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The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2194 - Dave Portnoy, Shiloh Hendrix, and Cancel Culture
00:50:08
A radical student posts a “F*** the Jews” sign, and Dave Portnoy responds; war looms between India and Pakistan; and President Trump declares a ceasefire with the Houthis. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2194 - - - Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings - - - DailyWire+: Join us at https://dailywire.com/subscribe and become a part of the rebellion against the ridiculous. Normal is back. And this time, we’re keeping it. The hit podcast, Morning Wire, is now on Video! Watch Now and subscribe to their YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/42SxDJC Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/ben and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! Legacybox - Save 60% at https://Legacybox.com/SHAPIRO SimpliSafe - Visit https://SIMPLISAFE.com/SHAPIRO to claim 50% off a new system with a professional monitoring plan and get your first month free. ...
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- [00:00]
Ben Shapiro
Alrighty. Tons. Coming up on today's show, Dave Portnoy is featured in the biggest Internet story of the moment which raises questions about cancel culture and answerability for doing bad things. Plus we get to war looming between India and Pakistan. President Trump declaring a ceasefire with the Houthis in Yemen first. If you are tired of the endless media lies, it is time to join us. Daily Wire plus members get ad free access to the best conservative news and commentary. Plus access to our award winning investigative journalism that exposes the government corruption the mainstream media refuses to touch. You'll even get our premium entertainment library, films and documentaries that break the box office, shift the culture and say the stuff no one else will. The fight for our country is happening right now. Be a part of it@dailywire.com subscribe Alrighty folks, the big online story of the day, the story that has exploded across the interwebs is a controversy involving Dave Portnoy. Dave Portnoy is of course the founder and owner of Barstool Sports. He also owns and series of bars restaurants around the country that are labeled with barstool. And the reason that he's in the news today is because of a controversy that broke into the open when a person who is a student apparently at Temple University named Mo Kahn went to a Barstool bar and proceeded to order from the back room some sort of dish. And one of the things they do, I guess at these bars is they have a sort of letter board and you can ask the waiter or waitress to change the letters on the letterboards. You can say break up with him on the letterboard or you can say go eagles on the letterboard. Well, this guy asked for a very specific thing on the letterboard, F the Jews. And then he proceeded to post that video online. And here is what it looked like. So you can see there are a bunch of girls who are laughing, thinks, thinking it's hilarious as, as a waiter holds up a sign that says F the Jews celebration in the club. So that's always wonderful. That's just delightful. All these people seem like just delightful, transgressive, wonderful human beings. Okay. In any case, Dave Portnoy is the owner of Barstool Sansom Street. The bar put out a statement saying that it involved a customer whose actions were deplorable. And Portnoy said that two customers were involved. The bar blamed misguided employees who ignored the company's training and their zero tolerance policy for discrimination and hate. And again, private companies can have those sorts of policies. If you are an employee and you are asked to say the N word on a sign or screw whitey or whatever it is, and you say no. That is what you are supposed to do as an employee of Barstool. Well, the president of Temple University, John Fry, announced that a student believed to have been involved in the incident had been suspended. That would be the person who posted this in celebratory fashion. Well then apparently Portnoy reached out to this person whose name is Mokan. Originally he said he was very angry and it happened at his bar. He himself is Jewish. He was upset about it and he said that he was going to make it his life mission to ruin these people, like I'm coming for your throat. And then he backed off of that. He put out another statement saying that he wanted to reconsider his approach and instead he was going to send the people responsible for the sign on an all expenses paid towards Auschwitz. Which by the way, I think is actually quite the wrong approach. I actually don't think that the right approach for people who don't like Jews is to send them to a place where Jews were killed in the hope that this is somehow going to make them better human beings. I just don't think that is a great approach to education in this way. I think that basically throwing up the middle finger is, is the proper response and we'll get to how we ought to respond as a society to bad things said publicly, which is what this is, a bad thing said publicly. Okay, well, he offered to pay this. And apparently he then had a call with this person, Mokon. He said, let's try to turn a hideous incident into maybe a learning experience. Adding the offer was cliche and very unlike me. And apparently he then revoked the offer for Mokan. Why? Well, because Mokan then passed put up another video. So remember, this whole thing became public because this person put up the video himself. This is not somebody who was outed by a third party. This is somebody who was posting in celebratory fashion on his Instagram publicly a sign saying F the Jews and then putting up a video begging for money. So here he was begging for money saying now he, now he was the victim. So I guess that the logic here is you do something crappy, you publicly post it, you get called out on it, and then you ask for money, which doesn't seem like a wonderful thing to do. Here is, here's Mokon. Dave Portnoy owes me restitutions and an apology for everything that he has done and caused for me in these past few days. In an attempt to expose me, he. He exposed himself as almost a total fraud, going back on anything he stands for. Please, I'm imploring you, I'm asking you for help to pay for these attacks, to pay for any possible legal restitution, any relocation expenses, any educational expenses, and show the founders of Cancel Culture that their reign of tyranny is over. Okay, so this is the new game, obviously. Obviously. This is the new game. Right? And this follows hot on the heels of the Shiloh Hendricks story, which you talked about yesterday on the show. That was the woman who allegedly called a child the N word at a playground and then was caught on video basically doubling down on that. And that was posted by a third party. And then people came after her, and then people raised like $500,000 for her. And now, just to be clear, this person, Mo Khan, who. He never denies the allegation that he was the person who put up the sign saying F the Jews. In fact, he then went on the show of a person who was extraordinarily and publicly anti Semitic on X, where he. Where the host said that Portnoy is a filthy Jews and Mokan basically just of course, because Mokhan is a person who does not like Jews. Clearly this guy is not a good, good guy. He just utterly destroyed my life. No, he's not a good guy. He's a filthy Jewish. So that's, that's delightful. Sounds great. So Portnoy then responded and he said, well, Mokan is a liar and a piece of bleep. So here's Portnoy's response.
