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April 2, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:10:19

The Truth About Tucker, Candace & Why 2024 Is About to Get a Lot Uglier | Ben Shapiro

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ben shapiro

55:29

dave rubin

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Speaker	Time	Text
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		he can clear that up any time he wants.
		I have never, once again, implied or suggested that Tucker has corrupt motivations.
		I think he believes what he believes for whatever reason he believes it.
		And then I've tried to take on the arguments that he makes, whether they are good or bad.
		Once you, you can have arguments and discussions over issues.
		What you can't do is if you get in a room with somebody and you say that that person is racist or evil, the conversation is now over.
		Now, the person may be racist and evil or anti-Semitic or whatever it is,
		but you should be able to show the receipts as to why you believe that thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, Shapiro, here we go in person once again.
		I was told that the last time we actually sat in person together was July of 2020.
		Here we are in the free state of Florida.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Not everything I say is prophetic, but that one felt like an easy call at the time and turned out to be like actually a really easy call.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		The good news is you did get the upside on the house that you bought in LA, so you didn't get totally hosed on that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Which is my fear for you when you bought that second house.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I will say you could have saved yourself a few years and a lot of money didn't come to action.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		A lot of money, a fruitless effort to depose Gavin Newsom in a recall election.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I got audited by the state after that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Your optimism had costs.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I tried, I tried.
		You know what I mean?
		And trying is always worth it, right?
		In this world that we're in right now.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I wish that were true.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		No?
		I wish that were true.
		Have you shifted now to the other side of this?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		You know, every time I think I've hit the bottom of the pessimistic well, it turns out that there are leagues below me and I can always find new ways to be pessimistic.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		So let's let's do a bunch of stuff here.
		We've obviously we've done this over Skype and that kind of stuff a couple of times, even just in the last few months.
		But it's been a while since we've sat down.
		I actually have notes here, which I hate having, but I want to kind of cover everything.
		In some ways, I want to do this as if I had never seen you before or know some of your stuff or interviewed you before, because I think there's a lot of confusion about you and your positions, which is do you find that odd, like someone who speaks as precisely and fast as you do, that people seem to be confused over your positions?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And I find it deeply confusing because, again, I'm public record on everything for at least 20 years.
		I started writing a syndicated column when I was 17.
		I'm currently 40.
		So the notion that you have to go far to search for my opinions is strange to me.
		But the online world is not a real world.
		And the phrase I've been finding myself using a lot lately is, touch some grass.
		And people need to go outside and they need to touch some grass.
		Like, turn off X, go touch some grass.
		Turn off Instagram, go outside, look at the sky.
		The reality is that if you want to know my positions, I've been outspoken about literally all of them.
		I've not been unclear about them.
		There are of course people who are going to seek to twist those positions into something that they are not.
		And I understand that's the nature of the game, nothing has changed there.
		But the prevalence and speed with which that happens, that has changed.
		And that's gotten significantly worse over the course of the last few years.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How do you balance that for yourself?
		Because I talk about it on the show all the time.
		I mean, we're in this digital world.
		We're basically existing in the matrix, which I would say if you spend more than 12 hours and one second on there, you pretty much are just the battery for the thing versus we all go out and about.
		And at least here in Florida, we have a functional society and we have law and order and things like that.
		So just contrasting the lunacy that's happening there.
		Versus actually, not that everything's great in America, it certainly isn't, we're going to get to it, but there's a huge chasm between those two things.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		For sure.
		And I think that for me, the big move that I made in my life was probably five, six years ago now, where my wife turned to me and she said, Twitter, even then, was taking up too much of your time and eating your life.
		You really need to not have Twitter on your phone.
		And so I took Twitter off my phone.
		So what I'll do is I'll check in on specific accounts from the outside of Twitter where I actually have to spend the effort to log in to Twitter and look up what a specific news account is saying as opposed to just having this scrolling doom feed that is also filled with an echo chamber about you.
		The notifications button on Twitter is bad.
		It's gotten way worse since the... Listen, I love that Elon took over... You checked the Ben Shapiro notifications?
		No, no, I gave that up a long time ago.
		I will say that it did get significantly worse when I would check on it since the changes to the blue check.
		I mean, the changes to the blue check mark definitely opened up all the floodgates in terms of anyone now being in your notifications, so it made it a lot less usable just in terms of being user-friendly and people you actually cared about commenting on what you were doing.
		But with all that said, yeah, I really don't check Twitter a lot except for the news when I'm attempting to prep for the show.
		And I really try never to check the notifications or the comments or anything remotely like that because it is toxicity all the way up, all the way down.
unidentified		All right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So let's do the elephant in the room for just a moment because I saw you this week on Piers Morgan.
		He asked you repeatedly about Candace.
		Uh, you repeatedly basically said, I won't talk about that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I'll say that here too.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And that's fine.
		And you know, it's interesting cause we all sort of came up together to different extents and we've all done a million things together and public events and networks and all of those things.
		It seems to me that at this moment, she's now a free agent.
		She happened to end up on Locals, which I created, and we're a platform, not a publisher that you guys are.
		Can you at least talk to just sort of where it's at now?
		She's not with you?
		She's free?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		She's free to do whatever she wants to do, to be wherever she wants to be.
		The difference between a publisher like The Daily Wire and a platform like Locals is obviously that a platform should have a very broad range of speech that it allows, including speech that maybe even the creators don't believe is inside what they would consider to be the Overton window.
		It's a very different thing than direct subsidization of particular opinions.
		The Daily Wire would not have a host, would not pay a host, who was staunchly pro-abortion.
		They'd have no obligation to pay a host who was staunchly pro-abortion.
		And so when it comes to the hosts on The Daily Wire, obviously everyone is able to say what they want.
		Nobody ever comes to me and says, you can't say X, nobody ever says that to Walsh,
		and no one ever said that to Candace.
		But the reality is that there is an Overton window Obviously, there was a non-meeting of the minds.
		That's pretty much all I can say on this.
		And, you know, a lot of this has happened publicly.
		To the extent that The Daily Wire is in fact not a publisher, that is in fact not a platform, it is a publisher, that means that there is no moral obligation for The Daily, and there's no free speech problem with The Daily Wire saying we don't wish to pay a particular host or that host saying I don't wish to work here anymore because again, there's a parting of the ways that, you know, it's not really open for discussion at this point.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Does it surprise you that so many people, even on our side of this, are confused about that as it relates to free speech and quote-unquote cancel culture?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Like, severing a business tie, as long as you're not throwing someone in jail and they're able to be everywhere else, is not... I'm not super surprised by the controversy, honestly, because to a certain extent I think that there's been a reaction on the right to the excesses of the left.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So because what the left did is they said that the Overton window ought to be closed so tight that no one can get inside the Overton window.
		Basically, if you're to the right of Hillary Clinton, you can't be allowed inside the Overton window.
		Welcome to my world, brother.
		Yes, exactly.
		And not just with regard to platforms, but with regard to publishers.
		So, for example, this week, NBC News deciding that Ronna McDaniel was too much for them.
		Ronna McDaniel can't work at NBC News.
		The sacred halls of NBC News must not be sullied by the former head of the RNC.
		Jen Psaki, however, can have a show on MSNBC, despite being the press secretary for the White House five seconds ago.
		The right's response to that is, I think, Correct to say, you guys have shut the Overton window too tight.
		But I think some elements of the right have basically said there is no Overton window.
		The Overton window should be completely exploded with regard, not just to platforms, with which I kind of agree, but with regard to publishers.
		So NBC News not only has an obligation to hire Ronna McDaniel, NBC News has the obligation to hire Alex Jones, for example.
unidentified		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Which just makes no sense at a business level, beyond free speech.
		I mean, there's a reason that networks exist.
		It comprises a series.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		They have editorial positions.
		Daily Wire has a very strong editorial position on a wide variety of issues.
		And by the way, I should say that there are a lot of people who are suggesting this is about disagreements over Israel.
		I mean, I can safely say it is not about disagreements over Israel to the extent that Without reference to Candace at all here, Matt Walsh has taken the position that America ought not be involved in the Middle East at all.
		Matt Walsh's position, so far as I understand it, and I've talked to him about it, is that in a conflict between Israel and Hamas, Israel is obviously a more moral party than the genocidal terrorist group Hamas, but also it's very far away, he doesn't care, and it doesn't involve America.
		That's just a pure isolationist position.
		I disagree with it.
		I think it's wrong.
		I think that it's short-sighted.
		But, again, he's on our platform.
		That is well within the range of acceptable discourse at The Daily Wire.
		So, you know, the notion that you have to mirror my exact perspectives on what Israel is doing in Gaza is obviously not true, based on the roster of hosts that we currently have.
		There are a lot of other factors, obviously, at play.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So actually, let's connect that to something else going on that we did discuss when I had you on a few months ago, that there is this sort of tension now that I think has been unearthed because of what's going on with Israel and Hamas on the right as it relates to the more libertarian wing.
