Is President Trump's Iran strategy strategy or just chaos? Plus, President Trump changes his mind on ICE rates and Democrats get even more radical. Also, I will regale you with the antics of my children during my wife s graduation ceremony. Later in the hour, we have a lot of news to get to, including the latest on the case against Dr. Dovid Schwartz, the Orthodox Jewish psychotherapist who is challenging a ban on same-sex marriage counseling in the United States. And a new piece from Michael Doran on the tension with Iran. And finally, we finish up the show with a story about my kids' antics at my wife's graduation ceremony, which you won't want to miss. Subscribe to my new podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review of the show on Apple Podcasts! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcast goons! Ben Shapiro's new book "The Big Stick" is out now! If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about it! I'll be looking out for Ben Shapiro on next week's episode of The Big Sticks Podcast on Tuesday nights at 8 PM Eastern Time! Subscribe on iTunes! Thank you for supporting the show and spreading the word to your friends and family about The Big Stick? I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Big Stick Podcast! - Ben Shapiro, Big Stick! "Big Sticks" - The Big stick theory? "The Man Who's Big Deal, Big stick Theory? - Big Stick Theory? "Big Stick Theory?" - Big Stuff, Big Steeves, Big Deal Theory, Big Idea, Big Rock Theory, and Big Deal Day, Little Steezy Day, Big Day Day, by: 5/20, 5/25, 6/27/19? 6/28, 7/7/9/19, 8/27, 9/30, 6 7/8, 8, and 7/9, 8/7, 9/8 9, & 8, & 6, & 7, 6, and 8, And 7, and 6, etc., etc., and 7, & so on, 8, etc. Thanks, Ben Shapiro etc.,
00:00:16.000Well, we have a lot of news to get to.
00:00:18.000Also, later in the hour, I will regale you with the antics of my children during my wife's graduation ceremony yesterday.
00:00:25.000Yeah, I know, I'm gonna put you through that, but don't worry, we'll save it for the end of the show.
00:00:29.000But first, will you fight for your freedom?
00:00:31.000Every week, it seems I bring you a new story about attacks on religious freedom and free speech.
00:00:34.000I mean, this is stuff that I truly care about, right?
00:00:37.000As a religious person, one of the things that I worry most about in the state of California is the state cracking down on religious practice.
00:00:43.000We're starting to see this all over the country from the radical left.
00:00:46.000Dr. Dovid Schwartz is an Orthodox Jewish psychotherapist.
00:00:48.000New York enacted a law that censors speech between therapist and client by prohibiting treatment of clients who struggle with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.
00:00:55.000Like the client comes in and just wants to be helped.
00:00:58.000Dr. Schwartz could be punished with fines of up to $10,000 per offense just for helping them the way they want to be helped.
00:01:04.000This type of case is why Alliance Defending Freedom exists.
00:01:07.000ADF provides free legal services to Dr. Schwartz and others whose freedoms are under assault, but ADF can't provide these resources without your help.
00:01:14.000ADF relies on donations to fight for your freedom.
00:01:17.000If this attack can happen to somebody like Dr. Schwartz, it could happen to you.
00:01:19.000I think this stuff is some of the most important... This may be the most important fight in America, seriously.
00:01:24.000Will you fight for Dr. Schwartz and protect your freedom?
00:01:51.000OK, so we begin today with the latest on the tension with Iran.
00:01:55.000So before we get to the actual latest on the tension with Iran, there's a really great piece by Michael Doran, who's a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.
00:02:02.000And he goes through what exactly Iran is trying to do here.
00:02:06.000And it's it's necessary to understand what Iran is trying to do and what the United States is trying to accomplish to determine what the strategy should be with regard to Iran.
00:02:15.000Now, listen, the backdrop here is that nobody really knows in foreign policy.
00:02:20.000Nobody knows in foreign policy what can happen given any circumstance.
00:02:24.000Foreign policy is simply too unpredictable.
00:02:26.000There are, however, tried and true strategies When it comes to things like deterrence, if you're trying to deter somebody's action, they have to know that you are committed to taking a very harsh step should they violate a line, right?
00:02:37.000This is why President Obama violating his own red line in Syria was so devastating.
00:02:42.000It's why when President Obama said to Syria, use chemical weapons and that'll violate our red line and then him backing off the red line, it undermined his credibility and it led to tremendous suffering across the Middle East and across the world.
00:02:54.000It's one of the reasons why a lot of America's enemies got more ambitious and more aggressive in the face of President Obama.
00:03:01.000In other words, the talk softly and carry a big stick methodology of Teddy Roosevelt isn't just a nice phrase, it's also a very good strategy.
00:03:09.000That when you carry the stick, people should know that you're carrying the stick.
00:04:03.000When it comes to the international community, there's no community.
00:04:05.000The international community is a dog-eat-dog space, and that means that the most powerful hand, the whip hand in international politics, has to be very predictable and very solid.
00:04:14.000People have to know what they are going to do before they do it, especially if they're going to take a strong policy.
00:04:21.000Because right now, Iran has been engaged in aggressive antics for the past several months.
00:04:25.000Well, Michael Doran, as I said, has a really good piece over at Mosaic.
00:04:28.000It's called, What Iran Is Really Up To.
00:04:31.000He says, in April 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, that is the Iran nuclear deal signed by President Obama, a garbage deal, was still to be formalized, but Republicans preparing to run for president in the following year were already denouncing it.
00:04:45.000At a public forum in New York City, The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius asked Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, whether he worried that one of these Republicans, if elected, might overturn the deal.
