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- [00:00]
Sports Enthusiast
Man, whenever I use a sportsbook during the soccer world championship, I feel like I'm getting robbed.
- [00:04]
Polymarket Promoter
Dude, delete that app. You need to be using Polymarket.
- [00:08]
Sports Enthusiast
Polymarket.
- [00:08]
Polymarket Promoter
Polymarket is a prediction market, not a sportsbook. You trade against other fans, not the house. That means more money for you and less for greedy sportsbooks.
- [00:17]
Sports Enthusiast
Even during the World Championship.
- [00:19]
Polymarket Promoter
Especially during the World Championship. Whether you're trading on who wins the next match or who lifts the trophy in the final. Sportsbooks take around $9 on a $100 position and pay out around $500. Polymarket pays out $650 on that same position.
- [00:33]
Sports Enthusiast
What's the catch?
- [00:34]
Polymarket Promoter
No catch. And it's available in all 50 states. Polymarket is so confident they're giving you $50 free on your first trade.
- [00:41]
Donald Trump
Huh?
- [00:41]
Sports Enthusiast
How do I get started?
- [00:42]
Polymarket Advertiser
Download Polymarket now and use Promo code pass for $50 free on your first trade. With the World championship heating up, stop letting sportsbooks steal from you. Download Polymarket and use Promo code pass for $50 free on your first trade. Use promo Code Pass.
- [00:56]
Legal Disclaimer Voice
Trading not available in all jurisdictions. Check local regulations before trading restrictions and eligibility requirements apply.
- [01:00]
Sports Enthusiast
Man, whenever I use a SP sportsbook during the soccer world Championship, I feel like I'm getting robbed.
- [01:04]
Polymarket Promoter
Dude, delete that app. You need to be using Polymarket.
- [01:08]
Sports Enthusiast
Polymarket.
- [01:08]
Polymarket Promoter
Polymarket is a prediction market, not a sportsbook. You trade against other fans, not the house. That means more money for you and less for greedy sportsbooks.
- [01:17]
Sports Enthusiast
Even during the World Championship.
- [01:19]
Polymarket Promoter
Especially during the World Championship. Whether you're trading on who wins the next match or who lifts the trophy in the final, Sportsbooks take around $9 on a $100 position and pay out around $500. Polymarket pays out $650.
- [01:33]
Sports Enthusiast
What's the catch?
- [01:34]
Polymarket Promoter
No catch. And it's available in all 50 states. Polymarket is so confident they're giving you $50 free on your first trade.
- [01:41]
Sports Enthusiast
How do I get started?
- [01:42]
Polymarket Advertiser
Download Polymarket now and use Promo code pass for $50 free on your first trade. With the World Championship heating up, stop letting sportsbooks steal from you. Download Polymarket and use promo code PASS for $50 free on your first trade. Use Promo Code Pass.
- [01:56]
Legal Disclaimer Voice
Trading not available in all jurisdictions. Check local regulations before trading restrictions and eligibility requirements apply.
- [02:01]
Ben Shapiro
So, Elon Musk's SpaceX iPos today, it will undoubtedly be the biggest in history. That is not a bad thing. It is an amazing thing. But you are going to hear from all the wrong people that it's immoral, terrible, even evil. Why? Well, because we all have within us a vicious equality. Envy. It's a universal human emotion. And envy is bad and wrong and God explicitly condemns it. I'll explain why that SpaceX IPO is actually awesome. Why Elon Musk deserves his wealth, and why we are all better off when we have a system where a guy can become a trillionaire. Plus we'll get to Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy explaining that it's great for women to be promiscuous before having kids. The family of Carmelo Anthony playing the race card. And the latest with Iran. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. So the SpaceX IPO is today. It has been long awaited. It will be the biggest IPO in all of human history. Again, the pre market valuation is likely to be in the $1.77 trillion range. According to the Wall Street Journal. It's kind of an unusual ipo initial public offering. This is where a private company goes to the public markets to raise money and then it uses that money in order to run the business, in order to spend. That is what an IPO is for. It's not just to make the founders rich. Although the founders now have stock that is liquid, meaning that they could sell their stock theoretically. Elon obviously is not in a position to be able to sell tons of stock because if a founder of a major company sells a lot of his stock, that is a signal to the market he has no faith in his own company. And then the stock dives is a problem for every founder, from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk. But what's unusual about this particular IPO is that it is actually widely available to retail investors like the man on the street. So typically in any ipo, a certain percentage of the stock of the company is put on the public markets and a huge percentage of that stock is already pre bought by institutional investors. All the big companies that you hear about, the Goldman Sachs of the world or institutional investors like sovereign wealth funds in the Middle east or whatever. Usually only about 5 to 7% of an initial public offering is available to retail investors like the guy using Robinhood or something. Today it's 20%. That actually is pretty high. Okay, but let's put aside the actual economics for a second of SpaceX. We'll get to that in a moment. The thing that really matters and the thing that I think could destroy the country honestly and the global economy is the thing that has always been a threat to humanity and that is envy. So Jimmy Kimmel is just a beautiful example of this. Jimmy Kimmel is A multimillionaire who works for billionaires who is upset about a trillionaire. That is who Jimmy Kimmel is. He's an obnoxious, non funny, woke pope of late night TV who is probably worth somewhere between 50 and $100 million. And he is paid by people who are worth tens of billions of dollars to complain about a guy who built a company that will be worth $1.77 trillion. So last night he started railing about how Elon Musk is not grateful enough. What, to Jimmy Kimmel or what?
- [05:03]
Jimmy Kimmel
Elon Musk came to the United States from South Africa in 1995, the son of a humble emerald mine owner. And he is so grateful to this country that allowed him to become a trillionaire. Tesla paid almost no federal income tax over the past three years. You know, for a guy who has been openly cheering immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing from us, sure seems like an immigrant who's been stealing from us to me.
- [05:29]
Ben Shapiro
Now this is just obnoxious trash. It is not true. Elon did not in fact grow up wealthy. His dad was kind of a mess. And as far as the idea that Elon came to the United States wealthy, that is eminently untrue. He was living in some of the worst apartments in America when he came here. And then he didn't get a job at Netscape, and then he ended up becoming this unbelievable success. The notion that he is stealing from Americans by building several of the most successful companies in American history is totally crazy. What has Jimmy Kimmel built ever? But here's what's really going on. Jimmy Kimmel doesn't like that Elon is really, really, really witch rich. That's what this is. He does not like that Elon is rich. That's all. Trillion dollars.
- [06:15]
Jimmy Kimmel
It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know a trillion is a number, but it's so large the same way we can't fathom it. The same way we know like, Elon has a lot of kids, but we can't fathom him getting laid. Right? So let me try to illustrate it. If you, if you tried to count out loud to a true, you would be counting until the year 33,736. A trillion dollars is ten billion hundred dollar bills. If you stack them up, the pile would be almost 700 miles high, as tall as 123 Mount Everest. With that kind of money, Elon could buy every NFL team, all of them, and he'd still have $773 billion left which he could use to buy all 30 Major League Baseball teams, every NBA team, every Wendy's, every Target store, the Beatles, entire music catalog. He could buy Nike, Macy's, and every Hyundai Elantra ever produced and would still have 260 billion, $50 million left over.
- [07:16]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so I'm just wondering, Jimmy Kimmel, again, is worth probably $100 million. If you counted to 100 million, it would take you somewhere between 20 and 30 years. If you counted one number per second and stayed up all night. Why the envy? Why the rage? Well, certainly there's something political to it. I mean, Jimmy Kimmel was much nicer to Elon Musk back in, say, 2013 when he was having him on his show to talk about SpaceX.
