King Charles III's US visit sparks a critique of Britain's 51% non-religious population and radical Islam, contrasting with Trump's praise for Anglo-American roots. The host condemns Germany's Chancellor Merz for claiming US strategic vacuity while the UAE exits OPEC to lower oil prices. Representative Elise Stefanik joins to expose foreign funding in elite universities like Harvard via her book "Poisoned Ivies," arguing they have abandoned truth for political indoctrination. Ultimately, the episode asserts that Western decline stems from economic mismanagement and cultural betrayal rather than external threats. [Automatically generated summary]
The tea and the crumpets and the fanfare, they were all good and fine.
But then the King of England, King Charles, decided to use his royal prerogative and lecture us on how to run our country, on how America ought to lead the world.
Kingo, shut the hell up.
See, here's the thing.
There are lots of lessons to be learned from Great Britain over the past century.
The biggest one is this don't do what they did.
King Charles is currently repping a civilization that no longer exists.
He's an empty crown sitting atop a civilization that gave up the ghost a long time ago.
There is only one takeaway Americans should have from the king's visit that if Britain has zigged, we ought to zag.
Britain is a cautionary tale.
If we follow their path, we collapse the way that they have.
Meanwhile, the Democrats tripped over a literal king after shouting no kings for months.
The latest on Iran and James Comey is back in the dock.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So, King Charles III made his first visit to the United States, and it was all very lovely.
It began with revolutionary soldiers welcoming the king in the rose garden, which I have to say was somewhat ironic.
The last king who experienced revolutionary soldiers would not have been welcomed in quite this way, I would assume.
Here is what that looked like.
You could say that's a friendly welcome, but I would kind of think that's actually a bit of an unfriendly welcome if you're the Brits, because the last time they had to face down soldiers who looked like that, they lost an empire, actually.
But President Trump had some very nice words for King Charles talking about America's cultural inheritance from England.
And of course, as a student of American history and as a devotee of British philosophers ranging from John Locke to Edmund Burke, I love the fact that the United States is rooted in Anglican history and English history and British history.
Here in the shadows of monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, honoring the British king, might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence, but in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate.
Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed.
Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us The rarest of gifts, moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea.
She loved, and I told the king this, she loved the royal family.
And she loved the queen.
And anytime the queen was involved in a ceremony or anything, my mother would be glued to the television and she'd say, Look, Donald, look how beautiful that is.
She really did love the family.
I also remember her saying very clearly, Charles, look, young Charles, he's so cute.
Here's what he had to say The special ingredient in our relationship.
As President Trump himself observed during his state visit to Britain last autumn, the bond of kinship and identity between America and the United Kingdom. Is priceless and eternal.
And the best part of King Charles' speech is when he gave the sort of long history of rights springing from Great Britain that made their way across the sea.
Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional monarchy, but also provided the source of so many.
Of the principles reiterated, often verbatim, in the American Bill of Rights of 1791.
And those roots go even further back in history.
The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle.
And of course, all of that's wonderful and all of that is true.
And listen, he made some lighthearted jokes as well.
This was not before Congress, this was a little bit later on.
He joked about the idea that if it were not for Great Britain, we would be speaking French.
That was a response to President Trump saying that if it were not for us, the British would be speaking German.
I assume this is a reference to the French and Indian War.
I have to say, historically, it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense because, let's be real, if the French had won the French and Indian War, it is very likely that the settlers, many of them, would have returned to England.
Guides us not only personally but together as members of our community.
Having devoted a large part of my life to interfaith relationships and greater understanding, it is that faith in the triumph of light over darkness, which I have found confirmed countless times.
Through it, I am inspired by the profound respect.
This all, by the way, was all going to lead up to a bit of a lecture about America's foreign policy.
So, again, the idea is Christianity is great, but interfaith relations, those are the things.
Now, again, I'm speaking as a person who is not Christian.
So that means that I have tremendous admiration for Christianity and what it has done in the world.
I encourage people to go to church all the time.
And it turns out, That if you want a robust Christianity, that Christianity cannot, in fact, be based on vague principles.
It has to be based in faith.
And so when you hear the Brits lecturing the United States, a much more religious country, on Christianity and interfaith relations, this is where I start to go a little bit wonky.
Because let's be real about this Britain has taken religion and trod it through the mud.
The statistics don't lie here.
According to the UK's 2022 census, 51% of people in the UK identify as having no religion.
According to a 2024 British Social Attitude Survey, 9% of the population attends a religious service once a week or more.
And as far as Anglican identity, it doesn't exist anymore.
The Church of England, 2.6% of people aged 16 to 34 identify with the Church of England.
Meanwhile, the radical increase in radical Islam in the kingdom has been overwhelming.
15% of London minimum at this point is Muslim.
A huge percentage of those people are radicalized.
