Syrian dictator Bashar Assad uses chemical weapons again.
London talks about banning knives.
Yes, really.
And the Atlantic bans conservatives.
I'm Ben Shapiro, and this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So welcome back.
Here we are in our beautiful studios once again, and I could not be more pleased to be home, except for how I wish I were on vacation still.
But since I am not, we will have to do a show.
So I have a lot to talk about today.
Obviously, the possibility of war in the Middle East is heating up in pretty dramatic fashion after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on his own citizens.
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Okay, so obviously the big news over the weekend and the big news today is the situation in Syria.
So over the last few days, the dictator of Syria used chemical weapons against his own citizens once again, and the footage broke on TV.
Now, as you recall, the last time there was a public use of chemical weapons and the news broke on TV, President Trump lobbed a couple of missiles into Syria.
Something like 50 missiles were lobbed into Syria.
And a particular airbase was hit.
Well, it's unclear what exactly the United States is going to do as of yet, but already action has been taken.
It's been taken by Israel.
So Israel went in and knocked out a Syrian airbase and took down some of their Syrian air defenses.
And I'll give you all that information in just a second.
For those who don't know what Syrian chemical weapons attacks look like, they are just horrendous and horrific.
The footage looked something like this.
So you can see these children are being treated.
They're being washed off with water because they've all been doused with chemical weapons.
A lot of these folks have died of suffocation.
Something like 100 people died of suffocation.
I mean, these are children.
These are small children.
So obviously when you see images like this, it's absolutely horrific.
Israel lashed out yesterday.
So here's the story from the Associated Press.
Russia and the Syrian military have blamed Israel for a pre-dawn missile attack Monday on a Syrian air base that reportedly killed 14 people, including three Iranians, while international condemnation grew over a suspected poison gas attack over the weekend that was said to be carried out by the Syrian government.
Opposition activists said 40 people died in the chemical attack, blaming President Bashar Assad's forces.
The U.N.
Security Council planned to hold an emergency meeting Monday to discuss the chemical attack.
We should pull all of our money from that awful institution.
Russia sits on the UN Security Council.
Russia is the great sponsor state of the Syrian regime.
So nothing is going to happen in the UN Security Council.
We should pull all of our money from that awful institution.
If you want to know how terrible the UN is, understand that Syria is about to sit on the committee for the regulation of chemical and biological weapons.
No, that is not a joke.
That is a real, actual thing.
So before you start thinking that the U.N.
is going to step in and solve anything at all, recognize that the U.N.
is a gigantic joke.
And that is why it's up to sovereign states to do something about these sort of atrocities.
The timing of the strike on the airbase in the central Homs province, hours after President Trump said there would be a big price to pay for the chemical weapons attack, raised questions about whether Israel is acting alone or is a proxy for the United States.
Israel typically does not comment on its airstrikes in Syria.
It was the second such attack this year on the airbase.
The airbase is known as T-4, and it's where Iranian fighters are believed to be stationed.
According to Russia's defense ministry, two Israeli aircraft targeted the T-4 airbase, firing eight missiles.
It said Syria shot down five of them.
The other three landed in the western part of the base.
Syrian state TV quoted an unnamed military official saying that Israeli F-15 warplanes fired several missiles at T-4, and it gave no further details.
And of course, Israel's foreign ministry said nothing.
Since 2012, Israel has struck inside Syria more than 100 times, mostly targeting suspected weapons convoys destined for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has been fighting along Syrian governmental forces.
So this looks like this could be the prelude to larger action.
John McCain and one of the people, Senator McCain, has been pushing for larger action in Syria for a long time.
to topple the Syrian regime for years and years, and he suggested that we arm Syrian rebels.
One of the problems with that at the time is it wasn't clear who the Syrian rebels actually were.
Were they all kind, gentle, nice people, or were some of them associated with terrorist groups the way that some of the people we armed in Libya were?
That was unclear at the time.
It led to a lot of Republican pushback.
Here's what Senator McCain had to say.
He said President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria.
We didn't have a chance to talk about this last week, but Trump did say he wanted to withdraw from Syria and immediately, within days.
Bashar Assad was using chemical weapons on his own citizens.
That's why President Trump's rhetoric actually matters, and to pretend otherwise is foolish.
McCain continues, Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him, and emboldened by American inaction, Assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women, and children, this time in Douma.
Initial accounts show dozens of innocent civilians, including children, have been targeted by this vicious bombardment designed to burn and choke the human body and leave victims writhing in unspeakable pain.
Crimes against humanity have become Assad's trademarks in his relentless campaign against the people of Syria that has killed more than half a million people and forced 11 million people from their homes, according to John McCain.
President Trump was quick to call out Assad today, along with the Russian and Iranian governments on Twitter.
The question now is whether he will do anything about it.
The president responded decisively when Assad used chemical weapons last year.
He should do so again and demonstrate that Assad will pay a price for his war crimes.
To be sure, President Trump inherited bad options after years of inactions by his predecessor in Syria.
History will render a bitter judgment on America for that failure.
But no one should believe that we are out of options.
We can and should change course, starting with a comprehensive strategy that lays out clear objectives for our mission there.
Well, that is the big question, is what are the objectives going to be for the mission there?
Because foreign policy isolationists, people like Ann Coulter or Rand Paul, they would say we have no interest in Syria whatsoever, so terrible things are happening there, awful humanitarian crisis, but Humanitarian crises are happening all over the world.
It is not the job of the United States to stop every humanitarian crisis.
It all depends on the sort of blood and treasure America will have to expend in order to stop those humanitarian crises.
Well, that's obviously true.
We have to calculate each individual situation on its own.
But the situation on Syria has fundamentally changed in the several years since President Obama allowed Bashar Assad to get away with his chemical weapons attack.
Here's what President Trump tweeted after the chemical weapons attack.
He tweeted, quote, So he's now gotten a nickname for Assad, which is entirely appropriate in this case.
Big price.
Okay, all of that is all of that is true.
The question becomes, okay, what is going to happen next?
