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June 20, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

22:08

True Evil Shows Its Face | Ep. 323

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	On Tuesday, Affinity Magazine, a social justice teen magazine, tweeted out this insanity as the world reacted to the death of college student Otto Wambier, murdered by the North Koreans for the sin of removing a poster from a wall to bring home.
	Quote, "'Watch whiteness work.
	He wasn't a kid or innocent.
	He can't go to another country and try to steal from them.
	Respect their laws.'" Unfortunately, this hot take, a take so hot it would actually consume the sun with its own heat, wasn't the only left-wing attempt to slam Wambier for the brutal sin of whiteness.
	The Huffington Post ran a piece after Warmbier was sentenced a few months ago to over a decade in jail in North Korea, in which the author stated, quote, My mother's callous reaction to Michael Faye's sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not Teflon abroad.
	I'm a black woman, though.
	The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality, living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering, even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense.
	He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help.
	I get it.
	Larry Wilmore, that moron, ripped Warren Bier as a frat boy and, quote, frat boy privilege not valid in totalitarian dystopias.
	Funny.
	Wilmore never had anything to say about his rich and famous friends visiting the gulag state of Cuba.
	This sort of stupidity from the left isn't uncommon.
	It merely demonstrates that when you see the world in terms of class, color, sexual orientation, when you are convinced that every white straight male is a victimizer, you are more likely to excuse atrocities against such fortunate people.
	Never mind, North Korea is filled with North Koreans, tortured, imprisoned, murdered, kept in slave-like conditions.
	Warmbier clearly had it coming because he was white.
	Extended to the politics of the United States, this sort of moral garbage leads to the breakdown of society.
	If you believe that every terrible thing that happens to a member of an outgroup is justified, you are a tribalist.
	Leftist politicians have spent decades pandering to such tribalism, and in response, there's been an upsurge of tribalism from the anti-left.
	The victims, like Otto Warmbier, remain victims.
	But if we fail to see them as victims because we're too concerned with the color of their skin, we become their victimizers, too.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	All right, so there's a lot of news breaking out of North Korea.
	We're going to talk about that and the history of how we got to where we are in North Korea and what it tells us about foreign policy.
	We're also going to talk about the breakdown in the health care bill, how that is working out.
	A lot to get to.
	Various and sundry items.
	But before we do any of that, first I want to say thanks to our supporters over at ZipRecruiter.
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	Okay, so for those who missed the news yesterday, I mean, this is just an awful, awful, awful story.
	Otto Warmbier is a 22-year-old University of Virginia student.
	He was apprehended by the North Korean government in prison for 17 months.
	Why?
	What did he do?
	Supposedly, he attempted to steal a propaganda sign praising North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un from a hotel.
	And then, last week, he was released, you recall, but he was released in a coma.
	And then he died at a Cincinnati hospital, surrounded by his family.
	They released a statement, the family did.
	They said, It is our sad duty to report that our son Otto Warmbier has completed his journey home.
	Surrounded by his loving family, Otto died today at 2.20 p.m.
	It would be easy at a moment like this to focus on all that we lost.
	Future time that won't be spent with a warm, engaging, brilliant young man whose curiosity and enthusiasm for life knew no bounds.
	But we choose to focus on the time we were given to be with this remarkable person.
	You can tell from the outpouring of emotion from the communities that he touched, Wyoming, Ohio, University of Virginia, just to name two, that the love for Otto went well beyond his immediate family.
	When Otto returned to Cincinnati late on June 13th, he was unable to speak, unable to see, unable to react to verbal comments.
	He looked very uncomfortable, almost anguished, although we would never hear his voice again.
	Within a day, the countenance of his face changed.
	He was at peace.
	He was home.
	We believe he could sense that.
	We thank everyone around the world who has kept him in our family and our thoughts and prayers.
	We are at peace and at home, too.
	Just horrifying, horrifying story.
	Basically, there's no question that the North Korean government essentially beat the living crap out of him.
	They said that botulism and a sleeping pill had led to the coma, which is just nuts.
	A U.S.
	doctor said that's just a lie.
	A spokesman for the U.S.
	State Department said the sentence meted out to Warmbier was a response to U.S.
	sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear activities.
	Warmbier's father said his son was forced to confess and he was detained for political purposes.
	He was active in Theta Chi fraternity and the Hillel campus organization.
	It's a Jewish campus organization.
	He was salutatorian at his high school.
	He was detained at Pyongyang airport.
	The North Koreans claimed that he entered the country under the guise of a tourist and plotted to destroy North Korean unity with the quote tacit connivance of the U.S.
	government and under its manipulation.
	Apparently, he confessed to stealing a piece of North Korean propaganda.
