The California Recall is a complete and total dud. Bob Woodward reports that General Mark Milley contemplated handing over American security to the Chinese to thwart President Trump. And the California Recall effort against Gavin Newsom is a DUD. Plus, the greatest comic of our generation, Norm Macdonald, has died. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don t let big tech track what you do, anonymize your web browsing, and don t let Big Tech track who you do it. Use the promo code SHAPIRO to get 50% off your very first month. That s PureTalk. You can get unlimited talk, text, and 6GB of data for just $30 a month. And if you still want unlimited data, you can get that too and still save a fortune. Puretalk is Simply Smarter Wireless. Head on over to Puretalk.com, enter your address to check the coverage at your home or office, then shop for the plan that s the right for you. You can even use their savings calculator to see exactly how much your family will save. Go to puretalk.co/SHAPIRO and you will save 50% your first month! You will be the first to know who you are saving the most, and how much you can save by becoming a member of the Pure Talk Club. . Pure Talk is a company that helps you save more than $800 a year in savings and get a better deal on everything you could ever dream of. That is Pure Talk, including insurance, insurance, and finance, and much more. Ben Shapiro's show is the show you need to know how to get the most out of your best deal possible. The show you ve ever heard of the best deal on anything you could possibly get on the internet, anywhere in the world, anywhere you go, no matter where you get it, it s not going to get it? the show that s a good deal, anywhere and everything you can do it, and more! You ll get it on the most reliable, reliable, affordable, fast and affordable, free, reliable and reliable, and affordable. the whole thing you can t have it all, no less expensive than what you need it s going to be, no more expensive than that, and you ll get what you ll ever need it, right here on the best of it s gonna be in the show, the real thing.
00:00:00.000Bob Woodward reports that General Mark Milley contemplated handing over American security to the Chinese to thwart Trump, and the California recall effort against Gavin Newsom is a dud.
00:00:19.000Anonymize your web browsing at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
00:00:23.000We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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00:01:48.000And as Jeremy Boring, my business partner, put it, the great genius of Norm Macdonald is that every single Norm Macdonald fan feels like they're the only Norm Macdonald fan, when in fact, pretty much everybody was a Norm Macdonald fan.
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00:02:05.000News. The California recall effort was a complete and total dud. Newsom won with an extraordinary percentage of the vote. He survived the recall effort by a margin of 64 to That's with 70% of the vote in.
00:02:20.000And in the question of who was going to replace him, Larry Elder was leading with 47% of the vote.
00:02:26.000The California governor recall exit polls via NBC News show that the desire to recall Newsom was not Was not held by a majority of Californians anywhere in the bowl, right?
00:02:42.000Only 47% of males, only 46% of males wanted to recall him.
00:02:47.000Only 38% of women wanted to recall him.
00:02:49.000Only 44% of white voters wanted to recall him.
00:02:50.000Only 19% of black voters wanted to recall him.
00:02:52.000So this is just a textbook blowout and that is because California is a completely blue state.
00:02:56.000So the bad news for California is that California is apparently irredeemable and now in an inevitable state of complete collapse and decline.
00:03:04.000Because there is no desire to actually reverse any of that.
00:03:08.000The good news is I don't have to think about moving back, so I guess that's good news.
00:03:11.000That is pretty much what the recall effort shows.
00:03:14.000They did ask folks about some of the issues that had come up in the recall effort, particularly COVID policy.
00:03:25.000And what they found is that a large percentage of Californians are very comfortable with COVID policies that were put forward by Gavin Newsom.
00:03:36.000Something like 46% of Californians said that they thought that they were about right, that this is all pretty good.
00:03:58.000This is the HL Mencken line about democracy being the theory that the voters ought to get what they want, good and hard.
00:04:03.000This is what they are getting, good and hard.
00:04:07.00026% of the people who voted in the recall strongly approved of Gavin Newsom's performance as governor, another 28% somewhat approved, so about 54%.
00:04:17.000And, you know, not a huge percentage of people actually Disapproved of him.
