O'REILLY This movement is a massive movement.

SHAPIRO The left believes, in a victim-victimizer complex. I can't even begin to speculate on the psychiatric state of Candace Owens. I think social media has been one of the worst things to happen to humanity.

O'REILLY Hey, Bill O'Reilly here. Welcome to another edition of We'll Do It Live. And we're very pleased to have Ben Shapiro. You know him. He's a commentator, dominates social media. He's a feud guy, gets in a lot of that. We'll talk about some of that, I can identify with the feud thing, that's for sure. But it's all a different world out there than what I have done for 50 years, and I wanna learn about it today. So, Mr. Shapiro, thanks for helping us out. Number one, nice of you to do it. I know you're crazy busy. The first thing is that researching you, I go back to, there's almost a constant theme that you are a defender of Israel and Judaism. Would that be true?

SHAPIRO I mean, it's certainly true that I'd defend Israel against people who would wish to destroy it, and it's certainly true that I'm a defender of Judaism because I'm an Orthodox Jew. I would not say that that is my predominant characteristic in the American public landscape. Obviously, I've been commenting on American politics, virtually none of it on Israel or Judaism, for the past twenty-five years since I was about seventeen years old. The sort of attempts to pigeonhole me into just does Israel, just does Jewish stuff, is sort of an oddity that's occurring online right now, I would say.

O'REILLY When you were doing general commentary, did you have a direction? So we know the big commentators on television, and they're either liberal or conservative or independent, as the case may be. What was your definition of what you were doing out there?

SHAPIRO Well, I mean, I was and still am a strong conservative, speaking about conservative issues every single day, ranging from a sort of free market view of capitalism, very strongly free market of capitalism, to hawkish foreign policy, to social conservatism. I'm sort of a traditional conservative along Buckleyite lines. And the vast majority of what I talk about today on my show has to do with those principles.

O'REILLY Okay, so you're a doctrinaire conservative, William F. Buckley, in case people don't know, was dominating conservative thought in America in the 50s and 60s. People have forgotten him, but he was a brilliant man, there's no question about it. Now, Donald Trump, so, you got an in-and-out relationship with the president. Would that be accurate?

SHAPIRO I would say that I've always called balls and strikes with the president as far as my own sort of voting pattern, I did not vote for either candidate in 2016, and then I voted for President Trump in 2020 and endorsed him and in 2024, I did some campaigning. I did one event with him around October 7th and ran a fundraiser for him. So obviously, I've evolved in my views of his politics. I don't like everything the president does. I like most of what the president does. I think it's my job to sort of call out where I think he's doing things that are wrong and to tout him for the things that he's doing that are right. And I think that there's more of the right than the wrong.

O'REILLY Why didn't you vote for him in '16? You didn't vote for Hillary, you didn't vote for him. Why did you sit it out?

SHAPIRO Nope. In '16,  my feeling was that neither met the minimum qualifications that I had to be president of the United States. I did not think the president from was going to govern conservatively. I thought that his ideology was all over the place. I thought the way that he approached politics was not something that I appreciated. Obvious is never gonna vote for Hillary Clinton,  I'm a doctrinaire conservative, as you just mentioned. And so my feeling was that I would sit it out and wait for a better set of candidates to rise, and then the president won, obviously, and when that happened he proceeded to govern a lot more conservatively than I thought he would, and he obviously won me over as a supporter between 2016 and 2020.

O'REILLY What kind of relationship do you have with him? Are you friendly with him, do you speak with him?

SHAPIRO We certainly don't talk. I mean, it's not as though we're on a first-texting basis or anything like that. I've had personal contact with the president a total of three times. One was a fundraiser that we ran for him down here in Florida. One was that aforementioned event around October 7th at the grave of Menachem Mendel Schneerson in New York. And the third was when he came on my show shortly before the election. That was the last time I had a conversation with him.

O'REILLY Okay. Right now we've got a very intense situation with Iran that some conservatives and almost all liberals are saying that the president cannot handle. Where do you come down on that?

