Stephen A. Smith attacks yours truly over claiming that Derek Chauvin should be pardoned by President Trump on federal charges. Plus, President Trump is not ruling out the possibility of a recession, and we ll get into the chaos in Syria.
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00:00:41.000Okay, so a lot of people have been asking why we're focused in here at the Ben Shapiro Show on the pardon of Derek Chauvin.
00:00:47.000After all, he's convicted on both federal charges as well as state charges.
00:00:51.000The first and most obvious reason is that there is a likelihood he serves less time if you relieve the federal charges.
00:00:56.000The reason for that is because while federal inmates can earn good time credit that reduces sentences, that happens at a much lower rate than it happens at the state level.
00:01:06.000So when you're talking about Derek Chauvin's concurrent sentences, Sentence on state charges and 21 on federal charges, but under Minnesota state sentencing structure, inmates usually serve about two-thirds of their sentence behind bars and one-third under supervised release.
00:01:21.000So he would serve like 15 years of the 22 and a half year state sentence in actual confinement under the state charges.
00:01:28.000So he'd get less time in jail is the short answer.
00:01:30.000But the other answer is that when you believe a person who is not guilty is languishing in prison, that is the time when the president of the United States ought to either commute a sentence or pardon.
00:01:42.000And as we're going to lay out over the course of coming weeks, I'm going to lay out in full detail why I believe that Derek Chauvin is not guilty in the killing of George Floyd.
00:01:53.000That is the real reason, because it is immoral to allow people who you believe are innocent to languish in prison.
00:01:58.000This should not be a particularly arguable issue.
00:02:01.000And just because that person was made into the face of American racism based on literally zero evidence that has been provided that Derek Chauvin...
00:02:37.000There are many people who object to all this.
00:02:40.000One of those people is Stephen A. Smith.
00:02:41.000Bizarrely enough, Stephen A. Smith, who is a loudmouth jackass on ESPN. That's what he does.
00:02:46.000And when I say loudmouth, I mean the man does not have a volume that goes below 8 on the Spinal Tap scale.
00:02:53.000I'm not sure that there is such a thing as a normal Stephen A. Smith voice.
00:02:56.000And I say this as a longtime watcher of ESPN. Every time Stephen A. Smith comes on the TV, you've got to turn down your volume significantly.
00:03:25.000If a black cop had his knee on a white Jewish person for over nine minutes, Ben Shapiro, would you have called for that individual to be would you have called for that individual to be pardoned?
00:03:44.000OK, so first of all, let's start with this.
00:03:50.000I don't know why he believes that it would be important, even for his stupid example, for it to be a quote-unquote white Jewish person, as opposed to just a Jewish person, right?
00:03:58.000His claim is that I am a tribal identitarian, and thus...
00:04:01.000I would be very fine with the prosecution of a cop wrongfully if a Jew died under the knee of that cop, even if the cop was not responsible.
00:04:11.000If the fact patterns were exactly the same, but George Floyd had been named Harold Bernstein or something, and the cop was named George Floyd, was a black guy.
00:04:39.000The reality is that this was made a national story specifically because the media had a pre-existing narrative of race in America, and this fulfilled their narrative even if the facts didn't match.
00:04:50.000Two, if in fact the facts had matched, and let's say that this was a Jewish person.
00:04:55.000A Jewish person had been arrested for counterfeiting, for passing counterfeit bills.
00:05:00.000And then had been high on fentanyl and had a pre-existing heart condition and then had died under the knee of a cop.
00:05:07.000Would I have said that the cop was innocent?
00:05:09.000Yes, because if the cop is innocent, the cop is innocent.
00:05:35.000If you're talking about Nikola Jokic, the greatest center of our generation, he'll talk about how Nikola Jokic should not be included in conversations for MVP, specifically because of his race.
00:05:44.000The reason Stephen A. Smith is saying this kind of stuff is because he is projecting.
00:05:47.000He is projecting a racial conversation where none exists.
00:05:51.000Here, for example, with Stephen A. Smith just a couple of years ago, I'm a Celtics fan.
00:05:57.000A few years ago, Danny Ainge was the chief of basketball operations for the Boston Celtics, and Brad Stevens was elevated to fill his position.
00:06:05.000Now, it turns out Brad Stevens is a really, really good president of basketball operations.
00:06:10.000Well, the Celtics won an NBA championship last year, and he's been one of the most successful NBA executives in all the NBA over the course of his tenure.