	His confession said that he stole the banner for the mother of a friend who wanted it as a souvenir to hang on the church at home.
	He said he was offered a used car worth $10,000 as payment if he was detained and didn't return.
	$200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable donation.
	He said that he took the chance because his family was suffering from very severe financial difficulties.
	He also said he was urged to steal the poster by a semi-secret ring society.
	His confession said, I never, never should have allowed myself to be lured by the United States administration to commit a crime in this country.
	No question he was coerced into doing all of this.
	He said, I entirely beg you, the people in the government of the DPRK, for your forgiveness.
	Please, I made the worst mistake of my life.
	And apparently, according to his parents, they said that the Obama administration urged them to keep quiet.
	Fred said they feel you don't get involved that way.
	It lets the other side solve problems and make things happen.
	He said there's no excuse for the way the North Koreans treated our son.
	Well, obviously, it is an act of war, technically, for a foreign government to detain, torture, and murder an American citizen.
	This is horrific beyond all measure.
	It truly is.
	Here was President Trump's response to the news that Adam Warmbier died yesterday.
	Here's what he had to say.
	We're so happy to see him, even though he was in very tough condition, but he just passed away a little while ago.
	It's a brutal regime.
	And we'll be in the handling.
	Okay, well, you know, it's a weak statement, but honest to goodness, I don't know what people expect from Trump at this point.
	There are some measures that Trump could pursue against North Korea.
	Mainly, he needs to pursue sanctions against the Chinese government that sponsors North Korea.
	And that means cracking down on Chinese banks that sponsor North Korea.
	One of the problems here is, of course, that with some 13,000 artillery pieces pointed at Seoul, not all of which can hit the city in South Korea, but many of which can, the notion of a first strike on North Korea carries significant risk.
	The Chinese government's not going to do much to hamper Kim Jong-un, but obviously, aside from sanctions, we've got to increase propaganda into North Korea, we've got to push to throw North Korea out of the United Nations, for whatever that's worth, and we've got to consider, as I say, taking financial measures against the Chinese government, which has been sponsoring and keeping Kim Jong-un's evil regime in power for the last 50-odd years.
	Eric Bolling considered the possibility on Fox News that maybe we should preemptively strike North Korea over this.
	This is being directly affected by this North Korean crazy dictator.
	It may be time for a preemptive strike.
	Now, is that realistic, to do a preemptive strike on North Korea?
	I don't know all the military details.
	You'd have to ask General Mattis about it.
	I'm sure that we have considered the possibility.
	I do want to trace, however, I think it's important because this has ramifications for general American foreign policy.
	I do want to trace for a second.
	You know, leave aside the left's evil reaction to Otto Warmbier's original conviction for a moment, which is just totally evil.
	I want to point out that when it comes to American foreign policy, American foreign policy is sort of like a comedy of errors.
	Have you ever seen a comedy of errors, like a Shakespearean comedy of errors?
	Usually it starts with somebody telling a fib, and then that fib turns into three more fibs, and then those three more fibs turn into eight fibs.
	If you've ever seen a tragedy, it's the same thing.
	someone makes a bad decision, that bad decision sort of radiates outward like a ripple in a pond and affects an ever-broadening number of people.
	That's true of American foreign policy as well.
	The reason that Otto Warmbier is dead today is not just because of Kim Jong-un.
	It's because Western foreign policy for nearly a century, there are a series of points in American foreign policy where all of this could have been stopped before it began with North Korea.
	And at virtually every turn, the wrong mistakes were made with regard to Western foreign policy.
	And this is why I'm not an isolationist.
	I think isolationism is an easy way to avoid making tough decisions in the now that have tremendous ramifications down the road.
	So, to take the example of North Korea, back in 1917, you have to go all the way back to 1917, there's the Russian Revolution.
	In the middle of the Russian Revolution, which was happening in the middle of World War I, There was an attempt by the communists to take over the country.
	First, Tsar Nicholas fell, and then after the Tsar fell, then there was a battle between the so-called Whites and the Reds.
	The Whites were socialists, and the Reds were communists.
	The Whites were led by a guy named Kerensky, and the Reds were, of course, led by Lenin.
	And the Western world basically said, we want to help the Whites win this war.
	So, the British and Americans actually put troops on the ground in 1917-1918 in Russia.
	It was called the Polar Bear Expedition for the Americans.
	And the goal was to help the whites beat back the reds.
	Now, if that had succeeded, there is no Soviet Union.
	The Soviet Union doesn't exist.
	The mass murder of tens of millions of people over the course of the 20th century doesn't happen.
	Woodrow Wilson ended up withdrawing because he didn't have public support for what really was a tiny operation.
	The same thing happened with Britain.
	In 1919, the British pulled out against the advice of Winston Churchill.