Well, Trump's national security advisor, well, his security advisor, rather, Tom Bossert, he was on national TV on Sunday, and he said, listen, all the options are on the table here.
This is one of those issues on which every nation, all peoples have all agreed and have agreed since World War II is an unacceptable practice.
So is it possible there will be another missile attack?
I wouldn't take anything off the table.
These are horrible photos.
We're looking into the attack at this point.
The State Department put out a statement last night and the President's Senior National Security Cabinet have been talking with him and with each other all throughout the evening and this morning and myself included.
So one of the things that's amazing about all of this is that people on the left are already critical of Trump.
Trump inherited an awful situation here.
Tommy Veeder, who is just a dolt, he used to drive a van for Obama, then suddenly ended up as a national security counselor for President Obama after driving a van.
And now, I guess that he is, and now I guess that he is doing Pod Save America type stuff.
Well, he tweeted out that President Trump inherited a bad situation.
Well, Tommy, who did he inherit that from?
Weren't you there?
I mean, all of you were there at the time.
Now, there were those of us who opposed President Obama's quote-unquote pinprick strike in Syria.
The reason being that if you send a missile into Syria and then you do nothing else, you actually embolden the Iranians and you embolden the Syrians and you embolden the Russians.
Nobody expected that President Obama was going to give away the store to the Russians.
If you recall back to 2013, Bashar Assad used chemical weapons.
Barack Obama then drew a red line in the sand.
Here is President Obama back then drawing a red line.
We have been very clear.
To the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.
That would change my calculus.
That would change my equation.
Okay, so he made that statement, actually, in August of 2012, and then, of course, Bashar Assad immediately used chemical weapons, like, within a couple of months.
And then, Barack Obama did something really unexpected.
First he said, maybe I'll throw a missile in there, but you know what?
I need congressional approval.
Now, that was obviously a lie, because he didn't have congressional approval for his Libya action.
He just went ahead and did it.
But he said, I'll throw it to Congress.
And that went nowhere.
And then he said, you know what?
I'll let the Russians take over.
The Russians can come in and they will disarm the Syrians.
So Barack Obama and Susan Rice both came out.
Susan Rice, then the National Security Advisor, she came out and she said, don't worry.
Syria's chemical weapons have been removed.
They're gone.
Syria has no more chemical weapons.
Obama was triumphalist about this.
He said, everything is better.
There will be no more chemical weapons attacks.
Everything is under control.
Here is Barack Obama and Susan Rice.
This is back in 2013.
Think about what we've done these last eight years without firing a shot.
We've eliminated Syria's declared chemical weapons program.
All of these steps have helped keep us safe and helped keep our troops safe.
Those are the result of diplomacy.
If we don't have strong efforts there, the more you will be called upon to clean up after The failure of diplomacy.
We were able to find a solution that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished.
Okay, and Tommy Vietor said the same thing.
Well, you know, we got rid of a lot of the chemical weapons, right, except for the ones that he's using on the civilians and has continued to use on the civilians.
So well done, Susan Rice.
It is amazing.
All these people who came into the Obama administration proclaiming that it was a new day for American foreign policy and they're going to act in the humanitarian interest of the people of Syria and then proceeded to allow that entire country to descend into utter and absolute chaos.
Now, there's a civil war going on and that wasn't Barack Obama's fault.
It was Barack Obama's fault that he decided to hand over all of these security concerns to the Russians.
The Russians obviously had nefarious purposes there.
All they care about is propping up Bashar Assad, and all of this raises the question, Which is, OK, what should the United States do now?
And that is a serious and open question.
You know, it is amazing, again, how badly the Obama administration blew it.
This is not on President Trump, but now Trump is the president.
So that raises a question as to where we go from here.
In a second, I'm going to answer that question for you, or at least give you maybe some some concerns that I have about full scale military intervention, as well as some possibilities on what we can do in Syria right now.
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What exactly should we do from here?
That is the big question in all of this.
And one of the things that has changed, there are a lot of people like me who back during the Obama administration said, this is a direct quote in 2013, In other words, whatever you do has to have real impact.
You can't do what Obama wanted to do and take a half-assed action and then hope that everything is going to be better.
That doesn't work.
And you can't hand over power to the Russian government, whose only interest is in continued propagation of the domination of Bashar Assad and the continued domination of the Iranian regime across the Middle East.
And things have changed radically since 2013 because of a couple of the deals that the Obama administration cut.
Remember, the situation in 2012-2013 was a lot simpler.
Russia was not running Syria at that point, and Iran was still under American sanction.
Well, because of Barack Obama, Iran now has a lot of money to play with, and they have expanded their terrorism outreach all across the Middle East.
Suddenly there's a swath of territory, all the way from Iran to Lebanon, that is dominated by Iran.
That's dominated by Iran, and that includes Syria.
This is why Israel was the one that actually struck out yesterday at the targets in Syria.
They've been striking out at targets in Syria, as I say, over a hundred times they've struck at targets in Syria since 2012, because Syria is being used as a thoroughfare for the world's worst weapons being put in the hands of terrorists, people like Hamas, people like Hezbollah.
Yadlin Amos is a retired general in the Israeli army, the executive director of Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies.
And he has a really interesting tweet thread about what happened last night when Israel apparently struck T4, which is a Syrian airbase.
He said, the reported strike last night in T4, Syria is part of the two colliding vectors.
Iranian determination to entrench itself in Syria and Israeli resolve to prevent it.
This was the first reported airstrike since February 10th incidents.
The colliding vectors were recognized months ago in the Israeli national security strategy and Syrian and Iranian responses cannot be ruled out.
The strikes timing drove Syria to first attribute it to the US as a response to Assad's use of chemical weapons against civilians in Douma.
However, the US has denied responsibility while the target hit is connected to Iran and not to chemical weapons.
It is not from T4 Air Force Base that the CW dropping aircraft came, while reports of Iranian casualties are a strong testament.
That being said, a strike may well serve two purposes, promoting two objectives in a single step, preventing Iranian entrenchment in Syria with advanced weaponry, and sending a moral message that using CW to commit mass murder is not acceptable.
