Comedian Kathy Griffin held up a mock-up of President Donald Trump's severed head covered in blood on New Year's Eve in order to protest the President's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. The stunt crossed the line for many, and the outrage was deafening. Yet, the same people who ask for censorship warnings for material that might offend anyone are silent about her antics. Why? Because political violence is no longer taboo in the U.S., it s just another tactic to utilize when useful, and denigrate when others engage in it. That sentiment expresses itself on both sides of the political aisle, and it s getting worse. If you spend all day proclaiming that you re in a civil war with other Americans, that you're part of a resistance, it's only a matter of time until you become willing to look the other way at violence itself. If Americans aren t your brothers and sisters, if we disagree, then they will quickly become your enemies. Ben Shapiro explains why this is a problem, and why we should all be prepared to fight back against it. Plus, we'll be discussing Trump's Paris Accord and why it's a good thing he did what he said, and what he did in a speech he delivered yesterday about the Paris Accord. and why you should be grateful for it, because it was the best speech of his presidency thus far, and that he did it in a way anyone could have ever seen him make, and we should be proud to call him a hero. And that's right and a hero, not a villain. Thanks to our sponsor, Upside Travel. They make great gift cards, and they give you a discount promo promo promo code, so you can get 20% off your purchase of $200 or more. You get a whole bunch of freebies, and you get 5 or more, and get 5% off the price of your flight and a bunch of miles, and a whole lot of miles to get all the miles and you still get 5 miles for free, too! you get it all you need to get a good deal on your next trip, too get all that you ve got it, and all that service, you re gonna get it for free. You re getting all the world's best deal on the best of it, no longer gets it, right now, no extra miles and they say it, they say so you re getting it, it s $200.
00:00:29.000On Tuesday, TMZ posted photos of comedian Kathy Griffin, who has helped host CNN's New Year's Eve coverage for a decade, holding a mock-up of President's severed head covered in blood.
00:00:39.000Griffin has a long record of anti-Trump sentiment, of course.
00:00:41.000In February, she told MSNBC's Chris Matthews, quote, I'm a big resister.
00:00:45.000And I don't believe in compromise with this president.
00:00:59.000Yet, the same people who ask for Tribble warnings for material that might offend anyone, the same people who believe there's a rape culture that pervades America, the same people who say President Trump has incentivized a culture of political violence across the land, many of them are silent about Griffin's antics.
00:01:13.000Because political violence is no longer taboo in the U.S.
00:01:15.000It's just another tactic to utilize when useful and denigrate when others engaged in it.
00:01:21.000That sentiment expresses itself on both sides of the political aisle.
00:01:24.000When Montana House candidate Greg Gianforte allegedly body-slammed a reporter, prominent conservatives, including talk show host Laura Ingraham, demeaned his victim as a wuss and championed Gianforte as a sort of stalwart man's man.
00:01:35.000When leftists attacked Trump rallies during the 2016 election cycle, the media attempted to paint them as the defenders of the common good against Trump himself.
00:01:43.000The overused phrase cycle of violence is often used by the press to refer to situations in which an aggressor acts violently and somebody defends him.
00:01:50.000But we've entered an actual cycle in political violent rhetoric, whereby the vileness of the left provokes a direct response from the right and vice versa.
00:01:58.000If you spend all day proclaiming that you're in a civil war with other Americans, that you're part of a resistance, it's only a matter of time until you become willing to look the other way at violence itself.
00:02:07.000If Americans aren't your brothers and sisters, if we disagree, then they will quickly become your enemies.
00:02:11.000Kathy Griffin may think it's hilarious to hold up a bloody head of the President of the United States, but she's tearing away at the social fabric far more than President Trump is.
00:02:19.000And those who backed her play are helping provoke their enemies to respond in kind.
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00:04:14.000President Trump, in my absence, I leave for two days, and many a thing has happened, but the big thing that happened is a very good thing, and that is, President Trump came out, and he rejected the Paris Accord.
