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June 21, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:16

War Drums | Ep. 806

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	Will the U.S.
	go to war with Iran?
	Will Joe Biden's campaign survive the weekend?
	Will Roy Moore visit the food court?
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Well, the news cycle is getting very serious out there.
	We begin today with the obvious news that the president considered a strike on Iranian resources.
	It is unclear at this point where in Iran we were planning to strike, but the president apparently pulled back at the very last minute.
	So there were a couple of conflicting reports last night, one from the New York Times, one from the Associated Press, about exactly what happened.
	It was late yesterday, and the president was basically deciding whether or not to strike Iranian targets.
	The planes were in the air, they were all ready to go, and then they were pulled back at the very last minute.
	According to the New York Times, President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but then pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.
	As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president's top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.
	Officials said that the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets like radar and missile batteries.
	The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, according to a senior administration official.
	Planes were already in the air.
	The ships were in position.
	No missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, according to the official, as all the New York Times reporting.
	The abrupt reversal put a halt to what would have been the president's third military action against targets in the Middle East.
	President Trump had twice struck at targets in Syria in 2017 and 2018.
	It was not clear, according to the New York Times, whether Mr. Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration altered course because of logistics or strategy.
	It was also not clear whether the attacks might still go forward.
	Asked about the plans for a strike and the decision to hold back, the White House declined to comment, as did Pentagon officials.
	No government officials asked the New York Times to withhold the article.
	That was the report that was coming forth from the New York Times, and they talk about a split among President Trump's advisers.
	Senior administration officials said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, and Gina Haspel, the CIA Director, had favored a military response.
	But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action Could result in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.
	That's the part of the story that conflicts with the Associated Press story.
	So the Associated Press story suggested that the President of the United States had been advised by the Pentagon, in fact, to go ahead.
	They said that the strikes were recommended by the Pentagon, so apparently the story isn't even straight within the media as to who was recommending what.
	The real question here was whether it was going to escalate if, in fact, the United States took some sort of retaliatory action.
	Obviously, President Trump thought that the answer was maybe.
	So this morning, the president started tweeting out his foreign policy, which, again, not my recommendation, because in the last 24 hours, we have seen the president tweet out that Iran made a very big mistake.
	And then within 24 hours, he's tweeting out why, in fact, Iran might have just made a mistake.
	It wasn't actually on purpose.
	And then he was suggesting that Iran Couldn't be hit because it would have been too provocative or too disproportionate.
	Here's what the president tweeted out.
	Well, that's what the president tweeted out, clarifying his position in just one second.
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	Okay, so the president clarifies his policy today via Twitter.
	Again, not a huge fan of clarifying foreign policy via tweet.
	I don't think that it's a good idea, but This is the president that we have.
	So, the president says, President Obama made a desperate and terrible deal with Iran.
	Gave them $150 billion plus $1.8 billion in cash.
	True.
	Iran was in big trouble and he bailed them out.
	Gave them a free path to nuclear weapons and soon, instead of saying thank you, Iran yelled death to America.
	I terminated a deal which was not even ratified by Congress and imposed strong sanctions.
	They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my presidency when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East.
	Now they are bust.
	Okay, so all of this is true, and all of this is correct.
	The president was absolutely correct to pull out of the Iran deal, which was, in fact, a deal that was garbage.
	The entire Iran deal was built to allow Iran to strengthen its regional ambitions while pledging to hold off on nuclear weapons just long enough for them to strengthen their hand.
	And then, as soon as the deal expired, in a 10-year period, they flipped the switch and they've got nuclear weapons, and now they are a regional power with nuclear weapons.
	The deal was always a crap deal.
	The Obama administration basically was paying off the Iranians, not to develop nuclear weapons, but to fund terrorism, just so long as Obama was in office and maybe a little bit beyond if another Democrat had been elected.
	And then the president addressed via Twitter what exactly happened last night.
	He says, On Monday, they, meaning the Iranians, shot down an unmanned drone flying in international waters.
	We were cocked and loaded to retaliate last night on three different sites when I asked how many will die.
	150 people, sir, was the answer from a general.
	Ten minutes before the strike, I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.
	He said, I'm in no hurry.
	Our military is rebuilt, new and ready to go.
	By far the best in the world.
	Sanctions are biting and more added last night.
	Iran can never have nuclear weapons, not against the United States and not against the world.
	OK, so it is that sort of middle tweet there with which I have some issues.
	The one where he actually spells out his strategy.
	So there are a few problems with this.
	One, he suggests that they were basically ready to go.
	The planes were in the air.
	They were on their way.
	And that's when he asked how many people will die.
	Now, the President of the United States should probably be asking that question before we load up the jets and get out there in the air, right?
	That should be kind of the first question you ask, is what exactly is this strike going to look like?
	What are the consequences of this strike?
	But, be that as it may, the President calls it back.
	Now, it's his rationale that I have a problem with.
	And when he says 150 people were going to die and that was not proportionate, I don't know where this idiotic notion came from that if you attack the United States, we are supposed to be proportionate in our response.
	In fact, I think that's a terrible idea.
	The reason I think that's a terrible idea is because the United States actually tried something that was basically called proportionate response.
	It was actually called graduated escalation during the Vietnam War.
	It was a strategy put in place by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
	And the strategy which is elucidated by former Trump National Security Advisor H.R.
	McMaster in his book Dereliction of Duty.
	The book is all about how Robert McNamara and the LBJ administration blew the Vietnam War by engaging in this graduated escalation.
	The idea was that we would gradually turn up the heat on the Vietnamese, on the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, until they realized that we were going, that we were very serious about this, and then they would back down.
	But that's not really how military conflict works.
	The reason that people don't want to get involved with you in military conflict is because they are afraid you will devastate them.
	Not that you will gradually turn up the heat, but that you will devastate them.
	Effectively speaking, foreign policy is much more like a high school playground than like a debate society.
	And a high school, junior high playground, there's always the one kid that you didn't want to fight because he was kind of crazy and you never knew what he was going to do.
	And there's always that one guy on the playground who you sort of suspected he might have a knife in his backpack.
	And if things went dramatically wrong, things would get really bad for you really quickly.
	Well, that's sort of President Trump's appeal, right?