To that end, even if it does not take responsibility for the strike last night, it is important that Israel make its voice heard denouncing the use of chemical weapons and their use in Syria awaits a U.S.
and Western response, and one cannot rule out the possibility of a U.S.
strike on regime targets.
So, here's what's happening.
This has now become a grand strategic game.
This is no longer a situation in which everything is contained.
Okay, that's the reality of the situation in Syria right now.
This is not a containable situation.
Russia is involved.
Iran is involved.
This is now a proxy war about who is going to control this entire swath of land in the Middle East.
That means Saudi Arabia is involved.
It means Jordan is involved.
It means Egypt is involved.
It means Israel is involved.
If World War III breaks out in Syria, World War III will break out because Barack Obama allowed Syria to become a tinderbox by pulling American troops out of Iraq, by allowing Iran to run roughshod through Iraq, and by allowing Iran to extend its domination all the way to Lebanon.
So what exactly should we do?
We should do a couple of things.
If we have the capacity, we should knock out as much of the Syrian Air Force as we possibly can.
We should knock down as many of their anti-aircraft missiles as we possibly can.
It's probably impossible to decapitate the regime with significant amounts of boot on the ground.
Whatever we can do from the air, we should do from the air.
And we should also ensure that there are safe havens for Syrian rebels and people who want to escape the Assad regime and those should be protected by a coalition force led by the United States The reason being that there have to be safe spaces for all of these Syrian refugees Otherwise, they're just gonna come into the West otherwise they're just going to escape across the Mediterranean and into Europe or they will come to the United States and That is something that a lot of Trump supporters are not fond of either so either they're gonna stay there in safe places that we help set up or they will be killed or they will escape but
Should we go in and make this a full-scale land war?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Because again, what's America's interest here?
America has two real interests.
Checking Russian ambitions?
Well, three interests, okay?
Humanitarian, but that exists all across the globe.
Checking Russian interest in Syria.
Russia wants to ensure that Bashar Assad and the Iranian regime retain power and gain power in that region, which makes it more likely that war breaks out.
And stopping the growth of the Iranian regime.
Israel and Saudi Arabia, by the way, are happy to take the lead here.
Right?
Israel obviously is already taking the lead here.
Israel isn't going to wait.
So, the fact that the United States can mobilize a commitment behind Israeli-led action in Syria would be a good thing.
If we have allies who are willing to do this, there's no reason the United States should have to lead the way.
But again, the U.S.
is going to have to be involved.
That means setting up these safer places for Syrian refugees to go.
It means neutering the ability of the Assad regime to use chemical weapons.
And it means preventing them from making more territorial encroachments into rebel-held areas.
And that means providing actual armed support to whatever Syrian rebels are left who have not been murdered already by ISIS and the Assad regime and arming those people who are left in order to resist the Assad regime.
This now has implications far beyond the borders of Syria, and we are going to pay a price for it in terms of money and treasure and the possibility of additional terrorism and the spread of chemical weapons if we take a fully hands-off approach, as some of the more isolationist members of the Republican Party seem to be promoting.
Okay, well, meanwhile, there's a bunch of other stuff going on.
Among those other things, apparently, President Trump is intent on launching a trade war.
The stock market has been up and down, basically assuming that Yeah, President Trump is not serious about the trade war or that he is serious about the trade war.
It's not clear where he is on the trade war, but it's interesting to see how many members of the Trump administration are trying to kind of shift his thinking on trade.
Let's talk a little bit about where he is.
So a couple of Trump's officials went on TV over the weekend to talk about President Trump's initiation of a trade war against China.
He obviously has set tariffs extraordinarily high in particular sectors of the economy.
And there are two takes on tariffs.
A take number one from the Trump administration on tariffs is that tariffs are a tool that is to be used as often as possible because they're good for the United States.
We have a trade deficit, and the only way to rectify that trade imbalance is to put tariffs on foreign products, thereby forcing American citizens to buy American and lowering the amount of money that we are exporting to China, for example.
Okay, that is idiotic economically for reasons that I've suggested many times on this program.
The reality is that taxing American citizens does not make American citizens more wealthy.
And all a tariff is, is an indirect tax on American citizens for the benefit of certain American businesses.
So if there is a steelmaker who is less efficient than another steelmaker that is located abroad, and you are forcing American citizens to patronize the American steelmaker, you are taking money out of my pocket and giving it to another business that is just A form of redistributionism.
It's a tax and spend program.
That's all a tariff is.
It's a domestic tax and spend program.
And that does not make America any wealthier.
Now, it is another question if you are using trade in order to punish bad regimes, for example.
We've done that with South Africa in the past.
We have done that with Iran.
We did that.
That's what sanctions were for.
It was essentially a tariff on, an impossibly high tariff on Iran was essentially what a sanction is in policy.
So there's using it for security reasons.
There's also using it in order to try and jog other countries to lower their tariffs.
So let's say China has a bunch of tariffs on American products and we say, listen, you lower your tariffs, we'll lower our tariffs.
But if you're going to tariff our products, we will tariff yours and our market is bigger than yours.
Right, then that may be worthwhile also.
Now, the problem here is that Trump is a devotee of the first kind of thinking, that tariffs are universally good.
A lot of the people who surround him are people who think that tariffs can be strategically useful.
And I think what they are trying to do inside the Trump administration is manipulate the president into using tariffs as a targeted method of lowering tariffs elsewhere or pushing security change.
And what Trump actually wants is he just likes the tariffs generally.
So you can see this from some of his officials.
Steve Mnuchin is one of them.
Mnuchin came out and he said, listen, maybe there'll be a trade war, but it'll be okay.
What Trump's officials know better than anybody, the people who surround Trump, is that there's one word Trump does not hear, and that word is no.
If you say to President Trump no about anything, there is a 100% guarantee he will do that thing.
It does not matter what the thing is.
Literally, they told him, don't look into a solar eclipse without your sunglasses.
And the president of the United States took off his sunglasses and looked into a solar eclipse.
Because if you tell him no, he's got the same reaction as both my kids.
