The Ben Shapiro Show - BREAKING: Daily Wire Uncovers MASSIVE Fraud Scandal In Ohio!
Aired: 2026-05-04
Duration: 58:39


=== Medicaid Fraud Exposed (08:51) ===

[00:00:00]  Money is being stolen out of your pocket and put into the hands of people defrauding you.
[00:00:05]  Not on the margins.
[00:00:06]  This is happening at the highest levels of the American government.
[00:00:09]  Elon Musk and Nick Shirley opened the door, but Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak is now busting through that wall like the Kool Aid man.
[00:00:17]  The Daily Wire is serving up the receipts for widespread fraud, which the president and vice president can wipe out entirely.
[00:00:23]  Billions of dollars of Medicaid stolen from you, the taxpayer.
[00:00:26]  We've seen the quality leering centers and the suspect behavior of thousands taking advantage of state level programs.
[00:00:33]  This is massive fraud that we're uncovering on the federal scale.
[00:00:36]  Conservatives have always stood by the notion that government screws things up.
[00:00:39]  Democrats build systems where waste, fraud, and abuse, that's the feature, not the bug.
[00:00:44]  They love stealing money from some and giving it to others, all to make people more dependent on the government more broadly while blaming the free markets.
[00:00:51]  It's disgusting and it has to end.
[00:00:52]  We'll get into all the receipts in a moment.
[00:00:54]  And speaking of disgusting, Tucker Carlson just did a crazy interview with the New York Times that proves once and for all he is not remotely on the right.
[00:01:01]  And in fact, he now stands with the worst enemies of American ideals.
[00:01:05]  Apparently, there's no daylight between these would be revolutionaries, Tucker Carlson, Bernie Sanders, and Hassan Piker.
[00:01:11]  Welcome back to the Ben Shapiro Show.
[00:01:19]  Well, Daily Wire exists to bring you the truth.
[00:01:21]  We do that in a lot of ways our commentary, our documentaries, our films, and not least with our investigative reporting.
[00:01:28]  So, this week, we have a series of bombshell reports after our reporters spent two months investigating the extent of welfare fraud in Ohio, where billions of dollars have now gone missing down the rat hole of government entitlement programs under the guise of home health care.
[00:01:43]  Our goal at the Daily Wire is to smash the supposedly untouchable pillars of the welfare state.
[00:01:47]  It's time to return to true conservatism.
[00:01:49]  Truth is the only way to get there.
[00:01:52]  So, fraud isn't just happening in the blue cities where you might expect.
[00:01:54]  It's happening right under the nose of Republican governors, too, in Ohio, for example.
[00:02:00]  Think one address 93 companies, no windows, totally empty, billed to you, the American taxpayer, $66 million over the last several years.
[00:02:10]  Shell companies, fake billing, fake services, covered tracks until this very instant.
[00:02:16]  So, Daily Wire has now uncovered, via Luke Rosiak and our investigative team, Medicaid millionaires in a piece titled, Medicaid millionaires, how the feds pay immigrants billions to hang out with their own families.
[00:02:28]  Luke points out Under the guise of healthcare, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid recipients' homes to perform homemaking and chores like cooking and cleaning.
[00:02:36]  The people performing these personal services tasks don't have to be healthcare workers.
[00:02:40]  In 2024, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home healthcare.
[00:02:45]  So they literally pay people Medicaid money to go to other people's houses to perform homemaking and chores.
[00:02:53]  And as Luke writes, the new welfare queens aren't the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs.
[00:02:58]  They're the companies getting rich off of them.
[00:03:01]  His overall impression that 99% of the facilities I visited had the hallmarks of waste, fraud, or abuse.
[00:03:06]  We are talking about alleged criminality at a breathtaking scale.
[00:03:11]  So, for example, this here is a picture of 93 offices in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:03:18]  It is 6161 Bush Boulevard.
[00:03:22]  So, as you can see, all the windows are covered, which is weird.
[00:03:25]  Typically, You know, if you have an office, you like to have windows because people like there to be some light in their offices.
[00:03:31]  Why would you cover all the windows?
[00:03:32]  Well, because there's nothing there.
[00:03:35]  According to Luke, what's inside is 93 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in Home Health LLC, and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break.
[00:03:49]  And again, this building, this address, billed taxpayers over $66 million over the last several years.
[00:03:57]  And as Luke points out, if you try to track down what exactly is happening at any one of these home healthcare companies, what you will find is an endless rabbit hole.
[00:04:06]  He says you'll find years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they are making from Medicaid are just a side gig.
[00:04:18]  The government is not and cannot be monitoring the people to whom they write million dollar checks.
[00:04:23]  They all share combinations of just a few names like Ahmed Mohammed and Mohammed Ahmed.
[00:04:28]  And the population of Columbus, Ohio, it's the second biggest Somali population outside of Minnesota.
[00:04:34]  They spell their own name multiple different ways within a single document.
[00:04:37]  Many of them have their birthdays listed as January 1 because we don't know when they were born.
[00:04:43]  Pretty much all of them, according to Luke, are registered voters.
[00:04:45]  Wait for it, wait for it.
[00:04:46]  For the Democratic Party.
[00:04:48]  Not a shock.
[00:04:48]  So the business model is apparently simple.
[00:04:50]  A 40 year old Somali gets paid for spending time with and maybe cooking for his own 65 year old mom.
[00:04:56]  Sitting in the middle is one of these thousands.
[00:04:58]  Of home health firms that have an NPI number necessary to build Medicaid.
[00:05:02]  And then the 40 year old becomes an employee of that company, but the only patient is mom.
[00:05:07]  There's no way to verify whether he's providing services unless his mom is willing to rat him out.
[00:05:13]  Maybe he even gives a portion of the pay to mommy as a kickback for allowing her social security number to be used.
[00:05:20]  Virtually, apparently, all of these home health care companies are owned by foreigners.
[00:05:26]  As Luke writes, when we asked what home health care companies did, one man threatened journalists, who cares?
[00:05:30]  You guys pay my bills?
[00:05:32]  I'm going to tell everybody you guys are racist.
[00:05:33]  Yay, there it is.
[00:05:35]  Isn't that nice?
[00:05:36]  See, this is the way the magic works defraud our Medicaid systems, defraud federal taxpayer dollars.
[00:05:43]  And then when somebody comes knocking on the door, you just claim that they are a racist.
[00:05:48]  Now, as Luke points out, this poverty program is different from others like food stamps because it doesn't have a monetary cap.
[00:05:54]  Its extent is not decided by politicians, but by any doctor willing to sign a form saying you could use some help around the home.
[00:06:00]  And one doctor can sign a billion of these forms.
[00:06:03]  You can bankrupt a state this way.
[00:06:05]  Again, this is just part one of our series.
[00:06:07]  What's coming tomorrow is so much worse.
[00:06:10]  So much worse.
[00:06:10]  I mean, already we're talking $66 million in potential fraud right here from 93 companies at one address.
[00:06:17]  Industrial scale alleged fraud happening right here.
[00:06:20]  So, how do we get this information?
[00:06:21]  Well, there was a quiet Doge document drop in February of this year.
[00:06:25]  So, again, people were ripping on Elon Musk over Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency.
[00:06:30]  Well, they had a lot of After Effects, Doge.
[00:06:33]  And one of the things they did is they revealed information into the public that allows journalists like Luke and our team, our investigative journalists here at Daily Wire, which we've been building for a couple of years, to go out and actually dig in.
[00:06:45]  Luke was able to dive in thanks to those Doge documents.
[00:06:48]  For decades, Medicaid billing data was a black box.
[00:06:50]  It's one of the biggest government programs in human history.
[00:06:53]  The public could not see a dime of it.
[00:06:55]  And Doge changed all of that in February with a quiet data release that a lot of people missed.
[00:06:59]  Well, again, this week, we're going to reveal a lot more about what's going on in Ohio.
[00:07:03]  We'll talk about one landlord who owned buildings with 300 different Medicaid companies that billed the federal government $250 million.
[00:07:14]  I mean, this kind of fraud has consequences.