00:05:36.000Which is why, if you're a Republican, even if you like Trump a lot, you might want to think a little bit seriously about whether you want Trump back on the ballot, because it does get Democrats out to the ballot box, for sure.
00:05:45.000Trump is good at Republican turnout, and he's even better at Democratic turnout.
00:05:48.000In any case, here is Gavin Newsom trying to push that point.
00:05:52.000I said this many, many times on the campaign trail.
00:05:55.000You know, We may have defeated Trump, but Trumpism is not dead in this country.
00:06:02.000The big lie, January 6th insurrection, all the voting suppression efforts that are happening all across this country, what's happening, the assault on fundamental rights, constitutionally protected rights of women and girls.
00:06:17.000It's a remarkable moment in our nation's history.
00:06:23.000It's not a remarkable moment in our nation's history.
00:06:24.000It would have been remarkable if you'd been dumped.
00:06:27.000Again, this would be the equivalent of the governor of Alabama surviving a recall election against a Democrat.
00:06:53.000By emphatically turning back the effort to recall him from office, however, Mr. Newsom made clear California's cherished role Presaging the politics of tomorrow was not as significant as another, larger factor in Tuesday's results, the tribal politics of today.
00:07:05.000The first-term Democratic governor will remain in office because, in a deeply liberal state, he effectively nationalized the recall effort as a Republican plot, making a flamethrowing radio host the Trump-like face of the opposition to polarize the electorate along red and blue lines.
00:07:17.000So the suggestion here, and this has been the suggestion of the media, is that if Larry Elder had not been the candidate for the Republican Party most likely to replace Gavin Newsom, then Newsom would have done worse in the recall effort.
00:07:28.000Now, that may be true in the sense that Larry is a very strong political personality with very strong views.
00:07:34.000But again, this is a heavily Democrat state.
00:07:36.000The notion that he was going to get recalled at all was probably a bit of a pipe dream.
00:07:41.000And even when the polls narrowed significantly and got to the point where it was really, really narrow, that was when they were not talking about any of the people running against him.
00:07:48.000If it had not been Larry, they probably would have done this to Kevin Falconer, for example.
00:07:52.000So again, the media are treating this as a referendum on sort of conservatism more generally.
00:07:59.000And they're attempting to make it a referendum on Trumpism.
00:08:01.000And it really had nothing to do with either.
00:08:03.000It had to do with the fact that this is a heavy, I can't say it enough, it's a heavy blue state.
00:08:07.000They have a super majority in the legislature, the Democrats do.
00:08:11.000So if they'd replaced Newsom with any Republican, that would have been a grave shock.
00:08:17.000Mr. Newsom found success not because of what makes California different, but because of how it's like everywhere else.
00:08:21.000He dominated in California's heavily populated Democratic cities, the key to victory in a state where his party outnumbers Republicans by 5 million voters.
00:08:28.000By the way, this should be a reminder.
00:08:29.000If you are a Republican in California, things are going to get worse, not better.
00:09:12.000There's plenty of opportunity in other states.
00:09:16.000So that is the takeaway from the California election is that the continued sorting effect is going to continue.
00:09:22.000And that we are going to be a country where the red states become redder and the blue states become bluer and the purple states will either shift over into red or blue and then follow that path inevitably.
00:10:06.000Whether we actually do want to remain part of the same body politic.
00:10:09.000If we do want to remain part of the same body politic, we're going to have to construct a system of a federal governance in which Texas can be Texas and California can be California.
00:10:18.000However, California has to let Texas be Texas.
00:10:21.000And herein lies the rub, because the federal government has no interest, when run by Democrats, in allowing Texas to be Texas.
00:10:27.000They would like Texas to be California.
00:10:29.000And if that's the case, what you're going to end up with is a fairly ugly split between states that wish to be left alone, and states that wish to run their business from the top level of the federal government.
00:10:40.000I think this is why you're hearing so much talk these days about a quote-unquote civil war, or talk about secession, or talk about the country breaking apart.
00:10:48.000Whenever you form a body politic, which is what happened at the founding and what happened again in the aftermath of the Civil War, if you form a body politic, you have to decide whether you wish to remain part of the same country.
