On Saturday, the co-founder of Twitter apologized for his creation. Why? Because it allowed the election of Donald Trump. In an interview with the New York Times, Evan Williams explained, "I think the internet is broken, and it's a lot more obvious to a lot of people that it's broken." This is silliness, of course. The internet isn't broken any more than guns are broken, just because bad people use them sometimes to do bad things. But Williams, like many of the left, believes that if a freedom can be exercised for great evil, it shouldn't be a freedom at all. Thus, he continues, I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange ideas, the world was automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that. It's a very bad thing, but that doesn't make the forum bad. In fact, that should make it important. And I don't believe I have the right to be the sole determinant of where those lines are drawn. But I certainly don't think that tech executives who vote universally Democrat have that right either, either on a moral level, and neither do I believe that they have a moral obligation to act as gatekeepers. I don t believe that all speech is created equal. The problem is that the internet was started without the expectation that we'd have to be moderated by someone with which we agree. And that's what makes the forum important. except for the fact that we don't have a lock on our mouths, and that we should be able to argue them out of their position. Ben Shapiro: Perhaps you ought to help his Democratic friends come up with better arguments than shut Trump up if he wants Trump to lose, because he doesn't have the power to do so. Ben: If you want to be cool, then you need a better lock on the doorbell, but you don't need a lock to keep Trump out of the door, right? Ben: Ring: Ring of Security Kit: $150 off Ring + Ring + a Ring + an additional $150 to keep your house safe from intruders at night-time surveillance. Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's show: The Ben Shapiro Show: Ben Shapiro s show on the Ben Shapiro show on The Ben Show: I Don t know what to do with Ring + more! Subscribe to his podcast: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices? Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on Podchats and other podcasting services.
00:00:04.000Because it allowed the election of Donald Trump.
00:00:06.000In an interview with the New York Times, Evan Williams explained, quote, I think the internet is broken, and it's a lot more obvious to a lot of people that it's broken.
00:00:34.000It's a very bad thing, Twitter's role in electing Trump.
00:00:37.000If it's true that he wouldn't be president if it weren't for Twitter, then yeah, I'm sorry.
00:00:41.000This is the problem with leftist thought.
00:00:42.000There are many Americans who are deeply unhappy at Trump's election.
00:00:45.000But there were just as many Americans unhappy at President Obama's election.
00:00:48.000Just because many Americans don't agree with Ev Williams doesn't make a forum for argument and discussion bad.
00:00:53.000In fact, that's what should make the forum important.
00:00:56.000The shortcoming isn't Twitter, any more than the raucous debate that surrounds politics thanks to the First Amendment, is responsible for excesses performed by individual human beings.
00:01:04.000We simply do not have the right to control what other people think or say, even if that results in bad people sometimes winning victories.
00:01:09.000We have the right to argue them out of their position.
00:01:11.000The moment they move toward violence, we have the right to stop them.
00:01:13.000But Twitter didn't win the election for Trump.
00:01:15.000It just provided Trump a forum for espousing his views, which those on the left were unable to counter effectively.
00:01:21.000I don't believe all speech is created equal.
00:01:22.000Some is evil, some is valueless, some is great.
00:01:24.000But I also don't believe I have the right to be the sole determinant of where those lines are drawn.
00:01:29.000And I certainly don't think that tech executives who vote universally Democrat have that right either on a moral level.
00:01:34.000When Williams compares himself to Prometheus and says he deserves to have eagles, quote, peck out his guts for eternity for giving the power of tweets to Donald Trump, he forgets he didn't give the power of free speech to Trump.
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00:03:48.000So it's great for Trump that he is now doing this foreign tour because it's obviously eating up all of the headlines.
00:03:53.000That's something that he needs because when last we left our story last Thursday, all of the talk was about Trump and Russia and firing of Comey and the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
00:04:02.000And there was a story that broke Friday that Trump had said to the Russians and the White House admitted that he said to the Russians that he was happy he got rid of Comey.
