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May 10, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:01
The Iranian War | Ep. 536
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President Trump brings home five Americans from North Korea.
Israel is attacked by Iran.
Israel fires back.
Will there be war in the Middle East?
We'll talk about all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So, legitimately, a ton of news breaking today.
All of it very good for the President of the United States, by the way.
I mean, almost universally good news for the President of the United States, and good news for America, which is more important, obviously.
We'll get to all of that.
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Alright, so...
A lot of news breaking.
A lot of news breaking.
And a lot of it is very good for the President of the United States.
So, the best piece of news for the President of the United States is that he went to the tarmac to greet a bunch of North Korean prisoners who had been released.
It was three North Korean prisoners rather than five.
Three North Korean prisoners who had been released.
They were American citizens.
And here is what it looked like when the President of the United States greeted them on the tarmac at Joint Base, at the Joint Air Force Base in Andrews, the Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
Okay, so you can just see him greeting these guys as they get off the plane.
And it is, in fact, a pretty amazing thing.
Now, Trump went on, he talked to the press, he did what Trump always does, right?
And it's just the best of Trump, right?
So Trump gets these guys out, right?
I mean, these guys are released, they come back.
Trump says now that he's going to meet directly with Kim Jong-un on June 12th, so that is coming up in the very near future, and we'll have to keep an eye on that, obviously.
We don't know how those negotiations are going to go, but all of these guys thanked President Trump for getting them out.
Trump then proceeded to go out there and brag about the ratings that he was getting at 2 a.m., and talk about how they'd been treated excellently by the North Koreans, which of course is not really true, but...
Here's the thing.
I think the American public have learned to separate out the Trumpy from the good stuff that he's doing.
I think that the longer Trump's presidency goes on, the less people are worried as much about the kind of crazed nature of the Trump presidency, and the more they're looking at the policy, because right now the economy is doing very well.
Instead of trading five terrorists for Bo Bergdahl, A traitor?
Instead, the President of the United States traded no terrorists for three Americans in North Korea, and five top ISIS leaders were just captured in Iraq.
So President Trump tweeted on Thursday that five of the most wanted ISIS leaders had been captured.
Spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve Army Colonel Ryan Dillon tweeted on Thursday that Iraq captured five key ISIS leaders as part of Operation Roundup.
The tweet didn't specify when or where the five were captured.
It didn't give any names.
Dylan's tweet said the capture was a coordinated operation between Iraqi and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
So those would be the same people who are helping fight Assad.
Iraq captures five key Daesh leaders.
Daesh is the Arabic name for ISIS.
During Operation Roundup, the arrest is a significant blow to Daesh and demonstrates close coordination between ISF, SDF in their fight to defeat Daesh, and then they say that the Okay, so all of this is very, very good news for President Trump.
All he has to do, apparently, is just ignore everything Obama would have done and everything goes swimmingly.
So all of that is excellent news for the President of the United States, who, again, instead of trading five terrorists for a traitor, just captured five terrorists, along with the Iraqis and the Syrians, and freed three Americans.
So, well done, President Trump.
Meanwhile, the president is doing the right thing in the Middle East as well.
Iran had attacked Israel with a bunch of missiles, a bunch of rockets, from Syria into the Golan Heights.
The Golan Heights is a portion of Israel that was captured originally from Syria during the 1973 war, I believe, was the Golan Heights.
The Golan Heights, sorry, yes, I think the 1973 war.
The Golan Heights is a very strong strategic point in Israel.
It's a section of Israel that is elevated by about 300 feet up almost a straight cliff that overlooks Israel.
When Syria owned it, Syria used to use it as a staging point for attacks.
Israel owns it now, and Syria has been very upset about that ever since.
Well, the Syrian government, which is working in cahoots with the Iranians, they fired a bunch of rockets at the Golan Heights.
Israel has this amazing defense system, this amazing rocket defense system.
They shot down all 20 of them.
And then Israel proceeded to pound the living crap out of a bunch of Syrian targets that had Iranians on them.
So Israel's intelligence is good enough that Israel knows where Iran is stationing its people in Syria.
And Israel went in and killed, I believe, 28 Iranians who were members of the Iranian military in Syria.
They're hitting, they're pounding Syria.
And what they said, and I love this line, they said, if it rains in Israel, it will pour in Iran.
Meaning, you try anything and we will make you bleed.
It's an amazing thing, because all of the people who have been victimized by the Assad regime in Syria, apparently there were reports that they were cheering as Israeli warplanes, as Jewish warplanes, were flying into Syria.
A bunch of Muslims were cheering that Israel was coming in.
Which is not a shock, because again, the enemy of my enemy is my friend in the Middle East, and right now it is very obvious who the friends are.
Right, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Israel.
They're all on one side against the Iranians.
And as I've been saying for a long time here, the reality is that the only thing that Obama's Iran deal achieved was the creation of this alliance.
So in a weird way, Obama actually facilitated the creation of an anti-Iranian alliance that is very powerful and I think is going to hold up for a long time.
I think that's really good.
That's actually a really good thing that happened unintentionally because Obama never did anything great intentionally.
He did something really great unintentionally by strengthening Iran.
He forced all these other countries to jump in the sack with Israel and now all of them are allied against the Iranian power.
That's a really good thing.
The UAE said that it was good that Israel had struck these Iranian targets last night.
They said Israel has a right to defend itself.
