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Aug. 26, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:36
Is Politics War By Other Means? | Ep. 847
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Polls show that Americans' values are shifting generationally.
President Trump revs up the trade war with China.
And Joe Biden still isn't sure where he is.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
We have a lot to get to today.
Hope you had a wonderful weekend.
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OK, so we have a lot to get to today.
We'll get to President Trump and the trade war with China, whether it is justified or unjustified in just a few minutes.
First, however, there is a poll that is making an awful lot of waves is a poll from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News.
And what it shows is that Americans views about politics and life generally.
are changing pretty radically.
And that is not a particular surprise.
Generation Z, millennials, these are kids who have grown up in a morally relativistic universe in which they are told that the only value is acceptance and tolerance, except for acceptance and tolerance of those who think differently.
Those people need to be ostracized.
Those people need to be outed.
Those people need to be shamed.
Everything else is good to go.
Not only that, these are kids who have been taught that in the two-sided sort of war over America's narrative, one side that says America was founded in eternal truth and goodness and was taken away from by the fact that it was concurrently founded at a time in which slavery was reprehensibly present on the American continent and was part of the founding bargain, that when all of this happened, That the good side of America is the side that is worth focusing on because the story of America is a story of us perfecting our own fulfillment of eternal values, right?
That's a story that was told by everybody from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr.
Then there's the other side of the American story and that side is America was rooted, as the 1619 Project says, In racism and sexism and bigotry and homophobia, all of our institutions are suffused by it, all of our institutions are replete with it, and thus, these are inextricably intertwined, and the institutions have to be torn down.
These are the two visions of American history.
Well, if you're a millennial, or if you're a Gen Z-er, The chances are that you have heard more from your public schooling and from the media world about the second narrative than you have about the first narrative.
The first narrative is considered parochial and insular.
That first narrative is considered brazen and wrong.
It's the second narrative that shows your humility.
See, the hilarious thing about the second narrative is that supposedly it shows your humility as an American, when in reality it shows your arrogance as a modern person.
Because, yes, it is more humble to talk about America's flaws in the context of America's history.
But it is also a lot more arrogant for you to sit around saying that you're so much better than people who lived 200 years ago, as though you would be implementing your values today, 200 years ago, were you only living then.
The fact is, you wouldn't be.
You'd have grown up in an entirely different circumstance.
But we live in a generation that believes that the world began spinning with their birth and this has really been true since the baby boomers who may have wrecked the country and then won't leave us alone as it turns out.
The baby boomer spends an awful lot of time...
Talking about how they transformed the world.
They seem not to recognize how they ripped away a lot of fundamental values that undergirded the American bargain in the first place.
Anyway, here are the results of the new poll.
It's a new poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News.
Nearly 80% of people aged 55 to 91 said being patriotic is important to them.
Only 42% of millennials and Gen Zers, those aged 18 to 38, that's my age group, said the same.
That's a shocking drop off.
So about half the number of millennials and Gen Zers as the number of people who are baby boomers and above think that being patriotic is important.
That's not even talking about nationalism, right?
There's this rich debate on the right about the differences between patriotism and nationalism.
Is America a country founded on a creed?
Or is America a country founded on a culture and ties of blood and ties of history?
And what exactly makes America, America?
That's a rich and interesting debate.
On the one side, you have people like David French.
On the other side, you have people like Rich Lowry over at National Review.
You have Yoram Hazony on the nationalistic side.
And you have Jonah Goldberg on the patriotic side.
And there's agreement and disagreement among them.
That's an interesting and important debate philosophically.
But all of them would agree that patriotism is important.
And even Democrats used to agree that patriotism was important, that an inherent pride in country was an important thing, because America is a uniquely wonderful place that has brought about uniquely wonderful things, namely freedom and prosperity to billions the globe over.
That's an incredible thing.
America is the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the world, most powerful country in the history of the world.
It ain't close, by the way.
I mean, America is so much more powerful than the British Empire or the Roman Empire, it would boggle the mind.
And that's not just because of technological advances, that's because of the power of the American economy, which is embedded in all of the other economies globally.
As America rises, the rest of the world rises.
As America sinks, the rest of the world sinks.
Being patriotic is an important part of being American, because there is a lot of us to be proud of, but The Millennials and Gen Zers have been taught that they can actually feel better about themselves by disdaining patriotism.
