Ben Shapiro argues Democratic obstruction of DHS funding caused record TSA delays, citing 40% absenteeism and linking it to political posturing by Schumer and Thune. He critiques cultural shifts, including the Harry Potter Snape casting change and Peter Jackson's collaboration with Stephen Colbert on a new Lord of the Rings film, which he deems philosophically misaligned with Tolkien. The episode concludes by analyzing Iran's military decapitation success, asserting U.S. strategic control over the Strait of Hormuz to counter China, while affirming support for citizenship pathways for long-term undocumented residents. [Automatically generated summary]
Folks, if you're traveling today, chances are you're listening to this at the airport in the TSA line, which is endless.
And you're probably getting frustrated.
You want to know why this is happening?
One word, Democrats.
I'm going to tell you all about it and more today on The Ben Shapiro Show.
The standoff over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, including TSA, continues.
People are waiting hours because of it.
According to NPR, the Transportation Security Administration is experiencing the longest wait times ever in its 24-year history because of the ongoing partial shutdown, according to agency deputy administrator Ha Nguyen McNeil.
This person told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday that wait times at some major airports have exceeded four hours and that employees at those airports are calling out of work at rates of 40 to 50 percent, according to McNeil.
And TSA may even have to close smaller airports due to understaffing.
And she worries the agency will continue to lose officers to more steady jobs and fail to attract new talent, which, of course, is not a giant shock.
Now, this is crazy talents.
It's insanity.
And it's happening because Democrats have decided that posturing over ICE is more important than basic safety standards and citizen protections all over the United States.
The Senate Majority Leader John Thune is not wrong when he says that Democrats seem to believe that the current shutdown is good for their left-wing base.
For them, it's all about politics, and it always has been.
You go back to the fall shutdown, the Democrats shut the government down, the whole government down, for 46 days last fall.
And if you remember Chuck Schumer's statement that every day gets better for us, and then you have Brian Schatz, a member of the Democrat leadership, and this shutdown saying we are very serene.
This is, I mean, I think they're just playing politics with this, have been from the beginning.
They think it's really good with their base.
Their left-wing base won't take, they won't take yes for an answer.
And so the Democrats are having a hard time taking yes for an answer.
But they're going to have to because at some point, people are realizing that it is the Democrats who are blockading and have been blockading funding the Department of Homeland Security now, literally for 46 days.
Now, for some reason, Democrats seem to think they can just insult their way to political victory here.
This is very simple.
The Democrats are shutting down the Department of Homeland Security.
Everyone knows this.
All they have to do is pass a clean funding bill for DHS.
But somehow, Jimmy Kimmel is out there just randomly insulting the new DHS secretary, Mark Wayne Mullen, for the great crime of being a plumber, which is a weird take from Jimmy Kimmel, who was like a shock jock radio sports guy.
Why is he commenting on this in this way?
Also, I was informed that it's good that AOC was a bartender.
So I guess it's bad that a man who was a senator is now running DHS because at one time he was a plumber.
Lily Giuliani might not be with us much longer, but don't worry, Trump's got a whole new generation of thinkers lined up, including his newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security, Mark Wayne, Chuck Mike, Bruce Dave Mullen.
Maybe Mellon's better.
He is the now former senator of Oklahoma.
Before he was elected to the Senate, Mark Wayne Mullen was a low-level MMA fighter and a plumber.
To all of the residents who participated in our snowplow naming contest, keep speaking up in every way and any way that you can.
I look forward to meeting with the Chicago ones who submitted the winning names, and I look forward to seeing our city's pride, our spirit, and even yes, our humor represent us again next year.
And so with that, take a moment to, I guess, take in all that you all have been waiting for.
This moment is finally here.
The snowplow with the most votes, most entries, abolish ice.
If you've been here since President Trump became the president on January 20th of 2017, you've been here since that time and you haven't committed a crime but for not having proper documentation, let's figure out a way to legalize you so you can go to work every day, you can pay your taxes, you can raise your family, you can travel freely and not be afraid of being deported.
I'm just going to point out, again, Democrats seem to believe that illegal immigrants roaming free is more important than you being able to get to your plane on time.
That is what is happening right now, which is crazy because first of all, they shouldn't be roaming free.
They committed a crime in entering the country.
