The Ben Shapiro Show - Hundreds Killed In Iran

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, all the celebrities are out, and they are showing their rage, their absolute rage, not at the Iranian government mowing people down in the streets, you know, at ICE.

00:00:08.000 Plus, we'll get to the latest in Iran, and President Trump goes after Jerome Powell with the law?

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00:00:43.000 So as epic things, cataclysmic proportions are happening over in Iran, apparently hundreds of protesters being shot to death at a minimum.

00:00:51.000 Could be all the way up to 10,000, according to certain eyewitnesses reporting to the BBC.

00:00:56.000 The folks in Hollywood have their priorities straight.

00:00:59.000 So, last night was the Golden Globes, and it was an opportunity for members of the Hollywood contingent to, of course, prize their pseudo-morality over everyone else's.

00:01:08.000 It was time for them to make a stand.

00:01:10.000 After all, they've made stands on issues ranging from Tibet back in the 90s, which they conveniently have now forgotten all about, In the Gaza Strip, remember that just last year, a bunch of Hollywood celebrities were prancing around like fools, claiming that a genocide that was not happening was, in fact, happening, and criticizing the state of Israel for defending its own existence.

00:01:34.000 Well, this year, they have a different cause because, hey, new day, new cause.

00:01:38.000 Now, is that cause the cause of the Iranian people who are out in the streets, risking their own deaths to defy the mullahs?

00:01:47.000 These people in Iran, many of them are secular.

00:01:51.000 Many of them are people who are westernized in their attitudes toward the state.

00:01:56.000 Are those the people toward whom Hollywood directs all of its sympathies?

00:02:01.000 Are they sparing a moment for those people?

00:02:03.000 Of course not.

00:02:04.000 Of course not.

00:02:04.000 Last night, Hollywood put on a show at the Golden Globes, and everything was about ICE.

00:02:09.000 It was all about ICE, and about LGBTQ, and about Barry Weiss taking over CBS.

00:02:14.000 Because you see, these are the real threats.

00:02:17.000 These are the real threats.

00:02:18.000 According to the people in Hollywood, the things that you should have your eyes focused on like a laser beam are the predations of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement enforcing the law with regard to illegal immigration and deporting people for welfare fraud.

00:02:34.000 You should have your eyes focused like a laser beam on Barry Weiss taking over CBS News and perverting it from its long history of not reporting the news properly.

00:02:44.000 You should be Terrible predations that affect LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign people all over the United States because, you know, they have to take refuge in places like the Golden Globes. 1.00

00:02:58.000 I mean, it is an act of bravery to stand up at the Golden Globes and virtue signal on behalf of the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign. 0.96

00:03:05.000 These are the things that matter most, according to Hollywood.

00:03:09.000 So last night, a bunch of celebs showed up. And again, they decided that the chief things you need to worry The thing that they are focused on as the moral guideposts, the lodestars of our civilization, those things are ICE, LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, and Barry Weiss.

00:03:28.000 So Nikki Glaser began the evening.

00:03:30.000 She was the hostess of the Golden Globes, and she began the evening by going after the most deserving target.

00:03:38.000 The thing that requires her absolute rage, that thing is Barry Weiss And the award for most editing goes to CBS News. 0.81

00:03:54.000 Yes, CBS News, America's newest place to see BS news.

00:04:02.000 It's a pun, because it's like, see BS. Man, she needs some new writers. 1.00

00:04:08.000 Not as good as her last Golden Globes performance.

00:04:11.000 Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo, who for some reason, I gotta say, Mark Ruffalo, overrated.

00:04:18.000 A performance where he wasn't playing Mark Ruffalo in the last 20 years.

00:04:22.000 He's just always Mark Ruffalo.

00:04:24.000 So, Mark Ruffalo shows up, and he says, you know, it's hard to pretend anymore that we don't live in a dictatorship, he says.

00:04:31.000 You know, wearing a tux at the Golden Globes, being paid millions of dollars to play the same character in Task that he has played in every other miniseries and movie for the last two decades.

00:04:43.000 I gotta be honest with you, I'm not feeling so great.

00:04:48.000 We have a woman, Renee Goode was murdered in our streets of America today and we got literally stormtroopers running around terrorizing and as much as I love all this I can't, I don't know if I could pretend like this crazy stuff isn't happening.

00:05:06.000 We have a president who says the laws of the world don't apply to him and we could rely on his morality but he has no morality.

00:05:15.000 So where does that leave us? Where does that leave the world?

00:05:17.000 So, I love these people.

00:05:20.000 I love you.

00:05:20.000 I love being here.

00:05:22.000 But also, it's so hard to pretend anymore.

00:05:26.000 This is crazy what's happening.

00:05:28.000 It's hard for him to pretend.

00:05:30.000 Being an actor, it's very, very difficult for him to pretend.

00:05:34.000 This is a person who, again, spent the last two years basically standing on behalf of terrorist groups in the Middle East, but it's very hard to pretend that there aren't stormtroopers wandering the street.

00:05:43.000 You know what's cool about being able to say that sort of thing?

00:05:45.000 That there aren't stormtroopers wandering the streets.

00:05:48.000 Because, you know, throughout history, when there were stormtroopers wandering the streets, you know what celebrities didn't get to do? Get on camera and talk about how there were stormtroopers wandering.

00:05:57.000 In fact, there are many places on Earth where the stormtroopers do wander the streets.

00:06:01.000 For example, in Iran, where there are, in fact, stormtroopers shooting people in the head for protesting.

00:06:07.000 Does Mark Ruffalo have a word for them?

00:06:08.000 He has a little pin that says, Be good.

00:06:08.000 No.

00:06:11.000 Be good.

00:06:12.000 Be presumably like Rene Good.

00:06:14.000 A reference to the woman who was shot by an ICE agent after directing her car to bump one of those ICE agents at the very least, after obstructing traffic for three full minutes trying to stop ICE from doing its job.

00:06:28.000 It is incredible to me how we just have to rewrite the histories.

00:06:32.000 And it happens on all sides, but in this particular case from the left, you have to rewrite a history that we watched happen in front of us five days ago, four days ago.

00:06:41.000 And we've all seen the tape.

00:06:44.000 Renee Good was there to obstruct ICE enforcement action. 1.00

00:06:47.000 That is a federal crime.

00:06:48.000 She did so. She did so for a very long period of time.

00:06:52.000 In fact, here is Renee Good. 0.99

00:06:55.000 This is Renee Goodpark for three full minutes, perpendicularly to traffic, attempting to block ICE from doing its job. 1.00

00:07:08.000 People are probably, look, she's dancing in her car as she honks, right? 0.53

00:07:14.000 ICE is trying to You can see the line of cars, and she's just parked that way.

00:07:25.000 and this is, you know, her backing up.

00:07:27.000 She's being approached by agents.

00:07:33.000 Here she is, right?

00:07:38.000 There she is, just pulling up. She's waving through people who are not cops. 0.99

00:07:42.000 But then she has stopped, and this tape cuts off just before the shooting happens.