[00:07:17]  And again, it is a feature, not a bug.
[00:07:18]  You would imagine.
[00:07:19]  That there'd be Democrats out there who are upset with this kind of fraud.
[00:07:22]  After all, if you're an advocate for a government program, you should want every dollar of that taxpayer money to go to someone who deserves the taxpayer money.
[00:07:31]  But that's not what's happening.
[00:07:32]  Democrats are irritated by the fact that people are uncovering this stuff.
[00:07:36]  Now, the good news is Ohio is Republican governed.
[00:07:39]  Mike DeWine is the governor of Ohio.
[00:07:40]  Vivek Ramaswamy is very likely to be the next governor of Ohio.
[00:07:43]  And President Trump is on top of this.
[00:07:45]  And Vice President Vance is heading up the waste, fraud, and abuse policing here.
[00:07:49]  So we are very hopeful that there will be action here.
[00:07:51]  And that's what we need.
[00:07:52]  That's what we need.
[00:07:53]  We need you to get involved.
[00:07:54]  Share that story from dailywire.com.
[00:07:57]  It's not paywalled.
[00:07:58]  We need to help spread the word and hold people who are defrauding the American people to account.
[00:08:02]  We need government hearings.
[00:08:04]  We need prosecutions.
[00:08:05]  We need doors kicked down.
[00:08:07]  We need investigations.
[00:08:09]  And again, Republican governors, federal officials need to fix this.
[00:08:13]  That is what we are working on.
[00:08:14]  That is what we are calling for.
[00:08:15]  Because true change can be effectuated here by criminal justice.
[00:08:19]  And this is a unique time to do it.
[00:08:20]  The Trump administration has made policing waste, fraud, and abuse possible.
[00:08:24]  This was not going to happen under Democrats.
[00:08:26]  It can happen under Republicans, but people need to know about this story and they need to get that out there.
[00:08:31]  So head on over to dailywire.com and help spread that story and be part of the movement that ends welfare fraud in the country.
[00:08:38]  Coming up, Spirit Airlines is now a ghost.
[00:08:41]  And guess what?
[00:08:41]  People are blaming capitalism rather than government.
[00:08:43]  They're getting it wrong.
[00:08:44]  Plus, Tucker Carlson does a very, very long interview with the New York Times, and there's something wrong.

=== JetBlue Merger Antitrust (06:13) ===

[00:08:51]  We'll get to it.
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[00:09:47]  And we love Balance of Nature here at the company.
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[00:10:01]  All right.
[00:10:01]  Meanwhile, on the economic front, one of the most astonishing features of the way that the left views economics is they block the free markets from working and then they blame the free markets.
[00:10:12]  When something fails.
[00:10:13]  So, over the weekend, Spirit Airlines finally gave up the ghost.
[00:10:20]  Spirit had entered bankruptcy in August of last year for the second time in a year.
[00:10:25]  And its executives, according to the Wall Street Journal, developed a game plan dubbed Plan Charlie in case the company's fortunes could not be turned around.
[00:10:33]  So, they tried to negotiate with the federal government.
[00:10:35]  They were hoping for a $500 million government bailout to the tune of 90% government ownership in Spirit Airlines.
[00:10:42]  Okay, I'm just telling you.
[00:10:43]  You know what I don't need to own?
[00:10:44]  You know what you don't need to own?
[00:10:45]  You know what taxpayers don't need to own?
[00:10:46]  Spirit Airlines.
[00:10:48]  That is not the way that failing companies should be bailed out.
[00:10:51]  In fact, when companies fail, when they are falling down, what should happen is that they find another private buyer.
[00:10:56]  They either go bankrupt, they run it into the ground, or they merge, or they seek outside funding.
[00:11:01]  Because again, when it comes to the risk taking that is necessary in private industry, the next step of failure is you have to go out and you have to demonstrate a turnaround plan.
[00:11:12]  You have to show somebody else that you are willing to make serious changes.
[00:11:16]  And then you can bring in new capital, or maybe you can merge.
[00:11:18]  The problem, of course, is that Democrats are responsible for the death of Spirit Airlines because Spirit Airlines tried to merge with JetBlue last year, and Democrats stopped it.
[00:11:30]  Now, Spirit is trying to blame the jet fuel prices for its bankruptcy.
[00:11:36]  They're trying to declare that the war in Iran is what the real problem was.
[00:11:39]  But that wasn't the real problem because, again, the other airline companies are not going bankrupt right now.
[00:11:44]  Spirit was running on non solid footing.
[00:11:47]  Again, Spirit was famous for very, very cheap.
[00:11:49]  Airline fares.
[00:11:52]  But now, what's happened is competition has actually made airline travel better.
[00:11:56]  I know there are a lot of people right now who are ripping on the airlines.
[00:11:58]  I get it.
[00:11:59]  I travel a lot.
[00:12:00]  I traveled the coach out to LA yesterday.
[00:12:04]  And I got to say, it wasn't the best.
[00:12:06]  I was flying JetBlue.
[00:12:07]  But one thing that's happened, for example, is JetBlue provides free internet.
[00:12:11]  So it used to be, and it still is on some of the airlines, that they make you pay for the internet.
[00:12:16]  And now it seems that more and more airliners are going to move toward the free model.
[00:12:20]  Competition and more competition in this area leads to better results.
[00:12:23]  Well, JetBlue was trying to buy spirit.
[00:12:25]  They were trying to merge with spirit.
[00:12:27]  That was blocked by Democrats because Democrats have a theory.
[00:12:30]  And that theory is if business gets bigger, that is inherently bad.
[00:12:35]  So there are two theories of antitrust.
[00:12:36]  Antitrust is the idea that you can't have a monopoly dominating a market because then it can set prices wherever it wants.
[00:12:42]  So if you had a grocery store monopoly in your neighborhood, theoretically, they could set the price twice what it normally would be because you don't have any other choices.
[00:12:50]  Now, true monopoly is incredibly rare in the market because if the prices tend to skyrocket, somebody else wants to get in on that action.
[00:12:57]  They open up a grocery store across the street.
[00:13:00]  Typically, true monopoly requires government intervention on behalf of the monopoly.
[00:13:05]  But there's a second theory of antitrust that is not about the consumer at all.
[00:13:09]  The first theory of antitrust says you should only police for monopoly when the consumer is harmed.
[00:13:16]  And then there's a second theory of antitrust, the Democrat theory, which is if something is big, it is bad.
[00:13:21]  That is the theory pursued by Senator Elizabeth Warren.
[00:13:23]  So Elizabeth Warren is now blaming President Trump for Spirit's bankruptcy.
[00:13:28]  She put out a tweet saying spiking fuel prices from Trump's war was the nail in the coffin for twice bankrupted Spirit Airline.
[00:13:34]  For what it's worth, JetBlue merger failed because a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan said the deal was illegal.
[00:13:39]  Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher cost hitting families, but that's not true.
[00:13:44]  The reality is there was a block by the Biden administration on the merger between JetBlue and Spirit.
[00:13:51]  In fact, here she was tweeting back in March of 2024, triumphantly, that the JetBlue Spirit merger had been ended I've warned for months that a JetBlue Spirit Airlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares.
[00:14:05]  The Justice Department and the Department of Transportation were right to stand up for consumers and fight against.
[00:14:10]  Runaway airline consolidation.
[00:14:12]  This is a Biden win for flyers.
[00:14:13]  So, do you feel like you're winning now?
[00:14:15]  There are fewer flights available.
[00:14:16]  Do you feel like you're winning?
[00:14:18]  By the way, the ex secretary of transportation, a man who really, really loves choo choo trains, Pete Buttigieg, who for some reason is considered an elite Democratic contender for the presidency after legitimately running the trains off the rails during his tenure at the Department of Transportation.
[00:14:34]  Here is Pete Buttigieg in March 2024 talking about why they blocked the merger that would have saved spirit.
[00:14:41]  Our department, the Department of Transportation, has generally not gotten involved in these merger cases, but that's changing today.
