Trump Butler

FBI Dumps Bizarre New Details About Trump Assassination Attempt. What Else Are They Hiding?

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And now for the stupid controversy of the day. 
Sydney Sweeney is a good-looking woman.
That’s inarguable, but online everything is arguable. She would not be famous if she were not good-looking.
Let’s point out how wild things have gotten. Sydney Sweeney is doing an ad for a sports betting app called Novig.  The ad involves her being scantily clad. In the opening shot, she holds two footballs in front of her greatest assets, then poses, still scantily clad, with various pieces of sporting equipment.
People went crazy. Beatriz Hatz, a U.S. Paralympian and &#8220;Love Island&#8221; season eight contestant, was very, very upset.
When I talk about people who aren&#8217;t exhibitionists, I go straight to &#8220;Love Island&#8221; contestants.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2509?elementPosition=0&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>
Hatz wrote, “Instead of watching Sydney Sweeney&#8217;s ads, let’s watch actual women in sports.”
Sorry that people don&#8217;t want to watch your athletic feats as much as people generally are drawn to good-looking naked people.
American artistic gymnast Gracie Kramer fired, “This ad is honestly infuriating. I&#8217;ve spent my entire life competing in a sport where female athletes have been oversexualized, reduced to our bodies, and forced to fight to be taken seriously for what we can actually do.”
Sydney Sweeney was not claiming to be a gymnast or a baseball player. That was not my impression of that ad. 
Let&#8217;s be real, people weren&#8217;t watching the ad for the sports stats. 
Kramer continued, “So to see women&#8217;s sports once again being marketed through the male gaze feels like a massive step backward. We should not have to take our clothes off to convince men that women belong in sports, or that we&#8217;re only worth watching if we&#8217;re showing enough skin.”
Sweeney was not making the case that she was trying to make the WNBA.
“And if you still don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s that deep, I invite you to do your best to empathize with every female athlete who has had to compete while simultaneously being objectified on the court, disrespected on the field, and oversexualized in the media,” Kramer wrote.
I have a question for Kramer: What does this have to do with you? I feel like you are inserting yourself into this story.
“I don&#8217;t typically speak out on controversial topics, but to me, this isn&#8217;t controversial,” Kramer declared. “This is about demanding respect for female athletes and protecting the future of women in sports.”
What the heck? Sydney Sweeney is not a woman in sports. She&#8217;s a woman in a sports commercial. 
Sweeney posted covers of ESPN&#8217;s Body Issue in response. ESPN has been doing this ridiculous Body Issue for years, where they get a bunch of athletes to pose nude. I always thought it was strange. 
In a statement to the Novig website, Sweeney said, “The campaign was about embracing a fun idea. The concept is simple: Cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor, and a playful edge.”
Our friend Clay Travis had some thoughts, saying:
<blockquote>Women&#8217;s athletics is in no way impacted by a pro sports gambling ad by Sydney Sweeney, but why in the world is it the case that anyone would even make that connection, especially when female athletes, by and large, are staying quiet about men competing in women&#8217;s sports? Don&#8217;t you think that if you were going to talk about things that are attacking female athletics, you might say, “Hey, maybe the WNBA should be able to tell us what the W in WNBA stands for. Maybe we should keep men out of women&#8217;s locker rooms. Maybe we should keep boys out of girls’ locker rooms?” Instead, these women are claiming that they&#8217;re offended by Sydney Sweeney.</blockquote>
He is 100% correct. 
I want to point out something else that’s funny. All of this shows you how far we have moved in the American public discourse. 
There was a 2005 ad that was very controversial in its time, but now seems tame by comparison. It was a Carl&#8217;s Jr. commercial featuring Paris Hilton. I remember this ad because it came out right around the time my book, “Porn Generation,” came out about the pornification of American society. 
I&#8217;ve been on the anti-porn bandwagon for literally decades, and I have been irritated by female nudity used to market sports for pretty much all my life. I was a long-time subscriber to Sports Illustrated, and I&#8217;m one of the seven people who called up Sports Illustrated and said, “Please don&#8217;t send the swimsuit edition, which has nothing to do with sports. Please just give me an extra edition of the magazine about baseball and basketball.”
The Carl&#8217;s Jr. ad showed Paris Hilton in a bathing suit soaping up a car. She was wearing more clothes than Sydney Sweeney, and it launched a thousand think pieces.
The ad made a lot of headlines back then, and I&#8217;m old enough to remember when conservatives thought that was bad.
So here&#8217;s the point: I still think this stuff is kind of bad. I&#8217;m not in favor of it — but the reason we are seeing so many conservatives rushing to defend Sydney Sweeney is because of how far the Left has moved: In 2005, they defended the Paris Hilton commercial because they said pornography was good.
That was the case. Sex work was work. Pornography was good. Shatter the systems through nudity. 
The Right responded, “No, we&#8217;re not doing any of that.”
But now the Left has moved all the way from where they were to “Boys can be girls.” Additionally, “Female beauty isn&#8217;t a thing,” and “Sydney Sweeney isn&#8217;t a beautiful woman,” and “We don&#8217;t even know if she is a woman. Maybe she&#8217;s a man.” And “Maybe a dude with a twig and berries is more of a woman than Sydney Sweeney.” And “Being fat and ugly is a new form of beauty.”
These statements all show you how far the Left has moved. Thus the Right responded, ”You know what is good? Good-looking women.”
Things have gotten crazy over the past 20 years. It was a more innocent time in 2005, when we debated whether those commercials were appropriate. 
Now the debate is over whether women exist in humanity and whether there are, in fact, standards of beauty that are clearly applicable.
All of this tells us more about where we&#8217;ve moved as a society than it does about Sydney Sweeney  — or sports.

