Ben Shapiro Is Waging Battle Inside the MAGA Movement

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. At the end of December, Turning Point USA, one of the most important conservative organizations in the country, held its annual conference, AmericaFest. The speakers included mainstays of conservative media like Tucker Carlson, Riley Gaines, Megyn Kelly, and Jesse Waters. Kicking things off was Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro. Founder of The Daily Wire and host of one of the most popular podcasts around. Shapiro began by celebrating Charlie Kirk, Turning Point's co-founder, who had been murdered just a few months earlier. I really believe that the best way to judge a goodness of a man is to see the goodness of his wife and his children. And on that measure, Charlie was unsurpassed. Erica and her children are in all of our hearts. But Shapiro's real subject that day was the dangers facing the conservative movement. Instead of focusing on opponents on the left or the few remaining never-Trumpers, he looked inward. Shapiro warned of people he called charlatans and grifters. He called out Tucker Carlson by name for friendly interviews with the accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and with anti-Semites like Daryl Cooper and Nick Fuentes. If you host a Hitler-apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes, you know the Nick Fuentes who said that the vice president of the United States is a, quote, fat gay race traitor married to a... If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it. Shapiro called out Megyn Kelly for hosting Candace Owens, Shapiro's former colleague, who'd been relentlessly pushing a conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the killing of Charlie Kirk. And when Megyn said this week, quote, my goal and my job here is to try to understand, yes, where Candace is coming from on this. And so she sees no purpose in inserting herself, quote, into this on one side. That is a moral and logical absurdity. Now, this is not the only rift on the right, of course. You've seen the big division between some MAGA leaders and Donald Trump over the Epstein files. But anti-Semitic views are openly embraced in much of the conservative world now, particularly among some young people. And I wanted to ask Ben Shapiro why he thinks that is. We spoke this past week. Ben, for many years now, you've been in the world of what we would call conservative media. From 2012, you were an editor at Breitbart, which is kind of like the ur-publication of the MAGA movement, I think it's fair to say. And you were acquainted there with Steve Bannon and all sorts of people. You look back on those Breitbart days, and what do you think was positive about it? What do you look back on with some regret, too, in terms of the leaders of Breitbart? So I worked at Talk Radio Network, which is the syndicator for Michael Savage and Laura Ingram. And then I ended up being hired by Andrew. I'd known Andrew since I was at UCLA. Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the publication. Yeah, who died in his 40s, I think. Yeah, he was very young. I think he was 41, I believe. Obviously, I'd known Andrew for about 10 years. I think he basically came to me and said, will you come on board and join Breitbart? This was in February 2012. So it's in the middle of the 2012 election cycle. And he died three, four weeks after I had signed up for Breitbart. And suddenly the leadership structure was completely upended because Andrew had been sort of a one-man band. He was obviously a charismatic person. He was the person from whom all sort of thoughts sprang in terms of the direction of the site. Obviously, the leadership structure changed pretty dramatically. Steve Bannon, who'd been kind of hanging around on the fringes of Breitbart universe, making a documentary about Andrew, was brought in by Larry Solove, who is Andrew's partner, to essentially be president of Breitbart. Did you have problems with Steve Bannon? It was never sort of a bed of roses with Steve Bannon. There are a lot of people in sort of Breitbart infrastructure who are not fond of Steve or the way that he was running things, making editorial decisions and the like. I think that there were some wonderful things. But how did you assess what Steve Bannon wanted in this world? He wasn't just a conservative. I mean, he was and remains a kind of warrior who's willing to say and do what is necessary to push that battle forward. And I'm being gentle about this. If you look at the coverage of Breitbart, say, circa 2012, 2013, I'd say those were fairly mainstream conservative talking points. It was certainly a mainstream conservative website at that time. I think by the time we hit 2015, 2016, things had started to evolve a fair bit, especially because of the rise of President Trump. I was not a supporter of President Trump in the 2015, 2016 election cycle. I was much more supportive of Ted Cruz in the primaries. And then in the general election, I actually didn't vote in 2016 because I was unhappy with both candidates. Obviously, post that, I think President Trump did many things that as a conservative I like. He is a certainly non-ideological figure, which is why so many people try to sort of claim that MAGA is part of their movement. You have Reagan conservatives who will say that MAGA is a Reagan conservatism. You'll have national populists who say that it's a national populist. Trump is none of those things. Trump is Trump, and he has instincts. Which means what to you, Ben? Trump means what? His instincts are sort of naturally those of a 1975 conservative. And that means that he likes a strong America on the world stage, but tempered by a sort of hard nosed realism about non-interventionism. I think that when it comes to domestic policy, he has sort of a weird mix of not liking the government to be involved in everything, but also wanting to use the government in ways that I don't particularly approve. He seems to be more about, you know, what is the solution at hand? Will I try it? And then if it doesn't work, then he pulls out of it. So people have termed that taco, right? Trump always chickens out. I don't think that's right. I think that President Trump is a person who is willing to try different things and then will shift on a dime if he doesn't think those things are working. Do you think Trump is honest? I mean, in some ways, yes, in some ways, no. