Massive pro- freedom protests break out in Cuba, the U.S. continues its ill-advised withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Kamala Harris thinks rural people don t have photocopiers. All that and more on today's show, coming up on The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code "UPLEVEL" to receive 20% off your first month of PureTalk USA. That's right, you can get unlimited talk, text, and 6GB of data for just $30 a month, and if you go over on data, they're not going to charge you for it. There's a reason PureTalk is the highest rated wireless company by Consumer Affairs and why they are the preferred wireless partner of AMAC. From your cell phone, dial POUND 250, say Ben Shapiro, and you will save an additional 50% of coverage. And again, if you re using one of those big wireless carriers, use my special code "DP250" to save your very first month. You have no idea what it is that you are getting. Save your family over $800 a year by switching over to Pure Talk USA, save your entire first month by getting a fraction of the price of a new SIM card, and get a discount of up to $50 a month! You re not even going to have to wait another month of coverage! You can get the same great service that you ve been using for years, with no extra features and features you re not getting anywhere else! - you ll get it all the same thing you re getting for free, plus you ll be getting twice as much service, plus a whole lot more! Ben Shapiro's Unbundling and free shipping throughout the process, plus an extra $200 in the process! FREE PROFESSIONAL PRIVATE PRICING! Want to become a supporter of the show? Subscribe to the show and get 10% off the entire show, plus I ll send you get an ad discount when you sign up for a new ad-free version of The Daily Mail and other perks like VIP access and access to The Daily Beast? FREE VIP REVIEW AND VIP PROMOTIONAL PROMO DEEDUCATION AND VIP SUPPORTING THE PODCAST? You ll get 7 DAYS OF THE SHOW AND FREE PRIDE PRODUCER SUPPORTING VIP SUPPORTED IN THE SHOW?
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00:01:35.000Alrighty, so at long last, there is an actual on the ground revolution going on in Cuba.
00:01:43.000It's being described as unprecedented by nearly everybody who's been watching Cuban politics for the last several decades.
00:01:48.000We are talking massive protests in the streets of this totalitarian dictatorship.
00:01:53.000I had the opportunity just a couple of weeks ago to go down to Miami and speak with many of the leaders in the Cuban dissident movement who are expatriates here in the United States and speak to some of the dissidents on the island itself, actually during one of the phone calls that I was holding with a dissident in Cuba.
00:02:08.000This dissident, he and I were speaking about what exactly this is all about.
00:02:13.000It was not just about vaccine shortages, which as we will see as the media spin on this thing, it is about the brutal communist dictatorship that has repressed nearly all personal freedom on the island.
00:02:22.000It is a cross-political movement in Cuba.
00:02:25.000It is not just a bunch of sort of Reaganite right-wingers.
00:02:28.000It is everybody who wants to see personal liberty win.
00:02:31.000The people who are leading this movement have deliberately kept it apolitical.
00:02:35.000Many of these people are artists who have a leftward bent on politics, but they understand the difference between being left with regard to some economic matters and also recognizing that you have to have human freedom.
00:02:44.000In any case, I was speaking with this dissident on the phone and the Cuban security services cut off the call with a pre-recorded message explaining, That the call had been cut off because it violated security protocols in Cuba.
00:02:55.000That is what kind of a country Cuba is.
00:02:58.000And that's why it was so evil, frankly, for the United States under Barack Obama to try to make nice with Raul Castro.
00:03:04.000Those pictures of Barack Obama holding hands with Raul Castro, going to baseball games with Raul Castro, standing in front of giant buildings with emblems of Che Guevara, one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century behind him.
00:03:17.000It was a disgrace to the United States.
00:03:19.000And unbecoming of any president of the United States to participate in.
00:03:22.000So far, the Biden administration has been completely silent on all of this.
00:03:25.000I've yet to see a statement, at least as of Monday morning, from the Biden administration on protests that have been rocking the island of Cuba since Saturday, according to the New York Times, shouting freedom and other anti-government slogans.
00:03:37.000Which, by the way, should tell you all you need to know about Cuba.
00:03:41.000If freedom is an anti-government slogan in Cuba, that says something about the nature of the government.
00:03:47.000Shouting freedom and other anti-government slogans, thousands of Cubans took to the streets and cities around the country on Sunday to protest food and medicine shortages in a remarkable eruption of discontent not seen in nearly 30 years.
00:03:57.000Again, this is a deliberate misconstruction by the New York Times.
00:04:00.000It is not just about food and medicine shortages.
00:04:03.000Cuba has had food and medicine shortages for quite a while.
00:04:05.000And by the way, I was reliably informed by all of the international community's most trusted sources that Cuba has one of the best medical systems on the planet.
