The Ben Shapiro Show - Your Yoga Pants Can Never Be Woke Enough | Ep. 1293

00:00:00.000 Lululemon comes under fire for lack of diversity despite its woke virtue signaling.

00:00:04.000 Trump sues big tech and Joe Biden hands Afghanistan over to the Taliban.

00:00:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:16.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:00:22.000 We'll get to all the news in just one moment.

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00:01:28.000 Alrighty.

00:01:29.000 The bosses at Lululemon, they must have thought that they were going to be okay.

00:01:33.000 They must have thought that everything was going to be fine.

00:01:34.000 After all, they've spent the last several years virtue signaling on a wide variety of issues.

00:01:39.000 You may recall that just last year, Lululemon came under fire after they tweeted out that it was time to decolonize gender.

00:01:47.000 And it was time to resist capitalism.

00:01:49.000 You remember, it was an event that was featured in an Instagram post in which Lululemon recommended other accounts to follow, including the host of the workshop, a person named Rebi Kern.

00:01:58.000 That yoga instructor is a US-based brand ambassador for the firm.

00:02:02.000 Now, a lot of people at the time pointed out Lululemon sells like $100 pairs of yoga pants.

00:02:07.000 By the way, quick side swipe of yoga pants, not actual clothing.

00:02:10.000 In any case, Lululemon sells these very overpriced yoga pants to middle-income to upper-income women with dispensable capital. 0.91

00:02:19.000 And they were ripping on capitalism.

00:02:21.000 And that's not where the virtue signaling, the woke virtue signaling, ended, of course.

00:02:25.000 You'll remember that Lululemon was a big pusher in the Black Lives Matter movement. 0.73

00:02:29.000 They started putting out the black square and they started telling everybody at their company, they had to sort of mirror the woke corporate message.

00:02:35.000 Well, now, now the woke come for thee.

00:02:37.000 Ask not for whom the woke come, they come for thee, Lululemon and thy yoga pants. 0.98

00:02:43.000 According to Business Insider, in spring 2020, days after the murder of George Floyd, a high level Lululemon manager told a team of designers and copywriters she wanted to put All Lives Matter at the top of Lululemon's website.

00:02:53.000 Amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations across North America, Lululemon had been scrambling in its Vancouver, British Columbia headquarters to craft a response to the events suddenly dominating the news cycle.

00:03:03.000 Over the course of the afternoon on June 1st, the company put together a task force to develop copy and graphics to present to Top Brass and quickly publish to its website.

00:03:11.000 The team of about 10 employees had spent hours mocking up a version of the homepage featuring Black Lives Matter as the headline because, you'll remember, it is very important in the modern age that every major corporation mirror whatever is the woke priority of the day.

00:03:24.000 I know, most of you, you really didn't care whether a yoga pants company was signaling about Black Lives Mattering, particularly a yoga pants company that largely caters to upper-class white ladies.

00:03:33.000 But it was very important to Lululemon that they do this.

00:03:36.000 It was very important that they signal to everyone how much that company that makes overpriced, extremely tight-fitting bottoms, how they signal about systemic American police racism, supposedly.

00:03:51.000 They were interrupted by a manager, however, according to four former and current employees close to the matter.

00:03:56.000 It is so amazing how the inside-outside game now works at these corporations.

00:03:59.000 It really is incredible.

00:04:00.000 All you have to have There's a couple of employees who go and leak to the media, and then the media suggests that your company is racist or sexist or bigoted in some way, and then you're not allowed to fire those people because, of course, these are good-hearted whistleblowers.

00:04:13.000 You're not allowed to look for the folks who are trying to destroy your company from the outside and run your company based on this inside-outside game.

00:04:19.000 All you have to do is craft a media response from the inside, these leakers, and suddenly the entire corporate structure is going to be responding to 21-year-old interns.

00:04:28.000 That's how all of this works.

00:04:29.000 So that's the story, Lululemon.

00:04:31.000 A bunch of people leaked to Business Insider.

00:04:33.000 they said the manager, a director who they added had not been previously involved in the project, demanded that the group use new approved copy. Near the beginning of the proposed text, the phrase All Lives Matter appeared in capital letters. We are not writing Black Lives Matter, that's not where we're at, the director told the group, according to two employees present in the room. After significant debate, the employees, several of whom are black, indigenous, and people of color, agreed to create two designs to present to leadership. One, One with All Lives Matter, another with Black Lives Matter.

00:04:58.000 While Black Lives Matter was ultimately selected, an employee who was involved in the homepage project said they felt triggered and traumatized and described it as one of the most disgusting moments in their time at Lululemon.

00:05:10.000 My God, the yoga pants company, a person, their final policy mirrored the policy priorities of these people of color who are low-level staffers inside the company. 0.99

00:05:20.000 Finally, the company agreed with the low-level staffers who are people of color.

00:05:23.000 We're now leaking to the media.

00:05:24.000 But the fact that somebody even pushed back, it was just devastating.

00:05:28.000 You cannot have pushback in the corporate world.

00:05:30.000 All must be ousted. 0.57

00:05:32.000 All must be destroyed. 1.00

00:05:35.000 After all of these black employees, all of these people of color said, we cannot go forward with this. 1.00

00:05:39.000 And please don't make us have to mock this up for you.

00:05:41.000 And her saying, we have to do it.

00:05:43.000 It was a very traumatic experience.

00:05:45.000 It's unbelievable.

00:05:46.000 They had to write the words, all lives matter in a mock-up that they didn't use.

00:05:50.000 Oh, oh, the heart flutters at the level of threat faced by these employees at a yoga pants company.

00:05:58.000 Lululemon then ended up putting out an Instagram post that said, words have power, actions have more power.

00:06:05.000 Many corporations stumbled in their internal and external communication after the murder of George Floyd, but even before Spring 2020, All Lives Matter had been widely recognized as a phrase that downplayed the Black Lives Matter movement.

00:06:15.000 The director was given the chance to apologize to a group of about 200 copywriters, designers, and photographers on a conference call.

00:06:21.000 Ah, the obligatory internal Maoist struggle session.

00:06:24.000 We have to make sure that this director knew he had sinned and he will atone.

00:06:31.000 Many of these copywriters, designers, and photographers were unaware of the events for which the director was apologizing, which, of course, is part and parcel of all of this.

00:06:38.000 It's not directed just at the director, of course.

00:06:40.000 It is directed at all of the low-level employees who will shut up or face the same treatment.

00:06:44.000 The director left Lululemon shortly after the apology.

00:06:47.000 So he made the apology, and then he left.

00:06:49.000 So you didn't get the benefit of the apology then.

00:06:51.000 From the outside, Lululemon exudes an aspirational lifestyle with its high-tech active wear and brightly curated 500 plus retail stores designed to reflect the company's core values of personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, honesty, courage, connection, fun, and inclusion, according to its website.

00:07:06.000 Lululemon has $4.4 billion in sales every year.

00:07:11.000 It has only accelerated its growth turn under CEO Calvin McDonald thanks to his strategic investments in growing categories like menswear, e-commerce, and connected fitness, including the acquisition of Mirror in June 2020.

00:07:21.000 But according to 12 current and former Lululemon corporate employees who spoke with Insider, the company's image stands in stark contrast to their experiences behind the scenes at the company's corporate offices.

00:07:32.000 My god, I can't wait to tell you about the sorts of oppression happening at the yoga pants company. 0.65

00:07:38.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second, because it is indicative of how companies are now being run, and it is indicative of the authoritarian moment that we are currently experiencing, and that is stretching out across the corporate landscape, and in some cases, being facilitated by government.