- [07:45]
Jimmy Kimmel
You know, I want to go over some of your many accomplishments just for the audience in case they're not familiar with them. In 1983, at age 12, you designed a video game and sold it to a computer magazine for $500. 1995, big money for a 12 year old. You quit the graduates program at Stanford to found Zip2. In 1999, you sold Zip2 to Compaq for $309 million. You co founded PayPal. In 2000, you sold PayPal to eBay for a billion and a half dollars. You founded SpaceX. You co founded Tesla Motors. You helped create SolarCity, the solar power company. Well, it's great to meet you. If you want to watch the launch. Why wouldn't you want to watch the
- [08:25]
Ben Shapiro
launch on SpaceX rocket on March 1? Go to SpaceX.com and take a look.
- [08:30]
Jimmy Kimmel
Elon Musk, everybody. Thanks for being here.
- [08:34]
Ben Shapiro
And there's the audience cheering Elon Musk. Back in 2013, right about the time of the launch of SpaceX. I mean, Barack Obama toured SpaceX with Elon in 2010, the Democratic president of the United States, and marveled at it. And I think it's fair to say that this is the most advanced rocket in the world. It's the only rocket that's designed in the 21st century. And the factors you see there, it's actually bonded on special thermal protection. Because the real big breakthrough that's needed is the President standing alongside Elon as Elon explains his rockets. You know, if we're to make a revolution in space, it's got to be reusable. If you think about any mode of transport, bicycle. And again, he's talking about reusable rockets back in 2010, that was not achieved for full over a decade and it took enormous risk. And Obama's just marveling at it. And now we've gone from that, that inspirational view to giant inflatable Elon Musks in Times Square with no shirt on, ugly and everything, saying SpaceX Grok makes AI child stop SpaceX child nudes, etc. So what's really going on here? The answer is very simple. The answer is just envy. That's all. All right, coming up, we'll get deeper into the question of envy. Why so many people don't understand basic economics in the United States. Why, why Elon deserves the pay. I mean, it is amazing. The story of SpaceX is incredible because America is awesome. And it's because America is awesome that we are very good at ceremonies like flyovers, parades, speeches. We put giant flags on everything. And that's great. But honoring veterans isn't just something that we should do for a few minutes on a holiday. The real question is what happens when a veteran comes home and needs help navigating the challenges of everyday life? That's why I want to tell you about something Pure Talk is doing. This summer, as America approaches its 250th birthday, PureTalk and its customers are working to raise $250,000 for America's Warrior Partnership, who works to prevent veteran suicide by helping veterans navigate real life challenges that often get overlooked. Housing, transportation, counseling, access to VA benefits. Practical things that can make an enormous difference in someone's life. Because real support means more than saying thank you for your service, helping is really easy when you switch your cell phone service to Pure Talk. This month you'll have the opportunity to round up your bill to support America's Warrior partnership. PureTalk will match donations until they reach 250 grand. At the same time, you'll get unlimited talk, unlimited text, unlimited high speed data for just $34.99 a month. It's a great deal. PureTalk is a veteran led company, so it's not a corporate publicity stunt. Supporting veterans is part of who they are. Go to PureTalk.com Shapiro and make the switch to PureTalk again. That's PureTalk.com Shapiro Switch to my wireless company, America's Wireless Company, PureTalk. So there is a very interesting study from a journal called Frontiers in Psychology in 2021 talking about what are called the two faces of envy. And the authors write, envy is like a wildfire destroying people. We feel envy for a classmate who gets a good grade or a neighbor who buys an expensive car. This kind of emotion drives our different behaviors, like small stones in the heart, like ruining our Peace of mind. Scholars have defined envy as the intense, unpleasant feeling that one feels when one realizes that another has something that one strives for, pursues, and yearns for. Envy. It's a painful emotion. There are two kinds of envy. One is useful and one is quite terrible. One is benign envy. In benign envy, the envious person may try to make themselves as good as the person being envied. Therefore, envy can increase personal effort, drive behavior to achieve the desired object and to turn attention to the means of achieving it. And then there is another type, malicious envy. This is where the envious person may try to degrade the person being envied, to vilify or denigrate the other person's advantages. Envy can increase schadenfreude behavior that leads to hostility and resentment. It can shift attention to the person being envied. By the way, it also leads to violence. There is literally a full commandment among the 10 that is directly about envy. You may remember it the 10th Commandment, the final one from Exodus 20:17. You shall not cover your neighbor's house, your neighbor's wife, his servant, his ox, his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbors. God takes time out to say, envy is bad. By the way, this is the only commandment that has to do with your feelings. All the rest are behaviorally driven, right? Don't steal, don't kill, don't blaspheme. Respect your parents and all of the rest. This one is emotional. Why did God reserve one commandment for the emotion of envy? Because it turns out the entire history of humanity relies on whether we can actually master our envy. This is the story of Cain and Abel. The story of Cain and Abel is about envy. Cain decides, you sacrifice to God, and Abel follows suit. And God, for a reason we don't understand from the Bible, accepts Abel's sacrifice, but not Cain's. And then God says the moral of the story. In Genesis 4:7, he says, surely if you do right, you will be uplifted. But if you do not do right, sin crouches at your door. Its urge is toward you, but you can be its master. What is that sin? It's envy. And what does Cain do? Instead of going to Abel and saying, what did you do right and I did wrong? How can I do better? He kills Abel. Envy is destructive. It is terrible. Now, what's interesting here is when we get envious, because it's not sort of a universal timing thing. Envy is a universal human emotion. We feel it all the time. But it tends to kick in for anyone who's just above you on the wealth index. So if you make a hundred grand, you may be envious of the guy who makes 200 grand. If you're worth $100 million late, Jimmy Kimmel is. You may be envious of the guy making a trillion dollars, but it's not every person who makes more than you. There is a particular envy for people who take risks because in our heart of hearts, we think we could have done that too. We look at Elon, we say, I could have founded a space company. He thought of it, but sure, I could have thought of it. I could have taken the risk. It's something that's within my purview. It's really, really interesting to watch New Yorkers who just voted for a democratic socialist like Zoran Mandani, who rips on Ken Griffin all day long, rooting for the Knicks this season, right? The Knicks are super rich. Really, really, really rich. Karl Anthony Towns made 53 million bucks this year. OG made 40 million bucks. Jalen Brunson makes 35 million bucks a year. That is a lot of money. But you're not seeing jealousy or outrage in the stadium. People aren't showing up and yelling at them about how they need to redistribute their income and pay more taxes and how many school teachers are out of a job and so we need more government sponsored grocery stores from cats paying more tax. So why aren't people so envious of these guys? Well, the truth is that everyone sort of recognizes that these guys have unique talent given by God. You're not seven foot, you're not 270 pounds, and you can't shoot the three. But when it's a smart person who doesn't have overt sort of alien like physical qualities, then we get pretty jealous. Why didn't we get what he has? Why don't we all get to be Elon Musk rich? He's not that much better than we are. But here is the thing. The reason that Elon is super rich and I know a lot of people who are as bright as Elon. I know a lot of very high iq. Elon has a very high iq. I know a lot of very high IQ people. He's much richer than any of them. Why? Well, because he took risks. Huge risks, unprecedented risks. And that is good because risk is what creates innovation. If you don't have people risking, you don't get better stuff. If you don't have people putting up their house for mortgage in order to sponsor and subsidize them building A company, the company does not get built if you don't have people willing to put their own money where their mouth is, their own time, their own effort where their mouth is. You do not get new things. And we need new things. And not only that, we need a system that allows you to keep what you make. Why? Well, because here's the thing. For every single Elon Musk in any industry, there are 10,000 dudes who thought of it, risked it, and failed. And so what is the only thing that will keep people risking it and trying to do the thing that actually builds, the only thing that incentivizes that is the possibility of making a lot of money. That is the only thing, the thing that generates people willing to take the risks that actually make the world a better place is a system that allows you to keep what you make, to. To keep. Keep what you kill. Okay? That is the. That is why the system must be maintained. Risk taking is risky. Take for example, Blue Origin. So Blue Origin is another company run by another billionaire, Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin is a competitor to SpaceX. This is a risky business. It was just a couple of weeks ago that we watched a Blue Origin rocket explode on the ground. I mean, you know how much money and time and effort were lost in this one millisecond? Billions of dollars? Billions. Not millions. Billions. This is what it looks like when you risk, because sometimes you fail. You know how many videos