Ben Shapiro pleads with his audience to ignore Alex Jones: “It makes you dumber”
Shapiro on Trump DOJ Epstein memo: “Either Alex Jones, as is usual, blew a conspiracy theory out of proportion and so did the rest of the Internet, or Dan Bongino and Kash Patel and Donald Trump are all lying to you.”
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From the July 8, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Guys, he has integrity. In fact, he's been called by some a prophet. Tucker Carlson literally called him a prophet on his program. So, actually, this is a person whose own lawyer made the case in a custody hearing with his ex-wife that he was a performance artist. This wasn't even the Sandy Hook trial where he tried to make the same case. His lawyers claim that this man of integrity is, in fact, a performance artist. Quote, he's playing a character and is nothing like his online persona, attorney Randall Wilhite reportedly insisted in a Texas courtroom at a pretrial hearing ahead of the right-wing radio jock's custody battle with ex-wife Kelly Jones. Judging Jones by his Infowars performances would be like judging Jack Nicholson by his depiction of the Joker on Batman. That's his own lawyer saying that. His own lawyer is saying that he was a performance artist. OK. That's — his wife was making the case that, actually, he's just unstable. Quote, he's not a stable person. He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin's neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped. His lawyer was like, no, no. He doesn't mean any of that. He's a performance artist.
OK. So those are your choices. So I'd just like to point out once again, at this point, you can watch whatever you want. It is a free country. You can watch Alex Jones. You can believe Alex Jones. You can think Alex Jones — you're entitled to any of those beliefs. That's fine. It's a free country.
On a moral and intellectual level, it is not so fine because it turns out that people who consistently traffic in conspiracy, it turns out that people who consistently traffic in trash, people who spend your time, your few brief breaths on this planet, filling your mind with stupidity, playing a WWE character — listen, if you wanna watch Alex Jones in the same way that you watch WWE because you know that the WWE is people who are fake jumping on each other and you find it dramatic and interesting, you know, more power to you. But if you're watching WWE and you think it's real, that makes you the stupid person. Don't do it. Don't do it. Seriously. It makes you dumber. It just makes you — in the end, you're responsible for the information that enters your brain and your independent judgment of that information. But if people are consistently being inauthentic, if people openly acknowledge that what they're saying to you publicly and what they say privately are two different things on the same matters, well, then maybe you ought to take what they say with a grain of salt rather than suggesting that, for example, Donald Trump is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein, or Dan Bongino, with whom I am friends, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein, or Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, is lying to you about Jeffrey Epstein. Because those are your only two choices here. Either Alex Jones, as is usual, blew a conspiracy theory out of proportion and so did the rest of the Internet, or Dan Bongino and Kash Patel and Donald Trump are all lying to you. Those are your choices. There is no third choice.