The Ben Shapiro Show - How America Forgot 9-11 | Ep. 1572

00:00:00.000 One generation after 9-11, the Taliban are in control of Afghanistan, and American leaders are labeling their fellow Americans their enemies.

00:00:07.000 Kamala Harris pledges to overthrow the filibuster and rips the Supreme Court, and Ukraine turns the tables on Russia.

00:00:12.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

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00:01:36.000 Well, it has been 21 years since 9-11, and it seems like all of the lessons of 9-11 have been forgotten.

00:01:43.000 And this is not a rarity in human history.

00:01:45.000 Obviously, the distance between, for example, World War I and World War II was about 21 years.

00:01:48.000 It ended in 1918, World War II began in 1939.

00:01:52.000 And 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.

00:02:00.000 And 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.

00:02:06.000 But 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.

00:02:16.000 It 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.

00:02:42.000 What 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.

00:02:58.000 Lessons that you learn have to be relearned over and over again.

00:03:00.000 So 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.

00:03:11.000 So it was 846 in the morning when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

00:03:16.000 Here's what that sounded and looked like.

00:03:20.000 There's a firefighter, and you can see the plane just flying directly into the tower.

00:03:24.000 I mean, it was legitimately the most stunning thing I think anyone alive had ever seen.

00:03:29.000 And then, a few minutes later, obviously, the second plane hits the second World Trade Center tower.

00:03:36.000 I mean, it was just horrific and shocking.

00:03:39.000 It was something out of a horror movie, obviously.

00:03:41.000 The reason I show this is it's important to be reminded of what our enemies did.

00:03:45.000 And of course, you saw the towers collapsing.

00:03:48.000 One of the most frightening scenes in all of American history.

00:03:53.000 It's easy to forget this, which is amazing, considering it was unforgettable.

00:04:00.000 And this is not even the most brutal footage, obviously.

00:04:02.000 You see the towers collapsing, nearly 3,000 Americans dead.

00:04:07.000 Just horrific, horrific stuff, obviously.

00:04:09.000 We cut out, we didn't include some of the even more brutal footage of people leaping to their deaths.

00:04:15.000 From the 85th story of the World Trade Center.

00:04:18.000 It was unbelievable.

00:04:21.000 I mean, unbelievable was the word to use, because I think everybody in the nation was in a state of absolute shock over it.

00:04:26.000 And 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.

00:04:39.000 That international diplomacy was going to rule the roost from here on in.

00:04:43.000 That violence against Americans was absolutely unthinkable.

00:04:46.000 And then 9-11 happened and it really taught us a bunch of lessons that we were supposed to remember.

00:04:51.000 And so I want to talk about five of those lessons right now.

00:04:54.000 And we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them.

00:04:56.000 First, the world is smaller than you think.

00:04:58.000 Things that happen far away in lands that we do not know.

00:05:02.000 Those things impact the United States.

00:05:04.000 Economically.

00:05:06.000 In terms of military power, in terms of safety of Americans, these things really affect us.

00:05:11.000 Because 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.

00:05:19.000 We cut our military spending.

00:05:20.000 We started treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than as an international policy problem.

00:05:25.000 We suggested that if the United States sort of withdrew within its own boundaries, that the world will police itself.

00:05:29.000 And that's not the way the world worked.

00:05:30.000 And that is a lesson that we learned on 9-11.

00:05:33.000 Is that the world is a very small place.

00:05:35.000 And 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?

00:05:42.000 That 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.

00:05:48.000 9-11 was a ringing rebuttal of that because that's pretty much what Bill Clinton had tried to do during the 1990s.

00:05:53.000 So much so that when apparently the American military had Osama bin Laden in its crosshairs, it was essentially called off during the Clinton administration.

00:05:59.000 The second lesson was that weakness, and mostly perceived weakness, in any form, economic, military, ideological, invites aggression.

00:06:08.000 If 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.

00:06:20.000 After 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.

00:06:30.000 After the United States did nothing in the aftermath of the bombing of the USS Cole by Al Qaeda.

00:06:34.000 The impression that was taken away by Osama Bin Laden and a lot of other people is that the United States is a paper tiger.

00:06:40.000 And 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.

00:06:59.000 And 9-11 rejected all of that.

00:07:01.000 The idea was, if you actually want to protect America, you're going to have to be strong militarily and strong ideologically.

