The Iranians have finally admitted that it shot down a plane by mistake. Iranians protest the Ayatollahs, and the Democrats cannot stand it. Bernie takes on Biden and Warren as the Iowa caucuses approach, and Nancy Pelosi finally decides to hand impeachment charges to the Senate. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. If you haven't gotten a VPN yet, what do I got to do here? Visit Express VPN.org/TheBen Shapiro Show/The Ben Shapiro Show Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download my newest book, "The Right Side of History" on the Apple App Store or Google Play. You can also join our FB group, The Ben Shapiro Group, and join the conversation by using the hashtag on the socials and , and find Ben on Insta: . Ben Shapiro's newest book "The Devil Next Door" is out now! It's out on Amazon Prime! and it's out in Kindle, iBook, iRSS, Paperback, and Paperback! The Dark Side Of History is also available on Audible, Podchaser, and is available on Kindle, and Audible. The Kindle edition is out on October 19th! You won't want to miss it! ! You'll get a signed copy of The Devil's Guide to The Devil in the Middle East? by clicking here. and get a copy of my book by The Devil Who Couldn't Wait for It? by The Devil Knows What I'm Working for It's Not There? and The Devil Can't Wait to Read It? by or The Devil Has Nothing to Do It by by Ben Shapiro, by me, by me? And so much more! by: Ben Shapiro FREE Mentioned in this episode of The Daily Mail, Subscribe To My Story by me on Podchronicity by me! , Thanks Ben Shapiro and I'll Tell Me About It on Anchor, Ben Shapiro on Instapod, and so Much More! - The Best Podcasts by you can vouch for Ben Shapiro & I'm Not Sorry by You Can Have It All by Me on Instacademy & Much More.
00:00:27.000If you've been watching world events, you understand that the world is an extraordinarily chaotic place.
00:00:32.000We have an election coming up this year that could have a massive impact on where the economy goes.
00:00:35.000The economy is strong right now, but there's still a lot of uncertainty out there as to when the economy might start to slow.
00:00:41.000It's probably a pretty good time to diversify into an asset like gold.
00:00:45.000Fox Business actually just published an article on how the world's richest people are stockpiling precious metals right now as part of their strategy to diversify.
00:00:52.000According to Goldman Sachs, gold could surge past $1,600 an ounce within the next year.
00:00:56.000So why aren't you looking into diversification, especially into something that is never going to be worth zero?
00:02:07.000So the idea that Trump sort of just did this on a whim, and one day he woke up and he was like, kill Soleimani, do it, blow him into a thousand pieces.
00:02:13.000That apparently is not how any of this went down.
00:02:16.000So Trump kills Soleimani in the immediate aftermath of an Iranian-backed militia burning the United States embassy and engaging in months of terror attacks.
00:02:25.000Soleimani is killed, and then the Iranians respond by firing off a couple of missiles from Iran into Iraq.
00:02:33.000It did, in fact, according to CNN, hit the sleeping quarters of troops, which suggests very, very strongly that Iran had called up Iraq and said, get your guys out of there, because what we don't want is to break another one of Trump's red lines, because if we violate another one of Trump's red lines, our rinky-dink navy could be at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz by this time tomorrow.
00:02:50.000But in the middle of that little exchange, It wasn't really an exchange because the United States didn't fire anything at Iran, but in the middle of that missile firing by Iran, a plane took off from Tehran.
00:03:03.000Within two minutes, it was shot down by anti-aircraft missiles that were based in Iran, which is just a horrific screw-up by the Iranian government.
00:03:10.000You'd expect no less from a terror regime.
00:03:13.000And now, Iran has finally admitted that it shot down the jetliner by mistake, according to the Associated Press.
00:03:18.000In the face of mounting evidence, Iran on Saturday acknowledged that it shot down the Ukrainian jetliner by accident, killing all 176 people aboard.
00:03:25.000The admission by Iran's Revolutionary Guard undermined the credibility of information provided by senior officials, who for three days had adamantly dismissed allegations of a missile strike as Western propaganda.
00:03:34.000And you did hear from the media when the Trump administration was saying things like, Well, yeah, no, it's pretty obvious the Iranians shut down the plane.
00:03:40.000Well, can we really trust the Trump administration on this sort of stuff?
00:03:46.000The Iranian regime, which lies repeatedly about its own terrorism?
00:03:49.000According to the AP, it also raised a host of new questions, such as why Iran did not shut down its international airport or airspace on Wednesday when it was bracing for the U.S.
00:03:57.000to retaliate for a ballistic missile attack on two bases housing U.S.
00:04:01.000No one was hurt in that attack carried out in retaliation for the killing of Qasem Soleimani in an American airstrike in Baghdad.
00:04:06.000Iran's acknowledgment alters the narrative around its confrontation with the U.S.
00:04:10.000in a way that could anger the Iranian public.
00:04:12.000Iran had promised harsh revenge after Soleimani's death, but instead of killing American soldiers, its forces downed a civilian plane in which most passengers were Iranian.
00:04:21.000On Saturday night, hundreds gathered at universities in Tehran to protest the government's late acknowledgment of the plane being shot down.
00:04:26.000They demanded officials involved in the missile attack be removed from their positions and tried.
00:04:30.000Police did break up the demonstrations.
00:04:34.000The Iranian people and their outrage, which has been roiling for a year now, actually four years, I mean going all the way back to like 2009.
00:04:40.000There have been Iranians who want to overthrow the regime because the regime is a garbage, horrible, radical Islamist regime that backs terror around the region with dollars that could be used for the goods of its citizens, closes off its own economy so it can pursue this radical Islamic attempt to spread Sharia law across various boundaries.
00:04:59.000All of that is opposed by a huge swath of Iranians.
00:05:02.000There's no way to know what those numbers look like because polling is not really allowed inside Iran.
00:05:05.000Suffice it to say the Iranian regime has been teetering on the brink for quite a long time and mass protests did emerge in the aftermath of the shooting down of the plane.
00:05:13.000According to CNN, apologies from Iranian leaders over the downing of an airliner last week have done little to quell mass anti-government protests spreading across the country.
00:05:20.000Thousands of demonstrators hit the streets this weekend Condemning Iranian authorities for shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane and killing all 176 people on board.
00:05:28.000The airliner disaster came hours after Iran fired missiles at Iraqi military bases housing US troops.
00:05:33.000That was retaliation for a drone strike at Baghdad airport that killed Qasem Soleimani.
00:05:38.000In Iran, demonstrators are calling for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to step down and for those responsible for downing the plane to be prosecuted.
00:05:45.000Khamenei, have shame, leave the country, chanted protesters in the capital Tehran in footage posted on social media.
00:05:50.000And it is indeed thousands of people in the streets.