How pathetic is the left on these issues?
The Loyola University of Chicago student newspaper, that's the campus newspaper of the murdered student Sheridan Gorman, issued a formal apology for calling her murderer an illegal immigrant.
I'm not even kidding.
So she was murdered, and the student newspaper put out this statement, quote, in the body of the original post, we describe the man who was charged as an illegal immigrant using language provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
That language does not align with associated press style, nor does it align with the values of this newspaper.
No human's existence is illegal.
And we quickly changed our wording to reflect that.
We acknowledge the harm such language can cause and the power and importance of the words we choose to use.
I mean, this is crazy.
It's all ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
No one says that a human's existence is illegal, but the term is not illegal human.
The term is illegal immigrant.
You immigrated illegally.
That is literally what that term means.
But apparently at the student newspaper, they are more concerned about the terminology to address illegal immigration than they are about the fact that an illegal immigrant allegedly murdered one of their students.
Well, we'll get to the craziness of Democrats trying to defend the indefensible in just a moment.
First, today's episode is sponsored by our friends at American Beverage.
Think about the iconic drinks you grew up with and still love today, whether it's soda, sparkling water, tea, or sports drink.
The companies behind those beverages, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, they've always made them right here in America.
So while there's a lot of talk about bringing jobs back, America's beverage companies never left in the first place.
These are American companies making American products with American workers in America's hometowns.
275,000 men and women across all 50 states who show up every day, do the work, help keep the country moving.
We're talking good paying jobs, the kind of jobs you can raise a family on.
For more than 100 years, these companies have been part of the American story, and they're still here, still investing, still building.
Learn more about how they're keeping America strong at wedeliverforamerica.org.
All righty, so the Democrats aren't just defending illegal immigration.
They're defending crime wholesale, wholesale.
So Philadelphia has been an epic fail when it comes to law and order for years and years and years and years.
Remember, just a couple of years ago, we visited the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, which was basically an open air fentanyl market.
One of the most horrifying things I've ever seen in person.
Well, now the Philadelphia DA, Krasner, Larry Krasner, he is threatening to prosecute ICE agents.
This is how crazy Democrats are.
So Democrats, apparently, many Democrats believe that ICE agents ought to be prosecuted, but illegal immigrants ought not.
And you should wait in the line at the airport because of this.
Here is the Philadelphia DA.
unidentified
This is how it works.
You commit crimes within the jurisdiction that is the city and county of Philadelphia.
I prosecute you.
That is how it works.
No, I don't take a phone call from the president saying let him go.
No, the president cannot pardon you.
I'll say it again.
The president cannot pardon you.
And yes, I will put you in handcuffs and I will put you in a courtroom.
Okay, so again, he wants to arrest the ICE agents.
And Caroline Levitt at the White House pointed out that this is kind of disgraceful that you have state-level actors, local actors threatening to arrest federal law enforcement for enforcing federal law.
He's talking to the ICE agents who are handing out water bottles and are helping people move through lines at airports.
It's a disgraceful comment.
The men and women of ICE are great people.
I would encourage this lawmaker whose name I don't know and don't care to know to actually sit down and speak with the ICE agents who are on the ground doing this important work, not just in our nation's airports, but again, to remove violent, dangerous, illegal alien criminals from our country to protect this individual and all of us in this room and Americans across the country from murderers, pedophiles, and rapists who have been allowed into our country by Democrat politicians.
And of course, the law breaking in Philadelphia, the open law breaking, and also the open anti-Americanism is pretty astonishing.
So there's a clip that was rocketing around the internet yesterday that is truly an amazing clip.
This is of protesters in Philadelphia.
These would be pro-Iran, pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist protesters openly in Philadelphia celebrating the killing of American troops, openly celebrating it.
I'm pretty sure we have an immigration problem, folks.
I'm pretty sure our standards are too lax when folks like this are in our country.
They should not be.
This is what was happening in Philadelphia just the other day.
unidentified
Wherever a U.S. military base that crumbles and for every U.S. soldier who returns home in the casket, we cheer.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Osral, all of the racist voices we celebrate.
These popular voices on the ground spend every waking moment in direct confrontation with Zionism and they rely on a strong Iranian state to maintain their fighting capacity.