	He said this before.
	He likes to be unpredictable.
	He likes to be the guy who is intimidating because you don't know what he is going to do.
	The fact is that if Iran knows that they can trade basically an unmanned U.S.
	drone for nothing, right, the United States is not going to retaliate in any way, do you think they're going to stop pushing?
	They like this.
	They're the ones initiating this conflict.
	So here's what Iran is after here.
	Iran is after a couple of things.
	One, they want to force up the price of oil, so they need chaos in the region, because the sanctions are working, because they have no money.
	They're deliberately trying to force up the price of oil by creating chaos in the region.
	They've basically become North Korea, except they are worried about the oil markets.
	And that brings us to the second rationale.
	The second rationale is that they are hoping that the sanctions will be dismantled if they act militaristic enough.
	They're hoping that they can sort of score the same deal that the Kim regime in North Korea has scored routinely with the West, which is we act like nutjobs.
	We launch nuclear tests every so often.
	We fire a few missiles over the Sea of Japan.
	And then you sign us a check and hope that we stop.
	That's what the Iranians were doing with the Obama administration.
	It's why they signed the nuclear deal.
	Give us cash, and we'll stop this for the moment, and then every so often we'll act crazy again, and then you give us more cash, and then eventually we'll have enough cash that we can do exactly what we want to do.
	That's the goal that is being pursued by the Iranians.
	And in order to achieve that goal, they also have to make the case to the Europeans that the Europeans should basically force the Trump administration to back down.
	So what they're going to continue to do now is push.
	And the Stalin line was that you push until you hit steel.
	And that's effectively what the Iranians are doing right now.
	They're pushing.
	They're pushing.
	They're pushing because they know that the left in the United States, the press, the media, are interested in boxing President Trump in.
	That they've created this false narrative where President Trump is the truly erratic force here.
	That President Trump is the one who is driving the conflict.
	That President Trump, if only he were a little bit kinder to the Iranians, none of this would be happening.
	Everything would be going back to the wonderful way that it was just before that evil President Trump took office.
	The Iranians know exactly what the Europeans think of President Trump.
	They know what the press thinks of President Trump.
	And they are playing that to the hilt.
	That's what this is.
	All of which suggests that the President is going to have to take action here sooner or later.
	Truly.
	Now the Iranians may be careful.
	They may be careful enough that they never shoot down an American manned aircraft.
	That they don't actually kill an American.
	That they just sort of keep this at a low level of boiling conflict, hoping that the Trump administration will back down.
	But that is not a good thing either, because sooner or later they will do something that damages us enough where we do have to retaliate.
	If you want to stop this thing in its tracks, you do have to show the Iranians that if things get real, the Ayatollahs are not only not going to be in charge of Iran anymore, they are not going to be breathing anymore.
	Because there is one thing that the Iranians want a lot less than the United States does, and that's a war.
	It's very funny.
	In the United States, because none of us want to go to war with Iran.
	I don't want to go to war with Iran.
	You don't want to go to war with Iran.
	Nobody wants war with Iran.
	Nobody wants hundreds of thousands of troops invading Iran.
	Nobody wants American lives lost.
	Nobody wants any of those things.
	You know who wants war with the United States less than the United States wants war with Iran?
	The Iranian regime.
	Because if it goes to all-out war, if it goes to all-out war, that regime does not stand a chance.
	And we should note here that there are a bunch of options still on the table for President Trump, but what is being pursued right now looks a lot like a Clintonian foreign policy, and that is not a good idea.
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	Okay, so a couple of things that we ought to put to bed right away.
	Us striking Iran and knocking out their navy, for example, does not mean full-scale war with Iran.
	It doesn't.
	Because as I say, if the Iranians retaliated to the point where a full-scale war were necessary, the Ayatollahs are dead.
	They're atomized.
	They are not living anymore.
	The United States does have overwhelming military force, with the most powerful force in the history of the world.
	The one thing that the Iranians don't want at the end of all this, they like the tension, but what they don't want is the release of tension in the form of the United States bombing the living crap out of them.
	That is not something they actually want.
	Number two.
	If the United States takes retaliatory action, that does not mean full-scale war.
	I'm very sick of this false binary that's being driven by the media that suggests that if the United States were to retaliate against the attack on American assets, that this means that war, like full-scale Iraq-style war, is exactly what's going to happen here.
	In a second, I'm going to read you a list of the kinetic military actions that we have taken just since 2010.
	How many of these devolved into full-scale war?
	The answer?
	Zero.
	Zero.
	The only one.
	Maybe one.
	Maybe Libya.
	That's it.
	Okay, so, here's a bit of a timeline, since 2010, of military actions in which the United States has been involved.
	And virtually none of these involved a full-scale war.
	Aside from 2011, when we intervened militarily in Libya, which, by the way, I opposed.
	Aside from that military intervention, every intervention that I'm about to read to you does not involve a full-scale war.
	Hey, in 2011, we had drone strikes on al-Shabaab militants in Somalia.
	That was the sixth nation in which we had carried out those drone strikes, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya.
	We sent combat troops as advisors to Uganda in 2011.
	We deployed troops to Jordan to help contain the Syrian civil war within Syria's borders in 2012.
	We sent Patriot missiles to Turkey to prevent missile strikes from Syria in 2012.
	We deployed troops to Chad in 2012.
	We deployed troops to Mali in 2012.
	We conducted a raid in Somalia in 2013.
	We sent soldiers to Uganda to help African forces search for Joseph Kony in 2014.
	We led intervention in Syria that did not devolve into full-scale war with the Syrian regime in 2014.
	And by the way, President Trump has launched two separate military strikes against Syria in 2017 and 2018, and neither time did it devolve into full-scale war.
	In 2015, the United States sent ships to the Strait of Hormuz to shield vessels after the Iranian seizure of a commercial vessel.
	Iran fired shots over the bow and seized the ship.
	And that's when the Obama administration chickened out and decided to sign a deal with the Iranians.
	In 2015, we deployed 300 troops to Cameroon.
	You've never heard of any of this stuff, right?
	The reason you've never heard of any of this stuff is because not every U.S.
	military action devolves into a full-scale war.
	Eli Lake has a good piece today over at Bloomberg talking about the various options that are available to the Trump administration.