See, they're not American citizens.
They're world citizens.
They're global citizens.
There's only one problem with that.
There's really no such thing as a global value.
It really is not.
Unless you're talking about religious values, which as it turns out, Millennials and Gen Zers also reject.
So what kind of global values are you talking about that you hold in common with the government of China?
Or with the government of Iran?
What kind of global values are you talking about that subsume American values under the rubric?
What exactly are you talking about?
Americans should be patriotic.
We should be.
America is something to be proud of.
You're lucky that you were born here, if you were born here.
If you immigrated here, you know how lucky you are to be here.
The vast majority of us have ancestors who did immigrate here and knew how lucky they were to be here in the first place.
How you could live in this country and not believe that being patriotic is important is mind-boggling, but that is a testament to the horrors of the American public school system and our university system and our media, all of whom have simultaneously declared that patriotism is passé, that to be patriotic is to sneer at other countries.
No, that's not what we're talking about.
I can freely acknowledge the wonders inherent in Chinese culture, or British culture, or Italian culture, while recognizing that America is something unique, America is something incredible, America is something to be proud of.
I mean, this is a massive generation gap, and it's going to have a significant impact.
Because if you do not feel pride in being an American, well then, what exactly is the culture that you are seeking to preserve?
What are the ideas that you are seeking to preserve?
What makes America, what makes our ideas and philosophy and values better than any place else?
And if they're not better than any place else, well then why should we seek to preserve them?
Why not just have open borders?
Why not just take the advice of other countries on matters related to how domestic policy is done?
What exactly are the values we should all be defending?
Now, normally when people say patriotism in the United States, it doesn't just mean that they're proud of the flag or they're proud of the American military.
It means they're proud of our traditions of free speech, our right to bear arms, the Constitution of the United States, which is a sort of secular, holy document to the citizens of the United States, the Declaration of Independence.
These are our twin founding documents, the Declaration and the Constitution.
And respect for those founding documents.
Belief in the rights that they lay forth.
Belief in the system of government that they talk about.
That's inherent to patriotism.
But if you are not patriotic about those things, what in there is worth upholding?
Maybe you want to substitute a European version of rights.
Maybe you want to substitute a European version of hate speech.
Maybe you want to imitate other countries in how they deal with their problems.
And this is what we are seeing more and more in the United States.
There's this belief that America is anachronistic.
Not in a good way, because we are exceptional, in a bad way.
And this is why you see so many folks on the political left talking about, America's the only country on earth, developed country, that doesn't have a universal healthcare system.
First of all, we have something that sort of approaches a universal healthcare system.
That's why we have Medicaid, that's why we have Medicare, that's why we also have laws on the books that require emergency room treatment for people who show up at a hospital.
We do have something that resembles it.
It may be too expensive, it may be a bad mix of private and public, but, Obviously, the reason that people talk about this on the left, America, as anachronism, is because they believe that America should be more like other countries, whereas true patriots believe that more countries should be more like America.
The world would be a better place if countries were more like America.
You hear this with regard to gun control all the time.
Why is America the only developed country that allows people to... Why is America the most powerful economy on Earth?
Why is America the freest country on Earth?
Why is it that you can come to America and hope to become Bill Gates, whereas you go to Europe and you hope to be on a welfare check the rest of your life?
Why is it that America is wonderful?
Looking at America and seeing only the downsides is so myopic, it's bound to make you insane.
But it's not just, as it turns out, patriotism that is on the downswing.
30% of millennials and Generation Z said religion is important, compared to over 75% of baby boomers.
Just over 30% of millennials and Generation Z said it was important to even have children.
These were the values that bound us together, right?
Pride in America.
In where you lived.
In the values that made America great.
And belief in religion.
Belief that religion was important.
That doesn't mean we all have to agree on a particular religious precept.
We disagree here at the Daily Wire offices all the time.
I'd say the leadership team here at the Daily Wire offices has significant religious disagreements.
My business partner is a lay pastor.
I'm an Orthodox Jew.
We've talked about Jesus before.
It doesn't mean that.
What it means is that understanding the religious basis of a moral life in the United States is actually quite important.
Because as John Adams said, the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
It is very difficult to sustain a system of rights when you don't trust your neighbor.
