“JUST GET THE HELL OUT AND VOTE”: Ben Shapiro Joins the Guy Benson Show and Talks Election Day, Media Censorship, and MORE

Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of the Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show, joined The Guy Benson Show today to share his thoughts as Election Day looms just four days away. Shapiro discussed his political evolution from a “Never Trump” stance in 2016, to voting for Trump in 2020, to now actively campaigning alongside Trump in 2024. He also addressed recent New York Times and Media Matters reports aimed at de-platforming and demonetizing conservative voices on YouTube. Additionally, Shapiro reacted to the troubling revelations about Chuck Schumer and rising antisemitism on college campuses. Listen to the full interview below!

Listen to the full interview:

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Shapiro had this to say on his feelings going into Election Day:

“You know, my feelings are irrelevant, as always, but my gut says Trump. And then every so often, the pessimism creeps up behind me and grabs me by the back of the neck. So, hey, I know how you’re feeling about it. My you know, my one word for everyone. Just get the hell out and vote, man. Like, if you’re counting on the polls to save, you, just don’t. Go out and vote.”

Read the automated transcript below:

Guy Benson: Joining me now is Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of the wildly popular Ben Shapiro Show. Ben, great to have you back.

Ben Shapiro Hey, thanks for having me.

Guy Benson: All right. So we’re four days out. How are you feeling about this one?

Ben Shapiro You know, my feelings are irrelevant, as always, but my gut says Trump. And then every so often, the pessimism creeps up behind me and grabbed me by the back of the neck. So, hey, I know how you’re feeling about it. My you know, my one word for everyone. Just get get the hell out and vote, man. Like, if you’re counting on the polls to save, you, just don’t. Go out and vote.

Guy Benson: Yep. That sounds very familiar. What you just described in terms of my overall sentiments as well. Your trajectory with Trump is interesting. You were a NeverTrump guy in 2016 and then you’ve sort of moved into a very different place, certainly for this cycle. Just talk about your evolution of thinking on this, because, you know, I’ve seen out there, Ben, you’ve probably seen like the T-shirts and the signs and the bumper stickers is Kamala, obviously, or Trump, obviously. And I think for some Americans, it’s not so obvious what they want to do. How have you come to Trump and what would your argument be to people who might be center right but wavering?

Ben Shapiro Sure. So I think that a lot of the reasons that swing voters are wavering is all the usual reasons about President Trump, the questions about his character, questions about the stuff that he says, the fact that, you know, he can be crude and all those things that haven’t changed since 2015, 2016 and 2015, 2016. One of the big critiques that I have of him is that I had no clue where he was on policy. He was sort of all over the map and I didn’t have any trust in him that he was going to actually enact conservative policies. And so I sat out that election. I didn’t vote for either candidate in 2016. And then he proceeded to give us some really, really good conservative policies. 33 originalist justices on the Supreme Court, excellent Middle Eastern policies, a booming economy, lower taxes, deregulation, a lot of stuff that I liked. And so in 2020, I supported him. In 2024, by the time that the election came around. And when it came to the primaries, I support Ron DeSantis in the primaries until he basically got ended in Iowa. And at that point, it was clear Trump was going to be the nominee. And meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which had promised a return to normalcy, had decided to go absolutely add their mind. So between their their overt insane spending proposals, their social policy, which was focused on the eye and, you know, social leftism, foreign policy, which set the world on fire in a multiplicity of places, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American allies in Ukraine and at least 1200 Israeli citizens. On October 7th, it was pretty obvious to me that I would actually have to go out and work this election cycle. So this is the first election cycle in my lifetime, or I’ve actively campaigned on behalf of candidates, and I personally, when campaigning with President Trump, held a fundraiser for him when on October 7th. Went up to New York with him introducing So I have this family. I’ve been out campaigning with Eric Huckabee, Senate candidate in Wisconsin, and Bernie Moreno, Senate candidate in Ohio, and defeating the Senate candidate in Montana. And I’m going to go campaign over the weekend and Ted Cruz down in Texas. You know, the the Dave McCormack in Pennsylvania, Sam Brown in Nevada, like I’ve been all over the country campaigning for Republican candidates. It’s just that important. The Democratic Party and I win here.

Guy Benson: You mentioned McCormack. We had him here earlier. That is such an important Senate race. I mean, you just namechecked some of the really big ones. I saw the projection from Cook Political Report today was the Republicans stand to gain somewhere in the range of 2 to 5 Senate seats. And you know as well as I do, there’s a huge difference between 2 and 5 when it comes to margins, control of committees, breathing room on certain important votes when it comes to confirmations and that sort of thing. And just looking ahead to 2026 and 2028. And I hate to talk about future elections, this one has been interminable already. But when you look at the Senate map upcoming, it’s nowhere near as favorable to the Republicans. So try to run up that score. This year is imperative. You said your first call was to Dave McCormack in Pennsylvania when you decided to sort of throw down this gantlet and get more involved. Why him?