there are of Elon Musk's rockets blowing up on the launch pad? We've watched videos on the show of his reusable rockets failing. This stuff happens. You have to take the risks. I mean, here's A picture from 2006 at Rocket debris from Falcon 1's first flight, a much younger Elon Musk. Looking at what it looks. I mean, to go from that to a $1.77 trillion IPO is an amazing feat. That's a great thing. It's a great thing. Look at that. That's what failure looks like. And what success looks like is the IPO today. How do you incentivize a person to keep looking failure in the face over and over and over and again? You have to have an American system, a free market system that rewards risk taking, that punishes failure and rewards success. That is what you require. I mean, people forget that Elon Musk risked pretty much his entire early fortune on SpaceX and Tesla. He got about $180 million when PayPal was sold. He poured about a hundred million of that $180 million into SpaceX and Tesla. Now again, over time, he ended up with a stake of approximately 42% in SpaceX. The company was almost bankrupt in 2008. By late 2008, after the first three Falcon 1 launches and you saw that picture of him just crouching, looking at the debris. SpaceX was running out of money. They were down to basically their final weeks of capital. And Elon scraped together personal loans against his own assets to make payroll to keep the company from shutting down. This is what risk takers do again. He's got personal loans to fund both SpaceX and Tesla personally to prevent them from folding before they were commercially viable. This is risk taking and it's awesome and it should be rewarded. If you want cool stuff, you have to reward risk taking. It is necessary. It is good. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Musk, talks about the fact that when Musk first decided that he wanted to send a mission to Mars, the first thing he realized is he had no clue about anything rocket related. So he cold called an aerospace consultant named Jim Cantrell and then he basically just learned up. According to Isaacson, from Cantrell and others, he'd borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Aero Thermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts. It wasn't that that Elon started off as some sort of expert on space. He was not. He knew pretty much nothing. It's that Elon is personally an incredible risk taker. Not just about his money, but also about his time and his expertise. He looked at something, thought, that's fascinating to me, I'm obsessed with it, and just launched himself into it. Isaacson quotes another billionaire, Peter Thiel, saying, what I didn't appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially and technically, that's what makes him a force of nature already. Coming up, we'll get you a bunch of people who just are envious of other people's wealth, but they're pretending that it's because they're altruistic. But really it's because they hate and don't understand free market. But you do. Running a business is tough. Every single day brings a new decision, a new task, a new problem to solve. Before long, managing the business starts getting in the way of actually growing the business. And this is where Shopify comes in handy. Shopify is the commerce platform powering millions of businesses worldwide and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. Including the Daily Wire. Our shop runs on Shopify. Tons of stuff at the DW shop, by the way. You get the tumblers and the books and the shirts, all of it via Shopify. Whether you're launching a side hustle or scaling an established brand, Shopify helps simplify the work. Build a professional online store with hundreds of customizable templates. Create email and social media campaigns. Use built in AI tools to help write product descriptions, page headlines and more. Plus, if you ever need help, Shopify's award winning 247 support team is there when you need them. So stop spending your time managing the tools. Start spending your time growing the business. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.comshapiro Again, that's shopify.com/shapiro. Shopify.com/Shapiro. So one of the things that you will see in modern American politics is pure envy right there. People jealous of Elon because he took a risk masquerading as altruism. This is, this is always and forever the socialist pitch. You don't like people who are rich because they're richer than you. You envy them and therefore they must have stolen from you. This is what malicious envy looks like. So Hasan Piker, who is truly a leech, the man has never created a thing. He has not innovated a product. He has not started a major company. He does not employ very many people. He's truly a useless Nepo baby of Chenk Uyghurs. And yet he's touted as some sort of great thinker. Well, he compares people like Elon to the Gilded Age. He blames capitalism for people sleeping outside in the United States every night. As though the natural condition of humanity is innovation and growth. As though wealth is the natural condition of humanity as opposed to abject poverty, which is the actual natural condition of humanity absent innovation. By the way, perform a quick thought experiment. You can see that the only thing that has changed in human history is free markets and innovation. Private property. That's the thing that changed. Because here's the thought experiment. Think of every single thing in Elon Musk's rockets. Think of every single element. Were any of those elements not present on planet Earth in the year 1000 BC or 10,000 BC or a hundred thousand BC? Every element in your computer was present on planet Earth when Jesus was walking the Earth. Every single element. What changed? Innovation, private property, capitalism. Rewards for risk taking. That's what changed. The reason Hasan Piker sits there in his well made suit and Cartier glasses is because those companies that make them exist thanks to private property and capitalism. That is the reason. But here's Hassan Piker masquerade. He takes the envy and then he hides it behind a mask of I just care about people. No you don't. No you don't. You're just jealous. You're just a jealous leech.
- [23:29]
Hasan Piker
In the wealthiest nation on Earth, 700,000 people sleep outside every single night. I mean, that's preposterous, right? And the solution to that is so simple really. If we were to just retool our system a little bit because we have all of the wealth, we have all of the potential, we have all of the opportunities to change this system to ensure that that doesn't happen. Because it's unbelievably inhumane and yet we don't do it. Because this is the way the system is designed, this is the way capitalism has to continue. And yet, in spite of the same wealth inequality, if not worse, that we're currently experiencing in comparison to the Gilded Age, Americans are sleepwalking in the direction of fascism. That's what I want to avoid.
- [24:21]
Ben Shapiro
What a ridiculous person. What a truly ridiculous person. And I just want to point out here that even the so called Gilded Age, which again was a propaganda angle on one of the most innovative and creative times in American industrial history, it's what launched America into the forefront of the global economy, is what generated America's leading wealth on planet Earth, the Gilded Age and all of the supposedly evil robber barons, people like J.P. morgan or Rockefeller, these are people who coined industries, also people who by the way saved the economy. In 1907 the American economy nearly collapsed and J.P. morgan got all the bankers in a room. There was no Federal Reserve at the time. And they backstop the entire American economy. But wealth creation helps people. People are not sleeping homeless because SpaceX is successful. You know, it is truly incredible the just baseline economic ignorance of folks. Go back 500 years and everyone was sleeping homeless. If you had a home, it was a trashy home. It was a set of four walls. Your animals slept inside with you. There was no actual floor and and you crapped in a bucket. Things are a lot better now. That is not because of Hasan Piker's predilections economically. So let's talk about SpaceX specifically. SpaceX is an amazing company. Again, this is not an advertisement for you to buy SpaceX stock. I don't know if it's overvalued or undervalued. I will say that ripping on SpaceX is an absurdity. SpaceX has done amazing and continues to do amazing things. SpaceX as a company is responsible for roughly 82% of all American space launches and over 84% of the global payload mass to orbit. It controls America's sole domestic crude ride to the ISS. It has revenue from three places, Starlink, which has 12 million active subscribers for direct to device Internet, which by the way Starlink will have a salutary impact on global politics. If Starlink had been widely available in the middle of the Iran war, it would have made a huge difference. Iran shutting down the Internet has been a disaster area and literally the only way anyone was getting any information from the outside with Starlink, its space launches. Obviously SpaceX makes a lot of money off its space launches. And the possibility of orbital AI data centers following its merger with X AI, by the way, that is legitimately the coolest possibility. You know how a lot of people these days have a lot of angst over land use with regard to data centers. So the fix for that innovation, man, it's, it's an amazing thing. Risk taking an amazing thing is something called orbital AI data centers. So what, what is that? That means that you literally launch pieces of data centers into space and then they rely on solar energy because the sun's energy is constant in space and the cold temperatures of space prevent overheating. According to the Wall Street Journal, orbital data centers will feature swarms of satellites laden with AI chips. They will need solar arrays to produce electricity to run the AI computing systems. The satellites are expected to fly in an orbit that roughly travels over Earth's poles to maximize their exposure to sunlight. This is amazing stuff. SpaceX will mint today probably 4000 millionaires, people down to the janitor who actually own stock in SpaceX. Because one of the ways when you have a startup company to get people to work for you is to