00:07:08.000 You're going to have to have the wherewithal and the ideological strength to withstand things like long-term commitments.

00:07:17.000 Which 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.

00:07:22.000 This is the lesson that we mostly learn in the aftermath of 9-11 when we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.

00:07:28.000 And there the lesson was, okay, well, if you're going to do it, you're going to have to actually do it.

00:07:32.000 You can go in, you can put a dictator in there.

00:07:33.000 That dictator can clean up some of the mess. 0.99

00:07:36.000 Eventually, that dictator will turn against you.

00:07:37.000 You'll have to replace him.

00:07:38.000 That is one way to do American foreign policy.

00:07:40.000 And traditionally speaking, that is the way that most regimes across the world have done their foreign policy.

00:07:44.000 The British Empire, for example, either directly administered its colonies or it found sort of friendly dictators to administer its colonies.

00:07:51.000 And then when those dictators went rogue, they killed them and replaced them.

00:07:54.000 That is not unique to the British Empire.

00:07:55.000 That was true of virtually every empire.

00:07:58.000 It's been true since ancient times. 0.86

00:08:00.000 This is how you control it.

00:08:01.000 Go back to the Roman Empire. 0.97

00:08:02.000 This is how they controlled their empires.

00:08:03.000 That is one way of doing it.

00:08:04.000 The 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.

00:08:09.000 We're going to go into Iraq. 0.98

00:08:11.000 And naturally, democracy will take root and bloom because there is a deep desire for human freedom in the human heart.

00:08:16.000 And not just human freedom, the sort of freedom that the West likes.

00:08:19.000 Individualistic, authentic, authentic human freedom.

00:08:23.000 Sort of atomistic human freedom.

00:08:25.000 The 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.

00:08:32.000 Things that the West holds very, very dear in terms of individual rights.

00:08:37.000 For a lot of the world, that's not how they view freedom.

00:08:40.000 Both, I think, unfortunately.

00:08:42.000 But those sorts of institutions don't just magically take root.

00:08:45.000 You actually have to sit there for In the case of Japan, generations. 0.98

00:08:49.000 You have to sit there, in the case of South Korea, for generations. 0.80

00:08:53.000 And you have to be willing to actually expend the money and keep the soldiers over there.

00:08:58.000 And 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? 0.87

00:09:22.000 These countries are new creations, by the way.

00:09:23.000 I mean, Afghanistan was never a unified polity.

00:09:25.000 Iraq was not a unified polity for an extraordinary period of time.

00:09:29.000 People tend to forget that the nations of the Middle East We're not talking about Israel here.

00:09:33.000 The left likes to talk about how Israel was established 1947-1948, so it's new.

00:09:37.000 India and Pakistan were not established until 1947-1948 as separate polities.

00:09:41.000 The separation of India and Pakistan wasn't until 1948.

00:09:45.000 The idea of a Saudi Arabian government didn't exist until the 1920s.

00:09:49.000 So these are, in terms of human history, relatively new polities.

00:09:53.000 In fact, most nations seem to be somewhat new.

00:09:56.000 The nation of Italy, for example.

00:09:57.000 The 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.

00:10:07.000 But 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.

00:10:15.000 And the West didn't take that seriously.

00:10:17.000 It 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.

00:10:29.000 That was the third lesson.

00:10:31.000 The 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.

00:10:38.000 And this is something that the American people, as we will see in a second, seem to have forgotten.

00:10:42.000 We tend to talk a lot in the United States about the gaps between Florida and New York, between Texas and California.

00:10:47.000 And those gaps absolutely exist.

00:10:48.000 These are serious ideological gaps.

00:10:51.000 And those gaps seem to be getting wider in the United States.

00:10:53.000 Whatever those gaps are, those gaps are not nearly as wide as the gap between, say, Texas and Afghanistan, or California and Afghanistan.

00:11:00.000 And 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.

00:11:18.000 Or Iran. 0.63

00:11:20.000 These are disagreements in kind, okay?

00:11:22.000 These are not disagreements of degree.

00:11:24.000 I mean, these are differences in kind.

00:11:25.000 Over time, it may be that the disagreements in the West come to resemble the sort of tribalistic differences that we see elsewhere.

00:11:30.000 But, 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.

00:11:37.000 They thought to themselves, that's my fellow Americans who are dying in those towers.