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago describing the fishy investments from Abu Dhabi into the Trump family. Our reporter, David Kirkpatrick, who's extremely conservative in his calculations about how he's assessing this, has said that the Trump family has enriched itself to the tune of $4 billion since taking office again in 2024. Does this concern you at all? Of course. I mean, I've been calling this out, I think, before pretty much anybody else. I mean, early on in the Trump administration, when World Liberty Financial was pretty clearly making a fair bit of money over in the Middle East. I raised red flags on my show consistently about how I thought this was wrong. If the name were Biden instead of Trump, people would be screaming bloody murder and how this was not beneficial to President Trump's agenda either. So sure, that concerns me. Not beneficial to his agenda or corrupt? I mean, both, obviously. I mean, I do think that if you are taking, you know, what I perceive to be digital assets that are not particularly worthwhile. And then you have people who are politically interested investing massive amounts of money into those things. That is that is that is not a good thing. You voted for him the second time. I voted for him in 2020 and then I campaigned for him in 2024. Why? Because it was now a binary choice between Trump and Kamala Harris. And I liked a lot of what he did during his first administration. I felt the guardrails would largely hold, which I believe they have with regard to President Trump. I know many on the left believe they've not. But what I would say is that guardrails have held this time. Yes, I'm hard pressed. Help me on that, Ben. Sure. So because I don't see it even remotely the case. So let me hear your point of view on that. Sure. So the so the Trump administration has not bucked the judiciary to the tune of simply saying that if an appellate court or the Supreme Court rules in a particular way, they will just go ahead and do whatever it is that they want to do. The president does cite legal authority for the things that he is doing. So you're confident that the Justice Department will pursue corruption charges against the Trump family because it's independent? Oh, no, I'm confident that the president will likely pardon himself and his children in the same way that Joe Biden did on his way out. I think that one of you- But you're laughing, but that's radically corrupt, is it not? Again, I think that it was radically corrupt when the DOJ did not pursue, with alacrity, a lot of the issues surrounding the Biden family too. I think one of the things, so the answer is yes, and it applies to all parties. What I hear from the left is a constant drumbeat of accusation about President Trump, to which I acquiesce in part, but I find them utterly unconcerned with the same sorts of issues arising on their side of the aisle. They see President Trump as the person who's constantly violating the standard, the person who's constantly setting the new standard. I think President Trump stumbled on the prone body of American politics and said, this is a dead body. I see him much more as a coroner than as the murderer. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not some of both, meaning I think things can get worse under President Trump than they were heretofore. And I'm not going to deny that he's done things that I think are bad and wrong. I was very critical of his rhetoric, for example, between the election of 2020 and January 6th. But I do think that to ignore the fact that both— Do you not see any of these things as disqualifying in a moral political sense like the election— Well, January 6th, for example. Right. So I don't know what disqualifying means in the sense that I did not support him in the primaries. He would lose your faith and vote and support forever. Well, I mean, the only way to lose my faith and support and vote forever would be for there to be an alternative that I find superior to him. This is the problem when you're making voting decisions. Would I want Donald Trump marrying into my family? Probably not. when it comes to my politicians, the problem is that once you say that, you know, the candidate is quote unquote disqualified, then you either have to sit out the election, which I did in 2016, right? I found both candidates to be insufficient. And then whatever damage President Trump, I thought had done by being elected in 2016, I thought that he did a bunch of things I liked between 2016 and 2020. And then I did not like what he did with regard to the election of 2020 and what I think are falsehoods that he told about winning that election. and I didn't support him in the primaries. And then he ended up winning the nomination. He was running against Kamala Harris. So I can either sit out the election again, which doesn't really achieve purposes. So what you're saying is that the potential of Kamala Harris, in your view politically, outweighs support for what in essence was an insurrection on Capitol Hill. That's hard for me, to say the least. Even for any conservative. First of all, I think that's a pretty poor way of putting it. That's not the way that we assess candidates in the real world. The way that we assess candidates in the real world is who is more likely to perform the agenda that I see as important versus who is more likely to inhibit that agenda. And so I can fully disapprove of what happened on January 6th and think it was quite terrible and still acknowledge that Donald Trump is president from 2017 to 2021. But there are many people who consider themselves never Trumpers in the Republican Party. not a decisive amount certainly but there were there's certainly a number of people in the republican party who see his moral transgressions as so serious that they make a very different calculation than you do i mean sure and and and they're entitled to that calculation the question to me is always one of iteration okay voting is one decision and then supporting every just because you vote for someone doesn't mean that you support everything that they do I'm speaking with the podcaster Ben Shapiro. