Syrian dictator Bashar Assad uses chemical weapons AGAIN. London talks about banning knives. Yes, really. And The Atlantic bans conservatives. Ben Shapiro talks about it all on The Ben Shapiro Show. Today's show is all about the chemical attack on Syrian citizens by the Assad regime, and why it's time to put your money in gold and precious metals. If you don't know what chemical weapons are, then you're in for a real treat! To get a free information kit on physical precious metals, go to www.birchgold.group and request a No-Cost, No-Obligation Kit. This comprehensive 16-page kit shows how gold and silver can protect your savings, and how you can, if you seek to do so, legally move your IRA or 401k out of stocks and bonds and into a precious metals IRA. To get that no-cost, no-obligation kit go to kit . They're good people, trustworthy people. They're trustworthy. They'll tell you all of your questions and give you all the answers you need to get the information you need. and then talk to my friends over at Birch Gold Group if you do decide to invest in precious metals! Get that FREE information kit and let them know that you want to get your questions answered! You can trust my friends, they'll give you the answers to your questions, and then you'll get that No-free information kit! and you'll be set up for the rest of your life! -Ben Shapiro's Note: This episode is sponsored by the Better Business Bureau. To learn more about the BGBB, check out their excellent BGB membership program. Click here. To become a supporter and get 20% off your first month of Gold and Silver, Gold, Copper, and Metals, you get 10% off of the purchase of a BGB Provenza Gold Membership! Check it out here. It's a great deal, and you get access to a 20% discount, plus a FREE FIBROTIONAL PRICING plan, and access to all kinds of BGB products, including a 7-day VIP membership, and much more! to get an A-Plus VIP membership plan, plus an A+ rating, plus access to the VIP discount, and a FREE PRICEDGE, and all other perks, plus all other VIP access to 7 days of VIP access, including VIP pricing, and VIP pricing!
00:00:16.000Here we are in our beautiful studios once again, and I could not be more pleased to be home, except for how I wish I were on vacation still.
00:00:23.000But since I am not, we will have to do a show.
00:00:27.000Obviously, the possibility of war in the Middle East is heating up in pretty dramatic fashion after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on his own citizens.
00:00:49.000I have a lot of my money in the stock market, but I do have a certain percentage of my earnings in precious metals.
00:00:54.000And the reason for that is because I don't want the government manipulating the currency and I want to hedge against that.
00:00:59.000And also, the stock market is quite volatile right now, and that means that if you want to hedge against the problems of volatility, gold is not a bad way to do that.
00:01:07.000Well, with all of that uncertainty, that means that you should trust my friends over at Birch Gold Group if you do decide to invest in precious metals.
00:01:12.000They have a long-standing track record of continued success with thousands of satisfied clients, countless five-star reviews, and an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
00:01:21.000and request a free information kit on physical precious metals.
00:01:24.000This comprehensive 16-page kit shows how gold and silver can protect your savings and how you can, if you seek to do so, legally move your IRA or 401k out of stocks and bonds and into a precious metals IRA.
00:01:34.000To get that no-cost, no-obligation kit, go to www.birchgold.com slash Ben.
00:01:49.000Get that free information kit, and that also lets them know that we sent you.
00:01:52.000Okay, so obviously the big news over the weekend and the big news today is the situation in Syria.
00:01:57.000So over the last few days, the dictator of Syria used chemical weapons against his own citizens once again, and the footage broke on TV.
00:02:07.000Now, as you recall, the last time there was a public use of chemical weapons and the news broke on TV, President Trump lobbed a couple of missiles into Syria.
00:02:15.000Something like 50 missiles were lobbed into Syria.
00:03:12.000So here's the story from the Associated Press.
00:03:14.000Russia and the Syrian military have blamed Israel for a pre-dawn missile attack Monday on a Syrian air base that reportedly killed 14 people, including three Iranians, while international condemnation grew over a suspected poison gas attack over the weekend that was said to be carried out by the Syrian government.
00:03:27.000Opposition activists said 40 people died in the chemical attack, blaming President Bashar Assad's forces.
00:03:33.000Security Council planned to hold an emergency meeting Monday to discuss the chemical attack.
00:03:37.000We should pull all of our money from that awful institution.
00:03:39.000If you wanna know how terrible the UN is, understand that Syria is about to sit on the committee for the regulation of chemical and biological weapons.
00:04:40.000Syrian state TV quoted an unnamed military official saying that Israeli F-15 warplanes fired several missiles at T-4 and it gave no further details.
00:04:49.000And of course, Israel's foreign ministry said nothing.
00:04:51.000Since 2012, Israel has struck inside Syria more than 100 times, mostly targeting suspected weapons convoys destined for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has been fighting along Syrian governmental forces.
00:05:02.000So this looks like this could be the prelude to larger action.
00:05:05.000John McCain and one of the people, Senator McCain, has been pushing for larger action in Syria for a long time.
00:05:28.000Here's what Senator McCain had to say.
00:05:30.000He said President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria.
00:05:34.000We didn't have a chance to talk about this last week, but Trump did say he wanted to withdraw from Syria and immediately, within days.