SHAPIRO I think the president certainly can handle it. I think the question is whether he will handle it. So, I think that...the real question with Iran is, of course, what is the off-ramp? The amount of damage that was done in the first six weeks of the conflict was to the tremendous good of the United States. We essentially wiped out their ballistic missile production facilities. We wiped out a good deal of their nuclear program, wiped out their leadership cadre, wiped out their air force, and wiped out much of their navy. We destroyed their capacity to produce new drones, all of that was to the good. And then we kind of unilaterally declared a ceasefire, and since then we've been keeping on this blockade and a set of sanctions. Again, I'm very much in favor of the sanctions. I think they're keeping the economy there weak, that they don't have the money to rebuild is a very good thing. What I object to is this idea that we ought to preemptively surrender to Iran, grant them control over the Strait of Hormuz, relieve sanctions, and allow them to run toward a nuclear weapon. I think there are things that could be done that range from striking their energy facilities and walking away to allowing. Our allies in the region, ranging from Israel to Saudi Arabia to UAE, to have oversight over these particular areas to, yeah, I think we could probably just walk away, retain the sanctions, and then let the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese deal with the Strait of Hormuz. I think the worst-case scenario here is cutting a bad deal that ends with Iran in a position to rebuild with control over the strait. And that's the thing that I'm concerned about.

O'REILLY Okay, are you concerned about it for both the welfare of the United States and Israel? Is there a nexus there? Because obviously Iran wants to wipe out every Jew on the planet.

SHAPIRO So, I mean, obviously there's a crossing of streams there, my predominant interest is obviously that the United States wishes for there not to be a nuclear Iran. This is something that the president has said over and over again. Obviously, there are other allies in the region that are threatened by Iran, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, all of which have been active in this conflict. And so I think there is sometimes an attempt to say that the only interest in the region is the Israeli interest and that if you are in favor of the president ending the conflict victoriously, it must only be on Israel's behalf. A strange contention given the fact that, I'm sure that if you ask Prime Minister Netanyahu what he would want, and just, you know, what would he want in a utopian world? The answer presumably would be the toppling of the Iranian regime using whatever possible force is necessary, which is not something that I've actually called for, so again, I think that America's interests are pretty straight.

O'REILLY Look, if you know history, you know that the Iranian government for 50 years since the Shah got booted out of there has been hell-bent on killing Jews. I mean, that's a fact. They got Hamas, they got Hezbollah, they've got Houthis, they injected themselves into the Iraq war with the United States by making heinous bombs, and so they have a vested interest in killing every Jew they can kill, and you know, they say death to America and this and that, but Jews are number one. So if you're the leader of Israel, you're going to certainly want the curtain to come down on these people, and that is just logic. But what happened was, because of the loathing for Donald Trump, and this is my opinion now, by the left in America, they attached Israel to Trump, and that's when you saw the rise of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism has always been in every country, as you know, okay, but the real intensity came when the progressives in America said, you know what, Trump, this is Trump's war, their words. And Israel was helping in Trump's war, therefore, we're not gonna like Israel, and yeah, we'll throw in personal Jews too. We don't like them much either. Would that be a wrong analysis?

SHAPIRO I  think there's certainly truth to that with regard to the current Iran conflict. I'd say that the radical increase in antisemitism particularly on the left, predates that. I think that there were roots of it in the Obama administration. I think it really broke loose after October 7th, when obviously the left decided that it wants to form a coalition of people who really hate Western civilization, and that range I don't want to do that

O'REILLY Well why would the progressive left want to throw in with people who want to destroy democracies like the United States and Israel? Why would they want to do that?

SHAPIRO Because the progressive left, in its essence, really believes that America is founded, and the West generally, is founded in exploitation, in imperialism, in colonialism, in white supremacy, these are all things that they say on a routine basis. And so it's really an alliance of convenience. And when it comes to Israel, they just see the conflict in the Middle East as a sort of reflection of domestic political concerns. So if you talk to the members of the radical left, they will say that the Palestinians, for example, in the Gaza Strip, it's just like black Americans in the United States. It's the same model. It's a model of exploitation and a model of imperialism and settler colonialism. They use all the same buzzwords. And so this sort of alliance of convenience has resulted in a made-over Democratic Party, which is moving very strongly in the direction of, say, Zohran Mamdani in New York or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

O'REILLY I don't understand still, though, what the benefit of the progressive left is for doing all that. It's happening. There's no doubt about it. But why this issue? Why? I open my book, Confronting Evil, with the attack on October 7th. And I did that on purpose, obviously, to show the reader of my book exactly how savage this attack was on unarmed civilians in the kibbutz. But now we have that because Israel struck back, that Israel is a villain. How many movie stars have you heard say that? How many entertainers? And if you go against that orthodoxy, you don't work in the entertainment industry. Look at Boy George. He got hammered last week in England for writing a pro-Israel song. So this movement is a massive movement, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish movement. And I'm sitting here going, I don't know what this does or what this gives the progressive communist socialists. What does it give them to hate the Jews?