00:04:14.000Why should they have medicine shortages?
00:04:16.000I was told that their nationalized healthcare system by Michael Moore, no less, no less a source than Michael Moore made an entire movie talking about the wonders of the Cuban healthcare system.
00:04:36.000March through San Antonio de los Paños, southwest of Havana, with videos streaming live on Facebook for nearly an hour before they suddenly disappeared.
00:05:07.000One clip circulating on Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles east of Havana.
00:05:12.000Another video showed people looting from one of the much-detested government-run stores, which sell wildly overpriced items and currencies most Cubans do not possess.
00:05:19.000Because as it turns out, communism just sucks.
00:05:23.000And I know that Bernie Sanders has this sort of warm feeling about bread lines.
00:05:26.000And I know that the Democratic Socialists of America, the folks like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who have never spent an instant living under communist repression, have a very soft spot for communist dictatorship.
00:05:37.000But let's be real, living under communist dictatorship absolutely sucks.
00:05:41.000There is a reason that since the rise of the Castro regime in the late 50s, Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have fled the island of Cuba.
00:05:51.000There's a reason why people will take the risk of putting their children on floating cars and attempting to float the 90 miles from Cuba to the south tip of Florida.
00:06:03.000As the New York Times reports, in a country known for repressive crackdowns on dissent, the rallies were widely viewed as astonishing.
00:06:08.000Activists and analysts called it the first time so many people had openly protested against the communist government since the so-called Malaconazo uprising, which exploded in the summer of 1994 into a huge wave of Cubans leaving the country by sea.
00:06:19.000And there is another sort of wave coming is sort of the widely expected response by the government because the government either is going to imprison everyone or beat up everyone or expel everyone.
00:06:29.000And so the United States should be ready to take in Cuban patriots.
00:06:32.000Who are attempting to overthrow the repressive regime that has condemned their country to living in the 1950s under zero freedom for literally three generations at this point.
00:06:43.000Carolina Barrero, a Cuban activist, went even further.
00:06:46.000She said, it is the most massive popular demonstration to protest the government we've experienced in Cuba since 1959.
00:06:52.000She called the public outpouring on Sunday spontaneous, frontal, and forceful.
00:06:55.000She said, what has happened is enormous.
00:06:57.000So what exactly is the New York Times' take on this?
00:07:04.000It's because the West has been so mean to Cuba.
00:07:06.000Yes, we have had an embargo on Cuba for 60 years, but it really is just because we're embargoing them now.
00:07:12.000It's Donald Trump's fault that all this is happening.
00:07:14.000Otherwise, everybody would be super happy with the Cuban regime.
00:07:17.000So terrible that people have been living in abject poverty for three generations and are still driving around 1955 Chevys.
00:07:23.000The protests were set off by a dire economic crisis in Cuba, where the coronavirus pandemic has cut off crucial tourism dollars.
00:07:28.000People now spend hours in line each day to buy basic food items.
00:07:32.000Many have been unable to work because restaurants and other businesses have remained on lockdown for months.
00:07:35.000Now, what's so weird about that, you may have noticed, is that all we heard from the American press is how horrible America's response to the coronavirus was because we were a capitalist country.
00:07:44.000Oh, our capitalist institutions are failing.
00:07:47.000Cuba is a completely state-run system, and it's a giant fail when it comes to COVID.
00:07:53.000The desperate conditions have triggered an uptick in migration by both land and sea.
00:07:56.000Since the start of the fiscal year last October, the U.S.
00:07:58.000Coast Guard has intercepted more than 512 Cubans at sea, compared with 49 for the entire previous year.
00:08:03.000On Saturday, the Coast Guard suspended the search for nine Cuban migrants whose vessel overturned at sea off Key West, Florida.
00:08:08.000Again, the enormous risk that people take simply attempting to, they literally take like buoys and then just try to float themselves 90 miles.
00:08:15.000You know how horrific your living conditions have to be in order for you to try that?
00:08:33.000That regime is a disgrace to the Western world.
00:08:35.000And the fact the United States has allowed a tin pot dictatorship to flourish off its coast Threatening America, by the way, in the middle of the Cold War for 60 years, it just demonstrates how little willing the United States actually is to project power.
00:08:47.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:08:50.000First, let's talk for a second about, you know, your energy levels.
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00:10:07.000You see American leftists on college campuses wearing t-shirts of Che Guevara, who, as I mentioned, is a mass murderer and an evil piece of human scum.
00:10:13.000I was honored to meet one of the men who helped capture him just last month here in Florida.
00:10:18.000It was a pretty amazing experience over at a museum for the brigade that fought in the Bay of Pigs.