00:04:56.000"Any successor to Barack Obama would be constrained by international law, by America's commitments, formal and informal, to allies and partners, and by all the norms that govern relations among nations today." He said, "I believe the United States will risk isolating itself in the world if there's an agreement and it decides to break it.
00:05:11.000The result of any such action," he predicted, "would be chaos." Zarif's comments, says Doran, prefigured the strategy that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is following today in his brinksmanship with President Trump.
00:05:22.000Playing on the fear, especially prevalent among European elites and American Democrats, that Trump is, precisely, an agent of chaos, Khamenei has taken a leaf from the book of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who in 2017 appeared at the World Economic Forum as the representative of enlightened globalism.
00:05:37.000We should adhere to multilateralism to uphold the authority and efficacy of multilateral institutions, Xi declared.
00:05:43.000We should honor promises and abide by rules.
00:05:45.000The chords struck by Xi were still resonating in the halls of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires last December, when the assembled leaders adopted a joint communique, affirming their commitment to a rules-based international order.
00:05:57.000This is shorthand for slapping Trump, presumably.
00:05:59.000Khomeini intends to leverage the fears that haunt Europeans by raising the specter of war and simultaneously offering a cooperative, multilateral way to exercise it, namely by returning America to the Iran nuclear deal.
00:06:11.000His goal is to place President Trump's renunciation of the Iran nuclear deal on the unofficial agenda of this week's G20 summit, which begins Saturday, June 29th and 30th.
00:06:21.000In the hope that it will win a place on the shortlist of Trump's major sins against a rules-based international order right up there with the American president's economic protectionism and his disavowal of the Paris climate accord.
00:06:32.000So basically what Khamenei wants is to get the Europeans to pressure President Trump into re-signing the Iran nuclear deal.
00:07:51.000BigToken in the App Store or at Google Play.
00:07:53.000Why should everybody else make money on your data?
00:07:55.000When you could be making money on your data, go check them out and use my referral code, Shapiro, to sign up.
00:07:59.000OK, back to the strategy that Iran is using here.
00:08:03.000So according to Michael Doran, he says it was the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani who revealed the public face of the new strategy.
00:08:08.000The date, May 8th, was highly symbolic.
00:08:10.000Exactly one year earlier to the day, Trump had renounced the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran.
00:08:15.000His country's patience, Rouhani declared in a televised speech, was exhausted.
00:08:19.000For 12 months, Iran had displayed admirable forbearance in the face of Trump's maximum pressure campaign against it.
00:08:25.000It had done so, he said, in an obvious nod to the Europeans, in large part because nameless signatories to the Iran nuclear deal had asked Tehran to avoid acts of retaliation while they worked to help shelter it from the worst ravages of American sanctions.
00:08:37.000Rouhani said, Now, notice that Rouhani is actually using the same language here that Barack Obama used about Iran.
00:08:47.000Barack Obama suggested that the strategy was strategic patience, and now Rouhani is saying that he is using strategic patience against Trump.
00:08:53.000In other words, the rogue actor here is not Iran.
00:08:55.000The rogue actor is Trump, according to the Iranian regime.
00:08:59.000But now they are going to give way to strategic pressure.
00:09:02.000According to Rouhani, Iran would cease to observe the restrictions the nuclear deal placed on its stockpiles of heavy water and enriched uranium.
00:09:08.000On June 17th, the spokesman of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization followed up, disclosing that Iran's stockpiles were set to exceed the JCPOA limits in 10 days, just in time for the G20 summit.
00:09:20.000Iran, in other words, would have to break the deal in order to save it.
00:09:22.000They were basically trying to push the Europeans, saying, listen, we're going to break the deal.
00:09:25.000We're going to go full nuclear unless you reinstate the Iran nuclear deal and pass off.
00:09:31.000And they were going to increase the pressure in order to generate a feeling of chaos such that the Europeans would pressure President Trump to sign up to an agreement again.
00:09:40.000The goal here is to get the Europeans to basically undercut President Trump and to undercut Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and to undercut the Trump administration's getting out of the Iran nuclear deal.
00:09:54.000According to the prevailing view, what pushed Iran over the edge and precipitated Rouhani's May 8th speech was the Trump administration's decision in April to tighten economic sanctions that were seriously affecting the Islamic Republic's ability to sell its oil.
00:10:07.000But this view overlooks something else.
00:10:08.000On May 3rd, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revoked two waivers that had been allowing Iran to ship heavy water to Oman.
00:10:17.000When Rouhani announced five days later that Iran would cease complying with the JCPOA restrictions on enriched uranium and heavy water, he was reacting directly to Mike Pompeo's May 3rd revocation of the two waivers.
00:10:27.000Iran's policy of strategic pressure then, says Mike Duran, this is a really good piece, is made up of three separate but interlocking lines of effort.
00:10:33.000One, a struggle to gain relief from the oil and banking sanctions.
00:10:37.000Two, a campaign to tarnish President Trump as an agent of chaos.
00:10:40.000And three, an initiative aimed at keeping its nuclear waivers in place.
00:10:45.000Among these, the third is by far the most important.
00:10:50.000Well, apparently there are a bunch of waivers that permit the Europeans to cooperate with the Iranians on projects permitted under the terms of the Iran nuclear deal.
00:10:58.000There are seven sets of such waivers in total.
00:11:00.000Pompeo has revoked only the two that pertain to the export of enriched uranium and heavy water, but the other five remain in force.
00:11:07.000Now, there are people inside the Trump administration who say we should end all the waivers, and that would dramatically put pressure on the Iranian economy.