00:05:39.000Bashar Assad was using chemical weapons on his own citizens.
00:05:42.000That's why President Trump's rhetoric actually matters, and to pretend otherwise is foolish.
00:05:47.000McCain continues, Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him, and emboldened by American inaction, Assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women, and children, this time in Douma.
00:05:57.000Initial accounts show dozens of innocent civilians, including children, have been targeted by this vicious bombardment designed to burn and choke the human body and leave victims writhing in unspeakable pain.
00:06:06.000Crimes against humanity have become Assad's trademarks in his relentless campaign against the people of Syria that has killed more than half a million people and forced 11 million people from their homes, according to John McCain.
00:06:16.000President Trump was quick to call out Assad today, along with the Russian and Iranian governments on Twitter.
00:06:20.000The question now is whether he will do anything about it.
00:06:22.000The president responded decisively when Assad used chemical weapons last year.
00:06:25.000He should do so again and demonstrate that Assad will pay a price for his war crimes.
00:06:29.000To be sure, President Trump inherited bad options after years of inactions by his predecessor in Syria.
00:06:34.000History will render a bitter judgment on America for that failure.
00:06:36.000But no one should believe that we are out of options.
00:06:38.000We can and should change course, starting with a comprehensive strategy that lays out clear objectives for our mission there.
00:06:43.000Well, that is the big question, is what are the objectives going to be for the mission there?
00:06:46.000Because foreign policy isolationists, people like Ann Coulter or Rand Paul, they would say we have no interest in Syria whatsoever, so terrible things are happening there, awful humanitarian crisis, but
00:06:55.000Humanitarian crises are happening all over the world.
00:06:57.000It is not the job of the United States to stop every humanitarian crisis.
00:07:01.000It all depends on the sort of blood and treasure America will have to expend in order to stop those humanitarian crises.
00:07:08.000We have to calculate each individual situation on its own.
00:07:11.000But the situation on Syria has fundamentally changed in the several years since President Obama allowed Bashar Assad to get away with his chemical weapons attack.
00:07:19.000Here's what President Trump tweeted after the chemical weapons attack.
00:07:51.000The question becomes, okay, what is going to happen next?
00:07:53.000Well, Trump's national security advisor, well, his security advisor, rather, Tom Bossert, he was on national TV on Sunday, and he said, listen, all the options are on the table here.
00:08:02.000This is one of those issues on which every nation, all peoples have all agreed and have agreed since World War II is an unacceptable practice.
00:08:09.000So is it possible there will be another missile attack?
00:08:13.000I wouldn't take anything off the table.
00:08:16.000We're looking into the attack at this point.
00:08:18.000The State Department put out a statement last night and the President's Senior National Security Cabinet have been talking with him and with each other all throughout the evening and this morning and myself included.
00:08:28.000So one of the things that's amazing about all of this is that people on the left are already critical of Trump.
00:08:32.000Trump inherited an awful situation here.
00:08:34.000Tommy Veeder, who is just a dolt, he used to drive a van for Obama, then suddenly ended up as a national security counselor for President Obama after driving a van.
00:08:42.000And now, I guess that he is, and now I guess that he is doing Pod Save America type stuff.
00:08:48.000Well, he tweeted out that President Trump inherited a bad situation.
00:08:52.000Well, Tommy, who did he inherit that from?
00:08:55.000I mean, all of you were there at the time.
00:08:57.000Now, there were those of us who opposed President Obama's quote-unquote pinprick strike in Syria.
00:09:01.000The reason being that if you send a missile into Syria and then you do nothing else, you actually embolden the Iranians and you embolden the Syrians and you embolden the Russians.
00:09:08.000Nobody expected that President Obama was going to give away the store to the Russians.
00:09:11.000If you recall back to 2013, Bashar Assad used chemical weapons.
00:09:14.000Barack Obama then drew a red line in the sand.
00:09:17.000Here is President Obama back then drawing a red line.
00:09:24.000To the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.
00:09:42.000Okay, so he made that statement, actually, in August of 2012, and then, of course, Bashar Assad immediately used chemical weapons, like, within a couple of months.
00:09:50.000And then, Barack Obama did something really unexpected.
00:09:54.000First he said, maybe I'll throw a missile in there, but you know what?
00:10:58.000We were able to find a solution that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished.
00:11:06.000Okay, and Tommy Vietor said the same thing.
00:11:07.000Well, you know, we got rid of a lot of the chemical weapons, right, except for the ones that he's using on the civilians.
00:11:27.000There's a civil war going on, and that wasn't Barack Obama's fault.
00:11:30.000It was Barack Obama's fault that he decided to hand over all of these security concerns to the Russians.
00:11:36.000The Russians obviously had nefarious purposes there.
00:11:38.000All they care about is propping up Bashar Assad, and all of this raises the question,
00:11:42.000Which is, OK, what should the United States do now?
00:11:45.000And that is a serious and open question.
00:11:46.000You know, it is amazing, again, how badly the Obama administration blew it.
