Trump brings home 5 Americans from North Korea, Israel attacks back, Iran fires back, Will there be war in the Middle East? We ll talk about all of it on today's show with Ben Shapiro ( )! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new show, The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your shows. You'll get exclusive episodes every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and on Saturday, depending on the length of the show, available as Vodcasts, Podcasts, and Special Offers. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first pack! You can get 10% OFF your entire order when you enter the Promo Code POWER10 at checkout. That's $29.99 plus a FREE vase! It's a great deal, but hurry because it expires today, because today is indeed Thursday! So pick your delivery date, and the rest will handle the rest! Don't put it off until tomorrow, Thursday. Thanks for listening and Happy Mother's Day! -BEN CRYPTOKE CHECK OUT THE PODCAST AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FACEBOOK GROUP AND DISCORD CHAT WITH ME AND OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA INCLUDE THE LINKS AND LINKS TO OUR PODCYCLOGGED LINKS! FREE MONEY CHAT AND PATREON INSTAGRAM AND TALK TO US AND OTHER LINKS IN OUR SOCIETY AND SOCIAL GROUP AND MORE! CHAT ABOUT US AND SOCYETY TO FOLLOW US IN OUR PAST AND OTHER MEET UP TO THE SOCIAL SCIPBOOK AND LINKED TO OUR SOCIAL PEDCAST AND FACEBOOK AND SOCETICAL MEDIA PEDIA AND SOC LANES AND POTCAST AND SOCIA AND OTHER THIRD PLACED TO SOCIAL GROWTH AND SOC INSTA CHETTER AND SOCIETS AND PEDI CHEER AND APPEAR TO SOCY AND VYAN MAKING SOMETHING IN THE SEA AND OTHER PLACET AND SEA MAKING THOTTER AND SEA AND MACAST AND OTHER CHET CHET AND APPGRAM AND OTHER MA AND OTHER AM FRIENDS THROW SOMETHARD SEA AND SOC COR COR CORRY AND SEA ME AND SOC AND MA MA AND A PLACE IN SOCIAL LANET AND SOC CHET HEARD SOMETOR AND OTHER SEA RAISE A PLACER AND A SOCIAL MEET ME THIRD THIRD RISE AND SEA R OUT A PLANET ROUTINE)
00:00:14.000So, legitimately, a ton of news breaking today.
00:00:16.000All of it very good for the President of the United States, by the way.
00:00:19.000I mean, almost universally good news for the President of the United States, and good news for America, which is more important, obviously.
00:00:26.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at 1-800-FLOWERS.
00:00:29.000So, you know Mother's Day is approaching, and you know you're a lazy bum, and you know you're gonna forget about Mother's Day until it's 5 p.m.
00:00:34.000on Mother's Day, and you remember that you have a mother, and you text her, and she's like, thanks for the text, but she doesn't really mean it because she thinks you're a jerk.
00:00:40.000Well, instead of you doing all of those things, what you should do is go over to 1-800-Flowers right now and get her some flowers.
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00:00:54.000It's an offer that your mother would certainly approve.
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00:01:01.000I just bought these actually for my mother-in-law to get that off the list.
00:01:03.000Multicolored roses are a perfect way to surprise all of the moms in your life.
00:01:44.000And a lot of it is very good for the President of the United States.
00:01:46.000So, the best piece of news for the President of the United States is that he went to the tarmac to greet a bunch of North Korean prisoners who had been released.
00:01:55.000It was three North Korean prisoners rather than five.
00:01:57.000Three North Korean prisoners who had been released.
00:02:00.000And here is what it looked like when the President of the United States greeted them on the tarmac at Joint Base, at the Joint Air Force Base in Andrews, the Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
00:02:14.000Okay, so you can just see him greeting these guys as they get off the plane.
00:02:17.000And it is, in fact, a pretty amazing thing.
00:02:20.000Now, Trump went on, he talked to the press, he did what Trump always does, right?
00:02:24.000And it's just the best of Trump, right?
00:02:28.000I mean, these guys are released, they come back.
00:02:30.000Trump says now that he's going to meet directly with Kim Jong-un on June 12th, so that is coming up in the very near future, and we'll have to keep an eye on that, obviously.
00:02:37.000We don't know how those negotiations are going to go, but all of these guys thanked President Trump for getting them out.
00:02:42.000Trump then proceeded to go out there and brag about the ratings that he was getting at 2 a.m., and talk about how they'd been treated excellently by the North Koreans, which of course is not really true, but...
00:02:51.000I think the American public have learned to separate out the Trumpy from the good stuff that he's doing.