00:10:58.000And if so, what common rules can you hold at the top level that everybody can agree to?
00:11:03.000Well, if the basic notion of American government is that the federal government is going to make all the rules and it's just going to be a struggle for the power of the one ring, then this country is not going to last this way.
00:11:13.000And maybe then the best hope for a lot of conservatives and maybe for a lot of liberals, depending on who's in control of that federal government, is a friendly separation.
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00:13:12.000Alrighty, so as we discuss, you know, the role of the federal government, I think at this point There are two possibilities for the federal government and the continuation thereof.
00:13:22.000One is, as I mentioned, the possibility that the rules at the top level are agreed upon, they're fairly light, and then we get to live locally the way we want to live locally.
00:13:30.000San Francisco gets to live like San Francisco, and Texas gets to live like Texas.
00:13:35.000Right, that seems like a fairly good way of doing things.
00:13:37.000In fact, that's kind of what the founders proposed.
00:13:39.000And then there's system number two, which is a competition over the vast power of the federal government.
00:13:44.000And every four years we switch our elected dictator.
00:13:47.000Now, the problem is this, that really only works if you think, number one, the downsides of the other guys gaining control is still worth the upside of remaining part of the union.
00:13:58.000And two, that you have enough of a shot of gaining control of the levers of power that you can reverse a lot of the bad stuff if you just stick in long enough.
00:14:06.000Those are the two conditions for sticking in a very centralized power regime.
00:14:10.000One is that the people who operate the centralized power on the other side aren't actually going to ruin your life in the time that they are in control.
00:14:16.000And two is that even if they attempt to ruin your life, there's still the shot that your guy can take office in two, three years and then reverse all of that.
00:14:24.000Republicans have bought into that, right?
00:14:26.000The idea is, okay, yeah, well, Biden's administration will suck, but maybe in two, three years, Trump comes back or you get Ron DeSantis or somebody else.
00:14:32.000Now, there's one factor that can militate against that possibility and exacerbates the possibility of a general crackup in the American political system.
00:14:45.000Not through election fraud and not through rigging of the rules or anything, but what if the federal government has essentially been reduced from a system of checks and balances In which the downsides are mitigated and the upsides are still available.
00:14:58.000What if those checks and balances have been completely replaced by an administrative state that effectively runs on its own?
00:15:04.000In opposition to conservatives when they're in power, but in support of Democrats when they're in power.
00:15:11.000This was the talk about the quote-unquote permanent deep state when Donald Trump was president.
00:15:14.000There was this idea that there were career staffers in the bureaucracy and they spent pretty much every waking moment attempting to thwart what the Trump administration was attempting to do.
00:15:23.000And this, of course, was true in large measure.
00:15:25.000And the fact is that there were career Democrats in the State Department who really didn't like what, for example, Mike Pompeo was trying to do at the State Department.
00:15:34.000There were career Democrats in the Department of Defense who didn't like what Donald Trump was trying to do.
00:15:38.000And Trump didn't clear out those administrative agencies.
00:15:40.000He fired a few people, but he really didn't clear them top to bottom.
00:15:43.000And so those administrative agencies were able to thwart a lot of his desires.
00:15:47.000And this goes all the way back to the Reagan administration when Ronald Reagan suggested he was going to dump the Department of Education and then proceeded to fund it.
00:15:54.000So Republicans, if like the quote-unquote deep state, it's not a conspiracy.
00:15:58.000It's just the idea that you have a bunch of staffers who are in positions of power who feel that they have an overall allegiance to the institution for which they work and they interpret that allegiance as we have a mission in this particular institution and no president is allowed to override that allegiance.
00:16:11.000So you effectively have an independent body of actors who just happen to align pretty heavily with people inside the Democratic Party.
00:16:19.000So if, as I say, the two possibilities for maintaining the union are one, a light touch at the federal level, which is not really a possibility anymore.
00:16:27.000Or two, that the federal level has a lot of power, but the downsides are mitigated because there is no kind of freewheeling, everything just gets done the way we want to do it, checks and balances.