00:07:46.000 We also, by the way, have footage of Renee Good before her death, taunting the feds.

00:07:50.000 She thought it was fun and games, okay?

00:07:51.000 That is pretty clearly the truth from the tape.

00:07:55.000 She thought that what was happening was not serious business.

00:07:59.000 That obstructing federal law enforcement came without any sort of real consequence, and then when they approached her presumably to detain or arrest her, that is when she took off with the car.

00:08:08.000 And again, that is not speaking to her intent as to whether she wanted to hit the officer or not.

00:08:13.000 But the fact is that when you resist federal law enforcement and your car hits an agent, bad things happen.

00:08:23.000 I'm just pointing this out because wearing pins that say be good as though She was walking down the street doing nothing and then she was shot by federal enforcement agents?

00:08:30.000 That is not true.

00:08:32.000 You don't have to do a revisionist history to say this is a tragedy.

00:08:34.000 But you should actually spell out the facts of the case.

00:08:37.000 You can hear an officer get out of his car.

00:08:47.000 Walks over with his phone.

00:08:49.000 Walks around the front of the car.

00:08:52.000 She's smiling in the car, by the way.

00:08:54.000 That's fine.

00:08:54.000 Do you have plates every morning?

00:09:00.000 Just so you know.

00:09:01.000 It'll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.

00:09:04.000 That is Renee Good's wife. 0.99

00:09:04.000 That's fine. 0.99

00:09:09.000 You want to come at us? I said go get yourself some lunch, big boy.

00:09:12.000 Get out of the car.

00:09:17.000 Get out of the car.

00:09:22.000 And so that is the footage of the shooting.

00:09:27.000 But as you can see, up until the moment that Renee Good tries to drive away, there is no perception that she's doing anything wrong.

00:09:34.000 I mean, she's taunting the police officers at the time. 0.90

00:09:36.000 So again, that doesn't mean that she was trying to kill the police officer.

00:09:39.000 I don't know what she was trying to do. Did the officer?

00:09:42.000 Have a reasonable supposition that he was under attack by the car?

00:09:46.000 I mean, it's going to be hard after that footage to deny that he had at least an objectively reasonable suspicion that she was attempting to direct the car into him, given her absolute disdain for law enforcement as she was violating federal law at the time.

00:09:58.000 The only reason that this is important in the context of the Golden Globes is if you're going to wear pins saying, be good, as though Renee Goode, again, was just walking down the street and was shot.

00:10:08.000 And we've seen this so many times.

00:10:11.000 With the virtue signaling left.

00:10:12.000 We've seen it so many times, ranging from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where they lied and they said that he was shot in the back, or that he was shot while he was holding his hands up. We've seen it so many times.

00:10:23.000 To, by the way, George Floyd, claiming that there was no prior medical issue with George Floyd before he was taken out and put on the ground.

00:10:30.000 We've gone in detail through the tape of George Floyd, what actually happened, what happened with Officer Derek Chauvin and all the rest.

00:10:37.000 The desperate desire and need.

00:10:39.000 To create a full-on black and white narrative with regard to what are very tragic and very often shaded incidents is truly an astonishing thing. And that's what Hollywood does best, but they always seem to pick the side that opposes law enforcement, opposes the West as a general rule. All right, coming up more from our most esteemed moral critics over at the Golden Globes. First, this episode is sponsored by Preborn Ministries. During this Sanctity of Life month,

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00:12:02.000 Slash ben or dial pound 250 and use keyword baby.

00:12:05.000 Here's Mark Ruffalo continuing to rant while wearing the Renee Good pin Mark.

00:12:12.000 What's the pin for Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered.

00:12:17.000 We have a vice president is lying about what's happening.

00:12:19.000 We have a um.

00:12:21.000 We're in the middle of a war with Venezuela that we illegally invaded.

00:12:26.000 He's telling the world that international law doesn't matter to him.

00:12:30.000 The only thing that matters to him is his own morality.

00:12:32.000 But the guy is a convicted felon or convicted, he's a. 1.00

00:12:37.000 He's the worst human being. 0.85

00:12:39.000 If we're relying on this guy's morality for the most powerful country in the world, then we're all in a lot of trouble. 0.91

00:12:45.000 So this is for her.

00:12:47.000 This is for the people in the United States who are terrorized and scared today.

00:12:51.000 I know i'm one of them.

00:12:53.000 I love this country and what i'm seeing here happening is not America, it's not.

00:12:59.000 why do you feel that this platform is still useful to spread a message like this? Listen, I want to pretend like this. I want to be here to celebrate. And I am here to celebrate. And I'm proud to have a Golden Globe nomination. But also, this is not normal anymore. This is not normal. By the way. In that little speech right there, he slandered the president of the United States as a pedophile, called him the worst person in the world for, among other things, extraditing Nicolas Maduro,

00:13:25.000 a communist dictator responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of people and the exile of literally millions of people. And that, to Mark Ruffalo, is a big moral problem. Donald Trump is the big moral problem. Again, not a word to spare for the millions marching in the streets in Iran right now, thousands of whom are getting mowed down. By the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Ariana Grande also showed up wearing her ice-out pin. This is the new hot thing in Hollywood,

00:13:51.000 your ice-out pin. And frankly, any amount of weight added to her garment puts her at risk of falling over, Ariana Grande. And Jean Smart also wore a Be Good pin. This is like the popular accoutrement of the night. She was wearing her pin. She also told the New York Post,

00:14:08.000 quote, I'm here speaking as a citizen and a mom, and I hope people understand that. And then she said, I don't think my opinion matters more than anybody's. That's not what I'm doing. I feel like if you feel strongly about something and you have a chance to share your feelings or encourage people or cheer somebody on, you should do it. Well, I have a feeling that that same feeling is not extended at the Golden Globes generally to people who might feel the opposite. I don't know. Call me crazy. So, this is where Hollywood puts its priorities. Wanda Sykes, of course,

00:14:35.000 showed up to talk about LGBTQ minus divided by sign. Here's Wanda Sykes at the Golden Globes. You know there's some people pissed off that a queer black woman is up here doing the job of two mediocre white guys. No one cares. And also, 1.00

00:14:52.000 you're not good at this. I mean, both those things. Literally, no one cares. The fact you have to keep saying it over and over shows that no one cares. But this is where Hollywood puts its priorities. The reason I say this is because there are people on Earth. What a spoiled country you are. Truly a spoiled country. There are people on Earth who are literally putting their lives at risk,

00:15:10.000 their And Hollywood has nothing to say to them. Nothing. Literally nothing. Dead silence. Are you seeing the protests on campuses in favor of the Iranian people right now? Have you seen a single protest? You have not. Have you seen a single mass protest by all of these international law-loving,

00:15:30.000 human rights-adoring left-wingers? The Zorhan Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party Horrifying theocratic regime gone. Have you seen a single comment,

00:15:45.000 in fact, from Democrats beyond these sort of thoughts and prayers? You have not. Have you seen protests in the streets? You have not. Have you seen calls for material aid? You have not. It's all just sad sack nonsense. It truly is because there are people in the world who are doing something courageous and incredible right now. According to certain eyewitnesses to the BBC. The number of people killed is well into the thousands at this point. Again,