00:11:50.000This is not on President Trump, but now Trump is the president.
00:11:52.000So that raises a question as to where we go from here.
00:11:55.000In a second, I'm going to answer that question for you, or at least give you maybe some some concerns that I have about full scale military intervention, as well as some possibilities on what we can do in Syria right now.
00:12:05.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Stamps.com.
00:12:08.000So these days you can get practically everything on demand, but
00:12:11.000You still think you have to go to the post office to get your stamps?
00:12:13.000Well, you no longer have to go to your post office to get the stamps.
00:12:31.000You can print it right onto the envelope, you can print it right onto a sticker, you can print it right onto a piece of paper, and then tape it to an envelope.
00:12:37.000We use stamps.com here at the Daily Wire offices all the time because we don't have time to run down to the post office.
00:12:42.000It saves us time, it saves us money, and it will save you time and money as well.
00:12:45.000Right now, we have a special offer for all of our listeners.
00:12:49.000If you use promo code SHAPIRO, you get 55 bucks, up to 55 bucks of free postage, plus a digital scale and a four-week trial.
00:12:57.000And before you do anything else, before you even check out the website, click on the radio microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Shapiro.
00:13:27.000That is the big question in all of this.
00:13:29.000And one of the things that has changed, there are a lot of people like me who back during the Obama administration said, this is a direct quote in 2013, In other words, whatever you do has to have real impact.
00:13:43.000You can't do what Obama wanted to do and take a half-assed action and then hope that everything is going to be better.
00:13:50.000And you can't hand over power to the Russian government, whose only interest is in continued propagation of the domination of Bashar Assad and the continued domination of the Iranian regime across the Middle East.
00:14:01.000And things have changed radically since 2013 because of a couple of the deals that the Obama administration cut.
00:14:07.000Remember, the situation in 2012-2013 was a lot simpler.
00:14:10.000Russia was not running Syria at that point, and Iran was still under American sanction.
00:14:15.000Well, because of Barack Obama, Iran now has a lot of money to play with, and they have expanded their terrorism outreach all across the Middle East.
00:14:21.000Suddenly there's a swath of territory, all the way from Iran to Lebanon, that is dominated by Iran.
00:14:27.000That's dominated by Iran, and that includes Syria.
00:14:29.000This is why Israel was the one that actually struck out yesterday at the targets in Syria.
00:14:34.000They've been striking out at targets in Syria, as I say, over a hundred times they've struck at targets in Syria since 2012, because Syria is being used as a thoroughfare
00:14:42.000for the world's worst weapons being put in the hands of terrorists, people like Hamas, people like Hezbollah.
00:14:48.000Yadlin Amos is a retired general in the Israeli army, the executive director of Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies.
00:14:55.000And he has a really interesting tweet thread about what happened last night when Israel apparently struck T4, which is a Syrian airbase.
00:15:02.000He said, the reported strike last night in T4, Syria is part of the two colliding vectors.
00:15:06.000Iranian determination to entrench itself in Syria and Israeli resolve to prevent it.
00:15:11.000This was the first reported airstrike since February 10th incidents.
00:15:15.000The colliding vectors were recognized months ago in the Israeli national security strategy and Syrian and Iranian responses cannot be ruled out.
00:15:22.000The strikes timing drove Syria to first attribute it to the US as a response to Assad's use of chemical weapons against civilians in Douma.
00:15:27.000However, the US has denied responsibility while the target hit is connected to Iran and not to chemical weapons.
00:15:34.000It is not from T4 Air Force Base that the CW dropping aircraft came, while reports of Iranian casualties are a strong testament.
00:15:41.000That being said, a strike may well serve two purposes, promoting two objectives in a single step, preventing Iranian entrenchment in Syria with advanced weaponry, and sending a moral message that using CW to commit mass murder is not acceptable.
00:15:53.000To that end, even if it does not take responsibility for the strike last night, it is important that Israel make its voice heard denouncing the use of chemical weapons and their use in Syria awaits a U.S.
00:16:02.000and Western response, and one cannot rule out the possibility of a U.S.
00:16:29.000If World War III breaks out in Syria, World War III will break out because Barack Obama allowed Syria to become a tinderbox by pulling American troops out of Iraq, by allowing Iran to run roughshod through Iraq, and by allowing Iran to extend its domination all the way to Lebanon.
00:16:47.000If we have the capacity, we should knock out as much of the Syrian Air Force as we possibly can.
00:16:51.000We should knock down as many of their anti-aircraft missiles as we possibly can.
00:16:57.000It's probably impossible to decapitate the regime with significant amounts of boot on the ground.
00:17:01.000Whatever we can do from the air, we should do from the air.
00:17:03.000And we should also ensure that there are safe havens for
00:17:08.000Syrian rebels and people who want to escape the Assad regime and those should be protected by a coalition force led by the United States The reason being that there have to be safe spaces for all of these Syrian refugees Otherwise, they're just gonna come into the West otherwise they're just going to escape across the Mediterranean and into Europe or they will come to the United States and That is something that a lot of Trump supporters are not fond of either so either they're gonna stay there in safe places that we help set up or they will be killed or they will escape but
00:17:33.000Should we go in and make this a full-scale land war?
