Will the U.S. go to war with Iran? Will Joe Biden's campaign survive the weekend? Will Roy Moore visit the food court? All that and more on this week's Ben Shapiro Show. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro is the host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Podcast" and is a regular contributor to CNN and the New York Times. He is also the co-host of the conservative radio show "The Weekly Standard" and hosts the conservative think tank "The Civility Project." He can be reached at ben.shapiro@whatiwatchedtonight.co.nz and is one of the few people in the country with a Bachelor s degree in international relations and a Master's degree in International Relations from the University of Notre Dame. If you need life insurance, you ve managed to procrastinate long enough to make it. But if you've been putting it off, procrastinating is a bad thing. You've managed to put it off long enough. Once you apply it, you'll be just as good as you could be. It's the easy way to get financial protection, no hidden fees, no fees, just financial protection and peace of mind. They can also help you find the best, affordable insurance, and a life insurance company that doesn't charge you just $5, they'll make it easy to get the best deal you can t get anywhere else? They'll help you get a FREE life insurance plan that covers your entire life insurance policy, without the added to your account, no extra fees, free of hidden fees and no late fees, and they'll give you just the best chance to get it all the benefits, no added fees and everything else else you'll need to do it, too you'll never have to pay for it, just like that, you won't have to go to the best place you'll ever need it, it'll just be the best of it, and you'll get it, right there, right in the whole thing, right at the service they'll know it, they won't even when you're in the service you'll go to it, won't you'll have it, no they'll get the whole service, it's got it, so you can say it, free, you're not even have to be there, you know, it won't be it, there's no big deal, right they'll just go to that, right you'll know that, they've got it all, you can do it right, they're gonna help you, right, you've got the right thing, you get it's not just that, and it's just not, you don't have it?
00:00:08.000Well, the news cycle is getting very serious out there.
00:00:16.000We begin today with the obvious news that the president considered a strike on Iranian resources.
00:00:22.000It is unclear at this point where in Iran we were planning to strike, but the president apparently pulled back at the very last minute.
00:00:27.000So there were a couple of conflicting reports last night, one from the New York Times, one from the Associated Press, about exactly what happened.
00:00:34.000It was late yesterday, and the president was basically deciding whether or not to strike Iranian targets.
00:00:40.000The planes were in the air, they were all ready to go, and then they were pulled back at the very last minute.
00:00:44.000According to the New York Times, President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but then pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.
00:00:55.000As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president's top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.
00:01:09.000Officials said that the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets like radar and missile batteries.
00:01:15.000The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, according to a senior administration official.
00:01:22.000No missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, according to the official, as all the New York Times reporting.
00:01:28.000The abrupt reversal put a halt to what would have been the president's third military action against targets in the Middle East.
00:01:34.000President Trump had twice struck at targets in Syria in 2017 and 2018.
00:01:39.000It was not clear, according to the New York Times, whether Mr. Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration altered course because of logistics or strategy.
00:01:47.000It was also not clear whether the attacks might still go forward.
00:01:51.000Asked about the plans for a strike and the decision to hold back, the White House declined to comment, as did Pentagon officials.
00:01:56.000No government officials asked the New York Times to withhold the article.
00:02:00.000That was the report that was coming forth from the New York Times, and they talk about a split among President Trump's advisers.
00:02:07.000Senior administration officials said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, and Gina Haspel, the CIA Director, had favored a military response.
00:02:14.000But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action Could result in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.
00:02:21.000That's the part of the story that conflicts with the Associated Press story.
00:02:25.000So the Associated Press story suggested that the President of the United States had been advised by the Pentagon, in fact, to go ahead.
00:02:33.000They said that the strikes were recommended by the Pentagon, so apparently the story isn't even straight within the media as to who was recommending what.
00:02:41.000The real question here was whether it was going to escalate if, in fact, the United States took some sort of retaliatory action.
00:02:47.000Obviously, President Trump thought that the answer was maybe.
00:02:51.000So this morning, the president started tweeting out his foreign policy, which, again, not my recommendation, because in the last 24 hours, we have seen the president tweet out that Iran made a very big mistake.
00:03:01.000And then within 24 hours, he's tweeting out why, in fact, Iran might have just made a mistake.
00:04:47.000Iran was in big trouble and he bailed them out.
00:04:49.000Gave them a free path to nuclear weapons and soon, instead of saying thank you, Iran yelled death to America.
00:04:54.000I terminated a deal which was not even ratified by Congress and imposed strong sanctions.
00:04:58.000They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my presidency when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East.
00:05:04.000Okay, so all of this is true, and all of this is correct.
00:05:07.000The president was absolutely correct to pull out of the Iran deal, which was, in fact, a deal that was garbage.
00:05:12.000The entire Iran deal was built to allow Iran to strengthen its regional ambitions while pledging to hold off on nuclear weapons just long enough for them to strengthen their hand.
00:05:22.000And then, as soon as the deal expired, in a 10-year period, they flipped the switch and they've got nuclear weapons, and now they are a regional power with nuclear weapons.
00:05:31.000The Obama administration basically was paying off the Iranians, not to develop nuclear weapons, but to fund terrorism, just so long as Obama was in office and maybe a little bit beyond if another Democrat had been elected.
00:05:44.000And then the president addressed via Twitter what exactly happened last night.
