It's 18 years since 9/11, and today marks the anniversary of the attacks that took place on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. In this episode, Ben Shapiro reflects on the lessons we can learn from that day, and how it shaped our foreign policy in the post-9/11 world, and the impact it had on the way we think about foreign policy and how we see it today. He also reflects on what it means to be a woke American, and what it was like to be at a time when America was unified behind a President George W. Bush and a country that was waking up to the realization that a stronger United States is more likely to draw the attention of bad guys all over the world. And as a result of the United States abandonding its duty around the world in the wake of the Cold War, the vacuum of terror was indeed filled by bad guys. And we saw a spate of terror attacks that could have been indicative of something like 9-11, which should have been an aberration in American foreign policy up to that point in history, but was actually a reflection of something that was like a wake-up call from a time in which we were all on the same page and uniting behind a president who was uniting against evil and standing up for our values and our values. Ben Shapiro the final straw that woke us up to what was really going on around the globe and made us all wake up to something bigger than we ever had been before. And it's a reminder that a strong, united America is better than we thought we were supposed to be, and that we can be. What a time to be woke up to our own values, and a wake up call from our leaders, and realize that we're all in a time where we don't have it all together. . - Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro Show is a podcast that doesn't get much more woke than we all have enough power to do what we need to do, and we can all be woke, not less woke, and get on the bandwagon, and remember that we are all in this together, even when we're awake, and wake up, and start to wake up and wake ourselves up and get into the next chapter of our lives, and begin to get our day to start waking up and start getting our priorities and our priorities, and learn to our lives to start living our lives.
00:00:00.000It's 18 years since 9-11, President Trump dumps his National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Republicans prevail in a North Carolina congressional bellwether election.
00:00:11.000Well, today does mark the 18th anniversary.
00:00:19.000It's always weird to call it an anniversary of nine There are a lot of people I know who are listening to this show who don't remember 9-11, who are too young to remember 9-11, which is an amazing thing, because for people who were there, it was a seminal moment, much like, I'm sure, the assassination of JFK was for our parents and our grandparents.
00:00:39.000I remember precisely where I was when 9-11 happened.
00:00:42.000We were dropping my sisters off at school, my father and I, and people rushed out into the parking lot to tell us that the planes had hit the World Trade Center towers.
00:00:49.000It was a moment of clarification and crystallization.
00:00:52.000It was a reminder that the world is an incredibly dangerous place, filled with evil and foes who hate the United States of America.
00:00:59.000And it was a reminder that America was still capable of coming together In times when America was under attack, because the fact is that as divided as America was at the time, and I think America is more divided now than it was in 2001, the fact is that we're still able to recognize the common humanity in other Americans, realize that we shared the vast majority of the same values, realize that we were all on the same page on an essential, key level.
00:01:24.000And we got together and we recognized that we had to go and fight the people who had murdered 3,000 Americans, who had taken down the World Trade Centers, who had attacked the Pentagon.
00:01:35.000It was a shocking and horrifying day, obviously.
00:01:39.000I still get a little bit nauseous thinking about it, and I'm sure everyone who remembers it does.
00:01:42.000I mean, I'm not unique in that capacity in any way, shape, or form.
00:01:46.000We all remember the sacrifice of the firefighters and then the police officers who were rushing into the towers as people were running out trying to save people.
00:01:54.000We all remember the firefighters who were there for cleanup, many of whom have gotten diseased since because of all the asbestos and soot and dust in the air.
00:02:02.000We all remember the soldiers who stood up and volunteered, people who are far braver than I was, who stood up and said, I'm going to go and I'm going to fight the bad guys over there so they never come over here.
00:02:13.000And it's important to remember those things because how you view 9-11 as a natural outgrowth of an isolationist foreign policy or as an aberration in American history, It's just something weird that happened that one time.
00:02:24.000Shapes how we see foreign policy in the United States today.
00:02:28.000And how you reacted to 9-11 and how you react now to remembering 9-11 is indicative of where the future of American foreign policy lies.
00:02:35.000Because it seems to me that in the United States right now, there is this long slide back into the post-Cold War, pre-9-11 mentality on foreign policy, which is that the United States should retreat from the world.
00:02:49.000In the world that a stronger United States is more likely to draw the attention of bad guys all over the world.
00:02:55.000If we sort of left the world alone the world would leave us alone.
00:02:57.000And 9-11 was a reminder that that wasn't true because the fact is that The Clinton administration had been extraordinarily non-forthcoming in terms of interventionism.
00:03:07.000In fact, the only real interventionist acts they took were on humanitarian levels, right?
00:03:10.000They did that in Yugoslavia, they did that in Somalia, they did that a little bit in Sudan.
00:03:14.000But the Clinton administration was certainly not an aggressive, hawkish administration.
00:03:21.000Bill Clinton rapidly cut the military such that the military was simply not ready to do a two-front war by the time 2003 came around.
00:03:28.000And as a result of the United States abdicating its duty around the world in the aftermath of the Cold War with the assumption that the vacuum would not be filled by bad guys, the vacuum was indeed filled by bad guys.
00:03:38.000And we saw a spate of terror attacks leading up to 9-11 that should have been indicative that something like 9-11 was going to happen.
00:03:43.000We saw the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.
00:03:46.000We saw the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996.
00:03:49.000We saw the bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998-1999.
00:03:52.000We saw the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
00:03:57.000And then, of course, we saw the massive World Trade Center attacks, and that was the final straw that woke America from its reverie.