The United Arab Emirates said that the Jewish state, which I'm not even sure that they formally recognize, has a right to defend itself.
The Saudis said the same thing.
And it's an amazing, amazing thing.
And the Trump administration said all the right things as well.
Unlike the Obama administration, which always called for restraint whenever Israel was attacked, the Trump administration said, listen, you get hit, you do what you want.
Right?
Israel has every right to defend itself.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you to the Trump administration for saying the right thing.
So here's the story from the UK sun.
Israel has blasted Iran's bases in Syria with 70 missiles, killing at least 23 fighters in revenge for rocket strikes on the Golan Heights.
Fighter jets bombarded military bases, munitions warehouse, and intelligence centers after Tel Aviv stoked fears of a war by warning if it rains in Israel, it will pour in Iran.
I'm sorry, I love the British media coverage there, that Israel stoked fears of a war.
Israel didn't initiate the conflict.
Israel was attacked by rockets.
And then Israel threatened in response that if you keep firing missiles at us, we're going to kick your ass.
That's fine.
That's good.
That's not Israel threatening a war.
That's Iran threatening a war, and Israel saying, if you start it, we will finish it.
Which, by the way, is exactly what you should teach your children when it comes to fights.
Never start a fight, but if you get in a fight, finish the fight.
The strikes hit nearly every target and were a response to 20 rockets fired by the Iranian Quds Force, Israeli military chiefs claimed.
Five Syrian soldiers, including two officers and 18 militia fighters, were killed in the attack, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The death toll is likely to rise because some of the wounded are in critical condition.
As I said, I believe that the actual number is about 28 at this point.
The conflict came hours after President Trump pulled out of the nuke deal with Iran.
Now, one of the things that's amazing about all of this is that the entire left is now blaming Trump for Iran attacking Israel.
They're suggesting that it's Trump's pullout from the Iran deal that emboldens the Iranians to pursue nuclear weapons.
This is the essence of stupidity.
It is such a bad argument.
The argument, I guess, is that Iran was moderating.
They were doing fine.
They were moderating.
And then Trump came along.
Then Trump came along and he did something super duper terrible.
He pulled out of this Iran deal.
And now, and now everything has gone to hell in a handbasket.
Now everything, now look at what he's done.
He's created a war in the Middle East because he pulled out of the Iran deal.
The reality is that the Iran deal was going to end with Iran having nuclear weapons.
It was never designed to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
It was designed to kick the can down the road.
To ensure that the next president would have to own anything that went wrong in Iran.
That's where all of this was going.
And here's the proof.
There is no nuclear deal that has ever been cut with an extremist group to remove them of nuclear weapons.
Never in history with bribery.
It doesn't work that way.
There are very few nations in the history of the world that have actually had nuclear weapons and then given up the nuclear weapons or been developing a nuclear program and then stopped developing the nuclear program.
You can actually list them on slightly more than one hand.
Ukraine had nuclear weapons, but those were left over from the USSR.
Kazakhstan had nuclear weapons, those were left over from the USSR.
Belarus had nuclear weapons, those were left over from the USSR.
The United States came in and said, listen, you guys don't have the capacity to take care of your nuclear weapons or secure your nuclear weapons, so you should give those up, and in return, we'll give you security guarantees.
That's worked out pretty well up until Obama, who allowed Russia to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea.
The only two nations that actually developed nuclear weapons or were in the process of developing nuclear weapons and gave them up were South Africa in 1993 and Libya in 2003.
Right?
Those are the only two nations that had active nuclear programs who gave up their nuclear weapons and just said no.
Okay, and the reasons they gave up those nuclear weapons were not because the United States came to them and said, we will bribe you to give up your nuclear weapons.
The reason they gave up their nuclear weapons is that those countries preemptively gave up their nuclear weapons, knowing that there would be consequences if they did not.
In other words, the countries themselves moderated.
So South Africa in 1993, under F.W.
de Klerk, he came forward and he said, listen, we have six nuclear weapons.
Those six nuclear weapons, we just gave those up.
And we had those that were created in the 1970s and the 1980s as a counterbalance to USSR influence in Africa.
We don't need those anymore.
And in order to demonstrate to the world that we are intent on being peaceful, I'm going to give up those nuclear weapons right now.
In expectation that the world would then treat them better.
It was an investment by South Africa in their own future.
The same thing happened with Muammar Qaddafi.
Now it turns out the Obama administration proceeded to take him out anyway, which was the wrong move, as I said at the time.
Qaddafi in 2003 apparently got a letter from George W. Bush, and the letter said, give up your nukes or we're coming after you.
And Qaddafi said, alright.
Sounds good.
He saw that the United States was about to go into Iraq.
And before the United States went into Iraq, he gave up his nuclear weapons because he figured, I don't want to go to war with these people.
I want to be seen as moderate.
And so I'm going to preemptively give up my nuclear weapons.
This is the reality.
If Iran wanted to give up its nukes, if Iran wanted an open economy, you know how they could do that?
You know how they could have a peaceful exchange with the rest of the world?
They could just stop their nuclear program now without any deal.
They could just say, listen, we've destroyed all of our nuclear facilities.
We're done.
Now open up.
Rest of the world, help us out.
And you know what would happen?
Everything would be hunky dory.
But they have no intention of doing that.
And I have the proof for you in just a second.
First...
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All right, so, Here is the proof that Iran has no intention of giving up its nuclear program or its nuclear weapons.
Again, all they would have to do is just give it up.
