Sometimes we are the news here at the Daily Wire.
Over the past few weeks, the Daily Wire has been the subject of a veritable cornucopia of hit pieces. There was one from the Washington Post, one from Puck, and finally an especially ridiculous one from the stellar journalists at New York Magazine, who plagiarized their hit piece from the Washington Post.
So much high-level journalism.
New York Magazine claims “there was a time when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media.”
I don&#8217;t remember that time, but it sounds cool.
“That’s all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs,” they continued.
According to New York Magazine, the future of conservatism isn&#8217;t traditional conservatism; free markets, equal rights before the law, checks and balances, and traditional virtue. That&#8217;s done.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2427?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
The future, according to New York Magazine, is Nick Fuentes, confirmed Nazistan and woman-hater, and a man who will never be able to get a human woman pregnant through natural means.
Or Tucker Carlson, confirmed anti-capitalist and Muslim apologist and victim of demon-scratching. Or maybe Candace Owens, the confirmed slanderer of widows and connoisseur of French testicles. Or maybe Megyn Kelly, clickwhore and Grandma Groyper.
New York Magazine writes, “The collapse of the Daily Wire can be seen as a dire warning for traditional Republicans. &#8230; There are two realities to Shapiro conservatism in 2026: It retains a significant foothold among Republican elites, and it is fast being rejected by the future grassroots of the party.”
The polling data shows that is wrong. The positions we take here on the show reflect the broad majority of Republicans. That&#8217;s just the reality.
But I figured that we should address all of this head-on. It&#8217;s true; the Daily Wire has laid off roughly 13% of our workforce since the beginning of the year.
It really sucked. It was truly sad because all those people are great, and any time you lay people off, it really sucks. It&#8217;s tough. It&#8217;s bad for them; it&#8217;s bad for us. And I&#8217;m personally working to find other places of employment for as many of these people as I possibly can, because everybody we let go deserves a job somewhere else; they&#8217;re great folks.
But for our critics, this was all cause for massive celebration, the joyful popping of the corks. (Or maybe, in the case of Nick Fuentes, a victory celebration with catboys and lubricant.)
We&#8217;re honored by the attention. Here&#8217;s the thing: People only tend to write stories like this about major American institutions, such as “Amazon dumps people” or “The Washington Post dumps people.” That&#8217;s a big story.
Thank God we are a major American institution. According to Podtrac, our podcast reaches 41 million people per month. We&#8217;re ranked sixth globally. We have a total of 11 shows. Paramount, for example, is ranked fourth globally, according to that same chart. They have 145 shows.
So on a per-capita basis, we&#8217;re killing it. We are responsible for the two most successful conservative documentaries in history, “Am I Racist?” and “What Is a Woman?” Just this week, Vice President JD Vance was quoting our reporting in his fraud investigations, and our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Olohan, was in the press room asking questions.
There&#8217;s no national media coverage if a Candace Owens producer and her manager quit, or if Megyn Kelly&#8217;s YouTube account starts shedding tens of thousands of subscribers a month, or if Tucker Carlson&#8217;s traffic is disproportionately drawn from Pakistan.
Those are all things that have actually happened, but nobody really cared very much because while those people have significant audience numbers, they don&#8217;t have any real institutional influence. They are not institutions.
That&#8217;s not true of the Daily Wire. We&#8217;re big enough that people care when we trip up. And of course, like any business, we have our ups and we have our downs.
As Mark Twain put it, the reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.
But there&#8217;s something else going on here. Something very clear is going on here.
The media Left, and the Woke Right — Candace and Fuentes and Tucker and Megyn — all of them together form the New Left. They are attempting to destroy traditional conservatism.
That&#8217;s the reason for these attacks. The Daily Wire is the largest traditional conservative media company in the digital space by leaps and bounds. We are multiple times the size of any of these others.
We have many conversations on our platform among our hosts about topics ranging from AI to the Middle East to Catholicism and Judaism. There&#8217;s a lot of rich disagreement here at the Daily Wire, but in the end, what we stand for is pretty simple: truth, virtue, and freedom.
And that is what the New Left would love to destroy. It&#8217;s why the attacks have been coming fast and furious for weeks now. They want to destroy traditional conservatism. It is their goal in life.
There are a couple of different reasons they do this.
The media Left is always happy to run this grift because they love a Right that is crazy. They don&#8217;t want a political Right characterized by normie beliefs. They want a Right that&#8217;s nuts, because the easiest way to make AOC president in the 2028 election is to have that nutty lady run against a conservative movement that is focused on Brigitte Macron&#8217;s testicles, or demon attacks in the wilds of Maine, or why the Jews are responsible for your incurable gingivitis and horrific body odor and inability to get a date.
As for the Woke Right, Fuentes and Tucker and Candace and Kelly, they’re ecstatic about all of this for both business and political reasons. First, they compete with us, and second, they want to tear down traditional conservatism. Their whole goal is to cannibalize the traditional conservative audience.
There are, by all available metrics, a hell of a lot more traditional conservatives and rational people in this country than people who are nuts. But the goal of the New Left is to gut the conservative movement and then turn it into a skin-suit for their own perverse politics.
That is why many of them are now coming out as Democrats. That’s why Russia Today, the official outlet for the Kremlin, is retweeting Nick Fuentes acting triumphant.
I don&#8217;t know; if living in your basement and streaming for eight hours a day while jacking off to catboys is a form of winning, then whatever floats your boat.
It&#8217;s also why the Washington Post is happy to quote Candace Owens, the ranting bag lady of the internet, to explain that The Daily Wire&#8217;s numbers are down.
The alliance between the Left and the Woke Right is genuine, and it&#8217;s active.
