Piers Morgan Uncensored - Ben Shapiro: On Trump Conviction & Latest in Rafah

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Ben Shapiro’s rise as a conservative poster boy has matured into something more professional in recent years. He’s managed to avoid the downward trajectories of other rightwing pundits such as Alex Jones and Steve Bannon, to become a media mogul in his own right. He joins Piers Morgan for a deep dive into current events affecting the US and the whole world; first taking aim at the historic Donald Trump trial verdict but also picking apart Joe Biden’s performance as President. Lastly, Ben tackles the war still raging in his beloved Israel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you feel slightly depressed that this is the choice that your country has got, Biden Trump? People say, well, look, he spent years saying, lock her up about Hillary Clinton. There's now footage of him saying it multiple times. Locker up, lock her up, lock her up. And then he didn't do it. If you take everything that Donald Trump says at pure face value, you're a fool. The truth is, if you're attacking terrorists in the area of a refugee camp, this is going to keep happening. Then you are against literally all retaliation or military action that Israel has taken.

My team have been desperate to try and get you to debate Norman Finkelstein. It's definitely not a no. It is also not a guess. Two seismic global stories have divided our audience, our panelists and wider public opinion more than I can remember in modern times. The first is a criminal conviction of former President Donald Trump. The second is the deadly Israeli incursion into Rafa and the growing international demands for a ceasefire in Gaza. My next guest is passionate and polarizing views on both.

I expect will strongly agree on at least some of them. it on the other? Well, let's wait and see. Returning to Uncensor of a Daily Wire editor emeritus, Ben Shapiro. Ben, great to see it. YouTube, Pierce. I feel like a bit like when Elvis died, I'll always remember where I was when Trump got convicted. The fact that an American president, one of the only 46 people to hold that office, actually turned into a criminal felon before our eyes, when you actually heard the verdict, what was your immediate gut reaction?

I think everybody's stomach sank who actually takes the justice system seriously. The entire case was obviously a put-up job. The coordination between the prosecution and the judge in this particular case in order to craft a set of charges that are pretty much the turducken of criminal charges who's a misdemeanor wrapped around what may have been a federal felony but wrapped around another New York state felony. And none of it made any sense. But the bottom line here was so long as they could somehow bootstrap some sort of criminal case

into a Manhattan jury. Donald Trump was going to get convicted. Now, the only question, of course, is whether he's going to go to jail or be put under house arrest. But the bottom line here is that is it going to impact the presidential race in any serious way? Not particularly. The only thing it might do, actually, is have a rally around the flag effect for Donald Trump on the right side of the aisle, and it might actually impact independence such that they look at what happened here. And they say to themselves, you know, the guy who keeps preaching about democracy being under threat from Donald Trump, that guy's party seems very focused on putting his chief political opponent who right now is winning the swing states in jail. Right. I mean, it stinks of being a banana republic.

It's the kind of thing you would expect Americans to look at from afar and mock this kind of political abuse, really, of the judicial system. I don't care what side people are on. This seems to me like an absolute clear case of an overreach purely for political purposes. And at that point, America becomes a very different country. For sure. I mean, the problem that you see in all these situations is that as soon as the break glass in case of emergency glass is broken, well, now the glass has been broken. It doesn't get unbroken. And in American politics, once you have a political opponent being prosecuted along specious lines for something that really happened many, many years ago and wasn't a crime at the time, do you believe that there will be any presidential candidate in the future from either party who is going to escape the threat of,

criminal inquisition from a political party in another state. I mean, this again is a state-level crime, and it was brought in Manhattan. Meanwhile, you have the president's son who's being brought up on federal charges that's happening in Wilmington. So Wilmington, Delaware, you would assume that's going to be a pretty friendly place for Hunter Biden to be brought up on charges. You know, all of this starts to call into question the justice system. Obviously, listen, we all have critiques of the criminal justice system here in the United States. We disagreed with particular verdicts. But on this one, it is so eminently clear that there is no charge. that should have been leveled here against Donald Trump,

that it's hard for me to see how people in the middle of the spectrum look at this and take it seriously. Yeah, I mean, it seems so pathetically trivial that really at the center of this is an alleged one-night stand between a billionaire real estate magnet-stroke TV star and a porn star 20 years ago, and he's then shuffled some paperwork, and then in the run-up to an election,

he's wanted it to stay quiet. I mean, it just seems so trivial to me. And yet now it's led to an American president becoming a convicted fellow, which, like you say, it's such a precedent now going forward. Every party going forward will now try and do this to the leader of the other party, because the precedent is now set. You know, there have been so many of these cases where Donald Trump has been targeted in unique ways, and it's actually not done any serious damage to Trump per se.

