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April 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
27:03
Ep. 286 - Trump The Conqueror
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On Thursday afternoon, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is a certifiable moron, tweeted about the wonders of the left's favorite new New York icon, the bronze statue of a fearless girl who stands in defiance of the even more famous statue of a Wall Street bull.
De Blasio tweeted, quote, unlike the charging bull, which has become a symbol of Wall Street, fearless girl is a beacon for the fight against injustice.
Here are a few things you need to know.
One, the Fearless Girl statue is funded by a hedge fund.
State Street Global Advisors is behind the sculpture.
State Street Global Advisors manages 2.5 trillion dollars in assets.
The notion that it funded a statue to rail against capitalism is idiotic.
State Street isn't just representative of Wall Street, it invests in Wall Street on the most general level by putting all money into funds that track the performance of the indices.
As Wall Street goes, so too does Fearless Girl.
Two, the hedge fund has few female executives.
State Street Global Advisors has 28 high-level executives, according to the New York Daily News.
Five are female, total.
Three, employment in New York relies heavily on Wall Street.
According to the New York Federal Reserve, the financial services sector represented 35% of all paid income in the city of New York as of 2000, and more than 1 in 10 people employed in New York City were employed on Wall Street.
The fearless girl statue is a bit of stupid virtue signaling by a firm looking for some good publicity.
de Blasio has embraced it because he is a stupid man.
But here is what de Blasio should understand.
If the bull actually walks away from New York and the fearless girl remains, the bull is going to be like all the jobs.
It'll just be gone in the distance.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
People on the left like de Blasi are so stupid, but it doesn't matter.
I love that they're obsessed with this statue that was put up by a hedge fund because they think that it's against hedge funds because stupid.
We'll talk about that.
We'll also talk about I have a theory.
I'm developing a theory of what exactly Trump is doing in foreign policy, which is good because no one really has a theory as to what is going on there.
There are multiple working theories, but we will discuss them.
I think it's a theory that will make no one happy and yet everyone happy, just like most of the things that I say.
But we'll get to that in just a second.
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Okay, well we have a lot coming up on the show today.
We have the mailbag that's coming up at the end of the show, which is why you need to subscribe.
If you subscribe, you can be part of the mailbag.
But don't worry, I'll make that pitch later.
Also, we are going to be having We are going to be having a guest on.
His name is Fadi Alkadi.
He is a Middle East and Northern Africa human rights advocate.
And I want to talk to him because he thinks that the United States has an obligation to take in Syrian refugees if we're going to bomb Assad.
And I would like to have that discussion with him.
So I look forward to that.
But we begin today with the big news.
There are two pieces of big military news.
Big piece of military news number one is that Trump is now threatening North Korea.
It's unclear what the threat actually is.
We moved a U.S.
naval carrier and aircraft carrier into the waters off North Korea and there's been rumors that we are going to preemptively hit them if they were going to drop some sort of nuclear test.
That Seems to me a wild rumor the Trump administration is basically denied it because that could precipitate World War III.
What folks need to understand about North Korea is that North Korea has like 20,000 missiles that are aimed, 20,000 rockets that are aimed directly at Seoul in South Korea and there are 10 million people who live in Seoul.
So if something should go wrong in North Korea, then Seoul is immediately under severe attack and probably hundreds of thousands of people die.
So it's very important that we handle this whole thing very carefully.
The other sort of response has been that the United States is going to take some sort of retaliatory strike against the North Koreans if they should test a nuclear weapon.
to demonstrate that we're not going to stand for this kind of stuff anymore.
I think that Kim Jong-un has enough wherewithal to understand that if he goes to war with us, then we'll wipe him off the map in five seconds flat, and he would like to preserve his rule, obviously.
So I think that his kind of crazy act, I'm going to act crazy so that people leave me alone, I don't think that that's going to work very much longer because people understand he wants to stay in power.
He's not going to launch a preemptive war on the United States that finishes him completely.
That would be a foolish move in the extreme and he's foolish but he's rational.
He's foolish but rational.
The Chinese are now applying pressure to North Korea.
They're saying that they're going to cut off a lot of their oil exports to North Korea.