00:05:48.000He says, On Monday, they, meaning the Iranians, shot down an unmanned drone flying in international waters.
00:05:54.000We were cocked and loaded to retaliate last night on three different sites when I asked how many will die.
00:06:01.000150 people, sir, was the answer from a general.
00:06:03.000Ten minutes before the strike, I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.
00:06:31.000And that's when he asked how many people will die.
00:06:34.000Now, the President of the United States should probably be asking that question before we load up the jets and get out there in the air, right?
00:06:40.000That should be kind of the first question you ask, is what exactly is this strike going to look like?
00:06:43.000What are the consequences of this strike?
00:06:45.000But, be that as it may, the President calls it back.
00:06:49.000Now, it's his rationale that I have a problem with.
00:06:51.000And when he says 150 people were going to die and that was not proportionate, I don't know where this idiotic notion came from that if you attack the United States, we are supposed to be proportionate in our response.
00:07:04.000In fact, I think that's a terrible idea.
00:07:06.000The reason I think that's a terrible idea is because the United States actually tried something that was basically called proportionate response.
00:07:12.000It was actually called graduated escalation during the Vietnam War.
00:07:15.000It was a strategy put in place by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
00:07:20.000And the strategy which is elucidated by former Trump National Security Advisor H.R.
00:07:25.000McMaster in his book Dereliction of Duty.
00:07:28.000The book is all about how Robert McNamara and the LBJ administration blew the Vietnam War by engaging in this graduated escalation.
00:07:35.000The idea was that we would gradually turn up the heat on the Vietnamese, on the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, until they realized that we were going, that we were very serious about this, and then they would back down.
00:07:46.000But that's not really how military conflict works.
00:07:49.000The reason that people don't want to get involved with you in military conflict is because they are afraid you will devastate them.
00:07:54.000Not that you will gradually turn up the heat, but that you will devastate them.
00:07:58.000Effectively speaking, foreign policy is much more like a high school playground than like a debate society.
00:08:03.000And a high school, junior high playground, there's always the one kid that you didn't want to fight because he was kind of crazy and you never knew what he was going to do.
00:08:11.000And there's always that one guy on the playground who you sort of suspected he might have a knife in his backpack.
00:08:16.000And if things went dramatically wrong, things would get really bad for you really quickly.
00:08:21.000Well, that's sort of President Trump's appeal, right?
00:08:47.000One, they want to force up the price of oil, so they need chaos in the region, because the sanctions are working, because they have no money.
00:08:52.000They're deliberately trying to force up the price of oil by creating chaos in the region.
00:08:57.000They've basically become North Korea, except they are worried about the oil markets.
00:09:01.000And that brings us to the second rationale.
00:09:03.000The second rationale is that they are hoping that the sanctions will be dismantled if they act militaristic enough.
00:09:08.000They're hoping that they can sort of score the same deal that the Kim regime in North Korea has scored routinely with the West, which is we act like nutjobs.
00:09:18.000We launch nuclear tests every so often.
00:09:20.000We fire a few missiles over the Sea of Japan.
00:09:23.000And then you sign us a check and hope that we stop.
00:09:27.000That's what the Iranians were doing with the Obama administration.
00:09:29.000It's why they signed the nuclear deal.
00:09:30.000Give us cash, and we'll stop this for the moment, and then every so often we'll act crazy again, and then you give us more cash, and then eventually we'll have enough cash that we can do exactly what we want to do.
00:09:39.000That's the goal that is being pursued by the Iranians.
00:09:42.000And in order to achieve that goal, they also have to make the case to the Europeans that the Europeans should basically force the Trump administration to back down.
00:09:51.000So what they're going to continue to do now is push.
00:09:54.000And the Stalin line was that you push until you hit steel.
00:09:59.000And that's effectively what the Iranians are doing right now.
00:10:43.000They may be careful enough that they never shoot down an American manned aircraft.
00:10:49.000That they don't actually kill an American.
00:10:51.000That they just sort of keep this at a low level of boiling conflict, hoping that the Trump administration will back down.
00:10:58.000But that is not a good thing either, because sooner or later they will do something that damages us enough where we do have to retaliate.
00:11:04.000If you want to stop this thing in its tracks, you do have to show the Iranians that if things get real, the Ayatollahs are not only not going to be in charge of Iran anymore, they are not going to be breathing anymore.
00:11:14.000Because there is one thing that the Iranians want a lot less than the United States does, and that's a war.
00:11:38.000Because if it goes to all-out war, if it goes to all-out war, that regime does not stand a chance.
00:11:45.000And we should note here that there are a bunch of options still on the table for President Trump, but what is being pursued right now looks a lot like a Clintonian foreign policy, and that is not a good idea.
00:13:40.000The United States does have overwhelming military force, with the most powerful force in the history of the world.
00:13:45.000The one thing that the Iranians don't want at the end of all this, they like the tension, but what they don't want is the release of tension in the form of the United States bombing the living crap out of them.
00:13:53.000That is not something they actually want.
00:13:55.000If the United States takes retaliatory action, that does not mean full-scale war.
00:14:00.000I'm very sick of this false binary that's being driven by the media that suggests that if the United States were to retaliate against the attack on American assets, that this means that war, like full-scale Iraq-style war, is exactly what's going to happen here.
