Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War

Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by Ye formerly known as Kanye West about Jewish people? They're awful and antisemitic and they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre death con 3 tweet, and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think that was the Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian stuff, and then Jews running all of the media, Jews being in charge of the financial sector. Jewish people... I called it on my show, there's Sherman Nazism, and it is. It's like right from protocols of the Elders of Zion type stuff.

There are a bunch of lessons too. Hitler taking power. The first thing I think people ought to recognize about Hitler taking power is that the power had been centralized in the government before Hitler took it. So if you actually look at the history of Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republic had effectively collapsed. The power had been centralized in the Chancellor and really under Hindenburg for a couple of years before that. And so it was only a matter of time until someone who was bad grabbed the power. And so the struggle between the reds and the browns in Nazism, in pre Nazi Germany led to this up spiraling of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler in through the front door, not through the back door, he was elected. So you think Communists could have also taken power?

So in his comments, in the jumping from the individual to the group, I'd like to ask you... You're one of the most effective people in the world that are attacking the left, and sometimes it can slip into attacking the group. Do you worry that's the same kind of oversimplification that Ye's, doing about Jewish people that you can sometimes do with the left as a group? So when I speak about the left, I'm speaking about a philosophy not really speaking about individual human beings as the leftist like group, and then try to name who the members of this individual group are. I also make a distinction between the left and liberals. There are a lot of people who are liberal who disagree with me on taxes, disagree with the foreign policy, disagree with me on a lot of things. The people who I'm talking about generally, and I talk about the left in the United States, are people who believe that alternative points of view ought to be silenced because they are damaging and harmful simply based on the disagreement. So that's one distinction.

Difficult question. In 2017, there was a mosque shooting in Quebec City, six people died, five others seriously injured. The 27 year old gunman consumed a lot of content online and checked Twitter accounts a lot, of a lot of people. But one of the people he checked quite a lot of is you 93 times in the month leading up to the shooting. If you could talk to that young man, what would you tell him? And maybe other young men listening to this that have hate in their heart in that same way. What would you tell them? You're getting it wrong. If anything that or anyone else in mainstream politics says drives you to violence, you're getting it wrong. Now again, when it comes to stuff like this, I have a hard and fast rule that I've applied evenly across the spectrum. And that is I never blame people's politics for other people committing acts of violence unless they're actively advocating violence. So when a fan of Bernie Sanders shoots up a congressional baseball game, that is not Bernie Sanders's fault. I may not like his rhetoric. I may disagree with him on everything. Bernie Sanders did not tell somebody to go shoot up a congressional baseball game when a nut case in San Francisco goes and hits Paul Pelosi with a hammer. I'm not going to blame Kevin McCarthy, the house speaker for that. When somebody threatens Brett Kavanaugh, I'm not going to suggest that that was Joe Biden's fault because it's not Joe Biden's fault.

Right. On that topic, what do you think about Elon buying Twitter? What are you hopeful on that front? What would you like to see Twitter improve? So I'm very hopeful about Elon buying Twitter. I mean, I think that Elon is significantly more transparent than what has taken place up till now. He seems committed to the idea that he's going to broaden the Overton window to allow for conversations that simply were banned before. Everything ranging from efficacy of masks, with regard to COVID to whether men can become women and all the rest. A lot of things that would get you banned on Twitter before without any sort of real explanation. It seems like he's dedicated to at least explaining what the standards are going to be and being broader in allowing a variety of perspectives on the outlet, which I think is wonderful. I think that's also why people are freaking out. I think the kind of wailing and mashing of teeth and wearing of sad cloth and ash by so many members of the legacy media, I think a lot of that is because Twitter essentially was an oligarchy in which certain perspectives were allowed and certain perspectives just were not. That was part of a broader social media-reimposed oligarchy in the aftermath of 2017. So in order for just to really understand, I think what it means for Elon to take over Twitter, I think that we have to take a look at of the history of media in the United States in two minutes or less, the United States, the media for most of its existence, up until about 1990, at least from about 1930s until the 1990s, virtually all media was three major television networks, a couple major newspapers and the wire services. Everybody had a local newspaper with wire services that basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy. McClatchy, Reuters, AP, AFP, et cetera. So that monopoly oligopoly existed until the rise of the internet. There were sort of pokes at it in talk radio and on Fox News, but there certainly was not this plethora of sources.