There doesn't have to be a deal.
If they want to be part of the family of nations, all they have to do is stop funding terrorism all over the world.
But they're not going to do that.
They're not interested in doing that.
They forcibly oppose doing that.
Since the Iran deal kicked in in 2015, in the last three years, Iran has increased its military spending 40%.
Their economy has been garbage, by the way.
Every dollar they got from us, every dollar we released to them, was used to fund terrorism or used in the military, essentially.
And their economy has been terrible, which is why what you're actually seeing is a rolling set of protests across Iran that has been ongoing now for legitimately months.
These are protests not even about the Islamic nature of the republic, but about the inability of the government to allow a free market economy and integrate into the world economy enough so that people aren't struggling.
These are basic bread-and-butter riots that are happening in Iran.
Now, how does all of this get solved?
In the end, the truth is, the only thing that's going to solve the Iranian problem is going to be a regime change.
That regime change does not necessarily have to be pushed by the outside.
It doesn't have to be a situation where the United States comes in and topples the Iranian mullahs.
We don't have to go to war with Iran in order to effectuate this.
There are groups within Iran that we ought to be fostering.
And beyond that, I'm sure that we could probably find a general inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who would be willing to overthrow the Shahs.
Overthrow the mullahs, rather.
And that's probably what's going to have to happen here, because realistically speaking, the Iranian military was purged of all of its moderates years and years and years ago, and if there were to be some sort of uprising, the Iranian military would just, as the tool of the mullahs, start shooting people in the streets.
So what you really need is an interior military coup by someone who figures that the mullahs are going to get us all killed, and we need to get rid of those mullahs, and we need to install a puppet dictatorship, basically.
Right, the same way that it happened in Egypt.
In Egypt, there was the revolution in Egypt, and Mubarak was replaced with Mohammed Morsi, who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then that degraded back into essentially a benevolent dictatorship.
I'll discuss that in just a second.
ally to the West and is very much like Mubarak except more so.
Right?
He's openly allied with Israel at this point, who's been very warm toward the United States.
Barack Obama tried actively to alienate him because he thought for some reason that the Iranians were going to be better allies than the Egyptians, which is just insane.
But it is very obvious at this point that Iran has no interest in anything beyond war.
Now, is there really going to be a large scale war between Israel and Iran?
I'll discuss that in just a second.
I do not think there will be.
I don't think there's going to be a large scale war between Israel and Iran.
The reason I don't think there's going to be a large-scale war between Israel and Iran is because I think Iran would be unbelievably foolish to pursue this.
If Iran does this, Israel will wipe them off the map.
Israel, using Saudi airspace in an alliance with the Egyptians and the Jordanians, will take out their facilities and topple the regime.
The Israelis do have the capacity to decapitate the regime.
The question is whether Israel wants to incur the casualties that will happen as a result of that, because Iran obviously does have ballistic weapons technology.
Iran does have terrorist groups all surrounding Israel.
Hezbollah to Israel's north, Hamas to Israel's south, and Syria to Israel's sort of northeast.
You know, the fact is, That Israel, if it had to fight a war, would win a war, but it would be a bloody war.
It could draw in countries like Turkey to try and save the Iranians, which would be weird because Turkey really hates Iran.
But as a counterbalance to Israel, they might do it.
Bottom line here is I do not think that Iran wants to risk it.
I think what Iran wants to do is fire off a few missiles, demonstrate that they have not been shut down in any serious way, and then Israel responds by saying, listen, you do that and we will finish you.
We will finish you.
Because here's the truth of it.
Everybody knows that if things really get bad, if things really get bad, if Iran launches a full-scale war and it's Iran versus Saudi Arabia and Israel and Egypt, that the United States Air Force alone would do unbelievable damage to the Iranian military.
So I don't want Iran going to war.
I don't want Israel going to war.
I don't want the United States going to war.
But if there is going to be a war between Israel and Iran, I know that Israel knows that they've got to do it now.
They can't wait until Iran has a nuclear weapon because that changes the dynamics on the ground.
Beyond that, there are other measures that can be taken, including a reinstitution of sanctions that can do serious damage to the regime.
Trump has now warned Iran, he says, do not restart your nuclear weapons program.
He said, I would advise Iran not to start their nuclear program.
I would advise them very strongly.
If they do, there will be very severe consequences.
The president spoke the day after the American withdrawal from the Iran deal and the reimposition of U.S.
sanctions on Tehran.
And then Trump said, Iran will come back and say, we don't want to negotiate.
And of course they're going to say that.
And if I were in their position, I'd say that, too, for the first couple of months.
We're not going to negotiate.
But they'll negotiate, or something will happen.
And hopefully that won't be the case.
You know, I think that a lot of the success that Trump is seeing on the foreign policy front is pretty simple.
And pretty interesting.
So, Trump has a perspective on the world.
Trump's perspective on the world is that every interaction is a win-lose interaction.
That in every interaction there is a winner and there is a loser.
It is a zero-sum game.
There is never a win-win situation.
So, in economics and trade, there are people who win and there are people who lose.
Now, he's wrong about that on trade.
But on foreign policy, he is not wrong.
Okay, the reality is that there are very few win-win situations in foreign policy.
Usually there is a winner, and usually there is a loser.
Barack Obama didn't believe that.
He believed in the family of nations, and it's a cooperative thing, and if we all get together and we get in a room and we talk about it, we'll put all of our differences aside and we'll move forward.