00:04:04.000And a second, I want to remind you exactly what that was like, what President George W. Bush had to say at the time, a time when America was unified and there was a realization, this brutal realization, that the world's problems would come here if we were not actively fighting them off away from our own doorstep.
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00:05:28.000Okay, so on 9-11, there was also a key reminder that we also seem to have forgotten in the United States, and that reminder is That for all the critiques we have of the United States, the people who wish to destroy the United States, if America stays true to our own values and true to ourselves, those people are enemies of the world and enemies of freedom.
00:05:46.000There's a strong, and I think morally correct, attempt in the United States toward constant self-correction.
00:05:54.000We're constantly introspective, and we should be.
00:05:56.000We should be looking at all the things we can do to alleviate sins of the past and to correct problems of the present.
00:06:09.000And yes, we are attempting to self-correct.
00:06:11.000But the story of America is a country that has done An insane amount of good on the world stage, a country that has freed billions of people, not only from tyranny, but also from poverty.
00:06:22.000The United States is a beacon of hope to the rest of the world.
00:06:25.000And when we act as we should act, then our enemies are the worst people on planet Earth.
00:06:31.000And for all the talk today about how terrible the United States is, Beto O'Rourke out there on the campaign trail talking about how America is a bastion of racism and violence.
00:06:39.000The idea that America is a dark, sinister place that you get sometimes from both sides.
00:06:43.000It's just not true, and it wasn't true on 9-11 either.
00:06:46.000And the people who attacked us on 9-11 saw America, and particularly saw our worldview, a worldview of liberalism, a worldview that suggested that freedoms allow the freedom to sin, a worldview that recognized that the power of the people Still, the majority should not be able to overrule the individual rights we all hold against government.
00:07:44.000What happened on 9-11 is that the United States got tired, the United States got lazy, in terms of foreign policy, and we forgot what we were all about.
00:07:51.000And then, in shattering fashion, we were reminded of that, and the United States had to unify once again, and the sleeping giant was awakened.
00:08:00.000On September 21st, 2001, he went before a joint session of Congress and he demanded that the Taliban, which was the evil terror group in charge of Afghanistan, surrender Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda was using Afghanistan as a home base.
00:08:14.000And here's what President George W. Bush had to say about it.
00:08:17.000The leadership of Al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country.
00:08:26.000The United States respects the people of Afghanistan.
00:08:30.000After all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid.
00:08:37.000And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban.
00:08:44.000Okay, and the United States was unified around that message.
00:08:51.000Now, later, obviously, this would all turn very political, and people would suggest that the Bush administration botched the invasion of Afghanistan, and then they would suggest that the war in Iraq was completely fruitless and pointless.
00:09:02.000And this all shattered on the shoals of war in foreign places.
00:09:07.000But the fact is, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, there was tremendous unity in the country on the basis of, we cannot sit around and hope that the rest of the world will leave us alone.
00:09:15.000President Trump spelled out the changes in American foreign policy.
00:10:21.000So it seems that we have now forgotten what exactly happened on 9-11, what that experience was like, what that experience meant in terms of foreign policy.
00:10:28.000I think we've forgotten it on the left.
00:10:30.000I think that many people have forgotten it on the right, because it has been nearly 20 years since that happened.
00:10:35.000And people are starting to view 9-11 as this historic aberration, as opposed to, as I mentioned, an outgrowth of an isolationist and retreat-based foreign policy.
00:10:45.000We'll talk about that in just one second.
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00:11:41.000He sort of rants in the background and things get awkward.
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00:12:20.000In any case, In any case, when we talk about 9-11 and forgetting the lessons of 9-11, a couple of pieces of evidence that people on the left have forgotten about 9-11, and then some evidence that people on the right may be moving away from a worldview that we remembered on 9-11 that was kind of important.
00:12:36.000In the post 9-11 world because let's be real about this.
00:12:39.000The fact is that the United States is actions in the aftermath of 9-11 did make America safer.
00:12:45.000You know, we can talk as much as we want about how 9-11 was an aberration as a uniquely spectacular attempt to commit terrorism in the United States.
00:12:52.000But the fact is that I remember in the aftermath of 9-11, there was serious fear of a follow-on attack.
00:13:56.000The story's lead, by the way, repeated exactly the same line.
00:13:59.000The story's lead also suggested that airplanes had taken AIM.
00:14:03.000For the same reason the media refuse, and still refuse, to show the actual pictures of what happened on 9-11, and refuse to talk about the actual perpetrators of 9-11, and refuse to show the pictures of people leaping from the tops of flaming buildings to their death because they don't want to remind America what 9-11 actually was.
00:14:20.000For the same reason the New York Times is tweeting out about how airplanes took aim.
00:14:52.000The one about 9-11 is titled, The World 9-11 Took From Us.
00:14:56.000It's by a person named Omar Aziz, and it's talking about Islamophobia.
00:15:01.000So 18 years after 9-11, we are still doing the routine that the media did in the aftermath of 9-11, which was that the biggest problem facing the United States was not evil Islamic radical terrorists attempting to murder Westerners.
00:15:11.000Now, the biggest problem in the United States was supposed brutal Islamophobia springing from the American people.
00:15:17.000In other words, the radical left's knee-jerk belief that the United States is responsible for everything that happens to the United States, that the United States' skirt was too short, led a lot of people on the left to immediately respond by suggesting that Americans were these vicious racists who were going to attempt to target Muslims across the United States.
00:15:34.000That wave of anti-Muslim violence never materialized.
00:15:37.000Okay, by hate crime statistics, Jews were targeted every single year, far more than Muslims were in the United States on a per capita basis.
