Ben Shapiro reacts to the death of college student Otto Warmbier, who was murdered by the North Korean government for removing a poster from a wall to bring home to the United States, and the hysterical reaction from left-wing media outlets and social justice publications to the news of his death. He also talks about the history of anti-Americanism in the anti-left, and what it says about the breakdown of American foreign policy and the failure to fix the broken health care system. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Daily Wire podcast, "The Ben Shapiro Show," and is a regular contributor to CNN and the New York Times. He is also a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire and has been featured on CNN, NPR, and The Huffington Post, among other media outlets. Ben also writes for The Weekly Standard and The Daily Beast, and is the author of the book, "Blindspotting the Biggest Threats: How to Fight for Your Identity in a Post-racial World," which he co-authored with Alex Blumberg. His latest book Other Words For Smoke is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime Video, Blu-ray on the Kindle Fire, and also rental on Audible, Vimeo, and other major rental and rental services, including the Audible store, wherever you get your hard copy of the Hardcover edition of Hardcover Hardcover. Hardcover or Audio Book, The Hardcover and Audio Book Depository, which is also available for $99.99. Subscribe to Hardcover: Hardcover, $24.99, $49.99 or $99, and get a limited edition hardcover edition, only $99 a year.00.0099.00 including Audible and T-shirts, limited edition print edition, $99 and Audible Provenza, and an Audible membership membership, and a lifetime membership, which includes shipping plans, and two Audible Prime memberships, shipping plans starting at $99/month, shipping only $24,99, plus two VGA Pro.99/VGABS and VGA Plus, shipping nationwide, shipping + 2 VGA Connections, shipping worldwide, and shipping plans will get you an additional $99 or two years of VGA Prime Video Pro and 7GB Pro and 3VGA Pro, and 2VGA Plus Pro, for $49,99 gets you an ad-free version of the Final Draft, for a total of $99 Plus gets you access to the entire service.
00:00:00.000On Tuesday, Affinity Magazine, a social justice teen magazine, tweeted out this insanity as the world reacted to the death of college student Otto Wambier, murdered by the North Koreans for the sin of removing a poster from a wall to bring home.
00:00:21.000Unfortunately, this hot take, a take so hot it would actually consume the sun with its own heat, wasn't the only left-wing attempt to slam Warmbier for the brutal sin of whiteness.
00:00:29.000The Huffington Post ran a piece after Warmbier was sentenced a few months ago to over a decade in jail in North Korea, in which the author stated, quote, My mother's callous reaction to Michael Faye's sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not Teflon abroad.
00:00:49.000The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality, living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering, even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense.
00:01:03.000He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help.
00:01:16.000Wilmore never had anything to say about his rich and famous friends visiting the gulag state of Cuba.
00:01:20.000This sort of stupidity from the left isn't uncommon.
00:01:22.000It merely demonstrates that when you see the world in terms of class, color, sexual orientation, when you are convinced that every white straight male is a victimizer, you are more likely to excuse atrocities against such fortunate people.
00:01:34.000Never mind, North Korea is filled with North Koreans, tortured, imprisoned, murdered, kept in slave-like conditions.
00:01:39.000Warmbier clearly had it coming because he was white.
00:01:41.000Extended to the politics of the United States, this sort of moral garbage leads to the breakdown of society.
00:01:46.000If you believe that every terrible thing that happens to a member of an outgroup is justified, you are a tribalist.
00:01:51.000Leftist politicians have spent decades pandering to such tribalism, and in response, there's been an upsurge of tribalism from the anti-left.
00:01:58.000The victims, like Otto Warmbier, remain victims.
00:02:01.000But if we fail to see them as victims because we're too concerned with the color of their skin, we become their victimizers, too.
00:02:31.000But before we do any of that, first I want to say thanks to our supporters over at ZipRecruiter.
00:02:37.000They are our sponsors, of course, and if you are concerned about the level of the employees that you've been hiring, as we so clearly are here at The Daily Wire, which is why we just fired half of them, then what we are going to do is we are going to provide you with a way to recruit the very best, and that is ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
00:02:53.000You can post your job to 100 plus job sites with just one click, and then their powerful technology matches the right people to your job better than anyone else.
00:03:01.000ZipRecruiter is different because it doesn't depend on candidates finding you.
00:03:35.000Make sure you use that slash DailyWire so that you get the free deal and also so that they can ensure that we sent you and continue advertising with us.
00:03:42.000Okay, so for those who missed the news yesterday, I mean, this is just an awful, awful, awful story.
00:03:47.000Otto Warmbier is a 22-year-old University of Virginia student.
