Ben Shapiro and Piers Morgan dissect the Israel-Hamas war, arguing disproportionate force is necessary against Hamas's war crimes in schools. They address Andrew Tate's criticism, Elon Musk's defense against anti-Semitism, and Shapiro's political shift from opposing to endorsing Trump due to Biden's candidacy. The conversation critiques progressive double standards in hip-hop, condemns transgender athletes like Leah Thomas as threats to women's sports, and advocates rebuilding society through responsible parenting rather than top-down politics. Ultimately, they emphasize the need for uncensored dialogue to restore social trust amidst tribalism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Gaza's Devastation and Legal Proportionality00:14:50
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, he's one of the most incisive and to many incendiary commentators in US politics.
And as of this week, extraordinarily, he's a chart-topping rap megastar.
Yes, really, brace yourself.
Ben Shapiro is back and he's very uncensored.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening, London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Ben Shapiro is one of the most talked about political pundits on the planet.
When he sounds off, people listen.
And as of this week, they've been listening to him rapping.
Yes, you heard that correctly.
The man who once infamously said, fact, rap isn't music.
And if you think it is, you're stupid, sparking international outrage, currently has, this is true, the number one hip-hop single in the United States.
We'll find out why and frankly how a little later.
But when he's not dropping the rap beats, Ben Shapiro's day job is dropping hard truths.
At least that's how he sees it.
He's incisive and as I say, there's some incendiary takes on politics, on Trump, on liberal insanity, and of course on the Israel-Hamas war and put him front and center of the debates we're all having.
So tonight, I'm going to have a few debates myself with Ben Shapiro.
And Ben, who hosted the Ben Shapiro Show, editor emeritus of the Daily Wire, joins me now.
Ben, well, first of all, I don't know quite how to say this with a straight face, but congratulations on being the number one rap hip-hop star in the world.
So first of all, you shouldn't say that with a straight face because it's legitimately the funniest thing maybe in the history of mankind.
It's ridiculous and silly and hilarious.
And yes, we're very much for it.
So yo, yo, yo from Dr. Dreidel to you.
Well, we're going to come back to your hip-hop career a little later, but let's just focus on where we left off last time.
I interviewed you four days after the appalling terror attacks of October the 7th when emotions were very raw.
And I asked you directly then about what you felt would be a proportionate response by Israel to what Hamas did on that terrible day.
And this is what you said.
Frankly, I don't believe in proportionate response to terrorism.
I believe that the way that you stop terrorism is with wildly disproportionate response.
That doesn't mean in terms of targeting civilians.
It means in terms of killing as many terrorists as humanly possible.
So my question is today, what is the going rate today for human lives?
I mean, 2014 was a great year for Ben Shapiro.
88 Israelis were died and there was 2,329 Palestinians killed on the other side.
That is one Israeli for 27 Palestinians.
That is a very good exchange rate.
What I'm saying is, what is the exchange rate for today?
Well, I think you guys will be happy.
So that was Basim Youssef's response to you saying, effectively, when you deal with terrorism, there should be no sense of proportion.
First of all, your response to what he said there.
Listen, Basim is a very smart guy, and I don't think that sarcasm or bad analogies or moral equivalents are really substitutes for realism or moral clarity about situations like fighting terrorism.
No one wants civilians to die, except for Hamas.
Hamas actually does want civilians to die, but nobody rejoices when civilians die.
No one is looking for an exchange rate of death for death.
The point that I was making is that when you're talking about, for example, legal proportionality in terms of just war, what you're talking is about proportionality to achieve your target.
There is no actual math that goes into a war where you say, if a certain number of people die on this side versus a certain number of people die on that side, therefore the war is unjust.
That's not exactly how war works.
War is geared toward achieving a certain goal.
Achieving that goal, if it is a moral goal, is moral.
And then the question is, what is the minimum amount of force that you need to use in order to achieve that goal?
That's what we were talking about when we talk about proportionality.
When you're fighting a war like Israel is currently fighting in the Gaza Strip, in which Hamas has embedded itself in virtually every area of life, in civilian neighborhoods, in schools, in hospitals, beneath cemeteries.
When you see Hamas do this sort of stuff, the question is what level of force must Israel use in order to extirpate that terrorist presence and that terrorist threat.
And frankly, Israel would love to do that with a minimum of both Palestinian death and Israeli death, considering that more than 200 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the Gaza Strip.
I mean, I'm one degree removed from three of the soldiers who've been killed in the Gaza Strip.
For Israel, that's a heavy burden.
Beyond that, Israel has no interest in mass killing of Palestinians.
They were perfectly happy to leave the Gaza Strip completely alone, despite heavy rocket fire for full on 20 years from 2005 all the way up till 2023.
It's 18 years.
And Israel did not participate in, for example, the kind of action that you are seeing, which is a direct result of October 7th.
The goal for Israel is to extirpate Hamas.
All of this could be over literally tomorrow.
And by the way, every day since October 7th, if the leaders of Hamas walked out, held their hands up, took deportation.
We're not even talking about an Israeli jail.
There's probably a deal on the table right now for Hamas leaders to actually be sent just to some third-party country.
If they were to surrender the hostages, surrender power and leave, this war would be over like immediately.
Okay, well, let me tell you that.
Hamas will not do that.
