David Remnick: At the end of December, Turning Point USA, one of the most important conservative organizations in the country, held its annual conference, AmericaFest. The speakers included mainstays of conservative media, like Tucker Carlson, Riley Gaines, Megyn Kelly, and Jesse Watters. Kicking things off was Ben Shapiro.

Host: Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Shapiro.

David Remnick: Founder of The Daily Wire and host of one of the most popular podcasts around. Shapiro began by celebrating Charlie Kirk, Turning Point's co-founder, who had been murdered just a few months earlier.

Ben Shapiro: I really believe that the best way to judge a goodness of a man is to see the goodness of his wife and his children. On that measure, Charlie was unsurpassed. Erika and her children are in all of our hearts.

David Remnick: But Shapiro's real subject that day was the dangers facing the conservative movement. Instead of focusing on opponents on the left or the few remaining Never Trumpers, he looked inward. Shapiro warned of people he called charlatans and grifters. He called out Tucker Carlson by name for friendly interviews with the accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and with antisemites like Darryl Cooper and Nick Fuentes.

Ben Shapiro: If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes, the Nick Fuentes who said that the Vice President of the United States is a "fat, gay race traitor married to a [beeps]." If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.

David Remnick: Shapiro called out Megyn Kelly for hosting Candace Owens, Shapiro's former colleague, who'd been relentlessly pushing a conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Ben Shapiro: When Megyn said this week, "My goal and my job here is to try to understand," yes, where Candace is coming from on this, and says she sees no purpose in inserting herself "into this on one side," that is a moral and logical absurdity.

David Remnick: Now, this is not the only rift on the right, of course, you've seen a big division between some MAGA leaders and Donald Trump over the Epstein files. Antisemitic views are openly embraced in much of the conservative world now, particularly among some young people. I wanted to ask Ben Shapiro why he thinks that is. We spoke this past week. Ben, for many years now, you've been in the world of what we would call conservative media.

From 2012, you were an editor at Breitbart, which is kind of like the ur publication of the MAGA movement, I think it's fair to say. You were acquainted there with Steve Bannon and all sorts of people. You look back on those Breitbart days, and what do you think was positive about it? What do you look back on with some regret, too, in terms of the leaders of Breitbart?

Ben Shapiro: I had worked at Talk Radio Network, which was the syndicator for Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham, and then I ended up being hired by Andrew. I've known Andrew since I was at UCLA.

David Remnick: Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the publication, who died in his 40s, I think.

Ben Shapiro: Yes, he's very young. I think he was 41, I believe. Obviously, I've known Andrew for about 10 years, I think. He basically came to me and said, "Will you come on board and join Breitbart this week in February 2012?" It's in the middle of the 2012 election cycle. He died three, four weeks after I had signed up for Breitbart. Suddenly, the leadership structure was completely upended because Andrew had been sort of a one-man band. He was obviously a charismatic person. He was the person from whom all sort of thoughts sprang in terms of the direction of the site.

Obviously, the leadership structure changed pretty dramatically. Steve Bannon, who'd been kind of hanging around on the fringes of Breitbart universe, making a documentary about Andrew, was brought in by Larry Solov, who is Andrew's partner, to essentially be president of Breitbart.

David Remnick: Did you have problems with Steve Bannon?

Ben Shapiro: It was never sort of a bed of roses with Steve Bannon. There are a lot of people in the Breitbart infrastructure who are not fond of Steve or the way that he was running things, making editorial decisions, and the like. I think that there were some wonderful things that--

David Remnick: But how did you assess what Steve Bannon wanted in this world? He wasn't just a conservative. I mean, he was and remains a kind of warrior who's willing to say and do what is necessary to push that battle forward, and I'm being gentle about this.

Ben Shapiro: If you look at the coverage of Breitbart, say circa 2012, 2013, I'd say those were fairly mainstream conservative talking points. It was certainly a mainstream conservative website at that time. I think by the time we hit 2015, 2016, things had started to evolve a fair bit, especially because of the rise of President Trump. I was not a supporter of President Trump in the 2015-2016 election cycle. I was much more supportive of Ted Cruz in the primaries, and then in the general election, I actually didn't vote in 2016 because I was unhappy with both candidates.

Obviously, post that, I think President Trump did many things that, as a conservative, I like. He is a certainly non-ideological figure, which is why so many people try to sort of claim that MAGA is part of their movement. Reagan conservatives will say that MAGA is a Reagan conservatism. You'll have national populists who say that it's a national populist. Trump is none of those things. Trump is Trump, and he has instincts.

David Remnick: Which means what to you, Ben? Trump is Trump means what?

Ben Shapiro: His instincts are, sort of naturally, those of a 1975 conservative. That means that he likes a strong America on the world stage, but tempered by a sort of hard-nosed realism about noninterventionism. I think that when it comes to domestic policy, he has a weird mix of not liking the government to be involved in everything, but also wanting to use the government in ways that I don't particularly approve. He seems to be more about, "What is the solution at hand? Will I try it?" If it doesn't work, then he pulls out of it.

People have termed that taco. Trump always chickens out. I don't think that's right. I think that President Trump is a person who is willing to try different things and then will shift on a dime.

David Remnick: You think he's honest?

Ben Shapiro: [unintelligible 00:06:00] [crosstalk] those things are working.

David Remnick: You think Trump is honest?