Okay, so this person, again, is cheering the death of Americans, calling for the death of more Americans, celebrating terrorist groups, and celebrating Iran for supporting terrorist groups.
I will point out at this point that even if this person immigrated here, assume that person is not a natural born American citizen.
If that person immigrated here and then holds those principles, that person can be deported under current law and should be deported under current law, and so should the people cheering for it.
You are not allowed to come to this country and support terrorist groups.
You are not allowed to do that.
That is a violation of immigration law.
That is falsification of your immigration papers.
But for so many of these folks, the law-breaking is the point.
The anti-Americanism is the point.
I mean, you wonder on a broader level, why do so many people in the Democratic Party seem so sanguine about a wide open border, about importing people that we can't vet, about allowing the taxpayer to pay for all these bills?
The answer is a lot of the people in the Democratic Party are totally fine with anti-Americanism.
They like the anti-Americanism.
Ilhan Omar, another immigrant we never should have admitted to the United States, given her wild hatred for America and our allies.
Ilhana Omar, she's railing against the war in Iran.
And here she was trotting out one of the oldest hackney chestnuts available in the political arsenal.
Her pretending that she gives a damn about American soldiers is really galling, truly galling for a woman who wrote a letter of support to a person who tried to join ISIS to a judge way back when who said that something happened to some people on 9-11.
Ilhana Omar has yet to find a terrorist group she cannot find some sort of excuse for.
And when she uses this shtick, by the way, this ridiculous shtick, where she suggests that it's the cost of war that she really is opposed to, let me ask a question.
If I said you can have all of your social programs, we can fund all of them, but also we're going to do the war in Iran.
Do you think suddenly that she would be in favor of it?
It's not an affordability issue.
The thing she opposes is attacks on anti-American enemies abroad.
All of which, of course, is part and parcel of a third worldist strategy to undermine the United States.
Third worldism is the philosophy that suggests that people suffering in the third world everywhere, that's the fault of the United States, and thus the United States must pay.
Now, the reality is, in the current conflict with Iran, we are kicking the living hell out of the Iranian government, which is a good thing.
It is a thing worth celebrating.
For those in the back of the room, here is Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, explaining why.
And as the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, pointed out, the Iranians lie about everything, up to and including their possession of long-range missiles.
Steve Witkoff, our chief negotiator with the Iranians, remember he was trying to negotiate a deal with them, with Jared Kushner, and then they announced that they wanted to build a nuclear weapon.
A statement from Admiral Brad Cooper of CENTCOM, commander.
He said, quote, the death of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy commander, Admiral Ali Reza Tangsiri, from an Israeli airstrike makes the region safer.
Because a couple of days ago, Israel killed the head of the Iranian Navy, who was commanding all of the shutdown in the Strait of Hormuz.
According to Cooper, Tangsiri commanded the IRGCN for eight years, I'd be the Navy, during which time the IRGC harassed thousands of innocent merchant mariners, attacked hundreds of vessels with one-way attack drones and missiles, and killed countless innocent civilians.
He was designated a specially designated global terrorist by the United States Treasury in June 2019, with additional secondary sanctions added in 2024 related to drone development.
Since the commencement of Operation Epic Fury, again, according to Admiral Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, 92% of the large ships in the Iranian Navy have been eliminated.
As a result, IRGC has completely lost their ability to protect power in the Middle East or around the world.
Now, at the loss of their longtime leader, the IRGC Navy is on an irreversible decline.
U.S. military strikes on the IRGC Navy will continue.
Therefore, we call on every Iranian serving in the IRGC Navy to immediately abandon their post and return home to avoid further risk of unnecessary injury or death.
All righty, so what comes next?
Well, President Trump, again, is kind of playing a double game here.
He says negotiations are continuing.
He says they continue because the Iranians want it, because they have been beat to bleep.
They said to show you the fact that we're real and solid and we're there, we're going to let you have eight boats of oil, eight boats, eight big boats of oil.
This was two days ago.
And they'll sail up tomorrow.
That was three days ago.
And I didn't think much about it.
And then I watched the news and they said, a very good anchor, actually.
Happened to be Fox.
But I watched it and they said, something's unusual happening.
There are eight boats that are going right up the middle of the Hormo Strait.
