The Ben Shapiro Show - The Situation In Syria | Ep. 513

00:00:00.000 Syrian dictator Bashar Assad uses chemical weapons again.

00:00:03.000 London talks about banning knives.

00:00:05.000 Yes, really.

00:00:06.000 And the Atlantic bans conservatives.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro and this is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:15.000 So welcome back.

00:00:16.000 Here we are in our beautiful studios once again, and I could not be more pleased to be home, except for how I wish I were on vacation still.

00:00:23.000 But since I am not, we will have to do a show.

00:00:25.000 So I have a lot to talk about today.

00:00:27.000 Obviously, the possibility of war in the Middle East is heating up in pretty dramatic fashion after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on his own citizens.

00:00:33.000 But first,

00:00:34.000 I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birchgold.

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00:00:46.000 I'm not saying take all your money out of the stock market and put it in precious metals.

00:00:49.000 I don't.

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00:01:52.000 Okay, so obviously the big news over the weekend and the big news today is the situation in Syria.

00:01:57.000 So over the last few days, the dictator of Syria used chemical weapons against his own citizens once again, and the footage broke on TV.

00:02:07.000 Now, as you recall, the last time there was a public use of chemical weapons and the news broke on TV, President Trump lobbed a couple of missiles into Syria.

00:02:15.000 Something like 50 missiles were lobbed into Syria.

00:02:18.000 And a particular airbase was hit.

00:02:20.000 Well, it's unclear what exactly the United States is going to do as of yet, but already action has been taken.

00:02:27.000 It's been taken by Israel. 0.70

00:02:28.000 So Israel went in and knocked out a Syrian airbase and took down some of their Syrian air defenses.

00:02:35.000 And I'll give you all that information in just a second.

00:02:37.000 For those who don't know what Syrian chemical weapons attacks look like, they are just horrendous and horrific.

00:02:43.000 The footage looked something like this.

00:02:50.000 So you can see these children are being treated.

00:02:52.000 They're being washed off with water because they've all been doused with chemical weapons.

00:02:57.000 A lot of these folks have died of suffocation.

00:03:01.000 Something like 100 people died of suffocation.

00:03:04.000 I mean, these are children.

00:03:06.000 These are small children.

00:03:07.000 So obviously when you see images like this, it's absolutely horrific.

00:03:10.000 Israel lashed out yesterday.

00:03:12.000 So here's the story from the Associated Press.

00:03:14.000 Russia and the Syrian military have blamed Israel for a pre-dawn missile attack Monday on a Syrian air base that reportedly killed 14 people, including three Iranians, while international condemnation grew over a suspected poison gas attack over the weekend that was said to be carried out by the Syrian government.

00:03:27.000 Opposition activists said 40 people died in the chemical attack, blaming President Bashar Assad's forces.

00:03:32.000 The U.N.

00:03:33.000 Security Council planned to hold an emergency meeting Monday to discuss the chemical attack.

00:03:37.000 We should pull all of our money from that awful institution. 0.82

00:03:39.000 If you wanna know how terrible the UN is, understand that Syria is about to sit on the committee for the regulation of chemical and biological weapons. 0.80

00:03:57.000 No, that is not a joke.

00:03:58.000 That is a real, actual thing.

00:04:00.000 So before you start thinking that the U.N.

00:04:02.000 is going to step in and solve anything at all, recognize that the U.N.

00:04:06.000 is a gigantic joke.

00:04:08.000 And that is why it's up to sovereign states to do something about these sort of atrocities.

00:04:12.000 The timing of the strike on the airbase in the central Homs province hours after President Trump

00:04:16.000 We're good to go!

00:04:40.000 Syrian state TV quoted an unnamed military official saying that Israeli F-15 warplanes fired several missiles at T-4 and it gave no further details.

00:04:49.000 And of course, Israel's foreign ministry said nothing.

00:04:51.000 Since 2012, Israel has struck inside Syria more than 100 times, mostly targeting suspected weapons convoys destined for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has been fighting along Syrian governmental forces.

00:05:02.000 So this looks like this could be the prelude to larger action.

00:05:05.000 John McCain and one of the people, Senator McCain, has been pushing for larger action in Syria for a long time.

00:05:10.000 I don't know.

00:05:28.000 Here's what Senator McCain had to say.

00:05:30.000 He said President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria.

00:05:34.000 We didn't have a chance to talk about this last week, but Trump did say he wanted to withdraw from Syria and immediately, within days.

00:05:39.000 Bashar Assad was using chemical weapons on his own citizens. 0.97

00:05:42.000 That's why President Trump's rhetoric actually matters, and to pretend otherwise is foolish.

00:05:47.000 McCain continues, Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him, and emboldened by American inaction, Assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women, and children, this time in Douma.

00:05:57.000 Initial accounts show dozens of innocent civilians, including children, have been targeted by this vicious bombardment designed to burn and choke the human body and leave victims writhing in unspeakable pain.

00:06:06.000 Crimes against humanity have become Assad's trademarks in his relentless campaign against the people of Syria that has killed more than half a million people and forced 11 million people from their homes, according to John McCain.

00:06:16.000 President Trump was quick to call out Assad today, along with the Russian and Iranian governments on Twitter.

00:06:20.000 The question now is whether he will do anything about it.

00:06:22.000 The president responded decisively when Assad used chemical weapons last year.

00:06:25.000 He should do so again and demonstrate that Assad will pay a price for his war crimes. 0.54

00:06:29.000 To be sure, President Trump inherited bad options after years of inactions by his predecessor in Syria.

00:06:34.000 History will render a bitter judgment on America for that failure.

00:06:36.000 But no one should believe that we are out of options.

00:06:38.000 We can and should change course, starting with a comprehensive strategy that lays out clear objectives for our mission there.

00:06:43.000 Well, that is the big question, is what are the objectives going to be for the mission there?

00:06:46.000 Because foreign policy isolationists, people like Ann Coulter or Rand Paul, they would say we have no interest in Syria whatsoever, so terrible things are happening there, awful humanitarian crisis, but

00:06:55.000 Humanitarian crises are happening all over the world.

00:06:57.000 It is not the job of the United States to stop every humanitarian crisis.

00:07:01.000 It all depends on the sort of blood and treasure America will have to expend in order to stop those humanitarian crises.

00:07:07.000 Well, that's obviously true.

00:07:08.000 We have to calculate each individual situation on its own.

00:07:11.000 But the situation on Syria has fundamentally changed in the several years since President Obama allowed Bashar Assad to get away with his chemical weapons attack.

00:07:19.000 Here's what President Trump tweeted after the chemical weapons attack.

00:07:23.000 He tweeted, quote,

00:07:24.000 So he's now gotten a nickname for Assad, which is entirely appropriate in this case. 1.00

00:07:27.000 Big price.

00:07:27.000 And continued.

00:07:43.000 Okay, all of that is true.

00:07:51.000 The question becomes, okay, what is going to happen next?

00:07:53.000 Well, Trump's national security advisor, well, his security advisor, rather, Tom Bossert, he was on national TV on Sunday, and he said, listen, all the options are on the table here.

00:08:02.000 This is one of those issues on which every nation, all peoples have all agreed and have agreed since World War II is an unacceptable practice.

00:08:09.000 So is it possible there will be another missile attack?

00:08:13.000 I wouldn't take anything off the table.

00:08:14.000 These are horrible photos.

00:08:16.000 We're looking into the attack at this point.

00:08:18.000 The State Department put out a statement last night and the President's Senior National Security Cabinet have been talking with him and with each other all throughout the evening and this morning and myself included.

00:08:28.000 So one of the things that's amazing about all of this is that people on the left are already critical of Trump.

00:08:32.000 Trump inherited an awful situation here.