Ben Shapiro: In some ways, yes. In some ways, no.

David Remnick: There's an article in The Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago, describing the fishy investments from Abu Dhabi into the Trump family. Our reporter, David Kirkpatrick, who's extremely conservative in his calculations about how he's assessing this, has said that the Trump family has enriched itself to the tune of $4 billion since taking office again in 2024. Does this concern you at all?

Ben Shapiro: Of course. I've been calling this out, I think, before pretty much anybody else. Early on in the Trump administration, when World Liberty Financial was pretty clearly making a fair bit of money over in the Middle East, I raised red flags on my show consistently about how I thought this was wrong. If the name were Biden instead of Trump, people would be screaming bloody murder, and how this was not beneficial to President Trump's agenda, either. Sure--

David Remnick: But not beneficial to his agenda or corrupt?

Ben Shapiro: I mean, both, obviously. I do think that if you are taking what I perceive to be digital assets that are not particularly worthwhile, and then you have people who are politically interested investing massive amounts of money into those things, that is not a good thing.

David Remnick: You voted for him the second time?

Ben Shapiro: I voted for him in 2020, and then I campaigned for him in 2024.

David Remnick: Why?

Ben Shapiro: Because it was now a binary choice between Trump and Kamala Harris. I liked a lot of what he did during his first administration. I felt the guardrails would largely hold, which I believe they have. With regard to President Trump, I know many on the left believe they've not, but what I--

David Remnick: Do you believe the guardrails have held this time?

Ben Shapiro: Yes. I'm hard pressed to say--

David Remnick: Help me on that, Ben.

Ben Shapiro: Sure.

David Remnick: Because I don't see even remotely the case. Let me hear your point of view on that.

Ben Shapiro: Sure. The Trump administration has not bucked the judiciary to the tune of simply saying that if an appellate court or the Supreme Court rules in a particular way, they will just go ahead and do whatever it is that they want to do. The president does cite legal authority for the things that he is doing.

David Remnick: You're confident that the Justice Department will pursue corruption charges against the Trump family because it's independent?

Ben Shapiro: Oh, no, I'm confident that the president will largely will likely pardon himself and his children in the same way that Joe Biden [laughs] did on his way out. I think--

David Remnick: You're laughing, but that's radically corrupt, is it not?

Ben Shapiro: Again, I think that it was radically corrupt when the DOJ did not pursue with alacrity, a lot of the issues surrounding the Biden family, too. I think one of the things-- The answer is yes, and it applies to all parties. What I hear from the left is a constant drumbeat of accusation about President Trump, to which I acquiesce in part. I find them utterly unconcerned with the same sorts of issues arising on their side of the aisle. They see President Trump as the person who's constantly violating the standard, the person who's constantly setting the new standard.

I think President Trump stumbled on the prone body of American politics and said, "This is a dead body." I see him much more as a coroner than as the murderer. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not some of both, meaning I think things can get worse under President Trump than they were heretofore. I'm not going to deny that he's done things that I think are bad and wrong. I was very critical of his rhetoric, for example, between the election of 2020 and January 6th, but I do think that to ignore the fact--

David Remnick: Do you not see any of these things as disqualifying in a moral, political sense? Well, January 6, for example.

Ben Shapiro: Right. I don't know what disqualifying means in the sense that I did not support him in the primaries.

David Remnick: He would lose your faith, vote, and support forever.

Ben Shapiro: The only way to lose my faith, support, and vote forever would be for there to be an alternative that I find superior to him. This is the problem. When you're making voting decision-- Would I want Donald Trump marrying into my family? Probably not.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Ben Shapiro: When it comes to my politicians. The problem is that once you say that the candidate is "disqualified," then you either have to sit out the election, which I did in 2016, where I found both candidates to be insufficient. Then whatever damage President Trump I thought had done by being elected in 2016, I thought that he did a bunch of things I liked between 2016 and 2020. Then I did not like what he did with regard to the election of 2020, and what I think are falsehoods that he told about winning that election.

I didn't support him in the primaries, and then he ended up winning the nomination. He was running against Kamala Harris. I can either sit out the election again, which doesn't really achieve the purposes.

David Remnick: In other words, what you're saying is that the potential of Kamala Harris, in your view politically, outweighs support for what, in essence, was an insurrection on Capitol Hill? That's hard for me, to say the least.

Ben Shapiro: First of all, I think that that's a pretty poor way of putting it. That's not the way that we assess candidates in the real world. The way that we assess candidates in the real world is who is more likely to perform the agenda that I see as important, versus who is more likely to inhibit that agenda. I can fully disapprove of what happened on January 6th and think it was quite terrible and still acknowledge that Donald Trump, as president from 2017 to 2021, did a better job than, I think, Joe Biden.

David Remnick: There are many people who consider themselves never Trumpers in the Republican Party. Not a decisive amount, certainly, but there's certainly a number of people in the Republican Party who see his moral transgressions so serious that they make a very different calculation than you do, electorally.

Ben Shapiro: Sure, and they're entitled to that calculation. The question to me is always one of iteration. Voting is one decision, and then supporting every-- just because you vote for someone, it doesn't mean that you support everything that they do.