They've been firing rockets into Tel Aviv literally this week.
Right.
Let me take you up on that because I don't think it would end that way.
Because I think the trouble with what's been going on since we last spoke in terms of proportion is I saw a BBC report yesterday that the UN were reporting that 19,000 children in Gaza have now been orphaned.
Another 10,000 children are reported by the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Authority have been killed.
50 to 60% of Gazan buildings have been severely damaged or completely destroyed.
And I don't see any nearness to the end of this because by Israel's own numbers, they've only killed, if you believe their numbers, and I'm not quite sure how they know this, under 10,000 Hamas terrorists.
That means that two-thirds of the Hamas terrorists are still to be taken out.
So this could go on for many months, maybe a year.
And those numbers of civilians being killed will exponentially rise.
And the devastation in Gaza will reach a point where there is no real Gaza left.
And I don't understand here, Ben, what the end game is for Israel.
I'm not even sure they've worked it out themselves other than to just obliterate everything in what many see as an overreaction to what happened by a superpower that hasn't thought through the consequences of taking out the whole of Gaza.
It's certainly hard to deem an overreaction to the murder of 1,200 of your citizens and more than 100 hostages still being kept by a terror group in destroying buildings, for example.
Right now, what Israel is attempting to do and what the long-term plan is going to be, and I said this in the interview, as you'll recall, days after October 7th, is that there would, in fact, be a long-term military occupation of Gaza.
The question is going to be when Israel shifts its strategy from a high-intensity campaign to a lower intensity occupation, which is predictably going to be the result of all of this.
Because again, the governing power in Gaza is still Hamas.
When Hamas is no longer the governing power, the question is going to be, what replaces it?
Unfortunately, there's been no power other than Israel that has been willing to actually take up that question simply because the Palestinian Authority is incapable of even running the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority is deeply unpopular, even in the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority is itself rife with corruption and Jew hatred.
There's literally law on the books in the Palestinian Authority, Payfor Slay, that actually pays people for the killing of Jews.
So that is not a power that can be in charge of the Gaza Strip that will leave Israel with any sort of sense of security.
The UAE has no interest in running the Gaza Strip.
Egypt has no interest in running the Gaza Strip.
Jordan has no interest in running the Gaza Strip.
Saudi has no interest in running the Gaza Strip.
The United States obviously has no interest in running the Gaza Strip.
So the question becomes, who runs the Gaza Strip?
And if you are Israel, that question is not a question for a distant day.
That is a question for every day.
And right now, the military is effectively in control of the Gaza Strip.
And that is likely to remain until there is some form of regime in the Gaza Strip that can be put in place that will end with the extirpation of terrorism that cannot involve the UNRWA, which is a terror haven, that cannot involve the UN, because the UN, unfortunately, has been cover for Hamas for literally 20 years.
And so the question here is a tough one, and it's not an answerable one in kind of right now.
And that's sort of the problem.
Just because there is no good answer to the question doesn't mean that the question isn't urgent or that there is an alternative option available to what Israel is doing.
What I've been missing in all of this is what exactly is the alternative option that has been presented by anyone other than Israel continuing on its quest to extirpate Hamas so long as Hamas is holding its citizens, firing rockets into the center of Israel and threatening Israeli life.
Okay, my response to that would be that I think it's morally incumbent on Israel, who I've already said many times and believe to this day, have not just a moral right to defend themselves, but a duty to their citizens to do so.
So let's just park that to one side.
My position on that has not changed.
It's just how they've gone about it.
And, you know, only yesterday we saw Israel forces dressing up both as, you know, in Hamas style clothes and Palestinian clothes to go into a hospital on the West Bank and take out three Hamas terrorists.
And there are many people, you know, impartial observers, who say that what they did there contravenes international law, that they're effectively committing war crimes because it's a violation of international law to feign protected status, in this case by dressing up as a doctor or patient, in order to invite the confidence of the adversary and then proceed to kill or injure them.
And it's also against international law for combatants who've been incapacitated by wounds or sickness and are protected from attack as persons ordered combat.
So if they're paralyzed or incapacitated, an attack on that individual is prohibited by international law.
So I look at that.
It seems to be a prima facie case of Israel breaking the law.
Do you defend that?
Yes, I defend that, because if Hamas, or in this case, Islamic Jihad, is using a hospital as a terror base, which they've historically done, then the violation of international law is on them.
I mean, by all international law, using a hospital as a terror base, which we have seen in the Gaza Strip, we're currently seeing in the West Bank as well.
That's the war crime.
I always find it very bizarre that international law is invoked when it comes to a response to a war crime, but not to the original war crime.
If you use a hospital as a terror base, then the hospital is no longer only a hospital.
It also becomes a site from which terror is emanating.
And so when Israel engages in a targeted military operation, by the way, not killing any civilians in this particular operation, killing people who are clearly terrorists, that is the war crime as opposed to terrorists using the hospital as an organizing base.
That seems to me peculiar.
Well, it is by the letter of the law of international law.
Yeah, it is.
What they did was a war crime.
You can't dress up effectively as doctors and patients and take out people who are being treated, which is what appears to have happened.
Well, it's unclear whether they were being treated or whether they were simply using the hospital as cover.
That's Israel's contention anyway.