00:14:15.000In a second, I'm going to read you a list of the kinetic military actions that we have taken just since 2010.
00:14:19.000How many of these devolved into full-scale war?
00:15:23.000We conducted a raid in Somalia in 2013.
00:15:28.000We sent soldiers to Uganda to help African forces search for Joseph Kony in 2014.
00:15:36.000We led intervention in Syria that did not devolve into full-scale war with the Syrian regime in 2014.
00:15:41.000And by the way, President Trump has launched two separate military strikes against Syria in 2017 and 2018, and neither time did it devolve into full-scale war.
00:15:50.000In 2015, the United States sent ships to the Strait of Hormuz to shield vessels after the Iranian seizure of a commercial vessel.
00:15:57.000Iran fired shots over the bow and seized the ship.
00:16:00.000And that's when the Obama administration chickened out and decided to sign a deal with the Iranians.
00:16:07.000In 2015, we deployed 300 troops to Cameroon.
00:16:09.000You've never heard of any of this stuff, right?
00:16:11.000The reason you've never heard of any of this stuff is because not every U.S.
00:16:14.000military action devolves into a full-scale war.
00:16:19.000Eli Lake has a good piece today over at Bloomberg talking about the various options that are available to the Trump administration.
00:16:28.000He suggests that there are a bunch of things that the United States could do.
00:16:32.000He says, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force are spread out throughout the Middle East.
00:16:36.000Not only are senior officials stationed in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon, but there are Iranian military outposts in those countries as well.
00:17:34.000First, when the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was to make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by the government.
00:17:41.000The second thing they did was enumerate the right of the population to protect that speech and their own persons with force.
00:17:46.000You know I'm a believer in the Second Amendment.
00:17:49.000Owning a rifle is an awesome responsibility.
00:17:51.000Started in a garage by Marine Vet more than two decades ago, Bravo Company Manufacturing, BCM for short, builds a professional-grade product which is built to combat standards.
00:17:59.000This is because BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American regardless if they're a private citizen or a professional.
00:18:06.000Bravo Company Manufacturing is not a sporting arms company.
00:18:16.000I have a gun because if somebody comes to my house and tries to break in and hurt me or my family, I want to be able to shoot them.
00:18:22.000The people of BCM know this, and they feel it is their moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the end user when it's not just a paper target, but somebody coming to do them harm.
00:18:31.000To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to BravoCompanyMFG.com, where you can discover more about their products, special offers, upcoming news.
00:18:52.000Okay, so as I say, the left is militating against any sort of deterrent action by the United States because they would prefer to pay off the worst terror regime on planet Earth.
00:19:00.000Ben Rhodes was a damned congenital liar.
00:19:03.000The man behind the Iran deal who admitted to the Atlantic that he lied openly to the American public about the predicate for the Iran deal.
00:19:10.000He suggested that the Iran, the Iranian regime was right on the verge of moderation.
00:19:20.000He's out there criticizing the Trump administration today, saying we didn't need to pull out of a deal that was working, and we don't need to go to war over a drone.
00:19:26.000Let me just point out, Ben Rhodes and the Obama administration went to war over not a drone, over literally no attacks on American assets in Libya.
00:19:36.000That war ended with effectively the takeover of the entire country of Libya by a variety of terrorist groups and a mass refugee crisis that ended up swamping the southern coasts of Europe.
00:19:49.000In other news, the administration in which he served presided over the murder of 500,000 people in Syria and handing over control of that country to the Russian government.
00:20:00.000So why don't you sit this one out, Ben?
00:20:02.000But not only that, he then tweets out, This is precisely why politics isn't a game.
00:20:06.000Diplomatic agreements should be honored, and temperament, intellect, and judgment are what matters in who is president.
00:20:13.000It should never have come... You know what might have stopped it from coming to this?
00:20:16.000If you had taken any sort of preventative action against Iran when, say, your boy was in the White House, when your guy was in the White House, when your man was in the White House, right?
00:20:32.000That Ben Rhodes is suggesting that this is Trump's fault, that it's Trump's problem, when it was Obama that led to the rise of Iran regionally in the area is pretty astonishing.
00:20:47.000With that said, when it comes to President Trump's policy, When it comes to what President Trump should do going forward, emulating the Clinton administration, emulating Clinton, who basically sat back and watched Al Qaeda attack the Kobar Towers, attack the U.S.
00:21:05.000embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attack the USS Cole, and didn't really respond because he was afraid that the blowback would be too great on him politically.
00:21:13.000That did not result in wonderful results for the United States.
00:21:16.000In fact, it resulted in a belief widespread in the radical Islamic terror world that the United States was a weak horse that could be taken.
00:21:25.000And that was the that was the idea here.
00:21:32.000And again, the people who are sort of defending Trump vacillating here, we'll see where Trump goes from here.
00:21:39.000But if Trump continues to vacillate and do nothing, that will have exactly the same results as if a Democratic president did the same thing.
00:21:45.000Now, listen, Trump doesn't want to go to war.
00:23:11.000But all these false narratives running around, that if you take action against Iran, that it's the end of the world and war is inevitable and everyone's going to die and all of this, that's not true either.
00:23:19.000Some deterrent force needs to be created here, and obviously what's been happening so far ain't cutting it.