David Remnick: I'm speaking with the podcaster Ben Shapiro. We'll continue in just a moment. I've been speaking today with Ben Shapiro, one of the most prominent voices in conservative media. The Ben Shapiro Show started in 2015. It often ranks in the top 10 podcasts in America. Shapiro worked as a lawyer at first. He went to Harvard Law School and practiced for a time, but he's been sharing his political opinions for much longer than that. He had a column when he was 17 years old while he was a student at UCLA.

Shapiro was a morning show host on Los Angeles Radio, an editor at Breitbart News, and eventually, he co-founded his own conservative media outlet called The Daily Wire. We'll continue our conversation with him now. You had your first syndicated column, as most 17-year-olds do when you were a teenager. How did that happen?

Ben Shapiro: When I went to UCLA, I'd skipped a couple of grades. I went to UCLA when I was 16. I walked onto campus, I picked up a copy of the UCLA Daily Bruin. I saw an editorial that I thought was pretty terrible.

David Remnick: What did it say?

Ben Shapiro: I believe that the editorial at the time was comparing Ariel Sharon, then Prime Minister of Israel, to Adolf Eichmann, the creator of the Nazi concentration camp system. I went in, and I asked if I could write a counterpoint. They said, "Sure." I wrote a counterpoint. Then they said, "We need somebody. We can't find anybody who's on the other side to write a sort of point-counterpoint point on Iraq." I said, "Okay, I can think about doing that." I did that. I wrote a point-counterpoint column for the Daily Bruin for a while, and then that turned into just a regular column.

After about a year of doing that, I was talking with my father, and I said, "Do you think that my stuff is good enough to be printed in a normal newspaper?" He said, "Let me do some research." He came up with a place called Creator Syndicate. I printed out some of my columns from the Daily Bruin. I sent them in. About three weeks later, I got a call from them asking if I would write a syndicated weekly column for them. That's how it started.

David Remnick: But you were fully formed as a conservative at age 17. How did that happen?

Ben Shapiro: I was always very into history. I was always very into politics. I read a lot. I still do, obviously. I had, I think, pretty strong opinions on a lot of subjects. I won't say that they were as well-informed as I'd hope they are 25 years later. In the era prior to kind of full-scale social media, I was unlucky enough to have a syndicated column at the age of 17. Meaning that many of my dumbest thoughts from ages 18 to 25 are on record.

David Remnick: What were your dumbest thoughts that you never heard?

Ben Shapiro: There's a whole list of them. I actually put up a list on our website over at Daily Wire. There were some thoughts about, for example, civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war that were poorly articulated. Thoughts about Israel and Palestinian issue that were poorly articulated or wrong that I rejected later. Some of them is when you're young, and in this field, one of the ways you get attention is by saying overtly provocative things. That has not changed. A lot of the ways that I would articulate things at the age of 19 are not the ways that I would articulate them today.

David Remnick: Would you say that you do that now that you push the boundaries of what you really think to get attention?

Ben Shapiro: No.

David Remnick: You don't?

Ben Shapiro: I would say that I really don't do that very much now.

David Remnick: Let's talk about the college campus that you came onto, because we hear a lot about this, that somehow the environment of a place like UCLA is completely left-leaning. We have the evidence of you walking into the newspaper offices, and you had a column right away. What was it like UCLA when you came there?

Ben Shapiro: I would never say that it was terrible for me to go to a left-leaning college. There's no question that UCLA was a left-leaning university. It wasn't a place where I felt as though I couldn't express my opinions. I will admit that when it came time for taking tests, depending on how restrictive I thought the professor was, I think that the best way to get an A in a class is to write what the professor would like you to write, as opposed to what you would like to write.

David Remnick: But you didn't do that, and you tried to Harvard Law School?

Ben Shapiro: Of course, I did.

David Remnick: You made your opinions conform to the professor, I'm shocked.

Ben Shapiro: In the blue book, right. The blue books were the way you would handwrite your essays. If I had a professor who I thought was very much to the left and intolerant of particular opinions, then I would do that. That wasn't every left-wing professor that I had. Some were quite eager or welcoming of differing opinions. I won't say that every single professor was equally welcoming of differing opinions.

David Remnick: Ben, what initially attracted you to conservatism?

Ben Shapiro: I grew up in a household with two Reagan Republicans. Obviously, my parents are pretty conservative. The basic idea that I think lies behind a good conservatism is personal responsibility, duty, a requirement that you do the right thing, a basic moral stance about how individuals should act in a free country. I think that's still largely what drives my conservatism today. I take that pretty seriously.

David Remnick: Is that antithetical to liberalism?

Ben Shapiro: It doesn't have to be. I think that liberalism very often is a way of shielding people from the consequences of their own decisions or an attempt to shift individual responsibility onto systems in a way that is frequently unjustified. The right acknowledges that when people fail, because human nature is fallible, very often that is your own responsibility. The best way to actually treat with that is to self-correct. For the left, because they have a rosier view of what human nature is, they tend to attribute to systems that which I think more properly lies in responsibility in the individual.

David Remnick: Let's talk about the debate that you're having inside MAGA. You're at the center of a fight, a feud that's developing in the conservative movement, and it has to do with antisemitism and conspiracy theories related to antisemitism. Not long after Charlie Kirk died, you spoke at the Turning Point conference, AmericaFest, and you called out Candace Owens and attendees like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. These are very influential figures now on the right and the media of the MAGA movement. Talk to me a little bit about this divide, how it's developed, what it's done to your relationships as well inside the MAGA movement.