Look, I think that the problem is when you talk about this, you talk with great clarity and you have a certainty about how you think this all plays out.
I think what you may underestimate, and correct me if you disagree with this, but I don't understand how the kind of devastation we're seeing now in Gaza, the kind of huge death toll on children and women in particular, who have nothing to do with this, obviously, how that is going to not just lead to a whole new radicalization of Palestinians that will replace Hamas.
So Hamas may well get permanently dismantled.
They're clearly being killed in large numbers, and clearly the underground tunnel operations are being dismantled, and Netanyahu has made it clear he'll keep going until the end.
So assume that Hamas are removed effectively.
Why do you think, Ben, that doing this in the way that Israel's doing it is not just going to lead to a whole new breeding ground of radicalized Palestinians who've lost family members, kids, wives, and so on, and who will want to exact revenge?
How does it make Israel safer?
It makes Israel safer by not allowing the governing party in that region to actually be fomenting the violence, providing weaponry, providing education to small children that reinforces all of the Jew hatred and anti-Semitism that has been reinforced in these areas.
That's sort of like asking in the aftermath of World War II, there'd been so much unbelievable devastation in Germany, in Italy, throughout continental Europe.
How is it the Western powers could expect that there wouldn't be an entire generation of people who would rise up in revenge for all of that?
And the answer is that a rebuilding process is going to have to take place.
This is currently why, from my understanding, Israel is negotiating with the United States, trying to bring in the UAE, trying to bring Saudi Arabia to essentially put in place some sort of marshall plan for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip.
That's going to take outside money.
That's going to take a long-term effort.
This is not something that can happen overnight.
I think one of the big problems in foreign policy is very often that people are looking for the immediate solution at the expense of the realistic solution.
And the realistic solution in an area of the world where conflicts go thousands of years deep is not something that's going to happen next week.
It's going to have to actually require heavy rebuilding, heavy monetary investment, but monetary investment not via groups that are linked to terror and sponsored terror and foment terror, but linked to groups that actually are going to promote quiescence, that are actually going to promote moderation, that are actually going to promote a future in this region of the world where both parties can coexist.
When I interviewed you, I later interviewed Andrew Tate several weeks later in Romania, and he said this.
So Ben is a warmonger.
Ben has been wrong on basically every single issue you can name.
He was with you with the vaccine and every other war.
Ben is always calling for other people's young men to go and die in some war.
He seems to love it.
I don't know if he has short man syndrome, but he's always behind his desk calling about how important it is that big, strong men like me go and die.
I mean, apart from the puerile name-calling and stuff, his point there, that you're a warmonger.
Your response.
I mean, if the question is whether Israel has a right to defend itself, the answer is, of course.
And if the idea is that somehow I'm asking Israeli soldiers to die, Israel is quite unified in its goals.
I'm not sure exactly who he's talking about.
The sort of chicken hawk argument simply would not even apply under these circumstances.
As far as war, I think that every single conflict the United States should get in.
I'm an American citizen, I'm an American.
Every conflict the United States gets in ought to be, we ought to be asking, what is the actual American goal?
What is the actual American interest?
Which is for one reason why I didn't support the war in Libya during the Obama administration.
It's why I was very skeptical of American interventionism, whether covert or over during the Arab Spring.
I thought that was going to end quite poorly.
Elon Musk's Real-Time Twitter Strategy00:14:00
So, you know, again, I think that that's inaccurate, but it's Andrew Tate.
So I'm not supremely surprised by that.
I'm not sure, you know, exactly what his level of knowledge is on foreign policy issues other than sort of the braggadocio.
And his thing that he's a big guy, tough guy, and you've got small man syndrome?
I'm not sure what to make of that.
I mean, I guess that, you know, if your version of manhood is walking around shirtless smoking cigars in Romania, then I guess you can have that.
That's okay.
I mean, sure.
My version of masculinity is a little bit different.
It's, you know, being married with four children and raising a family in a solid community, but I guess teach his own.
Do you think Andrew Tate is a good influence on young men in particular around the world?
It seems to have a very big one.
Is it a good one?
I think that Andrew Tate says, as I've said on your show before, I think that his diagnosis of some problems is correct.
I think that his actual prognosis and recommendations for solving those problems is more frequently than not deeply incorrect.
You tweeted something yesterday, I think, which got a lot of attention online.
I just want to quickly ask you about this.
It involves a woman called Rachel Corey.
So I'm sorry, it was posted yesterday.
You originally tweeted it in 2011.
And you said, I would love to write a book called Great Idiots of History.
Rachel Corey would make the list.
And it got retweeted yesterday and started fizzing around the internet.
When you look back at that tweet, do you have any regrets about the way you phrased that?
Not particularly.
I mean, I think that Rachel Corey, her death was tragic, but that doesn't mean that she wasn't engaged in deep foolishness.
There are many members of the West who unfortunately do act as useful idiots for terror groups.
Rachel Corey was associated with the International Solidarity Movement.
She was in the Gaza Strip in Rafa, Gaza in 2003 when Israel was conducting military operations in the middle of the second intifada.
She was blocking a site that Israel had suggested was actually being used to hide terror tunnels, which, as we now know, is a frequent tactic being used in the Gaza Strip.
And she planted herself in the blind spot of a bulldozer.
Her death was a tragic accident.
