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May 20, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:43
Iran, You Ran, We All Ran | Ep. 784
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Iran's provocations escalate, Democrats compete for attention, and yes, I will indeed review Game of Thrones.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So spoiler alert, Bran.
What the F?
Okay, we'll get to all that later on in the show.
I don't want to talk politics.
I just want to do an hour on that final Game of Thrones episode.
So later in the show, we will do a full hour on that Game of Thrones final episode.
But first, we're never going to agree on everything.
I think we can all agree that Bran should not have been king.
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Okay, so over the weekend, the Iranians continued to escalate the situation in the Middle East.
They obviously would like a conflict.
So President Trump does not want a conflict.
The Trump administration does not want a conflict.
Despite all of the talk from the left about John Bolton itching for conflict with the Iranians.
We are now in year three of the Trump administration.
He does not want a conflict with Iran.
He would like to see the regime fall.
He would like to see it fall from the inside, and that involves containment, and yes, the credible threat of military force to prevent Iran from getting too aggressive.
But it's pretty obvious that Trump doesn't want war.
Trump is, by nature, more of an isolationist on foreign policy.
He does not like being involved in different areas of the world.
Nonetheless, President Trump threatened Iran with destruction as tensions flared after a rocket almost hit the U.S.
embassy in Baghdad, according to The Sun in the UK.
Apparently, a rocket landed less than a mile from the U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone, further stoking hostility in the region.
Tensions between the United States and Iran have escalated in recent weeks after American warships and bombers were ordered to the Middle East to counter an unexplained threat.
The U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad and its consulate in the northern city of Erbil evacuated non-essential staff this week following the escalating tensions with Iran.
Trump has also tightened economic sanctions.
Originally, a brigadier general in the British Army said that he did not see the reason why the United States was getting uptight with Iran, and then it turns out that the Secretary of State, over the Foreign Secretary rather, in Britain, came forward and said, no, the info's pretty good, Iran is getting a lot more militant.
So President Trump tweeted out in his own inimitable fashion, quote, If Iran wants to fight, that would be the official end of Iran.
Never threaten the United States again!
Exclamation point.
I appreciate the sentiment.
I really do.
I also will note that President Trump used exactly the same sort of language with regard to North Korea before he then had as much ballyhooed summit with Kim Jong-un, which resulted in approximately nothing.
It resulted in the North Koreans continuing to develop their technology.
It resulted in the North Koreans being elevated on the world stage.
So taking President Trump's Twitter account at face value is always a mistake.
President Trump fulminates on his Twitter account.
He says bloviating things on his Twitter account.
I think it would be good if the Iranian regime understands that if they cross the line, we will end them.
And the truth is, we would end them.
They could do us damage because they have terror cells all around the world.
They could do us damage because there are American allies within striking distance of Iranian missiles.
But if they were to go to full-scale war with the United States, that war lasts not particularly long, because the fact is the U.S.
military is the greatest fighting force ever assembled in the history of mankind, and Iran is a second-rate military force despite the large size of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Nonetheless, it is obvious that President Trump does not want war with Iran General David Petraeus, who's not exactly a friend of the administration.
He came out on ABC this week.
He said, no, Trump is not interested in war.
And this is obviously true.
Frankly, it's pretty clear that he doesn't want to go to war with Iran.
He's not after regime change.
He's after what Secretary Pompeo has announced as the objective, which is regime behavior change.
Iran is a country that has a population that is three times the size of Iraq when we invaded it.
And a land mass that is three to four times the size of Iraq as well.
And I think any thoughts about invading Iran, again, rightly the president has shelved those, I think.
Okay, so Petraeus is, of course, correct about this.
Now, the way the media are treating this is that Trump is right on the verge of launching war on Iran.
It's gonna be a wag the dog scenario.
Yeah, except Trump hasn't built any support for that.
Look at the poll numbers.
This would not be a popular move.
There's nobody on the right who's in favor of a war with Iran at this point.
Legitimately, no one.
John Bolton is not in favor of war with Iran.
I don't know a single person in conservative circles who's interested in war with Iran at this point, including the most quote-unquote neocon forces inside the conservative movement.
So I don't know where this narrative is coming from that Trump is desperate for a war with Iran.
In reality, Iran is desperate for some sort of military conflict short of of complete war with the United States, because they're trying to shore up their flailing economy.
They're trying to create a rally around the flag effect in Iran.
There have been running protests for months there, thanks to economic shortages.
That's been largely ignored by the world media, mainly because the media do not have great access to what is going on in Iran.
But the media in the West are creating this narrative that Trump is desperate for war, that Trump is trying to do a George W. Bush circa 2003 with regard to Iraq.
Again, there is no evidence of that whatsoever.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, a lot of controversy broke out because Justin Amash, who is a congressperson from Michigan, Republican congressperson, very libertarian.
He's been a guest on our radio show.
Justin Amash tweeted this out over the weekend, quote, Now, again, I don't think there's any evidence for that at all.
I'm going to analyze these one by one.
I don't think there's any evidence for this at all, that Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report.
We can all see the report.
Barr gave the bottom line conclusions in the Mueller report.
Mueller's people themselves acknowledged that those conclusions were accurate.
They just didn't like the characterization.
They thought that Barr should have originally laid out all of the evidence in his original letter when Barr basically just said, look, my job as attorney general is not to make a case against somebody we are not prosecuting.
My job as the attorney general is to say whether or not the person is being prosecuted.
Justin Amash also claimed that President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
He then does not name what exactly the impeachable conduct is.
Now, here's the truth about impeachment.
Impeachment is, of course, a political standard.
It is not, in fact, a legal standard.
So you can impeach anybody for virtually any reason.
High crimes and misdemeanors does not have any legal definition.
In other words, if Congress were to impeach the president, he can't then appeal to the Supreme Court and say, well, Congress deliberately misinterpreted high crimes and misdemeanors.
The impeachment is no good.
Congress can do whatever it wants right there.
So numbers one and two, he has four points that he makes in this tweet that got all sorts of attention because he's a Republican saying that Trump is impeachable.
So point number one that he makes is that Barr deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report.
I see no evidence of this.
Point number two, Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
Well, it depends on your definition of impeachable conduct, I suppose, but I don't see anything that he did that is quote-unquote impeachable.
I see stuff that's bad.
I see that President Trump did stuff that is embarrassing for him.
I see that President Trump fulminates in a way that is unbecoming of the office.
But is that impeachable?
He didn't commit obstruction of justice, according to Mueller himself.
He didn't actually engage in any collusion with the Russians.