give them stock. And somehow this is bad. Somehow this is bad. The idea is that America's economy has been hollowed out by innovation. But that's not true. It is not even remotely true. Americans are so much wealthier than their parents, it is mind boggling. All the stuff that you consider baseline in your life. Your parents would never have had access to the cell phone that contains all human knowledge. And now a logic machine that would have taken the richest man, the richest man on Earth in 1980 would not have had that machine. It didn't exist. And now everyone has it, including people who are on welfare the notion that somehow innovation and risk taking have made America poorer is the biggest load of crap. And what makes innovation and risk taking possible in the first place is a system that incentivize innovation and risk taking. If you kill that system, you kill the innovation, you kill the risk taking. Economist Stephen Rose and Scott Winship point out that there are a wide variety of lies that have been pushed at this point about the supposed hollowing out of the American middle class. They point out the hollowing out message requires a curious definition of progress. By its logic, if everyone's income doubles, the same number of families fail to reach the middle class as in the past, because again, you are measuring middle against middle, not against what the middle class used to be. Thinking about the middle class in this way obscures progress because it mixes inequality with people's living standards. And those are two different things. In a recent report, we measured class using constant inflation adjusted thresholds. The core middle class shrunk, but so did the classes below the middle the poor, the near poor, and the lower middle class. In 1979, 36% of families were in the middle class. At first, it looks ominous that by 2024, a smaller number, 31%, could claim that status. But it's worrisome only if you overlook that over that same period, the upper middle class grew to 31% of families from 10%. Meanwhile, the number of Americans falling short of the middle class, once over half, dropped to 35% of all families. And by the way, again, even poor people today are living much better than poor people did 50 years ago. Clearly and obviously now there are people who are pretending that they are really, truly, they're not concerned. Fine. They say, all right, we're not concerned. We know capitalism is fine, free markets are good. But what we are really concerned with is centralization of wealth. Because with centralization of wealth comes outsized political power. Right? This is Bernie's backup envy argument. He has a few arguments. One is rich people are bad, they're just terrible, they become evil. And second is the rich people are stealing from the poor people. And then once you debunk both of those because they're stupid, he gets to the third argument. The rich people are going to take over the government. Not really. That the rich people have outsized impact on regulation and legal. Okay, so some people are making the argument that Elon being a trillionaire will be dangerous because then he'll control the government. So we should point out at this point that America has never been more evenly divided politically, that Democrats who Elon does not support are favored to take Congress and perhaps even the Senate. That Elon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on politics, but so have the Soros family and Tom Steyer and the public sector unions. So here's my thing. I also don't want rich people controlling the government. But mainly I don't want the government controlling my life. It turns out that the problem isn't which rich person controls the government. The problem is the government power in the first place. So let me suggest a fix. In fact, some people have thought of this in the past. What if, thought experiment. What if we had constructed a system of checks and balances designed precisely to avoid capture of our legal and regulatory system by any one player by, say, I don't know, disseminating power among multiple branches and multiple levels of government and restricting the powers of the government to a list of delegated powers. I don't know. It's a thought. It's called the Constitution. And then it turns out that the people most concerned with wealth concentration decided that to target wealth concentration, they would destroy the checks and balances and turn the American government into a regulatory, top down, centralized state. Great job, everyone. You did great. Bernie's fix for wealth concentration is power concentration. In Bernie, that is not a fix. That is significantly worse. It's terrible. So what should we do here? The answer is we need to preserve the things that make America awesome. The things that bring people like Elon Musk to the United States or say, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, or say, the adoptive father of Jeff Bezos, who came from Cuba in 1962. It turns out that what makes America awesome is the same thing that has always made America awesome. Private property rights and equal rights before the law and limited government powers. Free markets. These are great. Now, President Trump, on a sort of instinctive level, does understand this. Here he was yesterday talking about complainers. He's saying they're not the ones who built the country.
- [32:37]
Donald Trump
These people built the country. Not the complainers. The complainers didn't build the country. These people built the country. Whether it's fishermen or farmers or anything else. Me, guys like me, they built the country. You know, I watch all these ingrates. They're always complaining, complaining. They didn't build anything. They couldn't build anything.
- [32:59]
Ben Shapiro
He's not wrong about that, obviously. But there is always a political temptation. The political temptation, it will exist for all time. It always has existed. And populism is a version of this political temptation. As we say, envy is a universal human emotion. It is Something we all feel, there is no one immune from it. And you have to fight it by relying on self control and willpower. Right? Right back to Genesis. If you control it, you have the power to control it. You do. You have the power to channel your envy into a positive direction. I want to do more risk taking things. I want to be more innovative, I want to work harder. But the, the most fruitful path in politics is to channel envy toward the idea that actually people who have earned wealth, people who have created companies, who have innovated, they don't deserve it. And what we really need is for those people to, quote, unquote, give back. Give back. Now again, this is a very cheap way of channeling envy toward political gain. The president yesterday, he was praising the AI industry for its innovation, which is great. But then he said he wanted a meeting to discuss, quote, unquote, giving back to the public. Now, the way in a free market system that you give back to the public is you engage in a robust exchange of goods and services. That is how you give back. I've described capitalism before as forced altruism. Reality, not, not government, forced altruism, reality, forced altruism. Because it turns out that no matter how greedy I am, I can't have what you have unless I make a trade with you. And this is the part that's so funny. You go back to that Kimmel clip at the top. He says, you know, Elon, if he, with all that money, he could buy every team in the MLB and every team in the NBA and every football team and all the rest of it. Okay? And then he would have to have a willing seller, right? Somebody would have to be on the other side of that transaction. The companies founded by people like Bill Gates, by people like Elon Musk, will do far more for humanity than any amount of charity they plan to give because they employ people, because they create new products and services that make people's lives better. But the language of they have to give back to the public, as though when you engage in the robust free market, you are somehow taking from the public wheel. This kind of language I object to. When are you meeting with tech executives
- [35:17]
Legal Disclaimer Voice
about the government taking stake in AI companies?
- [35:20]
Ben Shapiro
And what could this partnership look like about AI?
- [35:24]
Donald Trump
Well, I can say this. We're having a meeting with them. It's an amazing industry. It's bigger than any industry anyone's ever seen. We are leading China by a lot. And you know, whoever leads that is going to really lead the world to a large extent. That's how big it is. And I'm going to have meetings with the top 12 or 15 executives very shortly. And we're talking about giving back something to the public. And if we do that, the public will become very rich, the people in our country, because that's the kind of money we're talking about. And I think they'll do that. And. And I think it'll make it very popular.
- [36:07]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, again, this idea, and I think that you see billionaires do this, too. What if we just. What if we just throw money at people? What if we subsidize public works projects? Okay, that's all fine. You can do it. But if you think that you are going to buy your way out of envy by giving people money, that is not the way envy works. In fact, it turns out that very often the recipients of largesse are angrier about receiving largesse. They are angry at the people who gave it to them than they would be otherwise. By the way, what Trump is saying there is mild compared to all of the stuff that's being preached by the far left, like Ro Khanna, the congressman from California who is increasingly unhinged. Here he was with Wajaha Ali talking about his plans were Democrats to take back power.
- [36:47]
Ro Khanna
This is what the agenda should be in 2028. We should be for calling it a Dred Scott court and having Supreme Court term limits and expanding the court from 9 to 13. We should be for abolishing ICE and replacing it with a immigration enforcement office that actually follows human rights and that focuses on sex trafficking, child trafficking, drug offenders, not conducting raids in places like Minneapolis going after undocumented immigrants, are working and paying taxes. We should be for a billionaire's tax, A tax on billionaires.