Candace says that the Daily Wire&#8217;s numbers are down because people don&#8217;t want to be lectured. This is the teenage point of view from Candace and Megyn and Tucker. They&#8217;re all saying the same thing. They don&#8217;t want to be lectured.
Megyn tweeted in March 2026, “You are the coward, Ben. And your moral preening, priggish lectures and holier-than-thou judgments are the reason you are losing fans.”
All of these people are on the same script. And because they are people who traffic in crap for sweet, sweet lucre, they would love to be spared the lecture. They don&#8217;t want to be lectured as they grift.
Thus, they&#8217;re going to do the same thing that a 13-year-old boy would do if caught doing naughty things on his iPad: “Don&#8217;t you lecture me!”
It turns out sometimes in life, people need lectures in decency and reason and in truth.
You know, like people who smear the wives of murdered men or cover for people who smear the wives of murdered men.
Maybe the people who revive Nazi propaganda, the people who have a weird interest in the non-existent testicles of the spouses of French politicians, or the people who make cause with actual Nazistan deserve lectures. 
Maybe the people who are repeating talking points from Hasan Piker and mimicking the propaganda of Vladimir Putin, or people who just randomly start cursing a ton and are hanging out with groyper-adjacent people and embracing Islam, deserve lectures.
There&#8217;s always a big YouTube audience for their crap. But let&#8217;s be real: There&#8217;s a massive online audience for pornography as well. People addicted to either deserve a bit of a lecture.
But getting back to the central issue: The point of the attacks on the Daily Wire is not just to attack the Daily Wire. It&#8217;s to destroy traditional conservatism.
That&#8217;s the whole thing. The entire thing. All of it. Every bit of it.
The reason they&#8217;re coming after the Daily Wire is that they want to come after you. They want to come after traditional conservatives who believe traditional conservative things.
It is no coincidence that at the same time the Washington Post and New York Magazine and all the rest of these legacy Left publications are attacking the Daily Wire, they&#8217;re also writing Strange New Respect features on Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson.
The Left wants those people to win — and they&#8217;re not hiding it very well. New York Magazine&#8217;s piece says,”Like the Rockefeller Republican of yore, the Shapiro Republican could go extinct entirely.”
That&#8217;s what they want. They want traditional normie Republicans to go away. It&#8217;s what they want, and it&#8217;s what they hope for.
Perhaps it will turn out that all these people who hate conservatism and what I consider to be traditional American principles are correct; maybe it&#8217;ll turn out that the future of the Right — perverted by the algorithmic insanity of the internet — is slopulism, the Tucker-style grievance conspiracism, complete with the night-scratching demons, or Candace Owens’s usual brand of kookery, or Nick Fuentes’ transgressive Nazi cosplay or Theo Von&#8217;s man-child podcast illiteracy.
Maybe that&#8217;s where the Right goes. Maybe that&#8217;s what comes next. Maybe that&#8217;s all facilitated by the click-whoring of the Megyn Kellys of the world and justified by an appeal to audience numbers, because none of these people ever appeal to morality; they just point to their clicks.
Maybe “Idiocracy” wasn&#8217;t a satire. Maybe it was a prophetic documentary.
But here&#8217;s the thing: From where I sit, that does not change one single thing for me.
Not a single thing.
I&#8217;ve been doing this since I was 17. I started writing a syndicated political column when I was 17. I didn&#8217;t do that because I wanted to get rich that way; that’s not how you get rich.
I got into politics because I cared about the truth, about saying things that I believed to be eternal and true, because I care about the ideas of conservatism.
It&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve done that for all these years.
I care about free markets, and I care about private property, and I care about equal rights before the law and checks and balances and the Constitution.
I care about all of those things.
I care about the America the Founders promised us, and the America our parents and grandparents fought for, worked for, and died for.
And I&#8217;m not going to lie for cash. I&#8217;m not going to do it.
I&#8217;m not going to tell you about the wonders of Moscow supermarkets or the glories of Sharia Law in Qatar. I&#8217;m not going to pander for clicks by pretending that Erika Kirk might have been complicit in Charlie Kirk&#8217;s murder, or that perverse and malicious questions about TPUSA’s “cover-up” are somehow a bizarre form of investigative journalism.
I&#8217;m not going to wink and nod at the transgressiveness of the Nazi incels, or chuckle along with people who pretend that “a conspiratorial elite” is the reason your life isn&#8217;t everything that you want it to be in the freest and most prosperous country in world history. I&#8217;m going to be grateful for America. I&#8217;m going to point out what&#8217;s great about America and what our principles are.
I&#8217;m not going to do any of that other stuff because I got into this business to do precisely the opposite. I haven&#8217;t changed my principles. I&#8217;ve been doing this for 25 years. I have not changed my principles.
There&#8217;s a question I get a lot these days from friends and family. People will come up and say, &#8220;What happened to all these people?&#8221;
They understand New York Magazine and Washington Post and what they are. But what happened to Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly, and all the rest?
I don&#8217;t know the answer because I&#8217;m not a psychiatrist.
But here&#8217;s what I do know. Nobody has ever asked that question about me. No one. Because my worldview has not changed, it has not changed. 
My principles haven&#8217;t changed because I think they&#8217;re true and good, and they won&#8217;t change.
So in the end, take it or leave it. If people decide they don&#8217;t want to hear it, it&#8217;s a free country; that&#8217;s their choice.
But I am willing to bet my future and the future of America that more Americans agree with me than agree with the people who want to destroy the Daily Wire. I&#8217;m betting there are far more rational people in this country than conspiracy-mongering nutjobs. I&#8217;m betting that there are far more people in America who believe in truth and virtue and freedom than people who revel in grievance and demoralization and stupidity.
Maybe I&#8217;m wrong. Maybe we lose.
But that doesn&#8217;t change a thing. It doesn&#8217;t matter.
Because the only thing that matters is the only thing that has ever mattered to me: speaking the truth, whether people like it or not.
That’s because facts still don&#8217;t care about your feelings.