00:08:34.000 Tommy Veeder, who is just a dolt, he used to drive a van for Obama, then suddenly ended up as a national security counselor for President Obama after driving a van. 0.75

00:08:42.000 And now, I guess that he is, and now I guess that he is doing Pod Save America type stuff. 0.79

00:08:48.000 Well, he tweeted out that President Trump inherited a bad situation.

00:08:52.000 Well, Tommy, who did he inherit that from?

00:08:54.000 Weren't you there?

00:08:55.000 I mean, all of you were there at the time.

00:08:57.000 Now, there were those of us who opposed President Obama's quote-unquote pinprick strike in Syria.

00:09:01.000 The reason being that if you send a missile into Syria and then you do nothing else, you actually embolden the Iranians and you embolden the Syrians and you embolden the Russians. 0.71

00:09:08.000 Nobody expected that President Obama was going to give away the store to the Russians.

00:09:11.000 If you recall back to 2013, Bashar Assad used chemical weapons.

00:09:14.000 Barack Obama then drew a red line in the sand.

00:09:17.000 Here is President Obama back then drawing a red line.

00:09:21.000 We have been very clear.

00:09:24.000 To the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.

00:09:39.000 That would change my calculus.

00:09:41.000 That would change my equation.

00:09:42.000 Okay, so he made that statement, actually, in August of 2012, and then, of course, Bashar Assad immediately used chemical weapons, like, within a couple of months.

00:09:50.000 And then, Barack Obama did something really unexpected.

00:09:54.000 First he said, maybe I'll throw a missile in there, but you know what?

00:09:57.000 I need congressional approval.

00:09:58.000 Now, that was obviously a lie, because he didn't have congressional approval for his Libya action.

00:10:01.000 He just went ahead and did it.

00:10:03.000 But he said, I'll throw it to Congress.

00:10:06.000 And that went nowhere.

00:10:07.000 And then he said, you know what?

00:10:08.000 I'll let the Russians take over. 1.00

00:10:09.000 The Russians can come in and they will disarm the Syrians. 1.00

00:10:12.000 So Barack Obama and Susan Rice both came out.

00:10:14.000 Susan Rice, then the National Security Advisor, she came out and she said, don't worry.

00:10:17.000 Syria's chemical weapons have been removed.

00:10:19.000 They're gone.

00:10:20.000 Syria has no more chemical weapons.

00:10:22.000 Obama was triumphalist about this.

00:10:23.000 He said, everything is better.

00:10:25.000 There will be no more chemical weapons attacks.

00:10:27.000 Everything is under control.

00:10:29.000 Here is Barack Obama and Susan Rice.

00:10:31.000 This is back in 2013.

00:10:32.000 Think about what we've done these last eight years without firing a shot.

00:10:36.000 We've eliminated Syria's declared chemical weapons program.

00:10:39.000 All of these steps have helped keep us safe and helped keep our troops safe.

00:10:45.000 Those are the result of diplomacy.

00:10:47.000 If we don't have strong efforts there, the more you will be called upon to clean up after

00:10:55.000 The failure of diplomacy.

00:10:58.000 We were able to find a solution that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished.

00:11:06.000 Okay, and Tommy Vietor said the same thing.

00:11:07.000 Well, you know, we got rid of a lot of the chemical weapons, right, except for the ones that he's using on the civilians. 0.68

00:11:11.000 We're good to go.

00:11:27.000 There's a civil war going on, and that wasn't Barack Obama's fault.

00:11:30.000 It was Barack Obama's fault that he decided to hand over all of these security concerns to the Russians. 0.68

00:11:36.000 The Russians obviously had nefarious purposes there. 1.00

00:11:38.000 All they care about is propping up Bashar Assad, and all of this raises the question,

00:11:42.000 Which is, OK, what should the United States do now?

00:11:45.000 And that is a serious and open question.

00:11:46.000 You know, it is amazing, again, how badly the Obama administration blew it.

00:11:50.000 This is not on President Trump, but now Trump is the president.

00:11:52.000 So that raises a question as to where we go from here.

00:11:55.000 In a second, I'm going to answer that question for you, or at least give you maybe some some concerns that I have about full scale military intervention, as well as some possibilities on what we can do in Syria right now.

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00:13:25.000 What exactly should we do from here?

00:13:27.000 That is the big question in all of this.

00:13:29.000 And one of the things that has changed, there are a lot of people like me who back during the Obama administration said, this is a direct quote in 2013, In other words, whatever you do has to have real impact.

00:13:43.000 You can't do what Obama wanted to do and take a half-assed action and then hope that everything is going to be better.

00:13:49.000 That doesn't work.

00:13:50.000 And you can't hand over power to the Russian government, whose only interest is in continued propagation of the domination of Bashar Assad and the continued domination of the Iranian regime across the Middle East.

00:14:01.000 And things have changed radically since 2013 because of a couple of the deals that the Obama administration cut.

00:14:07.000 Remember, the situation in 2012-2013 was a lot simpler.

00:14:10.000 Russia was not running Syria at that point, and Iran was still under American sanction.

00:14:15.000 Well, because of Barack Obama, Iran now has a lot of money to play with, and they have expanded their terrorism outreach all across the Middle East. 0.59

00:14:21.000 Suddenly there's a swath of territory, all the way from Iran to Lebanon, that is dominated by Iran.

00:14:27.000 That's dominated by Iran, and that includes Syria.

00:14:29.000 This is why Israel was the one that actually struck out yesterday at the targets in Syria.

00:14:34.000 They've been striking out at targets in Syria, as I say, over a hundred times they've struck at targets in Syria since 2012, because Syria is being used as a thoroughfare 0.99

00:14:42.000 for the world's worst weapons being put in the hands of terrorists, people like Hamas, people like Hezbollah. 0.90

00:14:48.000 Yadlin Amos is a retired general in the Israeli army, the executive director of Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies.

00:14:55.000 And he has a really interesting tweet thread about what happened last night when Israel apparently struck T4, which is a Syrian airbase.

00:15:02.000 He said, the reported strike last night in T4, Syria is part of the two colliding vectors.

00:15:06.000 Iranian determination to entrench itself in Syria and Israeli resolve to prevent it.

00:15:11.000 This was the first reported airstrike since February 10th incidents.

00:15:15.000 The colliding vectors were recognized months ago in the Israeli national security strategy and Syrian and Iranian responses cannot be ruled out.

00:15:22.000 The strikes timing drove Syria to first attribute it to the US as a response to Assad's use of chemical weapons against civilians in Douma.

00:15:27.000 However, the US has denied responsibility while the target hit is connected to Iran and not to chemical weapons.

00:15:34.000 It is not from T4 Air Force Base that the CW dropping aircraft came, while reports of Iranian casualties are a strong testament. 1.00

00:15:41.000 That being said, a strike may well serve two purposes, promoting two objectives in a single step, preventing Iranian entrenchment in Syria with advanced weaponry, and sending a moral message that using CW to commit mass murder is not acceptable.

00:15:53.000 To that end, even if it does not take responsibility for the strike last night, it is important that Israel make its voice heard denouncing the use of chemical weapons and their use in Syria awaits a U.S.

00:16:02.000 and Western response, and one cannot rule out the possibility of a U.S.

00:16:04.000 strike on regime targets.

00:16:06.000 So, here's what's happening.

00:16:07.000 This has now become a grand strategic game.

00:16:09.000 This is no longer a situation in which everything is contained.

00:16:13.000 Okay, that's the reality of the situation in Syria right now.

00:16:15.000 This is not a containable situation.

00:16:17.000 Russia is involved.

00:16:18.000 Iran is involved.

00:16:19.000 This is now a proxy war about who is going to control this entire swath of land in the Middle East.

00:16:24.000 That means Saudi Arabia is involved.

00:16:25.000 It means Jordan is involved.

00:16:27.000 It means Egypt is involved. 0.90

00:16:28.000 It means Israel is involved. 0.90

00:16:29.000 If World War III breaks out in Syria, World War III will break out because Barack Obama allowed Syria to become a tinderbox by pulling American troops out of Iraq, by allowing Iran to run roughshod through Iraq, and by allowing Iran to extend its domination all the way to Lebanon. 0.85

00:16:44.000 So what exactly should we do?