Ben Shapiro: First of all, as people may suspect, I'm not particularly interested in any personal relationships with others in the political sphere. I have a family that's very tight knit. I have four children, going on five. I have a dog. I have plenty of things going on in my social calendar. I don't see it as particularly important to hang out with people who are in sort of the same career milieu.

David Remnick: Well, then, tell me about your decision to make that speech.

Ben Shapiro: Sure. There were two speeches that I gave back-to-back. One was a speech that I gave at the Heritage Foundation the night before, and one was the TPUSA speech that I gave that night. The Heritage Foundation speech was specifically directed at Tucker Carlson because I believe that Tucker Carlson is not a conservative in any real market way that I can identify. I was pointing that out at the Heritage Foundation.

David Remnick: How would you describe his politics?

Ben Shapiro: Conspiratorial populism. I try not to speculate on motivations of people because I just don't have a window into their head. All I can say is that the stuff that he has been promoting for the past several years is very much in line with the philosophies of people like Alexander Dugin. It is very much in line--

David Remnick: The Russian nationalist philosopher said to be close to at least the thinking of Vladimir Putin.

Ben Shapiro: Yes, his view of America in the world is a view that is actually closer to Howard Zinn than I think to that of sort of traditional conservatives. This idea that America is a nefarious and terrible force in the world that has committed myriad sins and must withdraw from the world, both for its own good and for the good of the world. His belief that a conspiratorial coterie of people is manipulating American policy. Those people very often happen to have crossover with Jews, according to his guests that he routinely launders onto the air.

In the aftermath of Charlie's death, Candace Owens, in particular, had started speculating openly that people at TPUSA, up to and including, in my interpretation, Erika Kirk, Charlie's wife, had been complicit in his murder, or at least complicit in a cover-up of his murder.

Erika Kirk: If Charlie said he had no choice but to abandon the pro-Israel cause because of "Jewish donors, the behavior of Jewish donors." If he said that, yes or no, well, then I don't know, maybe some people didn't want to take that risk, that he was kind of what became Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson.

Ben Shapiro: Her bizarre conspiratorial rantings had been treated as legitimate and worthwhile by people ranging from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly. I felt that this was a necessary speech to make about the gap that has emerged on the right between a conspiratorial view of politics promoted by commentators who seem to bear less responsibility for truth-telling than I think they do. That sort of conspiratorialism has taken over large parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

David Remnick: Were you surprised by Candace Owen, I believe, is somebody that you worked with at Daily Wire?

Ben Shapiro: Yes, we hired her in 2021.

David Remnick: What did you see her then?

Ben Shapiro: Then we fired her in 2023. In 2021, what we saw was a fairly, I would say, mainstream conservative who said inflammatory things, obviously, and who had been telling us that she--

David Remnick: Inflammatory things that you liked?

Ben Shapiro: I would say most of them that I liked, some of them not as much. As people who hired her, we thought that she was going to develop in intellectual directions. She had said that she was learning with Shelby Steele, for example, and reading the works of Thomas Sowell and all this kind of thing. By 2022, it was apparent that she was moving in another direction. It took until 2023 for that direction to come to full fruition, which was fairly open antisemitism. She was spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, among other conspiracy theories, including the idea that Emmanuel Macron's wife is actually a man, and all this sort of stuff. At that point--

David Remnick: That was your limit with her?

Ben Shapiro: To be fair, I am not an officer of my company. The people who made that decision were Jeremy Boreing and Caleb Robinson, the co-CEOs of the company. That was the collective management decision, yes.

David Remnick: Now, you specifically criticize Tucker Carlson for a really soft interview he did with a guy named Nick Fuentes. You point out how outrageous he is, but is that exactly what Carlson wants in his guest, just attention?

Ben Shapiro: I think that probably the attention doesn't hurt, but at the same time, probably there is some ideological overlap between some of the things that he believes about America and the conspiratorial forces controlling it, and some of the stuff that Nick Fuentes believes. What Tucker has a habit of doing is bringing on guests who spout the most conspiratorial form of the theory. He sort of buys it back about 5%. He allows those views to be predominant in the public discourse while talking about what wonderful people these folks are.

David Remnick: I get that, and I can't help but agree with that, obviously. Then you have Donald Trump. He hasn't had dinner with me, but he's had dinner with Nick Fuentes. How does that affect your feeling about Donald Trump?

Ben Shapiro: I condemn that at the time, when it comes to his dinner with Fuentes, and I believe it was Kanye West. It was Kanye West and Fuentes at the time. The President of the United States, and people say that I grade on a curve, but I think I grade realistically here. I am not surprised by what President Trump does. He likes being with famous people. He very often does not know who they are. [chuckles] He will throw them out. He will say bad things about them five minutes later. He will like Steve Bannon until he calls him Sloppy Steve and fires him, whereupon he will welcome him back into his orbit and like him again. The sort of attempt to freak--

David Remnick: I think you're taking this too casually. He's having dinner with a Nazi apologist.

Ben Shapiro: I didn't take that casually--

David Remnick: Then really doesn't go off and blast him. He just kind of says, "Oh, I kind of didn't know who it was, and Kanye brought him along." First of all, that's bad staff work, to say the least.

Ben Shapiro: Terrible staff work.

David Remnick: And it's bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States. No?

