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Feb. 9, 2026 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:55
A Very BAD Bunny Super Bowl
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Time Text
End of Performance Critique 00:05:47
Hola, y bienvenidos al benchapiro show.
Yeah, so I had to learn Spanish so I could understand the halftime show over at the Super Bowl.
And I have a lot of thoughts.
I have a lot of thoughts.
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Overall, honestly, like great production value.
I understand.
This halftime show is not aimed at me.
I listened to classical music, and there was the usual plethora of butts on the screen, which again has become common to all halftime shows, unfortunately.
But overall, in terms of the production value, production value, incredible, incredible.
I was very much in favor of a couple actually getting married, like a straight couple getting married in the middle of the halftime show.
And by the way, I did enjoy the entire wedding production dance with Lady Gaga as the wedding singer and even the kid falling asleep on the chairs, which I've been told by some of my producers, producer Savvy, is of Latina extraction.
And also, Fabi, the makeup lady, is Puerto Rican.
And so they told me that this is like a common thing at Latino weddings.
It is also a common thing at Jewish weddings where everybody goes too late and the kids are all sleeping on the chairs.
Again, charming.
I enjoyed that.
The staging was immaculate.
All of that is fine.
So let's start with that.
Here is sort of my generalized critique.
There is a thing that goes on in American culture that is highly irritating to me.
And that thing is where everyone celebrates a thing that is left-leaning in nature politically.
And then, if you notice the thing is happening, they tell you that you're crazy and why are you focusing on it?
And you are just over your skis and why are you so upset?
So let's start with this.
Again, I'm not particularly upset by halftime shows at the Super Bowl because who cares?
In the grand scheme of life, is this a big deal?
No, it is not a big deal.
The reason that some people are concerned today or upset today is because really, I think the end of the performance.
So let's start with this.
Again, I am not a Bad Bunny fan.
To me, I don't know whether he's a good bunny, a bad bunny, or the worst bunny.
I have no gradation.
I have no scale upon which to judge his badness of bunniness.
I do not know his music.
I did not understand a word he was saying.
Frankly, it seemed to me as a person who, again, does not traffic in this music and doesn't listen to this music that when I was watching the aforementioned Bad Bunny walking through the screen, holding a football, gaining more yards than the New England Patriots the entire first half, and kind of saying things to me in Spanish.
And I had no idea what he was saying.
I will admit that it felt to me like perhaps I had been in a car crash and there was a person walking at me telling me that I needed to get out my insurance card in a language I did not understand.
So this was not geared toward me.
But again, I told you the pros.
The pros are that beautifully produced.
The couple getting married mid-show, the kids falling asleep on the chairs.
All that was very, very charming.
And I don't even have a problem with a lot of Spanish being in the show because guess what?
A lot of people in the United States speak Spanish, and that's totally cool.
A lot of people in the United States speak a lot of second languages.
There are some cons.
And again, here is where you get into the gaslighting.
One, one con: no English.
It is fine, obviously, to have a lot of Spanish and not even unprecedented.
I remember a few years ago, Shakira and J-Lo did the halftime show, and I believe they did a song in Spanish.
Cool.
That's awesome.
And of course, there are tens of millions of Latino Americans who contribute in unbelievable ways to our common project as Americans.
One third of the American military is Latino.
But why no English, right?
That's a decision.
That's a decision that's being made.
No English where people who don't speak Spanish don't understand what is going on.
I mean, he could have been saying literally anything, and I would have had no idea what he was saying.
And second of all, to pretend that Bad Bunny is an apolitical figure is, of course, very, very silly.
Bad Bunny is not an apolitical figure.
He has never pretended to be an apolitical figure.
So, for example, when he showed himself on the Grammys and then him giving a Grammy to a little kid who looked precisely like an iced detainee, don't tell me that this wasn't on purpose.
Of course it was on purpose.
Don't be silly.
Don't be silly now.
And here comes Bad Bunny to give the Grammy to the little kid who's supposed to look pretty clearly like the ice detainee.
I mean, so much so that everybody, he was not, by the way.
And then he starts with this stuff again.
Again, not my jam.
Not my jam.
The entire, I keep coming back to the production value because just as a person who enjoys a good show, the production value, incredibly high.
Building like an entire sugar cane field out in the middle of the Super Bowl.
All those sugar canes, by the way, were people inside the sugar cane.
So it was like the March of the Ents when they were setting that thing up.
People just kind of wandering into the middle of the field.
There are some weird moments.
Obviously, one of his songs is about the failure of electricity in Puerto Rico.
And so people falling off of telephone lines, which if you have no frame of reference, which I really did not until I actually looked it up, I have no idea what's going on.
And then when I found out, I feel like that's a very weird way to sort of tout your home culture is, and also our electricity fails a lot.
Policy Genius Protection 00:02:28
If I were to do one for Jewish culture, I would be like, also, Ashkenazic food is totally tasteless.
That'd be kind of a strange flex.
We'll get to more on the Super Bowl halftime show and all the rest of our cultural questions in just one moment.
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Dancing with Diversity 00:14:33
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The big, the big thing that happened, right?
The thing that kind of I think was the tell was that the very end of the halftime show, after he's done all of this, and of course, it had its little political touches here and there.
I already mentioned the where's waldo of human butts that happened.