		And I don't know if you want to say the more traditional conservative wing or whatever.
		They say neocon.
		I don't think really.
		I don't think the word really works anymore.
		But that there's a tension between isolationism and what the hell should America do at this point?
		And I'm sympathetic sometimes to the isolationists because with Joe Biden as president and this particular administration, I don't know what good we can do at the moment.
		So how do you balance?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I would say that there are actually four positions inside the Republican Party at the moment.
		Only one of them I find morally truly reprehensible.
		The four positions are traditional sort of old school isolationism, which is the idea that America really should not be involved anywhere.
		We should retreat inside Fortress America.
		We have a lot of oceans.
		We're surrounded on the other two borders by Canadians and Mexicans.
		We're well placed by God to be a safe country.
		And so why bother ourselves with anything happening in the rest of the world?
		Again, I think that's short-sighted.
		But that's certainly within the realm of discussion.
		Then there's the sort of realpolitik perspective, which is, we have allies, we have enemies.
		Sometimes we have to tell our allies not to do things.
		Sometimes we have to throw a worm to our enemies.
		Sometimes we have to juggle between the two.
		It's sort of the Henry Kissinger-esque balance of power position.
		That sort of realpolitik position.
		And even that, there are differences inside the realpolitik position.
unidentified		Sure.
unidentified		people who say that there's an American interest, for example, in being involved in Syria,
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		versus people who say there's no American interest involved in Syria, or Ukraine.
		There's an American interest involved in Ukraine, or there's no American interest involved in Ukraine.
		You can have honest discussions that are not isolationist about how large is that interest
		and what should America's commitment be.
		That's all within the realm of realpolitik.
		Then you have sort of the neocon position, which is the very interventionist
		Wilsonian foreign policy position, which is that the United States should be involved
		in shaping pretty much everything around the world.
		The United States has a duty to mainly a higher calling, like democracy, for example,
		and that the United States ought to impose democracy everywhere that it possibly can
		as part of America's sort of imperial calling.
		And that's a sort of Woodrow Wilson position that was adopted in large measure by some of the neocons in the 1990s and 2000s and manifests in A lot of interventionism.
		Now, you can have situations in which the real politic and the neocons cross paths, right?
		That does happen, but they don't have to.
		And then finally, you have the only position that I find truly to be immoral, and that position is the position that the United States is a nefarious force in the world, that for moral reasons, the United States should never involve itself anywhere else, that everything the United States touches turns to evil and viciousness, and that every problem around the world is to be blamed on America's imperialist, colonialist history.
		And there you see a sort of weird horseshoe theory, So what do we do about that?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That connection, that horseshoe between those pure isolationists and then the people who really hate America?
		Because someone like, I mean, I'll bring it up in a moment, but someone like Tucker obviously loves America.
		He takes the more of the isolationist approach and now he's finding some common cause on this other thing.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I think Tucker, having watched an enormous amount of his stuff, and Tucker, I've said it a thousand times, incredibly talented human being.
		Tucker has, I think, put one foot in the isolationist camp and then he's really dipped a lot of toes on the other foot into the sort of America is bad, no I'm Chomsky.
		idea, and his trip to Russia just being the latest example.
		You can take the pure isolationist position that the United States has nothing to do in Ukraine.
		Again, I think that that's wrong.
		I think America has interests in, for example, restricting Russian interventionism.
		I think that a Europe that is under Russian domination, or under the threat of Russian domination,
		is likely to become more aggressive.
		It's likely to make the world more unstable.
		Russia has spread its tentacles in the Middle East.
		In Africa, it has threatened shipping lanes via its proxies.
		That's gonna have a major impact on how Americans consume goods, on how goods move around the world.
		The freedom of the waterways is the single greatest guarantee of a free market economy and a functioning economy.
		Forget about free market, a functioning economy in the United States.
		Freedom of the seas, which has basically been guaranteed by the British Empire up until America took it over in the post-World War I and then certainly post-World War II era.
		That is something not to be taken lightly, and it's fading right now specifically because of American isolationism.
		But that position is, again, distinct from the idea that America is bad and, say, Russia is good.
		That Russia is somehow a defender of Christendom when it attacks Ukraine.
		That that's what that war is really about, as opposed to imperial ambitions by Vladimir Putin, who's made very clear exactly what he's doing.
		I think one of the fascinating things about Tucker's interview with Putin, which, again, I thought was really, really interesting, Mainly, I thought the part that was interesting was the part everyone thought was boring.
		I thought that Putin's sort of laying out of his vision of Russian history, in which he never once mentions Christianity.
		He never says, we're a Christian country, we're defending Christendom by going into Ukraine.
		That is a made-up excuse by a lot of people in the United States to sort of backfill why they are rooting for Russia in that particular conflict.
		And you can quarrel with Ukraine.
		Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country.
		Vladimir Zelensky is in fact acting in quite tyrannical ways at home.
		He has gone after opposing parties that are not pro-Russian parties.
		All of that is true.
		That still doesn't mean that Russia gets to walk into Kiev.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So how much of the backlash against Israel do you think is because for a year we were in this war not war with Ukraine and it was not laid out to us in a clear, like you just laid it out in a somewhat clearer way than certainly Joe Biden or anyone from the administration did.
		And that basically we ended Afghanistan in a horrible fashion, and then just jumped into another thing that wasn't explained properly, and then people are just like, we don't do anything, right?
		And here we go with Israel now.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Again, I don't think that that actually represents, particularly in the conservative movement, a large percentage of the conservative movement.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So if you take a look at the polls... I mean more broadly than the conservative movement, I mean for what's the temperature of the country.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, honestly, I think that Joe Biden's leadership on the Israel-Hamas war has been egregious because he has tried to have it every which way, like all the ways at once, which is always the worst thing that you can do as an American president.
		He has provided Israel with some level of rhetorical support at the beginning.
		And some level of material aid.
		And then he has suggested that Israel is sort of a weird attack dog that the United States needs to hold its leash as though the Israelis are like itching to go and just murder civilians.
		And if it weren't for Joe Biden chiding them every so often, that's exactly what they would be doing, which is just a lie.
		It is a 100% whole cloth lie that Israel is seeking to murder tons of civilians.
		Again, Israel has complete air superiority in Gaza.
		This is perfectly obvious.
		If Israel wanted zero Israeli soldiers to be killed, they could do it because again, complete air superiority.
		They could have carpet bombed Gaza.
		There are two million people living in Gaza.
		When you're talking about 30,000 casualties, at least one third to one half of those are actual
		terrorists and many of the others are people
		who are direct associates of those terrorists.
		I mean, by every available kill ratio, when you're talking terrorists to civilians, in the history of urban warfare, Israel's doing an extraordinary job, and of course, getting its own soldiers killed in the process.
		I mean, they've had nearly 300 soldiers who have been killed on the ground in Gaza going door to door, and that is what they are doing.
		They are not actually just carpet, again, if there were carpet bombing,
		there'd be far fewer Israeli casualties.
		The kind of Joe Biden, I want to have it both ways thing, has undermined levels of support for Israel
		that would normally be natural.
		I will say that Israel has moved far too slowly.
		That has been Donald Trump's critique.
		The American public cannot stand long conflicts, it cannot.
		Whether you're talking Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, or Israel, anything that lasts more than about 35 seconds,
		the American public is gung-ho at the beginning, and then by second 34.
		The American public's like, are we done with this yet?
		Like, what, what, why?
		Why is this still going on?
		And so Israel seemed to be under the weird misimpression that if it went slowly and was careful, that that would somehow earn more latitude from the United States and the public.
		And that actually is not true.
		The reality is that the American public almost doesn't care what happens in the first couple of weeks of any conflict.
		They only start to care when it continues to be on the TV and then they get annoyed that it's on the TV a lot.
		And Joe Biden, of course, has put it on the TV a lot because he's trying to cater to pro-Hamas voters in Michigan right now.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that that's part of the calculation?
		I mean, I hate to even say it, but it's like the Democrats know they're going to win New York with the Jews or without the Jews, basically.
		They know they're going to win California with the Jews or without the Jews, and they know they're going to lose Florida with the Jews or without the Jews.
		Like the map is not, if this is about some, like if you look at it sort of cynically from an electoral way, the map is not friendly to the Jews, let's say.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, so I will say that Joe Biden is listening to a left-wing advisory group that is lying to him.
		So they're telling him that he's losing Michigan because he's too supportive of Israel.
		That's a lie.
		He's not losing Michigan because he's too supportive of Israel.
		He's losing Michigan because blue-collar voters, who are white predominantly in Michigan, do not like him, and they think that he is bad for the economy, and they think that he has bad values, and they think that he sides with upper-crust white liberal women in the suburbs who are interested in left-wing social values.