00:02:56.000I think that the longer Trump's presidency goes on, the less people are worried as much about the kind of crazed nature of the Trump presidency, and the more they're looking at the policy, because right now the economy is doing very well.
00:03:07.000Instead of trading five terrorists for Bo Bergdahl,
00:03:10.000Instead, the President of the United States traded no terrorists for three Americans in North Korea, and five top ISIS leaders were just captured in Iraq.
00:03:18.000So President Trump tweeted on Thursday that five of the most wanted ISIS leaders had been captured.
00:03:23.000Spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve Army Colonel Ryan Dillon tweeted on Thursday that Iraq captured five key ISIS leaders as part of Operation Roundup.
00:03:31.000The tweet didn't specify when or where the five were captured.
00:03:48.000During Operation Roundup, the arrest is a significant blow to Daesh and demonstrates close coordination between ISF, SDF in their fight to defeat Daesh, and then they say that the
00:03:58.000Okay, so all of this is very, very good news for President Trump.
00:04:06.000All he has to do, apparently, is just ignore everything Obama would have done and everything goes swimmingly.
00:04:10.000So all of that is excellent news for the President of the United States, who, again, instead of trading five terrorists for a traitor, just captured five terrorists, along with the Iraqis and the Syrians, and freed three Americans.
00:05:30.000And what they said, and I love this line, they said, if it rains in Israel, it will pour in Iran.
00:05:35.000Meaning, you try anything and we will make you bleed.
00:05:38.000It's an amazing thing, because all of the people who have been victimized by the Assad regime in Syria, apparently there were reports that they were cheering as Israeli warplanes, as Jewish warplanes, were flying into Syria.
00:05:47.000A bunch of Muslims were cheering that Israel was coming in.
00:05:50.000Which is not a shock, because again, the enemy of my enemy is my friend in the Middle East, and right now it is very obvious who the friends are.
00:05:57.000Right, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Israel.
00:06:01.000They're all on one side against the Iranians.
00:06:03.000And as I've been saying for a long time here, the reality is that the only thing that Obama's Iran deal achieved was the creation of this alliance.
00:06:49.000And the Trump administration said all the right things as well.
00:06:51.000Unlike the Obama administration, which always called for restraint whenever Israel was attacked, the Trump administration said, listen, you get hit, you do what you want.
00:07:07.000Israel has blasted Iran's bases in Syria with 70 missiles, killing at least 23 fighters in revenge for rocket strikes on the Golan Heights.
00:07:13.000Fighter jets bombarded military bases, munitions warehouse, and intelligence centers after Tel Aviv stoked fears of a war by warning if it rains in Israel, it will pour in Iran.
00:07:21.000I'm sorry, I love the British media coverage there, that Israel stoked fears of a war.
00:07:36.000That's Iran threatening a war, and Israel saying, if you start it, we will finish it.
00:07:40.000Which, by the way, is exactly what you should teach your children when it comes to fights.
00:07:43.000Never start a fight, but if you get in a fight, finish the fight.
00:07:45.000The strikes hit nearly every target and were a response to 20 rockets fired by the Iranian Quds Force, Israeli military chiefs claimed.
00:07:51.000Five Syrian soldiers, including two officers and 18 militia fighters, were killed in the attack, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
00:08:00.000The death toll is likely to rise because some of the wounded are in critical condition.
00:08:03.000As I said, I believe that the actual number is about 28 at this point.
00:08:08.000The conflict came hours after President Trump pulled out of the nuke deal with Iran.
00:08:12.000Now, one of the things that's amazing about all of this is that the entire left is now blaming Trump for Iran attacking Israel.
00:08:18.000They're suggesting that it's Trump's pullout from the Iran deal that emboldens the Iranians to pursue nuclear weapons.
00:09:13.000There are very few nations in the history of the world that have actually had nuclear weapons and then given up the nuclear weapons or been developing a nuclear program and then stopped developing the nuclear program.
00:09:21.000You can actually list them on slightly more than one hand.
00:09:23.000Ukraine had nuclear weapons, but those were left over from the USSR.
00:09:26.000Kazakhstan had nuclear weapons, those were left over from the USSR.
00:09:28.000Belarus had nuclear weapons, those were left over from the USSR.
00:09:32.000The United States came in and said, listen, you guys don't have the capacity to take care of your nuclear weapons or secure your nuclear weapons, so you should give those up, and in return, we'll give you security guarantees.
00:09:41.000That's worked out pretty well up until Obama, who allowed Russia to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea.