	He suggests that there are a bunch of things that the United States could do.
	He says, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force are spread out throughout the Middle East.
	Not only are senior officials stationed in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon, but there are Iranian military outposts in those countries as well.
	Since 2017, the U.S.
	intelligence community has prioritized the mapping of these Iranian forces in the Middle East.
	Options currently under consideration include strikes on those outposts timed not to result in casualties.
	A more serious option under consideration involves direct lethal strikes on Iranian commanders stationed outside of Iran.
	We could also strike Iranian naval facilities, as we did in 1988 and 1989 in Operation Praying Mantis.
	And the list of U.S.
	options is not limited to traditional warfare.
	We have cyber operations.
	We could continue to attack Iranian military computer networks.
	We need to restore deterrence, obviously.
	And here is where things get ugly.
	It is obvious that the Democrats are not interested in restoring any level of deterrence.
	They're interested in trying to appease and bribe the Iranian regime.
	And we'll get to that in just a second, because we tried that in the 1990s with terrorists.
	It did not work well.
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	Okay, so as I say, the left is militating against any sort of deterrent action by the United States because they would prefer to pay off the worst terror regime on planet Earth.
	Ben Rhodes was a damned congenital liar.
	The man behind the Iran deal who admitted to the Atlantic that he lied openly to the American public about the predicate for the Iran deal.
	He suggested that the Iran, the Iranian regime was right on the verge of moderation.
	If only we'd cut a deal.
	It was all a lie.
	It was made up.
	He admitted it was all made up.
	He's out there criticizing the Trump administration today, saying we didn't need to pull out of a deal that was working, and we don't need to go to war over a drone.
	Let me just point out, Ben Rhodes and the Obama administration went to war over not a drone, over literally no attacks on American assets in Libya.
	We went to full-scale war.
	That war ended with effectively the takeover of the entire country of Libya by a variety of terrorist groups and a mass refugee crisis that ended up swamping the southern coasts of Europe.
	So that worked out great.
	In other news, the administration in which he served presided over the murder of 500,000 people in Syria and handing over control of that country to the Russian government.
	So why don't you sit this one out, Ben?
	But not only that, he then tweets out, This is precisely why politics isn't a game.
	Diplomatic agreements should be honored, and temperament, intellect, and judgment are what matters in who is president.
	It should never have come to this.
	It should never have come... You know what might have stopped it from coming to this?
	If you had taken any sort of preventative action against Iran when, say, your boy was in the White House, when your guy was in the White House, when your man was in the White House, right?
	When... This is ridiculous.
	This is just ridiculous.
	Okay, the fact?
	That Ben Rhodes is suggesting that this is Trump's fault, that it's Trump's problem, when it was Obama that led to the rise of Iran regionally in the area is pretty astonishing.
	With that said, when it comes to President Trump's policy, When it comes to what President Trump should do going forward, emulating the Clinton administration, emulating Clinton, who basically sat back and watched Al Qaeda attack the Kobar Towers, attack the U.S.
	embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attack the USS Cole, and didn't really respond because he was afraid that the blowback would be too great on him politically.
	That did not result in wonderful results for the United States.
	In fact, it resulted in a belief widespread in the radical Islamic terror world that the United States was a weak horse that could be taken.
	And that was the that was the idea here.
	So it's.
	Yeah, pretty, pretty astonishing, pretty.
	And again, the people who are sort of defending Trump vacillating here, we'll see where Trump goes from here.
	But if Trump continues to vacillate and do nothing, that will have exactly the same results as if a Democratic president did the same thing.
	Now, listen, Trump doesn't want to go to war.
	This is the thing.
	Everybody knows Trump doesn't want to go to war.
	And this is the part of this that's so dishonest on the part of the media and the Democrats.
	They keep suggesting that Trump desperately wants to take America into war.
	Yesterday, President Trump said openly, my administration isn't pushing me into war.
	He suggested it could have been something stupid that the Iranians were doing.
	Like, Trump desperately does not want a conflict here.
	No, not at all.
	Not at all.
	In fact, in many cases, it's the opposite.
	But I will say, look, I said I want to get out of these endless wars.
	I campaigned on that.
	I want to get out.
	We've been in Afghanistan for 19 years.
	As you know, we've reduced very substantially in Afghanistan.
	We beat the caliphate.
	We took back 100 percent of the caliphate.
	When it was 99 percent, Justin, I said, we're going to get out.
	We're going to start peeling back.
	And everybody went crazy because it was 99.
	So I said, all right, so we'll finish it up.
	So we got 100 percent.
	But this is something.
	This is a new wrinkle.
	This is a new fly in the ointment, what happened shooting down the drone.
	And this country will not stand for it.
	That I can tell you.
	Thank you very much.
	Nobody wants.
	But all these false narratives running around, that if you take action against Iran, that it's the end of the world and war is inevitable and everyone's going to die and all of this, that's not true either.
	Some deterrent force needs to be created here, and obviously what's been happening so far ain't cutting it.
	Okay, meanwhile, the Joe Biden campaign is having some serious trouble.
	According to the Washington Post, tensions ripple through the Biden campaign as his past working relationship with a segregationist senator comes to the forefront.
	According to the Washington Post, Joe Biden was a freshman senator, the youngest member of the August body, when he reached out to an older colleague for help on one of his early legislative proposals.
	The courts were ordering racially segregated school districts to bus children to create more integrated classrooms, a practice Biden opposed and wanted to change.
	Biden wrote on June 30th, 1977, "I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help "during this week's committee meeting "in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation "to a vote." The recipient of that entreaty was Senator James O. Eastland, at the time a well-known segregationist who had called blacks an inferior race and once vowed to prevent blacks and whites from eating together in Washington.
	The exchange, revealed in a series of letters, offers a new glimpse into an old relationship that erupted this week as a major controversy for Biden's presidential campaign.
	Now, as I've said before, amazing that the media are just uncovering this now.
	Weird, isn't it?
	He was vice president for eight long years.
	He's been in the Senate for one million years, Joe Biden.
	He is older than Methuselah.
	And yet only now are we digging up these letters from 1977, just in time for a coordinated assault by Democrats on his record on race.