What allows you to trust your neighbor?
Knowing that your neighbor goes to church.
Really.
Knowing that your neighbor goes to synagogue.
That doesn't mean there aren't great atheists.
There are.
There are wonderful moral atheists.
I'm friends with many of them.
Some of the top atheists in the country I'm friends with.
I'm friends with Sam Harris.
That's fine.
That's not the argument that I'm making.
The argument that I'm making is that a culture of trust requires you to have common values.
And atheism does not necessarily push a set of common values, whereas if you're going to church with somebody, that certainly is a social institution that does generate common values.
If you lose these social institutions, you're not spending time with neighbors, you don't know the people you live next to, you don't know the people in your community, there's no social safety net, that is going to lead to the rise of a massive government that is supposed to fill the gap where the social institutions have failed.
This is why you've seen millennials and Generation Z talking more and more about reliance on the government as opposed to reliance on local community.
And very often when you talk to younger people and you say, you know, your community will help pick you up, they look at you cross-eyed.
They say, what community?
And they're not wrong.
As religion has decreased in the United States, there's a greater call for the involvement of the collective.
That collective used to be present in places like churches and synagogues.
It is no longer present, particularly among young people who have disdained religion because they feel that it's too restrictive with regard to their lives.
And then they've created their own new religion, and that religion is leftism, a religion that has sinners but no saints, a religion that has no forgiveness, a religion that is as brutal as any religion in history.
I mean, over the course of the 20th century, leftism sure killed a few hundred million people.
But the fact is that 30% of millennials in Generation Z say religion is important to them.
So we don't have religion in common anymore.
We don't have patriotism in common anymore.
So you'd say, okay, well, at least we have a belief in the future, right?
At least we want to make the country better for our kids.
Except that this poll shows only 30% of millennials in Generation Z say it's even important to have children.
And this makes perfect sense.
It does.
As a corollary to, I don't care about patriotism and I don't care about religion, the question becomes, why would you think it's important to have children?
Why?
What makes it important and valuable for you to progenerate and have another generation of kids?
We'll talk about this in just one second.
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So, as I say, the final poll difference here is that 30% of millennials and Generation Z say it's important to have kids.
Well, why would they say it's important to have kids?
And really, what makes it important to have children?
So I know why I have children.
I have children, not because it is quote-unquote enriching to me, although I think it has changed my life in massive, incredible ways.
As I say repeatedly, I think that having children makes you a better person, because the more responsibility you take on in life, the better a person you become.
As I've said a thousand times on this show, having children also broadens your vision of the world.
As I've said, when you're single, your spectrum of happiness to sadness goes from maybe like a 10 to a 0, and then when you get married, your spectrum of happiness goes from like a 20 to a negative 20, because your spouse's pain is also your pain, and your spouse's happiness is also your happiness, and then you have kids, and the upper limit goes away, and the bottom limit goes away, and the worst moments of your life are things happening with your kids.
And the best moments of your life are also things happening with their kids.
All of that is a good, self-interested case for having children.
But let's be real about this.
Having kids is tough.
Accepting more responsibility is tough.
They cost a lot of money, they're a pain in the butt, it takes 18 years to raise them and they may still be horrible, you have no control over them after they hit 18.
Having kids is a burden, which is why religion suggested that you must, as a matter of morality, progenerate and have more kids.
It was a matter of morality.
You were put on earth to have more kids and to raise them properly.
This is one of your missions on the planet.
This is also bound up in the patriotic mission of having good kids who are going to enact American morality and guarantee a future for the greatest country in the history of the world and the philosophy of that country.
If you don't have any higher values, in other words, there really is not a lot of reason to have kids.
In fact, what polls show is that a lot of couples who don't have kids are pretty happy.
Why?
Well, because, hell, I mean, I can understand why.
I've had kids, I've not had kids.
I understand.
It'd be fun to go out with my wife every night.
It'd be great not to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on children.
I get it.
When you live, it used to be that people, and it still is, people in poorer countries have lots of kids.
Why?
Because those kids are units of labor.
It's not really a religious thing.
It's you need somebody to work the farm and take care of you when you get old.
In the United States, well, you got a fake social security program to take care of you when you get old.
And kids don't take care of you anyway.
They're lazy.