00:03:50.000He was apprehended by the North Korean government in prison for 17 months.
00:03:55.000Supposedly, he attempted to steal a propaganda sign praising North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un from a hotel.
00:04:01.000And then, last week, he was released, you recall, but he was released in a coma.
00:04:06.000And then he died at a Cincinnati hospital, surrounded by his family.
00:04:09.000They released a statement, the family did.
00:04:11.000They said, It is our sad duty to report that our son Otto Warmbier has completed his journey home.
00:04:15.000Surrounded by his loving family, Otto died today at 2.20 p.m.
00:04:18.000It would be easy at a moment like this to focus on all that we lost.
00:04:22.000Future time that won't be spent with a warm, engaging, brilliant young man whose curiosity and enthusiasm for life knew no bounds.
00:04:27.000But we choose to focus on the time we were given to be with this remarkable person.
00:04:30.000You can tell from the outpouring of emotion from the communities that he touched, Wyoming, Ohio, University of Virginia, just to name two, that the love for Otto went well beyond his immediate family.
00:04:40.000When Otto returned to Cincinnati late on June 13th, he was unable to speak, unable to see, unable to react to verbal comments.
00:04:46.000He looked very uncomfortable, almost anguished, although we would never hear his voice again.
00:04:49.000Within a day, the countenance of his face changed.
00:05:34.000The North Koreans claimed that he entered the country under the guise of a tourist and plotted to destroy North Korean unity with the quote tacit connivance of the U.S.
00:05:41.000government and under its manipulation.
00:05:44.000Apparently, he confessed to stealing a piece of North Korean propaganda.
00:05:49.000His confession said that he stole the banner for the mother of a friend who wanted it as a souvenir to hang on the church at home.
00:05:55.000He said he was offered a used car worth $10,000 as payment if he was detained and didn't return.
00:06:00.000$200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable donation.
00:06:04.000He said that he took the chance because his family was suffering from very severe financial difficulties.
00:06:08.000He also said he was urged to steal the poster by a semi-secret ring society.
00:06:12.000His confession said, I never, never should have allowed myself to be lured by the United States administration to commit a crime in this country.
00:06:18.000No question he was coerced into doing all of this.
00:06:21.000He said, I entirely beg you, the people in the government of the DPRK, for your forgiveness.
00:06:24.000Please, I made the worst mistake of my life.
00:06:28.000And apparently, according to his parents, they said that the Obama administration urged them to keep quiet.
00:06:33.000Fred said they feel you don't get involved that way.
00:06:35.000It lets the other side solve problems and make things happen.
00:06:38.000He said there's no excuse for the way the North Koreans treated our son.
00:06:41.000Well, obviously, it is an act of war, technically, for a foreign government to detain, torture, and murder an American citizen.
00:07:17.000Okay, well, you know, it's a weak statement, but honest to goodness, I don't know what people expect from Trump at this point.
00:07:23.000There are some measures that Trump could pursue against North Korea.
00:07:27.000Mainly, he needs to pursue sanctions against the Chinese government that sponsors North Korea.
00:07:31.000And that means cracking down on Chinese banks that sponsor North Korea.
00:07:35.000One of the problems here is, of course, that with some 13,000 artillery pieces pointed at Seoul, not all of which can hit the city in South Korea, but many of which can, the notion of a first strike on North Korea carries significant risk.
00:07:47.000The Chinese government's not going to do much to hamper Kim Jong-un, but obviously, aside from sanctions, we've got to increase propaganda into North Korea, we've got to push to throw North Korea out of the United Nations, for whatever that's worth, and we've got to consider, as I say, taking financial measures against the Chinese government, which has been sponsoring and keeping Kim Jong-un's evil regime in power for the last 50-odd years.
00:08:07.000Eric Bolling considered the possibility on Fox News that maybe we should preemptively strike North Korea over this.
00:08:12.000This is being directly affected by this North Korean crazy dictator.
00:08:17.000It may be time for a preemptive strike.
00:08:21.000Now, is that realistic, to do a preemptive strike on North Korea?
00:08:24.000I don't know all the military details.
00:08:25.000You'd have to ask General Mattis about it.
00:08:27.000I'm sure that we have considered the possibility.
00:08:30.000I do want to trace, however, I think it's important because this has ramifications for general American foreign policy.
00:08:37.000You know, leave aside the left's evil reaction to Otto Warmbier's original conviction for a moment, which is just totally evil.
00:08:44.000I want to point out that when it comes to American foreign policy, American foreign policy is sort of like a comedy of errors.
00:08:51.000Have you ever seen a comedy of errors, like a Shakespearean comedy of errors?