00:07:52.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:09:13.000 All right, back to Lululemon.

00:09:16.000 Again, the way that this works is you get a couple of your fellow employees to go and talk to Business Insider, and then you pressure a company that does $4.4 billion in sales every year.

00:09:25.000 To mirror your corporate woke priorities.

00:09:28.000 Some corporate employees said they felt that the rapid growth of the company had hindered its ability to implement changes, particularly in areas like diversity and inclusion that have long plagued Lululemon.

00:09:37.000 The employees who spoke with Insider did so on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their current and future employment opportunities.

00:09:42.000 By the way, you should fear jeopardizing your current and future business opportunities when you talk out of school about a company that is paying you.

00:09:49.000 Just a general rule, when the company is not violating the law, when you just don't like the priorities of the company, if you talk out of school about that, they have every right to fire you.

00:09:58.000 There's nothing in employment law that suggests that when you bitch and moan about their diversity policies, this means they must listen to you. 1.00

00:10:05.000 It is an absurdity of the highest order that these corporate heads don't just run their companies how they should normally run their companies.

00:10:13.000 Again, I'm the head of my company.

00:10:14.000 You know what would happen if one of my producers started talking out of school about the company, all the problems we have, we have lots of procedures.

00:10:21.000 We have an HR department for any problems inside the company. 0.99

00:10:24.000 You start going outside the company and talking to members of the media about how terrible the company you work for is, the boss has every right and nay, an obligation to fire your ass and put you on the unemployment line. 0.97

00:10:34.000 In any case, Business Insider, the suggestion is that Lululemon is deeply racist because they acquiesced to the left wing. 0.96

00:10:42.000 They were woke enough for the left wing for a brief period of time.

00:10:45.000 But you can never be woke enough.

00:10:47.000 That is the dirty secret.

00:10:48.000 According to Business Insider, according to one of the copywriters present in the room, several employees reported the director who demanded the All Lives Matter homepage design.

00:10:56.000 So they reported him after the director's tearful apology.

00:10:59.000 A copywriter who had left the company the year prior said she was notified of the incident by her former colleagues and felt compelled to send an email urging members of management to fire the director.

00:11:06.000 Okay, so you have somebody, a copywriter, who no longer even worked at the company.

00:11:10.000 Emailing the heads of the company to urge the firing of a person she had no relations with and was not even involved in the procedures with.

00:11:18.000 You're the bad guy here.

00:11:19.000 You're the bad guy.

00:11:21.000 Copywriter who no longer works at the company trying to get somebody to lose their job for the great sin of proposing an All Lives Matter post as opposed to a Black Lives Matter post?

00:11:28.000 You're the bad guy. 1.00

00:11:29.000 You're a jerk and an authoritarian to boot. 1.00

00:11:31.000 The email was sent on June 8, 2020 with the subject line, Racism, Privilege, and Inaction at Lululemon. 0.99

00:11:38.000 It is my ask of you, on behalf of many others who have complained and who do not feel able to speak on this issue publicly, out of fear for their employment, that you remove this person from your company immediately, she wrote in the email, which has been reviewed by Insider.

00:12:01.000 The former employee told Insider she didn't receive a response, but said the director left Lululemon shortly after her email was sent.

00:12:08.000 Stacia Jones, a vice president and head of inclusion, diversity, equity, and action at Lululemon, which is a filler of a job, says as a matter of company policy, we do not comment on individual employee situations.

00:12:18.000 If anyone at Lululemon has a negative experience, we have several ways for employees to share their concerns and feedback.

00:12:23.000 We take feedback very seriously.

00:12:25.000 But there was another incident involving racial insensitivity just weeks prior at the height of the global coronavirus outbreak in April 2020 when art director Trevor Fleming posted a link to a t-shirt on his personal Instagram account.

00:12:38.000 The t-shirt had the title of bat fried rice with a picture of a Chinese takeout box of bat wings on the front and the words no thank you on the back and right sleeve.

00:12:45.000 As in like don't eat the bats because it started the global coronavirus pandemic according to early reports before it turned out it was actually probably just a Chinese governmental lab leak.

00:12:54.000 In an email to Insider, Fleming said sharing the t-shirt, which was designed by an acquaintance of his, was a momentary lapse of judgment and an incident he had, quote, spent the past year regretting.

00:13:02.000 I fully understand the insensitivity associated with the design he made and deeply regret the pain I caused.

00:13:08.000 The scandal followed an even earlier incident.

00:13:10.000 Man, these are brutal incidents.

00:13:11.000 It used to be that companies in the United States actively discriminated against members of racial minorities.

00:13:16.000 Now, a director posts a mildly insensitive Instagram and suddenly all hell breaks loose.

00:13:22.000 That scandal, a scandal of epic proportions, followed an earlier incident in Lululemon's history when founder and then-CEO Chip Wilson wrote in a since-deleted post that the company's name was chosen as a marketing ploy to attract Japanese customers.

00:13:35.000 A Japanese marketing firm would not try to create a North American-sounding brand with the letter L because the sound does not exist in Japanese phonetics, Wilson wrote on the company's blog.

00:13:42.000 By including an L in the name, it was thought the Japanese consumer would find the name innately North American and authentic.

00:13:48.000 It's funny to watch them try and say it, he added. 0.97

00:13:50.000 Okay, well, that's a dumb comment. 0.99

00:13:52.000 A dumb comment does not mean the entire company is, of course, deeply racist. 0.99

00:13:55.000 But everything has to be taken as though it is a massive issue. 0.98

00:13:59.000 And of course, We'll have the obligatory struggle sessions.

00:14:02.000 There'll be donations to various interest groups.

00:14:05.000 Ibram Kendi will get a million-dollar donation from Lululemon, probably, in order to ensure that they are anti-racist enough.

00:14:11.000 They'll participate in the system of woke indulgences. 0.82

00:14:15.000 And none of us will buy them anything, except for a notion that the next time any employee has a problem, they immediately run back to Business Insider.

00:14:22.000 And this is the entire goal now with regard to corporate America.

00:14:25.000 You too can pressure your bosses into doing the bidding of the left.

00:14:28.000 All you have to do is find some member of the journactivist media to cover it and you are good to go.

00:14:33.000 Because this is what journalism has become.

00:14:35.000 The story here isn't about a bunch of woke employees who can't keep their mouths shut and violate their confidentiality agreements.

00:14:41.000 It is not about that.

00:14:42.000 The story is truly about a media that is designed and created in order to be an activist wing of the Democratic Party.

00:14:47.000 There is no difference at this point between business insider Or Daily Beast and Media Matters.

00:14:52.000 They are all part of the same ecosystem.

00:14:54.000 Their entire design is to pressure institutions that they believe they can pressure into doing the bidding of the left.

00:15:00.000 That is what all of these stories are about.

00:15:01.000 They're about can you get an institution to do what you want?

00:15:05.000 It's not about covering something that is innately newsworthy.

00:15:07.000 What the hell is newsworthy about a thing that happened in 2020 that is not even mildly worthy of news coverage that a director said all lives matter in 2020?

00:15:17.000 By the way, this was the featured story at Twitter yesterday.

00:15:19.000 And this is not just me bringing up a story that is random on the internet.

00:15:23.000 This was the featured story all day on Twitter.com.

00:15:27.000 And they actually put it in their news feed on the right side of the page.