- [06:11]
Dave Portnoy
Mo Khan is the guy who went to the barstool bar in Philly and uploaded the the Jews sign to Instagram. All hell broke loose. Went super viral. Everyone's sending it to me. Temple suspended his ass basically before I was even involved. Because, hey, you uploaded it to your personal Instagram. What do you think was going to happen, you brain dead moron? Well, anyways, I was so mad. Everyone saw that I calmed down. I'm like, I'm going to try to make this teachable moment. This kid's crying, he's like, I'm not anti Semitic, blah, blah, blah. All this, even though there's past incidents that came to light. And then he does a 180, he's like, oh, I was a citizen journalist. I don't know who did it. I have nothing to do.
- [06:54]
Ben Shapiro
It's.
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Dave Portnoy
You say he's just a flat, flat liar, coward with no responsibility. But this was about being a Jew in America. Other Jews in The bar. I'm a Jew. My parents are a Jew. American Jews.
- [07:06]
Ben Shapiro
Jews.
- [07:06]
Dave Portnoy
That's what you said, you anti Semitic piece of. And I tried to show grace. I tried to. You put your name out there. I tried to actually. Now I feel dumb to make it right.
- [07:20]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so let's be clear about this. It's okay for black people to feel offended and correct for them to be offended if somebody calls them the N word. And it's okay for Jews to feel offended if people say F the Jews. And it's okay for white people to be offended if somebody says F Whitey. Right? All of these things are bad things to say. The fact that this even needs to be said is indicative of breakdown in the social fabric that is pretty catastrophic inside the United States. Portmanoy put out a letter where he said Mokan post video an F the Jews sign at the Barstool bar. Portnoy, the Jewish owner of Barstool sees the video. He's a bit upset. He calls Khan who takes responsibility. Portnoy offers Khan the chance to make things right by educating himself on the history of anti Semitism across the world. Khan accepts. Then days later, he changes his mind and decides he's a victim who now needs to be sent. Solana. While Mo's apology may win him at some made up awards nobody cares about at Harvard or Columbia, this unfortunately is the real world. A world where Mo Khan is an anti Semitic grifting piece of bleep who deserves an awful life. A world where hate has no place. A world where Portnoy is. Portnoy is a great man. Team Portnoy. So again, Portnoy is who Portnoy is. He is. He's a. A person who obviously is self aggrandizing and very grand on the world stage. All this kind of stuff. Okay, but there are some deeper points to be made here and it speaks to where we are as a culture. We'll get some more on this in a moment. First, free online services like Google actually charge you because they use your personal data. They track your behavior. They sell that information to advertisers. When something's free, you're not the customer. You are the product being sold. Your digital self is traded to unknown entities who might want to sell you product, influence your political views. 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I partnered with ExpressVPN because because I would love for all my viewers to have access to important privacy protection. That's why right now you get an extra four months free when you go to expressvpn.com Ben that's E-P-R-E-S-V-PEN.com Ben get an extra four months totally free. Also, if you're unable to watch old family videos anymore because you have all of your old family videos on like video cassette tape and nobody has a VCR or everything's on old film reels or something, you're going to love my friends over at Legacy Box. Legacy Box offers a comprehensive, cost effective, thoughtfully designed approach to memory preservation. And they make it incredibly simple. Just pack up your outdated tapes, films and photos, mail them in. Their professional team handles the rest right here in the United States. Everything comes back digitized to the cloud so you can view and share your memories from any device anywhere. It's so effortless, you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. Plus, with Mother's Day just around the corner, this makes for a perfect present the entire family will in fact enjoy. So. So I've done this for my parents and for my in laws. The videos that have been uncovered and that we can now watch and access. It's amazing. I mean, it's connecting with your own family past and you can do it anytime with Legacy box. Join over 1.5 million families that have trusted Legacy Box with their memories. Go to legacybox.com Shapiro save 60% during their best ever Mother's Day sale. Legacybox.com Shapiro again, they've got that Mother's Day sale. It's their best ever. Use legacybox.com Shapiro and save 60%. So let's talk about cancel culture for a second. There are three perspectives on Cancel culture. Okay, so I want to define cancel culture here, because I think people are equating many different things that are not actually cancel culture. Illegal. If you. If you cancel somebody or if you criticize somebody, for example, that is not a legal ban on their behavior, and that is social ostracization. So let's talk about social ostracization or sanction for behavior or opinion. Not legal sanction, not banning people, not trying to jail people, just people not wanting to hang out with you. Or it can be a whole range of activity. Cancellation can range from people criticizing you, theoretically, to people wanting to not hang out with you, to people firing you, to people deciding no one can hire you. It's a whole range of activity. So there are basically three generalized perspectives on cancel culture. One, any violation of any taboo ought to be treated with the harshest possible measure of cancellation. That's perspective number one, which is like, to cancel everyone perspective, and use, like, the harshest, most brutal methods of, quote, unquote, ruining people's lives for any level of rhetorical transgression. Perspective number two is that no one should ever be canceled for any reason. So no criticism, no social ostracization, no calling out nothing that you can say whatever you want, and there will be no consequences socially, even attendant on you saying those things. And then there's perspective number three, which is, I think, the sort of more moderate, complex, and true perspective, which is some behaviors or opinions are actually disgusting and do in the real world receive social sanction and other behavior should not. And the level of forgiveness and social sanction ought to vary, which is complex. Right. Because you might be talking about, do you want to have dinner with somebody? Or you might be talking about, should somebody be able to, quote, unquote, hold a job, which is much, much