Ben Shapiro: I agree that it's bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States. I'm not sure what else to say about that.

David Remnick: What's the equivalent?

Ben Shapiro: I don't think that's quite the same thing as Tucker Carlson legitimately using his forum to provide Nick Fuentes a way to speak to the public two hours solid.

David Remnick: Fair enough, that's a pretty low bar.

Ben Shapiro: No, I agree, but those are the two things you're comparing.

David Remnick: Now, in AmericaFest, the vice president said this.

JD Vance: President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests. I didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform. And I don't really care if some people out there, I'm sure, will have the fake news media denounce me after this speech.

David Remnick: He was kind of attacking you, wasn't he?

Ben Shapiro: I assume that he was disagreeing with the thing that I had said, sure. I will point out that I don't think the vice president is being very accurate about his own approach to various conservatives and other people online. He's quite fond of attacking people online from time to time.

David Remnick: Totally. I remember when a bunch of, I think it was, young Republican leaders had their signal chat exposed, and they were making all kinds of antisemitic remarks on that. The vice president didn't denounce that either. In fact, he just kind of thought it was kids being kids.

Ben Shapiro: Right. Again, I highly disagree with this as both a matter of morality and as a matter of tactics. I think tactically is foolish. I think it's immoral.

David Remnick: What's going on? What's going on that this is so prevalent and excused at the top end of at least part of the conservative media sphere and the White House?

Ben Shapiro: I think it's a mirror image of what's going on on the left. I think to pretend that antisemitism is not rising on both the right and the left is to be whistling past the graveyard. It's one of the things--

David Remnick: Fair enough, but stick to the right. Let's anatomize that-- [crosstalk] Is there an office?

Ben Shapiro: I understand, but Democrats would like to be in office. Again, to go back to sort of the original point with regard to President Trump and voting for him and not voting for him, if the question is binary choice, then you're going to have to make a decision between one of these parties, because these are the two major parties. That's why I think it's important to bring into perspective what's happening in both parties.

David Remnick: Ben, do you see antisemitism in the mouths of leading Democratic contenders for the presidency?

Ben Shapiro: I see antisemitism in the Democratic Party apparatus's willingness to not only humor, but to promote everybody, ranging from New York Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani to Rashida Tlaib, congresswoman from Michigan, to Ilhan Omar, congresswoman from Minnesota, to the bizarre attempt to mirror all of the excesses of the anti-Israel movement. I don't just mean anti-Netanyahu, I mean anti-Israel. Listen, I asked Gavin Newsom about this. I was on Gavin's podcast, the Governor of California, and he acknowledged that this sort of stuff has become quite prevalent in Democratic circles.

The reason that I'm pointing this out is, number one, because I think it's important, just as a matter of description, to be realistic about the rise of antisemitism in the United States, period. Then I'm happy to discuss the problems on my own side of the political aisle, which I have repeatedly.

David Remnick: You have talked about the antisemitism on the left, and we can discuss that as well. Did the degree of it on the right take you by surprise?

Ben Shapiro: Yes, sure. First of all, to understand what's happening, I think we first have to understand what antisemitism actually is, because when people mischaracterize the definition, that allows their particular side to escape. What people tend to do is they will define antisemitism in a way that excuses their side, and that throws all of the blame on the other side. The definition of antisemitism. Antisemitism, at its root, is a conspiracy theory about the power of Jews as a group in the world.

That can be channeled into an anti-Zionism that says that Israel is controlling American foreign policy and that Israel has befuddled the world. It's all about the Benjamins, which is the kind of thing that Ilhan Omar says, or it can be channeled into Jews in America are too powerful in the media, and they are cliquish, and they are controlling the circumstances of my life.

David Remnick: Yet, Ben, as somebody who's written from Israel and Palestine for years and years, the reaction to some of the things I write is that I'm an antisemite, which is, I gotta say, news to me. I'm no more antisemitic than you are, and to get attacked like that is hideous.

Ben Shapiro: This is why I'm trying to be more precise about the definition. Being critical of Israeli policy is not the same thing as saying, for example, that Israel's government designs and implemented a genocide, which is a lie. That is a lie that can be chalked up to a nefarious view of what Jews are doing in the world. Because it is also part and parcel of a broader lie, which is the Jews have then sold the idea that they are capable of doing whatever they want under the guise of America's banner, and they've done so because of their inordinate power. It's part of a broader conspiracy theory.

One of the things that's happened is in much the same way that the right said for a long time, you keep calling everybody racist, therefore nobody's a racist, which is untrue. There are actual racists out there. The idea is that if you overapply a category, then it starts losing its power and its effectiveness, and that actually opens the door to the thing. I think the same thing has happened with antisemitism. What I've said before is, instead of talking in categories of antisemitism or Jew hatred or the rest of it, why don't we talk about what's true, what's false, what's moral, and what's not moral? Because that's easier for people to get their head around.

David Remnick: Ben, let me ask you about another extremely potent issue, not just in the Republican party, and that's the Epstein files. You've been following this. What do you think it proves or doesn't prove, other than the absolute hideous nature of the subject himself?