00:23:24.000Okay, meanwhile, the Joe Biden campaign is having some serious trouble.
00:23:28.000According to the Washington Post, tensions ripple through the Biden campaign as his past working relationship with a segregationist senator comes to the forefront.
00:23:36.000According to the Washington Post, Joe Biden was a freshman senator, the youngest member of the August body, when he reached out to an older colleague for help on one of his early legislative proposals.
00:23:46.000The courts were ordering racially segregated school districts to bus children to create more integrated classrooms, a practice Biden opposed and wanted to change.
00:23:54.000Biden wrote on June 30th, 1977, "I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help "during this week's committee meeting "in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation "to a vote." The recipient of that entreaty was Senator James O. Eastland, at the time a well-known segregationist who had called blacks an inferior race and once vowed to prevent blacks and whites from eating together in Washington.
00:24:13.000The exchange, revealed in a series of letters, offers a new glimpse into an old relationship that erupted this week as a major controversy for Biden's presidential campaign.
00:24:22.000Now, as I've said before, amazing that the media are just uncovering this now.
00:24:33.000And yet only now are we digging up these letters from 1977, just in time for a coordinated assault by Democrats on his record on race.
00:24:41.000Why, whoever would have suspected this sort of thing?
00:24:45.000And why would Barack Obama have employed such a vicious racist as Vice President of the United States?
00:24:52.000Biden's campaign late Thursday issued a statement saying that the insinuation that Joe Biden shared the same views as Eastland on segregation is a lie.
00:25:01.000Nonetheless, this is becoming part of a sort of broader narrative about Joe Biden that is being pushed not only by the media, but by a lot of his political rivals.
00:25:11.000He wrote a letter on March 2nd, 1977 to Eastland, who is a racist, saying, my bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court-ordered busing.
00:25:20.000It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the Constitution, where there is no evidence that the government officials intended to discriminate.
00:25:27.000He said, I believe there is growing sentiment in the Congress to curb unnecessary busing.
00:25:31.000Now, again, this is them deliberately taking Biden out of context.
00:25:35.000The fact is that forced busing was bad policy and led to tremendous amounts of white flight from cities.
00:25:40.000So voluntary sort of segregation of people who decided to leave particular areas because they didn't want their kids to be in in schools with black kids.
00:25:54.000There was a push by people that instead we would have to have forced busing.
00:25:57.000We're going to take kids from areas and move them into other areas.
00:26:01.000Black kids into white areas, white kids into black areas, and this is going to solve all of the problems.
00:26:05.000There's a difference between mandatory integration and the end of legal desegregation.
00:26:14.000Lino Graglia has an entire book on this, professor at University of Texas Law School.
00:26:19.000Biden was taking the side that you can't force kids to go to a school that they don't want to go to, and that it's in fact counterproductive.
00:26:24.000Force busing, by the way, was a giant failure as a policy.
00:26:26.000It did not, in fact, stop white flight.
00:26:29.000It did not solve the problems of school integration.
00:26:57.000If it isn't yet a respectable liberal position, it is no longer a racist one.
00:27:01.000This is his pushing against force busing.
00:27:05.000He says, "I think the Democratic Party "could stand a liberal George Wallace, "someone who's not afraid to stand up and offend people, "someone who wouldn't pander, "but would say what the American people know "in their gut is right." Now, the invocation of George Wallace is being trotted out as evidence that Joe Biden is a racist.
00:27:20.000And George Wallace was a vicious racist.
00:28:12.000Do you know why they want the death penalty?
00:28:14.000Because stupid sociologists and guys like people who sit up here in my job for years kept telling them we know how to rehabilitate.
00:28:20.000They do not have the slightest idea how to rehabilitate.
00:28:22.000Our entire criminal justice system is premised on the point that you sentence someone based upon the amount of time it will take to rehabilitate them.
00:28:29.000He says, so the American people, because they are basically good, like most people, in my opinion, are, went along and said, we'll buy that.
00:28:46.000Because if you don't, you know what is going to happen.
00:28:48.000Eventually, people are going to get so frustrated by the way, liberal sociologists and politicians who say, we must rehabilitate our fellow man.
00:29:01.000Now they have only one or two things to choose between.
00:29:04.000They choose between Strom Thurmond's view of hang them or continue business as usual.
00:29:09.000So this sort of language is being trotted out as evidence that Joe Biden is a racist, again invoking George Wallace, which is a bizarre decision.
00:29:16.000But Joe Biden, it seems, typically invokes people he thinks are bad, like George Wallace and segregationists, as sort of outliers in his examples.
00:29:27.000Is that evidence that he's a vicious, brutal racist?
00:29:30.000I have a tough time thinking that that is the case.
00:29:35.000Circa 1992, by the way, Joe Biden was saying that his crime bill would hang people.
00:29:39.000This is another thing that's being trotted out to prove that Joe Biden is actually a vicious racist because his crime bill was supposedly targeted at black folks as opposed to at criminals.
00:29:50.000Worth noting that in this 1990 clip, 92 clip, this is before hair plugs, apparently, here's Joe Biden talking about the crime bill.
00:30:39.000First, will you fight for your freedom?
00:30:41.000So I talk all the time on the show about growing attacks on your religious freedom and free speech.
00:30:45.000Well, now is the time to help people like Dr. David Schwartz.