00:15:31.000 Because again, all of the journalistic entities that you know and love are activist entities.

00:15:35.000 Now some of us in the conservative side of the aisle will say we're conservative.

00:15:38.000 We cover the news from a particular angle.

00:15:40.000 But the thing is that the media ecosystem that proclaims that it is in fact a sort of objective news ecosystem is not.

00:15:48.000 It is designed in the same way as Media Matters.

00:15:50.000 They run stories specifically in order to pressure these corporations.

00:15:53.000 They run stories specifically in order to Begin boycott.

00:15:58.000 Why do you think it is that every time a controversial comment is made, you get somebody from the Huffington Post calling up advertisers of Tucker Carlson's program and saying, do you know you advertised with Tucker Carlson?

00:16:07.000 That question is not designed to elicit a response.

00:16:10.000 That question is designed to elicit inaction.

00:16:12.000 Namely, the advertiser getting scared and canceling Tucker Carlson.

00:16:15.000 Right?

00:16:15.000 That is what this is designed to do.

00:16:17.000 That is, this insider story is designed in order to get Lululemon to do whatever the left wants it to do, because this is not innately newsworthy stuff.

00:16:25.000 It's not the president of Haiti being assassinated in his home.

00:16:28.000 It is not the United States pull out from Afghanistan.

00:16:31.000 It is a couple of woke employees from Lululemon who are frustrated with their day jobs and bored in their New York apartments.

00:16:39.000 But this is how the game works right now.

00:16:41.000 And it has predictable impacts in terms of politics.

00:16:43.000 Because it turns out that typically, when corporations are involved in politics, it's because, for example, they want to get people elected who are friendlier to their business positions.

00:16:51.000 But now the polarity has been reversed.

00:16:53.000 Politicians, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, are able to activate members of the media to now make the corporations do what the politicians want them to do.

00:17:00.000 It used to be the notion that corporations supported politicians because they wanted to get politicians elected who would be beneficial to their agenda.

00:17:08.000 Now it is actually precisely the opposite.

00:17:09.000 It is politicians who are cuddling businesses into doing what they want them to do in the social sphere.

00:17:14.000 It's fascinating.

00:17:15.000 And they're doing so with the help of a not compliant, a complicit media, an activist media that is deeply involved in every aspect of this.

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00:18:41.000 All right, so it's not just Lululemon, of course.

00:18:43.000 This entire sort of debacle is designed in order to push corporations to do what the left wants them to do. The latest element of this, of course, is Toyota has now announced it will stop any donation to any Republican member of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. Now, presumably, Toyota is not going to do this. For example, Jamie Raskin from Maryland, who you'll remember last time around in 2016, voted against certifying the election.

00:19:07.000 But according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the company's PAC has given $56,000 to 38 members of Congress who objected to the certification of the election on January 6th.

00:19:17.000 And it is a very short step from this particular thing.

00:19:20.000 Listen, I don't think that anyone should have voted against the certification of the election.

00:19:23.000 I don't think there is a legal basis to do so.

00:19:25.000 I've been very, very clear about this.

00:19:27.000 With that said, I don't think that corporations should be forced to boycott politicians who agree with their particular business agenda because those politicians also supported a thing with which the company was not involved.

00:19:43.000 So, for example, I do not think that companies should be forced to stop giving money if they are into giving money to Democrats based on their economic agenda for some reason.

00:19:53.000 I don't think that there should be a lot of social pressure to force those companies to stop giving money to Democrats based on the fact that Democrats support, broadly speaking, crackdowns on religious freedom.

00:20:05.000 It's a company that's not involved with any of that sort of stuff.

00:20:08.000 I don't really think those two things are related.

00:20:10.000 But we have now come to the point where anything that becomes a leftist talking point is an excuse to push corporations to not give to Republicans overall.

00:20:17.000 That is the goal.

00:20:18.000 January 6th is just the excuse.

00:20:19.000 And if it weren't January 6th, it would be something else.

00:20:21.000 It would be anybody who supported Donald Trump cannot be supported by any sort of corporation.

00:20:26.000 Because if they do, then they are supporting all of the evils and excesses of Donald Trump.

00:20:30.000 In a statement issued on Thursday, Japan-based automaker said it had, quote, decided to stop contributing to those members of Congress who contested the certification.

00:20:37.000 Toyota is committed to supporting and promoting actions that further our democracy, said Toyota.

00:20:41.000 This is the same thing that Stacey Abrams finally accomplished in Georgia when he saw corporations divesting from the state of Georgia because Georgia passed a law shoring up voter ID, for example.

00:20:51.000 And then she realized, oh, this was a bad idea and tried to back off of that.

00:20:55.000 Toyota says our company has long-standing relationships with members of Congress across the political spectrum, especially those representing our U.S.

00:21:00.000 operations.

00:21:01.000 Our bipartisan PAC equally supports Democrats and Republicans running for Congress.

00:21:04.000 In fact, in 2021, the vast majority of contributions went to Democrats and Republicans who supported the certification of the 2020 election.

00:21:12.000 We understand that the PAC decision to support select members of Congress who contested the results troubled some stakeholders.

00:21:19.000 We are actively listening to our stakeholders, and at this time we have decided to stop contributing to these members of Congress who contested the certification of certain states in the 2020 election.

00:21:27.000 The reason I pause on the word stakeholders is because this is deeply indicative of a perverse view of how business is supposed to work.

00:21:33.000 There are two views of how business is supposed to work.

00:21:36.000 One is what is called shareholder capitalism.

00:21:38.000 Pushed by people like Milton Friedman.

00:21:40.000 And the basic idea here is that a company's main duty is to its shareholders.

00:21:43.000 You buy stock in a company, and now the company has a duty to you.

00:21:45.000 The company has a duty to create a program that will allow for long-term earnings.

00:21:50.000 The company has a duty to ensure that your stock price over time does not go down, that they make good business decisions.

00:21:56.000 That's what shareholder capitalism is all about.

00:21:58.000 That the people who actually own a share of the company are the people to whom the company's board is responsible.

00:22:04.000 Stakeholder capitalism is a very different thing.

00:22:06.000 Stakeholder capitalism is a term that's been coined by quote-unquote intellectual elites to suggest a system in which corporations are answerable not just to their own shareholders, but to the public at large, which really means to government actors.

00:22:18.000 And the media.

00:22:19.000 Stakeholders are people who do not own shares in the company.

00:22:22.000 Who don't own any.

00:22:23.000 They don't buy Toyota cars.

00:22:25.000 They don't have a share of Toyota stock.

00:22:28.000 They're just anyone who's affected by Toyota.

00:22:30.000 Meaning a person in the world.

00:22:32.000 And so if a person in the world has a complaint about Toyota, Toyota will now respond to those people.

00:22:37.000 Which of course means they are not responding to economic concerns.

00:22:39.000 They are not focusing in on what makes their product better.

00:22:43.000 And less expensive for the consumer?

00:22:44.000 Instead, they are focused in on pleasing particular political actors who are the loudest.

00:22:48.000 Stakeholder capitalism, again, is just a way of saying that your corporate overlords ought to be responding not to market incentives, but to non-market incentives.

00:22:56.000 They are not responding to the demands of the market.

00:22:59.000 They are responding instead to the loudest political actors out there, which is a form of corporatism in which corporations act hand-in-glove with the government and with the Democrat media complex in order to cram down institutional power.

00:23:11.000 My new book, The Authoritarian Moment, is all about this.