00:11:41.000 Which is why you saw a mass upswing in the number of people who joined the military, for example.

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00:12:49.000 The final lesson that we learned in the aftermath of 9-11 was that our enemies do not think like we do.

00:12:55.000 That we think that when we are spreading liberal democracy or economic progress, that our enemies are going to be happy.

00:13:02.000 That when we bring additional material benefit to people around the world, that this is something they are going to appreciate.

00:13:09.000 And what we learned on 9-11 is that that's not actually the case.

00:13:12.000 Our enemies don't think like we do.

00:13:14.000 Our enemies don't have the same priorities that we do.

00:13:16.000 And 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.

00:13:30.000 And he leads off by saying, why did 9-11 happen?

00:13:32.000 Well, because Israel is bad and because the left funds Israel, which sounds very much like a left-wing talking point.

00:13:36.000 Sounds like Noam Chomsky.

00:13:38.000 And then, when it comes to domestic policy, he says, why do we hate you guys? 0.99

00:13:42.000 We hate you guys because of your sexual libertinism. 0.81

00:13:43.000 So a lot of people on the SoCon right were like, okay, well, he agrees with us on that. 0.98

00:13:48.000 Well, but he doesn't agree with any of you on any of this.

00:13:50.000 His holistic worldview is a replacement of all of the West with Islam, with a Sharia hardcore version of Islam. 0.98

00:13:58.000 He says this clearly in the manifesto.

00:14:00.000 What was amazing to watch in the aftermath of 9-11 is that people actually understood this.

00:14:04.000 Regardless 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.

00:14:23.000 And that's a real problem.

00:14:24.000 Okay, so, fast forward 21 years.

00:14:26.000 It's been a full generation. 0.79

00:14:27.000 And we've learned these lessons, we thought, right?

00:14:29.000 The world's a very small place.

00:14:30.000 You can't just surrender.

00:14:31.000 You can't just run away from it.

00:14:32.000 Weakness, economic, military, ideological, invites aggression.

00:14:37.000 And particularly the appearance of weakness invites aggression.

00:14:40.000 You have a lot more in common with your fellow Americans than you do with enemies of the United States.

00:14:44.000 Culture and institutions cannot be imposed except with extraordinary levels of investment and time.

00:14:48.000 And your enemies do not think like you do.

00:14:50.000 All these were lessons of 9-11 and we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them.

00:14:54.000 So for example, Joe Biden, there's something particularly galling about Joe Biden.

00:15:00.000 The President of the United States gave an address, we do this every year, we have these ceremonies commemorating 9-11.

00:15:05.000 But 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.

00:15:16.000 Here was Joe Biden on 9-11 yesterday.

00:15:18.000 21 years ago, 21 years and we still kept our promise.

00:15:25.000 Never forget.

00:15:27.000 We'll keep the memory of all those precious lives stolen from us.

00:15:35.000 2,977 at Ground Zero in New York and Shanksville where my wife is speaking now in Pennsylvania.

00:15:40.000 184 of them here at the Pentagon.

00:15:44.000 And I know for all those of you who've lost someone, 21 years is both a lifetime and no time at all.

00:15:53.000 And 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. 0.85

00:16:03.000 It's an amazing thing.

00:16:03.000 You want to talk about a full-scale forgetting of 9-11?

00:16:07.000 How 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?

00:16:17.000 There 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.

00:16:29.000 And lest we forget, it was only about a year ago that Joe Biden was trying to triumphantly champion his pullout from Afghanistan.

00:16:36.000 Well, the pullout from Afghanistan was a full-scale disaster area.

00:16:39.000 People attempting to jump on wheel wells to escape the Taliban who had been rushing into the cities. 0.90

00:16:45.000 Joe Biden's decision to withdraw all air support from Afghanistan, to withdraw all military advisors from Afghanistan.

00:16:53.000 That was Joe Biden's decision.

00:16:54.000 It's that first lesson that the world is a very small place.

00:16:57.000 And when you do this sort of thing, it has real spillover ramifications.

00:17:00.000 I mean, it had immediate ramifications in Afghanistan where 13 American service members were immediately murdered.

00:17:05.000 But it's not.

00:17:07.000 You don't get to run away from the world.

00:17:08.000 The very first lesson of 9-11, the world is a very small place.

00:17:12.000 Forgotten by Joe Biden nearly immediately.