00:09:47.000The only two nations that actually developed nuclear weapons or were in the process of developing nuclear weapons and gave them up were South Africa in 1993 and Libya in 2003.
00:09:57.000Those are the only two nations that had active nuclear programs who gave up their nuclear weapons and just said no.
00:10:03.000Okay, and the reasons they gave up those nuclear weapons were not because the United States came to them and said, we will bribe you to give up your nuclear weapons.
00:10:09.000The reason they gave up their nuclear weapons is that those countries preemptively gave up their nuclear weapons, knowing that there would be consequences if they did not.
00:10:16.000In other words, the countries themselves moderated.
00:11:05.000He saw that the United States was about to go into Iraq.
00:11:09.000And before the United States went into Iraq, he gave up his nuclear weapons because he figured, I don't want to go to war with these people.
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00:13:12.000Since the Iran deal kicked in in 2015, in the last three years, Iran has increased its military spending 40%.
00:13:20.000Their economy has been garbage, by the way.
00:13:21.000Every dollar they got from us, every dollar we released to them, was used to fund terrorism or used in the military, essentially.
00:13:28.000And their economy has been terrible, which is why what you're actually seeing is a rolling set of protests across Iran that has been ongoing now for legitimately months.
00:13:38.000These are protests not even about the Islamic nature of the republic, but about the inability of the government to allow a free market economy and integrate into the world economy enough so that people aren't struggling.
00:13:48.000These are basic bread-and-butter riots that are happening in Iran.
00:13:53.000In the end, the truth is, the only thing that's going to solve the Iranian problem is going to be a regime change.
00:13:57.000That regime change does not necessarily have to be pushed by the outside.
00:14:00.000It doesn't have to be a situation where the United States comes in and topples the Iranian mullahs.
00:14:04.000We don't have to go to war with Iran in order to effectuate this.
00:14:06.000There are groups within Iran that we ought to be fostering.
00:14:09.000And beyond that, I'm sure that we could probably find a general inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who would be willing to overthrow the Shahs.
00:14:18.000And that's probably what's going to have to happen here, because realistically speaking, the Iranian military was purged of all of its moderates years and years and years ago, and if there were to be some sort of uprising, the Iranian military would just, as the tool of the mullahs, start shooting people in the streets.
00:14:31.000So what you really need is an interior military coup by someone who figures that the mullahs are going to get us all killed, and we need to get rid of those mullahs, and we need to install a puppet dictatorship, basically.
00:14:40.000Right, the same way that it happened in Egypt.
00:14:42.000In Egypt, there was the revolution in Egypt, and Mubarak was replaced with Mohammed Morsi, who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then that degraded back into essentially a benevolent dictatorship.
00:15:21.000I don't think there's going to be a large-scale war between Israel and Iran.
00:15:24.000The reason I don't think there's going to be a large-scale war between Israel and Iran is because I think Iran would be unbelievably foolish to pursue this.
00:15:29.000If Iran does this, Israel will wipe them off the map.
00:15:32.000Israel, using Saudi airspace in an alliance with the Egyptians and the Jordanians, will take out their facilities and topple the regime.
00:15:38.000The Israelis do have the capacity to decapitate the regime.
00:15:43.000The question is whether Israel wants to incur the casualties that will happen as a result of that, because Iran obviously does have ballistic weapons technology.
00:15:49.000Iran does have terrorist groups all surrounding Israel.
00:15:52.000Hezbollah to Israel's north, Hamas to Israel's south, and Syria to Israel's sort of northeast.
00:16:01.000That Israel, if it had to fight a war, would win a war, but it would be a bloody war.
00:16:05.000It could draw in countries like Turkey to try and save the Iranians, which would be weird because Turkey really hates Iran.
00:16:11.000But as a counterbalance to Israel, they might do it.
00:16:13.000Bottom line here is I do not think that Iran wants to risk it.
00:16:16.000I think what Iran wants to do is fire off a few missiles, demonstrate that they have not been shut down in any serious way, and then Israel responds by saying, listen, you do that and we will finish you.
00:16:27.000Everybody knows that if things really get bad, if things really get bad, if Iran launches a full-scale war and it's Iran versus Saudi Arabia and Israel and Egypt, that the United States Air Force alone would do unbelievable damage to the Iranian military.
00:18:00.000He believed in the family of nations, and it's a cooperative thing, and if we all get together and we get in a room and we talk about it, we'll put all of our differences aside and we'll move forward.
00:18:09.000That's really not the way that international relations work.
00:18:12.000The way international relations work is that nations have interests.
00:18:15.000Where they have commonality of interest, they ally.