00:23:13.000 It's about how the institutions of power have been hijacked and weaponized by the left.

00:23:16.000 Stakeholder capitalism is a very big aspect of this.

00:23:19.000 And this is why you are seeing the media cover Lululemon, because you're a stakeholder in Lululemon, you see.

00:23:23.000 You don't own stocks.

00:23:24.000 You don't even own Lululemon pants.

00:23:26.000 You're a dude.

00:23:26.000 But still, you have a stake in what Lululemon does.

00:23:30.000 Same thing with Toyota.

00:23:31.000 You have a stake in what they do.

00:23:33.000 Therefore, you ought to run their company.

00:23:35.000 This is not a recipe for economic success or political health for a nation.

00:23:40.000 All of this has culminated in a wide level of distrust of major institutions in the marketplace.

00:23:46.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:23:48.000 First, let us talk about a simple fact.

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00:24:40.000 The only way to get that discount, go to lightstream.com slash Shapiro.

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00:25:04.000 Okay, so.

00:25:05.000 A lot of what is going on right now has been made much worse by, of course, the presence of social media.

00:25:12.000 Social media is a combination between corporations and the media ecostructure, right?

00:25:17.000 So on the one hand, there are corporations who say they are no longer answerable to their shareholders.

00:25:21.000 They're only answerable to stakeholders, right?

00:25:23.000 Broader political actors.

00:25:25.000 And so they're very much subject to media pressure and to being cudgeled into place, beaten into place, clubbed into place by members of the government.

00:25:34.000 Also, these are the main mechanisms by which people consume information.

00:25:37.000 So this creates a very bizarre situation where social media are both the people who control what you see and are in turn controlled by government incentive programs and by outside media coverage, which can shape how political actors work.

00:25:51.000 There's this iron triangle that I've talked about before between social media, media, and the Democrats.

00:25:55.000 The Democrats don't like that social media has been historically free and open and has allowed people to post a lot of material that they don't like.

00:26:03.000 And so they go to the media, and they say that these social media companies are responsible for every bad thing in the world.

00:26:07.000 If there's a violent attack, it must be social media.

00:26:09.000 If there is a story they don't like that's getting out, a Hunter Biden story, for example, that's social media, and it needs to be stopped.

00:26:15.000 The media then cover these social media companies as though they are evil.

00:26:19.000 The more open they are, the more evil they are, according to the media.

00:26:21.000 It's amazing.

00:26:22.000 Who could have foreseen that the press, being, of course, a political actor and not an actor that is in favor of free speech in the United States, the press has become the chief They're the chief rooting interest in favor of shutting down free dissemination of information.

00:26:37.000 It's unbelievable.

00:26:39.000 I think this is something that the founders probably could not have foreseen.

00:26:41.000 When they said freedom of the press, they assumed that people who took advantage of the press would be in favor of a free press.

00:26:45.000 Wrongo! 1.00

00:26:46.000 It turns out, members of the quote-unquote press are the people who are most interested in shutting down open debate on social media.

00:26:51.000 So you have the Democrats.

00:26:52.000 They launder their message through media.

00:26:54.000 The media whip up all of this fervor about how social media is to blame for all the problems.

00:26:59.000 The Democrats use that fervor in order to threaten social media.

00:27:01.000 And social media, in order to avoid regulation, then shuts down free speech, right?

00:27:05.000 This is the game.

00:27:06.000 This is the game they've been playing for quite a while.

00:27:09.000 The heads of these companies will routinely talk about... It's amazing how the messaging has shifted.

00:27:14.000 Again, I talk about this a lot in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment.

00:27:16.000 It's out in about two weeks now.

00:27:19.000 It is incredible how the messaging on social media has shifted.

00:27:23.000 In 2012, social media was seen as a godsend by Democrats, by Republicans.

00:27:27.000 It was very popular.

00:27:28.000 And the reason it was popular in sort of opinion polls, Democrats saw it as a way of reaching audiences they'd never reached before.

00:27:34.000 Also, Barack Obama was brilliant at it.

00:27:35.000 He was amazing, able to manipulate social media and get to audiences who had never seen his message before.

00:27:42.000 You remember that there was this whole wave of stories about how brilliant Obama's campaign was in 2012 using social media.

00:27:48.000 And social media was great, right?

00:27:50.000 Social media was making the world more interconnected, better, friendlier place.

00:27:53.000 Then 2016 happened and Trump won.

00:27:55.000 And the Democrats had to come up with some excuse for why it wasn't their fault.

00:27:58.000 Why it wasn't their fault that Hillary Clinton, the heir apparent, and the person who'd been pushed for the presidency since essentially 1992 by the Democratic Party and the media, why she had lost to this real estate Reality TV star who was wild and bombastic and said anything that came into his head.

00:28:15.000 How could you possibly have lost?

00:28:16.000 And they came up with a couple of solutions.

00:28:18.000 One was, of course, Russian collusion. 0.97

00:28:20.000 It was the evil Ruskies. 0.99

00:28:21.000 And the second was social media.

00:28:22.000 Social media had allowed messages that never should have been allowed.

00:28:26.000 If only social media had somehow stopped Trump from winning, the country would have been so much better.

00:28:30.000 Facebook was bad.

00:28:32.000 Facebook had allowed for Russian collusion to happen.

00:28:35.000 Now, as it turned out, statistically speaking, the amount of Russian propaganda put out on Facebook was extraordinarily minimal.

00:28:39.000 If you actually look at the stats, not big stats, as somebody who's in the Facebook stats like every single day, I can tell you, The amount of Russian messaging during the 2016 election and the impact thereof via Facebook was minimal on a percentage basis.

00:28:53.000 Like the total number of impressions created by the Russians for like a period of two years was equivalent to about the number of impressions I create for my personal Facebook page in the course of maybe a couple of weeks.

00:29:05.000 Okay, so no, it was not a big deal, but that was not the point.

00:29:08.000 The point was we have to get social media now to shift, right?

00:29:11.000 Social media has to move from being in favor of broad, open dissemination of information.

00:29:16.000 Social media now has to move into being the content police.

00:29:20.000 And so you saw Mark Zuckerberg giving speeches in 2018, as late as 2017, 2018, talking about how he wanted to cut in favor of free speech.

00:29:28.000 He wanted to cut in favor of open dissemination of information.

00:29:31.000 And then you would see them testify before Congress and saying we're responsible for the information on our platform, which of course is not true.

00:29:36.000 The minute you say you're responsible for the information on a social media platform, now you should be liable for the information on your platform.

00:29:42.000 We here at Daily Wire, we have legal liability for the stuff we print.

00:29:45.000 Our comments section is governed by section 230, which means it is a platform.

00:29:49.000 We are not liable for the stuff that appears in the content section.

00:29:52.000 And I will say that openly.

00:29:53.000 If somebody posts a bad comment on Daily Wire, not our fault, not our problem.

00:29:57.000 We tried to police some of that stuff to make sure that the comment section doesn't turn into a sewer, but that's about it.

00:30:02.000 And if somebody does post something that's really bad in our comments section, we didn't edit it.

00:30:07.000 So you know what?

00:30:08.000 We're not responsible under Section 230 or morally speaking, but Facebook has started to treat itself more like the editorial side than they have treated itself like a platform.

00:30:17.000 And that's because Democrats decided you must treat yourself like you're an editorial site.

00:30:21.000 And only then when you treat yourself like an editorial site will we give you immunity.