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I David Remnick and I been speaking today with Ben Shapiro one of the most prominent voices in conservative media The Ben Shapiro Show started in 2015 and it often ranks in the top 10 podcasts in America Shapiro worked as a lawyer at first. He went to Harvard Law School and practiced for a time. But he's been sharing his political opinions for much longer than that. He had a column when he was 17 years old while he was a student at UCLA. Shapiro was a morning show host on Los Angeles radio, an editor at Breitbart News, And eventually he co-founded his own conservative media outlet called The Daily Wire. We'll continue our conversation with him now. You had your first syndicated column, as most 17-year-olds do, when you were a teenager. How did that happen? So when I went to UCLA, I'd skipped a couple of grades. I went to UCLA when I was 16. And I walked onto campus. I picked up a copy of the UCLA Daily Bruin. I saw an editorial that I thought was pretty terrible. What did it say? What was the... I believe that the editorial at the time was comparing Ariel Sharon, then Prime Minister of Israel, to Adolf Eichmann, the creator of the Nazi concentration camp system. And so I went in and I asked if I could write a counterpoint. And they said, sure. So I wrote a counterpoint. And then they said, we need somebody. We can't find anybody who's on the other side to write a sort of point-counterpoint on Iraq. And I said, okay, I can think about doing that. So I did that. So I wrote a point counterpoint column for the Daily Bruin for a while. And then that turned into just a regular column. After about a year of doing that, I was talking with my father and I said, do you think that my stuff is good enough to be printed in like a normal newspaper? And so let me do some research. And he came up with a place called Creator Syndicate. So I printed out some of my columns from the Daily Bruin. I sent them in. And about three weeks later, I got a call from them asking if I would write a syndicated weekly column for them. And that's how it started. So you were fully formed as a conservative at age 17. How did that happen? So, I mean, I was always very into history. I was always very into politics. I read a lot. I still do, obviously. And so I had, you know, I think pretty strong opinions on a lot of subjects. I won't say that they were as well informed as I'd hope they are 25 years later. You know, in the era prior to kind of full scale social media, I was unlucky enough to have a syndicated column at the age of 17, meaning that many of my dumbest thoughts from ages 18 to 25 are on record. What were your dumbest thoughts that you never read? I mean, there's like a whole list of them. I mean, I actually put up a list on our website over at Daily Wire. There were some thoughts about, for example, civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war that were poorly articulated, thoughts about Israel and Palestinian issue that were poorly articulated or wrong that I rejected later. Some of them is when you're young and in this field, one of the ways you get attention is by saying overtly provocative things. That has not changed. And so a lot of the ways that I would articulate things at the age of 19 are not the ways that I would articulate them today. Would you say that you do that now, that you, you know, push the boundaries of what you really think to get attention? No. I would say that I really don't do that very much now. So let's talk about the college campus that you came on to, because we hear a lot about this, that somehow the environment of a place like UCLA is completely left-leaning. And then we have the evidence of you walking into the newspaper offices and you had a column right away. So what was it like UCLA when you came there? I would never say that it was terrible for me to go to a left-leaning college. There's no question that UCLA was a left-leaning university. It wasn't a place where I felt as though I couldn't express my opinions. I will admit that when it came time for taking tests, depending on how restrictive I thought the professor was, I think that the best way to get an A in a class is to write what the professor would like you to write as opposed to what you would like to write. But you didn't do that. And you got into Harvard law school. You made your opinions conform to the professor in the blue book, in the blue book. Right. I mean, so the blue books were the way you would handwrite your essays. And so if I had a professor who I thought was very much to the left and intolerant of particular opinions, then I would do that. And that wasn't every left wing professor that I had. Some were, you know, quite eager or welcoming of differing opinions. But I won't say that every single professor was equally welcoming of differing opinions. Ben, what initially attracted you to conservatism? I grew up in a household with two Reagan Republicans. Obviously, my parents are pretty conservative. The basic idea that I think lies behind a good conservatism is personal responsibility, duty, a requirement that you do the right thing, a basic moral stance about how individuals should act in a free country. And I think that's still largely what drives my conservatism today. I think that's antithetical to liberalism. It doesn't have to be. But I think that liberalism very often is a way of shielding people from the consequences of their own decisions or an attempt to shift individual responsibility onto systems in a way that I think is frequently unjustified. The right acknowledges that when people fail, because human nature is fallible, very often that is your own responsibility. And the best way to actually treat with that is to self-correct. And I think that for the left, because they have, I think, a rosier view of what human nature is, they tend to attribute to systems that which I think more properly lies in responsibility in the individual. Let's talk about the debate that you're having inside MAGA. You're at the center of a fight, a feud that's developing in the conservative movement, and it has to do with anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories related to anti-Semitism. Not long after Charlie Kirk died, you spoke at the Turning Point Conference, America Fest, and you called out Candace Owens and attendees like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. These are very influential figures now on the right and the media of the MAGA movement. Talk to me a little bit about this divide, how it's developed, what it's done to your relationships as well inside the MAGA movement. So, I mean, first of all, as people may suspect, I'm not particularly interested in my sort of personal relationships with others in the political sphere. I have a family that's very tight-knit. I have four children going on five. I have a dog. I have plenty of things going on in my social calendar, and I don't see it as particularly important to hang out with people who are in sort of the same career milieu. Well, then tell me about your decision to make that speech. Sure. There were two speeches that I gave back to back. One was a speech that