As it becomes clear Iran has backed away from conflict, the media seek a new spin, Joy Behar and the crowd at The View discover they actually like neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and Mitch McConnell vows not to take advice from Nancy Pelosi. Ben Shapiro explains why this is a huge win for the Trump administration and why the media should not have been so blinded by their obsession with Barack Obama and the idea that he was a magical man who could get Iran to give up their nukes and all of their terrorist activities. Iran is now on notice that there are lines, and if they cross them, there will be consequences. The media have been completely and utterly exposed, and now they need to come up with an alternative explanation for how things just went so right for Donald Trump. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News and host of the Daily Show with Bill Maher. He is a regular contributor to CNN and the New York Times, and is a frequent contributor to the Financial Times. The Weekly Standard, The Daily Wire, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling author of the book, The Dark Side of the Middle East: A Guide to the Arab World, and has been featured on CNN, CBS Radio, NPR, and NPR. and many other publications, including The Hill, among other publications. His work has been widely syndicated throughout the past 20 years, including Playboy, The Huffington Post, and The New York Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, USA Today, and Playboy, and Teen Vogue. . He is also a regular on the streets of New York, and has a new book out soon coming in the new paperback, The Independent, and many others. Check out Ben Shapiro s new podcast, . The Daily Mail, The Weekly Beast, The Financial Times, The Economist, and much more! - Ben Shapiro's new book is out now on the road, out in paperback edition, out soon, out on Nov. 22, The Besties, The Other Way, out now! The Devil Next Door, Outtro is out in the world? on November 6, 2019. Subscribe to his new book, The Devil in Tehran, by Ben Shapiro. by Join Ben Shapiro on his podcast, Ben Shapiro, on his website, and on The View on The View
00:00:00.000As it becomes clear Iran backed away from conflict, the media seek a new spin.
00:00:04.000Joy Behar and the crowd at The View discover they actually like neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and Mitch McConnell vows not to take advice from Nancy Pelosi.
00:00:30.000Because as I have been stating, ever since Soleimani was killed, the Trump administration has re-established a long forgotten doctrine known as deterrence.
00:00:38.000And it's amazing to watch people in the media, all of the talking heads, all of the wonks, tell you that deterrence is something that doesn't exist, could never have existed with Iran.
00:00:45.000All of that predicated on their worship for Barack Obama, who was a magical, magical man.
00:00:50.000In their view, the way this worked is that President Barack Obama had done something magical.
00:00:54.000He had basically converted Iran into Sweden.
00:00:56.000All he had to do was sign a few checks to the mullahs, and then they would abandon their nuclear program, not just for the 10 years specified by contract, but for all time.
00:01:05.000And as for the terrorism and the ballistic missile testing and the development of terrorist groups all around the region and the interference in Iraq and Lebanon and Syria and Saudi Arabia and Yemen, all of that, well, we would just ignore that because Barack Obama had done something magical.
00:01:19.000And Barack Obama's narrative had always been, They either sign a check to the Mullahs or, alternatively, that you go to war with them.
00:01:35.000Trump doesn't have to understand the totality of deterrence theory because the theory is really quite simple.
00:01:41.000And Trump gets it because he gets it in most areas of his own life, which is you threaten somebody with something worse than they are threatening you with, right?
00:01:47.000They threaten you that they are going to bring a knife, you threaten to bring a gun, right?
00:01:54.000And so when it came to Soleimani, basically the Iranians kept upping the ante, upping the ante, and Trump kept ignoring it because he did not want a conflict in the Middle East.
00:02:01.000He's the only president of my lifetime who has not been in an overt shooting war in the Middle East.
00:02:06.000And the president of the United States finally had had enough and he said, okay, you tried to burn our embassy.
00:02:11.000We're going to take out your big bad terrorists, Soleimani, Qasem Soleimani.
00:02:15.000And the media said, oh, well, war is now inevitable.
00:02:17.000Now we're going to have World War Three.
00:02:42.000CENTCOM by the Obama administration said in March 2016 that the Iranians had actually become more aggressive in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal because they had more money to play with and they knew that the only thing the West cared about was the nuclear weapons development, not the expansion of terrorism and terror growth around the region.
00:02:58.000So the media had Barack Obama had already been exposed by events, but the media had not been exposed.
00:03:03.000The media could continue to propagate the lies that have been fed to them by Ben Rose, who then went out and bragged about how he lied to the media and how they had formed an echo chamber on his behalf.
00:03:12.000Well, now that Donald Trump has shown over the last 72 hours That the laws of political gravity did not cease to apply with Barack Obama.
00:03:19.000That there is such a thing in foreign relations as actual deterrence.
00:03:22.000The media have been completely and utterly exposed for the fools that they are, and what this has created is a need for the media to now defend their flank.
00:03:29.000The media now need to come up with an alternative explanation for how things just went so right.
00:03:33.000For Donald Trump, that Soleimani is dead, and the Iranians were so cowed that you are seeing the PMF, the terror group that was responsible for the attempted burning of the U.S.
00:03:42.000Embassy in Baghdad, basically backing off.
00:03:45.000There are open calls by people like Muqtada al-Sadr, who is the leader of Shia Muslims in Iraq.
00:03:52.000There are calls by him for the PMF to disband as a functioning entity.
00:03:55.000I mean, all of that is a result of Donald Trump using some deterrence.
00:04:00.000And so the media have to come up with an alternative explanation.
00:04:02.000And as we'll see, their alternative explanation is that Donald Trump continues to be a nut and a very stupid nut, and that we ought to trust the Ayatollahs, and we ought to trust Barack Obama, and we ought to trust them.
00:04:12.000And so what they're doing now is they're talking up the possibility of war, even though it is absolutely clear at this point that Iran has backed away from the war.