SHAPIRO I mean, it certainly gives them a unifying glue. Historically speaking, anti-Semitism has always been a unifying glue for radical movements, and so it gives you something else also to talk about that doesn't involve directly attacking the west. If you say that really what you're worried about is imperialism in Israel, what you're really worried about are these settler colonialists in Israel. Even though all those same arguments, by the way, appear, they all map directly onto, again, the West, and if you're gonna argue that Israel's a settler-colonialist state, well, by the same logic, America is a settler-colonial estate. And you know the left doesn't really want to talk about that because that would be awkward politically, so instead they sort of project that out onto Israel. Anti-Semitism is typically symptomatic of a deeper malady. It is not sort of its own kind of free-floating thing, and the deeper malady of left right now is that the left believes in a victim-victimizer oppression-oppressor complex. Right, in every conflict there's a victim, and there is a victimizer. The victim is always the person who is less successful, and the victimizer is always the person who is more successful. The victim is always the nation that is less successful, more violent, poorer. The victimizer is always the more wealthy and thus exploitative nation. That is the basic logic of the left at this point.

O'REILLY That's a communist doctrine. It's very simple to figure out what Marx had in mind there. But I was surprised, and I'm pretty, you know, cocky in my assessment of my own ability. I was as surprised this anti-Semitism thing took off the way it did. Now, I understand New York City. I understand Mamdani. I understood Columbia University. I understand Cambridge. As you went to Harvard Law, I went to the Kennedy School at Harvard. I got it, but the media, the corporate media, throwing in by looking away from, and they absolutely have, the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel cabal, they look away from it, they won't confront it, they won't be honest about it. That caught me by surprise.

SHAPIRO Yeah, I mean, listen, an enormous amount of the legacy media is aligned with the political left. As the political left is eaten up by the radicals, then the legacy media have a choice to make. They can either condemn the radicals and maybe find themselves on the out with the movement on the rise, or they can pretend the radicalism away. And so what you see is sort of old school legacy media figures who are just pretending that what's happening isn't happening. A great example of this would be John Stewart. So John Stewart recently was talking about people like Hassan Piker, who is, of course, a radical communist who also hate Jews. And he was promoting the idea that, say, Zohran Mamdani or Hassan Piker, actually they don't hate capitalism. Now Zohran Mamdani openly says he hates capitalism, but John Stewart was trying to fit that back in sort of the traditional Democrat box. And so I think that's what you're seeing from a lot of traditional Democrats, an unwillingness to confront the radicalism in their own party, because to do so would mean they have to do something to stop it. And it's much easier to sort of give way, try to make common cause, and hope for the best. You're seeing that in Michigan today. Abdul El-Sayed wins this primary in Michigan while being pretty overtly pro-terrorism, and Hailey Stevens, who ran against him, immediately endorsed him for the United States Senate because it's more important that a Democrat win the seat so as to stop the evils of Donald Trump than to actually break up the party.

O'REILLY But I'm going to predict that El-Sayed is going to lose to Rogers, so that's going to come back and bite them. Now, John Stewart's a Jewish man, and you know that I have a long history with Stewart. We've always been respectful. It's always worked out well. But Stewart's a good example you're bringing up. There are many famous, influential Jewish Americans. I'm not gonna say they justify the anti-Semitism.

SHAPIRO Oh, no, they do. I'll say it. I will say it. They do. I mean, they do. 

O'REILLY You and I would probably differ then. They enable it, okay? So I don't see Stewart going back to his nice place on the Jersey Shore, jumping up and down, that anti-Semitism is on the rise. I don't see that. But I do see Jon Stewart defending the radical elements, as you just pointed out. Not going to turn on them, mainly because of his audience, but the larger question is Mamdani got the majority of Jewish voters in New York City. That's stunning, is it not?