00:17:13.000 How about weakness in any form invites aggression?

00:17:17.000 Well, I mean, it wasn't long between the pullout from Afghanistan and Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

00:17:23.000 He was obviously in the belief that the United States was not going to defend its allies.

00:17:27.000 After all, we had poured billions, tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan.

00:17:33.000 And then we just decided we were going to pull out.

00:17:36.000 And that made them the latest American ally for us to essentially abandon.

00:17:40.000 Weakness breeds aggression.

00:17:42.000 Joe Biden apparently doesn't see that, doesn't care about it.

00:17:45.000 Well, it wasn't something that made any sense to him.

00:17:47.000 He's forgotten about it.

00:17:48.000 It doesn't matter.

00:17:48.000 We've gone back to a time before 9-11.

00:17:50.000 And so, unfortunately, when people forget lessons of life, they tend to have to relearn those the hard way.

00:17:57.000 Meanwhile, you have people like Pramila Jayapal who are tweeting out about 9-11.

00:18:01.000 Quote, 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.

00:18:09.000 And this is the language of the Democrats.

00:18:11.000 Okay, so when Pramila Jayapal tweets that, number one, this is the second straight year where she said 2,996.

00:18:15.000 What you will remember is that 2,977 Americans were killed, 19 hijackers died committing suicide while attempting to murder Americans.

00:18:24.000 This is the second straight year she's included the hijackers and the number of dead from 9-11.

00:18:28.000 I'll assume that's unintentional and that all she's doing is just Wikipedia-ing the number of people who died in 9-11.

00:18:33.000 But, you know, that is something that she should absolutely correct.

00:18:36.000 But it's the broader point that she's making that is telling.

00:18:39.000 She says that 9-11 is when we remember people who died in the forever wars, these quote-unquote useless wars.

00:18:43.000 Well, it's easy to say.

00:18:45.000 And one of the great ironies of history, when you read enough history, is no one ever gets credit for the prevention.

00:18:51.000 You only get credit for the cure.

00:18:53.000 And 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.

00:19:08.000 If you never become obese and you don't have diabetes, that's a lot better.

00:19:12.000 Exercising now is a lot better than getting the diabetes and then having to deal and treat the diabetes.

00:19:19.000 But when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to politics, preventing the bad thing from happening is the thing that nobody sees.

00:19:25.000 So 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.

00:19:33.000 And instead what they do is they say, oh, well, look at what we're doing over here.

00:19:35.000 Look at all the resources we're spending over here.

00:19:37.000 Look at all the wasteful resources we're spending over here.

00:19:39.000 Well, because we don't have the counterfactual because the counterfactual didn't take place.

00:19:43.000 There wasn't.

00:19:43.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:19:45.000 Again, people don't remember 9-11.

00:19:46.000 The assumption in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 is that it was only the beginning.

00:19:49.000 There was talk about the possibility of, for example, a suitcase bomb being brought into New York City, right?

00:19:54.000 A nuke.

00:19:55.000 There was talk about the possibility of a large-scale biological attack.

00:19:58.000 Remember, right after this, there were a bunch of anthrax attacks in the United States.

00:20:02.000 There was a lot of concern about further terror attempts.

00:20:07.000 And the assumption now is that, oh, well, it's just a one-off.

00:20:10.000 They never had the capacity, that this was sort of unique.

00:20:12.000 But that was not the assumption in the wake of 9-11.

00:20:14.000 In the wake of 9-11, the assumption was we're going to get one of these every year.

00:20:18.000 Minimum.

00:20:19.000 That'd be very easy for the terrorists to actually kill an enormous number of Americans.

00:20:23.000 We spent extraordinary resources to prevent that.

00:20:26.000 And then it was largely prevented.

00:20:28.000 So does that mean that the threat never existed?

00:20:30.000 Or that we overestimated the threat?

00:20:31.000 Or does it mean that we actually did some stuff in our own blundering way that prevented more attacks from occurring?

00:20:37.000 But 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.

00:20:48.000 Because after all, you know, the world is a big place.

00:20:51.000 It's not a small place, it's a big place.

00:20:52.000 And stuff that happens far away doesn't affect us.

00:20:54.000 And after all, we can be as weak as we want and nobody's going to bother us.

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00:22:12.000 Okay, one of the other lessons of 9-11, obviously, is that we are supposed to be part of the same polity, right?