00:06:17.000But Stephen A. Smith was firmly convinced the only reason that Brad Stevens had been elevated is because of his race.
00:06:23.000It's moments like this where I get on people's nerves, particularly white America and the NBA community specifically, because I point out it's beautiful to be a white guy.
00:06:53.000By the way, worth noting that it's beautiful to be a white guy in America has not precluded Stephen A. Smith from a $100 million five-year contract for ESPN, a failing network where the ratings are going down.
00:07:07.000The reason that Stephen A. Smith is exercised over the George Floyd situation is specifically because of a racial narrative that is not predicated on facts.
00:07:15.000And then he's projecting that into me being some sort of racist for suggesting that the racial narrative should not predominate.
00:07:21.000This is the whole reason that Black Lives Matter was such a mistake and such a fail, because it was racializing of a question that was not, in fact, racial.
00:07:28.000And this is, again, it's just more evidence that what I'm saying about Chauvin is true, that the reason that Derek Chauvin is in prison right now is because he was the wrong race and George Floyd was the wrong race.
00:07:37.000And because of that, Derek Chauvin is in prison right now.
00:07:39.000Because here's the dirty little secret.
00:07:42.000It never would have been a national news story if the races had been reversed or if both people had been white or if both people had been black.
00:07:48.000It would not have been a national news story.
00:07:50.000And that means that the officer would have been assessed on the facts of the situation rather than on the racial narrative people like Stephen A. Smith were propagating.
00:07:59.000Meanwhile, again, this is part and parcel of a broader left-wing failure when it comes to narrative.
00:08:03.000The left-wing narrative has failed on so many fronts.
00:08:07.000Senator Alyssa Slotkin, who is from Michigan and she was supposed to be the Trump response.
00:08:12.000Well, she said, listen, we're on our heels.
00:08:27.000And I think it's on us to be clear about not only leadership, and there's lots of leaders in both parties, but also a strategy, right?
00:08:36.000And I think that's something that, as Trump has been successful in flooding the zone and just like every day 15 things happening, we are still finding our footing.
00:08:46.000And I think you can't get better until you admit you have a problem.
00:08:53.000Okay, so she will not admit the problem, however.
00:08:56.000She was asked about the fact that Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, is moving away from the men should play in women's sports routine, and she won't even address it.
00:09:05.000So you can't say that you admit you have a problem, but then not admit what the problem is.
00:09:10.000But for me, it's like, let the local community figure this out, right?
00:09:14.000In Michigan, we have a process in place where if someone who's born a boy wants to play in women's sports, you have to get a waiver.
00:09:20.000We've had it happen two times in our entire state.
00:09:24.000So let the local communities, just like everything with schools, handle that issue.
00:09:28.000For me, though, I think, you know, this issue is being sort of brought up in order to make sparks and see sparks fly.
00:09:37.000Okay, well then it would be very easy for you to avoid the sparks flying by simply saying the obvious thing, which is that boys should not play in girls' sports.
00:10:46.000When you have one of those mattresses from the box stores, you really don't think about how bad it is until you get something new and better.
00:10:52.000That's what happened with me and Helix Mattress.
00:10:54.000You know that feeling where you wake up and your back is already complaining at you?
00:11:46.000And so many of them are just doubling down on the most extreme elements of their agenda.
00:11:50.000So, for example, MSNBC host Melissa Murray asked Representative Al Green, you'll remember him from being ejected during the pseudo-State of the Union address, if the Democrats were being too conciliatory with President Trump.
00:12:02.000Do you think your colleagues in the Democratic Party are being too civil during this time when American rights and freedoms are literally on the line?
00:12:13.000I think we're at a point where we're making decisions as to how we should move forward.
00:12:18.000I believe that we have to move forward with righteous incivility.
00:12:22.000This is what we engaged in when we sang We Shall Overcome and what I engaged in when I stood and indicated that the president didn't have a mandate to cut Medicaid.
00:12:34.000Yes, they're not they're not being loud enough.
00:13:23.000Also, you're not doing anything useful right now.
00:13:24.000In any case, this has become a very contentious issue on the right side of the aisle.
00:13:30.000One of the reasonable members of Congress, who is in fact a deep fiscal conservative, is Representative Chip Roy, who joins us on the line.