		There are a thousand reasons why he's losing Michigan.
		Israel is super low on that list, and the idea that tons of voters in Dearborn, Michigan are suddenly going to swivel and vote for the most pro-Israel president in American history, Donald Trump, is wrong.
		There's a going theory that Joe Biden has about this election, and it's been the theory of Democrats since 2012, and it is a lie, and it is wrong.
		That theory, so in 2012, Which was, for my money, I'll always say this is the most important election of my lifetime.
		Everybody has said that every other election was really important.
		It was 2012 that was the important one.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		They say 2008 was important because Obama won.
		Okay, but Obama ran as effectively a moderate Republican in 2008.
		We're going to unify the country, bring together red states and blue states, right?
		We're all going to be friends, and we're American opportunity, and I, in my own person, am embodying this American opportunity in the American... Okay, that was 2008. 2012, Barack Obama did the most deeply cynical thing I've ever seen a politician do, and that is that he decided to completely abandon the independence that had actually won him the presidency and double down on his base.
		And so he decided that he was going to go radical on nearly every issue, and then he was going to get out the vote with his base.
		And the idea was that there was this ascendant majority-minority coalition, along with white liberal women, and that you could just get enough of those people out.
		You didn't need to appeal to moderates ever again.
		You could just ignore the moderates and get the base out, and you would never lose another election.
		Hillary tried to replicate that coalition in 2016, and then she lost.
		But weirdly enough, because everyone believed that Barack Obama, the first president in modern American history to lose independence and win re-election, to lose votes from election number one and win re-election, everyone believed that that was duplicable.
		You could do it again.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And so because of that, both Republicans and Democrats believed that and it shaped the parties in very weird ways.
		So the Republicans believed that it would take a miracle worker in order to defeat a Democrat.
		So when Trump came and he beat Hillary, It must have been because the man worked miracles.
		It couldn't be because Hillary underperformed and was a bad candidate.
		It had to be because Donald Trump had the magic sauce.
		And that meant in 2020, when he didn't win, it must have been because someone stole it.
		Because he's a wizard and wizards don't lose.
		And so that's why there's a lot of credibility to him saying there's no possible way I lost to Joe Biden and people willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because it took a magic man to beat Hillary the first time.
		For Democrats, they assumed that it was also magic, but it was Russian magic.
		It was Russian dark magic that allowed Trump to win in 2016.
		So that didn't lead them to moderate any of their stances.
		It led them to keep doubling down.
		Then 2020 happens, and it's this weird odd election in which you get an additional influx
		of over 20 million voters, right, which never happens.
		The transition between presidential election, presidential election, usually somewhere between
		three and four million voters are added each election cycle.
		Here, you had a multiple of that, like a five times multiple of that,
		with so many people voting early and voting by mail, and so Biden wins on that basis.
		He also wins independence, and then he immediately swivels to the left.
		And because he's swiveling to the left, he's now attempting to mimic the Barack Obama 2012 strategy again of get out the base, get out the base, get out the base.
		And so his pollsters are telling him, who's your base?
		Your base is radical progressives who live on college campuses and in the suburbs and radical members of your coalition, the people who love Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and AOC.
		And if you get those people out to vote, these people are Low preponderance voters.
		They don't tend to vote as much, but if you can get those people out to vote, then they will jog you to victory.
		That's not why he's losing.
		He's not going to find enough votes in Dearborn, Michigan to make up the deficit that he has in Michigan.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		What do you think this all does to the moderates?
		Because if even if you and I went back to the first time we sat down, which was even before that, it was I think around 2017 and I was still on the left and you were on the right and we debated abortion and we debated Gay rights and a whole bunch of other stuff.
		It clearly was within that that Overton window.
		And in some ways, I was kind of a moderate lefty and you were a moderate righty.
		Now we're both considered, you know, far right maniacs or something.
		But what does that do for all of the people?
		And I think it is most Americans that are decent and willing to live and let live and everything else.
		There's nothing playing to us right now.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So what's actually happening is that it's not even policy.
		If it were policy, I think the Republicans would be in pretty solid shape.
		I think that right now it's almost entirely affect.
		So the Democrats are trying to promote a moderate affect and very left-wing policy.
		That's what Joe Biden is actually doing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, do you think Biden knows what he's doing?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, just quickly on the cognitive stuff, do you think, like, he really understands what's driving this?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I think that Joe Biden has an inerrant instinct for being what he believes to be the center of the Democratic Party.
		So he will shift to wherever he believes the center of gravity is in the Democratic Party at any one time.
		So in the 90s, he was an anti-crime, hard on crime, I'm going to say the thing that nobody else will say, triangulating Democrat.
		And by 2024, he's mimicking Bernie Sanders because he believes that's where the center of weight is in his party.
		That's the only thing that he knows.
		I don't think that he is cognitively with it much of the time.
		but I don't think, frankly, that he has to be cognitively with it much of the time
		in order to have one thing that he knows.
		He can be a hedgehog, he doesn't have to be a fox.
		He can just say the one thing he knows over and over, which is, whatever my party wants me to say
		is the thing that I'm going to say.
		And so that's what he's doing over and over.
		So his shtick right now is provide a moderate doddering face on very radical policy.
		And on the right, weirdly enough, you have Donald Trump, who is a moderate on policy.
		Donald Trump is a moderate on policy by any stretch of the imagination.
		On abortion, he's a moderate on policy.
		Donald Trump has proposed, maybe, maybe, a 16-week abortion ban.
		That is a very late-term abortion ban.
		That's later than virtually all of Europe.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Which, by the way, has nothing to do with the President.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, and by the way, he's avoided the issue entirely.
		He doesn't even want to answer questions on it.
		So all the pro-lifers, people like me, are like, what the hell?
		Why isn't he more pro-life?
		But the answer is, he's a moderate on the issue of abortion.
		On same-sex marriage, he's a moderate on the issue of same-sex marriage.
		You can make the case that he's even quasi-moderate on some of the trans stuff.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Like, he's a very moderate candidate in terms of... He wants one bathroom at Trump Tower.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
		When it comes to entitlements, he doesn't want to touch them.
		This is a quote-unquote moderate position.
		In terms of his positioning, he's closer to Bill Clinton in 1992 than he is to, say, Pat Buchanan, which is where a lot of his followers think he is, right?
		And so what's sort of fascinating is that you have Donald Trump, who has extreme affect but moderate policies, and Joe Biden, who has Bewildered but moderate affect and extreme policies and everybody who's watching is like, what the hell is this?
		What is this?
		And so if they're forced to the position of, do I choose Trump or Biden?
		The question is going to be, do I choose affect or do I choose policy?
		And I think a lot of people are going to say, well, I mean, is there anyone else out there?
		This is why Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is, yeah, again, I think he's got a set of very odd opinions.
		I mean, it's like pick off the tree at random and that's how you end up.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I have him in here next week and we're going to do it again.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's a little bit of everything.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's eclectic.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, he's moved, by the way.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, on the border, especially since he's ran, he's definitely become more right-wing.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know he's right-wing on the border and he's right-wing on Israel, but he's also super left-wing on abortion and super left-wing on gay marriage and all this kind of stuff.
		So it's this very weird amalgam of policies.
		You know, but at the same time, people might look at him and they might be like, oh, I don't like either of these other two guys.
		I don't know much about this RFK Jr.
		character, but he seems like an OK guy.
		And so you'll see 8 to 10 percent of the population go with RFK.
		And then the question is like, OK, how many is he taking away from Biden?
		How many is he taking away from Trump?
		The two parties are locked in a death grip with one another in which each party believes it is not possible to lose to the other party.
		And one of them is going to be wrong.
		And that's why you can end with riots, because the Republicans legitimately believe there is no possible way for Donald Trump to lose to Joe Biden.
		He's old, he's senile, and he's in the high 30s, low 40s in approval rating.
		And Democrats look at Donald Trump and they say, there is no way we're possibly going to lose to this guy.
		He's under 97 indictments.
		He lost the last election cycle, January 6, all the usual litany that we've heard.
		One of those parties is going to be wrong.
		And that's going to get really ugly.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah. Do you think it's violence no matter what?
		Because I tend to agree with you, because Trump, no matter what, if he loses,
		let's say he loses completely legitimately, he has to say they stole it
		because that's the premise of running again, in essence.
		So it's not like, oh, they stole it once.
		They didn't steal it this time. Let's move on.
		So his people will be pissed.
		And clearly we know the left uses that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, if Trump wins, there will certainly be riots.
		100%.
		If Biden wins, I don't know if there will be riots or acts of sporadic violence.
		I would be shocked if there's nothing.
		Mainly because, I mean, to be fair to Trump, there is a better case that the 2024 election is being stolen than that the 2020 election was stolen.
		There actually is.
		I mean, like, I'm, you know, I've said Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
		Yes, it was rigged in the sense that many of the rules were changed.