00:22:17.000 We are the same people.

00:22:19.000 Everyone who's live on 9-11 remembers that people got the American flags.

00:22:22.000 They started waving them for the first time in my lifetime.

00:22:24.000 Everybody sort of in unified fashion started waving the American flag.

00:22:27.000 They started putting American flag decals on their cars and they started getting the window flags to put on their own cars.

00:22:34.000 And then if you lived in L.A.

00:22:34.000 as 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.

00:22:44.000 The American flag was then gradually replaced in L.A.

00:22:46.000 by the Lakers flag.

00:22:47.000 A few years in, people started taking down the American flag and they replaced the car window American flag with other flags and other priorities.

00:22:56.000 And that happened pretty quickly.

00:22:58.000 So 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.

00:23:08.000 It is worthwhile remembering that this thing got very political very quickly.

00:23:13.000 It 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?

00:23:21.000 This 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.

00:23:32.000 Now, what that memo never said is that they were planning on actually hijacking airplanes and flying them into American towers.

00:23:38.000 What it said is that they thought it was going to be a hijacking just like any other terrorist hijacking.

00:23:41.000 There was a plan to hijack these airplanes and then use them in order to free other terrorists who were being held in American custody.

00:23:47.000 But the media and the Democrats immediately decided to jump on this because Bush's approval rating was in the 80s at the time.

00:23:52.000 And so Hillary Clinton got up on the floor of the Senate and suggested that essentially Bush knew what was going on.

00:24:00.000 DNC Chairman Howard Dean said on local radio that Bush was, quote, warned ahead of time by the Saudis.

00:24:05.000 The 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.

00:24:15.000 So the unity around this blew up pretty much immediately.

00:24:18.000 There was never a ton of unity around 9-11.

00:24:20.000 It lasted for about five seconds.

00:24:23.000 But now, of course, you have the Democratic Party essentially saying that if 9-11 happened now, that it would all fall apart.

00:24:28.000 Now, again, that's a bit of revisionist history.

00:24:30.000 We really didn't stick together very, very long at all.

00:24:32.000 But 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.

00:24:37.000 Here is Hillary Clinton over the weekend, asked about whether elected officials would sort of unify in the wake of a 9-11 today.

00:24:43.000 And she's saying she's not sure.

00:24:44.000 I mean, she forgets that they didn't unify for very long in the wake of 9-11 the first time.

00:24:49.000 The United States is resolute, and we are going to support the president.

00:24:53.000 Just 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.

00:25:02.000 Would that be possible today?

00:25:04.000 Well, I hope that it will be.

00:25:05.000 And 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.

00:25:16.000 Okay, it's just nonsense.

00:25:17.000 I'm sorry, it's just nonsense.

00:25:18.000 First of all, American policy has always been pretty fractious.

00:25:21.000 But 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.

00:25:32.000 I 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.

00:25:41.000 Hillary Clinton used 9-11 as a prop over the weekend to talk about the quote-unquote extremism of any kind in the United States.

00:25:47.000 Whatever 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.

00:25:56.000 It's insipid.

00:25:58.000 The 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. 0.98

00:26:08.000 They wished to kill as many Western Americans as possible. 0.79

00:26:12.000 I mean, there's no comp. 0.97

00:26:16.000 I mean, these are just not comparable.

00:26:17.000 But here was Hillary Clinton making that comparison over the weekend at the same time decrying the divisions in American politics. 1.00

00:26:21.000 You can't do both.

00:26:23.000 We rebuilt New York.

00:26:25.000 We have done our best to take care of the families that lost so much on that terrible day.

00:26:32.000 And 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.

00:26:55.000 I mean, the comparison between what happened on January 6th and 9-11 is wild.

00:27:00.000 That is a wild comparison.

00:27:02.000 January 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.

00:27:16.000 That 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.

00:27:28.000 Also, they didn't actually kill anyone that day.

00:27:31.000 It was not 9-11.

00:27:31.000 Pretending it was 9-11 is just... I mean, it was far closer to the riots of 2020 than it was to 9-11.

00:27:38.000 These are not remotely comparable.

00:27:39.000 But the Democrats decided to do that yesterday.

00:27:41.000 So 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.

00:27:48.000 Apparently the idea is that your real enemy is the person who lives next door to you.

00:27:51.000 And 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. 0.91

00:28:05.000 The real enemy is the guy who lives next door to you who flies the Trump flag.

