Establishment Meltdown Over RFK, New Lisa Cook Questions, and Being a "Lion" Instead of a "Scavenger," with Ben Shapiro

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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.

Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.

Hope you had a great Labor Day weekend.

I don't know, it's like bittersweet.

Summer's over.

Had such a nice summer this year.

But also, I don't know about you.

I'm actually, I was looking forward to going back to school with the kids so that I could see them again.

My kids just scattered everywhere the whole summer long.

I was like, where'd they go?

Now I think I'm going to see more of them in the fall than I did this summer.

It's a blessing for them to have such fun.

And, you know, look, even though September is the time when all the trees start to die and we're headed toward winter, it's always felt like a time of renewal, hasn't it?

Because it's like the new school year.

Sometimes when you start a new job, it tends to happen.

I think for a lot of people in the fall, it's all possibilities.

I'm already in my fall clothing, so we're off to the races.

We're steps away from pumpkin spice lattes.

Life is good.

Not for Lisa Cook, but for us.

She's the Federal Reserve overseer whose scandal is only growing.

Lisa, you're going to have to give it up.

Girl, you're going to have to give it up because you appear to have been caught multiple times on the alleged mortgage fraud.

And she's not even denying it.

She's really just kind of having her surrogates play the race card.

I think she's going and I think Trump is within inches of taking over basically effective control of the Fed.

But it's really, I mean, yes, it is about that.

But for me, it's about her.

You can't just DEI your way into these powerful positions and then, when you're caught, try to fall back on your qualifications, which are non-existent.

We're going to get into that today.

So, more on her because there's more problems around her, including we're learning there are big questions about how she got tenure at Michigan State University.

Shocked, shocked.

Plus, the left is freaking out over Trump and RFKJ's reforms at the CDC.

They really are actually playing the science and expert cards on us.

But science, but experts, they don't understand the right half of the country at all.

And Maryland's governor is having a great time while people in Baltimore are getting shot while he's over at George Clooney's place in Italy, having a grand old time.

Remember when like Ted Cruz wasn't allowed to go out of the country for 24 hours when there was a weather crisis down in Texas?

But Westmore, I mean, people can literally be dying in his state and he can be on Clooney's yacht and he's not going to get the leftist treatment of what a bad person he is.

Here now to react for the full show.

So excited.

We've never done this before.

I've never done in person either me on his show or him on my show.

Is Ben Shapiro?

He's the co-founder of The Daily Wire, host of the Ben Shapiro Show, and author of the new book, Lions and Scavengers: The True History of America, which is out today.

Get your copy now.

We got to make sure he winds up number one.

He will, but we have to make sure of it on the New York Times bestseller list because they don't let people like Ben Shapiro wind up number one on the bestseller list unless we make them recognize reality.

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Good to see you.

Well, thanks for having me.

It's really sweet of you.

I don't think we've been together like this, like on the air for a show since my Fox days.

That's right.

Right.

It's been a long time.

We've seen each other like not on the air.

Yeah, on the air, it's been a long time, yeah.

Yeah, I know.

It's great to see him first.

You too.

Did you have a good Labor Day weekend?

I did.

It was really, really nice.

I was with the kids, and that's what it's about.

And now they're going back and doing all of their schooling, which means I do their homework.

No, no, no, no, teachers.

No.

They probably have Ben Shabiro big brains, so they don't need you to do their homework.

Yeah, I mean, I will say they get spicy on their social studies questions.

I'll bet.

Yeah.

So your kids are little, though, right?

What are the ages?

11, 9, 5, 2.

Yeah, so you're still at the age where it is sort of more of a blessing when they go back to school.

I like you.

A little bit.

They're so young.

You look like a break in the middle of the day.

Yeah, exactly.

Mine are more like, mine are 15, 14, and 12 now.

They're

so fun.

And like, I miss them so much.

They're just, their lives are so complete with friends that I'm like, remember, mom.

Mom loves you.

I will say this is a fun summer.

We took them like all over the place.

We took them to like Italy and Greece, and then we were in Montana.

And so was, that was awesome.

And they loved the travel.

And we did a lot of history lessons.

When we were in Sicily, I was showing my 11 to 9-year-old Patton, like the George D.

Scott movie.

We were doing World War II history.

And they're very into it.

That's how it goes in the Shiro Paris.

I'm listening to Dateline with my children, so we went a different way.

This is not good.

This says something about both of us, I think.

It's good.

My daughter's like, mom,

you listen to a lot of bad stories about crime.

I'm like, honey, I swear this is a genre.

Like, this is a thing.

It's not just my obsession.

I mean, you got to do what you're good at.

You got got to go with the thing.

Dance with the girl that brung you.

Maybe they're going to be, you know, law enforcement when they grow up.

You never know.

They could be in trading.

Maybe a prosecutor.

Some other kind of thing.

When we were waiting for the show to get started, I was telling you about my favorite story right now is Lisa Cook.

I'm very into this woman because it's very clear to me she DEI'd her way up to this seat.

How dare you?

How dare you?

That's terrible.

And now she's been caught.

It's just like, honestly,

I'm just going to say it.

There have been a lot of black women who have ascended to these positions on very thin credentials.

And then some sort of scandal takes them down.

And the left freaks out about the fact that you're going after a black woman.

You know, it's like from prosecutors, whatever, whether it's Kim Fox or Fannie Willis.

Like Marilyn Mosby.

Marilyn Mosby, thank you.

Like who get bounced out for whatever reason, but then you're not allowed to attack them because they're black women.

But it's like, well, you elevated them for that reason.

And we kind of were.

It was forced presidential election that was this.

Yes.

Right.

It was where Joe Biden was like, I'm picking a black woman.

And I'm like, but but you should really pick like a qualified person.

And then she ends up as the nominee.

And they're like, but you can't attack her saying she's a black woman.

It's like, well, when you said it, it was a good thing.

Right.

When we say it, it's somehow like a bad thing.

Like, it's the same thing that we're saying right now.

At least, like,

pick somebody who's got credentials that are pretty much unassailable, right?

If you're just going to bypass all the normal protocols and elevate them.

So it turns out not only does this woman has she allegedly committed at least three alleged instances of mortgage fraud with respect to a property in Michigan, a property in Atlanta, and now there's a third property where she allegedly misstated the purpose of her home.

And this one was in, oh gosh, I'm trying to remember.

It's a third location.

My team will get it to me.

And in all three instances, she has stated the wrong purpose for the home.

Two of them, she claimed, were her primary residences at the same time, which is not possible.

And it wasn't possible in her case.

And she's not even denying it.

Cambridge, Massachusetts was the third one.

She's not even denying it, man.

She hasn't like everyone's coming out saying she has the presumption of innocence.

Well, she's not saying she's innocent.

Not once has she said, I didn't commit this mortgage fraud.

At most, her lawyers have said, well, one was a mistake.

Well, my favorite is, well, she hasn't hurt anybody because she's paying back the mortgages, which is, of course, exactly what one Donald J.

Trump said in his New York fraud trial when they claimed that he was defrauding, remember, all of his lenders by making claims about the value of his various real estate properties.

And they said he's overclaiming.

He said, well, I mean, they can sue me.

Like, if I'm not paying it back, then they can sue me.

Like, no, you'll have a $500 million judgment against you, sir.

And so it's amazing.

When the shoe is on the other foot, they use precisely the same defenses without any understanding of what it is that they're saying.

Right, with or without a victim, they were going to go after Donald Trump because justice.

Right.

You know, but with her, it's, you know, what?

We, no one's been hurt.

We don't know if she even did it, even though she's not even denying it.

And black woman, black woman.

So now it comes out that this

totally qualified woman.

and I'll just give you an example of that, because Ellie Hoenig, who's the CNN legal analyst, he was even out there over the weekend saying,

she's kind of in some deep, you know what.

And for him to say it, you know, shows you they've got her.

But listen to how he describes in sort of the throwaway how qualified this woman is.

I mean, and I heard this over on NPR.

I heard this on the daily.

They really talk about this woman like she's, you know, gay keys.

So here we go.

Watch Ellie Hoenig.

There's some suspicious activity here that's really problematic by Lisa Cook.

The claim that this might be clerical error or just a mistake, that's not going to fly because Lisa Cook is one of the most established, accomplished financial and economic experts in this country.

I think that the allegations on their face could be enough for a judge to say, look, I'm going to defer to the president on cause.

Is she one of the most accomplished, respected econ experts in the nation?

I mean, I've never heard of her.

Had you heard of her?

Literally nobody has ever heard of her other than Chris Ruffo, who, unlike the two of us, is always paying attention to these details.

And he was

bad enough.

Wow.

If he went to look at my academic papers, he would find they are almost non-existent.

But Lisa Cook came under the Chris Ruffo magnifying glass, as well as that of his one-time research partner, Chris Brunette, who's an independent journalist.

And both of these guys were the ones who exposed Claudine Gay's plagiarism at Harvard.

And this guy works for the American Conservative.

He's written for the Daily Caller and he obtained her tenure packet, her 85-page tenure packet via FOIA.

It's heavily redacted, he writes, but here are the big takeaways.

She was at Michigan State in the Econ department and he concludes, although everything's blacked out, you can see these black outlines,

secret, that

it was clear from his review that they did not want to give her tenure, that they likely voted, the econ department likely voted against giving her tenure, but appeared to have been overruled by the dean.

There's a column titled Recommended by Department Chair slash School Director in Blackout.

The Dean's column is not in blackout.

You see the Dean check to recommend her, but there's this,

you can almost read between the lines.

This was long blackout, nor was this long blackout.

Lisa Cook is a valued colleague.

Whenever we fill a junior position, we hope that the individual will succeed and be promoted to associate professor with tenure.

We do everything that we can to help out along the way.

Black out, black out, black out, blackout.

It's very clear she didn't get it.

And then the dean elevated her.

And when she was applying for tenure, she relied on, among other things, Ben,

her paper, which was also mentioned when she came under fire from Trump last week because of the alleged mortgage fraud.

Okay, so here she was applying for tenure.

In a section called Commentary and Accomplishment, she devoted 15 paragraphs to her research on lynchings and patents,

and only one paragraph to how she's served the economics profession.

Okay.

All right.

But she's written a lot, like everyone obsessed with DEI, about how terrible America was and the Jim Crow South and lynchings in America.

She probably made our inflation decisions.

She totally should.

It's obvious.

Why not?

Well, and she knows a lot about mortgages.

Yeah, clearly.

Clearly, an expert.

So, so in this, so 15 paragraphs on her research on lynchings and patents, only one in her economic service.

And apparently, Ruffo writes, I was making fun of this paper because it was like the premise was that lynchings of black people led to fewer patents held by black people.

I was like, well, I mean, frankly, I get it, right?

That's math.

But it appears to have gone beyond that and crossed over into black people are depressed when they live in the Jim Crow South, and therefore they're not even trying for patents.

But I learned from Chris Ruffo that even that was totally debunked after she wrote it because she relied on

patent applications in the year 1900, concluding that the number plummeted because of lynchings and

discrimination.

Other researchers soon discovered the reasons for the sudden drop in 1900 was that one of the databases Cook relied on stopped collecting data that year.

The true number of black patents, one subsequent study found, might be as much as 70 times greater than Lisa Cook's figure, effectively debunking the study's premise.

So, even her greatest accomplishment fell apart after the fact.

Well, sounds like, I mean, I heard Eli Hoenig.

I mean, he said that she's amazing at this.

He said, I will take him for, I mean, he's on CNN.

There you go.

I mean, I think we're done here.

Can we talk about why he did that?

I mean, I think we all know why he did that, right?

It's so frustrating.

It's obligatory.

You must read the words.

You must read the words before you.

Ms.

Manchurian candidate kind of stuff.