Who are you?
Who are you?
So, Steve Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow both have been avoiding telling him no.
What they're trying to do instead is, I think, convince him that it's a qualified no.
Yes, Mr. President, that's brilliant policy, but it would be best if you used it in this particular way.
So I'll explain what they're doing in just a second.
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Okay, so here are the members of the Trump administration trying to convince President Trump that a trade war might not be a bad idea, while saying, well, okay, maybe there'll be a trade war, because they don't actually want to say no to the President.
Here's Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary.
I don't expect there will be a trade war.
It could be.
But I don't I don't expect it at all.
But the president is willing to make sure we are free and fair trade, as you've seen his tweet already this morning.
And again, he has a very close relationship with President Xi.
And we'll continue to discuss these issues with them.
Okay, so he is soft-pedaling it because, again, if you say no to Trump, it is more likely that he wants to trade war on everybody.
Larry Kudlow is sort of doing the same thing.
He's the new head of the National Economic Council and a free trader.
He says, listen, we have to do this, but listen to his rationale for why these tariffs are necessary.
It is not because the tariffs are a great idea just in and of themselves.
It's because he thinks that they are a useful tool for lowering tariffs elsewhere.
My message essentially is, look, we have to do this.
We have to get China to change its behavior.
It's been two decades and they're still stealing our intellectual property.
They're still forcing technology turnovers from our businesses to them.
They've still got high tariffs.
They've still got trade barriers.
They still have market closing instead of market opening.
So that's got to change.
Trump is doing the Lord's work.
Okay, so Kudlow is basically saying the tariffs are a point of leverage.
It's not that tariffs are just a wonderfully innate, great thing.
President Trump, however, tends to think that they are a great thing.
I hope that Kudlow obviously prevails.
I hope that Mnuchin prevails.
I hope that his team allows Trump to recognize the reality about trade, which is that tariffs can be a useful tool for leveraging things from other people, but they're not good, innately, for the United States of America.
Okay, meanwhile, in other news, late last week, We can get a chance to comment on it.
There's an amazing story.
Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of The Atlantic.
Jeffrey Goldberg is also a schmuck.
So Jeffrey Goldberg is a guy who was essentially a tool of the Obama administration in pushing out their Iran lies.
Every time they had a piece of propaganda, they went out to Jeffrey Goldberg because Jeffrey Goldberg was their boy.
Jeffrey Goldberg was the guy who was going to say what they wanted.
Well, now he's the editor of The Atlantic.
And a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago, he did something that Looked a little more reasonable.
It looked a little smarter.
He said he wanted to diversify the opinion pages over at The Atlantic, and they hired former National Review columnist Kevin Williamson.
Now, Kevin is a real iconoclast.
Kevin is the kind of guy who says, I would say, wild things on a regular basis.
He's a tremendous writer.
I mean, a really tremendous writer.
But all of his language is extraordinarily strong.
He always takes very strong positions, some of them on bizarre issues.
And one of the issues that people had known about for a long time that Kevin had spoken about was that he is not generally in favor of the death penalty.
He doesn't like the death penalty and he would avoid the death penalty.
But if the death penalty were to remain applicable in the United States, he believes that women should be punished for abortion because if abortion is homicide, then women should be punished for it.
And if women were to be punished for it and the death penalty were still in play, then he presumes that women would get the death penalty.
He had tweeted about that before.
And the Atlantic fully knew about this, right?
Jeffrey Goldberg knew about it, everyone on Twitter knew about this.
It was one of Williamson's weirder positions.
Now, the general pro-life position on this issue is that you wouldn't actually punish the woman for the abortion, you punish the abortion doctors for the abortion, because women who are obtaining abortions generally are doing so because they do not have the proper mens rea.
They don't actually think of it as killing their own baby, and so they don't actually know what it is they're doing, whereas a doctor full well knows what he's doing.
This has always been the pro-life position in the general pro-life community.
Williamson takes an even stronger position than that, obviously.
Well, he tweeted something out about it, and then they discovered that on a podcast he talked a little bit about it.
So here's what it sounded like when Kevin Williamson, this new Atlantic columnist, had talked about this on a podcast with Charlie Cook, a National Review podcast called Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
And someone challenged me on my views of abortion, saying if you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, treating it as a homicide.
And I do support that.
In fact, as I wrote, what I have in mind is hanging.
But yeah, so when I was talking about, yeah, I would totally go with that.
Okay, so what he meant there, of course, is that, as a thought experiment, if you were going to have hanging as the legal method of death in all of these various areas—Williamson, by nature, is against the death penalty, by the way—then he would say that that applies to abortion.
Now, do I think that's a good argument?
No.
Do I agree with Williamson?
No.
The Atlantic fired him for this, okay?
And they issued a statement talking about how his views were essentially unacceptable.
Here is what Goldberg said, quote, the language he used in this podcast and in my conversations with him in recent days made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views.
Okay, well, you didn't know that?
It was on his Twitter account.
And I assumed that Jeffrey Goldberg had called him up about it, and Goldberg had said, do you believe this?
And William said, yeah, I believe this.
Well, as the editor of the website, one of the things that we do is we hire a bunch of people with widely disparate views.
They're all on the right because I'm the editor of the website, and it's a right-wing website.
It's a conservative website.
Over at Daily Wire.
If people hold opinions, like pro-choice opinions, for example, they do not appear on our website.
There may be pro-choice writers who write for us.
I really don't know.
But I can edit what goes on my website.
Well, The Atlantic certainly could have done the same thing with Williamson if they don't like this particular opinion.
And he said, listen, I want to write a long article about why hanging is the proper response to abortion.
And The Atlantic said, listen, we don't want that in our pages.
That's their prerogative.
But firing him preemptively for a thought crime, for a view that he had not expressed in the pages of The Atlantic, is a pretty amazing thing.
And Williamson has a lot of very strong positions.
And what this really is, is that the left believes that any right-winger, it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't matter if it were Williamson, or Bret Stephens, or me, or Ross Douthat, it does not matter.
Anybody who is on the right, Barry Weiss is not even on the right.
