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Whether you're doing a few million in revenue or hundreds of millions of Bucks, you NetSuite helps you stay competitive and ahead of the curve. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures. Get our free business guide Demystifying AI at netsuite.com Shapiro the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Shapiro that's net.com Shapiro. Alrighty. So you've heard a thousand times from all your left wing friends that the fascists are right wing. The fascists are conservative. Donald Trump is Hitler. The Republicans are Nazis. Hell, Mitt Romney was a Nazi according to these people. And that's not true. Fascism has a specific definition. Now, I call a lot of things Marxist, but that's because the things I call Marxist are in fact Marxist. I mean, Zoran Mamdani talking about the power of government centralization in order to achieve a form of higher justice. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table. That is Marxism. There's a reason he's a member of Democratic Socialists of America. When I say that AOC is a Marxist, it is because she speaks the language of of Marxism. We were tired of a cynical politics that seemed blind to the realities of working people. This nation will not go back. We choose a new path and open the door to a new day. When people say fascism, they usually just mean things they don't like, and then they call it fascist. Because of course fascism has a long and terrible history. There are a lot of people out there who have been following me for a while and I've talked about the New Left or the Woke right or the Horseshoe Right, and they've been wondering what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the place where the fascist right meets the Marxist left. So the reality is that Marxism and fascism have a lot in common. Fascism was originally designed by people who were very warm toward Marxism, Mussolini, Hitler. These are people who had significant belief systems aligned with Marxism, meaning they wanted centralized government control or even nationalization of particular industries. They believed that the collective was much more important than the individual. They believed that justice could only be achieved at a social level, not at an individual level. There's a reason why the National Socialists were National Socialists. Mussolini, who is really the creator of modern fascism, began as a Marxist. According to his biographer R.J.B. bosworth, Mussolini in his twenties considered himself a part of an intellectual proletariat. And he wrote about overcoming wickedness in society. Quote, the disappearance of the tyranny which a single social class, the one with economic privilege exercises over the other, will signal the end of fanaticism and racial hatred. Then all men will be united in fraternal solidarity. Marx, he wrote, had demonstrated conclusively a class will never give up its privileges unless it is forced to do so. And he said that Marx had proven that the final struggle will be violent and catastrophic. So again, Mussolini just translated that Marxism, internationalist Marxism into nationalist socialism. In Italy, in fact, the term fascist derives from the Italian term fascio, which means a bundle. The idea being a bundle of sticks is stronger than a single stick. It is collectivist in its very nature. And there is a reason why the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, the pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, was not quite as much of a shocker as many people thought it was. These are Excerpts from the 25 points put forward by Adolf Hitler in the platform, the Nazi party platform in 1920 in Munich. We demand the nationalization of all trusts. We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries. We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare. We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses. And they're being leased at low cost to small firms. We demand land reform. We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman law serving a materialistic world order. And the state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program. They called for nationalized healthcare and the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Now, again, many of those proposals sound like Marxist proposals. So one of the big problems when you are working with terminology like conservative or liberal is that there's different terminology for Europe and for the United States. And so in this video, we're gonna talk about all of it. And I'm going to distinguish European liberalism, for example, from American liberalism or European conservatism from American conservatism. Alrighty. So I want to begin with this chart that I, along with my producers, have created this chart. It's rough, I get it. Because Every attempt to chart ideology is always going to be a little bit simplistic. But as a heuristic shortcut, as a way of understanding the world, it's not bad. So here is a matrix that we have created. It shows on the Y axis a spectrum, high government control to low government control. And on the X axis, nationalism versus internationalism. So how do various ideologies in Europe and the United States stack up in this political matrix? Let's start in the bottom left hand corner. Low governmental control and internationalists. This would be like libertarians. Libertarians don't believe in borders, for example. They believe that the same rules apply pretty much everywhere. There is no US national interest per se. Historically. They believe in the free flow of capital and labor. But that also means that they are quite non interventionist because they don't believe that America has national interests. They're sort of global interests. So in that corner you might put like Murray Rothbard, you might put theoretically Adam Smith, kind of sorta, not really. Other people who might be termed libertarian would be like Ron Paul. Thomas Massie probably falls into this category. They