SHAPIRO I can explain this pretty easily. So this is a category error. So Jews, they kind of cross a variety of categories, right? The big question about Jews, are Jews a religion? Are Jews an ethnicity? Are Jewish a tribe? What exactly are Jews? So when we talk about Jews and how Jews vote, typically we are talking about people who self-identify as Jews, meaning they were born into a Jewish family and maybe they had an occasional bagel. If you're looking at people who actually care about Jewish practice, who care about philosophy, who care about Israel, which is a part of Jewish practice, right. As an Orthodox Jew,  we pray, for example, for the restoration of Jerusalem three times a day. This has been a regular thing in Judaism for several thousand years at this point. And so if you're talking about Jews who have no association with Judaism and then you say, why do those people vote for democrats or or back...

O'REILLY Well, they're secular Jews.

Like a Zohran Mamdani. Yes, but the thing is that when people say secular Jew, they fail to understand that what they're really saying is about as coherent as atheist Catholic. Right, like, if you're talking about people who are born into a Catholic family, but if you say it like you want to Catholic family, you're a lapsed Catholic, nobody says, oh look at why are all these lapsed Catholics voting for democrats? And the answer is because they're lapsed Catholics. They're not actual practicing catholic so John Stewart is about as Jewish as a ham sandwich in practice, even if he was born to a Jewish family.

O'REILLY All right, I'm gonna defend Stewart because I don't know that. I don't know how he really feels about his ethnicity, and I'm not gonna hammer him for it. Now, you have gotten a lot of attention with feuds. So, Megyn Kelly, you were angry at her, I guess, for failing to condemn anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Is that true?

SHAPIRO No, I mean the original condemnation of Megyn Kelly was because Megyn. This was her attempt to misdirect the original condemnation. The original condemnation was Megyn Kelly defending Candace Owens, who was busily attacking Erika Kirk over the murder of Charlie. That was the thing that I was attacking Megyn publicly.

Okay, what was Kelly defending Owens? And again, I'm not in your world. Was Kelly defending Owens because of freedom of speech that she has a right to put her opinion out, or was she enabling, as the word I use with John Stewart?

SHAPIRO I mean absolutely enabling. Absolutely enabling. Refusal to condemn it...Listen, I'd have been cancerous freedom of speech. It's a free country since ever the hell she wants, no matter how crazy it is. That's not what Megyn was doing. Megyn was saying that she refused to condemn Candace Owens on any grounds whatsoever, that Candace has her own questions that are may be worthy of pursuit. She understands why Candace is doing what Candace is doing, and all the rest, which of course is absolutely asinine. Candace Owens has been cruel and indicative and quite evil toward Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk's widow, spreading at this point for nearly a year, completely unverified rumors and utter trash about how TPUSA and Erika personally, and pretty much everybody  it turns out, except for the actual murderer of Charlie Kirk was probably involved in the murder of Charlie Kirk. And so the fact that Megyn, you know, pretty militantly refuses to condemn anything Candace says along these lines seems to be a moral deficiency.

O'REILLY All right, so she is a part of whatever is going on, in your opinion. Have you ever talked to either Kelly or Owens about what they're doing?

SHAPIRO I mean, I did have a text conversation with Megyn about some of these issues, I would say prior to this all becoming quite public. As far as Candace, obviously Candace used to work for our company, and we fired her. So, the relations there are not exactly the best. Of course I'm not...

O'REILLY No, I mean, I'm just curious, as a journalist or lawyer, whatever you want to categorize yourself as, I always like to know the mindset of the people that I have to confront. And you know me, I mean, more than 50 years of confrontation. But I like to know before going in why they're doing what they're doing, and that's why I asked the question. And I'll seek them out. Through my producers and things like that, and say, look, is there something I'm missing here? You know, do you think you're missing anything with Kelly and Owens?

SHAPIRO No, I really do not think I'm missing anything with Megyn or Candace. I think that Megyn's motivation is generally that she would like cliques and that she would like friendships inside the so-called movement. And I think the motivation for Candace, I can't even begin to speculate on the psychiatric state of Candace Owens. I will say that she has humored legitimately every nutty conspiracy theory that is possible to humor, and she is uniquely capable of coming up with new ones at the drop of a hat. I'm frankly astonished at her creativity and innovativeness when it comes to making new conspiracy theories appear out of thin air.

O'REILLY Does that matter to the country and the nation? Do you think anybody pays attention to that?

SHAPIRO And she has, yes, millions of people pay attention to her, unfortunately, and I do think that brain rot, unfortunately, is infectious.

O'REILLY Brain rot?

SHAPIRO Yes, like the rotting of human brains with stupid ideas. Bad ideas are infectious, and they rot the brain.