00:16:14.000 we are now in day 14 of the protests that have been going on around Iran. Millions of people in the streets. According to the Washington Post, at least hundreds of demonstrators have been killed in Iran, according to rights groups on Sunday, as reports of a dramatic escalation in the use of deadly force by security forces began to break through a communications blackout imposed by authorities struggling to contain some of the largest protests since the Islamic Republic was Trump administration and national security officials were preparing to discuss options,

00:16:43.000 including possible military strikes, a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post. At the very least, if the United States is considering that, we ought to be moving aircraft carriers into the region. We have not so far mobilized resources into the region. Now, obviously, we have some resources at air bases in the Middle East, but if you're going to have a supported operation or if you wanted to threaten one, presumably you should at least put those The Center for Human Rights in Iran, based in New York,

00:17:12.000 said it had received eyewitness accounts and credible reports that hundreds of protesters have been killed since the government shut down access to the internet on Thursday night. A senior Western official briefed on the matter said hundreds were killed in 48 hours of protests. It's hard to gather credibility,

00:17:28.000 incredible casualty figures apparently because the protests are so widespread. According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration is considering military options in response to the crackdown. Officials across the key national security agencies were scheduled to brief President Trump early this week. President Trump himself suggested in a press gaggle on Air Force One that Iran seems to be killing the protesters. He has said that if they start shooting the protesters,

00:17:54.000 that's a red line for him. President Trump, unlike Barack Obama, unlike Joe Biden, is not one to have his red line crossed repeatedly without doing anything. Here's the president. There seem to be some people killed that aren't supposed to be killed. These are violent. If you call them leaders,

00:18:11.000 I don't know if they're leaders or just they rule through violence. But we're looking at it very seriously. The military is looking at it. And we're looking at some very strong options. We'll make a determination. Meanwhile,

00:18:25.000 the Wall Street Journal points out that Iran is in an unprecedentedly weak position, probably the weakest position that the Iranian regime has been in since 1979. The reason being, Israel's 12-day war followed by the American strike on the That the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is not competent,

00:18:43.000 they're not good at anything apparently aside from shooting their own citizens. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Ayatollah's rule was shaped by the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The social compact that endured since that trauma was that Iranians would acquiesce to hardship and restrictions in return for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack. That assumption came crashing down. When Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel in 2023, 0.74

00:19:08.000 triggering a regional war that brought death and destruction into the heart of Tehran last summer. Now protesters are braving arrest or bullets, as they demand not just changes in policy, but the downfall of the Islamic Republic itself. Ali Veyaz, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, says, This was the last straw. The regime over the years had argued that although it has not been able to bring about prosperity or pluralism for the Iranians, at least it had brought them safety and security. Turns out it didn't. Now the people have reached the point of saying, enough. Is enough. So,

00:19:38.000 it'll be interesting to see where things go from here. Obviously, the IRGC is the real power in Iran, and whoever has the guns makes the rules, the general rule of foreign policy. However, if the population mobilizes in serious fashion against the IRGC, and if President Trump keeps his word, that if the IRGC keeps mowing down Iranians in the streets, there'll be some sort of military action,

00:20:01.000 thus demonstrating that the IRGC is unable to stand up. To foreign military intervention? Or let's say the United States starts simply capturing all of the Iranian oil ships that are wandering around the globe in violation of sanctions right now. That's continuing to destroy the Iranian economy. How exactly does the IRGC hold up its end of the bargain? It does take money to keep the IRGC in line. It does take money,

00:20:29.000 just like it does in Venezuela. You got to pay off all of your apparatchiks. You got to give them the nice houses. You have to give them the nice cars. If you don't have those things to give away, it makes it difficult to keep them in line. Because then they say, what am I shooting my neighbor for?

00:20:43.000 At least if I was shooting my neighbor and getting a nicer house out of it, that's one thing.

00:20:46.000 But if there is no money to go around, then at that point, perhaps the IRGC support for the regime bleeds away.

00:20:54.000 That at least is the recommendation that is currently being made by Saeed Ghassamenejad and Ben Taleblu over in the Wall Street Journal, saying that just as the United States did with Venezuela, we can simply cut off the oil supplies from Iran.

00:21:10.000 They say Mr. Trump can change the impression that Washington will sit this out by targeting the regime's economic arteries and signal to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that the price of slaughtering his own people is the total collapse of his state's financial viability.

00:21:23.000 Iran is already under severe economic strain.

00:21:25.000 Its currency has fallen.

00:21:26.000 When we say it's fallen, by the way, we mean that the Iranian real amounts to something like point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one dollars, something like that. 0.88

00:21:36.000 Tehran still exports more than two million barrels of oil a day, which generates revenue to fund its proxies and oppress Iranians and advance their ballistic missile and nuclear program to break the regime's will. 0.53

00:21:46.000 these commentators suggest the U.S. must move beyond designating vessels on paper and start physically confiscating the tankers that transfer the Iranian oil. The U.S. already has the legal tools to do this. Civil forfeiture allows the U.S. to seize the illicit cargo and the tanker itself. Oil is a renewable resource,

00:22:02.000 but a specialized tanker is a strategic asset. A seizure is a foreclosure. We just need to actually take the tanker. So that is one suggestion that has been put out there. There has also been the suggestion that the United States strike directly at particular IRGC facilities in Tehran,

00:22:20.000 their specific command and control centers that if taken out would seriously degrade the regime's ability to crack down on the dissidents who are in the streets. There's supposed to be a meeting on Tuesday between Secretary of State Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Joint Chiefs Chair General Dan Kaine with the President of the United States about which sort of steps should be deployed. Obviously, lack of internet access in Iran is a major problem right now. My understanding is that Starlink is being activated over Iran or already is active over Iran,

00:22:49.000 but there are not enough sort of dishes, receiving bases in Iran to do it. That seems to be the current claim, anyway. Here's President Trump talking about activating Starlink in Iran. Well,

00:23:05.000 we're going to be talking about that. We may get the internet going, if that's possible. We may speak to Elon, because as you know, he's very good at that kind of thing. He's got a very good company. So we may speak to Elon Musk. In fact,

00:23:20.000 I'm going to call him as soon as I'm finished with you. President Trump suggested that the leaders of Iran have called to negotiate. I'm not sure exactly what they would negotiate at this point. They have no trust. They continue to speak publicly about how much they hate President Trump and are not going to listen to President Trump. Jacob Helberg,

00:23:40.000 State Department Undersecretary for Economic Affairs, wrote Sunday on social media that President Trump's strategy of maximum pressure has brought the regime to its knees. President Trump on Saturday posted to social media, Iran is looking at freedom,

00:23:53.000 perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help. And he linked to a story Who removed Iran's flag from its embassy and replaced it with an anti-regime banner. The State Department posted on X, do not play games with President Trump. When he says he'll do something, he means it. Now,