Apparently, some of those butts were famous butts, but there's a where's waldo of human butts.
There was also, of course, a little bit of LGBT content and that you had some two dudes rolling on each other.
It happened fairly quickly, but of course was there.
The tell, the tell, and this is where the real critique comes in.
The tell was the end of the halftime show.
So the end of the halftime show, Bad Bunny, again, a less than good bunny, he's walking through and he's followed by apparently the entire World Cup contingent from the Western Hemisphere.
So he walks through and he announces every single country in the Western hemisphere, starting geographically with Argentina, like starting there and finishing up with Canada.
And as he does, a bunch of people follow him carrying flags from various other countries that are not the United States.
So here's what that looked like.
God bless America.
He says, God bless America.
Maybe his only English word.
And then he starts listing countries.
He's modeling United Nations timeout.
good for him for memorizing his geography okay okay and then he uh okay Okay, so, and then he finishes.
He finishes with together we're all Americans.
Okay, so here is the problem with this particular thing.
Truly, celebrating Puerto Rican culture in the United States, celebrating Latino culture in the United States.
Cool.
One of the amazing things about America, truly amazing things, is you can both assimilate to the values of the United States and still keep the flavor of your old culture, of your common culture.
You can do that.
And one of the great things about America over the course of the last couple of hundred years is that you have lots of cultures that merge into the gigantic stream that is the United States, which is why every American has eaten Mexican food and Italian food and Chinese food.
And that's wonderful.
That's great.
Now, the fact that you have weddings where you have people dancing salsa and you have weddings where you have people dancing the horror, that's wonderful.
That's great.
That's fine.
I don't think a whole lot of Americans object to that.
The question is: are you showing gratitude for America being unique?
So, this, I think, is the reason why people are focusing on this on a political level.
Where is Bad Bunny's gratitude?
The worst bunny.
Why is Bad Bunny's?
I have such a hard time saying his stage name.
Why is this person's gratitude being so hidden here?
There have been other shows where he's refused to stand up for the national anthem.
He is rich and he is famous because of the United States.
He is living in splendor because of the United States.
He is one of the greatest recipients of American largesse ever because we all are.
If you're born in America and if you're born in Puerto Rico, you're an American.
If you're born in America, that is the greatest privilege that you can receive.
So it is my opinion that you should show some gratitude for America being unique.
It seems to me American flags should have been all over the place in the middle of this demonstration.
This is one of the things I think that the political left does totally wrong.
It's kind of astonishing to me.
The political left has the opportunity to grab the upper hand culturally with a lot of people and simultaneously celebrate the country.
He could have done this entire show almost identically with American flags everywhere saying America means that you can have salsa dancing at your wedding.
But that's what's amazing about America.
You can do all that and still be an American who loves football and still be an American.
Football is a uniquely American sport.
You can still be an American who is doing all the American things and you can also enjoy these cultural variants.
He could have done that, bringing out the flags of foreign nations, places, by the way, that are not purely Latino.
So it wasn't just a celebration of Latino culture at the end because Canada is not Latino.
Canada is a bunch of white people, Canada, generally speaking.
Haiti is not Latino.
There are a bunch of countries in the Western Hemisphere that are actually not predominantly Latino.
So what he's doing there, this kind of United Nations routine, is not a celebration of America or a celebration of cultures that coexist peacefully in America or a celebration of Latino culture in America.
It is a celebration of apparently everyone being American.
And this is what he says.
He says, we're all Americans.
Well, you're an American if you're in America's borders and your loyalty is to America.
You're not American if you are Peruvian and you live in Peru and you spent your entire life in Peru.
And his attempt to say we are all Americans by making some sort of pedantic geographic point that the Americas encompass like the continents of North America and South America, that's silly.
And no one sees it that way.
The reality is we are all from the Americas, but we are not all Americans.
When people say American, they believe that you are talking about the United States as they should.
And football is an American event.
It is actually not the world's biggest event.
It is America's biggest event, but ain't nobody in Japan watching the Super Bowl.
This was not the World Cup.
This performance at the World Cup would have made perfect sense.
It would have, because that's an international event with a bunch of different at the Olympics, this would have made perfect sense.
Doing it at the halftime show and then basically saying that America is one of many.
Saying that what is happening on the stage is not a representation of the greatness of America in being able to capture many different cultures and draw from many different cultures to merge in our assimilative American values.
Not doing that, but instead doing these sort of country separatism and then saying we are all Americans while flying the flags of countries that are not American.
Like, again, that last part was, I think, to tell.
And that was the part I think that people are really reacting to on a sort of gut level.
Now, again, none of this is to say that for the third time, there aren't parts of the show that were kind of enjoyable.
Again, I'll bring up the sort of wedding part of it, which I thought was kind of charming.
Here's some of the wedding stuff that was happening.
This is an actual wedding that happened on the stage.
Like, cool, nice.
And yeah, exactly a dude marrying one.
And then they drew aside and suddenly the whitest lady I've ever seen, Lady Gaga, who's Italian, she started singing a salsa version of one of her songs, Die With a Smile.
And then you had all the salsa dancing.
And again, I think the Super Bowl needs to take it down a couple of notches in terms of the fleshly pursuits, but that's not unique to this particular show.
But the salsa dancing at the wedding, I thought was charming.