00:13:36.000He, of course, represents Texas' 21st Congressional District, one of the strongest fiscal conservatives in Congress.
00:13:41.000Chip, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:14:08.000So when it comes to this continuing resolution, as one of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress, why should conservatives go along with this continuing resolution?
00:14:15.000The argument from the sort of shouting against the wind type says, well, we always say we're going to live to fight another day, but we never fight another day.
00:14:23.000Why on this one aren't we just, you know, fight, fight, fighting?
00:14:26.000Yeah, Ben, look, I'm not a huge fan of the kick the can down the road continuing resolution as the best form of government, how we fund our government.
00:14:36.000But what I do believe is that you've got to figure out how to empower President Trump and Elon to continue to keep the lights on, to carry out Doge, to identify the cuts and the waste that we've been identifying, in a mere six weeks, by the way, to add on to what we'd already started doing as fiscal conservatives two years ago through the Speaker's fight, you remember with Kevin McCarthy, where we forced a bunch of votes on amendments and started to change this place.
00:15:16.000It doesn't allow the defense hawks, who really wanted a whole bunch more money, to screw up the whole process by throwing a bunch of money in it, and then the non-defense Democrats want more money.
00:15:26.000So this is a win to keep the lights on for six months for Elon.
00:15:30.000The Democrats have threatened to shut down.
00:15:36.000It's the most fiscally responsible thing we can do at this moment.
00:15:39.000But then we'll have to do our job in the appropriations process for this next cycle, which, by the way, this appropriation cycle ends on September 30th.
00:15:47.000So we've got to get all that passed for FY26 by September.
00:15:51.000So we should focus on that and then get reconciliation done, which is where we deal with mandatory spending and tax policy.
00:16:01.000There's a handful of holdouts that are saying, oh, it's not good enough.
00:16:04.000Guys, this is a win to free spending and to give them power to continue to find cuts and doge.
00:16:11.000And I think the reality is that people in my industry, the sort of conservative media industry, it's always in our interest to claim that it's just insufficient fight on the part of Republicans that leads to all of this stuff, which ignores, of course, all the incentive structures as to how Congress actually works.
00:16:25.000There are a bunch of Republicans who are in purple districts.
00:16:26.000There are a bunch of Republicans who are even in blue districts.
00:16:28.000And the fact is that when you have a majority that is as slim as the majority Republicans are currently working with, the idea that under this Congress, you're going to restructure Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
00:17:03.000We budgeted for a freeze in our budget that we passed out a few weeks ago.
00:17:08.000If you hold spending flat for four years, for example, and while the economy is growing and we grow out of it, you save a trillion dollars over 10 years.
00:17:17.000In other words, freezing spending and doing our job to get tax policy and regulatory policy to allow, for example, Marco Rubio, just this morning, there's a report that says they're going to cut 83% of the USAID contracts.
00:17:30.000So I've got conservatives going, why are we going to fund USAID? Guys, we're not.
00:17:35.000We've got funding in there, but they're going to stop the contracts.
00:17:38.000So we can get that money, and then Russ Vogt can impound that money through the Office of Management and Budget.
00:17:56.000So Chip, when it comes to impoundment, obviously you say it's going to get hashed out by the courts.
00:18:00.000If the courts come down the other way on impoundment, then there's been talk that Congress might consider rescission.
00:18:05.000There might be a move to basically, with 51 votes in the Senate, you don't actually have to overcome a filibuster, rescind much of the spending that's being impounded right now.
00:20:03.000When it comes to the tariffs, the tariffs are incredibly chaotic.
00:20:07.000And the way they've been rolled out so far, which is sort of like a hokey pokey, we'll put a tariff in, we'll take a tariff out, we'll put a tariff in and we'll move it all about.
00:20:13.000Like that particular approach disquiets markets.
00:20:16.000It means that you don't know whether to invest in a particular contract.
00:20:20.000If you have inputs from foreign countries, you don't know whether to re-sign that contract.
00:20:24.000And you also don't know whether you are going to want to sign a domestic contract because maybe the tariff doesn't go into place and now you're paying twice what you otherwise would have paid.
00:20:34.000For the broader business community, which is why you see the Dow Jones Industrial Average giving up all of the gains since President Trump's election.
00:20:40.000So President Trump was asked about this over the weekend, and he said that he doesn't need to be clearer on tariffs.
00:21:12.000And I can say as a business person with hundreds of employees, I want to know what comes next because that's how I game for how I spend and how I save and how I invest.