00:10:25.000It is amazing the contrast between the Cuban protesters and the Americans who don't like the American flag.
00:10:31.000So this just struck me forcibly last night.
00:10:34.000One of the videos that was coming out of Cuba was protesters.
00:10:37.000And you'll notice that one of the flags that they are carrying around is the American flag.
00:10:54.000And they're carrying around American flags!
00:10:55.000Because everywhere on earth that you go, where you find people who want freedom, they are not carrying the flag of the Russians, or the Chinese, or the Swedes, or the Brits, or the French, or the Germans.
00:11:06.000They are carrying the American flag, and it is not true merely in Cuba.
00:11:53.000Again, from Cuba to Hong Kong, wherever communist tyranny reigns, those who stand up to it carry the American flag.
00:11:59.000Not just communist tyranny, by the way.
00:12:01.000In Iran, when you have dissidents who are standing up to Islamic dictatorship, you will see that protesters, dissidents, refuse to step on the American flag.
00:12:08.000This is an amazing video from just a couple of years ago, where dissidents were protesting against the Iranian regime, and they were stepping around the American flag.
00:12:16.000The Iranian regime had painted the American flag On the pavement.
00:12:19.000And the dissidents, instead of disrespecting and walking on the American flag, decided to walk around the American flag to demonstrate that they were not anti-America, they were actually pro-America.
00:12:29.000I mean, that's amazing stuff right there.
00:12:32.000The contrast between that and the number of Americans who hate and spit on the American flag is truly astonishing.
00:12:41.000Every single dissident who wants to fly the American flag and believes in American freedom, for all of the Americans who spit on the American flag and see it as a symbol of repression and evil.
00:12:51.000Now, in reality, American citizens can't be expelled simply because they don't like the flag, because we do have freedom of speech.
00:12:57.000But in principle, the folks who are marching in Cuba for liberty right now and flying the American flag are better Americans than the Americans who stand around spitting on the American flag and pretending that it is a symbol of repression and evil.
00:13:13.000If you live under the threat of true repression and evil, the American flag is the symbol of liberty.
00:13:17.000If you live in America, a place of liberty, we have this ungrateful, rather despicable distaste for our own freedom.
00:13:28.000We've gotten so used to being fat and lazy and rich and free that we seem to forget that there are people all over the planet who live like that.
00:13:36.000And that for most of human history, none of that was the rule.
00:13:40.000And when you see the contrast between people in Cuba who are risking life and limb, I mean, the security services are shooting people right now.
00:13:46.000There's video that was emerging from Cuba yesterday of the police in Cuba gunning down, like firing live ammunition, according to these videos, at dissidents, at protesters.
00:13:58.000We see people being arrested, people being shot at.
00:14:21.000And it's wonderful stuff happening over there.
00:14:23.000When you see that sort of activity by actual repressive regimes, and then you have the United States, the left of the United States, mainstream, going completely silent on it while spitting on the American flag, it does tell you something because they have been completely silent on it.
00:14:38.000The left simply has nothing to say about the liberty of people in Cuba.
00:14:42.000And by the way, the people who are protesting in Cuba would not.
00:14:50.000Many of them would identify, I'm sure, as Democrats.
00:14:53.000They believe in large social services.
00:14:55.000They're not people who nationally, who oppose naturally, for example, nationalized healthcare.
00:15:02.000They might like nationalized healthcare, but what they understand, on a root level, is that a government that represses its people, and abolishes private property, and cuts against profit motive, and decides that human beings ought not have rights that preexist government, We'll inevitably slip into tyranny that they understand at a gut level.
00:15:17.000And meanwhile, you have, again, the sickening specter of Americans kneeling for the American flag while living in the richest and freest country in the history of the world.
00:15:26.000I promise you Colin Kaepernick would not trade places with any one of these Cuban dissidents.
00:15:30.000I promise you Ilhan Omar would not be trading places with any one of the people living in Hong Kong right now.
00:15:36.000None of these people ever willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to ripping the United States and talking about how evil it is.
00:15:42.000None of these folks actually believe that the United States, like I really doubt the sincerity of many of these folks, or if I don't doubt their sincerity, I doubt their knowledge level.
00:15:50.000There's a tremendous level of ignorance.
00:15:52.000If you never look outside the borders of the United States, it's very easy to identify the problems of the United States.
00:15:57.000If you ever look for five seconds outside the border of the United States, or beyond the time period of today, what you will see is that the vast majority of history, and today, in the vast majority of countries, the kind of liberties that we expect, that we demand from our government, are not available to the vast majority of people.
