Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #336

The great lie we tell ourselves is that people who are evil are not like us. They're, they're a class apart. But everybody in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton, he's, he's fond of doing a, a sort of thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand if they had lived in Alabama in 1861. "How many of you would be abolitionists?" And everybody raises their hand. And he says, "Of course that's not true. Of course that's not true." Right? The, the, the best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over.

Do you ever sit back, you know, in the quiet of your mind and think, "Am I participating in evil?" The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, host of the Ben Shapiro Show, co-founder of The Daily Wire, and author of several books, including The Authoritarian Moment, The Right Side of History, and Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings. Whatever your political leanings, I humbly ask that you try to put those aside and listen with an open mind, trying to give the most charitable interpretation of the words we say. This is true in general for this podcast, whether the guest is Ben Shapiro or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump or Barack Obama. I will talk to everyone from every side, from the far left to the far right, from presidents to prisoners, from artists to scientists, from the powerful to the powerless, because we are all human, all capable of good and evil, all with fascinating stories and ideas to explore. I seek only to understand, and in so doing, hopefully add a bit of love to the world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro. Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, about Jewish people?

They're awful and anti-Semitic. And they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre Death Con 3 tweet, and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators, I think that was the Pete Davidson/Kim Kardashian stuff, and then Jews running all of the media, Jews being in charge of the financial sector, Jewish people... I mean, there's no, I mean, I, I called it on my show they're Sturmer Nazism, and it is. I mean, it's like, right From Protocols of the Elders of Zion type stuff.

Do you think those words come from pain? Where do they come from?

I mean, you know, it's, it's always hard to try and read somebody's mind. You know, w- what, what he looks like to me, just having experience in my own family, people who are bipolar, is he seems like a bipolar personality. He, he seems like somebody who is in the middle of a manic episode. And when you're manic, you tend to say a lot of things that, that you shouldn't say, and you tend to believe that they're the most brilliant things ever said. The Washington Post did an entire piece speculating about how bipolarism played into the kind of stuff that, that Ye was saying. And, um, it's hard for me to think that it's not playing into it, especially because even if he is an anti-Semite, and I have no reason to suspect he's not, given all of his comments, if he had an ounce of common sense, he would stop at a certain point. And bipolarism tends to drive you well past the, the point where common sense applies. So, I mean, I, I would imagine it's coming from that. I mean, I, I... From his comments, I would also imagine that he's doing the logical mistake that, that a lot of anti-Semites or racists or bigots do, which is, "Somebody hurt me. That person is a Jew. Therefore, all Jews are bad." And that, that jump from, "A person did something to me I don't like who's a member of a particular race or class, and therefore everybody of that race or class is bad," I mean, that's textbook bigotry, and that's pretty obviously what Ye is engaging in here.