harsher, or he might be talking about, do you want somebody in your school or not. Right. These are all different methods of dealing with behavior that people find unacceptable in the social world. So the problem with the first perspective that all violations of all taboos ought to receive the social, the social death penalty, is that it is censorious. It prevents useful conversations from happening. It's unforgiving. It's uncharitable. So we ended up for probably 20 years in this country with people being canceled, meaning socially ostracized, losing jobs, losing career opportunities, being destroyed for correct opinions like men are not women, or for saying a word in Mandarin that sort of sounds like the N word. Social media mobs were activated in order to destroy people who violated literally any taboo. The lines were bright, and if you crossed the line, you were destroyed. And this led to a reactionary right, which then moved to perspective. Number two, cancellation should never happen. There shouldn't even be criticism. Social sanction, even criticism is never ever the answer. In fact, it's the problem. Now, the problem with this perspective is that if there is never any social sanction or criticism or ostracization for bad behavior or terrible opinion, that's just called moral relativism, in which the ugliest opinions and expressions are supposed to be given equal credibility with decent or even controversial but useful opinions. So the real answer in a normal society would be, number three, sometimes people deserve the social consequences for what they do. Not always, but sometimes. And the social consequences can vary. They aren't irrevocable. In certain circumstances, forgiveness could be possible. So just for example, in the normal world, you don't have a duty as a business owner to hire or have over to dinner somebody who shouts the N word at children or who says that white people are colonizers and evil. But also in the real world, it would be a bad thing to do to post that person's address online so people can then go to their house and harass them. In the real world, you have every right to avoid buying a Bud Light because they claim that men can be women. And you also have every right to decide you don't want to engage with a company that says, for example, that the police are systemically racist. You also shouldn't go to the home of the CEO and threaten to burn down his house. Now, we all used to know this. In your daily life, we know this, right? If there's some kooky guy, some guy who's kind of a yucky guy, who everyone knows sits around like marinating about the Jews or the whites or the blacks or whatever, we all just kind of avoid that guy. And that's not a bad thing. That's okay. The sort of emergence, informal standards of the social fabric used to work just fine because most issues remained personal. So for example, in the pre social media era, if Shiloh Hendricks existed in that era, before cell phones, she might have said something awful to a kid and everybody in the neighborhood would have known that she was being crazy and everybody would have basically stayed away. And the same thing would have happened with this Mokon character. He'd have done something ugly and nasty at a restaurant. The employees probably would have lost their jobs for involving themselves, and everybody just kind of would have stayed away from that dude. Social media has made pretty Much everything worse, because now there's a mob waiting to form. Always. Basically, that's all social media is. It is a mob waiting to form around an issue. Just like kind of white blood cells in your immune system waiting for something to attack. Now mobs form to destroy people. And so we are all forced to decide on the spot whether we think a person is bad or good, hero or villain, deserving of shame or support, what level of shame, what level of support. But the biggest thing is that in this country, because we have lost the boundaries of what is sort of informal, acceptable debate, not legal bans. Again, what is sort of the acceptable range of argumentation. The Overton Window, as it's called. We no longer even agree on the vague outlines of an Overton Window. We're descending into a world of either total cancellation for everyone with whom we disagree or total support for bad behavior in order to fight total cancellation. And the thing is that these two perspectives are mutually reinforcing. The moral relativism of there should be no social consequences or criticism for anything leads people who don't like the stuff that's now being said to call for more social consequences, which leads to more reactionary moral relativism, which leads to more social consequences, and back and forth until the end of time. I said Monday on the program that people should stop giving money to bad people, because I think people should stop giving money to bad people. But there is another argument, and it's a pragmatic argument, the counter argument. It's pragmatic, sure, it's unpleasant that we have to give money to people like, say, Shiloh Hendricks, who say and do bad things. But if we don't, the social media mob will have incentive to continue targeting people in evil and nasty ways and even targeting people who aren't even doing bad things, like Justine Sacco or something. Sort of a bad joke. To stop cancel culture, we need to un. Cancel not just the people who don't deserve cancellation, but even the worst offenders. So my friend Matt Walsh on Monday made this argument. It's an interesting, I think, fascinating and colorable argument. Sometimes you do have to fight fire with fire. It's a pragmatic argument, right, that if you want to get rid of cancellation of people who shouldn't be canceled, then you have to basically stop the social media mob. The problem is, I don't think that this tactic is going to work pragmatically. In fact, I think it's going to fail. It's one thing to declare a sort of mutually assured destruction in a case where the parties involved are responsive and responsible. So, for example, I have argued in favor of a sort of mutually assured destruction to stop secondary corporate boycott tactics that the left enjoyed for decades. So I, along with Matt, agree that sometimes we ought to boycott Bud Light because that teaches corporations to stop pandering to the woke, even if, generally speaking, we don't like boycotts because. But that only works for one reason. Corporations are responsive to the market. They are responsible to their shareholders. You know who's not responsive or responsible? Social media mobs, by definition. So the idea that if you make a person who does a bad thing rich, then the even worse people targeting her will stop targeting her. That's not going to happen on an actual practical level. What actually will happen is that each side is going to continue to fund and support its own worst offenders, thus