[00:14:50]  It is so important to make sure that passengers have choices, that they have access to low fares, that they have access to competition, and yet we've seen less and less and less of that competition over the years.

=== Capitalism Is Moral (05:53) ===

[00:15:05]  Okay, again, the lack of competition is not going to be alleviated by things going bankrupt.
[00:15:12]  Ridiculous.
[00:15:14]  Now, again, this is the Democrat stick.
[00:15:16]  The Democrat stick always and forever is government gets involved in a thing, government makes the thing worse, blame capitalism.
[00:15:23]  And for people who don't understand free markets and don't understand capitalism, that's always an easy pitch because we live in a very, very prosperous time.
[00:15:31]  We are richer than any human beings in the history of mankind.
[00:15:35]  And so we tend to think that the natural state of things is being rich.
[00:15:39]  Again, if you took a person from 1800 and dropped them into modern American society, They would not know what is going on.
[00:15:45]  They would think that they dropped into materialist heaven because you can get anything you want at the press of a button delivered to your door with a magic device you hold in your hand.
[00:15:55]  And that thing was sourced from 70 different countries.
[00:15:57]  And you can do it affordably.
[00:15:59]  I know people talk about affordability.
[00:16:01]  And again, affordability is a malleable term because no one ever considers anything truly affordable.
[00:16:06]  But let's just put it this way back in 1800, an hour of candlelight might have cost you several hours of work during the day because you had to go get.
[00:16:15]  Wax, or you had to go get whale oil.
[00:16:17]  Okay, today, electricity is free.
[00:16:19]  You flick on a light and it just stays on all day and you don't even think about it.
[00:16:23]  Okay, because capitalism makes things better and it makes things cheaper.
[00:16:27]  But also because of that, we tend to not understand how capitalism works.
[00:16:30]  So when something fails, we blame, quote unquote, the system.
[00:16:34]  But we never allow the system, meaning free markets, credit for the success.
[00:16:38]  You want to know why it is cheap to fly coast to coast?
[00:16:42]  And it is, by the way, comparatively.
[00:16:44]  Look at the percentage of income people had to spend on an air ticket in 1960.
[00:16:49]  Versus the percentage of income that you have to spend on an air ticket today.
[00:16:52]  Way, way, way, way lower.
[00:16:53]  Okay, why?
[00:16:55]  Because of competition.
[00:16:56]  Why?
[00:16:56]  Because of innovation.
[00:16:57]  But if a company goes bankrupt, that must be the evil of capitalism.
[00:17:01]  Okay, so the reason that we have to argue in favor of capitalism is because if capitalism dies, America dies.
[00:17:07]  We lose.
[00:17:08]  We lose to our competitors.
[00:17:09]  Also, because capitalism is in fact moral.
[00:17:12]  And one of the things that I've been railing against in the conservative movement for a long time is this idea that capitalism and free markets can only be defended on a utilitarian basis.
[00:17:23]  That free markets and capitalism are only good because of their products.
[00:17:28]  And the problem with that argument is true.
[00:17:30]  It's true that capitalism does make things better and it does make things cheaper and people innovate and they invent.
[00:17:35]  That's all true.
[00:17:36]  But if you don't defend capitalism and free markets on a moral basis, you leave room for true grifters and demagogues, ranging from Tucker Carlson to Bernie Sanders, to suggest that true morality would be ditching the free markets in favor of a centralized governmental system that is fairer in some way.
[00:17:57]  See, the true Marxist appeal, the appeal of Marxism, was never that Marxism was going to make life better for people, it was that it was going to change men's souls.
[00:18:04]  That was always the religious appeal of the Marxist philosophy.
[00:18:07]  It is not that you're going to have better stuff cheaper, that you're going to be more prosperous.
[00:18:12]  That may have been Marx's original theory, but it was abjectly wrong and clearly wrong.
[00:18:18]  But undergirding that theory was a different theory that true justice for man springs from the idea that a centralized government can provide cosmic justice, that free markets are somehow inherently unfair, that they are immoral.
[00:18:32]  Not that they're not productive, that they are immoral.
[00:18:34]  So you have to make a moral defense of free markets.
[00:18:37]  So here's the moral defense of free markets that conservatives should be making.
[00:18:40]  First, man is made in the image of God.
[00:18:43]  We're all made in the image of God.
[00:18:44]  That means that we are creative, choosing people with autonomy and power.
[00:18:49]  And that means that we have a right to the products of our own labor because we are individuals.
[00:18:53]  So if we make something, we own that thing.
[00:18:57]  Free markets are rooted in that simple recognition.
[00:18:59]  If I own my property, I ought to be able to trade it.
[00:19:02]  I ought to be able to dispense with it.
[00:19:04]  I ought to be able to invest it as I see fit, so long as my decisions are not infringing upon the equal rights of other people.
[00:19:10]  And finally, free markets are just.
[00:19:12]  They are.
[00:19:13]  I understand there are a lot of people who believe that free markets are unjust because some people prosper and some people don't in the same measure.
[00:19:20]  But that is a misinterpretation of the concept of justice.
[00:19:23]  Justice does not mean that we all have the same result.
[00:19:25]  Justice is the proposition, as Aristotle suggested, that equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally.
[00:19:32]  You might be mad at God or at nature for not making the world the way that you would want it.
[00:19:36]  But that's not justice.
[00:19:38]  It's arrogance and stupidity and childishness.
[00:19:40]  If you're just mad because some people are better at things than you are, That's the way the world works.
[00:19:45]  LeBron James is better at basketball than I am.
[00:19:47]  I am better at talking on camera than LeBron James.
[00:19:49]  That's just the way the world is.
[00:19:51]  That is a natural state of the world.
[00:19:54]  We are all provided equal rights by God, but that doesn't mean we all have equal qualities.
[00:19:59]  And there is no way for a centralized government to rectify that absent some sort of Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron burden the people who actually achieve in order to achieve justice.
[00:20:11]  Thomas Sowell points out that justice is usually considered a process, not an outcome.
[00:20:15]  That's why the justice system, for example.
[00:20:18]  We're not God that we should just declare there should be equality or there should be justice.
[00:20:23]  There is a universe, there's a world of real facts, and we have to determine whether we are making things worse or better when we make a specific change in that system.
[00:20:33]  And by the way, free markets actually do promote true freedom because I get to value my labor however I choose.
[00:20:38]  That's what the pricing system is.
[00:20:40]  The pricing system is an aggregation of what I think something is worth and what you think something is worth and what we all collectively think things are worth.
[00:20:48]  Free markets prize diversity in a very, very serious sense.
[00:20:51]  They take account of every individual's needs and wants and desires, and then they allow for that diversity of opinion to emerge on the value of products, goods, and services.

=== Free Market Profit (15:03) ===

[00:20:59]  So, why am I explaining all of this?
[00:21:00]  Because what we are watching right now, and Spirit Airlines is a great example of this.
[00:21:03]  What we are watching right now is an anti capitalist revolution.
[00:21:08]  Artie, coming up, Tucker Carlson does an entire interview with the New York Times in which it becomes clear that he and Hassan Piker, they're basically the same thing, except that Tucker, you know, does his show out of a cabin and Hassan Piker does his show from Cartier.
[00:21:19]  But other than that, they say kind of the same thing.
[00:21:21]  First, there's been a lot of talk lately about how AI is going to make the world a better place.
[00:21:25]  The answer is that's true, probably, but the real question is better for whom?
[00:21:29]  Well, it's better for your insurance company.
[00:21:31]  Which now has the ability to scrape your data and figure out exactly how to raise your premiums based on what you've been searching for on WebMD.
[00:21:37]  Might be better for the HR department that can quietly filter candidates based on browsing history.
[00:21:41]  Probably better for political campaigns that can target you based on your personality profile, what you do online.
[00:21:47]  Not necessarily better all the way around for you.
[00:21:50]  Now, the reality is that your online activity, that's your business.
[00:21:54]  And you don't want people scraping that data, which is why you need ExpressVPN.
[00:21:58]  Your data is being collected.