00:15:44.000And yet, that media narrative remained.
00:15:56.000In the left's continued crusade to paint America as a uniquely terrible place.
00:16:00.000When 9-11 really reminded us that, you know, when you look at America in relation to the rest of the world, this place is pretty effing fantastic.
00:16:07.000And our ideals are pretty spectacular.
00:16:10.000The unity that surrounded 9-11 lasted for about five minutes and certainly by now on the left we have forgotten that unity and we've gone back to America's responsible for all the sins against her and if only we would be more conciliatory and we'd be more multicultural.
00:16:21.000If only we'd be nicer to the immigrants then everything would be fine.
00:16:25.000Now that is not an argument about illegal immigration.
00:16:27.000That's not an argument about legal immigration.
00:16:29.000I'm not making an argument on that basis.
00:16:31.000I'm saying that for the left The radical left, all of America's sins, in the words of Jeremiah Wright, came home to roost on 9-11.
00:17:06.000And that impact may not be felt for some years.
00:17:08.000But we do have to make difficult decisions on foreign policy.
00:17:12.000And some of those decisions are decisions like, should we have a more intrusive, invasive, Hawkish foreign policy to prevent the death of civilians at home, or should we accept the fact that if we are more isolated from the rest of the world in terms of foreign policy, if we leave areas to fester for years at a time without any sort of intervention, without any sort of American influence in those areas, that every so often we're going to take a mass casualty attack in the United States that may kill 3,000 Americans.
00:17:40.000Because to pretend that you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to foreign policy is an immature view of foreign policy.
00:17:46.000This immature view of foreign policy came to a head over the last week and a half when apparently the Trump administration and President Trump himself were specifically considering whether to have that same Taliban, the Taliban that George W. Bush talked about in 2001 that that fostered Al Qaeda.
00:18:02.000The same Taliban that continues to reject the legitimate government of Afghanistan and foster terrorism throughout Afghanistan.
00:18:10.000Whether that same Taliban should be welcomed to Camp David and the United States should cut a peace deal with a bunch of people who acknowledge openly that they wish to murder Americans and hate everything the United States stands for.
00:18:22.000And you can see this gap opening up on the right between sort of Bush-era foreign policy and the Trump-era foreign policy.
00:18:30.000And I was fearful that this was going to open up more in 2016 when President Trump was elected, mainly because the Bush administration made mistakes on foreign policy, right?
00:18:41.000Knowing now what they knew then, would they have invaded Iraq?
00:18:50.000Knowing now what we knew then, would they have focused on building up the military and fighting a one front war instead of a two front war?
00:19:01.000But the overall foreign policy view of the Bush administration was, If we do nothing, we're gonna get another 9-11 and we're gonna get a lot more terrorism and we're going to see our enemies thrive.
00:19:23.000There was a question, an open question in 2016 as to whether Trump was going to be more interventionist, sort of like Bush, or was he going to be more Obama-esque, seeking to bring America's troops home from these far-flung places across the world and assume that everything would sort of be fine.
00:19:36.000That was Obama's approach to foreign policy in which he slashed the military.
00:19:40.000Now, Trump has a knee-jerk like for the military that Obama simply didn't have.
00:19:43.000Obama had a knee-jerk dislike for the strength of the United States military, which is why when it came to, for example, sequestration, he insisted that half of the cuts come from the military.
00:19:51.000Trump innately likes the American military, loves the American military in a way that Barack Obama didn't, and so he's built up the American military.
00:19:58.000But the question was going to be how he deployed that military and how he approached diplomacy versus military force versus threats versus sanctions.
00:20:06.000And for a while there, it seemed that the Trump administration was going to be more Bush-like in its general approach than Obama-like in its general approach.
00:20:16.000That Taliban attempted meeting was a horrible, horrible idea on virtually every level.
00:21:59.000OK, so as I say, there's this open question about the Trump administration's foreign policy, and so far it seemed as though the Trump administration foreign policy had been more along sort of bushy in lines, although without the.
00:22:12.000the sort of Wilsonian aggressive instincts of the Bush foreign policy.
00:22:18.000So in other words, the United States had to be involved in the world, but sometimes it would just be a long-term holding pattern.
00:22:22.000It wasn't going to be the transformation of Afghanistan into a thriving democracy or the transformation of Iraq into a thriving democracy.
00:22:28.000It was Bushian aggressive interventionism with a real politic twinge.
00:22:37.000And then over the last week, we got all this talk about the Taliban and you could see the gaps beginning to emerge on the right over the legacy of 9-11.
00:22:43.000So Condoleezza Rice came out yesterday.
00:22:46.000And she said, listen, this is ridiculous.
00:22:48.000We should not be negotiating with the Taliban.
00:22:50.000Well, I'm relieved that we walked away from these talks.
00:22:54.000I always wondered if it was really possible to get a solution with a Taliban that is not really committed to peace.
00:23:02.000And there were some bad tell-tale signs.
00:23:05.000There is an Afghan government that has been there now as our ally for a decade and a half, and the Taliban says they don't recognize them, they won't talk to them.
00:23:15.000Okay, and Condoleezza Rice points out correctly that if the United States withdraws from Afghanistan, it collapses back into chaos again with the Taliban taking over.
00:23:23.000...in Europe for 45 years until Germany could unify between 1945 and 1990.
00:23:30.000We keep the peace on the Korean Peninsula since 1953.
00:23:34.000And I know that Americans are tired of some of the responsibilities, but frankly, there's nobody but the United States of America that can do these things.