leading to even further general degradation of the social fabric. Social media mobs will be so outraged by the funding of the canceled person that then they will seek to support even worse people on their own side. Meanwhile, criticism of bad behavior and speech, which, again, that is sort of a normal part of a moral life. It says in the Bible that you're not supposed to put a stumbling block before a blind person. What that means is that you are not supposed to let people go without warning if they are engaging in bad behavior and if they're engaging in evil opinions, because there are in fact opinions that are quite evil. If you believe in the mass murder of entire populations, for example, that's kind of an evil opinion criticism of that if you get rid of it. If you say that that sort of criticism is cancellation, that it's a sort of puritanical thought crime. This leads to a bizarre logic where it is actually worse to criticize a Nazi than to actually be a Nazi, or where it is worse to actually criticize the woke insanity than to be a woke insane person. Mobs in general are not dissuaded by the failure of their cause. In fact, they're very often emboldened by it. The only thing that actually will stop a mob is the judicious application of countermeasures. You rob them of their initiative. So, for example, the equal application of law. If somebody is being doxed, physically threatened, those people should be tracked down by law enforcement and go to jail because they're violating the law. We should support people whose social sanction, whose cancellation far outweighs the supposed social crime. We should support them not as sort of a moral matter because what they said is great, but because if the. If the punishment outweighs the crime. If it's way too extreme for the crime, that is a bad thing for the system. We should totally oppose obviously inappropriate cancellation. When people are canceled for dumb reasons, we should, that should be complete support and we should allow forgiveness where appropriate. People should in fact ask for forgiveness and we should give it to them. One of the reasons forgiveness has gone out of style is because people feel like they're going to be dunked on the moment that they actually ask for forgiveness by the social media mob. But the bottom line is this, if we are going to share a society together, a social fabric does require a more nuanced view of how we treat these sorts of things that we don't like. And that nuanced view can't just be cancel everyone or cancel no one. And cancellation itself has to be actually really defined. What does it mean? Because if we now define cancellation as just being criticized by somebody, you've actually shut down free speech. You haven't exacerbated or made better free speech. These are things we have to think through as a society. Social media has made this necessary and as our common moral standards degrade, the society is going to continue to fall apart through a sort of reactionary cycling between the cancel everyone and cancel no one sides of this particular argument. 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Meanwhile, in world news that is slightly more important, it appears that India and Pakistan may be on the brink of war. These are both nuclear armed powers. This should be a reminder, by the way, that a world in which many, many countries are nuclear is a supremely risky world. So just to illustrate how dangerous the world could become, let's talk for a moment about who has nuclear weapons and who is a nuclear country, meaning they have nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons, because the threshold for developing nuclear weapons is much higher than for just developing civilian nuclear energy. So right now, according to our friends over at Perplexity and sponsors over at Perplexity, there are nine countries that have nuclear weapons. Russia, the United States, China, France, the uk, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Okay, so there are also a bunch of countries that host foreign nuclear weapons. That includes Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, and Belarus. Belarus has been hosting Russian nuclear weapons since 2023. Okay, now imagine that all those countries decided that they were going to develop nuclear weapons of their own so Turkey right now is hosting nuclear weapons that are essentially US Sponsored. But imagine there are a bunch of countries right now that have civilian nuclear programs, not nuclear weapons, and then they decide to go nuclear. There are a bunch of countries that are planning civilian nuclear energy like Jordan, Egypt, Poland, Kazakhstan, and several others in Africa, Asia and South America. Do we think that this would be a good thing? Do we think that the world would become a safer place because of massive nuclear proliferation? Well, the reality is that in the absence of the sort of American global overwatch, in the absence of a feeling of security by America's allies and with the growth of America's enemies, more and more countries are going to feel that the guarantee of their security is nuclear armament. If you're enjoying having to care about India and Pakistan right now, let me recommend that you allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. Seriously, if India and Pakistan were just having like a little border dispute and firing at each other right now, people across the world would not be watching this conflict. They are watching this conflict because both of these countries are nuclear armed. And people are concerned that if this were to escalate, you would end up with nuclear war. And in that nuclear war, that could drag in China, which is a border country, and it could theoretically drag in other surrounding powers and possibly even the United States if this thing were to escalate. This is why people care about things like global thermonuclear war. Well, India yesterday launched military strikes on targets in Pakistan, both countries said. On Wednesday, Pakistan claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets, an escalation that has pushed the two nations to the brink of wider conflict. According to cnn, India's missile strikes were targeting terrorist infrastructure, they said across nine sites in Pakistan's densely populated Punjab Province and Pakistan administered Kashmir. That came in response to a massive terror assault by terrorists in Indian administered Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists. Pakistan, of course, does operate in cahoots with terrorist groups. Pakistan is extraordinarily radical. This is why they were housing, for example, Osama bin Laden for years in Pakistan. Pakistan said at least 26 people were killed in Wednesday's strikes. The country's Prime Minister, Shabazz Sharif, described the strikes as an act of war. Islamabad has now vowed to retaliate. Now, the