Can you say what your favorite and least favorite things are about President Trump and President Biden one at a time? So maybe one thing that you can say is super positive about Trump and one thing super negative about Trump? Okay, so the super positive thing about Trump is that because he has no preconceived views that are establishmentarian, he sometimes willing to go out of the box and do things that haven't been tried before, and sometimes that works. I mean, the best example being the entire foreign policy establishment telling him that he couldn't get a Middle Eastern deal done unless he centered the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Instead, he just went right around that and ended up cutting a bunch of peace deals in the Middle East or moving the embassy in Jerusalem. Sometimes he does stuff and it's really out of the box and it actually works. That's awesome in politics and neat to see.

You mentioned Biden being a good father. Can you make the case for and against the Hunter Biden laptop story for it being a big deal and against it being a big deal? Sure. So the case for it being a big deal is basically twofold. One is that it is clearly relevant if the president's son is running around to foreign countries picking up bags of cash because his last name is Biden, while his father is vice president of the United States. It raises questions as to influence peddling for either the vice president or the former vice president using political connections. Did he make any money? Who was the big guy, right? All these open questions, that obviously implicates the questions to be asked.

Well, my favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things that nobody else will say. My least favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things that nobody else will say. I mean, listen, she says things that are audacious and I think need to be said. Sometimes I think that she is morally wrong. I think the way she responded to Kanye, I've said this clearly was dead wrong and morally wrong. What was her response?

Right. Well that's interesting about intervention. Can you comment about the war in Ukraine? So for me it's a deeply personal thing, but I think you're able to look at it from a geopolitics perspective. What is the role of the United States in this conflict? Before the conflict, during the conflict, and right now in helping achieve peace? I think before the conflict, the big problem is that the West took almost the worst possible view, which was encourage Ukraine to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but don't let them in. And so what that does is it achieves the purpose of getting Russia really, really, really ticked off and feeling threatened, but also does not give any of the protections of NATO or the EU to Ukraine. I mean Zelensky is on film when he was a comedy actor making that exact joke. He has Merkel on the other line and she's like, "Oh, welcome to the NATO." And he's like, "Great." And she's like, "Wait, is this Ukraine on the line? Oops." But so that sort of policy is sort of nonsensical. If you're going to offer alliance to somebody, offer alliance to them, and if you're going to guarantee their security, guarantee their security and the West failed signally to do that.

You're exceptionally good at debate. You wrote How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them. You're kind of known for this kind of stuff, just exceptionally skilled, the conversation, the debate, at getting to the facts of the matter and using logic to get to the conclusion in the debate. Do you ever worry that this power... Talk about the ring, this power you were given has corrupted you and your ability to see what's... To pursue the truth versus just winning debates? I hope not. I so I think one of the things that's kind of funny about the branding versus the reality is that most of the things that get characterized as "Destroying" in debates with facts and logic, most of those things are basically me having a conversation with somebody on a college campus. It actually isn't like a formal debate where we sit there and we critique each other's positions or it's not me insulting anybody. A lot of the clips that have gone very viral is me making an argument and then they're not being an amazing counter argument. Many of the debates that I've held have been extremely cordial. I take the latest example about a year ago I debated Ana Kasparian from Young Turks. It was very cordial, it was very nice, right? Yeah. That's sort of the way that I like to debate. My rule when it comes to debate and or discussion is that my opponent actually gets to pick the mode in which we work.

You lost your cool in an interview with BBC's Andrew and Neil, and you were really honest about it after, which was kind of refreshing and enjoyable. As the internet said, "They've never seen anyone lose an interview." So to me, honestly, it was like seeing Floyd Mayweather Jr. or somebody knocked down. Can you take me through that experience? Here's that day. That day is I have a book released, didn't get a lot of sleep the night before, and this is the last interview of the day, and it's an interview with BBC. I don't know anything about BBC, I don't watch BBC, I don't know any of the hosts. So we get on the interview and it's supposed to be about the book and the host, Andrew Neil doesn't ask virtually a single question about the book. He just starts reading me bad, old tweets. Which I hate, I mean, it is annoying and it's stupid and it's the worst form of interview when somebody just reads you bad, old tweets. Especially when I've acknowledged bad, old tweets before.

