In fact, let's get to Ben right now, Daily Wire, co-founder, host of the Ben Shapiro Show, and number one New York Times bestseller. Ben, great to see you. Hey, good to see you too. How are you doing? Hey, by the way, I saw some of your great speeches, especially the one at the University of Austin.
Very impressive, of course, well delivered. And there were no protesters. Can you believe it, Ben? It was almost too easy. Yeah, University of Austin happens to be a great institution.
That's actually one of these startup universities that was started by Joe Lonsdale and Neil Ferguson and Barry Weiss. And it's done a fantastic job of actually trying to do higher education in a different way.
So that was cool. It was a bit different from the usual. First off, when it comes to the Iran war, they say 36% approval. Most Republicans were on board with it. It looks like the president is looking at a one-page, 14-point deal that he says has some promise.
If it moves forward, this thing could come to a close. I'm not really comfortable from what I've read so far. What about you? Yes, I mean, I think that the points that I've seen, and again, it's sort of vaguely reported by Barack Ravid over at Axios, what's in that fourteen points. I wouldn't be satisfied if our President Trump with that deal.
I do understand that Iran giving up its enriched uranium is probably the key sticking point in that deal. Iran is already apparently saying that they have problems with the deal. Again, the the IRGC is embedded.
Well, into the, not just into the government, they run the government, but they are really sort of dead enders. They are willing to go all the way down into the ashmen of history if it requires them to do so, to not give up their nuclear weapons or to not give up their nuclear development.
So I think that continuing to starve out the IRGC, continuing to deprive them of oil flow, continuing to deprive them of revenue, and continuing to degrade their ballistic missile capacity, that I think is going to be the path forward in the most likely scenario here. In pure political sense, you see everything hitting turbo speed with the president. You look at the earnings report. You look at the unemployment. They said it's going to boom.
AI has taken all jobs away. It hasn't shown up at all so far. And you see the fact that the Big Beautiful bill has produced the type of revenue people thought and has been reflected in the economy. In fact, we're close to 50,000 right now on the promise that this could be coming to a close. And how much is this war risking the success Republicans might be able to have at the midterms?
I don't think that it's that risky. And the reason I say that is because I noticed that we have a calendar, and the calendar says that it is now May. And because it is now May and the election is not going to happen until November, there will be approximately 2,387 news cycles before we get to the midterm elections. My belief is that this war will come to its terminus sometime in the next few weeks. I do not think that we're talking months away until the end of this.
I mean, I think the president, if he wanted to, could probably end this war within the next 72 hours by blowing up Harg Island, destroying the refinery capacity of the Iranians, and then basically saying to the Europeans, okay, it's your problem to reopen the Strait of Hormuz because we are perfectly well supplied here in the United States. The price might be a little bit higher than it was before, but we're also making a lot of money from exporting American oil. Permanently depriving Iran of its capacity to export would presumably put the administration there, the IRGC, on its last legs. And then you could leave it to allies in the region to help degrade their nuclear capacity.
So again, I think there are a lot of off-ramps here the president could take if he wishes to.
So, Ben, how amazing is it that you have a situation where Israel is. is not in the center of the storm. And when uh Iran has to take a shot, they take a shot at the UAE. Who, by the way, I could not be more impressed with. And I think they're going to end up extremely tight with us and Israel eventually as they break from OPEC.
So, why do you think that is? Why do you think Iran played the Gulf States or the problem card? I think that the Gulf states they thought were going to be their leverage. They believe that because the United States wants the free flow of oil, that if they threaten the oil supplies in UAE and Saudi, that was sort of their final Trump card to play. They only had a few cards to play here.
One was trying to create that ballistic missile shield that the United States and Israel took down. And the other was their nuclear program, which has been significantly degraded. The third was the Strait of Hormuz, which it appears the United States will either find a way to reopen or will simply continue blockading the Iranian oil coming out. And their final Trump card is really just bomb everything in sight in terms of oil supplies in an attempt to throw a crimp into the oil industry. The problem with that is that they're hurting their allies significantly more than they're hurting their enemies.
And the United States is pretty well supplied in terms of oil. That is not true for Japan. That is not true for China. That is not true for a lot of the countries that are actually quite aligned with Iran. And so Iran is on its last legs here.
And whether it takes six months or a year or two years for the regime there to fall apart, I I think that they are, it's a matter of time. I think the president knows that, and that's why I think the president keeps saying over and over that he has time and they don't. And he's right, he has three years left. And I'm not sure that that economy lasts another three years. I'm not sure that it'll last another three weeks given the current blockade.
You're right. I mean, if there's going to be some unrest, it'll happen maybe after the fighting stops and then people realize we have no water, I have no money, I have no job, and maybe we find a way to get them some guns.