00:04:19.000Again, there was another report today that the Iranians had basically warned the Iraqis.
00:04:23.000The administration's denying this, as they should.
00:04:25.000I mean, they should deny this because the fact is that If the Iranians were trying to save face, then suggesting to the world that the Iranians called up the United States and said, guys, get your guys out of there because we just need to save face here.
00:04:45.000It's a better line than, yeah, the Iranians completely chickened out and they called us and told us to get our guys out of the way so that they could save a little bit of face.
00:04:53.000That's what Mike Pence was saying today, for example, that this was a strike that was meant to kill and we just had this great early warning system.
00:04:59.000Count me a little skeptical on that point, but the media continue to play up the possibility of war because they just can't accept the fact that Iran has always been violent, that the possibility of war that existed six months ago, existed three years ago, existed eight years ago, existed 20 years ago, and will continue to exist years from now, but that it has not been heightened by the United States taking a hardline position.
00:05:18.000In fact, it has been decreased in terms of intensity and possibility of scope.
00:05:23.000By the fact that they've been deterred from future action.
00:05:26.000Like, Iran hasn't changed its regional orientation.
00:05:28.000And the United States has not changed its regional orientation.
00:05:31.000The difference is that Iran knows it can't get away with as much, and so they are going to scale back some of their more overt terror activity.
00:05:39.000It does mean that Donald Trump has backed them off of a lot of the activities that they were pursuing that were getting more and more overtly aggressive.
00:05:45.000Still, the media are going to play up the possibility that we're still at war.
00:05:49.000Right now, we are still in danger of launching into an immediate full-scale war.
00:05:53.000And so you get articles like this from the Associated Press.
00:05:56.000and Iran step back from the brink of possible war on Wednesday as President Donald Trump signaled he would not retaliate militarily for Iran's missile strikes on Iraqi bases housing U.S.
00:06:05.000No one was harmed in the strikes, but the U.S.
00:06:07.000forces in the region remained on high alert.
00:06:09.000Speaking from the White House, Trump seemed intent on de-escalating the crisis, which spiraled after he authorized the targeted killing last week of Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani.
00:06:17.000Did it spiral after that or was it, you know, like the burning of the embassy, the shooting down of the American drone, the destruction of Saudi oil facilities, the bombing of ships in the Strait of Hormuz?
00:06:26.000According to the media, it's always about Trump because the world began- Trump is like gods to these people.
00:07:25.000You just have to decide to change your life for the better.
00:07:27.000So for me, a big thing is how I eat and calorie counting.
00:07:30.000Noom does have a tool that helps you with all that.
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00:08:29.000I mean, you're going to want to continue to be on high alert, but the idea that we're going to full-scale war now is, I think, Pretty much off the table since the Iranians really backed down.
00:08:38.000What's hilarious, and we'll get to the media response in a second, is that the House Democrats, in an attempt to backfill a hole that they dug for themselves, right?
00:08:46.000We were in the middle of World War III, according to the Democrats.
00:08:49.000Trump had brought us to the brink of World War III.
00:09:06.000Iran just backed down, which is what smaller countries do when faced with the greatest military fighting force in the history of the world, as it turns out.
00:09:13.000So now Nancy Pelosi and the members of the House are trying to backfill that and make Trump look like a bad guy, even though Trump won this round.
00:09:25.000Well now, House Democrats emerged yesterday from a classified briefing on Wednesday, deeply skeptical of President Donald Trump's decision to order the killing of a top Iranian leader, and unconvinced he posed an imminent threat to the United States.
00:09:36.000Okay, first of all, the definition of imminent threat I think needs to be assessed here.
00:09:41.000So what you're seeing in the media is imminent threat means we had a very specific knowledge of the specific plan that the specific terrorist was engaged in and thus we had to kill him because tomorrow he was going to do something.
00:09:52.000The Trump administration used the word imminent in sort of a broader sense.
00:09:55.000I think the sense that most of us use imminent when we talk about terrorism.
00:09:58.000In other words, were there working plans in place to harm America and her interests?
00:10:02.000When it comes to Soleimani, that was basically his day job.
00:10:03.000This is like asking, as Noah Rothman at Commentary Magazine put it, whether at Dunkin' Donuts they're preparing to make donuts that day.
00:10:09.000That's what Soleimani did for a living.
00:10:11.000Soleimani's job was to plan terror attacks.
00:10:13.000That's why Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, when asked about imminence, he said, well, I mean, last week they burned our embassy, and the week before that they were shooting rockets at our bases, so it seems like a pretty good bet that he was not going to suddenly turn into a monk and go live at a monastery.
00:10:28.000Well heard the congressman from Texas, who in fact has been rather Trump skeptical.
00:10:32.000He came out, he said, I think that an attack from Soleimani was imminent because that's literally what the man did.
00:10:39.000Are you convinced that an attack from Soleimani was imminent against Americans?
00:10:55.000But I could go even further beyond this immediate threat.
00:10:58.000Qasem Soleimani has been a threat, an acute threat to the United States for a very long time.
00:11:04.000And taking him off the battlefield has had a significant impact.
00:11:08.000It showed the Iranian regime that there's going to be consequences to their What exactly was Osama Bin Laden's imminent threat when he was killed?
00:11:19.000The answer is probably not much because he was essentially isolated in his compound in Pakistan.
00:11:23.000Does that mean it was illegal for the United States to kill him?
00:11:37.000He literally started a war in Libya and then just stayed there.
00:11:39.000He killed Muammar Gaddafi for no apparent reason.
00:11:43.000Truly, no apparent reason other than his belief that Qaddafi was engaged in human rights violations.
00:11:47.000But Qaddafi at that point was funneling us information.
