It has been 21 years since 9/11, and it seems like all of the lessons we learned from that day have been forgotten. In this episode, Ben explains why it's so important to be reminded of what we did learn that day, and how important it is to remember the lessons that we learned in the 21st century, because as it turns out, the lessons you learn have to be relearned over and over again. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. They reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers, so your internet provider can't see or log what you do online. That's why ExpressVPN is the only VPN I trust because they don't do any of that! They use trusted servers to run in RAM, which makes it impossible for their VPN servers to store any data at all, including logs of any ExpressVPN customers. Visit ExpressVPN to get 3 months for FREE. You don't have to take my or ExpressVPN's word for it, you can get three months for free! Visit expressvpn.com/theBenShapiroShow to learn more about ExpressVPN and get a 3-month free trial. Find out how you can use ExpressVPN for free. It s the number 1 VPN service on the planet! That s no logs of what you did online! Ben Shapiro's favorite VPN service! Check out ExpressVPN! Subscribe to the show on the App Store or Google Play, and use the promo code: "TheBen Shapiro Show" to get 20% off your first month for three months! You can get 10% off the entire month, plus an additional month when you upgrade your membership when you sign up for a year, and get an ad-free version of the show that includes unlimited access to the entire service, plus a FREE 7-month trial, and a discount on the best vlog, and an additional 3 months of the ad-plan? and a FREE 5-day VIP membership, and 7-day shipping offer, and they get an extra $10/month gets you access to $50/month, plus they get $99/month for VIP access, and you get $4/place that gets you gets $19/choice, they also get a choice of VIP access to VIP access gets you a discount, and she gets $5/place gets $24/MBR and VIP gets VIP access?
00:00:00.000One generation after 9-11, the Taliban are in control of Afghanistan, and American leaders are labeling their fellow Americans their enemies.
00:00:07.000Kamala Harris pledges to overthrow the filibuster and rips the Supreme Court, and Ukraine turns the tables on Russia.
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00:01:36.000Well, it has been 21 years since 9-11, and it seems like all of the lessons of 9-11 have been forgotten.
00:01:43.000And this is not a rarity in human history.
00:01:45.000Obviously, the distance between, for example, World War I and World War II was about 21 years.
00:01:48.000It ended in 1918, World War II began in 1939.
00:01:52.000And so the space of a generation is enough time for people to forget all of the key lessons that they learn from life-changing international events.
00:02:00.000And 21 years, especially in the modern age, is an extraordinarily long time when it feels like every news cycle is about five and a half minutes long.
00:02:06.000But for those of us who are defined by 9-11, for those of us who actually lived through 9-11, for those who remember the planes crashing into the towers, it was supposed supposed to be a redefining moment for the United States.
00:02:16.000It was supposed to refocus us on some important lessons and that's why it's really important on 9-11 to actually remember the footage of it because if you don't remember where you were when 9-11 happened, if you don't remember how stunning it was to watch not one but two passenger airliners fly directly into the World Trade Centers and collapse the two most populous towers in New York City, then it really did not define you in the same way as it did for other people who watched it happen.
00:02:42.000What truly is amazing is that a huge percentage of people who actually watched this happen in real time on national television or in person, God forbid in New York City, all those people, a lot of them have forgotten the lessons of 9-11 because as it turns out, politics is not stable.
00:02:58.000Lessons that you learn have to be relearned over and over again.
00:03:00.000So I want to go through some of the lessons of 9-11 and then demonstrate how we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them by the year 2022, which is a depressing thought because what it really does suggest is that we are inviting more aggression from our enemies.
00:03:11.000So it was 846 in the morning when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
00:03:16.000Here's what that sounded and looked like.
00:03:20.000There's a firefighter, and you can see the plane just flying directly into the tower.
00:03:24.000I mean, it was legitimately the most stunning thing I think anyone alive had ever seen.
00:03:29.000And then, a few minutes later, obviously, the second plane hits the second World Trade Center tower.
00:03:36.000I mean, it was just horrific and shocking.
00:03:39.000It was something out of a horror movie, obviously.
00:03:41.000The reason I show this is it's important to be reminded of what our enemies did.
00:03:45.000And of course, you saw the towers collapsing.
00:03:48.000One of the most frightening scenes in all of American history.
00:03:53.000It's easy to forget this, which is amazing, considering it was unforgettable.
00:04:00.000And this is not even the most brutal footage, obviously.