00:11:15.000But there are also people in the State Department who didn't want that kind of pressure on the Europeans.
00:11:19.000The Europeans were lobbying Washington to continue renewing all of the waivers, and those efforts were partially successful.
00:11:26.000The five waivers escaped the acts because they applied to activities in which Iran's partners are European.
00:11:31.000Presumably, the Europeans kept Tehran well informed regarding the debate in Washington.
00:11:36.000Khamenei understands that the Europeans are fighting hard to save the nuclear deal and that their support is an asset to Iran and that the debate over the waivers has also been creating in the transatlantic alliance a fissure that benefits Iran.
00:11:47.000He also understands that the fight is by no means over.
00:11:50.000The administration usually grants waivers 180 days.
00:11:53.000On May 3rd, it shortened the term to 90 days.
00:11:56.000Khomeini is intent on pressuring the Europeans and interested powers like Japan to convince the American president to reinstate the two revoked waivers and commit his administration to leaving the other five in place for the remainder of his term in office.
00:12:08.000Also, the Trump administration has been considering whether to activate the multilateral snapback mechanism at the U.N., meaning that there was a mechanism that Was supposed to be in place during the Iran nuclear deal that if the Iranians violated the agreement, the sanctions would snap back.
00:12:24.000And there's enough information to show that the Iranians have violated the nuclear deal because there are archives showing that Iran never abandoned its nuclear weapons program, but simply restructured it, emphasizing dual use activities to allow Tehran to falsely claim that they are pursuing peaceful nuclear activities.
00:12:40.000If Trump were to invoke the snapback, then a bunch of sanctions would be put back into place.
00:12:46.000So Khamenei must instead push the idea that he has been abiding by the deal, that the waiver should stay in place, and that as President Trump puts new pressure, the possibilities of chaos are increasing.
00:14:14.000So basically, you have a bunch of people in the Democratic Party who made a deal with the Iranian regime and then blamed the Republicans, saying the Republicans were trying to undercut the deal and this helped Iran's hardliners.
00:14:26.000The Iranian hardliners are the government.
00:14:29.000Hey, now you have the Iranian government, which is stumping for chaos, specifically in order to undercut Trump, and Democrats are signing up for the party.
00:14:36.000You got folks like Adam Schiff, who are suggesting that it's Trump's chaos in the Middle East, even though he knows that it's Iran.
00:14:41.000You have people like Maxine Waters overtly parroting Iranian propaganda.
00:15:00.000People have to know where the lines are, where he is willing to bend, where he is not willing to bend, because otherwise the Iranians have an interest in upping the ante.
00:15:08.000If, as I suggest, the Iranians are interested in chaos, then forwarding chaos would seem to be what they are looking for.
00:15:14.000Okay, so here is President Trump's policy.
00:15:16.000So, according to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump ended up bucking his national security aides on his own proposed Iran attack.
00:15:24.000They say President Trump bucked most of his top national security advisors by abandoning retaliatory strikes in Iran on Thursday.
00:15:29.000In private conversations on Friday, Trump reveled in his judgment, certain about his decision to call off the attacks while speaking of his administration as if removed from the center of it.
00:15:38.000Trump told one confidant about his own inner circle of advisors, quote, Now, again, I disagree with that on a fundamental level.
00:15:48.000I don't think that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is itching for war with Iran.
00:15:51.000I don't think that John Bolton is itching for war with Iran.
00:15:54.000Despite all of the talk about this, I really don't.
00:15:57.000And the notion that these folks are just desperate to go to a war that would end with tens of thousands of American dead, presumably, and billions, if not trillions, of dollars spent.
00:16:08.000But one of the ways that you prevent war is you prevent international misunderstanding that escalates into war.
00:16:12.000Because here's two ways of falling into war.
00:16:14.000Way number one, the United States reacts to an Iranian provocation, and then the Iranians try to pancake a bunch of American bases, and then we're in a war.
00:16:45.000Because the Iranians are going to push right up to the line.
00:16:47.000Whatever the line is, the Iranians are going to push all the way up to it.
00:16:50.000And if you don't make clear what the line is, if you have a secret line in your head, and the Iranians violate it, you can find yourself in a war much more easily than if you say, here is the line, you cross it, and the hammer comes down.
00:17:00.000Right now, it's not clear where President Trump's line is, because he keeps moving around on the line.
00:17:06.000And listen, maybe there's a strategy in place, but it would be good to hear it.
00:17:09.000It would be good to hear what the strategy is, because the Iranians clearly have a strategy, and that is to play on the sense of chaos inside the Trump administration to convince the Europeans to pressure Trump to make a deal, and for them to appeal to Trump's isolationist side.
00:17:24.000Because here's what the Iranians are going to do now.
00:17:25.000What the Iranians are going to do is they're going to go to the Europeans and they're going to say to the Europeans, look, Trump's an agent of chaos.
00:17:30.000You need to get him back in this Iran nuclear deal.
00:17:33.000We can go back to status quo ante under the Iran nuclear deal and everything will be all better.
00:17:37.000And that chaotic Trump will be taken off the table.
00:17:39.000And then what you're going to get are Europeans and isolationists in the United States who go to President Trump and say, you don't need a war, man.
00:17:45.000And the best thing you can do here is do exactly what you did with NAFTA, which is you can sign a deal that looks a lot like the Iran nuclear deal, but call it Trump's deal and then get all the credit.
00:17:54.000And that's sort of an appealing pitch to President Trump.
00:17:57.000Now, this rests on what do you think America's interests are?
00:18:00.000Really, in the end, this rests on what do you think America's interests are in the region?