00:11:49.000Qaddafi had been neutralized as a threat to the West, and the war in Libya ended with vast swathes of refugees entering Europe.
00:11:55.000It ended with the burning of the American embassy in Benghazi.
00:11:58.000It ended with the provisional government of Libya having to try to govern with no available forces from boats offshore.
00:12:05.000It was a complete disaster, the war in Libya.
00:12:07.000The Obama administration pushed it anyway to the cheers of Nancy Pelosi.
00:12:10.000Now Nancy Pelosi is like, well, we need to restrict the president's ability to strike at Iran.
00:12:15.000Now, listen, on a principled level, should the president of the United States have the kind of war-making authority that he has been granted over the last several decades?
00:12:23.000The Constitution of the United States declares that Congress should have the authority to declare war.
00:12:28.000The president of the United States must have the ability to respond quickly to threats because you don't have time to just get a session of Congress together when there's a terrorist attacking you to kill a terrorist, for example.
00:12:38.000So even under the most, I think, strict circumstances, it would be difficult to argue that it's unconstitutional for Trump to shoot a missile at Soleimani.
00:12:45.000But For broader sort of engagements, the idea that you need congressional approval makes a lot of sense.
00:12:51.000I mean, the fact is that the Congress of the United States has basically been rendered a vestigial organ when it comes to the declaration of war.
00:12:58.000In the 1970s, I think it was 1973, the War Powers Resolution was brought to the fore that suggests that the President of the United States can get involved in foreign wars, basically for a period of, I believe, 60 days under the War Powers Act.
00:13:09.000And then he has to go to Congress for reauthorization.
00:13:12.000It has basically been ignored ever since.
00:13:14.000The United States has not had a single declared war, formally declared war since World War II.
00:13:18.000The Vietnam War was not a declared war.
00:13:42.000So the idea that Congress should seize back some of its war-making authority under the Constitution, I actually am very much in favor of, simply because I think that when a Democrat is in power, it would be better if Congress were able to check the power of any president.
00:13:54.000I'm not in favor of the broad expansion of executive authority, but what I'm saying here is that the House Democrats picked a very weird hill to die on, that now all of a sudden it's, well, Trump has challenged congressional authority.
00:14:05.000By any standard, what Trump did to Soleimani is so much less than anything that Barack Obama did for eight years, droning America.
00:14:12.000Anwar al-Awlaki, who was a terrorist, was also an American citizen.
00:14:25.000They can think that Rand Paul is wrong, but the suggestion that Trump droning an Iranian terrorist who was in Iraq planning terror attacks.
00:14:38.000The idea that that is a violation of presidential authority, but Barack Obama for eight long years was not violating executive authority in launching undeclared wars in Libya, a full-scale drone war across Africa and the Middle East.
00:14:50.000You're gonna have to explain that one to me, Democrats.
00:14:53.000It really is not driven by any real principle.
00:14:55.000All this is driven by is anger that President Trump showed them up because that's all that happened here.
00:15:00.000Remember, they didn't try to press this resolution in the aftermath of Trump firing a missile into Syria after Syria gassed some of its own citizens again.
00:15:10.000Because Obama had done exactly the same thing with Syria except less.
00:15:13.000Here, the problem was that Trump humiliated Obama, he humiliated the Democrats, and now they're going to seize back congressional authority, supposedly, under the auspices that Soleimani was not an imminent threat.
00:15:26.000You really are going to have to explain why it was illegal or bad to kill Soleimani.
00:15:29.000You're really going to need to explain that before you start discussing how Trump did a very bad thing.
00:15:35.000And this is why you're going to hear in a moment, I'm going to distinguish between some of the right-wing conservative opposition to executive authority coming from people like Mike Lee, and to a certain extent Rand Paul, and the left wing.
00:15:46.000anger at executive authority, which is coming purely from a place of, we hate Donald Trump, we don't like that he humiliated Barack Obama, and now we are going to check the executive authority.
00:15:55.000We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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00:17:12.000Okay, so Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday announced that the House would vote on Thursday to limit Trump's war-making powers, likely presenting a united democratic front against the administration's recent moves against Iran.
00:17:22.000So they are now opposing the moves that box in Iran.
00:17:25.000This is now the formal democratic position, not that they have a general objection, the way that Mike Lee does, to executive authority, but that they have a specific objection to what Trump just did in Iran, which is insane because this is the most successful foreign policy move since really Maybe the end of the Reagan administration, but certainly since since Gulf War one, the bottom line to this is that Iran was backed off of its aggression.
00:17:49.000They were backed off and they lost their top commander.
00:17:52.000They lost their top terror commander, who was by all accounts the most effective person in In Iran.
00:18:06.000The reason they're upset is because Donald Trump gave the lie to the Obama administration's lie, and now they've been exposed.
00:18:11.000So here's Nancy Pelosi saying, we're going to vote on a War Powers resolution.
00:18:17.000Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, putting out a statement moments ago saying that a War Powers Resolution will be voted on in the House tomorrow.
00:18:28.000A War Powers Resolution, she says, to, quote, limit the President's military actions regarding Iran.
00:18:36.000And this legislation is going to the Rules Committee and, she says, will be voted on tomorrow in the House.
00:18:43.000Okay, I know that we're all ignoring the fact that the Iranians tried to burn our embassy in Baghdad last week, but imagine the kind of insanity it takes to hate Trump so much that the Iranians burn an American embassy?
00:18:55.000And your first move is we've got to limit the president from retaliating.
00:18:58.000We have to limit the president from responding.
00:19:00.000Again, not coming from a place of principled opposition to executive use of commander-in-chief power, but coming from we just don't like that Trump has exposed our entire ideology on foreign policy.
00:19:11.000And the way Politico reports this is just ridiculous.