Eight big tankers are going loaded up with oil right through.
And I said, well, I guess they were right and they were real.
And I think they were Pakistani flagged.
And I said, well, I guess we'll deal with the right people.
And actually, they then apologized for something they said.
And they said, we're going to send two more boats.
Well, President Trump did add, he was asked about the fact that there are a lot of Arab allies in the region who are concerned about the United States not sticking around for long enough to truly cripple the Iranian regime permanently.
President Trump said, listen, if we decide that we're not going to stay for the moment, it is not as though we do not have airplanes that can fly a very long way very quickly.
First, the legacy media, they hold Americans who believe the way we do in contempt.
Coverage on any issue from immigration to crime accuses you, not the criminals, of being the ones really at fault.
My friends at PragerU will not stand for that nonsense.
They promote American values with content they like to call edutainment.
That means they teach what matters most in new creative ways through videos and more.
If you ever thought of supporting PragerU, now really would be the time to do it.
Every dollar you give right now is triple matched for maximum impact.
But time is running out.
That match opportunity ends March 31st.
Some of you may know.
I've worked for a long time with PragerU.
I know PragerU.
They are wonderful.
They're basically a sister company to Daily Wire.
Their resources are awesome and they can help you win over your family, friends, neighbors, and anyone else who might be too trusting with what they see on social media.
If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to regularly check out its powerful patriotic content.
PragerU somehow offers it all for free.
Doesn't take a dime of taxpayer money.
PragerU relies on supporters like you to shine a light for everyone.
We all need PragerU to be equipped with quintessentially American values and ideas that make our country so great.
Don't let the lights go out on this beacon of American freedom.
Visit our friends over at PragerU.com slash DW and support their important work before it is too late.
Also, when we began building Daily Wire, it was a risk.
And I'm glad we took that risk.
I hope that you're glad we took that risk.
But when you launch a business, you have to take risks.
And the best way to do that is with our sponsor, Shopify.
Shopify is the commerce platform powering millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including our very own Dailywire shop.
Getting started is unbelievably easy.
With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, you can build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style.
Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography so you can accelerate your efficiency whether you're uploading new products or improving existing ones.
Maybe you already know you have a good product, but you need help getting the word out.
Shopify helps you find your customers with easy-to-run email and social media campaigns, making it feel like you have a marketing team behind you.
You can tackle all these important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics without juggling multiple websites or platforms.
And if you ever get stuck, Shopify's award-winning 24-7 customer support.
It is the best converting checkout on planet Earth.
And that means more sales for you.
Again, we could not run our DW shop without our friends over at Shopify.
Their features are great for our CPG team.
Launching products is super simple.
It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash Shapiro.
Go to shopify.com slash Shapiro.
That's shopify.com slash Shapiro.
Well, as this conflict continues, a matter that is certainly going to come up for discussion in future months will be our relations with our NATO allies.
So far, they have been utterly and completely useless.
No shock there.
The European Union Vice President, Kaha Kallis, she says that the Iran war has to stop now.
Well, ladies, since you and your buddies aren't helping out at all, I think that we don't really need your say in this.
I think that your input is zero.
Zero.
Here she was.
unidentified
From this war, we need to exit from the war, not escalate this further, because the consequences for everybody around the world are quite severe.
With that kind of money, you can buy like seven cups of coffee in Four A. That's incredible.
Like really well done, Canada.
We need to hear from the people who have been tilting toward the Chinese.
Sounds great.
Now, you got to feel a little bit for the NATO chief, Mark Rudy, because Rudy is trying to hold together NATO at this point.
And he understands that actually NATO probably should be doing something, but the NATO countries aren't actually doing anything.
And so he is actually being morally clear here.
He says that the president is making the world safer, which is true.
It's just he can't get any of the countries that are actually members of NATO to do anything to help because the Europeans really like strongly worded letters and doing nothing and also opening their borders to mass radical Islamic immigration.
They're there for all those things.
They're there to chew bubblegum and allow Sharia law to take over their countries.
And they're running out of bubblegum.
Well, anyway, here's the NATO chief trying to hold things together.
We have seen with North Korea, if we negotiate for too long, you might pass the moment where you can still get this thing done.
And North Korea now has the nuclear capability.