It's tragic.
That doesn't mean that she wasn't acting as a useful idiot on behalf of far more nefarious forces.
But she is a young woman who got bulldozed to death.
And this was 13 years ago, and you're a different character now.
I just wonder whether, looking back on it, you would have phrased that differently.
I mean, perhaps I might phrase it differently now.
Do I feel that she was a fool and that she was acting on behalf of nefarious interests?
Absolutely.
Let's take a short break, Ben.
I want to come back and talk to you about your fascinating trip to Auschwitz with Elon Musk and about Musk himself.
What you think of him?
Is he a force for good or not?
We'll come back after the break.
Welcome back to Plays of Massensen with Ben Shapiro, who last week visited Auschwitz with Elon Musk.
Ben, for you, that must have been a profoundly moving trip.
It was definitely a difficult trip, for sure.
I'd never been to Auschwitz before, just even on my own.
And so that in and of itself was deeply disturbing.
Being in Krakow, which was a city with some 70,000 Jews, which basically has no Jewish presence anymore because of the Holocaust, is obviously a shocking experience.
And obviously, going at a time when Jews around the world are under disproportionate attack makes it even more shocking and a reminder that terrible ideology can have truly catastrophic consequences.
As a Jewish man, have you grown up always living with slight fear with your knowledge of history that something like that could happen again?
And when you saw what happened on October the 7th, was that the jolt that you'd always feared?
You know, I think that as a Jew, obviously you spend an awful lot of time learning about Jewish history.
And for those who know Jewish history, the Holocaust was really the culmination of a wide series of mass murders of Jews over the course of thousands of years.
So the idea that Jews are under threat in an enormous number of countries over the course of history is obviously true and something that you understand from the time that you're very young.
You know, I'm uniquely blessed.
As an American citizen, America has been the friendliest country to Jews in world history, bar none.
It's an unbelievable, free, incredible country.
Learning about the history of the Holocaust is a reminder that, again, when bad ideologies take over, even in places where Jews think that they are safe, I mean, Jews predominantly thought that they were safe.
In Germany, it was one of the most sophisticated countries in all of Europe.
Jews fought disproportionately, actually, on the side of the Germans during World War I. When you see that and when you realize that the sort of conspiracism about Jews that led to the Holocaust is still very much alive and well in a lot of different quarters, that is shocking.
And October 7th, the reaction by many people in the world to October 7th, which was not to come down on the head of Hamas, but to instead suggest solidarity with Hamas in many cases, to suggest in many places on earth that actually the Jews were in disproportionate control of events in sort of the same conspiratorial language that we've seen historically.
The way that crosses paths with more mainstream ideologies, all of that is certainly deeply disturbing.
Is there more anti-Semitism that's come to public awareness in the last four months or so than you anticipated or realized?
Yes, for sure.
I mean, if you had told me that there would be hundreds of thousands of people marching in solidarity with Hamas in various capitals or that college campuses would become hotbeds of anti-Semitism, I would have found that shocking, even as cynical as I am about politics.
So yes, I mean, the rise of anti-Semitism globally in the wake of October 7th is sort of a shocking thing, especially because, again, typically the response of the world in the wake of large-scale genocidal massacres.
And when I say genocidal, I don't mean that an actual genocide was perpetrated.
Hamas doesn't have the power to perpetrate an actual genocide.
They would if they could.
But in the wake of such massacres, typically people tend to rally to the side of the people who have been massacred.
In this particular case, again, there was an enormous backlash against Israel that began literally the day after.
I mean, there were protesters taking to the streets against Israel before Israel even launched any retaliatory strikes in the Gaza Strip.
And that I found absolutely disturbing.
Also, again, I think that there is a certain conspiratorial mindset that has become quite common in the West.
I see it more on the left than on the right, but there are certainly elements of it on the right that basically suggests that all of the structures of modern Western life are rigged, that the game is rigged.
It's rigged based on hierarchical privilege, that the people at the top of that hierarchy privilege status are disproportionately white males, and that Jews are a subset of white males, and that you can actually tell who's the exploiter, who's the victimizer by amount of success in Western society.
That is a deeply pernicious idea that tends to cross paths pretty easily with anti-Semitism.
You went with Elon Musk, as I mentioned, and he's had a pretty rough ride in the last couple of months after he tweeted, you have said the actual truth, responding to a post that falsely claimed that Jewish people push hatred for white people.
He's since apologized for that, and he went on this trip with you.
Some people think he is anti-Semitic.
I don't think he is, but what was your experience of traveling with him to Auschwitz?
Elon Musk is definitely not an anti-Semite.
And for people who are sort of jumping on various Twitter comments to suggest that he is, I would suggest that you look at the full corpus of everything that he's had to say on anti-Semitism on Israel, on what's going on in the world post-October 7th.
It's very hard to come to that conclusion.
One of the things that I've said about Elon is that Elon can be trumpy in the way that he uses Twitter.
He sort of puts out whatever he's thinking in the moment, unedited.
That's one of the benefits.
It's one of the drawbacks.
Very often, he will then come back and sort of fill out exactly what it is that he meant to say, which is what happened in the case of that particular tweet.
That also means that he's considering things in real time, which is one of you've interviewed him, I believe.
And interviewing him is really interesting that way.
You'll actually ask him a question.