00:05:53.000By the way, when they show up in the streets for this, it ain't like when they show up for Soleimani, where the government is urging them to be out there.
00:05:58.000In this particular case, they are risking death because we have seen 1,500 protesters killed in the last year alone, thanks to the Iranian government cracking down on roiling anti-regime protests.
00:06:11.000I would say that they've covered it far less and with far less vigor and enthusiasm than they covered the funeral for Soleimani, which they covered in just gawping terms.
00:06:20.000You saw Chris Matthews say, it's just like Elvis Presley.
00:06:25.000I do not suspect that you'll hear Chris Matthews tonight talking about the bravery of the Iranian protesters protesting this evil regime that would cut against the narrative that the Trump administration in killing Soleimani had also unleashed ground forces in Iran in terms of actual Iranian population.
00:06:40.000I don't think that the media are going to play this up in quite the same way.
00:06:49.000The reason I say that is because they have not played up in the last year any of the economic protests that have been rolling across the country and resulted in the death of 1,500 protesters.
00:06:58.000That's a lot of people killed by the Iranian military.
00:07:01.000Protests have now spread to other cities, including Shiraz, Isfahan, Hamadan, and Urumayyad, according to Reuters.
00:07:08.000People are tearing down posters of Soleimani.
00:07:10.000They're ripping posters off the walls of Soleimani.
00:07:14.000President Trump, for his part, tweeted his support for the demonstrators, saying his administration will continue to stand by you.
00:07:19.000Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his support for the protesters and called on European powers to increase pressure on the Iranian regime.
00:07:27.000President Trump tweeted out, To the leaders of Iran, DO NOT KILL YOUR PROTESTERS.
00:07:48.000He says, turn your internet back on and let reporters roam free.
00:07:51.000Stop the killing of your great Iranian people.
00:07:53.000This prompted, by the way, let reporters roam free.
00:07:55.000It prompted people like Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, who generally is a fairly good reporter, but she actually tweeted out, why won't we let reporters roam free in the United States?
00:08:06.000On the internet, in a free country, where the New York Times is the largest circulation paper in the United States, other than the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
00:08:13.000So, um, I don't think that's quite the same.
00:08:15.000President Trump also tweeted out, national security adviser suggested today that sanctions and protests have Iran, quote, choked off will force them to negotiate.
00:08:22.000Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate will be totally up to them, but no nuclear weapons and don't kill your protesters, which seems like a fairly strong stance from the president of the United States.
00:08:31.000Apparently, the UK Ambassador to Iran was also arrested.
00:08:34.000They temporarily arrested British Ambassador Rob McHare.
00:08:37.000He was summoned to the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
00:08:39.000McHare was then arrested while in the middle of a crowd of protesters in front of Tehran's Amir Kabir University.
00:08:44.000He was accused of instigating and directing radical and destructive demonstrations.
00:08:50.000And he said he was not taking part in any of the demonstrations.
00:08:52.000He just went to an event advertised as a vigil for victims of the tragedy.
00:08:57.000The fact is that the Iranian regime has been cracking down on all of this because the Iranian regime recognizes that it simply is not popular with a huge percentage of its own population.
00:09:08.000In fact, there was video emerging from the BBC.
00:09:11.000There's video that emerged from the BBC of Iranian citizens refusing to stomp on American and Israeli flags.
00:09:17.000So for all the talk about death to America, death to Israel, I mean, I mean, there was actually, earlier this year, I think we reported on the show, there were Iranian protests where people were chanting, I believe it was death to Palestine, because they were so angry that the Iranian government was sending hundreds of millions of dollars in terror support to Palestinian terrorists as opposed to helping to rebuild the economy.
00:09:36.000In other words, there's a huge number of secular Muslim, secularized Muslims, or moderate-leaning Muslims in Iran who are not happy with the regime turning the entire country of Iran, which has a long, by the way, long pre-Islamic history in Persia, Turning that country, which has a long storied history, into just a tool of Islamic theocracy.
00:10:16.000I mean, it would be unbelievable, except for the fact that Barack Obama couldn't bring himself to really back the protesters in 2009, leading to the Iranian regime cracking down on the protesters, even as Obama tried to negotiate some sort of nuclear deal with the people shooting the protesters.
00:10:28.000Well, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, she was on this week on Sunday on ABC.
00:10:32.000And she was asked about the protests and instead of her just saying, you know, I'm fully with the protesters, they are standing up to a blatantly theocratic evil regime.
00:10:41.000Instead of her saying that, instead she said, well, they could be out there for any number of reasons because she just can't credit Trump for anything.
00:10:49.000If anything, even remotely smacks of any sort of praise for President Trump, she must immediately shut it down.
00:10:55.000So here's Nancy Pelosi undercutting the protest.
00:10:57.000I mean, really, this is Nancy Pelosi undercutting Iranian protesters who are taking their lives in their hands to go out in the street and protest against a regime that just shot down a civilian airliner because it's violent and evil.
00:11:06.000There were protesters in the streets before against the regime.
00:11:12.000After the taking out of Soleimani, there were protesters in the street joined together, as you know, against us.
00:11:20.000Taking down this plane is a terrible, terrible tragedy.
00:11:24.000And they should be held accountable for letting commercial flights go at a time that was so dangerous.
00:11:31.000But there are different reasons why people are in the street.
00:11:35.000Oh, there are different reasons why people are in the street.
00:11:36.000Thank you for analyzing all the reasons and never at any point suggesting that maybe the reason people are in the streets is because this is an evil regime that's been spreading terrorism for years.
00:11:44.000See, the problem is, again, this is what I've been saying for the last several weeks, Democrats and members of the media, they are caught between a rock and a hard place.
00:11:50.000The narrative of the Obama administration is that this regime had moderated in the aftermath of the Iran agreement, that this regime was now contained, that this regime was now being integrated into the family of nations.
00:12:00.000So, if there are actual protesters being shot in the streets because they are protesting an evil dictatorial regime, Nancy Pelosi doesn't have a narrative anymore.
00:12:08.000And if it turns out that those protests have been exacerbated by the fact that President Trump stood up to the Iranians and the Iranian people are beginning to see light at the end of this tunnel, She can't allow that either.
00:12:18.000Because again, Barack Obama helped strengthen this regime.
00:12:24.000He did not weaken the regime in any way.
00:12:26.000He strengthened the regime in a number of ways, including trying to open its economy and allowing them to pursue regional terror and ballistic missile testing with American-allowed dollars into Iran.
00:12:35.000So Nancy Pelosi, the hashtag on Twitter today was trending that Nancy Pelosi was basically standing up for the Iranians.
00:12:44.000It was hashtag Nancy Pelosi fake news.
00:12:46.000President Trump, for his part, was going on Twitter and retweeting everything that he possibly could.