00:18:04.000Part of the problem for President Trump is, I'm not sure that he really believes America has significant interests in the region.
00:18:55.000When it comes to no further sponsoring of terrorism, who knows whether President Trump is really committed to Iran not sponsoring terrorism in the region.
00:19:32.000Do you think that that's beneficial for the United States?
00:19:35.000For China to control a significant amount of the world's oil supply?
00:19:39.000The fact is that we have a global oil market.
00:19:41.000So while the United States may be self-sufficient in terms of oil, the amount of oil that we put on the market has a heavy impact on what the price of oil is at the pump.
00:19:49.000In 1973, when OPEC decided on an oil embargo against the United States, the United States was still a solid producer of oil.
00:19:58.000But it does impact the global oil prices and the price of the pump if, in fact, the other players in the global market decide that they are going to shut down key shipping lanes like the Straits of Hormuz.
00:20:09.000So when the United States retreats from the world scene, that is not left open.
00:20:13.000And that also encourages the threat of violence in the end, because you strengthen China.
00:20:18.000President Trump is very concerned, I think rightly so, at the global ambitions of the Chinese.
00:20:23.000He's rightly concerned at the strength of China's government and China's territorial ambitions.
00:20:28.000So would the goal be to hand over the Straits of Hormuz?
00:20:30.000To me, that's no better than Vladimir Putin taking control of Syria.
00:20:35.000Those geopolitical rivals are interested in taking more territory under their own control and then providing threats to America's national security as well as to America's partners and allies, as well as to global trade and economics.
00:20:47.000If you believe that global economics is entirely global, indeed it's a global thing, The United States has an interest in preserving the freedom of economics and the freedom of flow of things like oil.
00:20:57.000If you believe that there are rival countries out there that have territorial ambitions and want to form alliances with evil countries like Iran in order to forward those ambitions, and that as those countries gain power, they become more threatening to the United States, you got a problem.
00:21:11.000Now, listen, you can err on the other side, too, right?
00:21:14.000You can err on the other side of looking to go to preemptive war every five minutes because you think that you see a threat around every corner.
00:21:23.000I think one thing that we learned from the debacle in terms of intelligence in Iraq is that we ought to be cautious about these things, obviously.
00:21:31.000There's also a point to be made, which is if you can take an action that forestalls the growth of an alliance against you at a cheap cost, meaning you knock out Iran's navy, for example, and Iran isn't going to go to full war.
00:21:45.000If that's the analysis, then maybe that's something you got to say to them.
00:21:49.000Right now we don't seem to have a strategy in President Trump.
00:21:52.000Well, he may have been right not to strike the Iranians over the downing of the drone.
00:21:57.000I said last week, I think that he was wrong.
00:22:25.000I think that that's a mistaken foreign policy, because the fact is, either the United States occupies this space, or our enemies occupy this space.
00:22:32.000And if we can do so at low cost, we ought to occupy the space, because if we don't, we will have to defend that space at much higher cost in the future.
00:22:40.000But we have to decide on what the vision is for foreign policy, because President Obama campaigned on retrenchment, and then he retrenched.
00:22:59.000And that actually helps the Iranians in the sense that they want to portray Trump as an agent of chaos.
00:23:03.000OK, in just a second, we'll get to the Trump administration again sending some mixed signals on this thing.
00:23:08.000President Trump looking sort of isolationist on the one hand and meanwhile acting out on the other.
00:23:14.000First, let's talk about the Wi-Fi in my house.
00:23:17.000Okay, so my house happens to be an older house.
00:23:19.000That means that the walls are all made of plaster, which means they are very, very thick, and that means that the Wi-Fi connection at my house sucks on one end of the house, or at least it did until I started using Eero.
00:23:28.000Getting a good Wi-Fi connection in every corner of my house, it's rough when you use a single router.
00:23:32.000What you actually need is a distributed system that allows strong Wi-Fi to reach everywhere.
00:23:36.000I mean, we couldn't use it in our kitchen, We could use it in our bedroom until Eero came around.
00:23:41.000This is what offices have had for years.
00:23:43.000With Eero, you can install an enterprise-grade Wi-Fi system in your home in just a few minutes.
00:23:48.000Simply download the Eero app on your iOS or Android devices.
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00:24:13.000Eero Plus includes third-party security apps, VPN protection from encrypt.me, password management from 1Password, antivirus software from Malwarebytes.
00:24:22.000Not only does it allow me to use my Wi-Fi all across my house, but also it helps protect me when I am online.
00:24:27.000Never worry about a weak Wi-Fi signal in your house again.
00:24:30.000Get 100 bucks off the Eero base unit and two beacons package and one year of Eero Plus.
00:25:28.000And if you want to talk about it, good.
00:25:29.000Otherwise, you can live in a shattered economy for a long time to come.
00:25:34.000Okay, notice, there are a couple things that he's saying here that are really interesting.
00:25:37.000One is, he says, if you cross a line, an unspecified line, then we will destroy you.
00:25:42.000And then he suggests that the line is the development of nuclear weapons, but he doesn't mention anything about terrorism, or about Iranian aggression in the Gulf of Oman, or any of that sort of stuff.
00:25:51.000Which puts him back on the path to re-entering the Iran nuclear deal.
00:25:55.000Because if the idea is all we have to do is stop Iran from getting a nuke, he can just re-sign into an agreement where supposedly they stop creating nuclear weapons.
00:26:03.000Which is what Obama was falsely claiming.