If North Korea tries to test a nuclear bomb.
So good on the Trump administration for pushing on that.
The other piece of big news yesterday was that the U.S.
military in Afghanistan dropped what is known as the mother of all bombs.
First of all, I think that all bombs should have nicknames.
And so I think this is awesome.
It's called the Mother of All Bombs.
Apparently Russia has something they like to call the Father of All Bombs.
So if you ever got them together, they'd make lots of little bombs.
It'd be really cute.
But the Mother of All Bombs is apparently a massive, massive piece of ordnance.
It's like 11 tons of TNT.
It has a blast radius of up to a mile.
And so we dropped it in the middle of nowhere, Afghanistan.
And we killed 36 ISIS fighters.
We took out a bunch of their tunnel systems.
We took out a bunch of their All of that is good.
And here is Donald Trump praising the use of Moab.
Take some pictures.
OK, thank you all very much.
How about that phone?
Very, very proud of the people.
Another really another successful job.
We're very, very proud of our military.
Just like we're proud of the folks in this room.
We are so proud of our military.
And it was another successful event.
Did you authorize it?
Everybody knows exactly what happens.
So, and what I do is I authorize my military.
We have the greatest military in the world and they've done a job as usual.
So we have given them total authorization and that's what they're doing.
And frankly, that's why they've been so successful lately.
If you look at what's happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what's happened over the last eight years, you'll see there's a tremendous difference.
Tremendous difference.
So, we have incredible leaders in the military, and we have incredible military, and we are very proud of them.
And this was another very, very successful mission.
So this is good Trump.
When Trump says this sort of stuff, it makes people in the military feel good.
It heightens morale.
This actually was in the works since the Obama administration.
So for months, they've been considering whether to use the Moab.
Every time I think of Moab, I also think of Ammon and the Jebusites and all the other biblical tribes.
The use of the Moab was not something that Trump initiated.
It was something where the Defense Department came to him and they said, can we use this thing?
Are you okay with that?
We'd like to.
And he said, sure, go for it.
And that's the difference between Trump and Obama.
You know, Obama had to agonize for apparently days and days and days about whether to go get Bin Laden.
I don't think that's something that Trump would agonize over very much.
And that's something that is obviously a very good thing.
Charles Krauthammer came out.
He says, look, Trump is returning America to world leadership.
Obviously, he's willing to be aggressive in his use of military force.
All right, well, we don't really know what the Trump doctrine is yet, but he's winning, isn't he?
Yes, I welcome this.
I'm not an America firster.
I thought it was a mistake to enunciate a doctrine in the inaugural address, which is we're coming home.
It scared the bejeebies out of our allies in NATO when he talked about it being obsolete.
It scared in the Middle East, the Gulf Arabs were scared to death.
I think this is reassuring that we are returning Well, this is what's confusing as all hell to a lot of the Trump supporters, and we'll get to that in just a minute.
We accept world leadership in a way that had not been accepted by Obama and seemed to be not accepted by Trump, the candidate.
Well, this is what's confusing as all hell to a lot of the Trump supporters.
And we'll get to that in just a minute.
Chris Wallace says that what's very clear here is that Trump has been basically humiliating Obama by being as quick as he is to use military force when called for.
And this is a president who's sending a message that he's, as opposed to Barack Obama, willing to project and very comfortable projecting the use of U.S.
force anywhere he feels is necessary.
And again, as I say, I think that Donald Trump has shown a willingness to project American force, what, less than 100 days into office, that we certainly didn't see with Barack Obama, who the Trump administration openly dismisses as paralysis through analysis.
Okay, so, you know, all of this is sort of, I think, a little bit early.
Not just because, you know, not because I think Trump is wrong in doing what he's doing.
I think he's exactly right in doing what he's doing.
But I think people are trying to graft an ideology onto Trump that he may not hold, and it's a little bit premature.
But I'll discuss that in just a minute.
I want to bring on our special guest today.
Fadi Alkadi is a Middle East and Northern Africa human rights advocate, and he's written about what he thinks the United States ought to do with regard to Syria and what the United States has an obligation to do with regard to Syrian refugees.