00:04:02.000You see the towers collapsing, nearly 3,000 Americans dead.
00:04:21.000I mean, unbelievable was the word to use, because I think everybody in the nation was in a state of absolute shock over it.
00:04:26.000And this was supposed to change how Americans thought about themselves, because after all, there was a feeling that had set in after the end of the Cold War, that basically all conflict was done, that international conflict was over, that the world was safe.
00:04:39.000That international diplomacy was going to rule the roost from here on in.
00:04:43.000That violence against Americans was absolutely unthinkable.
00:04:46.000And then 9-11 happened and it really taught us a bunch of lessons that we were supposed to remember.
00:04:51.000And so I want to talk about five of those lessons right now.
00:04:54.000And we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them.
00:04:56.000First, the world is smaller than you think.
00:04:58.000Things that happen far away in lands that we do not know.
00:05:02.000Those things impact the United States.
00:05:06.000In terms of military power, in terms of safety of Americans, these things really affect us.
00:05:11.000Because after 9-11, after the end of the Cold War, the idea was, OK, well, we can sort of retrench, go back to a certain level of isolationism.
00:05:20.000We started treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than as an international policy problem.
00:05:25.000We suggested that if the United States sort of withdrew within its own boundaries, that the world will police itself.
00:05:29.000And that's not the way the world worked.
00:05:30.000And that is a lesson that we learned on 9-11.
00:05:33.000Is that the world is a very small place.
00:05:35.000And so when you hear politicians on both sides of the aisle doing, and there's a traditional strain of American foreign policy thinking that says this, right?
00:05:42.000That basically says, if the United States withdraws inside of its borders and doesn't get itself involved in world politics, then we'll be safe.
00:05:48.0009-11 was a ringing rebuttal of that because that's pretty much what Bill Clinton had tried to do during the 1990s.
00:05:53.000So much so that when apparently the American military had Osama bin Laden in its crosshairs, it was essentially called off during the Clinton administration.
00:05:59.000The second lesson was that weakness, and mostly perceived weakness, in any form, economic, military, ideological, invites aggression.
00:06:08.000If you read the manifesto of Osama Bin Laden after 9-11, his manifesto was all talk about how the United States was basically a paper tiger, had made a bunch of promises, had not fulfilled those promises, the United States would run from conflict.
00:06:20.000After the United States withdrew from Somalia, after the Black Hawk Down incident, After the United States did essentially nothing after the Al Qaeda bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
00:06:30.000After the United States did nothing in the aftermath of the bombing of the USS Cole by Al Qaeda.
00:06:34.000The impression that was taken away by Osama Bin Laden and a lot of other people is that the United States is a paper tiger.
00:06:40.000And that impression, again, was driven by the fact that we had decided to cut our military spending, that ideologically we were talking a lot about how global liberalism was naturally going to take precedence, it was going to take the fore, that this wasn't an oppositional world anymore, that we had reached the end of history, and the infusion of liberal democratic ideals was going to just be natural throughout the world.
00:07:01.000The idea was, if you actually want to protect America, you're going to have to be strong militarily and strong ideologically.
00:07:08.000You're going to have to have the wherewithal and the ideological strength to withstand things like long-term commitments.
00:07:17.000Which brings us to the third point here, which is that culture and institutions can't be imposed except with extraordinary levels of investment in time.
00:07:22.000This is the lesson that we mostly learn in the aftermath of 9-11 when we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.
00:07:28.000And there the lesson was, okay, well, if you're going to do it, you're going to have to actually do it.
00:07:32.000You can go in, you can put a dictator in there.
00:07:33.000That dictator can clean up some of the mess.
00:07:36.000Eventually, that dictator will turn against you.
00:07:38.000That is one way to do American foreign policy.
00:07:40.000And traditionally speaking, that is the way that most regimes across the world have done their foreign policy.
00:07:44.000The British Empire, for example, either directly administered its colonies or it found sort of friendly dictators to administer its colonies.
00:07:51.000And then when those dictators went rogue, they killed them and replaced them.
00:07:54.000That is not unique to the British Empire.
00:07:55.000That was true of virtually every empire.
00:08:04.000The other way of doing it is the sort of idealistic way that the so-called neocon way of doing foreign policy, which is we're going to go into Afghanistan.
00:08:25.000The sort of freedom where the things that matter most in your life are how much property you can own or what kind of sex life you can have.
00:08:32.000Things that the West holds very, very dear in terms of individual rights.