According to one survey conducted in 2016 by the polling exchange, 4% of British Muslims say that 9 11 was created by Al Qaeda.
7% say the Jews.
31% say the American government.
Britain imported millions of people who believe this.
Millions of people.
This is where your interfaith nonsense has gotten you.
This is.
Being lectured on Christianity and interfaith attitudes by the Brits?
The answer there is no.
You know where interfaith is going in Britain?
Interfaith is going to tolerance for radical Islam, which is why today, the day after King Charles visited the United States, there was an attack in Golders Green, which is a very heavily Jewish part of London, in which a radical Muslim took out a kitchen knife and just started stabbing people who were wearing Jewish garb.
Here is some of the horrendous video.
You can see here is a radical Muslim.
He's walking down the street, takes out a knife, and literally just attacks a man wearing a yarmulke on the street.
He ended up stabbing two people on the street before he was taken down by guards in Golders Green.
According to UK government data, there were 15,859 total reported incidents of knife crime in London in 2025 alone.
And of course, we know that Great Britain's interfaith tolerance allowed for gigantic grooming gangs to basically run the place.
For years on end, out of fear that there might be a backlash to open immigration.
King Charles also took the opportunity, while he was in the United States, to lecture us on climate change.
We should mention that the UK has destroyed its own economy on the basis of this nonsense.
Our generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of nature.
We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems, in other words, nature's own economy, provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.
Again, listening to the Brits lecture us on energy production is ridiculous.
Roughly 78% of UK's energy still comes from hydrocarbons.
That would be like oil and natural gas.
And the UK is constantly on the economic edge because of their extraordinary regulations and low domestic gas storage capacity.
According to an article in the American Spectator, there is a 78% tax rate on North Sea gas production and a nuclear program that's not going to deliver energy for a decade.
The energy programs in the UK have driven them into the dirt, economically speaking.
All of this culminated in King Charles lecturing the United States on how to beat plowshares into swords rather than plowshares into swords.
He wants to be a moderating influence on our global hegemony.
Working together and with our international partners, we can stem the beating of plowshares into swords.
I am mindful that we are still.
In the season of Easter, the season that most strengthens my hope, it is why I believe with all my heart that the essence of our two nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding, and to value all people of all faiths and of none.
Okay, now again, listening to this from the same government, I understand King Charles is the monarchy.
Curist Armour's government is an appeasement oriented.
Left wing pacifist government.
And so, in order to understand my ire here, I think you have to understand having the British crown come to the United States and tell us all about the old style civilization that Britain basically surrendered in favor of welfare statism is highly irritating.
Listen to this person lecture the United States, the world's great hegemon, on what we ought to do from a country that decided to defenestrate itself over the course of the last century is pretty galling.
And we know what went wrong for Great Britain.
We know what went wrong.
Even after World War I, where they had suffered extraordinary losses and where financial leadership had largely been ceded to the United States because the United States was the borrowing center for the British.
Even after that, the global empire really was not America's yet.
The global empire was still Great Britain's.
And then they decided between World Wars I and II that they were going to become pacifists.
That they were going to move away from defending themselves, their civilization.
Famously, in 1933, there was a resolution at Oxford University, at their debate club, the so called King and Country Resolution, in which the students voted, quote, that this house will under no circumstances fight for its king and country.
And this was reflective of British sentiments.
There's an attempt in the aftermath of the cost of World War I to recede from global leadership.
And you know what ended up happening?
It was a self fulfilling prophecy.
I was recently rereading Winston Churchill's Gathering Storm, which has Of course, a classic.
It is the first volume of his Second World War series.
And one of the things that Churchill writes, right near the top of the book, he says that his purpose in writing this book, which he was writing again right after World War II, as the rise of the Soviet Union was creating the conditions for the Cold War, he said that he was writing to demonstrate, quote, how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous, how the structure and habits of democratic states, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses.
How, even in matters of self preservation, no policy is pursued for even 10 or 15 years at a time.
We shall see how the councils of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of moral danger, how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bullseye of disaster.
And he says, We shall see how absolute is the need of a broad path of international action pursued by many states in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics.
Meanwhile, Britain is telling the United States that we ought not do what we are doing in Iran.
They're doing absolutely nothing to help us in the Strait of Hormuz.
They're perfectly willing to allow China to maximize its global influence.
Only in the case of Ukraine has Britain taken a leading role in any sort of way.
And even there, it's basically to beg us for money and armaments.
Britain's recession, receding from its world leading position between World Wars I and II in the 1930s, actually ended with that catastrophic World War II, which basically decided that Britain was no longer a global power.
And then after the war, Britain decided that they were going to give up global leadership.
In favor of irrelevance and socialism.
In 1942, there was something called the Beverage Report in the middle of World War II.
And it was a report arguing essentially for large scale socialism in Great Britain.
This is where the phrase cradle to grave welfare state comes from.