00:30:24.000 So they've created this bizarre reverse situation in which it used to be.

00:30:28.000 Legal immunity had been provided for platforms in order to facilitate open information.

00:30:33.000 And then the Democrats decided that these open platforms should become closed, edited platforms in order to retain their immunity, which of course destroys the entire purpose of the immunity in the first place.

00:30:45.000 The whole purpose of the immunity is to incentivize open conversation.

00:30:49.000 It is not to shut down open conversation.

00:30:51.000 Okay, so all of this has culminated in a lawsuit that President Trump is now filing against, it's a class action lawsuit that he is filing against Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and he's doing this on the basis that they have banned him but he's suggesting that their censorship procedures affect a broad swath of people.

00:31:09.000 There's some problems with the lawsuit, there are also some interesting things about the lawsuit and I think that you're, on the one side you're hearing people say this is the greatest lawsuit since sliced bread, which it is not.

00:31:17.000 On the other side, you're hearing people say, this is absolute crap and there's no basis for it whatsoever. 0.66

00:31:20.000 Not quite that either. 0.99

00:31:21.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:32:36.000 Okay, so President Trump has now filed a lawsuit against YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, all of whom have banned him, which is frankly an unbelievable thing.

00:32:44.000 It is incredible that the sitting president of the United States was banned from the three largest social media services in the United States.

00:32:49.000 Okay, so here it was.

00:32:51.000 President Trump said in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, one of the gravest threats to our democracy today is a powerful group of big tech corporations that have teamed up with the government to censor the free speech of the American people.

00:33:01.000 This is not only wrong, it is unconstitutional.

00:33:03.000 To restore free speech for myself and for every American, I am suing big tech to stop it.

00:33:07.000 Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers, and television networks were in prior generations.

00:33:13.000 The internet is the new public square.

00:33:14.000 In recent years, however, big tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information, and people on social media, banning users, deplatforming organizations, aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.

00:33:28.000 No longer are big tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence.

00:33:31.000 They're manipulating and controlling the political debate itself.

00:33:34.000 Consider content that was censored in the past year.

00:33:36.000 Big tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true. 0.99

00:33:44.000 In the middle of a pandemic, big tech censored physicians from discussing potential treatments like hydroxychloroquine, which studies have now shown does work to relieve symptoms of COVID-19.

00:33:52.000 In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post, America's oldest newspaper, for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden's family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute.

00:34:01.000 Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social media accounts of the sitting president.

00:34:06.000 And if they can do it to me, they can do it to you.

00:34:08.000 And believe me, they are.

00:34:10.000 Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher, was banned from Facebook for sharing an article questioning whether mandatory masks for young children are healthy.

00:34:16.000 Later, when her brother went missing, she was unable to use Facebook to get the word out.

00:34:19.000 Colorado physician Kelly Victory was deplatformed by YouTube after she made a video for her church explaining how to hold services safely.

00:34:26.000 Kayan Michael of Florida and her husband Bobby lost their 21-year-old son in a fatal collision caused by a twice-deported illegal alien.

00:34:32.000 Facebook censored them after they posted on border security and immigration enforcement.

00:34:36.000 It says this flagrant attack on free speech is doing terrible damage to our country.

00:34:41.000 That is why in conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I filed class action lawsuits to force Big Tech to stop censoring the American people.

00:34:47.000 Our lawsuits argue that Big Tech companies are being used to impose illegal and unconstitutional government censorship.

00:34:53.000 In 1996, writes Trump, Congress sought to promote the growth of the Internet by extending liability protections to Internet platforms, recognizing that they were exactly that, platforms, not publishers.

00:35:02.000 Unlike publishers, companies like Facebook and Twitter can't be held legally liable for the content posted to their sites.

00:35:06.000 Without this immunity, social media companies could not exist.

00:35:09.000 Democrats in Congress are exploiting this leverage to coerce platforms into censoring their political opponents.

00:35:15.000 In recent years, we have all watched Congress haul Big Tech CEOs before the committees and demand that they censor, quote, false stories and disinformation, labels determined by an army of partisan fact-checkers loyal to the Democratic Party.

00:35:25.000 Further, Big Tech and government agencies are actively coordinating to remove content from the platforms according to the guidance of agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

00:35:34.000 This coercion and coordination is unconstitutional.

00:35:36.000 Okay, so here is where Trump is right and here is where Trump is wrong.

00:35:41.000 So he is not wrong when he says that there are certain activities that can be undertaken by private companies that are coincident with government action and that have been deemed by the courts in the past to be government action.

00:35:53.000 There's an article just back in January by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld.

00:35:57.000 Rubenfeld is a former professor over at Yale.

00:36:00.000 In which they specifically talk about the fact that private companies can, in fact, be deemed state actors if proper government leverage is applied.

00:36:09.000 So for example, it is axiomatic the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison that the government quote may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish. You see that's what Congress did by enacting section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.

00:36:31.000 The justices have long held that the provision of such immunity can turn private action into state action.

00:36:37.000 In Railway Employees Department v. Hanson, for example, they found state action in private union employer closed shop agreements, which force all employees to join the union because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law.

00:36:49.000 In other words, if Congress gives some sort of immunization to liability, and then in order to maintain the immunity, Congress cudgels companies to do a thing, that can be deemed state action.

00:36:58.000 In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association, the court again found state action in private party conduct, drug tests for company employees, because federal regulations immunized railroads from liability if they conducted those tests.

00:37:09.000 In both cases, with Section 230, the federal government didn't mandate anything.

00:37:13.000 It merely preempted state law protecting certain private parties from lawsuits if they engaged in conduct Congress was promoting.

00:37:18.000 Okay, so this is the part where Trump is not wrong, for example.

00:37:23.000 So, If these social media companies were granted immunity from liability by Section 230, because Section 230 was designed to basically promote open speech on the internet and, yes, to allow social media companies to curate content.

00:37:37.000 Now, the idea behind Section 230 is that you shouldn't be punished as a publisher if, for example, you started curating your comment section to get rid of things like pornography, if you curated your comment section to get rid of obscenity or violence or other maybe First Amendment-protected activities, but you just want to clean the comment section.

00:37:54.000 Okay, and Section 230 does in fact protect, for example, even a sort of partisan cleansing of platforms, right?

00:38:03.000 If you go through and you get rid of all the anti-Trump commentary in the comments section of a particular website, this does not relieve Section 230 liability.

00:38:11.000 Or Section 230 immunity, right?

00:38:13.000 You can still do that, but this changes once the government starts applying pressure.

00:38:18.000 Once the government starts applying pressure and saying, we are going to remove your immunity, that immunity is going to go away.

00:38:25.000 Unless you censor the kinds of content we want you to censor, now that looks a lot more like state action.

00:38:31.000 And so the Trump argument in the lawsuit is a little too broad for my liking.

00:38:35.000 He says that Communications Decency Act Section 230 is fully unconstitutional in that particular lawsuit.

00:38:41.000 He says that that basically created a section of immunity from liability that is not constitutional in the first place, which is questionable at best.

00:38:51.000 I don't think that that's right.

00:38:52.000 There's no immunity to that.

00:38:55.000 Liability is not written into the Constitution.

00:38:58.000 There's nothing in the Constitution that says you are definitely liable if you don't print X or Y, of course, because free speech still applies to private corporations.

00:39:06.000 However, once the government starts forcing corporations with threat of legislation into censoring what they want them to censor, now that looks like compelled state action.