[00:21:59]  It's not being used right now, but it will be used later by people you don't know for purposes you didn't agree to.
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[00:22:05]  That's why you should do the same.
[00:22:06]  ExpressVPN is an app that encrypts 100% of your online activity and reroutes it through secure servers.
[00:22:11]  That means no one can see what websites you visit or what apps you use.
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[00:22:22]  It's also incredibly easy to use.
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[00:22:52]  Okay.
[00:22:53]  A lot of people have asked over the course of the last several years because I've been highly critical of Tucker Carlson.
[00:22:57]  When I first noticed that Tucker Carlson was going wrong.
[00:23:01]  Okay.
[00:23:02]  So Tucker Carlson, he, um, I will say that Tucker Carlson's dislike of capitalism was the first clue.
[00:23:11]  The reason I'm bringing this up is because Tucker did a very, very long interview with the New York Times over the weekend that has struck a lot of conservatives as odd.
[00:23:19]  Didn't strike me as odd because, of course, I've been watching what Tucker has been doing for a while.
[00:23:23]  And what he's representative of is a demagogic right that despises free markets and meritocracy and believes there need to be special carve out rights for particular groups.
[00:23:33]  It is the mirror of the grievance party left.
[00:23:35]  It's why I have suggested that the horseshoe right and the left are basically on the same page.
[00:23:39]  They just have different groups they're trying to benefit.
[00:23:42]  That essentially their argument is the same.
[00:23:44]  American society is a big conspiracy.
[00:23:46]  Free markets, a gigantic conspiracy.
[00:23:48]  Constitutional government, a gigantic conspiracy.
[00:23:50]  That must be broken through.
[00:23:52]  There must be a revision of how we think about the role of government in our lives.
[00:23:57]  And free markets have to be brought to heal.
[00:23:59]  The meritocracy is a lie.
[00:24:01]  And you're suffering in your life.
[00:24:02]  That's the fault of these vague systems.
[00:24:04]  And there's a conspiratorial elite who are in charge of those systems trying to harm you.
[00:24:09]  Now, a lot of people are saying that right and they are saying that left.
[00:24:12]  But the clues were all there.
[00:24:14]  The clues are all there.
[00:24:16]  So, back in 2018, this is the moment where I first noticed that Tucker was off the rails.
[00:24:21]  So, back in 2018, now eight years ago, I interviewed Tucker Carlson.
[00:24:26]  This is a younger, more innocent Ben Shapiro interviewing Tucker Carlson.
[00:24:30]  And Tucker was still on Fox at the time.
[00:24:32]  And he had written a book in which he really ripped on capitalism in some pretty significant ways.
[00:24:37]  In this interview, by the way, he would endorse the economic proposals of, say, Bernie Sanders openly.
[00:24:42]  And I asked him about self driving cars.
[00:24:47]  And one of the things that he said about self driving cars is that he would ban them.
[00:24:50]  He said he would ban them because it would save trucker jobs in the Midwest.
[00:24:56]  Okay, which again is a Luddite perspective.
[00:24:58]  The reality is self driving cars make things cheaper for people all over the United States.
[00:25:03]  If transportation costs go down, guess what else goes down?
[00:25:05]  Your costs.
[00:25:06]  Productivity decreases cost because it increases supply.
[00:25:10]  So I asked him in this interview about banning self driving cars, and he said he would.
[00:25:16]  But this was the part that really struck me.
[00:25:19]  Look, capitalism is the best economic system I can think of, I think that anyone's ever thought of.
[00:25:24]  But that doesn't mean that it's a religion and everything about it is good.
[00:25:28]  No, but there's no niacin creed of capitalism that I have to buy into what I care about.
[00:25:33]  Is living in a country where decent people can live happy lives, actually.
[00:25:38]  And so, no, I would say immediately, no, are you joking?
[00:25:41]  And I maybe would make up some pretext for public consumption, like, oh, they're dangerous.
[00:25:45]  The technology is not quite finessed.
[00:25:46]  No, no.
[00:25:47]  But the truth would be, I don't want to put 10 million men out of work because you're going to have 10 million dead families, and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country.
[00:25:56]  And now, you'll notice that Tucker, even then, was doing this game where he would say, I love capitalism.
[00:26:01]  Capitalism is wonderful.
[00:26:02]  I just think that capitalism isn't something we have to adhere to.
[00:26:06]  It's something that we can ditch on behalf of the greater good.
[00:26:08]  Okay, when the exception eats the rule, you don't have a rule.
[00:26:13]  If the idea is that the greater good trumps the individual rights of the market, there is no limit on that.
[00:26:18]  You can use that argument for virtually anything.
[00:26:21]  For virtually anything.
[00:26:23]  Okay, so this was reflected in Tucker's interview with the New York Times.
[00:26:30]  So Tucker was asked if capitalism is evil.
[00:26:34]  And here's what Tucker Carlson had to say about whether capitalism was evil.
[00:26:37]  He said this to the New York Times.
[00:26:40]  The current system, and I don't know what you would call our economic system.
[00:26:45]  I mean, I'm often told it's free market capitalism.
[00:26:48]  It doesn't bear any resemblance to what I thought free market capitalism was.
[00:26:53]  I'm not sure the name is important, except as a way to mislead and bully people into being quiet about it.
[00:27:00]  But any economic system in which the overwhelming majority of the rewards go to an ever shrinking number of people or Or, the proportion of people is a doomed system because it makes people revolutionary.
[00:27:16]  I saw this in Venezuela, which I visited as a child.
[00:27:18]  It was a prosperous kind of first world country, beautiful country, actually.
[00:27:24]  Okay, so the idea, first of all, that Venezuela was a model of capitalism until Hugo Chavez came around is ridiculous.
[00:27:30]  They had serious corruption problems in Venezuela well before Hugo Chavez.
[00:27:34]  But again, he's not defending capitalism, he is ripping capitalism in precisely the same terms that leftists rip capitalism.
[00:27:41]  Tucker Carlson is not in any way on the right at this point.
[00:27:45]  I mean, here is Hassan Piker with the folks at Trigonometry basically saying the same thing that capitalism will inevitably lead to authoritarianism.
[00:27:54]  My fear is that that is where capitalism inevitably leads.
[00:28:00]  Why?
[00:28:00]  If left unaddressed, because capitalism is always going to deteriorate.
[00:28:05]  It's slowly going to improve material conditions as opposed to feudalism.
[00:28:09]  It's a far better system, for sure.
[00:28:10]  It's far better than monarchies, right?
[00:28:12]  I agree.
[00:28:13]  But there will come a point where it outlives its usefulness, and those who own the capital, the owners of capital, will have to make a decision.
[00:28:23]  There's too much instability.
[00:28:24]  There's too much chaos.
[00:28:25]  We need to restore order.
[00:28:30]  Okay, so again, Tucker Carlson, Hassan Piker saying the exact same thing.
[00:28:34]  Here was Tucker Carlson, again, in this interview with the New York Times, saying that what we are watching right now is a total destruction of economic opportunity.
[00:28:41]  Again, this is demagoguery at the highest level.
[00:28:44]  This is true demagoguery.
[00:28:45]  We have an unemployment rate in this country of under 5%.
[00:28:49]  The notion that nobody can get a job is a lie.
[00:28:51]  It is a lie that is fostered by people who are attempting to destroy free market systems.
[00:28:57]  Here's Tucker Carlson.
[00:28:58]  Again, he and Hassan Piker believe the same things about these issues.
[00:29:03]  Here he was.
[00:29:04]  I had dinner the other night with a bunch of kids from Stanford, really smart.
[00:29:09]  They're at Stanford.
[00:29:11]  And one of them said, Oh, yeah, his best friend just graduated with a degree in computer science last year, has not been able to find a job.
[00:29:17]  Stanford computer science can't find a job.
[00:29:19]  So that's like a window into the total destruction of the economic opportunity for young people.
[00:29:26]  And what looks to me as a non economist like the true.
[00:29:29]  Hoarding of capital by a tiny group of people, it looks like a very lopsided and unfair economic system that is guaranteed to radicalize young people, not just young people, but especially young people.