00:16:46.000 We should do a couple of things.

00:16:47.000 If we have the capacity, we should knock out as much of the Syrian Air Force as we possibly can. 1.00

00:16:51.000 We should knock down as many of their anti-aircraft missiles as we possibly can.

00:16:57.000 It's probably impossible to decapitate the regime with significant amounts of boot on the ground.

00:17:01.000 Whatever we can do from the air, we should do from the air.

00:17:03.000 And we should also ensure that there are safe havens for

00:17:08.000 Syrian rebels and people who want to escape the Assad regime and those should be protected by a coalition force led by the United States The reason being that there have to be safe spaces for all of these Syrian refugees Otherwise, they're just gonna come into the West otherwise they're just going to escape across the Mediterranean and into Europe or they will come to the United States and That is something that a lot of Trump supporters are not fond of either so either they're gonna stay there in safe places that we help set up or they will be killed or they will escape but

00:17:33.000 Should we go in and make this a full-scale land war?

00:17:36.000 Probably not.

00:17:37.000 Probably not.

00:17:37.000 Because again, what's America's interest here?

00:17:39.000 America has two real interests.

00:17:41.000 Checking Russian ambitions?

00:17:42.000 Well, three interests, okay?

00:17:43.000 Humanitarian, but that exists all across the globe.

00:17:46.000 Checking Russian interest in Syria.

00:17:47.000 Russia wants to ensure that Bashar Assad and the Iranian regime retain power and gain power in that region, which makes it more likely that war breaks out.

00:17:54.000 And stopping the growth of the Iranian regime.

00:17:57.000 Israel and Saudi Arabia, by the way, are happy to take the lead here.

00:18:00.000 Right?

00:18:00.000 Israel obviously is already taking the lead here.

00:18:02.000 Israel isn't going to wait. 0.98

00:18:03.000 So, the fact that the United States can mobilize a commitment behind Israeli-led action in Syria would be a good thing. 0.98

00:18:10.000 If we have allies who are willing to do this, there's no reason the United States should have to lead the way.

00:18:14.000 But again, the U.S.

00:18:15.000 is going to have to be involved.

00:18:16.000 That means setting up these safer places for Syrian refugees to go.

00:18:20.000 It means neutering the ability of the Assad regime to use chemical weapons.

00:18:25.000 And it means preventing them from making more territorial encroachments into rebel-held areas.

00:18:30.000 And that means providing actual armed support to whatever Syrian rebels are left who have not been murdered already by ISIS and the Assad regime and arming those people who are left in order to resist the Assad regime.

00:18:40.000 This now has implications far beyond the borders of Syria, and we are going to pay a price for it in terms of money and treasure and the possibility of additional terrorism and the spread of chemical weapons if we take a fully hands-off approach, as some of the more isolationist members of the Republican Party seem to be promoting.

00:18:56.000 Okay, well, meanwhile, there's a bunch of other stuff going on.

00:19:01.000 Among those other things, apparently, President Trump is intent on launching a trade war.

00:19:06.000 The stock market has been up and down, basically assuming that

00:19:11.000 Yeah, President Trump is not serious about the trade war or that he is serious about the trade war.

00:19:15.000 It's not clear where he is on the trade war, but it's interesting to see how many members of the Trump administration are trying to kind of shift his thinking on trade.

00:19:27.000 Let's talk a little bit about where he is.

00:19:28.000 So a couple of Trump's officials went on TV over the weekend to talk about President Trump's initiation of a trade war against China.

00:19:35.000 He obviously has set tariffs extraordinarily high in particular sectors of the economy.

00:19:39.000 And there are two takes on tariffs.

00:19:41.000 A take number one from the Trump administration on tariffs is that tariffs are a tool that is to be used as often as possible because they're good for the United States.

00:19:49.000 We have a trade deficit, and the only way to rectify that trade imbalance is to put tariffs on foreign products, thereby forcing American citizens to buy American and lowering the amount of money that we are exporting to China, for example. 0.86

00:19:59.000 Okay, that is idiotic economically for reasons that I've suggested many times on this program.

00:20:03.000 The reality is that taxing American citizens does not make American citizens more wealthy. 0.98

00:20:07.000 And all a tariff is, is an indirect tax on American citizens for the benefit of certain American businesses.

00:20:12.000 So if there is a steelmaker who is less efficient than another steelmaker that is located abroad, and you are forcing American citizens to patronize the American steelmaker, you are taking money out of my pocket and giving it to another business that is just

00:20:24.000 A form of redistributionism.

00:20:26.000 It's a tax and spend program.

00:20:27.000 That's all a tariff is.

00:20:28.000 It's a domestic tax and spend program.

00:20:30.000 And that does not make America any wealthier.

00:20:31.000 Now, it is another question if you are using trade in order to punish bad regimes, for example.

00:20:36.000 We've done that with South Africa in the past.

00:20:38.000 We have done that with Iran. 0.99

00:20:40.000 We did that.

00:20:40.000 That's what sanctions were for.

00:20:41.000 It was essentially a tariff on, an impossibly high tariff on Iran was essentially what a sanction is in policy.

00:20:48.000 So there's using it for security reasons.

00:20:50.000 There's also using it in order to try and jog other countries to lower their tariffs.

00:20:54.000 So let's say China has a bunch of tariffs on American products and we say, listen, you lower your tariffs, we'll lower our tariffs.

00:20:59.000 But if you're going to tariff our products, we will tariff yours and our market is bigger than yours.

00:21:03.000 Right, then that may be worthwhile also.

00:21:05.000 Now, the problem here is that Trump is a devotee of the first kind of thinking, that tariffs are universally good.

00:21:09.000 A lot of the people who surround him are people who think that tariffs can be strategically useful.

00:21:14.000 And I think what they are trying to do inside the Trump administration is manipulate the president into using tariffs as a targeted method of lowering tariffs elsewhere or pushing security change.

00:21:24.000 And what Trump actually wants is he just likes the tariffs generally.

00:21:26.000 So you can see this from some of his officials.

00:21:28.000 Steve Mnuchin is one of them.

00:21:29.000 Mnuchin came out and he said, listen, maybe there'll be a trade war, but it'll be okay.

00:21:33.000 What Trump's officials know better than anybody, the people who surround Trump, is that there's one word Trump does not hear, and that word is no.

00:21:40.000 If you say to President Trump no about anything, there is a 100% guarantee he will do that thing.

00:21:46.000 It does not matter what the thing is.

00:21:47.000 Literally, they told him, don't look into a solar eclipse without your sunglasses.

00:21:52.000 And the president of the United States took off his sunglasses and looked into a solar eclipse.

00:21:56.000 Because if you tell him no, he's got the same reaction as both my kids.

00:22:00.000 Who are you?

00:22:02.000 Who are you?

00:22:03.000 So, Steve Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow both have been avoiding telling him no.

00:22:07.000 What they're trying to do instead is, I think, convince him that it's a qualified no.

00:22:11.000 Yes, Mr. President, that's brilliant policy, but it would be best if you used it in this particular way.

00:22:15.000 So I'll explain what they're doing in just a second.

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00:23:48.000 Okay, so here are the members of the Trump administration trying to convince President Trump that a trade war might not be a bad idea, while saying, well, okay, maybe there'll be a trade war, because they don't actually want to say no to the President.

00:23:58.000 Here's Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary.

00:24:01.000 I don't expect there will be a trade war.

00:24:04.000 It could be.

00:24:05.000 But I don't I don't expect it at all.

00:24:07.000 But the president is willing to make sure we are free and fair trade, as you've seen his tweet already this morning.

00:24:12.000 And again, he has a very close relationship with President Xi.

00:24:16.000 And we'll continue to discuss these issues with them.