00:39:15.000 Now that looks like these companies have basically become mercantilist Free speech outlets for the Democratic Party.

00:39:22.000 And that's why it is so troubling when you see people like Dianne Feinstein threatening Facebook, if you don't stop this, we will.

00:39:29.000 But once you say that, then what is Facebook exactly going to do in order to maintain their own business?

00:39:34.000 They're going to have to do what Dianne Feinstein wants them to do.

00:39:37.000 And this means that you have to start treating these people like state actors, or maybe you do, right?

00:39:42.000 That legal theory is not nearly as wild as the media are making it out to be.

00:39:47.000 The media are like, well, it's a private company, they can do exactly what they want, which is weird because the media have yet to, the same media that will tell you that Lululemon cannot do what it wants because there are three woke employees who are pissed off at a guy who left the company a year ago, those same people will tell you Facebook can do exactly what it wants in censoring content as long as that content that they are censoring is the right content to censor.

00:40:06.000 Well, there is actually a fairly large difference between even Lululemon doing what it wants and Facebook doing what the government tells it to do in order to maintain its immunity from liability.

00:40:16.000 And that is the case that Trump is making.

00:40:19.000 Clarence Thomas has sort of hinted at this in the past.

00:40:21.000 So it's not quite as wild a lawsuit as people are suggesting.

00:40:24.000 Now, do I think that the lawsuit is actually going to go all the way?

00:40:26.000 I doubt it.

00:40:27.000 Trump says that he's going to sit for a deposition.

00:40:29.000 I can't imagine he will, because if he has to sit for a deposition, no lawyer in the world is going to allow Donald Trump to sit for a deposition.

00:40:35.000 He is the worst legal client on planet Earth.

00:40:37.000 There's a reason he's gone through every lawyer in America, to the point where he ended up like Sidney Powell, right? 0.72

00:40:41.000 He went through every lawyer because the first rule of being a lawyer is tell your client to shut up.

00:40:46.000 And Donald Trump, He knew that.

00:40:48.000 So he ain't going to be sitting for a deposition.

00:40:50.000 He says he will, but he probably won't.

00:40:51.000 But when you hear people on the left suddenly dismissing that, oh, well, companies can do what they want.

00:40:56.000 I swear, the same people who say Facebook can do what it wants in censoring content demand that Facebook censor content.

00:41:01.000 That is not a coincidence.

00:41:03.000 Kara Swisher is like, how dare you suggest that Facebook isn't a private company? 0.87

00:41:06.000 Also, Facebook should definitely censor the content I want them to censor or they should be regulated.

00:41:12.000 I'm sensing a bit of a conflict there.

00:41:14.000 All righty, meanwhile, in just a second, Joe Biden continues to futz around.

00:41:17.000 I am amazed, honestly amazed, that we are about to surrender in Afghanistan to the Taliban, and nobody seems to care.

00:41:23.000 That is amazing to me.

00:41:25.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:41:26.000 First, let's talk about the fact you don't need to go to the auto parts store.

00:41:29.000 Who needs to go to the auto parts store?

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00:41:34.000 You wait in line for like an hour, you get to the front.

00:41:37.000 Finally, the guy behind the counter, he finally asks you a bunch of questions, you type something into the computer, it's like, oh yeah, we don't have that part in stock, we're gonna order it, come back in three weeks.

00:41:44.000 You're like, my car doesn't even work right now, what are you talking about?

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00:41:48.000 Or, you can go to rockauto.com, you get the product delivered directly to your house, and then you can just do it yourself, right?

00:41:54.000 This is what rockauto.com does.

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00:42:18.000 See all the parts available for that car or truck Ray Shapiro in there.

00:42:20.000 How did you hear about us, Pac?

00:42:21.000 So they know that we sent you.

00:42:22.000 Again, that is rockauto.com.

00:42:24.000 Go check them out right now.

00:42:25.000 And again, remind them that you heard about them here on the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:42:29.000 Also, quick announcement.

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00:42:33.000 The Daily Wire is hiring a web marketing specialist to do, well, a bunch of technical stuff that I don't understand and that I'll pay you to do.

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00:43:09.000 Also, from pronouns to microaggressions, language has been turned into a tool used by the political left to silence dissenters and ostracize them from friends and family.

00:43:17.000 That's why Michael Knowles took it upon himself to write a book about it.

00:43:19.000 The book is called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.

00:43:22.000 If you have not picked up a copy, now would be a good time to do so.

00:43:25.000 The book will take you through the origins of political correctness, why it is essential we stand up and fight its insidious spread into every public institution in America.

00:43:32.000 Because if we don't, the consequences are waiting for us and our kids in the very, very near future.

00:43:37.000 And here is the thing.

00:43:39.000 The book is good, and also it has sold a bajillion copies, and it is just being boycotted by the New York Times.

00:43:43.000 It just is demonstrative of how the left shuts down anything that it doesn't like.

00:43:47.000 The book was the number one nonfiction bestseller in the country going into the July 4th holiday, according to Publishers Weekly.

00:43:51.000 It didn't even hit the New York Times bestseller list at all.

00:43:54.000 Last week, the New York Times number one bestseller sold a grand total of 6,900 copies.

00:43:59.000 Speechless sold 6,600 copies.

00:44:01.000 It wasn't on the top 15.

00:44:02.000 So, if you don't know the history and relevance of political correctness already, you're about to find out.

00:44:06.000 Just go pick up a copy of Speechless.

00:44:08.000 Controlling words, controlling minds.

00:44:09.000 It's available everywhere right now.

00:44:10.000 If you don't feel like making a trip, it's available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle edition.

00:44:14.000 You are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.

00:44:18.000 ♪♪ Meanwhile, Joe Biden is just losing Afghanistan.

00:44:26.000 He's just decided to surrender in Afghanistan.

00:44:27.000 And what's unbelievable about this, truly, is that Afghanistan was in a state of stasis.

00:44:33.000 It wasn't a war that was won in any realistic sense.

00:44:35.000 The Taliban was still around, obviously, but the country had not been ceded to the Taliban.

00:44:39.000 The Taliban did not have control of the entire territory.

00:44:43.000 It could not really provide safe havens for wide varieties of terrorist groups.

00:44:46.000 It was still being fought to a standstill at the very least by the Afghan government.

00:44:52.000 And we are pulling out at a time when we are spending approximately $50 billion a year in Afghanistan. That's how much money that we've been spending in Afghanistan as of like 2019.

00:45:00.000 That represents approximately 1.3% of a $4 trillion budget.

00:45:05.000 And now that we're talking about spending, you know, one bajillion dollars, well, it represents a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. The number of American soldiers who were being killed in combat every year was in the the single digits. This was not an endless war. In other words, it's not.

00:45:18.000 It doesn't count as a war when single-digit number of your soldiers are being killed in it every single year.

00:45:18.000 I'm sorry.

00:45:23.000 There are more cops who are being killed on the streets of Chicago every year than soldiers being killed in Afghanistan every year.

00:45:30.000 So that does not count as an endless war in any realistic sense.

00:45:35.000 The only reason that Joe Biden is withdrawing is because he wants to suggest that he did it.

00:45:39.000 And the left will never blame him for the fallout.

00:45:41.000 And there will be fallout.

00:45:42.000 I mean, tens of thousands of people will undoubtedly be made into refugees.

00:45:45.000 You'll see thousands of people murdered.

00:45:46.000 You'll see anyone who worked with the American government killed outright.