00:23:43.000And so, I don't know what the right numbers are, but I hope that the President and his aides are asking our military What can we do to leave enough of a presence there to stabilize the situation?
00:23:56.000Now, as I say, this is the conflict that is breaking out into the open.
00:24:00.000And it seems to have broken out specifically over this Taliban thing.
00:24:03.000And the conflict I'm talking about ends with the firing of John Bolton, the national security advisor.
00:24:08.000So apparently Bolton's position with the Taliban was exactly Condoleezza Rice's position with the Taliban, which would be the Bush position with the Taliban.
00:24:14.000Frankly, you can't negotiate with terrorists.
00:24:16.000And if we have to leave a footprint in Afghanistan indefinitely, we will leave a footprint in Afghanistan indefinitely.
00:24:23.000And then there was the other side of the equation, which was sort of Trump's instinct, which is get out now as fast as humanly possible.
00:24:28.000And if they hit us, then maybe we have to hit them again.
00:24:30.000But we got to get out as fast as humanly possible.
00:24:32.000That side of the equation is backed by people more like Tucker Carlson and Rand Paul.
00:24:37.000And that came to a head with the firing of Bolton.
00:24:39.000So according to Karen's young Josh Dawsey and John Hudson over at The Washington Post, over a turbulent 17 months, President Trump and National Security Advisor John Bolton had disagreed on a variety of issues from North Korea to Venezuela to Iran.
00:24:50.000But Trump finally decided to remove his top security aide on Tuesday after a heated discussion in the Oval Office following accusations by other officials in the administration that Bolton had leaked to the news media, tried to drag others into his battles with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over Afghanistan, and promoted his own views rather than those of the president, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:25:09.000Trump called on Bolton to meet with him on Monday afternoon as he prepared to leave for a campaign rally that night in North Carolina.
00:25:15.000Bolton was seen by some in the administration as the source of a media report that Vice President Pence and he were allies in opposing a peace deal with the Taliban negotiated by Pompeo's State Department.
00:25:24.000Just before the meeting, Trump had tweeted that it was fake news designed to create the look of turmoil in the White House, of which there is none.
00:25:32.000Bolton denied the charge, said, I didn't leak that to the media, that there was this big division.
00:25:35.000But the Afghanistan issue, according to The Washington Post, turned out to be a tipping point.
00:25:39.000Among accumulated grievances that had been building for months, the president was annoyed that Bolton would regularly call on members of Congress to try to get them to push Bolton-preferred policies on Trump, according to a senior official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
00:25:54.000Many on Bolton's handpicked staff were seen as unnecessarily confrontational with other parts of the national security bureaucracy.
00:26:09.000So it used to be that foreign policy was conducted in the room.
00:26:12.000Basically, you'd have all of your foreign policy players, they'd sit around the table, they'd bring in briefing experts, and then decisions would be made.
00:26:18.000That is not how President Trump makes policy.
00:26:19.000He makes policy by watching TV, he listens to commentary, he takes in the commentary, and then he produces a decision.
00:26:25.000Or, he gets a call from somebody outside, and then he considers that, and then he makes decisions.
00:26:30.000Okay, we have seen this repeatedly on everything from domestic to foreign policy.
00:26:34.000He'll take a call from Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity and then he will make decisions on the basis of his opinion about those calls.
00:26:40.000He'll watch something on Fox News and this will shape his thinking on how a particular issue takes place.
00:26:46.000Now, it's not my preferred methodology, but people inside the administration know this.
00:26:50.000Everyone inside the administration knows this, whether or not they are saying so.
00:26:53.000Everybody sort of acknowledges that this is how Trump's administration works.
00:26:56.000If you know anybody in the White House, you know this is true.
00:26:58.000And I know nearly everybody in the White House.
00:27:12.000What really happened here is that Trump got egg on his face over this whole Taliban ridiculous appeal that he's going to bring the worst people on earth, literally some of the worst people on earth to Camp David.
00:27:23.000And then he was going to have some sort of peace agreement with them in which they would promise something and then give up nothing.
00:27:28.000And then we were going to withdraw American troops on that basis.
00:27:31.000And never reinsert them, because once you withdraw them, Trump is not going to reinsert those troops.
00:27:38.000Bolton's pretty loud about opposing it until Bolton's out.
00:27:40.000That's pretty much what seems to have happened here.
00:27:42.000Trump had been inundated with complaints, according to officials.
00:27:45.000Pence and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who are awaiting Trump's arrival Monday afternoon in Fayetteville, found Bolton increasingly abrasive and self-promoting, which is to say, the best way to get someone fired in the Trump administration is to go to Trump and say, that guy's stealing your limelight.
00:28:04.000Secretary of State Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had told Trump that his national security advisor was not helping him, officials said.
00:28:11.000Bolton had even refused in recent weeks to go on television and defend the president's policies on Afghanistan and Russia.
00:28:17.000Bolton, the president felt, wasn't loyal.
00:28:19.000Of course, it always comes down to that for President Trump.
00:28:22.000After Trump made his views known, Bolton offered to resign.
00:28:25.000According to Bolton, Trump insisted that they would discuss it the next day.
00:28:29.000It was the last time he saw the president.
00:28:30.000He had the meeting, thought about it for a few hours, especially since the president wasn't exactly begging him to stay on and he'd had enough, said a person familiar with Bolton's thinking.
00:28:38.000On Tuesday morning, Bolton handed a two sentence letter to an aide for delivery to Trump and left the building.