And the little kid who's like lying asleep and they have like the old, the old grandfather or grandmother who's like moving the kid.
Like that's all nice.
That's not why I didn't react to any of that.
I thought, fine.
The only thing that as an American I reacted to was the point that was being made at the end that was clearly political.
And when people say that don't notice the politics, this is the part that drives me a little crazy.
You can't put it in every review.
And then when I notice that it's happening, you tell me that I'm crazy.
That's the part I think that's getting people.
If you go to the Wall Street Journal review of the show, they say in a history-making halftime show, performed almost entirely in Spanish.
So as soon as you say a history-making halftime show, you're already saying there is something uniquely important about this halftime show.
So don't pretend that this is, you know, Bon Jovi playing a halftime show a few years ago.
If you're saying it's history-making, clearly you're saying that it's important in a cultural political way.
In a history-making halftime show performed almost entirely in Spanish, the Puerto Rican star paid tribute to his heritage and the many countries from Brazil to Mexico, whose people have come to shape the modern day U.S.
And again, this is one of the weird conflicts about giving that list of countries and including, for example, Canada.
It's kind of strange because if you're just celebrating immigration, then theoretically a lot of immigrants from other places all over the world who come to the United States.
But as the Wall Street Journal review points out, just a week ago, Bad Bunny denounced ICE and customs enforcement while accepting a Grammy Award.
But on the halftime stage, he offered up a buoyant celebration of Latino culture.
The elaborate stage design included a maze of sugarcane and a single-story house similar to the one he used during his 31-day residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico last summer.
As Bad Bunny strutted through the greenery, he passed by old men playing dominoes, women chatting in a nail salon, and boxers sparring a montage of scenes from life in Puerto Rico.
And then there were a stream of celebrities who showed up to offer their support.
I will admit that I did not recognize any of them except for Ricky Martin showed up.
And I mean, I think we're all getting old because I'm old enough to remember when Ricky Martin was pretending to be straight.
So he showed up flanked by a bunch of bananas, which was a little strange.
Anyway, he showed up.
Apparently, Pedro Pascal and Jessica Alba were there for like a hot second.
And then he finished that set by spiking a football that said together, we are America.
So that's the part.
Like, again, if you're going to say it's important, and then we notice that it's important and we ask, so why is it important?
And then you tell us, and then we say, well, we don't like that.
That's not us doing something wrong.
That's you gaslighting people.
But here are the things that are not wrong.
Doing the vast majority of the show in Spanish, don't care.
Fine.
I'll be honest to you.
When Kendrick Lamar did his show, I had no idea what he was saying the entire show.
And he was purportedly speaking English.
I had no idea a single word that he was saying.
So my bewilderment at the innate illiteracy of many of our artists continues.
My inability to speak the language they are speaking is not unique to the halftime show.
That I'm not upset about.
I'm not upset about the featuring of Puerto Rican culture or Latino culture.
Cool, fine.
Kind of enjoy.
The thing that I am concerned about is the innate argument that is being made that the greatness of America somehow must be subsumed under the rubric of all countries are awesome and America is somehow equivalent in some way to other countries.
It is not.
America is exceptional.
It's unique.
And Bad Bunny, of all humans, should know this.
Because again, in other countries, he would still be working at the local bodega, which he was, I believe, in Puerto Rico until like 2015.
America is fabulous.
America is spectacular.
Do that exact same performance while thanking America and everybody goes home happy.
But again, I think he was meant not to do that and noticing that is not some sort of crime or sin.
President Trump predictably did not like the show.
He put out a statement on Truth Social in which he said the Super Bowl halftime show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst ever.
Okay, again, an overstatement.
I mean, I've seen many, many terrible Super Bowl halftime shows each year.
In fact, I generally hate the Super Bowl halftime show.
It makes no sense.
It is an affront to the greatness of America and doesn't represent our standards of success, creativity, or excellence.
Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.
And the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the United States and all over the world.
Again, I would have more sympathy for that statement, except for that's been true for 20 years.
It is gross.
And unfortunately, it now shows up in nearly every sporting event.
The sort of bump and grind dancing that you see from cheerleaders at a normal basketball game is so much more than a 14-year-old boy would have been able to take in 1983.
This show is just a slap in the face to our country, says the president, which is setting new standards and records every single day, including the best stock market in 401ks in history.
There's nothing inspirational about this mess of a halftime show and watch.
You'll get great reviews from the fake news media because they haven't got a clue of what is going on in the real world.
And by the way, the NFL should immediately replace its ridiculous new kickoff rule.
Make America great again, President Trump.
So I agree about the kickoff rule.
And again, I see where he is coming from when he does not like the halftime show.
I think that there's a better way to articulate that.
And this is, again, we'll get to this a little bit later on in the show.
This goes to the Republican Party's inability to articulate good critiques in a thoughtful way that will tend to broaden the coalition rather than narrowing it.
Well, while all this was going on at the Super Bowl halftime show, all the cultural chaos and all the argument, Turning Point USA held its All-American Super Bowl halftime show.
You could have seen that over at Daily Wire Plus.
We were one of the places that was streaming it.
The show featured Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Bryce, and Gabby Barrett.
And apparently, it is one of the most viewed shows in the history of YouTube.
Like astonishing numbers, actually.