00:16:12.000Which is why those people march with our flag while we, here in the United States, are giving millions of dollars to athletes who disdain the American flag.
00:17:03.000But if you run a business and you send somebody a text, there's a really good shot they return the text because it's quick and it's easy and it's convenient.
00:17:09.000Car dealerships are selling more cars by offering text messages.
00:17:12.000A dealer just sold a $50,000 truck in four text messages, for example.
00:17:15.000Retailers are increasing revenue by allowing customers to shop via text message.
00:17:19.000The jeweler just sold a $5,000 ring with a few text messages and even coordinated curbside pickup with Podium.
00:17:24.000So if you run a business and you're not taking advantage of the texting revolution, you're missing out.
00:17:47.000So here is it really is an amazing thing.
00:17:49.000Here is what the acting assistant secretary for U.S.
00:17:53.000Department of State's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs tweeted out.
00:17:56.000And this, so far, is the only statement that I've been able to find from the White House of Joe Biden.
00:18:02.000Quote, peaceful protests are growing in Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases, deaths, and medicine shortages.
00:18:11.000We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.
00:18:16.000Oh, so you're just going to completely miss the point there.
00:18:17.000So there are a few things about this tweet that are truly amazing.
00:18:20.000Ignorant, backwards, counterproductive, and yes, promoting support for an evil regime.
00:18:26.000One, there's no right to peaceful assembly in Cuba.
00:19:10.000House representative Democrats were urging Biden to repeal Trump's quote-unquote cruel sanctions on Cuba and renew engagement.
00:19:17.000The idea being that if we establish trade ties and capitalism, that this will somehow moderate Cuba.
00:19:23.000Weird, because we've tried that with China and all it's done is strengthen the regime and created a world historical opponent for the United States.
00:19:33.000Let's uphold their regime by ending the sanctions that have made them economically weak and vulnerable to protests like this.
00:19:40.000The fact that the United States has remained largely silent or that we'll mouth a few platitudes about the right to free assembly without any sort of comprehensive consequences is pretty astonishing.
00:19:51.000Again, this is a tin-pocked dictatorship.
00:19:55.000The fact that it's like North Korea on our border without a nuclear weapon.
00:20:03.000It is quite despicable in pretty much every way.
00:20:06.000But it doesn't matter because in the United States we are too busy beating up on ourselves.
00:20:10.000We're too busy talking about how terrible the United States is again.
00:20:13.000You can talk about the flaws in the United States and uphold freedom for other places and acknowledge that the United States is a beacon for freedom at the same time.
00:20:18.000But that is not what the American left does.
00:20:20.000The American left does not give a damn about the freedom of people anywhere else on Earth.
00:20:25.000In their perspective, the Noam Chomsky foreign policy perspective, the United States is a colonialist imperialist power.
00:20:30.000And if we project freedom in other places on Earth, this makes us the villain.
00:20:37.000This is part and parcel of foreign policy isolationism that is present on the left, not out of a drive to preserve American security, and not out of a drive to preserve American resources, but out of a drive to undermine the basic fundamental notion that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which it undoubtedly has.
00:20:57.000The United States' failure to help Batista sufficiently defeat the Cuban regime led to a 60-year dictatorship.
00:21:05.000And we're seeing the consequences of it right now.
00:21:08.000Again, it's, it is remarkable to me that the Biden administration can't, Joe Biden can't be woken up from his Sunday nap to make a statement about what is going on in Cuba.
00:21:19.000But you'll have the same Biden administration talking about how we must teach children in school classrooms critical race theory.
00:21:25.000The notion that the United States is not built on freedom the way that Cuban dissidents think it is, or that Hong Kong dissidents think it is, or that Iranians think it is.
00:21:33.000Actually, America is built on racism and bigotry and homophobia and cisgender patriarchy and all the rest of this nonsense.
00:21:39.000It wasn't five minutes ago, I mean literally the end of the week last week, Jen Psaki was saying to the White House press corps that critical race theory teaching in classrooms was an active good.
00:21:49.000There is a connection between these two things.
00:21:52.000It is not a coincidence that the same people who promote teaching critical race theory have nothing to say in defense of Cuban dissidents.
00:22:01.000It is not a coincidence that the same people who disdain the Iranian dissidents and the Hong Kong dissidents, that those people are the same people who spend all their time talking about how evil and terrible the United States is.
00:22:13.000These are not folks who simply want a better America.
00:22:16.000These are folks who see America as an active evil and anywhere we put our dirty, grubby little fingers, the world gets worse in their perspective.
00:22:23.000Here is Jen Psaki's take on critical race theory being taught in America.