00:29:12.000But it certainly provides an opening to a lot of the members of that caucus who seek to minimize America's presence on the world stage.
00:29:18.000Now, again, I'm not saying that's coming from a bad place for a lot of these folks.
00:29:21.000I'm not saying that Tucker, who tends to be on this side, or Rand Paul, who tends to be on this side.
00:29:26.000I'm not saying this is coming from a place that the American left is coming from, where they say that America's presence on the world stage provokes attacks against the United States, and America is a force for nefarious ends in the world.
00:29:39.000I think that Tucker's basic perspective is that the United States should not be expending resources abroad that could be better spent at home.
00:29:45.000I think this is Rand Paul's perspective, too.
00:29:48.000Although more tinged with maybe a Ron Paul sentiment.
00:29:50.000And Tucker's perspective is, if we bring those folks home from distant lands, we can build up the United States.
00:29:56.000If somebody hits us, we hit them back.
00:29:57.000And that's pretty much how this works.
00:29:58.000You don't need an interventionist foreign policy.
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00:32:17.000So the question about Bolton's ouster is whether it reflects deeper divides inside the Trump administration about foreign policy itself or whether this was just interpersonal conflict.
00:32:42.000So maybe it was just an interpersonal conflict.
00:32:45.000Can you describe your working relationship with John Bolton as it was today?
00:32:50.000And also, does this departure make it easier for you to do your job and for the administration to accomplish the President's foreign policy agenda?
00:33:00.000Look, I don't talk about the inner workings of how this all goes.
00:33:06.000There were many times Ambassador Bolton and I disagreed, that's to be sure.
00:33:10.000But that's true for lots of people with whom I interact.
00:33:14.000Okay, so Pompeo obviously had some interpersonal problems, and people like Lindsey Graham, who are close to the administration, also close to Bolton, he says, it was probably coming because this was as much a personality conflict as anything else.
00:33:26.000He says, the president had gotten into a situation where he didn't like reading about some stuff in the paper.
00:33:30.000It got to be a breakdown of trust that had pretty well shut down the policy process among national security agencies.
00:33:35.000At the White House, those outside the inner sanctum were stunned when Trump's tweet appeared.
00:33:40.000When Pompeo appeared in an unrelated news briefing shortly after Trump's tweet, he rebuffed frantic questions about Bolton, saying he would not talk about the administration's inner workings.
00:33:49.000Steve Mnuchin also looked pretty pleased over at the Treasury Department, and he sort of blamed this on the variant views of Trump and Bolton on the Iraq War, which makes zero sense considering that the United States does not have a lot going on in Iraq at this point as compared with Afghanistan.
00:34:05.000One thing I would just say, follow up, because the president's been very clear on this.
00:34:08.000The president's view of the Iraq war and Ambassador Bolton's was very different.
00:34:13.000Okay, so there is apparently a long list of people inside the White House who just didn't like Bolton very much on a personal level, apparently including Melania Trump, Pence, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Mnuchin, and other Defense Department officials.
00:34:27.000That's my hope, is that this was all interpersonal.
00:34:29.000I fear that this is reflective of a move to the left by the Trump administration on foreign policy, or at least a move toward a more isolationist sentiment by the Trump administration.
00:34:39.000So Tucker Carlson, to take an example, was celebrating Bolton's ouster last night.
00:34:43.000You can see he's very happy about all of this, is Tucker.
00:34:46.000And Tucker suggested, I think ridiculously, that Bolton is a man of the left, which is just bizarre and insane.
00:34:52.000Like, there's no evidence whatsoever that Bolton is a left winger.
00:34:55.000I mean, really, does the left love John Bolton?
00:34:58.000If you're wondering why so many progressives are mourning Bolton's firing tonight, it's because Bolton himself fundamentally was a man of the left.
00:35:47.000Rand Paul, of course, plays the same tune.
00:35:49.000He says that the threat of war is diminished with Bolton gone.
00:35:51.000Let me just make something clear here.
00:35:53.000This notion that John Bolton is going around stumping for war...
00:35:56.000If that were the case, wouldn't there have been a little more war under John Bolton?
00:35:59.000Because one of the things that I have noticed is that John Bolton mainly stymied President Trump for making a crap deal with the North Koreans.
00:36:06.000He was apparently ready to sign an agreement with the North Koreans in which the United States would stop military exercises, would start to withdraw some of its joint exercises with the South Koreans, would ease some of the economic burden on North Korea in return for empty promises.
00:36:21.000And Bolton was like, no, that's a bad idea.
00:36:22.000And then Bolton also undermined the negotiations with Iran that were going on that would have presumably returned the United States to something resembling the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in the first place.
00:36:34.000And then Bolton was standing strong against this Taliban deal.
00:36:48.000You know, I think the threat of war around the world is greatly diminished with Bolton out of the White House.
00:36:55.000I think he had a naive point of view for the world that we should topple regimes everywhere and institute, you know, democratic governments and we would make the world perfect or remake the world in our image.
00:37:06.000And frankly, it just doesn't work that way.
00:37:07.000There's a lot of history of getting rid of strong men in the Middle East and having them replaced by vacuums or chaos or actually making the Place more hospitable for terrorist training.
00:37:19.000OK, again, you can criticize Americans interventionist foreign policy, but doing this whole thing about how America is less likely to go to war now that John Bolton is out.
00:37:27.000And there are two ways America goes to war.
00:37:30.000America goes to war precipitously and America goes to war reactively.
00:37:34.000After 9-11, it was reactive and then it became precipitous.