00:04:10.000Because it provided him relief on the Russia issue, which is not something that you'd probably be saying.
00:04:14.000But the focus has now shifted because Trump is abroad.
00:04:17.000So as a PR matter, it's really good that Trump is over in Saudi Arabia, especially because there's no proof that anybody's done anything egregiously wrong as of yet.
00:04:25.000And all of the Trump-Russia talk for the moment is just that talk.
00:04:28.000So Trump heads over to Saudi Arabia, and supposedly the point of a tour like this is to create new ties and reestablish old ties.
00:04:36.000Really, the point of a tour, whenever a president does a foreign tour, the point of a tour is generally the same as when you go into the office at your work, but you are capable of working from home.
00:04:48.000Okay, so the point is not to actually do anything useful.
00:04:50.000It's to demonstrate to people that you're active.
00:04:52.000It's to demonstrate to people that you are on the move, that things are happening.
00:04:56.000When Obama went on his apology tour after he was elected, that didn't actually accomplish anything other than sort of give off the image of America as a country in retreat.
00:05:04.000So, Trump was going to Saudi Arabia in order to change the image of America as a country in retreat.
00:05:09.000Some of that he accomplished, some of that he didn't.
00:05:11.000But it started off, and I have to say it's really funny, when Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis knew that he loves pomp and circumstance, and that he loves flattery, and flattery will get you everywhere with Trump.
00:05:22.000So, they really laid out the red carpet for him.
00:05:24.000Here's what it looked like as Trump deplaned in Saudi Arabia.
00:05:50.000Like, you see the guys dancing with the swords?
00:05:51.000So that actually happened in real life.
00:05:54.000So here is some video of the Saudis doing the ceremonial sword dance, because nothing says friendly to people like a ceremonial sword dance.
00:06:02.000So they all got out their swords into ceremonies, and here is Trump bebopping along to the ceremonial sword dance.
00:06:21.000So Trump goes there and he takes part in all of this and of course everybody on the left is saying, well what in the world?
00:06:27.000This is the guy who was saying that Saudi Arabia was the people behind 9-11 and there he is bebopping along.
00:06:31.000So the left was kind of disappointed that Trump didn't start a nuclear war.
00:06:34.000The left is always disappointed when Trump exceeds expectations.
00:06:37.000And their expectation is that he was going to go to Saudi Arabia, spit on the Kaaba stone, and then immediately declare that everybody ought to convert to Christianity.
00:06:45.000That is, of course, not what happened, and so they were very disappointed that wasn't what happened.
00:06:49.000The imagery that came out, though, was pretty weird because
00:06:52.000The great disconnect in American foreign policy, and this has existed well before the Bush administration, is this disconnect where we say that we're against radical Islamic terror, but then we make best friends with the Saudis who fund radical Islamic terror.
00:07:04.000So you have some weird photos that were coming out like this one.
00:07:17.000Anti-terror center which again if Saudi Arabia is involved in the global anti-terror center I'm gonna go with that's not gonna be a huge success and apparently Trump and the king of Saudi Arabia switching souls actually or at least gazing into the Palantir to see if they could see Sauron or not the problem is that that Hassan Rouhani is on the other end of that Palantir and can actually see them Austin producer Austin suggests that Donald Trump's basketball skills were actually sapped by this particular orb from Space Jam which is indeed a possibility in any case
00:07:46.000All of this is, you know, not a huge deal.
00:07:50.000The right made a huge deal out of President Obama bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia.
00:08:06.000I mean, it's like saying that Han Solo was bowing to Princess Leia when she was awarding him a medal after the destruction of the Death Star.
00:08:12.000It turns out that whenever somebody puts a medal around your neck, you have to sort of lower your neck so it can get around your neck.
00:08:17.000So the left immediately tried to suggest that he was bowing in the same way that Obama had bowed, and that, of course, is just ridiculous and silly towns and nonsense.