00:17:47.000Russia wants to ensure that Bashar Assad and the Iranian regime retain power and gain power in that region, which makes it more likely that war breaks out.
00:17:54.000And stopping the growth of the Iranian regime.
00:17:57.000Israel and Saudi Arabia, by the way, are happy to take the lead here.
00:18:16.000That means setting up these safer places for Syrian refugees to go.
00:18:20.000It means neutering the ability of the Assad regime to use chemical weapons.
00:18:25.000And it means preventing them from making more territorial encroachments into rebel-held areas.
00:18:30.000And that means providing actual armed support to whatever Syrian rebels are left who have not been murdered already by ISIS and the Assad regime and arming those people who are left in order to resist the Assad regime.
00:18:40.000This now has implications far beyond the borders of Syria, and we are going to pay a price for it in terms of money and treasure and the possibility of additional terrorism and the spread of chemical weapons if we take a fully hands-off approach, as some of the more isolationist members of the Republican Party seem to be promoting.
00:18:56.000Okay, well, meanwhile, there's a bunch of other stuff going on.
00:19:01.000Among those other things, apparently, President Trump is intent on launching a trade war.
00:19:06.000The stock market has been up and down, basically assuming that
00:19:11.000Yeah, President Trump is not serious about the trade war or that he is serious about the trade war.
00:19:15.000It's not clear where he is on the trade war, but it's interesting to see how many members of the Trump administration are trying to kind of shift his thinking on trade.
00:19:27.000Let's talk a little bit about where he is.
00:19:28.000So a couple of Trump's officials went on TV over the weekend to talk about President Trump's initiation of a trade war against China.
00:19:35.000He obviously has set tariffs extraordinarily high in particular sectors of the economy.
00:19:41.000A take number one from the Trump administration on tariffs is that tariffs are a tool that is to be used as often as possible because they're good for the United States.
00:19:49.000We have a trade deficit, and the only way to rectify that trade imbalance is to put tariffs on foreign products, thereby forcing American citizens to buy American and lowering the amount of money that we are exporting to China, for example.
00:19:59.000Okay, that is idiotic economically for reasons that I've suggested many times on this program.
00:20:03.000The reality is that taxing American citizens does not make American citizens more wealthy.
00:20:07.000And all a tariff is, is an indirect tax on American citizens for the benefit of certain American businesses.
00:20:12.000So if there is a steelmaker who is less efficient than another steelmaker that is located abroad, and you are forcing American citizens to patronize the American steelmaker, you are taking money out of my pocket and giving it to another business that is just
00:20:41.000It was essentially a tariff on, an impossibly high tariff on Iran was essentially what a sanction is in policy.
00:20:48.000So there's using it for security reasons.
00:20:50.000There's also using it in order to try and jog other countries to lower their tariffs.
00:20:54.000So let's say China has a bunch of tariffs on American products and we say, listen, you lower your tariffs, we'll lower our tariffs.
00:20:59.000But if you're going to tariff our products, we will tariff yours and our market is bigger than yours.
00:21:03.000Right, then that may be worthwhile also.
00:21:05.000Now, the problem here is that Trump is a devotee of the first kind of thinking, that tariffs are universally good.
00:21:09.000A lot of the people who surround him are people who think that tariffs can be strategically useful.
00:21:14.000And I think what they are trying to do inside the Trump administration is manipulate the president into using tariffs as a targeted method of lowering tariffs elsewhere or pushing security change.
00:21:24.000And what Trump actually wants is he just likes the tariffs generally.
00:21:26.000So you can see this from some of his officials.
00:21:29.000Mnuchin came out and he said, listen, maybe there'll be a trade war, but it'll be okay.
00:21:33.000What Trump's officials know better than anybody, the people who surround Trump, is that there's one word Trump does not hear, and that word is no.
00:21:40.000If you say to President Trump no about anything, there is a 100% guarantee he will do that thing.
00:23:32.000Their wines are all tremendous, and you will really enjoy them.
00:23:35.000And again, they're all curated directly to your taste.
00:23:36.000You never have to arrive at somebody's house with a crappy bottle of wine ever again, nor do you have to spend $100 on a nice bottle of wine just to prove that you know what you're doing.
00:23:43.000Instead, go to trywink.com slash ben, and to get that $20 off, that also lets them know that we sent you.
00:23:48.000Okay, so here are the members of the Trump administration trying to convince President Trump that a trade war might not be a bad idea, while saying, well, okay, maybe there'll be a trade war, because they don't actually want to say no to the President.
00:23:58.000Here's Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary.
00:24:01.000I don't expect there will be a trade war.
00:25:20.000I hope that his team allows Trump to recognize the reality about trade, which is that tariffs can be a useful tool for leveraging things from other people, but they're not good, innately, for the United States of America.
00:25:30.000Okay, meanwhile, in other news, late last week,
00:26:16.000But all of his language is extraordinarily strong.
00:26:18.000He always takes very strong positions, some of them on bizarre issues.