00:18:17.000Where they do not have commonality of interest, they conflict.
00:18:23.000Trump gets that better than Obama ever did.
00:18:24.000Trump understands that when Iran gains power, that means that Saudi Arabia has lost power.
00:18:28.000He understands that when Iran increases its regional influence, it means that Israel is in danger.
00:18:33.000He understands that when North Korea increases its power, then that means that South Korea is losing its power, and by extension, the United States is losing power in an ally.
00:18:41.000Trump gets that far better than Obama ever did.
00:18:44.000Obama had this very complex realpolitik view of the world.
00:18:47.000But his realpolitik was not realistic.
00:18:48.000It was not real and it was not politics.
00:18:51.000It was actually just a view of the world that was rosy in the extreme.
00:18:53.000Well, perhaps our behavior can change Iran.
00:18:56.000You know, like the abused girlfriend who keeps going back to the boyfriend thinking she's going to change him.
00:19:16.000And the fact that Barack Obama was willing to forward the ambitions of the Mullahs in order to pursue his utopian vision of a counterbalance to Israel in the Middle East in the presence of Iran, not only was it idiotic, it actually ended up doing severe damage and killing a lot of people.
00:19:51.000I'm giving him credit right now for freeing the North Korean prisoners, the prisoners of North Korea.
00:19:56.000I'm giving him credit for pulling out of the Iran deal.
00:19:58.000Again, I think the strongest part of Trump's presidency has been on policy, obviously.
00:20:02.000The weakest part has been a lot of the personal scandal.
00:20:05.000In just a second, I want to talk about the personal scandal and whether it influences President Trump in any serious way.
00:20:11.000I have my doubts that it influences Trump in any real way.
00:20:15.000But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Blue Apron.
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00:21:46.000On foreign policy, North Korea looks like it is backing away from its militant stance.
00:21:50.000You know, that's not all due to President Trump, and we haven't seen what the conclusion of that negotiation will look like, but Trump gets a lot of credit.
00:21:57.000On Iran, Trump is doing the right thing, and an alliance is now being formed between countries that you thought would never ally.
00:22:03.000Okay, again, if you told me that Saudi Arabia and Israel were allies in 2001, I would say that you were smoking something, because that would have been nearly impossible.
00:22:11.000Because of Obama's horrifying policy and Trump's reaction to that horrifying policy, that relationship is really growing in a pretty significant way.
00:22:19.000The real downfall, the real part that's difficult for the Trump administration is, of course, all of the ancillary issues.
00:22:25.000The Stormy Daniels of the situation, the Michael Cohen of the situation, the fact that Trump tweets silly things.
00:22:30.000On a regular basis or says terrible things on a relatively infrequent basis.
00:22:34.000OK, here's the latest on the Michael Cohen saga.
00:22:37.000OK, so according to I believe this report is from The Washington Post, President Trump has been sworn into office and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, saw a golden opportunity
00:22:46.000From his perch in a law office on the 23rd floor of New York's Rockefeller Center, Cohn pitched potential clients on his close association with Trump, noting that he was still the president's lawyer, according to associates.
00:22:54.000He showed photos of himself with Trump.
00:22:56.000He mentioned how frequently they spoke, even asking people to share news articles describing him as the president's fixer.
00:23:01.000I'm crushing it," he said, according to an associate who spoke to him in the summer of 2017.
00:23:05.000Details this week emerged how quickly Cohen leveraged his role as Trump's personal attorney, developing a lucrative sideline as a consultant to companies eager for insight into how to navigate the new administration.
00:23:16.000The rapid flow of millions of dollars to Cohen shows the rush by corporations, unable to rely on the influence of Washington's traditional lobbying class in dealing with the new populist outsider president, to lock in relationships with Trump's inner circle.
00:24:00.000And that apparently gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:24:03.000Even the office in which he operated, which served as the fulcrum of the newly created Michael Cohen and Associates, was a side benefit of his Trump affiliation.
00:24:10.000It was provided by the powerhouse legal and lobbying firm Squire Patent Boggs, which signed Cohen to a $500,000 deal in the wake of the 2016 election.
00:24:33.000Apparently investigators could prove whether Cohen promised specific government actions in return for payments.
00:24:37.000And that could cause him legal trouble.
00:24:39.000If he spent large amounts of time speaking to government officials on behalf of clients, investigators could explore whether he should have registered as a lobbyist.
00:24:48.000So the media are going nuts over Michael Cohen doing this, but this is not only nothing new, it is done routinely on both sides of the aisle.