It's really done damage to the institution trying to target him. So they impeached Donald Trump not once but twice. And now, of course, Republicans have thought about impeaching Joe Biden. That's just going to be a tool that's on the table all the time, which doesn't mean that's an important tool anymore. It actually makes the tool less important. You're going to see the same thing happen with criminal prosecutions of political opponents across the political spectrum. There have already been calls inside the Republican Party for local DAs and jurisdictions in red states to go after Democratic officials. I don't think this is a good precedent for anybody.

But this is something that has been done by Democrats. And then you see Turnabout as fair play. You remember that Harry Reid nuked the filibuster with regard to judicial not. And at the time, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said, if you do this, this is going to come back to bite you. And of course, it did. The bottom line is that in politics, every sword has two edges. And so if you're going to go after Donald Trump with the one edge, you better be prepared for the other edge to come back at you in pretty short order. I mean, Trump, you know, the other side looking at it, people said, well, look, he spent years saying, lock her up about Hillary Clinton. There's now footage of him saying it multiple times. The crowd baying for blood, lock her up, lock her up. Has he brought that on himself? Well, I mean, again, I think that when Donald Trump's epitaph has written, it's going to say Donald Trump 50th or maybe 47th president of the United States, he said a lot of bleep. And I think the difference between Donald Trump saying things like lock her up and Joe Biden's DOJ and his various allies in the states actually attempting to lock up his political opposition, there's a wide difference right there. This has always been one of the bizarre things about how people pretend to interpret Trump.

I mean, peers, you know Donald Trump. I've met Donald Trump in for years, obviously. If you take everything that Donald Trump says at pure face value, you're a fool. I mean, you're really a fool. I agree. I agree. I agree. Everybody knows that, including the voting public. And so when he goes out there and he says colorful things like lock her up, does anyone, and then he didn't do it.

He didn't do it. He was president of the United States. His DOJ was in charge, and he didn't do it. And Joe Biden's been in charge for three years. And guess what? His DOJ is coming after Donald Trump in two separate jurisdictions in Florida and in D.C. You got local DAs in Atlanta and New York going after Donald Trump. Kind of weird how it happens whenever it's the Democrats.

but when Republicans talk about it, somehow that's equivalent. I don't buy it. Well, I keep asking Democrats about this since his verdict came in. Explain to me why, what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones and the paying off of a sexual harassment case and everything else and lying to American people. Why is that deemed to be not as bad as what Trump did consensually with Stormy Daniels? I don't get it. Right.

Now, there is no sense to it. Beyond which, obviously, this is such a stretch of criminal law. I mean, even people who are honest on the left will acknowledge, this is the first time these statutes have ever been used in this way. Well, if you're going after a former president of the United States who happens to be leading in the polls against the current president of the United States, you better do better than this is a unique interpretation of law that's being brought for the very first time.

That's totally insane. It better be a well-established corpus of law that has been clearly violated in a unique way, and that is not what happened here. Do you think Trump will win in November? I do. I think that if Donald Trump, There's always the proviso. If Donald Trump can keep his trap somewhat shut, he is going to win. Because if this is a referendum on Joe Biden's leadership, Joe Biden is falling apart.