DW_superhero

The Daily Wire Responds To The Haters Rooting For Its Death

Ben Shapiro

New Left

New Right

Opinion

China is not just America&#8217;s geopolitical opponent; they are our geopolitical enemy. They have been our geopolitical enemies since the establishment of the Chinese Communist regime in 1949.
We may have spent decades pretending that this isn&#8217;t true; Richard Nixon famously moved to open China as a way of separating China from the Soviet Union, and some neoliberals may have opened our markets to Chinese goods, hoping that free markets would lead to political moderation, but all that time, China was still our enemy.
The People&#8217;s Republic of China is a historically mass-murdering, currently terrorist-supporting, surveillance state of unprecedented proportions directed at destroying America&#8217;s global hegemony.
And they&#8217;re taking the long view. They can wait us out. They are taking advantage of our openness in order to defeat us. Whether it&#8217;s stealing literally tens of billions of dollars in intellectual property, stacking American universities with Chinese operatives, or infiltrating our political system, China is our geopolitical enemy.
This came to the fore in 2020, when China unleashed the Wuhan virus on the rest of humanity by lying and pretending that it was not transmissible from human to human, and by lying to the W.H.O., which was basically a Chinese front organization at that point.
Many folks have pointed out that we have supply chains that lead back to China, and we need to find ways to actually decouple from China.
So what should we be doing?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2424?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
We need to use both the carrot and the stick. That means we need to cut good trade deals with countries such as Canada. We need to cut better trade deals with all of the people who might move toward China but might move toward us.
We need to isolate China by flexing our economic power. The way you flex your economic power isn&#8217;t just about telling people they can&#8217;t access our markets unless we get better access to theirs. The way that you flex your economic power is by cutting deals that isolate China.
You tell countries: Pick between us. You can either have access to American markets or to Chinese manufacturing. Those are your choices.
If we utilized our power in this way, we could isolate China.
We can also cut off their sources of revenue and power. President Donald Trump has been doing this with alacrity. If you look at Trump&#8217;s foreign policy and what he has been doing, much of it is directed at minimizing Chinese power and influence. The operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela was designed to cut off a chief source of oil revenue for China.
Much of what is directed against Iran is actually directed against China. China receives 10-15% of its oil imports from Iran.
Isolating Iran cuts off a source of power and revenue for China. Helping Ukraine to defeat Russia in Ukraine is a way of cutting off a support base for China, because Russia is basically a giant gas station for China at this point.
What else can we do? Strengthen our own economy.
One of the big problems we have is the massive dependency in the United States on China buying our debt. China owns trillions of dollars in American debt. They buy American bonds. The tacit threat in doing so is that, at a certain strategic point, they could flood the market with those American bonds.
They could take a loss. They could cram that down on their own citizens, just make their own citizens poorer. They don&#8217;t really care about their citizens.
This is a stark reminder that if you wish to be a world power, you cannot be a bloated welfare state.
I know that there&#8217;s a third rail of American politics, and that third rail of American politics is all of the entitlement programs. President Trump and his administration have taken the position that the entitlement programs in the United States require no systemic changes.
The problem with that perspective is that when you bloat your own economy, when you create enormous anchors on the American ship of state, it is very difficult to move in the ways you need to move.
Our debt is a huge problem. What we should be doing is getting lean and mean in terms of how we actually run our ship of state. We should make our economy more innovative, lower taxes, and cut down the bloated welfare state.
Finally, we badly need to cut off China&#8217;s avenues for stealing our IP and destroying our institutions. One easy way to do that: Zero Chinese foreign exchange students. Zero.
I understand that there is a strong incentive for our university systems to bring in Chinese foreign exchange students, since foreign students pay full freight while American students pay a discounted rate.
We should not be importing students from places that hate the United States in order to study at our universities. Period. End of story. I do not care whether those are students from Iran, and I do not care whether those are students from sub-Saharan Africa. I don&#8217;t care whether they are students from China; it doesn&#8217;t matter.
Bringing people to the United States to access our systems and then going back to their home countries is a gigantic mistake. There is no upside for us. It is all downside.
To pretend that some geopolitical enemies do not take advantage of our openness here in the United States to harm us is nonsense. They absolutely do.
All of these things are possible — and necessary.

How America Became Blind To China’s Long Game

The Enemy America Helped Build Into A Global Superpower

Communist China

Foreign Policy

President Donald Trump is headed to China this week, and according to the legacy media, he is in a weak position. He has no cards to play. The Chinese have the upper hand.
This is total crap. President Trump has spent a decade totally reshaping the global power map. China is in trouble, and Trump is heading into the summit in a power position on every front.
Go back 10 years. Everyone said that China would be dominant 10 years ago.
Wrong.
Today, the Left and the woke Right — which is basically the New Left —  say that America should cede global power to “multi-polarity,” which means China and Russia.
That&#8217;s not just stupid. It makes them useful idiots for the world&#8217;s worst regimes.
According to some sources, China is overconfident. They believe that they have the upper hand. The Chinese government is allowing people in China to see what&#8217;s happening in America, and because that coverage is often negative about America, it&#8217;s reinforcing the Chinese government&#8217;s perception of its own strength.
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Now, Trump is headed to China, and our beloved legacy media is chanting that multi-polarity is happening.
Wrong.
China is in its weakest global position in at least a couple of decades.
China is an awful, terrible, autocratic, economically fascist, one-party state. They&#8217;ve had serious systemic problems for years, decades, even up to today. Those problems have been masked over the last three decades or so by China&#8217;s shift from a completely closed economy in the 1970s to one that engages with world markets, moving from communism at home to a form of mercantilism under the predecessors of Xi Jinping.
There are always moronic economists here in the West who are in love with the idea of a mercantilist, centralized state, meaning a state in which the government directs where private money should be spent and determines which trade deals can be made. Everything is government-sponsored. Everything is government-subsidized. Everything is government-regulated.
A lot of economists love this stuff because it gives them the illusion of control.
But China is not the economic powerhouse they&#8217;re making it out to be.
China can direct its economy in a few different directions with serious power, and it can take whatever it has of its economy, cobble that together, and then can punch in one direction.
For example, if they want to generate extraordinary levels of power, they can build many nuclear plants or dig for coal, and they don&#8217;t care about the environmental effects.
Thus, they can really out-produce us in terms of energy. And they can build some new cars that are pretty competitive by stealing and adapting Western technology, which they do.
But let us be real. The Chinese economy is not truly competitive with the American economy in any serious sense. Their products are not better than ours. Their services are not better than ours. Their economy is not better than ours. Not even close.
They lack innovation. So they can build these gigantic labs, and they can force a bunch of people into those labs, but when you don&#8217;t have free markets, you have a problem. The system of free markets allows for better products and services because of competition.
You want to know why every major AI company is located in the United States? Because they&#8217;re all competing with each other. In fact, many of them are located a few blocks from one another in Silicon Valley. That is not atypical in a free market economy.
China has a serious debt problem. They hide their debt problem by stealing money from their citizens.
We&#8217;re always hearing about the Chinese military; they have a gigantic nuclear arsenal. But technologically speaking, they are far behind the United States now. Maybe they can pick it up, but not if they&#8217;re also lagging in AI, which is why we need to win the AI race.
The only thing that can solve China&#8217;s demographic, productivity, and military problems is winning the AI race.
This is why it&#8217;s so stupid when you see people from the Left to the woke Right making the case for AI in the United States to be set back.
It&#8217;s nuts. That would hand global power to the Chinese.
You&#8217;re constantly hearing about China&#8217;s gigantic army. It’s huge, but manpower isn&#8217;t everything, as we saw in the Ukraine war.
Similar to Russia’s, the Chinese military isn&#8217;t up to snuff. China relies on older, less sophisticated chips. What&#8217;s more, China doesn&#8217;t yet have the capacity to project deepwater power. They have many boats in their navy, which is effective in coastal zones, but they have no capacity to project power beyond those zones.
China&#8217;s entire governmental system is built around a lack of competition. The problem with Chinese centralized control is that it cannot produce innovation or building or thriving.
President Trump knows all of this, and he has been spending the last 10 years putting the screws to China. It is the through line of his foreign policy.
People look at Trump&#8217;s foreign policy and ask, &#8220;What&#8217;s he doing in Iran? I don&#8217;t understand what he’s doing in Venezuela. I don&#8217;t understand what he’s doing with Japan.&#8221;
All of it is oriented to China. All of it.
President Trump is opportunistic in foreign policy terms. He waits for an opportunity to arise, and then he takes advantage of it.
A dozen years ago, people were talking about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or what they called the Silk Road Initiative. It was designed to basically create massive debt traps for countries. China would give them free money, but it wasn&#8217;t free; it would come with constraints. Those countries that were poor would take the loans, and then Beijing would basically foreclose on the loans and take control of property in strategic areas.
Countries were joining because they saw free money.
But it turns out the countries have been withdrawing from the Belt and Road Initiative, and even Chinese investment in the Belt and Road has been dropping precipitously.
The reality is that when it comes to the economic battle between China and the United States, we have the upper hand.