00:26:23.000And one of the issues that people had known about for a long time that Kevin had spoken about was that he is not generally in favor of the death penalty.
00:26:29.000He doesn't like the death penalty and he would avoid the death penalty.
00:26:31.000But if the death penalty were to remain applicable in the United States, he believes that women should be punished for abortion because if abortion is homicide, then women should be punished for it.
00:26:39.000And if women were to be punished for it and the death penalty were still in play, then he presumes that women would get the death penalty.
00:26:46.000And the Atlantic fully knew about this, right?
00:26:48.000Jeffrey Goldberg knew about it, everyone on Twitter knew about this.
00:26:50.000It was one of Williamson's weirder positions.
00:26:52.000Now, the general pro-life position on this issue is that you wouldn't actually punish the woman for the abortion, you punish the abortion doctors for the abortion, because women who are obtaining abortions generally are doing so because they do not have the proper mens rea.
00:27:05.000They don't actually think of it as killing their own baby, and so they don't actually know what it is they're doing, whereas a doctor full well knows what he's doing.
00:27:12.000This has always been the pro-life position in the general pro-life community.
00:27:15.000Williamson takes an even stronger position than that, obviously.
00:27:17.000Well, he tweeted something out about it, and then they discovered that on a podcast he talked a little bit about it.
00:27:22.000So here's what it sounded like when Kevin Williamson, this new Atlantic columnist, had talked about this on a podcast with Charlie Cook, a National Review podcast called Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
00:27:33.000And someone challenged me on my views of abortion, saying if you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, treating it as a homicide.
00:27:47.000In fact, as I wrote, what I have in mind is hanging.
00:27:50.000But yeah, so when I was talking about, yeah, I would totally go with that.
00:27:55.000Okay, so what he meant there, of course, is that, as a thought experiment, if you were going to have hanging as the legal method of death in all of these various areas—Williamson, by nature, is against the death penalty, by the way—then he would say that that applies to abortion.
00:28:09.000Now, do I think that's a good argument?
00:29:08.000But firing him preemptively for a thought crime, for a view that he had not expressed in the pages of The Atlantic, is a pretty amazing thing.
00:29:15.000And Williamson has a lot of very strong positions.
00:29:17.000And what this really is, is that the left believes that any right-winger, it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't matter if it were Williamson, or Bret Stephens, or me, or Ross Douthat, it does not matter.
00:29:27.000Anybody who is on the right, Barry Weiss is not even on the right.
00:29:30.000If you are not of the hardcore left, then the left sees you as an improper human being.
00:29:37.000They will not allow you to appear in their pages on a regular basis, or if they do, they will do so extraordinarily grudgingly.
00:29:45.000And the Atlantic was considered a more moderate sort of publication.
00:29:48.000There are more moderate publications that try to do this, but they are becoming fewer and far between.
00:29:53.000And just to point out that the Atlantic is not consistent about their standards for public rhetoric, the Atlantic champions the fact that they are the home of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
00:30:00.000Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about 9-11 first responders that they were, quote unquote, not human to me.
00:30:04.000That is a direct quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
00:30:09.000The fact is that The Atlantic has given glowing profiles to people like Peter Singer.
00:30:13.000Peter Singer is a quote-unquote ethicist at Princeton who forcibly advocates for the murder of children outside the womb.
00:30:21.000He says if a woman wants to kill a baby after it is born, that is okay.
00:30:24.000So just to be straight about this, Peter Singer says killing a baby after it's born is okay because babies don't have an awareness of their time and place in the universe because they're stupid.
00:30:34.000This is Peter Singer's stated position on genocide against small children, against babies.
00:30:40.000That is worthy of some sort of decent profile in the Atlantic, but Kevin Williamson is too harsh on people who actually kill their babies, and this is considered something just egregious and wrong and terrible.
00:30:52.000It's pretty amazing, and it demonstrates the extremism of the left.
00:30:55.000And in a second, I'm gonna explain to you why it is that this has some pretty dramatic ramifications for the entire political discourse.
00:31:01.000Because, you know, Williamson may be an iconoclastic figure, you may not know who he is, you may not care about the Atlantic, but this is an indicator of where our political discourse is going, and it is nowhere good.
00:31:10.000First, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:31:12.000So for $9.99 a month, you get a subscription to Daily Wire.
00:31:15.000When you get that subscription, you get the rest of my show live, you get the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, you get the rest of Michael Mull's show live as well,
00:31:21.000And you get to be part of my mailbag, Drew's mailbag.
00:31:24.000Also, tomorrow is The Conversation, right?
00:31:25.000So our next episode of The Conversation is coming up tomorrow, 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 PM Pacific.
00:32:17.000You'll add years to your life, I've heard.
00:32:19.000Okay, I can't make that claim, it's not been verified by the FDA, but I hear that if you drink just once from this tumbler, then your life is strengthened, that you actually double your muscle mass.
00:32:27.000I don't know if that's true or not, but I can tell you before this, I was just a weakling, and I drank from that, and suddenly I'm a stud.