There's an article in the Wall Street Journal that just said the obvious today about how Joe Biden is effectively seen aisle. Everybody around him knows it. You can read that in the Time Magazine interview that he just did where he stumbles all over himself. He mixes up Russia. He mixes up China. He mix up South Korea and Taiwan all in the course of one interview. There's a reason the DOJ, his DOJ, won't release tape of his interviews with Robert Herr, apparently interviews so bad that they basically allowed him off the hook in his own criminal case with regard to mishandling of classified documents because he was so dottering and so elderly that he might be too sympathetic to a jury. If this is a referendum on Joe Biden's leadership, Donald Trump will win. If Donald Trump makes himself the center of the election, then that's a diceier issue for him,

obviously. Do you feel slightly depressed that this is the choice that your country has got again, Biden Trump? I mean, I think that like most American voters, you know, this wouldn't have been much. my optimal. I didn't vote for Donald Trump in the primaries. I am financially supporting him in this election, right? I'm fundraising for Donald Trump because Joe Biden, in my opinion, cannot be president. He is just that bad a president, and he should not be occupying the White House. I know what a Donald Trump presidency looks like, and that's a lot of wild rhetoric and a lot of pretty good policy. And I know what a Joe Biden presidency looks like, and that is basically oatmeal in the mouth

and terrible policy. I mean, it is a strange election. I can remember feeling in 2016, I was absolutely sure Trump would win because I could feel it. This time, it's interesting, as a Reuters poll came out, and it said that 10% of registered of Republicans

and 25% of registered independence were now less inclined to vote for Trump since these verdicts came in. But at the same time, he's raised over $200 million, according to Eric Trump, for the campaign, which is a staggering

amount of money. So clearly the base has been massively surging on the back of this with their fury, but at the same time, is it concerning for him that even some of his own party now feel less inclined to vote for him? You know, less inclined ain't, I'm not going to vote for him. Less inclined is less inclined. I don't think you find a lot of Democrats right now who are massively inclined to vote for Joe Biden. I mean, the lack of enthusiasm in the American public for this electoral cycle is absolutely palpable, which cuts in Donald Trump's favor, by the way because a lower turnout election is how Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, he had an unprecedented jump of 22 million additional voters in the voting pool between 2016 and

2020, and those cut largely for Joe Biden. Many of those were in the early balloting, obviously, via mail-in ballots. That same thing is not going to happen this time. Joe Biden, in a low turnout election, has got a very serious problem on his hands. That's why he keeps trying to go back to his base. It's why he is now being forced to campaign in the black community, which presumably normally Democrats are going to win that 90-10. They're afraid that he might lose 15, 20% of the black. He doesn't even have to do that. If he doesn't get heavy black turnout in this election cycle,

he probably loses in the swing states. Is there any chance that he is persuaded to stand aside? And if he does, is there any Democrat out there that you would fear? Very unlikely he would stand aside. He's made very clear. I mean, he literally threatened to fight a Time magazine reporter two days ago who asked him about that, to which I say, I'll watch that televised.

Like 10 out of 10 would watch that. fight. But he's not going to stand it. If he were to stand aside, Kamala Harris is a much worse option for the Democrats than even Joe Biden is the only person who I fear is a Republican coming in from the wings. And I think everybody knows this is Michelle Obama. And Michelle Obama does have a very high level of popularity in the United States. She's widely seen as sort of an Oprah-like figure, despite the fact that she is fairly radical politically. So that would be the one I'd fear, but she seems to have no inclination to want to do that. Plus, Joe Biden is not going to step aside. Now, again, I think the possibility of a serious health event between now and November

is really high because I subscribe to a political philosophy that says that the rule about Chekhov's gun that if it's over the mantle in Act 1, it will be used by Act 2. I think that that's descriptive, not normative. So I think there's a really good shot. That's the thing we've all been waiting for, which is some sort of serious health event to happen to Joe Biden, unfortunately.

I have a feeling that's going to happen before November. I've got a bad feeling. It just doesn't look at all well to me or functioning properly as a human being. It's on that level. It's just sad to watch. Who's the smart play for Trump? as his running mate? I think anybody who gives a feeling of solidity for Trump.

So there's been some talk about Tim Scott. I think Tim Scott would be fine. I think Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas would be fine. I think, you know, Nikki Haley, although the base doesn't like Nikki Haley very much, she obviously has appeal to centrists in the polling. So you could see a world where Trump isn't going to lose his base. His base is going to show up to vote for Donald Trump.