00:30:48.000He's an Orthodox Jewish psychotherapist.
00:30:51.000New York has enacted a law that censors speech between therapists and clients by prohibiting treatment of clients who struggle with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.
00:30:58.000Dr. Schwartz could be punished with fines of up to $10,000 per offense.
00:31:02.000If somebody comes to Dr. Schwartz and says, I'm suffering with gender dysphoria, and he tries to work through it with them instead of just bolstering their views and their delusions, and now...
00:31:10.000The state of New York wants to crack down on him.
00:31:12.000Well, this is why the Alliance Defending Freedom exists.
00:31:14.000ADF provides free legal services to Dr. Schwartz and others whose freedoms are under assault.
00:31:19.000But ADF can't provide these resources without your help.
00:31:22.000ADF relies on donations to fight for your freedom.
00:31:25.000If this attack can happen to somebody like Dr. Schwartz, it could happen to you.
00:31:28.000Will you fight for Dr. Schwartz and protect your freedom?
00:31:57.000Who not only has a strong sense of good political content, he also appears to have a strong back.
00:32:01.000In the picture, David is holding his magnificent leftist tears tumbler into frame in front of what looks to be a picture of him as the bottom of a human pyramid.
00:33:09.000And of course, go subscribe at dailywire.com for the Leftist Tears Tumblr and all the other wondrous things that you get as a subscriber.
00:33:15.000We're the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:33:18.000So the Democrats in the media are crafting this narrative whereby Joe Biden is a secret, vicious racist and has been all the way back since 1975 because he made political, forged political vicious racist and has been all the way back since 1975 because he made political, forged political relationships with segregationists in order to get things that he wanted done because he opposed forced busing, You might not like white flight.
00:33:45.000I'm not a huge fan, but that does not mean That forced busing was a solution to that.
00:34:06.000Therefore, he must be some sort of vicious racist.
00:34:09.000He invoked George Wallace a couple of times, which, again, is a bad move, but fully in line with Joe Biden being an idiot who says things Without thinking about them fully and invokes people who are at the ultimate extreme of American politics in order to make points.
00:34:23.000This is sort of one of his strategies, like I'd even make a deal with that guy.
00:34:27.000I'd even make a deal with George Wallace.
00:34:28.000I mean, what we need is somebody who's going to be honest like George Wallace, but also not a piece of crap like George.
00:34:33.000That's the kind of way that Biden talks.
00:34:35.000That doesn't mean that it's great, but it also doesn't mean that he's a vicious racist.
00:34:39.000But the Democratic Party has decided to turn on old Joe.
00:34:52.000AOC tweeted out, For the record, Cory Booker does not owe Joe Biden an apology for pointing out that waxing nostalgic about working with segregationists is insensitive.
00:35:17.000Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is, of course, a racially polarizing figure.
00:35:24.000I think that he is, as I've said, wildly overrated, a muddy thinker, somebody who relies on racial polarization in order to push a particular left-leaning political agenda.
00:36:34.000That means that Kamala Harris is the one who's going to be attacking Joe Biden over the race issue, because Cory Booker is stuck in the in the kids table debate with Warren.
00:37:04.000But haven't you, over a four-decade career, had to align yourselves with people who don't share your views on things in order to advance your causes?
00:37:18.000The answer is a lot of this is truly dishonest.
00:37:21.000And again, it is amazing to me that the same media that suggested Beto O'Rourke was a world-beating candidate when he was running against Ted Cruz, then they flipped and said, oh, hey, look at this guy.
00:37:43.000When Joe Biden is running against Paul Ryan as VP, then it's old Joe, so authentic, so true to himself.
00:37:50.000And then he runs against a bunch of other Democrats that the media like better, and suddenly they're rediscovering how to do basic investigative journalism.
00:37:58.000How to search archives and find old things that Joe Biden has said and report those things.
00:38:03.000They're finally looking into stuff like Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son.
00:38:08.000Doing business with countries that Joe Biden was doing business with as vice president.
00:38:12.000How Joe Biden's son, Hunter, was getting magical contracts from businesses located in China and the Ukraine while Joe Biden was trying to do business with China and the Ukraine as vice president of the United States.
00:38:22.000You know when that stuff might have been more helpful to report on?
00:38:25.000When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, because all this was public material at the time.
00:38:29.000But the media, apparently the blinders only come off when it's convenient, which is pretty obvious.
00:38:39.000At what point, if any, do you think the U.S.
00:38:40.000should take military action against a foreign adversary, in this case, Iran?
00:38:44.000Given that we attacked the Syrian Air Force infrastructure in 2017, even without our own forces being attacked, what should the standard be for military intervention against Iran in this case?
00:38:52.000I appreciate your thoughts and have a great weekend.
00:38:54.000Obviously, any military intervention has to be calculated against what is the goal.
00:38:59.000The goal in this case is deterring Iran from attacking ships in the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman.
00:39:05.000So if that's the goal, it seems to me that a military intervention to stop them from doing so by blowing a couple of their ships out of the water would probably be a good idea.
00:39:13.000And, in fact, there is ample precedent for this.
00:39:22.000drone out of the sky, a $110 million U.S.
00:39:26.000drone out of the sky, that is in international territory, then knocking down a couple of their surface-to-air missile sites, that seems like a perfectly proportional and appropriate response.