00:08:37.000For a lot of the world, that's not how they view freedom.
00:08:42.000But those sorts of institutions don't just magically take root.
00:08:45.000You actually have to sit there for In the case of Japan, generations.
00:08:49.000You have to sit there, in the case of South Korea, for generations.
00:08:53.000And you have to be willing to actually expend the money and keep the soldiers over there.
00:08:58.000And that was the lesson of Afghanistan and Iraq, was that if you seem halfway about this thing, if the idea is you want to transform these countries into footprints for liberal democracy, and you're talking about some of the most backwards regions of the world, You're talking about places with barbaric tribalism as the governing philosophy for entire swaths of these countries?
00:09:22.000These countries are new creations, by the way.
00:09:23.000I mean, Afghanistan was never a unified polity.
00:09:25.000Iraq was not a unified polity for an extraordinary period of time.
00:09:29.000People tend to forget that the nations of the Middle East We're not talking about Israel here.
00:09:33.000The left likes to talk about how Israel was established 1947-1948, so it's new.
00:09:37.000India and Pakistan were not established until 1947-1948 as separate polities.
00:09:41.000The separation of India and Pakistan wasn't until 1948.
00:09:45.000The idea of a Saudi Arabian government didn't exist until the 1920s.
00:09:49.000So these are, in terms of human history, relatively new polities.
00:09:53.000In fact, most nations seem to be somewhat new.
00:09:57.000The idea of Italy as a unified country is something that crops up in the 19th century, so I think that we forget sort of historical context for how most people lived for most of time, which was in these tribal, small, autonomous regions.
00:10:07.000But if you're going to implant the idea of sort of a national government that presides in democratic fashion, that is a long-term thing you have to do.
00:10:15.000And the West didn't take that seriously.
00:10:17.000It thought it had taken it seriously, but as Neil Ferguson pointed out in his book, American Colossus, about the idea of American empire, he said that he was in favor of the war in Iraq, but he said he didn't think the American people would have the stomach to actually do the thing.
00:10:31.000The fourth lesson was that you have a lot in common with your fellow Americans, more than you think you do, and a lot more than you do with your enemies.
00:10:38.000And this is something that the American people, as we will see in a second, seem to have forgotten.
00:10:42.000We tend to talk a lot in the United States about the gaps between Florida and New York, between Texas and California.
00:10:51.000And those gaps seem to be getting wider in the United States.
00:10:53.000Whatever those gaps are, those gaps are not nearly as wide as the gap between, say, Texas and Afghanistan, or California and Afghanistan.
00:11:00.000And 9-11 was a reminder that the enemies of the American people do not think like Americans, that whatever disagreements we have with each other in the West, and they are very serious and they have real consequences, The gaps between the disagreements in the West and disagreements between people in the West and places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
00:11:20.000These are disagreements in kind, okay?
00:11:22.000These are not disagreements of degree.
00:11:24.000I mean, these are differences in kind.
00:11:25.000Over time, it may be that the disagreements in the West come to resemble the sort of tribalistic differences that we see elsewhere.
00:11:30.000But, at least on 9-11, you know, people in Texas didn't look at what was happening in New York and think to themselves, that's a foreign country, I don't really care.
00:11:37.000They thought to themselves, that's my fellow Americans who are dying in those towers.
00:11:41.000Which is why you saw a mass upswing in the number of people who joined the military, for example.
00:11:45.000There's a lot that separates us, but there are a few things that should bring us together as Americans.
00:11:48.000One of those things, amazing American meat.
00:11:52.000Good Ranchers, they make the best meat on planet Earth, right here in America.
00:11:57.000I know, they made me an actual kosher steak, and let me just tell you, that thing's amazing.
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00:12:02.000Pasture-raised, USDA Prime or Upper Choice beef.
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00:12:12.000All that stuff, pasture-raised, hand-cut and hand-trimmed to guarantee consistency, which makes prep super easy as well, because you're not actually trimming off 20% of the meat that you buy.
00:12:20.000They also have prime seafood, caught fresh, then flash frozen and vacuum sealed to lock in the quality until you're ready to eat it.
00:13:14.000Our enemies don't have the same priorities that we do.
00:13:16.000And when you read, for example, there's this weird thing that just happened where if you read Osama bin Laden's actual manifesto on 9-11, he talks in terms that sort of appeal to some religious conservatives and some terms that definitely appeal to the left.