If Iran would have the nuclear capability, including together with the missile capability, it would be a direct threat, an existential threat to Israel, to the region, to Europe, to the stability in the world.
So the president doing this is crucial.
And I've seen the polling, but I really hope the American people will be with him because he is doing this to make the whole world safer.
Well, negotiations may be happening or they may not, but the United States must change the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz.
That means radically weakening the regime still further.
Because here's the thing: if you leave the Iranians in charge of these trades, the oil prices will not go down.
They will just stay precisely where they are forever.
If you let the Iranians continue to threaten countries around them, ad nauseum, then all of the geopolitical turmoil currently baked into markets, why the stock market is down, why the oil prices are up, that will stay there forever.
So the Trump administration can still weaken the regime.
There are lots of options to do so.
The only question is which option President Trump will use.
The critics, however, are Legion and as per our usual arrangement, totally dishonest.
Jon Stewart, the pseudo-intellectual, sad clown of the left.
I mean, truly, I'm not sure anyone in modern American media history has been as bad for the country as Jon Stewart.
Truly.
If you go all the way back to that time, he was on Crossfire with Tucker Carlson and Paul Bagala, and he was saying that they ruined America by having kind of normal debate with one another, and then he made his stupid faces on TV for 10 years while playing 30-second clips of folks without any sort of serious conversation about the underlying issues.
If anything ruined media in America and ruined politics in America, it is precisely that approach, the approach of Jon Stewart.
Well, now he's mocking Pete Hegseth because Pete Hegseth talks about American dominance.
I think your choice of Trump for a second term is an indication of America deciding to go along with its own decline.
And the arrogance that you talk about, when you hear that vile Hegseth sort of spraying us with stuff from the Bible and telling us about what to believe and all this stuff, whilst clearly glorifying in the sense of domination and violence of other people.
He came out the other day, no quarter, no mercy, just blatantly saying, like, you know, those things that we came up after World War II to try and prevent the horrors?
Are we not supposed to root for the troops to do what they have to do?
Are we supposed to pretend that there is nothing incredible about what the United States military is doing?
Must we pretend that thing?
When the worst regime on earth faces down American firepower, when we watch some of the worst people in modern history be eliminated, are we supposed to pretend that nothing good is happening?
It's just pathetic stuff from these folks.
Truly pathetic.
But that's pretty much all they got at this point.
Well, the critics continue to maintain that somehow Iran, despite being beheaded and thrashing about like a dying snake, is actually somehow winning.
So The Economist, which has basically become the Jim Kramer of international politics, Jim Kramer, of course, the financial analyst on CNBC who makes stock picks and is always wrong, like wrong so often that reverse Kramer is an actual trade that you can buy and it outperforms the market by a fairly significant margin.
Well, The Economist, they put out a piece on the cover of their magazine called Advantage Iran, which I'm sorry to break it to you.
If you think that Iran has an advantage right now, you're out of your mind.
You're out of your mind.
Their entire leadership class has been killed.
Every major military apparatus they have has been extraordinarily degraded or destroyed.
They've been relegated to firing a few ballistic missiles at our allies and harassing shipping in the Strait of Hormuz by firing some drones.
They are recruiting 12-year-olds to their army.
That is not a joke.
Again, 12-year-olds are being recruited to the IRGC right now.
Is that the mark of a country that is winning, of a country that has an advantage?
Well, here's what the economist has to say: quote: The Islamic Republic has suffered dramatic blows.
Many of its leaders and hundreds of civilians are dead.
Its air defenses are in pieces.
Its Navy and missile launchers are largely gone.
And yet the regime endures.
As we warned when this war began, its mere survival counts as a victory of sorts.
I mean, of sorts is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
You get your ass absolutely kicked by the United States, continuing to exist, quote unquote, counts as a victory of sorts.
Okay.
Well, the economist goes on: at home, the regime's grip is not easing, but has, if anything, been strengthened by the onslaught from America and Israel.
Oh, has it been?
Has it been strengthened?
There's no way to tell this, by the way, because the people have not been freed from their homes to rise up against the regime.
Has it been strengthened from two months ago when they murdered 32,000 people in the streets?
32,000 people?
Has their grip been strengthened?
Has it been strengthened by Israeli suicide drones hitting specific IRGC checkpoints?