tend to be isolationist because their basic idea is that governments are all bad. Governments themselves are bad. So they very often border on the anarchistic. They tend to border on the idea that government itself is the problem. So much so that you cannot have a collective government that fights on behalf of its people. That's a violation of universal liberalism. You'll see a lot of Cato Institute open immigration talk from libertarians for precisely this reason. The sovereignty of a country is a threat to the individual, according to many libertarians. Then take a look at that right hand lower corner. This would be low governmental control, but nationalistic. So people who believe that the government should not control aspects of your daily life, there should be checks and balances. They believe that you have personal individual autonomy and liberty, but also that America has a broad national interest that must be pursued, particularly in the international arena. These would be American conservatives, right? This would be Ronald Reagan or Marco Rubio or President Trump. Majority rule becomes mob rule unless there is a set of ground rules protecting the individual one's right to life. So when President Trump talks about America first, he doesn't mean America first like the old isolationist Y America first. He believes America first as in America's interests come first, meaning he is a nationalist. Nationalism means that you believe that your country's interests do come first. And obviously President Trump believes that. Now, the reason the US conservatives are a little bit higher up on control than libertarians is libertarians don't want any government control at any level of government. U.S. conservatives will often delegate level of control down to other areas of government, meaning that there should be some rules at your local or city level or at your state level, and then there are fewer rules as you get up the chain toward the federal level. The idea is that social institutions very often do require a bulwark of legal support. Regulating porn, regulating drug distribution, regulating prostitution. When you're younger, you can survive on four hours of sleep, caffeine, and a frozen pizza, and somehow you're still mostly fine. But at a certain point, that stops working. Honestly, this time of year makes sleep even harder for a lot of people. 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According to Helix, a study they ran found 82% of participants saw an increase in deep sleep after switching to that Helix mattress. The mattress ships directly to your door. There's a 120 night sleep trial. It comes with a limited lifetime warranty. Head on over to helixleep.com ben for 27% off site wide. That's helixleep.com ben for27% off site wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com Ben now again, putting political figures in any of these categories clearly is is sometimes difficult because, for example, President Trump tends to be closer to European conservatives when it comes to government control of the economy. When people say that Trump isn't a typical conservative, that's true. There are a lot of areas in which he is heterodox. Obviously he, he, for example, is very big on protection of entitlement programs. That was not traditionally a conservative principle. There are some conservatives who have been pro tariffs, some who are Anti tariffs. But overall speaking, he is best associated with US conservatives like Ronald Reagan. He's closer to Reagan than he is to say, Marine Le Pen. If I were to be categorized on this chart, I'd be in the U.S. conservative category. I might be even slightly less government controlled than US Conservatives on this sort of chart. Highly nationalistic, lower even than Reagan or Rubio or Trump in terms of government control. Then we move into the upper right hand box, very nationalistic, with high levels of governmental control. So European conservatives have higher than average levels of government control. So these would include people like say Viktor Orban or Alice Vidal of the AFD or Marine Le Pen in France. So their economic programs are highly involved in lots of regulation, lots of subsidies, lots of payoffs, big government and social welfare states. And also pretty nationalistic, meaning closed borders, respect Brexit, get Brexit done. And I commend this statement to the House. Maybe there are national interests abroad that have to be pursued. So some things that you might be familiar with from the news, for example, Hungarian family policy, the idea of the government subsidizing particular people in order to have more kids, or subsidizing social institutions at a very, very high level. Or European restrictionism or immigration restrictionism from Marine Le Pen over in France or Tommy Robinson's movement over in the UK to bar immigration. There are some differences obviously within Europe. Hungarian conservatives are far more socially conservative than say, conservatives in the UK or even in France. Right. So the European conservatives are in that box. And then if you move all the way up, all the way up to the right and you get to Hitler and Mussolini like the actual fascists. So actual fascists believe in very, very high levels of governmental control, extraordinary regulation, high levels of government control, and also high levels of nationalism. So national interests predominate and sometimes that means imperialism abroad, like Hitler and Mussolini. If you look at this chart, calling Trump literally Hitler makes no sense because again, he is very nationalistic and obviously Hitler, Mussolini, very nationalistic as well. But in terms of government control, totally different. And again, the idea for Hitler and Mussolini was that their nationalism also translated over into invasion and annexation of a wide variety of countries that were supposed to live under Italian or German rule and cleansing of entire populations that didn't meet with the homogenous requirements of the