And unlike most people who are asked interview questions, he actually sits and considers the actual question.
He'll take it in.
You'll see him actually shift his opinion in real time as he processes the question.
It makes him a fascinating person.
Well, it's funny.
I wasn't going to say this, but you've triggered me by saying you've interviewed him.
I haven't interviewed him.
I spent a year courting him to do an interview.
He finally agreed to do an interview actually at the start of this year.
I was two days away from getting on a plane from Los Angeles to Austin in Texas to do it with him.
And at the last minute, he suddenly sent me, because he was doing all the organization himself on direct message on X.
He suddenly sent me a clip that someone had posted that day from an interview I did with Zuby at the start of December, in which I criticized Elon for bringing Alex Jones back to X, something he'd always said he wouldn't do.
And he said that he'd lost all respect for me because I had said that.
And the interview was summarily cancelled.
So I never got a chance to interview him, which is a great regret because I think he's probably the most fascinating guy in the world right now.
It also showed, and you mentioned his Trumpian tweeting, a slightly thin skin.
I was pretty surprised that someone who is such a defender of free speech was so thin-skinned about a criticism, which actually a lot of people felt.
He was right the first time about Jones, that Jones crossed a line that probably did warrant not being allowed back on the platform.
So I'm afraid I haven't interviewed him and that's why.
So I've given you a little scoop there.
But on that point that he was upset about, do you think Alex Jones should have been allowed back?
So my general belief is that Alex Jones should not have been banned from Twitter in the first place because he didn't actually violate on Twitter their terms of service.
My belief is that you should actually have a consistently applied set of terms of service that really is less cotty under the tree deciding who should be banned and who should not because that gets into some really dicey areas.
And living in fear on Twitter that you're going to cross an unspecified line at a certain point and find yourself on the outs, I don't think is particularly good.
I've actually never called for anyone to be banned on Twitter, including many people who despise me, hate my guts, and probably would like to see me dead.
So I actually don't even block people on Twitter, just on principle.
I refuse to block people on Twitter.
It's also why, for example, I don't delete old tweets.
Tweets that I disagree with that I wrote in 2008, 2009, 2000.
I leave those up for the public record.
So I tend to be in favor of radical transparency on X. Even if someone has had a billion dollar defamation case award against them for deliberately lying about families of kids who've been blown to pieces in their classrooms and hasn't paid a penny or dime of that.
Oh, you're certainly not.
Piers, you're certainly not going to get me to act in favor.
Alex Jones and I do not get along.
I think this is pretty clear publicly.
I think that Alex Jones lies a lot.
I think Alex Jones promotes conspiracy theories.
I think that Alex Jones is a wild personality.
And apparently in his divorce case, he claimed that many of the things that he says are for show.
That's what Alex does.
That's his shtick.
But when it comes to would I ban him from a platform if I owned a platform as opposed to, for example, owning a publication or being co-owner of a publication, which I am over at Daily Wire.
I mean, I don't have to hire Alex Jones at Daily Wire to suggest that if you have an app that's like a town square, that even people I absolutely think are excrable should be allowed to be on there.
One of the best things I think that Elon has brought to X is the community notes system, which I would hope would be used when people promote lies on X. I've actually agreed with pretty much everything Elon Musk has said and done.
That's why him canceling the interview was so painful.
So perhaps given you're such big buddies, you could put a good word in for your old mate across the pond, could you?
I didn't realize that was going to be Elon's conduit in this interview here.
I've got no other way in now.
You're my last chance.
Because I actually do think he's a genius.
And I think he's actually a force for good.
I asked the question earlier, but if you look at everything he does, I do think he comes from a place of wanting to make the world a better place and not a worse place.
And I think people like him should be encouraged.
I mean, I totally agree with that.
I mean, the world requires audacious thinkers.
Elon Musk is an audacious thinker.
The world requires people who have high aspirations for humanity.
Elon Musk has high aspirations for humanity.
I think that The chief personality thing about Elon, having sat with him for a while, is that Elon is a person who likes to solve problems.
And if the problem is in front of him, he really wants to expend all of his energy solving it, which is why he will literally go and sleep on the factory floor of new companies that he's working with or starting.
He will jet set off to, I've never seen, I mean, the guy's the wealthiest guy on earth.
He certainly doesn't have to go and sleep on the floor over a Tesla over a Tesla while he's redesigning their product or have to go and sleep at the offices of X as he did when he first acquired Twitter.
That is something that only a really dedicated person would do.
And I think that is beyond argument.
What Elon is trying to do, even when I disagree with him, is truly an audacious thing.
He's a big thinker.
It's a deeply American ideal.
I mean, to be, you know, America's contrary.
It's a deeply American ideal to shoot for the stars.
He's literally doing that.
So I think that that shouldn't be lost in all of the hubbub around whatever he's saying on X today.
Yeah, no, I completely agree.
And actually, you're the perfect person to put a good word in because you and I locked horns in spectacular fashion at CNN.
But here you are, like nothing happened.
We are with a living proof of it.
Let's take a short break.
I want to come back and talk about American politics.
Taylor Swift's Impact on Biden Votes00:07:54
Trump, you were a never-Trumper.
Are you still a Nether Trumper?
And Biden, is it really feasible that the Democrats are going to go into battle in November with a guy who can barely stand on his feet or think straight?