The numbers soared to as many as 5 million people concurrently tuning into the live stream on YouTube.
Now, again, they're doing that on a fraction of the budget of the Super Bowl, of course.
They're doing it in a closed room that does not involve 70,000 people.
So that's a pretty astonishing, a pretty astonishing showing there from TPUSA.
And as I say, you could head on over to Daily Wire Plus as a subscriber and watch it.
And I think that speaks to the amount of antipathy that people have for the sort of politics that are being promoted by Jay-Z and team over at the Super Bowl.
It's Jay-Z's team that handles the logistics for the halftime show.
There are a lot of people who decided that they were going to tune on over to the TPUSA show.
And that's astonishing, I mean, to go from nowhere to those kinds of numbers.
Amazing work by TPUSA.
Again, there's a reason that right-wing media have been on the upswing for quite a while.
And that answer is left-wing media and the infusion of left-wing politics into what used to be at least apolitical entertainment.
Meanwhile, over at the Super Bowl, one of the sort of more bizarre ads of the evening came when Mike Tyson suddenly appeared on your TV and told you to eat real food.
That was the thing that happened in our lives.
So that was put up by the Make America Healthy again part of the Trump administration.
Now, Maha's doing a lot of amazing things.
I'm not sure that Mike Tyson, who most famously dieted on human ear, is necessarily your best pick for a person to promote healthy eating.
He talked about how his 25-year-old sister died after a heart attack, and then it showed him biting into an apple and it said processed foods kill.
Problematic Levels in Baby Formula 00:07:49
It said, eat real food.
Now, again, I'm totally for the eat real food thing.
I think that that's great.
I'm just not sure that Mike Tyson is the best person that you could trot out theoretically for that.
It's kind of a strange pick, shall we say.
With that said, the Maha movement is doing some fascinating things.
And we're going to be joined in just a minute by the First Lady of Florida, where they have their own Maha movement, actually pushing forward what is eating healthy and checking into foods that may not be good for your kids.
This segment is sponsored by Balance of Nature.
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As I mentioned, I had the opportunity to sit down with the First Lady of Florida a little while ago to talk about what the state of Florida has been doing.
They're testing a lot of the foods that you are probably eating or feeding to your kids, and the results are not always wonderful.
Casey, thanks so much for joining.
Really appreciate the time.
Hey, Ben.
Thanks for having me, and thanks for taking an interest in all of this.
So let's talk about what you've been doing and some of the results that you've been getting.
So as I say, the FDA, they give the go-ahead to particular products.
But then I think everyone assumes that what you're eating is now safe because the FDA has said that it is safe, but there's no sort of follow-up testing.
And that was the basis for the Healthy Florida First Initiative.
That's 100% right.
And so what we have learned pretty much is that the FDA does a really good job as a reactionary force, right?
If there's a problem, they will go and investigate.
If there's a E. coli or salmonella outbreak, they will go and investigate.
But what we want to do in the free state of Florida and through a coalition of other states is to do trust but verified testing, right?
A company can put a product out on the market.
It has a list of ingredients.
And what we want to do is trust the integrity of that product to ensure that there are no contaminants like heavy metals, leads, or pesticides or anything like that.
And I think through the states in a federalist type way, we can help be a force multiplier to the federal Maha movement, give our data and our evidence to the FDA and say, hey, listen, here's some actors here that are problematic, like glyphosate, which we found in the bread, which is weed killer, commonly found in Roundup, right?
Like this is totally unacceptable.
And so we want to help provide truth and accountability and just give consumers the information so they can make informed decisions.
And some of these results are pretty astonishing.
So far, you guys have done baby formula, you've done candy, and you've done bread.
The candy results, I think, were the ones that actually got the most attention because, again, we all know that when we hand our kids candy, it ain't great for them, but we don't think that there's arsenic in it.
But it turns out that actually some of these candies have a non-insignificant portion of arsenic, apparently.
Yeah, right.
And the problem lies in aggregate.
We're not talking about one piece of candy on one day, but no child is eating one piece of candy on one day and not eating candy for the rest of the year, right?
When we look at it through our risk analysis, it is how much candy are they eating and consumption over the course of a year?
And what does that mean as far as the intake of arsenic and being problematic?
So what we saw, for instance, with nerds, if you eat more than 86 nerds over the course of a year as a child, you are exceeding the allowable safe threshold, as I put in air quotes, of arsenic for a child.
If you eat more than six Jolly Ranchers, you are exceeding the allowable level of arsenic for children.
And so when you think about Halloween and Valentine's Day coming up and Christmas, and even yesterday, I made the example of when I was in a store with my daughter in CVS and, you know, she's, you know, pulling at my shirt sleeve because she wants a candy, you know, and I just want to try to pacify her so I don't cause a big scene.
You know, you will just instinctively like, okay, sure, what is one piece of candy and how can it be problematic?
Well, when you make those decisions in aggregate, you know, every week or every month or over the course of a year, you can see how this adds up.
And it goes back to this fundamental principle that parents have a right to know what is in the food so they can make informed decisions to protect their health and certainly the health of their children.
So what's been the reaction from some of the candy companies to all of this?
Because you're presenting data.
I assume that they're not particularly happy with people believing that if you eat too many nerds, that you're going to be consuming unsafe levels of arsenic.
So what's been their response so far?