They're up in their room playing video games that you bought for them until they can leave the house and then make fun of you.
Right, so why would you?
In a hedonistic society, why have kids?
Okay, so you've taken away commonality of values when it comes to country.
You've taken away commonality of values when it comes to God and a common vision.
And you've taken away commonality of values when it comes to guarantees of the future.
Because if nobody's having babies, then what exactly are we waiting for?
Just blow out the debt right now, and you don't have to worry about the next generation.
They're not going to exist anyway.
Sure, the entire house of cards is going to cave in on itself.
And hell, maybe the solution is that you bring in lots and lots of new immigrants, and you don't really worry whether they share your values, because after all, patriotism doesn't matter.
And they come in, and then they are going to work hard.
I mean, first of all, there is something deeply cynical about suggesting that immigrants are supposed to come in and pay the bills for you, right?
I mean, that's really messed up on a moral level.
Yeah, well, I want some new immigrant who's seeking a freer life to come pay my social security.
That's absurdity on the highest level.
But with all of that said, What we are watching right now is a dramatic decrease in all the values that used to unify the country.
So patriotism declined massively.
Belief in God declining massively.
Having children declining massively.
Self-fulfillment, actually, this is, I love this.
So the value of self-fulfillment, this is where young people are succeeding.
Okay, so when it comes to self-fulfillment and belief in making yourself feel better, right there, the Millennials and Gen Z really have it on the mark.
Right there, nearly 80% of Millennials and Gen Z say that it is very important to be self-fulfilled, whereas about 60% of older people say it's important to be self-fulfilled.
So we are now living in the fully subjectivist, hedonistic, silly ideology of self-fulfillment rather than any vision of morality or objective decency or anything like that.
What's amazing about this is this doesn't suggest, by the way, that boomers in the silent generation are actually intolerant.
In fact, in terms of tolerance for others, the boomers and the millennials actually have basically the same value set.
And the same thing is true when it comes to financial security.
When it comes to hard work, it's very close.
And so when it comes to I want to work hard, or I want financial security, or I want to be tolerant of other people, the generations are fairly close.
The gaps emerge when it comes to higher values.
When it comes to higher values, older people have it right and younger people have it wrong.
It is indeed that simple.
Not shockingly.
The vast gaps are indeed partisan.
Over 80% of Republicans say patriotism is important, compared to just over 40% of Democrats.
Part of this, by the way, has to do with who's the president.
There have been polls that show that Democratic feelings about patriotism vary with the president.
So when Obama was president, Democrats were super patriotic.
But Republicans, by the way, didn't become unpatriotic.
Like 70% of Republicans felt they were patriotic.
Then Trump became president, and that jumped about 5 to 10 points for Republicans, and it dropped off like 40 for Democrats.
If you're patriotic based on who the president is, you're doing patriotism wrong.
Belief in God.
About 70% of Republicans say it's important.
Only 40% of Democrats do.
Under 60% of Republicans say it's important to have kids, which is a shocking number.
Under 40% of Democrats say it's important to have kids.
Many more Republicans than Democrats believe in hard work.
When it comes to tolerance for others, about 70% of Republicans say that that is a high value, as opposed to nearly 100% of Democrats.
Because obviously, these are the values of difference, and self-fulfillment, Democrats outrank Republicans there as well.
So the emerging generation just does not have the same values.
What does this say about our politics?
It says our politics are about to get a lot uglier.
Because the fact is that, you know, Clausewitz, the famous military strategist, he used to suggest that war is simply politics by other means, meaning that You're attempting to get something done.
You can't get it done politically.
So you go to war.
Well, the problem is when you don't share values with the people you live with, what ends up happening is that is that politics tends to be war by other means, meaning the only thing stopping war is the fact that we're drawing at each other.
And now that may be better than war.
I mean, as Winston Churchill famously said, draw draw is better than war war.
That's true.
It is true to talk, and it is to war on one another, but the line is getting very thin.
And if you really believe that the values that distinguish you from your neighbor are worth going to war over, and that the thin veneer of civilization is all that keeps us from being at each other's throats, that's not much of a veneer.
You need a revivification of American values.
You need a belief in patriotism.
You need to re-educate your kids about what being American means.
And yes, with all the ugly parts.
And yes, with the ugly history.