Trump_Xi

Trump’s Biggest Advantage Over China Is Obvious

Barack Obama was a horrible president, a terrible radical, and the best liar in modern American history, bar none.
He promoted the most radical policies: racial polarization, socialization of the health care system, surrender abroad, abortion, and trans radicalism here at home.
Then he was defeated by Donald Trump. There would be no Donald Trump as president without the far-Left insanity of the Obama era.
We tend to think of Trump as the defeat of Barack Obama.
But what if the Obama era is just beginning again? What if Donald Trump defeating Obamaism was not “Return of the Jedi,”  but “A New Hope”? Sure, President Trump blew up the Obama Death Star in 2016. But what if Barack Obama is back, building a newer, larger, more powerful Death Star?
What if what comes next in the story is the Obama empire striking back?
Barack Obama and his boys are taking over the Democratic Party. They are radical. They are vicious. They are incredibly talented.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2421?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
And yes, they can win. That&#8217;s what comes next in this story if we don&#8217;t stop it.
Obama has been back in the headlines a lot recently. You&#8217;ll remember that he went and read books to children with New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. And then he sat down with Stephen Colbert on &#8220;The Late Show&#8221; on CBS.
Obama is wildly talented, so talented that every Democratic politician since the Obama era has lived in his shadow. He is charming and avuncular in his approach.
Even I, who think that Obama was the death of modern American politics, acknowledge how talented Barack Obama is.
People perceive Barack Obama as moderate because he is charming and because he is unthreatening to people in his affect.
But Barack Obama is, was, and continues to be a radical leftist. He said Mamdani is just a normal politician who wants to fight for affordable housing. That is not true. Zohran Mamdani is an open socialist who openly sympathizes with terror groups.
And Barack Obama is hugging him and saying he&#8217;s just a normal Democrat, because Zohran Mamdani and he are the same. Barack Obama is just more talented at hiding who he is and who he was.
Obama thought of himself simultaneously as from America and also from outside America. If you read his original memoir, &#8220;Dreams From My Father,&#8221; he talks about his identity conflict between being an American growing up in Hawaii and his father&#8217;s past in Kenya, his identity as a black man, but also as a person raised by white grandparents.
What this amounts to in the end is a third-world philosophy. He best summarizes this in &#8220;Dreams From My Father,&#8221; where, in the most revealing paragraph that Obama ever wrote, he declared:
<blockquote>I know I have seen the desperation and disorder of the powerless, how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago&#8217;s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder, alternating as it does between a dull complacency and when the disorder spills out of its prescribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware, is inadequate to the task.</blockquote>
What he was saying was that the situation of every poor person on planet Earth, in America and outside America, lay at the foot of American capitalism and imperialism, that the desperation and disorder of the powerless should be laid at the feet of the powerful.
This has been the guiding philosophy of Barack Obama for his entire career: Somehow, America is guilty of all of these crimes. Obama has always been radical.
The reason I&#8217;m saying this is because he is reclaiming the leadership position of the Democratic Party. He is the glue that holds that party together. He is trying to build back his coalition. He looks at the period since he was president and sees a Hillary Clinton who did not demonstrate the capacity to hold this coalition together. He sees a Joe Biden who lucked into the presidency and a Kamala Harris who was wildly untalented, and says, “I can do this myself. I will put it back together, except more radical this time.” That’s because the Democratic Party has moved in the direction that Barack Obama set .
In 2008, he suggested that the reason people opposed his radicalism politically was that they were bitterly clinging to God and guns and all of the conservative things, but somehow Barack Obama has been retconned into some sort of moderate.
In 2008, he ran as a fake centrist, a racial unifier, but by 2012, he was running as a polarizing, race-centric candidate, a left-wing wrecking ball. He sued nuns to promote abortion. He forced public schools to allow boys to use girls&#8217; bathrooms. His IRS targeted political opposition. Barack Obama lied in 2008 about his position on same-sex marriage, and then bathed the White House in a rainbow flag. Barack Obama promoted racially polarizing lies in order to weave DEI into every area of American life. He revitalized the Iranian regime with billions of dollars in cash. He let Russia have its way; he let China expand its power base throughout the world. He “led from behind.”
And then, through the power of the mainstream media, that was forgotten because the media decided Barack Obama was a messianic figure and they would never criticize him.
The way you probably remember Barack Obama right now is that he was not that bad compared to Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, or AOC. The media are still pretending his administration was scandal-free. They cover for his failures. They explain away his lies. They pretend that he is some philosopher-king instead of the architect of the radical Left.
Obama is going to &#8220;Mamdani&#8221; the entire Democratic Party top-down. He oversaw the Democratic Party between 2008 and 2016, and now he&#8217;s taking control again.
I know it feels like the Democrats are in disarray with no leadership.
They are not.
Obama is and has been the single most radical active driver in his party. He did not go away. He&#8217;s not George W. Bush, who was president and then went away.
Obama has been active, and he&#8217;s going to get more active. He is a master at shifting ideological goalposts without being noticed, cloaking his radicalism in some form of moderation. The reason that Obama is particularly threatening is that one, he&#8217;s an excellent organizer, and two, he is the single most creative and convincing liar in modern American history.
He told Colbert, “I&#8217;m worried about the Republican Party, not just the Democratic Party. When I was president, people would ask me what change would you like to see in Washington? I&#8217;d say, I&#8217;d love a loyal opposition. I&#8217;d love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways, that didn&#8217;t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in the rule of law and judicial independence and empirical evidence and science and wasn&#8217;t constantly tapping into our worst impulses. And there has been a Republican Party like that in the past, and I want to see that return, because I think you have to have two healthy parties.&#8221;
That’s a lie.
He wrecked that Republican Party. You know that kinder, gentler Republican Party, the one that was the loyal opposition, the one that ran Mitt Romney for president in 2012, the cleanest candidate in the history of American politics? Barack Obama wrecked that guy. His allies literally put out an ad in 2012 saying that Mitt Romney fired a man so that his wife would die of cancer.
Obama pretends to be moderate; that&#8217;s the whole game. But he is going to be as radical as humanly possible. He&#8217;s setting up the system.
Barack Obama has the capacity to frame the Trump era as an interregnum in American history, a short detour on the road to left-wing devastation.
On the Right, we tend to think of this story as ending with President Trump victorious over all of his enemies.
But what if the Democratic Party is preparing to come back into power, sweep back into power, and do all the most radical things, led by Barack Obama, who was always radical but was great at hiding it?
How can the radicals win? If they get some help from the New Left, as I spoke about on Wednesday&#8217;s show.
That&#8217;s all it takes.
The coalition that is forming is the Barack Obama coalition.
And it should frighten us.