United States and China are sort of the powers sponsoring each side. So the United States does have a relationship with Pakistan because supposedly Pakistan helps us with counterterrorism. Let's just say that that support is incredibly intermittent. And the United States also supports India, which is a democratic ally of the United States and is an incredibly important country geopolitically. Very fast increasing economy, very fast increasing population. A border country again with China. If you wish to build a sort of geopolitical wall against Chinese interventionism, then India is a key part of that. Both sides, China and the United States, are urging weapons down. They're saying that, that they don't want this escalating any further. They're trying to encourage India to say that they've done enough at this point, response to the terror attack. And China is trying to encourage Pakistan to step down. Again, I don't think this escalates much from here because I don't think that either country has an incentive to drive a vastly larger war in which the end could actually be mutual nuclear destruction. Both India and Pakistan claim all of Kashmir, but the truth is that it's kind of divvied up. The last clash in the region happened in 2019. Something similar happened. A suicide bomber killed 40 Indian paramilitary police officers in Kashmir in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. And then the attacker claimed that he was a member of an Islamic militant group in Pakistan. Nice people. India then retaliated with airstrikes and Pakistani forces shot down a warplane, captured an Indian pilot, and then a negotiated release happened. This will probably be something similar. So again, the panic that this is going to leap into nuclear war is likely unwarranted. With that said, the reason everybody is worried about this sort of stuff is that a larger nuclear armed world is incredibly dangerous because everything gets put on the brink of disaster immediately. It is the reason why, for example, the war in Ukraine has lasted so long. If Russia were not armed with nuclear weapons, then presumably Western support for Ukraine would have been significantly larger and significantly more powerful. And there would have been a possibility of Ukraine literally pushing Russia out of their country. But that couldn't happen because of the possibility that Putin might actually unleash nuclear weapons were he to be pushed out of Donbass and Crimea. And so that war has just sort of continued for years on end. And geopolitics requires, it requires some sort of stability. The United States has been the guarantor of stability since World War II. As the United States recedes from the world scene, the world is going to become significantly less stable. And that chaotic and unstable world is going to lead to problems for the United States because the world is extraordinarily interconnected. Our economies are, are interconnected at this point. This is why you see sort of a drive from the Buchananite wing of the, of the Republican Party to move simultaneously toward foreign policy isolationism and economic autarky. Now, the consequences of that are lower living standards in the United States. Everything is more expensive. Jobs are, are fewer in number. Autarky in the modern economy is a great way to reduce your footprint and also to reduce your living standards. But as the world becomes more multipolar, as the United States withdraws from its hegemony since World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the globe is going to get more unstable, not less. Speaking of which, yesterday President Trump declared that there was a truce with the Houthis. Now, the Houthis, again, is a terrorist group in Yemen. They've been holding up shipping in the Red Sea and firing in a wide variety of ships in the Red Sea, basically destroying the that trade route. So everybody now has to go around the Horn of Africa in order to ship things from east to West. Well, the United States has been bombing the Houthis. And the Houthis apparently came back to the United States and said, we'll stop bombing American ships. We'll stop going after American ships. In fact, the Houthis said they'll stop going after everything except Israeli ships. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that the Houthis have attacked a number of ships that they claim are Israeli that are not actually Israeli. The other problem with that is that the Houthis should not be firing at anybody in the Red Sea, because if the idea is they get to pick off boats one by one and there's no collective response, well, they're going to start picking off more and more boats from. From more and more enemies. But President Trump. And again, there's a broader geopolitical context to this. What this really appears to be is a setup for a bad nuclear deal cut by the Trump administration. Now, President Trump has been saying that the Obama Iran deal is the worst deal in history. He's been saying that since 2015. And President Trump has also said steadfastly and repeatedly that Iran cannot be allowed nuclearization. They have to be completely denuclearized. Let's be clear what is happening with the Houthis. Yes, the strikes mattered on the Houthis by the United States and by the Israelis. By the way, yesterday, Israel basically blew up the Sana'a airport. But not just that. What this really is is a predicate. And the Middle east is reading this way, reading it as a predicate to a United States deal with Iran that will essentially allow an Obama 2.0 deal, a path toward nuclearization, opening up of the Iranian economy that will allow funding of terrorism and ballistic missiles. The Houthis are proxy group for the Iranian government. And this is being read this way by the entire Middle East. You can look at the cartoons that are coming out in the newspapers, from Iran to Qatar to Saudi Arabia. This is exactly how it's being read. So President Trump yesterday, he explained that the Houthis have said that they are not going to bomb our ships, which, of course, is a good thing. And again, the suggestion here is not that the United States needs to, quote, unquote, keep bombing the Houthis on behalf of Israel or something like that. We don't. The Israelis, it turns out, have extraordinary firepower and have been bombing the Houthis themselves. However, we have to be clear as to what Iran is doing here. Again, I'm not saying that Trump is doing the wrong thing here. What I'm saying is that Iran is attempting to play him, and so the Trump administration must be very careful as to what they are doing. Here's President Trump yesterday. Can you tell us a bit more about the deal that you've reached with the Houthis?
- [32:33]
Donald Trump
Not a deal. They've said, please don't bomb us anymore and we're not going to attack your ships.
- [32:39]
Ben Shapiro
And where did you hear about that?