00:22:26.000I'm glad that we've put our focus here, as opposed to, you know, projecting the most powerful economic and military force the world has ever seen to even a little bit, like a drop, just to help assure the liberty of freedom-seeking people.
00:22:41.000The president believes that in our history, there are many dark moments.
00:22:45.000And there is not just slavery and racism in our history.
00:22:49.000There are systemic racism that is still impacting society today.
00:22:52.000And he believes, as I believe, as a parent of children, that kids should learn about our history.
00:22:58.000So as the spouse of an educator and as somebody who continues to believe that children should learn not just the good, but also the challenging in our history.
00:23:07.000And that's part of what we're talking about here, even as it's become politically Charged.
00:23:11.000Okay, that is not what we are talking about here.
00:23:13.000That is a deliberate misreading of the entire controversy over critical race theory, which really is about what America fundamentally is.
00:23:20.000People in the United States believe the American flag is fundamentally bad because America is fundamentally bad.
00:23:24.000And it is not a coincidence that those people are completely silent today as Cuban dissidents get clubbed in the streets.
00:23:30.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:23:32.000First, let us talk about a simple fact.
00:23:35.000If you are a responsible person, you need things like home and auto insurance.
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00:24:41.000Again, what we are watching in Cuba is just a reminder, as Hong Kong was a reminder, that not only are there people who do seek their liberty and see the United States as a symbol of that liberty, but that without some level of American or foreign support, these people just get crushed.
00:24:56.000What we saw in Hong Kong was massive protests.
00:25:06.000And I have 7 million people who are living under the open tyranny of the Chinese government.
00:25:11.000And now you have China threatening Taiwan, as well as Japan by extension, by the way.
00:25:15.000The same thing is likely to happen in Cuba unless the United States actually grows some stones at a certain point and provides some sort of credible threat to the Cuban government with regard to protecting these dissidents.
00:25:26.000Because the reality is that the Cuban government can go in and break a few heads and then Cuba won't be in the headlines anymore and then everybody in the United States will forget because this is the way the United States does foreign policy.
00:25:35.000When it comes to foreign policy, unfortunately, the United States is not a serious country.
00:25:38.000We are not interested in foreign policy.
00:25:40.000We find it to be something unworthy of our time until it sort of pops its head up.
00:25:46.000through some sort of deeply disturbing foreign policy headline like the mass slaughter of the Yazidis in Iraq, for example, or more or more obviously a terrorist attack on an American entity.
00:25:59.000When that sort of stuff happens, we pay attention to foreign policy for about five seconds, and then we get bored.
00:26:03.000And then we're like, OK, well, you know, should we do we really care about this?
00:26:08.000Latest evidence of this, of course, is what's going on in Afghanistan, where Boredom, ignorance, and antipathy for America's role in the world have created this vast confluence which is leading to the United States' surrender in Afghanistan, which is effectively what is going on right now.
00:26:22.000The United States is pulling out of Afghanistan for no discernible reason.
00:26:25.000There really is no discernible reason.
00:26:26.000When Joe Biden goes on national television and he says things like, how many more American troops have to die in Afghanistan?
00:26:33.000This was a line that may have worked like 10 years ago.
00:26:35.000It should not have worked at any time in the past five or six years, considering the number of Americans who are actually dying in Afghanistan was lower than the number of Americans who are dying in Chicago pretty much every weekend, except over the course of a year.
00:26:44.000In Afghanistan, we were spending some money to uphold the Afghan government.
00:26:48.000Yes, it had corrupt serious corruption problems.
00:26:50.000Yes, there is serious tribalism in Afghanistan.
00:26:53.000But there was, in fact, a unified government over the country of Afghanistan.
00:26:56.000And now, for no apparent reason, to no end, we are pulling out of Afghanistan.
00:27:01.000And there are people who are celebrating it.
00:27:04.000For the life of me, I can't understand why.
00:27:07.000We are not at the point in Afghanistan where crisis was upon us.
00:27:10.000We are not at the point where tens of thousands of American troops were in harm's way, or hundreds of American troops were dying, or even tens of American troops were dying.
00:27:18.000And so the unilateral pullout is meant for only a couple of audiences.
00:27:21.000One, the isolationist audience at home that believes the United States really shouldn't be involved anywhere in the world, that we are a deleterious force in the world.
00:27:28.000And two, a bunch of people who don't care about foreign policy and anytime they see American troops abroad, get uncomfortable because they don't really understand that foreign policy is not a vacuum.
00:27:37.000And we are seeing full-scale foreign policy is not a vacuum.
00:27:40.000I mean, the reality is the Taliban is going to retake the country and that is going to have some pretty significant downstream effects.