The economist says the hardline revolutionary guards are in control, which they were before.
Domestic opponents, whether ethnic separatists or urban protesters, are deathly quiet.
They're deathly quiet, schmucko, because the United States and Israel told them to stay inside.
Literally.
The United States is putting out messages every single day to the Iranian people to stay inside because the bombs are still falling outside.
Israel is doing the same thing.
Iran's stocks of highly enriched uranium, says the economist, some 400 kilograms, remain untouched, probably still under rubble.
Well, I mean, if it's under rubble, then how is it like, how are they better off now?
Most strikingly, Iran has established a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, blocking exports of oil and gas from the Gulf that account for a fifth of the global oil supply.
Now, again, I think the thing to point out here is that it is not as though they did not have that chokehold before.
They did.
It is not as though in the absence of this conflict, Iran could not flex.
Iran had the power to flex, but they were flexing beyond the Strait of Hormuz before.
They were stretching with their proxies.
They were controlling an entire swath of land between Iran and the Mediterranean Sea via Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
The economist says, even though its proxies are weaker than before, Iran still has cards to play abroad.
Again, every, I love the caveats.
The caveats are really astonishing here.
So, sure, I mean, their whole military has basically been sure their leadership is sure, their proxies are weaker.
Sure, their navy is mostly underwater, but they're really winning.
They have the advantage.
And says The Economist, nor is Israel really any safer than before.
Benjamin Netanyahu is thrilled by the sustained attack on Iran.
First of all, you got to love The Economist, which refers to Netanyahu by his Hebrew name.
Ben Yamin is just Benjamin in the Hebrew.
Yeah, you got to love The Economist.
Very subtle.
Nor is Israel really any safer than before.
Benjamin Netanyahu is thrilled by the sustained attack on Iran.
Yet Iranian missiles have penetrated Israeli airspace, killing civilians.
The nuclear threat from Iran has not been eradicated.
Okay, so I talk to people in Israel all the time, all the time.
Going forward, those people feel a lot safer than they did before the war, given the fact that Iran's ballistic missile launchers have been degraded by at least 75%, given the fact that Iran's proxies have been degraded in the extreme.
I mean, how degraded is Hezbollah at this point?
Hezbollah is so degraded in Lebanon.
That was their chief proxy, the Iranian chief proxy in the region.
Hezbollah is so degraded that Israeli troops are strolling over the border with Lebanon and simply pushing their way up to the Latani River, which is like one-third of the way up the country.
And they're holding that territory and not giving it back to Hezbollah.
And as for the nuclear threat from Iran, it has not been eradicated.
It's been set back a fair bit considering all the scientists are dead.
All the leadership is dead.
All of their nuclear facilities have been bombed.
And at best, the uranium that has been enriched is under rubble, as the economist itself admits.
Without regime change, says the economist, the ballistic missile threat will return, requiring Israel to strike Iran every few months.
Most worrying for the Jewish state, its long-standing ties with America may be under strain.
So basically, the only thing that is apparently a problem is that Israel's relationships with America may be understrained.
I'm old enough to remember when it was understrain under Joe Biden because I am more than one year old.
Iran feels it has the upper hand over Mr. Trump, says The Economist.
It has shown that it is more capable than America of both inflicting pain and withstanding it.
Mr. Trump must agree to a full ceasefire, must.
The United States must agree to a full ceasefire with a country that we are grinding under our boots.
Like, what in the hell?
We have to agree to a ceasefire.
We do?
We, a country that has suffered in military terms, minimal retaliation, truly minimal retaliation from the enemy.
We have to agree to a ceasefire.
We, the United States.
And then we also have to compel Israel to abide by it.
So it's not enough that we have to agree to a ceasefire.
We have to force the Israelis to also not go after Iranian ballistic missile rebuilding and nuclear weaponry.
Talks on reopening the strait, says the economist, and steering Iran away from its nuclear program will be bitterly difficult.
So we have to preemptively ceasefire.
Preemptive surrender, say the Europeans.
In the least surprising news of the day, preemptive surrender.
Yeah, that's the way you win wars.
Again, none of this makes any sense at all.
If we leave the Iranian government in place, I have a question.
How does that make oil prices lower?
Do we just trust the Iranians that they're not going to harass the shipping?