- [37:23]
Ben Shapiro
Again, the goal of the billionaire tax would not be to actually make America's economy more robust. It would be to punish success. That's the whole thing. And of course, Chan Kuyger, who has never met a seizure of wealth that he does not like, put out a tweet saying, I want to be the first to say it. I think there's a chance Ro Khanna saves the country. All right, dude. Well, speaking of Ro Khanna and immorality, Ro Khanna and the left wing of the Democratic Party are very much behind Graham Platner. That would be the main Senate candidate. Democrats need him to pull out a surprise victory against Susan Collins in Maine. They need Nazi tattoo guy. Maybe I'll rape a home invader. You know, not. Not because it's gay out of dominance. They need that guy in the Senate. Here's Ro Khanna preaching.
- [38:07]
Ro Khanna
It's shocking that he he's just so out of touch. I mean he needs to step aside. I've called for him to step aside. No one thinks of him as the future of the party. You know, he was very weak. He didn't want to support Graham Platner. He was out there trying to get Janet Mills even. He now sees that Platner is the best chance to to to win the state one overwhelmingly last night.
- [38:27]
Ben Shapiro
Well what what. What a joy the Democrats are as Ro Khanna is preaching this sort of stuff, another Platner ex girlfriend came forward and acknowledged that actually he knew full well about his Nazi tattoo. It is kind of incredible. What a bag of crap Graham Platner is. Just as a human, I mean truly a bag of trash. According to this ex girlfriend, the woman offered allegations that part that Platner cheated on a second partner before his current wife, a now ex fiance who's engaged to around that time last October, she posted that Graham Platner was a piece of bleep but not because he's a communist. She alleged that their romance together ended after she found out from mutual friends that Platinum was engaged to another woman around the same time. Well, on Wednesday, that woman publicly shared screenshots of private messages where she described the Nazi tattoo. And here is what she actually wrote. Quote in the winter season of 20202021 as Covid restrictions lessened, I decided I was going to Maine for the summer, working seasonal jobs since 18. I quickly secured a job working housekeeping for a glamping resort in Maine outside of Acadia National Park. I matched with Graham on Tinder. By the way. Lazies don't match with dudes. I mean, I'm just saying this is not a great dating strategy. I thought he was hot and he was a leftist and I was 27 and freshly out of an incredibly tumultuous time politically and global health crisis. I was lying my head on his chest and like the well informed leftist I am by the swooning young woman I was, I asked him point blank OMG crazy question. Is that a toten cop tattooed on your chest? Haha. No worries if not lol. He sighed about it, put a hand to his forehead and pushed his hair back and said yeah, yeah. He explained he didn't know what it was when he was younger, but his leader of whatever military variety was big into World War II history and suggested he and his team all get it. My obvious response was wow. Oh my, oh my God, that's like, my God. So, so, so crazy. Why didn't you get it effing removed? And apparently his answer was. I am not kidding. His actual answer was that the reason he did not get it removed was to remind him that America was the bad guy. That's literally said. According to her quote, he provided what at the time was a pretty convincing explanation that when he finally returned from war and then private contracting and has settled into leftist ideology, he kept it as a reminder that the United States and by extension himself were the bad guys that. That. So his explanation for the Nazi tattoo is that America is the Nazis and that guy is the guy that Democrats want for the Senate. The other thing about Platner that is kind of hilarious is that he's actually quite bad at just basic politics. So here he was yesterday, slipping up and saying that families are saddled with children. What a wonderful they. They can pick them. They really can.
- [41:18]
Larry Reed
What we don't have enough representation for is people that work for a living. People who are in labor unions, people who work multiple jobs, people who are disabled, people who are and stuck at home, unable to work in the structures that we've created around them. Families who are saddled with children trying. Sorry, with cost of child care, not saddled with children. We're blessed with children saddled with child care costs that make it incredibly difficult to work and to have your kids.
- [41:52]
Ben Shapiro
Whoopsie. Whoopsie. Well, again, because Democrats only have two models of men. They have Nazi tattoo, Starship Troopers guy who's very rapey about home invaders and perhaps farm animals and that type. And they have James Talarico, Ned Flanders. So here he was on MSNL with Jen Psaki talking about what it's like to be a real man. Tell us, James.
- [42:17]
James Talarico
A man does what's right even when no one is watching. And here's what real men don't do. They don't lie and cheat their way through life. They don't sell their soul to the highest bidder. They don't steal from other people in order to enrich themselves. And so I've said before, and I will keep saying that real men serve others, weak men serve themselves. And so I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man. And I don't think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is.
- [42:53]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, so question what? Can a woman become one? It seems like a pretty easy question. He's defining what it's like to be a real man. Can a woman become a Man. I mean, he thinks that kids can literally become the opposite gender. He loves the trans kids. So, yeah, I mean, there, there is that. Okay, Speaking of. Of misdefinitions of gender, Alex Cooper is the host of a show called Call Her Daddy. And things have gotten quite awkward for Alex Cooper recently because after founding her show on the basis of female promiscuity being amazing, she has announced that she is pregnant. She's married. She says she's pregnant now, which, you know, great, more kids, better. But now she needs you to know that she does not regret a thing. Her decade of being promiscuous and then broadcasting about getting rich off of being promiscuous. Because that's what it was, right? It was. It was her doing episodes on oral sex techniques and talking about doing it with. With random people. This was legitimately the way that she made her money. Alex Cooper. But now the problem is that that cosplay is going away because she is a. What you might call a traditional woman, married with a child on the way. So now she wants you to know it was never a mistake. She is so proud of her body count. She is it. It was necessary to get there. It is better for women to sleep with a hundred men before settling down and then having a child. What, what, what's the problem? Well, here we go with Alex Cooper. I'm sure that her. Her children will be thrilled with her when they're old enough to watch these clips.
- [44:30]
Legal Disclaimer Voice
I would not be in the most wonderful, happy period of my life right now had I not lived the life I chose in my 20s. I wouldn't change a thing about the choices I made in my twenties. Who I slept with, who I dated. I wouldn't be who I am today had I not had fun and explored and gotten my heart broken and gotten over and. And made some mistakes and dealt with the consequences. Like that's what I personally needed in order to be ready for this next phase of my life. But choosing motherhood in my 30s doesn't erase the right to have enjoyed my 20s. It just doesn't.
- [45:22]
Ben Shapiro
Okay? So the fact that she even feels the necessity to say that is demonstrative of how much she regrets is kind of amazing. Okay? Because the reason she feels the necessity to say this thing is because she knows that now she's embracing a completely different set of values, such as monogamy and responsibility for another human being, and that those things are mutually exclusive. They are mutually exclusive with promiscuity and with lack of responsibility. And so the idea that you needed to go through promiscuity and lack of responsibility to get to monogamy and responsibility is stupid. You could have just embraced those things right from the top. And as somebody who skipped the promiscuity and the lack of responsibility, let me say I was happy from the very beginning. I didn't have to go through a decade of misery. I didn't have to go through a decade. That sounds like a bad romance series from Netflix where you're effed around and effed over and effed. You didn't have to go through any of that. It turns out there's a shortcut. That shortcut is to just get to the good part, because the good part, the reason she's so happy in her 30s is not because she had a crappy 20s. The reason she's happy now is because she embraced my standards. She got married, and then she's having a baby. That is the reason that she's happy. She didn't. The fact that she has to explain why it was great to bash herself in the head with a frying pan over and over and over for a decade because she needed to do that so that she could feel good when she stopped bashing herself in the head with a frying pan. You know what's great? Never having bashed yourself in the head with a frying pan. Now, again, the case I'm making is not that there can't be repentance or that people can't change their way, but people do that all the time, and it's great. That is a wonderful aspect to life, is you change your perspectives. But she is actively preaching for doing the things she did. According to Alex Cooper, in order for you to feel good about stopping smacking your face with a frying pan, you. You have to keep smacking your face. It is good. It's actively good for you to smack yourself in the face with the frying pan just so you can feel good when you stop smacking your face with the frying pan. Or you could skip the frying pan entirely. You could. You could just make it good right from the very beginning. One of the beautiful things about my personal life, I don't talk about my life on the show all that much because my life is the part that I care about. That is the private side of my life. It is protected. It is a bubble. I've built it that way for reasons both safety and emotional. My life is unbelievably happy. And guess what? It's been unbelievably happy for decades. You know, why? Because I got married to a wonderful human being, to my wife when I was 24 and she was 20 and we were both virgins at the time and we have slept only with one another and we have four children and a fifth on the way. And it's fantastic. It is great. And it was great right from the beginning. We didn't have to go through a decade of travail and heartbreak and learning to live with yourself and being yourself. You didn't have to go through any of that. You didn't. If you think Alex Cooper is happy now because she was unhappy for a decade, you are wrong. She's happy now because now she's doing the right thing. And you don't have to do the right thing, the wrong thing, in order to do the right thing. Okay? But again, Alex Cooper can't make a living that way. She can't. So instead she has to make the, the absolutely absurd argument that the only way to be happy is to be selfish. While she's pregnant. Lies. Her uterus tells a different story. It turns out that an amazing way to be happy is to be responsible for other people, is to be dutiful. Happiness is not instantaneous feelings of dopamine rush. If that were the case, then meth addicts would be the happiest people, you know. But that is not what happiness is. Here's Alex Cooper preaching absolutely terrible life advice.