00:04:24.000So, for people who don't know what the Paris Accord is, I think that it's important to spell what this is out, so people understand.
00:04:34.000Basically, the accord was, President Obama, in the very last days of his administration, he went to Paris and he met with all of these nations, and they all agreed to voluntarily submit these non-binding resolutions on how they were going to cut their carbon emissions.
00:05:27.000So, if they don't lose the one pound, nobody says to them, that was kind of bad.
00:05:30.000You said you were going to lose a pound and you didn't.
00:05:32.000So it was basically just a bunch of people slapping each other on the back pretending they were doing something for the world when actually they weren't doing anything for the world.
00:05:40.000Trump pulls out of the accord because what he says is it's just a way for people to generate anti-US headlines.
00:05:45.000In other words, Obama committed to a bunch of resolutions about lowering our carbon emissions that we were never going to meet, knowing that his successor would then have to eat it.
00:05:57.000If we didn't meet those resolutions, then his successor, the United States, would then be labeled as backing off its commitments, being ripped up and down.
00:06:06.000He was making a promise that somebody else's body was going to have to cash.
00:06:09.000And because of that, Trump says, look, this whole agreement is a joke and we're pulling out.
00:06:13.000So Trump speaks yesterday and he gives a very good speech.
00:06:19.000Here he was explaining what exactly it would do to the United States to abide by the actual resolutions that we had adopted with regard to the Paris Accord.
00:06:27.000Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the owner's energy restrictions that is placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025, according to the National Economic Research Associates.
00:06:48.000This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs, not what we need.
00:07:59.000Okay, so the reason that this is good, what he's doing right here, is he's spelling out a trade-off that Obama refused to acknowledge actually occurs.
00:08:05.000And that trade-off is, if you place heavy regulations on American industries, jobs are lost.
00:08:10.000If you place heavy regulations on American carbon emissions, then there's going to be an economic cost to that.
00:08:16.000And people on the right and the left pretend that this is not the case.
00:08:18.000Trump, you'll see later, actually pretends the opposite is the case.
00:08:22.000All the environmentalism we want and we can also have as much economic growth as we want.
00:08:27.000Not super true, but his balance is closer to the correct balance than Obama's balance was close to the correct balance.
00:08:33.000So he spells out the cost to Americans and he's not going to lose a single vote in 2018 or 2020 based on this.
00:08:38.000There are a lot of people who feel like these regulations, and I've spoken in Pennsylvania recently,
00:08:42.000You talk to manufacturers in Pennsylvania, they are afraid the regulations are going to destroy their industry and they are right.
00:08:47.000He continues along these lines and he points out that there would be a lot of loss in the economy if you continue along the lines of these Paris Accords.
00:08:55.000The cost to the economy at this time would be close to three trillion dollars in lost GDP and six and a half million industrial jobs.
00:09:08.000Well, households would have $7,000 less income, and in many cases, much worse than that.
00:09:19.000What he is saying is that basically the cost of energy production go up dramatically when you put heavy regulations on energy production, and that means that people are going to have less money to spend on other things.
00:10:37.000They can do whatever they want for 13 years, not us.
00:10:42.000India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries.
00:10:57.000There are many other examples, but the bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair at the highest level
00:11:08.000I don't think that a lot of Americans are going to disagree with that, and he is correct that the reason the rest of the world is so intent on the United States picking up the burden is because they would like to see the United States taken down a peg on the global economic level.
00:11:19.000He points that out, and again, this is exactly correct from President Trump.
00:11:24.000The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement.
00:11:36.000For the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage.
00:11:49.000A cynic would say the obvious reason for economic competitors and their wish to see us remain in the agreement is so that we continue to suffer this self-inflicted major economic wound.
00:12:05.000Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full,
00:12:35.000With total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree.
00:13:00.000In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone
00:13:05.000would wipe out the gains from America, and this is incredible statistic, would totally wipe out the gains from America's expected reductions in the year 2030.