		Some of them were changed illegally, like in Pennsylvania.
		We had a set of rules that had never been applied to any presidential election in history.
		Yes, they banned the Hunter Biden laptop story.
		Like, all of that's true and all that impacts it.
		That's not exactly the contention that Trump makes, which is that there was some dude in the back room who was shifting out the ballots and that there were actual, like, boxes of ballots being tossed in the river and this kind of stuff.
		That I don't believe.
		And I don't think the evidence has been shown for that.
		And I don't think Trump has really even had his lawyers allege it in a wide variety of court cases.
		With that said, in 2024, his case, which is that he is being legally targeted to prevent him from winning, It's hard to argue otherwise.
		It's really hard to argue otherwise.
		I mean, what is going on right now in the New York courts is insane.
		I mean, forcing the man to post half a billion dollars in bond on a bulls*** charge.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They did lower it to $175.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's all crazy!
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		The fine is still $464, right?
		They're still going to charge him half a billion dollars for what was effectively a negotiation with a bank that then gave him the loan and got repaid.
		That's wild.
		Okay.
		And this case that is now being brought by Bragg, Alvin Bragg, about a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels in 2016, eight years later, just in time for the election.
		It's obviously ridiculous.
		The case that Fannie Willis is bringing in Atlanta is an absurd case.
		The only case that actually has some legal merit to it is the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
		And that gets completely eviscerated by the fact that Joe Biden just got let off the hook for keeping classified documents in his garage for like 20 years.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		When he was the VP.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		When he did not have the ability to declassify, obviously was saying openly on tape to the guy ghostwriting for him.
		My classified materials are downstairs.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But is the problem with all of this that none of it matters to some extent?
unidentified		Yes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That we have all so siphoned off.
		You said to me right before we sat down that this all used to be so much fun.
		And there was a couple of years of doing all of this that it was fun.
		Every day it was like, there's a new voice out there that's awesome.
		And we watched Peterson rise and all of these different things.
		And then something has now shifted that we've so gone in our own ways that it may not, none of the, okay, facts, and they don't care about your feelings, but it may not matter because feelings don't care about your facts.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think that's true.
		I think that the biggest thing that's happened in politics over the course of the last decade is the tremendous destruction of a sense of humor.
		In order to be able to joke about things, you have to have a level of security with the person you're joking with.
		Whatever joke you tell is going to be offensive to somebody.
		So you have to have a generally secure population to tell jokes.
		This is why many of us have said that the 1980s were a better time.
		You could make movies like Airplane, and everyone was getting joked about it.
		Everyone was like, okay, fine, no one cares, it's fine.
		And now you can't tell a joke, even about people on your own side, two people on your own side, because of the levels of mistrust.
		If I tell a joke about Trump, I don't just support Trump, I hosted a fundraiser
		for him last week.
		If I tell a joke about Trump, I will get mail telling me how terrible it is that I'm telling
		a joke about Trump.
		I think Trump can take a joke.
		I mean, he's pretty powerful, he's pretty rich, he's the former president, he might be president again.
		But the lack of humor, for the first time, I'm seeing that on my side of the aisle,
		for a very long time, it was that if you were on the left side of the aisle and you had somebody
		right wing on, they would kill you.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And now you're starting to see some of the reverse, actually.
		You're starting to see this feeling like if you're a right-winger and a conservative, and you have somebody who disagrees with you on the show, I still think most people are appreciative of the discussion, but there's a group of people who will be like, no, that is not allowed.
		Like, we are too far off in our own camps that it's over.
		Well, that destroys the entire conversation.
		I mean, it really does.
		And when you and I met was at the beginning of the so-called intellectual dark web, which I've now been informed by reliable sources was a CIA op.
		But aside from that, you know, the, the, the sort of, you know, the, the intellectual dark web, the premise of it was we disagree all of us on politics.
		At the time, by the way, I was the only registered Republican.
		Who is in the intellectual dark web.
		It was considered this wild right-wing phenomenon by the New York Times.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And by the way, there was no laminated cards.
		We were just talking.
		It was just a bunch of us like, I don't know, we'll talk to each other.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And then it started to fall away because of the external pressure.
		People who would like no longer go out to dinner with you because they were getting too much external pressure and all of that.
		And I think that's a pretty good indicator of what's happened to the discourse in the country.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what do we do if, and I asked you this last time I had you on, what do we do to heal what seems to be that divide on the right?
		I think most people, certainly my audience is like, okay, fine.
		The left are all bananas.
		The woke are bananas.
		Biden's got dementia.
		The Democrats are insane.
		Like, okay, fine.
		This thing that's happening on the right now, this thing needs to be healed and quick.
		And I would say partly, um, it's why, it's why I have no desire personally.
		I'm not speaking to you.
		It's why I personally have no desire to go after Candace.
		It's like, her ideas, it is what it is, but it's like, we have to solve something on the right.
		Putting Candace aside, maybe between you and Tucker, let's say.
		Like, how do we put that together so that it's like, we're all gonna vote for Trump, we're all gonna try to, you know, restore America to something.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		When it comes to Candace, again, I've not said word one about Candace since, like, last November.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So that is what it is.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I mean it more clearly between, say, whatever the divide now is between you and Tucker.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I offered Tucker multiple times to come on the show and hash this out.
		It was Tucker who accused me of dual loyalty.
		It was Tucker who suggested I hate the country.
		That was not me saying that about Tucker.
		I said precisely the reverse about Tucker, which is that I believe that Tucker loves the country.
		So it is not up to me to heal a breach that was created by Tucker there.
		I've criticized Tucker's policy positions.
		I've never criticized his motives.
		I've never suggested that Russia was in the pay of the Russians, that Tucker was in the pay of the Russians.
		I've never suggested that Tucker is an America hater, that he despises the country in some sort of
		deep, dark, conspiratorial way or anything like that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You actually just said the reverse when you were laying out the floor. I just said the reverse,
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		and I said the reverse multiple times since he said the reverse about me, since he said that I hate the country,
		back in December.
		Again, I've reached out to him.
		Our team has reached out to him many times.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So if I offer, if I text him and offer to moderate a debate, you're down to do it?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		I mean, frankly, I don't even have to be there, but I'm willing to do it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
		Of course.
		I've literally personally texted him about this.
		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what do you think the confusion is on the foreign policies?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I think the divide with you and Tucker seems to be a foreign policy divide, not a domestic.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think we do have domestic policy to advise, by the way.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Sure, but that doesn't seem to be like the... He doesn't seem to put emphasis on that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, it seems to be... Mainly because he wishes to question my motives, right?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And so if we have disagreements about entitlement programs or subsidies for the Rust Belt or something, that doesn't allow him, apparently, to question my motives in Disliking the country.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		If we disagree about Israel, then he immediately goes to, apparently... Okay, so to clean that up one more time, even though I know you've done it a million times, he basically implied that you want troops on the ground in Israel... Of course I don't want American troops on the ground!
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Of course I don't.
		And you know, this implication that my foreign policy is about what Israel needs and would benefit from first.
		I've never suggested that America ought to go to war with Iran.
		I've never suggested that America ought to put troops on the ground in Israel.
		I've never suggested that America ought to get directly involved in a war with Hezbollah, for example, or Hamas, for example.
		I've never said any of those things.
		Tucker then goes publicly and suggests, not suggests, says that I want troops on the ground in the Middle East in order to protect Israel, which is an absurdity because I've never claimed that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The only thing I would like... I've never even heard an Israeli say that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Israelis don't want that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		They don't want it.
		But even if they did want it, I would still oppose it because it's not good for the United States to have troops on the ground fighting Hezbollah.
		There's no reason for the United States to be doing that.
		That changes if they start firing on American troops.
		But right now they're not.
unidentified		Right.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And by the way, this is the nice thing about having allies that actually have military wherewithal.
		What I've suggested, it's better to have American allies fighting bad guys using money that we effectively lend to them.
		Because all aid that goes to Israel is then spent back in the United States on American military programs.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Can you just explain that a little bit more clearly?
		Because I think people are very confused about this.
		They keep saying that we're just giving them money.
		Now, to me, you could slash the entire budget of the whole government by 25% across the board.
		It would be fine.
		But can you explain, there's some confusion about like, oh, we just hand Israel.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		That's not how foreign aid works.
		So the way that the foreign aid to Israel works is that Israel is mandated by American law that when they receive foreign aid from the United States, they must spend it with American contractors.
		They are not allowed to go out for competitive bids on the technology that they are buying from American military contractors.
		If the aid to Israel stops.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So basically it's a, it's a subsidy.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's a subsidization of the American military industrial complex.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Which people can have a legit argument about.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Right, you can say that you want the American military-industrial complex to die, or you can suggest that that's what's making American foreign policy, though I think that that's incredibly naive and stupid.