00:13:30.000And he leads off by saying, why did 9-11 happen?
00:13:32.000Well, because Israel is bad and because the left funds Israel, which sounds very much like a left-wing talking point.
00:13:38.000And then, when it comes to domestic policy, he says, why do we hate you guys?
00:13:42.000We hate you guys because of your sexual libertinism.
00:13:43.000So a lot of people on the SoCon right were like, okay, well, he agrees with us on that.
00:13:48.000Well, but he doesn't agree with any of you on any of this.
00:13:50.000His holistic worldview is a replacement of all of the West with Islam, with a Sharia hardcore version of Islam.
00:13:58.000He says this clearly in the manifesto.
00:14:00.000What was amazing to watch in the aftermath of 9-11 is that people actually understood this.
00:14:04.000Regardless if they agreed with Osama Bin Laden about Israel, or regardless of whether they agreed with Osama Bin Laden about, say, gay marriage, Osama Bin Laden was preaching a form of life that was radically opposed to the generalized worldview of the West, and now that seems to have broken down here in the West.
00:14:37.000And particularly the appearance of weakness invites aggression.
00:14:40.000You have a lot more in common with your fellow Americans than you do with enemies of the United States.
00:14:44.000Culture and institutions cannot be imposed except with extraordinary levels of investment and time.
00:14:48.000And your enemies do not think like you do.
00:14:50.000All these were lessons of 9-11 and we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them.
00:14:54.000So for example, Joe Biden, there's something particularly galling about Joe Biden.
00:15:00.000The President of the United States gave an address, we do this every year, we have these ceremonies commemorating 9-11.
00:15:05.000But when the person who is speaking apparently does not remember any of the lessons of 9-11, and in fact has effectuated policy to make another 9-11 significantly more possible, when he speaks, it just rings hollow.
00:15:44.000And I know for all those of you who've lost someone, 21 years is both a lifetime and no time at all.
00:15:53.000And when he says this sort of stuff, I would take it a lot more seriously if he had not presided over giving the country of Afghanistan back to the very people who presided over 9-11, including Al Qaeda.
00:16:03.000You want to talk about a full-scale forgetting of 9-11?
00:16:07.000How about we then fought a war legitimately directed against the people who attacked the United States and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, and Joe Biden just gave the country back to them?
00:16:17.000There was an incident over the weekend in which a Blackhawk helicopter went down in Afghanistan, an American Blackhawk helicopter, in a Taliban training exercise, because the Taliban took over all of our materiel when we left.
00:16:29.000And lest we forget, it was only about a year ago that Joe Biden was trying to triumphantly champion his pullout from Afghanistan.
00:16:36.000Well, the pullout from Afghanistan was a full-scale disaster area.
00:16:39.000People attempting to jump on wheel wells to escape the Taliban who had been rushing into the cities.
00:16:45.000Joe Biden's decision to withdraw all air support from Afghanistan, to withdraw all military advisors from Afghanistan.
00:17:48.000We've gone back to a time before 9-11.
00:17:50.000And so, unfortunately, when people forget lessons of life, they tend to have to relearn those the hard way.
00:17:57.000Meanwhile, you have people like Pramila Jayapal who are tweeting out about 9-11.
00:18:01.000Quote, today we remember the 2,996 people who were killed on 9-11 and all those who lost their lives while serving our country in the forever wars that followed.
00:18:09.000And this is the language of the Democrats.
00:18:11.000Okay, so when Pramila Jayapal tweets that, number one, this is the second straight year where she said 2,996.
00:18:15.000What you will remember is that 2,977 Americans were killed, 19 hijackers died committing suicide while attempting to murder Americans.
00:18:24.000This is the second straight year she's included the hijackers and the number of dead from 9-11.
00:18:28.000I'll assume that's unintentional and that all she's doing is just Wikipedia-ing the number of people who died in 9-11.
00:18:33.000But, you know, that is something that she should absolutely correct.
00:18:36.000But it's the broader point that she's making that is telling.
00:18:39.000She says that 9-11 is when we remember people who died in the forever wars, these quote-unquote useless wars.
00:18:53.000And what I mean by that is that in the health care field, people will say an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure, meaning that the idea is if you can prevent somebody from getting the disease, that's significantly better than a person getting the disease and then you having to cure the disease.
00:19:08.000If you never become obese and you don't have diabetes, that's a lot better.