00:21:22.000And that's true for every major or minor business person in the country.
00:21:27.000Now, President Trump, to his credit, He's being cautious about his predictions.
00:21:32.000Howard Lutnick, his Commerce Secretary, was on the Sunday shows and he said, don't worry, no recession is coming.
00:21:37.000And, you know, his mouth to God's ears.
00:21:40.000Should Americans brace for a recession?
00:22:05.000And I generally believe that that is true.
00:22:07.000However, uncertainty is in fact uncertainty.
00:22:11.000President Trump was asked the same exact question about an hour later, and he said, listen, I'm not going to make any predictions about the economy, which, by the way, is the smart response on this.
00:22:17.000President Trump has a good feel for this.
00:22:18.000A smart response is, I don't know what's going to happen, because the problem is, if you say there's going to be no recession, and then there is one recessionary quarter, it's all over the TV for the next three years.
00:22:26.000This is the lesson that should have been learned during the Biden administration, when the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve called inflation transitory, and it's now four years later, and inflation is not transitory.
00:22:36.000Are you expecting a recession this year?
00:23:05.000Okay, now, again, if the idea here is that we are ratcheting up pressure to then ratchet back down the tariffs, okay, if the idea is that we're trying to pry winds out of other countries, okay, I'm there.
00:23:15.000If the idea is that tariffs themselves are going to be good for the country, I have yet to see a situation in which that is true that is not from the 19th century.
00:23:25.000When trade internationally was significantly more limited, and spending, by the way, was significantly more limited, domestically speaking, as we spoke about last week.
00:23:34.000The reality is that while we are subsidizing a lot of businesses elsewhere through global trade in our markets, everybody else is subsidizing our welfare state by buying our bonds.
00:24:02.000And I think the president obviously wants a strong economy, obviously wants better trade deals as well.
00:24:07.000But this is about fentanyl and what we can do to stop the cartels from partnering with Chinese officials, laundering money, and bringing a poison into our country that is specifically designed to kill the next generation.
00:24:19.000Okay, so again, if the idea is let's make Canada arm up the border and militarize the border, all right, fine, okay.
00:24:27.000The problem is that the metrics that are being used, like, I want the deliverable, because that way you get a win, right?
00:24:32.000If President Trump says, I want Canada to do X, and if Canada does X, the tariffs go back down, I'm fine with it.
00:24:37.000But it's very difficult to make that argument about, for example, fentanyl, when you are not saying the thing you want from the Canadians.
00:24:43.000This is a point that was made by Ambassador Kirsten Hillman.
00:24:45.000She says, listen, less than 1% of all fentanyl that's being seized coming into the United States is coming from Canada.
00:24:50.000Last year, 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized coming from Canada.
00:24:53.000Now, you can make the argument that that's because we have a wide open border with Canada.
00:24:57.000But we had a wide open border with Mexico and 22,000 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the wide open border with Mexico last year under Joe Biden.
00:25:04.000Here's Kristen Hillman, the Canadian ambassador to the United States.
00:25:11.000Our neighbours, you know, the country that we feel closest to, the country that is partners, allies, often family, that we've gone to war with, that we've died with, that we come to each other's aid, most recently in L.A., but obviously 9-11.
00:25:24.000You've come to our aid over the years so many times.
00:25:27.000And we feel, Canadians feel, Under attack.
00:26:03.000Again, if there's a deliverable, great.
00:26:05.000And force Canada to the wall to get the deliverable.
00:26:07.000However, all of this is having an impact on domestic politics in Canada.
00:26:10.000So if you don't like Justin Trudeau and his party, then why exactly are you doing the things that are going to ensure that they remain in power?
00:26:16.000So before all this trade war stuff, the runaway winner.
00:26:20.000In the Canadian polling was Pierre Poliev, who's terrific.
00:26:23.000Pierre Poliev is the leader of the Conservative Party.
00:26:25.000He's one of the most articulate Conservative leaders of our generation.
00:26:29.000And he has now fallen behind in the polling to Mark Carney, who is the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, who will maintain all of the policies of Justin Trudeau, except without the dumb face.
00:26:41.000So Mark Carney just won the race to succeed Justin Trudeau as Canada's Prime Minister, and he vows to win the trade war with the United States and President Donald Trump.