		But, you can make that argument, but that's the claim that America is basically just cutting a check to Israel and seeing no benefit on the other end.
		First of all, America gets massive intelligence benefits from Israel, which is the largest intelligence base for the United States in the Middle East.
		Second of all, Israel is essentially a floating aircraft carrier, or a non-floating aircraft carrier, for the United States.
		America works with the Israelis and uses Israeli assets in order to pursue targets in the Middle East.
		Third, America gets an enormous amount of sophisticated military technology from Israel.
		Israel has a long record of taking military technology that it gains and then upgrading it tremendously, including, by the way, the F-35.
		The F-35, which Israel gained, Israel then used its own technologies in order to enhance.
		So when you see in the movies or when you see American military Pilots in F-35 and they have the over-the-horizon helmets where they're seeing stuff happening over the horizon.
		That's an Israeli military invention that ended up in the United States because of the military cooperation between Israel and the United States.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you telling me all the progressives are gonna have to boycott Top Gun 3 if they make it?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Again, like you can make the case against foreign aid.
		That's fine.
		But at least know what the hell you're talking about.
		And people don't know enough to care and they don't care enough to know.
		And that's, you know, a continuing problem.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what do you think?
		Is there anything else we can do about that on the right?
		I'm trying to build some bridges right now.
		It's how I started my career.
		Maybe I wasn't always perfect at it, but like at this particular moment, it seems like we got to build some bridges.
		So I'm just using you and Tucker as avatars in this.
		I'm talking about the idea set.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I am willing to talk with Tucker anytime, anywhere.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But I mean even beyond you and Tucker.
		I'm talking about just like, what do we do about this thing?
		It's happening right now.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, again, unless somebody, unless you have evidence of motivation that is corrupt or wrong.
		then you should not attribute motivation to people.
		Emotivism is the death of politics.
		It's something Alistair McIntyre has talked about at length, the philosopher.
		He has suggested that the death of politics is what he calls emotivism, which is attributing motive to the person's argument in order to effectively dismiss the argument.
		And that's what we're seeing a ton of on the right right now.
		When Tucker's talking about my political beliefs about Israel, he's not arguing with the actual beliefs that I hold.
		He's either strawmanning a belief that I don't hold, Or, he's attributing a corrupt motivation to me, or both, which is actually what he was doing right there, which I find objectionable, just on a personal level, I find that objectionable and disgusting.
		And, you know, again, he's perfectly... I've offered him the opportunity to clear that up, he can clear that up any time he wants.
		I have never, once again, implied or suggested that Tucker has corrupt motivations.
		I think he believes what he believes, for whatever reason he believes it.
		And then I've tried to take on the arguments that he makes, whether they are good or bad, Once you, you can, you can have arguments and discussions over issues.
		What you can't do is if you get in a room with somebody and you say that that person is, is racist or evil, the conversation is now over.
		Now the person may be racist and evil or anti-Semite or whatever it is, but you should be able to like show the receipts as to why you believe that thing as opposed to just seeing the position and then immediately jumping to, oh, the position means inherently.
		This is why, again, when it comes to the Israel position, there are people who work for the Daily Wire who disagree with me about Israel who, I would, Matt Walsh is not an anti-Semite,
		despite the fact that we definitely disagree about Middle Eastern policy,
		because there's no evidence that he's an anti-Semite or anything remotely like it.
		Again, this particular game, which used to be kind of a preserver of the left,
		it's now infected all of American politics.
		And I think that's the ugliest thing that's happened over the course of the last 10 years is this this kind of move toward the easiest way to to quote unquote destroy your enemies is not to actually dismantle their arguments.
		The easiest way to do it is to dismiss them as human beings.
		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I think that perhaps all of us that were exposing the woke early on before the word woke was in the vernacular, we were so focused on that that we maybe took our eye off what was going on over here.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I was new in the house.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, the truth is that what tends to happen with the right is that it picks up the successful tactics of the left and tries to reverse engineer it.
		That tends to happen a lot.
		So, you'll see, this happens in arguments all the time.
		So, a favorite of sort of the trad con right that bugs them to no end is there will be some sort of race story, and then people on the right will say, well, what if the races were reversed?
		And this will drive them crazy.
		They'll be like, well, you should make an argument on the merits, not about like, well, what if the races were reversed?
		You should just argue why it's wrong.
		And I sort of agree with that.
		But it is an effective argument.
		And so what you'll see is that the left uses an argument, we try to sort of reverse the argument on them.
		And the problem is that the most effective tactic the left has ever used, forever and always, is personal implication about the nature of the people who they disagree with.
		And now the right has picked that up and uses it pretty handily in a lot of circumstances where it's inappropriate.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So without impugning anyone's motive, so I'm not talking about Tucker, I'm literally just talking about what I see happening broadly on the right right now.
		What is going on as it relates to Jews?
		Because this, we've talked about Israel so far, but clearly something else is now going on, at least in a certain portion of this.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think there are a lot of strains.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You are the number one Jew.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I am.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Top Jew.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Top Jew is what it is.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Took out Jon Stewart.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		That's it.
		What's going on on the right?
		I mean, I think there are a few things.
		One is, again, all politics, this is my theory of politics for the last 10 years, all politics is incredibly reactionary.
		And so people tend to swing like a pendulum.
		And so if the left makes an argument here, People don't respond by swinging the pendulum to the center, which is where the rational, fact-based argument is.
		They swing all the way over here.
		So if the ADL is over-labeling antisemitism, which they do habitually and also for money, if the ADL does that, then the answer on the right is, well, antisemitism doesn't exist.
		There's no such thing as an antisemite.
		Like, if I'm not explicitly saying the Holocaust is good, then I can't possibly be an anti-Semite, which of course is ridiculous.
		That's like saying that you can't be a racist unless you're a person who says that slavery was good.
		Okay, well, no.
		I mean, there are a lot of forms of racism that are short of slavery was good, that we would all acknowledge are forms of racism.
		But I think that the, again, the left's overreach has exploded any sort of Overton window that the right has altogether.
		And I think that that has led in all sorts of crazy talk on the right.
		I mean, forget about the antisemitism.
		It's led in every conspiracy theory you could possibly imagine.
		I mean, literally something happens and the first thing that happens on X is some weird conspiracy theory starts trending.
		Why?
		Because the idea was whatever narrative they told you isn't true.
		So they went from the narratives that the legacy media tells you very often are untrue.
		To all narratives that you immediately get must be by nature untrue.
		And so you hear that a ship hit a bridge and the bridge went down.
		And so the first thing that happens is that the nuts online immediately go to, it must've been some sort of terror attack, or this is the result of DEI.
		I don't know what the hell, I don't know where the ship is from, what are you talking about?
		Can you wait until the facts and maybe it was DEI, probably, like, I don't know.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The bridge was built about 150 years ago, so, or, oh no, no, no, sorry, the bridge was built in I think 77, so it probably wasn't DEI.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I don't know who's piloting the ship, I don't know why.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		But again, the move always now is to go to the most conspiratorial place, and that is exacerbated by a social media environment where the more emotion you engage, the more engagement you get.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So then, to some extent, is what we're seeing now, and I don't want to overstate it, it's one of those, it's sort of like when Morgan Freeman talked to Lemon about racism, and he was basically like, stop talking about it, it'll go away.
		I sort of feel that way about what's going on with the Jews right now.
		If we just stop talking about it, like it would kind of just go away.
		But in some way, is the rush to the conspiracy now, is that just is that just baked into, you know, several thousand years of Jewish history like that?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is usually where all conspiracies end up.
		That's all a conspiracy theory really is, is a well-placed group of people who are very bright and able to manipulate all the circumstances.
		And frankly, my general view on conspiracy theory is that unless you have any sort of evidence, they're the prisoner of losers.
		Because they're an explanation for why you're losing.
		And that's true in virtually all circumstances.
		Now, that doesn't mean there aren't actual conspiracies.
		But very often they're right out in the open.
		So when people say, I lost my job, I lost my slot at college because there's a conspiracy to keep me out of college because I'm Asian.
		That's not a conspiracy theory.
		That's just the thing that's happening openly, clearly with affirmative action policies, right?
		That's like written into the actual policies.
		That's not a conspiracy theory.
		When you say that, say there's a group of Jews in Washington DC who are controlling all the workings of politics.
		I'm going to need you to show your work.
		I'm going to need you to show not only that there are a disproportionate number of Jews working in Washington, D.C., but that they are like-minded in any way.
		Like, this bizarre notion that the conspiracy of Jews includes, like, me and Bernie Sanders.
		I want to see your work.
		I want to see the flowchart of how this thing works.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So in a weird way, is it just that because Jews have cared about family and education and tradition and all of those things, Jews have just ended up in a lot of places where things are influential.
		They've ended up in interesting jobs in essence.