That's really not the way that international relations work.
The way international relations work is that nations have interests.
Where they have commonality of interest, they ally.
Where they do not have commonality of interest, they conflict.
It's really that simple.
And Trump gets that.
Trump gets that better than Obama ever did.
Trump understands that when Iran gains power, that means that Saudi Arabia has lost power.
He understands that when Iran increases its regional influence, it means that Israel is in danger.
He understands that when North Korea increases its power, then that means that South Korea is losing its power, and by extension, the United States is losing power in an ally.
Trump gets that far better than Obama ever did.
Obama had this very complex realpolitik view of the world.
But his realpolitik was not realistic.
It was not real and it was not politics.
It was actually just a view of the world that was rosy in the extreme.
Well, perhaps our behavior can change Iran.
You know, like the abused girlfriend who keeps going back to the boyfriend thinking she's going to change him.
That's how Obama was with Iran.
Well, if we go back, maybe they will moderate.
And they can be a moderate influence on the region.
I mean, look at the history of Iran.
Look at how Iran was actually one of the great forebears of civilization.
All of that's true, but ain't true now.
It hasn't been true since 1979.
And the fact that Barack Obama was willing to forward the ambitions of the Mullahs in order to pursue his utopian vision of a counterbalance to Israel in the Middle East in the presence of Iran, not only was it idiotic, it actually ended up doing severe damage and killing a lot of people.
A lot of people.
So, you know, good for President Trump for driving against that.
And again, there's a reason that he's winning all of these victories.
I hope that he takes that same perspective to negotiations with North Korea.
I hope that he does not I hope that he's not soothed by North Korean assurances.
I hope that he requires actual hard evidence that they are going to disarm.
If he does that, you gotta give the man unbelievable credit.
You gotta give him a lot of credit.
I'm giving him credit right now for freeing the North Korean prisoners, the prisoners of North Korea.
I'm giving him credit for pulling out of the Iran deal.
Again, I think the strongest part of Trump's presidency has been on policy, obviously.
The weakest part has been a lot of the personal scandal.
In just a second, I want to talk about the personal scandal and whether it influences President Trump in any serious way.
I have my doubts that it influences Trump in any real way.
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Get your first three meals for free at blueapron.com Okay, so, meanwhile, the latest on Michael Cohen and the Trump team.
So, the policy of the Trump administration is seeing tremendous success.
They're seeing incredible success.
The tax cuts have helped spur the economy.
The economy continues to boom.
On foreign policy, North Korea looks like it is backing away from its militant stance.
You know, that's not all due to President Trump, and we haven't seen what the conclusion of that negotiation will look like, but Trump gets a lot of credit.
On Iran, Trump is doing the right thing, and an alliance is now being formed between countries that you thought would never ally.
Okay, again, if you told me that Saudi Arabia and Israel were allies in 2001, I would say that you were smoking something, because that would have been nearly impossible.
Because of Obama's horrifying policy and Trump's reaction to that horrifying policy, that relationship is really growing in a pretty significant way.
The real downfall, the real part that's difficult for the Trump administration is, of course, all of the ancillary issues.
The Stormy Daniels of the situation, the Michael Cohen of the situation, the fact that Trump tweets silly things.
On a regular basis or says terrible things on a relatively infrequent basis.
OK, here's the latest on the Michael Cohen saga.
OK, so according to I believe this report is from The Washington Post, President Trump has been sworn into office and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, saw a golden opportunity From his perch in a law office on the 23rd floor of New York's Rockefeller Center, Cohn pitched potential clients on his close association with Trump, noting that he was still the president's lawyer, according to associates.
He showed photos of himself with Trump.
He mentioned how frequently they spoke, even asking people to share news articles describing him as the president's fixer.
I'm crushing it," he said, according to an associate who spoke to him in the summer of 2017.
Details this week emerged how quickly Cohen leveraged his role as Trump's personal attorney, developing a lucrative sideline as a consultant to companies eager for insight into how to navigate the new administration.
The rapid flow of millions of dollars to Cohen shows the rush by corporations, unable to rely on the influence of Washington's traditional lobbying class in dealing with the new populist outsider president, to lock in relationships with Trump's inner circle.
Yeah, I'm sure.
I'm sure they were definitely hiring Michael Cohen to do their accounting.
Korean defense company competed for a U.S. contract and said it paid him $150,000 to advise it on accounting practices.
Yeah, I'm sure.
I'm sure they were definitely hiring Michael Cohen to do their accounting.
A global pharmaceutical company said they paid him $1.2 million to provide insight into healthcare policy, and they had to give him the money even after Cohen said that he couldn't help them.
Does that sound like Michael Cohen was giving them really good advice on healthcare policy there?
That sound like what that is?
A telecommunication company said it turned to Cohen simply to better understand the Trump administration.
That would be AT&T.
And that apparently gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even the office in which he operated, which served as the fulcrum of the newly created Michael Cohen and Associates, was a side benefit of his Trump affiliation.
It was provided by the powerhouse legal and lobbying firm Squire Patent Boggs, which signed Cohen to a $500,000 deal in the wake of the 2016 election.
So, He's being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S.
Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
It is unclear that any of this is illegal.
It's really not clear that any of this is illegal in any way.
Selling access is pretty common.
Apparently investigators could prove whether Cohen promised specific government actions in return for payments.
And that could cause him legal trouble.
If he spent large amounts of time speaking to government officials on behalf of clients, investigators could explore whether he should have registered as a lobbyist.
