All Episodes
Previous Next
May 22, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:11
Ep. 306 - Donald Of Arabia!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
On Saturday, the co-founder of Twitter apologized for his creation.
Why?
Because it allowed the election of Donald Trump.
In an interview with the New York Times, Evan Williams explained, quote, I think the internet is broken, and it's a lot more obvious to a lot of people that it's broken.
This is silliness, of course.
The internet isn't broken any more than guns are broken, just because bad people use them sometimes to do bad things.
The internet is a tool that can do wonderful good or great evil.
But Williams, like many of the left, believes that if a freedom can be exercised for great evil, it shouldn't be a freedom at all.
Thus, he continues, quote, I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place.
I was wrong about that.
It's a very bad thing, Twitter's role in electing Trump.
If it's true that he wouldn't be president if it weren't for Twitter, then yeah, I'm sorry.
This is the problem with leftist thought.
There are many Americans who are deeply unhappy at Trump's election.
But there were just as many Americans unhappy at President Obama's election.
Just because many Americans don't agree with Ev Williams doesn't make a forum for argument and discussion bad.
In fact, that's what should make the forum important.
The shortcoming isn't Twitter, any more than the raucous debate that surrounds politics thanks to the First Amendment, is responsible for excesses performed by individual human beings.
We simply do not have the right to control what other people think or say, even if that results in bad people sometimes winning victories.
We have the right to argue them out of their position.
The moment they move toward violence, we have the right to stop them.
But Twitter didn't win the election for Trump.
It just provided Trump a forum for espousing his views, which those on the left were unable to counter effectively.
I don't believe all speech is created equal.
Some is evil, some is valueless, some is great.
But I also don't believe I have the right to be the sole determinant of where those lines are drawn.
And I certainly don't think that tech executives who vote universally Democrat have that right either on a moral level.
When Williams compares himself to Prometheus and says he deserves to have eagles, quote, peck out his guts for eternity for giving the power of tweets to Donald Trump, he forgets he didn't give the power of free speech to Trump.
God did.
He just provided a forum that wasn't moderated by someone with which he agrees.
Which is a good thing.
Perhaps you ought to help his Democratic friends come up with better arguments than shut Trump up if he wants Trump to lose.
But Williams has another solution.
Restore the gatekeepers.
He says the problem is that not everyone is going to be cool because humans are humans.
There's a lock on our office door and our homes at night.
The internet was started without the expectation that we'd have to do that online.
Except for the fact that there's no lock on our mouths.
Nor should there be.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, President Trump went to Saudi Arabia and great fun was had by all.
He said some good things.
He said some things that were eh.
And we'll talk about all of it.
Plus, the imagery was just amazing.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Ring.com.
So right now, if you go to Ring.com slash Ben, you get $150 off a ring of security kit.
So what that is, it's an advanced motion detection technology to protect your entire property.
The kit includes a ring video doorbell for the front door.
We have that at my house.
What that is, is someone rings the doorbell and usually somebody is ringing or sometimes when people are robbing your house, they ring to see if you are home first before they rob the house.
The ring video doorbell goes direct to your phone.
So you can pick it up, see who's at the door, make sure that they think that you're at home or just make sure that it's somebody that you know and like before you let them in.
That's what Ring.com, the video doorbell, does for you.
And then they have a Ring stick-up cam that's part of the Ring of Security Kit as well.
It's a wireless, weatherproof HD camera to keep an eye on other parts of your property.
And right now, if you go to Ring.com slash Ben, you get $150 off a Ring of Security Kit.
We have the kit.
We've bought extra gear from Ring because we think that they are so terrific and their product is so great.
Ring.com slash Ben right now.
Join the millions of homeowners who protect their homes with the Ring Video Doorbell.
Again, it allows you to keep track of your entire property, make sure that nobody's just ringing to break into your house.
Ring.com slash Ben for $150 off your kit.
Plus, it allows them to know that we're the ones who sent you, so that helps them keep advertising and paying so that the show can continue to be brought to you for free.