O'REILLY All right, now Tucker Carlson is a little bit different. But again, it was a feud and got into social media, and everybody takes sides even though they don't know what's going on, including me. I don't take sides, but I don't know what's going on. So apparently this is about isolationist foreign policy. Is that what this thing with Tucker Carlson's about?

SHAPIRO I've critiqued Tucker on a wide variety of grounds going back for years. I mean, I've criticized him on economic grounds because I think that in essence, Tucker is a bit of a statist. I've criticized him on foreign policy grounds because I think he says things that are unrooted in fact and humors conspiratorial musings of utterly uninformed people and brings them on his show to repeat the same. I think Tucker is deeply involved in a sort of what we would say in the online world, black pilled effort, meaning a sort of depressive effort to undermine American morale on pretty much every score.

O'REILLY But why? Why would a guy do it? His father was in the establishment, he's successful, he's wealthy. Why would he want to undermine the system that's in place?

SHAPIRO I mean, I think that he has a very, very negative view of what America is and has become. I think he believes that the American system is rigged on behalf of a particular cadre of people, rigged presumably by Israel, that's something that he has guest onto to suggest all the time. And so he has been, you know, sort of mouthing those nonsensical ideas for quite a while. While at the same time praising Vladimir Putin, traveling over to Moscow to praise the subways and the quality of the bread, heading over to the Middle East to talk about the wonders of Islam. Now, all of this seems worthy of critique. You know, one thing I will say, Bill, is that for me, none of the things that we've talked about are personal feuds. Tucker may be a very nice guy. Last time I talked with him was at Charlie Kirk's memorial. We got along fine. Megyn is a very nice lady, interpersonally. This has nothing to do with sort of interpersonal dynamics. I don't care about any of that. I have a family, and I have friends, and I have people that I hang out with. And then there is what we, you and I, do for a living, which is to critique the public positions of influential people. And so when people say things that I think are untrue, I don't characterize that as a feud. If I'm feuding with anything, it's their ideas, and if they would stop saying stupid things, I would stop critiquing them.

O'REILLY All right, that's fair enough. You know, in my interactions with both Tucker Carlson and Kelly, because they did work for Fox News, I don't know Candace Owens. I never picked up any kind of animus toward Jewish people. In fact, Carlson was a whole different point of view back then.

SHAPIRO I've not accused Megyn of anti-Semitism, and when it comes to Tucker, I think that Tucker has trafficked in conspiracy theories about Jews, is what I would say. But I think I'll also say that broadly speaking, the term antisemitism has lost purchase in the public debate, and so people misinterpret the meaning. Antisemitism does not mean hates every Jew he knows. That's not what antisemitism is. That's much more along the lines of racism. Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about the power of jews in the world these are in control of the media, they're in control of the banks, they're in control of foreign policy, and that is the sort of stuff that Tucker does repeat, you know, basically ad nauseam.

O'REILLY Okay, when you decide who you're going to challenge publicly, you know that it's going to get you ratings. People are going to come in and watch. And there's a segment of people who say, look, all of these social media czar-czarenas, they're doing it to get attention because if you get attention, then people look, and then you can sell ads, and then you can do all that. You've heard that, I'm sure. Do you think that, you aside, let's put you aside. You think there's an element of craziness in social media designed to get people rich and famous?

SHAPIRO I mean, absolutely, and if I could hit a red button and make social media disappear tomorrow, I would do it to my own financial non-benefit. I think social media has been one of the worst things to happen to humanity in the course of my life in my lifetime, I think so.

O'REILLY Why, why, why is it so bad for you?

SHAPIRO Well, I think that it has, once again, reduced people's attention spans. I think the conversations that are had are dumber. They're not long-form, they're not well-informed, they are not rooted in data and information. They're very often just rooted in sort of personal popularity. Now they're rooted in 30-second clips, in which you can't even make a complex argument. And so, yeah, and I think social media is rooted in virality. It is not about the search for truth. It's about the search for clicks. And that is something that I've never been involved in. And then the thing about me is that I've been doing this since I was 17 years old, I'm now 42. So I started doing, I started getting involved in politics when I was17. I had a syndicated column at that time, and so I'm a relatively young guy, but I've been doing this for a quarter century. And I didn't get into the business of politics because I was interested in the business, I got interested in the business of politics only as a byproduct of the fact that I actually care about the things that I espouse. So I'm one of the few people in American public life whose principles have been basically consistent over the course of the last quarter century. So I have not moved any of my positions. Everyone else may move, everyone else may stick for the clicks, but I'm not gonna do any of that sort of stuff.