	Why, whoever would have suspected this sort of thing?
	And why would Barack Obama have employed such a vicious racist as Vice President of the United States?
	Biden's campaign late Thursday issued a statement saying that the insinuation that Joe Biden shared the same views as Eastland on segregation is a lie.
	Nonetheless, this is becoming part of a sort of broader narrative about Joe Biden that is being pushed not only by the media, but by a lot of his political rivals.
	He wrote a letter on March 2nd, 1977 to Eastland, who is a racist, saying, my bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court-ordered busing.
	It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the Constitution, where there is no evidence that the government officials intended to discriminate.
	He said, I believe there is growing sentiment in the Congress to curb unnecessary busing.
	Now, again, this is them deliberately taking Biden out of context.
	The fact is that forced busing was bad policy and led to tremendous amounts of white flight from cities.
	So voluntary sort of segregation of people who decided to leave particular areas because they didn't want their kids to be in in schools with black kids.
	There was a push by people that instead we would have to have forced busing.
	We're going to take kids from areas and move them into other areas.
	Black kids into white areas, white kids into black areas, and this is going to solve all of the problems.
	There's a difference between mandatory integration and the end of legal desegregation.
	Lino Graglia has an entire book on this, professor at University of Texas Law School.
	Biden was taking the side that you can't force kids to go to a school that they don't want to go to, and that it's in fact counterproductive.
	Force busing, by the way, was a giant failure as a policy.
	It did not, in fact, stop white flight.
	It did not solve the problems of school integration.
	It didn't do any of those things.
	So if you oppose that, that didn't necessarily come from a racist place.
	For some racists, maybe it did.
	But also it may have come from the idea that the government doesn't have a role to play here.
	And also the government is ineffective here.
	But people are trying to suggest that it's really because Biden is racist.
	And we're seeing all sorts of this narrative pushed out today.
	In 1975, Joe Biden did an interview in which he said this.
	This is his pushing against forced busing.
	to come out of the closet.
	If it isn't yet a respectable liberal position, it is no longer a racist one.
	This is his pushing against force busing.
	He says, "I think the Democratic Party "could stand a liberal George Wallace, "someone who's not afraid to stand up and offend people, "someone who wouldn't pander, "but would say what the American people know "in their gut is right." Now, the invocation of George Wallace is being trotted out as evidence that Joe Biden is a racist.
	And George Wallace was a vicious racist.
	George Wallace was a segregationist.
	He believed black people were inferior.
	He ran for president on that platform.
	He won some southern states.
	So invoking George Wallace in 1975 is a pretty ugly move by Joe Biden.
	At the same time, does that mean that Joe Biden was a closet segregationist?
	Is that the contention?
	And does his record since 1975 mean anything on this sort of stuff?
	Is it possible that Joe Biden is just an idiot and he says idiotic things on a regular basis?
	I mean, that seems a lot more plausible, but the media are coming for old Joe and it's going to continue.
	In 1981, here's a comment he made, again invoking George Wallace.
	He said, Sometimes even George Wallace is right about some things.
	One of the things that is happening in this country is that the American people have given up because we're not very innovative.
	Let me move off busing to make my point and then I will end my part of it.
	Let us take the death penalty.
	Everybody wants the death penalty now.
	We are going to hang everybody.
	Do you know why they want the death penalty?
	Because stupid sociologists and guys like people who sit up here in my job for years kept telling them we know how to rehabilitate.
	They do not have the slightest idea how to rehabilitate.
	Our entire criminal justice system is premised on the point that you sentence someone based upon the amount of time it will take to rehabilitate them.
	He says, so the American people, because they are basically good, like most people, in my opinion, are, went along and said, we'll buy that.
	And they bought it for 20 years.
	And it does not work.
	Again, this is Joe Biden circa 1981.
	And I get killed by my liberal constituency for saying it.
	I say, hey, let's forget about rehabilitation.
	We do not know how to do it.
	Say it.
	Boom.
	Tell them.
	Because if you don't, you know what is going to happen.
	Eventually, people are going to get so frustrated by the way, liberal sociologists and politicians who say, we must rehabilitate our fellow man.
	We must help them.
	And then they see Richard Speck come up for parole, even though he did not get it.
	And they say, my God, why should that be?
	So guess what?
	Now they have only one or two things to choose between.
	They choose between Strom Thurmond's view of hang them or continue business as usual.
	So this sort of language is being trotted out as evidence that Joe Biden is a racist, again invoking George Wallace, which is a bizarre decision.
	But Joe Biden, it seems, typically invokes people he thinks are bad, like George Wallace and segregationists, as sort of outliers in his examples.
	He's been doing it for 30 years.
	Is that evidence that he's a vicious, brutal racist?
	I have a tough time thinking that that is the case.
	Circa 1992, by the way, Joe Biden was saying that his crime bill would hang people.
	This is another thing that's being trotted out to prove that Joe Biden is actually a vicious racist because his crime bill was supposedly targeted at black folks as opposed to at criminals.
	Worth noting that in this 1990 clip, 92 clip, this is before hair plugs, apparently, here's Joe Biden talking about the crime bill.
	Let me tell you what is in the bill.
	And I'll let you all decide Whether or not this is weak.
	Let me get down here a compendium of the things that are in the bill.
	One, the death penalty. - Okay.
	It provides 53 death penalty offenses.
	Weak as can be, you know?
	We do everything but hang people for jaywalking in this bill.
	That's weak stuff.
	So Joe Biden being raked over the coals.
	And you're going to see that the entire Democratic Party has decided to jump into this.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	OK, we're going to get to more of the Democrats piling on Joe Biden in just one moment.
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	So the Democrats in the media are crafting this narrative whereby Joe Biden is a secret, vicious racist and has been all the way back since 1975 because he made political, forged political vicious racist and has been all the way back since 1975 because he made political, forged political relationships with segregationists in order to get things that he wanted done because he opposed forced busing, You might not like white flight.
	I'm not a huge fan, but that does not mean That forced busing was a solution to that.
	In fact, it was not.
	It just led to more white flight even further out so that you were outside the forced busing areas.
	The fact is that you cannot force people to live where you want them to live in a free country.
	You just cannot do that.