But let's be real about this.
This is actually nothing new, right?
So the media are going nuts over Michael Cohen doing this, but this is not only nothing new, it is done routinely on both sides of the aisle.
K Street in Washington, D.C.
is built explicitly on this promise, that I know somebody who knows somebody in the administration, and if you give me money, I will advise you how your policy can become law.
The lobbying industry is really bad now.
One of the answers to the lobbying industry that's been put forward by a lot of folks on the left is, what if we just restrict the amount of money in politics?
What if we just prevent people from being paid to be lobbyists, for example?
Which doesn't help at all, because presumably these companies then just hire people in-house to go talk to legislators.
The real problem is that government is too big.
Government is too big and it has too much power.
You wouldn't care, as a company, what the government was doing if the government wasn't bothering you.
But the government does bother you.
The government makes policy, the government can create monopolies for you, the government can create oligopolies for you, the government can ensure that you are protected from competition.
That's why it is imperative that if you want to cut corruption from government, it is not just a matter of switching the people in office and saying that you need more honest people in office.
It is a matter of switching the system.
The system of patronage has been corrupt since the days of Ulysses S. Grant.
Ulysses S. Grant experienced in his administration, right after the Civil War, serious accusations of misuse of patronage inside his administration.
In fact, James Garfield was probably assassinated over a patronage issue.
This sort of stuff happened a lot.
Corruption is endemic to big governments.
And the bigger the government grows, the more corruption there is.
Now, what does this say about Trump?
The answer is not much.
We don't know what Michael Cohen actually made Trump do or tried to get Trump to do.
We don't know that Trump approved any of this stuff.
Rudy Giuliani said this morning that Trump didn't know that Michael Cohen was being paid all of this money in the first place.
That's, I think, quite likely.
I think that it's probable that Cohen probably said to Trump something like, man, I'm just making bank off the fact that you and I are friends.
And Trump probably laughed and said, ah ha ha ha ha.
I'm sure that's true.
OK, that's not the same thing as Cohen actually doing something corrupt or Trump actually doing something corrupt in the legal sense.
In the typical sense, it's certainly Cohen doing something corrupt, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I will attempt to influence someone, is not the best way of doing business.
But, it's not a law violation, and the attempt to kind of smear Trump with Cohen, I think that again, the evidence is not in.
There's a lot of speculation going on right now about Trump.
There are a lot of dots that have not yet been connected.
And I think it's a mistake for the, I think it's a mistake for the media to jump to conclusions on that.
Now, okay, so in other news, yesterday was a good day for Gina Haspel.
Gina Haspel is, of course, President Trump's nominee for CIA director.
She'd be the first female CIA director, and she's getting all sorts of crap from the Democrats because back when she was in the CIA as a low-ranking member, a lower-ranking member during the War on Terror, she was responsible for overseeing black sites and for participating in waterboarding of terrorists.
It was legal to waterboard terrorists.
People are saying it was torture.
This was a strong ongoing debate.
It is still an ongoing debate whether waterboarding is in fact torture or whether it is a quote-unquote enhanced interrogation technique.
Now, in the typical, in the sort of typical description, waterboarding is torture because you are using physical pressure in order to get somebody to do something.
Okay, so in the typical description it is, but it doesn't do permanent damage to you.
It is a temporary thing.
I watched my friend Steven Crowder get waterboarded.
Was it torture?
Well, I'll tell you, I didn't feel anything.
So it wasn't torture for me.
It was great for me.
I enjoyed it.
But Steven took it like a man.
I mean, Steven really went under like three, four times, maybe five times.
The last time he lasted for, I think, it was like 45 seconds or something.
So Steven's a rough and tough guy, but The idea here is that Gina Haspel was doing something that was completely legal when she was in the CIA, and now they're saying she can't be the head of the CIA, the Democrats, because she did something completely legal when she was there.
So I ask a simple question, which is, is there anyone working at the CIA during the war on terror who is now allowed to be head of the CIA?
This is what the Democrats do.
This is what folks on the left are fond of doing.
They move the field goal posts.
They move the goal posts.
What they are doing is they are saying that it was legal when she acted in the first place, But now, I don't like what she did, and so now I'm gonna bar her.
Okay, this would be the same thing as saying there's an attorney general, like say Kamala Harris in the state of California, who did not issue same-sex marriage licenses and did not order people to issue same-sex marriage licenses before same-sex marriage was forcibly legalized by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Well, now I don't think that she should be able to run for senator or president because, you know, back then she didn't violate the law.
Well, I'm confused.
Like, Gina Haspel was doing her job at the time, and we're not talking about a Nuremberg situation here, okay?
We're not talking about you're gassing people.
We're not talking about you're shooting innocent people, and therefore you have an obligation to stop.
We are talking about torturing, or waterboarding, not even torturing, waterboarding some of the worst people on planet Earth, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in situations in which you are attempting to gain all sorts of information that can be used to stop further terrorist attacks.
And we do know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has waterboarded a ton of times, He actually gave up actionable intelligence to the U.S.
intelligence community.
So, in just a second, I'm going to show you the exchanges between Gina Haspel and the Democrats, because I think that they do go to show what exactly the Democrats think of the reality of difficulties in foreign policy.
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Okay, in just a second, I'm going to continue with the Gina Haspel story.
Plus, I want to talk a little bit about how Republicans can win back young people, because I have a cover story in the Weekly Standard this week, and I want to talk a little bit about that.