It comes from the Beverage Report.
And after World War II, Britain embraced that in full.
And what that meant was basically blowing out global leadership in favor of domestic spending and destruction of their domestic economy.
At the beginning of the 20th century, for example, government.
In Britain, we spent about 0.5% of GDP on health.
As of April 2026, that number is 11.4% of GDP.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the British government spent about 0.7% of GDP on social protection.
Today, UK welfare spending is almost 11% of GDP.
In total, as of early this year, the UK's government expenditures are approximately 44% to 45% of their entire GDP annually.
By way of contrast, the United States, we spend a lot of money here in the United States.
It's like 22%.
Britain gave up the ghost.
They gave up global leadership.
So, having the king come here and lecture us on climate change or lecture us on foreign policy or lecture us on what we ought to do for global leadership, no country has done such damage to itself as Great Britain through pacifism and socialism and redistributionism and open borders.
And one of my favorite poems is a poem by the poet Philip Larkin, a British poet who's writing in around 1960.
And he wrote a poem called Homage to a Government.
And it ends this way.
Next year, we shall be living in a country that brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will still be standing in the same tree muffled squares and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.
And he was lamenting the demise of the British Empire in favor of, again, domestic redistributionism.
And as it turns out, the Brits can't even leave their kids money.
Because when you give up global leadership, and when you give up the free markets, and when you give up private property, and when you skew in favor of socialist idiocy, And global weakness, you become irrelevant.
So you don't get to come here and lecture us about that.
Don't give up your economic might in favor of specious nonsense like global redistributionism in the name of global warming.
And hell, don't open your borders to mass migration that helps facilitate all of that.
And then don't lecture us.
Don't lecture your successors who have been paying your bills for the last 80 years in terms of defense.
Don't do that.
By the way, it is not just Great Britain, of course.
All righty, coming up, we will get to the Europeans lecturing us on foreign policy.
Really, really, guys, this is what we're doing now.
First, you're driving home after a long day, and then your check engine light starts to flash, sputter, stall.
Now you're stuck on the side of the road.
Happens to everybody at some point or another.
And that's where our sponsor, CarShield, helps you be ready when life hits you with those surprise repair bills.
With over 20 years of experience and more than 2 million vehicles covered, CarShield has earned a nationwide reputation for reliability.
And yes, that includes a 96% customer satisfaction rating and an A from the Better Business Bureau.
CarShield offers affordable month to month vehicle protection plans designed to save you from the outrageous out of pocket costs that come with modern car repairs.
You get 24 7 roadside assistance, courtesy towing, rental car options, all at no extra charge.
One of our sales executives recently had his car's extended warranty expire.
He compared a bunch of options.
He found that CarShield's rate was 20% lower than all the other plans he was offered.
He's already used their services.
He couldn't be happier with the coverage and the convenience.
You'll feel the same way.
Their partnership with ACE certified mechanics ensure that your car gets real professional service when you need it.
Their low deductibles mean your wallet stays intact when those unexpected breakdowns occur.
Drive with zero worries thanks to CarShield.
Right now, Carshield is offering our listeners 20% off with code Shapiro at carshield.comslash Shapiro.
Don't let an unexpected breakdown ruin your day.
Get covered with Carshield and drive with confidence.
Again, head on over to carshield.comslash Shapiro.
Use code Shapiro right now for 20% off.
Listening to the Germans lecture the United States as we attempt to take down a truly Nazi esque power in Iran is pretty rich.
It's pretty rich.
And I weep for the Germans that their energy prices went up.
Oh, that's sad.
Maybe you guys shouldn't have completely destroyed your own energy supplies via Green Revolution nonsense.
Maybe it turns out that your facilitation of the Russian bear led to the invasion of Ukraine because you made yourself dependent on Russian oil for years.
Being lectured because you're having a rough economic time in Germany.
Often the Americans clearly have no strategy, and the problem is conflicts like This is always that you don't have just to go in, you also have to get out again.
We saw that all too painfully in Afghanistan for 20 years.
We saw it in Iraq.
So, this whole affair is, as I said, ill considered to say the least.
At the moment, I cannot see what strategic exit the Americans are now opting for.
Okay, a little bit later on, we'll get into President Trump's actual strategy.
By the way, comparing.
Afghanistan, where he had literally tens of thousands of boots on the ground, and Iraq, where he had hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground, to Iran, where he had zero boots on the ground.
And basically, we are just stopping shipping coming out of Iran at this point.
That is really, truly silly.
Truly, truly silly.
The president put out a statement.
The chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, thinks it's okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
If Iran had a nuclear weapon, the whole world would be held hostage.
I'm doing something with Iran right now that other nations or presidents should have done long ago.
No wonder Germany is doing so poorly, both economically and otherwise.
President Trump.
He ain't wrong.