- [32:40]
Donald Trump
It doesn't matter where I hear. The very good source I get. Very, very good source. Would you say, Marco? I would say pretty good, right, J.D. a very good source.
- [32:51]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so Stephen Miller, who of course is a. Is a top advisor to President Trump, senior advisor. He says the Houthis will no longer be firing on US Ships. Now, the question is whether that means US Ships, all ships, or what this means. Just today, President Trump announced that the Houthis have said that they will not shoot at American ships. They will not shoot at American military as a result of the bombardment campaign that President Trump authorized and led, a major victory for U.S. foreign policy. Okay, so if that's the extent of it, then sure. Great. You know, the fact that the Houthis will stop firing on shipping in the Red Sea is great. Although, again, if they're firing on ships that they consider, quote, unquote, Israelis, they have fired on a bunch of ships that are not Israeli in orientation while claiming that they are, in fact, Israeli. However, this is part of a broader gambit by Iran. Let's be very clear what is happening now. It is not that the United States bombed the Houthis into submission, and so the Houthis are stopping their activity. What the Houthis are attempting to do at the behest of Iran is basically carve off the United States from Israel in the Iranian nuclear negotiations. That is the goal. According to a report from the New York Times, two Iranian officials said that Iran had persuaded the Houthis to stop their attacks on US Assets as part of the Omani mediation efforts. CNN cited people familiar with the matter as saying that Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his supposed negotiator extraordinaire, who has yet to negotiate a good deal, had worked with the Omanis over the past week to broker the US Houthi ceasefire. The sources said the ceasefire was also meant to help build momentum in the Iran nuclear talks where Fishkov is leading. So, again, the goal here for Iran is to basically say, okay, the Houthis will stop attacking US Ships in the Red Sea, and in return, you guys cut a bad Iran nuclear deal and wash your hands of the whole region. That is the goal. Now, of course, Iran is not going to stop developing nuclear weapons, particularly if the Trump administration cuts a bad deal. And what is the predictable result of all that going to be? The predictable result is going to be something very much like what just happened in Yemen, meaning the Israelis took it upon themselves to destroy the entire airport in Sanaa. So if you want Israel bombing Iran, actually the best way to ensure that Israel is going to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities is to cut a bad Obama nuclear deal, because Israel will then have no choice but to go ahead and do that. So if what you're seeking to avoid is escalation, then stronger peace through strength, stronger strangling of the Iranian economy, stronger demands upon Iran would be the way to actually do that. It's not possible to see the Houthi deal outside of the context of the broader Iranian issue. I mean, President Trump said that back in March. He literally put out a statement in March saying that the Houthis are just an Iranian proxy state. So the reason, again, that the Houthis are doing this is to try and suggest that if Iran basically goes after Israel on its own, that the United States will sort of disappear, that it won't matter at all to the United States. And they're hoping the United States will buy into that. Of course, that's not actually true. Factually. If Iran were to gain a nuclear weapon, they wouldn't just be threatening Israel, they would also be threatening, presumably, the uae, they'd be threatening Saudi Arabia. They'd be threatening other areas in the Middle east, ranging from parts of Syria, presumably, to Iraq, to. To places like Azerbaijan, an Iranian nuclear weapon creates geopolitical instability for sure. And so if this is an attempt to basically say to the Trump administration, get an easy win with a, with a headline, and then we get to go nuclear. And after all, we don't care about you, we just care about the Israelis. First of all, the Iranians are good at this. They know the game that they are playing. And if the United States shows that it is uninterested in the region, the Iranians are not going to stop being interested in the region. And that will lead to more conflict. Again, when the United States recedes from the world scene. It is not that what fills the gap is something better and more peaceful and more wonderful. What fills the gap is usually something significantly worse, significantly more chaotic. And as I said before with regards to India and Pakistan, if the world is a more chaotic place, that has an impact on the United States economically, it has an impact on the United States in terms of security. Now, again, that is not a call for full scale American war in the Middle East. No one is calling for that. I think there's a strong case to be made that Iran being absolutely dishonorable a a country that is led by Islamic maniacs. I mean, that really is what the country is. It's an Islamic dictatorship, a revolutionary dictatorship, that they are untrustworthy in the extreme when it comes to foreign policy. They've killed thousands of American soldiers on Iraqi soil and all the rest. It seems to me that there's a strong case, not an impregnable case, but a strong case to be made, that a single B2 sortie involving the United States to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities would greatly reset the region. But at the very least, the United States should not be engaging in some sort of SOP to Iran that titularly allows us to escape responsibility for things going on in the Middle east while dramatically increasing the possibilities of chaos in the Middle east, which could be what is happening. President Trump, by the way, teased that he has a very big announcement ahead of his Middle east trip. It is unclear exactly what this means. Of course, it could just be a bitcoin announcement. He's done that before, but we don't actually know at this point.
- [37:54]
Donald Trump
We're going to UAE and Qatar, and that'll be, I guess, Monday night. Some of you are coming with us. I think before then we're going to have a very, very big announcement to make, like as big as it gets. And I won't tell you on what, but it's going to, and it's Very positive. I'd also, I'd tell you if it was negative or positive. I can't keep that out. It is really, really positive. And that announcement will be made either Thursday or Friday or Monday before we leave. But it'll be one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject. Very important subject.