O'REILLY But some might say it's a weakness because you're not reflective enough to say, you know, maybe I made a mistake, but you know, look.

SHAPIRO No, I mean, there are plenty of times when I made a mistake. Listen, I again, I made a mistake about President Trump in 2016. I made the mistake in believing what the government was spewing about, you know, the transmissibility due to vaccination or non-transmissibility due to the vaccination in December of 2020. I make mistakes all the time. But as far as kind of the central principles on which I base my public life, things like personal responsibility and private property and constitutional liberty, these things are unchanging and they have not changed for me for my entire career. I have yet to see the evidence emerge that would debunk any of them.

O'REILLY Okay. Why did you get involved, or maybe still are, in the trans, gay marriage, you know, the alternative lifestyle swap, because once you get in, you can't get out. And we're watching this unfold with Sophie Cunningham and WNBA, which is nasty, nasty. Why did you choose to get involved with that?

SHAPIRO I mean, I didn't really choose to get involved with it. I just said what I thought of it at the time, so again...

O'REILLY But why would you put yourself up there to say to people who may wanna be trans or they may wanna marry their same sex partner, whatever, why bother with that?

SHAPIRO So when we're talking about questions of public policy, like say gay marriage, then we have to determine why the government should be involved in that issue at all. And my opinion with regard to gay marriage was and remains that if you're talking about government incentives for personal relationships, the goal of the government in being involved in marriage at all, like, listen, I have two marriage certificates. I have the one from the state that I don't care about, and then I have my religious marriage certificate, which is the one that I actually care about. So the real question is why is the state involved in the marriage at all? The answer, originally and still, if the state is going to be involved in this is a marriage, it is because the state has an interest in ensuring that when a man and a woman get together and they have kids, there are additional protections for that and an incentivization of that. It's about the protection of the male-female children relationship. The state has no interest at all in whether two dudes decide to live together or two ladies decide to live together, so I'm not in favor of criminalization of this sort of behavior. I'm just saying that if you give a government benefit seems like the government ought to receive a benefit in return usually that benefit comes in the form of a couple having children. That is why marriage is important to the government in the first place. As far as trans, it is a fundamental human truth that male and female exist and are non-malleable. You cannot be a male who becomes a female. You can not be a female who becomes male. And this has public policy consequences when kids are being taught in school that lie. And it has social consequences when people all over society are being essentially blacklisted from their industry for saying things that are obviously true.

O'REILLY Okay. But you can have another argument by saying that science and all of this other stuff has made it possible now for people to be free or free themselves from a gender they don't want to be, whatever. But here's something you brought up without bringing it up. How in your opinion, and again you're a Harvard guy, and you saw what happened to Harvard. That lawsuit is still underway, that Jews are terrorizing Cambridge. How has the educational system, generally speaking, been captured by the progressive left? How did that happen?

SHAPIRO I mean that really goes back to the1960s. So, in the very first book I wrote all the way back in 2004, I talk about this, and the basic theory was that, and people study this issue, including Shelby Steele, have talked about the fact in the 1960s, there was essentially no systemic immunity to the radicals on campus. So student radical movements begin in the 1960s on the college campuses, a bunch of sort of old-style FDR liberals, JFK liberals who are staffed up at these administrations on the campuses, and they refuse to simply set hard lines in the sand, as far as proper behavior and modes of study, and a lot of the people who are graduating from these colleges then go into the administration. You see the conversion of these colleges and universities from sort of mainline left to significantly more radical over the course of time to the point where, as you know, Bill, pretty much the entire faculty, literally the entire faculty of places like Harvard Law, will have an entirely democratic or even green party bend with maybe a single person registered as a Republican on the entire faculty and staff list. That that is not a coincidence. Some of it is sort of social in nature, some of it is an unwritten rule, but the reality obviously is that academia was taken over by people who are quite radical and also, a wonderful system of incentives has been created where tuition rises every year because we've told pretty much everybody they deserve to go to college. And this means that there is now an incentive for colleges to start new majors that have less demanding and rigorous schedules and hire new professors and charge out the wazoo for those things and churn out people with useless degrees from top-level universities. Those people, of course, then end up radically in debt and kind of pissed off at the system, which is, I think, some of the blowback you're seeing now.