00:13:22.000After we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered
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00:15:40.000Okay, so a few more notes about the Paris Accord, and then I want to get to the left's insane reaction to this, because it's totally over the top.
00:15:45.000So, number one, the Accord was actually a treaty, but Obama never treated it that way.
00:15:49.000So, if Obama really thought this was super-duper-duper important, super-de-duper important, then what he should have done is signed the Paris Accords with some pretty significant American restrictions on carbon emissions, and then submitted it to the Senate and used his bully pulpit to get it approved.
00:16:03.000Constitution must be approved by two-thirds of the Senate.
00:16:06.000So, if he thinks it's that important, if the world is at stake, if we're all going to die, if it's going to be the day after tomorrow and Dennis Quaid's going to be hiding in the subway station while the waves pour through New York City, then you would think you might be able to get two-thirds of senators to vote for this thing.
00:16:19.000Obama couldn't even do that when he had 60 senators from the Democratic Party there.
00:16:23.000So the idea that this is ever going to be a political winner for Democrats is really stupid.
00:16:28.000Also, if you're going to do a treaty, do a treaty.
00:16:31.000Second, there are some significant legal implementation problems with the Paris Accords.
00:16:35.000So, Donald McGahn is the White House Counsel.
00:16:37.000He pointed out that, theoretically, you could have a court that would strike down the EPA's proposals to kill some of these anti-coal regulations on the basis of the Paris Accords.
00:16:46.000Now, legally, should they be able to do that?
00:16:48.000The left says the courts wouldn't do that.
00:16:50.000Of course, the left also said 15, 20 years ago that the courts wouldn't impose gay marriage from above, and then they did that.
00:16:55.000So, whenever the left says the courts will not do this, what they really mean is the courts won't do this tomorrow, but in the next six months, maybe.
00:17:06.000The statistic that Trump cites there, where he says the global climate would be lowered by a grand total of 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 if we kept by the Paris Accord, that is 100% true.
00:17:17.000That's only if people stop dividing by their obligations in 2030.
00:17:19.000Right, but the Paris Accord only runs through 2030, so what, is he supposed to assume that we're going to ratchet it up after 2030?
00:17:25.000He can't make assumptions about facts not in evidence.
00:17:29.000Fourth, it lets other countries free ride.
00:17:31.000Oren Kass points out a commentary magazine today.
00:17:33.000China committed to begin reducing emissions by 2030, roughly when its economic development would have caused this to happen anyway.
00:17:40.000India made no emissions commitment, pledging only to make progress on efficiency, at half the rate it had progressed in recent years.
00:17:45.000Pakistan outdid the rest, submitting a single page that offered to, quote, reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.
00:17:52.000This is a definition of the word peak, not a commitment.
00:17:55.000An April report by Transport Environment found only three European countries pursuing policies in line with their Paris commitments, and one of these, Germany, has now seen two straight years of emissions increases.
00:18:06.000The Philippines has outright renounced its commitment.
00:18:08.000A study published by the American Geophysical Union warns that India's coal plant construction is incompatible with its own targets.
00:18:18.000The only people who get ripped are the United States, because, of course, we're the most powerful.
00:18:21.000We're also supposed to fund, like, one-third of the entire commitment for all of the Paris Accord redistribution.
00:18:27.000We're supposed to put, like, three billion dollars in.
00:18:30.000Obama and the left have been claiming for years that this is going to create jobs.
00:18:32.000No evidence it's going to create jobs.
00:18:34.000The Paris Accord was basically meaningless.
00:18:35.000Now, that said, it is important to point out that, you know, the Trump pulling out of it doesn't actually materially change much because the Paris Accords weren't going to be implemented in any case.
00:18:45.000They're going to have the same shelf life as the Kyoto Protocol, adopted by the Clinton administration in 1997, never ratified by the Senate, and basically DOA.
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