But we have decided that we can't even face up To a narrative that allows America to be the good guy in the world.
Which, by the way, America is the good guy in the world.
America is good.
And we're not teaching young people anything.
I mean, our educational system is such an enormous failure.
Parents are failing their kids in teaching their kids.
There's another poll out today that shows that young Americans are warming to socialism because they don't know what the hell it is.
According to ABC News, there's a new Pew Research Center poll And it says that more than half of Americans reject socialism in a recent Gallup poll.
43% surveyed said some version of it would be good for the country.
That sentiment was held by 58% of respondents aged 18 to 34, compared with just 36% of those 55 and older.
Why?
Because they don't know what socialism is.
They really don't know how to define it.
These polls always ask, can you define socialism?
And then they just define it the Bernie Sanders way.
It means being nice to each other.
It means sharing harmony a little bit.
No, that's not what socialism means, guys.
It means the nationalization of the means of production and then use of that nationalization to cram down whatever distribution of wealth you find fair.
Usually with a few people at the top to get rich off of it.
What we are watching right now is a complete failure of education, a complete collapse in the inculcation of American values.
And I think part of this had to do with the fall of the Soviet Union.
I do not think that it is a coincidence that the generation born during and after the fall of the Soviet Union is abandoning core American values and embracing socialism.
Part of that is because there's no existential threat from a Soviet Union-type state and evil empire that is threatening nuclear annihilation against the United States while simultaneously keeping its people in poverty and poisoning them with nuclear fallout a la Chernobyl.
Right?
It's a lot easier to defend your own system in opposition to another system than to defend your own system in opposition to a vacuum.
It's very difficult to justify every action you take in a vacuum.
Because, after all, we all sin.
The United States has sinned.
The United States has some grave, awful sins on its record.
But, when you face them up to the Soviet Union, it's pretty obvious who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.
Well, the Soviet Union falls, and suddenly the United States is asked to justify its own system against nothing.
Against nothing.
Or against dreams.
Against utopian dreams of the left.
Well, it turns out that's pretty difficult to do because the other side, meaning people who don't like the American system, don't have to defend anything.
They can just club.
They can just beat down people.
And it's sort of the same attitude when it comes to the Middle East where you ignore Israel's opponents and you just focus in on Israel and say, ah, well, look at all these bad things Israel's doing.
I'm sure Israel does bad things.
In fact, I've criticized Israel for doing some bad things, but you can't look at them in a vacuum.
You can't look at the United States or capitalism or free markets in a vacuum.
If you do, you're doing it wrong.
But this is what we have taught our kids to do.
And again, they believe that America is bad, mainly because they've never lived anywhere else.
They've never seen the opposition to the United States, and that is disunifying the country.
All of which brings us to President Trump's trade war with the Chinese.
Now, I think that there is a solid case to be made for, as Niall Ferguson has suggested, the historian.
Niall Ferguson has suggested That we need a Cold War 2.0.
That China is actually incredibly dangerous.
And I think that this is actually true.
I think that China is incredibly dangerous.
We just haven't been talking about it because since the end of the Cold War, we haven't wanted to acknowledge the fact That China's massive growth, which has in fact enriched the United States, free trade tends to enrich both sides because these are mutually beneficial exchanges, but that bringing China into the so-called family of nations was bringing a fox into the chicken coop.
That China actually is a malevolent force on the world stage.
And this is not just because President Trump is mad at China.
This goes back a lot further than that.
And the Chinese strategy since now has been to see the United States as its opponent and to take measures against the United States.
This is particularly true under the current dictator of China, Xi Jinping.
The former Dengistu, it's called after Deng, who was the president slash prime minister.
He was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party for years.
His goal was to slowly grow Chinese power without offending the West too much.
Well, Xi Jinping is now making incredibly aggressive moves around the world in direct opposition to America's interests and saying to people that it's in direct opposition to the United States.
There are a couple of initiatives that are worth knowing about that that that Xi Jinping is involved in.
First of all, the continued buildup of the military, the continued testing of treaty violating weaponry.
Bill Gertz has a great new book out about the threat that China constitutes on the world stage.
But there are a couple of initiatives that folks really need to focus in on.