So, Ben, as I look what's happening over with Lebanon and Israel, once again, I see so much misinformation. The expansion of Israel. They're trying to grab land from Lebanon. They're trying to expand Israel. They're never going to leave.
Ben, why is it? That Israel is in the place it is inside Lebanon. Maybe people should understand: Israel has no interest in Lebanon except to live in peace. They're pushing forward in order to stop the rocketing that's stopping them from putting people, Israelis, in the north of their country. But yet it's being spun that Israel is expanding.
I mean, again, I think the thing to understand here is that the Lebanese government is not particularly opposed to what Israel is doing. This, by the way, was also true in the war that Israel fought in the early 1980s, late 1970s in Lebanon. They're actually working in conjunction with forces inside Lebanon because essentially Lebanon, which was once a Christian country, it is always amazing to me to hear how Israel is somehow anti-Christian when Lebanon was literally a Christian country and has now been turned into a divided hellhole by Islamist terrorist groups springing from Iran and Palestinian terrorist groups in the south of Lebanon. You know, the fact is that the Lebanese government is at the mercy of Hezbollah, which is a large-scale terrorist organization run essentially from Iran. They fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel.
They cleared out the entire north of Israel for fully two years. I mean, people had to abandon their homes in the north of Israel for two years. They were living in hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for two years, and their kids were going to different schools for two years because of that rocket fire. Israel moved into southern Lebanon after repeated warnings, specifically in order to clear out that terror. Nest.
And the Lebanese government would love nothing better if they had the strength than for Hezbollah to be defenestrated. The problem is, the Lebanese military is not strong enough to go up against Hezbollah by itself. And that's why the United States has been attempting under Secretary of State Marco Rubio to broker some sort of talks between the Israelis and the Lebanese government in order to combine forces to go after Hezbollah.
So this is not an Israeli attack on Lebanon. This is an Israeli attack on Hezbollah, which controls southern Lebanon. It was essentially a mini-terror state. I want to bring you to the theme in your speech at the University of Austin. You believe America's institutions are in crisis, that there's really nothing that America is, or there's very few things Americans can count on that we have done in the past, from the FDA on down.
Do you want to expand on that for our audience? Yeah, I think that what's happened, I think we all feel it, particularly since 2020, is a lack of faith in institutions. A lot of lack of that faith is earned. You know, our institutions in the scientific realm failed us during COVID. Our institutions of higher education, they failed us.
If you go back to the 2007, 2008 crisis, there's a feeling that our institutions on Wall Street failed us. And so the reaction to that has been a rampant anti-institutionalism, destroy the institutions, not correct them, not fix them, not make them better, but destroy those institutions wholesale.
Well, the problem is that institutions are also where we interact with one another. And in our daily lives, right, you and I interact via a news sort of institution. That's how you and I are interacting right now. If you go to church, you're interacting within the context of that institution. If those institutions degrade, what you end up with is individuals who really dislike each other because they never interact with each other.
They don't know each other and they're not governed by the same rules. And so the sort of hatred that Americans are feeling for one another can be laid at the foot of the death of those institutions. What this means, though, is that we really have a duty to fight. White people who wish to further degrade those institutions or to destroy them rather than to fix them. There are some institutions that are probably beyond repair, but when it comes to our constitutional institutions, for example, the attempt that we see now to destroy, for example, the Senate of the United States or destroy the filibuster, to destroy the Supreme Court on the part of the left.
There's so many of these attempts. Those attempts are going to make the country worse, not better. They're just going to drive division that doesn't need to be there. We need to work together to restore the credibility of these institutions and replace the people leading them rather than simply surrendering to the idea institutions have to be leveled. How many times have you sat down with people that you've thought you've known for a while and they say, you know, there's no proof we won on the moon, 9-11 was an inside job?
And I'm thinking to myself, what? Are you kidding me? Am I sitting next to Rosie O'Donnell? Am I sitting on the view? No, these are people with educations, but they're listening to certain other people and questioning everything, which is not a bad way to go to life, but go through life.
There's every everybody's foundation seems rocked and and uh and fragile. Yeah, and I think that when people say that they're questioning everybody, that is not really true. They're questioning people who they perceive as experts, and they are not questioning the non-experts. They are not asking hard questions of the people positing the conspiracy theories. They're asking hard questions of the people who are not positing the conspiracy theories.
And I understand very well, don't trust the experts, but that should not then turn into trust the non-experts. That is not the same proposition. Obviously, everybody should be asked hard questions. The real question is, how do we restore institutional trust such that we don't have conspiracism run amok, people believing that the moon landing was fake, also believing that the banks are controlled by nefarious forces or that President Trump is controlled by space aliens or whatever the stupid conspiracy theory of the day has been. Yes, no, that one comes up an awful lot.