Okay, we'll get back to the president's Iran strategy, which actually is quite a good strategy in just a second.
It turns out that the blockade is having a massive impact on Iran.
The Iranian regime is in serious, serious trouble.
We'll get to that in a bit.
First, we have to talk about this assassination attempt and new details emerging about the would be shooter Cole Allen.
There's something weird happening here.
The thing that's weird that's happening is that the assassination mindset is not relegated at this point to the far left.
It turns out that there is such a thing apparently as a moderate liberal assassin.
So NPR went and interviewed a person named Aliza Turlinden, who went to Caltech with Allen when they were in a Christian fellowship group a couple of years ago.
And NPR asked, did he seem to have a sort of grip on reality in the sense that this notion that I'm the only one who can do this?
And Turlendon answered, I never saw evidence of mental instability.
Even reading this manifesto, it struck me that it was relatively analytical and organized, the things that he was doing to try to minimize any harm to innocent people.
I got the impression that he was looking at it like an engineering problem he was solving under constraints.
He saw this most likely as his duty as a Christian and as an American.
Any rhetoric that he was being anti Christian is simply inaccurate.
I'm sad he took this step, but I believe in his mind.
He felt he didn't have any other choice.
Again, and if you read his manifesto, his manifesto is the same kind of stuff that people in mainstream Democratic circles say.
It really is.
If you stripped out the assassination part of it, it reads like any other Facebook post from your slightly crazed white liberal aunt.
I mean, here's James Carville saying the same kind of stuff yesterday.
Many times people have criticized me because I've called Trump.
The MF word, and I've called him worse than that, and I've called him a sack of shit.
Rod, who is Vance's spiritual mentor, and Tucker Carlson, who is a person of some substance in the Republican Party, have both called Trump the Antichrist.
Well, even I haven't gotten there.
So please, all of the people that faint in the street about my name calling, understand this.
I have not yet referred to Donald John Trump as the Antichrist.
All right, because I think the Antichrist would be smarter than him.
And by the way, as I pointed out, there are people like Tucker Carlson who have been saying some pretty awful things about the president.
Representative Rokhana, the fact that this guy is considered a mainstream liberal is insane to me.
The California congressman who wants to run for president, he was asked on Fox about his relationship with Hassan Piker, who we've talked extensively about this streamer who is openly violent in his rhetoric.
Openly, I mean, associates with terrorism.
Promotes terrorism, promotes actual honest to God violence, spilling of blood and guts, and all the rest of it.
And Kana's answer was simple Hassan Piker is popular.
And that means, you know, of course he's not going to dissociate in any real way.
What does that have to do with supporting a person and standing in solidarity with a person who legitimately supports murder, terrorism, violence, theft?
The number of people on the rational left is radically decreasing.
One of them is Van Jones.
It's amazing that this has become controversial in left wing circles.
Van Jones, again, I'm friends with Van.
I think Van is great.
He and I disagree on a wide variety of policies.
But he lives in the rational world.
Here is Van Jones saying a thing that many Democrats won't, which is that Hamas is quite terrible.
Remember, Hassan Piker literally told Pod Save America last week that Hamas is wonderful, that they're a thousand times better than Israel.
This is the thing that has become unpopular on the left.
That's how insane the left has become at this point.
So, what do we do about it?
What do we do about it?
So, I think there are a few answers: there is social ostracism of people like the Hassan Pikers, and then there is prosecution of people who actually make threats.
He finds himself in the legal crosshairs again.
But is this really like a good idea?
Listen, James Comey gets whatever he deserves in terms of the harassment and the annoyance because he has it coming.
But is it like a great idea?
We'll get to that in a moment.
First, here's the thing.
If you own a business, you probably have no idea how many brokers it actually takes to insure your business.
That's a bit of a problem.
You have policies scattered everywhere, applications that keep asking for the same information.
No real picture of how it all fits together when something goes wrong.
Our sponsor, SuperSure, is built to blow that up.
It's one brokerage for your business coverage with a licensed super agent and account team that actually works your account year round, not just at renewal.
Instead of wondering who to call, you have one place, one team, one platform to keep your policies organized in a single insurance vault.
If you've ever stared at a policy and thought, I speak English, this does not look like English, SuperSure's fine print fax tool translates the legalese into plain language so you can finally see what you have, what it covers, and what it does not.
Right now, you can go to supershure.com and get a full report on your current policies, no obligation.
Find out if you're overinsured, underinsured, somewhere in between.
You got to know your policies to know whether you are overinsured or underinsured.
Go to supershure.comslash Shapiro, one super agency, one powerful platform.
All your policies in one place.
Head on over to supershore.comslash Shapiro.
That is supershore.comslash Shapiro, paid for by Super Shore Insurance Agency, LLC, a licensed insurance agency.
Prosecution.
You have to be very careful with prosecution.
Why?