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How Sydney Sweeney’s Critics Are Showing More Than She Is

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The West is unique and has a better way of life and a better way of thought.
That is a reality.
It is being proved every day, not just by conflicts between Islamic radicals and the West, but also by the way that regimes fail in the Middle East.
A perfect example of this is what is happening right now in Saudi Arabia. 
Over the past 25 years or so, the United States has sold well over $200 billion in defense equipment, training, and services to the Saudi regime. They&#8217;ve been buying weaponry from us because they have lots of oil money. We give them the money for the oil, and then they use that money to buy American-made weaponry. They also get minor grants for anti-terrorism training, and we spend billions of dollars to maintain military bases on their soil to protect them.
There are military bases on Saudi soil because we put them there originally to protect the Saudis against Saddam Hussein. They couldn&#8217;t defend themselves.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2508?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 Saudis are getting their asses handed to them in Yemen by an Iranian terror group called the Houthis. In Yemen, the Iranians haven&#8217;t been shy about supporting the Houthis, a bunch of ragtag terrorists. The Houthis are not exactly a fearsome military power; they are impoverished terrorists.
The Houthis have a slogan, not super-catchy, but here it is: “Allahu Akbar. Death to America. Death to Israel. A curse upon the Jews and victory to Islam.”
This group of global losers is — with Iranian backing and Chinese-made weaponry — humiliating the Saudis. Over the last couple of weeks, they started pressing westward toward Yemen&#8217;s coastline.
Why does that matter? Because the coastline of Yemen is located along the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which is a global choke point for the shipping of oil and is used mainly by Europe, possibly even more important than the Strait of Hormuz. They took over without the Saudis flying a single sortie from aircraft that was sold to them, an act of extraordinary incompetence.
Why? Because these regimes are not good at governing. They are terrible at building military power and they are terrible at projecting military power, even against ragtag terrorists.
Apparently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke twice on Thursday with President Trump and urged him to strike the Houthis. Trump’s reaction? “Nah.”
The White House said, &#8220;The United States is focused on protecting our core national security interests, such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, while empowering our regional partners to take the lead in managing and resolving regional security challenges. We are in continuous dialogue with Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Yemen government regarding regional stability.&#8221;
The Strait of Hormuz, which the United States has largely opened, is no longer under full Iranian control. So the Iranians and the Yemenis have been attempting to hit the East-West crude oil pipeline that flows from the Persian Gulf toward the other side of Saudi Arabia into the Red Sea.
They&#8217;ve been striking those pipelines to cut off Saudi oil supply. And now they&#8217;re doing the same by grabbing hold of the Bab al-Mandab Strait to cut off Saudi oil supply and artificially increase the price of oil.
The idea from Iran is: What if we just exert pressure so that nobody can export any oil via this pipeline going the other way, either by bombing the pipeline or by closing off the Strait?
Now the questions become: Where are our allies? What is Saudi Arabia doing? Why are they wildly incompetent? Where are the Europeans?
This is a Muslim-on-Muslim fight. You may have noticed that in this entire conversation, Israel has not come up.
But the Saudis are incompetent and militarily pathetic. They clearly don&#8217;t even know how to use the weapons we sold and gave them. Their air force was totally useless. The Bab al-Mandab Strait was taken over by a bunch of terrorists with speedboats. What about that vaunted Saudi, Pakistani, Turkish, NATO-like defense pact, the Mecca Defense Alliance, which was signed just weeks ago? Wouldn&#8217;t it be handy to have Pakistan and Turkey help out?
It turns out the Pakistanis and Turks are handing out free high fives while Saudi Arabia drowns. And now Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, is under drone attack, reportedly from the Houthis, which, of course, is a slap in the face to the Saudis because the Saudis see themselves as the guardian of the holy sites.
So what are the Saudis doing now? After begging the Americans to get involved, and after yelling at the Israelis for some years about fighting Islamic terrorism, they are quietly and covertly begging the Israelis to help.
What does this say about Islam as a governing philosophy? The answer is it fails. Without the West, no oil; Without the West, no defense mechanisms; without the West, no skyscrapers and no financial capacity. Nothing.
That is a reality.
That doesn&#8217;t mean there aren&#8217;t Islamic countries moving toward more sophistication or seeking alliances with the West. But the only kingdoms in the region that are actually fully embracing the West, the UAE and Bahrain, are actively being alienated by the Saudis.
The Saudis want to play this dumb game where they triangulate with the Turks, the Chinese, the Pakistanis, and the Iranians. Genius-level work from the Saudi regime.
The Saudis couldn&#8217;t even help us properly defend the bases we set up to help them in the 1990s to protect them from Saddam Hussein.
This is just another reason why the president was right to go after Iran because if Iran dominated the region, it would be able to turn the spigot on and off at will. They&#8217;re doing it right now by striking pipelines and shutting off supply routes.
Our friends in Saudi Arabia can&#8217;t do anything about it, or at least aren&#8217;t capable of doing anything about it.
This is why Iran, the head of the snake, needs to be cut off.
That is not a call for boots on the ground.
It is a call for the president to continue doing what he is doing, which is absolutely cratering the Iranian economy.

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It’s Time To Cut Off The Head Of The Snake

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Household debt

Household Debt Is Getting Out Of Hand. Here’s Why It’s At An All-Time High.