		So the capitalist can turn and go look at all the communist Jews and the communist can go look at all the capitalist Jews.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's the history of kind of modern antisemitism is that Jews are disproportionately represented in a number of different industries.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And the reason for that... It should be everybody's dream to be disproportionately represented.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, by the way, there are other what Thomas Holt called middlemen minorities who are disproportionately represented in different parts of the world.
		There are ethnic Chinese minorities in many places of Southeast Asia who are disproportionately represented in particular areas of industry and finance, and they're hated by the surrounding population specifically for that.
		And typically, middlemen minorities end up in those positions because they've been barred from all the other positions in the society.
		And it turns out after a couple thousand years of being barred from, like, many of the industries in Europe, for example, but being allowed to be in finance because they can charge interest, which an interest is actually required in order to make economies function.
		It turns out that that allows for, you know, natural selection to work its weight in terms of what sort of qualities will make you successful in a particular society.
		And then in a society that's heavily finance-based like Western capitalism, well, Is it super surprising that Jews did well in that particular area?
		Is it because the Jews are conspiring together?
		Or is it because Jews have been in the banking industry for like several hundred years longer than many people in the Christian world, for example?
		And when it comes to, you know, the entertainment industry, Jews were unsuccessful in a wide variety of sort of blue-collar industries in the United States, and so they ended up in the entertainment industry.
		As, by the way, many Initially, less economically successful minorities do in the United States.
		It wasn't just Jews.
		If you look at black entertainers in the United States, the entertainment industry was very heavily dominated in certain areas, particularly music, by black musicians.
		Why?
		Not because whites are inherently untalented in music or something.
		It's because black people could not succeed.
		Well, we do tend to clap on one and three, but it's also because black Americans were forbidden from many other industries, and so they go into the industry where they can be the most successful.
		Again, none of this should be a surprise.
		The very idea that we should all be shocked when groups differentially perform is idiotic.
		Of course groups differentially perform.
		They don't even have to be ethnic groups.
		There have to be racial... Age groups differentially perform.
		Old people in the United States are much richer than young people.
		Is that because old people are screwing young people and stole their money?
		Or is it because all the young people ended up being old people after several decades of earning?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Did you ever see the video?
		It's from not... I think it's only from maybe eight months ago where Kanye, right now he's disappeared again, where he basically was on some radio show and he basically said that.
		He's like, Jews succeed wherever they go.
		I want that.
		And it was like, oh, Well, so this is really just jealousy in a way.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So what that's turned into, and again, I think you're watching this, I actually think that what's going on between Israel and the Palestinians is the highest manifestation of this, is they're a group of people in Western society and outside Western society who are not successful in the meritocracy, and so they've decided that the meritocracy is not in fact a meritocracy, it's a conspiracy.
		And there are, of course, again, conspiracies inside the meritocracy.
		There are places that are rigged, no question.
		There are old buddy networks.
		Those things, of course, exist.
		But that is not remotely the same thing as the proposition that has been put forward, that if you are unsuccessful, it's because you're a victim.
		And the successful groups, disproportionately, must be the ones who are in charge of pulling the strings.
		If that were the case, then Southeast Asians would be pulling the strings in the United States.
		Indian Americans would be pulling the strings in the United States.
		I think when you take that to foreign policy, it's the only thing that can possibly explain the deep stupidity of queers for Palestine.
unidentified		Right?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		You look at that, on the face of it, you're like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
		If you are queer and you go to Palestine, you will be dead.
		There is no question.
		But the reason the queers for Palestine is a thing is because you have a group of radical left-wingers on social policy who hate the meritocracy in the United States and believe that that meritocracy is rigged against them, and they are making common cause with another group of people who claim victimization at the hands of a more powerful group of people.
		There is no better example in modern history of a minority group doing well in a deeply unsuccessful region than the state of Israel.
		The Middle East is a complete failure in governance every place you go.
		It is a complete disaster area except for this one little state that is shockingly powerful in the region despite having a grand total of seven and a half million Jews.
		And so there's two ways to explain that.
		One is that the Jews are promoting a different set of values in that region and living by that different set of values and therefore benefiting from that different set of values.
		And the other way is to say that it's a conspiracy and they're stealing everything.
		And so for people on the left who believe the equation of unsuccess and victimhood and moral victimhood, They look at Israel, they say it's successful.
		They look at the Palestinians, they say they're unsuccessful.
		And instead of saying, well, maybe it's because the Palestinians have spent the last 60-odd years promoting lies to their children about how they're going to take back all the land and kill all the Jews and how the Jews are responsible for all their own... Maybe it's not because of... It can't be because of that.
		It must be because the Jews stole something.
		And if the Jews would stop stealing things, then it would all be better.
		And that's how you end up, again, with this weird coalition of far leftists who Palestinians would kill and hate and all... Hamas would murder them immediately.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And now when you see that they basically took billions of dollars and built a giant war machine, I mean an unbelievably powerful war machine, and it's like, man, you have literally the same beach on the Mediterranean.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you're not allowed to say that.
		Jared Kushner said that.
		You're not allowed to say that.
		How dare you?
		How dare you point out that it's the exact same beach in Gaza as it is in Ashdod or Ashkelon.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you can't say that.
		Can't say that Tel Aviv is on the same coast, guys.
		Jared Kushner wasn't saying that the Jews should seize it.
		He was saying that if you actually wanted to make that a good place to live, you certainly could, because if you travel about five miles north, then you're in Tel Aviv.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Ben, I want you to take a sip of water because now we're going to do something that either is going to be like your most favorite thing that you've done in years or you're going to hate me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But we're going to go through 30 topics right now.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I got 30 bullet points right here.
		We actually had 31.
		I axed one, so 30 sounded better to me.
		And I basically want one minute, if you can do them in one minute, just your policy on these things.
unidentified		Sure.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because we started this by, it's confusing to me how so many people are confused of your positions.
		This is my gift to you.
		This is like a perm gift so that you'll be able to splice this and send it out to the masses and say, these are my short answers on all this.
		So here we go.
		Abortion.
		Ben Shapiro on abortion.
		We'll do about 60 seconds on each one.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I'm fully pro-life on abortion.
		I believe that life begins at conception and ought to be protected by law.
		With that said, there's a difference in what the federal government is given the power to do and what the state governments are given the power to do.
		The state governments are given primary authority for establishing law in crime, and with regard to issues like this, the Constitution generally does not delegate this sort of power to the federal government.
		That's actually pretty clear from the latest Dobbs decision, which means the federal government has to go a lot slower than the state governments.
		And when it comes to the actual pragmatism of implementing a pro-life position,
		gradualism is going to be more successful, in my opinion, than extreme radical mobilization,
		just on a long-term basis.
		Because otherwise you end up with a backlash that actually you end up in a worse position
		as a pro-lifer than you would have if you had taken it slowly and convinced people.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Healthcare.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		My general belief is that we have a shortage of supply, and that when you subsidize demand,
		you even make that shortage of supply worse.
		We need more doctors, we need more nurses, we need more investment in R&D, we need to change the liability system in the United States.
		If we did all of those things, then we'd be incentivizing a much better healthcare system, we seem to have the worst of both worlds, we have a publicly subsidized private system which drives up cost.
		The only thing that that's actually good for, theoretically, is getting people into the R&D Space.
		The United States is very good at dealing with cancer and very bad at dealing with broken legs.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Taxes.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Taxes ought to be radically reduced.
		The lowest possible tax that is consonant with allowing a functional government that performs basic services to exist is the preferred tax.
		And I do not believe, in general, in a progressive income tax.
		I think that that's a silliness.
		Because, again, percentages are inherently progressive.
		That's how percentages work.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you loving this or is this like the greatest Ben Shapiro thing of all time?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I kind of like it.
		It's fast moving.
		It's done three topics in three minutes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		There we go.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Gender ideology.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Total crap.
		There are two sexes.
		Depending on how you define genders, there's either a million or two.
		There cannot be anything in between.
		There's either infinite genders, in which case we're just talking about your particular manifestation of your masculine or feminine characteristics, which means we could just call you by name instead of by a gender.
		Or we are talking about masculinity and femininity, which means that it's bimodal.
		And that's it.
		Any attempt to suggest that gender is separate from sex is, of course, deeply idiotic or meaningless.
		It's one of the two things.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is sort of an offshoot of that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The woke indoctrination in schools.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, obviously it has to stop.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It is one of the most damaging things happening to our school kids and parents have a primary responsibility for taking their kids out of those schools and or changing the schools themselves.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well then you got me to the next one which is school choice.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		School choice is the only way to actually effectuate that.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Thank God for Florida where we have basically full school vouchers available.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it the irony of Florida that they used to mock Florida because it was old people down here paying no taxes so the schools all sucked and now we have great public schools actually and school choice and pods and everything else.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Florida's great, there's a reason people are rushing down here.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's alright, it's alright.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean I told you that years ago and then finally you listened.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm slow, I'm slow.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Big tech censorship.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Big tech censorship, deeply dangerous.