00:24:11.000 Vice President JD Vance suggested that the smartest thing for the Iranians to do is for them to have a real negotiation with the United States about their nuclear program. Okay, I'm sorry. That's nonsense. That's just crap. That's silly. I like the Vice President, but that's nonsense. The notion that the Iranians could make any guarantee to the United That would now be sufficient to quiet our concerns about the revival of a nuclear program is silly talk. It is undermining, by the way,

00:24:37.000 the protesters who are in the streets. If the suggestion is that if the mullahs say pretty words, then the United States will withdraw its support for the protesters and watch them get mowed down by the thousands, that is a problem. That is foolish. Again, none of this is a call for hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Iran. Again, no one is talking about Iraq. The Iraq War syndrome, as I discussed last week, is broken. No one wants a gigantic American occupation of Iran. No one. That's silly talk. The question is,

00:25:05.000 what options are on the table that would protect the protesters, weaken the regime, and allow the Iranian people to take the situation into their own hands? And obviously, there's a risk-reward calculation here that has to be made by the President of the United States. Tehran is suggesting that it will consider targeting U.S. military facilities, as well as Israel, if it detects signs of an impending attack. Now, realistically speaking, if Iran were to strike back,

00:25:31.000 Let's say that the United States were to fly some F-16s into Iran, take out some IRGC facilities, and then Iran were to fire a bunch of missiles at Qatari airbases, Al-Udeid, for example.

00:25:42.000 First of all, their retaliatory response thus far has been lackluster, shall we say.

00:25:48.000 Israel completely defenestrated Iran's military in the 12-day war earlier last year.

00:25:54.000 But if the Iranian government truly decides to attack American troops in the region in retaliation for a couple of pinpoint strikes, deterring the IRGC from murdering people in the streets, that will be the end of the regime, and it will be performed largely through air power.

00:26:11.000 And no one is talking about a full-scale boots-on-the-ground intervention in Iran.

00:26:16.000 I'm going to say that over and over and over because a bunch of people will lie to you.

00:26:19.000 They're going to lie to you.

00:26:21.000 They'll spend all day today.

00:26:22.000 tomorrow and the next day playing defense for the Iranian regime. By claiming that somehow the stability of a mullah-led regime is the superior option in a country of 80 million people, the vast bulk of whom wish not to live under a mullah-ocracy,

00:26:37.000 and where there was a functioning government before, and this bizarre notion that the best available option is to keep the mullahs in place. How? And why? And the gigantic lie upon which that is predicated,

00:26:53.000 which is that the only two choices, the false choice, is between keeping the mullahs in place Negotiating with them. Massaging them. Allowing them to shoot people in the streets. That's one choice. And the other choice is full-scale 200,000 American troops on the ground in Tehran. Nonsense. Absolute tripe. People who are spewing it are as full of it as they were back in June when they suggested that World War III would break out if the United States struck the Fordo nuclear facility. Of course,

00:27:18.000 none of that happened. The reason that Iran is saying all of this, of course, is to create precisely that sort of dyspepsia inside the United States. That doesn't mean, by the way,

00:27:31.000 that there isn't risk. Here's a map, for example, of American bases in the Middle East. The United States has a wide variety of bases all over the Middle East. You can see them ranging from Kuwait to Qatar. The United States has bases that are close to the border of Iran and Iraq. Those are very real concerns,

00:27:52.000 and no one is pretending those away. But I promise you, the military options being considered by the Trump administration To want to engage America in an Iraq-like war. I mean, President Trump literally was elected to office in 2016 on the basis of breaking with his party and arguing against the Iraq war. If you think Trump wants to be involved in something like that, out of your mind. But, obviously,

00:28:18.000 the United States has a presence at, for example, Erbil Air Base. The United States has a presence at Balad Air Base. The United States has a large presence, of course, in Qatar, some in Bahrain, some in UAE. Could the Iranians strike at that and provide risk to American troops? Of course. So, that is why you have people like General Dan Raisin-Kane in charge of military option-making and Secretary of State Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and all the rest. Now, 0.87

00:28:47.000 what is certainly untrue, what is truly silly, is the perspective taken by Senator Tim Kaine. Remember, this guy was almost Vice President of the United States under Hillary Clinton, Senator Tim Kaine. I know, you forgot about him. He's the other Tim, not Walls, Kaine. He says that if the United States were involved in the toppling of the mullahs, this would somehow be reminiscent of the toppling of the Iranian president, Mohammad Mosaddegh, back in 1953. First of all,

00:29:14.000 that's silly. The reality is that the toppling of Mosaddegh was not, in fact, a predominantly Western operation. It was a domestic operation by the Shah of Iran who had the constitutional power to get rid of Mosaddegh. But put that aside. Put aside the actual history of what happened in Iran. In 1953, even if you want to make the case that Mossadegh was somehow a popular leader, a case unsupportable in historical records since he tried to literally dissolve the legislature and the judiciary, even if you want to make that case,

00:29:42.000 is the claim here that the Iranian people are in favor of the mullahs and that the fall of the mullahs would somehow be anti-Iranian people who are out there by the millions protesting in the dark with no internet? Margaret, U .S. Military action in Iran would be a massive Mistake.

00:30:02.000 It would have the effect of giving the Iranian regime the ability to say it's the U .S. That's screwing our country Up. 0.75

00:30:11.000 U .S. Military action would just bring back the painful history of the U .S. Toppling the Iranian prime minister back in the 1950s and would give the regime the ability to blame their own failures on the United States.

00:30:27.000 They're literally already doing it.

00:30:28.000 they're already doing it so the idea is that you can never do great So the coin toss is, heads I win, tails you lose.

00:30:36.000 The idea is, Iran will blame the United States if we do Nothing.

00:30:39.000 And Iran will also blame the United States if we do Something. 0.66

00:30:41.000 The question here is just what would be the most effective thing at the lowest risk to the United States?

00:30:45.000 Period.

00:30:46.000 Because would the geopolitical balance of power shift dramatically in America's To be overthrown and something America -friendly put in place?

00:30:54.000 Absolutely.

00:30:55.000 Iran is one of the biggest suppliers of oil to China on planet Earth.