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So as I was mentioning, Gina Haspel, who is up for CIA, she was grilled by Democrats and she made Democrats look pretty foolish because the truth is Democrats supported waterboarding for most of the 2000s.
And then they decided to turn against it.
And now they're ripping on her for it.
So, Dianne Feinstein, who was against waterboarding from the very beginning, she was ripping into Gina Haspel, and Gina Haspel just debunks her over and over and over.
In November and December of 2002, Did you oversee the enhanced interrogation of al-Nashiri, which included the use of the waterboard, as publicly reported?
Exposing operational information can be damaging to sources and methods, as you know, but there is also a physical risk to officers who go out to the far ends of the globe and conduct dangerous missions, and they believe that their participation in those dangerous missions will be protected.
Okay, so there she is making a good point there to Dianne Feinstein.
That's not the only good point she made.
There is a Democrat who actually compared CIA agents to terrorists in use of torture and Haspel just took him to school.
Your response seems to be that civilized nations don't do it, but uncivilized nations do it, or uncivilized groups do it.
The United States does it to its own soldiers.
A civilized nation was doing it until it was outlawed by this Congress.
Senator, I would never obviously support inhumane treatment of any CIA officers.
We've lost CIA officers over the years to terrorists.
I just gave an example.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed personally killed a Wall Street Journal correspondent and filmed that.
I don't think there's any comparison between CIA officers serving their country, adhering to U.S.
law, and terrorists who by their very definition are not following anybody's law.
Gina Haspel really, really taking it to Senator Jack Reed from Rhode Island.
I mean, this hearing was so bad for the Democrats that even Phil Mudd, Phil Mudd is not friendly to the Trump administration, okay?
He's a commentator over on CNN, and he just launched into these senators who are attacking Haspel, and he's totally right about this.
Let's go dirty and let's go ugly.
I was among the CIA officers 15 years ago who spoke with the Congress in detail about the techniques we used.
I spoke about the techniques that were authorized by the Department of Justice.
I spoke to Republicans and Democrats.
They were either silent or supportive.
They told us this was not torture, that it complied with the Constitution and that it complied with U.S.
law.
You can vote against Gina Haspel, but don't give me the collective amnesia about how it's on CIA.
I want to talk to the senators who told us that they represented American values, and conveniently in 2002 and 2003, this represented American values.
Now that we don't face the same threat and that we have different senators, it's okay to attack one of my former colleagues.
I am pissed off.
This is collective amnesia.
We didn't do it.
America did it.
Get over it.
Okay, exactly right.
Phil Mudd on the rampage, and for once, actually right on the money.
Okay, so well done, Phil Mudd.
It is amazing how Democrats, again, rewrite history.
And it's just demonstrative of how they rewrite history in every element.
So instead of looking at the context of the waterboarding and saying, hey, we just got hit and 3,000 Americans just died, should we pour some water over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's face to maybe stop that?
Instead of them saying, well, you know, that was probably a pretty justified decision, or at the very least you could make a strong argument.
Now it's, anyone who did that is evil.
So I tweeted out yesterday, you know, is there anyone from that period the Democrats would be okay with running the CIA?
And I got a bunch of answers from a bunch of Democrats saying no.
So the question is, then why were you fine with James Clapper being head of CIA?
He was there too, doing the same thing.
You were fine with that.
In fact, Gina Haspel has been recommended for the job by a bunch of Obama officials who were working for the CIA at the time.
But again, it's not just unique to Democrats.
I don't just want to say it's Democrats.
John McCain, who has been anti-torture all the way along, he was anti-waterboarding all the way along, he decides that Gina Haspel is not qualified for the job of CIA director for following the law at the time.
He says, I believe Gina Haspel is a patriot who loves our country and has devoted her professional life to its service and defense.
However, her role in overseeing the use of torture is disturbing, and her refusal to acknowledge torture's immorality is disqualifying.
Okay, so now we're at the point, it's the same point that we've come to with same-sex marriage, right?
Where anybody who ever once said traditional marriage ought to be the law and same-sex marriage ought not to be the law, is disqualified from public office, right?
It flipped like five years ago.
But now anyone who believed the opposite, which was the majority of the American public at the time, all those people are thrown out of the halls of good grace.
Okay, now John McCain is trying to do the same thing to Gina Haspel.
The reality is the American public wanted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded, and for good reason.
We didn't want more Americans to die to spare his nasal cavity.
Okay, that wasn't what we were interested in doing.
But the rewriting of history continues apace.
Every era of history, I think it is incumbent on us to not be so intellectually and morally arrogant that we can't go back and think, what was it like for people at the time?
What was their frame of reference?
This is the same thing that says that we have to take down Jefferson's statues because he held slaves.
Again, slavery was evil.
It was evil at the time.
It was evil when Jefferson was holding slaves.
But to pretend that that didn't happen in a slightly different context than you today, that you today are so much better than Thomas Jefferson was, you're a much better person than Thomas Jefferson was, you didn't live then, you didn't live in the context of slavery, you didn't live in a culture of slavery.
Maybe you are a better person, but that's because people like Thomas Jefferson paved the way for the rejection of Thomas Jefferson's own behavior with the values espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
You are a product of the culture that Thomas Jefferson helped build.
Okay?
And you are a product of the CIA that did not allow you to die in a terrorist attack because they were pursuing enhanced interrogation techniques that you now find reprehensible.