Well, you know, I'll let them speak for themselves.
I don't think that they're arguing that there is indeed arsenic in the products.
And so when we look at it in our analysis, it is in aggregate.
The silver lining, though, in a lot of this, Ben, is yes, while we found a lot of the name brand candies did have problematic levels of arsenic when you're eating it in aggregate over the course of a year, there are candies that didn't have any trace levels of arsenic in it.
And also we saw candies in the healthy side, right?
It sounds a little oxymoronic, but the healthier varietal or the organic varietal that didn't have it, which tells you a couple of things.
One, it can be done right.
You can manufacture this stuff better so that you don't have arsenic.
It is not inevitable.
And also, I see as more parents get informed about this, they will vote with their pocketbook, right?
They're going to go and buy the things that they deem to be better for their children.
And that by inertia is then going to hopefully kind of tip the scales a little bit of these companies to make better decisions as it pertains to their products.
So we have a safer, safer array of food out there.
And the organic and the healthy ones, by and large, of the ones we tested, and I think there were eight or nine, two were a little bit problematic, but not by much, but the rest of them were good.
So I can see, you know, as more of the consumer gets consumer folks get more educated about all of this, that companies hopefully will want to start shifting down this road because they're going to see there's this huge market of informed consumers that just want better options.
Now, we talked about candy.
Obviously, we're talking about some of the other staple products that people are using, things like baby formula.
You don't have a choice very often when you're using baby formula.
What are you finding when it comes to baby formula?
Oh, yeah.
So this is one of the most ridiculous things that I think we've seen.
And that's why we started with baby formula, because these are obviously, this is all that kids are going to be consuming sometimes for the first year or two of their life.
Like I tried to breastfeed as long as I could, but there came a point when I went back to work where I had to supplement.
You know, I was going down store aisles and I was looking at baby formula, making an assumption based on trust that everything there was safe, right?
So when you find problematic levels of arsenic, cadmium, mercury, you know, all of this arsenic, like it's really unnerving.
But here's the other unnerving part of it.
This is not new, right?
So if you go back to last year, Consumer View came out with a review of a lot of these baby formulas and they found there were problematic levels of these contaminants, right?
And you remember, rightfully so, Secretary Kennedy, President Trump, they went out and did Operation Storkspeed and they said, we need to go in and test, right?
Good.
100% the right avenue to take.
Applaud their efforts.
Here we are with the independent testing of the Florida Department of Health and there's no change, right?
We're seeing still problematic levels and it's not okay.
So now we're trying to say, hey, guys, you need to do a better job.
And so I think through the accountability and the sunlight, going on and talking to, you know, your viewers, going on and just informing the consumer base to make better informed decisions, I think that that can help push.
I do think that there might be some statutory reforms that might be done.
For instance, right now, they are required by law to test for things like salmonella before the formula leaves the factory.
Well, my thing is, is could we not just have them also test for lead and mercury and arsenic?
I mean, you know, we're talking about babies here, right?
And the ramifications of having these heavy metals in food is really problematic.
It doesn't just simply leave the system.
And our surgeon general would say your risk of getting cancer over the course of your lifetime by consuming these heavy metals and pesticides early in life, that risk goes up by 20%.
That's not okay, right?
As a former cancer survivor, okay, that's not cool.
Voter Fraud Videos 00:09:25
We don't want to do this.
We want better options and we want consumers to be informed.
Well, that's First Lady of Florida, Casey DeSantis, heading up the Healthy Florida First Initiative.
First Lady, thanks so much for the time.
Really appreciate it.
Hey, thanks, Ben.
Keep up the great work.
And meanwhile, on the sort of, it's okay to be proud of America storyline.
Over at the Olympics, controversy broke out over the last couple of days when USA Freestyle Skiers Chris Lillis and Hunter Has were asked about representing the United States and they talked about their mixed emotions.
Don't do this, guys.
Don't do this.
You want to have critiques of the presidency?
Go for it.
But to say you have mixed emotions about representing the greatest country in the history of the world, no.
Then don't represent it.
Then seriously, don't represent it.
Don't do it.
You don't have to.
Nobody thought that you were deeply necessary.
But here's what it sounded like.
I feel heartbroken about what's happened in the United States when, you know, I'm pretty sure you're referencing ICE and some of the protests and things like that.
I think that as a country, we need to focus on respecting everybody's rights and making sure that we're treating our citizens as well as anybody with love and respect.
And I hope that when people look at athletes compete in the Olympics, they realize that that's the America that we're trying to represent.
It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now, I think.
It's a little hard.
There's obviously a lot going on that I'm not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren't.
If it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I'm representing it.
Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on in the U.S.
Okay, guys, no one asked for that.
No one asked for that.
You can say, listen, my politics have nothing to do with my pride in representing my country, which is the greatest country in the history of the world.
That's all you have to say.
President Trump naturally was concerned about this and ticked about it.
He put out a statement on Truth Social.
U.S. Olympics given Hunter Hess, a real loser, says he doesn't represent his country in the current Winter Olympics.
If that's the case, he shouldn't have tried out for the team, and it's too bad he's on it.
Very hard to root for someone like this.
Make America great again.
And again, I think a huge percentage of Americans, all we're asking for, truly, all we're asking for is a baseline level of love of country, like true love of country.
That's all.