00:08:41.000I like the fact that, you know, because he is a strong alpha male leader, that the Arabs respect him.
00:08:48.000They don't respect the beta male Obama.
00:08:52.000Okay, well, I think that there's maybe some truth to this.
00:08:54.000I think that it's more likely that the Muslims figured, that the Saudis figured, that if you flatter Trump a lot, then he will be nice to you.
00:09:01.000And the reason I say this is because that's exactly what Bibi Netanyahu did immediately afterward.
00:09:05.000So Bibi saw that they had rolled out this red carpet, they brought in
00:09:21.000And so immediately, Bibi Netanyahu, recognizing that Trump loves to be feeded and treated like a king, Bibi immediately mandated that all of his ministers had to be on the tarmac when Trump went to Israel.
00:09:32.000And Bibi mandated that they basically up the amount of pomp and circumstance because
00:09:36.000Now this has turned into King Lear a little bit, where King Lear wants all of the daughters to show how much they love him and just express in the most glowing terms how much they love him.
00:10:34.000Because foreign policy is filled with hard choices.
00:10:36.000Because anytime you talk about foreign policy, in reality what you're talking about is the balance between diplomacy, isolationism, involvement in the world, military use of force.
00:10:45.000And these are very difficult questions because no one wants to be the person who puts American soldiers in harm's way or expends American resources in pursuit of some goal that we don't care about.
00:10:53.000And so there are three kind of fundamental conflicts in American foreign policy that have never been resolved.
00:10:59.000World War II is the last time that all of these were resolved in united fashion.
00:11:03.000Since then, the United States really has not had a coherent foreign policy, because World War II was such a clear-cut moral battle, and also such a clear-cut battle of self-defense at the same time.
00:11:14.000There was some of this during the Cold War as well.
00:11:16.000This was the key division between the right and the left.
00:11:17.000The right saw it as a moral battle and a self-defense battle.
00:11:19.000The left saw it as neither a self-defense battle nor a moral battle, and so there was battle over that.
00:11:24.000But here are sort of the three conflicts in American foreign policy, and you'll see how they materialize in Trump's speech.
00:11:29.000So, the first one is about human rights.
00:11:31.000So Americans have a very weird perspective about human rights.
00:11:35.000America has always stood for the notion that all human beings are created equal with certain inalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence.
00:11:42.000That does not mean, however, that it is the job of the American government to achieve the realization of those inalienable rights for everyone.
00:11:48.000America doesn't have the power to do that.
00:11:50.000America doesn't have the wherewithal to do it.
00:11:51.000If we could snap our fingers and everybody would have governments that protect the same rights that we have, then we would obviously do that.
00:11:57.000But it's not about snapping the fingers.
00:11:58.000It's about what are you willing to sacrifice to do that.
00:12:01.000The basic American foreign policy has always been where possible we push, where not possible we hold off.
00:12:10.000Since the Vietnam War, we have very little interest as a people in foreign interventions on the basis of human rights until there's something gross on our TV, in which case we get aggressive in knee-jerk fashion, which is sort of what happened in Syria.
00:12:21.000We were like, OK, we don't want anything to do with Syria.
00:12:56.000We're going to take the human rights violation seriously, that we have to take seriously, and that forward America's goals, we're not going to take other ones seriously.
00:13:04.000Instead you end up with this sort of bizarre
00:13:08.000So President Obama would speak about human rights all the time, but then he felt that America was actually the threat to human rights, so he would withdraw from the region and the isolationism ends up setting the region on fire.
00:13:17.000President Bush spoke about human rights and he actually meant it, so that meant he was much more interventionist.
00:13:22.000Trump is actually more Obama than Bush, not because he thinks America's a bad force in the world, but just because he thinks America should be isolationist and not involved.
00:13:30.000And so his foreign policy on human rights is, I'm going to speak in strong terms about violation of human rights, but there's no actual carrot and there's no actual stick.