	And you can't force people to go to school where you want them to go to school in a free country.
	Joe Biden opposed forced busing.
	Therefore, he must be some sort of vicious racist.
	He invoked George Wallace a couple of times, which, again, is a bad move, but fully in line with Joe Biden being an idiot who says things Without thinking about them fully and invokes people who are at the ultimate extreme of American politics in order to make points.
	This is sort of one of his strategies, like I'd even make a deal with that guy.
	I'd even make a deal with George Wallace.
	I mean, what we need is somebody who's going to be honest like George Wallace, but also not a piece of crap like George.
	That's the kind of way that Biden talks.
	That doesn't mean that it's great, but it also doesn't mean that he's a vicious racist.
	But the Democratic Party has decided to turn on old Joe.
	AOC leading the way.
	Cory Booker has been attacking Joe Biden and suggesting that Joe Biden is a racist and then pretending he is not suggesting that.
	So then what's the criticism?
	AOC tweeted out, For the record, Cory Booker does not owe Joe Biden an apology for pointing out that waxing nostalgic about working with segregationists is insensitive.
	He knows better?
	Really?
	What is better, to stay quiet about it?
	Well, no, it's better is to not proclaim that Joe Biden is actually in league with segregationists and sympathetic to segregation.
	And if he's not either of those things, then what exactly is the critique here?
	Truly, what is the critique?
	Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is, of course, a racially polarizing figure.
	I think that he is, as I've said, wildly overrated, a muddy thinker, somebody who relies on racial polarization in order to push a particular left-leaning political agenda.
	He's out there bashing Joe Biden.
	He says that Joe Biden shouldn't be president either.
	I don't—I mean, Joe Biden shouldn't be president, you know?
	You know, obviously, I don't think I'm breaking any news here.
	You know, if he ends up being the nominee, better him than Trump.
	But, you know, I think that's a really, really low standard.
	OK, so he's already out there opposing.
	He was a Biden.
	He was a Sanders supporter in the last election cycle.
	Bernie Sanders, by the way, got into it with an MSNBC anchor over Joe Biden's comments as well.
	The entire Democratic Party is mobilizing against Joe Biden right now.
	What will be fascinating to see is whether Biden actually starts to drop in the polls.
	Now, we have seen a drop in the polls for Biden.
	But the rich line of attack for Bernie Sanders in the debates next week will be on Joe Biden, and some of it will be racial.
	You'll see Kamala Harris and Cory Booker do it, too.
	Booker's already setting up for it.
	So is Booker in the... I'm trying to remember.
	I believe Booker is in the debate with... Is he in the same debate as Biden?
	Oh, no, he's in the one with Warren.
	OK, so so Biden gets lucky.
	That means that Kamala Harris is the one who's going to be attacking Joe Biden over the race issue, because Cory Booker is stuck in the in the kids table debate with Warren.
	But Sanders will go after it.
	Also, here's Sanders doing just that on MSNBC.
	I don't think you have to be touting personal relations with people who were very brutal segregationists.
	He wasn't touting relations.
	His point was... Okay, ma'am, I'm sorry.
	If you disagree with me, that's fine.
	That's my view.
	But haven't you, over a four-decade career, had to align yourselves with people who don't share your views on things in order to advance your causes?
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	It's just what I said.
	Absolutely.
	I have, and so has every other member of the Congress.
	So then what's the critique?
	The answer is a lot of this is truly dishonest.
	And again, it is amazing to me that the same media that suggested Beto O'Rourke was a world-beating candidate when he was running against Ted Cruz, then they flipped and said, oh, hey, look at this guy.
	He's an empty vessel who eats dirt.
	Isn't that weird?
	He's a furry.
	We're just noticing this now.
	What a weirdo with his weird arm movements and his faux-authenticity.
	We're just noticing that.
	As soon as Ted Cruz is off the stage, all of a sudden we know.
	Same thing with Joe Biden.
	When Joe Biden is running against Paul Ryan as VP, then it's old Joe, so authentic, so true to himself.
	And then he runs against a bunch of other Democrats that the media like better, and suddenly they're rediscovering how to do basic investigative journalism.
	How to search archives and find old things that Joe Biden has said and report those things.
	They're finally looking into stuff like Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son.
	Doing business with countries that Joe Biden was doing business with as vice president.
	How Joe Biden's son, Hunter, was getting magical contracts from businesses located in China and the Ukraine while Joe Biden was trying to do business with China and the Ukraine as vice president of the United States.
	You know when that stuff might have been more helpful to report on?
	When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, because all this was public material at the time.
	But the media, apparently the blinders only come off when it's convenient, which is pretty obvious.
	Okay, time for some mailbagging.
	So let's mailbag it up a little bit.
	John says, Hi Ben.
	At what point, if any, do you think the U.S.
	should take military action against a foreign adversary, in this case, Iran?
	Given that we attacked the Syrian Air Force infrastructure in 2017, even without our own forces being attacked, what should the standard be for military intervention against Iran in this case?
	I appreciate your thoughts and have a great weekend.
	Obviously, any military intervention has to be calculated against what is the goal.
	The goal in this case is deterring Iran from attacking ships in the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman.
	That is the goal here.
	So if that's the goal, it seems to me that a military intervention to stop them from doing so by blowing a couple of their ships out of the water would probably be a good idea.
	And, in fact, there is ample precedent for this.
	We did it in the 1980s.
	We sank basically their entire navy, their rinky-dink navy, in a day.
	When they knock a U.S.
	drone out of the sky, a $110 million U.S.
	drone out of the sky, that is in international territory, then knocking down a couple of their surface-to-air missile sites, that seems like a perfectly proportional and appropriate response.
	The point is you do what you do to have to deter the Iranians.
	I'll tell you what isn't going to deter the Iranians is sitting there and doing nothing.
	Now, maybe it's possible, as I suggested earlier in the show, maybe it is possible that the president merely threatening on Twitter, like, guys, we were this close to me knocking you guys.
	We were this close.
	So cut it out.
	Maybe that does the trick.
	I have serious doubts that that does the trick because, again, the credibility of the president has to be established by willingness to use force and the president Has wavered on this.
	He has wavered from time to time on the level of force to be used, on whether he wants to use force or not use force.
	Unpredictability.