00:24:57.000is built explicitly on this promise, that I know somebody who knows somebody in the administration, and if you give me money, I will advise you how your policy can become law.
00:25:06.000The lobbying industry is really bad now.
00:25:08.000One of the answers to the lobbying industry that's been put forward by a lot of folks on the left is, what if we just restrict the amount of money in politics?
00:25:14.000What if we just prevent people from being paid to be lobbyists, for example?
00:25:18.000Which doesn't help at all, because presumably these companies then just hire people in-house to go talk to legislators.
00:25:23.000The real problem is that government is too big.
00:25:26.000Government is too big and it has too much power.
00:25:28.000You wouldn't care, as a company, what the government was doing if the government wasn't bothering you.
00:25:34.000The government makes policy, the government can create monopolies for you, the government can create oligopolies for you, the government can ensure that you are protected from competition.
00:25:42.000That's why it is imperative that if you want to cut corruption from government, it is not just a matter of switching the people in office and saying that you need more honest people in office.
00:25:50.000It is a matter of switching the system.
00:25:52.000The system of patronage has been corrupt since the days of Ulysses S. Grant.
00:25:56.000Ulysses S. Grant experienced in his administration, right after the Civil War, serious accusations of misuse of patronage inside his administration.
00:26:04.000In fact, James Garfield was probably assassinated over a patronage issue.
00:26:31.000I think that it's probable that Cohen probably said to Trump something like, man, I'm just making bank off the fact that you and I are friends.
00:26:37.000And Trump probably laughed and said, ah ha ha ha ha.
00:26:40.000OK, that's not the same thing as Cohen actually doing something corrupt or Trump actually doing something corrupt in the legal sense.
00:26:46.000In the typical sense, it's certainly Cohen doing something corrupt, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I will attempt to influence someone, is not the best way of doing business.
00:26:54.000But, it's not a law violation, and the attempt to kind of smear Trump with Cohen, I think that again, the evidence is not in.
00:26:59.000There's a lot of speculation going on right now about Trump.
00:27:03.000There are a lot of dots that have not yet been connected.
00:27:06.000And I think it's a mistake for the, I think it's a mistake for the media to jump to conclusions on that.
00:27:09.000Now, okay, so in other news, yesterday was a good day for Gina Haspel.
00:27:12.000Gina Haspel is, of course, President Trump's nominee for CIA director.
00:27:17.000She'd be the first female CIA director, and she's getting all sorts of crap from the Democrats because back when she was in the CIA as a low-ranking member, a lower-ranking member during the War on Terror, she was responsible for overseeing black sites and for participating in waterboarding of terrorists.
00:27:33.000It was legal to waterboard terrorists.
00:27:38.000It is still an ongoing debate whether waterboarding is in fact torture or whether it is a quote-unquote enhanced interrogation technique.
00:27:44.000Now, in the typical, in the sort of typical description, waterboarding is torture because you are using physical pressure in order to get somebody to do something.
00:27:51.000Okay, so in the typical description it is, but it doesn't do permanent damage to you.
00:28:07.000I mean, Steven really went under like three, four times, maybe five times.
00:28:11.000The last time he lasted for, I think, it was like 45 seconds or something.
00:28:16.000So Steven's a rough and tough guy, but
00:28:19.000The idea here is that Gina Haspel was doing something that was completely legal when she was in the CIA, and now they're saying she can't be the head of the CIA, the Democrats, because she did something completely legal when she was there.
00:28:28.000So I ask a simple question, which is, is there anyone working at the CIA during the war on terror who is now allowed to be head of the CIA?
00:28:43.000What they are doing is they are saying that it was legal when she acted in the first place,
00:28:47.000But now, I don't like what she did, and so now I'm gonna bar her.
00:28:50.000Okay, this would be the same thing as saying there's an attorney general, like say Kamala Harris in the state of California, who did not issue same-sex marriage licenses and did not order people to issue same-sex marriage licenses before same-sex marriage was forcibly legalized by the Supreme Court in 2013.
00:29:03.000Well, now I don't think that she should be able to run for senator or president because, you know, back then she didn't violate the law.
00:29:11.000Like, Gina Haspel was doing her job at the time, and we're not talking about a Nuremberg situation here, okay?
00:29:16.000We're not talking about you're gassing people.
00:29:18.000We're not talking about you're shooting innocent people, and therefore you have an obligation to stop.
00:29:22.000We are talking about torturing, or waterboarding, not even torturing, waterboarding some of the worst people on planet Earth, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in situations in which you are attempting to gain all sorts of information that can be used to stop further terrorist attacks.