00:37:37.000Are you more fearful that the Trump administration is going to go to war reactively or precipitously?
00:37:42.000My fear is that we will go to war reactively.
00:37:44.000We will be attacked and then we'll be forced into a position of doing something.
00:37:48.000And so far, that's been Trump's tendency.
00:37:51.000One of the things about an active foreign policy is sometimes you forestall war by preventing the conditions that lead to an outbreak in the first place.
00:37:59.000The sort of preemptive strategy of interventionism in foreign policy that was Bushian, is that going to be replaced by a different sort of isolationist foreign policy now that Bolton is out?
00:38:17.000And now we are back to the Clinton era arguments that took place.
00:38:20.000Frankly, I think we're back to those arguments as soon as 2008-2009 when Barack Obama was elected.
00:38:25.000But to see that sort of cross party lines is at the very least somewhat disturbing.
00:38:30.000I would prefer to think, and I think realistically, that the Trump administration is not going to suddenly embrace all sorts of deals with the world's worst regimes, at least I hope not.
00:38:38.000Instead, I think that the Trump administration, maybe this was just about interpersonal conflict, that at least is my hope.
00:38:43.000I will say this, when Iran is celebrating the ouster of an American advisor, that's probably not a great thing.
00:38:49.000According to the Associated Press, Iran's president urged the United States on Wednesday to, quote, put warmongers aside as tensions roiled the Persian Gulf amid an escalating crisis between Washington and Tehran in the wake of collapsing nuclear deals with world powers.
00:39:02.000Hassan Rouhani, his remarks signaled approval of Trump's abrupt dismissal of John Bolton as national security adviser.
00:39:12.000The reason I say this is because Iran is run by evil, evil people who have pursued awful violence in the region against American allies, against various sovereign countries.
00:39:25.000Whenever you are Again, Iran celebrating is not a good thing for the United States as a general rule.
00:39:31.000OK, meanwhile, over in North Carolina, there was a special election last night.
00:39:34.000The Democrats were hoping very much like that Georgia district where John Ossoff ran and lost, that they were going to pull out a surprise victory in a heavy red district.
00:39:42.000This district was won by President Trump in 2016 by 12 points.
00:39:48.000Well, last night, the district was won again by a Republican.
00:39:51.000It's been held by a Republican for something like 40 years.
00:39:55.000According to the New York Times, Dan Bishop, a Republican state senator, scored a narrow victory on Tuesday in a special House election in North Carolina that demonstrated Trump's appeal with his political base, but also highlighted his party's deepening unpopularity with suburban voters.
00:40:08.000Bishop defeated Dan McCready, a moderate Democrat, one day after Trump made a full-throated plea for support for the Republican at a rally on the conservative end of a Charlotte to Fayetteville district, which the president carried by nearly 12 points in 2016.
00:40:21.000With most votes counted as of Tuesday night, Bishop was ahead by about two percentage points, according to the Associated Press.
00:40:27.000The fierce fight for the 9th Congressional District also brought to an end a tortured political drama.
00:40:31.000The 2018 midterm race for the seat, in which McCready barely lost against a different Republican, was in question for months because of evidence of election fraud on the GOP side.
00:40:40.000That election was thrown out and a special election had to be held, and then the Democrat lost actually by more votes than the Democrat lost the first time around.
00:40:49.000So, the question is what kind of bellwether this is.
00:40:50.000President Trump believes that this is a bellwether for coming Republican victory in 2020, and he tweeted out as much.
00:40:56.000He tweeted, Dan Bishop was down 17 points three weeks ago.
00:41:33.000He's a formidable political figure at getting out the base.
00:41:36.000As I am fond of saying, Winning an election in the United States is about two things, making it unpalatable to vote for your opponents, and making it very palatable for people to vote for you.
00:41:46.000Trump is fantastic at the former, and he is not phenomenal at the latter, getting people to vote for him.
00:41:55.000There are a lot of people who show up to vote against him, but in a special election where turnout's gonna be low, Trump's presence there may have been the turning point for the Republican in this race, Bishop.
00:42:07.000Is it true that Bishop was down 17 points a couple of weeks ago?
00:42:10.000I haven't seen any data that supports that.
00:42:12.000It was a pretty close race for weeks and months.
00:42:46.000Now, the possibility here is the Democrats failed to take the lesson.
00:42:49.000The lesson Democrats should take is if we run a very good candidate in a red district, it turns purple.
00:42:53.000And if we run a very good Democratic candidate in a purple district, it turns blue.
00:42:58.000In other words, they should be running more toward the center and not proclaiming progressive policy as the be-all end-all.
00:43:04.000But it seems like they're taking the opposite message, which is, I guess we didn't get out our base enough.
00:43:08.000So, for example, you get this article from the Washington Post's Philip Bump, quote, His impression is that what Democrats really need to do is skew to the progressive left.
00:43:21.000Now, if that's the lesson you took out of NC9, you're getting it wrong.
00:43:24.000The only reason that was a competitive race is because Democrats ran a very good candidate in that race against a somewhat weak Republican candidate.
00:43:33.000In a time when Republicans are not overwhelmingly popular.
00:43:36.000But if Democrats had run AOC in that district, they'd lose by 30, right?
00:43:40.000But a lot of Democrats are taking the wrong message.
00:43:41.000So Philip Bump says, "Since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, "there's been a slow uptick in Americans reporting satisfaction "with how things are going in the country." You can see that in the Gallup polling.
00:43:52.000Over the course of 2008, Gallup data indicated that, on average, 15% of Americans were satisfied with how things were going.