00:19:13.000Lawmakers from across the House Democratic Caucus left a closed-door meeting with top Trump administration officials in a secure room in the Capitol on Wednesday frustrated If not outright angry at what they described as a vague justification for last week's deadly drone strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani shortly after he arrived in Baghdad.
00:19:30.000So they're angry that we killed Soleimani?
00:19:32.000They're angry at the justification, which is that he was involved in the burning of the United States Embassy last week?
00:19:42.000Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is, she's kind of an adjunct member of the squad.
00:19:49.000She says, there was no raw evidence presented that this was an imminent threat.
00:19:53.000Okay, so he's only a non-imminent threat, meaning that, I guess two weeks from now, he was going to murder Americans, but we didn't know if he was going to murder Americans, like specifically tomorrow.
00:20:00.000Here is Jayapal announcing that Trump recklessly assassinated Soleimani.
00:20:05.000I mean, this is doing the PR work of the Iranians.
00:20:09.000This is the result of reckless actions by President Trump of military brinksmanship.
00:20:19.000He had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack.
00:20:23.000And we say that coming from a classified briefing where, again, there was no raw evidence presented that there was an imminent threat.
00:20:32.000Okay, again, I'm gonna need to know whether any of these Democrats asked for the raw classified information that led to the death of Anwar al-Awlaki.
00:20:40.000What was the imminent threat from Anwar al-Awlaki?
00:20:42.000What was the imminent threat from Osama bin Laden for that matter?
00:20:44.000It turns out that killing terrorists is authorized under the Authorization to Use Military Force.
00:20:49.000That is pretty much the only thing that is authorized under the AUMF that was passed in the aftermath of 9-11.
00:20:54.000And what this really is about is Democrats being upset that Donald Trump did a thing that they don't like, that exposed their entire ideology.
00:21:00.000That's why you have Jerry Connolly out there going, this briefing was entirely unconvincing.
00:21:04.000Okay, like, again, where were you when Barack Obama was declaring war in Libya without any congressional authorization, then ignoring congressional blowback?
00:21:13.000My reaction to this briefing was it was sophomoric and utterly unconvincing.
00:21:19.000And I believe more than ever, the Congress needs to act to protect the constitutional provisions about war and peace.
00:21:27.000There was no rationale that could pass a graduate school thesis test.
00:21:38.000I was, well, utterly unpersuaded about any evidence about the imminence of a threat that was new or compelling.
00:21:51.000Okay, well, even if that had been presented, do you really think the Democrats would be out there today saying, well, I guess that was new and compelling.
00:22:07.000It's troubled me that Speaker Pelosi responded to the earliest reports yesterday by leaping to blame, quote, needless provocations by our administration.
00:22:18.000In other words, blaming the United States.
00:22:22.000So let's be clear, we can and should debate how to responsibly respond to Iranian threats, but the notion, the notion that our administration is to blame for Iranian aggression Mr. President, that's nonsense.
00:22:42.000And again, the fact that Democrats are so opposed to what happened with Iran has little to do with the actual action with regard to Iran and much more to do with protect the precious, as always, Barack Obama.
00:22:51.000Now, I will say there is such a thing as principled opposition to what just happened in Iran.
00:22:56.000One is an actual anti-interventionist stance, right?
00:22:59.000An actual isolationist stance that's held by senators like Rand Paul.
00:23:02.000And then there's the sort of constitutional perspective, which is that the president of the United States of either party should not have the kind of authority that is routinely used by presidents of both parties.
00:23:10.000That's sort of the position of Mike Lee from Utah.
00:23:12.000Mike Lee was fulminating after the briefing the way the Democrats were, too, saying that he was going to support the Democrats' War Powers Resolution.
00:23:18.000The only difference is I think that Mike Lee would support it whether it's against a Republican or a Democrat.
00:23:22.000I think the Democrats would only support this against a Republican.
00:23:30.000But when we allow them to be exercised through the wrong branches of government, with the wrong process, when you don't have debate and discussion, you don't allow the process itself to correct itself for the American people who will be most affected by these decisions to weigh in.
00:23:47.000That was demeaning to the process ordained by the Constitution, and I find it completely unacceptable.
00:23:53.000On that basis, I've decided to support Senator Kaine's resolution, subject to the minor amendments that he and I discussed earlier today.
00:24:00.000Okay, now full disclosure, I'm very friendly with Senator Lee, I think that he's an excellent senator, and so perhaps I'm granting him the benefit of the doubt, but I do know his constitutional perspective well enough to know that this is a consistent constitutional perspective.
00:24:11.000And the fact that the Democrats are out there praising Obama for his interventionism, I mean, again, he did start shooting war in Libya, for his intervention in the Middle East without any congressional approval and, in fact, in spite of congressional disdain.
00:24:25.000And yet now they are complaining about all of this.
00:24:31.000The Democrats' behavior here is just amazing.
00:24:33.000The fact that Ilhan Omar, an open anti-Semite, who openly sympathizes with the Ayatollahs, I mean, she put out a tweet yesterday about economic sanctions against Iran, suggesting that economic sanctions are a form of warfare, which is weird because she doesn't really care about, in fact, she supports sanctions against the Jews!
00:25:01.000Yesterday, she did this press conference where Ilhan Omar expressed that she had post-traumatic stress disorder thanks to tensions with Iran.
00:25:08.000Well, clearly we should formulate our foreign policy based on the fact that Ilhan Omar is having flashbacks or something.
00:25:17.000I feel ill a little bit because of everything that is taking place.
00:25:25.000And I think every time I hear about, I hear of conversations around war, I find myself being stricken with PTSD.
00:25:36.000And I find peace knowing that I serve with great advocates for peace and people who have Sean, Courage Against War.
00:25:49.000Are we supposed to take this human being seriously?