Mr. Alkadi, thanks so much for joining The Ben Shapiro Show.
Thank you for having me.
So you write that we salute.
You have a statement in which you say we salute those that oppose discriminating against refugees or discriminating against individuals because of their race or religion.
You think that the Trump administration is making a huge mistake by not allowing in refugees.
You also are not in favor of Trump's strikes in Syria.
So let's start with Trump's strikes in Syria.
You say that President Trump's strikes in Syria violated international law and you say accountability is the answer.
What sort of accountability are you talking about if nobody's actually holding Assad to account?
Well, that exactly has been the problem for the past six years, whether the previous former American administration was part of the problem or the solution is not really the issue.
But there was never been a discussion, a conversation, an international conversation about how to bring Assad and everyone else who has committed atrocities in this particular conflict.
I mean, to me, it's just seemed that there is a sort of a missing connection here.
Mr. Trump's, I mean, during the presidential campaign, he has been sort of, I mean, I'm going to say it, he has been demonizing, you know, the refugee population, specifically, you know, those refugees coming from countries with a Muslim majority and the Syrians.
It seemed to me that there is a sort of inconsistent policy in terms of, you know, dealing, you know, with sending, you know, missiles to hit Assad, but at the same time not finding the linkage to this problem.
The problem is that these refugees really fled a country that is has been seeing atrocities and massacres over the past six years.
And if you denied that, if you fundamentally denied that, you don't have an excuse to send these missiles to punish a dictator or a brutal governor.
So I want to ask you a question about this, because this has been a contention made by a lot of people that it's fundamentally inconsistent, as you say, for the Trump administration to fire missiles at an airbase in Syria while also banning Muslim refugees from Syria into the United States.
But isn't it true that, I mean, there are 50-plus Muslim countries all around the world Uh, that have the capacity to take in refugees.
Turkey, obviously, has taken in well over a million Syrian refugees.
Uh, why do you think that it's the obligation of Western countries like the United States or countries in Europe to take in Syrian refugees who it's, I mean, let's face it, it's impossible to vet their backgrounds because the government has no records and we can't trust the government anyway.
We don't know who's coming in.
There have been serious issues with crime and some instances of terrorism in Europe due to refugees, not necessarily from Syria, but from places like Libya.
Why does the West have an obligation to take in everybody, or does the West have an obligation to take in everybody on Earth who is in some sort of dire human rights strait when an alternative might be available in terms of Muslim countries taking in these folks?
Well, Ben, everybody has a responsibility to take in refugees if they can and if they're willing.
And, I mean, I live in a country, we're talking now, you know, from Jordan, who has also, is a neighboring country to Syria and has taken, you know, approximately a million and a half.
Lebanon is another neighboring country which has taken more than it actually takes.
Turkey has taken so much refugees in the past few years.
In the sense of the responsibility, it's everyone's responsibility.
And the problem about the neighboring countries, they have been really flooded, their infrastructure cannot absorb extended waves of refugees.
And it's just the matter of fact that we cannot sustain, and I think this is the key word, We cannot sustain the neighboring countries to keep on receiving more refugees or else or otherwise they will collapse and we don't want them to collapse.
And there comes the sort of like the issue of Europe and the United States and Canada and everyone else.
You have a very true point about why other Muslim countries like Saudi, the UAE have not really mobilized, you know, these, you know, have not provided access to these refugees in the past.
But let's just face it, they are also on the, some of these Gulf countries are on the forefront of providing substantial financial aid to a UN agency that is providing aid to these to these refugees, which is, by the way, Ben, which is, by the way, another problem that Mr. Trump is facing in terms of this inconsistency.
Now, we're talking about helping the Syrians and recognizing that a massacre has happened and something needs to happen, but at the same time, he cuts aid to the World Food Program agency, which basically provides food.
But he's talked about increasing aid pretty dramatically for refugee programs, specifically Syrian refugee programs in the area by sponsoring refugee camps in places like Turkey.
One of the questions that I have here is that you say that every country has sort of an equal obligation to take in refugees in human rights situations.
Obviously, that has not been true historically.