I gave at the Heritage Foundation the night before, and one was the TPUSA speech that I gave that night. The Heritage Foundation speech was specifically directed at Tucker Carlson because I believe that Tucker Carlson is not a conservative in any real market way that I can identify. And I was pointing that out at the Heritage Foundation. How would you describe his politics? um conspiratorial populism i try not to speculate on motivations of people because i just don't have a window into their head all i can say is that the stuff that he has been promoting for the past several years is very much in line with the philosophies of people like alexander dugan uh it is very much the russian the russian nationalist uh philosopher said to be close to at least the thinking of vladimir putin yes uh his his view of american america in the world is is a view that is actually closer to Howard Zinn than I think to that of sort of traditional conservatives. This idea that America is a nefarious and terrible force in the world that has committed myriad sins and must withdraw from the world both for its own good and for the good of the world. His belief that a conspiratorial coterie of people is manipulating American policy. Those people very often happen to have crossover with Jews, according to his guests, that he routinely wanders onto the air. In the aftermath of Charlie's death, Candace Owens in particular had started speculating openly that people at TPUSA up to and including in my interpretation, Erica Kirk, Charlie's wife, had been complicit in his murder or at least complicit in a cover up of his murder. If Charlie said he had no choice but to abandon the pro-Israel cause because of, and I quote, Jewish donors, the behavior of Jewish donors, if he said that, yes or no, well then, I don't know, maybe some people didn't want to take that risk that he was kind of what, become Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson? Her bizarre conspiratorial rantings had been treated as legitimate and worthwhile by people ranging from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly. And so I felt that this was a necessary speech to make about the gap that has emerged on the right between a conspiratorial view of politics promoted by commentators who seem to bear less responsibility for truth telling than than I think they do. And that that sort of conspiratorialism has has taken over large parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Were you surprised by Candace Owen, I believe, is somebody that you worked with at The Daily Wire? Yeah, we hired her in 2021. What did you see? And then we fired her in 2023. So in 2021, what we saw was a fairly, I would say, mainstream conservative who said inflammatory things, obviously, and who had been telling us that she was- Inflammatory things that you liked. Some that I would say most of them that I liked, some of them not as much. And so, you know, as people who hired her, we thought that she was going to develop in sort of, you know, intellectual directions. She had said that she was learning with Shelby Steele, for example, and reading the works of Thomas Sowell and all this kind of thing. By 2022, it was apparent that she was moving in another direction. And then it took until 2023 for that direction to come to full fruition, which was fairly open anti-Semitism. She was spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, among other conspiracy theories, including the idea that Emmanuel Macron's wife is actually a man and all this sort of stuff. And so at that point. So that was your limit with her. Well, to be fair, I am not an officer of my company. The people who made that decision were Jeremy Boring and Caleb Robinson, the co-CEOs of the company. But that was the collective management decision, yes. And now you specifically criticized Tucker Carlson for a really soft interview he did with a guy named Nick Fuentes. You point out how outrageous he is. But is that exactly what Carlson wants in his guest? Just attention? I mean, I think that probably he, you know, the attention doesn't hurt. But at the same time, I think that probably there is some ideological overlap between some of the things that he believes about America and the conspiratorial forces controlling it and some of the stuff that Nick Fuentes believes. You know, what Tucker has a habit of doing is bringing on guests who spout the most conspiratorial form of the theory. And then he sort of buys it back about five percent. And then he allows those views to be predominant in the public discourse while talking about what wonderful people these folks are. Okay, but I get that. And I can't help but agree with that, obviously. But then you have Donald Trump. He hasn't had dinner with me, but he's had dinner with Nick Fuentes. So how does that affect your feeling about Donald Trump? I mean, I condemn that at the time when it comes to his dinner with Fuentes and I believe it was Kanye West. It was Kanye West and Fuentes at the time. The president of the United States, and people say that I grade on a curve, but I think I grade realistically here. I am not surprised by what President Trump does. He likes being with famous people. He very often does not know who they are. He will throw them out. He will say bad things about them five minutes later. He will like Steve Bannon until he calls him sloppy. Steven fires him, whereupon he will welcome him back into his orbit and like him again. And so the sort of attempt to treat. But he's having, but maybe I think you're taking this too casually. He's having dinner with a Nazi apologist. And I didn't take that casually. And then really doesn't go off and blast him. He just kind of says, oh, I kind of didn't know who it was. And Kanye brought him along. First of all, that's bad staff work, to say the least. Terrible staff work. And it's bad behavior on the part of the president of the United States. No, I agree that it's bad behavior on the part of the president of the United States. I'm not sure what else to say about that. What's the equivalent? I don't think that's quite the same thing as Tucker Carlson legitimately using his forum to provide Nick Fuentes a way to speak to the public for two hours. That a pretty low bar No I agree But those are the two things you comparing Now at America Fest the vice president said this President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests. I didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform. And I don't really care if some people out there, I'm sure we'll have the fake news media, denounce me after