[00:29:45]  So, again, this idea that he cites one Stanford student to say that there's a hoarding of capital at the top levels, it's just Marxist claptrap.
[00:29:54]  Okay, yes, AI means that there are obviously transitions in the job market, but this idea that this is therefore somehow.
[00:30:01]  To be laid at the feet of free market capitalism itself.
[00:30:04]  What you really need is government interventionism.
[00:30:07]  It's insanity.
[00:30:09]  Again, Hassan Piker says the exact same thing.
[00:30:12]  Here he was saying that profit seekers criticize him, right?
[00:30:15]  It's the profit seekers, the profiteers, the people who are hoarding the capital.
[00:30:20]  This is just pure Marxist language from Tucker, which is why he and Hassan Piker are again holding hands here.
[00:30:27]  I am the danger.
[00:30:28]  We are the danger.
[00:30:30]  And I need them to understand this.
[00:30:32]  Uh, we're dangerous to the corporate bottom line.
[00:30:34]  We're dangerous to profit seekers.
[00:30:36]  And that's the only thing that our politicians and many in the media care about right now.
[00:30:41]  So in some respects, they are correct.
[00:30:44]  Uh, the danger is, uh, what might happen to, to profit seekers who want to paywall healthcare.
[00:30:50]  And I don't mean like, uh, you know, divine retribution or, or punishment of any sort.
[00:30:54]  I mean the worst punishment of all, uh, where they can no longer, uh, they can no longer justify multi-million dollar salaries.
[00:31:03]  Um, I am a danger to those who seek profit and put the interests of profit over the interests of people.
[00:31:08]  And that's precisely the reason why they attack people like myself.
[00:31:14]  The interests of profit over the interests of people.
[00:31:15]  This is the same thing that Tucker is saying.
[00:31:17]  Here's Tucker in this New York Times interview saying that banks have an incentive to foment conflict.
[00:31:22]  This is just conspiratorial horseshit.
[00:31:24]  I mean, truly, this idea that the folks at Citibank are sitting there being like, yes, let's do war, let's do war.
[00:31:31]  Banks have zero incentive to foment conflict.
[00:31:34]  In fact, banks.
[00:31:36]  Lose money typically during wars because it turns out that the government gets very, very into the business of how banks run and then tries to seize their capital.
[00:31:45]  Anyway, here's Tucker.
[00:31:47]  For most Americans, people who are born here, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, doesn't matter of any race, the real concerns are economic.
[00:31:54]  And I do think that certain forces, the banks, people loaning the money, have a real incentive to foment.
[00:32:06]  Dissent within the population against each other.
[00:32:08]  Fight amongst yourselves while we continue to charge you 25% interest on your credit card.
[00:32:14]  I mean, again, it's indistinguishable from Hassan Piker.
[00:32:17]  The banks have an interest in what?
[00:32:18]  The BLM riots?
[00:32:20]  The banks have an interest in destruction of property?
[00:32:22]  What the hell is he talking about?
[00:32:24]  Again, the left and the right here are on the same page because in the end, what they hate, what they cannot stand, is the idea of a free market system that rests on individual freedom.
[00:32:32]  They want to restructure it in line with their own preferences.
[00:32:37]  Bernie Sanders' view on AI is basically the same as Tucker Carlson's view on AI, which is the same thing, by the way, as the Chinese view on AI, because China is trying to destroy us on the AI front.
[00:32:47]  There, trying to outcompete us.
[00:32:48]  Bernie Sanders, over the past couple of weeks, hosted a panel with literal members of Chinese universities on AI safety and governance.
[00:32:57]  And at that panel, he said, The richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes.
[00:33:03]  They acknowledge they don't understand how it works, they don't know where it's headed.
[00:33:08]  We need to cooperate, we need dialogue.
[00:33:10]  Again, the reason that Bernie and all the rest of these characters are ripping on AI is not because they have some sort of principled stand against AI excesses.
[00:33:20]  I think we all agree.
[00:33:22]  That AI is scary because we don't know quite what to make of it.
[00:33:24]  That is not the same thing as what Bernie is doing, which is literally aligning with the Chinese government on this matter.
[00:33:33]  Here is Bernie on the AI moratorium.
[00:33:37]  If scientists who are Nobel Prize winners, guys who've gotten the Turing Award, which is the major award given to Beatle in computer science, if they say to you that humanity is in danger, do you think you might want to do something about it?
[00:33:53]  Or am I missing something?
[00:33:54]  You tell me.
[00:33:55]  So, no, the percentages are also someone's, oh, there's only a 10% chance humanity is destroyed.
[00:34:02]  It's like, well, I don't like those odds.
[00:34:04]  Only a 10% chance.
[00:34:06]  God, I know.
[00:34:09]  The anti capitalists over at Pods of America and Bernie Sanders and Tucker are all on the same page.
[00:34:13]  And where does this end up?
[00:34:14]  This ends up with the grievance party, like a true grievance party, a third party that is rooted in grievance.
[00:34:19]  Here is Tucker Carlson in his interview with the New York Times saying that he wants a new party, basically.
[00:34:25]  A new party that is isolationist on foreign policy, that is restrictionist on immigration, and that is interventionist in the economy.
[00:34:32]  You might call it a national socialist party.
[00:34:34]  Here is Tucker Carlson.
[00:34:37]  You know, you can't just put a new coat of paint or fresh drywall on these structures because they are ridden with rot.
[00:34:45]  Okay.
[00:34:45]  So I would like to see them repaired.
[00:34:47]  That would be the simplest solution.
[00:34:49]  I don't think that's likely to happen.
[00:34:51]  So, of course, I would be thrilled to see the rise of a party that represented the majority of Americans.
[00:34:59]  And again, John Piker saying the same exact thing.
[00:35:01]  Here he was with former Democratic Congresswoman Corey Bush of BLM fame, saying they're not going to vote for the Democrats.
[00:35:07]  Again, it's all the same thing.
[00:35:09]  It's all the same thing.
[00:35:09]  It's an insurgent effort to overthrow American meritocracy.
[00:35:13]  That's all it is.
[00:35:15]  Here we go.
[00:35:17]  For far too long, we've been told you have to vote for harm reduction.
[00:35:21]  We all know the Republicans are corrupt.
[00:35:24]  We all know that they're monsters, they're racist, they traffic in hatred.
[00:35:29]  But we are here to say.
[00:35:31]  We are no longer going to vote for do nothing Democrats either.
[00:35:34]  We're voting for Democrats with a purpose.
[00:35:42]  Now, again, all of this is rooted in a broader conspiracy theory because here's the thing most Americans understand, because they are not ungrateful, that America is a unique and incredible place, that our free markets make us awesome, that our Constitution means we have freedoms no one else on earth has, that the greatest privilege in life is to be born an American.
[00:36:00]  It's an unbelievable privilege.

=== Cruz Foreign Threats (13:35) ===

[00:36:02]  And so you have to come up with a conspiracy theory that suggests actually.
[00:36:06]  You've been gaslit.
[00:36:07]  Actually, you are a victim of false consciousness.
[00:36:09]  Actually, the institutions have been brainwashing you and are routinely betraying you.
[00:36:14]  And Tucker and Hassan Piker, they're on the same team here.
[00:36:18]  This is why during this New York Times interview, it's insane, by the way, Tucker Carlson, who apparently pretends that he's a friend to TPUSA and Erica Kirk, is literally out there sowing doubts about the FBI's investigation into Charlie Kirk's murder.
[00:36:32]  This is not the activity of a friend.
[00:36:33]  This is an activity of a leech.
[00:36:35]  Here is Tucker Carlson.
[00:36:38]  My concern more broadly is about the investigation into Charlie's murder, which was short circuited by the FBI.
[00:36:45]  And I'd like to know why.
[00:36:47]  And I don't care to be screamed at for asking that question.
[00:36:51]  It's a legitimate question, and we know that.
[00:36:53]  I know that for a bunch of reasons.