Raymond Shraw is the kindest, gentlest, most wonderful human being I've ever known.

It's racist.

It is, of course, racist.

By the way, you can name half a dozen black economists who happen to be on the conservative side of the aisle, who actually are really well qualified.

Glenn Lowry.

Glenn Lowry, Thomas Dowell, Roland Fryer.

I mean, you can keep going with all of this stuff.

Where they're busy trying to, you know, kick out of Harvard.

Yeah, exactly.

And all those guys, very qualified, but given short shrift by the same exact people who will talk about the majestic qualifications of Lisa Cook, who, of course, does not seem to be a great chex.

If you just wanted some random black woman who actually had written a bunch of scholarly articles, who's actually really smart, You could go with Carol Swain.

Yes.

She's not an economist, but she's way more qualified to be on the Fed than this person from the sound of it.

And then here's another:

Her tenure packet lists her

writings that I just talked about on the lynchings as a peer-reviewed paper.

And this guy who I mentioned, Brunette, the co-author to Rufo on the Claudine Gay stuff, he himself wrote an article for Citi Journal about this in 2022, pointing out she billed herself as a macroeconomist, but she'd never published a peer-reviewed macroeconomics article ever.

Not only that, but she misrepresented her publication history in her CV, claiming she had published an article in the journal American Economic Review.

In truth, he writes, the article was published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, a less prestigious non-peer-reviewed magazine.

So she lied.

I mean, it's not exactly Elizabeth Warren, but she lied lied in an academic setting to get ahead to say that this paper had been peer-reviewed and it was in the more prestigious

senior partner to this less prestigious, shitty, you know, junior partner.

And the sort of stuff matters, obviously, because when you're talking about the Trump administration, the constant attempt by the media is anytime there's something like this, it must be.

They're out to get Lisa Cook because it's a perversion of the Federal Reserve, because the president has been so critical of Jay Powell over at the Fed.

Or if it's about John Bolton, it must be.

It can't be that there's actually a there there.

It must be that he hates John Bolton and that's why he's going after John Bolton.

And nobody just takes a breath for like five seconds to think, hey, why don't we let this play for three, four days and find out what the actual allegations are?

Because as you're pointing out, the allegations are pretty bad.

And it turns out this person probably shouldn't have been in that position in the first place.

But the media, it's Lucy with the football.

Every single time they think they've got this guy in

some authoritarian trap, then it gets pulled away.

And turns out.

Actually, there's kind of a legitimate basis for the thing that he's doing here.

Exactly right.

So what I see here is a pattern of somebody who is, appears to me, dishonest.

She lied, according to this, about her peer review.

Her paper fell apart.

It wasn't academically sound.

It's really the only thing she has.

She was denied tenure, we think, based on this reporting.

She only got elevated to a tenured position thanks to the dean.

I'm going to guess Ben Shapiro would not have been given the same

help up

as she got.

And then you have everybody running around saying how how incredibly accomplished she is and how incredibly.

I mean, now when she goes, think about her income trajectory now.

She can pay off all those primary mortgages.

It'll be amazing.

She's already making money off of multiple properties because they're actually rental properties.

Exactly.

Not a primary residence, not a secondary residence.

Now she'll be a resistance hero.

Right.

And now

she'll get a nice book deal out of this.

She will get tenure at some other university on the basis of all of this.

And she'll have a perennial slot next to Eli Hoenig talking about what a wonderful, I guess, legal professional he is.

And they can have a mutual admiration societal because what you see in her history, which is like the other strain.

So you've got these questionable academic achievements.

And then on the other side, right next to him, which really are blaring, are all of her woke commentary.

Like all of it.

It's everywhere.

And just today on The Hills Rising, Robbie Sov, Suave, yeah, sorry.

I'm sorry, I always screw that up because of the spelling.

He went into a big thing about what she was saying during the COVID pandemic and George Floyd a Palooza.

And she was everywhere.

She was everywhere talking about wokeism and Black Lives Matter and defunding the police.

And apparently she was involved in the effort to oust Harold Ullig, then editor of the Journal of Political Economy, he says, for crimes against wokeness.

What did Uleg do?

In the summer of 2020, quoting from Robbie here, Uleg wrote a few tweets in which he politely but firmly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for the defund the police push among him.

His most provocative sentence, this guy Ulig, was George Floyd and his family really didn't deserve to be taken advantage of by flat earthers and creationists.

So what did Lisa Cook do?

She demanded his head.

She, along with these other so-called conservatives or commentators like Janny Ellen was one of them, Paul Krugman was one of them.

They were all calling for this guy to be fired, and he was.

He actually did get the boot.

Cancel culture came for him.

It was successful, although temporarily.

He was placed on leave pending an investigation, eventually reinstated after Cooler Hairs prevailed.

But this woman was thrilled to see somebody canceled, losing their profession, for one ambiguous sentence that she found offensive.

But she can lie.

I mean, she can lie to get hired potentially, possibly to get tenure.

She can lie to get her job at the Federal Reserve because there's real questions about whether she disclosed any of this mortgage shenanigan stuff.

We don't know whether she lied or just didn't disclose.

There's no way she disclosed.

She would have already told us that.

And now she wants to run around claiming black woman, black woman, Trump, bad, Trump, bad.

And yet, in her history, who did she want to cut a break for?

Right.

I just feel like I'm looking forward to her going down.

Yes.

Well, I mean, member of Protected Class gets hit by rules that she was trying to apply to others is definitely delicious.

Yeah.

And that's one of the things I think we've all been enjoying about the Trump era thus far is just watching the rules be equally applied to the people who are only applying them for themselves over the course of

20 years.

Yeah.

I mean, mean,

a lot of these folks.

Yeah.

Like, I don't have anything against John Bolton himself, but like, if he actually did disclose confidential infer or classified information to the point where it was brought to our attention from some overseas CIA source, that would raise a red flag on anyone.

Yes.

I mean, clearly.

And he will go to jail if that is what he did.

And again.

On the CNN front, I just want to go back to the Ellie Hoening over-the-top praise.

We see this all the time.

We see this on that Abby Phillips panel virtually every night.

I am sick and tired.

It makes me very uncomfortable of people being like, when the subject of, let's say, a black woman like Abby Phillips comes up.

I love Abby Philip.

I mean, she's extremely talented.

She's incredibly talented.

She's one of my favorite people.

I consider her a friend.

She's a friend.

We've had dinner together.

I grow so uncomfortable when people do this.

It's so clear what they're doing.

Like, who else do you, I don't run around being like, I call Ben Shapiro a friend.

Like when the Israel folks got mad at me because I had like MTG on.

I don't run around like, I'm friends with Ben Shapiro.

Ben Shapiro is a good close personal friend of mine.

We are, but I don't, like, I'm so uncomfortable.

Stop fucking doing that.

It's definitely, it's, it's a weird tick.

It's a weird tick, and it's kind of a revealing tick when, when people do that.

But I think you have to say the words.

If you don't say the words, then you're not allowed to say the bad things about Lisa Cook unless you also say the very nice things about Lisa Cook.

She could just be a moron.

Yes.

Again, how dare you?

Back to the beginning.

No, no, she's brilliant.

Michigan State University, the Harvard of Michigan.

That's not University of Michigan?

Is it great?

The Harvard of not University of Michigan schools of Michigan.

Syracuse is the Harvard of upstate New York.

At least central New York,

arguably.

All right.

Well, that's Lisa Cook.

I think her goose is cooked and she won't be around much longer.

Let's spend a minute on foreign policy because

there's video out now from this big meeting of Putin and Modi.

Gee, yeah.

Yeah, she.

And on Morning Joe, they were very, very upset upset because Putin and Modi of India were shown very chummy together and kind of holding hands.

And, of course, they're not supposed to be doing that because we're trying to punish India with secondary sanctions because Putin is continuing the war in Ukraine.

And it doesn't seem like he's that phased by it.

They're still very chummy.

Here is what Morning Joe had to say about it in Sat Zero.

You literally had Putin and Modi holding hands yesterday.

Clearly, this meeting, a shot at President Trump's, the image of Vladimir Putin holding hands with the leader of Indy, India, Narendra Modi,

was a sign that Putin is getting away with it.

That

three years into this war, he is now claiming this was the West's fault.

And he has an audience of prominent world leaders who agree with him.

50% tariffs from the United States placed on India, in some ways driving Modi to that photo op where he's holding hands with Putin and that incredible, extraordinary show of support for Vladimir Putin.

Okay, so this jumped out at me, Ben, because

I was actually in the middle of those two men in July of 2017, Putin and Modi.

And

I got ripped for wearing like a sort of a dress to the thing instead of a suit, but I was literally told it was a state dinner to dress for a state dinner, which I did.

In any event, I thought the dress was nice.

But I was there.

Here, look, this is the video of it.

Here's Putin and Modi, and we are in St.

Petersburg together, meeting at the castle where Putin and I were together.

Nice dress.

Thank you.

We had sort of a state dinner thereafter.

Right after this, the three of us sat down at a table that was like barely enough to hold three teacups and had tea together, the three of us.

And they are and were and have been extremely chummy.

for many, many, many years.

So that's what jumped out at me.

Like, they've always been like this.

They actually do have a lot of strategic alignment.

And I don't know how, like, I don't think even Trump thought that he was going to end the relationship between the men by imposing a secondary statement.

They're also aiming at the wrong thing there.

The actual geopolitical change is Modi and G.

It's not Modi and Putin.

As you say,

around for a long time.

Yes.

I mean, also, India during the entirety of the Cold War was not aligned, but actually aligned pretty closely with the Soviet Union.

And it took until the mid-2000s for the United States to start really warming up the relationship with India to the point where they're now now considered a military strategic partner as part of the so-called Quad.

That'd be like the United States, Japan, Australia, and India.

And the idea there, and this is under Trump One, was to create essentially a ring of fire around China.

Because if you look at the map, obviously the Indo-Pacific is dominated by China, but not if you have India in kind of one corner and then Australia down in the south and Japan up.

kind of ringing them.

And so the idea was that we were going to sort of box China in.

So I'm more concerned about India realigning vis-a-vis China because they have a bad relationship historically.

They've almost gone to war several times.

Him being aligned with Putin is nothing new.

I mean, he's getting enormous amounts of oil from Vladimir Putin.

Something like 47% of all Russian oil exports go to the Chinese and 38% go to the Indians.

And that means that since 2022, the Indians have probably saved something like $17 billion on their oil costs because of the amount of oil that they've been taking in from the Russians.

And so the idea that

the Indians were going to turn away from Russia full scale because of the sanctions, I'm not sure if that's what Trump was going for.

I think that that that was not going to happen.

But I'm not going to say that the realignment here is not a problem.

I do think it is a problem.

This particular event was Turkey, Iran, North Korea, I believe, was there.

It was China.

It was India.

And it was Russia.

And that sort of anti-American coalition that territorially now stretches all the way from China all the way in the east to theoretically Turkey in the West, that is a very large land bridge.

I mean, that is a serious geopolitical issue.

And so I think that, again, the the idea that we were going to break the relationship between Russia and India is foolish.

And you're right.

Modi and Putin have been friendly for a very long time.

I will say that I think the tariff war does have some unforeseen consequences.

And I think one of those consequences is that instead of boxing China in with all these other countries, if you slap Japan with a tariff, you slap India with a tariff, you slap South Korea with a tariff, and then you slap China with a lower tariff than India, then you could theoretically be making moves that push India in the direction of a realignment.

And that has some significant impact.

I mean, monetarily it does.

You've seen that the dollar has been dropping as the global reserve currency.

The gold, spot price of gold today is like the highest it's been ever.

And so, you know, there is downstream effect to some of these decisions being made.

Do you think it's all about the tariffs?

I don't think it's all about the tariffs.