Okay, so, lots going on.
President Trump goes to Saudi Arabia.
So it's great for Trump that he is now doing this foreign tour because it's obviously eating up all of the headlines.
That's something that he needs because when last we left our story last Thursday, all of the talk was about Trump and Russia and firing of Comey and the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
And there was a story that broke Friday that Trump had said to the Russians and the White House admitted that he said to the Russians that he was happy he got rid of Comey.
Because it provided him relief on the Russia issue, which is not something that you'd probably be saying.
But the focus has now shifted because Trump is abroad.
So as a PR matter, it's really good that Trump is over in Saudi Arabia, especially because there's no proof that anybody's done anything egregiously wrong as of yet.
And all of the Trump-Russia talk for the moment is just that talk.
So Trump heads over to Saudi Arabia, and supposedly the point of a tour like this is to create new ties and reestablish old ties.
Really, the point of a tour, whenever a president does a foreign tour, the point of a tour is generally the same as when you go into the office at your work, but you are capable of working from home.
It's FaceTime.
Okay, so the point is not to actually do anything useful.
It's to demonstrate to people that you're active.
It's to demonstrate to people that you are on the move, that things are happening.
When Obama went on his apology tour after he was elected, that didn't actually accomplish anything other than sort of give off the image of America as a country in retreat.
So, Trump was going to Saudi Arabia in order to change the image of America as a country in retreat.
Some of that he accomplished, some of that he didn't.
But it started off, and I have to say it's really funny, when Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis knew that he loves pomp and circumstance, and that he loves flattery, and flattery will get you everywhere with Trump.
So, they really laid out the red carpet for him.
him.
Here's what it looked like as Trump de-planed in Saudi Arabia.
Almost exactly like that, actually.
Like, you see the guys dancing with the swords?
So that actually happened in real life.
So here is some video of the Saudis doing the ceremonial sword dance, because nothing says friendly to people like a ceremonial sword dance.
So they all got out their swords into ceremonies.
And here is Trump bebopping along to the ceremonial sword dance.
Oh, it's great stuff.
So Trump goes there and he takes part in all of this and of course everybody on the left is saying, well what in the world?
This is the guy who was saying that Saudi Arabia was the people behind 9-11 and there he is bebopping along.
So the left was kind of disappointed that Trump didn't start a nuclear war.
The left is always disappointed when Trump exceeds expectations.
And their expectation is that he was going to go to Saudi Arabia, spit on the Kaaba stone, and then immediately declare that everybody ought to convert to Christianity.
That is, of course, not what happened, and so they were very disappointed that wasn't what happened.
The imagery that came out, though, was pretty weird because The great disconnect in American foreign policy, and this has existed well before the Bush administration, is this disconnect where we say that we're against radical Islamic terror, but then we make best friends with the Saudis who fund radical Islamic terror.
So you have some weird photos that were coming out like this one.
This is 10.
Yeah, this one.
So you got Trump.
This is, I believe, the king of Saudi Arabia.
They're opening the global Anti-terror center which again if Saudi Arabia is involved in the global anti-terror center I'm gonna go with that's not gonna be a huge success and apparently Trump and the king of Saudi Arabia switching souls actually or at least gazing into the Palantir to see if they could see Sauron or not the problem is that that Hassan Rouhani is on the other end of that Palantir and can actually see them Austin producer Austin suggests that Donald Trump's basketball skills were actually sapped by this particular orb from Space Jam which is indeed a possibility in any case
All of this is, you know, not a huge deal.
The right made a huge deal out of President Obama bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia.
Trump didn't do that.
The left, it was really funny, the left tried to tell a fake news story where Trump had bowed.
He wasn't bowing, okay?
The prince of Saudi Arabia gave him some sort of medal and he bent over to receive it because how else do you get it?
On the person's neck.
I mean, it's like saying that Han Solo was bowing to Princess Leia when she was awarding him a medal after the destruction of the Death Star.
No.
It turns out that whenever somebody puts a medal around your neck, you have to sort of lower your neck so it can get around your neck.