Ben Shapiro: Let's put this way, the virality of the narrative around the Epstein files is different from what the evidence shows in the Epstein files. What the evidence shows in the Epstein files is that you have a number of very high-profile people who are in close contact with Jeffrey Epstein, who was a convicted sex offender with minors. The indictments against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell suggest that the trafficking of minors was about Jeffrey Epstein. There's no one else who's been indicted in terms of trafficking of minors except for Jeffrey Epstein.

According to the FBI under President Trump, there is no one who is going to be, because they do not have evidence sufficient that he was trafficking young girls to other people. The narrative that has been drawn from the Epstein story, because presumably people don't know where his money comes from-- Although there was a very, very deep dive, I believe, in New York Times Magazine looking into where his money came from. The narrative is a broader narrative that goes back to kind of the heart of conspiracy theorizing that has taken over, I think, large swaths of both parties, but it is very, very potent on the right.

That is that there is a cadre of people who are preying upon children who manipulate everything in your life, who may be doing so because they have been honeypotted or because they are being manipulated by a foreign intelligence service. Typically, on the right, on the far right, this is treated as Mossad, even though there is zero evidence that that is the case. Then Ehud Barak's name is brought up in this context. As you might imagine, I'm not a fan of Ehud Barak, but there is no evidence that on behalf of Mossad, who was running Jeffrey Epstein as a sex trafficking agent.

By the way, be pretty terrible statecraft, considering he was already a convicted sex offender. I think that the broader theory here, which goes well beyond the evidence and the virality of that theory, speaks to people's belief that they are not in control of their own lives and that conspiratorial forces who prey on children, which is obviously the best way to-- if you wish to have the most nefarious form of the most nefarious theory that you've got, making them pedophiles is a great way to do it.

The attempt to kind of draw out a gigantic pedophilic conspiracy ring that was running all of America's foreign policy and domestic policy and culture, I think that goes to people's desire to abdicate control over their own lives, which gets back to some of my original politics, which is where I was saying that individual responsibility is the lodestar of a successful society. When you have conspiratorialism take over, as Karl Popper suggested, it's a massive problem.

David Remnick: My guest is the commentator and podcast host, Ben Shapiro. Our conversation continues in a moment on The New Yorker Radio Hour. My guest today is the commentator, Ben Shapiro. Shapiro has maintained an enormous audience, especially among conservatives, but he walks a fine line. He's not exactly MAGA, certainly not all the time.

He's taken issue with some of Donald Trump's positions, not to mention his ethics. Earlier in our conversation, Shapiro frankly acknowledged real corruption on Trump's part, but he's very quick to accuse the left of pearl-clutching, too. He tends to find that whatever he may object to with Trump, Trump's opponents share equally in the blame.

Is Donald Trump and the MAGA movement healthy for this country, or would you rather see the Republican Party return to its the roots that you started out as a conservative and a Republican? Do you see promise in the people that have been put forward as successors to Donald Trump? JD Vance among them?

Ben Shapiro: I have differential opinions on a wide variety of these people. The president obviously picked Vance for his vice president. If vice president were in a primary with Marco Rubio, I would be likely to support Marco Rubio in that primary over JD Vance, for example. The president did pick Marco Rubio for a secretary of State. When we say, are there options that I like better than others? Sure. Are there things about the Trump movement that I think have been good and salutary? Sure. Is he my ideal?

If I could construct in my head the ideal Republican candidate or president, would it look exactly like Donald Trump? No, but I'm not sure that he's claiming to be that. Nor do I have that magical power, try as I might, to manifest that in real life.

David Remnick: What do you think Donald Trump cares about?

Ben Shapiro: I try not to get into motivations because I'm not a psychiatrist. Here's the nice thing about President Trump. When you asked if he was honest before, I said in some ways yes, in some ways no. We got to the ways in no, but we never got to the ways in yes. The way in yes is that whatever is in his head is going to come out his mouth in the next 2.7 seconds. There is no brain-mouth barrier for President Trump.

David Remnick: That's not so much honesty as impulsivity. No?

Ben Shapiro: It's honesty in the sense that you are getting his honest take on what he thinks in that moment. It may be an impulsive approach to honesty, but it is definitely-- there is a definition of honesty by which it--

David Remnick: It's revealing. I'll give you that.

Ben Shapiro: It is revealing. It is authentic. If you want to call it authentic, it's authentic. As far as what is sort of the core of his political belief, again, I think he has an instinct that he wants America to be great and powerful in the world. He likes the symbolism of America being great and powerful in the world. America is strong, America is virile. These are things that clearly he does believe. The way that manifests in policy may be grabbing Nicolás Maduro and taking him back to New York for trial, or it may be an industrial policy that is more reminiscent of a 1937 FDR policy than it is of a traditional sort of Reagan Republican policy.

David Remnick: Or finding more to be sympathetic about with Vladimir Putin than Zelensky.

Ben Shapiro: When it comes to Putin and Zelensky, again, that one I cannot explain from America great perspective. I think that the president--

David Remnick: Can't you explain? I mean, can't you explain it in terms if he is impressed by, taken with the kind of authoritarian impulses and behavior of Putin rather than Zelensky, same with Xi Jinping?

Ben Shapiro: I think that he is attracted by powerful people, for sure. Again, I'm not going to-- he has sort of varied fairly widely, actually, over the course of the last year and a half on Russia, Ukraine. Again, I've been very consistent that I think that we ought to be supporting Ukraine sufficient to deter the Russian threat and to force Putin to the table.