I can guarantee you, the President of the United States is not controlled by anyone. I mean, if you've dealt with the President or followed the President for any length of time, you should be able to tell that he is definitely his own man. Ask Maria. I'm pretty sure he's calling his own shots there.
So you've done some work, the Daily Wire did, on fraud in Ohio, and J.D. Vance spoke about it yesterday. Tell me what you discovered. We've been focused on Minneapolis and California, but there's more.
So, our investigative reporter, Luke Roziak, did a fabulous job. He went into Ohio and he actually checked out some of these home health care centers, basically, buildings that are stacked with hundreds of offices that are basically empty. And they are organized as home health care services and receiving Medicaid dollars. And in some cases, the applications are basically going out to people who are caring for their own parents, people who are supposedly getting taxpayer dollars in order to go and read to mom or dad or to bring mom and dad dinner. And then they are applying for federal aid on that basis.
And tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars being cleared through these sorts of fraudulent services.
Now, it's possible that this isn't actually technically legal fraud, right? It could be that all this is happening within the purview of the program, which speaks to the broadness of these programs and the amounts of waste that is in these programs. But again, it is hard to see how that is a good use of taxpayer funds when you have literal empty buildings that are just registered for 300 home health care services and hundreds of millions of dollars clearing through these false addresses. Yeah, it would just seem to me if when we start doing these fraud stories, it should be a bipartisan effort. And then you hear laws being proposed that would go after people who are pursuing fraud.
What was in California, what we're seeing now. I mean, and I imagine Ohio, you might be getting people that will say thank you. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that Governor DeWine will probably move on some of this. Certainly, Vivek Ramaswami, if he becomes governor, has already pledged that he's going to move on a lot of this.
The state legislature is Republican over there.
So I think that, again, fraud exists in all states, blue and red, but I think he'll get more action on it in red states than he would in the blue states. All right, a couple of things going on. There are problems on the right, and we just discussed them. There's a podcast world that has turned on Donald Trump, and it's not really affecting much in his ratings, but certainly something that Democrats are jumping on. I was struck by Barack Obama, sat down with Stephen Colbert, and they talked about this upcoming talent that we are saddled with here in New York, Cut 28.
I'm not as worried about this so-called rift between the left and liberals as you describe it. You look at somebody like Mondami. who I think is an extraordinary talent. He wants people to be able to afford housing in New York.
Well You know, uh I I I would assume liberals and New York want the same thing. And so I don't worry as much. What I'm more interested in for Democrats is. Do you know how to just talk to regular people like we're not in a college seminar? I think that's one of the powers that Mom Donnie has.
That's correct. Is that he also, not only does he talk like a normal person, but he lives a normal life, but he also names what is obviously wrong. Yes. And he goes, we should change that thing. That doesn't make any sense.
And not have a bunch of gobbledygook around it. Does it amaze you a guy with this type of political experience thinks that Mondami is the future? And if he is, I'm scared for the country.
Well, I mean, first of all, I think that Barack Obama was exactly Momdani's type of politician.
So this is not shocking to me at all. I think Barack Obama was always a radical, masquerading as a traditional liberal. And he unleashed that in his first term. And that's why he got shellacked in the 2010 midterms. And that's why he ran a competitive race with Mitt Romney in 2012.
I mean, so that this idea that Barack Obama was ever some sort of moderate is totally insane. He is always somebody who masqueraded as moderate while pushing Bernie Sanders-esque policies. And so he agrees with Mamdani. I mean, that's the dirty secret. The dirty secret is not that Momdani is somehow a traditional liberal.
The dirty secret is that Barack Obama was a leftist and that this party has moved so far to the left over the course of the last 20 years that it's unrecognizable from, say, the 1998 Bill Clinton Democratic Party. It is a completely different species. And so I am not surprised at all that Barack Obama, who has sort of a personal history somewhat similar to Zorn Mamdani's in the sense that, I mean, rights and dreams from my father. All about sort of his background, his feelings of split identity, and all this kind of stuff. That's very similar to how Mamdani thinks of himself, or the idea that Barack Obama, who did not live sort of the normal life in the United States, where he went to Occidental College and then he went to Harvard Law School and then he came back and he was a community organizer and was working in highfalutin law firms and then treating himself as a man of the people, saying that Doramdani, who is literally an itinerant rich kid.
Who rapped for a non-living until he ran for public office, and that that guy is living the life that New Yorkers are living. I mean, it's totally insane. But again, when you hear it from Obama, you have to understand he sees in Momdani a kindred spirit. And so I think that the gap between Obama and Momdani was basically non-existent. And so, of course, he sees this as a non-issue.
The gap between John Fetterman and Momdani is very much existent. The gap between Josh Shapiro and Mamdani is probably existent, but the gap between Barack Obama and Momdani is non-existent. Ben Shapiro, thanks so much. Always great. Check out the Daily Wire.
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