00:08:53.000Usually it starts with somebody telling a fib, and then that fib turns into three more fibs, and then those three more fibs turn into eight fibs.
00:09:00.000If you've ever seen a tragedy, it's the same thing.
00:09:01.000Someone makes a bad decision, that bad decision sort of
00:10:39.000In 1919, the British pulled out against the advice of Winston Churchill.
00:10:42.000The British Prime Minister, a guy named Lloyd George, he said the country could, quote, "...not afford to continue so costly an intervention in interminable civil war."
00:11:05.000Shanghai Shek, the nationalist leader, was at war with Mao Zedong, the communist.
00:11:09.000And the Truman administration tried to bring all parties to the table, saying they didn't want to take sides in the civil war.
00:11:14.000They actively stopped Shanghai Shek from wiping Mao off the map.
00:11:18.000In 1946, George Marshall, who was at the time the top American general, he helped stop an offensive by the Nationalists that would have crushed Mao.
00:11:27.000He said, Mao biographer Zhang Chang writes,
00:11:45.000Marshall's diktat was probably the single most important decision affecting the outcome of the Civil War.
00:11:49.000Shanghai Shek backed off because he was afraid that he would lose the money in American support and that Mao would win the war.
00:11:54.000As it turned out, that failure, the ceasefire that they engaged in, allowed Mao to regroup and then Mao ends up taking over the country.
00:12:01.000How does this have ramifications for North Korea?
00:12:03.000Well, without Mao, there is no North Korea.
00:12:05.000Remember that the Korean War begins when the Chinese government decides that they are going to intervene and help out the North Korean
00:12:16.000And they cross into South Korea as well over that 38th parallel.
00:12:21.000The United States guarantees the safety of the South Koreans.
00:12:24.000We cross back over the 38th parallel and we drive them all the way back up to the Yalu River, at which point the Chinese pour 200,000 men over the border.
00:12:31.000General Douglas MacArthur at that point said, OK, let's bomb the Chinese bases.
00:12:59.000This is one of those historical what-ifs that we're never going to know the answer to.
00:13:02.000Obviously, it would have been an even more costly war if we had not withdrawn below the 38th parallel.
00:13:06.000However, it is important to note that at each step along this chain, smaller sacrifices, because we avoided them, end up mandating larger interventions, right?
00:13:16.000If we had intervened in the Soviet Union in 1917, before it's the Soviet Union, maybe it costs a certain amount of money and a relatively
00:13:23.000Small number of troops, each one of which is a tragedy, but when we're talking about foreign policy, you do have to talk about numbers.
00:13:29.000We don't do that, and so we end up in a Cold War and World War II, which probably never would have happened if there is no Soviet Union.
00:13:35.000Very difficult to imagine that the Nazis even rise to power in the absence of the Soviet Union, because the Nazis were a direct response, actually, to the rise of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Communists in Nazi Germany and pre-Nazi Germany and Weimar Germany.
00:13:48.000So again, small sacrifice made then prevents the rise of the Soviet Union.
00:13:52.000Small sacrifice made in 1945 financially to Shanghai Shek and not tying his hands prevents the rise of the Chinese communists.
00:13:59.000And then you end up in the Korean War.
00:14:01.000And now we have basically an attractable problem.
00:14:03.000The North Koreans are not going to go away anytime soon.
00:14:05.000The reason I say this is because I think it has ramifications for how we deal with foreign policy today.
00:14:12.000There's a tendency on right and left to say that isolationism is the best possible solution to these problems.
00:14:17.000We just stay out of the world's civil wars.
00:14:19.000We just stay out of the world's problems.
00:15:01.000Pressuring the Chinese government, which, so far, we have not had the willingness to do.
00:15:06.000President Trump was actually more right on North Korea before he met with the Chinese than he was after he met with the Chinese government.
00:15:13.000It is tragic, it is horrifying, and please, for the love of God, people, do not go to evil dictatorships.
00:15:19.000For any reason, because you never know what is going to happen there.
00:15:42.000If you want the best underwear that are possible to have in the entire universe, mackweldon.com is the place to go.
00:15:49.000These underwear are comfortable, they are antimicrobial, their undergarments are antimicrobial, they have antimicrobial shirts, which means they eliminate odor.
00:15:58.000They are not just comfortable, they are durable.
00:16:00.000I have several pairs of Mack Weldon underwear, and unlike other brands of underwear that fall apart after several wears, Mack Weldon looks basically the same today as it did when it came out of the package.
00:16:15.000Stuff that you can wear in, stuff that you can wear out.
