Shapiro, Ben

conservative political commentator; host of The Ben Shapiro Show; co-founder of The Daily Wire; author of The Authoritarian Moment, The Right Side of History, and Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings

Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War

Lex Fridman Podcast · Nov 7, 2022

• Ben Shapiro
• Kanye West antisemitism
• Hitler and Weimar Germany
• free speech and Twitter moderation
• Hunter Biden laptop story
• Russia-Ukraine war negotiations
• abortion debate
• climate change policy
• role theory and religious ethics
• tribalism and political polarization

Core ideas

Shapiro opens by addressing Kanye West's antisemitic statements, calling them "awful and antisemitic" and speculating — while acknowledging the difficulty of reading anyone's mind — that they may partly reflect bipolar disorder rather than pure ideology, based on his own family's experience with bipolar relatives and a Washington Post piece raising the same possibility; he identifies the pattern as textbook bigotry (one person's grievance generalized into a claim about an entire group) and distinguishes this from legitimate observations about group over-representation in fields like media or law, which he argues are statistically real but say nothing about the moral character of the group. He extends this into a broader taxonomy of antisemitism (ethnic/racial, religious, and what he calls "political" antisemitism — treating Jews as a shadowy conspiratorial force behind whichever ideology one opposes), and applies the same framework to his criticism of Ilhan Omar, arguing her position (opposing Israel's existence specifically, rather than criticizing its policies, which he says he does regularly himself) singles out the Jewish state in a way she does not apply to any other nation or people.

Discussing the rise of Hitler, Shapiro emphasizes that Weimar-era power had already centralized before Hitler took it, that Communists were a comparably serious force in Germany at the time (and cites the concurrent Soviet Holodomor as evidence there were few purely "good" political actors), and uses the historical figure Franz von Papen — who enabled Hitler's chancellorship believing he could control him — to argue that "the great lie we tell ourselves is that people who are evil are not like us," a caution he says applies to modern political polarization where opponents are increasingly framed as existential threats to democracy justifying "any means necessary." Pressed on whether he sits with the possibility that his own rhetoric could be seen as participating in this dynamic, he says yes, describing regular self-reflection, and states that when he criticizes "the left" he intends a philosophy (specifically, in his usage, people who favor suppressing opposing views) rather than a demographic group, distinguishing this from race-based grouping; he separately criticizes Biden's "MAGA Republicans" line as imprecisely bounded, since Biden's own framing (implicitly equating "moderate Republicans" with those who agreed with him on the Inflation Reduction Act) left the line between the two groups unclear.

On free speech and Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition, Shapiro gives a historical account of how media consolidated from a handful of mid-20th-century outlets to internet-era social platforms, argues these platforms shifted toward suppressing content post-2016 as a partisan response, and cites the suppressed Hunter Biden laptop story as the clearest example, arguing the coordinated suppression of a story (rather than the story's ultimate importance) was itself the significant scandal — while cautioning Musk should be more careful about spreading unverified claims himself (citing Musk's retracted tweet about the Paul Pelosi attack). He states Trump's Twitter account should be restored, extends this same free-speech principle to Alex Jones despite personally disliking him and having been criticized by him, and frames his objection to speech-based bans as resting on distinguishing platforms (which should not "unperson" people absent criminal conduct) from private editorial outlets like his own Daily Wire. Discussing his own history of intense online criticism (including being named, per the ADL, the top target of antisemitism online in 2016), he describes deliberately removing Twitter from his phone at his wife's suggestion and relying on a small circle of trusted people willing to critique him honestly rather than either sycophants or hostile strangers.

On the war in Ukraine, Shapiro criticizes the pre-invasion Western approach of encouraging Ukraine's NATO/EU aspirations without ever extending actual security guarantees, argues U.S. interests since the invasion (preserving borders, degrading Russian military capacity, and pulling Europe away from economic alignment with Russia and China) have largely been achieved, and lays out what he sees as two divergent "worst case" scenarios going forward — Russian use of a tactical nuclear weapon, or a chaotic post-Putin collapse of central authority — arguing a negotiated off-ramp (likely involving Russia retaining Crimea and parts of Donbas, and Ukraine formally forgoing NATO membership in exchange for a genuine Western defense guarantee) will probably require Biden, not Zelensky, to take the political risk of proposing it, since Zelensky's domestic position makes it difficult for him to be the one to suggest concessions.

On abortion, Shapiro presents what he considers the strongest pro-choice case (that bodily autonomy has no countervailing limit, or a version rooted in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's sex-equality argument) alongside his own pro-life position: that human life with its own independent genetic identity begins at conception, that this creates an independent interest that shifts the burden of justification onto anyone seeking to end it, and that other proposed lines (viability, brain activity, heartbeat) are, in his view, comparatively arbitrary. He states he personally does not support exceptions for rape or incest (while noting most Americans, including many pro-life Americans, do), and distinguishes moral blameworthiness from strict legal categorization by declining to equate abortion with prosecutable murder, given that most people who have abortions do not believe they are ending a person's life. On climate change, he affirms accepting IPCC science and human contribution to warming while disputing the scale of feasible mitigation policy, arguing current climate policy targets are unworkable, that roughly 1.5°C of warming is "baked in" regardless (citing economist William Nordhaus), and advocating adaptation measures (sea walls, carbon capture, and especially expanded nuclear power, which he calls a "litmus test" for whether someone genuinely takes climate change seriously) over further subsidization of current-generation renewables.

Shapiro discusses his religious and philosophical views at length: he describes God, following an Aquinas-style formulation, as the underlying cause/logic of the universe rather than an anthropomorphic figure, and outlines a personal "role theory" (in contrast to virtue ethics or deontology) holding that meaning comes from fulfilling concrete social roles — parent, spouse, community member, creator — which he argues is both more actionable than abstract virtue talk and the basis for a "flourishing" society built from the local level upward rather than through universal, top-down solutions. He states plainly that he does not believe in humanity's inherent goodness absent social institutions, expects tribalism (in the sense of favoring one's own community) to be a permanent feature of human nature best channeled around shared ideas rather than physical characteristics, and — in a notable disagreement with Lex — argues that "respect" rather than "love" is the more honest and sustainable foundation for how strangers and distant groups should relate to one another, reserving genuine love for family, close community, and country. He closes with advice for young people (avoid social media until the brain is more fully formed around age 26, engage in local community rather than abstract global causes, read extensively) and personal reflections on formative mentors, including his parents and the early Breitbart News figure Andrew Breitbart, whom he credits with radical openness to engaging anyone in person while also citing Breitbart's late-life immersion in Twitter conflict as a cautionary example.

Excerpts