00:24:19.000 Okay, so he is soft-pedaling it because, again, if you say no to Trump, it is more likely that he wants to trade war on everybody.

00:24:26.000 Larry Kudlow is sort of doing the same thing.

00:24:27.000 He's the new head of the National Economic Council and a free trader.

00:24:30.000 He says, listen, we have to do this, but listen to his rationale for why these tariffs are necessary.

00:24:35.000 It is not because the tariffs are a great idea just in and of themselves.

00:24:38.000 It's because he thinks that they are a useful tool for lowering tariffs elsewhere.

00:24:42.000 My message essentially is, look, we have to do this.

00:24:46.000 We have to get China to change its behavior. 0.77

00:24:48.000 It's been two decades and they're still stealing our intellectual property.

00:24:52.000 They're still forcing technology turnovers from our businesses to them.

00:24:58.000 They've still got high tariffs.

00:24:59.000 They've still got trade barriers.

00:25:01.000 They still have market closing instead of market opening.

00:25:04.000 So that's got to change.

00:25:05.000 Trump is doing the Lord's work.

00:25:07.000 Okay, so Kudlow is basically saying the tariffs are a point of leverage.

00:25:11.000 It's not that tariffs are just a wonderfully innate, great thing.

00:25:14.000 President Trump, however, tends to think that they are a great thing.

00:25:16.000 I hope that Kudlow obviously prevails.

00:25:18.000 I hope that Mnuchin prevails.

00:25:20.000 I hope that his team allows Trump to recognize the reality about trade, which is that tariffs can be a useful tool for leveraging things from other people, but they're not good, innately, for the United States of America.

00:25:30.000 Okay, meanwhile, in other news, late last week,

00:25:33.000 We can get a chance to comment on it.

00:25:35.000 There's an amazing story.

00:25:36.000 Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of The Atlantic. 1.00

00:25:37.000 Jeffrey Goldberg is also a schmuck. 0.99

00:25:39.000 So Jeffrey Goldberg is a guy who was essentially a tool of the Obama administration in pushing out their Iran lies. 0.99

00:25:46.000 Every time they had a piece of propaganda, they went out to Jeffrey Goldberg because Jeffrey Goldberg was their boy.

00:25:50.000 Jeffrey Goldberg was the guy who was going to say what they wanted.

00:25:52.000 Well, now he's the editor of The Atlantic.

00:25:54.000 And a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago, he did something that

00:25:57.000 Looked a little more reasonable.

00:25:58.000 It looked a little smarter.

00:25:59.000 He said he wanted to diversify the opinion pages over at The Atlantic, and they hired former National Review columnist Kevin Williamson.

00:26:05.000 Now, Kevin is a real iconoclast.

00:26:08.000 Kevin is the kind of guy who says, I would say, wild things on a regular basis.

00:26:13.000 He's a tremendous writer.

00:26:15.000 I mean, a really tremendous writer.

00:26:16.000 But all of his language is extraordinarily strong.

00:26:18.000 He always takes very strong positions, some of them on bizarre issues.

00:26:23.000 And one of the issues that people had known about for a long time that Kevin had spoken about was that he is not generally in favor of the death penalty.

00:26:29.000 He doesn't like the death penalty and he would avoid the death penalty.

00:26:31.000 But if the death penalty were to remain applicable in the United States, he believes that women should be punished for abortion because if abortion is homicide, then women should be punished for it.

00:26:39.000 And if women were to be punished for it and the death penalty were still in play, then he presumes that women would get the death penalty.

00:26:45.000 He had tweeted about that before.

00:26:46.000 And the Atlantic fully knew about this, right?

00:26:48.000 Jeffrey Goldberg knew about it, everyone on Twitter knew about this.

00:26:50.000 It was one of Williamson's weirder positions.

00:26:52.000 Now, the general pro-life position on this issue is that you wouldn't actually punish the woman for the abortion, you punish the abortion doctors for the abortion, because women who are obtaining abortions generally are doing so because they do not have the proper mens rea.

00:27:05.000 They don't actually think of it as killing their own baby, and so they don't actually know what it is they're doing, whereas a doctor full well knows what he's doing.

00:27:12.000 This has always been the pro-life position in the general pro-life community.

00:27:15.000 Williamson takes an even stronger position than that, obviously.

00:27:17.000 Well, he tweeted something out about it, and then they discovered that on a podcast he talked a little bit about it.

00:27:22.000 So here's what it sounded like when Kevin Williamson, this new Atlantic columnist, had talked about this on a podcast with Charlie Cook, a National Review podcast called Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

00:27:33.000 And someone challenged me on my views of abortion, saying if you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, treating it as a homicide.

00:27:46.000 And I do support that.

00:27:47.000 In fact, as I wrote, what I have in mind is hanging.

00:27:50.000 But yeah, so when I was talking about, yeah, I would totally go with that.

00:27:55.000 Okay, so what he meant there, of course, is that, as a thought experiment, if you were going to have hanging as the legal method of death in all of these various areas—Williamson, by nature, is against the death penalty, by the way—then he would say that that applies to abortion.

00:28:09.000 Now, do I think that's a good argument?

00:28:10.000 No.

00:28:10.000 Do I agree with Williamson?

00:28:11.000 No.

00:28:13.000 The Atlantic fired him for this, okay?

00:28:14.000 And they issued a statement talking about how his views were essentially unacceptable.

00:28:18.000 Here is what Goldberg said, quote,

00:28:28.000 Okay, well, you didn't know that like he had said that.

00:28:30.000 It was on his Twitter account.

00:28:31.000 And I assumed that Jeffrey Goldberg had called him up about it, and Goldberg had said, do you believe this?

00:28:35.000 And William said, yeah, I believe this.

00:28:37.000 Well, as the editor of the website, one of the things that we do is we hire a bunch of people with widely disparate views.

00:28:42.000 They're all on the right because I'm the editor of the website, and it's a right-wing website.

00:28:45.000 It's a conservative website.

00:28:46.000 Over at Daily Wire.

00:28:48.000 If people hold opinions, like pro-choice opinions, for example, they do not appear on our website.

00:28:52.000 There may be pro-choice writers who write for us.

00:28:54.000 I really don't know.

00:28:55.000 But I can edit what goes on my website.

00:28:57.000 Well, The Atlantic certainly could have done the same thing with Williamson if they don't like this particular opinion.

00:29:00.000 And he said, listen, I want to write a long article about why hanging is the proper response to abortion. 0.73

00:29:04.000 And The Atlantic said, listen, we don't want that in our pages.

00:29:07.000 That's their prerogative.

00:29:08.000 But firing him preemptively for a thought crime, for a view that he had not expressed in the pages of The Atlantic, is a pretty amazing thing.

00:29:15.000 And Williamson has a lot of very strong positions.

00:29:17.000 And what this really is, is that the left believes that any right-winger, it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't matter if it were Williamson, or Bret Stephens, or me, or Ross Douthat, it does not matter.

00:29:27.000 Anybody who is on the right, Barry Weiss is not even on the right.

00:29:30.000 If you are not of the hardcore left, then the left sees you as an improper human being.

00:29:37.000 They will not allow you to appear in their pages on a regular basis, or if they do, they will do so extraordinarily grudgingly.

00:29:45.000 And the Atlantic was considered a more moderate sort of publication.

00:29:48.000 There are more moderate publications that try to do this, but they are becoming fewer and far between.

00:29:53.000 And just to point out that the Atlantic is not consistent about their standards for public rhetoric, the Atlantic champions the fact that they are the home of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

00:30:00.000 Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about 9-11 first responders that they were, quote unquote, not human to me.

00:30:04.000 That is a direct quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

00:30:07.000 Ta-Nehisi Coates.

00:30:09.000 The fact is that The Atlantic has given glowing profiles to people like Peter Singer.

00:30:13.000 Peter Singer is a quote-unquote ethicist at Princeton who forcibly advocates for the murder of children outside the womb.

