the university said, Yeah, sorry, you guys can't come in.
	It's about safety.
	So they intentionally stuck us in the smallest classroom on campus for safety, but I think it was clear they wanted to protect the number of students that were actually going to hear those ideas.
	I mean, these two events seem to be intertwined.
	The Heckler's Veto is obviously incredibly strong.
	I wonder, Cabot, if you know whether this particular student who we have footage of, I mean, let's show the footage so people understand what you're talking about.
	Here's some of the footage of students flipping tables, one particular student flipping tables going crazy over the University of Iowa.
	That's crazy.
	Oh, yeah.
	Those are discussing that you talk about or half the cat.
	Yeah, enjoying life.
	So here's my question: were there any repercussions from the University of Iowa administration for this sort of behavior, or would they just kind of look the other way?
	To the best of my knowledge, there were no consequences.
	The students told me that as at the time of the event, that nothing had been done, that this was very par for the course, that this sort of thing was a common occurrence there.
	And I've asked them to follow up if anything happens.
	Again, I have not heard that the university did anything, which you'd think that they would want to crack down on this sort of thing, given the environment, given how many Americans were horrified by what happened to Charlie and are now keeping a closer eye on what is coming from the left on college campuses.
	There were dozens, if not hundreds, of comments on a tweet that I posted from this video.
	So many of them were from parents saying, I have a student at Iowa, I got into the University of Iowa circle, I guess, online.
	So many people saying, Hey, I have a student here, or I have high school kids.
	I want them to go to the University of Iowa.
	Now I'm not sure.
	University of Iowa, what is your response?
	What are you going to do?
	So you'd think the school would want to step in and do something, but from what I've heard, they still have not.
	So, meanwhile, Cabot, amidst all of this, you had your debut in the New York Times on all topics, terrible Halloween displays.
	So, this is over at the New York Times.
	There's a piece called Have Halloween Decorations Become Too Scary.
	And you were quoted because you were talking about how you walk out of the way a couple of blocks with your 18-month-old son because people are putting up these scary displays.
	This actually is, I think, for a lot of families a real issue.
	The people who are, I think, a little too into the pagan aspect of Halloween have decided that it'll be lots of fun to put pretty horrifying and terrifying images in public view where small children can see them.
	What do you make of the phenomenon?
	Well, they initially reached out because of some tweets that I had done saying that I think that people who put up overly gory and violent demonic displays should actively be shamed by people in their community.
	I might sound like a boomer here, but I remember growing up in the 90s, Halloween, crazy concept, was a holiday for little kids.
	You go trick-or-treating, you might see some spooky stuff, little ghosts and trees, and maybe a little fake graveyard and skeletons, spider webs.
	But that is not what we're seeing more and more today with the advancements in technology, with the advancements of creepy perverts in society.
	We have seen more and more overtly demonic, gory, over-the-top violent displays.
	In my neighborhood alone, there's a four-foot inflatable zombie toddler baby with fangs and blood dripping from its face and bulging red eyes.
	There are a number of decaying corpses hanging from nooses, swaying in trees.
	And so, yeah, when I'm walking with my son, he has no idea what he's looking at.
	He knows that he's terrified.
	I can't explain to him what it is.
	Hey, this is all fake.
	He's a little kid.
	He doesn't know that.
	And that's why this stuff is so dangerous to protecting the innocence of kids.
	And the response that I've gotten to this has been very telling.
	The number of people commenting on that New York Times piece, the number of people on my social media saying, You're a Karen.
	You're the Scrooge of Halloween.
	Just tell your kid to look the other way.
	Karen used to be a phrase that just meant a middle-aged woman freaking out over a minor nuisance in her life.
	Now it's this catch-all phrase.
	Anyone in society who wants to protect certain basic cultural norms, they are a Karen.
	Anyone in society who wants to protect the innocence of little kids, they are a Karen.
	So in this case, I'm happy to be labeled a Karen if it means ignoring the requests of weirdos who want to traumatize little kids with violent displays in their front yards.
	I am happy to be a Karen standing with my fellow Karens in the bastion of normalcy when it comes to defending Halloween.
	And to the people that want to partake in the weird, gory, creepy demonic stuff.
	All we're asking as parents, all we're asking as normal Americans is that you do it behind closed doors.
	Go buy a movie ticket and see a horror movie.