I do think it is largely about the tariffs.

I think that we've offered

a lot of sticks and not enough carrots to places like India.

The truth is that the trade relationship that we have with India is not wildly important to the United States.

They represent, I think, our 10th largest trading partner.

They do have access to some rare earth minerals.

And I think one of the goals theoretically should have been to, if we were going to do cheap goods at all from other parts of the world, to realign that from China to India and make more of an ally of India, specifically because they're geopolitically between Pakistan here and China here.

And so what you want to do is make, by the way, we hold more military exercises with India than we do with NATO.

I was going to say, and they're not, you know, creating mass amounts of ships to potentially take us down.

Right.

We're a lot friendlier with China.

But if you start to see them like actually realign with China, if you start to see them move into the Chinese camp, then that really does upend the geopolitical order.

And so, again,

I'm not a Peter Navarro guy, and I think that Peter Navarro's trade policy, if you do the opposite of that, typically you're going to do well.

So, when you look at Putin, you look at Modi, you look at Xi, are they all lions?

I think that the idea of the lion in the book is somebody who builds

in Lions and Scavengers

is somebody who is

to build as opposed to tear down.

So I would say no.

I think that all three of those people, well, two of those three, I think, are attempting to tear down.

I'm not sure about Modi.

I think Modi may be more in the lion category.

And I think him sort of forging a middle path and trying to move as an independent in the world, which has been traditional Indian policy.

You could see him as a lion more than a scavenger.

I think she is definitely a scavenger.

Communism is a scavenger philosophy.

And I think Putin is a scavenger, too.

I think that Putin is essentially attempting to savage various countries and institutions.

What is he building?

Yeah, nothing.

I mean, it's a gas station with nuclear weapons.

That's right.

And so, yeah, I've never seen Vladimir Putin.

I think very early in his career, there was the possibility he could be.

If you remember back to 99, 2000, when he first took over, he lowered the tax rates like 12%.

People thought he was going to realign with the West.

It didn't work out that way, obviously.

Lisa Cook?

Definitely a scavenger.

Totally.

She defines scavenger.

Yes, yes.

Somebody who has nothing but complaints about the United States, lives.

high on the hog because of the systems that she criticizes, and then has the temerity to suggest that she is a victim while prospering.

It's just pure, hard to come with a better example of a scavenger than Lisa Cook.

The way, I mean, that's obviously the title of the book, but you kind of break down what does it mean to be a lion?

What does it mean to be a scavenger?

And you don't do it in purely right versus left way.

No, I don't think it's a right versus left thing.

No.

I even think it's a personal thing.

Meaning, I think that if you take it to the personal level,

there's a part of all of us that wants to build, and there's a part of all of us that wants to.

destroy.

And the easiest thing in the world when we face a problem is to say that it's somebody else's fault, that it's a system's fault, and we should tear down the system.

Sometimes it is the system's fault, but you actually have to have evidence of that.

And then there's the part of us that wants to build.

And you get to wake up every morning and decide whether you want to build or whether you want to destroy.

And civilizationally, do we want to build or do we want to destroy things?

And again, I'm not talking here about unjust systems where you can show the evidence for why it's unjust and whom it's victimizing.

I'm talking about, you know, the Zoran Mamdanification of America.

The sort of idea that America

is a victimizing oppressor party, and all the institutions need to be laid low so that Zoram Amdani and his friends can feel better about themselves, even though they, again, are the greatest beneficiaries of American freedom and prosperity in the history of all of humanity.

And so what you've seen, I think, over the course of the last couple of decades is the rise of what I call the scavengers, this coalition of people who

essentially have three categories of scavengers.

They're barbarians, they're looters, and they're lechers.

Barbarians are people who believe that we have made their civilization poor.

It largely comes from outside the United States.

I think there's a big gathering of them in Detroit, scavengers who basically say that America is an awful place, an exploitative place, an oppressive place that has made the rest of the world poorer and terrible.

And then they import that into our borders.

And then there are looters, people who believe that free markets, private property, equal application of the law, these are actually biased.

And what we need is a system that benefits people, quote unquote, like me.

So Marxism definitely pauses.

Like the Democratic Socialists of America.

Exactly.

And then you have lechers, people who believe that family and church are a threat to them because their own own identity is wrapped up in behavior that family and church pose a threat to.

And so family and church need to be wiped away.

And the reason I say they're a coalition is because you see them acting coalitionally.

It's very weird.

Like they should be mutually exclusive.

Barbarians and lechers in particular.

It's very weird to watch Queers for Palestine.

Sort of like the apex example of this.

People who would be thrown off of buildings in Gaza who are out there standing for Gaza.

And you're like, why?

Because the answer is they just don't like the civilization as a whole.

It's not that they want to live in Gaza.

It's that they believe the civilization that is responsible for the terrible situation in Gaza and is also responsible for the terrible situation I find myself in personally because I'm not accepted at my local family dinner.

Those are the same civilization.

They need to be torn down.

So we're all going to march together en masse.

And you see, I think Mamdani is like a perfect example of this since we're in New York anyway.

I mean,

he is like a perfect example of this.

You look at his coalition and it's like radical Islamists and radical transgender advocates and abortionists and communists.

Like, what do all these people have in common?

And the answer is they hate all of the good things.

That's the thing that they have in common.

They want to tear down all of these good things.

It makes perfect sense, actually.

And to me, one of the pieces that resonated with me was you wrote something in the effect of

you don't have to have like a conscious philosophy with which you're going through life in order to be a lion.

Like you can just be a person, let's say a strong person with moral convictions, a person of faith, a person who knows how they're raising their children.

And there was one piece in there that really resonated where you were saying the difference between a lion and a scavenger, among others, is a lion would never sit around saying, this is so unfair.

Right.

You know, poor me.

The whole attitude is just very un-lion-esque.

And you either teach that to your children or you don't.

You may have a philosophy

around it.

It may be on the board as one of your family values, or it may just be something that a parent says to a kid, which is like, no, stop doing that.

We don't do that in this family.

That's not a healthy, positive way of thinking.

And if you don't pass it down to your kids, your kids end up becoming scavengers.

Because the society is just filled with them and they're trying to convert your child into a scavenger at every turn, K through 12 and beyond.

100%.

And also, I think there's a natural thing that lions do that has made us very vulnerable.

And I speak here just for people who believe that duty is the way that you do life, that you get up in the morning, you figure what's your duty, and you do those things.

But one of the things that Western civilization does differently than a lot of other civilizations is that we're a guilt-based culture as opposed to a shame-based culture.

So we're a culture where we actually value the feeling of internal guilt.

It shows that you're a good person, right?

That you recognize your own mistakes.

You try to correct those mistakes.

Shame-based cultures don't worry about what you're feeling internally with regard to guilt.

They are interested in avoiding shame.

And so what that means is they want to shame you.

And so this imbalance between kind of guilt cultures and shame cultures explains why the whole cancel culture thing went out of control.

Because there were a bunch of people who would traditionally be considered lions who are like somebody would call them out for a sin.

They'd say, oh, you know what?

That's true.

You know, I have sinned.

I could have done better.

And then people would stomp on their neck and be like, wait, that's not what's supposed to happen.

Right.

Right.

When I express guilt, I'm supposed to like get forgiveness at the other end of that.

The religious concept of repentance is I acknowledge sin.

In return, I am restored.

Right.

That's the basic idea.

And we have an entire side of the culture that says, if you acknowledge sin, you have been shamed.

And being shamed is shameful, right?

You are lesser now because you've acknowledged your own guilt.

And so people do this and they don't understand if you pass on to your kids a sense of guilt without a sense of pride.

in your civilization and in your duty and in the important things to do, what you end up with is a bunch of kids who are ashamed of who they are.

And they end up trying to dissociate from their own civilization.

And they only feel good when they're doing that.

And this is why you see so many of sort of the scavengers not appearing in the poorest areas of America.

A lot of those people are lions.

What you end up seeing is them appearing on very rich college campuses, having parents who are earning in six figures.

Because they're saying, I don't want to be like my shame-ridden parents, these terrible people who have made the world an exploited place.

I'm different.

I'm not like them.

And so you see them marching in the streets, you know, hundreds of thousands strong in some places, in solidarity with destroying a civilization they've benefited from.

And again, I keep going back to Mamdani.

He's like a perfect example.

No one has grown up richer and more privileged in America than Zora Mamdani.

He's walking around trying to rip down everything that makes success possible.

And also, like so many of these scavengers, he's accomplished nothing.

Nothing.

He has absolutely nothing on his resume to point to.

Lisa Cook is way more qualified to be mayor of New York than he is.

She wrote a paper one time.

She did.

She did.

Exactly.

She did get that tenure.

No matter how she got it, she did get it.

It's more than we can say for him.

The person I keep thinking of when you're talking about this, because she's on my list of things to ask you about today, because I just find her amusing, is Greta Turnberg.

So

she embodies this game.

The farm squad.

Exactly.

Totally.

And also Little Lord Fauntleroy, both kind of all.

She's got a he-man haircut now?

Yes.

It's very odd.

I don't know.

I mean, like, I'm sorry, but if you're Greta Turnberg, your goal when you wake up in the morning should not be to say, I want to, how can I make myself look less attractive?

It should not, you're good.

You can, you can stay.

You're at the point where you can say, I hold, I hold.

I don't need anything additional.

I don't need the haircut with the bangs up here and the curl down.

She's back.

David Burge, Iowa Hawk had a great line.

He said she has now surpassed the, what was it, Gary Coleman record for playing a 10-year-old the longest?

For playing a 10-year-old the longest totally.

Yes.

Because, well, she not only is scavenger-esque, and the book again is called Lions and Scavengers by Ben Shapiro.

It's out now.

Get it.

It's a great social, cultural, moral commentary on where we are as a world, not to mention a country.

But she's not only a scavenger, she represents something else, which is how scavengers elevate other scavengers, how they see it in a certain individual and they genuinely admire it.

You know, it's not fake, their admiration for somebody like that.

She's taught in schools.

I mean, every single school we've been at, we've been at four of them because we were at the two in New York before we fled, and now two out here, she gets mentioned as like someone for these kids to look up to.

So she's gone from, do we have the SAT of making predictions about, you know, world calamity that did not come true to now making all sorts of pronouncements on Israel?

Because sure, why not?

Why not?

At tracks.

Geopolitical.

Yeah.

Here she is, just as a flavor for those who have forgotten.

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.

And yet, I'm one of the lucky ones.

People are suffering.

People are dying.

Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

How dare you?

Why is it so important to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius?

Because even at one degree people are dying from climate change.

Because that's what the United Science calls for, to avoid destabilizing the climate so that we have the best possible chance to avoid setting off irreversible chain reactions.

Every fraction of a degree matches.

I feel like we're doing okay.

Yes.

Just for the first time, one of the Arctic ice shelves grew this past summer.

Like I feel pretty good about where we are.

I think that's why she got off the climate change band.

I had a rule, and the rule was until she was 18, I couldn't make fun of her, right?

Because we have this stupid game that we play in the media where if somebody trots out like a child actor, which she is, I mean, she actually is like a child actor.

And then you're not allowed to criticize because they're not of majority.

Well, she's like 35 years old now.

And so we can, we can make fun of her as much as we could possibly want.

But she is a perfect embodiment of what people have called the Omni-Clause, right?

What she actually is in favor of is like all the things, right?

She went from climate change seamlessly over to Gaza because it's all the same thing, which is, I just hate the civilization.

I hate capitalism.

I mean, when she was talking about climate change, she didn't care about climate change.

She openly said she wanted to destroy capitalism.

Capitalism was responsible for climate change.

It was responsible for all the evils on planet Earth.

And now she's transferred that right on over to Israel versus Hamas.

Seamlessly trip.