		It's the reason why I make such a harsh distinction between platforms and publishers.
		I'd much rather have a platform that has a lot of poison on it than a platform that is anodyne, but only anodyne according to the left.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The First Amendment.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		The First Amendment is, thank God for the First Amendment.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It allows us the ability to actually say what we think in this country, unlike, say, Canada or the UK.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Oh, here, I'm gonna give you three in one.
		Capitalism versus socialism.
		Basically, make an argument for free markets.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Capitalism is the greatest wealth creator in the history of humanity, bar none.
		Socialism at best freezes society and redistributes its income, thus to crush wealth creation and innovation.
		Capitalism is wonderful.
		Capitalism is awesome.
		Capitalism is also not the source of your values.
		Your values come from a different place.
		Whenever people say that they are disappointed that capitalism doesn't, for example, quote unquote, promote the family, that's like saying that your hammer doesn't do well.
		Now let's get you in some trouble.
		It's not what the hammer is for.
		Capitalism is not designed to promote your family.
		Capitalism is about the distribution of resources based on merit and work,
		which has tremendously positive externalities.
		Church, synagogue, these are the things that are about promoting the family.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Now let's get you in some trouble.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Climate change.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Climate change is happening.
		It is anthropogenic, at least what the evidence shows.
		How much of it is anthropogenic, meaning man-caused, is unclear at this point.
		There are upper-end estimates that the UN uses.
		There are much lower-end estimates.
		The bottom line is that nearly all of that is irrelevant because no one has proposed anything remotely like a workable solution to climate change.
		That pays off economically.
		There's no way you're gonna get China or India to cooperate on any sort of broad-based carbon tax.
		Carbon-based fossil fuels are one of the single greatest generators of health and wealth in the history of humanity.
		No good substitute has yet been found, and so I'm much more in favor of adaptation rather than mitigation.
		Human beings are very, very bad at mitigation, saying, like, stop driving your car.
		No one's gonna stop driving their car.
		You know what we're good at? We're good at like building seawalls.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you'd be willing to stay at Barack Obama's 30-acre place in Martha's Vineyard for a weekend without fear of being
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		drowned?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I think so with Barack Obama, which is how I know that he's lying, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Government bureaucracy or basically, you know... The administrative state.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, the administrative state is a disaster area.
		I believe in a unitary executive.
		If I were president of the United States, it'd be much more like Javier Mille.
		I'd be going around afuera.
		I'd just be like ripping apart departments and just removing people willy-nilly.
		It'd be great.
		I'm a big advocate.
		I think that law-abiding people should have and know how to use them and then keep them safely locked up from their children.
		I'm a gun owner myself.
		We own, at this point, four pistols, a shotgun, and an AR.
		My wife has become a big gun fan.
		We were at the gun range the other day, actually, with my parents, and we already had a handgun, and my wife was buying a couple more, and my mom was like, why are you buying so many handguns?
		And my wife was like, the more the better.
		I was like, oh, this is great.
		I took her to Florida shooting a Florida woman.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I got my first AR-15 a couple months ago, and the guy at the gun shop, not too far from your house, actually, maybe it's the same place, the guy said that he's never seen more Jews buying guns.
		That is for sure true.
		Multiculturalism.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Multiculturalism is, as defined generally by the left, destined to be a failure.
		There has to be some sort of centralizing culture that is inculcated in the people who share a country.
		The kind of notion that you can have a country that's basically just a bag of separate marbles without any intermixing of values, that there has to be no assimilation whatsoever, that's destined to failure.
		And you can see it in Britain, you can see it in France, you can see it in the Netherlands, you can see it pretty much everywhere.
		I don't believe that the natural state of human beings is to identify with the globe.
		I don't think that's possible.
		I think that human beings have a hierarchy of identification in terms of group identification.
		It goes family, then extended kinship networks, then your local community, then broader community, state, federal.
		And then that's about as far as you can go.
		And the question is, How far you can go before that completely breaks down.
		I mean, that's the question in the United States right now for a lot of people is like, are you more Floridian or more American?
		And if you're more Floridian than more American, what happens if you come into conflict with, say, California, right?
		That's what these questions are.
		But the idea that nationalism can be extirpated or that nationalism is the cause of violence, that's not true.
		In fact, nationalism for A few hundred years actually was an excellent development against violence.
		It's when nationalism starts to overrun its boundaries and turn into a more global view of what your role should be in the world.
		And you're not like the United States attempting to actually allow countries to be separate from you, governing in democratic ways.
		I'm not going to pretend a moral equivalence between the United States' brand of colonialism or imperialism and, say, Russia's.
		During USSR.
		But nationalism, generally speaking, when it overruns its boundaries and becomes something closer to a dominant imperialism, can be quite dangerous.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Try to knock this one out in 60 seconds.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The COVID-19 response.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		The COVID-19 response was a complete discombobulated mess.
		It was not based on the data, obviously.
		We were being lied to throughout.
		All you could do was sort of operate on the data that was being provided.
		And then it turned out that a lot of that data was a lie.
		So I know that for my part, you know, I feel that my own response to COVID-19 was somewhat discombobulated only in the sense that if you followed what the data were when they were being released, they were changing so often.
		So I was never a proponent of any sort of mandate.
		I was never a proponent of a mask mandate.
		I was never a proponent of a vaccine mandate.
		My opinion on the vaccine changed based on the data that was being released.
		They originally said that it killed the ability to transmit.
		And so I thought, OK, well, that's a useful thing.
		And then it turns out they had no data on that and they were just lying about it.
		So that wasn't true.
		And I didn't have my kids vaxxed.
		I was vaxxed.
		Would I vax now knowing now what I know then?
		Probably not.
		Am I glad that my parents vax?
		My parents are 65 plus.
		I'm still glad that my parents vax based on the data that we have.
		Now, again, that's a more nuanced position than I think most people are willing to take.
		But when it comes to like the generalized, the media were garbage.
		The government was even worse.
		And the government that continued to promote things like school shutdowns.
		I mean, it was clear very early the kids weren't getting this and they certainly weren't dying of it.
		And so the school shutdowns that lasted for two years were obviously driven by Randy Weingarten and the folks at the AFT rather than good policy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You actually already answered the next one, which was about vaccine mandates.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I guess, and maybe I'll switch it to, do you have any regrets in the, well, I suppose the answer is yes, in some of the trust that you laid out.
unidentified		Yeah, absolutely.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		A hundred percent.
		I've spelled that out.
		Pfizer was lying about the data that they had actually promoted.
		They said that they were, they were promoting the data that, that transmission had become basically impossible because of the COVID-19 vaccine.
		And they admitted they had not even done any sort of real study on whether it was transmissible.
		After you get the COVID-19 vaccine.
		So yeah, I feel bad that I, you know, promoted what we were all being told, including by the Trump administration at the time.
		So yeah, of course.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Federalism in states, right?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		That said, by the way, I should mention, our company literally sued the federal government for vaccine mandates.
		So at no point along the line, if you listen to my personal judgment, based on what Pfizer is telling me, I apologize on my own behalf for believing Pfizer.
		If your suggestion, and again, this is one of those ones that goes around the line, is that I was in favor of mandating the vaccine on anyone, that is an overt lie.
		That is not only not true, we spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars suing the federal government to stop our own employees from having the vaccine if they didn't want to.
		I'm a big fan of subsidiarity.
		I believe that you can do a lot with local government in order to make your world more livable.
		Zoning restrictions for example are a good example of this.
		I have no problem with local communities kind of wanting to live how they want to live, and then if people don't like that, they can move to the local community next door.
		As you move up the chain, you get more and more heterogeneity with the population, which means less and less agreement, which means that you should have less and less powerful government as you rise up the chain.
		This was the Founding Father's vision, and it's totally right.
		You can have a very powerful local government, In your very local area, most of us do.
		It's called NHOA.
		And then as you move up the chain, then you really don't want the federal government dictating to you what kind of plants you can have on your front yard.
unidentified		There's another.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		This is going to be tucked for 60 seconds.
		The border.
		What the hell's going on with the border?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, actually, that's a really easy answer.
		We need to close it.
		I mean, that's it.
		And the two easiest things to do there are return to Mexico policy, remain in Mexico policy, which was which was Donald Trump's policy, which was if you're applying for asylum, you stay in Mexico.
		Which stops the vast majority of people from even coming.
		Because their whole game is, get here, apply for asylum, be released into the interior, never show up for your follow-up appointment.
		And two, change the definition of asylum so that you actually have to show by preponderance of the evidence that you deserve asylum.
		You can't just make a claim and then assume that we are going to say, okay, good enough.
		Like, that's not the way any of that ought to work.
		So closing the border is an obvious one.