00:13:37.000And that's what was missing from the Saudi speech.
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00:16:00.000We say that we like them, then we're not willing to do all that much to do anything about them, in many cases, until there's something ugly on our TV and then we do something.
00:16:06.000And this has been true since Black Hawk Down in Somalia, it's been true in Yugoslavia, it's been true in Iraq, it's been true in Syria, it's been true in Libya.
00:16:15.000We have a tendency in the United States...
00:16:17.000Or we don't actually want to commit resources, but then when it comes down to it, we recognize that we are actually the world's policemen, whether we like it or not, and that we are sometimes going to have to commit resources.
00:16:26.000But, there's no real good way to articulate that.
00:16:29.000Fundamental conflict number two, over radical Islamic terror.
00:16:31.000So, there's a lot of talk about how Obama was doing a grave disservice to the United States by not recognizing the threat of radical Islamic terror.
00:16:38.000He wouldn't even say the words radical Islamic terror, and the reason that Obama said he wouldn't say the words radical Islamic terror is because his take, what he liked to say,
00:16:46.000Is that if he said the words radical Islamic terror, he would be lumping terrorists in with regular Muslims, and it has nothing to do with Islam, it's just a cult of death that has nothing to do with Islam.
00:16:56.000And people on the right said, no, no, no, it does have something to do with Islam, and if you fail to recognize that, then you're failing to look in the right place for the enemy.
00:17:02.000Like, pretending that terrorism is equally a threat in Sweden as it is coming from Saudi Arabia is just silly.
00:17:10.000And if you look at the polls, you'll see that a huge, huge number, hundreds of millions of Muslims, believe in things that we in the West would consider extraordinarily extreme.
00:17:17.000I mean, I have a whole video about this, about the myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority.
00:17:23.000So the whole point here was that leads you to a long-term strategy about how do you change the Muslim world?
00:17:50.000Not terrorists, but radicalized and hold radical views according to Western standards.
00:17:53.000That requires a pretty large sacrifice of resources if you want to change that.
00:17:57.000It requires, for example, in some cases, regime change.
00:18:00.000It requires the backing of rebel groups in particular areas that we might find uncomfortable.
00:18:05.000It requires us to get deeply involved in areas that we don't necessarily want to be involved in.
00:18:10.000And so what we tend to do is we tend to say, well, yeah, we should label the bad guys the radical Islamic terrorists.
00:18:15.000But also, it's really not that many of them, and they're really not worshipping Islam.
00:18:20.000So, that's sort of what happened with Trump yesterday.
00:18:22.000He said radical Islamic terror, and then he parroted a bunch of Obama platitudes.
00:18:25.000And finally, the third conflict that exists in American foreign policy that we really don't want to face up to, is isolationism itself.
00:18:33.000So, Americans tend to be gut-level isolationists.
00:18:36.000There has yet to be a president who ran on being an interventionist.
00:18:39.000All presidents run on being isolationists, essentially.
00:18:42.000And they all end up interventionists because the world is a pretty complex place.
00:18:45.000So you can either be honest about your foreign policy or you can be not honest about your foreign policy.
00:18:51.000President Bush ended up, he campaigned as an isolationist.
00:18:54.000He ended up as an interventionist and stretched us too far in the process.
00:18:57.000President Obama embraced isolationism and watched the region burst into flame.
00:19:01.000The truth is that Trump is more along Obama's lines in terms of withdrawal from the region than he is along Bush's lines in terms of intervention in the region.
00:19:12.000The right saw it as a fundamental rebuke to Obama, and in some ways it was.
00:19:16.000The truth is it was actually more of a fundamental rebuke to the Bush foreign policy than to the Obama foreign policy.
00:19:22.000So now I actually want to play some of the speech.
00:19:24.000With all that in mind, I actually want to go through some of the speech.
00:19:26.000But in order for us to actually go through the speech, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
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