Barack Vader 3

Obama’s ‘Empire Strikes Back’? Why The Real Fight May Still Be Ahead

Barack Obama

Democrats

Mayor Mamdani And Governor Hochul Make FIFA World Cup Announcement

The Bizarre Strategy Where Losing Actually Helps You Win

The Worst People Imaginable Are Building The Future

Artificial Intelligence

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Google Gemini

Matt Walsh

Socialists

Sonia Sotomayor

Zohran Mamdani

Across the board, trust in our institutions in the United States is at an all-time low.
Trust in the media is at an all-time low. Trust in church is at an all-time low. Trust in the scientific establishment is at an all-time low. Trust in government is at an all-time low. And, of course, trust in academia is at an all-time low.
Because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another.
You might think that it would be the opposite, that we mistrust one another, and therefore we mistrust our institutions.
That’s not the case. Our institutions shape us, and the way that we interact with the world is through the mechanism of institutions.
If you grew up in a religious community, going to church helped shape you. The rules of the church helped shape you. The people you spent time with shaped you. The institution of your family shaped you. Your school or university shaped you. 
As we lose faith in all of those institutions to shape us, we are incapable of coming together anymore.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2416-2-university-of-austin-speech"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Institutions tend to foster a common orientation, which is why Alexis de Tocqueville was such a big fan of them. It&#8217;s why in Democracy in America, he made the suggestion that one of the things that made America so different from all other countries was the plethora of social institutions in which Americans were enmeshed. He noted that in most other countries, people had formal institutions that they were forced to interact with, but in America, everybody was a member of a social institution or many social institutions — and that created this extraordinary social fabric that was durable, that allowed for innovation, that allowed for freedom. 
Without trust, there can&#8217;t be freedom at all. If the institutions that provide the shaping function that set the rules for our lives, the way we interact with the world, die, so does the social fabric. And then, when the social fabric dies, we stop attributing decent motivation to each other.
Instead, we start engaging in what the philosopher Alistair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: the belief that everybody except for you is motivated by something nefarious. Instead of having a political conversation, what you do is attribute a motive to the person&#8217;s policy.
You shouldn&#8217;t be attributing motivations to other people unless you have good evidence that their motivation is malign.
But that&#8217;s what we jump to when there is no trust.
I trust my wife. I&#8217;m not worried that when she criticizes me, it&#8217;s coming from a terrible place. I trust the people that I go to synagogue with. If they have a critique or we have a disagreement, I don&#8217;t immediately jump to, “They do it because they hate me.”
“You&#8217;re doing it because you hate me” is the death of politics, because if that&#8217;s the case, then how exactly are we supposed to live together and work together and create policy together?
Religious institutions used to be truth-making institutions, but the question of whether those institutions ought to pursue truth has been supplanted by the idea that they ought to do politics. In many cases, they have become progressive bastions where people go to eat pizza and play guitar rather than unite with some eternal value.
That is why many people don&#8217;t attend anymore. Why go there when you can go to a sports event instead?
We saw the scientific establishment move from evidence to narrative, most obviously during COVID. The result for an enormous number of people was to completely discard science in favor of nonsense that has zero evidence to back it.
The slide from truth to narrative is almost invariably followed by a slide from narrative to conspiracism or nonsense.
The move from seeking the truth at universities to “We are going to engineer a population of discontented people who believe that the system must be turned on its ear” led people to stop trusting the universities.
The American government was built to pursue one fundamental principle above all: epistemic humility, the idea that you might not be correct.
If you think you&#8217;re always correct, you might want to be a tyrant. 
Humility with regard to other people in your society, the idea that maybe they&#8217;re right on occasion, maybe you&#8217;re wrong on occasion, has to be rooted in trust of our fellow citizens.
We have checks and balances in the United States government to prevent it from swinging side to side to stop radical things from happening. That is legitimately the point of the American government. Unless we have a very broad agreement on something, it should not happen. That is why we have a bicameral legislature. It is why we have three branches of government.
But when that wears away, when we hate each other, what we end up with is a battle to the death in the blood sport of politics.
We get angry at the checks and balances because it&#8217;s not possible that people who oppose me are correct; those people are malign. “Those people want bad things to happen to me and to my family, and so I&#8217;m going to grab the government. I&#8217;m going to kill the filibuster. I&#8217;m gonna stack the Supreme Court. I&#8217;m going to add states willy-nilly to the United States Senate, and then I&#8217;m just going to run right over everybody.”
In the absence of rebuilding trust in the institutions, you end up with a war of all against all on the governmental level. And things will not go well.
When you get rid of the fundamental epistemic humility of the government, checks and balances give way to a centralized tyranny.
If you don&#8217;t trust your neighbor and you think your neighbor is taking advantage of you, you might say that the government should just do what you want it to do. Grab that brass ring and do exactly what you want with that power.
In order for a solid debate to take place, there must be a fundamental sharing of values and rules of the road. There ought not to be debate about fundamental propositions, because if you are having to debate individual value — such as the idea that individual human beings have individual worth — you&#8217;re arguing with something outside the system.
If you have to argue with somebody about the worthiness of truth, that is not an argument that can ever be won, because truth itself is an assumed value.
This is why, in the Declaration of Independence, when the Founders said that there are certain rights that are self-evident, they didn&#8217;t mean that they prove themselves. They mean that these are the fundamental building blocks of a society. And if you question them, the society crumbles.
Only a carefully cultivated moral culture that values truth and evidence and logic and moral decency, that actually protects free speech and property rights and equal rights under the law, is capable of restoring our institutions.
We shouldn&#8217;t be debating about fundamental moral matters, things like “lying is wrong.” If I have to debate you about that, there&#8217;s no debate.
Individual human beings have moral worth, and their autonomy has moral value.
Those are the values that we begin with, and those are the values that need to be embodied in institutions.