If you are not of the hardcore left, then the left sees you as an improper human being.
They will not allow you to appear in their pages on a regular basis, or if they do, they will do so extraordinarily grudgingly.
And the Atlantic was considered a more moderate sort of publication.
There are more moderate publications that try to do this, but they are becoming fewer and far between.
And just to point out that the Atlantic is not consistent about their standards for public rhetoric, the Atlantic champions the fact that they are the home of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about 9-11 first responders that they were, quote unquote, not human to me.
That is a direct quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The fact is that The Atlantic has given glowing profiles to people like Peter Singer.
Peter Singer is a quote-unquote ethicist at Princeton who forcibly advocates for the murder of children outside the womb.
He says if a woman wants to kill a baby after it is born, that is okay.
So just to be straight about this, Peter Singer says killing a baby after it's born is okay because babies don't have an awareness of their time and place in the universe because they're stupid.
And so you can kill them, right?
This is Peter Singer's stated position on genocide against small children, against babies.
That is worthy of some sort of decent profile in the Atlantic, but Kevin Williamson is too harsh on people who actually kill their babies, and this is considered something just egregious and wrong and terrible.
It's pretty amazing, and it demonstrates the extremism of the left.
And in a second, I'm gonna explain to you why it is that this has some pretty dramatic ramifications for the entire political discourse.
Because, you know, Williamson may be an iconoclastic figure, you may not know who he is, you may not care about the Atlantic, but this is an indicator of where our political discourse is going, and it is nowhere good.
I have a lot of thoughts on this.
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Alrighty, so I want to talk a little bit more about Kevin Williamson here.
So here is why this is a problem.
You may think that Williamson's crazy.
You may hate his viewpoints.
You may think that Williamson is garbage.
Kevin Williamson, first of all, is a very good writer.
Second of all, Kevin Williamson is wildly anti-Trump.
When I say he is wildly anti-Trump, I don't mean he just opposed Trump in the election.
I mean that he wrote a column when Trump announced called The Ape Descends the Escalator.
I mean that this is a guy who in his columns has called Donald Trump's sons oudé and cousé.
OK, he is not subtle about his dislike for President Trump.
And even he was not acceptable to the left because he has he has a view on abortion that is outside the mainstream.
And as I say, leftist views on abortion, which are inherently outside the mainstream, those are not outside the mainstream.
According to The Atlantic, they are just fine.
Again, Peter Singer is probably just fine for The Atlantic.
But Kevin Williamson is not acceptable.
What does this mean?
What this means that the left is doing something really, really damaging to American discourse.
They're shrinking the Overton window.
The Overton window, it's a term that I believe was originally used by the VP of a think tank.
It was named after him.
The Overton window means the range of acceptable discourse.
Right, so in any conversation, there's a range of acceptable discourse.
There are people who you say are just not acceptable to talk to.
You have people who, for example, say that black people are innately inferior, right?
Those are people who are just not worth talking to.
That is not acceptable discourse.
Now, this does not mean they don't have a right to say what they want to say.
They have a right to say whatever they want to say.
It's the First Amendment.
Welcome to America.
That's fine.
But I am not a moral relativist, and I don't believe that just because you have a right to say something means that you should say it or that everything that is said is equal in value.
So there's something called the Overton window, which is the window of acceptable discourse or useful discourse.
But what the left has done is they've shrunk the Overton window down to about pinprick size.
So the Overton window is now the space of opinion between Bernie Sanders and maybe Kamala Harris.
That's basically the level of acceptable discourse.
Between Ta-Nehisi Coates' intersectional leftism and Bernie Sanders' socialist leftism, everything in between there is cool.
But if you're outside that Overton window, Then, you are unacceptable.
So, what does this mean?
Well, it means that the left has now separated discourse not into three categories, but into two.
So, here are the three categories I have for speech.
There's the acceptable.
There's the unacceptable, right outside the Overton window.
And then, there's the acceptable stuff, but I disagree with it.
And there's lots of that stuff.
I'd say most discourse is stuff that I disagree with, but is within the Overton window.
What the left has done instead is they've said, there's the stuff we agree with, And then there's everything else, and everything else is unacceptable.
So that means that Kevin Williamson is now a deplorable.
It means that I am a deplorable.
It means that Barry Weiss, a columnist for the New York Times, who I'm sure voted for Hillary Clinton, is a deplorable.
It means that people like Brett Stevens and Ross Douthat, these people are deplorable.
It means that...
Again, Sam Harris is deplorable.
Sam Harris and I disagree about a wide variety of things, but Sam Harris once said on national television that Islam is a more dangerous religion than Christianity, and suddenly he was an other.
Brett Weinstein, right?
A leftist, socialist college professor at Evergreen State College who refused to not teach on a day that the students said, we only want non-white teachers teaching.
He showed up anyway and wanted to teach.
You know, that guy was declared an deplorable because he was outside the acceptable range of windows, right?
He was outside the acceptable range of opinions.
So what happens when you do this?
Well, what happens when you do this is it means that you are lumping in a bunch of people you disagree with with unacceptable bigots.
Right?
So now Kevin Williamson is in the same category, according to the left, as Richard Spencer.
I'm in the same category as Richard Spencer.
You wonder why I get labeled a Nazi by idiots on campus who don't know the first thing about me?
Because I am not agreeing with them.
Therefore, I am a Nazi.
It is that simple.
I am not agreeing with them.
Therefore, I am part of this basket of deplorables.
I am now outside the Overton window, and I must be excluded from the range of acceptable discourse.
This is why President Trump is president.
This is why, for a short period of time, the alt-right was in the ascendance.
The reason is because this leaves people who have now been thrown out of the acceptable range with a choice.
We can either say, listen, We still think there are three categories.
Right?
Not two, three.
We still think that you may disagree with us, but we're in the acceptable category, and so we refuse to allow you to lump us in with people like Richard Spencer.
We refuse to allow you to label us a deplorable like some of the other people you're labeling deplorables.
Right?
You can do that, or you can say, listen, screw you guys.