00:12:51.000He was retweeting Iranians who are complaining about all of this.
00:12:55.000There's a journalist named Mohammad Mozaffari, who Trump retweeted, who said, the Iranian people are being killed in the streets by the Islamic Republic, but Nancy Pelosi and the USA supports those who kill the Iranian people.
00:13:03.000And then he retweeted a man named Farhad Khalifi, who's apparently also a journalist, I guess in London.
00:13:09.000He says, while the Iranian people are being killed by the mullahs in the protests, you're lying to the American people.
00:13:13.000The real people of Iran don't want the Democrats back terrorists.
00:13:15.000Shame on you for playing with the blood of Iranian people.
00:13:19.000President Trump was retreating all of this and you know people in the media of course are very upset about the most egregious thing that he retweeted was a picture of Nancy Pelosi wearing effectively a burqa and Chuck Schumer wearing some form of Islamic headgear.
00:13:38.000With the Iranian flag in the background.
00:13:40.000So people are all over Trump for all of this, obviously, because this is what Trump does.
00:13:44.000I mean, President Trump, this is where the commenter on websites of him comes out, right?
00:13:48.000The caller into talk radio for President Trump comes out.
00:13:52.000But the bottom line is that Trump's perspective on Iran is correct, and the Democrats' perspective on this is wrong.
00:13:57.000And it's not just wrong, it's highly damaging to people who are protesting at the risk of their lives in all of this.
00:14:04.000President Trump tweeted out, the Democrats in the fake news are trying to make terrorist Soleimani into a wonderful guy only because I did what should have been done for 20 years.
00:14:10.000Anything I do, whether it's the economy, military or anything else, will be scorned by the radical left.
00:14:24.000I don't understand why that's a bad thing.
00:14:27.000And I don't understand why this is supposed to be supremely controversial that President Trump is standing up for the rights of Americans.
00:14:34.000To be safe and standing up against Iranian terrorism.
00:14:37.000And why the protesters are being denigrated by Nancy Pelosi.
00:14:40.000Trump also tweeted out a few minutes ago, the fake news media and their Democrat partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was imminent or not and was my team in agreement.
00:14:51.000But it doesn't really matter because of his horrible past.
00:14:52.000That brings us to the next narrative that's being attempted by the Democrats because it turns out that their narrative that Soleimani's death was going to lead to World War III didn't materialize.
00:15:00.000It turns out that the evidence is very solid that the Iranian regime is a terror regime that just shot down a civilian airliner and is now being riven by protests by its own citizens.
00:15:10.000And so they have to turn to a second narrative.
00:15:11.000We're going to get to the Democrats and the media's second narrative over the weekend, which is a truly egregious narrative.
00:15:18.000First, One of the questions in the aftermath of the Iranian attack was whether the Iranians would engage in some sort of cyberterrorism, whether they were engaged in hacking.
00:15:26.000And there are a lot of reports all around the media ecosystem that there were attempted hacks all throughout the days in the aftermath of the Soleimani attack.
00:16:41.000Again, expressvpn.com slash Ben to learn more.
00:16:44.000Okay, so one of the Democrat narratives over the weekend was the Nancy Pelosi narrative that apparently these protests have many reasons and Trump being doing the right thing apparently has nothing to do with it.
00:16:55.000And then the second narrative is that Trump is, of course, a crazy person and that the only reason he attacked Soleimani is because he's precipitous.
00:17:01.000Now, as I say, there was a report that came out over the weekend suggesting that for months in advance, Trump had greenlit the kill of Soleimani because Soleimani was, in fact, the world's leading sponsor of terrorism around the world.
00:17:11.000But this narrative of the Democrats that Trump was doing this based on bad info, bad intel, this was exacerbated by President Trump because President Trump very often will get over his skis in the sorts of information that he chooses to divulge to the public.
00:17:26.000What President Trump tweeted this morning, which is that whether the attack was imminent or not, Soleimani needed to go, that is 100% true.
00:17:32.000And as I've been saying on this program for, again, weeks at this point, since the Democrats decided to make imminent the standard, The question as to whether there was any imminent attack by Osama Bin Laden or Anwar al-Awlaki is basically irrelevant.
00:17:44.000If you're a terrorist for a living, what you do is pursue terror attacks.
00:17:47.000And so this bizarre notion that you have to have the date, time, and place of a terror attack on a list in order to kill a terrorist is just silly towns.
00:17:54.000But this is the attack that the Democrats are choosing to pursue, which is that Trump didn't actually have an excuse to kill Soleimani, despite the fact that Soleimani, again, was in Iraq, not Iran.
00:18:04.000He was in Iraq the day after a burning of a U.S.
00:18:08.000He was in the same car as the leader of the PMF, which was an Iranian-backed Terrorist group that was responsible for the burn he was in that car with that guy by the way that terrorist happened to have a Death sentence in absentia placed on his head by the Kuwaiti government for his terror activities in the past But apparently according to the Democrats that's not strong enough So Laura Ingram asked Trump about it and Trump instead of just saying listen I'm not gonna divulge all the information that we have at our disposal because a lot of that is classified Suffices to say this man was a lifelong terrorist.
00:18:36.000I'm confused as to why it is that the Democrats What exactly are they demanding?
00:18:41.000Like, when his next terror attack was going to occur?
00:18:44.000Because, again, we know that with Bin Laden, he was basically cut off from everybody on Earth.
00:18:48.000He wasn't even in electronic communication with anybody.
00:18:50.000They were hand-delivering handwritten notes to him because they were afraid that people would locate him.
00:19:02.000Instead, President Trump says that Soleimani was planning attacks on four embassies, and this of course leads to a bit of a disconnect between Trump and his own intelligence community and defense department.
00:19:12.000I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies, and I think that probably Baghdad already started.
00:19:20.000They were really amazed that we came in with that kind of a force.
00:19:23.000We came in with very powerful force, and drove them out.
00:19:26.000You know, that ended almost immediately.
00:19:29.000But Baghdad certainly would have been the lead, but I think it would have been four embassies, could have been military bases, could have been a lot of other things too.
00:19:35.000But it was imminent, and then all of a sudden, he was gone.
00:19:39.000Okay, so Trump obviously is happy that Soleimani is gone, but the fact that he suggests that there were imminent attacks on four embassies, this does not meet with the intel that has been presented either to the American public or to Congress apparently.
00:19:52.000So Secretary of Defense Mark Esper appeared on Face the Nation.
00:19:55.000He was asked specifically about this notion that there were four pending embassy attacks.
00:19:59.000Now, here's the very obvious possibility.
00:20:01.000You know, we're not allowed to talk about obvious possibilities when it comes to Trump's interpretation.
00:20:05.000We're supposed to instead take him supremely literally that there were imminent attacks on four U.S.