00:16:38.000There's a check and balance to just ramming through things, right?
00:16:42.000And mitigating factor number two is your guy could take control and reverse everything.
00:16:46.000What if the mitigating factors go away because you have an enormous administrative state run by the executive and the executive can do whatever the F he wants at any time, right?
00:16:54.000He can just use the CDC to cram down an eviction moratorium.
00:16:57.000By the way, that happened under Trump, and then was re-upped under Biden.
00:17:01.000Or he can use the Justice Department to simply stop enforcing immigration law, as happened under Barack Obama.
00:17:07.000Or, OSHA can be used, of all places, to cram down vaccine mandates on 100 million Americans.
00:17:14.000What if the checks and balances go away, so the downsides are now not only not mitigated, they are actually exacerbated, right?
00:17:20.000The downsides of the bad guys, in your view, whatever your view is, running the government, the downsides are unlimited.
00:17:26.000And not only that, what if, if you're on the right, you look at the federal government, you're like, okay, well, even if the downsides are unlimited, the upsides are also unlimited, because if our guy takes power, then he can undo it.
00:17:49.000The administrative bureaucracy is staffed by career professionals, most of whom graduated from colleges with degrees in government, and who have spent most of their working lives working on behalf of institutions that are thoroughly entrenched in liberal groupthink.
00:18:08.000If you walk into the regulatory agencies of the federal government and you actually polled the regulatory agencies to exactly how those folks vote, my guess is that it looks a lot like 80-20 Democrat.
00:18:19.000And those people have an enormous amount of power since they're writing the actual regulations.
00:18:22.000You think Donald Trump is sitting there reading the regulations, binders of regulations?
00:18:25.000You think even if Ron DeSantis were president, he'd have the ability to read through the thousands and tens of thousands of pages of the Federal Register generated by the bureaucracy every year?
00:18:34.000The administrative threat is a threat to liberty, but it's also a threat to the stability of the government.
00:18:40.000Because the more rigid it becomes, the more self-sustaining it becomes, the less the American people feel like they have a bargain here, the less they feel like their voices are heard, like they can push back against a one-way ratchet in terms of the federal government.
00:18:54.000And that's where things kind of stand.
00:18:55.000Now, the greatest indicator of this that maybe I've seen in my lifetime is the brand new story, courtesy of Bob Woodward in his new book.
00:19:04.000So Bob Woodward and Robert Costa have a new book titled Peril.
00:19:07.000And in this book, there's a bit of a shocking revelation.
00:19:11.000The shocking revelation is that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, General Li Xiuquan, of the People's Liberation Army that the United States would not strike.
00:19:24.000Apparently he was so fearful twice in the final months of the Trump administration that the president's action might spark a war with China, he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.
00:19:33.000I guess at number one, you have to ask yourself, where did this story come from?
00:19:37.000Because apparently there's only two people on that phone call.
00:19:40.000One is Mark Milley and the other is General Li Zhuoqiang of the People's Liberation Army.
00:19:45.000Presumably Woodward didn't get this from the Chinese, which means that Mark Milley is bragging about this, which is not a shock because Mark Milley has a greatly inflated sense of both his own importance and of the historical moment.
00:19:56.000Mark Milley was the one who was comparing January 6th to an actual Reichstag fire and suggesting the entire democracy was in danger, which of course wasn't true.
00:20:03.000He has this kind of bizarre, Blown up sense of himself as the man standing in the gap, standing in the breach.
00:20:13.000But even if you believe that, there are ways to resist presidential illegal orders.
00:20:19.000And number one, you don't carry them out.
00:20:23.000We actually have precedent for this during the Trump administration.
00:20:25.000Even if it's not illegal, you can threaten to quit.
00:20:27.000James Mattis did it several times before he actually quit.
00:20:31.000The Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, You'll recall that Donald Trump wanted him to do particular things that he didn't want to do in Syria and Mattis just went to him and was like, I'm not doing that.
00:21:22.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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00:22:28.000Okay, so according to Bob Woodward's book, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Trump, General Mark Milley, called up the Head of the Chinese military, General Li Zhuocheng, and told him the United States would not strike.