Seamlessly.

And it's all the same people saying all the same things.

They just change the banner out every so often.

Truly.

It's why you see what's happening on campus.

And it's the exact same people.

They just switched out the BLM for the Gaza.

They just went right from one to the other.

And then whatever the next cause will be, probably immigration, that'll be the next banner because they can just move seamlessly from cause to cause.

The only thing the causes have in common is the system sucks.

I want to tear down the system.

And again, this girl has had the most privileged life.

I mean, she didn't go to school from the time she was like 12, 13 years old.

She was jet-setting around the, well, sailing sailing around the world to the great plaudits of the rest of planet Earth.

And now, I guess she's getting attention for getting on a boat and trying to float her way to Gaza and then being turned away after taking a few pictures with Camouse members.

And the Israelis gave her a bunch of sandwiches and drinks.

It was the nice

rejection.

It was very funny.

You saw you saw the pictures of her.

She's actually smiling as she receives the foods.

Yeah.

Like they took, they're like,

you can't come in, but here's a lovely meal for you on your way out.

Take care.

Enjoy.

And of course, she's still with the, I'm a victim.

Well, they actually oppressed the Israelis.

They definitely, it was basically like an air to line genocide because they put her in the back row next to the bathrooms on LL, which I have done, which is brutal.

Well, she's not wrong about Israel becoming more and more controversial.

And that is why Chris Martin did what he did at the Cole Play concert the other night, which I just thought was shameful.

I really, I can't believe it's at this point now where you get an Israeli on the stage and you have to like, you're jarred.

You can clearly see, I'm going to play the clip.

You can see he's like jarred when he says, where are you from?

And she says, Israel, As if she said, you know, I don't know.

Hell.

Like, yeah, North Korea.

Yeah, something like where you were like, holy shit, what have you been through?

What's going on?

I'll play the clip and we'll talk about it.

Here it is.

Wow.

Wow, he says.

Thank you for being here.

It's so sweet.

I also want to welcome people in the audience from Palestine because we are

a belief that the world is not equal human.

And

I want to treat you as equal humans on Earth.

Well, don't do any favors.

I know.

Like, first of all, you're a cold play.

You suck.

Second of all,

and apparently all he does is just go around ruining random people's lives at Coldplay concerts.

That's just all that happens.

Beware if you go to a a cold play concert, you get what's coming to you.

But yeah, I mean, the entire premise, which is like, look at me, I'm bestowing humanity on you because you come from a country that's in the middle of a war after the worst assault on Jews since World War II.

And now I'm also going to name check, you know, people who are on the other side of that.

Would he do this in literally any other circumstance?

No.

Like if it were Russians, let's say it were Russians and they said, I'm from Russia, would you say, well, you know, I just have to name, throw it out there, you're human.

And so are people from, I'm just going to name check Ukraine.

I can't imagine him.

Yeah, just I can't imagine him doing something like that.

Why wouldn't you just say nothing?

Or I'm sorry for all your country's been going through.

Right.

Or, or, like, I'm so glad you came.

Yeah, that's it.

Just leave it.

You don't have to do anything.

You don't have to do anything.

But I mean, an Israeli citizen, like, this isn't the IDF.

Right.

Like, this is some like heavyset woman who showed up at his concert.

Right.

Who's clearly, you know, not one of the chief fighters.

And he can't, he's got to take it political.

Like, why can't with her, you just say, you know what?

There's, it's unambiguous.

Obviously, the war has gone on for two years and it's getting more controversial as we've discussed.

But,

but that's not to say that Israel

was

anything other than wrongly attacked on 10-7 in an absolutely brutal terrorist attack from which the country is still very much suffering.

I mean, like, the bodies haven't even been in the ground for two years.

Like, maybe a word about the hostages, the Israeli hostages who are still suffering, who are starving to death, too.

I always find it interesting at these sort of musical events.

I mean, you remember this thing was launched on the basis of of a gigantic attack at a music event, right?

It was the Nova Music Festival, where some 300 people were slaughtered for going to essentially a rave on a Friday night in the desert.

And at all these music festivals, they're out there like chanting in favor of essentially a group that bans all music festivals in the Gaza Strip.

Not a lot of music festivals starring Coldplay in the Gaza Strip.

But again, he didn't have to go there.

I mean, wherever you are on these issues, and obviously my perspective is extremely clear on this.

You just don't have to do it.

The fact that he felt the necessity to sort of apologize for the presence of Israelis at his concert says something really disturbing.

Yeah.

Because you don't have to do that.

You don't have to.

And I understand there are people there who immediately start booing any mention of Israel.

He could just go right over the top of that.

Yep.

He doesn't need to.

I think if it were me, it caught by surprise by like somebody's in the middle of a war, whose country's, I think I would have said something like, I hope your family's okay.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, and by the way, he would have said the same thing if it was somebody from Gaza.

Yeah.

Right.

You could have done that.

Right.

But I would have been reverse.

He wouldn't treat you like a human.

He would certainly not say that.

If those had had been two people from Gaza, he would not have said, I'm choosing to treat you as a human.

As a human, I just want to say, welcome to the people from Israel here also.

No way in hell, which shows you exactly where he's standing.

And here's the thing, Ben, even though, like, even Trump is saying now, like,

Israel's losing the PR war.

Okay.

And I've been saying that, and I think that's true.

I don't think they should, but I think they are.

I mean,

it is true.

Yeah.

And also, like, wars go on a long time and they're ugly.

And Hamas is great at propaganda.

Hamas is great at propaganda.

And also, I've yet to see a long-standing war in which one side is Western and the other side is terrorist, and you don't end up quote-unquote losing the PR war if it goes on a long time.

Well, this is where I was going to go with it because who does Chris Martin think his values, like his core values that actually he lives by align better with, right?

I mean, if you actually press this guy, he would, of course, say Israel every day of the week.

But so many people, when they comment on this, when they embrace Hamas or, you know, they won't usually say Hamas.

They'll say the Palestinians.

Right.

When pressed, like, what is it about them, you know, that really resonates with you really can't say anything.

No, No, but it wasn't just about how bad Israel is.

It'll always be their victims, right?

Victims, victims.

They're oppressed.

And the thing was about the victims and oppression narrative that that was basically thoroughly debunked by October 8th, meaning on October 7th, there was a gigantic attack that was launched on Israel.

In 2005, Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip.

They were not in control of the Gaza Strip.

It's the reason October 7th happened.

If they'd had any sort of security oversight in the Gaza Strip, it never would have happened in the first place.

And on October 7th, there was a gigantic attack.

And

then the idea was that somehow the attack was Israel's fault, despite having abandoned the strip in 2005.

And so it's like, it's a no-win situation.

Yeah, the blockade, it was

occupied.

Right.

It's occupied.

It's the blockade.

But as everyone recognizes who's watched this conflict for any period of time, if the Palestinians in Gaza had put down the guns and put down the cement mixers for building the gigantic terror larger than the London subway, and if they had said, we wish to economically develop, nobody would have been happier about that than the Israelis.

And I know everyone on both sides of the Israeli political divide, the left and the right over there.

And there's virtually no one there who would not have been very much in favor of an economically well-developed neighbor to its immediate southwest that was not at war with it.

That would be a much nicer thing.

Because again, Israel has to draft all of its 18-year-olds into an army where they're having their limbs blown off.

I mean, nobody in Israel is like clamoring for more war.

And this lie that

that's what this is all about.

I think that goes to a broader perception of the West, that the West is a war-mongering place, that all problems that happen all over the world are the West's fault.

Everybody is doing blowback to the West.

Nobody ever has any individual agency anywhere else on Earth.

Anything bad that happens anywhere on Earth is the result of American foreign policy or Israeli foreign policy or European foreign policy.

Well, what if it turns out that the world is a complex place and there are a lot of people out there who have their own ideas of what they would like in life and geopolitically?

And those ideas don't match what the West wants, that people actually have agency.

When you say, you know, people should just take, like, maybe take a minute and actually take a look over there, I think you're being too hard.

Ibram X.

Kendi, didn't he go for, was it even?

Yeah, Tan Haskell.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

My left-wing black scholars, and I use that term scholars very liberally.

10 days, I think he said.

10 whole days, Ben.

10 whole days.

He knows.

And his narrative, and he's a perfect example.

His narrative lines up with the idea that there are brown people in the Middle East and white people in the Middle East.

And the brown people in the Middle East are the Palestinians, and the white people are the Jews.

And therefore, it's just like, and he says this in his book, Black Americans and White Americans.

And so because he believes that black Americans are oppressed in the United States by a white supremacist structure, he then takes that exact same logic and he tries to apply that wrong, faulty, false,

and ugly logic to the Middle East, despite the fact that, by the way, half of Israelis are brown.

Okay, let me ask you this, you know, in a couple of minutes.

How is it going to wrap up?

Because I will say, you know,

a good friend of mine, it might have been Alan Dershowitz.

I was in the middle of several text exchanges.

He said something like, I want to come on and we'll debate Israel.

And I was like, there's nothing to debate.

This happened with with me and a couple of people.

I'm like, there's nothing to debate.

I'm on Israel's side.

I don't, I'm not, you're looking for the wrong target.

But

I do think they need to wrap it up because as a fan of Israel, I just, you know, you can see what's happening, right?

I think everyone in Israel wants them to wrap it up.

So, what's the solution?

Because they don't have their hostages back.

Right.

So,

this has always been what if they don't get them back.

So, this has always been the serious problem with how Israel has approached the war from October 8th.

And I've said this many, many times.

Israel elevated as co-equal goals, getting the hostage back and winning the war.

And those cannot be co-equal goals.

They can't.

And because the minute that you get down to the end of the war, and now you have to pick one of those, getting the hostages back or quote unquote winning the war, then you're in a conundrum.

And that's kind of where Israel is right now.

Now, I think that Netanyahu is doing the right thing by saying they all come out.

We're not going to do this, this sort of Zenos paradox with hostages where I get 10 and then 5 and then 2 and then 1.

And Hamas obviously doesn't want to give all the hostages out because they're afraid that the minute they do, Israel goes in and finishes the job.

And Hamas is basically defenestrated and that's the end of it.

So that's the impasse that they're at right now.

I think the way that the war probably ends is that Israel goes into Gaza City.

Israel sets up humanitarian enclaves.

They've already talked about this, in Rafah and several on the coast in Gaza, where humanitarian aid is available plentifully.

Right now, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is shipping in something on the order of 4,400 calories per day per person into the Gaza Strip.

No war in history has seen the amount of aid go from one side to the opposing side's civilians in the history of all modern warfare, the way that Israel has been been shipping in aid over the course of the last six months or so into the into the Gaza Strip.

And so those areas, I believe the plan is to make those areas essentially terror-free.

The security will be provided by the Israelis.

And I think they're hoping for a coalition of Arab countries as well.

And listen, I think the United States should be involved in the most minimal possible way, like really minimal.

I don't want American boots on the ground ever, ever, ever, ever.

I don't think the United States.

should have boots on the ground in that place.

It's a very, very bad place.

I think the idea that President Trump has put forward, which is essentially, Israel should make the ground safe over there, and then economic building can happen.

Let the free market rain.

Trump, Trump, Trump Lago, Gaza Lago, Maragaza.

Maragaza.

It's a better plan than whatever the hell they've been doing in the Gaza Strip for the last 80 years, which has been a hellhole for a very long time.

Alternatively, by the way, on social media, either a hellhole or a paradise prior to October 7th, depending on which account you're looking at.

But that seems to be the most likely scenario:

full-scale military crackdown in the areas that are not humanitarian enclaves, a declaration of the end of the war by the Israelis, and then the announcement that they are now in counterinsurgency operations in all the areas that are not the humanitarian enclaves.