00:39:37.000The point is you do what you do to have to deter the Iranians.
00:39:41.000I'll tell you what isn't going to deter the Iranians is sitting there and doing nothing.
00:39:44.000Now, maybe it's possible, as I suggested earlier in the show, maybe it is possible that the president merely threatening on Twitter, like, guys, we were this close to me knocking you guys.
00:39:57.000I have serious doubts that that does the trick because, again, the credibility of the president has to be established by willingness to use force and the president Has wavered on this.
00:40:07.000He has wavered from time to time on the level of force to be used, on whether he wants to use force or not use force.
00:40:15.000There has to be a certain level of predictable unpredictability.
00:40:17.000But it doesn't really hold when within 24 hours you're saying Iran made a very big mistake, but maybe they also didn't make a really big mistake, etc.
00:40:25.000Zachariah says, hey Ben, love the show and all you guys do at the Daily Wire.
00:40:28.000Quick question about the executive branch.
00:40:30.000Does the president have the power to eliminate the alphabet soup offices that exist under the executive branch, i.e.
00:40:34.000eliminate the DEA or some other office, and then shift those funds over to Border Patrol?
00:40:39.000I've often wondered this after the government audit under Barack Obama showed that several agencies that were budgetary sinkholes with nothing to show for all their funding.
00:40:47.000If so, why does no president use that power?
00:40:52.000v. Nixon in which Nixon said he didn't want to spend money allocated to the executive branch by Congress, and it was passed over as veto.
00:40:59.000And the Supreme Court found that the executive branch couldn't just stop spending the money, and they couldn't just not do what Congress wanted them to do.
00:41:05.000But the executive branch Could do, presumably, is just not ask Congress for the funding, or veto any funding for a particular department.
00:41:13.000The executive branch does have the power to fire people within a department, so you could theoretically eliminate nearly the entirety of a department.
00:41:20.000And then, you know, you still have the money sitting around there.
00:41:23.000As far as eliminating entire departments that are established by congressional fiat, I don't believe the executive branch can unilaterally just eliminate the Department of Education.
00:41:30.000Legally speaking, I don't think that that's the case.
00:41:33.000Although, frankly, I'd want to check it out.
00:42:20.000So it would be one thing if King were just writing books that were apolitical, but very often lately, I also have read many, many Stephen King books.
00:42:27.000I think particularly his premises of his books are really interesting, and then he has no idea how to finish them.
00:42:31.000This is the common pattern to Stephen King.
00:42:33.000Basically, a Stephen King book starts out with this really interesting premise, and something interesting happens, something odd and interesting.
00:42:39.000And then it progresses for 300 pages of pulp, and then he blows everything up.
00:42:43.000That has been the ending to, I think, his last three books, last four books.
00:42:46.000At the very end, everything just sort of goes on fire and explodes.
00:42:49.000And that's annoying just from an artistic point of view.
00:42:52.000But what's even more annoying is all of this.
00:42:54.000There's I remember I read Under the Dome and in Under the Dome, every villain.
00:43:00.000is a caricature of some sort of right-wing, hick, ridiculous figure who's secretly disgusting and terrible, even though they're a Bible thumper.
00:43:09.000And King has this very John Lithgow in Footloose view of what conservatives are, and it's very irritating and very self-flattering for King.
00:43:16.000No, that is not how trade deficits work.
00:43:17.000has a trade deficit year after year, doesn't it eventually run out of money?
00:43:20.000How is it sustainable year after year if we buy $500 billion and sell only $100 billion, doesn't it wind up as debt?
00:43:25.000No, that is not how trade deficits work.
00:43:27.000So a trade deficit, people misunderstand what a trade deficit is.
00:43:31.000A trade deficit is not the United States government spends more than it takes in.
00:43:38.000A trade deficit is that the members of the United States citizenry spend more on products from foreign countries than those countries spend on the United States.
00:43:47.000But that money doesn't just disappear.
00:43:49.000So, you spend a hundred bucks on a product from China.
00:44:30.000Presumably the reason you shopped at the supermarket and you didn't grow all the food in your backyard is because you wanted to save money.
00:44:35.000So a trade deficit can actually, for you, make a lot of sense.
00:44:38.000And for the citizenry, it can make a lot of sense.
00:44:40.000Now there's an argument that is often made that a trade deficit hollows out particular industries because basically you're buying from places that are not American.
00:45:43.000I originally subscribed during the Vox Adpocalypse.
00:45:45.000If President Trump wins re-election and the left goes so far left that they will hit a brick wall and then blow open that wall so they can go even further left.
00:45:52.000Do you think that the moderate Democrats, currently keeping quiet, will start to push back against the radical left and try to take back the party from crazy people?
00:46:02.000I really doubt this because I think that the left has been driven so fully insane by President Trump and that they live in such a delusional world that they believe that they are not sufficiently committed to the left.
00:46:13.000And I think the same thing will be true in 2020.
00:46:15.000If Joe Biden is the nominee and they lose, they'll say we were too moderate.
00:46:18.000And if it is somebody who's more woke and they lose, then it will be, well, we just need to get out there and fight harder.
00:46:25.000I think that the Democratic Party has engaged in a sort of bizarre myth of its own creation.