00:22:41.000One call, according to the Washington Post, took place on October 30th, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Trump.
00:22:49.000The other took place January 8th, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.
00:22:55.000The first call was prompted by Milley's review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack.
00:23:02.000That belief, the author's right, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea and deepened by Trump's belligerent rhetoric toward China.
00:23:09.000Milley apparently called up General Lee and said, quote, I want to assure you the American government is stable and everything is going to be OK.
00:23:16.000We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.
00:23:20.000In the book's account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S.
00:23:25.000attack, stressing the rapport they'd established through a back channel.
00:23:28.000General Lee, you and I have known each other for five years now.
00:23:31.000If we're going to attack, I'm going to call you ahead of time.
00:24:13.000Like, I feel like I would have heard about that given the fact that President Trump is a big devotee to cable news.
00:24:18.000And cable news presumably would have been discussing that pretty rabidly if Trump were talking about it.
00:24:24.000What were the actual possibilities that the Chinese thought that we were going to start a shooting war with a country with a billion humans in it?
00:24:43.000I mean, that's insane that he called up the Chinese.
00:24:47.000Even if you believed that, the element of surprise is a bit of a thing in a war.
00:24:51.000Let's say that Trump had issued an actual legal order to fire on a Chinese boat in the South China Sea.
00:24:58.000Is Milley actually going to warn the Chinese that we're about to do that?
00:25:01.000Losing the fundamental element of surprise in a military conflict?
00:25:05.000Also, the notion that Milley would have to call the Chinese is crazy.
00:25:08.000Because again, we do have procedures to defy illegal orders in the military.
00:25:14.000CNN reported on this back in September of 2018.
00:25:19.000Based on another Bob Woodward book, actually.
00:25:22.000Because a couple of years ago, there was a Bob Woodward book talking about how James Mattis was mouthing off about Trump and all of the rest of this.
00:25:31.000But CNN reported at the time that all of the top U.S.
00:25:36.000commanders would push back against an order from Trump for a nuclear strike if it were quote-unquote illegal.
00:25:41.000General John Hyten, who is the top US nuclear commander, said, quote, I provide advice to the President.
00:25:58.000Hyten emphasized the US military has the obligation to follow only legal orders, including those entailing the launch of nuclear weapons.
00:26:06.000Also, Air Force General Robert Keillor, who served as commander of U.S.
00:26:11.000U.S. Strategic Command under Obama said there are layers of safeguards within the system designed to ensure any order is legal and proportionally appropriate.
00:26:18.000Quote, U.S. nuclear forces operate under strict civilian control.
00:26:22.000Only the president of the United States can order the employment of U.S. nuclear weapons.
00:26:25.000This is a system controlled by human beings.
00:26:30.000CNN military analyst John Kirby right now, he's the spokesperson for the Pentagon.
00:26:34.000But at that point, he was a military analyst for CNN.
00:26:36.000He said that military judge advocates and general counsel are active participants in the decision-making process at virtually every level from the tactical to the strategic.
00:26:45.000He said they help ensure political appointees and uniformed commanders fully understand and consider law of war principles as well as the dictates of congressional legislation before any final decision is reached regarding the use of armed force in defense of the nation, particularly during the planning of combat operations.
00:26:58.000So in other words, is there any circumstance under which it would have been necessary for an American general to go to the Chinese and say, we're going to give you a heads up on a military attack?
00:27:10.000I mean, no matter how much I hate Trump, Let's say you're a Democrat.
00:27:14.000Do you want that same logic being applied to Joe Biden?
00:27:16.000Do you want the generals to start calling up targets of American military ire and being like, yeah, guys, you know, we're not going to obey any of those orders.
00:27:24.000And if Biden threatens you, it's an empty threat.
00:27:27.000In the second call, placed to assuage Chinese fears about the events of January 6th, Lee wasn't as easily assuaged.
00:27:33.000Even after Milley promised him, quote, we are 100% steady, everything's fine, but democracy can be sloppy sometimes, Lee remained rattled.
00:27:39.000Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, understood why.