So politically speaking, putting aside whatever disagreements, I or anybody else has, Nikki Haley, she would not be a bad pick for that political position. Doug Bergham, North Dakota. Bottom line, I don't think that vice presidential candidates win you an election. I do think a bad vice presidential candidate can really hurt you electorally, which is why Joe Biden being saddled with Kamala Harris is really bad, because she's the first VP candidate that people have looked at in a while and go,

whoa, she might actually be president, and that's the person who he's running with? Well, what's incredible is that he insisted on having a black woman as his vice president, and their approval ratings with the black community in America have been plummeting and migrating to a guy, they spent years saying is the biggest racist in the country. Yeah, well, I mean, the fact is that Joe Biden has been relegated to simply pandering and pandering and pandering at this point. I mean, he went to Morehouse College, and he suggested to brand-new college graduates that they were facing an intractably racist America in which they could never succeed. You're saying this to people at their graduation from college, a really uplifting message from the presidents of the United States. Again, I think that him attempting to relieve student loan debt, I think that many of his policies in the Middle East, a lot of what Joe Biden is doing,

right now is geared to trying to reenthusy a very unenthusiastic base. Yeah, I agree. Let's turn to the Middle East. I know you have very passionate, strong feelings about all this. Where do you think we are with the war? I mean, if you're being completely honest with yourself, perhaps, do you feel it's reaching a point where Israel has to, at some stage, do some kind of deal? Well, I mean, it depends on the kind of deal that would be on the table. presumably any deal that leaves Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip would not be acceptable to the Israeli government, no matter who was leading the Israeli government at this point. No government in Israel could stand on the basis of that after October 7th. And so far as I'm aware, Hamas has not accepted any deal that involves Hamas actually leaving power, its leaders going into exile and Israel not completely pulling out of the Gaza Strip. So again, there is no deal on the table like that. I think the realistic scenario here is that Israel, because of all the pressure, is going to go slower in Rafa than they otherwise would have, which, Frankly, I think it's bad policy for the Israelis. I think it's bad policy for the West.

This thing could have been over back in March if the West had let Israel kind of finish the job in Rafah and then move on to whatever the next thing is. And of course, that's the other big problem. You and I've discussed this before. What is the next thing? Who's willing to take responsibility for the situation in the Gaza Strip other than the Israeli military? It's not the Americans, not the UAE, it's not the Jordanians, not the Saudis, not the Egyptians, none of whom, by the way, will accept any Palestinian refugees under any circumstances, good or bad. So, again, that's an intractable problem.

But as far as finishing off Hamas as a functioning, well-organized military machine, the final step of that is finishing things off in Rafah, where there are still at least three battalions of Hamas fighters in Rafah. Of course, the biggest problem for Israel right now actually may not militarily be in the south. The biggest problem for Israel right now is militarily in the north, where Quesbalah has really been upping the ante. Yeah, they obviously believe that their pressure up north is going to force Israel into concessions down south, and they believe that the West is going to continue to pressure.

Israel, even in the face of increasingly deadly fire aimed from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. See, where I was slightly to take issue with you with this situation with Rafa is that the American intelligence is clear that they believe that Hamas's ability to commit anything like October the 7th again has been completely degraded. They no longer see them as an existential threat of any kind to Israel. And of course, you've got hundreds of thousands of innocent women and kids in this refugee camp. And you've also got the remaining members of Hamas deliberately putting

themselves around refugees. And almost I would imagine hoping that Israel continues to bomb, because each time they land a bomb, tents will catch fire and 50 more civilians get killed and more opprobrium reigns on Israel's head. And that there's a kind of no-win scenario there. And the ultimate game that gets Israel to finish off Hamas in Rafah will be completely negated by the downside of so many more civilians being killed. Do you believe that the American intelligence is correct, that Hamas has now been degraded

to the extent where there's no actual military point in continuing this? Well, that's a massive moving of the goalposts. Remember, the original goal of the war was to extirpate Hamas as the ruling authority in the Gaza Strip because they had built hundreds of kilometers. of terror tunnels and they had access

But I agree Hamas should be I agree Hamas can't return to power. Let's agree that Hamas can't return to power. I don't think that is remotely ever going to be allowed to happen. And I would be totally supportive of Israel. But do you not think that now is a moment for the deal to be done and how obstructive

to that deal is Netanyahu, who Biden made pretty explicit that he believes a lot of the reason that he's continuing to war is that at the end of it, he's out of a job because Israelis want him to be held accountable for what happened, even though they support the war effort.