00:30:21.000 He says if a woman wants to kill a baby after it is born, that is okay. 1.00

00:30:24.000 So just to be straight about this, Peter Singer says killing a baby after it's born is okay because babies don't have an awareness of their time and place in the universe because they're stupid. 1.00

00:30:33.000 And so you can kill them, right? 1.00

00:30:34.000 This is Peter Singer's stated position on genocide against small children, against babies. 0.99

00:30:40.000 That is worthy of some sort of decent profile in the Atlantic, but Kevin Williamson is too harsh on people who actually kill their babies, and this is considered something just egregious and wrong and terrible.

00:30:52.000 It's pretty amazing, and it demonstrates the extremism of the left.

00:30:55.000 And in a second, I'm gonna explain to you why it is that this has some pretty dramatic ramifications for the entire political discourse.

00:31:01.000 Because, you know, Williamson may be an iconoclastic figure, you may not know who he is, you may not care about the Atlantic, but this is an indicator of where our political discourse is going, and it is nowhere good.

00:31:09.000 I have a lot of thoughts on this.

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00:32:49.000 Alrighty, so I want to talk a little bit more about Kevin Williamson here.

00:32:52.000 So here is why this is a problem.

00:32:54.000 You may think that Williamson's crazy.

00:32:56.000 You may hate his viewpoints. 1.00

00:32:57.000 You may think that Williamson is garbage. 0.97

00:32:59.000 Kevin Williamson, first of all, is a very good writer. 0.99

00:33:01.000 Second of all, Kevin Williamson is wildly anti-Trump.

00:33:03.000 When I say he is wildly anti-Trump, I don't mean he just opposed Trump in the election.

00:33:07.000 I mean that he wrote a column when Trump announced called The Ape Descends the Escalator.

00:33:12.000 I mean that this is a guy who in his columns has called Donald Trump's sons oudé and cousé.

00:33:17.000 OK, he is not subtle about his dislike for President Trump.

00:33:19.000 And even he was not acceptable to the left because he has he has a view on abortion that is outside the mainstream.

00:33:25.000 And as I say, leftist views on abortion, which are inherently outside the mainstream, those are not outside the mainstream.

00:33:30.000 According to The Atlantic, they are just fine.

00:33:32.000 Again, Peter Singer is probably just fine for The Atlantic.

00:33:34.000 But Kevin Williamson is not acceptable.

00:33:36.000 What does this mean?

00:33:37.000 What this means that the left is doing something really, really damaging to American discourse.

00:33:42.000 They're shrinking the Overton window.

00:33:43.000 The Overton window, it's a term that I believe was originally used by the VP of a think tank.

00:33:48.000 It was named after him.

00:33:49.000 The Overton window means the range of acceptable discourse.

00:33:52.000 Right, so in any conversation, there's a range of acceptable discourse.

00:33:56.000 There are people who you say are just not acceptable to talk to. 0.85

00:33:58.000 You have people who, for example, say that black people are innately inferior, right? 0.97

00:34:03.000 Those are people who are just not worth talking to. 0.98

00:34:05.000 That is not acceptable discourse.

00:34:07.000 Now, this does not mean they don't have a right to say what they want to say.

00:34:09.000 They have a right to say whatever they want to say.

00:34:10.000 It's the First Amendment.

00:34:11.000 Welcome to America.

00:34:12.000 That's fine.

00:34:13.000 But I am not a moral relativist, and I don't believe that just because you have a right to say something means that you should say it or that everything that is said is equal in value.

00:34:21.000 So there's something called the Overton window, which is the window of acceptable discourse or useful discourse.

00:34:26.000 But what the left has done is they've shrunk the Overton window down to about pinprick size.

00:34:31.000 So the Overton window is now the space of opinion between Bernie Sanders and maybe Kamala Harris.

00:34:38.000 That's basically the level of acceptable discourse.

00:34:40.000 Between Ta-Nehisi Coates' intersectional leftism and Bernie Sanders' socialist leftism, everything in between there is cool.

00:34:45.000 But if you're outside that Overton window,

00:34:48.000 Then, you are unacceptable.

00:34:50.000 So, what does this mean?

00:34:51.000 Well, it means that the left has now separated discourse not into three categories, but into two.

00:34:55.000 So, here are the three categories I have for speech.

00:34:57.000 There's the acceptable.

00:34:59.000 There's the unacceptable, right outside the Overton window.

00:35:01.000 And then, there's the acceptable stuff, but I disagree with it.

00:35:04.000 And there's lots of that stuff.

00:35:05.000 I'd say most discourse is stuff that I disagree with, but is within the Overton window.

00:35:10.000 What the left has done instead is they've said, there's the stuff we agree with,

00:35:14.000 And then there's everything else, and everything else is unacceptable.

00:35:16.000 So that means that Kevin Williamson is now a deplorable.

00:35:19.000 It means that I am a deplorable.

00:35:20.000 It means that Barry Weiss, a columnist for the New York Times, who I'm sure voted for Hillary Clinton, is a deplorable.

00:35:25.000 It means that people like Brett Stevens and Ross Douthat, these people are deplorable.

00:35:29.000 It means that...

00:35:31.000 Again, Sam Harris is deplorable. 0.89

00:35:33.000 Sam Harris and I disagree about a wide variety of things, but Sam Harris once said on national television that Islam is a more dangerous religion than Christianity, and suddenly he was an other. 0.61

00:35:41.000 Brett Weinstein, right?

00:35:42.000 A leftist, socialist college professor at Evergreen State College who refused to not teach on a day that the students said, we only want non-white teachers teaching.

00:35:50.000 He showed up anyway and wanted to teach.

00:35:52.000 You know, that guy was declared an deplorable because he was outside the acceptable range of windows, right?

00:35:58.000 He was outside the acceptable range of opinions.

00:36:00.000 So what happens when you do this?

00:36:02.000 Well, what happens when you do this is it means that you are lumping in a bunch of people you disagree with with unacceptable bigots.

00:36:09.000 Right?

00:36:09.000 So now Kevin Williamson is in the same category, according to the left, as Richard Spencer.

00:36:13.000 I'm in the same category as Richard Spencer. 1.00

00:36:14.000 You wonder why I get labeled a Nazi by idiots on campus who don't know the first thing about me? 1.00

00:36:18.000 Because I am not agreeing with them. 1.00

00:36:20.000 Therefore, I am a Nazi.

00:36:21.000 It is that simple.

00:36:22.000 I am not agreeing with them.

00:36:23.000 Therefore, I am part of this basket of deplorables.

00:36:25.000 I am now outside the Overton window, and I must be excluded from the range of acceptable discourse.

00:36:30.000 This is why President Trump is president.

00:36:33.000 This is why, for a short period of time, the alt-right was in the ascendance.

00:36:35.000 The reason is because this leaves people who have now been thrown out of the acceptable range with a choice.

00:36:42.000 We can either say, listen,

00:36:44.000 We still think there are three categories.

00:36:46.000 Right?

00:36:46.000 Not two, three.

00:36:47.000 We still think that you may disagree with us, but we're in the acceptable category, and so we refuse to allow you to lump us in with people like Richard Spencer.

00:36:53.000 We refuse to allow you to label us a deplorable like some of the other people you're labeling deplorables.

00:36:58.000 Right? 0.99

00:36:58.000 You can do that, or you can say, listen, screw you guys. 0.99

00:37:01.000 You've now labeled everyone a Nazi. 0.98

00:37:03.000 So if you're labeling me a Nazi, I don't know if... I know I'm not a Nazi.

00:37:06.000 Maybe the other people you're labeling Nazis also are not Nazis.

00:37:09.000 Maybe all these bad people who are already out here, maybe they're out here just because you don't like them.

00:37:13.000 Maybe you ought to give their views a second look.

00:37:15.000 Because if you're labeling me the same way you're labeling them, if I get hit with the same category that they're being hit with, then how do I know that you were honest in your original appraisal of those people?