00:27:42.000The chairman, 62 at the time, chosen by Trump in 2018, believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election, the authors write, a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a phone call January 8th.
00:27:54.000He agreed with her evaluation Trump was unstable according to a call transcript obtained by the authors.
00:27:58.000Now, again, that's not illegal, right?
00:28:01.000Milley is allowed to talk to Nancy Pelosi.
00:28:04.000What he's not allowed to do is call up the Chinese and start conveying this stuff.
00:28:08.000Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action.
00:28:13.000The same day, he called the admiral overseeing U.S.
00:28:16.000Indo-Pacific Command, the military responsible for Asia and Pacific, and recommended postponing military exercises, and the admiral complied.
00:28:23.000Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order, but also that he, Milley, had to be involved.
00:28:31.000which is a bit of a violation of the chain of command.
00:28:34.000Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood in what he considered an oath. Milley went furthest in seeking to stave off a national security crisis, but his alarm was shared throughout the highest ranks of the administration, including CIA Director Gina Haspel, who told Milley, quote, we are on the way to a right-wing coup, a right-wing coup.
00:28:53.000Again, there was no institutional support for the January 6th rioters.
00:28:57.000And in fact, it was a bunch of Republicans who signed off on the election in the states and in the federal government as well.
00:29:03.000Now, all of this is deeply dangerous stuff.
00:29:06.000As I'm suggesting, if you have an administrative bureaucracy, unelected officials who are actually making the policy of the United States in opposition to the elected leaders of the United States, you have on your hands a real threat to democracy, an actual coup.
00:29:21.000The threat to democracy lies in unelected bureaucrats, not a part of the judicial branch or at least appointed and voted on, unelected bureaucrats making policy in defiance of their democratically elected bosses.
00:29:34.000And we have procedures for people saying they don't want to follow illegal orders.
00:29:37.000What we don't have are procedures for you calling up a foreign power and trying to define foreign policy on your own as an appointee of the President of the United States in defiance of statute.
00:29:48.000Millie needs to go, and he needs to go forthwith.
00:29:54.000And that would hold true regardless of who the President of the United States is.
00:29:58.000Nonetheless, the hatred for Trump means, and this is where we are in our politics, hatred for Trump means that the Democratic left expects quote-unquote deep state actors to do this sort of stuff.
00:30:09.000They expect people in the administrative bureaucracy to thwart Republicans.
00:30:12.000This is why the ratchet only works one way.
00:30:13.000And again, it's not only true when it comes to the military infrastructure.
00:30:56.000But what I know of that general and his role as chief of staff is that he would call a meeting given the concerns of an unhinged president at that period of time.
00:31:16.000MSNBC's Barry McCaffrey, who of course is a general himself, he said, well, you know, it's fine.
00:31:21.000He was just trying to stop World War III.
00:31:24.000I think what General Milley was doing, and by the way, routinely, the chairman, the service chiefs, the joint combatant commanders routinely are in contact with their counterparts globally.
00:31:35.000Part of the deterrence of unwanted combat I think he felt it important to not end up with a World War I start of a war through miscalculation on the part of the Chinese.
00:31:50.000So again, I think we ought to be fortunate.
00:31:52.000We got this Princeton grad, tremendous combat officer, extremely intelligent, law-based, trying to safeguard the transition to a duly elected President Biden administration.
00:32:12.000Why didn't he walk across the office, Milley, to folks in the State Department and say to the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, you know, there might be a miscalculation here.
00:32:24.000You might want to call up the Chinese and assure them that there is no imminent military action.
00:32:29.000The idea here is that Milley was working.
00:32:33.000CNN's Lieutenant General Mark Hertling also defended Milley.
00:32:37.000And I'm not sure how you defend the general who is calling up the enemy and trying to inform them about how he is going to essentially create the military policy on his own in defiance of the civilian leadership.
00:32:49.000I think General Milley took some very prudent measures.
00:32:51.000General Milley isn't going to call the head of the People's Liberation Army in China and say, hey, don't worry about it, everything's going on.
00:32:59.000He's getting signals that other countries are concerned as well they should have been during this period of time.