00:30:58.000 Iran's support for the Chinese regime and the Russian regime, by the way, is exorbitant. It is Iranian drones that are flying into Ukrainian buildings in Ukraine. Iran has been an oil supplier and military weaponry supplier to places like Russia and an oil supplier to places like China for decades,

00:31:18.000 aside from funding literally every terrorist group around the region. But the change that would happen in the Middle East if the Iranian regime were to fall, and again, for the 100th time, no one is calling for boots on the ground, 100,000 strong invasion of Iran. No one. We are talking now about what is the most efficacious action that could be taken to shift the geopolitics of the Middle East. If that were to happen, it would not only be a boon to the Iranian people, which of course would be fabulous,

00:31:48.000 it would also be a boon to the broader Middle East and to American interests worldwide. The Trump administration knows that. That is why President Trump. is considering some form of action in Iran. But thankfully, thankfully, we have the Hollywood coterie to inform us that the real issue we should all be worried about is not what's happening in Iran. It's the fact that ICE is trying to do its job. Meanwhile, the chaos surrounding ICE continues largely because the left has decided to turn ICE into a national issue. And again,

00:32:16.000 what President Trump has been doing with ICE is highly controversial because he has been deploying large scale ICE raids into particular left wing areas. Is that the best way of addressing the problem? Well, it accomplishes two things. One, actually, criminal illegal immigrants are being arrested and deported. And two, it is making clear to illegal immigrants that it may happen to them. And so you're getting an enormous amount of self-deportation. That really is the purpose of what is going on right now. Now, with that said,

00:32:43.000 everything in American politics gets boiled down into the dumbest version of itself. That is what has happened with the Rene Good situation. We played the tape a little bit earlier. Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Had a bit of a hot interview with Jake Tapper over on CNN. They got into the tape of Renee Good and also, comparatively, the tape of the shooting of Ashley Babbitt on January 6th. Because the point that Tapper is making is, if Ashley Babbitt was a victim, why is Renee Good a victim? By the way, 0.97

00:33:13.000 my perspective on both of those cases is that law enforcement was investigated in both of those cases or will be investigated in the case of Renee Good. And the question, as always, is objective fear of a reasonable officer. And Ashley Babbitt was breaking through an area of the Capitol building when she was shot by the available data. Does that mean that what happened to her wasn't a tragedy? No. Does that mean that she intended death on the officer? Also no. But that's not the question. Again,

00:33:39.000 it all comes down to the objective, reasonable expectation of the officer. The problem that I have in analyzing, again, many of these situations is try to look at the objective facts. Without reference to the politics of the people involved. Anyway, here was Jake Tapper with Christy Noem of DHS. The first thing you said was, quote, what happened was our ICE officers were out in an enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out their vehicle,

00:34:08.000 And a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. 0.95

00:34:13.000 That's not what happened.

00:34:14.000 We all saw what happened.

00:34:15.000 It absolutely is what happened.

00:34:16.000 Those officers had been out in an enforcement action.

00:34:19.000 A vehicle had been stuck.

00:34:20.000 They had come to help get that vehicle out.

00:34:22.000 That's when this individual started blocking traffic for minutes and minutes.

00:34:27.000 You said that the woman attacked them and surrounded them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle, Blocked the road for a long time and was yelling at them and impeding a federal law enforcement investigation.

00:34:39.000 I just showed you video of people attacking law enforcement officers.

00:34:46.000 Undisputed proof, Undisputed evidence.

00:34:48.000 And I just said President Trump pardoned all of them.

00:34:50.000 And you said that President Trump is enforcing all the laws equally.

00:34:54.000 It's just not true.

00:34:56.000 There's a different standard for law enforcement officials being attacked if they're being attacked by Trump supporters.

00:35:01.000 We just saw that.

00:35:03.000 This individual and these instances and these investigations all have to be taken and done and done correctly, in context of every situation that is happening on the ground.

00:35:12.000 So what we are doing today, as the Department OF Homeland Security is out there with our law enforcement officers making sure that we're targeting the worst of the worst and that we're talking factually about each situation.

00:35:24.000 Okay, so literally that's what you should have done in the first place. Again, I said this when this news broke is that She should have waited until the investigation was done and all the tape was out. The attempt to jump to conclusions by everyone at all times is the enemy of good sense and also conciliation in the American Republic. If you just jump to whatever is your favorite narrative,

00:35:42.000 regardless whether you're left or right, in the middle of a fraught situation, you very often end up getting it wrong and making things worse in the process because you end up having to double down. Again, whether you are left or right, the left has doubled down on the idea. That Renee Goode did nothing wrong whatsoever, that she was, you know, just an innocent who happened to be in a place at a time, which is not true. And then, of course, Kristi Noem's original statement had problems with it, for sure. The bottom line, however, is that all of this is adding fuel to the fire for all of the anti-ICE protesters, which, of course,

00:36:10.000 will lead to more confrontations with ICE, which will lead to more violence, because you cannot have more confrontation with the cops without it eventually leading to some violence. According to the Daily Following the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, the radical Ice Watch organization she was working with is pushing to get more activists onto the streets. The Ice Watch groups, which organize activists to follow and obstruct federal immigration agents making arrests across the country,

00:36:35.000 are trying to get more activists out onto the streets where the Trump administration has warned they could put their lives in danger. On Saturday, thousands of activists participated in a church training in Roseville, Minnesota,

00:36:46.000 where they were encouraged One of the local Minneapolis ice watch groups known as Defend the 612 held a training day the day after the shooting for anyone who wants to learn how to plug in and for those who have already been in the streets and can share lessons from that experience. So this is just going to continue. Meanwhile,

00:37:06.000 ice out for good protests rallied nationwide over the weekend. They're expected to be in the tens of thousands in Minneapolis. Here's some footage of a large Protest in Minneapolis. Thousands of demonstrators gathering today in the cold to make their voices heard following Wednesday's fatal shooting of Rene Good. Their message was clear. They want ICE out of the city of Minneapolis and they are furious over the killing of Rene Good. Now,

00:37:35.000 that protest began, like I mentioned, here at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, which is located less than a mile away from where Rene Good was shot and killed by an immigration officer on Wednesday morning. Now, again, the rhetoric being used is unhinged. I mean, listen,

00:37:50.000 you can look right there. There's a sign in the background that shows a swastika being crossed out saying no fascism. The members of ICE are not the Storm Abdullam. They're not. They're not the SA. They're not the SS. This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. You need to stop this. It's ridiculous. One protester was with our own Breka Stoll, who's been on the ground covering all of this, and compared ICE to the SS, which, of course, if ICE were the SS, this lady wouldn't be on the streets in the first place. We've heard a lot of people today,

00:38:19.000 we went to protests that talked about how ICE isn't a real job. Do you think ICE is a real job? I mean, I think that ICE is a real job in the same way that being a member of the SS was a real job. Sure,

00:38:35.000 it's a job. It's a job that the people hold it should be condemned for and ashamed of. Okay, then. Meanwhile, that is being echoed by Again, A man who wants to run for president for no reason I can discern, says that it's inhumane and illegal.

00:38:55.000 What happened here?

00:38:58.000 Well, of course you need a domestic enforcement mechanism for the immigration laws of this country.

00:39:04.000 But the way in which ICE is operating today is inhumane and illegal.

00:39:09.000 This is the most high profile and most heinous act of violence that has been undertaken, But there have already been over a dozen shootings all across our country by ICE officers.