- [38:34]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so, you know, again, President Trump pitches like nobody else. So we are all on the edge of our seats about that. Meanwhile, by the way, the again, unstable world that is being created as America basically recedes and tries to move into a more multipolar age that's having impact on Eastern Europe as well. Apparently, Poland is now feeling some anxiety because of course, they're bordering Ukraine. If the idea is that the United States is sort of withdrawing from the Ukraine war, which appears to be quasi happening kind of happening, not really clear what's happening. Poland is getting nervous as well. The possibility of serious nuclear development in pretty much every country that borders with a Russia or a China or a Pakistan or an Iran is very, very real. And a universal nuclear weapon world is going to be a very, very dangerous place. We have some more on this in a moment. First, you know, every time I go shooting, I think to myself, this is great. Could probably be a little better. Guess what? It can. Let me tell you how to make shooting more fun, safer, just overall cooler. If you've never used a suppressor before, you're missing out. Trust me, once you shoot suppressed, you're not gonna wanna shoot unsuppressed again. That's where my friends at Silencer Shop come in. They don't just sell silencers. They specialize in making sure your shooting experience is awesome. The experts at Silencer Shop will help you find the perfect silencer so you can enjoy your guns even more. And now is the perfect time to get one. Why not let your tax return work for you this year? Invest in a suppressor and completely upgrade your shooting experience. The best part, Silencer Shop makes the entire process ridiculously simple. They're the number one source for suppressors in America with the largest selection of top brands. Silencer Shop helps handle all of the paperwork so you actually don't have to. With their nationwide dealer network and easy to use kiosk system, you can get started in minutes and have your suppressor faster than ever. So don't wait. Visit silencershop.com Shapiro turn your tax return into the ultimate shooting upgrade. That's silencershop.com Shapiro Again silencer shop.com Shapiro that's silencershop.com Shapiro Meanwhile, the markets are actually on the rise thanks to the fact that President Trump now seems to be looking for an off ramp in his trade talks with the Chinese. Now again, there is a good way to box in China when it comes to trade. Bill Ackman, the investor, put out a statement yesterday that I think is totally correct. He said, what if President Trump were to announce that China tariffs would immediately be reduced to 20% and then escalate thereafter by 0.5% per month for the next 12 months and then by 1% per month for the next 12 Months and 1.5% per month for the Next 12 Months and so on, which would mean like a 6% increase for a year. So by end of year, one year at 26% and then 12% the year after that. So after that you're now at 38%. This approach, he says, would incentivize companies to relocate their supply chains from China while enabling them to continue to operate profitably during the transition. China would be incentivized to make a good deal with President Trump and as promptly as practicable, while the risk of a dramatic shock to the US and global economies would be greatly reduced, if not eliminated. And this is right. He's totally right about this. As I've said many times on the show, at this point, doing a trade war with China is not a bad idea if you do the preconditional work. The preconditional work involves better trade deals with everybody else on earth that is not China and with whom you can ally. To box China in part two would be to gradually escalate the tariffs to give people time to reshore their manufacturing from China. Part three would be to find other supply lines for key national security based industries like rare earth metals, for example. And four would be to rapidly build up the United States naval capacity so that if China, feeling in a box, tried to go for Taiwan, the United States could dissuade them. Those are all preconditions to really going after China on the trade route. And this is exactly what Ackman is saying. President Trump yesterday said that China wants a deal.
- [42:10]
Donald Trump
China wants to very much wants to make a deal. They all do. But yeah, I would say that every country wants to make a deal and not the ones they had in the past where we were like, look, we were being ripped off by every country practically without exception in the entire world. And those days are over.
- [42:32]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so again, that's fine. The question is, what are the deals going to look like? So President Trump says that he could be announcing 50 or 100 deals. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant has said that those deals, they take a long time to negotiate. By the way, a typical trade deal might take a year to negotiate. You'll probably have some term sheets, basically one or two page rough outline that will allow the United States to at least temporarily lower tariffs as the rest of the negotiation goes on. Here's President Trump talking about announcing further trade deals.
- [43:00]
Donald Trump
Well, I can announce all of them now. I could announce 50 to 100 deals right now because you know, the shopkeeper and I keep the store and you know, I know what countries are looking for and I know what we're looking for and I can just set those terms and they can go shopping or they don't have to go shopping because everybody wants to shop here. This is like a beautiful store.
- [43:23]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so. And we'll see what those trade deals look like. Scott Bessant, the Treasury secretary, again, simple rule for the Trump administration. When Secretary Bessant talks, markets are quieted. When Howard Lutnick or Peter Navarro talk, markets freak out. There's a good reason for this. Here's the Treasury Secretary.
- [43:40]
Scott Bessant
Well, it's called in game theory, it's called strategic uncertainty. What you're talking about. Nobody does it better than President Trump and it can be unsettling for the markets. But why, why are they unsettled? Because they have a lack of information. You know, I have President Trump has asymmetric information for what he's willing to do. We don't disclose it. And again with President Trump that the strategic uncertainty will make sure that we get the best deal possible. That's what's happening with the trading partners who are coming to us.