00:26:48.000He's the former governor of the Canadian Central Bank and Bank of England, according to the BBC. He is a green revolution guy.
00:27:00.000His replacement of the minority government means that he is the new leader of the party that is competitive.
00:27:08.000According to the BBC, the governing liberals have seen a remarkable political turnaround since Trudeau's exit, as Canadians have been galvanized by President Trump's trade threats and support for annexing their country.
00:27:16.000At the beginning of the year, Pierre Poliev was ahead 20 points in the election polls.
00:27:32.000It turns out that politics has a lot of downstream effect.
00:27:35.000In the end, listen, I trust President Trump on this stuff because I think in the end, as I've said a thousand times, he's a results-driven guy.
00:27:40.000He said over the weekend he wants a dynamic economy and a dynamic country.
00:27:44.000The way to do that is to provide a steady, understandable economy for investors that reduces regulations and taxes.
00:27:50.000It makes it easier to do business in the country for Americans.
00:28:07.000You can see that probably better than ever before.
00:28:12.000Okay, I agree with him, and I think that that is the way that he's going to move, and if the results are bad, I think he's going to change tactics.
00:28:18.000We'll get some more on this in a moment.
00:28:19.000First, you know, one of the things I love about working in the news industry is that every day I get to connect with millions of listeners and share breaking stories and work with incredible talent, or just as passionate about the political sphere as I am.
00:28:28.000There's nothing quite like the energy and thrill of creating content that not only informs, but also resonates with people around the country.
00:28:34.000If you're doing what you love to do, there's nothing better than being surrounded by people who love it the way that you do.
00:28:38.000And if you own your own business, you want to hire employees who love what they do to boost the overall success of your business.
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00:29:18.000Also, there's a lot going on in my life, which means I need to make sure I'm maintaining my health, hitting the gym, spending time with family, even with the busy work schedule.
00:29:26.000When I was younger, I used to think I could just power through on willpower and caffeine.
00:29:29.000I learned pretty quickly, peak performance requires peak nutrition, and that means eating enough veggies.
00:29:34.000Well, I don't like veggies, and so I'm very thankful to have Balance of Nature, which fits right into even the busiest of days.
00:29:39.000Imagine trying to eat 31 different fruits and veggies every day.
00:29:41.000That sounds miserable and time-consuming.
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00:29:49.000Balance of Nature takes fruits and veggies.
00:29:50.000They freeze-dry them, they turn them into a powder, and then they put them into a capsule.
00:29:53.000You take your fruit and veggie capsules every day, and then your body knows precisely.
00:29:57.000What to do with them is kosher, which means I can pop it right into the protein smoothie and keep that gun show going strong.
00:30:32.000You'll recall that Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy group, had been attacking Israel for decades.
00:30:38.000And then they escalated their attacks after October 7th.
00:30:42.000And then Israel, in October of last year, went after Hezbollah and basically defenestrated their entire leadership.
00:30:48.000With everything from the beeper attacks to...
00:30:50.000The attacks killing Hassan Nasrallah and all the rest.
00:30:53.000And they hit Hezbollah so hard that Hezbollah was no longer able to support and Iran was really no longer able to support the Assad regime in Syria, which was a terrorist genocidal regime on its own.
00:31:04.000There are no good guys in the Syrian fight except for some of the Druze and the Kurds and the Christians.
00:31:09.000That is a complete list of all of the good parties in Syria right now in terms of the domestic parties in Syria.
00:31:45.000knowing that HTS was a terrorist regime, then moved into The south of Syria, the other side of the Mount Hermon region, and they have now formed a basic coalition with many of the Druze in the south who were also afraid of being targeted by HTS. And Israel also proceeded to blow up pretty much every weapons depot in Syria as all this was happening.
00:32:01.000Israel did that to deny vast stockpiles of weaponry to HTS, a terror group backed again by Turkey.
00:32:07.000If you don't like HTS, blame Turkey because that's Turkey.
00:32:11.000After all this happened, HTS has been proclaiming to the rest of the world that it was moderate.
00:32:17.000Again, there were salutary effects to Assad falling.
00:32:19.000One of them was that the Iranian crescent that stretched from Iran through Iraq, through Syria, into Lebanon, and then curved all the way down into Yemen, into the Gaza Strip, and all the rest of that.
00:32:31.000A downside effect is that a bunch of terrorists took over, right?
00:32:33.000Not a lot of great solutions in the Middle East, as it turns out.