00:37:25.000 And so there's a real temptation on the part of people who have been thrown out of the acceptable category by the left to simply band together and say, listen, we're all in this together because we hate you guys.

00:37:35.000 Because you guys threw us out.

00:37:36.000 We're out here in the cold.

00:37:38.000 You threw us out of the cabin.

00:37:39.000 And now it's snowing.

00:37:40.000 So we can either argue amongst ourselves in the snow, or we can all band together and we can try to break back into the cabin, right?

00:37:45.000 That's sort of the idea that's being pushed here.

00:37:48.000 Now, the moral thing to do would say, listen,

00:37:50.000 We're going to try to break in the cabin without the people we think are bad.

00:37:52.000 We have our own independent viewpoints.

00:37:54.000 I have my own independent viewpoint.

00:37:55.000 And you can try to throw me out of the range of acceptable discourse, but I refuse to accept your label.

00:38:00.000 And I refuse to accept that you are labeling me in the same way that you label a bunch of people who really are disgusting and who really do have disgusting views.

00:38:06.000 But the temptation is going to be always and ever

00:38:10.000 To simply say, listen, you've thrown us all out.

00:38:12.000 Alliances of convenience.

00:38:14.000 If you've declared war on us, well, we're not going to play by the Marcus of Queensberry rules.

00:38:18.000 You declare war on us, we'll take the allies we can get and we'll fight back against you. 0.98

00:38:22.000 The left has been counting on the virtue of conservatives to keep them from making common cause with truly garbage people. 0.98

00:38:27.000 But that makes no sense. 0.99

00:38:29.000 If you call conservatives garbage people and then you say, yes, but you really should continue to separate yourself off from the actual garbage people. 0.99

00:38:35.000 You can't have it both ways. 0.99

00:38:37.000 If we're garbage, then you have to expect us not to act virtuous. 0.94

00:38:41.000 You want to know why we're entering into a tribal routine here? 0.98

00:38:45.000 Why we're getting closer and closer to political tribalism that is going to end poorly for all involved?

00:38:49.000 The reason is because the left has created the anti-left tribe.

00:38:53.000 That's what's happened.

00:38:54.000 This is why Donald Trump was successful.

00:38:57.000 He didn't campaign as a conservative.

00:38:58.000 He campaigned as an anti-left fighter.

00:39:00.000 And a lot of people said, OK, fine.

00:39:02.000 Well, if he's against them, I'm with him.

00:39:05.000 This is how you generate that.

00:39:06.000 If the left really wanted to have a serious conversation, they wanted to prevent this sort of tribalism, all they have to do is recognize that there are people with whom they disagree, that they will still allow to be part of the discourse.

00:39:15.000 And I don't mean people like David Frum, who pretend to disagree with them, but really agree with them on a broad swath of policies.

00:39:22.000 If they continue along these lines, they're really cruising for a bruising.

00:39:26.000 There's going to be a backlash and it's going to be uncontrollable.

00:39:29.000 And they're not going to like the impact.

00:39:30.000 They're already not liking the impact because the backlash is already underway.

00:39:34.000 OK, so now I want to talk a little bit about some insanity that's happening in Great Britain because this is truly crazy.

00:39:39.000 So apparently there's been a wild upswing in the amount of murder in London.

00:39:43.000 Well, that's not a tremendous shock, considering that the demographics of London have changed, that the policing in London has changed wildly, that the mayor of London City, Khan, is really terrible at his job.

00:39:53.000 But the murder rate in London now outstrips the murder rate in New York, which is pretty incredible, actually.

00:39:59.000 The murder rate in Britain has always been extraordinarily low.

00:40:01.000 This is why when people say, well, you know, you ban guns in Britain, that's why the murder rate is low.

00:40:05.000 The murder rate was low before the bans on guns.

00:40:08.000 And the murder rate in Britain was always quite low.

00:40:10.000 But here is what it says, according to Today Online.

00:40:14.000 On Thursday, April 5th, five teenagers were stabbed in an hour and a half before sunset, including a boy of 13.

00:40:19.000 All these attacks took place in London over the past week, part of an apparent spike in violence in the British capital.

00:40:24.000 After a long period of steady declines in violent crime, the city has averaged in excess of three killings a week so far this year.

00:40:30.000 More than 50 people have been killed in London since the start of 2018.

00:40:32.000 The total for all of 2017, a year when the city suffered multiple deadly terrorist attacks, was 116.

00:40:39.000 Criminologists have expressed caution about drawing conclusions from only a few months' figures, but if the uptick continues, it will amount to London's highest level of violence in more than a decade.

00:40:48.000 A year with 200 homicides for a city of 8.5 million people would be far from a shocking high in the U.S.

00:40:53.000 New York City had 292 murders last year, according to the 2018 police commissioner's report.

00:40:58.000 That was a record low, but

00:41:00.000 Right now, London's murder rate is outstripping the murder rate in New York City, which is, again, a pretty incredible thing.

00:41:05.000 So I do love what they're now talking about in London.

00:41:08.000 They're now talking about banning knives.

00:41:10.000 No joke.

00:41:11.000 So they're using the exact same logic they used about guns and now they're applying it to knives.

00:41:15.000 So Sadiq Khan has announced a broad new knife control policy designed to keep quote-unquote weapons of war out of the hands of Londoners looking to cause others harm.

00:41:24.000 The UK Parliament is considering bills that restrict the manufacture and purchase of kitchen cooking knives.

00:41:30.000 Because they have points on them.

00:41:31.000 Because they're pointy things.

00:41:32.000 So I guess machetes would still be okay, like the one that that guy used a couple of years ago, that Muslim terrorist used to chop down an actual British soldier on the streets of London? 0.99

00:41:43.000 That'll still be okay, because as we all know, machetes aren't really dangerous.

00:41:47.000 Like from every horror film, we know machetes aren't dangerous.

00:41:49.000 Only knives are dangerous.

00:41:50.000 But they're going to start determining how exactly knives are distributed.

00:41:55.000 The tough immediate measures involve an incredible police crackdown, a ban on home deliveries of knives and acid, and expanding law enforcement stop and search powers so the police may stop anyone they believe to be a threat or planning a knife or acid attack.

00:42:08.000 Khan announced Friday the city has created a, quote, violent crime task force of 120 officers tasked with rooting out knife-wielding individuals in public spaces and is pumping nearly $50 million into the Metropolitan Police Department so they can better arm themselves against knife attacks.

00:42:22.000 He's also empowering the Met Police to introduce targeted patrols with extra stop and search powers for areas worst affected, according to a statement.

00:42:30.000 Now, what's really kind of hilarious here is that one of the reasons that the crime rate is going up is because Khan is responsible for, according to Emily Zanotti of the Daily Wire, for decreasing the number of stop-and-searches, having previously declared the tactic racist and potentially Islamophobic.

00:42:44.000 So in other words, he got rid of stop-and-frisk in London, saying that it was targeting too many young Muslim guys, and then the crime rate went up, and now he's going to target everyone.

00:42:53.000 It's not really clear what they're going to use in London to cut their food anymore if you can't get a home delivery of a knife.

00:42:58.000 And if you're not allowed to carry it home, how do you actually get the knife from the department store home?

00:43:01.000 Parliament is set to take up heavy knife control legislation when it resumes this week.

00:43:05.000 The UK government is expected to introduce a ban on online knife sales and home knife deliveries.

00:43:10.000 So now you have to go to a store to purchase a knife.

00:43:12.000 Maybe you have to have a license to purchase a knife.

00:43:13.000 You have to be a culinary specialist.

00:43:16.000 Of course, that won't really stop anything, since most of these acid attacks that have been occurring are occurring among people who are late teenagers or older.

00:43:21.000 London has seen a dramatic uptick in murder rates, of course.

00:43:23.000 So again,

00:43:39.000 It ain't about the knives, folks.