00:43:58.000In 2009, that jumped to an average of 26%, before slipping back into the upper teens by 2011.
00:44:03.000By Obama's last year in office, the average was 27%, which carried into 2017, President Trump's first year in office.
00:44:12.000So far this year, the average has fallen slightly.
00:44:14.000Now, I love that he's attributing this to politics.
00:44:16.000Okay, the fact is, That this has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with how the economy is going.
00:44:22.000In other words, when the economy sucks, satisfaction goes down.
00:44:24.000And when the economy gets better, satisfaction goes up.
00:44:28.000But Bump says during the 1990s, views of satisfaction among Democrats and Republicans generally tracked with one another.
00:44:33.000Starting in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, Democratic satisfaction tanked, while Republicans remained confident with how things were going, at least until Bush was re-elected.
00:44:43.000Then the Iraq war and the economy submarine satisfaction, even within Bush's own party.
00:44:47.000Satisfaction stayed low among Republicans during Obama's two turns, recovering only once Trump won.
00:44:52.000Trump's victory, though, prompted Democrats to suddenly see the direction of the country as increasingly unsatisfactory.
00:44:58.000There is a partisan gap in satisfaction with the country that is largely based on political control.
00:45:02.000But overall, The satisfaction with the country tends to track with the economy fairly well.
00:45:08.000During Bill Clinton's presidency, Democrats and Republicans differed in their satisfaction over how things were going by about 19 points on average.
00:45:14.000Under Bush, that gap soared to an average of 40 points.
00:45:17.000Under Trump, the average gap has been 45 points.
00:45:21.000Philip Bump says this largely mirrors another metric, which is presidential job approval because of partisanship.
00:45:27.000So he says all of this brings us to the question we're here to answer.
00:45:30.000Does this new reality suggest new mechanics will be in play in 2020?
00:45:33.000And on Tuesday, the New York Times looked at the history of successful Democratic moderates in political campaigns.
00:45:39.000Even in the 2018 Democratic wave, they argue, more moderate candidates had more success in congressional campaigns.
00:45:44.000That's good news for the current leader, former Vice President Joe Biden.
00:45:48.000But, they say, do more moderate positions mean that Biden has a better chance of winning?
00:45:54.000But, says Philip Bump, Democrats hate Trump, so hatred of Trump may drive them to support more progressive policies and drive them out to the polls.
00:46:01.000So he suggests that it is possible a more progressive candidate will be more useful to Democrats.
00:46:09.000He says the countervailing theory to a moderate is the safer bet for Democrats is a variant on the Ted Cruz theory of 2016.
00:46:15.000Nominate a hard-right conservative, more moderate Republicans will vote for that candidate anyway, but conservatives were the ones staying home and now they'll show up.
00:46:23.000So the idea from Democrats is very similar.
00:46:27.000Philip Bum says most Democrats now identify as liberal.
00:46:29.000That's a shift that has been slowly happening in the party, with self-identified liberals passing moderates during Obama's tenure.
00:46:37.000So Democrats may, in fact, take the wrong lesson from NC9 and then run somebody who is radically progressive.
00:46:43.000Now, again, the reason that this is not going to it may be true on a national popular vote level that you get more people from New York and California to vote for you if you run Elizabeth Warren than if you run Joe Biden.
00:47:24.000And it still shows that President Trump has some last-minute push-button appeal.
00:47:27.000With Republicans that many Democrats do not.
00:47:29.000Like, for example, there's a poll out of Texas today that shows a bunch of Democrats ahead of President Trump in Texas in the national election, but none of those Democrats is breaking 50.
00:47:39.000Every single Democrat in that poll is stuck in the upper 40s, which really suggests that President Trump is going to win that state and probably win the state pretty handily.
00:47:48.000All of the polls that have Trump down at 42 right now have no Democratic opponent.
00:47:52.000Right, it's Trump against generic Democrat.
00:47:54.000Well, Trump against generic Democrat probably gets 40% in 2016.
00:47:57.000Against Hillary Clinton, Trump against generic Democrat ends up with something like 46%.
00:48:01.000Okay, so the opponent matters very, very much here.
00:48:05.000NC9 demonstrates that, but I think Democrats may take the wrong lesson, at least I hope so.
00:48:09.000All right, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:48:13.000So, I'm constantly hearing questions from parents about what are some great books for kids.
00:48:18.000I love this series from Brad Meltzer, illustrated by Christopher Eliopoulos.
00:48:22.000It's called the I am series the ordinary people change the world series and it's great they have these books about Albert Einstein have recommended them before there are two new ones that have just come out one is called I am Walt Disney and the other is I am Mary Curie and it's just these are great books they're all about the obstacles that these historical figures had to overcome and the great things that they did I just read my daughter, the one on Marie Curie.
00:48:44.000And first of all, it taught me things that I didn't remember about Marie Curie.
00:48:48.000And second of all, it really is inspiring for kids.
00:48:50.000My daughter turned to me and she said, when I grow up, I want to be a scientist.
00:48:54.000And I said, well, you know, mommy's also a scientist.
00:48:55.000She said, no, I want to be a real scientist.
00:49:07.000They're really, Pro-America, but in the sort of non-flag-waving sense, meaning that the ones about American citizens, they don't sugarcoat American history.
00:49:15.000They have one about Jackie Robinson that talks about racism in American history, but reminds you that America is the land of opportunity and reminds you that the most successful people in life are the people who work through obstacles and work hard and take advantage of the opportunities that they have and make opportunities for themselves.