	The British Prime Minister, a guy named Lloyd George, he said the country could, quote, "...not afford to continue so costly an intervention in interminable civil war." What was that costly intervention?
	The British, to that point, had lost 327 men.
	For the next 70 years, hundreds of millions of people would die thanks to the rise of the Soviet Union.
	Three decades later, the United States made a very similar decision.
	In 1945, China was at war.
	Shanghai Shek, the nationalist leader, was at war with Mao Zedong, the communist.
	And the Truman administration tried to bring all parties to the table, saying they didn't want to take sides in the civil war.
	They actively stopped Shanghai Shek from wiping Mao off the map.
	In 1946, George Marshall, who was at the time the top American general, he helped stop an offensive by the Nationalists that would have crushed Mao.
	Marshall actually berated Chiang Kai-shek.
	Shecky said, under the circumstances of the continued advance of the government troops in Manchuria, I must repeat that a point is being reached where the integrity of my position is open to serious question.
	Therefore, I request you again to immediately issue an order terminating advances, attacks, or pursuits by government troops.
	Mao biographer Zhang Chang writes, Marshall's diktat was probably the single most important decision affecting the outcome of the civil war.
	Shanghai Shek backed off because he was afraid that he would lose the money in American support and that Mao would win the war.
	As it turned out, that failure, the ceasefire that they engaged in, allowed Mao to regroup and then Mao ends up taking over the country.
	How does this have ramifications for North Korea?
	Well, without Mao, there is no North Korea.
	Remember that the Korean War begins when the Chinese government decides that they are going to intervene and help out the North Korean And they cross into South Korea as well over that 38th parallel.
	The United States guarantees the safety of the South Koreans.
	We cross back over the 38th parallel and we drive them all the way back up to the Yalu River, at which point the Chinese pour 200,000 men over the border.
	General Douglas MacArthur at that point said, OK, let's bomb the Chinese bases.
	Let's topple the Chinese government.
	Let's have the nationalists come in and knock out.
	Let's bring Shanghai back and let's knock out the Chinese communists.
	And from Taiwan and Truman says, no, we can't do that.
	So South Korea is preserved as an independent as an independent republic.
	But North Korea falls to the communists in essentially late 1950.
	Now, does that mean that Truman made the right decision?
	You know, it's sort of unclear.
	This is one of those historical what-ifs that we're never going to know the answer to.
	Obviously, it would have been an even more costly war if we had not withdrawn below the 38th parallel.
	However, it is important to note that at each step along this chain, smaller sacrifices, because we avoided them, end up mandating larger interventions, right?
	If we had intervened in the Soviet Union in 1917, before it's the Soviet Union, maybe it costs a certain amount of money and a relatively Small number of troops, each one of which is a tragedy, but when we're talking about foreign policy, you do have to talk about numbers.
	We don't do that, and so we end up in a Cold War and World War II, which probably never would have happened if there is no Soviet Union.
	Very difficult to imagine that the Nazis even rise to power in the absence of the Soviet Union, because the Nazis were a direct response, actually, to the rise of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Communists in Nazi Germany and pre-Nazi Germany and Weimar Germany.
	So again, small sacrifice made then prevents the rise of the Soviet Union.
	Small sacrifice made in 1945 financially to Shanghai Shek and not tying his hands prevents the rise of the Chinese communists.
	And then you end up in the Korean War.
	And now we have basically an attractable problem.
	The North Koreans are not going to go away anytime soon.
	The reason I say this is because I think it has ramifications for how we deal with foreign policy today.
	There's a tendency on right and left to say that isolationism is the best possible solution to these problems.
	We just stay out of the world's civil wars.
	We just stay out of the world's problems.
	Then things will get better.
	This is sort of the Obama administration tack with regard to Iraq.
	If we withdraw, everything will be fine.
	And then naturally, you get ISIS.
	The same sort of thing happens all around the world on a regular basis.
	That doesn't mean every intervention is necessary, and we have to carefully consider.
	And sometimes an intervention is going to fail.
	Sometimes an intervention is going to be counterproductive.
	But that doesn't absolve us of the obligation to look the future straight in the eye and determine whether we believe that this problem is going to balloon into a far larger problem over time.
	So, again, I don't have any good solutions for North Korea.
	That's why I am not ripping on President Trump for having no good solutions for North Korea.
	There are no good solutions for North Korea at this point, short of pressuring the Chinese government, which so far we have not had the willingness to do, you know, President Trump was actually more right on North Korea before he met with the Chinese than he was after he met with the Chinese government.
	It is tragic, it is horrifying, and please, for the love of God, people, do not go to evil dictatorships.
	For any reason, because you never know what is going to happen there.
	It's just horrifying.