00:16:17.000When I go home, I don't dress like the million bucks that I do here, but I look as good as I possibly can and I feel as good as I possibly can in my Mack Weldon gear because they are the best.
00:16:26.000So right now, if you go to MackWeldon.com and use promo code Shapiro, promo code Shapiro, you get 20% off
00:16:54.000So I think that Al Franken sort of gave away the game yesterday when he was talking about why it is that he opposes President Trump.
00:17:04.000So Al Franken came out and said that he is, it's actually pretty spectacular, he came out and he said that the big problem here is Pence.
00:17:16.000You know, this, I think, demonstrates that when it comes to the left's attempt to get President Trump, it has very little to do with their actual worries about President Trump.
00:17:23.000They don't actually think that President Trump is the biggest problem.
00:17:26.000If I were a Democrat at this point, I would be a lot more afraid of Pence than Trump, just for political reasons.
00:17:43.000I think that in terms of domestic policy, certainly would be worse than Trump.
00:17:48.000So he's saying that we should be careful about getting rid of Trump because then you might end up with Pence, which just demonstrates this is all a political hack job anyway.
00:17:53.000All the Russian collusion stuff, it has nothing to do with actual Russian collusion.
00:18:00.000With the fact that they are trying to hamstring Trump's agenda.
00:18:04.000And again, talking about Pence's efficacy, I think it's important to go back to 2016 when the Democrats were all saying that Rubio would be scarier than Trump to them in office.
00:18:21.000This is not about anything terrible that he's done.
00:18:23.000But number two, you should take note that Democrats truly are more afraid of Republicans who are good at this than they are of Trump, which would suggest that Trump needs to get better at this.
00:18:30.000Which brings us to the health care negotiations.
00:18:33.000So, right now, Republicans are negotiating behind closed doors this health care bill.
00:18:38.000And we're not hearing out a lot from the Senate because Mitch McConnell runs that place as a tight ship.
00:18:43.000I don't have a problem with them negotiating about it behind closed doors.
00:18:46.000I do have a problem with them releasing the bill and then within five seconds voting on the bill.
00:18:51.000That's something the Democrats did as well.
00:18:53.000It's not good when the Obama people did it.
00:18:55.000It's not good when the Trump people do it.
00:18:57.000Here's Bernie Sanders saying Republicans are cowardly for refusing to release any sort of text.
00:19:32.000The answer is not to make a difficult situation much, much worse.
00:19:36.000And again, getting back to the initial point, our Republican colleagues are so cowardly, are so frightful that the American people will learn what's in their legislation.
00:19:48.000They refuse to have one hearing, one open discussion.
00:19:52.000And I am very confused about the lack of pudding cups in this room.
00:19:56.000I think that's right, Senator Sanders.
00:19:57.000I love that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the same place at the same time.
00:20:01.000The universe should actually implode on itself out of the socialistic stupidity in that room.
00:20:05.000You know, Elizabeth Warren is not a dumb lady, but she certainly talks dumb when it comes to economics and pandering to her leftist base.
00:20:11.000Look, Bernie Sanders is wrong about a lot of things here when he says that we're the richest country in the history of the world, we can afford health care for everyone.
00:20:38.000If somebody is keeping a secret from you, unless it's a Valentine's Day gift from your significant other, it's going to be bad.
00:20:45.000Okay, there's never been a secret kept from you that ends up being a great secret when it comes out.
00:20:49.000So the fact that Republicans are doing all this behind closed doors should not be encouraging to a lot of Republicans who actually want to see Obamacare repealed.
00:20:57.000Apparently they're going to dump a lot of money into it, Obamacare style.
00:21:18.000It's $8 a month, gets you your subscription.
00:21:20.000And if you want an annual subscription, then you get a free signed copy of this very book, Say It's So, a book by me and my pops about the Chicago White Sox 2005 championship season.
00:21:29.000It's really more about baseball and fathers and sons.
00:21:31.000You don't have to be a Sox fan in order to enjoy the book.
00:21:35.000Obviously, if I thought that you did have to be a Sox fan, we wouldn't have written it because there are three of us, my dad and me, and well, two and a half.
00:21:44.000You can get a signed copy of Say It's So when you become an annual subscriber, plus you get to be part of the Mailbag, which we now do on Fridays.
00:21:49.000You get to be part of Andrew Klavan's Mailbag.
00:21:51.000We have some brand new shows that are coming that you're going to be able to be a part of.
00:21:54.000If you become an annual subscriber or subscriber, go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe, or check us out later over at iTunes or SoundCloud.
00:22:02.000Make sure that you subscribe, download the show, and make sure that you also leave us a review.