00:34:13.000But I am not a moral relativist, and I don't believe that just because you have a right to say something means that you should say it or that everything that is said is equal in value.
00:34:21.000So there's something called the Overton window, which is the window of acceptable discourse or useful discourse.
00:34:26.000But what the left has done is they've shrunk the Overton window down to about pinprick size.
00:34:31.000So the Overton window is now the space of opinion between Bernie Sanders and maybe Kamala Harris.
00:34:38.000That's basically the level of acceptable discourse.
00:34:40.000Between Ta-Nehisi Coates' intersectional leftism and Bernie Sanders' socialist leftism, everything in between there is cool.
00:34:45.000But if you're outside that Overton window,
00:35:33.000Sam Harris and I disagree about a wide variety of things, but Sam Harris once said on national television that Islam is a more dangerous religion than Christianity, and suddenly he was an other.
00:35:42.000A leftist, socialist college professor at Evergreen State College who refused to not teach on a day that the students said, we only want non-white teachers teaching.
00:35:50.000He showed up anyway and wanted to teach.
00:35:52.000You know, that guy was declared an deplorable because he was outside the acceptable range of windows, right?
00:35:58.000He was outside the acceptable range of opinions.
00:36:47.000We still think that you may disagree with us, but we're in the acceptable category, and so we refuse to allow you to lump us in with people like Richard Spencer.
00:36:53.000We refuse to allow you to label us a deplorable like some of the other people you're labeling deplorables.
00:37:03.000So if you're labeling me a Nazi, I don't know if... I know I'm not a Nazi.
00:37:06.000Maybe the other people you're labeling Nazis also are not Nazis.
00:37:09.000Maybe all these bad people who are already out here, maybe they're out here just because you don't like them.
00:37:13.000Maybe you ought to give their views a second look.
00:37:15.000Because if you're labeling me the same way you're labeling them, if I get hit with the same category that they're being hit with, then how do I know that you were honest in your original appraisal of those people?
00:37:25.000And so there's a real temptation on the part of people who have been thrown out of the acceptable category by the left to simply band together and say, listen, we're all in this together because we hate you guys.
00:37:55.000And you can try to throw me out of the range of acceptable discourse, but I refuse to accept your label.
00:38:00.000And I refuse to accept that you are labeling me in the same way that you label a bunch of people who really are disgusting and who really do have disgusting views.
00:38:06.000But the temptation is going to be always and ever
00:38:10.000To simply say, listen, you've thrown us all out.
00:38:29.000If you call conservatives garbage people and then you say, yes, but you really should continue to separate yourself off from the actual garbage people.
00:39:06.000If the left really wanted to have a serious conversation, they wanted to prevent this sort of tribalism, all they have to do is recognize that there are people with whom they disagree, that they will still allow to be part of the discourse.
00:39:15.000And I don't mean people like David Frum, who pretend to disagree with them, but really agree with them on a broad swath of policies.
00:39:22.000If they continue along these lines, they're really cruising for a bruising.
00:39:26.000There's going to be a backlash and it's going to be uncontrollable.
00:39:29.000And they're not going to like the impact.
00:39:30.000They're already not liking the impact because the backlash is already underway.
00:39:34.000OK, so now I want to talk a little bit about some insanity that's happening in Great Britain because this is truly crazy.
00:39:39.000So apparently there's been a wild upswing in the amount of murder in London.
00:39:43.000Well, that's not a tremendous shock, considering that the demographics of London have changed, that the policing in London has changed wildly, that the mayor of London City, Khan, is really terrible at his job.
00:39:53.000But the murder rate in London now outstrips the murder rate in New York, which is pretty incredible, actually.
00:39:59.000The murder rate in Britain has always been extraordinarily low.
00:40:01.000This is why when people say, well, you know, you ban guns in Britain, that's why the murder rate is low.
00:40:05.000The murder rate was low before the bans on guns.
00:40:08.000And the murder rate in Britain was always quite low.
00:40:10.000But here is what it says, according to Today Online.
00:40:14.000On Thursday, April 5th, five teenagers were stabbed in an hour and a half before sunset, including a boy of 13.
00:40:19.000All these attacks took place in London over the past week, part of an apparent spike in violence in the British capital.
00:40:24.000After a long period of steady declines in violent crime, the city has averaged in excess of three killings a week so far this year.
00:40:30.000More than 50 people have been killed in London since the start of 2018.
00:40:32.000The total for all of 2017, a year when the city suffered multiple deadly terrorist attacks, was 116.
00:40:39.000Criminologists have expressed caution about drawing conclusions from only a few months' figures, but if the uptick continues, it will amount to London's highest level of violence in more than a decade.
00:40:48.000A year with 200 homicides for a city of 8.5 million people would be far from a shocking high in the U.S.
00:40:53.000New York City had 292 murders last year, according to the 2018 police commissioner's report.
00:41:11.000So they're using the exact same logic they used about guns and now they're applying it to knives.
00:41:15.000So Sadiq Khan has announced a broad new knife control policy designed to keep quote-unquote weapons of war out of the hands of Londoners looking to cause others harm.