So the left immediately tried to suggest that he was bowing in the same way that Obama had bowed, and that, of course, is just ridiculous and silly towns and nonsense.
I will again say that I was of a divided mind about all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Trump arriving.
Ann Coulter said the reason that Saudi Arabia welcomed Trump this way is because he's an alpha as opposed to Obama who was a real beta.
Here is Ann on Saturday night.
I like the fact that, you know, because he is a strong alpha male leader, that the Arabs respect him.
They don't respect the beta male Obama.
Okay, well, I think that there's maybe some truth to this.
I think that it's more likely that the Muslims figured, that the Saudis figured, that if you flatter Trump a lot, then he will be nice to you.
And the reason I say this is because that's exactly what Bibi Netanyahu did immediately afterward.
So Bibi saw that they had rolled out this red carpet, they brought in Which country star was it?
They brought in some country music singer to sing in front of an all-male concert in Saudi Arabia.
They basically did the full Vegas.
And Trump loved it.
And so immediately, Bibi Netanyahu, recognizing that Trump loves to be feeded and treated like a king, Bibi immediately mandated that all of his ministers had to be on the tarmac when Trump went to Israel.
Trump arrived in Israel today.
And Bibi mandated that they basically up the amount of pomp and circumstance because Now this has turned into King Lear a little bit, where King Lear wants all of the daughters to show how much they love him and just express in the most glowing terms how much they love him.
So, is that a big deal or not?
No.
In fact, I think that it's kind of great when countries pay homage to the United States.
We are the most powerful country on earth, as well we should be.
But I'm not sure that the Saudis are paying homage to the United States.
I think they're paying homage to Trump, which is a slightly different thing.
Okay, so then Trump goes and he does his Saudi speech.
And the speech itself, you know, is widely praised by people on the right.
I am of divided mind about the speech, to tell you the truth.
I think there were some good things in the speech.
I think there were some things that were not so good in the speech.
I don't think it has much to do with Trump.
I think that Trump's speech has more to do with divides in the mind of the American people.
I think that the American people are very divided mind on foreign policy, and they're not of clear mind on foreign policy.
And there are three kind of key distinctions in foreign policy that the American people are not willing To face up to.
Because foreign policy is filled with hard choices.
Because anytime you talk about foreign policy, in reality what you're talking about is the balance between diplomacy, isolationism, involvement in the world, military use of force.
And these are very difficult questions because no one wants to be the person who puts American soldiers in harm's way or expends American resources in pursuit of some goal that we don't care about.
And so there are three kind of fundamental conflicts in American foreign policy that have never been resolved.
Particularly since World War II.
World War II is the last time that all of these were resolved in united fashion.
Since then, the United States really has not had a coherent foreign policy, because World War II was such a clear-cut moral battle, and also such a clear-cut battle of self-defense at the same time.
There was some of this during the Cold War as well.
This was the key division between the right and the left.
The right saw it as a moral battle and a self-defense battle.
The left saw it as neither a self-defense battle nor a moral battle, and so there was battle over that.
But here are sort of the three conflicts in American foreign policy, and you'll see how they materialize in Trump's speech.
So, the first one is about human rights.
So Americans have a very weird perspective about human rights.
America has always stood for the notion that all human beings are created equal with certain inalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence.
That does not mean, however, that it is the job of the American government to achieve the realization of those inalienable rights for everyone.
America doesn't have the power to do that.
America doesn't have the wherewithal to do it.
If we could snap our fingers and everybody would have governments that protect the same rights that we have, then we would obviously do that.
But it's not about snapping the fingers.
It's about what are you willing to sacrifice to do that.
The basic American foreign policy has always been where possible we push, where not possible we hold off.
But here's the truth.
Since the Vietnam War, we have very little interest as a people in foreign interventions on the basis of human rights until there's something gross on our TV, in which case we get aggressive in knee-jerk fashion, which is sort of what happened in Syria.
We were like, OK, we don't want anything to do with Syria.
It's a civil war.