David Remnick: Now, I want to ask you about Minneapolis, which is still going on, just from a free speech point of view, from a First Amendment point of view, should somebody like Don Lemon be prosecuted?

Ben Shapiro: Obviously, if what he was doing was performing an act of journalism, the answer is no. The question is going to be whether they can prove in court that he was actually a conspirator in the violation of the FACE Act.

David Remnick: Are you worried about Donald Trump's regard for journalists? He's obviously infatuated them. He loves to talk to them, but he refers to them as enemies of the people. You know as a student of history, that's a phrase that comes from Robespierre, it comes from Stalin, and it has consequences.

Ben Shapiro: Again, he's been doing that for 10 years, and you seem to have a robust audience and the ability to speak freely every day. I don't think that you're sitting in your studio right now waiting for the FBI to break down your door.

David Remnick: You think he's just kidding around? Well, the FBI had no problem breaking down the door of The Washington Post reporter and taking her all her devices recently.

Ben Shapiro: If you go back to the Obama administration, James Rosen was treated quite similarly when he was working for Fox News. Then the Associated Press had some situations with the Obama administration as well. Again, this is why I go back to, is Trump breaking new ground here, or is he using tools that were left over from other administrations in ways that other people don't like? I don't like it either. Him suing various outlets, I think, is wrong and bad. Do I think that we are now at grave threat that the First Amendment is ended in the United States because Don Lemon was picked up by the DOJ?

David Remnick: Ben, sooner or later, he's not going to like what you say, and your turn is going to come and you're going to be deposed and you're going to be sued. Will that change your view of this?

Ben Shapiro: Not particularly. Again, I think that it's wrong for him to do the suing of these outlets. I'm not sure what would change about my opinion, given that I've said already that I think that it's wrong. It might hurt more if he did it to me.

David Remnick: Let me get a little insight about--

Ben Shapiro: You've noticed that I'm not excusing any of the things that I think he's doing that are wrong.

David Remnick: I do.

Ben Shapiro: This is why-- one of the things that I think that if people on the opposite side of the aisle actually wanted to be shooting for a better future here, which is what we would all like. It's not enough to simply rail against Trump and say this is not normal. It's why I think the people on the left should do some of the same with their own side. Much of what we talked about here is me criticizing my own side. I'd say 90% of what we've talked about is me criticizing my own side. I find an extraordinary dearth of that, unfortunately, on the left.

Because of that, I think people do react by supporting the right. This is one of the things that I think is a huge mistake on the part of media, is to sort of play this game where Trump does a thing, therefore it is a bad thing. People on the left do the same thing. They are posing Trump, therefore it's a good thing. That seems to me completely problematic. I'm perfectly willing on each of these specific problems, say, if the evidence shows that Donald Trump is targeting Don Lemon--

David Remnick: There's no question that every president, and I'll just say it unequivocally, every president, sooner or later, lies. Every president, sooner or later, misbehaves. We're talking, though, about radical difference in degree, are we not?

Ben Shapiro: I really do not think so.

David Remnick: That's where we disagree.

Ben Shapiro: We definitely disagree on this. We definitely disagree on this. I think that the left routinely underestimates what's done by the left, whereas I think I'm being pretty accurate in that both sides are routinely violating the rules. That's why we are in sort of a political death spiral to a certain extent.

David Remnick: When you look at immigration policy, I think we can agree that there was no immigration policy, certainly no effective immigration policy, when it came to the southern border for far too long. We can argue about the reasons for that and what bill didn't get passed, and da, da, da, and so on. How do you feel about the way it's being done, as dramatized by ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and mass deportations and people being shipped off to El Salvador, and this kind of thing?

Ben Shapiro: These are really sort of two separate questions, right? Trump's border policy is incredibly popular because the border was sealed day one. It turns out that you didn't need a piece of legislation to do that. Joe Biden could have always done that. In fact, even in the last couple of months while he was president, he started to do that.

As far as internal policing of illegal immigration, I think that the approach taken by Tom Homan, the border czar, has been significantly better than the approach taken by the DHS secretary or Stephen Miller, the president's top adviser, on these issues, which is honed in on the criminal illegal immigrants, many of which are in the system. I think that Democrats are actually making a major mistake by not having local law enforcement cooperate with ICE in taking people who are in jail and deporting those people or reporting them to ICE for deportation.

I think that's a huge mistake by Democrats politically and just in terms of policy, and that's been a consistent policy in the United States for a while, is to deport criminal illegal immigrants. Ramping that up, I think, is both smart policy and good policy. I think that the Trump administration's reaction, which has been, what if we set up quotas, or what if we decide that we're going to radically ramp up and going after non-criminal illegal immigrants, by which I mean people who have not committed an additional crime other than crossing the border illegally.

That is a political mistake, and that that's been resounding, not to the benefit of the Trump administration. I think that there are better ways to do it than they've been-- but I think that Democrats are playing with fire in a lot of the stuff that they've been doing in places like Minneapolis. I think the idea that ICE agents are state-sponsored terrorism. I confronted the California governor about that, and he backed off of that.

David Remnick: Rhetorically.

Ben Shapiro: Yes. When people suggest that ICE is Gestapo, when people are likening this to the Holocaust, I think it's a massive, massive not only mistake.

David Remnick: When people in the government, the highest levels of government, refer to people who are like Alex Preddy as not just-- well, they refer to him as a terrorist.