this speech. He was kind of attacking you, wasn't he? I mean, I assume that he was disagreeing with the thing that I had said, sure. And I will point out that I don't think the vice president is being very accurate about his own approach to various conservatives and other people online. He's quite fond of attacking people online from time to time. Totally. And I remember when a bunch of I think it was young Republican leaders had their signal chat exposed and they were making all kinds of anti-Semitic remarks on that. And the vice president didn't denounce that either. In fact, he just kind of thought it was, you know, kids, kids being kids. Right. And again, I highly disagree with this as both a matter of morality and as a matter of tactics. I think tactically is foolish. I think it's immoral. What's going on? What's going on that this is so prevalent and excused at the top end of at least part of the conservative media sphere and the White House? I mean, I think it's a mirror image of what's going on on the left. I think to pretend that anti-Semitism is not rising on both the right and the left is to be whistling past the graveyard. Fair enough, but stick to the right. But the reason that I'm pointing this out is that. out. I understand. But Democrats would like to be in office. And so, again, to go back to sort of the original point with regard to President Trump and voting for him and not voting for him, if the question is binary choice, then you're going to have to make a decision between one of these parties because these are the two major parties. And so that's why I think it's important to bring into perspective what's happening in both parties. But Ben, do you see anti-Semitism in the mouths of leading Democratic contenders for the presidency? I see anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party apparatus's willingness to not only humor, but to promote everybody ranging from New York Mayor Zahra Mamdani to Rashida Tlaib, Congresswoman from Michigan, to Ilhan Omar, Congresswoman from Minnesota, to the bizarre attempt to mirror all of the excesses of the anti-Israel movement. And I don't just mean anti-Netanayahu, I mean anti-Israel. Listen, I asked Gavin Newsom about this, right? I was on Gavin's podcast, the governor of California. And he acknowledged that this sort of stuff has become quite prevalent in sort of democratic circles. So the reason that I'm pointing this out is, number one, because I think it's important just as a matter of description to be realistic about the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States period. And then I'm happy to discuss the problems on my own side of the political aisle, which I have repeatedly. And you have talked about the anti-Semitism on the left. We can discuss that as well. But did the degree of it on the right take you by surprise? Yes. Sure. First of all, to understand what's happening, I think we first have to understand what anti-Semitism actually is, because I think that when people mischaracterize the definition, that allows their particular side to escape. So what people tend to do is they will define anti-Semitism in a way that excuses their side and that throws all of the blame on the other side. The definition of anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism at its root, is a conspiracy theory about the power of Jews as a group in the world. And that can be channeled into an anti-Zionism that says that Israel is controlling American foreign policy and that Israel has befuddled the world. And it's all about the Benjamin's, which is the kind of thing that Ilhan Omar says. Or it can be channeled into Jews in America are too powerful in the media and they are cliquish and they are controlling the circumstances of my life. And yet, Ben, as somebody who's written from Israel and Palestine for years and years, and I, you know, the reaction to some of the things I write is that I'm an anti-Semite, which is, I got to say, news to me. But I'm no more anti-Semitic than you are. And to get attacked like that is hideous. Okay, but so this is why I'm trying to be more precise about the definition. Being critical of Israeli policy is not the same thing as saying, for example, that Israel's government designed and implemented a genocide, which is a lie. OK, and that is a lie that can be chalked up to a nefarious view of what Jews are doing in the world, because it is also part and parcel of a broader lie, which is the Jews have then sold the idea that they are capable of doing whatever they want under the guise of America's banner. And they've done so because of their inordinate power. It's part of a broader conspiracy theory. And so one of the things that's happened is in much the same way that the right said for a long time, you keep calling everybody racist, therefore nobody's a racist, which is untrue. There are actual racists out there. But the idea is that if you over apply a category, then it starts losing its power and its effectiveness. And that actually opens the door to the thing. I think the same thing has happened with anti-Semitism. And so what I've said before is instead of talking in categories of anti-Semitism or Jew hatred or the rest of it, why don't we talk about what's true and what's false and what's moral and what's not moral? Because that's easier for people to get their head around. Ben, let me ask you about another extremely potent issue, not just in the Republican Party, and that's the Epstein files. You've been following this. What do you think it proves or doesn't prove other than the absolute hideous nature of the subject himself? I think the let's put the virality of the narrative around the Epstein files is different from what the evidence shows in the Epstein files. What the evidence shows in the Epstein files is that you have a number of very high profile people who are in in close contact with Jeffrey Epstein, who was a convicted sex offender with minors. The the indictments against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell suggests that the trafficking of minors was about Jeffrey Epstein. There's no one else who's been indicted in terms of trafficking of minors except for Jeffrey Epstein. And according to the FBI under President Trump, there is no one who is going to be because they do not have evidence sufficient that he was trafficking young girls to other people. The narrative that has been drawn from the Epstein story, because presumably people don't know where his money comes from, although there was a very, very deep dive, I believe, in New York Times Magazine looking