00:46:30.000And that myth is that Barack Obama ushered in a new political world.
00:46:34.000That Barack Obama changed the status of American politics forever, and that another Democrat could pick up that mantle and run with it.
00:46:41.000And basically the proposition was that before this was a 50-50 country, Barack Obama made it into a 52-48 country or a 53-47 country, and that was specifically because of the outsized contribution of minorities to Barack Obama's electoral coalition.
00:46:55.000So they could safely ignore blue-collar white folks, they could safely ignore the Rust Belt, they could safely ignore all of these places and focus in only on urban areas, drive out turnout in those urban areas, and win re-election from here to the end of time.
00:47:06.000There's a lot of talk about this in the left commentariat, From 2008 to 2016, how basically a new demographic shift and the rise of the millennial generation meant that you no longer have to appeal to the old constituencies.
00:47:25.000He had a unique draw, particularly with the black population, voting population of the United States.
00:47:30.000And because of all of that, he was uniquely capable of drawing outsized votes for himself.
00:47:35.000But it didn't translate over to other Democrats.
00:47:37.000And you could see that it didn't translate over to other Democrats because he lost virtually every state house in the country over the course of his presidency.
00:47:45.000So Democrats, but I think the Democrats are so delusional that they think that it was basically such a fluke in 2016 that all they have to do is keep doubling down on what brought them Barack Obama and they'll be fine.
00:47:57.000So I don't think they're going to shift back to the center.
00:48:01.000Well, I think a lot of celebrities are leftists because to be in the arts, and I know a lot of artists, a lot of artists are people who consider themselves sort of outcasts, sort of the weirdos in their communities, sort of the weirdos in their, where they grew up.
00:48:14.000The free thinkers, the people who are held down by the man.
00:48:17.000And then they escaped to beautiful Hollywood.
00:48:19.000And then they decided that they were going to become more tolerant and diverse and leave behind the foolishness of their parents because they're artists and they have the artist mentality.
00:48:30.000And also there's something about art that is inherently subjective.
00:48:33.000And so I think many artists rightly believe that there's a fair amount of luck involved in their success.
00:48:38.000And there are a lot of good actors who are working at Coffee Bean right now.
00:48:40.000There are a lot of terrific script writers who presumably are managing Coffee Beans right now.
00:48:44.000And the only thing that separates them from the people who are working in Hollywood is a fair bit of luck.
00:48:48.000So there's a feeling of sort of randomization that occurs in the celebrity world like Yeah, I worked hard for this, but it's not like those other people didn't work hard for it.
00:48:59.000And so there's a real guilt complex that lives in sort of celebrity halls.
00:49:03.000And a lot of those celebrities feel the necessity to pay off the social justice warrior types to make amends for their own success, to make amends for not being a starving artist, but for being a quote-unquote sellout by engaging in extraordinarily woke politics designed to appeal to the fringes of American life.
00:49:21.000And to chide the American people from whom they draw their money.
00:49:29.000And it makes for worse art, by the way.
00:49:32.000Let's see... Nicholas says, Hey Ben, as a self-proclaimed patriotic Christian conservative who also happens to be gay, I've enjoyed listening to your recent discussions on same-sex marriage and its relationship with religion.
00:49:41.000Specifically, you mentioned that while you don't believe the government should be in the business of marriage, you as an individual would not attend a gay wedding because you believe the act is a sin.
00:49:48.000I just wanted to probe this point a bit more, perhaps to understand it better, which would be amenable to attending a wedding between two atheists, being that completely secular marriage is presumably also not endorsed by Judaism.
00:49:58.000Well, no, I don't think that it is a sin for heterosexual people to be married outside of a church.
00:50:05.000I don't think that that is a sin in the Jewish view.
00:50:09.000The question of same-sex marriage is the idea that homosexuality, not the orientation, but the actual act of the sin itself, or the legitimization of that sin, I don't think so.
00:50:19.000The heterosexual act is not in and of itself, in a married context, a sin under Judaism.
00:50:25.000It says, "Do you think this perspective could change "if say a child or other close relative "were to come out as gay?" I don't think so.
00:50:30.000And the reason I don't think so is because my definition of sin does not mean that I'm unsympathetic to people who are gay.
00:50:35.000This is something that I think folks need to understand about people who are religious.
00:50:39.000I have tremendous sympathy for people who are homosexual in orientation.
00:50:43.000I have friends, I have family, who are in fact gay.
00:50:47.000And that does not mean that I think that the sin itself is no longer a sin, but it also means that I have tremendous sympathy for them.
00:50:55.000I just can't participate in the celebration of something that I religiously consider to be a sin.
00:50:59.000And by the way, this doesn't just extend to homosexuality and same-sex marriages.
00:51:04.000I mean, when I was on Dave Rubin's show, I talked about this.
00:51:06.000This extends, in Judaism, to intermarriage.
00:51:22.000Our shared perspective on individual liberty and personal freedom are what make America in 2019 the best time and place in the history of the world to be gay.
00:51:28.000Looking forward to hearing a bit more about your views.
00:52:25.000Well, there's a great book by Richard Epstein called Takings, and his basic theory is that under the Fifth Amendment, which talks about presumably eminent domain, it said that the government cannot take private property for public use without just compensation.
00:52:45.000No private property for public use without just compensation.