You've now labeled everyone a Nazi.
So if you're labeling me a Nazi, I don't know if... I know I'm not a Nazi.
Maybe the other people you're labeling Nazis also are not Nazis.
Maybe all these bad people who are already out here, maybe they're out here just because you don't like them.
Maybe you ought to give their views a second look.
Because if you're labeling me the same way you're labeling them, if I get hit with the same category that they're being hit with, then how do I know that you were honest in your original appraisal of those people?
And so there's a real temptation on the part of people who have been thrown out of the acceptable category by the left to simply band together and say, listen, we're all in this together because we hate you guys.
Because you guys threw us out.
We're out here in the cold.
You threw us out of the cabin.
And now it's snowing.
So we can either argue amongst ourselves in the snow, or we can all band together and we can try to break back into the cabin, right?
That's sort of the idea that's being pushed here.
Now, the moral thing to do would say, listen, We're going to try to break in the cabin without the people we think are bad.
We have our own independent viewpoints.
I have my own independent viewpoint.
And you can try to throw me out of the range of acceptable discourse, but I refuse to accept your label.
And I refuse to accept that you are labeling me in the same way that you label a bunch of people who really are disgusting and who really do have disgusting views.
But the temptation is going to be always and ever To simply say, listen, you've thrown us all out.
Alliances of convenience.
If you've declared war on us, well, we're not going to play by the Marcus of Queensberry rules.
You declare war on us, we'll take the allies we can get and we'll fight back against you.
The left has been counting on the virtue of conservatives to keep them from making common cause with truly garbage people.
But that makes no sense.
If you call conservatives garbage people and then you say, yes, but you really should continue to separate yourself off from the actual garbage people.
You can't have it both ways.
If we're garbage, then you have to expect us not to act virtuous.
You want to know why we're entering into a tribal routine here?
Why we're getting closer and closer to political tribalism that is going to end poorly for all involved?
The reason is because the left has created the anti-left tribe.
That's what's happened.
This is why Donald Trump was successful.
He didn't campaign as a conservative.
He campaigned as an anti-left fighter.
And a lot of people said, OK, fine.
Well, if he's against them, I'm with him.
This is how you generate that.
If the left really wanted to have a serious conversation, they wanted to prevent this sort of tribalism, all they have to do is recognize that there are people with whom they disagree, that they will still allow to be part of the discourse.
And I don't mean people like David Frum, who pretend to disagree with them, but really agree with them on a broad swath of policies.
If they continue along these lines, they're really cruising for a bruising.
There's going to be a backlash and it's going to be uncontrollable.
And they're not going to like the impact.
They're already not liking the impact because the backlash is already underway.
OK, so now I want to talk a little bit about some insanity that's happening in Great Britain because this is truly crazy.
So apparently there's been a wild upswing in the amount of murder in London.
Well, that's not a tremendous shock, considering that the demographics of London have changed, that the policing in London has changed wildly, that the mayor of London City, Khan, is really terrible at his job.
But the murder rate in London now outstrips the murder rate in New York, which is pretty incredible, actually.
The murder rate in Britain has always been extraordinarily low.
This is why when people say, well, you know, you ban guns in Britain, that's why the murder rate is low.
The murder rate was low before the bans on guns.
And the murder rate in Britain was always quite low.
But here is what it says, according to Today Online.
On Thursday, April 5th, five teenagers were stabbed in an hour and a half before sunset, including a boy of 13.
All these attacks took place in London over the past week, part of an apparent spike in violence in the British capital.
After a long period of steady declines in violent crime, the city has averaged in excess of three killings a week so far this year.
More than 50 people have been killed in London since the start of 2018.
The total for all of 2017, a year when the city suffered multiple deadly terrorist attacks, was 116.
Criminologists have expressed caution about drawing conclusions from only a few months' figures, but if the uptick continues, it will amount to London's highest level of violence in more than a decade.
A year with 200 homicides for a city of 8.5 million people would be far from a shocking high in the U.S.
New York City had 292 murders last year, according to the 2018 police commissioner's report.
That was a record low, but Right now, London's murder rate is outstripping the murder rate in New York City, which is, again, a pretty incredible thing.
So I do love what they're now talking about in London.
They're now talking about banning knives.
No joke.
So they're using the exact same logic they used about guns and now they're applying it to knives.
So Sadiq Khan has announced a broad new knife control policy designed to keep quote-unquote weapons of war out of the hands of Londoners looking to cause others harm.
The UK Parliament is considering bills that restrict the manufacture and purchase of kitchen cooking knives.
Because they have points on them.
Because they're pointy things.
So I guess machetes would still be okay, like the one that that guy used a couple of years ago, that Muslim terrorist used to chop down an actual British soldier on the streets of London?
That'll still be okay, because as we all know, machetes aren't really dangerous.
Like from every horror film, we know machetes aren't dangerous.
Only knives are dangerous.
But they're going to start determining how exactly knives are distributed.
The tough immediate measures involve an incredible police crackdown, a ban on home deliveries of knives and acid, and expanding law enforcement stop and search powers so the police may stop anyone they believe to be a threat or planning a knife or acid attack.
Khan announced Friday the city has created a, quote, violent crime task force of 120 officers tasked with rooting out knife-wielding individuals in public spaces and is pumping nearly $50 million into the Metropolitan Police Department so they can better arm themselves against knife attacks.
He's also empowering the Met Police to introduce targeted patrols with extra stop and search powers for areas worst affected, according to a statement.
Now, what's really kind of hilarious here is that one of the reasons that the crime rate is going up is because Khan is responsible for, according to Emily Zanotti of the Daily Wire, for decreasing the number of stop-and-searches, having previously declared the tactic racist and potentially Islamophobic.
So in other words, he got rid of stop-and-frisk in London, saying that it was targeting too many young Muslim guys, and then the crime rate went up, and now he's going to target everyone.
It's not really clear what they're going to use in London to cut their food anymore if you can't get a home delivery of a knife.
And if you're not allowed to carry it home, how do you actually get the knife from the department store home?
Parliament is set to take up heavy knife control legislation when it resumes this week.