00:20:11.000In all likelihood, what happened is that the Department of Defense and the State Department went to Trump and they said, the Iranians are fond of attacking embassies.
00:20:35.000Soleimani actually was out there petting kittens and adopting puppies.
00:20:38.000That guy was all rainbows and flowers.
00:20:40.000And then Trump made this up from his crazy head about Soleimani attacking embassies.
00:20:45.000And now for no reason, a respected member of the Iranian military is dead.
00:20:51.000So Mark Esper is like, yeah, I didn't see any evidence pending of the attacks, but I think it's likely that Iran probably planned to attack U.S.
00:20:59.000embassies considering they've done this like a thousand times.
00:21:01.000What the president said was he believed that it probably could have been attacks against additional embassies.
00:21:08.000I know other members of national security team share that view.
00:21:11.000That's why I deployed thousands of American paratroopers to the Middle East to reinforce our embassy in Baghdad and other sites throughout the region.
00:21:19.000That is, that sounds more like an assessment than a specific, tangible threat with a decisive piece of intelligence.
00:21:27.000Well, the president didn't say it was a tangible, he didn't cite a specific piece of evidence.
00:21:31.000What he said is he probably, he believed- Are you saying there wasn't one?
00:21:34.000I didn't see one with regard to four embassies.
00:21:37.000What I'm saying is I share the president's view that probably my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies.
00:21:43.000Okay, so he was saying, again, what I'm saying, which is that there's an expectation, like some broad-based expectation.
00:21:47.000Trump didn't say that the attacks on the embassies were imminent, even in that quote with Laura Ingraham, but this led to the media suggesting that Trump was embellishing, don't you see?
00:21:56.000So that means that I guess Soleimani...
00:22:06.000When it came to the evidence, for example, that al-Baghdadi was in a cave and he was crying and whimpering and all of this stuff, members of the Defense Department were like, yeah, we didn't see a lot of evidence for that.
00:22:18.000Take everything he says with a grain of salt.
00:22:21.000But instead, the media, in order to try and debunk the idea that Soleimani should have been killed, they're like, well, I guess it wasn't imminent because Trump says that it was the embassies, but we've seen no evidence of the embassies, and that means he shouldn't have been killed.
00:22:32.000One, maybe there were no imminent attacks on the embassies, or maybe there were imminent attacks on the embassies that we just don't know about.
00:22:38.000But Soleimani should have been killed anyway because, again, a terrorist does what he does, like, for a living.
00:22:44.000He's a terrorist for a living and now for a dying.
00:22:46.000Here was Jake Tapper, though, going after Esper, suggesting the president was embellishing.
00:22:50.000Again, I think that's a relevant question to ask for Tapper.
00:22:53.000I just don't know what the relevance is to whether Soleimani should have been killed.
00:22:56.000When President Trump lies or embellishes on a topic this sensitive and administration officials then parrot his claims to avoid drawing his ire, the situation becomes extremely dangerous for our troops and the American people.
00:23:19.000One of the briefers told me, He's not embellishing.
00:23:21.000nearly all the members of that gang of eight believed that the intelligence was persuasive as well and that it should not be shared with a broader membership because of the concerns that it could be released reveal our sources and methods.
00:23:47.000Yeah, except for the fact that it's not like the Iraq War because, again, if the case in the Iraq War had been Saddam Hussein, if this had been the only case, Saddam Hussein is a human rights violator who murders his own citizens on a regular basis and is aggressive on foreign borders.
00:24:03.000Wouldn't take a lot of proof to prove that.
00:24:04.000I mean, the man literally did that pretty much every day.
00:24:06.000And the same thing is true of Soleimani.
00:24:08.000There was nothing new that had to be proved with regard to who Soleimani was.
00:24:12.000The man pursued terror every single day.
00:24:14.000It was his job with the Iranian government.
00:24:16.000But according to Democrats, this completely undercuts the case that President Trump has for killing Soleimani in the first place.
00:24:22.000They will do anything they can to turn, again, a win into a loss on foreign policy.
00:24:26.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:24:29.000President Trump's favorite pencil neck, Adam Schiff, sounds off.
00:24:31.000We'll get to that in just one second first.
00:24:33.000Have you ever been in a situation where something in your car breaks down and then you have to go to an auto parts store, but really you go to auto parts, they don't have the right part, so you go to a second auto parts store, and now you're driving around in somebody else's car because your car is at home, and then you go to a third auto parts store, and all these parts are overpriced, And you can't find the exact right part?
00:25:39.000See all the parts available for your car or truck, write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box, so they know that we sent you again.
00:25:44.000Go check them out, rockauto.com, and write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box, that helps the show, and it helps them, and helps you, because obviously, you're now checking out rockauto.com, getting the best parts at the best prices.
00:25:55.000Okay, so, hey Democrats, Jump on the President Trump is embellishing bandwagon to try and suggest that President Trump did something wrong in killing Soleimani, despite the fact that he backed the Iranians off their overt aggression, despite the fact that the Iranians are now protesting in the streets the Iranian regime.
00:26:12.000Here's Adam Schiff, pens and make Adam Schiff, talking about Trump fudging the intelligence, trying to make this an intelligence mistake as opposed to a giant foreign policy win.
00:26:22.000And so when you hear the president out there on Fox, he is fudging the intelligence.
00:26:27.000And when you hear the secretary say, well, that wasn't what the intelligence said, but that's my personal belief, he is fudging.
00:26:34.000When Secretary Pompeo was on your show last week and made the claim that the intelligence analysis was that taking Soleimani out would improve our security and leaving him in would make us less safe, that is also fudging.
00:26:49.000That's not an intelligence conclusion.
00:26:51.000So again, it's just all fudging, and why do we do this?
00:26:54.000Trump's point this morning on Twitter is basically correct, which is, yeah, I believed it was four embassies, but guess what?
00:27:00.000In the struggles of Democrats, Nancy Pelosi suggesting that the protests are for various reasons, and Adam Schiff going off on the intelligence.
00:27:06.000How about at some point, somebody just says, Soleimani deserved to die, Trump did the right thing in killing him, this is a good act of deterrence, and we're gonna have to take precautions against future Iranian aggression, but that's been true for decades.
00:27:22.000Apparently, the answer is yes, it is indeed that hard.
00:27:25.000Okay, now, we move on to the 2020 Democratic presidential race.
00:27:29.000So, there's a big debate coming up this week, and that debate really is featuring a three-way face-off.
00:27:35.000Now, Elizabeth Warren is barely making it into the conversation these days, so really, it's about Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but Sanders is clocking Warren as well.
00:27:42.000I'll tell you who's not in the conversation anymore, and that, of course, is Cory McBooker.