- [49:15]
Legal Disclaimer Voice
What do you want? Stop reading what other people are doing. Stop seeing your mother in law who's like, well it's, you're this years old so you have to do it. What do you want?
- [49:25]
Ben Shapiro
Want? What do you, what do you want? Well, the problem is that if you are never given a message, it's what is right and wrong. And all anyone ever asks you is what do you want? You will become a terrible person. It turns out people want an awful lot of things. They want other people's wealth, as we discussed. They want to screw over other people. People want to do things without any responsibility for those things. Do not teach people to be immoral for long periods of time while pretending that that's what leads you to the, the happiness at the end of the rainbow. You don't have to do any of that and in fact you damage yourself in the process. You make your life worse for a long period of time. You bear the scars of those things. They never leave you. It is, there's a, an idea in, in Judaism about repentance. It's, it's kind of interesting idea. The idea is that when you repent your sins turn into merit. Which is an interesting idea, right? Because why should a sin turn into a merit? Shouldn't the sin just sort of remain a sin? The basic philosophical idea is that the sin turns into a merit when you learn from it. When you realize you did something cause that's hard to do. That there's a difference between a scar that was incurred and then healed and then you realize the mistake you made and lead a better life from here on, and the scar that you carry around, the tattoo that you emblazon on your body that brags about your sin. Those are not the same thing. But again, this is the this is the message that is now being taught to young women by a really poisonous culture. Emily Badajkowski has a piece over at the at New York magazine called Sex as a Single mom. Preaching much the same sort of stuff. She says the character I'd learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating was a villain. Poison ivy, Catwoman. Sexual but scary. And she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis. She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous. Divorced single mom. What about instead, a woman who needs nothing from men? I already had the kid and the motherhood experience so many of my friends secretly coveted. While pretending to date casually, I had no illusions about the romance of marriage or a shared life together. I'd learned the hard way that being alone was better than most partnerships. I'd seen too much, discovered what many women do only when they get divorced in their mid-40s. I'd lived through the failure of a unit and I was barely into my 30s. This was my villain origin story. I decided to f my way into a new kind of woman. I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I'd worked so hard to be before an 8 pound baby had torn my vagina in two and replace her with the whore. Let's give them a taste of their own medicine, I joke with friends. I thought I'd get some great orgasms and a few funny stories on the way to I can't think of a less happy way to lead your life than that. That sounds like a truly horrible way to lead your life. And it is bad advice. You want people to be happy. Happiness is correlative with duty, is a point that Arthur Brooks makes over and over. Who's a scholar of happiness? The more duty you take on, the more things you do for other people, for your spouse, for your kids for your family, for your community. The better you are as a human and the happier you will be. And the more you pursue this selfish idea that somehow whatever in the moment is the thing you feel like doing is the thing that is important for you to do, the worse your life will be. Stop giving young women bad advice, please. And young men, by the way, because you have a correlative on the manosphere side saying exactly the same thing. Ditch responsibility, treat women horribly, and you will be happy. You will be successful. No, you won't. You'll be a loser and you'll be unhappy. That is the reality. Joining me on the line is Mary Margaret Olahan. She, of course, is the Daily Wire's White House correspondent. A lot going on at the White House. As always, Mary Margaret, thanks for the time. Really appreciate it.
- [53:11]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Thanks, Ben. It's great to be here.
- [53:15]
Ben Shapiro
So a lot of kind of serious stuff going on in the news, but also some bizarre stuff going on in the news. There was a new UFO data dump today by the Trump administration which includes a mysterious glowing orb. Not, not the orb that was touched by the president and the leadership of Saudi Arabia during his first term. That was a different glowing orb. This is a different sort of explain the orb and what's going on with the aliens. And is this all being dumped in coordination with Steven Spielberg and disclosure day?
- [53:40]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Well, Ben, there's actually a lot of orbs involved in this disclosure. And I received a briefing yesterday on these unidentified aerial phenomena. Uap. It's the fancy new way of saying ufo. I received a briefing by senior administration officials ahead of the documents released today. And what they told us was very shocking. And we found the contents of these documents to contain all of it, the major things that we're learning. And I'm not trying to sound like I'm talking about signs, the Mel Gibson movie, or Independence Day, but people have seen orbs all over the United States. According to these files, they've talked to the FBI. They've been deemed credible. They are eyewitness accounts of orbs being spotted in the northeastern United States on a number of occasions. And in these situations, you'd see two glowing orbs. There's videos that I shared on my social media that or on dailywire.com of two glowing orbs up in the sky moving along. In one case they were red, a very bright colored red. In another case they were white moving through the sky. They also spotted these orbs in two other scenarios out in Colorado and then in the western United States. They didn't specify Where. But in a lot of these cases, these orbs were spotted by intelligence officials, military type people who gave credible white eyewitness accounts to the FBI. And these accounts are now under investigation by the United States. Now, I should note up front, Ben, that obviously NASA has said, the administration has said they haven't found evidence of aliens. But that being said, a UAP is something that, you know, the government doesn't know what it is. They've ruled out that it's by causes or, you know, technology that they understand. So this is very interesting. It's a little scary, and it is absolutely a huge development.
- [55:37]
Ben Shapiro
I'm only smiling because when people describe seeing two glowing orbs in the sky, I'm just flashing to airplane jokes. In any case, that is, I have to say, whenever I hear these reports, I'm the skeptic at the company about UFOs and about aliens. I know that Matt Walsh is the far more credible host and credulous host when it comes to these matters. Matt is fully convinced that the aliens are real. Again, I think that people see things all the time. Uh, they maybe, they maybe think that they saw a thing that they didn't see or they saw a thing and it looked like. In any case, it'll be interesting to see what comes out from it. But, you know, I will. I'm not holding my breath, you know, effort. I'm just going to prejudge it. They're not aliens. Let's stop with this now. Anyway, okay, let's go to the other story because obviously this is, this, this one was not made for me. So we need to discuss another type of aliens. And that, of course, is the State Department uncovering massive birth tourism networks. And this is actually a serious story. This has been going on for a very long time in the United States. People who are coming into the US and they are having babies specifically in order to make them United States citizens because of birthright citizenship. Obviously, the story is, is correlative with the administration's efforts to end birthright citizenship more broadly. What's going on with this?