Is that how this works?
How doesn't the market price of the possibility of an Iranian shutdown at any time for any reason get priced in?
Giving Iran more leverage is a fool's errand.
And preemptive surrender, preemptive ceasefire on the basis that Iran is harassing shipping.
Man, The Economist, geniuses over there.
The reality is the president has a lot of tools in his arsenal.
If the war were to end today, the United States would have so significantly degraded Iran's capacity that Iran would be on its last legs anyway.
As we've been discussing for days, the Iranian economy does not exist.
It does not exist.
The Iranian government was trying to hold the real to an exchange rate against the dollar of 42,000.
They tried it for years, and then they had to give up the ghost in January, and it immediately skyrocketed from 42,000 rials per US dollar to 988,000 reals per US dollar.
Right now, there is no price for reals.
They do not exist.
And that is because of the damage that we have dealt them.
So again, the notion that we are losing, that we're on the wrong side here.
We're on the wrong side.
We can't outlast them.
Maybe we can't outlast them.
If we can't outlast them, it'll be because of the cowardice of places like The Economist.
I think the most important line there is that Iran has shown it is more capable than America of both inflicting pain and withstanding it.
They've certainly not shown they're capable of inflicting pain beyond the United States.
That is absolutely false.
But the only arguable thing in this piece is the argument made by The Economist that Iran has shown that it's more capable of withstanding pain.
The Iranian government.
If that's true, it's only because places like The Economist attempt to make the West incapable of withstanding even the most minute and temporary sacrifice on behalf of a long-term victory.
All right, well, meanwhile, in terms of victory, cultural victory, the New York Times reported yesterday that the International Olympic Committee has now banned trans athletes.
Again, I'm old enough to remember when this was a terrible, terrible thing that we must have men fighting women, for example.
According to the New York Times, the International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women's category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing.
The decision, the most consequential since Kirsty Coventry was elected last year as the first woman to serve as president of the IOC, followed a board meeting and months of speculation over the organization's policy on one of the most contentious issues facing global sports.
The rules will be applicable starting at the next Olympics in LA in 2028.
Again, shows how culture has moved.
Culture has radically shifted.
There was a time when we were the only company in America who said that men were men and women were women, and we refused to use the preferred pronouns.
And we were basically treated as outcasts by social media companies.
Major social media companies tried to shut down our capacity to disseminate information over it.
And now, even the Olympics is saying, hey, by the way, no men competing with the ladies.
That is a big cultural victory.
Okay, other sort of cultural news while we're at it.
A lot of people seem very upset about the new HBO trailer for Harry Potter.
So my kids are very, very into Harry Potter.
My daughter loves Harry Potter.
In fact, one of her bot mitzvah gifts from a friend was a signed copy by J.K. Rowling of book two of the Harry Potter series.
My nine-year-old son just finished reading all of the Harry Potter books inside the last six weeks.
So my kids are very, very into Harry Potter and they love the movies.
They really enjoy them, love the John Williams score, all of it.
HBO just put out a trailer for their new relaunching of Harry Potter.
And there are a lot of people who are super down on this.
I mean, at least they're not doing what some of the other mainline IP is doing here by totally destroying itself.
This all looks fine.
This all looks fine.
Okay, so what's the thing everybody's upset about?
So the thing everybody is upset about is Papa Esidu, I believe that's this person's name, as Severus Snape, because Papa Esidu is black.
Now, I get it.
This annoys people because there's actual physical descriptions in the books of the characters.
Like Snape, for example, is described as having greasy black hair and a hooked nose and sallow skin.
So, you know, like Alan Rickman, which is who played him in the original movies.
And there are, in fact, black characters in the books.
A couple of the students are openly described as black in the books.
I think one's named Blaze Sabini or something.
There's one called Dean Thomas in the books who are actually black.
I got to say, I can't get supremely worked up over this.
I cannot.
Like, there's certain race switching that actually makes a difference because it is integral to the character.
I'm not sure that Snape being white is integral to the character.
I've said this before about other sort of mainstream figures.
Like I've said before that if you make James Bond a woman, you totally destroy the series.
But if James Bond were to be black, it wouldn't destroy the series in any way.
I kind of feel the same thing here.
I don't think it makes pretty much any difference.