00:39:21.000 The bottom line is that the way in which DHS is conducting itself today is making our communities less safe. It's not adding to public safety. They're not adding to public safety. What would add to public safety is presumably not enforcing the law. Representative Ayanna Pressley, the Ringo Starr of the squad. She's always the one who gets forgotten, right? You got AOC, and Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. So many luminaries, and then you have Ayanna Pressley, who just sort of gets forgotten. Here she was,

00:39:49.000 trying to out-compete them by saying that President Trump is a dictator now. Again, if you lived in a dictatorship, you know what you wouldn't be able to say? Any of this. Ice. Cannot be reformed. This has nothing to do with training or new protocols. This is about cultural practices that have been underway for many years. And again,

00:40:11.000 not only the brutality and the constitutional abuses of ICE in our streets, but what is happening in our ICE facilities where people are being detained in warehouses and many of them unlawfully. We have had over 30 deaths in ICE facilities. So again,

00:40:30.000 keep ratcheting it up. Ilhan Omar says that ICE is an occupying force. Again, this terror group sympathizer says that ICE is an occupying force. All right. Federal law enforcement is being sent as an occupying force. This is to create fear, It's to terrorize our communities, it is to tell us that we are powerless.

00:40:55.000 And it is dangerous because the American people are used to knowing their constitutional rights.

00:41:01.000 The American people know that ICE agents and border control agents have no jurisdiction over them in our urban cities.

00:41:11.000 They know that they're only supposed to interact with them if they're crossing a border or if they're doing something that relates to immigration and customs.

00:41:20.000 So this doesn't make any sense.

00:41:22.000 And what this administration is looking for is for there to be deadly encounters so that they can revoke the Insurrection Act and have martial law.

00:41:34.000 And it is a dangerous, dangerous escalation that they're looking for. And Minneapolis residents are not going to give them that. Wait, so she just said that ICE doesn't have any internal authority in the United States? They don't have the capacity to do, like, immigration raids at all, according to Ilhan Omar? American citizens and Americans generally, people who live in America, don't have to be worried about, you know, ICE knocking on your door if you are engaged in welfare fraud and you are an illegal immigrant Somali? Okay, then. Meanwhile, Tom Homan,

00:42:02.000 apparently the only sane person in the room, he says ICE is, you know, looking for dangerous people because that's what we actually do. ICE is out looking for dangerous people. It's not okay to impede and interfere with an officer. Would it be okay if a citizen impeded, interfered with a U.S. Marshal arresting a fugitive? No. Is it okay if they stood in before the FBI when they're going to arrest a terrorist? No. These are targeted enforcement operations. They're arresting bad people. And it's illegal. Let's remember,

00:42:31.000 what she did was a crime. It's illegal to interfere and impede ICE law enforcement officers. That's why we're there. You know, as Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, has pointed out, speaking with Chris Rufo, these groups don't exist in a vacuum. Someone finances them. When you see these protesters,

00:42:48.000 someone is financing them. There are safe houses that when you see the 300 people with the same laser that they're using to blind DHS agents in courthouses in Portland, someone bought those lasers. And again, what we do is Follow the money. Just like we followed it with the mafia, just like we followed it with the drug cartels. And we will find out who's done this. So, again,

00:43:15.000 the fact that this is ratcheting up and ratcheting up and ratcheting up is a bad thing. And two things can be true at once. What happened in Minneapolis is a tragedy, and the insane ire that is being driven against ICE by Democrats will lead to further violence and make this even worse from here. Meanwhile,

00:43:31.000 the Minneapolis fraud situation continues to grow. It's not going anywhere? That is not going to stop Minneapolis politicians from defending the people who presided over the fraud. It is kind of an incredible thing when you think about it. If you're a Democrat, and you want big government programs, like you love big government programs, that's the way you help people, is by taking money from these people, and giving it to these people, and helping the poor, and helping the suffering, through redistribution of tax resources. The thing you should hate the most is fraud,

00:43:58.000 right? You should hate it. Because it undermines the entire reason for your program. In the same way. Here at the Daily Wire, if I found out that somebody was embezzling a lot of money, I would find who they were and I would fire them and then prosecute them. That's because I care about the money in our organization and where it goes and what we use it for, obviously. In the same way, you would imagine the Democrats presiding over their states, localities, federal programs, that they would care deeply about the waste of money and the fraud. But they don't. Instead, 0.77

00:44:28.000 They just defend the people who presided over the fraud.

00:44:30.000 It's unbelievable.

00:44:31.000 Here is Ilhan Omar defending Tim Walz for presiding over what is likely billions of dollars in fraud in her state.

00:44:38.000 Governor Walz did choose to not run for re -election.

00:44:42.000 He dropped out of the race because of all of this.

00:44:43.000 Because he wants to focus on defending our state and not defending a seat.

00:44:49.000 Do you think there has been a sufficient level of accountability and ownership of the failure to have oversight here?

00:44:57.000 Do you think this ends?

00:44:59.000 That is what we want.

00:45:00.000 We want to collaboratively work with the administration to try to make sure that there is no fraud that's being perpetuated on our state.

00:45:12.000 What we do not want is the level of terror, of confusion, of chaos that is being created without any results. Well, then you know what you could do? You could yourself investigate the fraud and root it out and get rid of the politicians who have been doing it,

00:45:29.000 but you're not going to do any of that. That is why what is happening is happening. Meanwhile, Jacob Fry, the mayor of Minneapolis, he's the one who is cursing at ICE and calling them essentially a terror group and all the rest. He says that, yeah, actually, the fraud's real. It's kind of a thing that did happen. I mean, he'll admit that. Well, look, Governor Walz is the reason that we've got paid family leave in Minnesota. He's the reason we've got free school lunches. Uh, him and I,

00:45:57.000 we've been through thick and thin. But did he do enough to combat fraud, Mayor? Did he do enough to combat fraud? Look, obviously, everybody could have done more to prevent fraud, and I think that's a fair point to make. Do more to prevent fraud, and you look what he's doing right now, he's setting up a whole bunch of infrastructure to do that. And by the way, look, the fraud's real. We've all got to acknowledge it. The fraud is very real. So, um, if the fraud is real, and you didn't do enough to combat it,

00:46:23.000 why are you still defending the dude? Pretty incredible stuff. And the answer, of course, is because you can't have big government without the fraud. And the fraud is, in fact, the point in many of these cases, because you're paying off constituents in particular ways. What's happening in New York also. According to Breitbart, a Bronx apartment building New York City Mayor Zorhan Mamdani showcased to highlight the talents of his new housing commissioner has accumulated almost 200 unresolved violations, including citations for broken doors, broken refrigerators, rat and roach infestation,

00:46:50.000 and potentially hazardous mold. That is the conclusion of an exclusive New York Post investigation of the non-profit-owned and operated building in Morris Heights that the newly elected mayor cited to highlight the talents of his new housing commissioner,

00:47:03.000 Dina Levy. The Post reported, quote, the 102-unit building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in Morris Heights as of Saturday had a staggering 194 open housing code violations dating back to 2016. Mamdani visited that affordable housing complex January Long-time tenant rights advocate and former state housing official,

00:47:26.000 naming her Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner. I mean, really well done. According to one tenant, quote, since the nonprofit took over, the building has deteriorated. They lack porters. No one maintains it. The complaints fall on deaf ears,

00:47:40.000 especially if you complain a lot. Yeah, because it turns out that the thing that keeps landlords making the repairs is the profit margin, is the reality that if they don't, people will move out and then their apartment will be worthless. Market mechanisms are always going to work better than non-market mechanisms. But that's never the point. The point is always spreading the money to your friends. That's always the point in the end. Okay,

00:48:03.000 Meanwhile, the other gigantic controversy of the day, the Trump Department of Justice has apparently now initiated an investigation into the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

00:48:15.000 According to The New York Times, the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. has opened a criminal investigation into Powell about whether Powell lied to Congress about the scope of the project.