Again, none of that means that torture is okay.
None of that means waterboarding is okay.
None of that means that slavery is okay.
None of those things are okay.
But you do have to understand what people were saying and doing at the time if you really want to understand human beings and not just be somebody who stands around virtue signaling about the past.
OK, now I want to discuss for just a few minutes here.
How conservatives can reach out to young people because I have an article that's cover story in the Weekly Standards, a long essay about the generational gap between young conservatives and older conservatives in America.
And I think we're sort of uniquely qualified to talk about this issue because we have a lot of young people who listen to this program.
We also have a lot of folks who are older Republicans who listen to this program, older Americans who listen to this program.
There is a major generation gap inside the Republican Party and it largely breaks down on a couple of issues.
One issue is social issues, and by that I mean largely same-sex marriage and drug legalization, and the other is character issues.
So these generation gaps, I think, can be bridged, but I think that we have to understand what they are.
So the first issue is this libertarian approach to same-sex marriage and drug legalization.
So younger Americans look at the government and they say, the government stinks at everything.
Not only does the government stink at everything, I think the government ought to leave me alone.
In fact, I think the government ought to leave everybody alone.
So when it comes to same-sex marriage, even if I personally believe in traditional marriage, that doesn't mean that the government has a role in any of this stuff.
I think older conservatives can get with that.
I think older conservatives can understand that.
I think they can sympathize.
The drug legalization issue, it seems to come from the same place.
It's not that young people are all drugged up and doped up.
It's that they don't want the government in their business.
And I think there are a lot of conservatives who believe that too.
I think the policy issues are actually rather easy to bridge for conservatives.
I think that the character issue is a different issue.
And here, there is a serious gap.
And the gap happens to be over President Trump.
So, young conservatives do not like President Trump.
Older conservatives love President Trump.
Okay, they love him.
So, here are the polls.
Okay, the polls show The younger Americans are moving dramatically away from the Republican Party, but one of the reasons for that is because of President Trump.
An incredible 82% of Republican and Republican-leading voters between the ages of 18 and 24 say they want another Republican to challenge President Trump for the party's nomination in 2020.
Older Americans hear this, they say young Americans are idiots.
And younger Americans hear that and they say, older Americans are fine with all the terrible things that Trump is doing.
Here's the reality.
They just have two different frames.
Young conservatives look at Trump and they say that he has bad values.
They say that he is not a person who treats women well.
They don't like what he said about Charlottesville.
He's crude about a lot of things.
Young conservatives are more likely to see Trump as an obstacle to their ability to speak to people their own age.
Okay, older conservatives judge Trump on his politics and younger conservatives judge Trump on his values.
So older conservatives love Trump because they say, look at all the great stuff he's doing.
And they're right.
And younger conservatives judge Trump on who he is as a person.
They say, look at all the terrible things he's said and done.
And they're not completely wrong.
So why do these two groups view the issue from opposite sides?
Why do they use opposite lenses?
Well, older conservatives remember fighting the Bill Clinton wars.
And they carry the scars from that.
They remember arguing that Clinton was unfit for office based on his treatment of women and his perjury.
And they remember losing that argument to the left.
They remember arguing that character counts and watching as Democrats held aloft the banner of Teddy Kennedy, right, who was creating waitress sandwiches with Chris Dodd when he wasn't drowning women in rivers.
Older conservatives remember Mitt Romney and they remember how he got just slandered and destroyed while he was the cleanest guy in the room.
And so they were looking for a hammer.
Younger conservatives, they think that the character question is still up for debate.
Older conservatives say the character question is over, we lost, let's get a guy in there who does what we want.
Younger conservatives think that the character question is still unfolding.
And they're not wrong.
It is unfolding, but only for younger Americans.
If you're older, you already made up your mind on this.
If you're young, then you want to be able to say to your friends, I'm a good person and the person I voted for is a good person.
Because you're still making up your mind on what character means.
Trump presents a serious problem for a lot of young conservatives who are trying to make the character argument in favor of the Republican Party.
When you're young, you decide how you're going to vote based on character.
As you get older, I think you start to vote more based on policy than character.
Young conservatives didn't see the battle of 2016 as a battle in which character had already lost.
They saw it as presenting a question about their own character.
Were they willing to enthusiastically back a guy that they thought was a problem?
And the answer, by and large, was no for young conservatives.
Hey, so that's a serious gap.
But again, I think that that gap can be bridged.
The way that gap is bridged is by older conservatives telling younger conservatives, listen, it's not that we think that Trump is amazing in terms of his personal character.
We don't think that he's a god king or anything.
We just like what he's doing.
And you can have both.
You can have both.
A guy who is not a character that you particularly think is great, And some really amazing policy.
That's what older conservatives can teach younger conservatives.
And what younger conservatives can teach older conservatives is you don't have to go along with everything bad that Trump does in order to say that his policies are quite good.
And if they can come to that sort of conciliation, I think that will at least solidify the party, solidify the conservative movement in a fairly significant way.
Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things I like.
If you haven't seen it, John Mulaney is a very funny comic.
So he had a show on Fox that was really not good.
Like, it was a really, really bad show.
But then he has a comedy special on Netflix.
His stand-up, I think, is really good.
Pretty clean.
I'd say, like, if he got rid of the cursing, it would be virtually 100% clean.
There's, like, one joke in this whole thing that's really super dirty, but it's really not a particularly dirty performance.