into where his money came from. The narrative is a broader narrative that goes back to kind of the heart of conspiracy theorizing that has taken over, I think, large swaths of both parties, but it is very, very potent on the right. and that is that there is a cadre of people who are preying upon children, who manipulate everything in your life, who may be doing so because they have been honeypotted or because they are being manipulated by a foreign intelligence service, typically on the right, on the far right, this is treated as Mossad, even though there is zero evidence that that is the case. And then Ehud Barak's name is brought up in this context. As you might imagine, I'm not a fan of Ehud Barak, but there is no evidence that on behalf of Mossad, he was running Jeffrey Epstein as a sex trafficking agent. By the way, it'd be pretty terrible statecraft considering he was already a convicted sex offender. I think that the broader theory here, which goes well beyond the evidence and the virality of that theory speaks to people's belief that they are not in control of their own lives and that conspiratorial forces who prey on children, which is obviously the best way to, if you wish to have the most nefarious form of the most nefarious theory that you've got, making them pedophiles is a great way to do it. But the attempt to kind of draw out a gigantic pedophilic conspiracy ring that was running all of America's foreign policy and domestic policy and culture, I think that goes to people's desire to abdicate control over their own lives, which I think gets back to some of my original politics, right? Which is where I was saying that I think individual responsibility is the lodestar of a successful society. And when you have conspiratorialism take over, as Karl Popper suggested, it's a massive problem. My guest is the commentator and podcast host, Ben Shapiro. Our conversation continues in a moment on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. My guest today is the commentator Ben Shapiro. Shapiro has maintained an enormous audience, especially among conservatives, but he walks a fine line. He's not exactly MAGA, certainly not all the time. He's taken issue with some of Donald Trump's positions, not to mention his ethics. And earlier in our conversation, Shapiro frankly acknowledged real corruption on Trump's part. But he's very quick to accuse the left of pearl-clutching, too. And he tends to find that whatever he may object to with Trump, Trump's opponents share equally in the blame. is donald trump and the mega movement healthy for this country or would you rather see the republican party return to its the roots that you started out as a conservative and a republican do you see um promise in the people that have been put forward as successors to donald trump jd that's among them so you know i have differential opinions on on a wide variety these people, right? The president obviously picked Vance for his vice president. If vice president were in a primary with Marco Rubio, I would be likely to support Marco Rubio in that primary over J.D. Vance, for example. But the president did pick Marco Rubio for a secretary of state. And so I like, you know, so I think that when we say, are there options that I like better than others? Sure. Are there things about the Trump movement that I think have been good and salutary? Sure. Do I think that, is he my ideal? If I could construct in my head the ideal Republican candidate or president? Would it look exactly like Donald Trump? No, but I'm not sure that he's claiming to be that, nor do I have that magical power. And try as I might to manifest that in real life. What do you think Donald Trump cares about? I try not to get into motivations because I'm not a psychiatrist, but here's the nice thing about President Trump. When you asked if he was honest before, I said in some ways, yes, in some ways, no. And we got to the ways in no, but we never got to the ways in yes. The way in yes is that whatever is in his head is going to come out his mouth in the next 2.7 seconds. There is no brain mouth barrier for President Trump. That's not so much honesty as impulsivity, no? Well, I mean, it's honesty in the sense that you are getting his honest take on what he thinks in that moment. It may be an impulsive approach to honesty, but it is definitely, there is a definition of honesty by which it occurs. It's revealing, I'll give you that. It is revealing, it is authentic. If you want to call it authentic, it's authentic. But as far as what is sort of the core of his sort of political belief, Again, I think he has an instinct that he wants America to be great and powerful in the world. He likes the symbolism of America being great and powerful in the world. America is strong. America is virile. These are things that clearly he does believe. And so the way that manifests in policy may be grabbing Nicolas Maduro and taking him back to New York for trial. Or it may be an industrial policy that is more reminiscent of a 1937 FDR policy than it is of a traditional sort of Reagan Republican policy. Or finding more to be sympathetic about with Vladimir Putin than Zelensky. It's pretty slippery slope. Yeah. So when it comes to Putin and Zelensky, again, that one I cannot explain from a sort of, you know, America great perspective. I think that the president has an – I mean, can't you explain it in terms of he is impressed by, taken with the kind of authoritarian impulses and behavior of Putin rather than Zelensky? So same with Xi Jinping. I think that he is attracted by powerful people, for sure. But again, I'm not going to – he has sort of varied fairly widely, actually, over the course of the last year and a half on Russia-Ukraine. And again, I've been very consistent that I think that we ought to be supporting Ukraine sufficient to deter the Russian threat and to force Putin to the table. Now, I want to ask you about Minneapolis, which is still going on. Just from a free speech point of view, from a First Amendment point of view, should somebody like Don Lemon be prosecuted? I mean, obviously, if what he was doing was performing an act of journalism, the answer is no. And the question is going to be whether they can prove in court that he was actually a conspirator in the violation of the FACE Act Are you worried about Donald Trump regard for journalists He obviously infatuated them He loves to talk to them but he refers to them as enemies of the people And you know as a student of history, that's a phrase that comes from Robespierre. It comes from Stalin. And it has