Rotten_Core

The Rot Spreading Through America’s Core

When A Nation Forgets Its Foundations

Church

Family Values

Federal Government

Founding Fathers

Religion

TOPSHOT-US-BRITAIN-ROYALS-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY

Ilhan Omar Hits Rock Bottom With Her Dumbest Remarks Yet As Trump Delivers His Best Speech Ever

Congress

Donald Trump

Great Britain

Ilhan Omar

King Charles III

Revolutionary War

Initially, it was all very dapper: the tea, the crumpets, and the fanfare. They were all good and fine.
But then the King of England, King Charles III, decided to use his royal prerogative and lecture us on how to run our country, on how America ought to lead the world.
Shut the hell up.
It’s true that there are many lessons to be learned from Great Britain over the past century.
But the biggest one is this: Don’t do what they did.
King Charles is currently representing a civilization that no longer exists. He&#8217;s an empty crown, sitting atop a civilization that gave up the ghost a long time ago. There&#8217;s only one takeaway Americans should have from the King&#8217;s visit: If Great Britain has zigged, we ought to zag.
Britain is a cautionary tale. If we follow their path, we collapse the same way they have.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2416?elementPosition=5&amp;row=5&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Charles’ visit to the United States began with Revolutionary-Era soldiers welcoming the king in the Rose Garden.
Somewhat ironic; the last king who experienced Revolutionary-era soldiers would not have been welcomed in quite this way.
As a student of American history and as a devotee of British philosophers ranging from John Locke to Edmund Burke, I love the fact that the United States is rooted in Anglican and English history. I love it. It&#8217;s great.
Charles called the bond between the United States and the UK priceless and eternal. He joked about the idea that if it were not for Great Britain, we would be speaking French, a response to President Trump saying that if it were not for us, the British would be speaking German (I assume Charles was referring to the French and Indian War, which doesn&#8217;t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, because if the French had won the French and Indian War, it is very likely that many of the settlers would have returned to England).
But then the king decided it was time to lecture the United States. And this is the part to which I object.
It began with him talking about Christianity. He said, “For many here and for myself, the Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration that guides us not only personally.”
So far, so good, although I&#8217;m not sure why Democrats were clapping.
“Together as members of our community, having devoted a large part of my life to interfaith relationships and greater understanding,” he continued. “It is that faith in the triumph of light over darkness, which I have found confirmed countless times through it. I am inspired by the profound respect that develops as people of different faiths grow in their understanding of each other.”
There we go. This was all going to lead up to a bit of a lecture about America&#8217;s foreign policy.
As a person who is not Christian, I have tremendous admiration for Christianity and what it has done in the world. I encourage people to go to church all the time, but it turns out that if you want a robust Christianity, that Christianity cannot be based on vague principles. It has to be based on faith.
So when you hear the Brits lecturing the United States, a much more religious country, about Christianity and interfaith relations, let&#8217;s be real: Great Britain has taken religion and trodden it through the mud.
The statistics don&#8217;t lie. According to the UK&#8217;s 2022 census, 51% of people in the UK identify as having no religion, according to a 2024 British Social Attitudes Survey. A paltry 9% of the population attends a religious service once a week or more.
And as far as Anglican identity, it doesn&#8217;t exist anymore. 2.6% of people aged 16 to 34 identify with the Church of England.
Meanwhile, the tremendous increase in radical Islam in the kingdom has been overwhelming. 15% of London, at a minimum, is Muslim. A huge percentage of those people are radicalized. According to one survey conducted in 2016 by the polling exchange, 4% of British Muslims say that 9/11 was executed by al Qaeda, 7% say the Jews, and 31% say the American government.
Great Britain imported millions of people who believe this. Millions of people. This is where their interfaith nonsense has gotten them.
So, as far as being lectured on Christianity and interfaith attitudes by the Brits, the answer is no.
You know where interfaith is going in Britain. Interfaith is about tolerance for radical Islam, which is why today, the day after King Charles visited the United States, there was an attack in Golders Green, which is a very heavily Jewish part of London, in which a radical Muslim took out a kitchen knife and started stabbing people who were wearing Jewish garb.
According to UK government data, there were 15,859 total reported incidents of knife crime in London in 2025 alone. We know that Great Britain&#8217;s interfaith tolerance allowed for gigantic grooming gangs to basically run the place for years on end, out of fear that there might be a backlash to open immigration.
King Charles also took the opportunity to lecture us on climate change. We should mention that the UK has destroyed its own economy on the basis of this nonsense.
Listening to the Brits lecture us on energy production is ridiculous. Roughly 78% of the UK&#8217;s energy still comes from hydrocarbons. That would be things like oil and natural gas. The UK is constantly on the economic edge because of its extraordinary regulations and low domestic gas storage capacity. According to an article in The American Spectator, there&#8217;s a 78% tax rate on North Sea gas production and a nuclear program that&#8217;s not going to deliver energy for a decade.
The energy programs in the UK have driven them into the dirt, economically speaking.
All of this culminated in King Charles lecturing the United States on how to beat swords into plowshares rather than plowshares into swords.
I understand: King Charles represents the monarchy. Keir Starmer&#8217;s government is an appeasement-oriented, left-wing pacifist government.
In order to understand my ire here, I think you have to understand that having the British Crown come to the United States and tell us all about the old-style civilization that Britain basically surrendered in favor of welfare statism is highly irritating. 
In 1933, there was a resolution at Oxford University at their debate club, the so-called King and Country Resolution, in which the students voted, “that this House will under no circumstances fight for its king and country.” This was reflective of British sentiments; an attempt in the aftermath of the course of World War I to recede from global leadership.
You know what ended up happening? It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was recently reading Winston Churchill&#8217;s “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Storm-Second-World-War/dp/039541055X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0">The Gathering Storm</a>,” which is, of course, a classic. It is the first volume of his Second World War series. In the beginning pages of the book, Churchill explains his purpose in writing the book, saying he was writing to demonstrate “how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous, how the structure and habits of democratic states, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lacked those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to a humble masses. How, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even 10 or 15 years at a time. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger. How the middle course, adopted from desires for safety and quiet life, may be found to lead direct to the bullseye of disaster.” 

He continued, “We shall see how absolute is the need of a broad path of international action, pursued by many states in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics.”
Great Britain is currently telling the United States that we ought not do what we are doing in Iran. They are doing absolutely nothing to help us in the Strait of Hormuz. They are perfectly willing to allow China to maximize its global influence. Only in the case of Ukraine has Britain taken a leading role in any sort of way, and even there, it&#8217;s basically to beg us for money and armaments.
After World War II, Great Britain decided it would give up global leadership in favor of irrelevance and socialism.
No country has done as much damage to itself as Great Britain through pacifism, socialism, redistributionism, and open borders.
The Brits can&#8217;t even leave their kids money, because when you give up global leadership, free markets, private property, and skew in favor of socialist idiocy and global weakness, you become irrelevant.
You don&#8217;t get to come here and lecture us about any of this.