So what exactly is impeachable as opposed to just embarrassing bad conduct?
Well, that part is obviously true.
But that's been true for a very long time.
I mean, Eric Holder was acting, in his own words, as President Obama's wingman.
So that is nothing new.
Partisanship has, of course, eroded our system of checks and balances.
Congress no longer holds the president to account if he's a member of their own party.
And if the president is not a member of their own party, then people are interested in endless investigations, even if those investigations result in nothing.
And finally, Amash says few members of Congress have read the report.
That obviously is true as well.
The media ran with this because Amash is, of course, a libertarian-leaning Republican in Michigan.
He's in a very tightly contested race in Michigan.
He's the most likely Republican to be ousted into primary at this point.
As a general rule, I really like Justin Amash.
Representative Amash, his perspective on the role of government, I think, is quite correct.
He and I have similar views on the role of government and the libertarian nature of government.
With that said, Amash, I think, is off base here.
He then completes his tweets by suggesting, contrary to Barr's portrayal, Mueller's report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment.
But that's not what Barr ruled, right?
Barr didn't say anything about impeachment.
Barr just said that there is nothing that is criminally prosecutable.
Barr's letter and his statements go to that.
The AG's job is not to determine whether something is impeachable or not.
That's Congress's job.
Well, the press have had a field day with Amash's tweets.
Politico ran a long article about the bravery of Justin Amash for coming out and saying this.
Again, if I thought that Amash were correct, I would think that it's brave.
It's certainly brave to the extent that he's running against the prevailing winds inside his own party.
But brave is not the same thing as correct.
And in this particular case, I don't see that he is exactly correct here.
According to Politico, in recent days, more rank-and-file Democrats have said they support initiating impeachment proceedings against the president.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and most Democratic leaders and committee chairs have resisted those calls, citing their ongoing investigations into the president's alleged conduct.
The House Judiciary Committee, for example, is investigating Trump for allegations of obstruction of justice and abuses of power.
Now, that is the most telling thing.
The Democrats are really not all that interested in impeaching President Trump because they don't believe they have solid enough grounds with the American public to push for impeachment.
They are afraid of the backlash should that happen.
So when Amash says that Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct, the Democrats don't think so.
The Democrats don't think so.
And because the Democrats don't think so, it's interesting that Amash is arguing that extreme partisanship is undercutting the case for impeachment.
I think that if extreme partisanship were to cut in favor of anything, it would cut in favor of impeachment.
In a statement on Saturday, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel slammed Amash for, quote, parroting the Democrats' talking points on Russia.
McDaniel didn't explicitly endorse a GOP primary challenge to Amash in 2020, but noted that voters in Amash's district strongly support this president.
Now, Amash does have a rival who is running in the primary and is campaigning in front of giant Trump flags.
So it's pretty obvious this person knows where his bread is buttered with regard to the Republican base.
President Trump himself fired back on Amash.
I'll get to that in just one second.
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So, President Trump lashed back at Amash via Twitter.
He said, never a fan of Justin Amash, a total lightweight, who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy.
If he actually read the biased Mueller report, composed by 18 angry Dems who hated Trump, he would see it was nevertheless strong on no collusion and, ultimately, no obstruction.
Anyway, how do you obstruct when there's no crime, and in fact the crimes are committed by the other side?
Justin is a loser who sadly plays right into our opponent's hands.
So obviously President Trump is taking it personally.
When President Trump uses a couple of key terms, you know he's taking it personally.
Lightweight and loser.
When he calls someone a lightweight.
That means the president is taking it personally.
And by the way, I don't blame the president for taking it personally.
Do I think it's good strategy to attack Amash here?
No, I should just say, Justin Amash is entitled to his opinion.
Obviously, I think he is misreading the report.
And then if you want to encourage a primary challenge, you quietly do that.
Nonetheless, the fact that Trump is angry about this.
President Trump is feeling the pressure.
There's just no question that President Trump is feeling the pressure.
And it's not helping that there are people like Mitt Romney.
Romney is out there saying Amash is brave.
He disagrees with Amash, but Amash is brave.
A statement with which I generally agree, but there's a general perception that Romney himself is much more comfortable attacking people on the right than people on the left.
Here's Mitt Romney basically quasi-supporting Amash here.
My own view is that Justin Amash has reached a different conclusion than I have.
I respect him.
I think it's a courageous statement.
But I believe that to make a case for obstruction of justice, you just don't have the elements that are evidenced in this document.
And I also believe that An impeachment call is not only something that relates to the law, but also considers practicality and politics.
And the American people just aren't there.
And I think those that are considering impeachment have to look also at the jury, which would be the Senate.
The Senate is certainly not there either.
OK, Romney is right about all of the last part of it.
The problem is that the people who are expressing sympathy for Amash as a general rule are people who the Republican base does not trust.
And Mitt Romney is one of those people, unfortunately.
OK, in just a second, we're going to get to the real reason that President Trump is, I think, on edge.
And the real reason he is on edge is because the president is running a very tough re-elect race.
The fact is the polls are not cutting in his favor in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
President Trump has solidified Ohio.
He has not solidified Florida.
If the economy goes south at all, not only does the president lose reelection, the president loses reelection pretty handily.
I mean, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings here, But the fact is that the polls are just not good for the president at this point.
He has to bet on the Democrats destroying themselves.
And this is why most Democrats at this point, or at least a plurality of Democrats, are looking to Joe Biden.
The reason they're looking to Biden is because they think that Biden is moderate enough to win a state like Flora.
And take Pennsylvania away from Trump and take Wisconsin away from Trump and take Michigan away from Trump.
And by the way, that is what the polls show at this point in time.
Now, listen, we're a year and a half out.
A lot can happen.
Joe Biden could fall apart at the seams.
He has before in presidential races.
And the fact is that the Democratic Party is increasingly a radical party.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, she came out over the weekend and she described the Democratic Party.
And the fact is that the Democratic Party's policies are well to the left of mainstream America.
I think the party's response is going to be strong, and hopefully you've seen that it's strong across the board.
Personally, I do think that there should be a set of core democratic ideals that we all agree to, and that you can't say you're a Democrat if you're against immigrants, if you're against abortion, if you're against gay marriage and LGBTQ rights.
I'm not sure what it means to be a Democrat if all of those things are true.
Okay, so basically Jayapal, who's a congresswoman from Washington, all Democrats are pro-illegal immigration, all of them are pro-abortion, all of them are pro-gay marriage, all of them are pro-LGBT rights, which I assume would include the so-called Equality Act, which has passed the Democratic House and is an act so radical that many advocates of things like same-sex marriage are still looking at this and saying this violates core constitutional freedoms.