00:45:49.000 You'll see women forced back into effectively chattel slavery, which is what they were living like in Afghanistan before the United States got there. 0.94

00:45:56.000 And this notion that long-term occupation of countries has no positive effect is just silly.

00:46:03.000 And the United States still has bases in South Korea.

00:46:05.000 And guess what?

00:46:06.000 After the Korean War, we should note that after the Korean War, it was not as though the U.S.' 's presence was widely appreciated in South Korea.

00:46:14.000 It was not as though South Korea immediately transformed into a successful market democracy.

00:46:19.000 It took a long time.

00:46:22.000 There was a full military dictatorship In South Korea for a fairly significant period of time and an extraordinary amount of corruption in South Korea before the so-called Sixth Republic was founded.

00:46:37.000 There's a reason it was called the Sixth Republic because it took a lot of go around in order to get to anything remotely resembling an actual republic in South Korea.

00:46:44.000 There's still high levels of corruption in South Korea.

00:46:46.000 It is also a thriving market economy.

00:46:49.000 So the notion that when America pulls out, things get better just doesn't, it's not true.

00:46:53.000 And guess what?

00:46:53.000 Long-term occupations that don't have tremendously high costs to the United States actually are not a horrible thing.

00:46:59.000 They are not.

00:47:00.000 You know what's the worst thing?

00:47:01.000 Ceding control of a country to the Taliban.

00:47:03.000 We used to actually understand this sort of stuff in the United States.

00:47:08.000 I know that there's this weird idea in the aftermath of World War II, the United States basically just everyone came home.

00:47:13.000 And that's not true.

00:47:14.000 A huge percentage of soldiers did come home because the active military combat was over.

00:47:18.000 But there are still a bunch of soldiers who are sitting around in Germany.

00:47:21.000 There's a bunch of soldiers sitting around.

00:47:22.000 There are still a bunch of soldiers sitting.

00:47:24.000 World War Two ended in 1945.

00:47:24.000 It is now 2021.

00:47:26.000 It has been nearly 80 years since the end of World War Two.

00:47:30.000 We still have bases in Germany and Japan.

00:47:33.000 The Korean War ended in the early 50s.

00:47:35.000 We still have bases in South Korea.

00:47:38.000 So this bizarre notion that we win anything by pulling out of Afghanistan is weird.

00:47:41.000 It is a weird thing. 1.00

00:47:42.000 And it's not only weird, it is stupid. 0.99

00:47:43.000 Because again, it will be treated by all of America's worst enemies as a big win for the Taliban, as though they drove the United States out. 0.99

00:47:51.000 What they really did is they just waited for the United States to get bored, and then we unilaterally pulled out when there was really no effective reason to. 0.98

00:47:58.000 Joe Biden, like an idiot, says the United States has achieved its objectives, which of course is not true. 0.98

00:48:03.000 Yesterday, speaking after the withdrawal of nearly all U.S. 0.99

00:48:05.000 combat forces, and as the Taliban surge across the country, Biden spoke directly to critics of his order to bring an end to American participation in a conflict born from the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

00:48:15.000 He said, let me ask those who want us to stay.

00:48:17.000 How many more?

00:48:18.000 How many thousands more American daughters and sons are you willing to risk?

00:48:21.000 How long would you have them stay?

00:48:22.000 What do you mean thousands more are you willing to risk?

00:48:26.000 Since where are thousands of Americans dying in Afghanistan?

00:48:29.000 Like, really.

00:48:30.000 You can say thousands of Americans died in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war when we were responding to, you know, the murder of 3,000 Americans in New York and Washington, D.C.

00:48:38.000 But when we're losing, like, single-digit soldiers per year in Afghanistan, in an active combat situation, um, that is, like, he has to exaggerate for a fact.

00:48:47.000 It's the only way that he can justify what he is doing.

00:48:49.000 Because a lot of people have been pointing out quite correctly that Joe Biden's policy here is indistinguishable on every available level.

00:48:56.000 I mean, truly indistinguishable from pulling out from Saigon in 1975 and handing the entire country over to the Viet Cong, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing, many of them literally getting in boats to get out of Vietnam and the fall of Cambodia and the murder of two million people by Pol Pot in Cambodia.

00:49:12.000 He's going to have This sort of withdrawal leaves blood on American hands in the same way that there was blood on American hands when we made promises to the Kurds in 1991, and then just let Saddam Hussein go in and slaughter them. 0.79

00:49:22.000 There's blood on American hands when you make promises to people, and those people rely on those promises.

00:49:26.000 And then, to prevent not even a high-cost scenario, to prevent a very, very low-cost scenario, relatively speaking, with regard to American foreign policy, you withdraw all troops.

00:49:36.000 Joe Biden's position here makes no sense at all.

00:49:39.000 Well, yesterday, Joe Biden, he got slightly tongue-tied announcing the Afghanistan withdrawal because, again, Joe Biden is in a running gun battle with the teleprompter.

00:49:48.000 Here was President Biden getting a little confused about the Afghanistan withdrawal yesterday.

00:49:54.000 We're going to continue to work for the release of detained Americans, including Mark, excuse me, Ferex.

00:50:04.000 I want to pronounce the name correctly.

00:50:06.000 I misspoke.

00:50:07.000 So that he can return to his family safely. 0.99

00:50:11.000 Um, yeah, that is, again, him versus this doddering old fool is now going to lead to the fall of Afghanistan again. 0.98

00:50:20.000 And there will be long term downstream effects. 0.97

00:50:23.000 There will be.

00:50:24.000 I mean, the fact is that the United States' troop presence in Germany prevented not only the Russians from taking over Western Europe, but also ended up forestalling the possibility of Germany turning back into something horrific. 0.71

00:50:36.000 The same thing in Japan.

00:50:37.000 The same thing in South Korea.

00:50:39.000 I point this out because people seem to have forgotten basic American history.

00:50:42.000 And there seems to be this bizarre left-wing Noam Chomsky opinion that anywhere American boots go, things get worse.

00:50:47.000 That is not true.

00:50:49.000 Generally, where American boots withdraw, things get massively worse.

00:50:53.000 I mean, the United States got involved in the Haitian situation in the 1990s.

00:50:59.000 Since America has not been so involved in Haiti, how have things gone over there?

00:51:03.000 Have things been, like, great over in Haiti last time I checked?

00:51:06.000 Okay, Joe Biden, he's basically admitting at this point that the mission is failing.

00:51:11.000 He says, don't worry, the mission hasn't failed yet.

00:51:11.000 It's incredible.

00:51:13.000 Okay, that's always a great indicator.

00:51:15.000 It's always very encouraging when the president of the United States says, well, we're withdrawing from Afghanistan. 1.00

00:51:21.000 Come on, man.

00:51:22.000 And we haven't failed.

00:51:24.000 Checks his watch, looks.

00:51:27.000 Yeah, very encouraging stuff here from the President of the United States.

00:51:31.000 How serious was the corruption among the Afghanistan government to this mission failing there?

00:51:39.000 Well, first of all, the mission hasn't failed yet.

00:51:43.000 There is in Afghanistan and all parties, there's been corruption.

00:51:52.000 The question is, can there be an agreement on unity of purpose?

00:51:56.000 Okay, it's amazing.

00:52:00.000 We haven't lost yet.

00:52:02.000 Great.

00:52:03.000 Great.

00:52:03.000 You know, we hadn't lost yet when they started pushing American helicopters off the top of the U.S.

00:52:06.000 Embassy in Saigon.

00:52:08.000 We hadn't lost yet.