	Go buy a ticket to a haunted house and partake in all that stuff you want.
	Don't put it in your yard.
	There's a reason that if a guy wanted to celebrate Halloween by putting up a giant display of a topless witch in his yard, you'd say, no, you can't do that.
	That crosses the line.
	That's indecent.
	We're not going to allow you to put this nudity in your front yard for little kids to see.
	It should be the same thing with this violent stuff.
	And I'll end on this here.
	I think a big reason we're seeing this type of stuff happen is number one, that people revel in exposing little kids to things they shouldn't see.
	They take sadistic pleasure in it.
	It's why we see kids being dragged to these drag time story hours at libraries.
	It's why we see kids getting dragged to these crazy pride parades.
	There are a certain sect of society that takes pleasure in exposing kids to things and stripping their innocence from them.
	And second, there is this growing number of adults who want to prolong their adolescence as long as possible and take things meant for kids and make them for adults.
	That's why you see so many like Disney adults who would think, no, Disney World is not actually for kids.
	It's for adults and you need to accommodate me here.
	They're now doing that with Halloween saying Halloween, it's not for little kids.
	It's just as much for adults when we all know trick-or-treating and Halloween, it is for little kids.
	Adults can take part at its core.
	It's for little kids.
	And I'm just trying to defend it.
	Ben, I got to get your take.
	Am I being a Karen here?
	Am I over the top for being offended?
	No, I totally agree with this.
	I have four kids, all of whom are under the age of 12.
	And when we walk around the neighborhood and we live where there's an HOA that's pretty strict about what you can display outside your house, but we've been in neighborhoods where that is not the case.
	And yeah, I mean, there are people who are putting out egregious stuff.
	And frankly, I do think that I have a right to walk down the street with my children without having to be confronted with gory, hideous images where I have to shield my children's eyes.
	And I don't think that that's a crazy statement.
	The stuff that happens in the public sphere actually affects everybody.
	And pretending that public and private, that that distinction needs to go away because of the feelings of adults who wish to act like rowdy teenagers is really silly to me.
	So, Cabot, I congratulate you on being yet another Gen Z 80-year-old.
	That's exciting stuff.
	Cabot, I appreciate the time.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Joining us online is my friend Andrew Clavin, the host of the Andrew Clavin Show and author of After That, The Dark, which is his brand new book.
	It's around here somewhere.
	Guys, I don't know where you put it.
	Do you have one, Clavin?
	Hold it up.
	Hold up your book.
	It's behind you.
	Okay, fine.
	There we go.
	Perfect.
	Thank you.
	Okay.
	And we just have to do this stuff on the fly.
	It is his latest book.
	It is his Cameron Winter Mysteries.
	This is the fifth book in that series.
	And like all of them, it is a fantastic read.
	So, Drew, what was the sort of angle that drove you to write this particular book?
	Well, this guy has been looking for love through the whole series.
	You know, he's a former assassin.
	Kind of the things he's done weigh really heavy on him and he doesn't feel he's worthy of love.
	So here's this guy who has incredible courage when it comes to danger, who's been trying to work up the courage to call this woman that he understands from at first sight is going to be somebody he is really connected to.
	And he finally takes her out on a date and she knows that he likes to go around solving murder mysteries.
	So she tells him a true story about a locked room mystery and he goes out to solve it just to impress her.
	And he finds that he opens up, he stumbles into this incredible nationwide conspiracy that puts him in danger, puts this girl he's falling in love with in danger.
	And he realizes everything he's done to try and stop being an assassin has failed because now he has to go and kill people to keep her safe and to stop these people.
	So it's kind of a, it's a locked room mystery.
	It's a thriller and it's a love story.
	And I think it's just as good as anything I've written.
	I'm just so proud of it and pleased with it.
	I want everybody to take a look because I really do think they're going to love it.
	And Drew, one of the things that's sort of fascinating about your books, and I've read a bunch of your books, actually, which I don't like to admit publicly because, you know, you might go swell ahead and we wouldn't want that to happen.
	But I've read a lot of your books.
	One of the things that you do when you write your books is you write not just great plots and great characters, but thematically.
	There's always a lot of sort of symbolic thematics and important issues and even spiritual issues that you sort of bring up in your books.
	What were the ones that drove this one?