[00:36:55]  But the public knows it because Joe Kent said it out loud and explained it.
[00:37:01]  He's the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, he's an ODI, and he was told by the FBI that he could not investigate it.
[00:37:08]  And as a friend of Charlie's, I'm not going to be intimidated into saying the following, which is on what grounds would you do that?
[00:37:16]  I'm not saying the guy who's been arrested didn't pull the trigger.
[00:37:20]  I'm not, there's been no trial.
[00:37:21]  He was obviously handed over by his father.
[00:37:24]  Do we know that?
[00:37:25]  I don't know what I know because there hasn't been a trial yet.
[00:37:29]  I don't know what I know.
[00:37:30]  I don't know what I know.
[00:37:31]  This ridiculous game.
[00:37:32]  I'm not going to go into the tremendous evil of undermining an ongoing prosecution into the murder of Charlie Kirk, which actually is an evil thing to do.
[00:37:39]  I'm just going to point out the point of what Tucker is doing, which of course is to sow doubt in American institutions, even the ones that are currently run by Tucker's supposed erstwhile allies.
[00:37:47]  It's all part of a broader conspiracy theory.
[00:37:49]  That the institutions of America are lying to you.
[00:37:52]  They are aimed at destroying you.
[00:37:55]  Again, he and the Hassan Pikers of the world are holding hands.
[00:37:58]  America is inherently corrupt.
[00:37:59]  America's systems are inherently evil.
[00:38:01]  America's systems need to be torn to the ground.
[00:38:04]  Here's Hassan Piker saying the same thing from a different angle.
[00:38:08]  America is, in its foundation, a white supremacist country.
[00:38:12]  This is very frustrating for Republicans to hear.
[00:38:14]  This is even frustrating for liberals to hear sometimes, but it's just the truth.
[00:38:19]  Okay, and then you get to where it's very clear everybody's holding hands.
[00:38:24]  So, if you have a conspiracy theory about the free markets, that truly they're the invention of a corrupt group of people, if your belief is that America's systems are inherently evil, they lie to you on behalf of somebody else, and then you look around and say, who's successful?
[00:38:39]  Who are the beneficiaries of this system?
[00:38:42]  This is how you end up with Tucker Carlson and Hassan Piker and all the rest of the people trafficking in anti Israel, bizarre anti Jewish conspiracy theories in the same group.
[00:38:53]  That is always the outcome of this conspiratorial worldview.
[00:38:56]  It is not a feature.
[00:38:57]  It is not a bug.
[00:38:58]  It is a feature.
[00:38:58]  It is a thing that unifies.
[00:39:00]  It is the glue that holds everybody together, truly holds everybody together.
[00:39:05]  And this is not speculative, right?
[00:39:06]  Mehdi Hassan, who is a wild anti American propagandist, he's out there saying that his relatives love Tucker Carlson now.
[00:39:13]  I can't imagine why.
[00:39:15]  Would that be because Tucker Carlson is upholding the virtue of Sharia law in cities around the world?
[00:39:20]  Or would it be because he's doing propaganda on behalf of Islam's view of Jesus?
[00:39:24]  Or is it because he is doing propaganda against Israel every single day of the week?
[00:39:29]  Or is it because he is spreading propaganda?
[00:39:30]  Conspiracy theories about how nefarious Zionists are in control of the American government.
[00:39:35]  Here's Mehdi Hassan, again, one of the more despicable people in American public commentary.
[00:39:39]  I'm going to talk about people who are immigrants to the United States taking advantage of the system.
[00:39:44]  Here he is praising Tucker Carlson.
[00:39:47]  For the people watching at home, these days Tucker Carlson has a big fan base amongst the anti war left who see him as saying the right stuff, trying to stop Trump from illegal wars in Iran, and amongst a lot of Muslims and Arab Americans who see him now as this great champion of Palestine.
[00:40:03]  Wherever I go, Literally, wherever I go in this country, I do a lot of live events.
[00:40:07]  I do a lot of public events.
[00:40:08]  People come up to me, when are you going on Tucker Carlson?
[00:40:10]  When are you going to do an event with Tucker Carlson?
[00:40:11]  Why don't you do a collab with Tucker Carlson?
[00:40:13]  We love Tucker Carlson.
[00:40:14]  Wherever I go, people ask me more about Tucker Carlson, even in my own family, than they ask me about my wife and kids.
[00:40:19]  Meanwhile, Chenk Ueger is out there also standing for Tucker Carlson.
[00:40:23]  Quote If your house is on fire and someone comes with a hose, you don't ask him about what his policy is on the carried interest loophole.
[00:40:29]  You thank him for the help.
[00:40:30]  If you hadn't noticed, Israel lit our house on fire.
[00:40:33]  And the alliance is very strong and it is based again on this idea.
[00:40:36]  That somehow a nefarious coterie of outside people, Jews, are running the country.
[00:40:42]  Here is Tucker Carlson claiming that President Trump is being held hostage by Netanyahu and his advocates in the United States, who presumably would be pro Israel Jews and Christian Zionists, the people he says he despises most.
[00:40:52]  Here he was talking to the New York Times in terms that are quite familiar to every anti Semite in the right wing and on the left.
[00:41:00]  This was not a normal decision making process, and my strong impression was that Trump was more a hostage than a sovereign decision maker in this.
[00:41:10]  Well, so tell me what you're getting at when you say the President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, had no choice.
[00:41:16]  I don't know what I'm getting at.
[00:41:17]  I'm just telling you what I observed.
[00:41:18]  He seemed, and that's kind of the question.
[00:41:21]  And I'm, what I'm really fascinated by is the lack of curiosity on display into how exactly this happened.
[00:41:27]  What are the mechanisms by which a guy who's supposedly sovereign, in charge, granted this authority by voters, tens of millions of them, can't make a decision in the country's interest or even in his own interest?
[00:41:40]  He knew, and I know he knew because I talked to him about it directly, that.
[00:41:44]  The consequences, potential consequences, were profound and profoundly bad.
[00:41:48]  The end of his presidency to start, which I think it has proven to be, he knew that.
[00:41:56]  I don't even know what I knew.
[00:41:57]  I don't even know what I'm saying.
[00:41:57]  I don't even know what I'm questioning.
[00:41:59]  I'm just asking why people aren't asking the same questions I'm asking when there's no evidence of the questions.
[00:42:04]  Okay, this again is a right left uniting issue, at least on the fringes.
[00:42:10]  Now, the mainstream of the Democratic Party has been doing the same thing.
[00:42:12]  They've also been claiming that Trump was somehow argued into the war by the nefarious Jews.
[00:42:17]  Now, President Trump, I've noticed, he's kind of a headstrong character.
[00:42:19]  I've noticed he makes a lot of his own decisions.
[00:42:21]  But according to Tucker Carlson and the left, the only way this could have happened is if somebody argued Trump into it, and those people probably had suspiciously evil motives.
[00:42:31]  He entered a war, got pulled into it by BB Netanyahu.
[00:42:36]  Let's be clear about that.
[00:42:37]  Because people are offended that Netanyahu is bragging that JD Vance, the vice president, is reporting to him.
[00:42:45]  How about reporting to the United States Congress?
[00:42:47]  I mean, this administration has insulted Congress.
[00:42:51]  They're more concerned with reporting to people like Netanyahu than they are to the American people.
[00:42:56]  What are our country leaders doing?
[00:42:58]  They're following Netanyahu.
[00:43:00]  The timing of this war was dictated by BB Netanyahu.
[00:43:07]  But we should never, ever be bullied as maybe President Trump was by any other world leader.
[00:43:15]  Just ridiculous.
[00:43:16]  And by the way, Tucker goes further than that.
[00:43:18]  He says that Israel decides the future of the American economy and American service members in this interview at the New York Times.
[00:43:25]  Israel has that power in our Congress, not because we have so many Jews.
[00:43:30]  I don't know how many Jews live in the United States, fewer than 10 million, I think, but because we have tens of millions of evangelical Christians who unquestioningly support Israel because they believe it's their theological duty to do so.