So the fact that that became somewhat viral and stood out just shows that it happens so rarely to you. So just to look at the day in the life of Ben Shapiro, you speak a lot, very eloquently, about difficult topics. What goes into the research, the mental part... And you always look pretty energetic and you're not exhausted by the burden, the heaviness of the topics you're covering day, after day, after day, after day. So what goes through the preparation mentally, diet wise, anything like that? When do you wake up? Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up, usually that's my baby daughter who's two and a half. We hear on the monitor usually about 6:15, 6:20 AM So I get up, my wife sleeps in a little bit. I go get the baby, then my son gets up, and then my oldest daughter gets up. I have eight, six, and two. The boy is the middle child.

Speaking about the nature of self, you've been an outspoken proponent of pro-life. Can we start by you tried to steel man the case for pro-choice that abortion is not murder ,and a woman's right to choose is a fundamental human right freedom. I think that the only way to steel man the pro-choice case and be ideologically consistent is to suggest that there is no interest in the life of the unborn that counter weighs at all freedom of choice. What that means is we can take the full example or we can take the partial example. If we take the full example, what that would mean is that up until point of birth, which is the Democratic Party platform position that a woman's right to choose ought to extend for any reason whatsoever up to point of birth. The only way to argue that is that bodily autonomy is the only factor. There is no countervailing factor that would ever outweigh bodily autonomy. That would be the strongest version of the argument. Another version of that argument would be that the reason that bodily autonomy ought to weigh so heavily is because women can't be the equals of men If this institutes of biology are allowed to decide their futures.

Sure. Okay. The meme is, there's a clip of you talking about climate change and saying that =

Yeah, I tend to agree with the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Let me ask you back to the question of God, and a big ridiculous question, who's God? Who is God? I'm going to use the Aquinas formulation of what God is, that if there is a cause of all things, not physical things, if there is a cause underlying the reason of the universe, then that is the thing we call God, so not a big guy in the sky with a beard. He is the forest underlying the logic of the universe, if there is a logic to the universe, and he is the creator in the Judeo view of that universe. He does have an interest in us living in accordance with the laws of the universe that if you're a religious Jew are encoded in the Torah. But if you're not a religious Jew, it would be encoded in the natural law by Catholic theology.

Do you think on the topic of tribalism in our modern world, what are the pros and cons of tribes? Is that something we should try to outgrow as a civilization? I don't think it's ever going to be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I think it's a natural human condition to want to be with people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs. And I think trying to obliterate that in the name of a universalism, likely leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences. Utopian sort of universalism has been failing every time it's tried, whether you're talking about, now it seems to be sort of a liberal universalism, which is being rejected by a huge number of people around the world in various different cultures. Or you're talking about religious universalism, which typically comes with religious tyranny or you're talking about communistic or Nazi-ist sort of universalism, which comes with mass slaughter.

I think people will quote you for years and years to come on that. What advice would you give, a lot of young people look up to you, what advice, despite their better judgment? No, I'm just kidding. Only kidding. They seriously look up to you and draw inspiration from your ideas, from your bold thinking. What advice would you give to them? How to live a life worth living, how to have a career they can be proud of and everything like that? So live out the values that you think are really important and seek those values in others would be the first piece of advice. Second piece of advice, don't go on Twitter until you're 26.

As far as of other mentors, in terms of the media, Andrew Breitbart was a mentor. Andrew, obviously, he was kind of known in his latter days, I think more for the militancy than when I was very close with him. So for somebody like me who knows more about the militancy, can you tell me what makes him a great man?

Did you ever have doubt in yourself? I mean, especially as you gotten into the public eye with all the attacks, did you ever doubt your ability to stay strong, to be able to be a voice of the ideas that you represent? Definitely. I doubt my ability to say what I want to say. I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blowback of saying it, meaning that that's difficult. I mean, again, to take just one example, in 2016, the ADL measured that I was the number one target of antisemitism on planet earth. That's not fun. It's unpleasant. And when you take critiques, not from anti-Semites, but when you take critiques from people generally, we talked about near the beginning, how you surround yourself with people who are going to give you good feedback. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes people are giving you feedback and you don't know whether it's well motivated or poorly motivated. And if you are trying to be a decent person, you can't cut off the mechanism of feedback.

Man, don't get asked for love too much. In fact, I was- You don't get that question on college campuses?