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We should have at least one simple rule when it comes to legal immigration: If you are here to sponge off the American taxpayer, get the hell out. 
Don&#8217;t plan on working? Out. Bring an entire family, most of whom will draw on the taxpayer dime? Nope. 
This is what the Trump administration is arguing. 
And New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rest of the Democrats are screaming bloody murder.
The question is: Why? Why are Democrats so desperate to import people who are dependent on the American taxpayer? Why aren&#8217;t Democrats concerned with the people who actually pay the taxes in the United States? 
When my great-great-grandparents came here from Lithuania and Russia more than 100 years ago, they had pretty much nothing. And they were entitled to pretty much nothing because that&#8217;s the way that things work. 
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2507?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>
This was true of virtually all immigrants to the United States for roughly the first 160 years of our existence. They came here knowing that they probably weren&#8217;t going to get anything. There were some mutual aid societies, perhaps some friends and family who were already here, who might be able to help them out. 
But the government was not going to be the primary means of support for these people. And they knew it. They were coming here because they were coming for the opportunity. 
First, all of that meant high levels of assimilation. If you couldn&#8217;t get paid without a job, and if you couldn&#8217;t get a job without assimilating, you actually had to assimilate. 
My great-great-grandparents came here speaking Yiddish, and within a generation everyone was speaking English. This was very common among immigrants from the places that my ancestors came from. They came here, and they said to their kids, “You are not allowed to speak Yiddish in the home. You actually have to speak English so that you can learn English and then assimilate.”
Second, it meant much greater involvement with social institutions. If you were a Christian immigrant and needed help, you went to your local religious institution. That was good, because when you go to your local religious institution for help — as opposed to going to the government — that comes with strings.
If you&#8217;re part of a community and you&#8217;re drawing from the communal pool in terms of support, you owe something to the community. You’re not simply getting a faceless check in the mail.
Third, the situation drew a certain type of immigrant, a type of person who came here for the opportunity, who wanted to work, and who was upwardly mobile. That was the basic bargain. 
It&#8217;s the difference between a store putting out a “help wanted” sign and a store putting out a free donut sign; the stores draw two very different types of people. “Help wanted” brings people looking for a job; “free donuts” brings the people who want free donuts. 
If you change the incentive structure, you are going to draw different people. 
For nearly 150 years — longer than any modern federal welfare or entitlement program has existed — U.S. immigration law has included some form of public charge exclusion. In the Immigration Act of 1889, Congress excluded paupers and persons likely to become a public charge.
 Congress recognized that, given the fact that the United States is very wealthy, a lot of people would come here and be better off as paupers than they would be staying in their native countries. That remains very true today.
The current form of the public charge rule is found in the Immigration and Nationality Act. It provides that any alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for a visa or in the opinion of the attorney general at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge, is inadmissible.
The problem is pretty much no one is getting deported on this basis. No one. The current standard is based on a 1999 interim field guidance issued during the Clinton administration. That standard is not particularly hard to meet.
In 2017, roughly 1,000 immigrant visa petitions out of 1 million were rejected based on the public charge rule, which is insane. The idea that you have over 1 million people who are coming here, many of whom will become public charges, and only 1,000 of whom get rejected on those grounds, is nuts. 
What happened? Why wasn&#8217;t the public charge rule really implemented? Look at the history of how immigration worked in the United States. In the beginning of the 20th century, there was vast migration to the United States, but virtually no federal welfare programs. Then, in the 1930s, you had the New Deal programs, which were accessible to legal residents, but immigrant households were less likely to receive welfare than native-born households.
It progressed from there.
One of the reasons that you have seen a vast spate of right-wing upsurges in Europe is not just because of a lack of assimilation or no-go zones across the continent, from Sweden to France to Germany. It is also because of welfare dependency.
Welfare dependency and crime have a heavy overlap because if you are coming to a country to take advantage of its welfare benefits and not integrate into the system, the same mentality that says that the government owes you something, that says society owes you something, makes it easy to justify stealing from people.
So why do Democrats favor this? 
Because Democrats love importing people who become dependent on the government. They want them to become citizens, and they want them to vote. That is the goal, because that fosters the kind of government they seek. 
Zohran Mamdani would love to import millions more people into Manhattan, increasing demand without increasing supply, to have those people be dependent on public welfare benefits and then vote for him.
If you can vote with other people&#8217;s money, you will keep doing so until the end of time. 
Thus, the Trump administration announced that it was going to start strictly applying the public charge rule that insists that if you come here and you&#8217;re dependent on welfare benefits, out you go. 
The Democrats have gotten very upset about this. Mamdani joined other mayors across the country in a joint lawsuit to challenge the new public charge rule on Monday.
Entitlement programs are a massive problem. They drive our national debt. They bankrupt cities. They bankrupt states. They bankrupt the country. The very idea that these programs are titled “entitlements” as opposed to what they actually are, which is the dole, is a way of changing the mentality people have toward drawing from the state.
In the movie &#8220;Cinderella Man,&#8221; the main character, James J. Braddock, has to go on welfare in the 1930s. In one scene, after he becomes rich again by boxing, he brings money back to the welfare office and drops it off. 
No one in America would do that now because of the entire mentality shift about taking taxpayer dollars.
Remember, taxpayer dollars, even ones that are created out of thin air by racking up the debt, are someone else&#8217;s dollars. They do not belong to you. But because we keep saying “entitlement” over and over and over, the basic idea is that you&#8217;re entitled to draw on the taxpayers. You&#8217;re entitled to it. 
I don&#8217;t care who you are in the United States; if you are healthy but you are taking advantage of the entitlement programs to avoid working, you are doing something morally wrong.
It&#8217;s even worse when we&#8217;re importing vast numbers of people to do this. We should not be standing up entire programs, opening our doors wide and saying, “You are entitled to this,” but that is what Mamdani wants. 
I have a question. Why is Mamdani more worried about people coming here who want to become citizens and are already on the dole than the people paying for them? 
Because Zohran Mamdani is an “Eat the rich guy.” There&#8217;s nothing he wants more than that.
Of course, we get the usual routine: “People will die,” which is the stupidest form of politics. Unless you can show an actual correlation between the policy change that is being made and the malicious death of people, that is the dumbest argument possible. 
Every public policy argument has risks and benefits. All of them. Going all the way to “people could die” is malicious. He is saying that you maliciously want those people to die. 
There is no data that says if people don&#8217;t have Medicaid because they are immigrants, there will be mass death.
This is part and parcel of a broader worldview for people like Zohran Mamdani. It is not just about importing people who are dependent on the federal government and on the state government and local government. 
It is also about importing people who fundamentally hate our country and what it stands for. 
It is about destroying America.

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What Happens When America Becomes The Free Donut Shop?