00:33:05.000They were all watching what was going on in the insurrection on the 5th of January.
00:33:09.000So I think General Milley Didn't limit the president's power.
00:33:14.000I think if he did, that would be certainly a civil military action of the highest measure and should be condemned.
00:33:21.000But what he did was ensure the guardrails were in place.
00:33:25.000So I give him high marks for this based on what's described in the book.
00:33:42.000I'm going to keep focusing on he called up the Chinese government.
00:33:47.000Right after they'd unleashed, by the way, worldwide virus, he called up the Chinese government and told them about what America's military plans would or would not be.
00:33:56.000This, of course, led President Trump to fire back.
00:33:59.000First of all, if it is actually true, which is hard to believe, that he would have called China and done these things and was willing to advise them of an attack or in advance of an attack, that's treason.
00:34:14.000For him to say that I would even think about attacking China, I think he's trying to just get out of his incompetent withdrawal out of Afghanistan.
00:34:25.000Okay, so Trump is not wrong about this.
00:34:28.000And it does speak to the fact that once the bureaucracy is entrenched, it stays entrenched.
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00:35:40.000That's www.magbreakthrough.com slash Shapiro for that 10% discount and use code Shapiro10 to save that 10%. Alrighty, we'll get to Afghanistan and the lack of accountability that is throughout the administrative state.
00:35:54.000First, last week, Joe Biden announced his authoritarian vaccine mandate.
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00:36:44.000So General Mark Milley, remember, he's part of a bureaucracy that no one will ever get fired.
00:36:55.000No one is going to lose their job for incompetence so long as they carry out the wishes of a democratic president.
00:37:01.000So, we have watched an extraordinarily botched operation in Afghanistan.
00:37:05.000General Mark Milley, it is kind of amazing that Mark Milley called up The Chinese to assure them that we wouldn't do anything that offended their tender sensibilities while Trump was president.
00:37:14.000Meanwhile, General Mark Milley and the entire Pentagon was working with the Biden administration to make nice with the Taliban.
00:37:19.000That's that's really just wonderful and apparently droning randos.
00:37:25.000Rand Paul asked Secretary of State Tony Blinken yesterday about this because on the way out of Afghanistan, after the ISIS-K attack, which is like the special K of ISIS attack on American troops in Afghanistan while they were trying to evacuate folks, you'll recall that after that on the way out, there was a drone attack by the American military.
00:37:46.000And according to the New York Times, we basically killed an Afghan translator and many members of his family, including children.
00:37:52.000Rand Paul asked Secretary of State Tony Blinken, do you have any idea who he droned?
00:38:06.000Maybe when a Democratic president, the answer is the Democratic president is in control, but when a Republican president is president, then the bureaucracy is in control.
00:38:14.000Here is Senator Rand Paul with Tony Blinken.
00:38:17.000The guy the Biden administration droned, was he an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?
00:38:24.000The administration is, of course, reviewing that strike, and I'm sure that a full assessment will be forthcoming.
00:38:34.000So you don't know if it was an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?
00:38:38.000I can't speak to that, and I can't speak to that in this setting in any event.
00:39:07.000And the answer is, because if you are part of the Democratic blob, you can't lose your job for pretty much any reasons other than just kind of offending the president.
00:39:14.000But other than that, you're going to stay there forever, no matter how incompetent you are.
00:39:18.000And then when a Republican enters office, he's not going to fire any of these career staffers.
00:39:38.000By the way, everybody knew who was watching this for five seconds this was going to happen if you did this the way you did it.
00:39:44.000And you didn't take a genius to figure this out.
00:39:47.000I wrote a novel like five years ago in which the first chapter is this happening.
00:39:52.000It wasn't because I was watching Afghanistan closely.
00:39:54.000It's because it was patently obvious to anybody that if you withdraw all support for the Afghan military and hand the country back to the Taliban, bad crap was going to follow.
00:40:05.000We, the intelligence community, did not say that the countrywide collapse of all meaningful resistance would be likely to occur in a matter of days.
00:40:13.000And you referenced Chairman Milley, as I did earlier.