dictator. Okay, now we move into the upper left hand side and you see American style liberals, American style liberals are for again, high levels of government involvement, significantly higher than libertarians or US Conservatives. And also they're more internationalist in their approach. They don't believe in closed borders. They don't believe in American national interests. They think that there ought to be a sort of global community of interest. So obviously you've seen Democrats become ever more interventionist in terms of government control. You had Barack Obama claiming that he just wanted to slightly remake healthcare with Obamacare. And then you saw Joe Biden moving ever closer toward Bernie Sanders style healthcare. AOC obviously wants full scale nationalization of the health care system. You see this with regard to taxation. If you go all the way back to the 1990s. Bill Clinton, who was a US liberal, wanted higher taxes, but he also lowered the capital gains tax. Barack Obama wanted higher taxes. Biden wanted even higher taxes than that. AOC wants as high taxes as possible. Higher levels of government control for the Democratic Party is a one way ratchet, it never moves the other way. And when you look at all of these Democrat leaders, they have embraced internationalism over nationalism, meaning the ideas and principles and priorities of other countries ought to supplant those of the United States. The idea is that America bears a sort of peculiar guilt for what it has done on the world stage. And therefore it is our job to alleviate that guilt either through surrender, like Joe Biden in Afghanistan, or like leading from behind like Barack Obama in the Middle east, or like global redistributionism, which is what AOC would like. European liberals are even more up and to the left. There are even more internationalists. Emmanuel Macron, Gier, Starmer. These would be people who believe in very, very high levels of government spending, very high levels of government regulation, enormous government involvement in every area of life, and also high levels of internationalism. The idea that Britain doesn't have a national interest, it has international interests. European liberals are like Democrats, except even more so. So European liberals tend to full scale embrace, quote, unquote, democratic socialism. At least Joe Biden would pay occasional lip service to capitalism. You don't see the same thing very much from say, Keir Starmer in the uk and the heavy regulatory state in Europe is far more regulatory even than places like California or New York, like way, way, way more burdensome in terms of taxation, in terms of regulation. Very difficult to start a business in these places. And if you move all the way up to the left, you end up with people like Mao or Stalin or Karl Marx. People who believe in total levels of government control, nationalization of industry, people who believe that government should control everything up to and including your personal life, and also are very. Internationalists believe that the entire globe should be ruled by a universal philosophy. Known as Marxism. Zoram Hamdani would be up in the Marxist category. So you might think that it's totally crazy to group Zoramdani with Stalin or Mao, because obviously he's not a genocidal dictator. That is not because of his principles. That is because of his position. He's the mayor of New York, so he can't exactly open internment camps. But in terms of the policies that he has espoused, the idea that the rich bear some sort of peculiar guilt for the very fact of being rich, the idea that fairness is to be had in total government control, that government should be involved in every single area of your life, that particular groups that he is associated with ought to be elevated at the expense of other groups and his endorsement of political violence, depending on who is perpetrating it. Mamdani in control of a country, in control of a full system. His ideology looks a lot closer to Mao and Stalin than it does even to, say, Joe Biden. Okay, now, when you map this on to a horseshoe, you can see this kind of goes into a sort of horseshoe here. What you see is that in many ways, American conservatives lie somewhere between libertarians on the one hand and European conservatives on the other. You see that American liberals lie between libertarians on the one hand on social issues and European liberals on the other. And you see that at the edges, the Marxists and the fascists end up in very similar territory. The reason that the Marxists and the fascists are becoming ever closer and is because the area in which they disagree was never high governmental control, because they are both in favor of extremely high levels of government control. And what they mainly argue about is whether their program ought to be focused on nationality or whether it ought to be focused on a sort of a global philosophy. So again, the conflict between Hitler and Stalin was a conflict between nationalism and internationalism, particularism, German particularism versus a sort of global ideology. And Hitler identified that global ideology with Jewishness. He said that Marxism was inherently Jewish, which is idiotic, considering that Judaism has its entire own form of worldview. He wrote, slowly, fear and the Marxist weapon of Jewry descend like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent people. And again, Hitler routinely spoke of why his socialism was national in orientation. Quote, national and social are two identical conceptions. It was only the Jew who succeeded through falsifying the social idea and turning it into Marxism. And not only in divorcing the social idea from the national, but in actually representing them is utterly contradictory. But what you are seeing increasingly is that the fascistic right. The woke right is moving toward internationalism, to Third Worldism. So Hitler and Mussolini were very much in favor of an imperialism on behalf of their country. That is not the