Well, the polling does say that. A few things. That's wishcasting, that's wishcasting right over the Grand Canyon that exists where Hamas actually cuts a deal, because there has to be somebody on the other side of that deal. No, I understand that. I understand that. I think Hamas have got to go.

I also think that Neton Yahu has to go, and I also think that Smodrich and Van Gavir in that cabinet are spewing rhetoric, and which plays into the hands of people who think Israel's being genocidal, which I don't think they are, and I think it's a ridiculous label to put aside them. But when you hear those guys talk,

I would, look, I'm not Jewish, I'm not an Israeli, but I would be uncomfortable that they have another agenda going on here and that this not doesn't reflect what most Israelis want. Well, they're not part of the war cabinet. I mean, the immediate war cabinet right now, I mean, just to get technical, the immediate war cabinet in Israel,

is Netanyahu, his defense minister, Gav Ghalant, who's a member of Likud, and Benigand, who's a member of his own party and the chief rival to Netanyahu for the prime ministership. So that government still exists, that may collapse in terms of the war cabinet. The actual sitting government of the state of Israel is, of course, a coalition government that does include right-wing parties who are calling on Netanyahu to finish the job. But again, if there were an optimal situation where Hamas leaves, where the leadership of Hamas goes into exile and where some form of Ghazan native leadership is brought up to bear, Israel, I think, pretty much along all lines, with maybe the exception of Samothrich and Bengavir, would be totally willing to do that. That deal is not on the table. I can't say this enough. What Joe Biden has been doing right now is actually an incredibly, incredibly dishonest tactic.

He essentially walked out a deal that was vague on the central point of the negotiation, which is whether Hamas would go and how. And then he proclaimed that Israel had accepted it. And then he proclaimed that Israel should accept it. So question, if this was Israel's offer, as Joe Biden suggested that it was originally last Friday, why is he encouraging the Israelis to accept it? They made the offer. When was the last time you made an offer, Pears, that somebody then came back to and said,

Pears, will you accept the offer that you just made? If you make an offer, typically you're the one who made the offer, and yet all the pressure right now seems to be brought to bear on the Israeli government in the hope that presumably will break the internal coalition in Israeli politics. The truth is that right now, the Biden administration is putting an extraordinary focus on getting rid of Netanyahu,

significantly more focused than they are on getting rid of Hamas, unfortunately, because the reality is Hamas is not. going to surrender. Hamas is not going to give up the hostages so long as the hostages are the thing protecting them, they think, from being ousted in the Gaza Strip. The minute they give up the hostages, the reason they haven't gone through this multi-stage deal is because the minute they give up the remaining hostages, there is no reason for Israel not to extirpate them and finish them off. And the reports from Israel are that Sinwar, who's the military leader of Hamas,

still sitting in the Gaza Strip, has surrounded himself personally with the remaining living hostages. So again, this is an intractable situation. Only military pressure is going to end whatever rule Hamas has of the Gaza Strip. Chamas, as you and I both agree, cannot be the governing party in Gaza, nor should it be part of a selection committee in terms of the government in Gaza, which is something that had been floated before. The idea was that the PA and Hamas were somehow going to form a coalition government, which is insane. Yeah, on that I completely agree, but should Netanyahu stay in power at the end of this? I mean, I think that the coalition, likely, when the war is over, will in fact collapse, We will see a new election at that point.