00:32:37.000Okay, well now, a sort of Alawite reconstitution took place over the course of the last week.
00:32:43.000There were some battles that happened between the Alawites, who were...
00:32:46.000Ethnically associated with the Assad regime and HTS. Battles broke out and then HTS decided what a great opportunity to slaughter a bunch of Alawites and some Christians along for the ride.
00:32:58.000And so there are an enormous number of people who were killed over the course of last week.
00:33:04.000The United States put out a statement.
00:33:07.000From the State Department, from Secretary Rubio, quote, Okay, the reality is everybody ought to be gaming for the evil of HTS and for the Turks.
00:33:32.000The Turks are members of NATO. The Turks are the biggest single backers of HTS. Bar none.
00:34:37.000This has now led to, again, not blaming Turkey and not blaming HDS, but somehow people blaming American quote-unquote neocons or blaming Israel or blaming Jews.
00:34:50.000The only Jews in Syria right now are the Israelis in the South who are literally protecting the Druze from the slaughter of HDS. At the request of the Druze, by the way.
00:34:59.000The Christian community has been targeted in Syria for a decade or more.
00:35:06.000The truth is that Syria, which used to be a Christian country, if you go all the way back, Syria was a Christian country.
00:35:12.000That's why so many of the sites mentioned in the New Testament are in fact in Syria.
00:35:16.000The Syrian population had already been devastated by Islamic takeover and Islamic rule.
00:35:22.000They didn't have it great under Bashar Assad.
00:35:24.000They did better than they had it in, say, Iran.
00:35:27.000They didn't have it amazing under Bashar Assad.
00:35:29.000There were about 1.5 million Christians living in Syria before the Syrian civil war in 2011. That number is now as few as 300,000 Christians.
00:35:41.000And the major challenges existed under Assad.
00:35:44.000The replacement of Assad by HDS was going to be bad for Christians.
00:35:47.000The attempt to turn this, however, into a story about the evils of the West as opposed to Assad being an evil dictator who was replaced by people who were completely evil in a different direction.
00:36:04.000Sort of bizarre supposition is that this is because of America as opposed to because the Middle East happens to be a long chain of terrorist tyrannies following one another with different enemies.
00:36:16.000I don't think that you've been following Middle Eastern history very long.
00:36:19.000Tucker Carlson has been on tour in the Middle East.
00:36:23.000He was over hanging out with the leader of Qatar.
00:36:27.000And in the middle of that, he tweeted out, quote, As predictable as this is, it's still infuriating to see it.
00:36:32.000For decades, Bashar Assad protected minority religious communities in Syria, including the country's large Christian population.
00:36:44.000And the downstream effect of Bashar Assad attacking, for example, Kurds.
00:36:49.000Bashar Assad repressing his people to the extent that he did was going to be a blowback that was very bad for many of the people living in the area during the Syrian civil war.
00:37:28.000I disagree with Barry Weiss about Tulsi Gabbard, but actually what she was condemning was the idea that Bashar Assad was an ally of the West, which was something that Tulsi Gabbard was sort of promoting a little bit back in 2011, 2012, 2013. The weaker Assad was, the more Christians died.
00:37:42.000During the years that neocons in the West backed the war against Assad, the percentage of Christians in Syria went from 10% to 2%.
00:37:48.000Now that Assad has been driven from power, many of the remaining Syrian Christians are being slaughtered and their holy places desecrated.
00:37:53.000Barry Weiss and John Bolton haven't said a word about it, but no one who's paying attention can be surprised it's happening.
00:37:57.000Neocon projects in the Middle East invariably destroy ancient Christian communities from Iraq to Gaza and in many places in between.
00:38:05.000Again, this is a bizarre and twisted reading of history at best.
00:38:11.000I'm not going to attribute motives because that's not something that I like to do.
00:38:14.000I will say that this is so ahistorical.
00:38:17.000The idea that chaos in the Middle East has not targeted Christians is ignorant of literally all Christian history in the Middle East.
00:38:26.000Was Constantinople before it was Istanbul.
00:38:29.000The notion that Christians have generally been targeted by neocons in the West, in the Middle East, is a complete reversal of how history actually has worked in this area.
00:38:41.000I have suspicions as to what Tucker means by quote-unquote neocons.
00:38:45.000But again, the idea that Christians, who can live safely in the Middle East, by the way, in about one country, which is Israel, Not a lot of Christians who are living safely in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi.