00:27:47.000Cory McBooker, this morning, dropped out of the presidential race in the saddest story since Toy Story 4, when he finally parted ways with Mr. Potato Head, the real Mr. Potato Head.
00:28:47.000It turns out he was a garbage candidate, just like Kamala Harris was a garbage candidate, and now he has put on his sad eyes.
00:28:53.000He opened his back, took out the sad eyes, Rosario Dawson popped those in for him, and he said, Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win.
00:29:03.000Money we don't have and money that is harder to raise because I won't be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington.
00:29:11.000So Booker is using the impeachment as an excuse for ending his campaign.
00:29:15.000In his letter to supporters, Booker writes, I believe to my core that the answer to the common pain Americans are feeling right now The answer to Donald Trump's hatred and division is to reignite our spirit of common purpose, to take on our biggest challenges, and build a more just and fair country for everyone.
00:29:31.000I'm proud I never compromised my faith in these principles during this campaign to score political points or tear down others.
00:29:36.000Actually, very early on in the campaign, he sort of implied that Joe Biden was a racist.
00:29:40.000He was incredibly divisive throughout the campaign, but pretended that he was a unifier throughout the campaign.
00:29:44.000He couldn't decide whether he was campaigning on righteous indignation or whether he was campaigning on hopey, changey Barack Obama kind of stuff.
00:29:53.000He intends to run for reelection to the Senate.
00:29:56.000He'll probably win because he's in New Jersey and whatever.
00:29:59.000But this means, you know, hashtag Oscar so white, hashtag Democrats so white.
00:30:05.000And I'm really looking forward to the latest rounds of recrimination.
00:30:07.000I also look forward to the retrospective pieces in the New York Times op-ed page about why we all should take Cory Booker more seriously.
00:30:13.000Basically, every time a Democrat of color drops out, we get a round of think pieces about why that candidate was actually awesome, even though they had no support.
00:30:21.000You didn't get that for Beto, because Beto was a white dude.
00:30:23.000But you did get that for Kamala Harris.
00:30:26.000Tons of think pieces about, we're all going to miss Kamala.
00:30:31.000And then you got it with Julián Castro, right?
00:30:33.000Castro dropped out and everybody's like, oh man, that Julián Castro, what a guy, what a wonderful, wonderful dude.
00:30:39.000It is funny how the treatment of candidates of color in the Democratic Party is they are ignored while they are alive, and then at their funeral, everybody gets up and eulogizes like Marc Anthony over Julius Caesar's body.
00:30:51.000Oh, this Julian Castro, what a great candidate he was!
00:30:55.000I come not to praise Julian Castro, but to bury him.
00:30:58.000They're going to do the same thing with Cory Booker.
00:31:02.000We're gonna see all these people now come out of the woodwork.
00:31:03.000Cory Booker, isn't it sad that he's gone?
00:31:05.000It just shows the endemic racism of American society.
00:31:08.000It's like Barack Obama never existed in the Democratic Party.
00:31:10.000They do the same thing at the Oscars, by the way.
00:31:12.000The Oscar nominations came out today, and already you're getting the, there aren't enough people of color in the Oscar nominations.
00:31:37.000In any case, the Democrats are the same way.
00:31:39.000Barack Obama never existed, and so every election cycle they're supposed to prove they're not racist by nominating a black person, or nominating a Hispanic person, and then if they don't, then it's because they're racist, and then we lament all those candidates who couldn't pick up any support because they were garbage candidates.
00:31:51.000Okay, so what does this leave us with?
00:31:53.000It leaves us with a bunch of old white people!
00:31:55.000Yes, it's the old white people primary inside the Democratic Party.
00:31:58.000So in just one second, we'll get to the old white people primary, where the oldest, not the whitest, but the oldest person on the Democratic debate stage is gaining momentum in the betting odds.
00:32:09.000We'll get We'll get to Bernard McSanders in just one second.
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00:32:56.000So if you look at the betting odds today, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are basically even.
00:33:00.000In the betting odds, Joe Biden is up by less than a point.
00:33:02.000Now, those betting odds don't really mean a lot, considering that back in November, Elizabeth Warren was at like 50% in the betting odds to be the nominee.
00:33:09.000It just shows that Sanders does have momentum going into Iowa.
00:33:12.000And that is particularly true because Donald Trump did a foreign policy thing that is good, and it was interventionist.
00:33:17.000And Democrats aren't allowed to say that it was good, and they aren't allowed to say that the intervention was useful.
00:33:22.000So instead, they're going to swing toward the isolationism that Bernie Sanders has been promoting idiotically his entire career because he's always been wrong about everything.
00:33:29.000Right now, in the polling data, the latest poll has Bernie Sanders up in Iowa.
00:33:33.000Buttigieg has been fading pretty strongly in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
00:33:36.000According to the latest Des Moines Register CNN poll, this just came out.
00:33:40.000On January 8th, Bernie Sanders is up at 20%, followed by Elizabeth Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden, all between 15 and 17%.
00:33:47.000The margin of error in that poll is 3.7%.
00:33:50.000So that means that Sanders is indeed leading.
00:33:53.000It would be sort of surprising if Sanders does not win Iowa, given the fact that it is a caucus state, which means that enthusiasm really counts.
00:33:58.000Remember, in the caucus states, it's not that everybody goes and casts a ballot.
00:34:01.000It's that you actually gather at a caucus place and then there's shows of hands and all of this.
00:34:10.000And then they move on to New Hampshire, a state that Sanders won 49% of the vote just the last election cycle.
00:34:16.000According to the latest Monmouth poll that came out on January 7th, Buttigieg Buttigieg is still leading there, although it is basically a group of three right at the top.
00:34:26.000If Sanders were to win Iowa, assuredly you would see a boost in New Hampshire as well.
00:34:30.000CBS YouGov poll that came out on January 3rd actually has Sanders in the lead at 27% over Biden at 25%.
00:34:37.000The real question is whether you're going to see some movement for Sanders in Nevada and if he can win a big victory in either of these two states.
00:34:44.000What you would need for Bernie Sanders to take the nomination is for Bernie Sanders to win big over Joe Biden in either Iowa or New Hampshire and then to run the table and take Nevada as well.
00:34:53.000The Nevada polling Again, it's been incredibly sporadic.
00:34:56.000There's only one poll in Nevada in the last two months, and that is a poll that just came out January 8th from Fox News.
00:35:02.000It shows Biden up by only six points over Bernie Sanders.
00:35:04.000That six point lead is not a large lead when you consider the fact that Joe Biden could lose the first couple of states and then the media would turn to Bernie Sanders Might be the guy.
00:35:13.000Bernie, for his part, is getting more and more aggressive, which is, of course, the smart play.
00:35:17.000He's been sort of withholding his fire until now.