But Netanyahu is not the obstacle to, quote, unquote, peace or a ceasefire. The obstacle would be the terrorist group currently holding hostages, including American citizens, women in the elderly. Who runs Gaza after this? I mean, it depends. Chámas has literally been killing the people who are bringing in the humanitarian aids. There was a Ghazan family that was working with the Israelis and working with the international community to get aid in. And Chahmas literally went and killed them. So if Israel can identify locals who are willing to do local rules,

rule, as has been the case in some parts of the West Bank for years and years and years, then presumably Israel will do that. The question is, is there anyone there? Again, politics, unfortunately, is a series of bad decisions and worse decisions. The Israelis want nothing less than to station 30 to 40,000 troops in Gaza for the duration. They don't want that. But the problem is they can't hand it back over to a population that is 70 to 80 percent supportive of October 7th in Hamas in the hopes that that population will suddenly moderate and become a full-fledged flourishing member of the international community. They tried that in 2005, 2006, and they got October 7th for their troubles. I mean, they got October the 7th. There was a

heinous terror attack. It was fueled by an ideology. Are you comfortable that that ideology has been crushed, or do you fear that it may just have been exacerbated by what's happened, particularly given the very large civilian toll? The reality is that when it comes to crushing ideologies, the only way to do that is to essentially clear and hold. Counterinsurgency strategy is going to have to be the tactic that is applied with regard to this. Let's put it this way. There has never been a truly disgusting ideology that has been extirpated simply through hoping, praying, and giving things away to the people who are promoting that ideology. That has never happened in the history of the world. It turns out the massaging bad ideologies

tends to make them more powerful and that the only way to get rid of ideologies, unfortunately, to be long-term commitments to change the situation on the ground. That's what the British did, for example, in Malaya. That is what the United States did in Germany and Japan. And what you're watching right now with regard to the perverse ideology that's been promoted in the Palestinian Authority and in the Gaza Strip is something that's going to take generations to remove. Is a two-state solution feasible in our lifetime?

I have a hard time seeing how, unless there is a massive change in the opinions of the people who are living in the Gaza Strip. the West Bank. And those opinions are not going to be bought off by temporary concessions that are made on a one-to-one basis or even by the idea of a, quote-unquote, Palestinian state handed over to whom. There's no government, no borders, and no actual citizenry, given the fact that the Palestinian authority and Hamas both claim that there's a quote-unquote right of return for all of the Palestinians who are living in these areas, meaning that they would get to become citizens of

the state of Israel. So again, it's an intractable problem with a series of goals that are totally unrealistic in the real world. So, you know, until things become realistic, I tend to believe they are unrealistic. As we're talking, the, well, it's not an invasion of Rafah clearly yet, but the attacks are going to continue, Netanyahu's made that clear. If there are many more incidents like the one the other day where 50 civilians end up being killed as a consequence of two Hamas terrorists being taken out, how many of those can Israel sustain before public opinion globally really does turn on them

in a massively bigger scale. Well, I mean, I think public opinion has turned on Israel to a large extent already. So I think the only question for Israel is, does it want to win the war, does it want to lose the war? And as far as that particular incident, Israel used literally the smallest bombs in its arsenal to hit a site that was not inside the humanitarian protected area. Apparently, it set off some sort of weapons cash that Hamas was keeping there, and that's what led to the fire that killed a lot of people.

This is Hamas's strategy. Hamas has been using civilian sites to hide weaponry, to hide its own fighters. The entire construction of this war was predicated on that idea. new idea in fighting war is that if terrorists are even more evil than you thought they were, they're going to hide behind women and children and they're going to hide themselves among civilians and hide weapons there, that this somehow amounts to, like, safe in tag, then all you're going to get from here on in is insurgency strategy that relies on the humanitarian impulses of the West in order for terrorists to survive and thrive. But on that incident, you're right.