It's going to get ugly.
Fine.
Who cares?
And then there are pictures of gas children on our TV and everybody snaps to and boom, we need to get involved right now.
I mean, you fire some cruise missiles and hit a camel in the ass right now.
It's incoherent, but that incoherence didn't start with Trump and it doesn't end with Trump.
It's just incoherence that's been part of American foreign policy for the last few decades.
What that incoherence means is it's more incoherent, it means that there are basically a couple of views on how to pursue human rights.
People lie to themselves.
Instead of just saying, listen, we're not going to save every, we're not going to take every human rights violation all that seriously.
We're not.
We're going to take the human rights violation seriously, that we have to take seriously, and that forward America's goals, we're not going to take other ones seriously.
Instead you end up with this sort of bizarre Snap back and forth foreign policy.
So President Obama would speak about human rights all the time, but then he felt that America was actually the threat to human rights, so he would withdraw from the region and the isolationism ends up setting the region on fire.
President Bush spoke about human rights and he actually meant it, so that meant he was much more interventionist.
Trump is actually more Obama than Bush, not because he thinks America's a bad force in the world, but just because he thinks America should be isolationist and not involved.
And so his foreign policy on human rights is, I'm going to speak in strong terms about violation of human rights, but there's no actual carrot and there's no actual stick.
And that's what was missing from the Saudi speech.
There was not a lot of carrot.
There was not a lot of stick.
It was not clear what his actual plan was in any of this.
And so you have to ask, okay, well, if he's not laying forth a plan in Saudi Arabia, what's he there to do?
There's only two things a foreign speech really, well three things, a foreign speech can do.
One is it can rev up your domestic base.
That I think Trump did and did well.
The second thing that it could do is it could set forth a sort of foreign policy goal.
I don't think that Trump did that all that well.
And the third thing is he could set forward policy and he didn't do that at all.
The second conflict, so I said that there are three central conflicts to American foreign policy that Americans really have not yet Come to grips with because it's ugly.
We don't actually want to make these ugly choices.
I'm gonna get to the second one in just a second.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Upside.
So, I found this great way to travel.
It's Upside.com.
Upside.com is all about being able to travel for cheaper as a business traveler.
It's basically, you have a business trip.
It's not really for families.
It's more you travel a lot.
You have a business trip you need to get from point A to point B.
Upside.com bundles your flight and your hotel and gets you the cheapest possible price, and they kick back to you a gift card as well.
So they bundle that flight and the hotel in a low price.
They save money on business travel, and then they give you free Amazon gift cards.
So if your company travels you a bunch of times a year, you can get thousands of dollars a year yourself just for buying your air and your hotel through Upside.
So the price itself is lower than you'll get anywhere else.
And then you also get the kickback from Amazon.com in terms of the gift cards as well.
So you get all your miles, you get a lower price, and that's all because of the bundling.
They also have live customer service, so if you have a problem, you're not going to be stuck on the phone with a machine trying to figure all of it out.
Upside.com is the best way to travel.
Right now, if you use my name, so you go to Upside.com slash Ben, use that promo code Ben, Radio Listeners promo code Ben, Then you are guaranteed to get at least a $200 Amazon gift card for your first trip.
So use my name and it gets you at least a $200 Amazon gift card for free.
You save big on travel.
You get a big gift card every single trip.
I love UpSight.com.
We use it here at the office ourselves.
There's a minimum purchase required.
You can see the site for complete details.
But again, you're going to save money for your company and you personally benefit, which is pretty awesome.
Go to Upside.com and use that promo code, Ben, not only so that they know that we sent you, but also so you can receive that $200 in gift cards with minimum purchase on your very first flight.
So that is pretty awesome.
Okay, so I said there are three fundamental contradictions in American foreign policy.
One is over human rights.
We say that we like them, then we're not willing to do all that much to do anything about them, in many cases, until there's something ugly on our TV and then we do something.
And this has been true since Black Hawk Down in Somalia, it's been true in Yugoslavia, it's been true in Iraq, it's been true in Syria, it's been true in Libya.