00:19:12.000Exercising now is a lot better than getting the diabetes and then having to deal and treat the diabetes.
00:19:19.000But when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to politics, preventing the bad thing from happening is the thing that nobody sees.
00:19:25.000So if you spend 20 years fighting wars, that there's not another 9-11 and then there isn't another 9-11, people tend to forget that 9-11 is a possibility.
00:19:33.000And instead what they do is they say, oh, well, look at what we're doing over here.
00:19:35.000Look at all the resources we're spending over here.
00:19:37.000Look at all the wasteful resources we're spending over here.
00:19:39.000Well, because we don't have the counterfactual because the counterfactual didn't take place.
00:20:31.000Or does it mean that we actually did some stuff in our own blundering way that prevented more attacks from occurring?
00:20:37.000But we've decided that it was the former, that it was really, we just miss, we underestimate, basically we should have just gone to sleep after 9-11 and pretended that it was one-off and if a few thousand Americans get killed every 20 years, well I guess that's no big deal.
00:20:48.000Because after all, you know, the world is a big place.
00:20:51.000It's not a small place, it's a big place.
00:20:52.000And stuff that happens far away doesn't affect us.
00:20:54.000And after all, we can be as weak as we want and nobody's going to bother us.
00:20:57.000There are a lot of things in life that make you lose sleep, including restoration of American weakness.
00:21:01.000But there's one way you shouldn't lose sleep.
00:21:03.000That's having a bad mattress not made for you, which is why I love my Helix Sleep Mattress.
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00:21:10.000I've had my Helix for years at this point.
00:22:34.000as I did, over the course of time, you saw gradually as this happened, it was kind of a unique visual reminder that people had forgotten the lessons of 9-11.
00:22:44.000The American flag was then gradually replaced in L.A.
00:22:47.000A few years in, people started taking down the American flag and they replaced the car window American flag with other flags and other priorities.
00:22:58.000So now there's a sort of revisionist history that you're seeing presented by, I would say, the Democrats and the left in the media, which is that American unity is being undermined by the Republicans.
00:23:08.000It is worthwhile remembering that this thing got very political very quickly.
00:23:13.000It was only about a year after 9-11, I think it was within the year, that Hillary Clinton was on the floor of the Senate holding up a newspaper and shouting, what did Bush know and when did he know it?
00:23:21.000This is after the revelation that there had been a national security document that had been shown to Consolita Rice that essentially said that bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States and that he wanted to hijack an airplane.
00:23:32.000Now, what that memo never said is that they were planning on actually hijacking airplanes and flying them into American towers.
00:23:38.000What it said is that they thought it was going to be a hijacking just like any other terrorist hijacking.
00:23:41.000There was a plan to hijack these airplanes and then use them in order to free other terrorists who were being held in American custody.
00:23:47.000But the media and the Democrats immediately decided to jump on this because Bush's approval rating was in the 80s at the time.
00:23:52.000And so Hillary Clinton got up on the floor of the Senate and suggested that essentially Bush knew what was going on.
00:24:00.000DNC Chairman Howard Dean said on local radio that Bush was, quote, warned ahead of time by the Saudis.
00:24:05.000The New York Times did admit that the briefing didn't point to any specific time and place, but printed in like big block letters across the front page of the New York Times that basically the Bush administration had known and they had blown it.
00:24:15.000So the unity around this blew up pretty much immediately.
00:24:18.000There was never a ton of unity around 9-11.
00:24:23.000But now, of course, you have the Democratic Party essentially saying that if 9-11 happened now, that it would all fall apart.
00:24:28.000Now, again, that's a bit of revisionist history.
00:24:30.000We really didn't stick together very, very long at all.
00:24:32.000But one of the key factors in us not sticking together very long was politicians like Hillary Clinton, who again was senator from New York at the time.
00:24:37.000Here is Hillary Clinton over the weekend, asked about whether elected officials would sort of unify in the wake of a 9-11 today.
00:24:44.000I mean, she forgets that they didn't unify for very long in the wake of 9-11 the first time.
00:24:49.000The United States is resolute, and we are going to support the president.
00:24:53.000Just listening to that, it is such a striking reminder of how all of America's elected officials really genuinely put party aside and came together after those attacks.
00:25:05.000And I give President Biden a lot of credit for trying to continue to reach out to people while still sounding the alarm about the threats to our democracy.
00:25:18.000First of all, American policy has always been pretty fractious.