Because the purpose of law enforcement is to effectuate the enforcement of the law.
I understand that the left has used law enforcement as a weapon to make people's lives miserable.
This happened to President Trump.
It happened to his entire family.
There's no question that specious charges were routinely filed and investigations that had no basis were routinely done against President Trump.
Initiated by people like James Comey, the former FBI director.
That is absolutely true.
And that was wrong.
And by the way, when people say that because James Comey did that now, you know, the Republicans should do the same, how do we ever win if we?
The answer is the way you win is by winning elections.
Like, let's be real about this.
When it comes to the winning of elections, alienating the people in the middle is the wrong way to do it.
And the reality is that Russiagate did not have, in the long run, a particularly beneficial effect for Democrats.
It's one of the reasons why President Trump is president again.
If the Democrats had not initiated an entirely new round of investigations into President Trump in 2023, would he be president today?
I don't know the answer to that.
So that means that if you're going to prosecute, prosecute cases that actually have real basis to them.
And when it comes to social ostracization, that should in fact be utilized in large scale.
We should be forcing the feet of people like Arokhana to the fire on Hassan Piker.
Should you be associating with Hassan Piker?
Should you be associating with people who engage in violent rhetoric?
Are you willing to condemn actual terrorist groups like Hamas or Hezbollah?
Are you willing to move away from democratic socialists of America who justify the violence of people like Luigi Mangia?
Like, what are you willing to do?
And we can answer at the ballot box and we can answer in terms of social ostracization.
When it comes to prosecution, we should quite carefully tailor that, the power of the federal government, to cases you're going to win.
Otherwise, you end up with a backlash.
I mention this because yesterday it was announced that a federal grand jury had indicted former FBI director and giant weirdo James Comey again.
Now, listen again.
James Comey being harassed by law enforcement on a sort of Scheudenfreude level, I ain't losing sleep.
James Comey helped initiate the Russiagate investigation that spun up a bajillion conspiracy theories and ruined people's lives, destroyed their finances, and all the rest.
And he did it based on absolute trash that he knew at the time was trash.
However, are these counts that are being filed against Comey likely to succeed in court?
I mean, we'll find out, I assume.
I would hope that there is more to this case than he put out a dumb Instagram post.
And maybe they came up with some supporting information that suggested that he actually wanted to inflict bodily harm on the president.
But there are two counts that an Eastern North Carolina grand jury indicted on.
Count one is that James Comey, the former FBI director, quote, knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of and to inflict bodily harm upon the president of the United States.
Now, what was that?
You will remember that back on May 15th of last year, he put up an image on his Instagram of seashells that said 8647, 8647.
Now, the prosecutors say a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret this as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the president of the United States.
And count two is basically the same thing.
They say that Comey consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communication would be viewed as threatening violence and knowingly transmitted a communication in interstate commerce that contained a threat to injure the person of another.
So, Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, said that a year of resources were.
I'm not sure.
I mean, I'll be curious to see what the effect of that is.
I feel like that case is exactly what the case is.
He put out.
A photo that's hit 8647.
86 can mean kill, like 86, or it can mean just get rid of.
Meaning, like, if you want an 86 a customer, kick the customer out.
Or if you want an 86 a dish, you can just take the dish off the menu, for example.
But if all we've got here, if all the evidence that they end up with after a year is basically what we see right now, that case ain't going nowhere and it's going to backfire because it'll look as though the mechanisms of law enforcement are being used for political gain, which is never a good look.
And again, it's not a good look on the left either.
Now, here was James Comey telling this story with Stephen Colbert last year, because you'll remember that there was another attempted prosecution of James Comey on this particular matter.
I mean, listen, if irritating, annoying, self congratulatory were a crime, put this guy in jail for life.
He is so wildly annoying.
He totally destroyed the credibility of his own department.
He ran us through years of just absolute garbage with regard to the Russiagate stuff.
And now he gets to.
This is why I don't like the move.
I don't love it.
Because, again, giving this guy what he wants, which is attention, is just a bad strategy.
Meanwhile, the FCC is going after ABC over Jimmy Kimmel again.
Apparently, according to the FCC's filing, eight Disney owned ABC affiliates will now have to prove to the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, they've been operating in the public interest.
The licenses are not up for renewal for several years.
The FCC accelerated their renewal process on the heels of Kimmel's expectant widow joke, which we talked about yesterday on the show.
Using the government in this manner seems to me ill advised.
And listen, I get the turnabout is fair play of all of this, but I will just say that there is such a thing as political backlash to governmental overreach.
And if it looks as though you are utilizing the mechanisms of government to go after Jimmy Kimmel, not because he committed a crime, but because you don't like what he is saying, that is not going to redound to the benefit of Republicans electorally.
And there are solutions to what's going on.
Social ostracization is right, the use of government is wrong here.
This is not the proper use of government.