- [56:49]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Yeah, so we scooped this story this week that the State Department had uncovered evidence of birth tourism networks all over the country or all over the world, actually in West Africa, in Europe, in North Africa, they found plans, multiple plans actually, to produce fraudulent documents and facilitate individuals traveling from these countries to the United States to give birth within our borders. In West Africa, a US Embassy found one of these sophisticated birth tourism networks where more than 100 foreign nationals were using these documents to get visas secure U.S. citizenship for their children. And the State Department told me they're shutting this down. They're looking into these individuals or coordinating with local authorities to arrest and identify the people involved. Similarly, in Europe, they found more than 400 suspected birth tourism cases that had occurred since 2024. And in North Africa, one embassy revoked more than 100 visas for birth tours and parents who came to the United States. Now, obviously, Ben, we've been talking about birthright citizenship a lot in the United States. The President just truthed about it. I want to say two days ago. He's very, very invested in the outcome of the Supreme Court case on this matter. But the State Department has really steadily messaged that a USA visa is a privilege, not a right. And they're taking action all over the world to stop these birth tourism explorations and activities, as the President has promised that they would since the beginning of this administration.
- [58:26]
Ben Shapiro
Mary Margaret, I would be remiss if I did not ask if there have been any updates from the White House about the content. Obviously, there's been a lot of discussion of a memorandum of understanding with Iran. No real details from the White House at this point. Iran is putting out its own version of an agreement that frankly would look absurd on its face. The president himself has said this morning via Truth Social that the stuff that's being circulated by the Iranian government is just trash. It's not real. Have you heard anything as to the contents of some sort of memorandum of understanding?
- [58:52]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Yeah, Ben, the truth that you just referenced is probably the latest we have from the President on this topic where he, he blasts the fake news media for sharing a plan that he's saying is not accurate and is not the real deal of what he has going on. So that's straight from the horse's mouth, as it were from the President's mouth. And we'll have to wait to hear from him next on, on what the details of that plan are. We would love to know. We would love to hear. We don't always get all the details on this stuff as the negotiations continue.
- [59:25]
Ben Shapiro
So also, the, the big story of the weekend over at the White House is the UFC fight that's going to happen. What, what's the kind of mood over at the White House given all the controversy that that has sort of attended the event?
- [59:36]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Yeah, I mean, look, Ben, even the legacy media is excited about this. It is quite large. If you head over there, you can see the whole UFC structure. Cabot Phillips corrected me on my description of what this UFC structure is yesterday, because apparently I Described it like a girl. But it is the. The octagon that is set up in the backyard of the White House. It is massive. The press got a good look at it yesterday morning, and this is going to be a huge event. We saw one of the fighters at the White House yesterday. All the press, press were running after him, trying to get photos, trying to chat with him, and it's just. It's jubilant. The White House is excited. The president is excited. Like I said, even the legacy media is excited. The traffic in the city is really, really, truly atrocious, which is probably partially due to the World Cup. Soccer games will be happening around the country, too. But it's exciting. Aside from the 100 degree heat, it's a great place to be right now.
- [60:35]
Ben Shapiro
That's Mary Margaret Olihan straight from the White House. Thanks so much for your time, Mary Margaret. And it sounds like you have a bit of a cold, so I hope you feel better over the weekend.
- [60:43]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Thank you. Thank you.
- [60:45]
Ben Shapiro
Well, in other terrible news, the conviction of Carmelo Anthony for the murder of Austin Metcalfe is a good thing. Obviously, when people murder other people, that's a good thing. That is a good thing. But the parents of Carmelo Anthony are. They seem like not good people. Just going to put it out there. These do not seem like good people. Obviously, there are problems at some level when you raise a son who stabs a person unprovoked in the heart to death. Some problems probably were happening in the home. Not always, but the vast majority of the time. Well, his parents are still doing the tour. They're on the Breakfast Club, and they say they regret having hired a white lawyer. This is where we are now. It's the lawyer's fault that their son was convicted for stabbing a person in the heart. Is there anything that you both wish you could have done differently?
- [61:39]
Carmelo Anthony's Parent
I wish I would have been just being rebellious and just do what I.
- [61:50]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Or listening to advice that you thought was.
- [61:53]
Carmelo Anthony's Parent
Yeah, I was told, don't talk to this person. Don't talk to this person. I feel like it was just a setup now. Like, like I said, they told us, go get. I'm white attorneys. Every black person. I went to white attorney, no white attorney. Said them up, push them. Hey, here you go. I mean, no objections. It is. It wasn't. It wasn't.
- [62:24]
Ben Shapiro
That's the regret. That's the regret. So your son stabbed somebody to death and your regret is that you hired a white lawyer? That's where you're going with this? This is after, by the way, again, they started a GoFundMe that raised almost a million dollars and then rented a house in a pricey Tony neighborhood for the duration of the trial for safety reasons. Here's Carmelo's father saying that the verdict. Well, what it shows is that basically black people are the victims. You know, because if a. If a black kid can't stab a white kid to death without being convicted, is this even America?
- [62:57]
Carmelo Anthony's Parent
It don't matter where you at. It don't matter where you at. Like, like I'm. We was in the pose. Been the safest place, but it's like they're telling us that you could be assaulted, but you better not fight back. That's what this. This is what this case saying. It could be two, three people size. They don't matter. Yeah, so that's. That's what this, this case is really all about.
- [63:25]
Ben Shapiro
No, what the case is really about is that if you have an altercation with someone, you don't get to stab them directly in the chest with a kitchen knife. That. That would be what this case is. Is really about. I mean, the. The lack of. The lack of sadness for the victim, the lack of understanding of what has happened here. There must have been a moral framework that Carmelo Anthony was. Was operating within, because when the parents act like this, I don't know what to take away from that. You know, God forbid any parent should be in a situation where your kid does something like that. But to pretend that parents don't have any impact on kids and the things that they do is also incredibly silly. There is, by the way, you want to talk about just ugliness and horror and racial polarization for no reason at all. There is now a social media trend of people Photoshopping themselves. Young black people urinating on Austin Metcalfe's grave. He died. He died. He was literally stabbed in the chest and died. And you are Photoshopping yourself peeing on his grave. There are no allegations that he was a racist. There's no evidence that he was a racist. Even if he had been a racist, that is still. Racism is not punishable by death in the United States. That's not how it works. But that, I mean, that attitude is being spread by some. Someone. It's being spread somewhere. Here's Al Green calling for reparations on the back of this. Reparations for black people on the back of a black person stabbing a white person to death.
- [64:57]
Sports Enthusiast
There could be no reconciliation without reparative justice, and there could be no reparations without reparative justice. And to have reparative justice, you've got to have the thing that we call. What? No, the money. You got to have the money.
- [65:19]
Ben Shapiro
Yes, Reparative compensation.
- [65:21]
Sports Enthusiast
You got to have reparations. You've got to have money. Look, if money can solve the problems for everybody else, it can solve some of our problems. And anybody who doesn't want the reparations, it's okay with me. I will take your portion.
- [65:40]
Ben Shapiro
Well, I mean, don't. Don't let the mask clip too much there.
- [65:43]
Sports Enthusiast
That.
- [65:43]
Ben Shapiro
It's all about the money. My goodness. Well, now Carmelo Anthony is saying that he does not actually have any money. He wants the judge to appoint him an appeals attorney. The document says that Anthony is penniless, destitute, and indigent. Too poor to employ counsel to represent him on appeal. Well, didn't they just raise almost a million dollars on a GoFundMe? Didn't they just raise, like, a lot of money on all of this? So now the taxpayer should take it up again? Where are his parents in all this? What are they doing? Why aren't they raising money? Why aren't they taking mortgages on houses that they're buying? What is happening here? Something has gone deeply wrong. One podcaster, a person named Larry Reed, is calling for a black exodus from America back to Africa on the basis that a man who stabbed a white man went to jail.
- [66:34]
Larry Reed
Let's drain this place of its benefits and make our mass exodus and go home and build. See, civil rights did not make white people that are infected with whiteness stop being racist. They still raised racist children that run this country to this day.