00:43:41.000 Maybe you ought to look at the people who are wielding the knives.

00:43:43.000 Maybe you ought to be looking at the people who are actually performing the acid attacks.

00:43:46.000 But since we're not allowed to do that, we're going to crack down on knives.

00:43:48.000 And then we'll crack down on fists. 0.97

00:43:49.000 And then we'll crack down on any blunt object in your home.

00:43:53.000 You don't have to be allowed to have blunt objects.

00:43:54.000 Soon, we'll end up all sitting in blank rooms with no furniture.

00:43:58.000 Because anything can be used as... Maybe pillows?

00:44:00.000 But no, we can use pillows for suffocation.

00:44:02.000 So eventually, we're all just walking around like John Travolta in the Bubble Boy, because that presumably will stop crime, not actually targeting criminals.

00:44:10.000 Pretty amazing stuff, but demonstrates what happens when an entire civilization loses their mind and stops targeting criminality, and starts instead pretending that the tools of criminality are more important than the criminals themselves.

00:44:21.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I like.

00:44:24.000 And then some things that I hate.

00:44:26.000 So, things that I like.

00:44:28.000 So, on the way home yesterday in the car, it was a long drive, and so everyone was asleep, and so that's a good time to listen to musical theater, because you actually get a story told to you.

00:44:37.000 Well, one of my favorite musicals is, of course, Pippin, and one of the best numbers from Pippin is Corner of the Sky.

00:44:43.000 Here's what it sounds like.

00:44:43.000 And the new Broadway production is just tremendous.

00:44:45.000 I believe it's on tour now.

00:44:47.000 If it's not, then it was recently.

00:44:49.000 But the production is really, really good.

00:44:51.000 It's not for children, obviously.

00:44:52.000 It's PG-13 and up.

00:44:53.000 But this song is just great.

00:45:16.000 Everything has its season.

00:45:18.000 Everything has its time.

00:45:21.000 Show me a reason and I'll soon show you a rhyme.

00:45:26.000 Cats fit on the windowsill.

00:45:29.000 Children fit in the snow.

00:45:31.000 So why do I feel I don't fit in anywhere I go?

00:45:37.000 Rivers belong where they can ramble.

00:45:45.000 So this show won Best Tony, Best Musical Tony in the 1970s.

00:45:51.000 And it's really first rate.

00:45:52.000 One of the things that's fascinating about this show is that the whole show is about a guy who has these wide world aspirations for changing the world and making a dent in the world and all this stuff.

00:46:02.000 And it's about him learning that

00:46:04.000 You can.

00:46:05.000 Maybe the best way to make a dent in the world is just by living a life where you bring up your wife and kids.

00:46:09.000 That's a pretty amazing message that comes out of Broadway, particularly because Broadway is so far to the left, but it's an important message nonetheless, so check out Pippin if you ever have a chance.

00:46:18.000 It's really great.

00:46:20.000 OK, a couple of other things that I like.

00:46:22.000 So apparently, Bill Maher over the weekend defended Laura Ingraham.

00:46:26.000 Laura Ingraham, of course, was victim of a boycott by a bunch of leftists because she said something quasi-mean to a Parkland student, which you're not allowed to do. 0.99

00:46:33.000 And Bill Maher comes out and he says, listen, I don't like Laura Ingraham, but this is stupid. 0.99

00:46:36.000 Good for Bill Maher. 0.98

00:46:37.000 I want to defend Laura Ingraham. 0.96

00:46:39.000 I know that sounds ridiculous.

00:46:44.000 But it has to do with the Parkland kids and guns and free speech.

00:46:48.000 Now, I think those kids did a great thing.

00:46:50.000 They put this issue in a place.

00:46:52.000 We've never had it before, and I wish them success.

00:46:55.000 But, you know, if you're going to be out there in the arena and make yourselves the champions of this cause, people are going to have the right, I think, to argue back.

00:47:05.000 Here's what she she tweeted David Hogg rejected by four colleges because he put that up there because of course we have to share everything To which he applied and whined about it Okay Maybe you shouldn't say that about a 17 year old But again, he is in the arena and then he calls for a boycott of her sponsors now what what is

00:47:27.000 Really?

00:47:28.000 Is that American?

00:47:30.000 Let me explain something.

00:47:34.000 And he complains about bullying?

00:47:35.000 That's bullying.

00:47:36.000 I have been the victim of a boycott.

00:47:39.000 I lost a job once.

00:47:41.000 It is wrong.

00:47:42.000 You shouldn't do this by team.

00:47:43.000 You should do it by principle.

00:47:45.000 Good for Maher.

00:47:46.000 Good for Maher.

00:47:46.000 I mean, what Maher is saying here is exactly correct.

00:47:49.000 And again, you know, Maher's one of these guys who knows because he has been thrown out of the left for his failures to abide by the window of acceptable discourse, right?

00:47:56.000 He said some things the left doesn't like on occasion, particularly about Islam, and this has made him a target of the left.

00:48:02.000 The more the left throws people out and calls for boycotts against them, the more they are destroying their own credibility, even with the people who supposedly like them.

00:48:10.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.

00:48:16.000 Okay, thing that I hate, number one.

00:48:18.000 So there's a story out of Bradenton, Florida, and this is supposed to be some sort of grand civil rights issue. 0.53

00:48:23.000 Apparently, there's a 17-year-old named Lizzie Martin, and she was told by the principal of her school or the school district that she needed to put Band-Aids on her nipples. 0.75

00:48:32.000 Why?

00:48:32.000 Because she showed up to school in a gray Calvin Klein shirt without wearing any bra.

00:48:37.000 And so they tried to make her put on a second t-shirt, and then they said, well, maybe you should just cover up your nipples. 1.00

00:48:42.000 And she said, we went to the clinic, and the nurse gave me band-aids in there, and she told me to X out my nipples. 0.79

00:48:47.000 She followed the command, saying she felt she had no other options.

00:48:49.000 Her mother told the outlet that the school dean made a big deal about it.

00:48:52.000 She said this was a shirt that was unisex, that was too big, that was not form-fitting.

00:48:55.000 She said there was a double standard, that a male with excessive breast tissue wouldn't be asked to confine the movement of his chest. 1.00

00:49:00.000 Okay, this is the stupidest crap ever. 1.00

00:49:02.000 Okay, she's a 17-year-old girl. 1.00

00:49:04.000 She's in a class with a bunch of 17-year-old boys.

00:49:06.000 If you really believe there's a 17-year-old girl with half a grain of intelligence on planet Earth who doesn't know exactly what she's doing when she wears no bra to class with a bunch of 17-year-old boys, you got another thing coming.

00:49:18.000 This doesn't mean boys should sexually harass.

00:49:19.000 Obviously not.

00:49:20.000 It doesn't mean that boys

00:49:22.000 I should say anything or do anything to her.

00:49:24.000 None of that is the case. 1.00

00:49:25.000 But if you think it's not distracting to boys when there are girls walking around with their nipples showing, you're out of your mind. 0.98

00:49:31.000 Are we supposed to pretend that human nature doesn't exist now? 0.97

00:49:33.000 Is this what we are supposed to pretend?

00:49:34.000 And are we supposed to pretend that this 17-year-old girl doesn't know that human nature exists?

00:49:38.000 Are we supposed to pretend this is a thing?

00:49:41.000 Most schools have dress codes.

00:49:42.000 The reason they have dress codes is precisely to avoid this sort of situation where boys are being distracted by girls and girls are being distracted by boys.

00:49:50.000 Honestly, you want the best thing for girls in school? 1.00

00:49:52.000 Really, there have been studies to prove this.

00:49:53.000 The best things for girls in school are sex-segregated classes. 1.00

00:49:57.000 When I went to high school, I went to an Orthodox Jewish high school, there was a boys' school, there was a girls' school.

00:50:01.000 Girls in sex-segregated classes do better. 0.99

00:50:03.000 They do better.