	There has to be a certain level of predictable unpredictability.
	But it doesn't really hold when within 24 hours you're saying Iran made a very big mistake, but maybe they also didn't make a really big mistake, etc.
	Zachariah says, hey Ben, love the show and all you guys do at the Daily Wire.
	Quick question about the executive branch.
	Does the president have the power to eliminate the alphabet soup offices that exist under the executive branch, i.e.
	eliminate the DEA or some other office, and then shift those funds over to Border Patrol?
	I've often wondered this after the government audit under Barack Obama showed that several agencies that were budgetary sinkholes with nothing to show for all their funding.
	If so, why does no president use that power?
	Thanks, Zach.
	Well, there was a case called U.S.
	v. Nixon in which Nixon said he didn't want to spend money allocated to the executive branch by Congress, and it was passed over as veto.
	And the Supreme Court found that the executive branch couldn't just stop spending the money, and they couldn't just not do what Congress wanted them to do.
	But the executive branch Could do, presumably, is just not ask Congress for the funding, or veto any funding for a particular department.
	The executive branch does have the power to fire people within a department, so you could theoretically eliminate nearly the entirety of a department.
	And then, you know, you still have the money sitting around there.
	As far as eliminating entire departments that are established by congressional fiat, I don't believe the executive branch can unilaterally just eliminate the Department of Education.
	Legally speaking, I don't think that that's the case.
	Although, frankly, I'd want to check it out.
	I don't know the full answer.
	Luciano says, Sir Ben, I was a huge Stephen King fan for years, but over the last few years, I've been hearing his stance on politics.
	Nowadays, when I listen to his audio books, I hear King's point of view instead of the stories I enjoyed.
	Do you think there's a way to separate the art from the artist?
	Longtime listener, first time member, Luciano.
	So, number one, I think that it is very important to separate the art from the artist when we can.
	There are a lot of horrible people who create great art.
	And I think we should still be able to enjoy the art created by horrible people.
	The truth is virtually everybody is flawed to some extent or another.
	You can always find an excuse.
	Some excuses are great.
	Some excuses are bad as to why you should engage or not engage with somebody.
	But art is separate from the artist.
	The problem for King is that King has actually infused his books with his politics.
	That makes it very difficult.
	So it would be one thing if King were just writing books that were apolitical, but very often lately, I also have read many, many Stephen King books.
	I think particularly his premises of his books are really interesting, and then he has no idea how to finish them.
	This is the common pattern to Stephen King.
	Basically, a Stephen King book starts out with this really interesting premise, and something interesting happens, something odd and interesting.
	And then it progresses for 300 pages of pulp, and then he blows everything up.
	That has been the ending to, I think, his last three books, last four books.
	At the very end, everything just sort of goes on fire and explodes.
	And that's annoying just from an artistic point of view.
	But what's even more annoying is all of this.
	There's I remember I read Under the Dome and in Under the Dome, every villain.
	is a caricature of some sort of right-wing, hick, ridiculous figure who's secretly disgusting and terrible, even though they're a Bible thumper.
	And King has this very John Lithgow in Footloose view of what conservatives are, and it's very irritating and very self-flattering for King.
	No, that is not how trade deficits work.
	has a trade deficit year after year, doesn't it eventually run out of money?
	How is it sustainable year after year if we buy $500 billion and sell only $100 billion, doesn't it wind up as debt?
	No, that is not how trade deficits work.
	So a trade deficit, people misunderstand what a trade deficit is.
	A trade deficit is not the United States government spends more than it takes in.
	That's just a deficit.
	A trade deficit is that the members of the United States citizenry spend more on products from foreign countries than those countries spend on the United States.
	But that money doesn't just disappear.
	So, you spend a hundred bucks on a product from China.
	What happens to that hundred dollars?
	Well, the Chinese can't use it in their own commerce.
	They don't use dollars for commerce.
	Instead, they're going to have to use that money for investment.
	And so, very often, they will use that capital for capital reinvestment.
	They'll buy American bonds, or they'll buy American companies, or they'll invest in American real estate.
	Balance of trade is not, in my opinion, an important indicator of the economic health of a country.
	I mean, you don't have a balance of trade with your supermarket.
	You buy stuff from your supermarket all the time.
	Presumably, the supermarket doesn't buy nearly as much from you as you buy from the supermarket.
	Does that mean that you have been damaged by the supermarket?
	You're running a trade deficit with them.
	The answer is no.
	Right, because now you saved money.
	Presumably the reason you shopped at the supermarket and you didn't grow all the food in your backyard is because you wanted to save money.
	So a trade deficit can actually, for you, make a lot of sense.
	And for the citizenry, it can make a lot of sense.
	Now there's an argument that is often made that a trade deficit hollows out particular industries because basically you're buying from places that are not American.
	That is true.
	There's no question that if you buy from a place that is not American, an American business didn't get your business.
	But, again, those dollars end up reinvested into the American economy over time.
	Those dollars end up invested into presumably more lucrative and more efficient American businesses.
	This is the concept of comparative advantage.
	Well, there are many great charities.
	I support a bunch of pro-life charities.
	I support a bunch of Jewish charities.
	Obviously, as a religious Jew, I support a lot of religious charities.
	I support the Gary Sinise Foundation, which is a pro-military charity.
	I'm trying to remember where I gave.
	I gave a fair bit of charity last year.
	I'm trying to remember the exact list of organizations to which I gave.
	It was somewhere between five and ten charities that I signed fairly large checks to.
	I'll get a list of it.
	But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of wonderful charities out there.
	John says, hello Ben.
	I originally subscribed during the Vox Adpocalypse.
	If President Trump wins re-election and the left goes so far left that they will hit a brick wall and then blow open that wall so they can go even further left.
	Do you think that the moderate Democrats, currently keeping quiet, will start to push back against the radical left and try to take back the party from crazy people?
	I really doubt this.
	I really doubt this because I think that the left has been driven so fully insane by President Trump and that they live in such a delusional world that they believe that they are not sufficiently committed to the left.
	And that's why they lost in 2016.
	And I think the same thing will be true in 2020.
	If Joe Biden is the nominee and they lose, they'll say we were too moderate.