consequences. I mean, again, he's been doing that for 10 years and you seem to have a robust audience and the ability to speak freely every day. And I don't think that you're sitting in your studio right now waiting for the FBI to break down your door. You think he's just kidding around? Well, the FBI had no problem breaking down the door of the Washington Post reporter and taking her all her devices recently. And if you go back to the Obama administration, James Rosen was treated quite similarly when he was working for Fox News. And then the Associated Press, I think, had some situations with the Obama administration as well. Like this again, this is why I go back to is Trump breaking new ground here or is he using tools that were that were left over from other administrations in ways that other people don't like. And I don't like it either. I mean, him suing various outlets, I think is wrong and bad. Do I think that we are now at grave threat that the First Amendment has ended in the United States because Don Lemon was picked up by the by the DOJ? But Ben, sooner or later, he's not going to like what you say. And your turn is going to come and you're going to be deposed and you're going to be sued. And will that change your view of this? Not particularly. I mean, I'm not if he again, I think that it's wrong for him to do the suing of these outlets. So I'm not sure what would change about my opinion, given that I've said already that I think that it's wrong. It might hurt more if he did it to me. Let me get a little inside about- You've noticed that I'm not excusing any of the things that I think he's doing that are wrong. And this is why, you know, one of the things that I think that if people on the opposite side of the aisle actually wanted to be shooting for a better future here, which is I think what we would all like, it's not enough to simply rail against Trump and say, this is not normal. It's why, you know, I think the people on the left should do some of the same with their own side. Much of what we talked about here is me criticizing my own side. I'd say 90 percent of what we talked about is me criticizing my own side. But I find an extraordinary dearth of that, unfortunately, on the left. And because of that, I think people do react by supporting the right. And this is this is one of the things that I think is is a huge mistake on the part of media is to sort of play this game where Trump does a thing. Therefore, it is a bad thing. People on the left do the same thing. They are opposing Trump. Therefore, it's a good thing. And that seems to me completely problematic. I'm perfectly willing to on each of these specific problems. Say if the evidence shows that Donald Trump is targeting Donald. There's no question that every president and I'll just say it unequivocally, every president sooner or later lies. every president sooner or later misbehaves. We're talking though about radical difference in degree, are we not? I mean, I really do not think so. That's where we disagree. So yeah, we definitely disagree on this. We definitely disagree on this. I think that the left routinely underestimates what's done by the left. Whereas I think I'm being pretty accurate in that I think both sides are routinely violating the rules. And that's why we are in sort of a political death spiral to a certain extent. When you look at immigration policy, I think we can agree that there was no immigration policy, certainly no effective immigration policy when it came to the southern border for far too long. And we can argue about the reasons for that and what bill didn't get passed and so on. How do you feel about the way it's being done as dramatized by ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere and mass deportations and people being shipped off to El Salvador and this kind of thing? So these are really sort of two separate questions, right? Trump's border policy is incredibly popular because the border was sealed day one. And it turns out that you didn't need a piece of legislation to do that. Joe Biden could have always done that. And in fact, even in the last couple of months while he was president, he sort of started to do that. As far as internal policing of illegal immigration, I think that the approach taken by Tom Homan, the borders are, has been significantly better than the approach taken by the DHS secretary or Stephen Miller, the president's top advisor on these issues. which is hone in on the criminal illegal immigrants, many of which are in the system. I think that Democrats are actually making a major mistake by not having local law enforcement cooperate with ICE in taking people who are in jail and deporting those people or reporting them to ICE for deportation. I think that's a huge mistake by Democrats politically and just in terms of policy. And that's been a consistent policy in the United States for a while is to deport criminal illegal immigrants. Ramping that up, I think, is both smart policy and good policy. I think that the Trump administration's reaction, which has been, you know, what if we set up quotas or what if we decide that we're going to radically ramp up and going after non-criminal illegal immigrants, by which I mean people who have not committed an additional crime other than crossing the border illegally, that that is a political mistake and that that's been resounding not to the benefit of the Trump administration. I think that there are better ways to do it than they've been. But I think that Democrats are playing with fire in a lot of the stuff that they've been doing in places like Minneapolis. I think the idea that ICE agents are state-sponsored terrorism, I confronted the California governor about that, and he backed off of that. Rhetorically. Yes. When people suggest that ICE is Gestapo, when people are likening this to the Holocaust, I think it's a massive, massive, not only mistake, it's- When people in the government, the highest levels of government call, you know, refer to people who are like Alex Preddy as a as not just refer to him as a terrorist. Yes, I thought that I literally came out that day and I said that that was a complete misapprehension of the situation so far as I could tell on the tape. And I said the same thing about the characterization of Renee Good as somebody who's trying to mow down immigration officers by the bushel. I mean, it was stated by Gregory Bovino, I believe, that Alex Preddy wanted to kill as many ICE agents as possible or Border Patrol as possible. And I said that that's not true. And I think that that's wrong, which is why I'm very