It basically Forces everyone in the country who is religious to knuckle under to the social left.
The Democratic program is well to the left of the general public.
So the Democrats instead are seeking to present the most palatable face.
And that really looks like Joe Biden right now, because Joe Biden is widely considered the not only most known Democrat, but also the guy that most Americans are kind of comfortable with.
It's hard to find a lot of Americans who have tremendous amounts of ire or disdain for Joe Biden.
At worst, they think that he's kind of a dunderhead.
But there are not a lot of Republicans who are motivated by Joe Biden to go out there in the same way that they were motivated by Hillary Clinton, who they saw as a really nefarious character.
Biden, thus, is making a pretty generic Democratic argument for why he ought to be president right now.
He is fibbing all the while doing it.
He is, in fact, a demagogue.
I mean, this is a guy who, again, back in 2012 suggested that black people were going to be put back in chains by Mitt Romney, of all humans.
But over the weekend, he was out there campaigning and he's doing the moderate thing.
He says, listen, we don't need to be angry.
Our politics is too angry.
I will remind you that last week at a rally, a woman got up and said to him that she believes that Donald Trump stole the election and effectively was a tool of Russia.
And Biden said, maybe you should be my running mate.
So much for no anger in politics.
Here's Joe Biden doing that routine, though.
I know some of the really smart folks say Democrats don't want to hear about unity.
They say Democrats are so angry that the angrier a candidate can be, the better chance he or she has to win the Democratic nomination.
Well, I don't believe it.
I really don't.
If Democrats, I believe Democrats want to unify this nation.
That's what our party's always been about.
If American people want a president to add to our division, lead with a clenched fist, a closed hand, a hard heart, To demonize your opponents, to spew hatred.
They don't need me.
They've got President Donald Trump.
OK, well, the fact is that Barack Obama did run with a closed fist and a hard heart.
He was quite cruel to his political opponents throughout his presidency.
He was constantly suggesting that his political opponents were motivated by racism and greed.
Joe Biden did a lot of the same sort of stuff.
Nonetheless, this is the face that Democrats are going to try to present.
And here's the thing.
A lot of people are saying Joe Biden is running Hillary Clinton's campaign.
And to a certain extent, he is.
The difference is that Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.
You can run an identical campaign, but the face that you present to the public makes a huge, huge difference.
Now, Biden is also making the case that President Trump's economy is an inherited economy.
It's the Obama economy.
Now, there is some truth to that in the sense that the stock market did grow consistently from 2009 to 2016.
There is a bit of lack of truth in the sense that the economy of the United States was growing in the slowest recovery in the history of the United States, and then Trump took office.
And correlation does not always equal causation, but the economy has dramatically accelerated under President Trump in terms of quarter-to-quarter GDP growth.
Here is Joe Biden, though, saying that Donald Trump inherited all the good stuff.
President Trump likes to take credit for the economy and the economic growth and the low unemployment numbers.
But just look at the facts, not the alternative facts.
President Trump inherited an economy from Obama-Biden administration that was given to him, just like he inherited everything else in his life.
So this is the case that Joe Biden is obviously going to be making.
Now, as I say, the Democratic Party platform is way out to the left.
Joe Biden simply puts a palatable face on that Democratic Party platform.
And it's interesting because President Trump is really trying desperately not to be drawn into some of the most politically polarizing fights.
So over the weekend, President Trump was asked, for example, about Pete Buttigieg and his gay marriage.
And Trump said, there are a lot of people in my own party who oppose same-sex marriage.
I'm not one of those people.
I think it's great.
So that's Trump trying to defang that particular argument from the left.
He did the same thing on abortion.
Over the weekend, President Trump suggested that Alabama's abortion law was effectively too strict.
The president tweeted out that he was strategically against it.
And I think, as I said last week, that there's a case to be made that the Alabama abortion law, while morally correct, is a strategic mistake in the sense that it is highly, highly unlikely that the Supreme Court is ready to strike down Roe versus Wade.
Still, the fact that President Trump is attempting to kind of elide the issue shows that President Trump is also trying to run for that moderate middle.
President Trump tweeted this out.
He said,
of the controversy over abortion laws.
So President Trump is trying to run for the middle.
And the truth is, his policies are a lot closer to the middle than Joe Biden's.
Now, in a second, I will provide proof that the Democratic Party is basically just trying to put a palatable face on radical leftism, while Trump is actually much more moderate on policy than, I think, the typical Republican.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, so the other candidate in the Democratic race who has been heating up is Pete Buttigieg.
This has been true for months.
The reason that Pete Buttigieg has risen in the polls is because Pete Buttigieg puts out a moderate face on radical policy.
Unlike Elizabeth Warren, who seems like a radical, and Bernie Sanders, who is openly a radical, and Kamala Harris, who is openly a radical, Pete Buttigieg has attempted to kind of play it both ways.
He's the best politician in this race on the Democratic side, including Joe Biden.
I mean, he's coming out of nowhere in South Bend, Indiana, with effectively no real record to run on.
It's pretty impressive.
I mean, honestly, because if you look at the polling in South Bend, according to a report that just came out recently, the City of South Bend Community Survey from 2018, 65% of South Bend residents are dissatisfied with the maintenance of city streets, sidewalks, and infrastructure.
51% don't agree they have an overall feeling of safety in their neighborhood.
64% disagree that the city has a safe community for everyone.
70% don't agree the city has a vibrant, welcoming neighborhood.
71% don't agree the city has a strong, inclusive economy.
And 72% don't agree that all residents are empowered with education, mobility, and technology.
There's been an uptick in violence as well in the city of South Bend.
Nonetheless, Pete Buttigieg is running a successful campaign for, I think, probably the vice presidency.
Why?
Because he is putting that palatable face on radical policies.
And we're going to deconstruct how Democrats are successful at doing this.
So, Pete Buttigieg.
His number one pitch is that Trump is a bad man.
Trump is a very, very, orange man bad, very, very bad man.
So people to judge first of all is smart enough to go on Fox News.
This is a smart move.
The reason it's a smart move is because he understands that there really is no loss for him.
If things go badly for him, he just claims that Fox News is biased against the left.
And if things go well for him, then he gets to claim that he has walked into the lion's den and emerged unscathed.
Also, he rips into Fox News on Fox News, which How would you handle the insults and the attacks and the tweets and all of that?
So Buttigieg starts off by attacking President Trump as a grotesque human.
How would you handle the insults and the attacks and the tweets and all of that?
The tweets are...