We'll discuss after the break.
Well, I'm back with Ben Shapiro, who, just to remind the world, is currently number one rapper in the world, which we will come to a little later.
Ben, let's talk Donald Trump, who's really making one of the all-time great comebacks that politics has ever seen, not just in America, but anywhere.
He seems now nailed down for the Republican nomination.
And polls I saw today show him significantly up now in almost every swing state, I think, against Joe Biden, who is showing increasing signs of seniority and dementia.
Now, you in 2016, in March, I think it was, said this about Trump.
If we don't say no to Donald Trump now, we will continue drifting ever further left, diluting conservatism into the vacillating, demagoguing absurdity of Trumpism.
Conservatism will become the crypto-racist, pseudo-strong, quasi-tyrannical, toxic brew leftists have always accused of being.
And we will have been complicit in that.
How do you feel today?
Well, I mean, I was wrong on that one.
So that's good.
I mean, you know, I think that in 2016, my objections to Trump were character-based, and they were sort of looking at the state of the world and saying, I just object to this choice.
I didn't vote for Hillary.
I'm not voting for Trump.
That was my take in 2016.
So I just didn't vote for president at the top of the ticket in 2016 at all, hoping to sort of forestall the binary world that then arrived.
Now, one of the things that I was wrong about with regard to Trump is obviously he governed much more to my liking in terms of actual policy than I thought he would based on his campaign.
His campaign in 2016 was sort of all over the place.
It was quite peripatetic.
It was, you know, in one place on an issue, and then five minutes later, another place on the same issue.
But the actual policy that emerged from his administration, particularly in the first three years of his administration, I liked quite a lot.
And so obviously I was wrong about all of that.
My character critiques of Trump remained.
Those have not changed.
Even when I endorsed him in 2020, I suggested that my opinions of his character had not shifted particularly much.
It was just that my belief was that we were now down to a binary choice, that many of the eventualities I had hoped to forestall by basically not involving myself in the 2016 election, whatever had happened and now happened.
And so the situation had changed.
I feel the same way with regard to 2024.
So obviously, Trump against Biden, I'll vote for Trump.
You were in the DeSantis camp.
He kind of fizzled away.
I suspect it was really almost out of his hands in the sense that the moment they began throwing all the indictments at Trump, his poll numbers just began to rocket in a way that it was almost impossible for any other candidate to do anything about it.
So I don't really blame DeSantis or his campaign.
I think it was just an unstoppable tsunami of support that flooded him for Trump right when he most needed it.
And it came because the, you know, the Democrats decided to play throw in the kitchen sink of stopping him.
And by doing that, all they did was embolden him and make him stronger.
I think there are two main factors that led to the revival of Trump in this campaign.
So as you recall, he actually declared his re-elect in December 2022, which was incredibly early.
And a lot of people were skeptical of that, including me.
I thought that's a very early re-elect campaign in an attempt to basically clear the pool of all other candidates.
And DeSantis or anyone else who's hoping to run against him, if they had really had a shot, that shot was only present if they had gotten in maybe December, January of 2023.
The reason being that there was a widespread perception in the Republican Party that because of underperformance in 2022, due to Trump picking bad candidates in the Senate, that made the third straight election where Trump had lost.
He had done poorly in 2020.
He'd done poorly in 2021.
He'd done poorly in 2022.
And so there was a bit of a taste for something new.
But then two things happen.
One you mentioned, which is the indictments drop.
And so the Republican Party's heart immediately just reverts to Trump.
And you can see it in the polls.
DeSantis running even with Trump up till the indictments.
The indictments happen.
Trump skyrockets.
DeSantis drops in proportionate amount.
And then there's a second factor, and that is Joe Biden's a terrible president.
And so as his poll numbers started to really drop significantly, the big argument that any other Republican had against Trump, which is he's not electable, Biden's going to beat him, that went away because when every poll is showing Donald Trump competitive with or ahead of Joe Biden, that argument just doesn't exist anymore.
So DeSantis' chief argument, which is you'll get Trump-ism without actually Trump.
Everyone's like, well, what if I get Trumpism and also Trump, right?
I get to have sort of the Trump revenge tour on the people who are victimizing him.
And also, he can actually win.
So basically, the entire case for anyone else disappeared.
This election will see 8 million new voters in the U.S. electorate and 41 million Gen Z voters.
It's apparently, according to one poll, 18% of voters say they're more likely or significantly more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Taylor Swift, the phenomenon of our age.
And a lot of conservatives have got very upset about this and think that she's going to deliberately sabotage the whole thing by saying vote Biden.
Do you think this is a bit ridiculous, this whole debate?
Or is there a point to it?
It's not a little bit ridiculous.
It's a lot ridiculous.
Taylor Swift endorsed Biden in 2020.
So like, who cares?
Also, that same poll, by the way, shows that 17% of Americans said they would be less likely to vote for Joe Biden if Taylor Swift endorsed Joe Biden.
So basically, it's a wash.
This whole thing, it really is just a sign of our absurd times that people are focusing.
Instead of focusing in on like, you know, the actual issues, like who's going to run the country and how is that foreign policy going to be effectuated?
And is the economy going to heal?