- [44:14]
Ben Shapiro
Okay. Now again, I think that's the best possible and plausible defense of Trump's approach on trade. The reality is you don't need strategic uncertainty when you have the cards in your pocket. The reality is that if you're playing poker and you hold four aces, you don't need to act as though you are bluffing because you have the cards. The United States does have the cards when it comes to these trade deals. If we went to Vietnam behind the scenes, like, guys, we need you to lower your non tariff trade barriers. We need you to do that right now or we're going to slap you. You don't do it publicly, just do it privately. They'll lower it because we have all the leverage in that relationship. And one of the big problems for the administration and the reason why the economy continues to sort of be held in abeyance. Investors are still waiting to put their money back in is because President Trump says things and then Bessant basically has to fill in the gap. He has to backfill it. So President Trump, of course, said that kids don't need 30 dolls, they only need two dolls, which is a very bad approach to this particular issue. And Scott Bessant is out there trying to defend it because that's his job.
- [45:12]
Scott Bessant
Look, the other thing too is this reporter behind me was quite snarky the other day when President Trump talked about the girl having two dolls. And he said, well, what president didn't take the question, but he said, what would you tell that girl? I said, I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents. That you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents. Which working class Americans had abandoned that idea. Your family will own a home. You will be able to to the advance. You will have a good education. You will have economic freedom. That's what we are advancing.
- [45:55]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, now again, if you can explain to me why you need to own two dolls instead of 30 in order to own a home. I like the relationship between the two should be made clearer by the administration, let's just put it that way. Yesterday, Mark Carney, the freshly elected Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, who should not have been elected, Pierre Poliev should have been the Prime Minister of Canada. At this point, Mark Carney showed up and President Trump basically acknowledged that his intervention in the Canadian election helped swing the election to Carney. Here he's sensing he can't take full credit for Carney's win.
- [46:28]
Donald Trump
It's a great honor to have Prime Minister Mark Carney with us. As you know, just a few days ago, he won a very big election in Canada. And I think I was probably the greatest thing that happened to him. But I can't take full credit. They were his party was losing by a lot and he ended up winning. So I really want to congratulate him. Was one of probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine. But I want to just congratulate you. That was a great election, actually.
- [47:00]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah. You know, it would have been a better election if President Trump hadn't declared trade war on Canada and then talked about annexing their country. Carney, for his part, had a grand old time in the Oval, basically shellacking Trump to his face. So here's Mark Carney saying that Canada will not be bought. Which of course gives him a lot of street cred with his, with his people back home.
- [47:19]
Mark Carney
As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale.
- [47:23]
Donald Trump
That's true.
- [47:24]
Mark Carney
We're sitting in one right now. You know, Buckingham palace that you visited as well.
- [47:27]
Donald Trump
That's true.
- [47:28]
Mark Carney
And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign last several months, it's not for sale, won't be for sale ever. But the opportunity is in the partnership and what we can build together. And we have done that in the past.
- [47:46]
Ben Shapiro
And then Carney went on to fact check Trump in the middle of the Oval Office meeting. And you know who wouldn't have done any of this? Pierre Poliev. Would have been much better if you were Prime Minister. Here was. Here was Carney.
- [47:57]
Donald Trump
Yes, go ahead.
- [47:58]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah.
- [47:58]
Mark Carney
If I may. Well, I respectfully, Canadians view on. This is not going to change on the 51st state. Secondly, we are the largest client of the United States in the totality of all the goods. So we are the largest client in the United States. We have a tremendous auto sector between the two of us. And the changes that made have been helpful. You know, 50% of a car that comes from Canada is American. That's not like anywhere else in the world.
- [48:28]
Ben Shapiro
Okay. So he's fact checking Trump on Trump saying that we actually don't need Canada. We don't have a big trade relationship. And Carney happens to be correct there. We actually do sell billions, as in upward of $350 billion of stuff in Canada. They are our largest single trade partner, actually. President Trump, for his part, refused to give up on Canadian annexation. This is what he had to say in the Oval yesterday.
- [48:51]
Donald Trump
I must say Canada is stepping up the military participation because Mark knew, you know, they were low and now they're stepping it up. And that's a very important thing. But never say, never ever say never.
- [49:05]
Ben Shapiro
Okay. Well, Carney was asked later afterward what he was thinking when President Trump was talking about annexing Canada. And here's what he had to say. I was watching your face through the meeting in the Oval Office and I wondered what was going through your mind when the president talked about rebracing the artificial border and how he criticized your predecessor and Madame Freeland.
- [49:29]
Mark Carney
Well, thank you for, I guess, for your question. I'm glad that you couldn't tell what was going through my mind as that was going through. Look, with respect to the first point, the president has made known his wish about that issue for some time. I've been careful always to distinguish between wish and reality. I was clear there in the Oval Office, as I've been clear throughout on behalf of Canadians that this is never going to happen. Canada is not for sale. It never will be for sale.
- [50:07]
Ben Shapiro
So again, you know what have been better than this? Pierre Poliev I can't say that enough because there are some members of the right who seem to believe that it's like a big win to Duncan. Pierre Poliev, who lost because again, the Trump administration decided to Leroy Jenkins some sort of trade war with Canada. Again, I just don't see the purpose of that. I don't see why that had to happen. And I hope that Mark Carney, who is not going to be a good prime minister, I hope that the Canadian people see that and that his tenure as prime minister is short lived. Well, folks, the show continues in just a moment with a piece of good news for the Trump administration. The Supreme Court has made a ruling as to whether trans people can be banned from the military, at least for the moment. First, you have to become a member. We have all sorts of great stuff. Got Matt Walsh's movies, we've got series of Jordan Peterson. We've got All Access live. We have run, hide fight, all sorts of good stuff. In order to watch though, you have to be a member. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro Checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.