00:25:21.000But beyond that, if we're talking about, you know, the splitting apart of the American polity, if we're talking about labeling your fellow Americans the enemies, the simple fact is that the Democratic Party is doing that a lot these days.
00:25:32.000I mean, Joe Biden gave an entire blood-red Independence Hall speech in which he essentially suggested that half the country were enemies of the Republic.
00:25:41.000Hillary Clinton used 9-11 as a prop over the weekend to talk about the quote-unquote extremism of any kind in the United States.
00:25:47.000Whatever you think of the rioters of January 6th, the notion that these people were on the level of what happened on 9-11 is just historically benighted.
00:25:58.000The terrorists of 9-11 sought to not only overthrow the democracy of the United States, but to replace it with a sharia law state in which women would be pushed into absolute subjugation.
00:26:08.000They wished to kill as many Western Americans as possible.
00:26:25.000We have done our best to take care of the families that lost so much on that terrible day.
00:26:32.000And we have also, I think, been reminded about How important it is to try to deal with extremism of any kind, especially when it uses violence to try to achieve political and ideological goals.
00:26:55.000I mean, the comparison between what happened on January 6th and 9-11 is wild.
00:27:02.000January 6th is something that I decried because I thought that, frankly, it was an act of despicable Nastiness to invade the United States Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election results.
00:27:16.000That was crazy criminal behavior by a select few people who by the way Participated in the kind of violence that landed them in jail en masse.
00:27:28.000Also, they didn't actually kill anyone that day.
00:27:39.000But the Democrats decided to do that yesterday.
00:27:41.000So this idea that you hold more in common with your fellow American than you do with America's enemies, apparently that's been completely forgotten in the United States.
00:27:48.000Apparently the idea is that your real enemy is the person who lives next door to you.
00:27:51.000And when we look at 9-11, we're not supposed to see the reflection of radical Islam, which, by the way, is still a threat to Western ideals all over the world, including in Iran, where Joe Biden is attempting to now cut a deal with the Mullahs, the greatest terror spreaders on planet Earth.
00:28:05.000The real enemy is the guy who lives next door to you who flies the Trump flag.
00:28:07.000Here's Mark Warner comparing Republican protesters from January 6th to 9-11 terrorists.
00:28:12.000I was in the middle of a political campaign and suddenly the differences with my opponent seemed very small in comparison.
00:28:31.000The stunning thing to me is here we are 20 years later, and the attack on the symbol of our democracy was not coming from terrorists, but it came from literally insurgents attacking the Capitol on January 6th.
00:28:43.000Again, that is a clear and overt attempt to compare 9-11 to 1-6, and those are not the same thing.
00:28:51.000Especially because the democratic idea here is to broaden out January 6th to include all Republicans.
00:28:56.000If you voted for Trump in 2020, if you'd consider voting for Trump again in 2024, if you're somebody who believes that Roe versus Wade was wrongly decided, if you're somebody who believes that the United States should allow for religious freedom, That counters prevailing left-wing social orthodoxy.
00:29:11.000If you're one of those people, then you're a MAGA extremist in league with 1-6.
00:30:22.000So that lesson has been completely lost, right?
00:30:24.000That we have to at least have a unified front against the bad guys out there.
00:30:26.000Apparently the bad guys are the people who just go into the voting booth next door and vote the way that is other than yours.
00:30:33.000By the way, I think it is worthwhile at this point to debunking the idea that opposition to democracy exists on only one side of the aisle.
00:30:41.000It's kind of a fascinating poll with a bunch of interesting implications talking about how many people generally are warm toward What we would say are anti-institutional democratic tendencies in the United States.
00:31:05.000That basically politics is a way that we avoid actual armed conflict with one another.
00:31:10.000But because people view it that way, as opposed to, we have a shared set of broader ideals that require us to vote on them, and we have to have checks and balance to protect fundamental rights, which is the way the founders saw it, which is how you should see it in a unified polity.
00:31:23.000If you see politics as merely war by other means, then what if you lose?
00:31:28.000If you lose, then you start to look at the institutions and say, those institutions are my enemy.
00:31:31.000And unfortunately, a broad swath of people, I think this is exist.
00:31:34.000I don't think this is unique to America in 2022.
00:31:36.000I think this exists across nearly every democracy, but it is very striking.
00:31:40.000poll statistics showing how many people in the United States would rather win than sort of preserve the institutions.
00:31:46.000And again, this is a bipartisan problem in the United States.