I don't care.
And that gets a lot of applause here.
The fact is, it's a very effective way for him to reach tens of millions of Americans.
Well, it's a very effective way to command the attention of the media.
And I think that, you know, we need to make sure that we're changing the channel from this show that he's created.
Because what matters, and I get it, look, it's mesmerizing, it's hard for anybody to look away.
Me too.
It is the nature of grotesque things that you can't look away.
OK, so I think that his take here is the smart take, which is I don't care about his tweets.
President Trump is just a grotesque figure.
Again, Orange Man Bad is part of the Democratic campaign, but he looks moderate by not fulminating.
Buttigieg's attitude is I'm going to smile through this.
I'm not going to fulminate, which is a smart thing to do.
And then Buttigieg pleases the left by going after Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham on Fox News.
This is his big win that he's going to get from the left.
You know, a lot of folks in my party were critical of me for even doing this with Fox News.
I've heard that.
And I get where that's coming from, especially when you see what goes on with some of the opinion hosts on this network.
I mean, when you've got Tucker Carlson saying that immigrants make America dirty, when you've got Laura Ingraham comparing detention centers with children in cages to summer camps, summer camps, then there is a reason why anybody has to swallow hard and think twice before participating in this media ecosystem.
Okay, so again, this is his way of pandering to the left.
Now, the reality is that what Tucker Carlson actually said is he said that if you bring in a lot of people from countries that don't have the same culture regarding keeping the streets clean, the streets will be a little more dirty.
That's my recollection of Tucker Carlson's comments.
I don't think they're wonderful comments, but I also don't think that Buttigieg is being accurate in his characterization.
And as far as Laura Ingraham, again, I don't think they're wonderful comments when she is comparing detention centers to summer camps, but My recollection of that is that what she is discussing is that people actually are being treated pretty humanely in detention centers, which is generally a true story.
OK, nonetheless, Buttigieg wins some points with the left for saying all of that sort of stuff.
And because he is coming off as moderate, because of the way he expresses himself as a moderate, he's able to get away with pushing very extreme policies.
This is the Democratic plan.
So here's Pete Buttigieg on abortion.
He's asked about whether abortions should be restricted.
And he basically says, no, there should be no restrictions on abortion.
But after all, he's saying it in a nice tone, so I guess he's a moderate now.
Thank you.
So I believe that the right of a woman to make her own decisions about her reproductive health and about her body is a national right.
I believe it's an American freedom.
And I believe that should be enjoyed by women everywhere.
Now it's funny because a lot of people are pointing out that he's getting a big ovation in the Fox News studios.
That's because the people who are going to the Fox News town hall with Pete Buttigieg are not rabid right-wingers.
They're fans of Pete Buttigieg.
Bernie Sanders also got big ovations while he was on Fox News.
Then Buttigieg was asked specifically about third trimester abortions.
And Pete Buttigieg defended third trimester abortions, partial birth abortion, abortion up to point of birth.
These are radical positions that the American public does not hold.
Here's Pete Buttigieg making that defense.
...saying that you would be okay with a woman, well into the third trimester, deciding to abort her pregnancy.
Look, these hypotheticals are usually set up in order to provoke a strong emotional... No, but in fairness, sir, it's not hypothetical.
There's 6,000 women a year who get abortions in the third trimester.
That's right, representing less than 1% of cases.
I know, but 6,000 pregnancies.
If it's that late in your pregnancy, that means almost by definition you've been expecting to carry it to term.
We're talking about women who have perhaps chosen a name, women who have purchased a crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime.
Okay, that is not true.
If you look at the rationales that are generally given for late-term abortion, it is not health problems in the vast majority of cases, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, according to people who have surveyed women who have late-term abortions.
He sounds moderate, and Buttigieg is really good at this, but because Wallace was not asking serious follow-up questions there, I mean, he started to, right?
He says there are 6,000 pregnancies, and Buttigieg goes, well, it's just 1% of cases.
Why are we even worried about those 1% of cases?
Well, let's put it this way.
More people are killed every year In late-term abortions, 1% of all cases in America, it's about a million abortions a year, so that means that 1% of a million is what, 10,000 cases a year?
10,000 people about somewhere in that neighborhood are killed with guns in the United States, not in suicides but in homicides.
That's that number of late-term abortions.
I don't see Pete Buttigieg talking about why shootings in the United States are not a huge problem.
Nonetheless, Nonetheless, he does come off as more moderate.
And this is the pitch of the Democratic Party.
It's a personality pitch.
It is not actually a political pitch.
It's a personality pitch.
We'll continue along these lines.
Then we'll show you what it looks like when you remove the nice personality and you get Bernie Sanders.
Because it's the same policies, it's just that now the nice personality is gone and you get the irritating guy from Brooklyn.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
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Okay, in just a second, we'll finish up with Pete Buttigieg's big move on Fox News.
And then we'll show you what Buttigieg's agenda looks like when it is expressed by somebody who is not Pete Buttigieg.
Presentation is everything in presidential politics.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So Buttigieg has a big night, and that big night is predicated on him expressing very radical ideas in the most moderate possible fashions.
So here's Buttigieg pitching tax hikes openly three times in about a minute on Fox News last night.
When candidates, Democrats, go out promising, as I think we should, that we're going to have major increases in investment in things like education, health, and infrastructure, we've also got to be willing to say where the revenue is going to come from.
And it's why we really do need to entertain ideas like, I would say, a fairer, which means higher, marginal income tax rate on those earning the most, a reasonable wealth tax, or something like that, to make sure that people are giving back when they become enormously wealthy.
Okay, these are massive tax hikes that he's talking about.
A wealth tax is unconstitutional.
There's no predicate for Congress being able to pass a wealth tax.
It is not approved by the Constitution.
Only income taxes are approved by the Constitution, as well as tariffs, for example, or levies on the states.
There are certain specific types of taxes that are approved by the Constitution.
A wealth tax is not one of them.
When he suggests that people at the top of the income bracket have to pay more in top marginal tax rates, That's insane.
Yeah, it's insane.
I have paid virtually every tax rate in the system over the course of my career.
I promise you, the percentage that I'm paying now is so much higher than the percentage that I paid five years ago, it would make your head swim.
The people who are at the top of the income brackets are paying for virtually everything in this country on a net basis.
Nonetheless, because Buttigieg comes off as moderate, he comes off as moderate.
He also tries to downplay his lack of moderation.
So, Buttigieg was on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, and Hugh Hewitt asked him about Jefferson-Jackson dinners.