That seems to be the direction that things are moving pretty quickly.

Let's hope they move quickly.

I think they will.

Stand by.

Ben Stays With Us.

The book's Lions and Scavengers.

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We're back.

Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.

Back with me here.

My friend Ben Shapiro.

He's the author of the new book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America and her critics.

It's out today.

Go get it now.

All sorts of good stuff in here.

Lots of wisdom for you, your kids, and just a philosophy and like how to be in your life.

How do you accept daily troubles?

How do you accept what the hand life has dealt you?

How do you accept messages that are all around you about the news or our country and so on?

What made you write it?

Well, I mean, I think that the genesis of this book was different than some of my others.

So usually I sit down and I sort of plan out what I want the book to be and then I read and I research and then it comes out.

This one was written originally almost as a diary.

I was writing it contemporaneously over the course of the last couple of years.

And so there's a lot of first person.

I never use first person in my writing ever.

I hate using the word I on my show or in my books.

It appears a fair bit in this one because there's a lot of travel involved over the course of the last couple of years.

The book opens in London because this is where it first forcibly struck struck me what was going on.

So I went to London.

This is November of 2023.

I was supposed to debate over at Oxford and Cambridge over what was going on in the Gaza Strip.

And there had been a gigantic, like 300,000 person march with the entire scavenger panoply.

And my security said, like, you're not allowed to stay in London.

If you stay in London, it's actually unsafe.

You have to stay like an hour outside of London, closer to Oxford.

And then when we actually went to Oxford, there was a significant security threat.

Like

my security was quite concerned about it.

I mean, I have 24-7 security, so so I'm pretty used to that sort of stuff, but it was kind of a real thing.

And so I sat down and I started writing, like, this is one of the most historic.

It's upstairs right now that I have my entire staff at gunpoint.

Yeah, exactly.

And I started thinking, like, this is one of the great historic places of Western civilization, the University of Oxford.

You're going back a thousand years to its establishment.

And just a few blocks down, you can find the place where Richard the Lionheart was crowned.

You can find all these places.

And the people who are marching through these places are people who hate all of this, who hate every single bit of this.

And so I started writing it because of that.

It was kind of out of a confusion and anger and

true kind of interior turmoil about what have we done to our own civilization that this sort of thing seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

Because I think we all grew up in a time, and I grew up in the 90s, where this really was the exception.

Everyone sort of accepted right and left.

And America is a pretty damned amazing place.

And now it seems as though there is a bit of a horseshoe theory thing going on here where huge swaths of the left and small parts of the right may be growing.

Think America is not all that great or Western civilization is the great center in the history of the world.

And where is that coming from?

And so

over the course of the last couple of years, I sort of wrote it.

One area from which it's coming, and I understand the theory of the book and really enjoyed it, Lions and Scavengers, Everyone, by Ben Shapiro.

But one area it's coming from is just right now, great distrust of government, right?

Of our own government too.

And like to me, part of it is very understandable and justifiable only because our government is so effed up.

They're not to be trusted.

Like we saw that over the past five years in such technicolor that that's why I think you have people on the right sharing in this too.

I mean, I agree with a lot of that, actually.

I think that on the left, it's endemic to the ideology.

On the right, I do think it's an outgrowth of events and lack of trust.

I do think that it's easy for conservatives and people on the right to throw the baby out with the bathwater because I've spent my entire life being skeptical of government for the most part.

I'm a conservative.

I want the government to be small enough to be drowned in the bathtub, as Grover Norquist once memorably said.

Lovely.

You know, like, that's fine.

I think that, I think it's, I think the government is quite awful in most ways.

With that said, the institutions that were set up by the founders are quite good.

And many of the institutions that we need in our lives, family and church, are really, really, really important.

And when you start tearing away at the institutions, or when the idea is that the institutions have been so thoroughly destroyed from the inside by the left that you have to tear them down, I think there are cases where that's true, but I think you can overlearn the lesson.

I think you can go from the CDC really screwed it up in 2020.

Never trust any science, random guy on the street giving you advice.

And we still do need, like I was thinking about with the CDC controversy.

I have no tears to shed for these losers who are leaving now.

Neither do I.

But we need a CDC.

Like, there needs to be some public health organization that keeps an eye on growing bugs and whatever in the world.

And ideally, it would be one that's non-politicized that could just give us a straight scoop on: here's what we know, here's what we don't know.

We're not going to overreact.

We're going to be, I think we have that team in place right now.

I love Dr.

Jay Bhattacharya, thrilled about him.

Martin Koldorf would be amazing.

Marty McCarry is great.

Marty McCary is awesome.

I like RFKJ, but my point is simply under him.

He's controversial, but under him, there's a wonderful team.

Vinay Prazad over it

with Marty McCary.

So I like those guys.

And I feel the same about the FBI.

Like, if the FBI would just do like crime fighting and actually, like, I'm fine with them keeping an eye on all the domestic terrorists who want to blow us up from radical Islamic countries.

I'm not, I don't have a problem with that.

It's when they started to really like turn political and turn like us into political enemies.

I totally agree.

So it's like I agree, those institutions can stay, but down to the studs and then rebut reboot.

I mean, so I totally agree with this, and I think that was one of the purposes of the Trump revolution, right?

I mean, the idea of the Trump election was to put people who had been victimized by these specific agencies in charge of the agencies and let them go to town, let them purge and let them go through and try to make these institutions more honest.

By the way, including places like the State Department, where Secretary Rubio has been going through with a hatchet.

Like all of that, I think is really, really good.

But I think that

the gap emerges for me from the CIA has done some pretty terrible things over the course of the last five years or so in terms of going after political enemies, for example, with regard to RussiaGate.

There's a leap from there to the CIA killed JFK, or the CIA was always a nefarious actor in the world.

And anything that it did from 1950.

Or that it's been responsible for everything.

Right.

Oh, right.

Secretly, it's behind the scenes, manipulating everything.

Here's my thing, evidence, right?

So I can evidentially show you how the CDC screwed things up in 2020, and you can too.

It's like available for everyone to see lived it yeah exactly you can see how the FBI screwed things up with Russia gate because we all saw it happen and all the evidence is basically available the I make the case in the book that conspiracy theories are bad but that doesn't mean conspiracies don't exist they do the difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy is that a conspiracy has evidence to it and a conspiracy theory does not and there is something that karl popper the philosopher talked about is sort of the great conspiracy theory of life which is this idea that everything in my life that's going wrong is the result of a shadowy cadre of people i can't quite quite identify, but maybe I can, but I can't quite identify, who are behind the scenes, who are manipulating things.

And that's really beyond it being wrong, it's really enervating, like truly enervating.

Any population that believes that there's a shadowy conspiracy, that they can't identify or fight in any material way, who's wrecking their lives, what you're really saying to people is you cannot succeed.

There is no way for you to succeed.

It's basically back to a pagan world before God where the gods are up there fighting.

Let's do a real life example of it because you look at COVID.

That's obviously the most recent, where

we know, and we knew at the time, some of us who were paying attention knew that this thing came from a lab, that it did not come from some random pangolin.

It became clear, I should say.

Not everybody knew right from the get-go, but it seemed really super clear.

And then the reason that conspiracy theory, in quotes, was borne out as an actual conspiracy that was being perpetrated against us, I think, was in large part the Republicans won the House.

The Republicans started using subpoenas.

The Republicans got documents from Fauci and Collins on all these others showing the top virologists were all saying this looks like it is man-made.

This does not look like anything that could grow in nature.

You saw the men in power saying, fuck off.

Do not say that publicly.

Everyone needs to get in line.

It would be very damaging to our relationship with China and health to say something like that.

And literally overnight, those same virologists came out and said, from a penguin, it's nature.

Some dude did a bad.

Definitely not lab-made.

I mean, so that it's very rare when your conspiracy theory is actually proven with evidence, like with papers that you could submit in a court of law law to win the case before a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

In nine times out of 10, the conspiracy theories never get that.

So that's where some people get stuck in that.

And some people are like adjacent.

And I'm still waiting for my proof.

I'm waiting on my proof.

I agree with this.

And I do think you do have to do a sort of Bayesian analysis, meaning like look at the plausibility of the conspiracy theory and the number of people that it required to carry it out.

And usually the grandest conspiracy theories require an extraordinary level of competence, coordination, and number of people involved.

So to take the example of the idiotic theory that the moon landing was fake, the number of people who would have to be involved in the faking of the moon landing and be great at their jobs, right?

Not just like good at their jobs, incredible at their jobs, because they'd have to fake it and then they'd have to maintain that silence and that secrecy for six decades plus.

And they would have to get everybody around them to also maintain that silence and secrecy in order to come up with this.

Well, isn't it also true that there's like an alien being held captive someplace in Nevada?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, look at the government.

You know what usually a conspiracy theory is, an actual conspiracy in the government typically is some power-hungry schmuck who's telling his immediate subordinates to do a thing.

And usually the circle of trust is like, oh, 15, 20 people.

Like if you look at like the Mueller report or you're looking at what James Comey was doing, that wasn't involving 2,000 agents.

That was involving a fairly small team inside the FBI.

And it was really bad and really ugly.

But it was like that one was plausible, especially because all of the outside indicators matched up with extremely plausible activity that a person was doing.

And then over time, it was revealed that that was true.

When you see these sort of kind of grand overarching conspiracy theories where everything is the result, every single thing is a grand unifying field theory of why your life isn't the way you want it to be.

Yeah.

It doesn't make your life better.

Does it make your life better?

Or does it make you smarter?

This is my test.

If you believe in all of them, it's you.

Yes.

You know, I mean, truly, I know people like this who like used to have a stronger foothold in reality, but just have become untethered.

I think COVID had a major effect on a lot of people like that who are like borderline conspiratorial, but then went full, where it's almost like they've had a break and they've nothing is as it seems anymore they see conspiracies everywhere they believe nothing that's being told to them especially if it involves any facet of the government and i really think a good test for anybody to ask themselves is do i believe in all of them are there some where i'm like that i don't buy because if you believe in all of them we're dealing with a you problem i mean i think that's right i think also that when you're analyzing information obviously the source of the information matters this is obviously true that no one in the world is perfectly objective about anything.

Maybe math is objective.

Not very many other things are.

And when you are hearing people who are espousing conspiracy theories, they are always taking somebody's expertise word for it, somebody's word for it, right?

This idea, like, I never listened to anyone, right?

I'm a pure skeptic.

You're really not, though, because...

In the end, you're believing a theory.

That theory is based on somebody else's opinion.

And so that means that you're having to take somebody's view for granted.

So you have to try to establish, I mean, this is just how we go through life.

You try to establish the credibility of the people that you're talking to based on prior track record.

It's hard, though.

It is today's day and age.

Because if you realize, over the past five years alone, you realize that the people who are given to you as the so-called experts are freaking, they're liars.

That's what I started the show by saying, right?

Like, you know, 51 intelligence officials believe that the Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation.

Now, we never believe that one.

But you can see how well-meaning people in America believed it.

Well, I think one of the things you said was right.

You said, you said, I mean, and the opposite of it also.

You said, if you believe all the theories, it's you.

And if you believe none of the theories, I think that it's also you.

Yeah.

Because I think that, you know, when you're looking at conspiracy theories at least at the very outset you have to judge the plausibility and then you follow the evidence where it leads but i think this is the difference also between what what i've called on the show just asking questions and actually just like asking questions if you're just asking questions typically you're not looking for an answer if if your question is not seeking an answer and if no answer given to your question can satisfy you you're not asking questions you're positing a theorist well and also i think if you if you genuinely If you genuinely don't have an agenda and you're in the business of just asking questions, then you'll ask those questions of people who say the opposite thing to, right?

Like,

that's my own approach to everybody.

I try to get both sides on, you know, so that the audience can make up their own minds.