00:29:34.000And we do know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has waterboarded a ton of times,
00:29:38.000He actually gave up actionable intelligence to the U.S.
00:29:43.000So, in just a second, I'm going to show you the exchanges between Gina Haspel and the Democrats, because I think that they do go to show what exactly the Democrats think of the reality of difficulties in foreign policy.
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00:31:48.000Okay, in just a second, I'm going to continue with the Gina Haspel story.
00:31:53.000Plus, I want to talk a little bit about how Republicans can win back young people, because I have a cover story in the Weekly Standard this week, and I want to talk a little bit about that.
00:32:00.000But first, you're going to have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
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00:33:40.000So as I was mentioning, Gina Haspel, who is up for CIA, she was grilled by Democrats, and she made Democrats look pretty foolish, because the truth is, Democrats supported waterboarding for most of the 2000s, and then they decided to turn against it, and now they're ripping on her for it.
00:33:54.000So, Dianne Feinstein, who was against waterboarding from the very beginning, she was ripping into Gina Haspel, and Gina Haspel just debunks her over and over and over.
00:34:08.000Did you oversee the enhanced interrogation of al-Nashiri, which included the use of the waterboard, as publicly reported?
00:34:18.000Exposing operational information can be damaging to sources and methods, as you know, but there is also a physical risk to officers who go out to the far ends of the globe and conduct dangerous missions, and they believe that their participation in those dangerous missions will be protected.
00:34:38.000Okay, so there she is making a good point there to Dianne Feinstein.
00:34:41.000That's not the only good point she made.
00:34:43.000There is a Democrat who actually compared CIA agents to terrorists in use of torture and Haspel just took him to school.
00:34:50.000Your response seems to be that civilized nations don't do it, but uncivilized nations do it, or uncivilized groups do it.
00:34:58.000The United States does it to its own soldiers.
00:35:01.000A civilized nation was doing it until it was outlawed by this Congress.
00:35:06.000Senator, I would never obviously support inhumane treatment of any CIA officers.
00:35:13.000We've lost CIA officers over the years to terrorists.
00:36:16.000You can vote against Gina Haspel, but don't give me the collective amnesia about how it's on CIA.
00:36:22.000I want to talk to the senators who told us that they represented American values, and conveniently in 2002 and 2003, this represented American values.
00:36:31.000Now that we don't face the same threat and that we have different senators, it's okay to attack one of my former colleagues.
00:36:49.000It is amazing how Democrats, again, rewrite history.
00:36:51.000And it's just demonstrative of how they rewrite history in every element.
00:36:54.000So instead of looking at the context of the waterboarding and saying, hey, we just got hit and 3,000 Americans just died, should we pour some water over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's face to maybe stop that?
00:37:02.000Instead of them saying, well, you know, that was probably a pretty justified decision, or at the very least you could make a strong argument.
00:37:07.000Now it's, anyone who did that is evil.
00:37:09.000So I tweeted out yesterday, you know, is there anyone from that period the Democrats would be okay with running the CIA?
00:37:15.000And I got a bunch of answers from a bunch of Democrats saying no.
00:37:17.000So the question is, then why were you fine with James Clapper being head of CIA?
00:37:21.000He was there too, doing the same thing.
00:37:24.000In fact, Gina Haspel has been recommended for the job by a bunch of Obama officials who were working for the CIA at the time.
00:37:32.000But again, it's not just unique to Democrats.
00:37:34.000I don't just want to say it's Democrats.
00:37:35.000John McCain, who has been anti-torture all the way along, he was anti-waterboarding all the way along, he decides that Gina Haspel is not qualified for the job of CIA director for following the law at the time.
00:37:45.000He says, I believe Gina Haspel is a patriot who loves our country and has devoted her professional life to its service and defense.
00:37:50.000However, her role in overseeing the use of torture is disturbing, and her refusal to acknowledge torture's immorality is disqualifying.
00:37:56.000Okay, so now we're at the point, it's the same point that we've come to with same-sex marriage, right?
00:37:59.000Where anybody who ever once said traditional marriage ought to be the law and same-sex marriage ought not to be the law, is disqualified from public office, right?
00:38:08.000But now anyone who believed the opposite, which was the majority of the American public at the time, all those people are thrown out of the halls of good grace.
00:38:15.000Okay, now John McCain is trying to do the same thing to Gina Haspel.
00:38:18.000The reality is the American public wanted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded, and for good reason.
00:38:22.000We didn't want more Americans to die to spare his nasal cavity.
00:38:26.000Okay, that wasn't what we were interested in doing.
00:38:29.000But the rewriting of history continues apace.