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We are all being played. You are being played. 
Top AI developers are warning us in the scariest terms that the end of the world is nigh. They say there must be heavy regulation of artificial intelligence development lest AI run out of control, achieve artificial general intelligence, superintelligent sentience, and destroy humanity. 
So here is the question: Are these developers good-hearted folks who are deeply concerned about the future of the West, and who desperately want government intervention to stop them?
Or — are these AI leaders magnifying public angst about AI in order to achieve regulatory capture and to make more money? Do they want to rewrite the rules of the AI road in order to bar new competitors, collude with each other, and take control of the entire industry in monopolistic fashion? 
It&#8217;s an interesting question. You decide. 
Is AI going to kill us all? This broke into the open and has been discussed pretty widely over the course of the last few years, with people like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei at Anthropic talking about the risks.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2506?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>
It became a huge issue over the last week or so, when a person named Jacob Coxon, who used to work at both Anthropic and OpenAI as a researcher, warned online that many people believe AI would kill everybody. 
He then went on the BBC and reiterated this argument, saying that there&#8217;s a strong chance we could all die in the immediate future.
This is reminiscent of climate-change apocalyptic talk. “All the ice caps are going to be gone! The polar bears are all going to drown!”
I say that because Coxon has not explained exactly how we get from here to there. He hasn’t explained in detail, or even in relative detail, how we get from “AI is outracing us” to “We all die.”
We should know, because if you can game for those risks, you can presumably restrict them. 
It is worth noting that Coxon is politically aligned with the Left. He worked for Newspeak in 2021, which is a Left-wing British NGO dedicated to “democracy tech projects,” “collective transformation,” “prison abolition,” “abolitionist community-based harm prevention and response,” and “extinction rebellion.” He only worked at Anthropic for six weeks.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang called Coxon outlandish, deeply untrue, and arrogant. Elon Musk called him “sus.” 
How scared should we be?
I tend not to be alarmist about most things, because the vast majority of terrible things predicted never occur; a lot of people out there have predicted the last 25 recessions. 
But if we&#8217;re talking about an extinction-level event, like we&#8217;re all going to die, that&#8217;s an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. 
We have a choice to make as a population: Are the AI founders — who are calling for heavy AI regulations, AI pauses, heavy governmental oversight — just good-hearted, awesome people trying to save us from them?
Or are they very profit-motivated, trying to freeze the market in place? It&#8217;s a horse race, and they are ahead. They&#8217;re trying to freeze the horse race while they are ahead and allow for both collusion and limitations on legal liability. 
I might be a little cynical. I think the latter is more likely.
First, we have to understand that companies like Nvidia are developing the hardware and infrastructure for AI, and they make the chips AI runs on, as do microprocessors like AMD. And those people have a strong incentive for AI to keep developing as fast as possible. If there&#8217;s an AI pause, Nvidia is in serious trouble. 
Then there are software developers like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT; Anthropic, which makes Claude; Meta, which makes Llama; or Google, which makes Gemini. These developers make models in two flavors: closed source or open source.
Closed-source or proprietary AI means the company hides the inner design; you&#8217;re not building your own variation of the model, you just use theirs. You subscribe to Claude, put in the data, and they churn out whatever they want. The closed-source economic model relies on highly profitable AI models that charge per token; the more you use their AI, the more you have to pay. 
Then there are open-source, often called open-weight, AI models. This means that the core mathematical files that make the model work are published online for free. It doesn&#8217;t mean the entire formula; it means the general ingredients. 
So to understand this, let&#8217;s use a metaphor: you&#8217;re at a restaurant.
Open source would be the chef walking out, giving you the cookbook, a list of ingredients, and a video showing you how to cook it. You can make your own changes. You can change the flavorings. You can add a little salt here, or take away a little paprika there. A few AI companies are doing this.
Open weight is kind of a version of open source. It&#8217;s like if the chef made you the meal and let you take it home and mix in your own ingredients. So they&#8217;re actually making the thing for you. So this would be Meta&#8217;s system. And you can add whatever you want on top of that.
Closed sources like Claude or ChatGPT would be like ordering the meal: no changes allowed. The chef makes it the way the chef makes it. You can&#8217;t take it home; you can&#8217;t reverse-engineer it. You have to eat it inside a protected area of the restaurant. 
To keep this metaphor going, let&#8217;s say that you are one of these closed-source restaurants. Your greatest fear is that somebody from the open-weights restaurant comes along with a better meal and destroys your restaurant, because if somebody makes a better meal — one that can be taken home, changed out of the takeout box — it&#8217;s modular and it&#8217;s better than your restaurant. Who would bother going to your restaurant and paying extra to be in that closed-door environment in which the food is worse? You&#8217;re dead in the water. 
So the closed-source companies and the open-weights companies are very much at odds. 
The closed-source models — Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI — tend to be the ones arguing the most that AI is going to kill all of us. That makes sense, because if your argument is that the takeout restaurant that lets you take the food home might give you food with poison in it, guess what happens to your restaurant? 
It succeeds because the open source model can no longer defeat you. So you want to argue that you need our guardianship; you need our protection. You need a closed source because open source will kill you. And that aligns with your profit motive. 
Open-source models want unrestricted information on flow and development because they know that if they aren&#8217;t restricted, they could theoretically outrace and then destroy closed-source models.
Which brings us back to those discussions of the apocalypse. There are two basic views right now about AI: camp number one says the big danger is a black swan event that superintelligence goes apocalyptic, launches all the nuclear missiles, and we&#8217;re all dead. That is the apocalypse camp. 
And then there&#8217;s the second camp, the stagnation camp. They say the greatest threat here is that we stagnate. If we stagnate, China wins. If we stagnate, our economy dies. If we stagnate, our productivity declines. 
You could theoretically believe both these things. You could believe stagnation is likely if you restrict, but also that, if you don&#8217;t restrict, a black swan event is possible.
Camp number one says the apocalypse is about to happen. They argue that AI will kill us unless the government comes in and restricts it. Members of the apocalypse camp may have some ulterior motives. They may want to restrict their opposition. They may also want to restrict their own liability because if the government regulates an industry, they can then claim that they don&#8217;t actually have liability because they just fulfilled the government checkbox. They argue the ultimate threat to humanity is uncontrolled superintelligence, recursive AI that is able to self-prompt and avoid being unplugged and then outrace humanity itself. 
Anthropic, which leans to the Left, is leading this camp. Dario Amodei, Anthropic&#8217;s founder, compared President Trump to a feudal warlord when explaining why he voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. He came out on CNN and said that he basically agreed with Jacob Coxon, which is astonishing, because Coxon came out and basically ripped into Anthropic and said that they are running us directly toward a human apocalypse.
If somebody came out from my company and said, “Ben Shapiro&#8217;s company is about to end the world and kill all of humanity,” I&#8217;d be angry, because that&#8217;s not true. But Amodei seemed somewhat happy about Jacob Coxon saying that the apocalypse is happening and that his company might be responsible.
I find that suspicious. Call me a cynic, but I don&#8217;t believe that all these people are just so good-hearted that they want to race forward with the technology, but only they get to race forward with the technology.
If we are going to be cynical about this, why exactly would Amodei be calling for governmental regulation and slowing down? According to the Kalshi market, 71% of people think Claude will have the best AI at the end of 2026.
So they might have an interest in freezing the horse race with them ahead. And they might want regulation because closed models are significantly more legally liable than open models. They want regulation because they have more legal liability. They want governmental protection.
It’s possible all these people want to preserve their business model. 
Then there&#8217;s the second worry, which I think is the much greater worry: stagnation. There are people who are arguing the greatest danger is not that we&#8217;re going to invent a superintelligence that launches all the nukes; the great risk is that we are going to end up with a collusive, monopoly-ridden AI industry that basically stagnates. And then we get outcompeted and we fall behind China, and China destroys us.
People who fear stagnation worry that slowing AI by letting the government write massive regulatory regimes will mean we lose. Unsurprisingly, those people are in the open-weights camp. They want fast development. They want to outcompete the closed-source models. 
The closed-source camp argues that once the open-weights camp releases their models, anybody, bad people included, can alter and then use them. The open-weights camp argues that top-down control is stagnating. 
I understand the worries from everyday Americans. These are normal people who are worried: they don&#8217;t understand what the hell is going on because it&#8217;s complex.
But when Bernie Sanders says anything, you should probably believe the opposite. Sanders said, “When you are racing towards a cliff, you don&#8217;t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes. When the future of humanity is at stake, we need a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence — an AI mind smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond our control. At their upcoming AI summit, Trump and Xi must negotiate a treaty to pause AI and ban superintelligence before it is too late.”
I have no idea how he plans on banning superintelligence. Nobody is actually aiming at this point for full-scale superintelligence of the sort that he&#8217;s talking about, because people understand that if you had the “singularity,” there are inherent risks to that. Everyone agrees that you need a human being running the process.
Barack Obama is coming out of the woodwork now to move AI oversight to the center of their agenda. Why? Because Democrats have now found a populist issue. People are very uncomfortable with tech, and because people are uncomfortable with tech, because they don&#8217;t understand it, and because half the AI founders are now doom-mongering, an enormous number of Americans, justifiably, are deeply worried about the development of AI.
It&#8217;s the technology that will likely save the American economy. 
I have not seen beyond vague statements from people who claim to have special knowledge any specific roadmap for how we all die because of AI.
I do see the political motivations behind that. And whenever the government gets involved at the top level to protect us from “the danger,” this usually ends with cartelization, corruption, and stagnation. 
I&#8217;m not saying that there is no risk to AI. Of course there&#8217;s a risk to AI. I&#8217;m not saying people can&#8217;t misuse AI, but that can happen both inside and outside companies. That&#8217;s an argument, as they say, that proves too much. 
From a cynical point of view, these closed-source companies are looking for a legal liability shield now, while also looking for regulatory capture, and they are looking for some sort of excuse where, if things go wrong, it&#8217;s not their fault while they continue to develop.
What they don&#8217;t understand is that if they keep making the case that “AI is so highly dangerous that we&#8217;re all going to die from it,” the natural inclination of people on both the Right and the Left will be to ban AI entirely and push back against it.
And if that happens, we lose.