00:28:07.000 Here's Mark Warner comparing Republican protesters from January 6th to 9-11 terrorists.

00:28:12.000 I was in the middle of a political campaign and suddenly the differences with my opponent seemed very small in comparison.

00:28:19.000 And our country came together.

00:28:21.000 In many ways, we defeated the terrorists because of the resilience of the American public, because of our intelligence community.

00:28:28.000 And we are safer, better prepared.

00:28:31.000 The 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.

00:28:43.000 Again, that is a clear and overt attempt to compare 9-11 to 1-6, and those are not the same thing.

00:28:50.000 They are just not.

00:28:51.000 Especially because the democratic idea here is to broaden out January 6th to include all Republicans.

00:28:56.000 If 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.

00:29:11.000 If you're one of those people, then you're a MAGA extremist in league with 1-6.

00:29:16.000 And 1-6 is just like 9-11.

00:29:18.000 So that lesson that we learned immediately after 9-11, which is that Americans are not your enemies.

00:29:21.000 Americans are your friends against the real enemies out there. 0.82

00:29:23.000 That's gone.

00:29:24.000 I mean, that is long gone at this point.

00:29:26.000 Here is Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the United States over the weekend, talking about letting extremists undermine.

00:29:30.000 Again, they talk about their fellow Americans the same way that Bush talked about Al Qaeda after 9-11.

00:29:38.000 As the President and our President made clear in Philadelphia last week, the threats we face as a nation are great.

00:29:47.000 Threats to our freedom.

00:29:50.000 Threats to our very democracy.

00:29:53.000 And we need to speak truth about that.

00:29:56.000 And so today, we all, by coming together, reaffirm that we refuse to let extremist so-called leaders dismantle our democracy.

00:30:11.000 She sounds like she's talking about Osama Bin Laden.

00:30:13.000 Is she not?

00:30:14.000 I mean, that is rhetoric that is identical to the rhetoric that was used by politicians of both parties in the aftermath of 9-11.

00:30:20.000 Which is truly wild.

00:30:22.000 So that lesson has been completely lost, right?

00:30:24.000 That we have to at least have a unified front against the bad guys out there.

00:30:26.000 Apparently the bad guys are the people who just go into the voting booth next door and vote the way that is other than yours.

00:30:33.000 By 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.

00:30:40.000 There's a poll out from Axios today.

00:30:41.000 It'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.

00:30:54.000 And this is true nearly everywhere.

00:30:56.000 Most people see politics as an extension of war by other means.

00:31:00.000 We do politics.

00:31:01.000 You draw, draw so you don't have to fight, fight.

00:31:03.000 In the words of Winston Churchill.

00:31:04.000 Except domestically.

00:31:05.000 That basically politics is a way that we avoid actual armed conflict with one another.

00:31:10.000 But 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.

00:31:23.000 If you see politics as merely war by other means, then what if you lose?

00:31:28.000 If you lose, then you start to look at the institutions and say, those institutions are my enemy.

00:31:31.000 And unfortunately, a broad swath of people, I think this is exist.

00:31:34.000 I don't think this is unique to America in 2022.

00:31:36.000 I think this exists across nearly every democracy, but it is very striking.

00:31:40.000 poll statistics showing how many people in the United States would rather win than sort of preserve the institutions.

00:31:46.000 And again, this is a bipartisan problem in the United States.

00:31:49.000 So for example, in this poll, people were asked, are strong unelected leaders better than weak elected ones?

00:31:55.000 Now there are a couple ways to read that question, right?

00:31:58.000 One is, is democracy better than dictatorship in all cases?

00:32:03.000 And honestly, it would be, you'd be hard pressed to say that democracy is better than dictatorship in literally every case.

00:32:08.000 I mean, there have been democracies in which Hamas is elected, right? 0.99

00:32:11.000 There's a democratic election in the Gaza Strip and a terrorist group got elected.

00:32:15.000 There have been democracies where truly evil people get elected.

00:32:18.000 And there have been dictatorships in which certain human rights were actually upheld, for example, Singapore.

00:32:24.000 So, 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.

00:32:32.000 They tried some democracy in Egypt and it ended with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge. 0.96

00:32:35.000 So, again, that is not saying that, broadly speaking, democracy is not better than dictatorship.