These are these historic Democrat dinners where people go around, they do fundraising, and they've been named after Thomas Jefferson as well as Andrew Jackson.
And Buttigieg basically disowns Jefferson a little bit.
People, I think, are exaggerating this, but here's what Buttigieg had to say about Thomas Jefferson.
Could Jefferson, Jackson, Dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves?
Yeah, we're doing that in Indiana.
I think it's the right thing to do.
You know, over time you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor, and I think we know enough, especially Jackson.
You know, you just look at what basically enough to genocide that happened here.
Jefferson's more problematic.
You know, there's a lot to, of course, admire in his thinking and his philosophy.
If you plunge into his writings, especially the notes on the state of Virginia, you know that he knew that slavery was wrong, and yet he did it.
Okay, and then he continued by suggesting that they maybe ought to rename all of these things.
He says, over time you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor.
Naming something after someone confers a lot of honor.
Buttigieg tried to walk that back on Fox News because he realizes how radical it sounds to the vast majority of Americans to rename things not after Thomas Jefferson.
Here is Buttigieg making that case.
My campaign office is actually on Jefferson Boulevard.
So are you going to change the name?
I'm not planning that.
But this is a great example, actually, of how the media noise machine on the right wing takes things out of control.
So I mentioned this, that some counties are rethinking some of our events.
Some of you might have seen this, right?
Basically, I said that, you know, we're rethinking how we might, democratic functions, might name our event.
Maybe we should name it for a person who's living.
Maybe we should name it after a person of color.
I don't know.
Next thing you know, you would have thought I had proposed blowing up the Jefferson Memorial in D.C.
And folks from Laura Ingram on this network to a columnist actually in the New York Times, so it's not just a Fox thing, just jumped on that.
Well, yeah, they jumped on it because you suggested that maybe we should actually rename things, right?
I mean, it was in that context.
Now, I'm glad that Buttigieg is clarifying all of that, but he did... I mean, we played the comments for you, so you can make your own decision.
President Trump was very angry, frankly, that Buttigieg was even getting this attention.
It's a problem that the president sees Fox News as his specific preserve.
Fox News is not, in fact, the president's preserve, as Brit Hume pointed out.
It is a news network, and they do, if they can, have an obligation to have on Democrats to interview them.
I will point out that Buttigieg has expressed interest in coming on our Sunday special, and then, as soon as the left hit him, he ran away.
He has not gotten back to us.
He did the same thing to my friend Dave Rubin.
He was willing to go on Fox News because Fox News is traditional television, but he's not willing to go on with anybody who might have a longer form conversation with him in the absence of a crowd, I think.
In any case, President Trump tweeted out, Hard to believe that Fox News is wasting airtime on Mayor Pete, as Chris Wallace likes to call him.
Fox is moving more and more to the losing, wrong side in covering the Dems.
They got dumped from the Democrats' boring debates, and they just won in.
They forgot the people who got them there.
Chris Wallace actually said, I actually think whether you like his opinions or not, Mayor Pete has a lot of substance.
Fascinating biography.
Gee, he never speaks well of me.
I like Mike Wallace better.
And Alfred E. Newman will never be president.
Well, first of all, the Alfred E. Newman tag on Mayor Pete is pretty great.
But beyond that, Trump is evincing and evidencing.
He's evidencing a fair bit of disquiet here.
And if he's really confident in this election, Advice to President Trump.
Just stop.
Just stop.
Because this is all going to play out.
Democrats are going to savage each other.
All you have to do is sit off to the side.
You don't need to comment every time you see somebody on the TV who's ripping into you.
All you're doing is elevating Pete Buttigieg.
Now, as I've been saying, Buttigieg presents an attractive face for Democratic radicalism.
In those clips, you heard him Effectively argue in favor of late-term abortion, including up to point of birth, in favor of massive wealth tax increases, him attacking other news networks, which is, last I heard when President Trump did it, all of a sudden it was an attack on the press.
When Buttigieg does it, then it's just him being brave.
But when you strip away the nice face, what you end up with here is Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders makes exactly the same points that Pete Buttigieg does on most of these topics.
Here's Bernie Sanders over the weekend talking about abortion on NBC News with Chuck Todd.
Go, Bernie, talk!
Do you believe there should be any restrictions on abortion in in law?
I think that that is a decision that is being made that should be made by the woman and her physician and I think many of you know what what people are doing is sadly is creating a political issue out of a medical issue so the decision about women should be able to control their own body and those decisions are made by a doctor.
So, again, this is Bernie Sanders repeating the same rote talking points, but they don't sound as attractive coming from Bernie Sanders because he's not as attractive a candidate.
Bernie Sanders, by the way, over the weekend also suggested that baseball players make too much money.
You know, when folks on the right say that folks on the left sound like economic fascists, like they want to control every aspect of your economic life, this would be the reason why.
Listen to how Bernie Sanders describes baseball players being paid.
It's pretty amazing.
So if we are a nation that can provide contracts to baseball players for hundreds of millions of dollars, don't tell me we cannot pay teachers in this country the kind of wages and salaries they deserve.
The government does not pay baseball players.
Okay?
And the government is not the nation.
We pay baseball players because we are willing.
When teachers can draw 40,000 paying customers, then they will get paid like baseball players.
That's not the way this works.
There are lots and lots of teachers who are capable of teaching third grade.
There are only a couple of people on planet Earth who are capable of hitting a 100 mile per hour baseball and entertaining millions of people.
That doesn't mean that on a social level, what is more valuable are baseball players than teachers.
It means that there is a market for baseball players in a way there is not for teachers, and that if you want to get paid like a baseball player, you have to be one of the couple hundred most elite people on planet Earth at this particular job.
I mean, I guess maybe teachers should just go write a book like Bernie Sanders, right?
Bernie Sanders says that he's written a best-selling book, and this means that he deserves the wealth that he has earned from his books.
I guess those teachers maybe should just go write a book.
Again, when you strip away the attractive facade of the Pete Buttigiegs, what you end up with is Bernie Sanders.
Now, Bernie Sanders also did an interview over the weekend about his foreign policy that is extraordinarily radical and frightening and reminds us why Democrats should not be in charge of foreign policy.
That when Barack Obama left office, the world was on fire in a lot of ways.
That the Arab Spring was a giant fail.
That the former president of the United States shipped pallets of cash to Iran.
The former president of the United States let Russia walk all over him.
And now Bernie Sanders is promoting that exact same sort of foreign policy.
He said, I plead guilty to, throughout my adult life, doing everything that I can to prevent war and destruction.
Really?
Everything he could to prevent war and destruction?
Like he supported the communists in Nicaragua.
He honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
I'm pretty sure he didn't do everything he could to avoid war and destruction.
He said, I am very proud that in my small city we established two sister city programs, which I believe honestly are still going on today.
One with Yaroslavl, a city in Russia, the other with the city Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua.
And I happen to believe cultural exchanges and student exchanges are a very important tool to try to bring people together and avoid wars.
And also I help lead the opposition to the war in Iraq, etc, etc, etc.
And he says that he was asked by the New York Times that that Bernie attended a rally in Managua and a wire report at the time said there were anti-American chants from the crowd.
And Bernie answered, the United States was actively supporting the Contras to overthrow the government.
So there was anti-American sentiment.
I remember that.
I remember that event very clearly.
He said they were fighting against American.
He said, are you shocked to learn there was anti-American sentiment?
In other words, he sided with the communist government of Nicaragua and was not upset when people were chanting anti-American things.
That is the foreign policy of Bernie Sanders.
Unfortunately, that's the foreign policy of a large swath of the Democratic Party today.
There's been a lot of talk about quote-unquote nut picking, meaning finding nuts in the Democratic Party and talking about them.
The fact is the mainstream Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left over time.
Bernie Sanders is now considered a thought leader in the Democratic Party, where he was considered a kook back in the 1980s.
Even mainstream Democrats are pushing radical policies.
Amy Klobuchar, who is considered a more moderate-to-right-leaning Democrat, was asked about abortion over the weekend by Chris Wallace, and she said she didn't want any abortion restrictions.
Are you okay with abortions after 24 weeks?
To protect the life and the health of the mother.
That is exactly what the Supreme Court ruling says.
And I am OK with that.
To protect the life and health of the mother.
Health of the mother means that for any reason, effectively, you can get an abortion.
Kirsten Gillibrand, also running for president, a sitting senator from New York.
She was asked about immigration detentions.
She said, I would detain no one.
She would have no detentions at the border.
This is the Democratic Party.
And the Democratic Party is trying to shield their own radicalism by putting out Joe Biden, who's just sort of seen as this doddering old nice guy and Pete Buttigieg, who's seen as a moderate because he wears a tie, but he doesn't wear a jacket and because he's a friendly face.
But Kirsten Gillibrand is, again, a mainstream Democrat.
Here she is saying she would not detain anyone ever.
then support something like Senator Graham has proposed, which would, you mentioned family separation, to stop what the administration has used as a justification for that.
They have said, look, legally we're restricted to only keeping people in detention together for 20 days.
You can't move them through the process that fast.
I wouldn't keep them in detention at all.
But you oppose even what the Obama administration did in terms of keeping families together or keeping him together for a longer period of time in detention?
I wouldn't, as President of the United States, I wouldn't use the detention system at all.
At all?
At all?
Okay, that is a mainstream Democrat running for President talking about that.
Kamala Harris over the weekend.
Came out and said that she wants to find companies that pay men more than women.
Not on the basis of experience, not on the basis of different jobs.
If, just plainly, on average, men are paid more than women, even if women take time off from the workforce, have different jobs, work fewer hours, she wants to find those companies.
That's the heart and soul of the Democratic Party at this point.
It's going to be up to President Trump to, number one, provide a more palatable face for his policies, and number two, to point out that no matter how friendly these Democrats may appear, the Pete Buttigiegs and the Joe Bidens, Behind the smiling facade lurks the same agenda as Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders.
That is the task for the President of the United States if he wishes to win re-election.
It is indeed that simple.
Okay, time for some things I like and then we'll get to some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
So Mark Levin has a new book out this week.
I've been reading it over the weekend.
It's really fun.
It's called Unfreedom of the Press.
By fun, I mean that it's an easy read.
It tells you a lot about the history of the press in the United States.
It's already number one at Amazon, blowing up on the charts.
So go check out Mark Levin's new book.
I think it only comes out in a couple of days, but you can preorder it right now on Freedom of the Press.
Mark's a good friend and a wonderful dude and a great thinker.
Go check out on Freedom of the Press right now.
Other things that I like, so I have to say congratulations to not only everybody who graduated over the weekend and is graduating over the coming few weeks, because we have a lot of college students, law students who listen to the program.
My brother-in-law graduated from University of Virginia Law School yesterday.
So congratulations to Jacob.
But to all grads, I want to say congratulations because big weekend for you.
Other things that I like.
So Jim Carrey put out a cartoon that I think is actually quite wonderful.
He put out a cartoon and it said, I think if you're going to terminate a pregnancy, it should be done sometime before the fetus becomes governor of Alabama.
His painting is of what appears to be a late term abortion of Governor Kay Ivey.
It's her face and her brains are being sucked into some sort of tube.
Now, the reason that I put this in Things I Like is because it does demonstrate, full scale, how many pro-abortion activists feel.
They are fine with the procedure of abortion.
This is a pretty accurate depiction of what a DNE looks like, a dilation and extraction, or a DNC, actually.
Basically, the tube here is sucking out the brains of Governor Kay Ivey.
By the way, no suspension on Twitter.
Nothing.
Really, social media is not cracking down on this at all.
It has, by the way, almost 100,000 likes at this point.
The murder of Kay Ivey, the sitting governor of the state of Alabama.
So, number one, many Democrats, not all, many Democrats don't care about the brutality of the procedure, even if they fully understand it, as this painting seems to.
And number two, If they could, they would murder everyone who they disagree with, which is a pretty amazing, amazing thing from Jim Carrey.
So thanks to Jim Carrey for at least his honesty.
Okay, other things that I like today.
So this could be both in things I like and things I hate.
The time has come for our Game of Thrones finale review.
So if you have not yet seen the Game of Thrones finale, then you're going to want to skip the next few minutes of the program because I am going to go into great detail.
And that means that we are going to have to, we are going to have to spoil some things.
Okay, so, let's talk about what just happened.
The episode starts, Jon is watching as Grey Worm basically executes people, and then Jon is told by, so Tyrion gets imprisoned, and Jon does nothing.
The biggest problem with this season of Game of Thrones, and the last season actually, is that Jon becomes a non-factor.
Jon is basically an extra in this season.
He's turned into a whiny twerp.
So he goes around the season basically lovesick for Dani, who's his aunt, by the way.
He watches her nuke a million people, and he's still spending half the episode going, well, she's my queen.
She's my queen.
She just nuked a million people, dude.
A million.
Like, I have seen you try to take up arms to go with Rob and you were about to leave.
I've seen you go defend the wildlings from the north instead of letting them all get killed.
You let a battle in Winterfell against Ramsay Bolton?