00:25:52.000This is a human being we are supposed to take seriously?
00:25:54.000A person who once wrote letters in support of people who had joined ISIS, asking a judge for more mercy upon them?
00:26:00.000This did happen in Minnesota, well reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
00:26:04.000She sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee despite the fact that she says an anti-semitic thing approximately once every 32.9 seconds.
00:26:10.000This human being who says, yes, clearly we should formulate our Iran policy around Ilhan Omar because she feels a little, a little ill.
00:26:23.000What this is about for people who are not Ilhan Omar, who's just a radical, who is not cold, she's lukewarm at best with regard to America's anti-terror efforts.
00:26:43.000James Clapper, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama, he suggested that, you know, when we were paying off the Iranians, that wasn't us paying off the Iranians, we were just It's giving them the money that they had already earned.
00:26:55.000I mean, we were just freeing up their money.
00:26:56.000I've heard this talking point from many members of the left, that when the Obama administration shipped pallets of cash to Iran and gave them $150 billion, that that wasn't bad, because after all, that was money that had been earned by the Iranian government.
00:27:07.000I mean, that was money that was owed to the Iranian government.
00:27:09.000Okay, well, you know what's a thing that we do here in the United States?
00:27:11.000Let's say that a drug dealer gets arrested for being a drug dealer.
00:28:08.000They didn't have to use that specific earmarked dollar for buying a ballistic missile.
00:28:13.000If they used that specific earmarked dollar for something else and then used a different dollar for the ballistic missile, the dollar still went for the ballistic missile.
00:28:19.000Okay, but the media really have been outshining themselves.
00:28:25.000outdoing themselves on a regular basis.
00:28:26.000So if you ever had doubts that the media and the Democratic Party are just wings of one another, that the Democratic Party is the activist wing of the media and the media are the PR wing for the Democrats, all you had to do is watch the media this week who are doing the overt work of the Obama administration, which is to say the overt work of the Iranian PR agencies, which is to say the overt work of the Iranian PR agencies, because effectively the Obama administration became a PR agency for the Iranians in order to push the
00:28:50.000The Obama administration had to make the case that the Iranians were good, reasonable, decent people who are going to moderate and who are going to become friends to the world community so long as we appease them.
00:28:59.000And so, what you saw from the Obama administration over and over is that when Iran would do something terrible, it would be, well, no, you're just getting Iran wrong, guys.
00:29:07.000Basically, the Obama administration became the girlfriend to the abusive, drug-addicted boyfriend trying to explain her boyfriend to her parents.
00:29:14.000That was what the Obama administration became with regard to the Iranian government.
00:29:17.000He's like, well, you know, he's he's not that bad guy.
00:29:32.000That was the Obama administration with regard to Iran.
00:29:34.000And the media started doing the same thing.
00:29:35.000And now they continue to do the same thing.
00:29:37.000The media's take on all of this is so patently removed from reality that it should destroy their credibility in a massive way for a huge period of time.
00:29:45.000It won't, of course, because once you have authoritative voices standing in Tehran, well, that means they know things.
00:29:51.000Alternatively, they don't know a damn thing.
00:29:52.000And many of them are unbelievably stupid and or dishonest.
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00:30:30.000So the media simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the overt reality, which is this was a win for America and it was a win for Trump.
00:30:43.000And there's some members of the media who don't really like Trump very much, or at least not honest enough to admit this.
00:30:47.000I had on Ian Bremmer yesterday, who's a foreign policy analyst for GZERO Media, teaches, I believe, at Georgetown.
00:30:54.000And he said, Iran is weaker than it was when Trump took office, and Trump just opened a window for negotiation, and Trump has actually re-established a level of deterrence with Iran that the Obama administration had completely avoided.
00:31:20.000They do the same thing with regard to Israel and its enemies.
00:31:23.000Whenever the Palestinians, when the government authorities in the Gaza Strip, for example, put out casualty numbers, the media just repeat it without even checking it.
00:31:31.000And those casualty numbers are always inflated and always refuse to take into account military-age males who are actually members of terrorist groups.
00:32:08.000Based on a report from Iranian state media that was a full-on lie that had no merit to it whatsoever.
00:32:13.000Sure, we're not gonna take it too seriously, but you should take it super duper seriously.
00:32:18.000And every element of what Trump has done along the way has been criticized for the dumbest possible reasons.
00:32:22.000You go on Twitter today, people are criticizing the fact that Trump sniffs during his speeches.
00:32:27.000It's been a thing during his speeches for a very long time.
00:32:29.000They're suggesting that the reason he sniffs is because he's on Adderall.
00:32:32.000They're criticizing the fact that he was slurring a couple of his words How about the fact that Joe Biden cannot string together a human sentence?
00:32:42.000How about the fact that Nancy Pelosi bobbles her words routinely?
00:32:46.000But Donald Trump is a very bad man because of that.
00:32:48.000An MSNBC panel yesterday could not even believe that military brass were attending Trump's speech.
00:32:53.000How could military brass... Here's Ben Rhodes, the vicious liar, going after the Trump administration.
00:32:58.000How could the military brass attend Trump's speech even though they were the ones who had presided over the attack?
00:33:05.000It's just sad that we're still sitting here with a President of the United States who out of a weird mixture of envy and deep antipathy has to attack his predecessor in the most political manner with the military standing behind him discussing life or death issues.
00:33:23.000We just shouldn't come to this, Nicole.
00:34:47.000President Trump's exuberance, says Nicholas Kristof, suggests that he may have learned precisely the wrong lesson from his clash with Iran.
00:34:53.000Trump and some of his supporters are crowing at the lack of American casualties.