They're big boys and girls.

They don't need me to pronounce this is what's real.

Sometimes I will.

But I think I like to be open-minded, unless something's just totally fucking lunatic, you know, and it's like, well, forget it.

I'm not going to put you on because I don't want to intentionally confuse anybody.

But it's very hard.

And that's one of the things that's bothering me about the CDC meltdown.

Because, so RFKJ, I mean, what appears to have happened is RFKJ had in the head of the CDC, Lisa Menarez, and

Susan Monarez.

Her last name confuses me too.

And wanted her to do a couple things around vaccines and wanted to change some things around vaccines.

And she disagreed with him.

And then from what I read in the papers, She ran to Secretary or to Senator Cassidy.

Senator Cassidy and tattled on him and was like, he's doing crazy things.

We need more oversight.

And then they got mad because she wasn't going to do what he wanted her to do.

And she ran and tattled on him to set to Senator Cassidy, who's annoying and thinks he's the HHS secretary.

He annoys me greatly.

And then she got fired.

So fine.

I'm fine with her being fired.

Like, you're not the boss.

No one elected you or nominated and confirmed you as HHS secretary.

You're lucky you have the job you do have.

Anyway, she got fired and then wouldn't leave.

And now we have four or five top CDC officials being like, me too.

I quit too.

I'm not working for this lunatic.

Including some of the greatest people.

Okay, so this is so the couple things.

There's the

just ask him, very sexy, BDSM, very gay, over-the-top, pregnant people person.

Empox dude.

Yeah, empox dude.

Okay, I have zero use for somebody lecturing me on, as you would say, the science TM

who's using the term pregnant people and pronouns and saying, I can't stand the rice in there.

Erasure of the trans community.

Okay, stop.

So that's, here he is.

This is the most tame.

If you go on X and search this guy, Dascalakis or whatever his last name is, you will find genuinely near X-rated photos of this person who never should have been in a position of public authority, certainly not public health.

Oh, here we go.

Here are some of them.

Does that look like somebody from whom you want your public health advice?

It does not.

I mean, it looks like MPox patient zero.

Honestly, like,

none of that looks sanitary.

Okay, so that's one thing.

So he still wants to advise us on what vaccines we should be taking.

Okay, so that's one piece of it, whatever, to somebody like that.

But the nerve of these people to now be like

the distrust in public health that RFKJ is creating and the team around him.

I've never seen someone so immune to the science and real facts.

It really makes me want to figuratively, not actually, strangle somebody.

Yes.

You've got to be kidding us, Ben.

They're doing the game that they did with Trump when he first came on the scene, where Trump would say, this institution sucks.

This is all terrible.

They'd say, he's destroying the credibility of the institution.

Well, what I always said about President Trump is the left accused him of being the killer, and actually he was the coroner.

He would stumble on a body and be like, that's a dead body.

And they'd be like, because you killed it.

Like, no, no, no, it was dead before I got here.

I mean, the reason that RFK Jr.

is the HHS secretary is the same reason that Cash Catelle is the head of the FBI.

It's very funny you should say this because I always said about Trump and the media and certain other organizations too, he was the Kvorkian to their suicide, right?

Like he's there.

I'll give you the machine.

That's fair.

It's up to you what you want to do with it.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think that, and when it comes to RFK, the reason he ended up as HHS secretary is specifically because of this.

It's because of the radical distrust of the public health authorities.

And one of the ways that you can tell, they did this whole New York Times op-ed.

It was like nine former CDC heads writing an op-ed about how terrible RFK Jr.

I know, I know.

And some of the things that they're pointing out are frankly things where I actually kind of disagree with RFK Jr.

I don't agree with everything RFK Jr.

is doing.

What I've said before is that, you know, RFK Jr., I like him.

I feel like he needs to take the spinal tap 11 down to like a spinal tap seven.

Like everything is always all the way to the the top but but you know that like you know when when it comes to completely defunding for example all mrna vaccine research i think that the vaccine obviously not i think it was clearly oversold right we were lied to about the the vaccine's ability to stop transmissibility of the virus that obviously was was untrue and that was like an overt lie that was told by members of government

and by pfizer and his risks were undersold particularly for young people uh for for older people the steel man case for the vaccine is that if you're over 65 and no bees that it that it lowered your death rate okay fine fair enough the the killing of like all mrna vaccine vaccine research because you don't like the COVID vaccine, that might be overkill and that might be a problem.

But one of the things they did, and this just demonstrates how incompetent they are, let's say that you were going to advise them on PR.

What you would do is you'd say, pick the single most obvious topic where he is in violation of sort of the typical understanding of science, RFK Jr., right?

Like, find the thing where he's sinned the worst, and then focus on that.

Instead, what that op-ed does, it lists like 10 things.

And then the last thing that it lists is, and he backed a terrible health bill that cuts Medicaid services and could deprive people of the lives.

And it's like, okay, so now you're just doing politics.

And now you're just doing politics.

And then they bring out the AMA and say, well, the AMA has worked for the people.

We don't trust them at all.

I literally did a story on my show last week about how the top, the guy who runs the AMA, Bobby McCamala, he literally did

a Zoom call with Dr.

Ethan Haim, the guy from Texas.

Children's Hospital, who's talking about transing the kids, in which he made all sorts of insane claims about why it was necessary to trans the kids and how 50% of transgender people were going to kill themselves if they didn't have their body parts chopped off.

that guy is going to critique RFK juniorly and sorry.

And the American Association of Pediatrics, APE, whatever it is.

Yeah, exactly.

They're just as bad.

Or the APA.

They're dying to trans our kids.

100%.

And so you guys emptied out science of its content and then you ran around wearing its face like a Hannibal Lecter mask.

And then we're supposed to believe you.

Like that's not good enough.

What you should do, again, you want to reestablish trust in science.

What you should do is basically what we would call peer review, right?

You should say, here's the thing he's doing.

Here's the analysis of the data.

And here is why it's wrong.

Because that leaves commentators like you and me in the position of having to now analyze the data that you're presenting as opposed to you as a human.

Yep.

Right.

But when you go out there and you say, it's all about the pregnant people in my BDSM gear and I feel disrespected, he, him, her, yeah.

Then like, I'm sorry.

No, I'm, yeah, not interested anymore.

And it's amazing, just like the over-reliance on experts.

Like, they actually want to speak like 20 former CDC directors.

We don't care.

No one cares.

No one cares.

The CDC has humiliated itself.

It has lost the trust of at least half of the country.

We no longer, like, the moment Rochelle Walensky came out crying during the COVID pandemic, we actually cut it for those of you who had the lovely benefit of forgetting.

Here she was crying.

She was upset that some people might not get vaccinated and might go outside.

Here she is.

When I first started at CDC about two months ago, I made a promise to you.

I would tell you the truth, even if it was not the news we wanted to hear.

Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth and I have to hope and trust you will listen.

I'm going to pause here.

I'm going to lose the script and I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.

We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope.

But right now I'm scared.

Doom!

Who gives a shit what Rochelle Wolensky thinks about what's happening at CDC?

It's ridiculous.

And when they started with the whole you must vax your kids stuff in the vibe and in again, against all available data.

One of the things we knew like from the very beginning is that the virus was not hitting kids the same way that it was hitting old men, for example.

And when they were like, you must vax your kids, like you, you've got to be kidding me.

And so again, that's how you end up with RFK Jr.

And there's been no accounting for it.

No.

No, no admissions, no legal liability for the drug manufacturers, no terminations for the people who made up the quote science and shoved it down our throats and the throats of our children, endangered our children.

How about like an apology?

How about like, okay, so for me, when I tried to go along with the data during the early pandemic, and what that meant was I was always against max mask mandates and vax mandates where my company sued the federal government to try and stop the vax mandates.

But I also said at the beginning,

when they were arguing, and the Trump administration and Pfizer were arguing, there was going to stop transmission, that you should get the vax, right?

I said this in, I believe, January of 2021, I believe.

And this is before Trump left office.

And then the data came out that the transmission was not being cut cut off by any of this and that it was actually, the vaccine was actually not nearly as effective as people thought.

And I apologized.

I said on my show, I got it wrong.

I followed the data.

The data that they presented was not true.

And so, you know, I got it wrong.

I'm sorry.

Like, why is it that the same people who presented that data to me aren't out there apologizing?

They should be apologizing, right?

Why was it that Pfizer, they literally said in a conference like a year later, we never even bothered to do.

research on the transmissibility post-vaccination.

But they, you remember, they retailed this idea that you got it to stop your mother from getting it, right?

Which is the reason I got it.

My parents were 65 at the time, and we were basically in California with them and kind of our own little bubble.

If that were true, then you would want to get vaccinated if you're going to spend time with your elderly.

And it was like, okay, if I'd have had to have the info that we have now in retrospect, no, why would I have?

That would have been silly.

And when it came to my kids, I certainly didn't get my kids vaccinated, no matter how much pressure they were putting on because the data just wasn't there.

But why is it that none of the public officials are willing to follow their own data, right?

Why won't they just say the thing that's true?

Because the overselling is the problem.

If they just came out and they said, listen, the vaccine didn't say, it didn't do what we originally said it was going to do, right?

We, we were wrong or we fibbed or whatever it is.

And now here's what we know, right?

What we know is kids don't need it.

Young people don't need it.

It may do, you know, it may have cardiac problems that are cardiomyopathy and all the rest of this

that it's a problem.

But it's good for like if you're 65 and fat.

Yeah.

Right.

Then we'll be like, oh.

And they did.

And now they want to be like, well, we disclosed that there was a risk of myocarditis at the time.

It was in the most minuscule, low

publicized, like minor press release you've ever seen.

It was a CYA.

The problem was much more pernicious behind the scenes.

Vinay Prasad, again, who's working with McCary over at FDA, was one of the only ones out there saying, this is bullshit.

This is a real problem.

Like, this is actually potentially life-changing or ending for teenagers.

And this is insane that we're not telling people this.

There's been no accountability for that.

And for me, this is one of the reasons why, you know, we're sort of laying into people who see conspiracies everywhere, but

they didn't get the vaccine.

Like people who are hardcore, like, I don't trust my government and I don't trust this.

I remember some of them like texting me or not texting me, posted online after I said I got the vaccine.

Something like, we'll miss you when you're gone.

And I was like, oh, wow, that's harsh.

But, you know, I wound up getting an autoimmune issue from that fucking thing.

And I wish I had listened to them.

You know, sometimes when you're too trusting, and I was very trusting of these, I just, I was like, well, the doctors, you're not, right?

And of my doctor, my doctor, who I do love, but he loved the vaccine.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, but I think, I think this is also the danger on all sides of trying to analyze information.

We can say, well, yeah, they didn't get the vaccine.

And that's true.

And they got that one right.

But also, does that mean that you're going to listen to them when it comes to, you know, broken leg?

Like, you do have to sort of analyze each one of these issues independently.

That's what makes it so hard.

It's a very hard informational environment.

I think part of what our entire society is struggling with is how do you analyze this fire hose of information that's coming from all available sources?

Including AI, which may actually be trying to actively mislead you.

Right, exactly.

And how do you then deal with that?

And I think that honestly, in some cases, you're just going to get it wrong.

Like, there's no, nobody has a perfect record, I think, is the best thing.

And if we all recognize we don't have perfect records, then we can say, okay, well, you know, here's what I got wrong.

Here's why I got it wrong.

And hopefully I won't get it wrong in the future.

But one of the things that tends to happen on social media and also in the commentariat is you get one one thing right that was very heterodox and 99 things wrong.

But we pay attention to the one thing that you got right.

And that happens on all sides.

And it's, and you know, again, consider the source of

your information.

Doesn't mean that it's always going to be the same source, right?

Nobody is gospel, right?