And yet, when it comes to Dany, suddenly it's cool for her to nuke the entire city of King's Landing?
You don't draw a line there?
So, Jon is basically whiny.
He sees Tyrion, who has screwed everything up.
Tyrion says to him, you need to take out Dany.
Why?
Well, because you are the one true heir.
And now, the entire series has been set up to this point, that Jon is the true heir, and it should matter that he is the true heir.
And not only that, Jon has to be active because he is the hero of the story.
So, Jon goes, he sees Dany, all this is fine, Dany is going crazy, and she gives the full-on fascist-slash-communist answer, which is, in the pursuit of utopia, I get to kill whoever I want, which is something that fascists have said Many, many times, right?
This is the Milton Friedman description, the Frederick Hayek description of fascism and socialism.
And John's like, OK, well, you're hot and you're my aunt, but enough.
And he kills her.
So once John kills her, this is where things begin to go wildly wrong.
So what has to happen at that point is that John then has to take the throne, at least temporarily.
The dragon is right there.
For some reason, the dragon is pissed off at the throne.
Nobody knows why.
Dragon's just like, you know what?
This throne right here, this MF-er, I'm taking out the throne.
And he just blowtorches the throne, the dragon.
You're like, well, that's weird.
Don't know why the dragon is doing that.
And the dragon won't attack Jon, obviously, because he's Targaryen.
But the question is, what happens next?
Because the next thing you see, you flash forward to three weeks later, and Jon is in prison.
This makes no sense.
Grey Worm has just executed half the city.
And you think Grey Worm's not going to run in and try to kill Jon, like, right then, that instant?
The dragon has already flown away with Dany's body.
There's nothing to stop him.
Why doesn't he just run in and spear Jon through the chest?
That's what you would expect to happen.
And even that would have made a certain amount of sense if Sansa had then arrived and fought Grey Worm or something.
But instead, we just fast forward to three weeks later and everybody's just having a meeting for no reason.
Okay, so, here, I'll tell you what should have happened after I tell you what does happen.
We've finished reviewing the episode.
So, the, so, Jon ends up in prison.
And Tyrion's in prison, too.
And then suddenly, we're three weeks later, and Tyrion is brought forth, and there's this council.
And the council is basically Sansa Stark and all of her family members.
Right, it's the Tullys, who you will recall are the relatives of her mother, and it is the Arryns, who are also relatives of her mother.
So it's like her mom's entire family is now the only powerful people in Westeros.
And Tyrion comes out, and Grey Worm shows up.
And Grey Worm's like, well, we're not going to let Jon go.
We want to execute him.
And Sans is like, well, if you execute him, we're going to go to war with you.
And their agreement is that we are going to send Jon north to the wall.
This is the problem.
If Jon wanted to take the crown and then abdicate and say, listen, I don't want any part of this.
I've been too messed up by this, like Frodo at the end of Lord of the Rings.
I got to go north of the wall.
I'm not interested.
That would make some sense.
He is the rightful heir.
Instead, he's getting negotiated over by Grey Worm, who is at best a secondary character and Sansa Stark.
Okay, so, we'll get to what should have happened, as I say, in a second.
So, there's this council, and the council's all sitting there, and they're like, oh, who should we make the king?
And the only funny moment of this, by the way, is when Sam proposes a democracy, and then all of the Lord's like, ha ha ha, we have an electoral college here.
That was pretty great, I will admit, because my great fear was that it was gonna be like, let all the people vote.
Listen, in real life, I'm a big fan of all the people voting.
In fantasy fiction, how anticlimactic would it be if they're like, we have to let all the people vote, and then all the people vote for like, whoever's the reality TV star of the day.
But who do they decide on?
So here's who they don't decide on.
They don't decide on Sansa, who's sitting right there, happens to be Queen of the North, also is the legitimate heir to Jon.
Right, Jon is the rightful king.
If Jon is not the king, who is the legitimate heir to Jon?
Well, she, presumably, as Queen of the North would be, because Bran has declared himself unavailable for this job.
Right, Bran goes back to Winterfell at some point earlier, and he's the rightful heir, and he's like, I don't want it, I'm not interested in it.
I'm not interested in it.
But it's not going to go to Sansa.
Tyrion is like, you know, everything is built around stories.
Everything is built.
We need a story to sell to the people.
And who has a better story than Bran?
And I'm sitting there going, everyone.
Every single person who is sitting there, including Edmund Tully, has a better story than Bran.
Bran's story is, he was thrown out of a tower, and then people sledded him around for seven seasons.
And now he's here.
I'll get to Bran in a second.
So everybody on the council is like, yeah, you know what?
Great idea.
Let's make it Bran.
Let's make it the most useless person in all seven seasons of Game of Thrones to this point.
That guy.
Let's make it him.
Except for Sansa.
And Sansa says, yeah, not into it.
Number one, dude can't have kids.
Number two, no.
Just no.
Not going to do that.
I'm going independent.
My favorite part of this is that Asha Greyjoy is sitting right there, and she's got to be thinking to herself, why didn't I do that?
Like, how does she get out of this, but I don't get out of this?
How is that a real thing?
And everybody else says, yeah, let's make it Bran, for no reason.
For no reason at all.
Not Arya, who has killed the Night King, learned to shapeshift, is a member of the Stark family who is not the Three-Eyed Raven, Not her.
Not Sansa, who runs a kingdom up north.
Not Jon, who is still sitting in prison and is the only true heir to the throne.
Right, he's the only Targaryen and he's a Stark.
He's the only heir to the throne.
No, we're gonna banish Jon to the north for no reason at all.
And then, I guess the idea was that he has to be banished to the north because they made a deal with the Unsullied.
Except the Unsullied leave, right?
The Unsullied go to north.
So at that point, wouldn't you see Sansa going, you know who'd be the true king right now?
That guy.
Nope, Sansa's like, you know what?
Sorry I couldn't do anything about you being banished to the north.
Where I'm the queen!
And she could just be like, yeah, you know, John, you could be on the throne.
That would be a thing.
Nope.
They banish him to the north.
So Arya goes and plays Columbus, colonizer Arya, who's, I guess, now our favorite character.
She's bringing Westerosi civilization to unknown lands.
And then you get Bran sitting there.
How useless is Bran?
In his first council meeting, his advisors are sitting around talking about, OK, we need a sewage system.
We also need to rebuild our military.
And also we need to rebuild our navy.
And Bran is like, okay, you guys all do that.
I'm gonna go over here and smoke some weed.
Basically.
Whatever happened to that dragon?