00:26:06.000Senator Tom Cotton, who's an ally of the administration, a very strong ally of the administration from Arkansas, obviously a man also with military experience, who's on Fox News Sunday, he said, the big problem here is we don't have a firm set of boundaries.
00:26:16.000He's saying the same thing I'm saying here, and I think Cotton is correct, obviously.
00:26:20.000I think retaliatory strikes were warranted when we were talking about foreign vessels on the high seas.
00:26:24.000I think they were warranted against an American unmanned aircraft.
00:26:28.000What I see is Iran steadily marching up the escalation chain.
00:27:26.000And Trump said, well, what we're complaining about is Iran using billions of dollars in our money for terrorism, or money we were holding back from Iran for terrorism.
00:27:33.000We're concerned about Iran's regional ambitions.
00:27:35.000And so we're placing sanctions back on them.
00:27:37.000Also, we think they're lying about the nuclear weapons.
00:27:39.000Now, Iran is attempting to force Trump back into the Obama-created box.
00:27:44.000They're trying to suggest that President Trump is the agent of chaos.
00:27:47.000They're trying to suggest that the only way out of this morass right here, the only way to avoid war, is for President Trump to basically bribe them and give them a pathway free to a nuclear weapon.
00:27:56.000In just a second, I'll show you how Democrats are jumping on this bandwagon trying to help Iran out.
00:28:00.000President Trump should not fall for the trap.
00:28:02.000Again, if he's a full-on isolationist, believes the United States should not be in the region, he's willing to abandon that area of the world to the vicissitudes of the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians, that's one thing.
00:28:11.000But I don't think that's what President Trump wants.
00:28:12.000And I think that's not what his supporters want either.
00:28:18.000Really, it's a bad idea in most areas of life.
00:28:21.000But there's one area of life where actually it's worked out in your favor.
00:28:25.000Because if you wait long enough, sometimes people come up with some good stuff.
00:28:27.000Well, that is true with life insurance.
00:28:29.000Now, if you're an adult, you need life insurance.
00:28:30.000I know, you don't want to think about death.
00:28:32.000It's no fun to think about plotting and then doing whatever with your body.
00:28:37.000There's one area where you do have to think about death, and that is life insurance.
00:28:39.000Because what happens to you after you plot?
00:28:41.000Well, you may not care after you die, but your family certainly will.
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00:29:28.000Okay, so Democrats are jumping onto the Iranian bandwagon.
00:29:31.000Kamala Harris, who's running for president on the Democratic side and is also a NARC, she says on Face the Nation that President Trump created the situation.
00:29:38.000So it's not the Iranians who obviously are creating this chaotic situation specifically in order to reach out to people like Kamala Harris so she will pressure Trump.
00:29:53.000But she is doing the work of the Iranian government because the Iranian government is, I think, in quite smart fashion, attempting to create a feeling of pressure all around President Trump based on the fact that people don't like Trump personally.
00:30:04.000And Kamala Harris is jumping right in, doing the work the Iranians are looking for the left to do.
00:30:10.000We have to conduct ourselves in a way that we are smart about what we do to have one and one goal only, which is ensuring that our nation is secure.
00:30:23.000And it cannot be the goal to express one's ego and to engage in gamesmanship without much serious regard to the consequence.
00:30:35.000And I think that's what we've seen in this president.
00:30:36.000Oh, well, you know, it's Trump who's the agent here.
00:31:04.000Well, they could have quoted some experts.
00:31:05.000I know some experts, but no, those aren't the experts they want to talk to.
00:31:08.000The New York Times has a piece today from Susan Rice, a former national security advisor to Barack Obama, suggesting that it's President Trump's fault.
00:31:18.000She says, President Trump's process of ordering and then canceling military strikes was a mess, but he now has an opening to restart talks on Iran's nuclear program.
00:31:26.000The punchline, members of the Obama administration doing exactly what Iran would like them to do, trying to push President Trump back into a bad Iran nuclear deal that allows Iran a pathway to a bomb and also allows Iran to pursue its regional ambitions with American and European cash.
00:31:40.000They're doing exactly what Iran wants them to do.
00:31:43.000The only way to fight that is for the president to take a forthright, strong and solid stance on what exactly he's willing to do, what our policy is, And that's our policy.
00:32:13.000Let me point out that Barack Obama routinely violated his oath of office by exceeding his constitutional boundaries.
00:32:19.000Now we've got Cory Booker saying, well, you know, President Trump can't act on Iran without coming to Congress.
00:32:23.000Realistically speaking, the last time we declared an official war in the United States, Was back in World War II.
00:32:30.000We haven't had an official war since then.
00:32:32.000So Cory Booker is a little late to this bandwagon.
00:32:34.000I'm sympathetic, by the way, to the idea the president should go to Congress for foreign policy.
00:32:39.000I mean, that is the way the Constitution is supposed to work.
00:32:41.000All I'm pointing out is that Democrats seem to have had a slight change of heart about the powers of the executive branch as soon as the man in the Oval Office was named Trump, not Obama.
00:32:50.000I think there's bipartisan group of senators that spoke pretty clearly last week that this president cannot take military action against Iran without coming to Congress.
00:32:59.000The 2001 authorization for the use of military force does not cover a military strike against Iran.
00:33:06.000The Constitution speaks very clearly on this, that he needs to come to Congress before he engages in military action that, again, could have us tumbling towards chaos and war in that region.
00:33:19.000Now to Libya, where we went to full-scale war to achieve basically not much, except getting rid of a bad guy Qaddafi and replacing him with a bunch of terrorists, which is basically what happened in the aftermath of all of that.
00:33:30.000The legislature ended up trying to legislate from a boat off the coast of Libya.