00:40:17.000Nothing that he saw, that I saw, that we saw, suggested that this government and security force would collapse in a matter of 11 days.
00:40:26.000And you're right that I think we need to look back at all of this.
00:40:31.000Oh, you need to look back at all of this, but has anybody been fired?
00:40:35.000Senator Josh Hawley is asking that question.
00:40:38.000Yesterday, he said that he's going to slow walk Joe Biden's foreign policy nominees until the top officials who oversaw all of this lose their jobs.
00:40:45.000He says he's going to object to confirming nominees for state and defense by unanimous consent unless Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, and NSA Jake Sullivan all resign.
00:40:55.000He says they should take responsibility for their failures.
00:41:07.000There would have been a hue and cry that Trump was getting rid of career officials.
00:41:10.000See, when Democrats get rid of career officials or termed officials, it's no big deal.
00:41:15.000In fact, Joe Biden recently attempted to fire a bunch of Trump appointees to sort of non-partisan boards in the very end of his administration.
00:41:24.000It included some folks like Kayleigh McEnany, but it also included some people like Lieutenant General, like General McMaster.
00:41:32.000And Biden was like, I just don't like you, so I'm gonna try and fire you, even though you actually have terms, right?
00:42:05.000The reason that I keep coming back to this centralizing point about the administrative bureaucracy is because if the country breaks, it is going to be because people, there is no incentive structure for people to stay within the structure.
00:42:16.000You have to give people something if you want them to remain inside a structure that takes 40% of their money, 30% of their money, and restricts every area of their life.
00:42:24.000There has to be some guarantee on the other end.
00:42:26.000And the guarantee on the other end cannot simply be that people you disagree with are going to govern every aspect of your life.
00:42:32.000It is why people are seeing movement to red states as an escape.
00:42:37.000They are seeing it as a way of avoiding blue state governance.
00:42:44.000And if the response by the Democrats and their friends in the bureaucracy is to tighten their grip, to harden their defenses, to become more sclerotic, to become less responsive, to cut off all the feedback loops, You're gonna break the thing.
00:43:02.000And that is the direction that we are moving right now.
00:43:04.000On everything from defense, to Afghanistan, to COVID.
00:43:10.000The attempts to grip everything incredibly tightly are going to lead to the... Tommy Lasorda once said that coaching a baseball team was sort of like holding a dove.
00:43:17.000You want to hold it tight enough that the dove doesn't escape, but you don't want to hold it so tight that you crush the dove.
00:43:21.000You could say the federal government is sort of the same thing.
00:43:24.000The goal of the federal government should be to be strong enough to maintain the union, but not strong enough to actually destroy the union.
00:43:32.000And it seems as though we are moving very rapidly in the direction of strong enough to destroy the union.
00:43:37.000And they'd rather crush the dove than allow the dove to breathe a little bit.
00:43:43.000And the predictable result of that is not gonna, the tighter you grip, the more things are gonna break.
00:43:48.000You're not creating stability, you're actually creating radical instability in this entire process.
00:43:53.000And that radical instability is going to lead to a lot of very bad things.
00:43:57.000It's not going to lead to an amicable breakup.
00:44:01.000It's just not gonna be an amicable divorce.
00:44:05.000The high likelihood is that things get uglier as time goes on.
00:44:08.000Because in a desire for top-down dominance, you are alienating everybody, and when they have no place left to go, because you are using the federal government as the cram-down power, through the power of an unelected administrative bureaucracy, the only check apparently being the Supreme Court.
00:44:22.000I mean, really, we now have two branches of the American government.
00:44:26.000The administrative state and the Supreme Court, and that's it.
00:44:29.000And if the Democrats simply pack the Supreme Court, that check goes away too.
00:44:34.000Then I will say that the end of the American Republican experiment would then be at an end.
00:44:41.000On that depressing note, we'll have an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show a little bit later on.
00:44:45.000In the meantime, go check out The Michael Nolsen Show.
00:45:20.000The California recall effort fails, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley flirts with treason, and the funniest man in the world dies unexpectedly.