He gets political a little bit near the end of this.
It's John Mulaney's Kid Gorgeous at Radio City.
He's very, very talented.
It's really funny.
The first 40 minutes of this are really great.
Once he gets to politics, it starts to go off the rails because he can't help himself.
He starts off, you know, with some jokes about President Trump that are fairly innocuous and kind of funny, and then he jumps into You know, President Obama was just the greatest.
And you're like, come on, come on.
You didn't have to go here.
But overall, very, very funny guy.
So worth watching.
Do we have a little bit of the preview of him?
OK.
This guy being the president, it's like there's a horse loose in a hospital.
It's like there's a horse loose in a hospital.
I think eventually everything's going to be OK.
But I have no idea what's going to happen next.
And neither do any of you.
And neither do your parents.
Because there's a horse loose in the hospital.
It's never happened before.
No one knows what the horse is going to do next.
Least of all the horse.
He's never been in a hospital before.
Okay, so again, this is the innocuous part, and then he gets to the part where he sort of rips into Trump, but more by praising Obama, and, of course, suggests that anyone who allowed Trump into office is a rube and all this kind of stuff.
That's the part that's annoying.
So, if this annoys you, don't watch the last 20 minutes of the special.
The first 40 minutes of the special, though, is really, really funny.
Okay, other things that I like.
Jason Whitlock.
Who partners with Colin Calherd on a show on Fox Sports 1, talking about, obviously, the sporting events of the day.
Jason is, I think, a different thinker.
We're going to try and get him on our Sunday show, I think.
And Jason says that one of the big problems that's happening in our culture right now, particularly for black folks, is that if you say that Trump is a good idea, then you just get kicked out.
He's talking about Kanye West with Tucker Carlson.
But if you just say, you know what, I think Trump has a good idea here.
You get kicked out of the black race.
Kanye's saying, I don't agree with everything Trump believes in.
Kanye disagrees with Trump and the Republican Party and conservatives on a lot of issues, but he's not willing to cast someone out of the human race just because he disagrees with them.
Okay, so Whitlock has said a lot of this sort of stuff, and for that he has been excised from large segments of the black community.
Again, I think that what we're seeing right now, there's an amazing tweet, I have to get this tweet for you, it's so good.
So, Kanye West tweeted something else out about freedom of thought.
Great!
You know, I love when Kanye West tweets that kind of stuff, because I like freedom of thought whenever anybody talks about it.
And Perez Hilton tweeted back, Kanye is enslaved to freedom of thought.
Paris Hilton tweeted that back, not Paris, Perez.
That, I think, is the problem right there.
You may be missing the point.
If you think that freedom of thought is the new slavery, or as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, that freedom of thought is just a form of white freedom, that you're free to be white, then we can't have a conversation.
There's no conversation to be had.
You're just a tribal enthusiast and there's nothing else to be said about it.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Alrighty, so, there's a guy who is 104 years old, he's an Australian dude, and he plans to end his life in Switzerland today.
And he apparently sang a few bars of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as he told reporters that medically assisted suicide should be more widely available and not only viewed as a last resort for the terminally ill.
So he sounded sanguine.
The British-born biologist approaching death has led some people in the country, where he came to die, to question if they want to be known as the death country, right?
Is it just going to become, you go to Switzerland because you want to kill yourself?
I have to acknowledge the Unspoken irony of the fact that this is now being considered a wonderful thing by the media.
There's a movie called Soylent Green.
Soylent Green is most famous for Charlton Heston screaming that Soylent Green is people.
Spoiler alert.
Okay, but there's a scene near the end of the movie, Edward G. Robinson.
It's actually quite a good movie.
Edward G. Robinson plays an older guy.
All the older people in this society are encouraged to have euthanasia.
They're not sick, but the society encourages them that if you're feeling a little bit of pain, or you're feeling old, you should just go kill yourself.
So, here's the irony.
Or at least the weirdness of it.
This 104-year-old guy who's singing Beethoven's 9th as he prepares to die, that is literally what happens in Soylent Green.
Edward G. Robinson literally lies there as they play Beethoven's 7th symphony, the pastoral.
Or his 6th symphony, rather, the pastoral.
And he literally dies listening to Beethoven.
And this is a horror movie from the 1970s, but now it's a wonderful thing.
Okay, this is played as a horror thing because it is a horrible thing, okay?
I'm sorry, killing yourself to Beethoven is still not a great thing, because while everyone wants to believe that there is such a thing as a beautiful death, there really is no such thing as a beautiful death.
There is just death, okay?
Some deaths can be more peaceful and more comfortable, but death does not become beautiful just because you're playing Beethoven in the background, and assisted suicide doesn't become more moral just because you're listening to good music when you do it.
So it's pretty amazing.
The Swiss Federal Statistics Office says the number of assisted suicides has been growing fast.
Nine years ago, there were 297.
By 2015, the most recent year tabulated, the figure had more than tripled to 965.
most recent year tabulated, the figure had more than tripled to 965.
Nearly 15% of the cases last year were people under 65 years of age.
Okay, the West is literally killing itself.
And the West is killing itself because they don't see the inherent value in human life anymore, and human life is something that can be disposed of as you see fit.
That's a serious, major moral issue, I think, that we're all going to have to deal with.
I think in the 70s, they used to have a concept that this was a bad thing.
Now, apparently, this will be played as like a peaceful ending to a movie, actually, now.
So that's pretty great.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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