	Okay, before we go any further, and I do want to talk about the democratic insanity that is currently breaking out over President Trump.
	It's continuing, rather, over President Trump.
	Also, I want to talk about Amazon.com, because there's now a call from the left to break up Amazon, which is just nuts.
	But before I do that, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Mack Weldon.
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	Okay.
	So I think that Al Franken sort of gave away the game yesterday when he was talking about why it is that he opposes President Trump.
	So Al Franken came out and said that he is, it's actually pretty spectacular, he came out and he said that the big problem here is Pence.
	You know, this, I think, demonstrates that when it comes to the left's attempt to get President Trump, it has very little to do with their actual worries about President Trump.
	They don't actually think that President Trump is the biggest problem.
	If I were a Democrat at this point, I would be a lot more afraid of Pence than Trump, just for political reasons.
	Pence seems more competent.
	He has more principles.
	He knows how to work with Congress.
	Trump has problems on all of these scores.
	But here's what Franken said.
	He said, quote, He's ideological.
	I consider him to be a zealot.
	It's about Pence.
	I think that in terms of domestic policy, certainly would be worse than Trump.
	So he's saying that we should be careful about getting rid of Trump because then you might end up with Pence, which just demonstrates this is all a political hack job anyway.
	All the Russian collusion stuff, it has nothing to do with actual Russian collusion.
	It has to do a lot more With the fact that they are trying to hamstring Trump's agenda.
	And again, talking about Pence's efficacy, I think it's important to go back to 2016 when the Democrats were all saying that Rubio would be scarier than Trump to them in office.
	Trumpsters should take note.
	This demonstrates two things.
	One, you are absolutely correct that the left is out to get Trump for unjustified reasons.
	This is not about his corruption.
	This is not about anything terrible that he's done.
	But number two, you should take note that Democrats truly are more afraid of Republicans who are good at this than they are of Trump, which would suggest that Trump needs to get better at this.
	Which brings us to the health care negotiations.
	So, right now, Republicans are negotiating behind closed doors this health care bill.
	And we're not hearing out a lot from the Senate because Mitch McConnell runs that place as a tight ship.
	I don't have a problem with them negotiating about it behind closed doors.
	I do have a problem with them releasing the bill and then within five seconds voting on the bill.
	That's something the Democrats did as well.
	It's not good when the Obama people did it.
	It's not good when the Trump people do it.
	Here's Bernie Sanders saying Republicans are cowardly for refusing to release any sort of text.
	We are not a poor country.
	We should not be talking about severe austerity efforts.
	We are the richest country in the history of the world.
	Most people don't know that because almost all new income and wealth is going to the people on top.
	But you do know that.
	And Elizabeth knows that.
	And I know that.
	And our job is to ask the simple question, okay, does Obamacare have problems?
	Absolutely.
	Deductibles too high, too many people remain uninsured, prescription drug costs too high, etc.
	How do we deal with it?
	That's the rational discussion.
	That's right.
	The answer is not to make a difficult situation much, much worse.
	And again, getting back to the initial point, our Republican colleagues are so cowardly, are so frightful that the American people will learn what's in their legislation.
	They refuse to have one hearing, one open discussion.
	And I am very confused about the lack of pudding cups in this room.
	Well, I think that's right.
	I think that's right, Senator Sanders.
	I love that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the same place at the same time.
	The universe should actually implode on itself out of the socialistic stupidity in that room.
	You know, Elizabeth Warren is not a dumb lady, but she certainly talks dumb when it comes to economics and pandering to her leftist base.
	Look, Bernie Sanders is wrong about a lot of things here when he says that we're the richest country in the history of the world, we can afford health care for everyone.
	Um, no.
	Okay, we are the richest country in the history of the world.
	We also have the most debt of any country in the history of the world.
	And that is not going to go away if you start paying for everybody's health care.
	And then you're going to have to ration everybody's health care because you can't have unlimited cost and unlimited coverage.
	That's not the way that works.
	But he's right about the fact that Republicans are ramming this thing through.
	I have one thing to say about this.
	If somebody is keeping a secret from you, unless it's a Valentine's Day gift from your significant other, it's going to be bad.
	Okay, there's never been a secret kept from you that ends up being a great secret when it comes out.
	So the fact that Republicans are doing all this behind closed doors should not be encouraging to a lot of Republicans who actually want to see Obamacare repealed.
	Apparently they're going to dump a lot of money into it, Obamacare style.
	That's not good for the Republicans.
	I'm going to talk a little bit more about that.
	Plus, the leftist attempt to shut down Amazon.com in just a second.
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	Plus, we're going to deconstruct the culture today.
	Lots of deconstructing of the culture.
	We talked Beatles and Katy Perry.
	All sorts of fun things today on deconstructing the culture.
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