The Empty Crown: Why America Should Ignore King Charles

Christianity

England

Radical Islam

Apparently, one of the most powerful leftist charities in the world has been donating money to groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a left-wing agitprop organization that raises roughly $100 million every year, has been handing money to white supremacists.
Why in the world would they do that? What the hell is going on?
Let&#8217;s begin with this premise. The demand for white supremacy on the Left outstrips the supply.
What do I mean by this?
I mean that people on the Left think, broadly speaking, that Americans are horrible racists. Then they look around at the world, and it turns out that Americans are some of the least racist people in history.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2411?elementPosition=4&amp;row=5&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Americans basically rank dead last in racism on the planet right now. If you go to any other country on planet Earth, you will notice significantly more racism than there is in the United States.
If you go to Japan, there’s a fair bit of racism, as in South Korea, as in India.
But when you come to the United States, the polls suggest that the vast majority of Americans are fine with living next to people of different races and fine with intermarrying with people of other races. We have very high rates of ethnic intermarriage in America. We are an extraordinarily tolerant and diverse people.
But for the Left to make its play for a communitarian, centralized government, they have to constantly suggest that the government must be there to ram decency and goodness down the throats of those evil racists.
And the only way that you can sell that proposition is to create a false supply of racism, which brings us to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the most powerful left-wing groups in America. It&#8217;s a supposedly civil rights nonprofit originally founded in 1971, in Montgomery, Alabama. It built a reputation on using litigation and “research” — pretty shoddy “research” — to combat what they have called white supremacists and other domestic extremist groups while advocating for marginalized communities as their stated purpose. Over time, that turned into monitoring so-called extremist movements. They published a <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/">hate group list</a>, a <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map/">hate map</a>, and they pushed programs on bias and intolerance.
This was used to mainline their intel into everything from media to education to law enforcement. The FBI, up until October 2025, was using inputs from the SPLC to determine the kinds of people to monitor.
Even in the private sector, SPLC data was being used. Amazon, under Jeff Bezos, said that it used SPLC data to decide whom to exclude from its Amazon Smile charity programs.
How prominent has the SPLC been? Since 2010, a search of The New York Times pulls up 711 instances where the SPLC is cited as an authority on hate or discrimination statistics.
They are the go-to. The New York Times sees a Jussie Smollett story, and they call up somebody from the SPLC to talk about it. There&#8217;s a Nick Fuentes story; they call the SPLC to talk about it. There&#8217;s a Charlie Kirk story, and they call the SPLC to talk about it. 
The New York Times repeatedly quoted the SPLC data in its coverage of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the media routinely claimed that President Trump said there were &#8220;fine people on both sides,” which was not what he actually said. They lied about that, but the “Unite the Right” rally has been the calling card for entire swaths of the Left for a very, very long time. The New York Times even quoted the SPLC leadership to provide historical context for the rise of the alt-right.
In fact, a Google Gemini search of The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today shows that 20 to 25% of all analytical pieces on the “Unite the Right” rally referenced data or quoted directly from the SPLC.
Why is this relevant? 
It turns out that the SPLC provided some of the funding for the “Unite the Right” rally. Yesterday, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanch, announced criminal charges for the Southern Poverty Law Center. 
He said:
<blockquote>Today, a few minutes ago, in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11 count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups. As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.</blockquote>
The DOJ is saying that the Southern Poverty Law Center was basically paying all sorts of white supremacists and extremists to generate more white supremacy so that they could continue fundraising.
Here&#8217;s what’s true virtually everywhere in the nonprofit world — they exist, theoretically, to solve problems. You give money to a nonprofit to solve a problem. If the problem goes away, you no longer give to that nonprofit.
Let&#8217;s say that you are the leader of a nonprofit or your leadership class of a nonprofit, and it turns out the thing you&#8217;re trying to solve has been pretty much solved in the United States — such as the “racism of the American population.”
When you launched in 1971, racism was a very, very real and ever-present part of American life. But today, racism is not even a blip on most Americans’ radar.
But you&#8217;re the Southern Poverty Law Center, and you need to raise some money.
So what do you do? You create a fake supply of white supremacy so you can go back to your donors and say, “The problem is worse than ever.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is accused of using donor money to pay actual white supremacists.
It&#8217;s totally insane.
According to the <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and">press release</a> from the Justice Department, “Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million and donated funds to individuals were associated with various violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, National Socialist Party of America, the American Nazi Party, and Unite the Right.”
Unite the Right happens to be one that leaps off the page because the SPLC and the Left made bank off the “Unite the Right” rally for years and years and years. It was the key example they used over and over and over again to prove that the Right happened to be racist, even though the Right did not associate with the “Unite the Right” rally.
Blanche said on the Laura Ingraham Show on Tuesday that the Biden administration opened the investigation and then closed the investigation.
I wonder why.
“How did they get away with this for so long?” Ingraham asked.
“It&#8217;s a great question. I said today during the press conference that we know that this investigation was opened during the Biden administration and then mysteriously closed,” Blanche answered. “I really don&#8217;t have any information about why it was closed. And then we started again last year, the FBI did, working with the U.S. attorney in Alabama. And it&#8217;s extraordinarily egregious. You just talked about it. But imagine a donor to the SPLC, if they were told, ‘By the way, we&#8217;re going to give the money you&#8217;re giving us to the Ku Klux Klan &#8230; in some cases over $1 million.’ I mean, it&#8217;s incredible.”
We should remember the SPLC’s game was to label anyone remotely conservative an extremist.
This is the game. It does lend itself to the idea that much of what we consume in the media, on social media, and in politics is just not true. As for the “hatred” that a lot of Americans feel for other Americans, a lot of it is ginned up by groups like the SPLC.
The fakery here is quite real, and people make money off of it because the algorithm favors it. The algorithm favors amygdala-friendly responses.
The amygdala is the emotional center of your brain. It’s what responds to fear signals. The prefrontal cortex is the reasoning center of your brain, which says that the fear is not what you should be worried about. It&#8217;s not real.
The internet and virality are designed to appeal to your amygdala.
Thus, if you&#8217;re the SPLC, you say, “White supremacy is a threat to you and your family; it&#8217;s virulent, it&#8217;s violent, and it&#8217;s racist.” The whole pitch goes directly to the amygdala, because at no point does the prefrontal cortex kick in and say, “Wait, hold on, I know none of my neighbors are racist. They don&#8217;t like racism. They think it&#8217;s bad.”
But because the amygdala has kicked in, you now think worse of your neighbors, even though you have never really thought about the issue using the reasoning part of your brain.
The same is true in the algorithmic space online. There are a lot of accounts that go extremely viral because they use extraordinarily charged language, which tends to feature second-person pronouns. If I speak directly to you, the minute I say “you,” it&#8217;s probably firing up the centers in your brain that are more emotionally resonant. If I use words like “evil” or “wicked” or “soulless,” those are words that are much more likely to fire up the emotional centers of your brain than to appeal to your prefrontal cortex.
It&#8217;s a shortcut for politicians and influencers — and for groups like the SPLC. 
The more that you can use emotionally charged language that is second-person directed, the better you will do.
That&#8217;s why we all seem to be living in a world that is totally different from reality these days. The more time you spend online, the more you see this sort of stuff that is routinely retweeted and reposted, and is always deeply emotionally charged stuff.
That shtick is the entire game. And that&#8217;s why you feel alienated.
It&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve said a thousand times, and I will say it a thousand times more, that you ought to talk to your neighbors in person, because when you talk with your neighbors, your prefrontal cortex will kick in as opposed to your fear center in the amygdala.
And you might learn that the neighbor with whom you disagree about tax rates actually is not a racist.