- [67:08]
Ben Shapiro
I mean, I'm just going to point out that the Democratic candidate in the last election cycle was a black woman named Kamala Harris, and that we had a president for two terms named Barack Obama. He was black, and that he had a black attorney general who headed up the Justice Department. This is stupidity. It is stupidity of the highest order. But notice, notice, by the way, the phraseology there. We need to drain America of its benefits and then go back to Africa. I mean, if the idea is that you want to build somewhere else, everyone is welcome to build somewhere else. You can leave. But the idea that you are somehow owed by taxpayers, like your fellow taxpayers, the people who are actively working inside the system, that you should drain them of their money, that is truly ugly stuff. It is a leech mentality. And again, it's an astonishing betrayal of what you think America is. The idea that America is deeply racist because of the, of this incident above all others, that the Carmelo Anthony murder of a white man was somehow, and the conviction of that murderer was somehow a reflection of deep seated American racism. If you're that far gone, I suppose that maybe you should leave the country at that point. You obviously don't like the country very much. You think the country is pretty terrible. So perhaps you should in fact leave now. Speaking of people who should leave the country, the third worldism of the left is on full display. It turns out that the Democratic candidate for Michigan, a person named Abdul El Sayed, we've talked about him before, he's a full scale terrorism sympathizer. Unsurprisingly, one of his former staffers was one of the students who was charged in an indictment at the University of Michigan that we talked about yesterday on the show. According to Yahoo. In the audio recording obtained by the Detroit News from the court appearance, pretrial services officer Brian Harmon reportedly told the judge that a person named Oda who he said attended the University of Michigan from 2020 to 2025 held full time employment for approximately four months through April of this year for a local Senate candidate. That would be. That would be El Said. According to the indictment, this staffer for El Said vandalized a building at 2am by padlocking the doors, painting inverted red triangles on the building. Those would be the Hamas markers for where to bomb. Pressing red painted handprints on the windows and throwing red paint balloons and spray painting on the sidewalk. Free Palestine, F the idf, mtu arms, genocide, FRR and fmtu. Blood on your hands. Long live the Intifada. People taking advantage of the system. It's a very real thing. President Trump went after Ilhan Omar and other people imported from the third world who have ripped off our system in fraudulent fashion.
- [69:49]
Donald Trump
Look at what's happened in Minnesota. Somalia. All these people came in for Somalia. They ripped off our system. You have the woman who married her brother. She came in and married her brother. Isn't that wonderful? And then she talks about the Constitution of the United States. She comes from Somalia. They don't have constitutions in Somalia. They don't have police, they don't have. All they have is people that run around shooting each other. And then she comes and tells us how to run our country. I don't like it.
- [70:21]
Jimmy Kimmel
Okay.
- [70:21]
Ben Shapiro
No, he's not wrong about that. Well, meanwhile, with regard to Iran, I, I wish I could tell you I knew what the hell was going on, but I can't tell you I know what the Hell is going on. So you'll recall that yesterday in the morning, the President suggested he was finally going to take or bomb Kharga island, which I have been suggesting for months is basically the only way to end the war. Then the President last night said that he had canceled the strikes, quote, based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved. I have, as President of the United States of America, canceled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening. Discussions and final points have been in both concept and great detail approved by all parties involved, including the U.S. israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt and others. The naval blockade will remain in full force in effect until this transaction is finalized. Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly. And then it turned out that none of that is true. So the Israelis certainly were not party to this memo of Understanding. We don't know the terms of the Memo of Understanding. We have no idea when it was supposed to be signed, what it is supposed to do, how soon it will be implemented. These supposed parties to the agreement are not parties to the agreement. The Prime Minister of Israel's office, again, they were listed in that tweet, put out a tweet saying that Israel is, in fact, not a party to the mou Quote. President Trump spoke this evening with Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the emerging memo of understanding with Iran to enter into negotiations even though Israel is not a party to the Memorandum of Understanding. The Prime Minister expressed his appreciation for President Trump's commitment that any final agreement at the conclusion of negotiations will include the removal of enriched material, the dismantling of enrichment infrastructure, limits on missile production, and the cessation of Iran's support for its terrorist proxies in the region. Again, those were all the goals that Trump established at the beginning and the ones that I have been defining as the victorious goals of the United States. It is utterly unclear that any of those goals are actually reached through some sort of kick the can down the road memo of understanding here. The President says this time is different. Now, the President has, I kid you not, 39 times in the past 60 odd days suggested that a deal was at hand. So color me a little skeptical. Now, here's the President yesterday suggesting this time is different because Iran has been pounded.
- [72:35]
Mary Margaret Olahan
You have said before that Iran and
- [72:37]
Ben Shapiro
the United States were close to a deal. It has not happened yet.
- [72:40]
Mary Margaret Olahan
Why are you so convinced that this time is different?
- [72:43]
Donald Trump
Because they've taken a pounding. They've taken a Pounding like very few people could take. And they want to make the deal a lot more than I do. And we could have had it done the other way, I guess, but it would have taken longer. They, they got hit very hard recently, as you know. And I don't like to have to do things that way, but I felt it was necessary.
- [73:08]
Ben Shapiro
Now, again, that is certainly not what the Iranians are perceiving here. The Iranians were firing again at things in the Strait of Hormuz last night. So after the President announced that there was in fact a deal that was on the verge of being signed, the Iranians were sending drones to attack commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz literally last night after that particular announcement. Well, meanwhile, there are reports that the Qataris, this is from the Washington Post, pursued secret talks with Iran to basically bribe them to shield their gas complex from strikes. That would not be surprising at all. Qatar has always been a cutout for the Iranian government. They are always putting one foot in either camp and massaging the Iranians. The fact that the brokers in any negotiation have been the Pakistanis, who are a Chinese cutout, and the Qataris, who are an Iranian cutout, never, I think, instilled great confidence here. Now, the President this morning rejected a bunch of claims by Iran. So Iran's MERS Agency, which is their official news media, they basically put out a synopsis of what they said the deal was. And if that was the deal, it's just called surrender. If the Iranian summation of the deal is what the deal was, it's just surrender. It was things like pay all the, Pay all the rebuilding costs in Iran and don't discuss ballistics and don't discuss terrorism and allow Iran to reengage with the world economy. And also on nuclear, no shipment of the material outside the country. It would just be, quote, unquote, watered down inside the country and no destruction of their, of their nuclear development. All of that ought to be a nonstarter. Again, as I've said before, what would a good deal look like? No nuclear development, including the dismantlement of nuclear facilities, no ballistic missile development, no funding of terrorism abroad, opening the strait permanently. And then when all of those things have happened, then you can talk about whether they get money, because otherwise you are propping up a terror regime that is the cancer in the region and paying the money to continue doing all the bad things. So what would a good temporary agreement look like? Because again, what we're talking about here is a memo of understanding, not a final agreement. So what Would a memo of understanding look like anything that facilitates a good permanent agreement? That's what a good memo of understanding would look like. If it gets us closer to a good final agreement, it's good. If it doesn't, it's bad. It just buys them time and gives them money, that's all. So if we put money back in Iran's pocket and that's basically, you know, we. We give them some money, depending on the amount of money, and they open up the strait, that is not a great deal. It's not the worst deal I ever heard of in terms of like, okay, the strait opens again and they can chip out and they can chip in. That's not enough to rebuild all of their stuff. But if you're releasing sanctions on them or allowing them to rebuild their ballistic missile facilities or somehow barring Israel from taking action against the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah in Lebanon, or telling the Israelis they can't bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, then that's an L. That is the spurs in the second half of the of the game four collapse in New York. We've won the first half of this war, but if you lose the second half, you lose the game. That is all. So, you know, again, I will wait to see what any sort of final arrangement here looks like because we just don't know at this point. Alrighty, folks, the show continues for our members right now. We'll get some things I like, including Masters of the Universe and some things that I hate. We'll get to all that in a moment. First, you have to become a member so you can watch all that kind of stuff. So why don't you just do it? Become a member. Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.