O'REILLY Okay, the rise of the left-wing academic environment, all right? It's not every school, but I would say it's most schools now because California is the biggest state and that's just crazy. New York, where I am, is insane. Yeah, you got Texas and Florida to balance out, but you really have that. So that rise has led to Mamdani and El-Sayed and all these other guys, all right? That's what it's led to. Do you fear a genuine, communist movement in America?

SHAPIRO I mean, yes, it's not going to look like communist movements in Russia, where you essentially had an impoverished population of peasants, and then you had a vanguard of the proletariat violently overthrow the government. I don't think that's what it's going to look like over here. I think it'll look much more like the infiltration of various governmental systems by people who truly hate capitalism and private property, and who gradually steer America down a significantly more statist path. I think there are constitutional limits on a lot of this stuff, but that is the great fear is that those constitutional limits will gradually be eviscerated. This is why when Democrats talk about abolishing the Senate or adding new senators to the Senate so as to create a permanent Democratic majority or adding justices to the Supreme Court so as to thwart the current majority on the Supreme Court. When you start talking about removing the constitutional barriers to the massive growth of the state, sure, I'm deeply worried about a communist slash democratic socialist revolution.

O'REILLY So, to you, it's a real thing, this movement that seemingly four years ago you would go what? Communism? What? And now it's been mainstreamed in places like Colorado and Maine, places you would never think. And I put it on, and this is going to sound harsh, but I believe it's true, an electorate that doesn't know very much. They don't know.

SHAPIRO I tend to agree. I mean, especially a younger electorate that doesn't remember things like the Soviet Union. And there used to be an object lesson out there for Americans to point out and say, you know what we don't want to do, we don't wanna do that. And since the Soviet Union fell and the vast majority of people who are my age and younger have no memory of the Soviet Union, there really is no object lesson, and so you have people who are sort of wolves in sheep's clothing, who are saying no, what we really want is just Sweden. We really want is Sweden. That is not what Zohran Mamdani is looking for. He's not just looking for Sweden. No, he wants me to produce-

O'REILLY He wants means of production control, and Sweden, by the way, has cut back on all that nonsense because it couldn't support it, and Mamdani is an absolute communist, but the most dangerous man, and I'd like your opinion on this, in the country, is Senator Bernie Sanders because he's the godfather of this whole thing. He must be thrilled because I know he never thought that his brand of communism, which is basically the government controls everything from child rearing to where you live to what you have to where you can work, whatever it may be. The latest thing is now universal child care. It has nothing to do with child care. What universal child care is that the state takes the kid at age three and indoctrinates the kid into left-wing progressive communist policies. That's what that is. It's not having a babysitter show up teaching your kid how to ride a tricycle. But if you were to go out and then talk to voters, younger voters in particular, and say, are you in favor of this universal child care? Oh yeah, oh yeah. You want the state telling your kids what they can and can't do, how they should living and thinking? That's what Sanders is after, and that's a tenet of Karl Marx. And I'll submit to you, Ben, that maybe one out of 50 Americans understand that.

SHAPIRO I mean, I totally agree with you, and I've been saying for years that Sanders is the most dangerous person in the country. I think that Sanders, who has been legitimately a lifelong useless leech on the ass of American society literally his entire political career. He has never held a real job. He was he was so lazy was kicked off a commune back in the 1970s for not working. So, I mean, this is the guy who is now sort of the lone star of the democratic party but he does have one thing that very few people in politics have, which is the ability to constantly stand outside the status quo, calling for revolution and that, to me, is sort of the underlying factor in everything that's going on right now, is that Americans have decided that status quo in the United States is just so unusable, it's so unaffordable, so terrible, that they will turn to whoever promises them utopia. And that's a really dangerous place to be. It's one of the reasons why I've been pushing back against, as I say, the black pilling from both the left and the right, this idea that America is fatally flawed, that America was either founded in sin or somehow went wayward. The idea that young Americans have no opportunity, you can't afford anything, you can't get an apartment, you can't get married, you cannot have kids. None of that is true. Again, affordability is a problem, and there are actual solutions we can bring to bear, but nobody is actually talking about that. What they're really talking about is the idea that the entire system is rigged and corrupt, and success eludes an entire generation of people, and therefore, we have to overturn the system completely in favor of something new. Now, there's a lot of different visions of what that something new looks like. But one of the best places to be, always politically, is outside the status quo, yelling about how terrible the status quo is. It is a political winner, always.