00:50:04.000 And it's not for the benefit of the boys that this happens.

00:50:07.000 Girls do better. 1.00

00:50:07.000 Why? 1.00

00:50:08.000 Because girls have this weird idea that boys want them to be stupid and sexualized, and so they play to those stereotypes. 1.00

00:50:15.000 But if they're with a bunch of girls, then they're just there for the academics. 0.99

00:50:18.000 But again, if a 17-year-old girl wears something completely inappropriate to school and she's distracting the other students, I fail to see how this is completely, like, what the school district did that was so unbelievably wrong here.

00:50:29.000 They probably shouldn't have told her to go put, like, band-aids on her nipples, but they should have called up her parents and said, you know, mom, bring her a sweatshirt. 1.00

00:50:34.000 Or they should have had one of the teachers say, okay, here's a sweatshirt, put it on the sweatshirt. 0.72

00:50:37.000 But, again, like, if you're going to take this logic to its full extreme, presumably what you would say is that she should walk around topless, and that should be no problem.

00:50:44.000 Everybody should basically say, okay, no problem.

00:50:46.000 You know what?

00:50:47.000 Listen, if a boy walked around topless, then you wouldn't have a problem with that? 0.67

00:50:51.000 Yes, because boys and girls are different.

00:50:54.000 First of all, you wouldn't want boys walking around topless either, but to pretend that a dude walking around topless is the same thing as a woman walking around topless in American society is fully crazy.

00:51:03.000 It's fully crazy. 0.88

00:51:05.000 But I guess we have to completely pretend that, again, reality doesn't exist and human nature doesn't exist and so it's some sort of grand sin that the school district thought that a girl should actually cover up her nipples in a class with boys. 1.00

00:51:18.000 What stupidity. 1.00

00:51:19.000 What stupidity. 1.00

00:51:19.000 Okay, other things that I hate. 1.00

00:51:21.000 Last week, I made it sound like the Stephon Clark case in Sacramento was a little more clear-cut than it was, and I want to correct myself on that, because I think that it's important that we get as much of the truth about this as possible.

00:51:32.000 So here is the actual tape of what happened with Stephon Clark.

00:51:35.000 So here is, first of all, the introduction to that tape.

00:51:37.000 Police responded to reports of a broken window.

00:51:40.000 David French over at National Review describes it, and when you watch all the released footage,

00:51:44.000 You can see the initial response is pretty calm and casual.

00:51:46.000 Two officers politely knock on a door.

00:51:47.000 They ask permission to search a backyard.

00:51:49.000 They find nothing.

00:51:50.000 And then they walk back to the street.

00:51:51.000 Meanwhile, a helicopter overhead spots a person trying to break into a car and then jumping a fence and moving to a neighboring house where he looks in a car window.

00:51:59.000 That person is Stephon Clark, so he is in the middle of criminal activity, and then he runs to his grandparents' house.

00:52:03.000 There's nothing visible in his hands at that time.

00:52:05.000 The police run to the house.

00:52:06.000 They spot Clark in the driveway, and they yell, and Clark, instead of obeying, flees to the back of the house.

00:52:12.000 The officers pursue, and they round the corner of the house, and one says,

00:52:17.000 Okay, so they think that he has a gun.

00:52:18.000 They retreat behind the corner for roughly one or two seconds, then they round the corner again.

00:52:22.000 One officer yells, show me your hands, gun, gun, gun, and they start firing.

00:52:25.000 And 20 seconds later, he's dead.

00:52:27.000 So the encounter from yelling hey to Clark to firing the first shot takes approximately 17 seconds.

00:52:32.000 Here is what it looks like on the body cams.

00:52:37.000 Hey! 0.99

00:52:37.000 Show me your hands! 0.99

00:52:41.000 Stay up!

00:52:42.000 Stay up!

00:52:53.000 Show me how!

00:52:53.000 Go, go, go!

00:53:01.000 Okay, so, as you can see, it's really difficult to see what's going on there.

00:53:04.000 It's very difficult to see.

00:53:06.000 And so, I wouldn't want to be unfair to the officers by saying that they went in there with the intent to kill or anything like this.

00:53:10.000 But, does this look like something negligent to me?

00:53:14.000 It looks like, I mean, the amount of time that he's given to respond is very short.

00:53:17.000 Now, should he have immediately obeyed the officer's command?

00:53:19.000 Yes.

00:53:20.000 I mean, this is rule number one.

00:53:21.000 When an officer tells you to do something, you obey the command.

00:53:23.000 Also, should she have been breaking into cars? 0.96

00:53:25.000 Probably not.

00:53:26.000 This is not a good idea.

00:53:26.000 However, that said, does that mean that officers are completely free from fallibility in these sorts of situations?

00:53:33.000 The guy was unarmed.

00:53:34.000 He was unarmed, okay?

00:53:36.000 And when he comes back around, they say, show me your hands, gun, gun, gun.

00:53:39.000 I mean, you can hear it.

00:53:40.000 It's right on the back of it.

00:53:41.000 It's not show me your hands, gun, gun, gun, right?

00:53:44.000 It's show me your hands, gun, gun, gun.

00:53:46.000 So they're not having a chance to give him a chance to respond.

00:53:50.000 And I think David French gets this right.

00:53:52.000 He says, before you object and tell me that routine encounters can and do escalate, I know that, but what I'm questioning are probabilities and perspective.

00:53:58.000 Here are some questions.

00:53:59.000 If it's dark, police are sprinting, and flashlights are shaking, what are the chances that the cop's first assessment that the suspect had a gun are wrong?

00:54:05.000 What was the reasonable risk of backing off and continuing to give strong verbal commands rather than immediately moving from cover to an exposed position and opening fire?

00:54:12.000 What are the possibility that the suspect hadn't heard the commands at all?

00:54:15.000 There's some evidence that he may have had earbuds in.

00:54:17.000 Also, what's the background level of risk here?

00:54:19.000 Sacramento hasn't seen a cop shot and killed in the line of duty for almost 20 years.

00:54:23.000 And it's true that cops have seconds to make life-and-death decisions, but you know who else has just a couple of seconds to figure that out?

00:54:29.000 It's the suspect.

00:54:30.000 So if you don't give the suspect a chance to respond, then what exactly are you supposed to do?

00:54:35.000 This doesn't mean that these cops are going to go to jail, as I sort of suggested last week.

00:54:37.000 It's possible that they won't.

00:54:39.000 It's possible that people will find their story convincing, or at least they will find it justifiable, or at least excusable.

00:54:47.000 There are some problems with training, I think, among some of our police officers, and certainly this does raise questions about deadly use of force by police officers and whether they should be so quick on the trigger in some of these particular situations.

00:54:59.000 Okay, so I just wanted to clarify all of that because I don't want to get any of the facts wrong.

00:55:02.000 By the way, there's another correction I think I have to make from last week as well.

00:55:06.000 And that was on the show last week.

00:55:07.000 I mentioned the YouTube shooter, and I think I suggested that she was Muslim. 0.99

00:55:10.000 I said, of course, that her religion had nothing to do with the shooting, because she just seemed like a crazy person. 0.99

00:55:14.000 Apparently, she was Baha'i, so it doesn't really change much, because I said religion had nothing to do with it. 1.00

00:55:18.000 But just to correct the record, I want to make sure I get as many facts correct as I can on the show.

00:55:22.000 And by the way, folks, you all have my email address.

00:55:24.000 It's bshapiroatdailywire.com.

00:55:26.000 If you hear me make a mistake on the air, please let me know so I can correct it on the air so that I'm not screwing things up.

00:55:30.000 All righty, so I think we've run out of time.

00:55:31.000 We'll do a Federalist paper tomorrow, probably, sometime later this week, because we've run out of time.

00:55:36.000 But we'll see you here then.

00:55:37.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:55:38.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - April 09, 2018

The Situation In Syria | Ep. 513

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