00:34:56.000Iran may have carefully aimed so as to miss people in ways that remind me of the hubris preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
00:35:02.000As there were then, there are today concerns about whether intelligence has been overstated, leaders are thumping their chests, and there's too much confidence in the ability of the military toolbox to solve complex problems.
00:35:11.000So he can't actually explain why this was a bad thing?
00:35:14.000So he's just going to go back to the Iraq War, which in popular revisionist history was a complete loss for the United States, despite the fact that the original aim of the war, which was to depose Saddam Hussein, was accomplished inside of three weeks, thanks to the greatest military in the history of the world.
00:35:27.000But according to Nicholas Kristof, this is a big loss.
00:35:30.000Well, Trump, who in 2012 repeatedly claimed that Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to help win re-election, is already running election ads on Facebook trumpeting his killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani and stating that this is keeping America safe.
00:35:42.000Again, Trump did not quote-unquote start a war with Iran to win re-election.
00:35:46.000That's absurdity at the highest level.
00:35:48.000And killing Soleimani is a good thing.
00:35:50.000I'm sorry that Democrats are finding it hard to campaign against killing terrorists, but You guys picked that position.
00:36:00.000Iran has cast off nuclear curbs so that it is now potentially within five months of having enough fuel for a nuclear warhead, down from almost 15 years when Trump took office.
00:36:08.000It was not 15 years when Trump took office!
00:36:10.000That was their voluntary statement that they would not develop nuclear weapons for quote-unquote 15 years.
00:36:15.000The nuclear deal didn't even extend for 15 years.
00:36:19.000And their development of nuclear weapons was a secondary priority for them next to their development of regional power, which they had been pursuing pedal to the metal ever since the Iran nuclear deal.
00:36:29.000United States forces, according to Christoph, may be pushed out of Iraq, allowing Soleimani to achieve in death one of his foremost goals in life.
00:36:45.000The reason the cabinet does not exist in Iraq is because the president, the prime minister of Iraq, does not have any authority.
00:36:52.000He's the acting prime minister because of protests inside his own country that were suggesting that he was enthralled to Iran.
00:36:58.000There's not support inside Iraq by Shia, by Sunnis rather, and Kurds for the United States to pull out of there because they know the moment that happens, the Iranians basically take over.
00:37:08.000American forces in Syria may be difficult to support without the military presence in Iraq, so some or all of them might pull out as well.
00:37:16.000Are you saying that pulling troops out of the region would be a victory for Iran?
00:37:19.000Because it was my impression that Barack Obama precipitously withdrew all troops from Iraq, or nearly all troops from Iraq, leading to the rise of ISIS, leading to the continuation of Syria, leading to Russia taking over Syria and Iran funding Syria.
00:37:59.000Listen, when you're talking about regime change, first of all, Christoph and the rest of the left don't want the regime changed in Iran.
00:38:05.000Barack Obama didn't want the regime changed in Iran.
00:38:07.000He wanted to strengthen the regime in Iran.
00:38:09.000But, if you're talking about regime change in Iran, there's only one real way that's happening, from inside the Iranian military.
00:38:14.000Because the people do not have anything like the sort of ability to overthrow the military that they had in other countries where the military was smaller.
00:38:22.000The fact is that as long as the military support the mullahs, the mullahs will remain in power.
00:38:26.000It will take somebody in the military changing his mind in order for that to change.
00:38:30.000But there have been roiling protests across Iran for literally years at this point and I'm old enough to remember in 2009 when the Iranians were out in the streets protesting by the hundreds of thousands and Iranian troops were gunning them down and Barack Obama did nothing, nothing to help, nothing.
00:38:44.000But according to Nicholas Kristof, Iranians have rallied around the flag and the Iraqi narrative has changed overnight from the bullying of Iranians to the bullying of Americans.
00:38:52.000Really, is that what the Iraqi narrative is?
00:38:53.000Because it seems that the Iranians just fired actual ballistic missiles into a foreign nation.
00:38:57.000Instead of bringing troops home, Trump has had to deploy more to the Middle East at huge cost.
00:39:01.000Wait a second, two points ago, Nicholas Kristof was arguing that we should not bring any of those troops home because it would free up the Middle East for ISIS and for Iran.
00:39:07.000Now he's arguing that Trump should bring the troops home.
00:39:09.000It's like the narrative will shift just so that Trump is bad.
00:39:14.000So much winning and there will be more, says Nicholas Kristof.
00:39:17.000It's true that Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said that Iran's response had concluded, but Zarif is a moderate, often outmaneuvered by hardliners.
00:39:24.000I know this partly because back in 2004, after Zarif approved a visa for me, I was detained in Iran by security forces looking for information that could embarrass Zarif and get him fired.
00:39:31.000Oh, well, Nicholas Kristof is friends with Zarif.
00:39:34.000So we're still hearing echoes of the Ben Rhodes crap that there is a moderate faction inside the Iranian government that is being challenged by the hardliners inside the Iranian government.
00:39:44.000It's like saying, who's more pro-Trump, Ivanka or Trump?
00:40:08.000But according to Jamal Bowie, it's just that Trump is a nut.
00:40:10.000He says, this standoff, which in its latest incarnation saw Iranian missiles sailing toward bases in Iraq on Tuesday night, is so consequential, it's been hard not to impute some logic to the president's actions, even as many observers acknowledge the lies and dysfunction surrounding the attack.
00:40:24.000We're just looking for some sort of logic.
00:40:25.000But we've learned since the strike on Soleimani was almost certainly another impulsive action from an impatient president, except for the fact the New York Times reported that Mike Pompeo had been pushing for Soleimani's killing for literally months on end.
00:40:37.000He says that Trump is not a steady hand, he's never been one, yada yada yada.
00:40:40.000So apparently, Trump is the nut, and it's only thanks to the forethought of the Iranian regime that everything is hunky-dory.