That's all.
Do all the things from the halftime show to skiing for the United States at the Olympics, just exhibit love of country.
It's not that much to ask.
And honestly, it is the reason why President Trump has been so successful because he does not have politically consistent positions, the president.
But what he does have is a gut-level patriotism.
And I think the vast majority of Americans share that, which is why the Make America Great Again movement has been successful.
Now, going back to the things that will make the Make America Great Again movement not successful, one of those things would be tweeting out idiotic and terrible videos showing the Obamas as monkeys.
That would be a terrible, stupid thing to do.
Truly, it was taken down from Truth Social.
As I predicted, I told you.
I told you this.
Okay.
And there are people in the media who are upset that I said this, but it was clearly true.
President Trump tweeted out a video.
The video, which I think was unverified in terms of its actual content, talked about voting machines in Georgia and the flaws in the voting machines.
And the president, of course, is very caught up in all of the hubbub about voting machines in Georgia because he still maintains he won the 2020 election.
He's at the very tail end of that video.
There's a graphic that popped up of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
It's really gross.
It's racist and it's ugly.
And it's stupid.
And at first, the administration tried to claim that he didn't put it up.
They said that some sort of intern put it up, which, of course, is not true.
The president is the only one who's posting on Truth Social.
And the president says he didn't see the whole thing, which was clearly the case.
I told you, the president does not have the attention span to watch through a full one-minute video that he is.
If you think he's watching every video that he's putting up on Truth Social, you're out of your mind.
Here's the president basically saying that.
I looked at it, I saw it, and I just looked at the first part.
It was about voter fraud in someplace, Georgia.
There's a lot of voter fraud, 2020 voter fraud.
And I didn't see the whole thing.
I guess toward the end of it, there was some kind of a picture that people don't like.
I wouldn't like it either, but I didn't see it.
I just looked at the first part, and it was really about voter fraud and the machines, how crooked it is, how disgusting it is.
Then I gave it to the people to generally they look at the whole thing, but I guess somebody didn't.
And they posted and we took it down.
Okay, so yeah, duh.
That's what I said last week.
Duh.
And yeah, I think he's telling the truth because I don't think that the president, again, watches through any of the videos that he posts.
If they have nice pictures of President Trump, he puts them up.
This has been true for his videos for legitimately 10 years, the stuff that he puts on social media.
And President Trump condemned the racist part of the video, of course.
Do you condemn the racist parts of the video?
Of course I do.
Okay, so I mean, yes.
Okay, so don't make that sort of mistake.
That's a dumb mistake.
It's dumb.
Now, what's amazing to me is truly that the left gets away with extraordinary open racism, and everybody pretends it's not going on.
So, for example, Representative Gene Wu, who is in the Texas House of Representatives, he basically spills out his program.
He says that minorities need to side against the white man.
This is an elected official in Texas.
The day the Latino, African-American, Asian, and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning because we are the majority in this country now.
We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone.
Okay, so that is a problem.
See, that seems to be much more problematic just in terms of thoroughgoing ideology than President Trump tweeting out a racist meme, not having watched the end of it, which is legitimately what happened.
If your thoroughgoing ideology is all minorities against the white guy, that is a massive, massive issue in American life.
It really is.
And the left seems to be embracing this more and more.
This is why, again, the biggest thing for the Trump administration is make your policy choices, which are designed to benefit Americans, all Americans.
Make those clear, be consistent in their application, take down the rhetoric, just enforce, just do the baseline business of governing, and let the left spin out.
That would be the advice to the Trump administration for 2026.
Thank God the Trump administration is now doing that with regard to sanctuary cities by putting Tom Homan, an adult, in charge of the policy.
Here is Tom Homan over the weekend criticizing politicians' doublespeak on sanctuary cities.
But for the politicians that say, we want you to arrest the criminals, we want you to target criminals, but not let me in the jails, you can't square that.
If you really want to arrest the criminals and target the criminals, which I do, then let us do it in the safety and security of a jail or a prison where it's safer for the alien, safer for the community, and safer for the agents.
So, for those, and there's many of them on both sides of the aisle, says public safety threats are what you should be concentrating on.
So, everybody should come together and make that happen and give us access to the jails.
Again, this sort of low-key advocacy for the basic intervention of law enforcement, that's the way to go.
That's the thing that the Republicans should be doing right now, especially because Democrats continue to spin out on the immigration issue, truly spin out on it.
Over the weekend, Zor Mamdani in New York signed an executive order to restrict ICE in New York City.
He restricted access to city property, barred the federal government from accessing city data, and mandated training for city employees on where they do and don't need to cooperate with ICE.
And then he went ahead and cited the Quran in support of anti-ICE policy, which, dude, Madud.
All right.
The story of the Hijrah reminds us that Prophet Muhammad was a stranger too, who fled Mecca and was welcomed in Medina.
Surah Nahal 1642 tells us: As for those who immigrated in the cause of Allah after being persecuted, we will surely bless them with a good home in this world.
Or as the Prophet Muhammad said, Islam began as something strange and will go back to being strange.
So, glad tidings to the strangers.
Okay, he also then proceeded to invade the entire Middle East and slaughter people who did not adhere to his religion.
So, there was some of that happening as well in Quranic times.
Yeah, things getting weird out there.