00:48:23.000 According to officials briefed on the situation, the inquiry was approved in November by Jeanine Pirro.

00:48:28.000 Well, the investigation escalates Trump's long running feud with Powell, whom the president has continually attacked for resisting his demands to slash interest rates significantly.

00:48:38.000 Apparently, now again, Powell's term as chair ends in May.

00:48:41.000 He'll still stay on through January 2028 unless he steps down early.

00:48:45.000 Trump wants him to step down early so that his vote goes away.

00:48:47.000 Anyway, so the the actual the actual investigation, presumably, is into comments made with regard to the rebuild and reno at the center of the Federal Reserve.

00:49:04.000 The reno broke ground in 2022.

00:49:06.000 It was set to be completed in 2027.

00:49:08.000 It's going to run seven hundred million dollars over budget.

00:49:11.000 The project involves expanding and modernizing the Mariner S. Eckley's building and another building on Constitution Avenue, which dates all the way back to the 1930s.

00:49:18.000 As the Fed says, neither of those buildings has been comprehensively renovated since their construction at nearly 100 years ago, suggesting that they were in need of significant overhaul.

00:49:29.000 the central bank has cited expenses tied to materials, equipment, and labor, because when the original estimate was made, it was back in 2021, the plans have changed, and also things were less expensive in 2021 than they are now. Here is my question. Obviously, Powell could have said things that were accurate at the time and later became inaccurate because the facts on the ground changed. Is there evidence that Powell was stealing money? Or embezzling? Well, what is the case here,

00:49:29.000 So.

00:49:55.000 in other words? And why is it that the Trump administration, the two people who he seems to be focused on very much at the Federal Reserve, are people who have opposed his agenda? There's a reason why the markets are roiling this morning. This is bad policy. You should not be targeting people based on specious investigations. If it turns out that it's specious,

00:50:15.000 again, there may be something there. There's suspicion that's what was happening with John Bolton, and then it turns out that John Bolton may very well have breached national security. I don't know the full case with regard to Jerome Powell, but if it turns out that what they're upset at him about has little to do with the actual reno of the Federal Reserve,

00:50:31.000 and a lot to do with his policy with regard to interest rates, because Trump wants to keep cutting those interest rates. Again, I don't believe that the interest rates need to be cut, actually. The money that's been pouring into the economy. And this is,

00:50:50.000 it is a risky financial move. And again, just to put it out there, the DOJ should not be used for political purposes, whether you are targeting Donald J. Trump, and your name is Joseph R. Biden, or whether you are targeting Jerome Powell,

00:51:03.000 and your name is President Donald J. Trump. Here's Jerome Powell responding to these accusations. Good evening. On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas. Threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. That testimony concerned,

00:51:25.000 in part, a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings. I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one, certainly not the Chair of the Federal Reserve,

00:51:40.000 is above the law. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration's threats This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress's oversight role. The Fed,

00:51:59.000 through testimony and other public disclosures, made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public. Okay, Now, again, this is this is a mistake.

00:52:25.000 The president should not be intervening in federal policy in this way.

00:52:29.000 All it does is create uncertainty in an economy that is doing quite well by all available reports.

00:52:37.000 The broiling because of the tariffs has not overcome the momentum in the economy.

00:52:42.000 But playing with fire here is not a good response.

00:52:45.000 So in better news and any more uplifting news, we at The Daily Wire, we have brought on board Matt Fradd.

00:52:51.000 Matt Fradd is the host of a show called Pints with Aquinas, which is really about Christian apologetics and biblical apologetics, biblical morality.

00:52:58.000 It's a great show.

00:52:59.000 It's existed for a long time.

00:53:00.000 We couldn't be more excited to bring it on platform.

00:53:02.000 I had the opportunity to sit down with Matt.

00:53:04.000 Here's what it sounded like.

00:53:05.000 Well, Matt Fradd is here.

00:53:07.000 The Catholic takeover of Daily Wire is nearly complete. 0.75

00:53:10.000 Pints with Aquinas is finally coming to air.

00:53:13.000 Matt, welcome.

00:53:14.000 We are very excited about the show.

00:53:15.000 For people who don't know about Pines with Aquinas, what exactly are you going to be talking about?

00:53:19.000 I'm thrilled to be here, first of all.

00:53:19.000 Thanks so much.

00:53:22.000 Pines with Aquinas has been going on for about 10 years now.

00:53:24.000 I thought I was going to absorb you, but y'all absorb me.

00:53:27.000 That's fine.

00:53:28.000 And it's terrific.

00:53:30.000 They're long-form discussions about faith, philosophy, and theology.

00:53:33.000 The very first episode we did is with Dr. Brent Petra, who's a theologian, and that goes live today on Daily Wire, YouTube, everywhere.

00:53:42.000 So people can check it out, and Pines with Aquinas.

00:53:44.000 And we talk about the historicity of the New Testament, why it's bananas to say that Jesus was a mythical figure.

00:53:51.000 And we even talk about Christ's claims to be God.

00:53:53.000 A lot of skeptics will say, sure, later on in the Gospel of John.

00:53:56.000 you get a divine Jesus, Bart Ehrman says this sort of stuff, but in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, not so much. And that's just not true. And so it's like a three-hour discussion about this stuff. And it's really fascinating. It's not three hours for the sake of three hours. Like, that could get boring. It's three hours with a really brilliant, articulate individual. And so we have a lot of things like that coming up. So I've talked to you a lot about this in the past, but I think one of the things that you do uniquely is approach faith from an intellectual perspective and that doesn't just give people the sort of arguments that they need in order to defend their faith,

00:54:24.000 But it also provides a permission structure for people to say, hey, look, smart people actually believe this stuff. 0.98

00:54:29.000 Because I think the number one weapon for the New Atheists for a couple of decades was, Only dumb people are religious. 0.54

00:54:35.000 And that seems to be an argument that's sort of fallen out of favor lately. 0.98

00:54:38.000 A hundred percent.

00:54:39.000 Yeah.

00:54:39.000 Thomas Aquinas made this clear.

00:54:40.000 One doesn't need faith to know that God exists.

00:54:43.000 One doesn't need revelation to know that God exists.

00:54:45.000 One can look at different arguments that have been presented over the years by like Aristotle and Anselm, and even Aquinas himself.

00:54:52.000 To show that there is an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, and so on.

00:54:56.000 So, even if every individual can't maybe reason their way to God's existence, they can believe it on faith, but that this is not an irrational thing to believe.

00:55:06.000 And that's important.

00:55:08.000 So one of the reasons that obviously we wanted to work with you and bring Pines Of Aquinas on board is because we believe that the revitalization of Christianity, in particular in the West, but faith generally is really important in an increasingly secular world.