Ben Shapiro So I know Dave before he ran for Senate in the first time and lost in the primary by 900 votes. Obviously, I’m very friendly with him. And then when he declared that he’s going to run again this time, I was already figuring the Pennsylvania was going to be sort of the Keystone State in terms of ensuring a Trump victory. And also because I think that Pennsylvania was on the verge of moving entirely blue of Bob Casey, John Patterson, and in just security, had the entire triumvirate in a state that really need to remain purple for the foreseeable future for Republicans to have a chance in presidential elections. So, you know, I think McCormack is uniquely good candidate. I think he’s really, really bright and really, really able to sort of a lot of these candidates. But this was the one that I know the best. Like he was the first person I approached as soon as I found out that he was running again.

Guy Benson: Ben, you got an interesting email a couple of days ago, I believe it was from a reporter. I use that term fairly loosely at The New York Times. He had some questions for you. You went very public with what this interrogation was about. He admitted in the email that he was essentially teaming up with media matters to try to hold right leaning content creators accountable or whatever, however he phrased it, but he explicitly went and mentioned media matters. So first of all, for those who don’t know, tell us what media matters is as an organization. And then what was the significance of this email you got from The Times?

Ben Shapiro So the times you know me and you mentioned they suggested that they were looking at YouTube accounts that had violated, they thought rules on election misinformation or at least had been purveying election misinformation. And they’d gotten all of their research. They said they double check it for media matters, Media matters. They Far-Left organization founded originally by David Brock. It was sort of an offshoot of Clinton World, and the entire goal of media matters was essentially destroy conservative media. They were very clear about that. Their goal was to start secondary boycotts against conservative advertisers that are some of the people who led the Rush Limbaugh boycott back in the day. And they spent the intervening quarter century basically attempting to destroy everybody who is to the right of The New York Times. And so the fact that The New York Times is overtly name checking media matters demonstrated what what they were trying to do, that the entire goal was to essentially create a pressure strategy to get YouTube to Demonetized and thus to stifle the dissemination of conservative material. The way that works on YouTube is once they’re demonetized now, YouTube has no more incentive to actually allow people to see your videos or expand the range of your videos. And so you start getting stifled in terms of the number of people who can actually see them. And so this is clearly an attempt to do that. What was most astonishing about it to me on a personal level is that they’re accusing me of election misinformation based on the fact I had President Trump on the show a couple of weeks ago, the first time he’d ever been on the show, by the way, and and that during that interview, I suggested the Democrats had rigged the rules in terms of voting in order to ensure lots of mail in ballots and the efficacy of ballot harvesting, which is just true. I mean.

Guy Benson: Yes, that’s.

Ben Shapiro What rigged. I mean, they didn’t do it illegally. I mean, in sort of the traditional sense, meaning that they they had changed the rules to their own benefit because this was going to be effective in 2020. And as I pointed out in a Twitter thread I did about this, you know, this is reported by The New York Times is reported by CBS News. There’s nothing that’s information about that. In fact, mean guys, you know, I’m one of the few sort of conservative commentators. You’re another one who after 2020 said that Joe Biden won the election. So, you know, of all the people to target with accusations of election, quote unquote, misinformation, which by the way, is still free speech of all the people to target, I am not the person.

Guy Benson: And so it gives away the game, right? It gives away the game of what they’re trying to do. Right. If they’re going to come after you on that, it’s it’s not about that at all.

Ben Shapiro Exactly. And then and then literally later, we got a follow up message, this time from The Washington Post. Right. I was saying, you know, podcasts are a real medium for election misinformation. And you and you’ve been checked, you’ve been name checked as a person spreading election misinformation. This time the accusation was that President Trump on my program has suggested that Democrats are cheaters. Okay. Well, I mean, he’s the president of the United States. Is the idea that they’re not supposed to have the president of the United States on on why he’s the former president. Yeah. At this point, he’s quite likely to be the future president. So I guess the idea is that I as a as a person who is, you know, who is in conservative media, I’m supposed to what banned him from the airwaves.

Guy Benson: And their platform. Donald Trump. Yeah. And by the way.

Ben Shapiro It’s.