If you want to go after the ABC affiliates on a market level and say, listen, we're going to drive your ratings into the ground because Jimmy Kimmel's terrible, all for it.
If advertisers want to pull, all for that.
But if the idea here is that the government should be kind of the point of the spear here, I think that is a strategy that is likely to be unsuccessful.
Okay, meanwhile, back on Iran.
So, as we spoke about a little bit earlier, the German government is claiming that the president has no strategy.
Well, that's weird because it turns out that Iran's rial is trading at an all time low.
We are talking about 1.8 to 1.9 million per dollar.
Their economy is basically dead.
Operation Economic Fury, there's a case to be made, has been more damaging by far.
Than actual operation, whatever it was called, Fury.
The original name of the operation, I can remember Economic Fury versus Epic Fury.
Thank you.
I had even forgotten about it because it's been a while since Epic Fury.
In any case, Epic Fury has been, in some cases, it's been effective for sure.
In some cases, even less effective than Economic Fury, which is the thing continuing.
And the president is loving it.
There are reports out today that the blockade on Iran's government may remain in place for weeks to come.
Which is fairly easy for the United States, right?
We're not dropping a lot of bombs.
We're not flying a lot of sorties.
We've got ships that are stopping other ships and turning them back.
And we are also going after their shadow banking facilitators.
According to the Treasury Department, as part of economic theory, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated 35 entities and individuals that oversee Iran's shadow banking architecture, facilitating the movement of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars tied to sanctions, evasion, and Iran's sponsorship of terrorism.
And those networks allow the IRGC to access the international financial system.
This is a picture, a chart of Iran's shadow banking network.
As you can see, they use a bunch of cutouts.
And so now we are sanctioning those as well.
Meanwhile, U.S. Marines are boarding and searching vessels to enforce the blockade.
Here is some video of that.
You can see here is the United States launching helicopters to go and blockade vessels, dropping Marines down onto the shore, onto the ships themselves.
And the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the president has told his aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran.
He has continued to squeeze Iran's economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports.
He says that his other options right now, like resume bombing or walk away from the conflict, carry more risk than maintaining the blockade.
So he is not wrong about this.
The Iranian government is on its last legs.
How do you know?
Because they've already started to propagandize about the civilian suffering in Iran.
This is always the last vestige of a dying regime, is that they start to talk about the suffering.
You don't know to end the suffering right now.
You give up your nuclear weapons.
The suffering ends right now.
Give up your nuclear weapons.
Stop developing long range ballistic missiles.
Stop funding terrorist groups.
It's really simple, actually.
According to the Wall Street Journal, war has imposed a heavy cost on Iran's economy, more than a million people out of work, soaring food prices, a prolonged internet shutdown that has slammed online business.
The question is how much more pain Iran's leaders are willing to tolerate as they try to negotiate a favorable end. to the war.
American officials are betting Iran will soon crack because of the deepening economic crisis.
Iran is betting the U.S. will crack first.
Well, here's the thing.
The, this is very short-term stuff for Iran.
Iran cannot continue this for months and months and months and months.
They cannot.
And the reality is that the poll numbers for the president are basically stagnant at this point.
His approval rating is stuck in the mid-30s.
The congressional ballot, by the way, continues to be not as bad as you might think.
Democrats certainly have an advantage On the generic congressional ballot right now.
With that said, the generic ballot is not heavily in favor of Democrats in kind of the way you might expect at this point in time.
Democrats are up by an average about 5.5, 5.2 in the generic ballot.
Democrats have not been able to take advantage of this.
So, can the Iranian economy last for another four, five, six months with nothing coming in and nothing going out?
That would be the main question here.
At the same time, The situation in Lebanon continues to percolate.
The Israelis and the Lebanese government are on exactly the same side.
It's Hezbollah that opposes both.
This is a point being made by the Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I think if you ask the Israelis, they would tell you the perfect outcome is a strong Lebanese government with a strong Lebanese armed forces who is able to dismantle Hezbollah to prevent them from these attacks and ultimately to make sure that they don't exist anymore as a military unit.
That is the negotiation that's currently taking place as well.
And Israel continues to take action against Hezbollah.
Here is some footage of them blowing up a gigantic Hezbollah tunnel.
This tunnel was two kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide in terms of the coverage area.
Just massive.
It had spread out in several different directions under numerous villages in the area.
You see the size of these tunnels that Hezbollah had built.
So Israel blew it up.
I love the exercise equipment tent.
They got to make sure you're staying in shape while you're in a tunnel buried 10 meters under the ground in order to pursue terrorism.
What wonderful people, the people at Hezbollah.
Just, just joys they are.
By the way, in oil news, this is actually major oil news that is being underplayed, I think.
The United Arab Emirates, which is the third biggest country in OPEC, is now going to exit OPEC.