00:41:24.000The UK Parliament is considering bills that restrict the manufacture and purchase of kitchen cooking knives.
00:41:32.000So I guess machetes would still be okay, like the one that that guy used a couple of years ago, that Muslim terrorist used to chop down an actual British soldier on the streets of London?
00:41:43.000That'll still be okay, because as we all know, machetes aren't really dangerous.
00:41:47.000Like from every horror film, we know machetes aren't dangerous.
00:41:50.000But they're going to start determining how exactly knives are distributed.
00:41:55.000The tough immediate measures involve an incredible police crackdown, a ban on home deliveries of knives and acid, and expanding law enforcement stop and search powers so the police may stop anyone they believe to be a threat or planning a knife or acid attack.
00:42:08.000Khan announced Friday the city has created a, quote, violent crime task force of 120 officers tasked with rooting out knife-wielding individuals in public spaces and is pumping nearly $50 million into the Metropolitan Police Department so they can better arm themselves against knife attacks.
00:42:22.000He's also empowering the Met Police to introduce targeted patrols with extra stop and search powers for areas worst affected, according to a statement.
00:42:30.000Now, what's really kind of hilarious here is that one of the reasons that the crime rate is going up is because Khan is responsible for, according to Emily Zanotti of the Daily Wire, for decreasing the number of stop-and-searches, having previously declared the tactic racist and potentially Islamophobic.
00:42:44.000So in other words, he got rid of stop-and-frisk in London, saying that it was targeting too many young Muslim guys, and then the crime rate went up, and now he's going to target everyone.
00:42:53.000It's not really clear what they're going to use in London to cut their food anymore if you can't get a home delivery of a knife.
00:42:58.000And if you're not allowed to carry it home, how do you actually get the knife from the department store home?
00:43:01.000Parliament is set to take up heavy knife control legislation when it resumes this week.
00:43:05.000The UK government is expected to introduce a ban on online knife sales and home knife deliveries.
00:43:10.000So now you have to go to a store to purchase a knife.
00:43:12.000Maybe you have to have a license to purchase a knife.
00:43:16.000Of course, that won't really stop anything, since most of these acid attacks that have been occurring are occurring among people who are late teenagers or older.
00:43:21.000London has seen a dramatic uptick in murder rates, of course.
00:43:49.000And then we'll crack down on any blunt object in your home.
00:43:53.000You don't have to be allowed to have blunt objects.
00:43:54.000Soon, we'll end up all sitting in blank rooms with no furniture.
00:43:58.000Because anything can be used as... Maybe pillows?
00:44:00.000But no, we can use pillows for suffocation.
00:44:02.000So eventually, we're all just walking around like John Travolta in the Bubble Boy, because that presumably will stop crime, not actually targeting criminals.
00:44:10.000Pretty amazing stuff, but demonstrates what happens when an entire civilization loses their mind and stops targeting criminality, and starts instead pretending that the tools of criminality are more important than the criminals themselves.
00:44:21.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I like.
00:44:28.000So, on the way home yesterday in the car, it was a long drive, and so everyone was asleep, and so that's a good time to listen to musical theater, because you actually get a story told to you.
00:44:37.000Well, one of my favorite musicals is, of course, Pippin, and one of the best numbers from Pippin is Corner of the Sky.
00:45:52.000One of the things that's fascinating about this show is that the whole show is about a guy who has these wide world aspirations for changing the world and making a dent in the world and all this stuff.
00:46:05.000Maybe the best way to make a dent in the world is just by living a life where you bring up your wife and kids.
00:46:09.000That's a pretty amazing message that comes out of Broadway, particularly because Broadway is so far to the left, but it's an important message nonetheless, so check out Pippin if you ever have a chance.
00:46:20.000OK, a couple of other things that I like.
00:46:22.000So apparently, Bill Maher over the weekend defended Laura Ingraham.
00:46:26.000Laura Ingraham, of course, was victim of a boycott by a bunch of leftists because she said something quasi-mean to a Parkland student, which you're not allowed to do.
00:46:33.000And Bill Maher comes out and he says, listen, I don't like Laura Ingraham, but this is stupid.
00:46:52.000We've never had it before, and I wish them success.
00:46:55.000But, you know, if you're going to be out there in the arena and make yourselves the champions of this cause, people are going to have the right, I think, to argue back.
00:47:05.000Here's what she she tweeted David Hogg rejected by four colleges because he put that up there because of course we have to share everything To which he applied and whined about it Okay Maybe you shouldn't say that about a 17 year old But again, he is in the arena and then he calls for a boycott of her sponsors now what what is
00:47:46.000I mean, what Maher is saying here is exactly correct.
00:47:49.000And again, you know, Maher's one of these guys who knows because he has been thrown out of the left for his failures to abide by the window of acceptable discourse, right?
00:47:56.000He said some things the left doesn't like on occasion, particularly about Islam, and this has made him a target of the left.
00:48:02.000The more the left throws people out and calls for boycotts against them, the more they are destroying their own credibility, even with the people who supposedly like them.