Guy Benson: A it’s not it’s not really all that subtle to figure this out. Media matters. Concocted an attack to try to demonetized and therefore help silence voices that they hate, that they’ve been trying to cancel and get fired and at the very least decrease their impact on the public discussion. They put together a little package and then they handed that package to the New York Times and to The Washington Post. And I guess they didn’t talk to each other, so they both kind of came after you as if these were totally independent journalistic enterprises. They both happened to be doing at exactly the same time. It’s just so helpful that one of them made the stupid mistake of telling you that media matters had done the work for him.

Ben Shapiro And again, it’s not the week before the election. Right. The goal was pretty obvious. They’re going to run these pieces back to back. And then the idea was going to be that YouTube would cower in fear and then they would start demonetized pretty much everything on the right side of the aisle. Getting rid of the reach of these platforms right before the election, I mean, it was election manipulation is really what it was an attempt to do. Now, the other thing I think it’s an attempt to do pretty obviously is pregame out an excuse if Kamala Harris loses. We’ve been in this really weird matrix in American politics really since 2016, where before 2016. It’s so funny because Guy, you and I started when we were really young. So what? We’re now likely the middle aged and elderly of the political right. But we’re now old.

Guy Benson: Enough dinosaurs.

Ben Shapiro When I was you know I remember, you know, I remember in an age where when a candidate lost an election, it was typically a shock after the candidate not being good enough. In fact, this was the way that pretty much everybody did it for literally my entire lifetime. It’s all losers because it wasn’t good enough. Or at least the Bush Gore isn’t good enough if McCain loses the Obama because McCain is not good enough. And in 2015, when Hillary Clinton lost, the Democrats refused to actually just acknowledge she wasn’t good enough. And I think it started this bizarre, ugly era where basically a candidate loses and now you blame everything except for the candidate. So you remember in 2016, they blamed Facebook and Facebook and Russia manipulation. And so they’re setting up the pre gaming that out there suggestion is going to be that if Donald Trump wins that it’s not because Kamala Harris is a bad candidate and Joe Biden was a bad candidate before her. It’s actually simply because YouTube allowed for election misinformation and that YouTube must be punished. I mean, it’s setting up a predicate for investigations by presumably any Democratic House into places like YouTube for quote unquote, election misinformation.

Guy Benson: Now built into what you just said is the reality that at least for now, YouTube stood up to this, YouTube was pressured, and YouTube said, no, get lost. They did not violate our terms of service or anything like that. We’re standing by these programs. Is that an important win? Is that a Pyrrhic victory? Like what? What do you think of it?

Ben Shapiro You know, I think it’s I think it’s important that they’re actually planting a flag and saying, no, these don’t violate our terms and conditions and we’re going to allow this stuff on. And so I think that’s a permanent state of affairs. I anything is permanent in tech world. I think it’s the incentive structure changes, which is what The New York Times is trying to do and and post then obviously these tech these tech companies are going to change with the incentive structure. But that’s just why it’s so important to expose it, to keep the pressure on and to point out what these media companies are doing. Again, I think that, you know, if President Trump wins, this is likely to go away. It’s likely to die by death. The sort of media matters that if Conway Harris wins, I’m not so sure. I mean, there’s obviously been tremendous attempts to restrict social media by the left wing. I mean, Dianne Feinstein just a few years ago was was out there basically claiming that the that she was going to single handedly regulate Facebook if they didn’t regulate the kinds of information, if you want to regulate those.

Guy Benson: Sorts of things. Harris to right. Kamala herself has been an advocate for this sort of things. And she’d be at the very top of the government if she wins this election. Now, Ben, you just mentioned the prospect of a Democratic House, and that’s totally conceivable, totally plausible. Cook Political Report. I mentioned their Senate analysis earlier. On the House side, they see a range of Republicans winning up to half a dozen seats or Democrats netting up to ten seats. So it’s very, very tight. And if the Democrats win the House, we just learned yesterday the Education Committee put out their report about anti-Semitism on college campuses. It is devastating. There are some unbelievably scandalous, outrageous things that they have uncovered that they’ve put into this report, including some incidents and situations at my alma mater, at Northwestern and a number of other of these schools. And one thing that we learned is that some college administrators at these so-called elite schools have been rooting for Democrats to win the election, not for all their usual reasons, because they’re leftists, but specifically in this case, because they are under the impression, perhaps correctly, that if Democrats win the House, the Republican led investigation into this vile anti-Semitism, systemic on a lot of these campuses will simply go away. Isn’t it interesting that these college administrators believe that a Democrat run Congress would basically allow this problem, that they have to go away, at least in terms of federal oversight?