00:38:31.000Every era of history, I think it is incumbent on us to not be so intellectually and morally arrogant that we can't go back and think, what was it like for people at the time?
00:38:48.000It was evil when Jefferson was holding slaves.
00:38:51.000But to pretend that that didn't happen in a slightly different context than you today, that you today are so much better than Thomas Jefferson was, you're a much better person than Thomas Jefferson was, you didn't live then, you didn't live in the context of slavery, you didn't live in a culture of slavery.
00:39:04.000Maybe you are a better person, but that's because people like Thomas Jefferson paved the way for the rejection of Thomas Jefferson's own behavior with the values espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
00:39:13.000You are a product of the culture that Thomas Jefferson helped build.
00:39:16.000And you are a product of the CIA that did not allow you to die in a terrorist attack because they were pursuing enhanced interrogation techniques that you now find reprehensible.
00:39:24.000Again, none of that means that torture is okay.
00:39:26.000None of that means waterboarding is okay.
00:39:28.000None of that means that slavery is okay.
00:39:31.000But you do have to understand what people were saying and doing at the time if you really want to understand human beings and not just be somebody who stands around virtue signaling about the past.
00:39:41.000OK, now I want to discuss for just a few minutes here.
00:39:45.000How conservatives can reach out to young people because I have an article that's cover story in the Weekly Standards, a long essay about the generational gap between young conservatives and older conservatives in America.
00:39:56.000And I think we're sort of uniquely qualified to talk about this issue because we have a lot of young people who listen to this program.
00:40:02.000We also have a lot of folks who are older Republicans who listen to this program, older Americans who listen to this program.
00:40:06.000There is a major generation gap inside the Republican Party and it largely breaks down on a couple of issues.
00:40:12.000One issue is social issues, and by that I mean largely same-sex marriage and drug legalization, and the other is character issues.
00:40:19.000So these generation gaps, I think, can be bridged, but I think that we have to understand what they are.
00:40:24.000So the first issue is this libertarian approach to same-sex marriage and drug legalization.
00:40:29.000So younger Americans look at the government and they say, the government stinks at everything.
00:40:33.000Not only does the government stink at everything, I think the government ought to leave me alone.
00:40:36.000In fact, I think the government ought to leave everybody alone.
00:40:38.000So when it comes to same-sex marriage, even if I personally believe in traditional marriage, that doesn't mean that the government has a role in any of this stuff.
00:40:45.000I think older conservatives can get with that.
00:40:46.000I think older conservatives can understand that.
00:41:18.000The younger Americans are moving dramatically away from the Republican Party, but one of the reasons for that is because of President Trump.
00:41:25.000An incredible 82% of Republican and Republican-leading voters between the ages of 18 and 24 say they want another Republican to challenge President Trump for the party's nomination in 2020.
00:41:35.000Older Americans hear this, they say young Americans are idiots.
00:41:37.000And younger Americans hear that and they say, older Americans are fine with all the terrible things that Trump is doing.
00:42:24.000They remember arguing that Clinton was unfit for office based on his treatment of women and his perjury.
00:42:28.000And they remember losing that argument to the left.
00:42:31.000They remember arguing that character counts and watching as Democrats held aloft the banner of Teddy Kennedy, right, who was creating waitress sandwiches with Chris Dodd when he wasn't drowning women in rivers.
00:42:40.000Older conservatives remember Mitt Romney and they remember how he got just slandered and destroyed while he was the cleanest guy in the room.
00:42:47.000And so they were looking for a hammer.
00:42:48.000Younger conservatives, they think that the character question is still up for debate.
00:42:52.000Older conservatives say the character question is over, we lost, let's get a guy in there who does what we want.
00:42:56.000Younger conservatives think that the character question is still unfolding.
00:43:01.000It is unfolding, but only for younger Americans.
00:43:03.000If you're older, you already made up your mind on this.
00:43:05.000If you're young, then you want to be able to say to your friends, I'm a good person and the person I voted for is a good person.
00:43:10.000Because you're still making up your mind on what character means.
00:43:14.000Trump presents a serious problem for a lot of young conservatives who are trying to make the character argument in favor of the Republican Party.
00:43:20.000When you're young, you decide how you're going to vote based on character.
00:43:23.000As you get older, I think you start to vote more based on policy than character.
00:43:27.000Young conservatives didn't see the battle of 2016 as a battle in which character had already lost.
00:43:31.000They saw it as presenting a question about their own character.
00:43:34.000Were they willing to enthusiastically back a guy that they thought was a problem?
00:43:37.000And the answer, by and large, was no for young conservatives.