case for the woke right. The woke right would like America to give up global power in favor of Russia and China. So you're actually seeing that far right corner move closer to the center. And so that is meeting the Marxists in the middle. So if you want to export this to sort of an American context, where do people map on? Well, Hasan Piker would fall into the Marxist category. He is openly in favor of pretty much total government control and he is a total internationalist. He does not believe in American national interests. Modern day American fascists. That would presumably be somebody like a Nick Fuentes who calls for very, very high levels of government control and also believes in a sort of national American interest which he believes to be isolationist. Now again, one difference between sort of the modern fascists in America and the old style fascists in Europe is that the old style fascists in Europe were pursuing colonial and imperialistic ends. Many of the fascists in America today suggest that the best thing would be for America to withdraw from the world. So the Democratic Party is moving very, very quickly toward that Marxist corner. The right has basically excised the fascists and those fascists are now pretty much openly identifying as members of the left. This is why Nick Fuentes says he's gonna vote Democrat in the next election cycle. So radical Islamic fascism would end up somewhere in the nexus between fascists and Marxists, which is where they are. It's why they have openly sympathized with both of those groups. It's the reason why the Arab nations were largely siding with Hitler and also were quite warm toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Everything depends on the actual lens through which you are viewing politics. So if you are looking at that lens through the lens of nationalism, and this has been one of the things that the left has pushed for a long time. In the aftermath of World War II, the left pushed the idea that nationalism was the problem, that the problem with Hitler was not that he was a fascist who believed in top down government control, who believed in racial supremacy. That was not the problem. The problem is that he was a nationalist. Now that's stupid because, you know, who else were the nationalists during World War II? The Americans. Pretty nationalistic during World War II, pretty patriotic. You know who else was really, really, really nationalistic? The British. Very, very nationalistic during World War II. In fact, pretty much everybody in World War II was a nationalist. With that said, the left attempted to paint the world as a division between the nationalists and the internationalists. Why did they do that? Because they were trying to draw a hard line between Marxist tyranny and fascist tyranny. So they could lump conservatives, European and American in with the fascists and, and they could say that they were with the liberals. That was the game. And so that lie has persisted ever since that Marxists are actually broad hearted and kindhearted and open minded, kind of like libertarians, except for being completely tyrannical. And actually Hitler was on the side of Donald Trump. That's nonsense. It's total crap. As you can see from, again, this very rudimentary chart, American conservatives are a very, very long way away from, from fascists. And American liberals are actually significantly closer to the Marxists and the fascists in some ways than American conservatives. So when I say that the Nazis were quite close to the communists, I mean it. Okay? That is the reality. That's the historical reality. So obviously these sort of coming together of the new left, and here I've talked about Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens coming together with Chiank Uyghur and Hasan Piker. All of that is dangerous politically because that alliance between the fascists and the Marxists, between the woke right and the woke left, has been historically pretty dangerous. Now, it doesn't mean they're gonna win electorally, but it does mean that they could have a massive impact on the future of the country in a deeply negative way. Now, all of this is fundamentally anti American because again, Americans, we like our freedom. We like to be able to do what it is that we want to do. We like private property, we like the rule of law, we like checks and balances, generally speaking. But as a movement grows that dislikes all of those things, it is a danger to American princip.
Episode: Ben Shapiro Explains The Political Matrix
Date: May 22, 2026
Host: Ben Shapiro (The Daily Wire)
In this episode, Ben Shapiro unpacks common misconceptions about political ideologies, especially the conflation of fascism with conservatism. He lays out a two-axis “political matrix”—contrasting government control (high vs. low) and orientation (nationalist vs. internationalist)—to explain where different political movements and figures, both American and European, fall. Shapiro critiques the reductionist accusations often made against the right and provides a historical, ideological context to distinguish between libertarianism, conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and fascism.
Shapiro speaks in his characteristic fast-paced, pointed, and argumentative style, blending historical references, ideological analysis, and contemporary political commentary. He uses sarcasm and direct attribution to debunk popular left-wing talking points while positioning his own brand of conservatism squarely against both authoritarian leftism and nationalist authoritarianism.
This episode provides a detailed, ideological cartography for listeners interested in the nuances of political movements beyond superficial left-right binaries. Shapiro’s matrix encourages listeners to scrutinize the motives and histories behind political labels, warning about recurring alliances between the far left and far right, and urging a defense of classical American principles of freedom, private property, and limited government.