00:38:59.000These are not places with large Christian populations.
00:39:03.000Many of these places are places that Tucker is busy defending this week.
00:39:06.000And what's going on in Syria, which is a horror show, is not the fault of the Turks, who are literally backing the regime that is murdering people, including Christians.
00:39:13.000It's somehow the fault of the neocon warmongers.
00:39:19.000But, again, this is part and parcel of some of the stuff that...
00:39:24.000Tucker seems to be pushing lately, which again is the idea that all conflict in the Middle East is the fault of an evil cadre of Americans who are pushing conflict in the Middle East.
00:39:33.000No one in the Middle East apparently has any agency.
00:39:54.000I think that Tucker's worldview suggests that apparently the only actors in the Middle East who have any agency at all are the United States, Israel, and pretty much no one else, apparently.
00:40:07.000And so everything bad that happens in the Middle East is the fault of those people, and no one else has any agency at all.
00:40:14.000So, Iran has been growing closer and closer to a nuclear weapon.
00:40:20.000Not only in the region, but all over the world.
00:40:21.000Iran has its tentacles all the way down in South America.
00:40:25.000Iran's proxies in Hezbollah, the Houthis, all these people have been engaged in terrorism that affects American interests ranging from the Red Sea to the murder of literally thousands of American soldiers in Iraq by Iranian terror-supporting groups to the murder of 241 Marines at the U.S. Marine barracks bombing back in the 1980s.
00:40:43.000And while Iran has been growing more and more loud, they are currently holding joint military drills with China and Russia.
00:41:41.000I'm not sure that everybody agrees with me, but we can make a deal that would be just as good as if you won militarily.
00:41:49.000Okay, so if you can get that deal, great.
00:41:50.000And if you can't, then there's a threat.
00:41:52.000So, Tucker has decided, again, that the only two options, and this, again, is a false binary, the only two options here are either you concede to the Iranian nuclear program or full-scale war with Iran, which, again, is not a reality.
00:43:07.000Try to find that number, and then compare it to the number of Americans killed by drug ODs, or suicide or illegal aliens, or carjackings, diabetes, and the COVID vaccine.
00:43:14.000Still think Iran is the greatest threat?
00:43:15.000How about we focus on our own country for a minute?
00:43:19.000It turns out that there are, in fact, foreign threats to American interests ranging from shipping in the Red Sea to oil supply coming from the Gulf.
00:43:26.000And also, all the things that he mentioned are really bad.
00:43:29.000I noticed that for a guy who is very concerned about illegal aliens, carjackings, diabetes, and the COVID vax, he's spending an awful lot of time in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Russia lately.
00:43:44.000In favor of quote-unquote endless war.
00:43:46.000This is an argument in favor of reality.
00:43:49.000And living in the realm of reality is a healthier perspective on foreign affairs than the sort of bizarre melange of claims that are made about dead-eyed people that you disagree with or people who want perennial war.
00:44:00.000How about argue with the argument as opposed to arguing with the phantom that you are creating in your own mind without ever actually coming to grips with the nature of the argument.
00:44:10.000Now speaking of spending time abroad, Tucker Carlson, of course, was in Qatar, where he was interviewing the Prime Minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.
00:44:19.000Now, it should be mentioned at this point that Qatar is, in fact, effectively a front state for Iran.
00:44:23.000They sort of try to play a middle role between the United States and Iran.
00:44:27.000Whenever there's a negotiation with a terrorist group, it always happens in Qatar.
00:44:29.000This is where the United States negotiated with the Taliban, sort of America's emissary to the terrorist world.
00:44:35.000But there's no question that Qatar is, in fact, a malign force in international politics.
00:44:40.000They supply literally billions of dollars in funding to Hamas.
00:44:43.000They've provided literal support to terrorist groups all over the region.
00:44:48.000They have provided significant financial relief to Iran itself.
00:44:53.000They have huge ties with Iran because they share a giant oil field.
00:44:57.000Qatar, for example, over the last few years has transferred almost $2 billion to Hamas.
00:45:03.000All of their leaders, Hamas' leaders, were in Qatar, obviously.
00:45:07.000They also have a history of terror financing allegations ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to even ISIL. There is also an American airbase in Qatar.
00:45:15.000So again, they try to play both sides.