00:31:49.000So for example, in this poll, people were asked, are strong unelected leaders better than weak elected ones?
00:31:55.000Now there are a couple ways to read that question, right?
00:31:58.000One is, is democracy better than dictatorship in all cases?
00:32:03.000And honestly, it would be, you'd be hard pressed to say that democracy is better than dictatorship in literally every case.
00:32:08.000I mean, there have been democracies in which Hamas is elected, right?
00:32:11.000There's a democratic election in the Gaza Strip and a terrorist group got elected.
00:32:15.000There have been democracies where truly evil people get elected.
00:32:18.000And there have been dictatorships in which certain human rights were actually upheld, for example, Singapore.
00:32:24.000So, to pretend that this is like an easy, universal thing, that democracy always, every time, is better than dictatorship, it wasn't better during the Arab Spring.
00:32:32.000They tried some democracy in Egypt and it ended with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge.
00:32:35.000So, again, that is not saying that, broadly speaking, democracy is not better than dictatorship.
00:32:39.000Broadly speaking, democracy is, of course, better than dictatorship, as Winston Churchill said.
00:32:43.000Democracy is the worst system except for all of the others.
00:32:45.000But, there are a couple ways to read this.
00:32:49.000So, way one to read this is, would you prefer a dictator who agrees with you to a democratically elected leader In your own system, who disagrees with you, right?
00:32:59.000That's one way to read it, which is a real threat to democracy.
00:33:01.000The other way to read it is, is it always true that a democratically elected leader, even if he is weak and terrible, is better than a strong, powerful, centralized figure?
00:33:12.000And unsurprisingly, an enormous number of Americans on both sides of the aisle actually are warm toward the idea of a strong centralized power.
00:33:22.000And Woodrow Wilson was very close to a dictator in the United States.
00:33:25.000FDR was very close to a dictator in the United States.
00:33:27.000Like people are very warm for dictatorial figures, just generally speaking.
00:33:31.000Demagoguery will get you a long way in any country.
00:33:34.000That's true in the United States right now.
00:33:35.000Unsurprisingly, that favor, that poll, 42% of Republicans say that strong unelected leaders are better than weak elected ones.
00:33:42.000And some people on the left are going to say, well, that means people are talking about Trump.
00:33:45.000They'd rather have Trump as a dictator than Joe Biden as an elected leader.
00:33:49.000It's also quite possible that what they mean by this is that Joe Biden is so weak that he's endangering the Republic and he's being out-competed by dictators abroad.
00:33:57.000That, again, is not a unique thought in human history.
00:35:15.00038% total of Americans say the government should side with the majority over ethnic or religious minority rights.
00:35:20.000So the idea of rights should just not exist.
00:35:22.000You should have a French Revolution style mobocracy, according to at least 38% of Americans.
00:35:27.000So when people say that democracy is in danger from just the right side of the aisle, understand that that's not actually true.
00:35:31.000It's always, you know, on a knife's edge, which is why you have to have people who act within the confines of institutions.
00:35:37.000And so when you talk about the undermining of democracy, as the left has been doing so much lately, they should remember that when they undermine institutional trust, They are undermining the system under which we live.
00:35:46.000And it's that system that preserves the idea of democracy.
00:35:48.000Well, if it feels like America is on the verge of something bad, that's kind of economically true.
00:35:53.000Inflation has a long way to go to get back to pre-pandemic levels.
00:35:56.000Interest rates are going to continue to rise.
00:35:58.000The Federal Reserve is trying to contain that inflation.
00:35:59.000That means the economy is probably going to enter a fairly Significant recession?
00:36:04.000It's time to take care of your debt problems right now because you don't want that hovering over you.
00:37:36.000If you are talking about American unity in the face of an aggressive, bad world, and the idea that you have something in common with your fellow Americans, what you shouldn't do is spend your time actually undermining the institutions.
00:37:47.000Everybody, when it comes to Trump on the left, the suggestion is always that Donald Trump is the killer, when in reality Donald Trump seems to be more of a symptom than the disease.
00:37:55.000That's not to say that Donald Trump hasn't done damage to our institutions.
00:38:03.000I mean, Donald Trump as the chief threat to America's institutions is not a reality.
00:38:09.000Not when you have the Democrats who proclaim that they are all in favor of democratic institutions fundamentally undermining American institutions.
00:38:16.000So, for example, How much confidence do you have in the Supreme Court?