	Well, I think the whole Cameron Winter ethos is how does a man who's been an anti-hero turn himself into a hero?
	I mean, one of the things I've seen in the culture for the last 20 years is that the role of men has become completely murky on TV and the great moments of TV, which were around the 2000s, early 2000s.
	All you saw were anti-heroes.
	You saw the Sopranos and you saw Breaking Bad.
	You saw The Shield, The Wire.
	Every guy was a good guy, but also a bad guy at the same time, or he was manly, but he was a bad man.
	And so Cameron Winter has been that bad man.
	And suddenly he thinks, you know, wait a minute, maybe there's some other way to be a man.
	So it's this transitional thing.
	It's a real struggle because men have to do dangerous things.
	They have to do wicked things.
	They have to be able to do nasty, dangerous things in order to be good people, but they also have to not be able to do those things.
	And that's the kind of thing he's wrestling with.
	When is it right to pull the trigger?
	When isn't it?
	And to me, you know, I consider myself, I probably shouldn't say it, but I consider myself one of the best action writers in the country.
	However, action doesn't mean anything to me unless it's about the characters involved.
	So everything that happens in these books is really a way of exploring character and exploring character in the culture of the moment, which is obviously in a low point and trying to climb up out of it.
	And I believe it will, but I think it has to be led by men who figure out what it is to be a good man.
	You know, and Drew, one of the things that I think conservatives tend to overlook very often, because conservatives are business focused or they're religion focused or they're fact focused.
	When they sit down and they sort of watch what they want to watch on TV, they tend to watch whatever is sort of available.
	It's like they turn off that part of their brain.
	And then when you, as a conservative, say, you know, you ought to read this type of fiction because this sort of fiction is actually good and promotes your values, then you kind of see the eyes glaze over very often with conservatives.
	Like, oh, you know, that's not how I view entertainment.
	Or why shouldn't I spend my money on the latest nonfiction book?
	So, you know, for conservatives, I think it's valuable to understand why fiction is actually a really important medium, maybe a more important medium than nonfiction for most people.
	Yeah, it's the most intimate cultural artifact there is.
	It goes, it's a complete direct connection between creator and the reader.
	And the other thing is, you know, there are two things going on at once.
	One is the publishing business, except for my publisher, has been taken over by women and they don't produce things that men want to read.
	So they say, well, men don't want to read novels, but every time I write a novel, men want to read it.
	And when I was asked by Thomas Nelson to write books for boys, they said, we can't get boys to read.
	And they said, of course, look around the room.
	You're all women.
	You don't know what boys want to read.
	And when I wrote action novels for boys, they really sold well.
	You know, they sold very quickly and a lot of copies.
	And so I think that that's one thing that men have been sort of struck out of the arts.
	But the other thing is conservatives do have this prejudice where they think, why am I reading this?
	It's not true.
	There are like two people that I talk to in the conservative movement who really appreciate fiction.
	You're one and Glenn Beck is the other one.
	And they're the two people who get it, that this is an important thing.
	And the reason it's important is because it adds perspectives to your mind.
	You don't have to agree with those perspectives.
	You just have to be able to experience them.
	So, you understand what other people are doing.
	You read enough and you start to look at the culture and get what's going on beneath the surface.
	Because so often, conservatives look for practical causes, financial causes, economic causes, political causes.
	All those things are real, but you're also dealing with human nature.
	And you do not know what finances, economics, and politics will do if you don't understand human nature.
	You can only get that understanding from the arts, from an engagement with the arts.
	And I think the conservative movement would really benefit in not only each individual, but the movement itself would benefit from a real engagement with creativity in the arts.
	Well, the book is After That in the Dark by our friend Andrew Clavin.
	Check out his show, The Andrew Clavin Show, as well over at Daily Wire Plus.
	And I believe that there are signed copies of your book, After That the Dark in the Daily Wire shop.
	So people can go check it out over there as well.
	If you are desperately in need of a cultural artifact that soon will be worth more on eBay, because I mean, as we all know, after people plot, the prices go up.
	So the supply stops.
	So that's it.
	That's it.
	I'd be mispending.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I can't go through an interview with Drew without making a joke about his impending death.
	Drew, I appreciate the time.
	Good to see you, dude.
	Always great to see you.
	Bye.
	All righty, coming up.
	We'll jump into the latest on the economy because, again, some mixed signals.
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