00:45:17.000It is also worthwhile noting here that Qatar is a major donor to America's universities.
00:45:21.000So if you don't like America's universities and you think they're trash, one major reason would be Qatar, which has spent, I kid you not, over the course of 2001 to 2021, $4.7 billion.
00:45:36.000Those are donations from a country that has 400,000 citizens of almost $5 billion to American universities.
00:45:43.000So if you don't like the wokeism, you don't like the anti-Americanism at America's universities, it turns out that the money is flowing from Qatar and has been flowing from Qatar for decades at this point.
00:45:55.000So here is Tucker Carlson with the Prime Minister of Qatar.
00:47:43.000So apparently Qatar is an ally, but not Israel because he doesn't know what an ally is.
00:47:47.000Other places, by the way, where American troops are stationed, and we just heard in that tweet from Tucker that apparently...
00:47:53.000If an American troop dies abroad in, say, Jordan, an American ally, by the way, or in Iraq, or anywhere else in the Middle East, that doesn't count.
00:48:02.000That doesn't matter if Iran funds their murder.
00:48:18.000The reason this matters with regard to Qatar...
00:48:21.000It's because Qatar, as we say, has been funding enormous, enormous chaos at America's universities.
00:48:30.000And so one of the things the Trump administration has quite properly been doing is pulling money from universities that are, in fact, not enforcing civil rights law with regard to Jews.
00:48:40.000Because it turns out a lot of these major universities are perfectly fine with Jew hatred on their campus in a way that they wouldn't be anti-black hatred.
00:48:47.000We're anti-Hispanic hatred or anything else.
00:48:48.000Now, again, you can argue with the civil rights law on anti-discrimination, and I'll hear that argument.
00:48:52.000But the notion that Jews are exempt from those civil rights laws while other groups are not is a bizarre one.
00:48:56.000The Trump administration doesn't take that seriously.
00:48:58.000And so the Trump administration on Friday said it was pulling $400 million from Columbia University, canceling grants and contracts because of what the government describes as the Ivy League school's failure to squelch anti-semitism on campus.
00:49:10.000When it comes to Middle Eastern politics and all the rest of it, a lot of bad things can be happening simultaneously.
00:49:15.000That does not mean that America is the bad actor or that actual American allies that, you know, are against terrorism are the bad actors.
00:49:22.000And thinking in that way tends to facilitate the actions of the actual bad actors, including, yes, Iran, which is not a peace-loving state, an Islamic Republic that has murdered thousands of American troops in places like Iraq, spread terrorism all over the region.
00:49:36.000And this is not a case for us to go to, quote, full-scale war, hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground.
00:49:41.000No one, literally no one is arguing this.
00:50:12.000Well, because, apparently, there's a person named Sarah, and there's a person named Ben, and they were supposed to get married on Love is Blind.
00:50:19.000And then, it all broke apart at the altar.
00:50:22.000So, we begin this tragic story with their first date on episode two.
00:50:29.000Ben was raised in a strong Christian household.
00:50:41.000And so here was one of their first dates or their first date.
00:50:43.000I grew up in a very strong Christian household.
00:50:48.000There's a lot of things that I believe about, like, the Bible, and I believe about, you know, the Christian faith, but it's all hard to obviously know for certain.
00:52:25.000That does not mean that the church has to approve the sin, which is the shtick that she's doing.
00:52:29.000She can't go to a church that won't approve all of her moral values or her friend's lifestyles.
00:52:34.000Literally, the nature of religion is to try to set out an objective morality that is true whether you like it or not.
00:52:40.000But in any case, apparently this all culminated at the end of Season 8 because Sarah decided that she was not in fact going to marry Ben based on his incompatible values.
00:52:48.000And all I've got to say is you both knew this.
00:55:21.000So I can totally disagree with her politics and also understand that actually the way that she approached this is more correct than the way that he approached all of this.
00:55:28.000Alrighty, that's enough of that dumb news.
00:55:30.000Coming up, we'll get into the latest in Ukraine.
00:55:36.000The Trump administration is making some moves that...
00:55:39.000Frankly, I'm skeptical that they're going to end with the kind of peace agreement that is going to be durable or lasting if this continues in this way.
00:55:46.000First, you need to become a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:55:49.000It's important because we are fighting the fight.
00:55:51.000Now, there is such a thing as rationality and such a thing as decency, and there are increasingly few people who actually fight for those things.