The UK government is expected to introduce a ban on online knife sales and home knife deliveries.
So now you have to go to a store to purchase a knife.
Maybe you have to have a license to purchase a knife.
You have to be a culinary specialist.
Of course, that won't really stop anything, since most of these acid attacks that have been occurring are occurring among people who are late teenagers or older.
London has seen a dramatic uptick in murder rates, of course.
of being used as a person-to-person weapon and banned sales of caustic materials to anyone under the age of 18.
Of course, that won't really stop anything since most of these asset attacks that have been occurring are occurring among people who are late teenagers or older.
London has seen a dramatic uptick in murder rates, of course.
So again, it ain't about the knives, folks.
Maybe you ought to look at the people who are wielding the knives.
Maybe you ought to be looking at the people who are actually performing the acid attacks.
But since we're not allowed to do that, we're going to crack down on knives.
And then we'll crack down on fists.
And then we'll crack down on any blunt object in your home.
You don't have to be allowed to have blunt objects.
Soon, we'll end up all sitting in blank rooms with no furniture.
Because anything can be used as... Maybe pillows?
But no, we can use pillows for suffocation.
So eventually, we're all just walking around like John Travolta in the Bubble Boy, because that presumably will stop crime, not actually targeting criminals.
Pretty amazing stuff, but demonstrates what happens when an entire civilization loses their mind and stops targeting criminality, and starts instead pretending that the tools of criminality are more important than the criminals themselves.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I like.
And then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
So, on the way home yesterday in the car, it was a long drive, and so everyone was asleep, and so that's a good time to listen to musical theater, because you actually get a story told to you.
Well, one of my favorite musicals is, of course, Pippin, and one of the best numbers from Pippin is Corner of the Sky.
Here's what it sounds like.
And the new Broadway production is just tremendous.
I believe it's on tour now.
If it's not, then it was recently.
But the production is really, really good.
It's not for children, obviously.
It's PG-13 and up.
But this song is just great.
Everything has its season.
Everything has its time.
Show me a reason and I'll soon show you a rhyme.
Cats fit on the windowsill.
Children fit in the snow.
So why do I feel I don't fit in anywhere I go?
Rivers belong where they can ramble.
So this show won Best Tony, Best Musical Tony in the 1970s.
And it's really first rate.
One of the things that's fascinating about this show is that the whole show is about a guy who has these wide world aspirations for changing the world and making a dent in the world and all this stuff.
And it's about him learning that You can.
Maybe the best way to make a dent in the world is just by living a life where you bring up your wife and kids.
That's a pretty amazing message that comes out of Broadway, particularly because Broadway is so far to the left, but it's an important message nonetheless, so check out Pippin if you ever have a chance.
It's really great.
OK, a couple of other things that I like.
So apparently, Bill Maher over the weekend defended Laura Ingraham.
Laura Ingraham, of course, was victim of a boycott by a bunch of leftists because she said something quasi-mean to a Parkland student, which you're not allowed to do.
And Bill Maher comes out and he says, listen, I don't like Laura Ingraham, but this is stupid.
Good for Bill Maher.
I want to defend Laura Ingraham.
I know that sounds ridiculous.
But it has to do with the Parkland kids and guns and free speech.
Now, I think those kids did a great thing.
They put this issue in a place.
We've never had it before, and I wish them success.
But, you know, if you're going to be out there in the arena and make yourselves the champions of this cause, people are going to have the right, I think, to argue back.
Here's what she she tweeted David Hogg rejected by four colleges because he put that up there because of course we have to share everything To which he applied and whined about it Okay Maybe you shouldn't say that about a 17 year old But again, he is in the arena and then he calls for a boycott of her sponsors now what what is Really?
Is that American?
Let me explain something.
And he complains about bullying?
That's bullying.
I have been the victim of a boycott.
I lost a job once.
It is wrong.
You shouldn't do this by team.
You should do it by principle.
Good for Maher.
Good for Maher.
I mean, what Maher is saying here is exactly correct.
And again, you know, Maher's one of these guys who knows because he has been thrown out of the left for his failures to abide by the window of acceptable discourse, right?
He said some things the left doesn't like on occasion, particularly about Islam, and this has made him a target of the left.
The more the left throws people out and calls for boycotts against them, the more they are destroying their own credibility, even with the people who supposedly like them.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, thing that I hate, number one.
So there's a story out of Bradenton, Florida, and this is supposed to be some sort of grand civil rights issue.
Apparently, there's a 17-year-old named Lizzie Martin, and she was told by the principal of her school or the school district that she needed to put Band-Aids on her nipples.
Why?
Because she showed up to school in a gray Calvin Klein shirt without wearing any bra.
And so they tried to make her put on a second t-shirt, and then they said, well, maybe you should just cover up your nipples.
And she said, we went to the clinic, and the nurse gave me band-aids in there, and she told me to X out my nipples.
She followed the command, saying she felt she had no other options.
Her mother told the outlet that the school dean made a big deal about it.
She said this was a shirt that was unisex, that was too big, that was not form-fitting.
She said there was a double standard, that a male with excessive breast tissue wouldn't be asked to confine the movement of his chest.
Okay, this is the stupidest crap ever.
Okay, she's a 17-year-old girl.
She's in a class with a bunch of 17-year-old boys.
If you really believe there's a 17-year-old girl with half a grain of intelligence on planet Earth who doesn't know exactly what she's doing when she wears no bra to class with a bunch of 17-year-old boys, you got another thing coming.
This doesn't mean boys should sexually harass.
Obviously not.
It doesn't mean that boys I should say anything or do anything to her.
None of that is the case.
But if you think it's not distracting to boys when there are girls walking around with their nipples showing, you're out of your mind.
Are we supposed to pretend that human nature doesn't exist now?
Is this what we are supposed to pretend?
And are we supposed to pretend that this 17-year-old girl doesn't know that human nature exists?
Are we supposed to pretend this is a thing?
Most schools have dress codes.
The reason they have dress codes is precisely to avoid this sort of situation where boys are being distracted by girls and girls are being distracted by boys.