Ben Shapiro: Yes, I thought that. I literally came out that day. I said that that was a complete misapprehension of the situation, so far as I could tell on the tape. I said the same thing about the characterization of Renée Good as somebody who was trying to mow down immigration officers by the bushel. It was stated by Gregory Bovino, I believe that Alex Preddy wanted to kill as many ICE agents as possible or Border Patrol as possible.

I said that that's not true, and I think that that's wrong, which is why I'm very happy that Tom Homan, who seems to be more of an adult, has been put in charge of implementation of border policy in Minnesota.

David Remnick: I do want to focus on one thing. You said, and I think quite rightly earlier, that the left and the right keep-- these aren't your words, but mine, just building their, you know, digging their trenches deeper and deeper and deeper. Who do you see on your side of things in the conservative world who's a potential leader that would not have these tremendous moral failings that you've described? Who would do without the kind of rhetorical ugliness that you have denounced? Who would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging?

Who do you see as a potential leader on the Republican side that would make you a great deal more comfortable?

Ben Shapiro: Again, I think there are a number of them. Ranging from Glenn Youngkin, former governor of Virginia, to Brian Kemp, former governor of Georgia. I think the Governor DeSantis in Florida has done an excellent job. I think that Senator Ted Cruz has spoken out very clearly against people, like for example, Tucker Carlson and his predations. I think Secretary of State Rubio would be really good. I'd like to see Vice President Vance change tack on a lot of this. I hope that he will.

This is actually a systemic problem on both the left and the right, is the primary system is very, very difficult for people who are not deliberately inflammatory to navigate because primary voters tend to be the most passionate voters. That means that the people who tend to elevate are the people who are sometimes the most provocative. You've spent time in the United States Senate. If you go and you talk to some of the most passionate advocates on both sides of the aisle in the Senate, they actually do still do the kind of Tip O'Neill, Ronald Reagan thing.

They still know each other. A lot of them still like each other. A lot of them still do lunch together. The kind of story that's sold in the commentariat, particularly, is that you must hate the person on the other side in order for you to win great victory. You shouldn't be able to do things with 51%. You should have to have 70% to do it. That's why the system was built the way it is, with all of the gridlock between the branches and between the states and the federal government.

The way that both the political parties, as vehicles for political victory and also the commentariat in search of clicks and giggles, have mobilized is in opposition to that. People are getting more and more frustrated.

David Remnick: I'm not interested in clicks, much less giggles. Even though we do have cartoons. My concern is with the sustenance of democracy and democratic institutions. I wonder if we share or we don't share a concern that the period that we're in now is potentially lays waste to those institutions.

Ben Shapiro: I'm worried about it, for sure, but I think that we may be worried about it from different angles. One of the things that I notice about democracies that sort of fall into crisis is, number one, obviously, lack of institutional trust. If you believe that if the other side wins, it's literally the end of the democracy, that is incredibly dangerous. That really is a problem, because then, it suggests that if the other side wins, you're never going to get to vote again. Tyranny is upon you. Perhaps the only solution is a solution that sort of breaks the system.

David Remnick: Ben, when the president of the United States tries to threaten people in Georgia to give him some votes, or he starts to talk about nationalizing the elections, all these things, whether it's January 6th, aren't these legitimate concerns? Is the worrier the problem or the actual situation the problem?

Ben Shapiro: Well, I mean, no, I think in some situations, the worrier is the problem. it depends on the conclusion you're drawing. I think the worry about January 6th was justified because obviously, I think that the behavior of the president between the election and January 6th was morally wrong and also legally wrong. I also think that the guardrails held. I think that the notion that Democrats are sitting around worrying that there will never be another clean election, that's not true. When Republicans say the same thing, Democrats are right to pounce on that.

Democrats will say, and President Trump will say, "If we don't win this election, it's because it was stolen." Then I'll hear Democrats turn around and say very much the same thing about Republicans. Once both sides believe that if the other side wins, the election was stolen, then how are we supposed to ever share a polity together? That is a massive problem. This is something-- Again, I pressed Governor Newsom on this when I sat with him. It's like you're out there saying that it's the death of democracy, we're at the end of democracy, you're trying to run in 2028, so you don't believe that.

One of the things that when the President says he wants to federalize elections, I say that he shouldn't say that. He's wrong. You know what else was wrong? When the House of Representatives under Democrats tried to push HR1, which was a federalization of elections. It was an attempt to use the power of the federal government to cram down particular election rules on states, including things like ballot harvesting. What it leads to is a place that actually Vice President Vance has said.

He said, "You shouldn't refrain from using the tool because you believe the other side won't use it. They will use it, so you should preemptively use it." Once we get to the point in American politics where one side basically says the other side will do whatever it can to cheat, steal, lie, change election results, destroy the country, therefore we must do that to stop them from doing that, then you are really at sort of the end of a thing. That thing is the American experiment. The reality is that our system is very much still functional. Last I checked, Democrats are slated to win the House and possibly the Senate, so they don't feel like this is the end of the road.

David Remnick: Ben Shapiro, thank you.

Ben Shapiro: Thanks so much.

David Remnick: Ben Shapiro has hosted The Ben Shapiro Show. I'm David Remnick, and you can find episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour and everything we publish in The New Yorker at newyorker.com. You can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com.

 

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