Meanwhile, over in Minnesota, anti-ICE rioters were attacking cars with sex toys, which seems like a very strange thing to do.
I'm not sure I understand the logic of attacking a car with a dildo, but I guess here we are.
Also, I find it somewhat unsurprising that the Minnesota ICE protesters have such a rich supply of dildos to hurl.
So there they are, throwing sex toys at the ICE vehicles, which, um, that's interesting.
You did it.
You saved America.
AI's Impact on Hiring Uncertainty 00:03:03
Great job, guys.
That's a lot of bored white people out there in Minneapolis in the cold, throwing sex toys that presumably they got from their nightside stands at the ice vehicles.
Great job, everyone.
And of course, you have Don Lemon, who's still out there.
No one is happier than Don Lemon about what happened to Don Lemon comparing himself to civil rights leaders of the past.
Yes, you too are a civil rights leader if you allegedly coordinate with people to go inside a church and harass the parishioners.
In my time when I was there, I thought about all the people who'd come before me.
I thought about all of the people who fought for civil rights, who fought for gay rights, all of the people who were at Stonewall, Marsha P. Clark.
I'm like, yes, those are the people.
Those are the real heroes.
And so what's happening to me, I have at least in this time that I'm living now, more agency, more resources, more rights, and I would hope than the people who are fighting for our freedom and our civil rights.
So much heroism.
Okay, so the Democrats are doing that.
So all Republicans have to do is implement basically good policy in a low-key way, and they will benefit from doing this.
This is the thing they will benefit from.
Now, that, of course, assumes that the economy continues to sail forward.
And that is an open question right now.
A lot of cross currents in the economy right now.
Obviously, the Dow Jones industrial average continues to soar.
It closed above 50,000 for the first time on Friday.
It's been doing great.
With all that said, when it comes to, for example, employment, there is a deep freeze that has enveloped the U.S. labor market, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The pace of hiring in America has dropped precipitously.
There isn't a single reason why.
Instead, there are a lot of them.
Uncertainty over tariff policy, high short-term interest rates.
Workers aren't leaving the jobs that they have right now.
And of course, a lot of concerns that AI is going to wipe out large swaths of the job market by replacing a lot of labor.
All those are very, very serious concerns.
And those concerns are leading people to feel worried about the economy, even if the stock market is doing great.
Because there has been a stall in tech employment starting November 2022.
There's some evidence that AI is filtering down into the markets.
Amazon, obviously, cutting out jobs.
AI is wiping out certain value in the market while propping up value in the AI end of the market.
So software companies took it right on the chin last week because there are so many things that AI is now doing that used to be the preserve of software companies.
So the president is trying to run the economy hot, apparently, running up to the election.
So that is why presumably he wants the interest rates lowered.
He is hoping that there will be more liquidity available and that will mean more hiring.
The question is whether the uncertainty over AI is preventing people from hiring up because they believe that AI is going to develop such that they don't need to hire a lot of other people.
Again, economic uncertainty always harms presidencies.
And we are in an off-year election.
That's always bad for the party in power with very few exceptions.
Starmer's Resignation Crisis 00:10:46
All of that is true.
But the biggest thing the Trump administration can do, speak rationally to the American people, show that you are doing things on the topics that they care about, and be calm and collected in your approach to the American public, considering that the left is spinning out.
Joining me on the line is Winston Marshall, host of the Winston Marshall Show, co-founder of the Dissident Dialogues Festival of Ideas, and a former member of the Grammy Award-winning folk rock band Mumford and Sons.
Winston, of course, covers everything political in the UK as well.
Winston, thanks so much for taking time.
Really appreciate it.
Hi, Ben.
Thanks for having me.
So, one of the things that's really fascinating that's been going on, obviously, is what's surrounding Keir Starmer and team in the UK because of Jeffrey Epstein.
So, while the focus in the United States has been on large-scale, unsupportable conspiracy theorizing about what Epstein did, didn't do, the suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein is the head of an international intelligence ring on behalf of a foreign power, trafficking in little girls or whatever.
There actually is, there is supportable scandal, right?
That's stuff that I said before.
That's all conspiracy conjecture at this point, based on the reams of evidence that we have seen.
It is beyond the evidence.
But the one thing that we do know is that there were members of the Keir Starmer administration in the UK who have been forced to resign because of their connection with Jeffrey Epstein, not necessarily because of trafficking in women or girls, but because of actual business corruption.
Maybe you can fill us in.
Well, I'm going to try and fill you in.
I've just spent the last four or five days in full whiteboard meme mode trying to piece this all together.
It is quite literally a bottomless pit of information.
And it seems that Jeffrey Epstein might indeed be taking down the Starmer government from beyond the grave.
Some people might think that he is saving Britain actually from beyond the grave, although there could be much worse things around the corner.
Now, I joke about it, but it is an absolutely disgusting story.
It's been brought me no pleasure whatsoever going into this, but it is not just a case that Starmer, this might be the last week of Starmer's as prime minister, but it is also a corruption scandal, as you say.
It's got political sleaze in it, but it's also the epitome, maybe I should say the nadir of crony capitalism, all in one story.
So I'm going to attempt to break this down for you.
It's not easy.
There have been six new revelations about Mandelson's relationship with Epstein from the January 30th tranche.
But I need to explain to you what's going on.