Everybody's focused in on, is there a CIA conspiracy around Taylor Swift or is Taylor Swift really a magical political kingmaker?
By the way, everyone is talking about Taylor Swift mobilizing votes.
Taylor Swift has something like 200 million plus, I think it's more, it's like 260 million Instagram followers.
She put out an Instagram telling people to register to vote.
She got 35,000 people to vote.
And people are shooting that like, oh, that's an enormous 35,000 people?
160 million people voted in the last election cycle.
Like Taylor Swift is not going to be the make or break for Joe Biden.
She has had a big effect on NFL ratings, though.
That is true.
Women are watching the NFL for the first time.
And I will say that my conspiracy theory was that if Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens had been on the brink of actually beating the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship, Lamar Jackson might have actually been drone-striked by Roger Goodell from the NFL higher offices because the NFL desperately needs the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl.
And putting aside her politics, I would imagine that Taylor Swift is pretty much your idea of a good role model, isn't she?
For young girls in particular.
I mean, my only critique of Taylor Swift is that she's 34 and all of her songs sound like a 17-year-old going through her first breakup.
That's my only critique, is that she's two years younger than my wife.
My wife is a doctor and we have four kids, and Taylor Swift is 34 and single and still acting like she's in the dating pool.
Now, that's my only critique of Taylor Swift.
My great hope for Taylor Swift is that Travis Kelsey proposes to her.
She gets married to Travis Kelsey.
They have lots of babies.
And a bunch of young feminist women decide that actually marriage is not the worst idea and they get married and have a bunch of babies and we can have the Taylor Swift baby boom.
Are you a secret Swifty, Ben?
I'm definitely not a secret Swifty.
Rap Lyrics Promoting Social Responsibility00:06:36
I mean, listen, I'm a rap legend.
So frankly, that's not even my bag.
Yo.
But we're going to come back after the break.
We're going to talk about your astonishing rise to number one in the rap music charts.
How has this happened?
Why has this happened?
And what does it say about America?
That's after the break.
Welcome back, Don Sensor.
Ben Shapiro is still with me.
Now, Ben, four years ago, you were pretty scathing in your criticism of rap and hip-hop.
From the outside, when I listen to hip-hop, I don't hear a lot of family-oriented messages.
In fact, I hear a lot of messages that are degrading to women.
I hear messages that push violence, that are disparaging to the police.
I hear messages very often that seem to treat relationships between men and women as something disposable or glorify mistreatment.
Yet, here you are, the same Ben Shapiro, the rap hater.
Here's a clip from your number one hit.
Let's look at the stats.
I've got the facts.
My money like Liz in my pockets are fat.
Home, yeah, I'm epic.
Don't be a whap.
Dog, it's a yamaka, homie, no cap.
Look at the graphs, look at my charts.
You're blowing money on strippers and cars.
You going to prison, I'm on television.
Dogs, no one knows who you are.
Keep hating on me on the internet.
My comment section all woke parents.
And I make racks off compound interest.
Y'all live with your parents.
Nikki, take some notes.
I just did this for fun.
All my people download this.
Let's get a billboard number one.
So, first question: how do we get from that first clip to the second one?
You know, life is a journey, Piers.
And I've decided to take that journey one step at a time.
Just never know what life is going to throw your way.
If my parents had known when they spent thousands of dollars on 15 years of classical violin lessons with some of the best teachers in the world, that my musical career would culminate in me at the top of the world rap charts.
I think they, I can only think that they would be incredibly proud.
Just so proud that they spent all of that time so that I wouldn't at least clap on one in three.
So that's that's very, very exciting stuff.
And yes, I mean, we're taking over the industry from the inside.
Tom McDonald is the real talent behind all of that, obviously.
Tom can actually rap.
Tom's actually good at this.
The entire joke of me being part of the rap is, I think, the funniest thing in the world.
And I'm really enjoying a lot of the reaction videos, which people hysterically laughing at the fact that I even attempt such a thing.
So, you know, good for Tom and good for everybody who's sort of in on the prank, because I think there's an actual very good shot that we end up at the Billboard number one.
No question.
And I think you should, because it's based around facts, which is from your great quote: facts don't care about your feelings.
I think it's your pinned tweet.
It still has had gazillions of people who like it.
And I've always liked that because it kind of sums up to me the facade of wokery, which is that it's all feeling driven and very rarely fact-driven.
And in fact, all the lyrics of this, which, you know, you send up rap music very, very cleverly.
But also in Tom's lyrics, go woke, go broke, no hope, it's pathetic, pro-choice, pronouns, pro-love, your progresses, and so on and so on.
Where are the American flags?
Remember when people would hang those, they'd been taken down, replaced with BLM flags or a rainbow, and so on.
It will hit a nerve with people who feel like their country is no longer somewhere that they feel comfortable in or recognize because the woke brigade have made everyone, or tried to make everyone, feel so ashamed of what it means to be an American or what it means to be British.
I think that's exactly right.
It's why Tom has resonated so much as an independent artist.
Now, the fact is that there are a lot of systemic kind of barriers to entry for a song like some of the ones that Tom has made before, which are very right-wing, which are very conservative in orientation.
And I think that a lot of the resonance that you're seeing to this is a rejection of many of the values that I'm actually talking about in that clip from one of my shows where I'm talking about the sort of stuff that rap is promoting.