IMG_7392

The Doomsday Warning That’s Starting To Look Awfully Convenient

ai regulation

anthropic

artificial general intelligence

dario amodei

open source ai

openai

Clancy Demonstrators

A Lot Of People Should Go To Prison For Doxxing Lindsay Clancy’s Black Juror

doxxing

gayle king

insanity defense

jury tampering

lindsay clancy

massachusetts

Twenty-five years after 9/11, a quarter-century after Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, here is where we currently stand: The mayor of New York is an Islamic terrorist sympathizer. So is the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. So are congresspeople from New York to Michigan to Minnesota.
The West has imported millions of immigrants from Muslim countries, a huge swath of whom do not support Western values. The West has continued to excuse and appease Islamic radicalism across the globe, with some rare exceptions. Many Americans, nearly the entire Left along with the horseshoe Right, now agree with the anti-American worldview promoted by Osama bin Laden that the United States and the West are chiefly responsible for suffering around the world, and that Islamic terrorism is simply blowback for Western sin.
Let’s start with a history lesson, a lesson in memory. There are a lot of people listening to my show and walking around the United States who weren&#8217;t alive for 9/11.
You have to be about 30 or older to remember 9/11. For a lot of folks, this is the first time they&#8217;re even experiencing what history was.
That&#8217;s just a reality. As time moves on, things become more distant.
But for an entire generation of people, for several generations of people, this was the worst moment in American history. What ought we remember on the 25th anniversary of 9/11?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2505?elementPosition=0&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>
Of course, we should remember the pain Americans suffered and still suffer.
When we remember, it is not enough to be vague about that day, but that seems to be the purposeful tendency: to be vague.
Who did it and what did they think? If you listen to our politicians, they have no idea. It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. It&#8217;s just a bad thing that happened, and we have no idea why or how it happened, or what the people who did it thought, or what people who still agree with them today think.
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York — a man who once rapped in solidarity with the Holy Land Five, the people who went to jail for material support of terrorism via the Holy Land Foundation — has nothing but sympathy for a wide variety of Islamic radicals.
He issued this statement:
<blockquote>We remember 9/11 as the darkest day in our city&#8217;s history, but we also remember what so many New Yorkers did in that darkness. We remember the thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers who lined up for hours to donate blood. We remember the people who opened their homes to those who could not get home. We remember the workers who carried their colleagues down hundreds of stairs, then turned around and went back up to find someone else who needed help. 
25 years later, we have a sacred obligation to those who were stolen from us to care for one another as they cared for strangers, to live lives worthy of the sacrifices they made, and to build a city worthy of their courage. A city where we run toward one another. That is how we remember.</blockquote>
Everything that Mamdani is saying here would be equally applicable if the towers had simply collapsed on their own.
If you were just watching this, if you didn&#8217;t know anything about it, if you were a young person who didn&#8217;t live through 9/11, if you were an alien who landed on planet Earth today, you would have no idea who did what and to whom.
There is a purposeful attempt to obscure what happened on 9/11, who did it, and why they did it.
The top of The New York Times web page had the following three headlines. Headline number one: “25 years after 9/11, a nation gathers to remember and to mourn the lives lost.”
Headline number two: “Trump personifies a nation moving on.”
Headline number three: “Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers.” There was also this headline from The New York Times: “Facing Islamophobia. Mamdani keeps focus on 9/11 victims.”
Never mind that many of the 9/11 victims don&#8217;t want him around. They certainly don&#8217;t want him attending their events.
This is worse than useless. It is counterproductive. It is a total betrayal of the American people and the victims of 9/11 and their families and all the people who fought to defend America in the aftermath. We have to remember and relive the evil that happened on 9/11, because if we don&#8217;t, what we forget is the nature of our enemies, who are still out there and still doing things and still think the same things.
On 9/11, 2,977 Americans were murdered while two American airplanes were hijacked and flown directly into the World Trade Center. Flight 11 was the first flight that hit; it hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. There were 87 passengers on board, including the crew. Everyone was killed instantly. Every stairwell route above floor 91 was severed. No one could escape if you were above that floor.
There are many, many, many tapes of people who were located in the towers who were calling their families to tell them they loved them because they knew they would never come home to them. 
Firefighters immediately started rushing the buildings, trying to get people out. Hundreds of firefighters were killed on 9/11.
The second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The 60 passengers who were on board, including the crew, were instantly killed.
People on the street tried to dodge the debris as it began raining down from the towers.
The footage is astonishing. Much of this footage wasn&#8217;t made publicly available for years because there was essentially a conspiracy of silence to keep these images from becoming ingrained in an entire generation of Americans beyond the basics. Why?
Because Americans might respond terribly.
People began leaning out of the towers, trying to breathe, trying to survive, if they were above the stories that had been hit. They had nowhere to go. At least 37 people, probably well over 50, ended up jumping to their deaths from the North Towers because people were trapped in the heat.
It is important to recognize what America&#8217;s enemies are willing to do. This is what they celebrated. People were dancing in the streets in certain places on planet Earth.