Yeah.

But it's, I'm not going to pretend like it's not hard.

Of course, it's hard.

I know.

Gosh, it's harder than it should be.

Most people don't, they don't have the time, right?

They don't.

People ask me this all the time, given the business I'm in, and I'm sure you get it too.

Just like, how, how am I supposed to like know what's real?

And I always say the same, which is like, it's not just because I'm in this lane, but you have to find the person or the handful of people you trust.

That's it.

Like, don't trust a big platform.

I wouldn't anymore.

I wouldn't at all.

I would never just say, I trust CNN for the news or Fox News either.

But I do have certain individuals, you're among them, who I trust not to actively mislead me and whose brain I've come to say, that's reliable.

You know, like that, that brain analyzes information much in the same way I want it analyzed in the way my own aspires to.

And so you get that.

That's sort of how I curate my own newsfeed, which I would say, right or wrong on everything.

Like, I think we have a high grade on our overall accuracy.

I mean, I think that's right.

And I think that, listen, in life, we're all having to use heuristic shortcuts, right?

We're all looking for the shortcut.

When it comes to, you know, any problem that you have in your life, you're not the person who's like going to town on engineering to fix your engine unless you're actually a person who works on engines for a living.

You're going to find somebody who you know who knows how to do that better than you.

And we're constantly doing that throughout our lives.

Some people are better at analyzing information, but what I always say is you should listen to more than my show, right?

Try to find like three or four shows that you think are trustworthy and analyze information in a responsible way.

And then where they intersect is the fact and everything else is the opinion.

Yeah, exactly right.

It's funny because I just said to my husband, Doug, just speaking of like, what can we actually do?

What are our actual abilities and knowing what they really are and where they're limited?

Our kids are getting that age where here and there they're winning some sports trophies and stuff like that.

And I said, you know, maybe we should get like a little, a little trophy case and someplace to put them because right now we just kind of put them in a chest.

Nobody ever sees them again.

And Doug actually said he would build one, which still has me laughing, Ben.

And I said, okay, well, that'll be ready just in time for our little boys to win the men's senior tournament down at the

club.

We do need to know where our limitations are and yeah, call in.

Not their experts, but people we believe have expertise.

Also a great way to tell who's telling lies to you and who's not is telling them what, what, if does that person also say what they don't know?

Yeah.

What are the limitations of your knowledge?

Like, how far, how far are you willing to go?

Yep.

And that's why, you know, the people, it actually is sort of a brain thing with human beings that we tend to listen to very authoritative language.

The more strongly someone speaks, the more we believe them.

But the problem with that is that actually the people you probably ought to believe are the people who are not speaking necessarily.

Well, I mean, I hate to go back to this, but was there, there aren't in history much, many greater, many, easy for me to say, speakers than Adolf Hitler.

He was amazing.

Certainty in language is an easy shortcut to authenticity and a belief by people that you know what you're talking about.

His style is so strong.

Right, exactly.

The feeling of authority that comes along with using very charged language, particularly in politics.

I mean, again, there are lots of studies on this and they all demonstrate the same thing.

The stronger the language you use, the more trust you get from the audience.

But the reality is that that actually may be sometimes the worst way to analyze information, particularly when you're talking about, for example, the science, where every single study has some element at the very end of every study.

It's a bunch of limitations explaining what exactly the data is doing, what the data is not actually doing.

Yep.

And honestly, on, you know, this so-called revered science, you know, you wait two weeks, you'll get a different answer.

I like the stupidest stuff too.

I recently, what was it, last six months or so, one of my doctors, my lady doctor, said, oh, do you take a multivitamin?

I'm like, no, I don't.

She's like, oh, you know, they're great for you.

You should consider one.

Okay, so I bought one for me.

I bought one for Doug.

Then I just saw a study.

Multivitamins, if you take one every day, you're more likely to die early i'm like this can't be real so i googled it and it was like oh i saw at least one thing that said that was actually real like give me back your multivitamin doc

it's so annoying you can't get real information when it comes to health these days because it changes underneath your feet like quicksand in any event uh i think that uh

this woman at the cdc will go rfkj will get his way and then when it comes to mRNA vaccines and the research I'm actually okay with it, what he's doing, because I think the public sector can handle all of this.

We don't need our private sector, sector.

Yeah, sorry, the private sector.

We don't need our government doing this stuff.

I mean, I think there's a case for that across research lines.

Yeah, we need money and we need it for a lot of things, and this doesn't have to be on the list.

But I am hopeful.

Like, when it comes to mRNA, like my doctor, again, he loved the COVID vaccine, but he was saying someday that mRNA technology might have a vaccine against pancreatic cancer.

I mean, thinking of that.

Or like, if they told me there was an mRNA vaccine against all forms of dementia, right?

Can you imagine?

I don't even know if that's possible.

I'm just saying, like, it depends.

I can't say, I can't rule out all vaccines.

Cutting out research is definitely a dicey proposition, but yes, I mean, I think a lot can be done in the private sector.

A lot.

A lot more than has been.

I'll tell you what you can't do.

You can't say innovate in the private sector, but cost control the drugs on the other end.

Yeah.

That you can't do.

And that, I think, is a bit of a problem.

Yeah, that's fair.

All right.

Stand by.

More with Ben Shabira right after this quick break.

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Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.

Ben Shapiro is with me today.

He's author of the new book, Lions and Scavengers.

And among the many things that Ben has done is testify before Congress about this advertising group that was trying to exclude right-wingers.

And at that appearance, you mixed it up with somebody who I think it's fair to say none of us likes, Eric Swalwell.

And here is this moment who shall live not in infamy, but with respect and admiration.

SOT 32.

You did say, I think homosexual activity is a sin.

Yes.

I'm religious.

There's a genetic component

of orientation, but the view of all religious people people I know has always been that sexual behavior is something that is up to you.

And you said, I may have a desire to sleep with many women, but I do not.

I agree with me.

Yes, that's true.

Congratulations on your.

Yeah.

I'm sure it's very hard to restrain yourself.

You know how hard I had to restrain myself not from making a Fang Fang reference right there?

Yes.

I was holding myself back.

I was like, don't do it.

Bye, guys.

Don't do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did you have that in your back pocket?

I agree with me.

No, that one was for the moment, actually.

That was well done.

What do you think?

You're reading a quote of me.

What do you think I'm going to say?

Come on.

Right.

He didn't know you.

You know what I mean?

He actually thought he could scare you off of your prior position because it was too controversial for you to say publicly, which is how he heard it in the first place.

Right, exactly.

Exactly.

No, I'm terrified of you reading back a quote of me saying a thing that I said.

Right.

Are you aware of what I do for a living?

Exactly.

You know, like, I pretty much

that quote doesn't make like the top thousand things that I've said that are controversial.

My goodness.

You know, I have noticed something interesting in my own life since I've gotten more into this line of work, you know, podcasting as opposed to like journalism on Fox News or NBC for that matter.

I don't worry about that anymore.

But like, I used to worry that somebody might tape me and then all of my opinions would be out there.

And as a journalist, you're not supposed to share that.

And it would somehow feel like dishonest because like I tried to report the news in a fair way without saying my real opinions.

And then if you heard the way I talked off camera, like a normal person, you'd realize I had a lot of them.

And I was just trying not to blow that by, you know, you're not supposed to as a journalist.

Now it's so freeing.

It's like, oh, yeah.

And there's nothing somebody could tape of me that the audience wouldn't be like, yeah, that sounds exactly like her.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I remember I had this kind of tete-tete with Sam Donaldson back in the days, like 12, 2012.

I was at the RNC, and Sam Donaldson had moved over from being, you know, reporter on ABC, yelling at Ronald Reagan, to being a guy who did commentary.

And so I remember going up to him.

I'm like, so you held all the same beliefs when you were a reporter that you do as a commentator.

Do you think that impacted your work in any way?

And he said, what are you trying to say?

You're trying to say you're better than me?

And And I was like, Well, I mean, kind of.

I mean, like, I'm totally honest about where I'm coming from.

And, and so if you detect bias, that's because my bias is quite obvious.

I'm not trying to hide it from you in some sort of radical way.

And so, I do think, you know, again, I've been an advocate for a very long time of this idea that objective journalism is a lie.

is true.

Like, it is.

It's just a lie.

There's no such thing.

It's going to get shaded one way or the other.

Some people do a better job of getting it out of their work for sure.

But you're right.

I mean, nothing you say privately, if we got hot mic'd here nothing would change

what we're saying on the air nothing whereas at fox people would have been like oh whoa she's got all these different opinions about these different things that she reports on and doesn't show her cards which is fine that's that is the way we used to do it but i agree with you and it's one of the reasons why i'm not worried about what some people worry about which is like mainstream news is collapsing you know when i gave my interview to the new york times they were very very worried about these like errant weird podcasters who are going to drive the national conversation now because there's no standards there's no belts and suspenders there's no guardrails i guess and um therefore, we're going to be living in just a non-stop disinformation, misinformation age.

And I get it because there are guardrails in the existing corporate media, but they're the wrong guardrails.

So I feel like taking those away and letting it become the Wild Western, which it is.

And then maybe there'll be excesses.

Maybe it will implode and then rebuild.

I don't know.

But whatever it is, I'm in favor of it.

I mean, I totally agree with that.

I think there was a monopoly or an oligopoly, and then the oligopoly dissolved.

And now what you've got is kind of anarchic, but better the anarchy that eventually consolidates, I hope, into something that's like a more varied but trustworthy informational environment than one guy telling you what you ought to think.

And you don't have any alternative because there's like three channels on your TV.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and you must think it.

All right, let's talk about politics for a bit.

Wes Moore is interesting to me.

I mean, he's definitely on the short list for Democratic contender in 2028.

He's the governor of Maryland.

He's obviously a Democrat.

He's a military vet.

He's a black guy.

He's a good-looking guy.

And he's starting to get out there a little bit more on the TV circuit, which tells me something, even though he's officially said he's not into it.

He's into it.

He's run.

He's into it.

He's going to run it.

So he's now making news the way everybody wants to make news these days, from Brandon Johnson of Chicago to

Pritzker, the governor out in Illinois, which is to make themselves an adversary of Trump, Gavin Newsom, and so on.

And so he's basically saying, I don't want your help.

I know Baltimore's got, I think, the fifth highest murder rate in the country.

I don't want your help.

Don't send any troops here.

But as he's like saying that, and people are getting shot and killed in his city, he's on George Clooney's yacht

over on Lake Como, Italy, which I'm sorry.

I'm sure it's very nice to get the George Clooney invite.

Apparently, he wasn't there, Clooney.

So it was just they had the mansion and the yacht to themselves.

That's even better.

But think, of course,

for us.

The resources of George Clooney without having to deal with George Clooney is not going to be able to do it.

It's even better for us.

I think probably somebody like Wes Moore would like to spend time with him.

But that's a nightmare.

I mean, that actually could come back to haunt him as

he potentially runs.

But like

your state was hurting your city that you were fighting with Trump as you were rejecting troops that would keep them safe.

You paraded off on Clooney's yacht.

First of all, this is like the dumbest fight in the world.

The Democrats are picking here on crime.

It's really, really, really stupid.

Because, again, it's not as though Trump can indefinitely, legally leave gigantic numbers of federal troops like policing, pickpocketing in Baltimore.

He can't actually do that.

A judge will strike it down and he will have to stop doing that.

He's been using sort of the bootstrap of immigration enforcement in order to get federal troops into places like LA or into Chicago.

And again, there's kind of an expiration date on that sort of thing.

If Democrats were smart, they would basically just wait him out.

They would say, okay, you know, we don't like what he's doing, but if it lowers the crime rate, we're open to anything, right?

Anything would be good.

And then just, this is the wrong issue for them.