00:32:39.000 Broadly speaking, democracy is, of course, better than dictatorship, as Winston Churchill said.

00:32:43.000 Democracy is the worst system except for all of the others.

00:32:45.000 But, there are a couple ways to read this.

00:32:49.000 So, 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?

00:32:59.000 That's one way to read it, which is a real threat to democracy.

00:33:01.000 The 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?

00:33:12.000 And unsurprisingly, an enormous number of Americans on both sides of the aisle actually are warm toward the idea of a strong centralized power.

00:33:20.000 That is not a shock.

00:33:22.000 And Woodrow Wilson was very close to a dictator in the United States.

00:33:25.000 FDR was very close to a dictator in the United States.

00:33:27.000 Like people are very warm for dictatorial figures, just generally speaking.

00:33:31.000 Demagoguery will get you a long way in any country.

00:33:34.000 That's true in the United States right now.

00:33:35.000 Unsurprisingly, that favor, that poll, 42% of Republicans say that strong unelected leaders are better than weak elected ones.

00:33:42.000 And some people on the left are going to say, well, that means people are talking about Trump.

00:33:45.000 They'd rather have Trump as a dictator than Joe Biden as an elected leader.

00:33:49.000 It'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.

00:33:57.000 That, again, is not a unique thought in human history.

00:34:00.000 33% of Democrats agree, by the way.

00:34:02.000 So if you if you are a believer that democratic institutions are more important than the character and quality of an individual leader.

00:34:08.000 No matter where you are, there will always be a significant percentage of people in a democracy who disagree with that.

00:34:13.000 But is that a threat to democracy?

00:34:14.000 Well, it's certainly something we ought to take into consideration when we actually elect leaders.

00:34:17.000 We ought to elect leaders who are capable of doing the job and are strong in performance of their constitutional duties.

00:34:22.000 It turns out the best leader is a strong elected leader, not either a strong dictator or a weak elected leader.

00:34:27.000 The best is a strong elected leader, not in the sense of centralizing power, but in the sense of doing his duty.

00:34:31.000 OK, another question on the poll, and it just shows the flip side.

00:34:35.000 Presidents should be able to remove judges whose decisions go against the national interest.

00:34:39.000 This this question, frankly, seems to me a lot more specific than strong and elected leaders are better than weak elected ones.

00:34:47.000 Right, but.

00:34:48.000 Let's let's pretend that the questions are adjacent or equivalent.

00:34:53.000 42% of Democrats say that a president should simply be able to remove a judge she doesn't like, which is that's a really insane step.

00:34:58.000 By the way, 35% of Republicans agree.

00:34:58.000 Sorry, 35% total agree.

00:34:59.000 Sorry, 35% total agree, 29% of Republicans agree.

00:34:59.000 29% of Republicans agree.

00:35:05.000 So those are big numbers.

00:35:06.000 Basically, now you're getting into the water where at least one third of Americans just kind of like dictatorship.

00:35:12.000 And that's scary.

00:35:15.000 38% total of Americans say the government should side with the majority over ethnic or religious minority rights.

00:35:20.000 So the idea of rights should just not exist.

00:35:22.000 You should have a French Revolution style mobocracy, according to at least 38% of Americans.

00:35:27.000 So when people say that democracy is in danger from just the right side of the aisle, understand that that's not actually true.

00:35:31.000 It's always, you know, on a knife's edge, which is why you have to have people who act within the confines of institutions.

00:35:37.000 And 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.

00:35:46.000 And it's that system that preserves the idea of democracy.

00:35:48.000 Well, if it feels like America is on the verge of something bad, that's kind of economically true.

00:35:53.000 Inflation has a long way to go to get back to pre-pandemic levels.

00:35:56.000 Interest rates are going to continue to rise.

00:35:58.000 The Federal Reserve is trying to contain that inflation.

00:35:59.000 That means the economy is probably going to enter a fairly Significant recession?

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00:36:54.000 Well, as many of you know, Candace Owens has been out on maternity leave. 1.00

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00:37:30.000 Okay, so we are talking about the undermining of institutional trust in the United States.

00:37:33.000 And again, the lessons of 9-11.

00:37:36.000 If 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.

00:37:47.000 Everybody, 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.

00:37:55.000 That's not to say that Donald Trump hasn't done damage to our institutions.

00:37:58.000 He certainly has. 0.78

00:37:59.000 But the idea that Donald Trump is the chief threat to American institutions is just silliness.