There was a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, that hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. The 59 passengers and crew were killed instantly. One hundred and twenty-five military and civilian personnel died inside the building as well. It was like a missile hitting the Pentagon.
There was the horrifying sight of the South Tower collapsing at 9:59 a.m., with somewhere between 600 and 1,000 people dying inside the South Tower, including 343 New York City Fire Department firefighters and 71 law enforcement officers.
Meanwhile, one of the great stories of heroism in American history was taking place aboard United Airlines Flight 93. That flight to the fourth plane had been hijacked. It was likely headed for the Capitol building, and the passengers breached the cockpit and counterattacked the hijackers, forcing the plane to crash. All 40 of the passengers and crew died.
In an iconic moment in American history, passenger Todd Beamer told the others, “Are you guys ready? Let&#8217;s roll.” That became a battle cry for Americans.
The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. One thousand six hundred people died inside the North Tower. Everyone above the impact zone died.
Most of midtown Manhattan was a war zone. Lower Manhattan was a war zone.
The 9/11 Commission released its full report in July 2004. Of course, conspiracy theorists will claim the report was rigged from the start and other nonsense. But the reality is that the commission produced an incredibly thorough report. 
The report summarized institutional breakdowns before 9/11 and the failures of intelligence to communicate with one another. The commission reviewed some 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed 1,200 individuals.
The chief failure was the failure of imagination. People just did not think that Islamic terrorists could carry off anything of this size and scale. Terrorism was not regarded as a paramount national security concern before 9/11. Counterterrorism was treated as a law enforcement issue rather than as a foreign policy and intelligence issue. Our intelligence agencies failed. The FBI was more reactive than proactive. The CIA had been weakened.
A Chinese firewall separated the CIA and the FBI, so they could not share information. The FAA had a no-fly watch list with a total of 12 people; none of the hijackers were on it.
Al-Qaeda, which carried out the attacks, obviously had a strategy in the lead-up to 9/11. Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda in 1998, declared it a religious duty for Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world, both military and civilian, and Al-Qaeda built a network of state sanctuaries during the 1990s in Sudan and in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
We know why Osama bin Laden did this. It is not a mystery. The answer is that Osama bin Laden was a terrorist devotee of Islam. This does not mean that all Muslims are terrorists or that all Muslims agreed with Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden wrote a letter to America in 2002, and you can break it down into two parts: the excuse-making and the real reason. The excuse-making is about how Muslims everywhere are victims of America.
That’s nonsense. It&#8217;s not true. It is factually untrue. It is a victim mentality, unsupported by the evidence.
The real reason Osama bin Laden did this is that he was a Muslim fundamentalist who believed that everyone in the world ought to convert to Islam.
He knew the West lacked the courage to stand up and say we have a civilization worth preserving and defending. He believed we would tire and become stupid. That was his premise.
Our enemies thought we were weak. They thought that we would blind ourselves to reality.
As it turns out over the subsequent 25 years, they were not wrong. Just days after 9/11, the president of the United States appeared at the Islamic Center of Washington to explain that Islam was a religion of peace.
By saying this and many things like it, President Bush essentially defanged the entire Western movement against our actual enemies. That doesn&#8217;t mean every Muslim is an enemy of the United States, but if you want to make the argument that our enemies hate American freedom, you need to explain why they hated American freedom and what motivated them.
President Bush believed the false idea that all human beings around the world believe the same kinds of things, and that we are all, at root, exactly the same in our orientation toward the world.
This is untrue. Not every human being on Earth is oriented toward freedom the way Westerners believe in it.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted in <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mohamed-atta-25-years-911">Tablet</a>: 
<blockquote>Islam is not an “Abrahamic faith” that functions anything like Protestant Christianity or rabbinic Judaism. There is no equivalent in Islamic doctrine for such foundational Western concepts as the separation of church and state, secular law, or the idea of individual freedoms and rights, including the freedom to worship freely. Rather, Islam is animated by the beliefs that the Muslim world suffered a historical dispossession with the abolition of the caliphate and that this loss must eventually be reversed, including the retaking of all lands that have ever been ruled by Muslims. In the temporal sphere, Islam as much resembles totalizing and irredentist political ideologies as it does a religion.
In the frame in which both ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed political spokesmen see the world, America and the wider West are not just geopolitical rivals. They are civilizational obstacles: powers that uphold a secular, liberal, and postcaliphal order that Islamists seek to overcome. </blockquote>
Americans have been lied to. We&#8217;ve been taught the opposite of this for a generation.
When you refuse to acknowledge the reality of Islam&#8217;s role in geopolitics, people are left to speculate about the motives behind acts like 9/11, and then they glom on to precisely the worldview that Osama bin Laden was counting on: The idea that if only the U.S. and the West weren&#8217;t so mean and cruel and interventionist, there&#8217;d be no problems and 9/11 never would have happened.
The belief system held by a huge percentage of Muslims across planet Earth — and a heavy percentage in the West as well — is not conciliatory with basic ideas of the West such as separation of church and state and freedom of religion.
That does not mean that there aren&#8217;t Muslims who don&#8217;t support terrorism; it does not mean that there aren&#8217;t some moderate or reform Muslims out there. There are some, and I truly hope they win.
But if we refuse to acknowledge who did 9/11, why they did it, and what the overall problem is, we will import it.
And it will be our fault.