00:35:19.000He's going after Joe Biden and going after Joe Biden incredibly hard.
00:35:23.000In fact, he expects in the debates this week for Joe Biden to be attacked on his foreign policy record early and often.
00:35:30.000And the question is going to be whether Democrats really believe in the sort of full-on isolationist kookiness of Bernie Sanders, the pro-communist isolationism of Bernie Sanders, who has never met a communist tyranny he wasn't willing to bow before, nor has he met a Democratic ally he was willing to stand up for.
00:35:45.000Are they going to prefer that, or are they going to prefer the sort of finger-in-the-wind foreign policy of Joe Biden?
00:35:48.000Because here's the problem with Joe Biden.
00:35:52.000Muddling through is, in fact, America's actual foreign policy.
00:35:55.000For all the talk about America's principled foreign policy, since the end of the Cold War, muddling through has sort of been the rule rather than the exception.
00:36:01.000And the leader in muddling through has been Joe Biden, who has taken every stance on every possible issue.
00:36:05.000For example, this week, Joe Biden and John Kerry, his surrogate, The worst secretary of state in American history.
00:36:12.000They were going around saying that Joe Biden didn't actually vote for the war in Iraq.
00:36:15.000He voted to authorize Bush to go through the process with regard to Iraq at the United Nations.
00:36:22.000Bernie Sanders released a video from 2003 in which Joe Biden was praising George W. Bush with regard to the Iraq war.
00:36:28.000The cost of not acting against Saddam, I think, would have been much greater.
00:36:33.000And so is the cost, and so will be the cost of not finishing this job.
00:36:40.000The President of the United States is a bold leader and he is popular.
00:36:46.000The stakes are high and the need for leadership is great.
00:36:51.000I wish he'd use some of his stored up popularity to make what I admit is not a very popular case, but I and many others will support him.
00:37:00.000Okay, so that was Joe Biden back in 2003, strongly standing by George W. Bush and the Iraq War.
00:37:04.000Now, of course, he runs screaming from the Iraq War because it has become Sort of the popular wisdom, the conventional wisdom that the Iraq War is the biggest mistake in American foreign policy history and all of this sort of nonsense.
00:37:16.000So the Democrats have to choose between Joe Biden, who takes every position on every issue, but at least understands at root that America can't run away from the world, or Bernie Sanders, who has the ability, and this is one of the things that's nice about isolationism.
00:37:30.000Isolationism is always popular until precisely the moment that it isn't.
00:37:33.000This is true throughout American history.
00:37:34.000Isolationism was popular in the run-up to World War I until precisely the moment the Lusitania got sunk, at which point the American public was like, no, screw this, we're gonna bang on the hun.
00:37:43.000And then we got to World War II, and isolationism was extremely popular in the United States all the way up to Really, the German invasion of France and even beyond.
00:37:52.000It took a year beyond the German invasion of France for the United States to get involved in the war.
00:37:56.000And that was only after a revert attack at Pearl Harbor.
00:37:59.000Isolationism is always popular until it isn't.
00:38:01.000So Bernie Sanders always gets, especially in the last several decades, when the United States has never been on the verge of being militarily overpowered.
00:38:08.000Right, at least with World War I and World War II, you could say that the United States had actual rivals for global hegemony.
00:38:13.000That has not been true in the past several decades, and certainly not since the fall of the Soviet Union.
00:38:17.000And so, Bernie Sanders' foreign policy, which is basically, what if we just sit here?
00:38:21.000What if we just sit here and let bad guys do whatever they want to all over the world?
00:38:29.000That is a fairly popular position given the fact that America's power is not truly threatened on an existential level by any of these other countries.
00:38:40.000And even that is more of a long-term threat rather than a short-term military threat.
00:38:45.000So Bernie Sanders has sort of an inherent advantage, but Democrats are also going to have to face up to the fact that Bernie Sanders is a guy who thinks that the Squad has great foreign policy ideas.
00:38:53.000Bernie Sanders is on the trail this weekend, and he is stumping for the Squad, thanking them for what they do every day.
00:38:58.000This would be AOC, who's making common cause with Jeremy Corbyn, the open anti-Semite in Great Britain.
00:39:04.000who signs letters to judges asking for mercy on people recruited to ISIS and suggests that we should sanction Israel but not Iran, and then suggests that we should basically back off of Maduro in Venezuela.
00:39:15.000Here's Bernie Sanders thanking all of those people.
00:39:17.000So what you have a choice between is an isolationist old commie and Joe Biden, who has the principles of a jellyfish.
00:39:24.000I wanted to thank Rashida Tlaib for doing that exactly.
00:39:31.000What she and other members of the so-called squad And she's really, she's really standing against the Jews.
00:39:40.000What Rashida is doing every day is standing up for the working families of this country and day after day having the courage to take on powerful special interests.
00:39:53.000And she's really she's really standing against the Jews.
00:40:10.000But the fact is that Bernie Sanders surrounds himself with the worst sort of anti-Semites.
00:40:14.000I mean, he campaigns with Linda Sarsour, and Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
00:40:17.000But put aside the anti-Semitism, his actual foreign policy is extraordinarily radical.
00:40:20.000And so Democrats may cheer all the sloganeering, but Barack Obama did this too, right?
00:40:24.000Barack Obama was into the isolationist sloganeering, and then he became president, launched a war in Libya, launched a drone war, increased troop presence in Iraq, in Afghanistan, had to reverse himself and increase troop presence in Iraq in order to fight ISIS.
00:40:36.000It turns out that that presidential seat tends to make you more interventionist because when threats around the world materialize, well, you gotta do something about it.
00:40:44.000And so Democrats might have to come to grips with the fact that all of their sloganeering is generally stupid, and that a man who puts that into practice is actually dangerous.
00:40:52.000There's an article in the Washington Post today by Sean Sullivan talking about Bernie Sanders' foreign policy.
00:40:56.000It says, when Bolivia's leftist president was pressured to resign by his country's military after an audit found signs of a tainted election two months ago, many American leaders showed little interest in condemning the ouster.
00:41:05.000Some said it was a potentially positive step for democracy, a sign, as President Trump put it, that the will of the people will always prevail.
00:41:11.000A sharply different response came from Bernie Sanders, who immediately condemned, quote, what appears to be a coup.
00:41:16.000The ousted leader, Evo Morales, who had challenged term limits to remain in power, later thanked the senator from Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate, referring to him affectionately as brother.
00:41:24.000Most of Sanders' rivals paid little attention to the incident in a faraway place, but for Sanders, the episode offers a glimpse into an unorthodox foreign policy worldview.
00:41:33.000Basically, he has the same foreign policy worldview as Noam Chomsky.
00:41:35.000He's a radical, radical leftist who believes that America's role in the world is based in racism, imperialism, colonialism.