00:40:48.000The Washington Post editorial board today is insisting that Trump didn't win.
00:40:54.000He shouted as he turned slowly into a corncob.
00:40:57.000According to the Washington Post, proclaiming Trump victorious in Iran is short-sighted and premature.
00:41:01.000Oh really, what was it when you declared Obama victorious in Iran after he decided to sign them checks so they could pursue further terrorism and ballistic missile testing while pretending that their nuclear program was shut down for all time?
00:41:12.000According to the Washington Post, Mr. Trump's acolytes quickly proclaimed him victorious for having eliminated the architect of Iran's foreign adventurism while avoiding a more damaging response.
00:41:20.000That assessment was premature and short-sighted.
00:41:24.000interests and allies will almost certainly continue in the coming months.
00:41:27.000Oh, you mean as opposed to like before when we had months on end of them firing rockets at American military bases and pursuing terrorist actions across the Middle East?
00:41:35.000Unless the Trump administration quickly steps up its diplomatic aim, what Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called his ultimate aim, the removal of the United States from the Middle East, could soon be realized in Iraq and Syria.
00:41:46.000Again, based on no evidence whatsoever.
00:41:48.000But the media are going to try to declare a victory, an actual loss, because that's how much they hate Trump.
00:41:54.000How much do members of the media hate Trump?
00:41:56.000Yesterday on The View, Joy Behar mentioned that white supremacist Richard Spencer, one of the Charlottesville leaders, had decided that he would no longer endorse Trump going into 2020.
00:42:05.000Because Richard Spencer didn't like that Trump had threatened, quote unquote, Aryan cultural heritage sites.
00:42:09.000This is part of this idiotic race nationalism that suggests that, first of all, Persians are Aryans.
00:42:15.000And then second of all, that Trump is pursuing the interests of the Jews.
00:42:23.000Here's Joy Behar, full-scale moron, suggesting that Richard Spencer leaving Donald Trump in terms of allegiance is a good thing, and then the entire crowd cheering a white nationalist.
00:43:26.000If I was such a nice guy, I'd get up here, I'd get up here every morning, in my ruffle coat, come here with a shoe, come in here and explain that President Trump's a meanie with regards to Obama.
00:45:21.000If she doesn't hand the charges to McConnell, then she won't have handed the charges to McConnell, and then McConnell won't be able to acquit Trump.
00:45:28.000And so then, and then, and then, and, and, and then she'll have won!
00:46:09.000You have nothing, you have no leverage, nothing to threaten with.
00:46:13.000The Republican caucus is not going to agree to your procedures on impeachment after you ran the House investigation in the dumbest possible way, refusing to call any of the witnesses who are actually relevant or wait for a judge to actually decide whether those witnesses could be called in the first place.
00:46:28.000So Mitch McConnell yesterday is like, no, we're not haggling over this.
00:46:46.000The combined IQ over at the squad If it were electricity, could not toast a piece of bread lightly.
00:46:51.000I mean, those are not a set of brilliant human beings over at the squad.
00:46:55.000They say dumb things routinely, they step in it all the time, they say openly anti-semitic things, but Nancy Pelosi could not even motivate her own base to condemn anti-semitism in its own resolution.
00:47:04.000Instead, they had to put together a huge resolution condemning all the bad things, including asparagus for dinner.
00:47:09.000Because she just couldn't stand up to the squad.
00:47:11.000And so Nancy Pelosi lost control of her own caucus.
00:47:14.000Then, because she lost control of her own caucus, she had to push for impeachment when censure would have been a much easier move on Ukraine and probably would have drawn some Republican votes.
00:47:23.000And then she's caught out because it turns out that they don't actually have the grounds for impeachment.
00:47:27.000They couldn't prove their case, which is that Trump Was deliberately attempting to sink Joe Biden, not because of concerns about corruption in Ukraine, not because of actual corruption concerns about Hunter Biden, but specifically because he wanted Joe Biden out of the way for 2020.
00:48:54.000Senate will move forward with its own legislative agenda next week unless it receives articles of impeachment against Trump from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, McConnell said on Thursday.
00:49:02.000He said on the Senate floor, there's real business for the American people that the U.S.
00:49:06.000If the Speaker continues to refuse to take her own accusations to trial, the Senate will move forward next week with the business of our people.
00:49:27.000There was one Democratic congressperson who actually said it.
00:49:30.000His name is Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington.
00:49:32.000And he said, we should be sending these impeachment charges over if we actually take them seriously.
00:49:37.000And then the entire Nancy Pelosi wing of the media and the Democratic Party, but I repeat myself, They came out and they're like, Adam Smith is a bad man.
00:50:35.000Oh, the unspeakable heroism of Nancy Pelosi.
00:50:39.000Molly Ball writes, Nancy Pelosi isn't wild about the question.
00:50:42.000The impeachment of President Trump is underway, and I've asked the Speaker of the House if she thinks it's the most important thing she'll ever do.
00:50:48.000We're sitting in her elegant office in the Capitol, on gold-upholstered armchairs around a low table topped with a vase of hydrangeas.
00:50:53.000One of my favorite things about these sorts of long-form pieces is the description of the surroundings, because it tells you everything you need to know about the journalist.
00:51:02.000Because what they're saying about the surroundings is the person, right?
00:51:05.000If it were Donald Trump and you're sitting in the same place, it would be Donald Trump sitting in his vulgar office in the White House, surrounded by gold-adorned Versailles furniture, topped with a vase of fake flowers.
00:51:18.000But with Nancy Pelosi, it's Wow, she's a queen in her own right.
00:51:37.000Can't you picture it in your mind's eye?