00:33:35.000I don't remember all of the congressional debate about Libya.
00:33:46.000Regardless of what President Trump does at this point as president, if the Democrats move too far to the left, which they are in the process of doing, they're not winning the election.
00:33:55.000And they are busily moving in that direction.
00:33:57.000First, cell phone plans, bills, they're notoriously confusing, and you're spending a bunch of money on crap you don't need.
00:34:02.000It is impossible to know what you are paying for.
00:34:05.000Those tiny hidden fees, they're not so tiny when you add them up.
00:35:02.000Okay, in just a second, we'll get to immigration.
00:35:04.000President Trump put ICE raids on hold over the weekend.
00:35:06.000And then we'll get to the insane radicalism of the Democratic Party, which continues to basically pledge to hand out everything for free, everything in the universe.
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00:36:14.000In other news over the weekend, the president of the United States said that he would temporarily put deportation efforts on hold.
00:36:27.000You remember late last week, he sort of randomly announced on Twitter that there were going to be ICE raids, which is already kind of weird.
00:36:33.000I mean, I pointed out last week, this is the president who says that you need strategic unpredictability.
00:36:38.000Announcing raids in advance is probably not a great strategy if you're then going to do immigration raids.
00:36:43.000Well, President Trump pulled back from that over the weekend.
00:36:45.000He tweeted out that, at the request of Democrats, I have delayed the illegal immigration removal process, deportation, for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the asylum and loophole problems at the southern border.
00:37:05.000Either the deportations are useful or they are not useful.
00:37:08.000Either they are good or they are not good.
00:37:09.000The case that he has been making is that these deportations are necessary because they're going to be directed against people who already have deportation orders.
00:37:16.000In other words, people who have overstayed visas, people who have been adjudicated by a court to be absconding, people who have committed crimes.
00:37:23.000So saying that you are going to wait to do anything to see if Democrats will make a deal with you on the border is like, what would the deal include?
00:37:34.000Either do the deportations or don't do the deportations.
00:37:37.000But to make a contingent on the Democrats funding the border is very, is a strange policy.
00:37:43.000He then continued along these lines and suggested that he was going to reinstate this in a couple of weeks.
00:37:50.000According to the Washington Post, President Trump abruptly suspended his wide-ranging threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants starting on Sunday, demanding that Democrats and Republicans forge a plan to stanch the record flows of asylum-seeking families across the southern border into the United States.
00:38:06.000Okay, then why are we negotiating over them?
00:38:32.000So Democrats aren't going to make a deal.
00:38:34.000Instead, they're just going to suggest that this is another act of cruelty.
00:38:37.000Because this is one of the things that Democrats do on immigration, and it really is awful.
00:38:41.000And that is that they facilitate cruelty, and then they suggest that the cruelty is the fault of the Republicans.
00:38:48.000They make the cruelty happen, and then they suggest that it's the fault of Republicans.
00:38:51.000The best evidence of this was over the weekend.
00:38:54.000When there was a tape of a government lawyer that was going around in which the government lawyer was telling a panel of Ninth Circuit judges that it is safe and sanitary to confine immigrant children in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights.
00:39:10.000The idea here is that the Trump administration is uniquely cruel to illegal immigrant children.
00:39:16.000Sarah Fabian, the senior attorney at the Department of Justice online office, rather, of immigration litigation, was instantly excoriated online.
00:39:24.000As fate would have it, the clip of her argument went viral at the same time as a new wave of reports of brutal and inhumane conditions at immigration confinement centers.
00:39:32.000Nobody is in favor of any of this stuff, obviously.
00:39:35.000We want better conditions on the border.
00:39:37.000However, it is worth noting that what exactly this lawyer was arguing over was an Obama-era policy.
00:39:44.000In other words, it was the Obama-era policy not to give these kids toothbrushes.
00:39:47.000It was initiated then, and the Trump administration, the Office of Legal Counsel, the Department of Justice, they were arguing simply that it was time to reconsider the so-called Flores Settlement.
00:40:00.000Ken White has a piece over at The Atlantic in which he talks about this.
00:40:04.000He says the government's safe and sanitary argument did not arise from a new case generated by Trump administration policies.
00:40:10.000It arose in 1985, during the Reagan administration, when a 15-year-old Salvadoran child named Jenny Lisette Flores was detained after entering the United States illegally, hoping to escape her country's vicious civil war.
00:40:20.000Flores spent two months at a facility in California, confined with adult strangers in poor conditions and strip-searched regularly.
00:40:26.000In July 1985, she and three other minors brought a class action against what was then called INS, challenging its policies for the care and confinement of minors.
00:40:34.000The party settled the lawsuit in the Flores Agreement, which required that the government hold minors in facilities that are safe and sanitary, and that they be released from confinement without delay whenever possible.
00:40:44.000Over the years, lawyers acting on behalf of minors protected by Flores have filed numerous motions asking judges to enforce it.
00:40:51.000They argue that confining minors in these facilities are not safe and sanitary.
00:40:56.000District Court judge ruled that the Border Patrol was violating the Flores Agreement during Obama.
00:41:02.000In 2017, she found that the CBP failed to provide adequate food and water to minors.
00:41:06.000She found that CBP's obligation to provide safe and sanitary conditions, including provided soap, dry towels, showers, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and ordered the Border Patrol to appoint a monitor to bring its facilities into compliance with Flores.
00:41:20.000G's order put the government in a technical legal bind.
00:41:22.000When a federal judge appoints an official to monitor compliance with an already existing injunction or agreement like the Flores Agreement, the government can't immediately appeal.