00:48:10.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:48:18.000So there's a story out of Bradenton, Florida, and this is supposed to be some sort of grand civil rights issue.
00:48:23.000Apparently, there's a 17-year-old named Lizzie Martin, and she was told by the principal of her school or the school district that she needed to put Band-Aids on her nipples.
00:49:04.000She's in a class with a bunch of 17-year-old boys.
00:49:06.000If you really believe there's a 17-year-old girl with half a grain of intelligence on planet Earth who doesn't know exactly what she's doing when she wears no bra to class with a bunch of 17-year-old boys, you got another thing coming.
00:49:18.000This doesn't mean boys should sexually harass.
00:49:42.000The reason they have dress codes is precisely to avoid this sort of situation where boys are being distracted by girls and girls are being distracted by boys.
00:49:50.000Honestly, you want the best thing for girls in school?
00:49:52.000Really, there have been studies to prove this.
00:49:53.000The best things for girls in school are sex-segregated classes.
00:49:57.000When I went to high school, I went to an Orthodox Jewish high school, there was a boys' school, there was a girls' school.
00:50:01.000Girls in sex-segregated classes do better.
00:50:08.000Because girls have this weird idea that boys want them to be stupid and sexualized, and so they play to those stereotypes.
00:50:15.000But if they're with a bunch of girls, then they're just there for the academics.
00:50:18.000But again, if a 17-year-old girl wears something completely inappropriate to school and she's distracting the other students, I fail to see how this is completely, like, what the school district did that was so unbelievably wrong here.
00:50:29.000They probably shouldn't have told her to go put, like, band-aids on her nipples, but they should have called up her parents and said, you know, mom, bring her a sweatshirt.
00:50:34.000Or they should have had one of the teachers say, okay, here's a sweatshirt, put it on the sweatshirt.
00:50:37.000But, again, like, if you're going to take this logic to its full extreme, presumably what you would say is that she should walk around topless, and that should be no problem.
00:50:44.000Everybody should basically say, okay, no problem.
00:50:47.000Listen, if a boy walked around topless, then you wouldn't have a problem with that?
00:50:51.000Yes, because boys and girls are different.
00:50:54.000First of all, you wouldn't want boys walking around topless either, but to pretend that a dude walking around topless is the same thing as a woman walking around topless in American society is fully crazy.
00:51:05.000But I guess we have to completely pretend that, again, reality doesn't exist and human nature doesn't exist and so it's some sort of grand sin that the school district thought that a girl should actually cover up her nipples in a class with boys.
00:51:21.000Last week, I made it sound like the Stephon Clark case in Sacramento was a little more clear-cut than it was, and I want to correct myself on that, because I think that it's important that we get as much of the truth about this as possible.
00:51:32.000So here is the actual tape of what happened with Stephon Clark.
00:51:35.000So here is, first of all, the introduction to that tape.
00:51:37.000Police responded to reports of a broken window.
00:51:40.000David French over at National Review describes it, and when you watch all the released footage,
00:51:44.000You can see the initial response is pretty calm and casual.
00:51:46.000Two officers politely knock on a door.
00:51:47.000They ask permission to search a backyard.
00:51:50.000And then they walk back to the street.
00:51:51.000Meanwhile, a helicopter overhead spots a person trying to break into a car and then jumping a fence and moving to a neighboring house where he looks in a car window.
00:51:59.000That person is Stephon Clark, so he is in the middle of criminal activity, and then he runs to his grandparents' house.
00:52:03.000There's nothing visible in his hands at that time.
00:53:41.000It's not show me your hands, gun, gun, gun, right?
00:53:44.000It's show me your hands, gun, gun, gun.
00:53:46.000So they're not having a chance to give him a chance to respond.
00:53:50.000And I think David French gets this right.
00:53:52.000He says, before you object and tell me that routine encounters can and do escalate, I know that, but what I'm questioning are probabilities and perspective.
00:53:59.000If it's dark, police are sprinting, and flashlights are shaking, what are the chances that the cop's first assessment that the suspect had a gun are wrong?
00:54:05.000What was the reasonable risk of backing off and continuing to give strong verbal commands rather than immediately moving from cover to an exposed position and opening fire?
00:54:12.000What are the possibility that the suspect hadn't heard the commands at all?
00:54:15.000There's some evidence that he may have had earbuds in.
00:54:17.000Also, what's the background level of risk here?
00:54:19.000Sacramento hasn't seen a cop shot and killed in the line of duty for almost 20 years.
00:54:23.000And it's true that cops have seconds to make life-and-death decisions, but you know who else has just a couple of seconds to figure that out?
00:54:39.000It's possible that people will find their story convincing, or at least they will find it justifiable, or at least excusable.
00:54:47.000There are some problems with training, I think, among some of our police officers, and certainly this does raise questions about deadly use of force by police officers and whether they should be so quick on the trigger in some of these particular situations.
00:54:59.000Okay, so I just wanted to clarify all of that because I don't want to get any of the facts wrong.
00:55:02.000By the way, there's another correction I think I have to make from last week as well.