Peter Mandelson, yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I need to explain to you who Peter Mandelson is.
Peter Mandelson is a Labour Party grandee.
His grandfather was part of setting up the Labour Party at the beginning of the last century.
His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was also in Churchill's war cabinet and famously had many clashes with Churchill.
They were sort of ideologically opposed from each other.
But not only that, Mandelson is regarded, was regarded at the time as the dark prince behind Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and the new labor movement from 97 to 2010.
The dark prince is a name, by the way, that he embraced very happily.
He is known as being sort of the archetypal Machiavelli.
And in fact, I actually met him once when he was ambassador, and that was my experience.
He seemed to me to be a total Machiavell.
So having had his political career where he started as doing campaigning, then became an MP for a while, got himself up to being deputy prime minister under Gordon Brown, and had various ministerial roles up until 2010 when the Tories took power in the coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
At which point he pivots to the private sector, which we'll come back to.
The point, though, is that in that period, even then, his career was filled with scandal, which I'd love to go into, but there's too many other present scandals for us to address.
So he became, he was appointed in February 2025 as ambassador to DC.
And this was by Keir Starmer.
Now, in February 2025, it was in the public domain already, as revealed by the FT in June 2023, that Mandelson had maintained a post-conviction relationship with Epstein, i.e., after Epstein had been convicted in 2008.
Mandelson continued his friendship with him.
In that 2023 expose by the FT, we learned that he even stayed at Epstein's Paris apartment during Epstein's prison time and that they had communications after which Epstein would call him Petey.
They were friends.
Then he becomes ambassador in February 2025.
September 2025, we have the first tranche of Epstein files.
Famously, the birthday message, the big birthdays.
I don't know if you've gone through that book.
It's like a 250-page document of sort of memories of Epstein and messages from friends.
And in that birthday book, he says Mandelson calls Epstein his best pal and that he loves him.
And what's important to remember, though, is that birthday book was from 2003, so pre-conviction.
So you might say, oh, well, you know, it's not necessarily the case that he knew about the sort of dastardly disgusting behavior.
But it was also the case then that there was evidence of a post-2008 relationship.
And it was also evidence that he flew on Epstein's jet.
And it shows an ongoing communication.
So in other words, we knew that they were friends post-conviction.
Why this is important is because although there is new information that's been released over the last week in this new tranche from January 30th, and it's pretty disgusting information, when it comes to the sleaze, we've actually known the core salient issues all along.
And why this is also important, that your American viewers might not have picked up on is in the British media and across the British nation, it is the sleaze that everyone is focusing on.
The bottom line in all of this is that Peter Mandelson was a close deputy of the Prime Minister, Kier Starmer.
He was appointed, even though it was clearly public that he had a relationship with Epstein.
The things that we're finding out right now are that there were actual law-breaking activities happening between Mandelson and Epstein going back years.
As you mentioned, a criminal investigation into Mandelson for having leaked insider government information to Epstein that he then used to trade off of.
And this could bring down Kier Starmer's government.
Just today, his chief of staff had to resign over all of this.
Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, who had to resign over his role in the appointment of Mandelson.
If Starmer were to go down right now, according to virtually every opinion poll, the leader in the clubhouse right now is the Reform Party, if there were to be a new election that were to hold, if he weren't to be replaced simply as prime minister, if there were to be an actual collapse in his coalition and suddenly there were a new election to be held, the Reform Party is the chief beneficiary.
The Labour Party is in quite low odor.
It has now fallen in many polls below the Conservative Party, which was basically dead as a doornail just a couple of years ago.
And some of this has to be due not just to Kier Starmer's poor governance, but also to the Epstein scandal.
Yes, except I think it's very unlikely that Labour Party will have an election.
They know how unpopular they are.
That means that all of them will lose their job.
They also hate reform because they think reform are far right.
They won't have an election because they know reform will sweep through and have a stonking majority in Parliament, making Nigel Farage prime minister.
That would be their worst nightmare.
So I don't think we're going to see an election.
What I think is more likely is that Starmer will either resign or say that he'll resign after the May council elections.
Now, there's two other things going on with regards to party politics.
There's a by-election going on in South Manchester, in Bornton and Denton, where I was just on the weekend visiting voters.
But there's also these council elections, which probably Labour will get smashed.
And at that point, it will be seen that he is untenable to stay as prime minister.
So then there'll be, he'll stay probably until there's inter-party elections and they decide between themselves who the new prime minister and leader would be.
I can run through some of the likely candidates if you want there, but suffice to say that all of them are further left than Pierce Starmer.
He is actually the best of a bad bunch.
And they are also seem far less competent than Starmer.
So that's why I say Epstein, and I joked at the beginning, actually might have made things much worse for Britain.
And that might be on the horizon.
Well, that is Winston Marshall.
Go check out all of his ideas over at the Winston Marshall Show, and you can check out all of his social media as well.
Winston, thanks so much for the time and the insight.
Thanks, Ben.
All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
The American military buildup in the Middle East continues.
Plus, we will bring you the latest on the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, which that situation still is unfolding.
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Okay, no, not even close.
Two.
Whatever.
You know what?
Two, four, three, six.
I cannot believe we're back here again, Ben.
If the Ben Shapiro shows a mom, then Ben After Dark is a cool mom.
Jay.
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