00:41:47.000With the Iran crisis thrusting foreign affairs to the forefront of the campaign, just as Sanders rises in early state polls, Democrats who previously waved off the Senators' views as fringe now must contemplate the possibility of a Democratic Socialist becoming Commander-in-Chief of the United States.
00:42:00.000Trump has already upended the world order with an America First approach that tests Western alliances.
00:42:05.000Sanders would deliver another jolt, echoing some of Trump's criticisms of military action and free train, but realigning the country's priorities even more strongly.
00:42:12.000Well, what that actually means is that he would presumably try to make alliances with actual terror groups, right?
00:42:16.000He suggested that the United States withdraw military aid from Israel and give it to an actual terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, Hamas.
00:42:22.000Beyond his objection to Morales' removal, Sanders has poignantly declined to label Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro a dictator because he is a commie.
00:42:29.000He called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a racist for the great sin of noting that the Arab parties in Israel stand for the destruction of the State of Israel.
00:42:36.000He has campaigned with Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, both of whom favor sanctions against the State of Israel.
00:42:41.000He said that China has done more to address extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization, neglecting the forced abortion of some 350 million children minimum, and the forced sterilization of presumably tens of millions of women, and also neglecting the fact the only thing that allowed China to rise from poverty at all was their engagement in the free market and free trade.
00:43:00.000Also, Sanders opposed the 2000 invasion of Iraq.
00:43:02.000That's going to be his bumper sticker against Joe Biden this week.
00:43:05.000Aaron David Miller, former advisor to six secretaries of state, now senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
00:43:10.000He says, I think it would be a fundamental shift, assuming his principles hold in the transition from campaigning to governing.
00:43:15.000Even some Democrats note Sanders has put much more emphasis on domestic policies than global ones.
00:43:19.000That's right, because domestic socialism is more popular than international alliances with some of the worst people on the face of the planet.
00:43:27.000Senator Richard Durbin, who is a wild leftist, said it hasn't been his strong suit, but Sanders and company are making the case that Joe Biden is basically on Trump's side, that Biden and Trump are closer together than Biden and Sanders, which of course is true when it comes to foreign policy.
00:43:42.000That's a dangerous choice for Democrats to make.
00:43:44.000But Bernie is gaining and he is picking up steam also because running this close to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren is still carrying 15 to 20 percent of the vote.
00:43:51.000And so Sanders is now reorienting himself.
00:43:53.000He's saying, OK, well, I've got sort of my ceiling here, but if I tear down Elizabeth Warren and she drops out, most of her support will go to me.
00:44:00.000Now, what the statistics show is that a heavy share of Elizabeth Warren's support will actually go to Biden, too.
00:44:04.000But he's not wrong that a plurality of that support will go to him.
00:44:08.000This is why Sanders is beginning to try to push Warren out of the race more and more quickly.
00:44:12.000By the way, if Warren loses Iowa-New Hampshire, she's done.
00:44:14.000At that point, the race is over for her.
00:44:17.000She's got to win either Iowa or New Hampshire because she's got no potential in any of the future states.
00:44:23.000Sanders' presidential campaign, according to the Washington Post, has suddenly gone on the attack as he seeks to secure an opening in the early February caucuses, engaging in a rare dispute with Senator Elizabeth Warren, tussling with former VP Joe Biden, drawing an insult from President Trump.
00:44:35.000Which, by the way, if you're Trump and you want Sanders as your opponent, that'd be your smart move, would be to insult Sanders.
00:44:40.000Because then it makes, it elevates Sanders.
00:44:41.000Anybody you want to elevate, you insult.
00:44:43.000Although Sanders had mostly resisted comparing himself with other candidates, his surrogates and aides intensified their attacks on Biden, targeting his past positions on racial issues and his vote to sanction the Iraq War.
00:44:54.000A script first reported by Politico told Sanders' volunteers to tell voters that they called on Sanders' behalf, who had indicated support for her that Warren's popularity was limited to the rich and educated denigrating her electability.
00:45:05.000Elizabeth Warren, for her part, was firing back at Bernie Sanders, suggesting that she was quote-unquote disappointed with Sanders' campaign script painting her as elitist.
00:45:14.000She used the opportunity to warn about factionalism.
00:45:16.000She says, I hope Bernie reconsiders and turns his campaign in a different direction.
00:45:20.000But Bernie's not going to make the same mistake with Elizabeth Warren he made with Hillary Clinton, which was, who cares about her damn emails?
00:48:03.000And it always assures me when Nancy Pelosi meets with a person who hates Trump so much that she applauded Richard Spencer on her show the other day.
00:48:20.000So the Democrats are beginning to realize that Nancy Pelosi's impeachment effort is a giant fail.
00:48:25.000The Washington Post's Rachel Bade explained over the weekend This week on ABC, that many Democrats internally are saying that Nancy Pelosi's strategy did not paint Mitch McConnell into a corner on impeachment, that instead, she basically accomplished nothing.
00:48:37.000Here's the Washington Post's Rachel Bade.
00:48:39.000She's clearly putting a positive spin on what a lot of Democrats have privately said was a failed strategy.
00:48:45.000I mean, she and Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, set out to, number one, try to get a commitment from McConnell on witnesses, firsthand witnesses to have him testify in a Senate trial.
00:48:54.000She also said she wanted to see a resolution about, you know, how the whole proceedings would be governed.
00:49:03.000Nancy Pelosi is basically acknowledging her own irrelevance at this point.
00:49:06.000She's protesting against the fact that her strategy was an enormous failure.
00:49:10.000So, aside from being on this week and denigrating Iranian protesters, she was also on this week and she suggested that no matter what happens from here, Trump is impeached for life.
00:49:24.000It turns out that being impeached but not expelled from office does not have any real long-term impact on the way that the American people view you, especially when it turns out that that was done with only Democratic votes.
00:49:33.000But Nancy Pelosi's like, we did our part.
00:49:39.000We have confidence in our case that it is impeachable, and this president is impeached for life, regardless of any gamesmanship on the part of Mitch McConnell.
00:49:51.000However, that could still come to bear.
00:49:54.000But we're confident in the impeachment, and we think that it is enough testimony to remove him from office.
00:50:00.000However, we want the American people to see the truth.
00:50:12.000You really have changed the world, Nancy Pelosi.
00:50:14.000Put her on the cover of Time magazine for her brilliant manipulations here.
00:50:19.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:50:26.000So there's an article from Arianna Njuncha over at the Washington Post.
00:50:29.000It is called, Five years after an abortion, most women say they made the right decision.
00:50:34.000First off, we should just acknowledge that when people make a decision in life, it is extraordinarily rare that they look back and they say publicly, that was a mistake.