00:49:56.000And they continue to push terrible policy, the Democrats in Sacramento.
00:49:59.000Today, California legislators approved a landmark bill on Tuesday that requires companies like Uber and Lyft to treat contract workers as employees, a move that could reshape the gig economy and that adds fuel to a years-long debate over whether the nature of work has become too insecure.
00:50:12.000This is the part Where we remind everybody that if you make all of these people employees, then Uber and Lyft have to pay them like employees and not like independent contractors, which means that the price dramatically goes up on consumers, which means fewer people are employed.
00:50:27.000You're artificially boosting wages as opposed to just paying people what they want to take a job for.
00:50:34.000Uber and Lyft have transformed the transportation economy, particularly in the city of Los Angeles, which is very spread out.
00:50:40.000You've seen this in New York, where people with taxi medallions have been lobbying for years to have Uber and Lyft treated as though all of the drivers are actually working directly for the business, creating liability and health insurance issues and all of the rest of it.
00:50:53.000Well, I don't blame the folks who paid 50 grand for a taxi medallion in New York, because New York had created this idiotic cartel.
00:51:00.000In Los Angeles, you want to make LA, a lot worse place to live, do exactly this.
00:51:05.000And that, of course, is what they're doing.
00:51:06.000We have a massive homeless problem here in Los Angeles.
00:51:09.000A lot of people who are seeking jobs to tide them over from job to job, drive an Uber and Lyft.
00:51:14.000I mean, if you've ever driven with any of these rideshare services and you talk to the folks who are driving, very often they'll say, yeah, I'm between jobs right now and one of the ways I'm paying my rent is that I was able to become one of these drivers on like 48 hours notice and it's allowing me to pay my bills.
00:51:28.000So California is going to take that ability away from you, which is just spectacular.
00:51:31.000The bill passed in a 29 to 11 vote in the state senate and will apply to app-based companies despite their efforts to negotiate an exemption.
00:51:38.000Gavin Newsom, who has the looks and brains of a Ken doll, endorsed the bill this month and is expected to sign it after it goes through the state assembly.
00:51:46.000Under the measure, workers must be designated as employees instead of contractors if a company exerts control over how they perform their tasks or if their work is part of a company's regular business.
00:52:07.000A coalition of labor groups, of course, is pushing similar legislation in New York because they don't like free and open competition in the labor market.
00:52:14.000Instead, they prefer unionized work that raises wages but limits employment.
00:52:19.000Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom signed another idiotic bill today.
00:52:22.000This bill prevents schools from suspending disruptive students from kindergarten through eighth grade because nothing makes education in California's public schools better than having a kid who's being a little crap, disrupting the class and not being able to do anything about it.
00:52:37.000Gavin Newsom signed the law, Senate Bill 419.
00:52:40.000It permanently prohibits willful defiance suspensions in grades 4 and 5.
00:52:44.000It also bans such suspensions in grades 6 through 8 for five years.
00:52:47.000Nothing like taking away a tool that a teacher has to remove a bad influence from a classroom.
00:52:51.000Nothing ruins a classroom quite like disruptive children that you can't do anything about.
00:52:56.000In fact, I remember even when I was in private school, you'd get this because if the parents were big donors to the school, then teachers were reluctant to remove the kids from the classroom.
00:53:03.000Those were always the kids who were in the classroom.
00:53:05.000Now, the reason they're doing this is because they suggest that too many minority kids are being suspended from class.
00:53:11.000Well, first of all, there are a lot of minority teachers who are suspending minority kids.
00:53:14.000This is not necessarily the result of some endemic racism.
00:53:18.000Maybe kids who are acting badly should stop acting badly in class and their parents should step in.
00:53:23.000There is this endemic problem, white, black, and green in the United States, and that is that parents these days...
00:53:28.000Toss their kids on schools, and then expect the teachers to raise their kids for them.
00:53:31.000And then, if their kids come home and they're like, ah, my teacher got on my case, the parents call up the teacher and whine about it.
00:53:35.000And you know what happens if a teacher calls us up and says, your kid is making trouble in class?
00:53:41.000The talk that I have is not with the teacher.
00:53:51.000Kids don't have behavioral regulation.
00:53:52.000Their brains aren't that developed yet.
00:53:55.000You need to be able to remove disruptive students from the classroom because, especially in LA, you got like 30 other kids in the classroom.
00:54:03.000I've been in classrooms where kids are disruptive.
00:54:05.000It is not a pretty picture and it tends to have a snowball effect because once kids know they can get away with something, then all the kids start acting this way.
00:54:14.000The bill was opposed by the Charter School Development Center, whose executive director argued that this was one-size-fits-all legislation that is a fix in search of a problem.
00:54:22.000And that is correct, but there is this whole case that this is one of the best ways to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.
00:54:28.000I'm sure that suspending kids from class is what causes them to be bad kids, not the fact that they were being bad kids in class, which is why they were suspended in the first place.
00:54:37.000I would love to see the control group here.
00:54:40.000The kids who were terrible in class were not suspended, and then ended up being Fortune 500 CEOs.
00:54:45.000As opposed to, kids were suspended, their parents called the school, the parents punished the kid, and then the kid got back on the straight and narrow.
00:54:51.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today for two additional hours of content.
00:54:55.000And as always, you know, I think we should keep 9-11 in our hearts and minds today.
00:55:00.000Remember what that was like, and remember that that sort of thing can happen again if the United States falls asleep again.
00:55:05.000You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:55:06.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
00:55:52.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:55:55.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:56:01.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.