Obviously, to take an easy example, the Palestinian refugee crisis has been on the hook for 70 years plus.
And Jordan took in many Palestinian refugees and then pushed them out to Lebanon.
Lebanon pushed out those Palestinian refugees to Tunis.
The problem that I have here with a lot of the talk about who should take in refugees is it assumes that all cultures are equally malleable and assimilate easily to the cultures that are supposed to take them in.
It seems to me that it should be easier for Jordan to absorb refugees from Syria than it would be for France to absorb refugees from Syria, given cultural differences, which do make a difference in terms of how people have grown up, what The idea that you have to take in a refugee in order to oppose the slaughter of civilians, I don't see how that follows, in other words.
Why is it bad that Trump is trying to bomb Assad and stop Assad from committing gas attacks if Trump doesn't take in Syrian refugees?
It doesn't seem like there's a connection between the two.
You may think that he's wrong not to take in Syrian refugees, but why is it now bad for him to bomb the airfield from which Assad is launching gas attacks?
Well, let's put it this way, Ben.
The issue about the global responsibility to protect those who flee atrocities, I don't think it's just a moral issue.
And I'm not quite sure that it is sort of, you know, the issue about cultural differences can substantiate the issue of the need to protection.
We have also to recognize that in some, what you just said, or refer to as culture, there may not be an adequate sort of structure to provide protection to those people who are fleeing massacres and atrocities.
And I sort of think the neighboring countries have sort of grown to a point where they can no longer provide such protection.
So I think that the main difference here is that some countries, some cultures, as you referred, have more sort of advanced, more of substantiated structures that, you know, that makes them capable of providing such protection.
The other point, I think, is that when we talk about, you know, Mr. Trump's administration sort of sending these messages to punish Assad, they actually do not punish Assad.
I think what we need from Mr. Trump is a sort of a clear policy on accountability.
And what we refer to as being accountability is just to find sort of a venue, an international venue to prosecute those who are responsible for crimes.
This could stop atrocities and massacres.
Russia would never stand for that, obviously.
And that's one of the big problems here in the international community is that unilateral action becomes necessary when there are international actors who won't cooperate in all of this.
But thank you for your time.
I really do appreciate the perspective.
This is Fadi Al-Khadi.
He's a Middle East and Northern Africa human rights advocate.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
All the way from Jordan.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ben.
Okay, so back to what's going on with regard to the Trump administration policy here.
So obviously Trump has been very militaristic, his use of Moab, his use of his militarism with regard to Assad.
So what exactly is going on here?
So I have a working theory that I'm going to tell you about.
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Here is my theory about what's going on with the Trump administration foreign policy.
There are two theories that have been put out there.
Theory number one is the theory that President Trump is basically being co-opted by all of the evil neocons in the administration.
That it's basically Reince Priebus and it's It's General Mattis, and it's all these members of the administration who are neocons.
Nikki Haley, all of the interventionists, the globalist cucks, who are taking advantage of President Trump, and President Trump is basically being led astray by these people.
This has been the line that's been taken by people like Ann Coulter, who is never willing to take Trump on directly, but instead will sort of blame his action on the people who surround him.
So theory number one is that Trump is being co-opted by the establishment.
Here's Ann Coulter basically expressing that theory.
And for that region of the world, Assad is one of the better leaders.
There are probably only one or two that are better than he.
He's not even like a Saddam Hussein murderous thug.
He helped us after 9-11, giving us intelligence.
It's a very strange thing we've done here and I feel like it is such a departure from what Trump said on the campaign trail and in 2013 on his Twitter feed.
Okay, and so she's sort of saying it's a departure, and Roger Stone, who's sort of this conspiracy-minded guy who worked closely with Trump, he says that Trump is being co-opted and Steve Bannon is basically being attacked by all of the neocon globalist cucks.
You're a Bannonite.
Well, I'm a friend of Steve Bannon.
You're a friend of his, and you, I think, share a little bit more of his ideology than perhaps Mr. Kushner or Mr. Priebus.
If he's getting elbowed out, what does that tell you?
Well, it tells me a couple things.
First of all, I think Steve made an error by not spending any of his political capital to bring other Trump-ites and non-globalists into the White House circle.