00:27:46.000Yes for the United States and yes for our allies.
00:27:48.000There are going to be downstream effects because it turns out that when a regime that you defeated 20 years ago in about three weeks, the Taliban, when you defeat that regime and you drive them to the hills and then you establish a government and then you let that government fall back to the people you drove out, You are demonstrating that America is, in fact, a paper tiger.
00:28:05.000Also, you are demonstrating that we are a bad ally.
00:28:07.000If you are a freedom-seeking person, how long are you going to keep looking to the United States if the United States no longer backs you?
00:28:13.000If you know that the minute the American voter gets bored, There's going to be a pullout and that you are probably going to die and your family is going to be killed along with you.
00:28:21.000How many people are going to stand up for freedom then?
00:28:23.000How many people are going to be willing to stand up against the predations of the Taliban or against the Iranian regime?
00:28:27.000How many times can the United States over the course of the last 10, 15 years screw our allies?
00:28:33.000Seriously, I'm just wondering how many times can we screw our allies before people start to say, you know what?
00:28:57.000It's because clearly our willingness to pay any price for freedom, as John F. Kennedy once famously suggested, is no longer there.
00:29:05.000At least that is the message from Joe Biden.
00:29:07.000The Biden administration is openly acknowledging at this point we're handing the country back to the Taliban, which, by the way, will provide a safe haven once again for terrorism, because this is what they did to begin.
00:29:15.000There was the Pentagon spokesperson basically admitting to Chris Wallace, yeah, you know, the Taliban could take over.
00:29:22.000It is only a matter of time until the Taliban take over.
00:29:26.000We're certainly watching with deep concern, Chris, the deteriorating security situation and the violence, which is, of course, way too high, and the advances and the momentum that the Taliban seems to have right now.
00:29:36.000I mean, we're not unmindful of that, Chris.
00:29:38.000We're watching it and monitoring it, which is why we are, again, working with our Afghan partners to encourage them to use the capacity and the capability that we know they have, and we know that they know how to defend their country.
00:29:49.000This is a time for them to step up and to do exactly that.
00:29:53.000Except that the Taliban has taken back one-third of the country without serious combat.
00:29:57.000And everybody in foreign policy circles knows that the Taliban are likely to topple the Afghan government almost immediately upon the exit of the United States.
00:30:04.000This has led to a rather uncomfortable reality for the Democrats, who are having to acknowledge that they are, in fact, engaging in the same sort of pullout in Vietnam that led to the imprisonment of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people floating in boats off the coast of Vietnam, and the murder of millions of people in Cambodia.
00:30:18.000The Democrats have a long history of doing this sort of stuff, and it is never good.
00:30:22.000In fact, here is a Democrat trying to suggest, this is Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senator, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, trying to suggest that, you know what, pulling out is the best of bad options.
00:31:31.000Underlying all of this is a fundamental lack of confidence in what the United States is and what the United States' role in the world is, and that is a serious problem.
00:31:40.000Because again, there are people out there who do not lack our confidence.
00:31:54.000Tehran is worried about the Taliban because Afghanistan, returning to civil war, Afghanistan, you'll remember, is on Iran's border.
00:32:00.000And so this creates some external effects for Iran.
00:32:02.000But Iran has cultivated ties with some Taliban factions and softened its tone toward the extremist group.
00:32:07.000That gamble has elicited fierce debate in Iran, supposedly.
00:32:10.000Iran's increasingly public overtures to the Taliban continue.
00:32:16.000One of the experts over there says Iran believes they are using the Taliban.
00:32:19.000Some could argue the Taliban is using Iran to present themselves as more powerful and worthy of ruling a country.
00:32:26.000The Taliban, thought to control around a third of Afghanistan, has so far largely gained ground without full-scale fighting, has instead relied on cutting deals with local leaders.
00:32:32.000And the reason they can do that is because there is no counterweight in the region.
00:32:37.000Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Iranian hardliners aligned with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President-elect Ebrahim Raisi, who himself is a terrorist mass murderer, have gone on the offensive and publicly painted a rose-tinted picture of a changed Taliban.
00:32:50.000So it is just wonderful to see how the United States is complicit in all of this.
00:32:54.000We've now pulled out of Afghanistan in order to facilitate the rise of the Taliban.
00:32:57.000We are openly making overtures to an Iranian regime that rigged an election on behalf of a mass-murdering terrorist.
00:33:02.000We have allowed Hong Kong to fall to the Chinese.
00:33:05.000If pattern holds, we'll do very little as Cuban dissidents are clubbed into submission on the streets of Cuba, of Havana.
00:33:14.000America is going to need to figure out exactly what it is if we wish to be a beacon of liberty in the world.