They didn't use massive missiles, as was originally thought to be the case. The smallest, 37 pounds. I understand. But the damage that was caused by the repercussions of that attack were enormous. And 50 people is an enormous number of people to be killed. And the truth is, if you're attacking terrorists in the area of a refugee camp, this is going to keep happening. That's why I was always extremely against the idea of attacking them in Rafa, because that is, of course, where Israel sent everybody. And so, yeah, a lot of them have moved on to another place. To be fair, Israel has also cleared, Israel against the opinions of the West, Israel has cleared some one million people.

from Rafa and move them outside of Rafa. A hundred of thousands remain. And they're all intense. And they're all living around the... And there will be hundreds of thousands more who will move. Right. I mean, listen, it's all a tragic scenario. But if the idea appears is that Israel cannot attack anyone who is juxtaposed to civilians,

then you are against literally all retaliation or military action that Israel has taken since October 7th, since that's literally Hamas's entire strategy. This has been going on now for 75 years, this conflict, right back to the late 40s. Well, it's been going on longer than that, but yes. I mean, you're going to go back. You know, thousands of years, of course, but this particular phase of it, if you like. You know, I remember I often

do the parallel. It's obviously not exactly the same, but there are parallels with Northern Ireland and what went on there for many decades, where a lot of blood was shed on both sides, and eventually new leadership came together on all sides, and the Americans helped obviously, and peace

was found. They did learn to live with each other, and the killing stopped. But you seem a lot more pessimistic about that being able to happen between Palestinians and Israelis. Yes. Why? Because the goal of the Northern, the goal of the IRA was never to extirpate the UK from complete existence. Their goal was not to completely destroy Great Britain as an entire entity and the murder of all of her citizens. That is a very different goal than the goals of, say, Hamas, the terror arm, obviously, of the pseudo-nationalist Palestinian movement. I say pseudo-national is because the goal actually is not a state in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

As Hamas has made clear, it's a state in Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem and all the rest. So, again, these conflicts are not particularly comparable. The tactics are not particularly comparable. And unfortunately, the conflict is significantly more intractable even than the conflict between the IRA and the British government. Do you feel that Israel has been singled out in a negative way for the way it's executed this war, compared, for example, how the allies went after ISIS and other terror groups? Of course. I mean, by the statistics provided by a combination of the Gaza Ministry of Health, which would be Hamas, and the Israeli government, Israel currently has the lowest ratio of terror to civilian casualties in terms of death ratios.

Terror has killed to civilian casualties of any army in the history of modern warfare. And yet Israel has been treated by the media as though there is an ongoing genocide, a desire by Israel to destroy millions of people, which, by the way, Israel does have the military capacity. capacity to do if it were so evenly inclined, which it is not. Obviously, Israel has been singled out in a way that no other force fighting an entrenched terror group has been singled out during my lifetime, but that's not a particular shock because there is a perverse moral equivalence that tends to apply in the Western media with regard to Israel. Instead of seeing Israel as a repository of Western values in a very unfriendly region of the world, there's been this

sort of post-colonialist idea that Israel is a European colonial outlet and that basically what's happening in Israel and Gaza is more like, say, the Algerian war than it is like a war for the existence of a population that has historic tied to the homeland and a right to exist. How has it been for you personally? Because you're a very high-profile Jewish man. You've taken very strident views about this since the war began. I know the kind of stuff I've been on receiving in from both sides at various stages of this, for hosting debates and both sides accusing me of being against them and so on. It's been pretty vicious, pretty awful,

a lot of death threats and so on. You must have had exactly the same. How have you dealt with that? You know, 24-7 security helps. But, you know, the reality is that, you know, social media is mind poison to a certain extent. And I try to use it as an outlet for pushing views that I think are worthwhile and then log off.

Because if you read the comments, never read the comments, as you know, peers, the comments are the worst place to be. What do you make of the media landscape? generally at the moment, because people like you, like me, like Joe Rogan, like Jordan Peterson, there's a whole kind of new world outside of conventional mainstream media. I read last week that 10% of Americans now spend their TV watching time on the YouTube app on their smart TVs, which struck me as a very striking statistic. What do you think is happening here?