Firefighters Look Though Debris At Ground Zero

The 9/11 Lesson America Can’t Afford To Forget

islamic terrorism

islamophobia

osama bin laden

september 11 attacks

Every American remembers where he was on September 11, 2001.
It was the same for my generation on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Dark days such as these may not cause the dark history that follows them, but it’s difficult not to feel they mark the place in time where a certain shadow fell.
JFK’s murder marked the end of that period of patriotism, confidence, and unity brought about by the Allied victory in World War II. The Islamist destruction of the World Trade Center marked the end of the “Holiday from History” that followed the West’s victory in the Cold War.
Many of today’s young people feel beset and battered by such catastrophic days. Endless wars in the Middle East. The 2008 financial crisis. The COVID lockdowns. Race riots. Inflation. The madness of woke — or the rise of conservative populism, or both, depending on your point of view.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/andrew-klavan-show-ep-1295"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-974735 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now.jpg" alt="" width="1800" height="300" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1536x256.jpg 1536w" sizes=" (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px" /></a>
But, of course, my generation also saw such things. The Cuban missile crisis. The 60s riots. Assassination after assassination. The stagflation of the Jimmy Carter economy, and the gas shortage. Speaking personally, I lived in the crime-ridden New York City of the 70s and 80s, when smoking was bad for your health because you were likely to get shot going to the store for a pack of cigarettes.
Yet I also saw that things could turn around. I saw Ronald Reagan restore the economy and help engineer the end of the Soviet Union. I saw Rudy Giuliani transform a cesspool of a city into the greatest, safest metropolis on Earth, thus leading the way to an era of lower crime across the nation. These men were reviled every day by the powers-that-be and the news media. Yet on they went, and did what they did and accomplished what they accomplished. As we recently saw in the Lindsay Clancy trial, it really is true: One man with courage makes a majority.
Still, there is no doubt we are living in an age of uncertainty. As the Baby Boom generation passes into the greater life and its long-dominant vision begins to fade, destructive radicals are vying to fill the gap. The collapse of a non-credible news media followed by the rise of a non-credible social media has caused an information crisis — a long Good Friday in which it seems the truth is forever being crucified. We know from history that such uncertainties often resolve themselves through war. It doesn’t take a catastrophist to trace a potential path from the present moment to some worldwide conflagration.
All this, I think, should be taken seriously, but calmly, too, in a spirit of hope.
It has always fascinated me — and puzzled me somewhat — that hope is considered one of the three primary Christian virtues. Faith, hope, and agape love — that spirit of benign, non-judgmental goodwill sometimes called charity. I feel I understand two of these virtues. Faith is “the evidence of things unseen.” It gives us assurance that we can know and live in some human version of God’s truth. Agape love is the spiritual practice that helps us develop the third eye with which we see that truth, even amid the harsh practicalities of life.
But what about hope? I suppose this could mean the sort of generalized hope that “all things work together for good to them that love God,” the hope that suffering and death lead to eternal life and so on. But this always sounds to me better than it actually is. I know a lot of people who believe in that kind of hope, and yet they live as pessimists, morosely and sometimes angrily counting every setback as a sign of the incipient End of Days.
I myself am frequently derided for what some deem my blindly optimistic attitude. But I think they mistake me. I see the possibility of disaster just as clearly as they do. It’s the certainty of disaster that is rarely apparent to me. I am a tragedian by nature. I take a dim view of humanity. I know that every mortal enterprise will ultimately end in failure and death. I simply don’t believe that it will necessarily end today — &#8220;Sufficient unto this day is the evil thereof.&#8221;
This sort of hope is the hope of doctors and soldiers. Of Gandalf’s consolation: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” This is the sort of hope that knows that in the certain march toward death, today is a day of life and there are works to do and tears to shed and loves to love. This, I think, is the hope described by the poet Emily Dickinson when she <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>
Hope is the thing with feathers &#8211; 
That perches in the soul &#8211; 
And sings the tune without the words &#8211; 
And never stops &#8211; at all &#8230;
</blockquote>
“The tune without the words,” means, as I read it, not with grim reason ceaselessly charting out the possible paths to destruction, but with a general attitude of joy in living. Whatever the outcome, after all, this is the day that the Lord has made. We should rejoice in it and be glad.
When The Daily Wire began, it was Ben Shapiro and I recording podcasts in the pool house in Jeremy Boreing’s backyard. The first day, I was so jet-lagged from a trip to England that I forgot to put my shoes on and arrived wearing bedroom slippers. I stumbled through a short opening podcast that ended with that Bible quote: &#8220;This is the day that the Lord has made.&#8221; It was like nothing else I’d ever done. So when I was finished, I asked Jeremy how it went. He said, “Great, but you say ‘uh’ too much.” I said, “Well, what can I do about that?” He said, “You can not say it.”
I was startled to discover that this was true. It was a small piece of wisdom, but it grew greater over time. Because I also soon discovered you could treat fear and depression and despair in much the same way. Without denial, without repression, without dishonesty, you could simply not do them and let the thing with feathers sing.
“A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.” So says Aragorn in the movie version of “The Lord of the Rings.” And he adds: “This day we fight.”
So yes, the crises facing the West this day are real, and so are the possibilities that they will lead to disaster. But every day is the Lord’s day, and we are only responsible for the days He has given us.
So this day, we rejoice — each one of us — and we fight.
Because one man with courage makes a majority.