[00:43:43]  So on this question hangs the future of the American economy and the lives of American service members.
[00:43:51]  The idea that the American economy hinges on the future of Israel is bizarre.
[00:43:56]  It's bizarre.
[00:43:57]  Hey, but of course, Tucker also thinks that Citibank is a bigger threat to the United States than Hamas.
[00:44:01]  So here we go.
[00:44:05]  I'm against the idea that Hezbollah and Hamas are at the center of our domestic conversation.
[00:44:09]  Like, they're the big problems we face.
[00:44:10]  They're not.
[00:44:12]  Like, they're not a bigger problem than the behavior of Citibank.
[00:44:15]  I'm sorry.
[00:44:15]  Credit card debt is a much bigger problem than Hezbollah will ever be.
[00:44:18]  So stop with this.
[00:44:20]  Stop with the brainwashing.
[00:44:21]  This is bonkers.
[00:44:22]  I live here.
[00:44:23]  I'm almost 57.
[00:44:24]  I've lived here a long time.
[00:44:25]  Hamas and Hezbollah, while they're not getting my endorsement, are not relevant to the experience of most Americans.
[00:44:34]  Citibank is a bigger threat to Americans than Hamas or Hezbollah.
[00:44:38]  I mean, first of all, we should start with the question of whether Citibank is actually a threat to Americans, because it turns out tens of millions of Americans actually bank at Citibank, and they could not take out a credit card from Citibank if they so chose.
[00:44:50]  They could do that.
[00:44:51]  That doesn't seem, again, what Tucker is doing here is suggesting that you are being distracted from the evils of American capitalism by foreign threats that don't actually exist on behalf, presumably, of a nefarious coterie of people who are somehow gaming the system.
[00:45:06]  And this is left wing agitprop.
[00:45:08]  That's all it is.
[00:45:09]  And then Tucker, of course, plays ignorant about everything.
[00:45:12]  The final point here is that he plays ignorant about literally everything.
[00:45:16]  So, the New York Times asks Tucker about the Protocols of the Elder's Design.
[00:45:19]  The Protocols of the Elder's Design is a conspiracy tract that was written by the Russian secret police in the early 20th century.
[00:45:28]  It was trafficked around, it became very popular in anti Semitic circles.
[00:45:31]  And it claimed that essentially there were a group of Jews that got together on Friday nights and basically decided to control the world.
[00:45:36]  It is the most famous anti Semitic tract ever written.
[00:45:39]  Tucker's not a moron, he knows totally what this is.
[00:45:41]  But of course, Tucker claims he has no idea what it is.
[00:45:43]  This is always the game.
[00:45:45]  Tucker knows a lot.
[00:45:46]  He knows more than you.
[00:45:47]  He knows what he knows.
[00:45:48]  He doesn't know much, but what he knows.
[00:45:50]  And it's always something that he doesn't actually know.
[00:45:52]  And then when something comes up that he actually does know, his immediate response is, I don't know anything about that.
[00:45:56]  I don't even know what you're talking about.
[00:45:58]  What is a protocol?
[00:46:00]  I don't even know.
[00:46:01]  Here we go.
[00:46:02]  There is an entire anti Semitic worldview that has been based on the protocols of the elders of Zion, you know, that there is like this cabal of powerful Jews that. controls the world and, you know, that book was written in the early 20th century, but it, you know, helped the Nazis and it really has informed a lot of the views of many people today that there is, you know,
[00:46:29]  this very powerful sect of Jewish people who want global war and global conflict.
[00:46:36]  People are genuinely concerned that it opens the door to this idea that has been debunked and has been used in, you know, absolutely vicious ways to annihilate an entire people.
[00:46:49]  I'm not.
[00:46:51]  Quite sure what that means.
[00:46:54]  Let me tell you my concerns.
[00:46:56]  My main concern is the destruction of the United States.
[00:46:59]  And that is in no way to minimize anyone else's concerns.
[00:47:02]  But I have a right to that concern.
[00:47:04]  And I will not have my own concerns hijacked.
[00:47:08]  I will not submit to being told what my concerns should be.
[00:47:11]  I'm an adult man who pays his taxes.
[00:47:13]  I have a right to come up with my own hierarchy of concern.
[00:47:18]  No one is telling him what his concerns should be.
[00:47:20]  He can have whatever concerns he wants.
[00:47:22]  It is indeed a free country.
[00:47:23]  The question is whether his concerns are justified, whether they are based in evidence, or whether they are part of a broader conspiracy theory about the evils of the United States.
[00:47:31]  By the way, he was asked about Nick Fuentes, of course, and he said that Senator Ted Cruz is more morally repulsive than the Nazi standing Nick Fuentes.
[00:47:40]  This guy is supposedly a leader on the right.
[00:47:42]  All right.
[00:47:45]  Who do you think is more morally repulsive?
[00:47:47]  Ted Cruz?
[00:47:49]  Who do you think is more morally repulsive?
[00:47:51]  Ted Cruz.
[00:47:53]  Ted Cruz is a sitting U.S. Senator who has. called for the killing of people who did nothing wrong.
[00:48:01]  Whole populations who advocated for this war.
[00:48:04]  Nick Fuentes is like a kid.
[00:48:05]  He's like 26 or 70.
[00:48:07]  He has no power except his words.
[00:48:10]  Here you have a public official who we pay, who has actual power, who's voting for things, who's making policy decisions.
[00:48:18]  And those decisions would include, in fact, they are focused on the murder of people who did nothing wrong.
[00:48:23]  And yet no one thinks it's a big deal.
[00:48:25]  Well, this is totally fine.
[00:48:27]  I mean, if there's tape of Nick Fuentes saying we should kill people because we hate their parents, or it's okay to kill children, I would love to see the tape.
[00:48:35]  Because that's disgusting.
[00:48:36]  Is there any Ted Cruz saying that?
[00:48:38]  Based on what the entire U.S. Senate does every single day, and no one notices.
[00:48:43]  Tucker is such a liar.
[00:48:44]  In the end, he's just a liar.
[00:48:45]  He's a liar.
[00:48:45]  But because here's the thing you have to believe in a gigantic lie about the United States in order to propagate this crap.
[00:48:51]  You have to.
[00:48:51]  And when I say he's a liar, I mean that in the purest possible sense.
[00:48:54]  Here was Tucker Carlson literally denying he said a thing that he is on tape saying.
[00:48:59]  So he was asked by this New York Times reporter about that time he suggested that the president was the Antichrist.
[00:49:04]  And he says, I never said that.
[00:49:05]  And she plays him the tape.
[00:49:06]  And then he continues to pretend he never said it.
[00:49:08]  It's unbelievable.
[00:49:11]  But I ask because, you know, you've been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist.
[00:49:16]  I have not said that.
[00:49:18]  On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during his swearing in ceremony as president.
[00:49:24]  You said, and I'm quoting, maybe he didn't put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what's inside that book.
[00:49:30]  And then on a recent show, you went further saying, here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods and exalting himself above them.

=== Strait of Hormuz Deal (06:06) ===

[00:49:38]  Could this be the Antichrist?
[00:49:41]  Actually, did not say, could this be the Antichrist?
[00:49:43]  Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exalting himself above them.
[00:49:52]  Could this be the Antichrist?
[00:49:54]  Well, who knows?
[00:49:57]  I don't know where that comes from, but I know that those words never left my lips because I'm not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is.
[00:50:04]  If there's just one, I actually tried to understand it.
[00:50:07]  Another thing he doesn't understand.
[00:50:10]  And then he hides behind ignorance.
[00:50:11]  The thing he literally said.
[00:50:13]  And that's just one lie.
[00:50:15]  But the bigger lie is the lie that he is propagating.
[00:50:17]  It's a lie that the left is also propagating.
[00:50:19]  It is a lie that America is a terrible place that is filled with nefarious forces beyond your control that are actually in control of your life and wrecking America.
[00:50:27]  And if that view of America prevails, then we are in serious, serious, serious trouble.