happy that Tom Homan, who seems to be more of an adult, has been put in charge of implementation of border policy in Minnesota. I do want to focus on one thing. You said, and I think quite rightly earlier, that the left and the right keep, these aren't your words, but mine, just building their, you know, digging their trenches deeper and deeper and deeper. who do you see on your side of things in the conservative world who's a potential leader that would not have these tremendous moral failings that you've described, who would do without the kind of rhetorical ugliness that you have denounced, who would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging? Who do you see as a potential leader on the Republican side that would make you a great deal more comfortable? I mean, again, I think there are a number of them. I think ranging from Glenn Youngkin, former governor of Virginia, to Brian Kemp, former governor of Georgia. I think the governor of DeSantis in Florida has done an excellent job. I think that Senator Ted Cruz has spoken out very clearly against people like, for example, Tucker Carlson and his predations. I think Secretary of State Rubio would be really good. I'd like to see Vice President Vance change tack on a lot of this. I hope that he will. this is actually a systemic problem on both the left and the right is the primary system is very, very difficult for people who are not deliberately inflammatory to navigate because primary voters tend to be the most passionate voters. And that means that the people who tend to elevate are the people who are sometimes the most provocative. I mean, you know, you've spent time in the United States Senate. If you go and you talk to some of the most passionate advocates on both sides of the aisle in the Senate, they actually do still do the kind of Tip O'Neill, Ronald Reagan thing. Like they still mow each other. A lot of them still like each other. A lot of them still do lunch together. And the kind of story that's sold, I think, in the commentariat particularly is that you must hate the person on the other side in order for you to win great victory. You shouldn't be able to do things with 51 percent. You should have to have 70 percent to do it. That's why the system was built the way it is with all of the gridlock between the branches and between the states and the federal government. And I think that the way that both the political parties as vehicles for political victory and also the commentariat in search of clicks and giggles have mobilized is in opposition to that. And so people are getting more and more frustrated. I'm not interested in clicks, much less giggles, even though we do have cartoons. My concern is with the sustenance of democracy and democratic institutions. and I wonder if we share or we don't share a concern that the period that we're in now is potentially lays waste to those institutions. I mean, I'm worried about it for sure, but I think that we may be worried about it from different angles. One of the things that I notice about democracies that sort of fall into crisis is number one, obviously lack of institutional trust. But if you believe that if the other side wins, it's literally the end of the democracy, that is incredibly dangerous. That really is a problem because then it suggests that if the other side wins, you're never going to get to vote again. Tyranny is upon you. And perhaps the only solution is a solution that sort of breaks the system. But Ben, when the president of the United States tries to threaten people in Georgia to give him some votes or he starts to talk about nationalizing the elections, all these things, whether it's January 6th, aren't these legitimate concerns? Is the worrier the problem or the actual situation the problem? Well, I mean, no, I think in some situations, the worrier is the problem. In some situations, it depends on the conclusion you're drawing. I think the worry about January 6th was justified because obviously I think that the behavior of the president between the election and January 6th was morally wrong and also legally wrong. But I also think that the guardrails held. And I think that, you know, the notion that Democrats are sitting around worrying that there will never be another clean election, that's not true. And when Republicans say the same thing, Democrats are right to pounce on that. Democrats will say, President Trump will say, if we don't win this election, it's because it was stolen. But then I'll hear Democrats turn around and say very much the same thing about Republicans. And once both sides believe that if the other side wins, the election was stolen, then how are we supposed to ever share a polity together? That is a massive problem. And so it's something, again, I pressed Governor Newsom on this when I sat with him. It's like, you're out there saying that it's the death of democracy. We're at the end of democracy. You're trying to run in 2028. So you don't believe that. And one of the things that when the president says he wants to federalize elections, I say that he shouldn't say that he's wrong. You know what else was wrong when the House of Representatives under Democrats tried to push H.R.1, which was a federalization of elections. It was an attempt to use the power of the federal government to cram down particular election rules on states, including things like ballot harvesting. What it leads to is a place that actually Vice President Vance has said. He said you shouldn't refrain from using the tool because you believe the other side won't use it. They will use it. So you should preemptively use it. Once we get to the point in American politics where one side basically says the other side will do whatever it can to cheat, steal, lie, change election results, destroy the country. Therefore, we must do that to stop them from doing that. Then you are really at sort of the end of a thing. And that thing is the American experiment. But the reality is that our system is very much still functional. And last I checked, Democrats are slated to win the House and possibly the Senate. So they don't feel like this is the end of the road. Ben Shapiro, thank you. Thanks so much. Ben Shapiro is host of The Ben Shapiro Show. I'm David Remnick, and you can find episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour and everything we publish in The New Yorker at newyorker.com. You can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening, and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Mike Kutchman, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.egan歴史