00:43:42.000But again, I think that that gap can be bridged.
00:43:45.000The way that gap is bridged is by older conservatives telling younger conservatives, listen, it's not that we think that Trump is amazing in terms of his personal character.
00:43:52.000We don't think that he's a god king or anything.
00:44:03.000That's what older conservatives can teach younger conservatives.
00:44:06.000And what younger conservatives can teach older conservatives is you don't have to go along with everything bad that Trump does in order to say that his policies are quite good.
00:44:14.000And if they can come to that sort of conciliation, I think that will at least solidify the party, solidify the conservative movement in a fairly significant way.
00:44:21.000Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:45:54.000Okay, so again, this is the innocuous part, and then he gets to the part where he sort of rips into Trump, but more by praising Obama, and, of course, suggests that anyone who allowed Trump into office is a rube and all this kind of stuff.
00:46:13.000Who partners with Colin Calherd on a show on Fox Sports 1, talking about, obviously, the sporting events of the day.
00:46:20.000Jason is, I think, a different thinker.
00:46:22.000We're going to try and get him on our Sunday show, I think.
00:46:25.000And Jason says that one of the big problems that's happening in our culture right now, particularly for black folks, is that if you say that Trump is a good idea, then you just get kicked out.
00:46:32.000He's talking about Kanye West with Tucker Carlson.
00:46:35.000But if you just say, you know what, I think Trump has a good idea here.
00:46:44.000Kanye's saying, I don't agree with everything Trump believes in.
00:46:48.000Kanye disagrees with Trump and the Republican Party and conservatives on a lot of issues, but he's not willing to cast someone out of the human race just because he disagrees with them.
00:47:01.000Okay, so Whitlock has said a lot of this sort of stuff, and for that he has been excised from large segments of the black community.
00:47:07.000Again, I think that what we're seeing right now, there's an amazing tweet, I have to get this tweet for you, it's so good.
00:47:12.000So, Kanye West tweeted something else out about freedom of thought.
00:47:33.000If you think that freedom of thought is the new slavery, or as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, that freedom of thought is just a form of white freedom, that you're free to be white, then we can't have a conversation.
00:47:49.000You're just a tribal enthusiast and there's nothing else to be said about it.
00:47:52.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:47:58.000Alrighty, so, there's a guy who is 104 years old, he's an Australian dude, and he plans to end his life in Switzerland today.
00:48:06.000And he apparently sang a few bars of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as he told reporters that medically assisted suicide should be more widely available and not only viewed as a last resort for the terminally ill.
00:48:17.000The British-born biologist approaching death has led some people in the country, where he came to die, to question if they want to be known as the death country, right?
00:48:24.000Is it just going to become, you go to Switzerland because you want to kill yourself?
00:48:47.000Edward G. Robinson plays an older guy.
00:48:49.000All the older people in this society are encouraged to have euthanasia.
00:48:52.000They're not sick, but the society encourages them that if you're feeling a little bit of pain, or you're feeling old, you should just go kill yourself.
00:49:03.000This 104-year-old guy who's singing Beethoven's 9th as he prepares to die, that is literally what happens in Soylent Green.
00:49:09.000Edward G. Robinson literally lies there as they play Beethoven's 7th symphony, the pastoral.
00:49:14.000Or his 6th symphony, rather, the pastoral.
00:49:17.000And he literally dies listening to Beethoven.
00:49:19.000And this is a horror movie from the 1970s, but now it's a wonderful thing.
00:49:34.000Okay, this is played as a horror thing, because it is a horrible thing, okay?
00:49:38.000I'm sorry, killing yourself to Beethoven is still not a great thing, because while everyone wants to believe that there is such a thing as a beautiful death, there really is no such thing as a beautiful death.
00:49:49.000Some deaths can be more peaceful and more comfortable, but death does not become beautiful just because you're playing Beethoven in the background, and assisted suicide doesn't become more moral just because you're listening to good music when you do it.
00:50:05.000By 2015, the most recent year tabulated, the figure had more than tripled to 965.
00:50:07.000Nearly 15% of the cases last year were people under 65 years of age.
00:50:17.000Hey, the West is literally killing itself.
00:50:19.000And the West is killing itself because they don't see the inherent value in human life anymore, and human life is something that can be disposed of as you see fit.
00:50:27.000That's a serious, major moral issue, I think, that we're all going to have to deal with.
00:50:32.000I think in the 70s, they used to have a concept that this was a bad thing.
00:50:35.000Now, apparently, this will be played as like a peaceful ending to a movie, actually, now.