00:41:30.000The government can only appeal if the judge modifies the prior injunction or order.
00:41:34.000argued that this judge altered the deal, that before it was considered safe and sanitary, now it's no longer considered safe and sanitary so they can appeal.
00:41:51.000The Trump administration should be condemned for the argument, says Ken White, but it's wrong to think the problem can be cured with a presidential election.
00:41:59.000Administrations for 20 years have been doing this sort of stuff.
00:42:04.000Nonetheless, Trump gets the blame because that's the way that this works.
00:42:07.000Meanwhile, Democrats refuse to provide the funding that would actually rectify this situation.
00:42:11.000Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats get increasingly radical.
00:42:14.000So they are all competing for attention at this point.
00:42:17.000Bernie Sanders has now unleashed a new proposal.
00:42:19.000You'll recall that Elizabeth Warren created a proposal that would fund free college education for all going forward.
00:42:27.000Going forward in time, we would tax wealth and then we would use that money, or Wall Street transactions, we'd use that money to fund college education for everybody.
00:43:32.000In fact, the path to success for a lot of smart people is not just that there are a bunch of people who go to college and they don't need to because they're going to work with their hands or they're going to be mechanics or something.
00:43:42.000No, there are a lot of smart people who don't need to go to college because they're smart and they can just get started in business.
00:43:47.000My business partner here at Daily Wire did not graduate college.
00:43:49.000He went to JUCO for two years and then he dropped out.
00:43:51.000He went to a community college and then he majored in music.
00:43:55.000He could have stayed a musician or he could become the partner in this business and have a lot of money.
00:44:00.000Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish up at Harvard.
00:44:04.000There are just a lot of people who don't need to finish college because college doesn't do what it was supposed to do in the first place for a lot of folks.
00:44:11.000There are people like my wife for whom college was useful because it finishes with her becoming a doctor.
00:44:16.000And then there are people who don't really need to be there because they're majoring in poli sci and they're going to get a job teaching history, which they could have done without having to major in poli sci at a university and incur $120,000 of debt minimum.
00:44:27.000Well, Bernie Sanders is now going even further than Elizabeth Warren.
00:44:30.000He wants to propose cancelling the entire $1.6 trillion in U.S.
00:44:34.000student loan debt, which really means $3 trillion, because he also wants to pay for everybody's college going forward.
00:44:40.000And then there's refi of the student loan debt.
00:44:42.000So presumably you're talking about probably $3 trillion in actual student loan debt.
00:45:26.000Under the Refund Equality Act, according to Amanda Prestigiacomo over at Daily Wire, same-sex couples would be able to amend their past taxes, readjusting with jointly filed tax returns, and accepting refunds from the IRS.
00:45:49.000Although my libertarianism extends to the government should not be involved in marriage, period.
00:45:54.000This is a contractual arrangement between two people.
00:45:56.000I'm not sure, frankly, that there should be tax benefits to getting married.
00:46:01.000Just on a libertarian level, I think the idea that the government benefits married people at the expense of single people is pretty stupid.
00:46:09.000The fact is that if you tax my wife's and my combined income, we end up in a higher tax bracket.
00:46:13.000So that's not... It's never been particularly accurate, this idea that getting married provides you massive tax benefits.
00:46:18.000In any case, her proposal is that because the Supreme Court has now ruled that same-sex marriage is a right provided by the Constitution of the United States, which is an absurd contention, That because of that, now we should go back and basically pay reparations by allowing gay married couples to file in the past, retroactively.
00:46:39.000Well, they weren't married before, so how exactly would you get to that?
00:46:45.000She said, the federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade.
00:46:52.000We need to call out that discrimination and make it right.
00:46:56.000And so, I don't even know how you would do this, because there are a lot of couples who didn't get legally married because they couldn't get legally married, and so Obergefell.
00:47:04.000Also, how exactly do you prevent people from getting legally married simply for the tax benefits at this point?
00:47:20.000Also, if we're going to point out income differentials, Gay couples, gay male couples particularly, have a higher joint income than any other couples in America by statistics.
00:47:31.000So now you're paying reparations to couples that make more money than any of the other couples by sexual orientation.
00:47:54.000He says he's not going to rule out meeting with Louis Farrakhan because this is where we are in American life.
00:47:58.000That Louis Farrakhan, an open, unrepentant, vicious, anti-Semitic piece of crap, that guy is still receiving plaudits from people like Cory Booker because the woke intersectional crowd insists upon it.
00:48:09.000Here's Senator Cory Booker saying this. - Excuse me, but you're not supposed to be fair. - I am, I am. - My question was, would you be willing to have an audience with him concerning that Senate matter?
00:48:22.000You know, I have met, I live in Newark, so we have famous Mosque 25, we have Nation of Islam there.
00:48:31.000I've heard Minister Farrakhan's speeches for a lot of my life, so I don't feel like I need to do that, but I'm not one of these people that says I wouldn't sit down with anybody here what they have to say.
00:48:42.000But I live on a neighborhood where I'm getting guys on the streets offering and selling his works.
00:48:49.000I'm very familiar with Minister Louis Farrakhan. - So not only is he very familiar, he will still meet with him.
00:50:08.000He says that's an artificial distinction that in the ancient world, people very often in accessing their reason would suggest that they were speaking with God.
00:50:15.000That that was sort of godly reason that had descended upon them.
00:50:18.000So why exactly aren't we looking at the Hebrew Bible for moral lessons that can be sussed out by reason?
00:50:32.000Okay, time for a bevy of things that I hate.