Giuliani 9/11

Defiant Hope Conquers Despair In An Age Of Uncertainty

faith

ronald reagan

rudy giuliani

the daily wire

AI Companies 2

Only A Few People Win From AI Hysteria. Everyone Else Loses.

artificial intelligence regulation

artificial intelligence safety

jacob coxon

One year ago today, our friend Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered live on camera while debating public policy at a public university. 
He was shot in the neck; he bled out in front of all of us. We all remember it. His murderer was a militant gay man in a relationship with a trans furry. The motives were perfectly clear, and the evidence was perfectly clear.
What should have happened next was just as clear. Political reunification on the Right around core principles. United opposition to left-wing violence, maybe a religious revival. 
None of that happened.
Whatever expectations we all had for what would happen next were largely thwarted. What&#8217;s truly incredible is that what wrecked those expectations was a campaign against Erika Kirk, his wife, because people decided it was imperative to destroy Erika as a human being and destroy TPUSA as an organization for their own nefarious political purposes.
The fact that Erika has had to go through all of this while simultaneously heading up TPUSA — and by all of this I don&#8217;t just mean the grief; I mean the insane desire by some to destroy her or to destroy TPUSA — demonstrates the moral limits of many people in the so-called conservative movement who were never really part of the conservative movement, who are out for themselves and wish to tear down rather than to build it up again.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2504?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>
It was perfectly obvious almost immediately, the minute that I had heard that Charlie had been shot, that the person who shot him was likely to be a part of the radical trans movement. Charlie was not wildly offensive to a huge variety of people — he said some controversial things from time to time on matters ranging from criminal justice to the nature of Islam.
But the people who were the most agitated about Charlie Kirk were radical trans activists because, as I said at the time, there&#8217;s a permission structure for violence that is implicit in the trans radical ideology. The basic idea is that if you say a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you are “erasing” them.
Thus it was not a tremendous shock that Tyler Robinson ended up being the murderer; it was perfectly obvious who was behind this from the very beginning.
But what should have happened here? There should have been a political coming-together — at the very least — around basic principles of free speech. That is what Charlie was famous for. He was best known for his debates on college campuses and for being a free-speech advocate. 
Some people try to portray Charlie as some sort of radical, insane, nasty person. That never came from him. So what should have happened was for people to come together against those who wish to destroy the body politic. 
What also should have happened was a religious revival. Charlie openly talked about the importance of his faith. 
After Charlie&#8217;s assassination, there was what can best be termed a gigantic religious revival tent meeting for his memorial. I was privileged to be there. 
If what you were looking for was some level of political reunification against political violence, against permission structures for violence, or even on the Right more broadly, a religious revival, people returning to church, a principled rebuilding of the social fabric that Charlie actually cared about — what that did require was borders. 
That’s because people who tear apart that social fabric, or people who were not part of that movement, or people who took advantage of that movement from the inside, needed to be stopped.
But not long after this, things started to fall apart. A couple of months after his death, I spoke at the TPUSA event where I said that personal feeling is not a substitute for moral judgment, that politics is not the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; politics is about principle. That if you&#8217;re willing to sacrifice basic truth and simple principle in favor of emotional solidarity, you have betrayed your fundamental duty to the American people. 
TPUSA is alive and well. There are lots of great things happening, but the promise of the moment was destroyed by people like Candace Owens, who has spent literally the entire year since the tragedy going after TPUSA and Erika Kirk and promoting wild, insane conspiracies with regard to pretty much everybody. Megyn Kelly defended her and still defends her. 
Tucker Carlson, of course, engaged in precisely the same sort of stuff. He laughed with Jimmy Dore about conspiracy theories surrounding Charlie Kirk, then went on to mock Erika Kirk for her incorrect grieving. 
This gave the Left permission to do the same. For a brief moment in time, the Left had to denounce political violence and say they were upset about Charlie&#8217;s death. That all went away because members of the Right decided to make it okay. 
And so now what do we get? We get comedian Druski mocking Erika Kirk in a clip that had almost 200 million views on X alone. Candace Owens then did a clip laughing about how wonderful this was.
This is what happened in America. Political unity was never part of this either, because it turned out that the exact same people who were promoting insane, hideous conspiracies are the ones who have openly declared that they&#8217;re not part of the conservative movement.
It wasn&#8217;t a matter of people like me saying they weren&#8217;t part of the movement and pointing out the truth. It was they themselves saying they were not part of the movement. Since that day, Tucker Carlson has declared himself no longer part of the GOP and called Trump the Antichrist. Candace Owens suggested that satanic Zionists were occupying the White House, and Congress needs to move to have the mad king Trump removed. 
Megyn Kelly declared with podcast host Sean Ryan that the GOP had betrayed the American people and that all it had left were Epstein fans. 
If you wanted the unity to last, if you wanted a spiritual revival, if you wanted all those things, it required you to draw borders, because it turns out those borders will be drawn for you in any case.
But here is the primary issue as we move forward: In the end, if you want a conservative future, you need a set of conservative principles. And those must be built on basic truth and decency. 
If you don&#8217;t have truth and decency, you can&#8217;t build a conservative movement. You can’t build such a movement around anything else.
You cannot. 
It is not possible.

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