CNBC calls this a major blow to the cartel that coordinates production among the world's largest oil producers, particularly those in the Middle East.
Why is this happening?
Because UAE and Saudi have been in a bit of a scuffle internationally because Saudi doesn't really like that UAE is forming its own future.
That it has joined the Abraham Accords, that it is strengthening its own economy, its own connections with the United States.
They see their leadership role being ceded in some cases by UAE.
And UAE is saying, listen, we're not going to coordinate production with you anymore.
What does that mean for Americans?
Well, it probably means lower oil prices.
The entire design of OPEC is to artificially ratchet down supply in order to take advantage of demand or to play politics.
Undercutting OPEC by leaving OPEC means more freedom for the United States and lower oil prices.
That's what it means.
The UAE apparently has the ambition to achieve 5 million barrels per day of capacity by 2027, and they want more freedom of action to pursue that goal.
This is very good for the United States.
It's very good for the world.
OPEC has been a blight.
The free market competition between these countries in terms of their oil development and production is a very, very good thing.
Joining us on the line is Representative Elise Stefanik.
She represents New York's 21st district.
She is currently the chairwoman of House leadership, Republican leadership.
She has a new book out called Poison to Ivies.
It's the inside account of the academic and moral rot at America's elite universities.
Representative, thanks so much for taking the time.
So the book poisoned IVs, my book does a deep dive on what went wrong at so many of our most elite universities that were once considered elite and prestigious.
If you look at the billions of dollars of foreign funding that's flowing into institutions like Harvard, like Penn, like MIT, it is deeply concerning.
And we've been working in Congress to make sure that there is full transparency.
And frankly, we need to do more to block foreign funding that is sowing anti-Americanism on these campuses.
For example, Ben, The billions of dollars coming from Qatar flowing into many of these universities is propping up Middle Eastern studies departments, which is inherently pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic.
In addition, Communist China is the second largest foreign funder into our higher education system.
We've taken action from Congress to block what are called Confucius Institutes, which essentially is a front for the Chinese Communist Party, but China is still circumventing that.
And it begs the question, these American universities, which in many cases were founded prior to the founding of our country, They have multi billion dollar endowments.
Why are we allowing foreign dollars to sow discord on these campuses?
That's one of the many reasons why we've seen this academic and moral route at these institutions.
You know, I talk about the shift in these universities.
These universities were founded as American institutions.
And the leadership, which is rotten at many of these universities, they now view themselves as global institutions, really pulling away from those America first values.
And my book, Poisoned Ivies, it goes into the founding missions, which were incredible, of these universities.
If you take Harvard, it was founded in 1636, it was part of the principles and fervor that led to the Revolutionary War.
You take Penn, one of the visionaries that.
Modeled Penn was Benjamin Franklin.
You take Columbia.
Alexander Hamilton was one of the original founders and board members of Columbia.
And yet these institutions now have shifted so far away from their founding mission.
The other aspect of the foreign dollars, Ben, is the percentage of foreign students.
Columbia, for example, I think it's a surprise to many Americans that 40% of the student body at Columbia is foreign.
So they're no longer prioritizing American students.
And what do these foreign dollars do?
It creates strings attached to the curricula that's taught and the type of professors who are hired.
That's deeply concerning, and it goes hand in hand with the moral rot that we saw in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attacks against Israel and this skyrocketing of anti Semitism and anti American at these universities.
You know, Congresswoman, obviously, you had this very famous tete a tete with a bunch of Ivy League presidents who refused to condemn anti Semitic slogans that were being chanted, genocidal anti Semitic slogans that were being chanted at their universities.
What is the sort of fundamental guiding philosophy at these universities now?
As you say, they used to be rooted in at Harvard, it was Veritas, right?
That was my alma mater for law school.
But it certainly has not been that way for many decades at this point.
What is the guiding philosophy that really is sort of infusing their action here?
Well, it's political indoctrination rather than academic excellence.
And in the case of Harvard, we are both alumni, you of the Harvard Law School, I went to Harvard undergrad, and the motto is Veritas, which means truth.
But the original founding motto in the 1600s was, Veritas e Cristo et Ecclesiae, truth in Christ and the Church.
I view that as a moral truth.
And Harvard shifted so far away from that founding mission.
Right now, their prioritization, unfortunately, has been monoculture and a radical lurch to the left.
When I was an undergraduate 20 years ago, we had a handful of conservative professors.
But if you look at how much that has shifted in the past decade, it is now a self-selection process of increasingly further and further to the left to the point where some of these departments, if they even have a conservative leading professor, The ratios are 88 to 1 in some of the humanities departments.
That's not reflective of the American people.
That's not reflective of the founding missions of these institutions.
So the book does a deep dive of Harvard, of Penn, of some of the poisoned ivies.
But importantly, it points out the schools that are getting it right.
Places like where you just spoke and I will be at soon.