And we're trying to promote the exact opposite.
One of the lyrics in the song that Tom actually raps is that we are not going to turn your sons into thugs or your daughters into hoes, meaning like we're actually trying to promote social responsibility and good citizenship in a rap, which is, again, I think part of the humor, but hopefully some people listen to it and they think, well, maybe, you know, there's an alternative point of view that's worth listening to here.
You know what's always got my goat about it?
It's the ridiculous double standard.
And I'll give an example.
When John Legend decided to take upon himself to rewrite the lyrics to Baby It's Cold Outside, one of the most innocent songs and videos ever created in music history.
And yet he didn't, he decided to cleanse it up to make it Me Too friendly because apparently it was involving sexual assault, although everybody knows it wasn't.
But he didn't say a word about any of his rap friends and their truly disgusting, violent, misogynist lyrics.
It didn't cross his mind to rewrite one of those because that wouldn't have given him street credibility.
That would have damaged him.
Whereas playing the we've got to clean up this shocking baby it's cold outside that was a virtue signaling winner.
Oh, absolutely.
The attempt to wipe away history, to wipe away old culture, because old culture is bad and we have better values now.
But that stops right at the front door when it comes to rap.
When it comes to hip-hop and rap, I mean, any song that you pick up is going to be the most retrograde values that you ever heard.
If you're a progressive and you listen to rap, I'm not sure exactly how you square that, frankly, because a lot of the stuff that's promoted in rap is mistreatment of women, treating of women as commodities, drugs, the attempts to promote violence.
I mean, all these messages are really bad, and kids do, in fact, imbibe them.
So if we can send that up at the same time that we're doing something successful like this and also do something as hilarious as, you know, put Jew life crew over here at the top of the rap charts, then that's a win for everybody.
What was a touch of the NMN's about you?
I've got to say, MNM's about you.
The hoodie, the whole look, the movements, everything.
Oh, yeah.
Ben M. Benimem, we've got it.
That's the one.
I was watching you talking to Jordan Peterson, I think it was a couple of days ago.
And he was saying, you know, we're talking about society and where it's all gone.
And he was like, you know, once you reach a point where people can't say what a woman is, society's kind of gone so nuts, it's very hard to work out what we're living in.
Bridging Racial Divides Through Conversation00:03:44
And I'm sure that in 20 years' time, we'll look back and think, what the hell was going on?
And how did we ever let this happen?
You know, we've got to the stage now where Leah Thomas, this infamous transgender swimmer in America, who's decimating women's sport in the swimming pool, now wants to compete in the Olympics and literally steal a place in the American Olympic team, if she's successful, Ms. Appeal, from a biological female.
What do you think about this?
I mean, again, it's absurd, but I think it goes to something we were talking about earlier.
We were talking about sort of the rise of conspiracism.
The reason that so many conspiracy theories seem less conspiratorial than they used to is because there are, in fact, a cadre of elites, particularly in sort of legacy media, who promote ideas that are so counter to just basic common sense and then demand that you actually abide by those ideas, that you repeat the nostrums and the aphorisms over and over in almost Maoist struggle session ways, that of course a lot of people are feeling like there's a sort of conspiracy of people who don't share your values and are attempting to cram those down on you.
The problem is, of course, when that metastasizes into broader critiques of this racial group or that racial group, that starts to get really, really dangerous.
But yes, I mean, the simple fact that the question of man versus woman, do they exist, is up for debate, says that there is something fundamentally sick about the society.
Now, it's my view that the only way that you can actually rebuild societies, you can't do it top down.
You actually have to do it bottom up, which is why when people ask me, what can I do to help?
Because politics seems, it's so hard.
I mean, there's so much stuff going on and the world's on fire.
The best thing you can do, be a responsible husband, if you're a man, be a responsible parent, be a responsible citizen, be a member of your religious community, build the local institutions that actually facilitate trust.
And then you can build those up such that broader institutions can be built on top of that.
But it's going to require a full rebuilding effort.
Yeah, it is.
One of the things I really like about you, Ben, apart from the fact you're staggeringly successful businessman through the portal of your opinions, which I'm fully signed up to, is that you're very comfortable and willing, in fact, eager to get into the debating fray with people who completely disagree with you.
You're quite happy to engage with the enemy in that sense.
But we live in an era where so many people are now too terrified to do that.
They only want to exist in their tribe, driven by social media.
What do we do about that?
I mean, frankly, I think that all you can do is try to use your platform to talk with people of various sides who disagree with you.
Now, again, I think that there is such a thing as an Overton window, right?
I'm not interested in sitting down with somebody who's espousing the murder of all Jews, for example.
I agree with you, there is such a thing as the Overton window.
With that said, you know, I think that good faith conversations happening across the aisle is deeply important, not only because it clarifies positions, but also it does rebuild that social trust that is clearly falling apart.
Because one of the biggest problems we have is what I've termed sort of the happy birthday problem, which is, you know, you're a public figure, Piers.
How many people do you know who will text you happy birthday, but will not tweet it for fear that they might receive blowback simply for recognizing that you were born of woman?
That sort of problem is the sort of thing that I think fundamentally carves away at a society because we can at least acknowledge that we're part of the same civilization, that we share probably 80% of our values, even if we disagree strenuously on the other 20%.