00:51:40.000Can't you picture how the wintry clouds, the threat to democracy, is coming over the National Mall, that symbol where Martin Luther King once spoke?
00:51:49.000Can't with the Washington Monument, the...
00:51:52.000Bolts of lightning striking as Nancy Pelosi stands up and picks up the hammer of Thor!
00:51:56.000According to Molly Ball, for a long moment, the speaker goes silent as she seems to compile in her mind the list of accomplishments she'd rather claim as her legacy.
00:52:05.000Apart from declaring war, this is the most important thing that Congress can do, she finally says.
00:52:09.000I'm most proud of the Affordable Care Act, but this is the most serious initiative I've ever been involved in in my career.
00:52:15.000Molly Ball says Pelosi has spent decades at the highest level of politics, but the past 12 months have been arguably her most consequential.
00:52:38.000Returning to the speakership after eight years of running the House Democratic minority, she established herself as a counterweight and constrainer of this divisive president.
00:52:46.000She outmaneuvered Trump on policy from the border wall he didn't get to the budget agreement he signed, loaded with goodies that Democrats wanted.
00:52:52.000She oversaw an unprecedented litigation effort against the executive branch, racking up landmark court victories.
00:52:57.000Oh, you mean there were a bunch of lower courts that didn't like Trump and ruled against him and then all of that was overturned by the Supreme Court for the most part?
00:53:04.000And she was the tactician behind the investigation that resulted in Trump's impeachment on December 18th.
00:53:09.000That really took a huge amount of tactics.
00:53:10.000I mean, what an amount of tactics it took to say, we're going to investigate the president for impeachment.
00:53:15.000And then your majority of Democrats that you run actually impeach.
00:53:21.000I mean, imagine it's like the tactical brilliance.
00:53:23.000If I were to poll my employees about whether they liked the show, and then it turns out that most of them say yes, and the rest of them get fired.
00:53:46.000What is most striking, according to Molly Ball, about this moment in Pelosi's career, is that at the peak of power, she is not protecting her position, but rather using it in aggressive, even risky ways.
00:53:56.000If she weren't protecting her position, she would have condemned Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, and AOC, and the rest of the squad repeatedly.
00:54:05.000But instead, she has kowtowed to them.
00:54:07.000Of course she's protecting her position.
00:54:10.000There's a brief moment in time where it looked like she was going to challenge them, and then, Trump got involved and said that the squad sucked.
00:54:16.000And then Nancy Pelosi immediately jumped in and said, they're the greatest.
00:54:19.000They're the most beautiful young women standing up for femininity.
00:54:24.000Just the revisionist nonsense from the media.
00:54:55.000It's a risk for whoever runs against Trump.
00:54:56.000But in the House, it's not risking anything.
00:54:58.000The polarizing effect could jeopardize Democrats who hold seats in Trump territory and thereby endanger Pelosi's House majority.
00:55:04.000Yes, but she made the calculation that she is more in danger from the left wing of her base than she is from Republicans retaking the House.
00:55:26.000She was doing what the President wanted her to do.
00:55:28.000But she was careful to cast impeachment, not as a political gambit, but as a project to preserve the checks and balances of American democracy.
00:55:34.000That's my responsibility, to protect the Constitution.
00:55:37.000Could anything be more fawning than this?
00:55:38.000It's hard to imagine anything more fawning than this.
00:55:43.000And she didn't go all in against Trump.
00:55:44.000She had nothing to risk because her base freaking hates Trump, despises Trump.
00:55:49.000But just the amount of navel-gazing sycophancy here is beyond compare.
00:55:56.000Molly Ball writing, no aspect of the spectacle was too small to escape Pelosi's control.
00:56:02.000When the Intelligence Committee held its public impeachment hearings in November, Pelosi noticed that Chairman Adam Schiff's head reached nearly to the top of his high-backed chair.
00:56:10.000After Intelligence finished its work, Judiciary, chaired by Representative Jerry Nadler, was slated to hold hearings in the same room.
00:56:15.000Pelosi thought if he sat in the same chair, Nadler, a head shorter than Schiff, would look small.
00:56:19.000Pelosi sent word down there would have to be a change in furniture, and when Judiciary convened on December 4th, Nadler was seated in a leather-backed chair that reached no higher than here.
00:56:28.000My God, she even did the Feng Shui in the Judiciary Committee!
00:56:33.000Alternatively, she put together an impeachment effort with only Democratic votes that is going absolutely nowhere.
00:56:38.000And now she has to browbeat her fellow Democratic congresspeople into pretending she's good at her job.
00:56:42.000Adam Smith had to put out a statement today saying, I misspoke this morning.
00:56:46.000I do believe we should do everything we can to force the Senate to have a fair trial.
00:56:49.000If the Speaker believes that holding onto the articles for a longer time will help force a fair trial in the Senate, I wholeheartedly support that decision.
00:56:56.000I am concerned that Senator McConnell won't have a fair trial.
00:56:58.000I am with the Speaker that we should do everything we can to ensure he does.
00:57:02.000Ultimately, I do want the article sent to the Senate for the very simple reason that I want the impeachment process to go forward.
00:57:06.000To the very end, he says, oh yeah, by the way, what I said before, it's still true, but Nancy Pelosi yelled at me, and so now I'm going to pretend to back off.
00:57:13.000This whole thing has been a debacle for Democrats.
00:57:15.000It will continue to be a debacle for Democrats.
00:57:29.000And it is perfectly obvious to anybody who has eyes to see and is willing to not listen to the stupid morons over in the media who continue to just carry water for Democrats.
00:57:37.000The media partisanship in the Trump era is just as bad as it was during the Obama era.
00:58:25.000If you want to cut through the madness of our politics and culture and know what's really going on, head on over to The Michael Knowles Show, where we can all bask in the simple joys of being right.