Honestly, you want the best thing for girls in school?
Really, there have been studies to prove this.
The best things for girls in school are sex-segregated classes.
When I went to high school, I went to an Orthodox Jewish high school, there was a boys' school, there was a girls' school.
Girls in sex-segregated classes do better.
They do better.
And it's not for the benefit of the boys that this happens.
Girls do better.
Why?
Because girls have this weird idea that boys want them to be stupid and sexualized, and so they play to those stereotypes.
But if they're with a bunch of girls, then they're just there for the academics.
But again, if a 17-year-old girl wears something completely inappropriate to school and she's distracting the other students, I fail to see how this is completely, like, what the school district did that was so unbelievably wrong here.
They probably shouldn't have told her to go put, like, band-aids on her nipples, but they should have called up her parents and said, you know, mom, bring her a sweatshirt.
Or they should have had one of the teachers say, okay, here's a sweatshirt, put it on the sweatshirt.
But, again, like, if you're going to take this logic to its full extreme, presumably what you would say is that she should walk around topless, and that should be no problem.
Everybody should basically say, okay, no problem.
You know what?
Listen, if a boy walked around topless, then you wouldn't have a problem with that?
Yes, because boys and girls are different.
First of all, you wouldn't want boys walking around topless either, but to pretend that a dude walking around topless is the same thing as a woman walking around topless in American society is fully crazy.
It's fully crazy.
But I guess we have to completely pretend that, again, reality doesn't exist and human nature doesn't exist and so it's some sort of grand sin that the school district thought that a girl should actually cover up her nipples in a class with boys.
What stupidity.
What stupidity.
Okay, other things that I hate.
Last week, I made it sound like the Stephon Clark case in Sacramento was a little more clear-cut than it was, and I want to correct myself on that, because I think that it's important that we get as much of the truth about this as possible.
So here is the actual tape of what happened with Stephon Clark.
So here is, first of all, the introduction to that tape.
Police responded to reports of a broken window.
David French over at National Review describes it, and when you watch all the released footage, You can see the initial response is pretty calm and casual.
Two officers politely knock on a door.
They ask permission to search a backyard.
They find nothing.
And then they walk back to the street.
Meanwhile, a helicopter overhead spots a person trying to break into a car and then jumping a fence and moving to a neighboring house where he looks in a car window.
That person is Stephon Clark, so he is in the middle of criminal activity, and then he runs to his grandparents' house.
There's nothing visible in his hands at that time.
The police run to the house.
They spot Clark in the driveway, and they yell, and Clark, instead of obeying, flees to the back of the house.
The officers pursue, and they round the corner of the house, and one says, Okay, so they think that he has a gun.
They retreat behind the corner for roughly one or two seconds, then they round the corner again.
One officer yells, show me your hands, gun, gun, gun, and they start firing.
And 20 seconds later, he's dead.
So the encounter from yelling hey to Clark to firing the first shot takes approximately 17 seconds.
Here is what it looks like on the body cams.
Hey!
Show me your hands!
- I'm going to get some salt. - Show me!
Stay up!
Show me!
- Go, go, go, go! - Five seven shots fired, sub-state down. - Okay, so as you can see, it's really difficult to see what's going on there.
It's very difficult to see.
And so, I wouldn't want to be unfair to the officers by saying that they went in there with the intent to kill or anything like this.
But, does this look like something negligent to me?
It looks like, I mean, the amount of time that he's given to respond is very short.
Now, should he have immediately obeyed the officer's command?
Yes.
I mean, this is rule number one.
When an officer tells you to do something, you obey the command.
Also, should she have been breaking into cars?
Probably not.
This is not a good idea.
However, that said, does that mean that officers are completely free from fallibility in these sorts of situations?
The guy was unarmed.
He was unarmed, okay?
And when he comes back around, they say, show me your hands, gun, gun, gun.
I mean, you can hear it.
It's right on the back of it.
It's not show me your hands, gun, gun, gun, right?
It's show me your hands, gun, gun, gun.
So they're not having a chance to give him a chance to respond.
And I think David French gets this right.
He says, before you object and tell me that routine encounters can and do escalate, I know that, but what I'm questioning are probabilities and perspective.
Here are some questions.
If it's dark, police are sprinting, and flashlights are shaking, what are the chances that the cop's first assessment that the suspect had a gun are wrong?
What was the reasonable risk of backing off and continuing to give strong verbal commands rather than immediately moving from cover to an exposed position and opening fire?
What are the possibility that the suspect hadn't heard the commands at all?
There's some evidence that he may have had earbuds in.
Also, what's the background level of risk here?
Sacramento hasn't seen a cop shot and killed in the line of duty for almost 20 years.
And it's true that cops have seconds to make life-and-death decisions, but you know who else has just a couple of seconds to figure that out?
It's the suspect.
So if you don't give the suspect a chance to respond, then what exactly are you supposed to do?
This doesn't mean that these cops are going to go to jail, as I sort of suggested last week.
It's possible that they won't.
It's possible that people will find their story convincing, or at least they will find it justifiable, or at least excusable.
There are some problems with training, I think, among some of our police officers, and certainly this does raise questions about deadly use of force by police officers and whether they should be so quick on the trigger in some of these particular situations.
Okay, so I just wanted to clarify all of that because I don't want to get any of the facts wrong.
By the way, there's another correction I think I have to make from last week as well.
And that was on the show last week.
I mentioned the YouTube shooter, and I think I suggested that she was Muslim.
I said, of course, that her religion had nothing to do with the shooting, because she just seemed like a crazy person.
Apparently, she was Baha'i, so it doesn't really change much, because I said religion had nothing to do with it.
But just to correct the record, I want to make sure I get as many facts correct as I can on the show.
And by the way, folks, you all have my email address.
It's bshapiroatdailywire.com.
If you hear me make a mistake on the air, please let me know so I can correct it on the air so that I'm not screwing things up.
All righty, so I think we've run out of time.
We'll do a Federalist paper tomorrow, probably, sometime later this week, because we've run out of time.