00:33:20.000But given that the United States is own citizenry, at least half of them apparently believe the United States is not even a beacon of liberty inside its own borders, there's a fundamental lack of confidence that is setting in.
00:33:30.000And the world is not gonna be better off for that.
00:33:31.000Americans aren't gonna be better off for that because there are malign influences in the world at work.
00:33:35.000The United States is not going to have a better future if vicious totalitarian powers gain power internationally and inside the United States, Those who seek to tear down the fundamental institutions of freedom are successful here.
00:33:47.000None of that is going to be good for American citizens or for human beings the world over.
00:33:51.000Because let's face it, the radical increase in prosperity and freedom that has occurred since the end of World War II is almost solely due to the massive power and influence of the United States, a confident United States bestriding the world stage.
00:34:02.000When that ends, So does all of the wealth, so does all of the prosperity, and so does all of the freedom.
00:34:06.000We can go right back to what things were before the United States was the most prosperous and powerful force on planet Earth.
00:34:14.000The New York Times apparently has noticed that Joe Biden is in a running gun battle with his teleprompter and Kamala Harris is no substitute for a real candidate.
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00:35:41.000Whether it is totalitarian lockdown measures that destroyed the middle class while big business thrived or the blatant indoctrination of schoolchildren into critical race theory, there's no denying the freedom of everyday Americans is under assault.
00:35:52.000And you can tell it's gone too far when just questioning the mainstream narrative inspires fear of retribution and creates waves of silence where otherwise there would be dissent.
00:36:02.000You feel it every time you go into a store these days.
00:36:04.000We are living through an authoritarian moment, which is why I wrote the book, The Authoritarian Moment, to help people like you learn as much about how we got there as you can, and more importantly, how you can fight back.
00:36:15.000We all feel like we are swimming in a miasma of totalitarian thought right now.
00:36:21.000It feels like if you say the wrong thing on Facebook, you're gonna be excised from your social circles.
00:36:25.000It feels like if you say the wrong thing in an email, you're gonna get fired.
00:36:28.000It feels like if you just express a basic opinion about the goodness of America, you may find yourself on the social outs, and you have all the most powerful institutions of society weaponized against you.
00:36:38.000This is what the authoritarian moment is all about.
00:36:40.000The left has suggested that people on the right are the totalitarians.
00:36:44.000There's certainly totalitarians on the far right, but the great threat to the United States right now is the mainstream left, which has imbibed from the authoritarian well and sees itself as a utopian group capable of cramming down on you all of their own ideas.
00:37:00.000My book, The Authoritarian Moment, is about how all of our major institutions from science to tech to Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be in a running gun battle with his teleprompter.
00:37:31.000Even the New York Times has now noticed this.
00:37:34.000According to the New York Times, even the president labeled a speech boring recently, an emission that highlights a tendency towards delivering minutiae-filled discourse over scaling oratorical heights.
00:37:43.000I love how they really have to obscure even their own message.
00:37:47.000They got Biden's penchant for pontificating, according to Michael Scheer.
00:37:51.000Even President Biden thought he had been ponderous.
00:37:53.000I know it's a boring speech, the 46th president said at the end of 31 minutes and 19 seconds filled with statistics, academic studies, global growth, domestic product, comparisons, and predictions of 7.4% economic growth.
00:38:04.000The president's remarks on Wednesday delivered to a friendly and respectful crowd of supporters at McHenry County College in the Chicago suburb even included reconciliation, which Mr. Biden quickly admitted was a fancy Washington word.
00:38:15.000As the president travels the country, pitching his plan for spending trillions of dollars to reshape the American economy, he is facing a rhetorical reality that has long plagued many of his predecessors.
00:38:23.000There's a vast difference between explaining and inspiring.
00:38:26.000And Mr. Biden, who was recently called the explainer-in-chief by his press secretary, often struggles to reach the potential oratorical heights of the office he holds.
00:38:36.000The substance of his presidency has been dramatic at times.
00:38:38.000He sometimes describes his agenda as a way to prove that the very concept of democracy itself can deliver for the people.
00:38:45.000The White House is perfectly fine with Mr. Biden's ability to turn down the political heat in Washington after four years of chaotic governance.
00:38:50.000But like former President Barack Obama once delivered a 17-minute answer to a healthcare question, and Bill Clinton was forced to apologize to a late-night comic for a dreadful convention speech, Mr. Biden can sometimes get lost in the minutia.
00:39:02.000Okay, I love how the New York Times is framing this.
00:39:04.000Joe Biden cannot string together a sentence off teleprompter.