We have a tendency in the United States...
Or we don't actually want to commit resources, but then when it comes down to it, we recognize that we are actually the world's policemen, whether we like it or not, and that we are sometimes going to have to commit resources.
But, there's no real good way to articulate that.
Fundamental conflict number two, over radical Islamic terror.
So, there's a lot of talk about how Obama was doing a grave disservice to the United States by not recognizing the threat of radical Islamic terror.
He wouldn't even say the words radical Islamic terror, and the reason that Obama said he wouldn't say the words radical Islamic terror is because his take, what he liked to say, Is that if he said the words radical Islamic terror, he would be lumping terrorists in with regular Muslims, and it has nothing to do with Islam, it's just a cult of death that has nothing to do with Islam.
And people on the right said, no, no, no, it does have something to do with Islam, and if you fail to recognize that, then you're failing to look in the right place for the enemy.
Like, pretending that terrorism is equally a threat in Sweden as it is coming from Saudi Arabia is just silly.
It's just silly.
And if you look at the polls, you'll see that a huge, huge number, hundreds of millions of Muslims, believe in things that we in the West would consider extraordinarily extreme.
I mean, I have a whole video about this, about the myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority.
So the whole point here was that leads you to a long-term strategy about how do you change the Muslim world?
Do you make temporary alliances?
Do you call on Muslims to do forward groups that are more secular in nature in Muslim countries?
But the point is that labeling radical Islamic terror is connected to a worldview and an action.
It's not just about saying the words and then doing nothing.
And there is this fundamental disconnect in the American mind because once you recognize that hundreds of millions of people are radicalized.
Not terrorists, but radicalized and hold radical views according to Western standards.
That requires a pretty large sacrifice of resources if you want to change that.
It requires, for example, in some cases, regime change.
It requires the backing of rebel groups in particular areas that we might find uncomfortable.
It requires us to get deeply involved in areas that we don't necessarily want to be involved in.
And so what we tend to do is we tend to say, well, yeah, we should label the bad guys the radical Islamic terrorists.
But also, it's really not that many of them, and they're really not worshipping Islam.
So, that's sort of what happened with Trump yesterday.
He said radical Islamic terror, and then he parroted a bunch of Obama platitudes.
And finally, the third conflict that exists in American foreign policy that we really don't want to face up to, is isolationism itself.
So, Americans tend to be gut-level isolationists.
There has yet to be a president who ran on being an interventionist.
All presidents run on being isolationists, essentially.
And they all end up interventionists because the world is a pretty complex place.
So you can either be honest about your foreign policy or you can be not honest about your foreign policy.
President Bush ended up, he campaigned as an isolationist.
He ended up as an interventionist and stretched us too far in the process.
President Obama embraced isolationism and watched the region burst into flame.
The truth is that Trump is more along Obama's lines in terms of withdrawal from the region than he is along Bush's lines in terms of intervention in the region.
And so this speech The right saw it as a fundamental rebuke to Obama, and in some ways it was.
The truth is it was actually more of a fundamental rebuke to the Bush foreign policy than to the Obama foreign policy.
So now I actually want to play some of the speech.
With all that in mind, I actually want to go through some of the speech.
But in order for us to actually go through the speech, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
So for $8 a month, you can go over and subscribe at dailywire.com, see the rest of the show live with our Sparkling analysis each and every day.
Plus, on Thursdays, we do the mailbag, so you can be part of that.
There are plenty of other goodies coming, and if you're an annual subscriber, then right now you still get a free copy of the Arroyo, a modern western set on the southern border about a rancher trying to protect his lands from the depredations and depravity of the Mexican drug cartels.
So go over and subscribe.
Become an annual subscriber over at dailywire.com.
Check that out.
Or if you just want to listen later, go over to iTunes or SoundCloud.
Become a subscriber.
Leave a review.
We always appreciate your reviews.
Make sure it's five stars or we don't want it.
But go over to iTunes or SoundCloud and make sure you do that.
▲
Export Selection