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O'REILLY Now, how much of the disenchantment, in your opinion, can be laid at the doorstep of the most populist president in history, Donald Trump? How much of it... Trump hatred fueled the I don't care, just get rid of him.

SHAPIRO I mean, I think it has a lot to do with it. I also think the American public is sort of bouncing around like a ping pong ball right now. To bounce from Trump to Biden and then back to Trump demonstrates a deep unease with whoever is in power. So some of it is sort of the underlying dynamics, and some of that is, you know, policies that I think are poorly aligned with the interests of the American people. I mean, here I would cite the liberation day tariffs. If you look at President Trump's approval ratings, he was over water before liberation day. Liberation Day happens, he's now underwater, and then he just continues to go down in a steady straight line pretty much ever since. And again, I think there are a lot of things the president has done that are great, particularly on the deregulatory front economically speaking. Are there things that he could have done better and mistakes that he made? Absolutely. Does that drive unease? For sure. But we should remember that the approval rating for pretty much every president since maybe the mid-Obama era has been underwater for literally all of them the whole time, which speaks to again...

O'REILLY But he's so much larger than life that he has taken on the poster person for the progressive movement. I mean, they rally around him. That's what the midterms are going to be. Midterms aren't going to have democratic solutions to affordability. No. They don't have any solutions, okay? Zero. It's going to be you hate them, we hate them. Get them out of there, and we'll figure out something. You know that's what it's gonna be.

SHAPIRO I totally agree with that, but if you're talking about sort of the long-term ailment that needs to be cured in the United States, honestly, it can only be cured by politicians who eventually start telling us the truth, which is we cannot solve all of the problems that we say we can solve. When you have politicians of both parties saying every problem you have in your life is mostly solvable by government, I promise you government cannot solve those problems. And then people will get pissed at you for having said that you could solve them and then you don't solve them. So they turn to the other side that's making the exact same promise. They fail. And then they turn back to the others. I think this...

O'REILLY But that's been going on since John Adams. What is your accessibility to the mainstream media, and Disney in particular? I could never figure out why Disney has hurt its brand so much. If you look at its stock price, you can see that. By alienating half the country with its radical form of presentation, The View, Jimmy Kimmel, its news organization. It's all committed left. I mean, can you get on The View or Good Morning America with a book?

SHAPIRO No. Not in one million years. I mean, I've been I've been trying to get on The View for years. That is that is a dream booking for me. There's nothing I would love better than to have a conversation with Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg and Sonny Hostin. And I'm a bit of a of a hate watching fan of The View. So I would definitely appreciate a booking slot. But that has been, that has never been in the offing despite 10 years of trying to help myself get booked on The View. So yeah, that's something.

O'REILLY Well, I've been on The View 12 years, but when Barbara Walters died, that was the end of that. And we trace The View back to 2025, they had one non-liberal guest on the show. But had you ever thought about why Disney has entered this zone where it doesn't mind alienating conservatives, traditionalists, independents?

SHAPIRO Again, I think that what we're watching with CBS is the first time anyone has experimented with sort of the counter proposition that maybe there's a whole other half of the population that needs to be appealed to, and we'll see how that goes with CBS, it's an audacious experiment. As far as Disney, Disney did get clocked back into reality over the course of the last five to ten years. They went extremely woke in their children's programming. It's one thing for Disney to put the view on during daytime, mainly for women who are at home watching TV at that time. It is another thing for them to infuse all that liberalism into their kids' programming. They started to do that, and people really started to buck that. We bucked that very strongly at Daily Wire. And then Disney sort of steered out of that. The Chapek era ended, Bob Iger came back in, and he basically said, we're going to try to program apolitically, at least as far as the children's programming goes, which is, of course, the only smart move.

O'REILLY All right, so I want to thank Ben Shapiro. What we're going to do now is we're going to let our regular viewers on YouTube go have supper or whatever you want to do. And we're gonna hold over Mr. Shapiro for BillOReilly.com Concierge and Premium Members in a segment called Killing Time. Yeah, it runs about eight, 10 minutes. I still have a few more questions. So if you'd like to be Concierge Members, go to BillOReilly.com. It's easy, we keep the price down, unlike the American oil companies. We're not gouging anybody. We want you to get the information. And for those of you who are not Premium Members, thank you very much for watching, and we will see you soon.