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There is a current tendency to blame free markets and technology for dyspepsia with the economy, as if there is a nefarious group of people destroying your way of life.
People are literally trying to attack data centers.
As David Friedberg noted on the “<a href="https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2046280245758787914">All-In Podcast</a>”:
<blockquote>Most people in America are starting to really hate rich people. And there&#8217;s no physical space that better represents the wealth in America, the wealth creation that&#8217;s happened that a lot of people feel left behind from, than the data center. It is the temple of the wealthy. It is the way that the rich, elite, tech, kind of political, connected billionaires that we&#8217;re obviously all attached to are taking from the poor, getting themselves ahead, shooting themselves to space, leaving everyone else behind, and the data center, I think, is the representation of their progress. And it is a representation of the progress that others don&#8217;t feel.
For a consumer&#8217;s life to actually be altered in a meaningfully positive way, most people don&#8217;t feel that yet. The best thing they see is some medical advice they&#8217;re getting on ChatGPT or something, and that&#8217;s kind of the end of it for them. So I think there&#8217;s a lot of this populism that&#8217;s swollen and that&#8217;s taken over, not just the US, but probably a good chunk of the West. And the data center is the target.</blockquote>
David Friedberg&#8217;s explanation is exactly right. This is the way that economic populists have been pushing.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2410?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Let’s differentiate between moral and economic populism. Moral populism was exemplified by William F. Buckley back in the 1960s when he stated that he would trust the first 100 names in the Harvard phone book on matters of public policy more than he would trust 100 Harvard professors.
The idea was that the common man in the United States — shaped as he or she was by the institutions of church and family and community — had a better moral compass, on average, than the elites.
I totally agree with that, because elites very often believe that they have been freed from these systems of morality.
However, when it comes to the economy, economic populism is virtually the inverse. Economic populism assumes that there should be some sort of centralized control placed into the hands of that central power by “the people,” and centralized control should overwhelm the disseminated knowledge that is implicit in free markets and capital markets.
The basic principle of capitalism is that disparate views on things lead to better outcomes, that differential knowledge and the diffusion of knowledge are actually significantly more effective than one guy at the top with a stick beating people into submission.
But economic populism says that free markets are bad if the product of the free market is something I don&#8217;t like, therefore, we should take power away from the free market to destroy it.
Whenever there is economic unease, people tend to attack free market capitalism, or what they see as the symbols of free market capitalism, and they tend to blame people who are wealthy.
The great lie is that people in the United States are wealthy because they&#8217;re stealing from the poor. It is a full-scale lie. It is not true.
The only places in the world where people are rich because they steal from the poor are communist countries and other forms of tyranny. The reason people get rich in a free market economy is because they are providing products and services at a price people are willing to pay. People want that product or service.
But if you can somehow recast the economy of the United States as “rigged” on behalf of the wealthy and go after the means of production, you target data centers.
What you are going to end up doing, in this view, is overthrow the capitalist system.
The outcome of that will be quite dire.
There is a grievance-based, horseshoe-theory economic Right that is also wildly upset about artificial intelligence data centers because they&#8217;re big and ugly.
You know what else is big and ugly? Walmart — but it’s wonderful for the vast majority of consumers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman&#8217;s home was allegedly targeted in the second attack in just two days; a shot was even fired. This is part and parcel of a broader movement that is targeting technology more generally, including technologies that are required for the United States to win wars.
City Journal <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/palantir-protests-ice-national-security?utm_source=virtuous&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=cjdaily">reported</a> there is a campaign against the military contractor Palantir — which generates extraordinary technologies in terms of intelligence gathering, capacity to target, and much of the actual technology that goes into the machines that we use.
This crosses paths with all of America&#8217;s enemies. America&#8217;s enemies are delighted to watch us destroy ourselves by taking down the technologies that allow us to win.
If you buy into this entire shtick — the idea that AI as a technology must be destroyed — it won&#8217;t be destroyed.
We&#8217;ll just lose.
If you think that China is going to forgo AI, you&#8217;re a fool. They won’t.
If the United States were to heavily restrict AI, not just in terms of preventing its gravest harms, but restricting the development of AI, or if there were to be a political party that attempts to prevent the building of data centers, not for any sort of understandable economic reason — like, for example, make the data centers pay their fair share of electricity production, which I think is a fair argument — if there&#8217;s a broad scale movement to destroy the AI industry out of either misplaced agrarianism or a deep and abiding hatred for capitalism or the generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose.
If the United States heavily restricts AI, not just by preventing its gravest harms but by restricting its development, we will lose. If a political party tries to stop the construction of data centers, we will lose. That is different from making data centers pay their fair share for electricity production, which I think is a fair argument. But if there is a broad-based movement to destroy the AI industry out of misplaced agrarianism, a deep and abiding hatred of capitalism, or a generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose.
China wins.
This is not a vacuum. It is not as though if the United States forgoes AI magically, we would continue to have a burgeoning, wealthy economy, and China goes weapons down.
When it comes to AI, indeed, there are problems, there are dangers — and we should all recognize those dangers, not whistling past the graveyard — but at the same time, it is a tremendous opportunity.
A China in a dominant AI position means a China in a dominant military position. The amount of AI that is being used right now by the United States military in the conflict in Iran and in the operation in Venezuela is tremendous and growing.
If China outpaces us in AI development, that means their military is now superior to ours. If their military is superior to ours, that means they can not only effectuate change in their region, it means they can also spread that technology throughout the world and make other countries dependent on the receipt of that technology.
It means that many, many other countries all over planet Earth would suddenly become dependent on China.
That is a huge problem, and it also leaves China in a dominant economic position, because AI means more productivity. If productivity goes up for China but remains stagnant for the United States, they will outcompete us. If they outcompete us, one of two things happens: Either we block off our economy and become backward and protectionist — meaning we don&#8217;t have any of the best goods and products and services at the best price, we&#8217;re all poorer and we slide into poverty and stagnation — or we have to be dependent on Chinese products, our kids work for Chinese companies, and China is able to spread its influence.
When it comes to the game of economics, you must win.
When it comes to the game of military dominance, you must win.
And when it comes to the technological game, you must win.
The economic populism that&#8217;s been rising says that we ought to tariff our way out of all our problems, that we ought to attack technological development, that it would be great to have an economy based on t-shirts — none of this is going to solve the bigger problem.
Attacking tech CEOs or healthcare CEOs or burning up Teslas and attacking Tesla showrooms or shooting Charlie Kirk or attempting to shoot President Trump — all of these are the most extreme manifestations of an ideology.
That ideology says that you are a victim of American society and therefore you get to do bad things. On a broader political level, you are a victim of American society, and therefore you ought to get together with the other victims, take over the government, and use centralized, tyrannical power r to cram down your view of the world.

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