So now... He didn't do a good job staffing the White House.
He's alone.
Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner did.
Yes.
So therefore, now he's alone and he's surrounded.
I think unfairly, perhaps, he takes the rap for the fiasco surrounding health care.
Maybe Reince should be wearing a bit more of that.
The travel ban is also probably counting against him, although I would argue that in Donald Trump's case, he only suffers politically not when he's defeated, but when he stops trying.
Okay, so again, the idea is that Bannon has been surrounded by this cabal and they're taking advantage of Trump.
So that's theory number one, is that Trump is being co-opted by this evil cabal.
It's not Trump's fault, he's just being co-opted by this evil cabal.
Theory number two is a little bit different.
Theory number two is that Donald Trump basically just reacts.
That something happens and Donald Trump reacts and there is no plan and he's just Acting how Donald Trump has always acted, which is he reacts to the news that's on TV.
And there's a fair bit of evidence to support this basic case.
Here's Sean Spicer saying that basically Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump pushed Trump into reacting to the gas attack in Syria.
There's no question that Ivanka and others weighed into him as, you know, it was asked earlier, Hallie asked it, that when he himself saw images, he was very, very moved.
And I think Ivanka and others, frankly, I don't think that there's many humans that came into contact with the president during that window of time that said, did you see those images on television?
So I don't You know, I think there was a widespread acknowledgement that the images and the actions that have been taken were horrific and required action.
Okay, so, you know, the story is that apparently Ivanka came to Trump and she said, it's really bad what's happening in Syria.
He said, great, let's bomb it.
That's basically how the story went.
And then here is Trump describing the moment that he chose to make the decision to fire the missiles at Assad in Syria.
I was sitting at the table.
We had finished dinner.
We're now having dessert.
And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen.
And President Xi was enjoying it.
And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded.
What do you do?
And we made a determination to do it.
So the missiles were on the way.
Does that seem like someone with a worldview?
I was sitting there eating a piece of the most beautiful chocolate cake.
Let me tell you, this chocolate cake was just big league.
Big league chocolate cake.
And the president of China loved it.
Loved.
L-U-V-E-Y.
Loved.
I mean, does this sound like somebody with a plan?
So, I guess the second theory here is that Trump just sort of lashes out.
Here is my theory.
My theory is that both are true.
Basically, Trump reacts to a certain thing.
And then Trump responds to the applause based on that reaction.
So, if he reacts, follow the course of his campaign.
Basically, he leads off his campaign by talking about Mexican immigrants coming across the border and committing crimes.
And a certain cadre of people cheer and love it and they think it's just great.
At least Trump is saying this sort of thing.
And Trump responds to them, and he panders to their applause, because Trump is motivated by one thing and one thing mostly, and that is love of Trump.
If you love Trump, you are great, right?
Trump has said this in interviews about Vladimir Putin.
Putin likes me.
That means he's okay, right?
This has been Trump's sort of theory, his working theory of the world for 70 years.
If you like Trump, that makes you good.
If you don't like Trump, that makes you bad.
So, something happens like a gas attack in Syria.
Trump responds because Ivanka says it's bad.
He says, okay, let's fire some missiles.
And then, who's going to respond positively to that?
Well, it's not going to be all of the people who backed him.
It's not going to be the alt-right group.
It's not going to be the isolationists.
It's not going to be Pat Buchanan.
It's going to be all of the more interventionist, hawkish people on foreign policy.
Those people will cheer him.
And so then, he falls into their thrall because he starts pandering to their applause.
Now, Ivanka and Jared are leading the crew instead of Bannon.
So, Bannon was leading the crew when everybody was applauding him for his trillion-dollar infrastructure package, and for his talk about how he was going to put up tariffs.
That was Bannon's doing, and so Bannon was the guy applauding the loudest, and that's when Trump was friends with him.
Now Bannon doesn't like what he just did, in terms of reaction.
And so now he's fallen under the sway of Ivanka and Jared, at least up to the point where he does something Ivanka and Jared don't like, and then he turns on them in favor of another ideology.
Now, what does that mean for the future of the Trump administration?
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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