Ben Shapiro I mean, it really is amazing. And there was an email in that report from Chuck Schumer, New Shafie, who is the president of Columbia University, basically telling her, do not talk to the House because the house is run by these crazy Republicans and the Republicans care about antisemitism. But we don’t we don’t care about it at all. And so if you just you just hold out long enough and we’ll save you. I mean, it just demonstrates where the Democratic Party is on Semitism. They have a pathological inability to condemn anti-Semitism at this point. And again, you have to chalk that up to this intersectional woke ideology that suggests that everyone who is a failure in life was actually a victim of this system. Every group that is that is successful economically is an exploiter, and Jews don’t tend to fit into that matrix very well. They do Asian-Americans, among others. And because of that, Jews have now become white and they too are exploiters. And Asian-Americans can be banned from colleges like that. That sort of stuff is now kind of wrote on the left, including at the top echelons of the Democratic Party. But hard to make that the Chuck Schumer of it so. Is that Chuck Schumer is obviously in a very big deal over the course of his career about how pro Jewish he is. He calls himself Chuck Schumer, which in Hebrew means Guardian is supposed to be the guardian of the gate. And it’s just it’s just nonsense. And the Democratic Party need the irony of them losing because of a state like Pennsylvania, which is quite plausible. Right. And that’s the state of the three swing states in the Midwest. That’s the state, the blue wall state. That’s the state that Trump is most likely to win right now. More than Michigan. More than Wisconsin. If they end up losing the election because they lost Pennsylvania, because Kamala Harris couldn’t pick Josh Shapiro, the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, that will be the greatest irony and richly deserved.

Guy Benson: Ben, this information just came out yesterday. Is there enough time for this to penetrate right before the election?

Ben Shapiro I mean, I do think there is I think there are a lot of Jewish voters. And you mentioned earlier that kind of center right or centrist voter who is from curious but still hesitant. This is enough to push some people over the edge for sure. I would be surprised at this point if Trump doesn’t win 40% of the Jewish. The reason it’s not a majority for for people who don’t, you know, who are not sort of versed in Jewish demographics in the United States, the vast majority of Jews in the United States don’t actually practice this area of Judaism. They don’t go to synagogue. They don’t they don’t keep any of the rules. They don’t care particularly much about Israel. They’re basically people who are born in Jewish families but are but are atheists on the left. And, you know, that’s fine. But but it’s important to kind of recognize that the further right you get in terms of Jewish practice, I mean, more orthodox you are in terms of Jewish practice, the more you’re voting for Trump. I mean, my synagogue is about 400 family. About 800 of us are going to vote for Trump. I mean, it’s is a 100% Trump community. And it’s very common right now in the Orthodox community.

Guy Benson: Finally, Ben, my quasi hot take, it’s not a scalding take. Maybe lukewarm is I think there’s a very good chance we will know late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. Who’s won the election? I know everyone’s like, buckle up for days or weeks. Do you think I’m crazy about that?

Ben Shapiro: I don’t think you’re crazy about that. I think we could know actually pretty early, just based on, you know, a few kind of key indicators. If, let’s say, voter turnout is down in Philadelphia than she does. Right. If she’s if she’s getting low urban turnout, she’s finished. And conversely, if he’s getting low rural turnout, he’s in it. So, you know, I think there are going to be some early sort of red flags that go up. But yeah, I mean, in terms of what worst case scenarios, I have sort of a perverse fascination with worst case scenarios in politics. I was laying this one out on my on my show actually, today. So here’s here’s the worst case scenario that is possible for there to be. Trump wins North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada. Right. That take him to 268 and she wins to 70 at that point. One of the things that people are going to say and they’re going to be right is that the 2020 census was done wrong. The 2020 census screwed up the count in a bunch of states. It over counted a bunch of people living in blue states and it undercounted a bunch of people living in red states. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an openly acknowledged by the Census Department itself, as widely reported by Defense Department itself, that in 2021, if they had counted. Right. Florida will pick up two more Electoral College votes. Texas would have picked up at least one, probably seven electoral College votes to switch from blue to red. And that means that Trump theoretically just states, according to the real population of the United States, should have won the election. At that point, there will be lawsuits, I would assume, from some of those red states against the Census Department for disenfranchizing voters from those states that has adapted that to work as an area.

Guy Benson: Well, it seems like a lot of worst case scenarios come true. So let’s just say that’s not normal.

Ben Shapiro: Now to have to have jinx everything. But yeah, I mean, that was actually quite plausible. Those are the states that Trump is currently leading pretty clearly in.

Guy Benson: Yeah, with the other three being toss ups, it seems. So I guess we will know soon enough one way or the other. Ben Shapiro, check out his show, of course, The Ben Shapiro Show. You can read his stuff at The Daily Wire. He’s all over the place. Ben, we really appreciate your time. Thanks so much.

Ben Shapiro: Thanks, Guy. Good to talk to you.