[00:50:32]  Now, meanwhile, the president of the United States continues to be a bulwark against stupidity, particularly when it comes to the war in Iran, the one that Tucker is decrying as the end of America.
[00:50:42]  By the way, there is no.
[00:50:43]  Legitimately, no argument that what is happening in Iran is the end of America.
[00:50:48]  Even if we were to walk away right now, it would not be remotely close to the end of America.
[00:50:52]  That's insane.
[00:50:55]  Okay, the CENTCOM, United States Central Command, put out a notice this morning that the United States is now forcibly attempting to open the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:51:06]  U.S. Navy guided missile destroyers are currently operating in the Arabian Gulf after transiting the Strait of Hormuz in support of Project Freedom.
[00:51:12]  American forces are actively assisting efforts to restore transit for commercial shipping.
[00:51:16]  As a first step, two U.S. flagged merchant vessels have successfully transited through the Strait of Hormuz and are safely headed on their journey.
[00:51:21]  Okay, so if the United States opens the Strait of Hormuz and the only thing that remains closed is Iran's capacity to ship oil out, they've got a massive problem.
[00:51:30]  Because again, their leverage point is the idea they could blackmail the United States into basically ending our conflict with them without them giving up anything by shutting off the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:51:42]  President Trump is not having any of it.
[00:51:43]  Here he was saying, listen, if we have to, we'll strike again.
[00:51:48]  What circumstances would you restart military strikes on Turkey?
[00:51:52]  Well, I don't want to say that.
[00:51:53]  I mean, I can't tell that to a reporter.
[00:51:55]  If they misbehave, if they do something bad, but right now, we'll see.
[00:52:02]  But it's a possibility that could happen, certainly.
[00:52:08]  Well, I mean, again, the president, I have to give him extraordinary credit here.
[00:52:13]  What he's doing right now is an act of tremendous political bravery.
[00:52:15]  The polls, by the way, are very negative on the war.
[00:52:18]  Not a shock.
[00:52:19]  The polls are very negative on everything.
[00:52:20]  And this is what happened.
[00:52:21]  When people look at one number in isolation without looking at the other numbers, they think that, for example, the president's approval ratings are low because of the war.
[00:52:29]  The reality is the president's approval ratings are low across the board right now, and that is because of people's dyspepsia with the economy.
[00:52:36]  Right now, he's got a 34% approval rating on the economy.
[00:52:38]  He's got a 33% approval rating on the war.
[00:52:40]  He's got a 45% approval rating on the border.
[00:52:42]  What happens is if a politician starts to hit an unpopular period, everything that he does gets unpopular.
[00:52:48]  But that doesn't mean that what he's doing isn't brave.
[00:52:51]  What he's doing is incredibly brave.
[00:52:54]  His point is that we can blast the hell out of Ron or we can make a deal.
[00:52:58]  He would prefer a deal, but he's not going to walk away with an American L. Which is, again, very different from pretty much all the presidents we've had in recent history.
[00:53:10]  What kind of options?
[00:53:11]  How would it look different?
[00:53:12]  I mean, do we want to go and just blast the hell out of him and finish him forever, or do we want to try and make a deal?
[00:53:18]  I mean, those are the options.
[00:53:20]  Do you want to go blast the hell out of him?
[00:53:22]  I prefer not.
[00:53:24]  On a human basis, I prefer not, but that's the option.
[00:53:29]  Okay, meanwhile, the Secretary of the Treasury, who has been operating with Extraordinary precision with regard to the Iranian economy.
[00:53:36]  He points out that they are basically running out of money.
[00:53:39]  They are having to shut down oil refineries because they don't have a way of shipping their oil out of the country.
[00:53:44]  They're running out of money to pay their guys, the IRGC, which means the regime has a serious problem on its hands.
[00:53:49]  And remember, grabbing the Strait of Hormuz was not an exercise of power, it was an exercise of desperation.
[00:53:55]  Shutting off the Strait of Hormuz alienated every country in the region and most of the countries of Asia as well.
[00:54:00]  And if they somehow lose control of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians, if they can no longer control the flow in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, Except that their oil is being stopped, then what leverage do they have left, especially if the United States goes after the remainder of their ballistic missile facility, something that, for example, the UAE and Saudi Arabia would love to see happen?
[00:54:19]  Here's Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant.
[00:54:24]  And I can tell you that we are suffocating the regime, and they are not able to pay their soldiers.
[00:54:32]  This is a real economic blockade, and it is in all parts of government.
[00:54:38]  All hands on deck.
[00:54:39]  It is the blockade that our great Navy is doing.
[00:54:43]  No ships are getting through, and we have upped the pressure on anyone trying to remit money into Iran to help the IRGC.
[00:54:55]  They are a corrupt institution.
[00:54:57]  They've been stealing from the Iranian people for years.
[00:54:59]  They have money offshore.
[00:55:01]  We've tracked that down.
[00:55:02]  We will continue to track that down, and we're going to preserve those assets for the Iranian people on the other side of this conflict.
[00:55:11]  Again, what the president is doing right now is likely to be successful.
[00:55:15]  Okay, so time for a thing I like and a thing that I hate.
[00:55:17]  So I know that people like Tucker Carlson have suggested that the great villain of World War II was not Adolf Hitler, you know, the person who started World War II and was responsible for the death of legitimately tens of millions of human beings.
[00:55:28]  That actually the great villain of World War II is Winston Churchill, the leader of Great Britain during World War II.
[00:55:34]  This, of course, is historically ignorant and ridiculous on its face.
[00:55:37]  So I've been going through and rereading Churchill's six volume history of the Second World War, and there's some good reminders for our time.

=== Mandalorian War Prevention (02:55) ===

[00:55:44]  Mainly because they are eternal lessons.
[00:55:46]  Quote, delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, genuine love of peace, and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation.
[00:55:54]  The utter devotion of the liberals to sentiment apart from reality, though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries.
[00:56:04]  As Churchill pointed out, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.
[00:56:15]  There may even be a worse case.
[00:56:17]  You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
[00:56:21]  And the point being that starry eyed anti Americanism, anti Westernism is not a solve for people who want to destroy you, ranging from China to Russia to Iran to the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany.
[00:56:37]  And one more thing that I like we'll end on an upbeat note before we get to the subscriber member block.
[00:56:44]  Okay, so it is May the 4th.
[00:56:46]  So may the 4th be with you.
[00:56:48]  As we who like Star Wars are fond of saying, there is a brand new trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is one of the successful spinoff properties under sort of the Kathleen Kennedy universe.
[00:56:59]  This is the Pedro Pascal series that is now being made into a movie about Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian.
[00:57:06]  Here we go.
[00:57:11]  We've all heard stories of the Mandalorian bounty hunter and a child.
[00:57:20]  I only hunt Imperial war criminals.
[00:57:22]  I'll take out every bad guy in your deck of cards.
[00:57:31]  This isn't about revenge, it's about preventing another war.
[00:57:37]  Up and video.
[00:57:39]  Okay.
[00:57:39]  Before going into harm's way, check your armor first.
[00:57:46]  We're protecting everything the rebellion fought for.
[00:57:48]  Good luck.
[00:57:52]  Okay, I'm into it.
[00:57:59]  I'll take my kids to watch this.
[00:58:06]  Listen, I'm a Star Wars fan, so this is a thing that I will check out for sure.
[00:58:09]  Okay, we don't have to watch the rest of it, but this is cool.
[00:58:11]  Okay, I'm into it.
[00:58:12]  I like it.
[00:58:12]  Okay, it's got the ATATs, it's got the land speeders.
[00:58:17]  I'm there.
[00:58:17]  So may the fourth be with you.
[00:58:20]  Alrighty, the show continues for our members right now.
[00:58:22]  We're going to get into Zorn Momdani.
[00:58:25]  And his take on protesters clashing with ICE in New York.
[00:58:29]  Again, third worldism is a real thing.
[00:58:30]  It's happening inside the United States.
[00:58:32]  Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
[00:58:34]  If you're not a member, become a member.
[00:58:35]  Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
[00:58:38]  Click that link in the description and join us.