UTX, which was started in 2021.
I also point out University of Florida under the leadership of Ben Sass when he was head of that university system.
Vanderbilt, which is continuing to grow and lead And frankly, its admissions and matriculation have skyrocketed because of what's been happening, the poisoning of these Ivy League schools.
And they still don't get it, Ben, as they dig deeper and deeper and try to push back on any effort to reform.
So the Trump administration has been very publicly active in going after a lot of these Ivy League schools.
They've reached settlements with some of them.
They've been using the Civil Rights Act and the violation thereof to push policy changes.
And my expectation, being cynical, is that the minute that a Democrat takes office as president, The Ivy Leagues will revert back to what they were, that they already are finding workarounds to try and avoid the consequences of the settlements that they've reached with the federal government.
Are these places poisoned beyond the possibility of repair?
Should we basically just surrender the Ivy, say, listen, they're done, send our kids elsewhere, and just let them rot?
Or do you think that there's the possibility of recovery?
Two of those presidents were forced to resign as a result of that hearing.
And my questions.
They had a year of the Biden administration where they could have fixed themselves and the Biden administration could have taken any action.
Nothing was done.
The leaders of these schools put their heads in the sand and they dug deeper and deeper.
It was only on day one of the Trump administration and my office worked directly to craft these executive orders that President Trump signed in on his first day in office to hold these schools accountable.
We also know that the only way these schools are going to listen is when you withhold taxpayer funds.
They're not entitled to U.S. taxpayer dollars if they are not complying with the law.
And it's not reflective of our American principles.
So that withholding has been an important tool.
My fear long term, as you said, is as administrations shift back and forth, these schools are going to try to wait it out.
We need to, as policymakers, ensure that doesn't happen.
How do we do that?
We have to codify all these executive orders.
We have to reform aspects of the Higher Education Act.
Um, and we have to piecemeal address these issues.
The reason why I argue it's important not to completely give up on these Ivy League schools is We know they're not going to fix themselves.
We have to force this upon them.
One bright spotlight, and we'll have to see what action they take, is the Yale report that just came out.
And I'm very skeptical because while it's, you know, a statement and a report that was put out in the last two weeks, basically, with this institution understanding that they have created this fundamental lack of faith in our higher ed institutions, and many of the decisions they've made have caused this, let's see if they take action as a result.
The other aspect of many of these settlements is holding the school's feet to the fire to make sure they don't try to circumvent the settlements, like we've seen, unfortunately, in the case of Columbia.
The other piece of this that's important as well is these DOJ lawsuits are incredibly important because in my book, I give example after example where the universities were not protecting the civil rights of American Jewish students on these campuses who were facing unbelievable acts of anti Semitism, physical assault, drawing of swastikas on the door, and Making sure that the DOJ holds these schools accountable, that's been incredibly important for the Trump administration.
So I'm of the argument that we have to do both.
We have to build new institutions.
We have to continue to support those institutions that are getting it right the Vandies of the world, University of Florida, UTX, as an example.
We have to focus on some of these centers like the Hoover Institution to provide that ideological balance.
But we need to continue to hold the Ivy Leagues accountable to force change.
One is the fault of sort of how Israel has addressed the world, and one is the fault of underlying trends.
The first is that Israel spent years and years and years and years saying that its geopolitical opponents were reasonable and rational and they could make a deal with them.
If you keep saying over and over that actual terrorist groups are reasonable and rational and you can make a deal with them, which is the predicate for Oslo, then it makes it very difficult to tell the truth later, which is that they are terrorist groups who want to kill you.
Oslo is a disaster area.
It took until basically October 7th to put a final nail in the coffin of the Oslo agreements.
So that's part one.
As far as the sort of overarching trends, the grievance culture that has now spread throughout the West, one symptom of that is anti Israel belief.
It is basically a mapping of domestic economic concerns onto foreign policy.
So the idea is anyone who is successful is an exploiter, any country that is powerful is an exploiter.
The West is innately guilty for the failure of non Western cultures.
And when you extend that to the Middle East, then you look.
There and there's only one westernized country, there's only one truly successful country, and it's Israel.
And so, this is why you will see people like Tanahasi Coates claiming that Israel is the white oppressor in the Middle East.
Never mind the fact that half of Israel is brown, meaning Mizrahi Jews, right?
Jews from Arabic countries.
But that is the basic model.
In the same way that people are angry at the successful in their societies because they feel the successful have set up the system for their own benefit, for that same reason, They have now decided in conspiratorial fashion that at the top of that apex predator heap are the Jews who must be defenestrated from the top of that pile.
All righty, folks, coming up, we're going to get into the latest on the economy, the economic numbers.
We're going to get into why Americans are so upset about the economy and what President Trump can do about it.
Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
If you're not a member, become a member.
Use code Shapiro.
Check out for two months free on all annual plans.