	And if it is somebody who's more woke and they lose, then it will be, well, we just need to get out there and fight harder.
	I think that the Democratic Party has engaged in a sort of bizarre myth of its own creation.
	And that myth is that Barack Obama ushered in a new political world.
	That Barack Obama changed the status of American politics forever, and that another Democrat could pick up that mantle and run with it.
	And basically the proposition was that before this was a 50-50 country, Barack Obama made it into a 52-48 country or a 53-47 country, and that was specifically because of the outsized contribution of minorities to Barack Obama's electoral coalition.
	So they could safely ignore blue-collar white folks, they could safely ignore the Rust Belt, they could safely ignore all of these places and focus in only on urban areas, drive out turnout in those urban areas, and win re-election from here to the end of time.
	There's a lot of talk about this in the left commentariat, From 2008 to 2016, how basically a new demographic shift and the rise of the millennial generation meant that you no longer have to appeal to the old constituencies.
	Now, Democrats are wrong about this.
	It turns out that Barack Obama was not a transformational figure.
	He was a unique figure.
	He was uniquely talented.
	He had a unique draw, particularly with the black population, voting population of the United States.
	And because of all of that, he was uniquely capable of drawing outsized votes for himself.
	But it didn't translate over to other Democrats.
	And you could see that it didn't translate over to other Democrats because he lost virtually every state house in the country over the course of his presidency.
	So Democrats, but I think the Democrats are so delusional that they think that it was basically such a fluke in 2016 that all they have to do is keep doubling down on what brought them Barack Obama and they'll be fine.
	So I don't think they're going to shift back to the center.
	Why are so many celebrities leftists?
	Well, I think a lot of celebrities are leftists because to be in the arts, and I know a lot of artists, a lot of artists are people who consider themselves sort of outcasts, sort of the weirdos in their communities, sort of the weirdos in their, where they grew up.
	The free thinkers, the people who are held down by the man.
	And then they escaped to beautiful Hollywood.
	And then they decided that they were going to become more tolerant and diverse and leave behind the foolishness of their parents because they're artists and they have the artist mentality.
	And also there's something about art that is inherently subjective.
	And so I think many artists rightly believe that there's a fair amount of luck involved in their success.
	And there are a lot of good actors who are working at Coffee Bean right now.
	There are a lot of terrific script writers who presumably are managing Coffee Beans right now.
	And the only thing that separates them from the people who are working in Hollywood is a fair bit of luck.
	So there's a feeling of sort of randomization that occurs in the celebrity world like Yeah, I worked hard for this, but it's not like those other people didn't work hard for it.
	It was just sort of randomized.
	And so there's a real guilt complex that lives in sort of celebrity halls.
	And a lot of those celebrities feel the necessity to pay off the social justice warrior types to make amends for their own success, to make amends for not being a starving artist, but for being a quote-unquote sellout by engaging in extraordinarily woke politics designed to appeal to the fringes of American life.
	And to chide the American people from whom they draw their money.
	You see this very often with artists.
	They start to disdain the audience that actually pays them.
	And it's an ugly thing.
	And it makes for worse art, by the way.
	Let's see... Nicholas says, Hey Ben, as a self-proclaimed patriotic Christian conservative who also happens to be gay, I've enjoyed listening to your recent discussions on same-sex marriage and its relationship with religion.
	Specifically, you mentioned that while you don't believe the government should be in the business of marriage, you as an individual would not attend a gay wedding because you believe the act is a sin.
	I just wanted to probe this point a bit more, perhaps to understand it better, which would be amenable to attending a wedding between two atheists, being that completely secular marriage is presumably also not endorsed by Judaism.
	Well, no, I don't think that it is a sin for heterosexual people to be married outside of a church.
	I don't think that that is a sin in the Jewish view.
	The question of same-sex marriage is the idea that homosexuality, not the orientation, but the actual act of the sin itself, or the legitimization of that sin, I don't think so.
	The heterosexual act is not in and of itself, in a married context, a sin under Judaism.
	It says, "Do you think this perspective could change "if say a child or other close relative "were to come out as gay?" I don't think so.
	And the reason I don't think so is because my definition of sin does not mean that I'm unsympathetic to people who are gay.
	This is something that I think folks need to understand about people who are religious.
	I have tremendous sympathy for people who are homosexual in orientation.
	I have friends, I have family, who are in fact gay.
	And that does not mean that I think that the sin itself is no longer a sin, but it also means that I have tremendous sympathy for them.
	I just can't participate in the celebration of something that I religiously consider to be a sin.
	And by the way, this doesn't just extend to homosexuality and same-sex marriages.
	I mean, when I was on Dave Rubin's show, I talked about this.
	This extends, in Judaism, to intermarriage.
	I can't attend an intermarriage.
	If a non-Jew marries a Jew, I can't go to that wedding.
	Because that is a sin.
	According to Jewish law.
	It says, just so you know, I'm not of the mindset that your viewpoints on this make you or anyone else a bigot homophobe monster.
	In fact, I think quite the opposite.
	Our shared perspective on individual liberty and personal freedom are what make America in 2019 the best time and place in the history of the world to be gay.
	Looking forward to hearing a bit more about your views.
	Thanks, big fan, love the show.
	Well, I appreciate it.
	You know, one of the things that I've always found bizarre is why people care what I think is a sin.
	I think all sorts of things are sins.
	I'm an Orthodox Jew.
	That means that, like, everything is sinful.
	A lot of things.
	And I can recognize that I don't live up to all my own standards when it comes to sin, because no one does.
	And I can acknowledge that people sin.
	What I can't do is suggest that a sin is not a sin, or celebrate what I consider to be a sin.
	But that's not the same thing as suggesting that the government should be involved in enforcing my vision of sin on the world.
	That, I think, is a mistake.
	There's no secular rationale for it.
	So, if you don't like what I think is a sin, I have good news for you.
	You don't have to care, because I'm not imposing it on you.
	Blake says hi, Ben.
	I'm not in favor of a proportional response, as I said earlier.
	I'm in favor of a disproportionate response sufficient to establish deterrence.
	Thanks.
	Well, there's a great book by Richard Epstein called Takings, and his basic theory is that under the Fifth Amendment, which talks about presumably eminent domain, it said that the government cannot take private property for public use without just compensation.