00:50:39.000All righty, so Trump was accused last week of rape.
00:50:44.000He was accused last week of rape by a gossip columnist.
00:50:48.000She's been for years a gossip columnist named E. Jane Carroll.
00:50:51.000She accused President Trump of attempting to rape her in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman's department store in the mid-1990s.
00:50:58.000So, her story was in the middle of a book where she also accused Les Moonves of sexually assaulting her and a bevy of other men of sexually assaulting her.
00:51:06.000Now, listen, I think that all allegations of rape should be taken seriously.
00:51:11.000I do not, however, think that all allegations of rape are equally credible.
00:51:14.000Her original story, which was in an interview with New York Magazine, she says that President Trump attacked her after the pair met in a chance encounter while shopping at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.
00:51:23.000Carol says that Trump met her She was 52 at the time.
00:51:28.000Trump met her, and then urged her to try on lingerie shopping with him.
00:51:35.000He urged her to try on some lingerie, and then she laughingly implied he should try on the lingerie.
00:51:41.000And then they went into a changing room together, or into the changing area.
00:51:44.000He pushed her into a changing room, pinned her arms to her side, and then sexually assaulted her.
00:51:47.000She says that she then fought off Trump and escaped.
00:51:51.000Now, there are several questions about this that should be asked, because if this were a rape prosecution, then you would have to ask the questions.
00:51:57.000Questions would include, was there anybody else around?
00:52:54.000When you're coming out with a book about it, and you waited to say anything about it until the book comes out, That has to raise some red flags.
00:53:02.000Her behavior during interviews also raises red flags.
00:53:04.000Not all allegations are equally credible.
00:53:06.000Julie Swetnick's allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were on their face significantly less credible than the allegations that were made by Christine Blasey Ford And even those allegations had no supporting detail.
00:53:18.000And so you couldn't end somebody's career or life based on those allegations.
00:54:19.000I would find it disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection.
00:54:28.000They're young women, you know, and mine was three minutes.
00:54:51.000You were, according to her, she was forcibly raped in a dressing room.
00:54:55.000And now she doesn't want to bring charges.
00:54:56.000She just wants to talk about it on national TV because she's afraid that it would distract from people being raped around the clock on the border.
00:55:05.000I mean, I do find it interesting that this story disappeared basically from mainstream media over the weekend, that on Friday it was one of the bigger stories in the country by the time we finished our radio show.
00:55:15.000And by Monday, not a lot of coverage of this.
00:55:17.000Might it have something to do with the fact that this woman being interviewed does not, she does not reek of credibility?
00:55:26.000Her story does not reek of credibility.
00:55:28.000Again, rape allegations should be taken seriously, absent any other evidence other than this woman's account.
00:55:34.000And the president, of course, has denied it, says he doesn't know her.
00:55:37.000But in the absence of any other evidence, she hasn't brought forward even the people she spoke to contemporaneously.
00:55:42.000I don't know how seriously you can take something like this, given her behavior during... I mean, all we have to judge is her behavior.
00:56:24.000So she starred in the 1915 silent film, which is a vicious, racist, awful film, aired, by the way, by Woodrow Wilson at the White House, because Woodrow Wilson was the worst president in American history.
00:56:33.000He was a garbage, terrible human being.
00:56:35.000His students at Bowling Green requested the change.
00:56:38.000And after a study, it was agreed to change the name.
00:56:42.000Now, a bunch of Hollywood stars, including James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, and Martin Scorsese, have released an open letter calling for Bowling Green to retain Agish's name.
00:56:54.000Griffith's film takes an indefensible racist approach to the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, but as even the University admits, Lillian was no racist.
00:57:01.000Her work in many films, such as Griffith's own Intolerance, a dazzling four-part overview of world history in which she plays the symbolic mother figure rocking the cradle of humanity and tolerance, The Broken Blossoms, an interracial drama.
00:57:13.000The 1955 masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter, in which she plays a protector of endangered children.
00:57:18.000The 67 film of Graham Greene's The Comedians, in which she challenges Haiti's dreaded secret police.
00:57:23.000So the idea is if she played a part in a movie and the movie is racist, therefore they're going to remove her name from things.
00:57:33.000Speaking of things that you wonder if it makes America any better, there are a bunch of schools that are named after Robert E. Lee.
00:57:38.000Now, Robert E. Lee's legacy has come up for a lot of debate recently, I think fairly.
00:57:42.000There's some new accounts, new histories written about Robert E. Lee, talking about how he treated his slaves specifically, how brutal he was in all of this, what he really was, whether he had been kind of, whether he'd been painted with the sepia Afterglow, because of the attempt to repaint a level of heroism in the Civil War that didn't exist in the cause.
00:58:05.000Well, schools named after Robert E. Lee are now trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that changing the signage cost them a lot of money.
00:58:14.000So they are now looking to pick new Lees to be named after.
00:58:20.000You could just name all these schools after Richard Henry Lee, who was one of the founding fathers and the sponsor of the resolution in Congress that led to the Declaration of Independence.
00:58:30.000It was a resolution suggesting that the colonies hereby ought to be independent.
00:58:36.000So Richard Henry Lee, an actual founding father, member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.
00:58:40.000He presided over the first confederation, meaning before continental Congress was formed.
00:58:46.000You could name him after Richard Henry Lee, but I guess that wouldn't be woke enough.
00:59:37.000Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show, Representative Ilhan Omar is accused now of marrying her brother in order to skirt our immigration laws.
00:59:46.000A very bizarre, weird situation, but if it's true, she committed a serious crime.