00:39:07.000When he is on teleprompter, he is in a running battle with the teleprompter.
00:39:10.000And the New York Times frames this as he's too much of an expert.
00:39:43.000Because as it turns out, according to the media, every Republican is an idiot dunderhead who can't speak a sentence and every Democrat is world-beatingly genius.
00:39:52.000Remember, they made the same excuse about Al Gore.
00:39:54.000Al Gore was unbelievably boring, a terrible speaker, no charisma.
00:39:58.000And their excuse for why he lost to George W. Bush is, of course, that Al Gore was too smart for the room.
00:40:03.000They said the same thing about John Kerry in 2004.
00:40:05.000John Kerry has never been in a room where he was too smart for the room.
00:40:08.000He has not been in a first grade classroom as an adult where he was too smart for the room.
00:40:13.000I mean, John Kerry is one of the stupidest people alive.
00:40:16.000And yet, according to the New York Times and according to the rest of the media, the big problem for every Democrat incapable of properly communicating is, of course, that they are just too brilliant for the room.
00:40:24.000Well, one of the other people who is obviously too brilliant for the room is Kamala Harris.
00:40:28.000The reason that Kamala Harris is having her political struggles right now is clearly because Kamala Harris is just so smart.
00:40:55.000So, like for example, over the weekend, when she did an interview with BET, In which she explained that voter ID is racist because rural people can't get photocopies.
00:41:18.000It's like all the conversations that the media critics now have about Hollywood.
00:41:23.000Whenever a crowd doesn't like a particular movie or an aspect of a particular movie that the media want them to like, it's that the crowd is filled with toxic fandom.
00:41:30.000Whenever people are like, yeah, you know, wasn't so into that That character from Last Jedi?
00:41:55.000So listen to the world-breaking genius of our Vice President of the United States, who was selected Largely and almost solely on the basis of her intersectional qualifications.
00:42:04.000Here she was demonstrating her full-scale genius.
00:42:07.000In some people's mind, that means, well, you're gonna have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove you are who you are.
00:42:19.000Well, there are a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don't, there's no Kinko's, there's no Office Max near them.
00:42:26.000People have to understand that when we're talking about voter ID laws, Be clear about who you have in mind and what would be required of them to prove who they are.
00:44:23.000It's trolling mainly, and it's a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the emotional kind of blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses.
00:44:31.000But it's worth answering a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics because it seems to me that the dynamic really should be the other way around.
00:44:38.000The real question is, what happened to you?
00:44:41.000The critical race theory debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so.
00:44:45.000And yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News-hyped campaign are well taken.
00:45:19.000It is, says Andrew Sullivan, I'd argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites.
00:45:25.000It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation.
00:45:29.000It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of white supremacy, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
00:45:40.000The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools, that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a, quote, social justice reckoning these past few years.
00:45:52.000And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.
00:45:56.000Take it from a woke New York Times star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that, quote, the country's social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.
00:46:05.000She's right, and certainly about the New York Times and all mainstream journalism.
00:46:09.000This is the media hub of the social justice movement, and the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough.
00:46:16.000Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate white supremacy, designed to oppress, harm, and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling.
00:46:24.000That's a huge deal, and it explains a lot.
00:46:27.000A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable systems and structures and internal biases arrived to hover around the world.
00:46:34.000Some of this critique was specific and helpful, the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap, but much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.
00:46:41.000The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent gut-wrenching memoir Between the World and Me.
00:46:47.000He combined the worldview and vocabulary of critical race theory with the vivid lived experience of his own biography.
00:46:54.000I'm not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to in what many of his blog readers called his blue period.
00:47:06.000The movement is much broader than race, as anyone who's dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you.
00:47:10.000The best moniker I've read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang's coinage, the successor ideology.
00:47:20.000The structural oppression is white supremacy, but it can be also expressed more broadly to describe a hegemony that is saturated with anti-blackness, misogyny, transphobia, and a miasma of social, cis-heteronormative, patriarchal white supremacy.
00:47:32.000And the term successor ideology works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes first and foremost to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.
00:47:43.000In this successor ideology, there's no escape, no refuge from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence.
00:47:47.000You're either fighting this and on the right side of history, or you're against it and abating evil.
00:47:52.000That is the world the left is building for you.
00:47:54.000And that is why you are right to lie about Kamala Harris's wild qualifications and Joe Biden fighting his teleprompter.
00:48:00.000It is why you are correct to ignore dissidents in Hong Kong and Cuba as they fly the American flag and instead rip on the American flag because it represents systems and structures of oppression.
00:48:09.000This is, in fact, the great ideological battle of our time, and it's going to continue.