	That is the language that is used.
	No private property for public use without just compensation.
	Richard Epstein suggests, I think quite correctly, that what this means is the government can't take your property and then not compensate you for that property in some way.
	So what that means is that if they take my money for taxes and then they use it for services from the police that I can access, that is one thing.
	If they take my money and just hand it to Bob over there, I'm not getting compensated in any way for that.
	That is an illegitimate taking.
	I think that is a good framework for thinking about taxes.
	Well, he didn't just tweet that.
	He suggested that the gaming industry grossed over $40 billion last year and that the $40 billion should therefore be distributed among the workers.
	He demonstrated that he literally does not understand the difference between gross and net.
	So he thinks that because the gaming industry made $40 billion last year, that means they profited $40 billion last year, which is idiotic.
	The vast majority of that went to the people who work for the gaming industry.
	He said, I've heard some downsides, this is Raphael, of industries unionizing.
	Can you remind me of those downsides, especially for an industry as huge as the gaming industry?
	Thanks, love the show.
	Well, the problem with unionization typically is that it makes businesses less efficient.
	Now, I'm in favor of private unions, so long as they're not kneecapping people.
	If you want to get together with all your friends and then unionize, and you're not trying to kneecap scabs, and you're not trying to use physical force against anybody, enjoy.
	All for it.
	Don't see a problem with it.
	If, however, what you're talking about is forced collective bargaining, where I have to negotiate with you as the employer by law, Then you're talking about cartelizing the industry and basically putting the workers in control of a business they did not capitalize in the first place.
	If I can hire somebody more efficiently than you, I should be able to hire somebody more efficiently than you.
	Also, the reason that so many members of private industry have decided not to unionize, I mean, because the unionization rate in the United States went from something like 60% to something like 5% over the last several decades.
	The reason that that happened is because people decided, wait a second, What unions very often do is they guarantee a stagnating business that I work for that becomes unprofitable and has to fire people.
	Also, very often what unions guarantee is seniority.
	So I may be a better qualified younger employee and I can't get a raise because there's somebody else who's older than I am who's a dunderhead, but the union contract says that person has to get a raise before I do.
	I'd rather operate in a freewheeling manner in which I can go in and ask for an individual raise anytime I want.
	Union contracts usually forbid that sort of thing.
	That's sort of the story with unions.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then a quick thing that I hate, and then we will be out of here.
	So, things that I like today.
	So, there's a really good book edited by Meir Soloveitchik, he's a rabbi at Yeshiva University, and Stuart Halpern writes the book.
	It is called Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land, the Hebrew Bible in the United States, a source book.
	So, what's great about this book, it's from Toby Press, what it is designed to do is provide the foundational biblical text That a lot of early thinkers ranging from John Winthrop all the way up through Abraham Lincoln relied upon in the forming of their philosophy.
	The book doesn't suggest that America is a quote-unquote biblical country or a Christian country.
	It does suggest that the background for a lot of the thought of the founders was in fact biblical thinking, that that was the backdrop and that organically speaking, the Bible has a lot to do with the founding of the United States because it infused everybody's thinking.
	And so it really kind of points out how that happened takes foundational documents in the history of the United States and connects them with the source texts in the Bible.
	It's a really good resource.
	I think it's a lot of fun.
	Go check it out.
	Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land, the Hebrew Bible in the United States, a source book.
	Worth checking out.
	Okay, time for one more thing I like.
	So, Condoleezza Rice was questioned specifically by an NBC reporter who wanted her to suggest that President Trump has radically reduced the quality of race relations in the United States.
	And Condi Rice, who lived through segregation, who watched her church firebombed, she had some words.
	There are people who will say it feels worse now when we're talking about race or it just feels like a divisive environment.
	It sure doesn't feel worse than when I grew up in Jim Crow, Alabama.
	OK, so let's drop this notion that we're worse at race relations today than we were in the past.
	Really?
	That means we've made no progress?
	Really?
	And so I think the hyperbole about how much worse it is isn't doing us any good.
	We still, this country is never going to be colorblind.
	We had the initial, original sin of slavery.
	It's still with us.
	Okay, so what she says there is that you should put all this in perspective, which of course is true.
	And we can look at history, and we can recognize the value of history, and we can also recognize that in a free country, The way for us to all get along is to live under equal protection of the laws, which should have been enshrined in the 14th Amendment and then applied by the federal government and was not for over a century afterward.
	But Condi's putting things in context?
	Yeah, the media should definitely take that under consideration.
	Time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez keeps doubling down.
	We're now in, what, day four of her refusing to acknowledge that calling detention centers concentration camps is an idiotic thing.
	She doubled down on it again yesterday.
	She keeps digging.
	Eventually, she's going to actually reach China.
	She's going to dig a hole all the way through the earth.
	She's going to hit the molten core and keep going.
	Here's AOC once again doubling down.
	I'm absolutely comfortable using that term because it is rooted in that academic definition.
	Often times when people, you know, when the term concentration camp is evoked, what people think of are extermination camps.
	They think of Auschwitz.
	And I think what we need to realize is that one of the biggest lessons that we learn from both Holocaust experience and civil rights What I've learned from academics and experts is that it takes a process, a slow gradual process of increasingly dehumanizing steps.
	OK, this is again, she's quoting the experts.
	Name them.
	Explain how many books have you read in concentration camps?
	Explain how this is about the Boer War.
	The media will continue to defend her because they will defend anyone, but anyone on the left anyway, who is useful to them in the moment until they become not useful, like Joe Biden and they are put out to pasture like Edward G. Robinson and Soylent Green.
	But.
	AOC will continue to double down because nobody on the left will ever call her out on it.
	It's pretty impressive.
	And if they do call her out, like Chuck Todd, then they get shellacked as well.
	OK, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, the Democrats have decided suddenly now that Joe Biden is racist.
	Now, if that's true, why are they just noticing now, after 50 years?
	Also, I want to talk about the danger of misleading and dishonest headlines, which is a scourge now, an epidemic.
	And how we can guard ourselves against it.
	Finally, are we putting teachers in a basically impossible situation by sending them legions of poorly-parented, out-of-control kids to educate?
	I would say yes, we are.

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