It's the wrong issue.

And the fact that they all seem to consolidate around this issue demonstrates President Trump has an enormous number of gifts.

This is, I think, his greatest gift: his enemies constantly be clown themselves.

He's just a field of rakes, and they're constantly jumping on them.

And no matter what he does, they have to declare themselves in opposition.

If he came out in favor of abolishing cancer tomorrow, they would come out in favor of stage four.

Well, it's kind of what they did with the little boy at the State of the Union.

100%.

Yeah, we're against him.

Or come up with Prego Garcia or like any other thing.

Or men and women's sports.

They can't help themselves.

They have to pick the 20% side of every 80-20 issue, so long as he picks the 80% side of that issue.

And so, listen, I think West Moore is formidable actually in a Democratic primary.

South Carolina, it's still unclear what the first Democratic primary is going to be, right?

Because remember that Biden rigged the calendar to avoid Iowa and New Hampshire.

So that's like a big internal DNC fight right now.

If it ends up being South Carolina, again, West Moore is the odds on favorite because 58% of the Democratic electorate in a primary in a presidential year is black.

And so he's going to hope that they vote as a block, and that will stop like an AOC candidacy or a super white person, Gavin Newsom candidacy.

Super white.

I mean, he's the whitest person who's ever whited.

Not white supremacist, but super white.

Yes,

he's like unbelievably white.

If it

blends into just the paint, white.

But have we seen him dance?

Because that will be the true test.

Oh, man.

I feel like he and Justin Trudeau are kind of like two halves of the same hole.

I think that's an insult to Gavin Newsome.

I will defend the American in that equation.

I mean, there's no one more stomach turning as a possible life partner than Justin Trudeau to me.

I mean, I don't know.

Have Have you seen Gavin Newsome's history?

I sound like a great history.

Like, if you said, who are you going to wind up with?

Like, one of the Tate brothers or Trudeau.

Wow.

Brutal.

I know.

I just, I find Justin Trudeau makes my skin crawl in his effete, effeminate, mealy mouth, zero back bone.

His father, Fidel Castro, would be so ashamed of him.

He's so soft.

He's soft in every way.

Yeah, right.

But yeah, Gavin Newsom, he's got some problems in the primaries.

I don't think that Gavin Newsom has the kind of juice that Gavin Newsom seems to think he does.

Westmore has Clooney's support, and he'll be able to raise a lot of money, Westmore.

The fact that he is a black man is going to help him a lot in the Democratic primaries because, again, you do have that effect in the Democratic primaries right now.

And he is not quite as openly psychotic as some of the far leftists in his party.

Yeah, he does have another problem, though.

There is a stolen valor issue.

Yeah, but he actually served in the military.

So the stolen valor is about him.

He said

that he'd been awarded the brown star when he had not.

And then later he got it, correct?

He got it in 2024.

Clearly, somebody was like, oh, shit, he stole Valor.

So let's give it to him so he can say he got it.

Yeah.

And his story is, my commanding officer told me that he was going to submit me for it.

And so I thought it was okay to fill out this application saying that I got it.

But he was introduced, just like Tim Walsh, by many, many news anchors over the years saying he got it when he did not have it.

He was asked about it actually by Will Kane on Fox and also by Martha Radditz

on ABC.

Here's Martha, Sat 15.

You claiming you had a bronze star in 2006 when you were applying for a job.

Why did you do that?

Well, I think it's, I'm deeply proud of my service to this country.

Oh, boy.

And I know my soldiers that I serve with are deeply proud, and the veteran community is as well.

When your commanding officers and your superior officers tell you, listen, we put you in and we've gone through everything.

So as you're going through your application, include it I included it and I didn't think about it they introduced you Gwen I full saying you had earned a bronze star medal that's 2008

2010 you were on the Colbert show when he said you had a bronze star you did not correct him you had to know you did not have one then well it was I I did not go back and you know go back and tell the Pentagon hey I was told to put this on my application and didn't and honestly at that point

I'm not talking about the Pentagon I'm talking about you knew in those interviews you did not have one.

No, because even at the time of those interviews, it wasn't something that I even thought about.

When I came home, it wasn't something I even thought about.

By the way, full points to her doing a journalism.

I would say that, but she's clearly trying to get it out of the way before he actually went.

That's true.

But you're not going to get credit where credit is due.

At least she's asking me.

Those are good questions and good follow-ups.

I don't believe one word of what he just said.

No.

You know whether you've received the Bronze Star or not.

I haven't.

So, I mean, yeah.

I would assume, I would assume

you would know this.

It's a big deal.

I think when you get it.

Yes.

And the actual medal is a thing that they give you.

Listen, he didn't have it.

If it's him, he knew it.

If it's him versus JD, JD will hammer him over the head with it.

I look forward to that.

Yes.

I'm sick of these Democrats with their stolen valor.

And like, it truly is deeply immoral to say that you have the bronze star when you don't.

He wasn't confused.

He didn't think he had it when he didn't have it.

I wouldn't be surprised if he tries to go back and find some of his commanding officers to retell the story, though, right?

Like sign a letter saying I applied for it.

I mean,

the question is whether it's in play.

Where is it?

Why?

Why?

Did you think they just forgot to nail it?

I'm just saying, like, as a political candidate, how many points of damage is that worth?

No, I mean, here's the reality.

A lot.

I mean, maybe.

I think it changed Tim Waltz's trajectory with the electorate when all the stolen valor stuff came out about him.

I mean, I think Tim Waltz is like weird handy.

I agree.

And his transing of the children.

He wants to be, he's worse than Pritzkurtz.

I mean, the strange clapping and the hopping around and the fact that he's.

Come on now.

Yeah, exactly.

That he looked like one of the things that was like an inflatable outside used car lock as you know like normal americans you know democrats too they care about the military and they care about stolen valor i i don't think this is going to make or break him but i do think it's going to hurt i i think that's probably true i think it's probably true but again i think that when we get to 2028 the biggest thing is going to be the economy if the economy is good in 2028 then j.dsushuan basically if he's the nominee and if the economy is bad then things get real dicey real fast and and i'm old enough to remember when republicans thought we would never lose an election again after 2004 And then by 2006, Democrats were running the Congress.

And by 2008, Barack Obama was president.

And I'm also old enough to remember when Democrats thought they would never lose another election after 2012.

And then, lo and behold, four years later, Donald Trump was president of the United States.

So things shift real fast in this country.

Well, that's why the executive orders are not ideal.

Yes.

Yes.

But he can't do anything more.

I mean, he can't get.

It's almost now.

I used to be a little bit more.

You need 60 votes in the Senate.

You need 60 votes in the Senate.

51 is irrelevant.

53 is irrelevant.

So I've made a proposal uh actually my friend jeremy boring originally aired this um and i think it's a smart idea he he suggested that senate majority leader thune should go to the democrats and say listen we need a constitutional amendment today to enshrine the filibuster in the constitution and you have 12 months and if in 12 months this is not enshrined in the constitution we're nuking it

because that puts a time limit on it and you don't want to and you don't yet and you don't want to wait for democrats to be the first to activate the full filibuster nuke option.

Just get rid of the filibuster next time they're in power.

So they don't need six.

Right, exactly.

So either it's good for the goose and good for the gander or it shouldn't be good for either.

I think it's a pretty good idea.

I like that a lot.

Right now, like nothing can get done.

Yes.

But I'm thankful for nothing getting done when it's the other side that's in power.

Right, exactly.

So I don't know.

The whole thing's been frustrating because I love the Trump executive orders.

I can't think of one I didn't really love.

I'm sure there is one because there have been so many, but

I know they're all going away.

You know, it's like, yeah, Christmas every day, but then, you know, something comes up and it blows up your entire Christmas.

All the presents are gone.

Someone took them.

You know, it's like that scene in Mommy Deerus where she then makes little Christina give all the presents back.

Every election cycle, we're going to do this, like hundreds of executive orders to rebut the original executive orders.

Yeah.

It definitely is a problem.

That's why I think what he's doing with staffing may be long-term more important.

Like the reductions?

Yeah, the staff reductions,

eliminating departments if you can get away with it.

Yep.

All that sort of stuff.

It takes a while to rebuild that.

So I think going through with the chainsaw that we mentioned before is definitely a good thing.

I do think some of the things he's done on, like the EE executive order on boys and girls sports.

That's going to stick.

Yeah, because it has such majority support.

Who wants to be the president that switches that around?

Immigration, by the way.

Yeah.

I don't think Democrats are going to reopen that one.

I had Ron Emmanuel on the show.

I said, what would you change about Trump's border policies?

He said, nothing.

Yep, that's smart.

Nothing.

They're smart.

He doesn't like the deportation policies, but the border?

Nothing.

Well, I mean, if Democrats are smart, that's what they will do.

They will pocket the fact that Trump basically won the issue for them and then move on with it with their lives.

It's sort of like how everyone thought that Roe versus Wade, when it was overturned, it was going to be like the only thing that mattered in American politics.

And then it turns out that within two years, everybody just kind of was moving on.

And while it was still a hot issue, it was helping the Democrats.

So they were like, ah, actually,

exactly.

Is this so bad?

And abortions went up, which is not so great.

But on immigration, if the Republicans solved it, Democrats don't have to talk about it anymore.

So that's actually quite nice for them.

And what about crime?

Because that's crime, both on a national level and that committed by Biden administration officials will be one of the big, big storylines, I think, for the next few years.

Well, that giant, I still think the worst scandal of our lifetime, you know, there have been many in the last five years.

I still think the worst scandal of our lifetime is we didn't have a president for full on two years and we were being lied to about it every single day.

That's the thing.

Did you hear Trump's joke about the picture he's going to put up of Biden in his new like presidential hall of fame?

He says he's going to put a picture up of the Autopen.

told the Daily Caller that.

So good.

Yeah,

the fact that we didn't have a president for a solid two years.

Like anybody who's even remotely attached to that administration has to be nuked out of the process.

No?

I mean, that gets rid of like

Pete Budigrege, that unbelievable great Secretary of Transportation.

Oh, my Lord.

So he grew a beard.

So

that's family now.

Yeah, very.

And so that's exciting.

But yeah, I mean, anybody who's attached to...

Scavenger.

Yes.

Yeah.

The book is called Lions and Scavengers by Ben Shapiro.

Yeah, total scavenger.

Yeah, that dude has spent an awful lot of time talking about how much America sucks after being made Secretary of Transportation based on not being able to fill potholes in South Bend.

I was just thinking, are there any Democrats we would call Alliance?

Rahm Emanuel?

In his new iteration, I think you can make that case.

There's some of the

few kind of like abundance-based Democrats who are sort of interesting.

Seth Moulton from Massachusetts, kind of an interesting guy.

I'm against him.

So, okay, explain.

Because he said he was like, oh, it doesn't make sense to have the boys.

And then, of course, as soon as he got his hands slapped, he was like, never mind.

I'm not transinging it.

But the fact that he dipped it, you know, again, partial credit, he dipped his toe into a water that Democrats won't.

I wish you would go all the way.

I'm a meaner greater than you are.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Harsh standards here.

Yeah, it's hard to identify.

The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that it's very difficult to identify a non-grievance-based Democrat at this point.

I know.

It's not the way it was when we grew up.

We used to have normies on both sides.

I can make a solid case in the 1990s might have been the best time in American history.

Seriously.

Yeah, it's certainly better than the 70s, but I'll take the 80s.

I have to say, the hair was great,

the style, the fashion was very hot.

The music, come on, there's no better music than the 1980s.

The 80s channel, it's awesome.

There is a theory that whatever, whatever was the decade where you were like 13, yeah, was what you think is the best time.

Yes, and that's why I'm right.

Yeah, exactly.

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Okay, we'll see you guys tomorrow.

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