00:52:09.000 Except we did.

00:52:10.000 Except we did.

00:52:11.000 And then Biden was asked, well, aren't you going to be responsible for what happens next?

00:52:15.000 Considering the fact that our cost of remaining in Afghanistan was very low by historic American standards.

00:52:21.000 And considering the fact that when we abandon Afghanistan, thousands of people will undoubtedly be murdered.

00:52:26.000 Don't you bear some responsibility? 0.54

00:52:27.000 No, man, I've never borne responsibility for a damn thing. 0.96

00:52:32.000 Get me on Amtrak. 0.75

00:52:33.000 Here's the president of the United States.

00:52:37.000 Will the United States be responsible for the loss of Afghan civilian lives that could happen after the military exit?

00:52:44.000 No, no, no.

00:52:46.000 It's up to the people of Afghanistan to decide on what government they want, not us to impose the government on them.

00:52:54.000 No country's ever been able to do that.

00:52:56.000 That's insane.

00:52:56.000 Keep in mind, as a student of history, as I'm sure you are, never has Afghanistan been a united country.

00:53:02.000 Not in all of its history.

00:53:04.000 Okay, we can't impose a government on Afghanistan.

00:53:10.000 They have to choose the government they want.

00:53:12.000 Is he suggesting that when the Taliban completely overruns the place, that this is the government that the Afghan people want?

00:53:17.000 That they are desperate to have the Taliban back in power?

00:53:21.000 This is the same sort of argument, again, that the left used to use during the Vietnam War, that the Vietnamese clearly want communism.

00:53:26.000 They clearly do.

00:53:27.000 Just as the South Koreans presumably wanted communism, except they didn't.

00:53:31.000 Yes, clearly.

00:53:32.000 Here's the thing.

00:53:32.000 The United States has actually allowed for elections to take place in Afghanistan.

00:53:36.000 That is much more a reflection of quote-unquote what the people want than, you know, an armed terrorist group running over the country and then stuffing women in burqas and taking them out of school. 0.62

00:53:47.000 Like that.

00:53:48.000 It is incredible how the President of the United States is currently doing the propaganda work of the Taliban. 0.64

00:53:52.000 He is.

00:53:52.000 When he says that they get to choose the government that they want, and, you know, if we walk away and the Taliban take over, probably that's the government that they want.

00:54:00.000 That is some ugly, ugly stuff.

00:54:02.000 The reality is the only thing on the ground allowing the Afghans to make any choice at all is that baseline presence of American troops.

00:54:11.000 And so Biden, predictably enough, was asked if he trusts the Taliban.

00:54:13.000 No, I don't trust the Taliban.

00:54:15.000 So then why are you so then why are you suggesting that the Afghan government, which is weak and has historically been weak?

00:54:20.000 Because, again, there isn't he's correct that there's been no history of democracy in Afghanistan before the United States got there.

00:54:26.000 There's been no history of security in Afghanistan before the United States got there, which is why it takes a long time.

00:54:32.000 And why democracy can't be simply grafted on to Afghanistan's roots.

00:54:36.000 But that doesn't mean that safety and security and the value of human rights can't be grafted on to those roots over time.

00:54:42.000 Over time being the key word.

00:54:44.000 And he's just removed the timetable.

00:54:46.000 Here is the president of the United States saying, well, no, no, I don't trust the Taliban.

00:54:48.000 I'm just going to hand over the entire country to them. 1.00

00:54:51.000 You trust the Taliban. 0.99

00:54:55.000 It's absolutely a serious question.

00:54:56.000 Do you trust the Taliban?

00:54:58.000 No, I do not.

00:55:00.000 No, I do not trust the Taliban.

00:55:02.000 Will you amplify your answer, please, while you don't trust the Taliban? 0.94

00:55:05.000 It's a silly question.

00:55:06.000 Do I trust the Taliban? 0.50

00:55:08.000 No.

00:55:09.000 But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.

00:55:21.000 No, he doesn't.

00:55:22.000 No, he doesn't.

00:55:23.000 I mean, he really doesn't. 1.00

00:55:24.000 I mean, and if he does, he's an idiot. 1.00

00:55:26.000 If he thinks that the Afghan government is going to suddenly hold up in the face of the Taliban right now, then there would be no controversy. 1.00

00:55:32.000 And this is, again, this is disconnected from reality.

00:55:35.000 All he wants is a cheap political win.

00:55:38.000 It's not really even going to be a win.

00:55:39.000 Because let me just tell you, five minutes after we leave and the headlines come out about how the Taliban are rounding up women who are going to school and slaughtering them in the streets, those headlines ain't going to look good for Joe Biden.

00:55:50.000 In fact, Jen Psaki's basically acknowledging as much, right?

00:55:53.000 She says, we're not going to have a mission accomplished.

00:55:55.000 This is a war that hasn't been won.

00:55:57.000 So what are you accomplishing by withdrawing then, exactly?

00:56:00.000 Explain.

00:56:02.000 In terms of plans for the end for our men and women coming back, I don't have anything to preview, but we don't, we're not going to have a mission accomplished moment in this regard.

00:56:11.000 It's a 20 year war that has not been won militarily.

00:56:17.000 Um, so she's admitting that they haven't won anything.

00:56:20.000 So there's no gain here.

00:56:22.000 It is all just politics, which is pretty, pretty horrifying.

00:56:26.000 But you know what?

00:56:27.000 It's okay.

00:56:28.000 Everything's fine.

00:56:29.000 The Biden administration is, um, the Biden administration is Friendly with the media, so it really doesn't matter.

00:56:35.000 Yesterday, Jen Psaki, she did the outreach to the media that they so deeply crave.

00:56:38.000 She gave them the attention they so deeply want.

00:56:41.000 She led a singing of happy birthday for Reuters' Steve Holland.

00:56:45.000 Now, listen, she can be as friendly in the press room as she wants to be. 0.97

00:56:48.000 That's nice, okay?

00:56:49.000 What is not as nice is the fact that the media then reciprocate by slobbering all over the Biden administration.

00:56:55.000 Here was Jen Psaki dealing with, frankly, her propaganda wing. 0.70

00:57:00.000 Who's with me?

00:57:01.000 Someone here has a good voice.

00:57:02.000 Happy birthday to you.

00:57:05.000 Happy birthday to you.

00:57:08.000 Happy birthday dear Steve.

00:57:13.000 Happy birthday to you.

00:57:19.000 Alright.

00:57:19.000 I will also note Brian Durham's excellent voice.

00:57:25.000 Oh, Brian Cameron.

00:57:26.000 Oh, isn't it nice?

00:57:27.000 And well, I guess they don't have to cover the news anymore.

00:57:30.000 I mean, after all, so refreshing.

00:57:32.000 How refreshing is Jen Psaki? 1.00

00:57:33.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.

00:57:36.000 First, you can't forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:57:39.000 Drew's shows every Friday.

00:57:40.000 He's got an exciting evening planned for you.

00:57:42.000 So head on over to dailyware.com, 7 p.m.

00:57:44.000 Eastern, 6 p.m.

00:57:44.000 Central.

00:57:45.000 Tune in.

00:57:45.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:57:46.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:57:48.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld.

00:57:55.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.

00:57:57.000 Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.

00:57:59.000 Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.

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00:58:13.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:58:15.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:58:18.000 Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:58:21.000 You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.

00:58:27.000 But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 09, 2021

Your Yoga Pants Can Never Be Woke Enough | Ep. 1293

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