I don't know.
I'm gonna go over here and warg.
Gotta fly like a bird, man.
Just like at the Battle of Winterfell.
Gotta fly like a useless person.
So here's what should have happened.
What should have happened, you could even have Bran be king.
What should have happened is that after Jon kills Daenerys, before the dragon picks up Dany's body and leaves, Jon should have hopped onto the back of the dragon.
The Unsullied come charging up through the door.
They're about to kill Jon, except that Jon is now on top of the greatest killing machine in the history of Westeros.
And he says, and then you fade to black because it is obvious that Jon is now the king.
Or Jon is on top of the dragon, and then you hear a horn from outside because, remember, Varys sent his little birds all over to let everyone know that Jon is the actual heir to the throne.
Everyone is supposed to know this already.
Sansa arrives from the north.
Now, the Unsullied are trapped in the middle, and they just surrender.
And then Jon says to Sansa and Bran and Tyrion, I can't do this.
I'm out.
You know, I had to kill this woman that I loved, and I've been too ruined by all of this.
I need to go north and find my dog.
And then he gives it to Bran.
Then you have the same council scene, and all of that's fine.
The problem is, by robbing Jon of his agency, it makes him a pathetic character.
He's a loser who has to kill the only woman he's interested in, who happens to be his aunt.
And then he gets imprisoned by a eunuch.
And then he gets sent, against his will, back to the north of the Wall.
None of that makes any sense at all.
Okay, final take on this.
Final take on this.
I will say, I have an alternative theory.
Not everybody's going to like this, but here's my alternative theory.
It's my Jar Jar Binks is a Sith theory.
My theory is that Bran is the most evil person in Westeros.
Because it turns out that Bran can see the future.
There's a scene at the council meeting where they're like, Bran, do you want to be the king?
And Bran's like, why do you think I came all this way?
In other words, I knew it was gonna happen the whole time.
Okay, so let's assume he knew it was gonna happen the whole time.
Here are the things that Bran did.
He's a bad guy.
If Bran knew what was gonna happen the whole time, he is a bad, bad man.
So what are all the things?
One, he abandons Rickon.
You remember, he had a brother named Rickon.
And he could go back with Rickon to Winterfell.
Instead, he's like, you know what?
Not interested.
Out.
Rickon goes back.
Rickon gets killed.
He's like, I'm gonna take these two people, my two friends here, we're gonna go north of the wall because I'm having these weird visions.
Okay, he goes north of the wall, he gets dragged around on a sled, gets one of them killed, gets Hodor killed, and then treats the woman who's carrying him around, I can't even remember her name, Mira?
He treats her like garbage, to the point where she's like, why are you treating me badly?
He's like, I'm not Bran anymore.
I'm the Three-Eyed Raven.
Unless I decide to become king, in which case I'm Bran again.
He gets rid of her.
Battle of Winterfell happens.
He does nothing.
Zero things does he do during the Battle of Winterfell.
He's like, I'm going to sit here in my chair, not going to do anything.
I'm just going to sit here.
And am I going to warg into one of the dragons?
Nope.
Am I going to tell Theon what to do so he can save his life?
Nope.
I'm going to be like, Theon, you're a good man.
Go charge at that guy uselessly and get stabbed.
Well done, Bran.
And Theon's like, well, you could do something.
He's like, nope.
I'm turning into birds for no reason.
Just birds, man.
Got to fly like a bird.
No, Bran is totally useless during the Battle of Winterfell.
He tells Jon about his lineage.
For no reason.
For no reason.
Imagine he doesn't tell Jon about his lineage.
Jon marries Dany happily ever after, right?
But he tells Jon about his lineage.
So now Jon knows his lineage.
But he doesn't tell Jon that Dany's gonna go crazy.
Which apparently he already knows.
Or at least has a good sense of.
Which would have been helpful before a million people were burned to death in King's Landing.
He then accepts the crown, but after accepting the crown, he doesn't accept the crown and go, and you know what?
The true heir is John.
John is the king.
Instead, he's like, I'm the king now.
Okay, I guess I'll stick with this deal.
John goes north.
He lets his sister go independent, right?
He's like, okay, well Sansa, she's going to go independent.
That's fine.
She gets to take the north.
Totally cool.
Asha Greyjoy, you stay in.
You ain't going nowhere, sister.
And then finally, he lets the council handle the sewage and military problems while he puffs the magic dragon.
So Bran is actually an evil genius.
This is my theory.
He's like a Sith Lord.
He's an evil genius.
He let the Night King do what he wanted to do for several seasons so that the Night King would take out two dragons, making it possible for him to take the crown after the third dragon couldn't burn Jon.
So, it was disappointing.
Again, all of it would have been okay if they had let Jon be the character that he was the first few seasons, which is a guy who reluctantly is forced into a position of leadership.
But having Jon be imprisoned by people is so dumb.
It's so dumb.
I guess Tyrion gets what he deserves, sort of.
Sansa is the only person who really... By the way, at the end of the... If there were another season of Game of Thrones, you know who becomes the queen of all Westeros, right?
Sansa.
Because Bran, when he dies, who's the only legitimate heir?
Sansa, who also happens to have the only independent army, and all of whose relatives sit on that council.
And happens to be married to the Hand of the King, right?
She's still married to Tyrion.
So, there's that.
Alright, so...
Was it a thing I like or a thing I hate?
It was mostly a thing that I was kind of pissed about.
Overall, the series is still great.
I'm just angry that in the end they rob the only hero who is left of his agency in the show.
The only thing that he does that is worthwhile is he kills Danny.
Which is sad, but then he proceeds to become a loser who is sent back north of the wall the way that he was when he was a kid, which is irritating.
Okay, so that counts as, I think, both things I like and things I hate.
I think we'll skip the rest because that was about a one-hour recapitulation of Game of Thrones.
We'll be back here later today with two additional hours.
I plan on spending all of them talking Game of Thrones.
In fact, this week, nothing but Game of Thrones talk.
Or John Wick 3 Talk.
I don't know.
I'm getting bored with Pete Buttigieg on Fox News.
I'm not sure about you guys, but I'd rather talk Game of Thrones.
And we'll see you here later today.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Copyright, Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, the Democrats have once again proven that they are a radical, anti-science cult, which we already knew, but now we have more evidence of that, with the passage of a bill that would, if it became law, among other things, force women's sports teams to allow men.
So we'll discuss that.
Also, Mayor Pete is supposed to be this moderate, reasonable Democrat.
But why is he then advocating for abortion in the third trimester?
Is that moderate and reasonable now in the Democrat Party?
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