00:38:33.000It means that we had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body as an extension of what we have decided to be the privacy rights to which all people are entitled.
00:38:58.000And this court took that constitutional right away.
00:39:02.000Okay, for 50 years in this country, there was a right established in Plessy v. Ferguson for railroad cars to segregate.
00:39:09.000Then it was taken away in Brown v. Board.
00:39:12.000I'm sorry, but the establishment of a fake right by the Supreme Court does not mean the Supreme Court cannot later overrule the establishment of that fake right.
00:39:20.000There is no right to abortion in the Constitution of the United States.
00:39:23.000But again, you want to talk about the undermining of the American judicial system?
00:39:26.000That would be it right there from Kamala Harris.
00:39:28.000And that poll shows 42% of Democrats believe the president should simply be able to remove judges who disagree with him.
00:39:33.000Meanwhile, you have Kamala Harris, who is a friend of democracy, saying that we have to ditch the filibuster entirely.
00:39:40.000We need to make sure that you're able to ram through whatever you want with 51 votes in the Senate.
00:39:45.000Our president has said he will not let the filibuster get in the way.
00:39:51.000If the Senate, through a majority vote, votes to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, You know what that means?
00:39:58.000In the midterms, we need to hold on to the Senate and get two more.
00:40:03.000And then we can put into law the protections of Roe v. Wade.
00:40:06.000Everything is on the line when you think about the millions of women and people in America who care about them, who understand the significance of protecting a woman's right to make decisions about her own body instead of her government telling her what to do.
00:40:21.000Legislative filibuster gone or just on this issue?
00:40:25.000The president has been clear on this issue and on a very important issue in addition to that important issue, which is voting rights.
00:40:32.000Okay, so basically everything they want to ram through, they're just going to kill the filibuster.
00:40:35.000If they declare an issue important enough, they're going to say they can ram it through with a simple majority and Kamala Harris being the deciding vote, right?
00:40:43.000I mean, she's openly bragging about the fact that she's not doing anything in bipartisan fashion.
00:40:47.000She says that she's the vice president who's been the deciding vote the most times and she's bragging about this as though this is a bipartisan presidency that cares deeply about democratic institutions.
00:40:58.000In our first year in office, some of the historians here may know I broke John Adams' record of casting the most tie-breaking votes in a single term.
00:41:14.000I, with a bare majority, rammed things through bipartisanship.
00:41:20.000Meanwhile, I got Al Franken, who's openly doubting the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
00:41:23.000Don't worry, guys, democracy is in safe hands with the Democrats.
00:41:26.000The legitimacy of the court was undermined when they wouldn't take up Merrick Garland.
00:41:31.000And you'll remember that McConnell said it was because it was during election year.
00:41:36.000And you remember Lindsey Graham pledging that if a vacancy came open during election year in 20 that he wouldn't vote for, they wouldn't take up a nominee.
00:41:54.000The one that Merrick Garland Uh, wasn't given a hearing for and the one that Coney Barrett was, uh, where she was seated a week before the election.
00:42:06.000That destroyed the legitimacy of the court.
00:42:10.000There is no legitimacy to the court, according to Al Franken.
00:42:12.000Don't worry, these are the great defenders of democracy.
00:42:15.000By the way, Kamala Harris was actually asked about, you know, you guys keep saying that the right and people who disagree with you are threatening democracy.
00:42:20.000So why do you keep your party, why do they keep backing election deniers in elections on the Republican side of the aisle to run against Democrats?
00:42:29.000Here's Kamala Harris trying to bob and weave as though she has any capacity to do so and meet the press over the weekend.
00:42:35.000When you see the Democratic Party and some parts of the party funding ads to promote some of these election deniers in primaries, whether it's Michigan, the high profile race there, Illinois, Colorado, New Hampshire, it looks like a cynical, a little bit cynical.
00:42:52.000Is this something you'd be comfortable with?
00:42:54.000I'm not gonna tell people how to run their campaigns, Chuck.
00:42:57.000I ran statewide for Attorney General, re-election, won both times for Senate.
00:43:04.000won that race and I know that it is best to let a candidate along with their advisors, let them make the decision based on what they believe is in the best interest of their state.
00:43:17.000Oh, okay, so she's not going to deny propping up people she says are an actual threat to the Republic of the United States. Again, the lessons of 9-11 are way in the rearview mirror, which means that we are setting ourselves up for a bruising.
00:43:30.000Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.