00:55:21.000 There's been a lot of talk lately about the sort of religious trends among young Americans, and it seems like there's two simultaneous trends.

00:55:28.000 One is that fewer people are going to church, and the other is that the people who are going to church are going much more often.

00:55:33.000 You're seeing this in, I think, every religious community, actually.

00:55:36.000 You're seeing this in the Jewish community as well.

00:55:38.000 Fewer people who are Jewish by birth are actually practicing Judaism, but the ones who are are becoming increasingly orthodox.

00:55:44.000 What do you make of that?

00:55:45.000 And do you see the possibility of a broader spread, not just sort of a revitalization of the very religious core of each movement, but a broader spread back to a place where churchgoing is dominant?

00:55:56.000 say? Yeah, a lot of thoughts here. I mean, the new atheism went off like a smoke bomb within culture and people couldn't see straight. And they were given the impression that perhaps religion was just for stupid, naive people. That seems to have dissipated. I think Jordan Peterson, in a way, was a gateway drug for many people to take another look at Christianity and not mock it or Judaism or just belief in God in general. And I think the reason a lot of people are returning to more orthodox and traditional forms of Christianity, what we would call apostolic Christianity,

00:56:25.000 like orthodoxy, Catholicism, and so on, is because I think they long for ritual. They long to connect themselves to something with a historical pedigree, and they don't want their faith to be patronized. We live in a very secular society,

00:56:40.000 and I think a lot of people desire to find a place of reverence where they can, as it were. Kiss the earth, to find a place like Moses, right? Take the shoes off and stand honestly before the good God. Also probably has a lot to do with the sexual perversion that was foisted upon us for the last 50 plus years,

00:56:58.000 which is just insane and leads to complete misery. And so I think one of the reasons Catholicism in particular is very attractive right now is that if people are looking to Christianity, they Even though there's individual priests and bad Catholics, just as there are bad people everywhere,

00:57:13.000 who would promote something contrary to church teaching, if you look at what the Catholic church teaches about things like homosexual acts and contraception and abortion and IVF, It's pretty hardcore, and I wonder if that isn't part of it, where, okay, if I'm going to do this Christianity thing, I'm going to do it seriously.

00:57:29.000 I wonder, is that true in Judaism?

00:57:31.000 Do you find if people are returning to Judaism, they're returning to more traditional?

00:57:34.000 Yeah, I mean, and that's also true personally.

00:57:36.000 When people tend to return to religion in Judaism, the term that is used is Baal Teshuvah, which means literally master of repentance, is that when people go from not Orthodox to Orthodox, they become like the most Orthodox.

00:57:46.000 And I think that that's fairly common in conversion stories.

00:57:49.000 You kind of go all the way.

00:57:50.000 Yeah, we're seeing that today, right?

00:57:53.000 Online, people are going full on, which is beautiful.

00:57:56.000 But from a Christian perspective, I would think that if a person who's coming back to Christianity is more concerned with other people's sins than their own, this is not a good sign. 0.52

00:58:05.000 That we really should be in a state of continual repentance before the all good and all loving God so we can trust in his repentance.

00:58:12.000 It's not a sort of slavish fear of God.

00:58:14.000 but that's my fear because online there's a lot of people who are sneering and are triumphal and okay, maybe there's a, I don't know if there's a place for that ever,

00:58:26.000 but the first thing should be a desire to amend my own life by the grace of God. And one of the things that I think is pretty good advice is that People should be in a system for a while before they immediately go to the front and start preaching from the pulpit. And you see this a lot in both politics and also in religion is that people are sort of the newly converted. And the first thing they do is they run to the front of the church or the front of the synagogue and pick up the book and they say,

00:58:48.000 well, now I know this book. I say, well, you know, you might not know all the sort of bends here. You might not know. You know, the interpretations. You might not know the doctrine. You might just be reading it and think you know what you're talking about, but it takes experience in a system to really understand the system, which is one of the reasons why I think that your show is so vital. So, obviously, your show is largely Catholic, but it's not directed specifically at Catholics. And when you're talking to audiences who aren't Catholic, why do you think they should listen? Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, I would say, like,

00:59:17.000 cards on the table, my desire is that all people would become Catholic. Uh, so if they're a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist, I think Catholicism has the fullness of the truth. And I wouldn't want to patronize people by pretending that's what I, I don't want that. Uh, but that said, I mean, I love, for example, my Protestant brothers and sisters, we share a lot in common. I read Protestant authors and greatly benefit from, from some of their, uh, teaching. And so, yeah, we're going to have some Protestants, some Orthodox on the show, but primarily Catholic. But I mean, as I say, 0.52

00:59:46.000 this first episode that releases today will be strands of Christians ought to enjoy because it has to do with the reliability of the Gospels and Christ claims to be divine, etc. So, you know, as you move forward, how do you hope the show develops? How often is the show? How often are people going to be able to engage with it? Yeah, so we have a long-form interview show every single week. And then we're doing a second episode in, which is, we're working on that format right now,

01:00:10.000 but it'll enable people who follow the show to be more in contact with me. So it'll be me taking phone calls and me responding to people's questions on faith-related issues and personal issues as well. So that's the goal for now. Obviously, a lot of clips on our clip channel, and then we have a lot of ideas. We're thinking about doing a five minutes on, like the 21 Ecumenical Councils, or understand the Protestant Reformation in five minutes, and those sorts of things. So there's a lot of thought. Well, Matt Fradd, we could not be more excited to have you aboard. And folks,

01:00:38.000 you should go check out Pints with Aquinas right now, available over at Daily Wire and everywhere else. Alrighty, folks, the show continues for our members right now. We'll get to President Trump's somewhat strange announcement that he's going to somehow, I don't know how, cap credit card rates, like the interest rates. Remember, In order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:00:55.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:00:56.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout, for two months free on all annual plans.

01:00:59.000 Click that link in the description and join us.

01:01:02.000 What was it like, Merlin, To be alone with God.

01:01:11.000 Is that who you think I was alone with?

01:01:13.000 I knew your father.

01:01:19.000 I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.

01:01:25.000 All men know of the great Taliesin.

01:01:28.000 You are my father.

01:01:29.000 Now the gods should war for my soul.

01:01:33.000 Princess Garrus.

01:01:34.000 Saviour of our people.

01:01:38.000 I know what the bull god offered you.

01:01:41.000 I was offered the same.

01:01:42.000 And?

01:01:44.000 There is a new pirate work in the world.

01:01:46.000 I've seen it.

01:01:48.000 A god who sacrifices what he loves for us.

01:01:51.000 We are each given only one life, Singer. No. We're given another. I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower. He's waiting on a miracle, and I think you can give him one. Trust in Yezu. He is the only hope for men like us. Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Light. Great Light. Great Darkness. Such things mattered to me then. What matters to you now,

01:02:20.000 mistress of lies? You, nephew, are the High King. How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield? Circling into the promises of a god who has abandoned you. I cannot take up that sword again. You know what you must do. Great Light, 0.74

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 12, 2026

Hundreds Killed In Iran

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