		It is shocking to me that this is even remotely controversial at this point in time.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Connected to that, the fentanyl crisis.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it obviously is connected.
		We just did an episode of Divided States of Biden, which is our new series on the fentanyl crisis.
		It's horrific.
		I wasn't even aware of how horrific it was, despite the numbers, because when you think of a drug overdose epidemic, you tend to think of a drug overdose epidemic.
		You know, OK, so don't take drugs, right?
		Don't do drugs.
		You're doing crack.
		You overdose from crack.
		That's tragic.
		It's terrible.
		Also, you shouldn't have done crack.
		When it comes to fentanyl, A lot of these people are being poisoned.
		It's somebody who believes they're taking Adderall.
		It's somebody who believes that they're taking Xanax.
		And it turns out that it's poison with fentanyl.
		Very few people are, well, not very few, but many, a huge number of people who are dying of fentanyl overdose really more fall under the category of being poisoned by their drug dealers and by the cartels than they fall under the category of, they were taking fentanyl for fun, now they just took too much fentanyl.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Is that really beyond the dealers and the gangs?
		Is that really China?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I mean, China is the source for nearly 100% of all precursors for fentanyl.
		They originally just sent the fentanyl raw into Mexico, and then the United States said you can't do that.
		So they're like, okay, what if we just take it apart a little bit, and then we'll reassemble it down south in Mexico, where they have actual Chinese nationals who are working to remix all of that stuff, put it in Chinese presses, turn it into pills, and then ship it across the border.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So we did border, we did fentanyl.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So more broadly, just immigration in general, like saying immigration policy.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, my general feeling is that the United States has no obligation to take in immigrants unless they're going to be of net benefit to the United States.
		And that means that if you're coming here and you are going to be on welfare, we have no obligation to take you in.
		If you're coming here and you wish to work hard and contribute to the economy and assimilate to American values, then we're happy to have you.
		Telling those two things apart can sometimes be difficult, but That's the goal of an immigration system in a welfare state.
		You could have a much more open border when you didn't have a welfare state because then the assumption was no one is gonna be supporting you.
		You come here like all of our great-grandparents came here.
		And my great-grandparents got here, great-great-grandparents got here in 1907.
		And when they got here, there was no welfare system.
		You came here, you found a relative, you didn't speak the language, you learned the language, you got a job, and then you assimilated to the culture.
		And that is a pretty good way of assimilating people into American values.
		But once you have a welfare system, you have to be a lot more picky about who you let in.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Oh, here's an easy one.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		God.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, in terms of existence, involvement in the world, there's a lot there.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I believe in the omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent God who created heaven and earth and to whose moral law we are all subject.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Can people be moral without God?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm giving a... Sure.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		People can act in moral ways without believing in God.
		Can you build a moral system without God?
		I do not believe so.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Here's one for a friend of yours.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Does Ben Shapiro care about America?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I've spent my entire career caring about America.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Any implication to the contrary is, I think, disgusting, frankly.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll blind out one more with that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you America first?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I am, of course, America First, without the connotations that it carries, thanks to, you know, Groypers and such.
		If by America First, do they mean that I believe all the things that those folks believe?
		Of course not.
		If by America First, do they believe that, do I believe that the priorities of American citizens ought to come before the priorities of any other place on Earth, and the interests of America are best for humanity?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Peace through strength.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And the only rational foreign policy.
		There is no other rational foreign policy.
		This is the thing I love most about Trump, actually.
		And I've had my critiques of Trump over the years.
		The thing I love most about Trump is that in his bones, the dude understands this sort of stuff.
		So I co-hosted an event for Trump last week, and he was talking about his foreign policy.
		And I will say that he is hysterically funny when it comes to foreign policy, because he just,
		and I'll tell you a story that he's told publicly, right?
		And he's talking about why the Taliban didn't kill troops while he was president, in the last 18 months of his presidency.
unidentified		He's like, well, you know, I was, I called up the head of the Taliban.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They told me not to do it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		They told me, don't call up the head of the Taliban.
unidentified		Don't do it.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Don't call him up.
unidentified		I did.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		His name's Abdul.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		And I got on the phone with Abdul.
unidentified		And Abdul says, very nicely, says, Your Excellency, says, Your Excellency, why are you sending me pictures of my house?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
unidentified		And I said, because I'm going to kill you, Arnul, if you kill Americans.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and the thing that Trump understands more than anything else is that foreign policy is a fifth grade playground, and if you're the biggest bully on the playground, that carries an awful lot of weight.
		It doesn't mean that you can bluff, but it means that a credible threat of force issued every so often can be highly productive, and Donald Trump knew that.
		The reason the world was a much less violent place under Donald Trump is because he inherently understood that the way to prevent conflict is to make it clear that if you cross this line, we'll knock you into the last century.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Did Trump kind of needle you a little bit on the fact that, you know, a few days before the first primary, you said that you would support DeSantis?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		I mean, I walked in the room and he said, Ben Shaviro, Ben Shaviro, big fan, enjoy your work.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Ben Shaviro, you're a big DeSantis guy.
		You liked Ron DeSantis.
		We know, but you're going to love us much more.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I suppose I will get that treatment the next time I get my invite.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, then this one.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		We'll say he's easily the funniest person ever to be president.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, there's just no question.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Did he give a speech at this thing?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		I mean, there was, you know, sort of the picture line and then there was a round table that was kind of like behind closed doors.
		And then there was an actual, you know, lunch event.
		Ironically, it was on a fast day, so I couldn't eat lunch.
		But yes, he gave a speech at that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to slightly edit what my guys gave me on this one.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is there anything that Trump could do at this point that would cause you not to vote for him?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		I mean, I think there are always things that any politician can do to cause me not to not to vote for them.
		If he flipped on all of his policies, then it would be hard to vote for him.
		But I mean, given the fact that he's running against Joe Biden, it's hard to see him doing that.
		Again, this is now a this is now a binary decision.
		It's not just what he does.
		It's what Joe Biden does.
		And so he would have to become a worse decision than Joe Biden.
		It is hard for me to see how that is even possible at this point.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		There's two or three others here that we already nailed, so I'll ask you the most important one, which is best podcast interviewer.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you, you're the best podcast interviewer.
unidentified		I mean, it's without a doubt, without a doubt.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		You were Rogan, you were Rogan.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Didn't I invent interviewing?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Nobody was doing it before me, right?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's true.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		No one had ever interviewed anybody before your show.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is there anything else we haven't really hit here?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		No, that's pretty wide ranging right there.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We did a little bit of everything there.
		Well, I got one for you then, maybe to end us in a little more of a In a positive way.
		This has been sort of positive, I suppose.
		But, I mean, are you hopeful that we can get... Not hopeful.
		Do you think we will get through this in a sane way and that America, the America that we knew and loved for a long time, that many of us are trying to, let's say, restore to some extent, is going to be there in five years?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		If I lived in California, I'd probably say no.
		I don't.
		I live in Florida, which is a wonderful place that still embodies all of those American values.
		And that population is growing.
		People want to be in these places.
		The failures of governance that the left has unleashed in blue areas, I think is becoming clear to pretty much everyone at this point.
		I also think that we've unleashed technologies on the human mind in the last 20 years that the human mind was just not prepared for.
		And we're going to do more of it.
		I mean, AI is going to be more of this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The paraplegic playing chess?
unidentified		Did you see that?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing.
		It's unbelievable.
		And that's the positive side of technological change.
		The negative side is that we're all addicted to our phones now and that we live in that nether region that we were talking about where you need to go outside and touch some grass.
		I do think that there is the possibility that human beings are going to want to re-engage with the world after what is a pretty ugly period.
		And I think you are starting to see that.
		I think you're starting to see some people saying, okay, it might be worthwhile to log off.
		I think what we need right now is a national Sabbath movement.
		Whether you keep that Sabbath on Saturday like I do, or whether you keep it on Sunday.
		We need a national movement that for 25 hours a week, you get off your damned phone, you get off your computer, and you go spend time with friends and family, and you do not look at any of the social media.
		And then hopefully you take that into your daily life a little bit more.
		Because, you know, all the things that were promised to bring us connections have actually, I think, exacerbated our divisions.
		And the only way to get over that is to actually see, like, a human being in person and talk to that human being and not just, you know, an avatar of the worst parts of that human being.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you saying, Ben Shapiro, that old ideas could still have value in our modern world?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		I think human beings don't change.
		And the story of humanity is not humanity becoming ever better in sort of the Steven Pinker notion.
		I think that human nature is what human nature is, and we've built better containment systems for human nature, and then sometimes we've built worse containment systems for human nature.
		But human nature is going to rebel against the fake world that we've created for ourselves because it's an ugly, depressing world.
		And, you know, what comes next is either going to be, you know, conflagration before resurrection, or it's going to be a correction.
		But it can't continue in this direction forever.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You want to shoot some threes?

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