00:52:47.000Richard Epstein suggests, I think quite correctly, that what this means is the government can't take your property and then not compensate you for that property in some way.
00:52:54.000So what that means is that if they take my money for taxes and then they use it for services from the police that I can access, that is one thing.
00:53:00.000If they take my money and just hand it to Bob over there, I'm not getting compensated in any way for that.
00:53:17.000He suggested that the gaming industry grossed over $40 billion last year and that the $40 billion should therefore be distributed among the workers.
00:53:24.000He demonstrated that he literally does not understand the difference between gross and net.
00:53:29.000So he thinks that because the gaming industry made $40 billion last year, that means they profited $40 billion last year, which is idiotic.
00:53:37.000The vast majority of that went to the people who work for the gaming industry.
00:53:40.000He said, I've heard some downsides, this is Raphael, of industries unionizing.
00:53:44.000Can you remind me of those downsides, especially for an industry as huge as the gaming industry?
00:53:48.000Well, the problem with unionization typically is that it makes businesses less efficient.
00:53:54.000Now, I'm in favor of private unions, so long as they're not kneecapping people.
00:53:57.000If you want to get together with all your friends and then unionize, and you're not trying to kneecap scabs, and you're not trying to use physical force against anybody, enjoy.
00:54:09.000If, however, what you're talking about is forced collective bargaining, where I have to negotiate with you as the employer by law, Then you're talking about cartelizing the industry and basically putting the workers in control of a business they did not capitalize in the first place.
00:54:23.000If I can hire somebody more efficiently than you, I should be able to hire somebody more efficiently than you.
00:54:27.000Also, the reason that so many members of private industry have decided not to unionize, I mean, because the unionization rate in the United States went from something like 60% to something like 5% over the last several decades.
00:54:39.000The reason that that happened is because people decided, wait a second, What unions very often do is they guarantee a stagnating business that I work for that becomes unprofitable and has to fire people.
00:54:51.000Also, very often what unions guarantee is seniority.
00:54:54.000So I may be a better qualified younger employee and I can't get a raise because there's somebody else who's older than I am who's a dunderhead, but the union contract says that person has to get a raise before I do.
00:55:04.000I'd rather operate in a freewheeling manner in which I can go in and ask for an individual raise anytime I want.
00:55:09.000Union contracts usually forbid that sort of thing.
00:55:19.000So, there's a really good book edited by Meir Soloveitchik, he's a rabbi at Yeshiva University, and Stuart Halpern writes the book.
00:55:27.000It is called Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land, the Hebrew Bible in the United States, a source book.
00:55:31.000So, what's great about this book, it's from Toby Press, what it is designed to do is provide the foundational biblical text That a lot of early thinkers ranging from John Winthrop all the way up through Abraham Lincoln relied upon in the forming of their philosophy.
00:55:46.000The book doesn't suggest that America is a quote-unquote biblical country or a Christian country.
00:55:51.000It does suggest that the background for a lot of the thought of the founders was in fact biblical thinking, that that was the backdrop and that organically speaking, the Bible has a lot to do with the founding of the United States because it infused everybody's thinking.
00:56:04.000And so it really kind of points out how that happened takes foundational documents in the history of the United States and connects them with the source texts in the Bible.
00:56:23.000So, Condoleezza Rice was questioned specifically by an NBC reporter who wanted her to suggest that President Trump has radically reduced the quality of race relations in the United States.
00:56:38.000And Condi Rice, who lived through segregation, who watched her church firebombed, she had some words.
00:56:44.000There are people who will say it feels worse now when we're talking about race or it just feels like a divisive environment.
00:56:50.000It sure doesn't feel worse than when I grew up in Jim Crow, Alabama.
00:56:53.000OK, so let's drop this notion that we're worse at race relations today than we were in the past.
00:57:17.000Okay, so what she says there is that you should put all this in perspective, which of course is true.
00:57:22.000And we can look at history, and we can recognize the value of history, and we can also recognize that in a free country, The way for us to all get along is to live under equal protection of the laws, which should have been enshrined in the 14th Amendment and then applied by the federal government and was not for over a century afterward.
00:57:38.000But Condi's putting things in context?
00:57:40.000Yeah, the media should definitely take that under consideration.
00:58:23.000And I think what we need to realize is that one of the biggest lessons that we learn from both Holocaust experience and civil rights What I've learned from academics and experts is that it takes a process, a slow gradual process of increasingly dehumanizing steps.
00:58:40.000OK, this is again, she's quoting the experts.
00:58:46.000Explain how many books have you read in concentration camps?
00:58:49.000Explain how this is about the Boer War.
00:58:51.000The media will continue to defend her because they will defend anyone, but anyone on the left anyway, who is useful to them in the moment until they become not useful, like Joe Biden and they are put out to pasture like Edward G. Robinson and Soylent Green.
00:59:45.000Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, the Democrats have decided suddenly now that Joe Biden is racist.
00:59:51.000Now, if that's true, why are they just noticing now, after 50 years?
00:59:55.000Also, I want to talk about the danger of misleading and dishonest headlines, which is a scourge now, an epidemic.
01:00:02.000And how we can guard ourselves against it.
01:00:04.000Finally, are we putting teachers in a basically impossible situation by sending them legions of poorly-parented, out-of-control kids to educate?