So am I upset?
I am not upset about the Harry Potter of this, about the relaunch Harry Potter.
The same is not true with the Lord of the Rings nonsense that is going on.
So according to the New York Times, the New York Times is reporting in a video announcement with the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson posted on Wednesday, Stephen Colbert revealed he has been developing a new movie based on early chapters of J.R.R. Tolkien's novels that were largely omitted in Jackson's original trilogy.
So I guess it's just a bunch of Tom Bombadil.
Is that what's happening over here?
I guess that's the idea.
They did a video announcement together, Peter Jackson and Stephen Colbert.
Why is Stephen Colbert writing Lord of the Rings?
Like, go write something original, my dude.
Stephen Colbert is like the, as the, why can't you find somebody who is even philosophically aligned in any way with J.R.R. Tolkien to write it?
It makes a bit of a difference.
It really does.
You want to talk about changes that make like Stephen Colbert, ideologically, philosophically, holds zero in common with J.R.R. Tolkien, so far as I'm aware.
And yet, I guess because he likes the property and he's famous, they're doing this routine.
I mean, first of all, I'm not even sure why we're doing a sequel to Lord of the Rings, who is the antagonist in this sequel.
So I was just explaining to the folks about the next Tolkien movie after Hunt for Gollum and the fact that we've partnered up with you to develop the script.
Maybe he was really cheap or something, but I cannot understand for the life of me, for the life of me, why precisely Stephen Colbert would be writing a Tolkien movie.
This seems like the worst idea ever.
And I believe that the idea of it is Mary and Pippin and Sam, after Frodo is gone, like they come back years later, is my understanding.
And they are now going to basically relive.
It's basically like the bucket list.
It's like a bunch of old hobbits walking around the shire and remaking the journey as they get old, which sounds terrible.
It is hard for me to imagine, actually, a worse idea than this.
And again, I love Peter Jackson.
I think Lord of the Rings, the original trilogy, is one of the great film achievements of all time.
I love it beyond measure.
I know pretty much every line from memory.
So as a lover of the original movies, no, the answer is no on that one from me, dog.
Well, folks, I touch on everything from politics to culture here in the Ben Shapiro show mailbag.
So we're going to take some of your questions.
Be sure to send your questions in.
This segment is sponsored by our friends over at Pure Talk.
Riley asked, how do we counter the narrative the conflict with Iran is a strategic failure when the mainstream news is mostly slanted against it?
Specifically, claims that the administration expected a Venezuela-style rapid collapse, failed to account for the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and ignored the resulting economic fallout.
I just don't see the evidence of this.
You have people who are like, well, they didn't see what was coming.
Did they not?
Did they not?
We're 26 days in.
What evidence do we have that they had never gamed out the Strait of Hormuz?
Seriously, that they're all shocked by what happened in the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, again, I think what happened here is that Iran was a target of opportunity.
They took some contingency plans off the shelf and immediately went to work.
And then, you know, things don't always go according to plan, but this idea that somehow we are strategically under the thumb of the Iranians because they're harassing shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Why?
Like, that was totally unpredictable.
What's the deal?
David says, hey, Ben, do you see it as likely the U.S. takes over the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely to ensure free travel and to have a strategic choke point to China and control it?
Like we used to have the Panama Canal.
That would not be surprising to me at all.
And frankly, that seems worth the cost.
You control that strategic choke point.
That seems kind of important to push China off of the Taiwan Strait, which is another strategic choke point where China has significantly more sway.
China can't do much in the Strait of Hormuz, but they can do a lot in the Taiwan Strait.
Daniel says, hey, Ben, I'm a recruiter with the Tennessee Army National Guard.
One of the more common things we come across as recruiters is young men and women who have been brought over to the country illegally by their parents and have been here their entire lives at minimum.
For somebody to process in the military, however, they need to have a green card.
Do you agree that there should be something in place for them to be able to process in the military, especially with their situation?
Yes, I do.
If people are willing to come here and make sacrifices that I myself did not make, I'm going to be hard-pressed to explain why, in fact, they should not be allowed to become citizens.
All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
I'll be taking more of your questions, but remember, in order to be able to watch that and hang out with us and be best friends, you have to become a member and use code Shapiro at checkout.