00:38:03.000 It's just not real.

00:38:03.000 I mean, Donald Trump as the chief threat to America's institutions is not a reality.

00:38:09.000 Not when you have the Democrats who proclaim that they are all in favor of democratic institutions fundamentally undermining American institutions.

00:38:16.000 So, for example, How much confidence do you have in the Supreme Court?

00:38:21.000 I think this is an activist court.

00:38:22.000 What does that mean?

00:38:22.000 activist Supreme Court for overturning Roe versus Wade. Boy is she terrible at this.

00:38:26.000 How much confidence do you have in the Supreme Court?

00:38:28.000 I think this is an activist court.

00:38:32.000 What does that mean?

00:38:33.000 It 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.

00:38:58.000 And this court took that constitutional right away.

00:39:02.000 Okay, for 50 years in this country, there was a right established in Plessy v. Ferguson for railroad cars to segregate.

00:39:09.000 Then it was taken away in Brown v. Board.

00:39:12.000 I'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.

00:39:20.000 There is no right to abortion in the Constitution of the United States.

00:39:23.000 But again, you want to talk about the undermining of the American judicial system?

00:39:26.000 That would be it right there from Kamala Harris.

00:39:28.000 And that poll shows 42% of Democrats believe the president should simply be able to remove judges who disagree with him.

00:39:33.000 Meanwhile, you have Kamala Harris, who is a friend of democracy, saying that we have to ditch the filibuster entirely.

00:39:40.000 We need to make sure that you're able to ram through whatever you want with 51 votes in the Senate.

00:39:45.000 Our president has said he will not let the filibuster get in the way.

00:39:51.000 If the Senate, through a majority vote, votes to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, You know what that means?

00:39:58.000 In the midterms, we need to hold on to the Senate and get two more.

00:40:03.000 And then we can put into law the protections of Roe v. Wade.

00:40:06.000 Everything 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.

00:40:19.000 52 Senate seats or more.

00:40:21.000 Legislative filibuster gone or just on this issue?

00:40:25.000 The president has been clear on this issue and on a very important issue in addition to that important issue, which is voting rights.

00:40:32.000 Okay, so basically everything they want to ram through, they're just going to kill the filibuster.

00:40:35.000 If 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?

00:40:42.000 50 plus 1.

00:40:43.000 I mean, she's openly bragging about the fact that she's not doing anything in bipartisan fashion.

00:40:47.000 She 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.

00:40:55.000 Uh, no.

00:40:58.000 In 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.

00:41:09.000 So funny!

00:41:10.000 How about that?

00:41:14.000 I, with a bare majority, rammed things through bipartisanship.

00:41:20.000 Meanwhile, I got Al Franken, who's openly doubting the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

00:41:23.000 Don't worry, guys, democracy is in safe hands with the Democrats.

00:41:26.000 The legitimacy of the court was undermined when they wouldn't take up Merrick Garland.

00:41:31.000 And you'll remember that McConnell said it was because it was during election year.

00:41:36.000 And 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.

00:41:52.000 They've stolen two seats.

00:41:54.000 The 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.

00:42:06.000 That destroyed the legitimacy of the court.

00:42:10.000 There is no legitimacy to the court, according to Al Franken.

00:42:12.000 Don't worry, these are the great defenders of democracy.

00:42:15.000 By 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.

00:42:20.000 So 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?

00:42:27.000 What's the deal?

00:42:28.000 And so she has to dodge.

00:42:29.000 Here's Kamala Harris trying to bob and weave as though she has any capacity to do so and meet the press over the weekend. 1.00

00:42:35.000 When 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.

00:42:51.000 Would you have done this?

00:42:52.000 Is this something you'd be comfortable with?

00:42:54.000 I'm not gonna tell people how to run their campaigns, Chuck.

00:42:57.000 I ran statewide for Attorney General, re-election, won both times for Senate.

00:43:04.000 won 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.

00:43:17.000 Oh, 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.

00:43:30.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.

00:43:31.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:43:32.000 We'll be getting into Ukraine actually pushing Russia back, what that means globally speaking.

00:43:37.000 Plus, we are going to get to Hillary talking about her love for Megan Thee Stallion.

00:43:42.000 Yes, you are Thee Stallion.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 12, 2022

How America Forgot 9-11 | Ep. 1572

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