00:50:44.000It's a rare thing for people to feel shame or guilt about things they have done, especially something as morally deplorable as killing an unborn child.
00:50:52.000Because in order for you to look back with regret, you have to acknowledge the enormity of what it is that you just did.
00:50:58.000In order for you to look back with regret, you have to acknowledge that you committed about as grave a sin as it is possible to commit on this earth.
00:51:04.000To go along with, to choose to kill your own child is an extraordinary, extraordinary sin.
00:51:14.000And to acknowledge that is obviously going to lead to some significant cognitive dissonance.
00:51:38.000The filmmaker at the very end of the film tries to make the case for the sort of pro-abortion case in the United States because there, in China, women were forced into abortions, but here they get to choose abortion and that makes all the difference.
00:51:48.000No, I mean, either that's a life or it's not a life.
00:51:50.000Either you mourn the life or you don't mourn the life.
00:52:03.000In any case, That film, which is all about the evils of forced abortion, it has an entire section in One Child Nation, it's really unbelievable, about how many Chinese women, because they wanted a boy, if they had a girl, and the girl is completely born, okay, this is in the fetus, the girl is completely born, would take the baby to the market, drop the baby off in a wicker basket at the market, and just leave the baby there.
00:52:27.000And if no one took the baby, the baby would die of heat exposure, would die of exposure to Insects or starve to death.
00:52:36.000And what was amazing about the documentary is that the documentarian then went back and talked to all these women and asked, did you dislike the one child policy?
00:52:50.000The human capacity to go along with evil in order to justify our own actions is nearly endless.
00:52:56.000It's why what good people have to spend time doing every day is what we in Hebrew call teshuvah, right?
00:53:01.000We have to spend an enormous amount of time examining our own actions, trying to examine our own actions for the sins that we may have committed.
00:53:08.000In Christianity, obviously, this is quite a big thing.
00:53:11.000It should be a big thing for any good person, whether you're religious or not religious.
00:53:14.000But the point being made here is that the fact that there are any women at all who have an abortion and then feel bad about it later is a sign of the human capacity for repentance, and that's good.
00:53:24.000But the way this study is done, if women don't regret it, that means that women should have the right to do it, which is an insane standard, right?
00:53:29.000I mean, obviously, OJ Simpson, I don't think regrets killing Nicole Brown Simpson.
00:53:35.000That doesn't mean that he had a right to do it.
00:53:36.000The Washington Post, though, reports, there's been quite a lot of research about women's emotions immediately following an abortion.
00:53:40.000Some experience sadness, guilt, and anger.
00:53:46.000Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco delved into this question in an analysis of 667 women recruited from 30 sites across the country as part of the Turnaway Study, a landmark body of research about how abortion affects women physically, socially, emotionally, and economically.
00:54:01.000Starting one week after their abortions and then twice yearly after that, the women were asked about their feelings.
00:54:06.000The authors said they wondered about stigma and how the women would reflect on their decisions as time passed.
00:54:16.000I mean, as time goes on, people rarely feel the same way as they do in the heat of the moment.
00:54:21.000A really interesting finding is how the intensity of all emotions is so low, said Corinne Rocha, lead author of the study and UCSF Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences.
00:54:31.000A week after their abortions, about 51% of women expressed mostly positive emotions, 17% expressed negative emotions, and 20% said they had few or none.
00:54:40.000As time went by, the number who felt few or none emotions rose sharply.
00:54:43.000At the five-year mark, 84% reported either primarily positive emotions or none at all, while 6% had primarily negative feelings.
00:54:50.000There was no evidence of new negative or positive emotions, the authors said.
00:54:54.000Immediately after their abortions, 95% of those who agreed to interviews said they had made the right decision.
00:55:09.000It's a self-selected group, in other words.
00:55:10.000At five years, that percentage increased to 99%.
00:55:13.000Roca was careful to point out that a woman's feelings of regret and her judgment that an abortion was the correct decision for her under the circumstances are different things.
00:55:20.000You can feel the emotion of regret, yet feel what you did was right for you.
00:55:23.000So in other words, she thinks that it's 100% of women who should not feel any regret about what they did.
00:55:29.000The study authors wrote that their findings challenged the rationale for state-mandated counseling protocols and other policies regulating access to abortion premised on emotional harm claims, e.g.
00:55:40.000Well, no, actually, because those waiting periods are based on the idea that women have not, in many cases, fully considered the possibility of what it is they are doing, that a lot of the state-mandated regulations with regard to, like, seeing 40 ultrasounds are designed to give the woman more information before she just goes in there on the vague promise that that fetus is actually just a cluster of cells.
00:56:01.000But according to Rocha, what the study is showing is that there is a small minority who do regret their abortions.
00:56:05.000I know I want to reduce the struggles of those who regret their abortions, but it is misguided to take away options for everyone based on this minority.
00:56:12.000Well, no, usually the attempt to take away abortion has very little to do with the emotional status of the women affected.
00:56:18.000It has a lot more to do with trying to grant women more information so they can make a morally proper decision with regard to whether or not to dispose of their own child.
00:56:26.000But again, The study itself is incredibly foolish in the sense that most people have an incredible capacity, as I've said, for overlooking their own sins, for not regretting their own sins, and the fact that anybody regrets what they've done in the past is a sign that the human being is capable of change.
00:56:44.000And so it is the job of good-hearted people who care about the unborn to make the case to women that your feelings of regret should not be a barrier.
00:56:54.000to you or you're feeling that you don't want to feel guilty should not be a barrier to you changing your mind it's a sign of you being a better person right when you repent to sin that makes you a better person not a worse person in in sort of jewish thought there's a whole school of thought in the talmud that suggests that if you have sinned and you repent to sin in some ways this makes you greater than the person who has never sinned at all Because you've now had to go from the depths to the heights, as opposed to having been in the heights the entire time.
00:57:21.000There's a whole school of thought in the Talmud that says that your sins actually turn to merit when you fully repent those sins and recognize that what you did was wrong.
00:57:26.000That's how difficult it is to do repentance.
00:57:29.000And this is true in every school, not just abortion.
00:57:33.000We should all be examining our actions every day to determine what it is that we did that was wrong, how we can do better in the future.
00:57:38.000But this is why the pro-abort movement tends to push the shout-your-abortion idea, because once you've shouted your abortion, it's very difficult for you to then climb down from that perspective and suggest, wait a second, I never should have shouted that abortion, that abortion was wrong.
00:57:51.000Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
00:57:54.000Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow in preparation for the big Democratic debate.
00:57:57.000I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:58:03.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz.
00:58:29.000Iranians take to the streets to protest their dirtbag terrorist leaders in exactly the way conservatives predicted they would in direct opposition to two weeks of leftist howling.
00:58:39.000We will examine how Trump got it so right and why reality contradicts the left's international worldview.