I mean, there is definitely a lack of trust in the legacy media that has been extraordinarily well-earned. There's a reason that the Washington Post was losing tens of millions of dollars. single quarter. The big question for independent operators like us, like you, Pierce, is going to be that we still exist sort of at the sufferance of many of these big social media companies. How long will the social media companies actually allow the distribution of speech that they don't particularly like? How wide are they going to allow their Overton window to be? That is a constant ongoing concern. I know for our company, I'm sure for you as well, because there's going to be a temptation by a lot of these social media companies under political pressure to simply dispense with news and political

commentary altogether or to shut it off in order to avoid the contract. Yeah, I mean, and the one who's sort of fighting against that is Elon Musk. What do you make of his tenure at so far? I mean, listen, I think that Elon buying Twitter was a signal act in favor of the public good. And I can have quibbles about the way that Twitter has run, about the comment section, about safety, in terms of stuff that pornography in the comments and all that sort of thing. But the general overarching free speech concerns that Musk seems to take incredibly seriously to the point of even letting people I think are despicable back on the platform in the name of free speech, I think that is an overwhelming good. I mean, I had a bit of a falling out with him over Alex Jones. You know, he canceled an interview that we had planned because he didn't like me criticizing him for letting Alex Jones back on. But I pointed out, he had initially said he wasn't going to let him back on and then did.

Is there, do you have a line? If you were running X, you have a line of people that you wouldn't let on? Would it include Alex Jones? I mean, so the truth is that if I were running X in the way that Elon says he wants to, public square, it depends on your concept of what you think this company is. If it's public square, Alex Jones should be on it. And so should the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so should people who I think are truly evil out there, I think, that a public square is a public square, and you can't discriminate based on viewpoint

generally speaking unless you break the law, which is the stance that Elon, I think, is trying to take. If it were up to me, I'd, you know, run it like my company, which means that there's an Overton window, and inside that Overton window are a series of views, many of which I disagree with, but I think contribute to the public discourse, and then there are views that I don't. And I don't think that there's like an amazing, hard and fast line there. I think Elon is doing an admirable job of trying to find a clear, bright line for what's allowed and what's not allowed. But as we've seen with all of these social media platforms, it's very difficult to define that in any serious and clear way. And so to a certain extent, you always end up with a bit of a cody under a palm tree sort of discerning what you like and what you don't.

You pretty much, I think, could hold your own in a debate with anyone. My team have been desperate to try and get you to debate Norman Finkelstein. Is there a particular reason you're resisting our advances? I'm not sure that we've particularly resisted your advances, peers, but I'm happy to take a look at the schedule. Would you have any principle? Would you object to debating with him? I mean, I generally object to debating with people

who say that October 7th warmed every fiber of their being. I don't think that Norman Finkelstein is a particularly honest interlocutor, so I do have objections along those lines. I think I have moral objections to that. I don't think that every debate is particularly worthwhile. I don't find Norman Finkelstein to particularly be a valuable source of information. That's not a no, though. It's definitely not a no.

It's also not a yes. So I'll have to consider that one. What is your next move, Ben? Because I've been watching you for the last few years with great interest, a big admirer of what you've done. You've built a very successful media empire with all sorts of different strands. Do you have a big grand plan? I mean, I think that our plan is to continue to expand where we can.

And then I think that we want to branch out into different and new areas. Obviously, we have a series of product lines that we think are pretty successful. we'd like to expand into those areas. We want to impact culture. We have a children's programming network that we haven't really marketed to its full extent yet in Bent Key. So we have a lot of aspirations

to shape the culture and the politics of the world. Obviously, growth is the number one prerequisite for that. So when it comes to the running of the company, I'll leave that in the hands of the people who actually run the company, my business partners, Jeremy Boring and Caleb Robinson. Are you optimistic about America going forward? I'm not an optimistic person, as you can tell here.

So I'm never particularly optimistic about the state of things or where they are going. I will say that I think that decline, as Charles Crowe-Hemmer-on said, is a choice. And I think it's a choice that can be reversed by an American people who are reinvigorated with the spirit of the founding and who start to actually look back at the ideas that made the country great in the first place. And you're not tempted to go into politics yourself and really affect that change? Dude, that sounds so terrible. I can't even express to you how terrible that sounds. Although I would imagine

They would have a difficult time criminally prosecuting me. I overpay my taxes And I'm an Orthodox Jew who lives the cleanest personal lifestyle It's possible to live. That said, anything's possible. Again, I won't say that as I know.

Ben Shapiro, great to catch up with you. Thank you very much. Thanks, peers. Appreciate it.