This is where, as I've been saying, I think that President Trump, if he wants a trade war with the Chinese, if he is ready to bring America face-to-face with the specter of Chinese communism, which is aggressive and which does need to be curbed, then the president owes it to the American people to make a speech in which he lays out exactly what China has been doing and why they're a malevolent force.
Because the fact is, for a lot of years, there's been a lot of people saying, no, China's fine.
China's our friend.
We're getting along fine with them.
They're good.
You know, and if they grow economically good, that means fewer people in poverty.
Look, we all want fewer people in poverty, but we don't want that enriching a regime that is then going to keep a billion and a half people under the communist heel while building up a massive land army, as well as taking over shipping lanes in the South China Sea.
And just a second, I'm going to lay forth the actual threat of China on the world stage.
There are several areas in which China is becoming an increasing threat, and in many ways more of a threat than the Soviet Union even was.
The Soviet Union was an overt threat because of their nuclear-tipped missiles pointed right at the United States, and because of their threats to take over territory in Eastern Europe.
For example, they had already taken over Eastern Europe, but to move into Western Europe, or to roll on into Areas like Afghanistan, all of that was deeply threatening.
But the fact is that Russia was a second rate economy.
China is moving quickly into the ranks of a first rate economy, and they are doing so at the same time that they are building up their military and making the same sort of territorial overtures to regimes around the world to place them in opposition to America's interests.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so let's talk about the threat of China.
So, China, is involved in something they like to call the Belt and Road Initiative.
The Economist reported on this back in May of 2017, and they gave a pretty good summary of it, so I'll use their summary.
They say, over the weekend, Xi Jinping welcomed 28 heads of state and government to Beijing for a coming out party, which continues today to celebrate the Belt and Road Initiative, his most ambitious foreign policy.
Launched in 2013 as One Belt, One Road, it involves China underwriting billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in countries along the old Silk Road, linking it with Europe.
The ambition is immense.
China is spending roughly $150 billion a year in the 68 countries that have signed up to the scheme.
The summit meeting has attracted the largest number of foreign dignitaries since the Olympic Games in 2008.
Europe has been ignoring it.
So what exactly is the Belt and Road Initiative?
The project is the clearest expression so far, according to The Economist, of Mr. Xi's determination to break with Deng Xiaoping's dictum to hide our capabilities and bide our time, never try to take the lead.
The Belt and Road Forum, which was actually called BARF, is the second set piece event this year at which Mr. Xi will lay out China's claim to global leadership.
There is also the World Economic Forum in 2017.
The ultimate aim here is to make Eurasia, dominated by China, an economic and trading area to rival the transatlantic one, dominated by the United States.
This is one of the reasons why President Obama, for all the crap he took for it, was actually not doing the wrong thing with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
There are holes in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
There are problems with the deal.
That deal needed to be opened up so that we could actually take a look at it.
But the idea of creating a trading block to shut out China was actually quite a good one.
Behind this broad strategic imperative lie a plethora of secondary motivations.
And it is the number and variety of these, says the economist, that prompts skepticism about the coherence and practicality of the project.
By investing in infrastructure, Xi hopes to find a more profitable home for China's vast foreign exchange reserves, most of which are in low-interest-bearing American government securities.
But that's not really what this is about.
It ain't about China making money.
Really, what they want is to invest in volatile countries in Central Asia so that they can expand their areas of influence.
By encouraging more Chinese projects around the South China Sea, the initiative could bolster China's claims in that area.
When belt and road, belt refers to the actual roads, the road refers to sea lanes.
The sea lanes are what China wants to take control of.
So this may not be a smart investment on a monetary level, but this is obviously a foreign policy initiative that the Chinese are trying to use on foreign countries.
They're offering them all sorts of sweetheart deals in order so that they can help control their economy and control their foreign policy future and direct it against the United States.
It's not merely that.
China is also pursuing its own 5G strategy.
So the United States has a decentralized approach to 5G.
The United States has basically allowed private companies to take the lead.
China is not doing that, right?
China has been sponsoring Huawei, right?
They are using literally billions of dollars to pump money into the development of 5G, and they're offering it more and more to developing countries at discounted prices.
Why?
Because they also can use Huawei to spy on the material in those countries.
And many countries don't care.
Many countries are simply taking Huawei's technology because it's cheaper.
And, okay, well, if the Chinese have a backdoor to grab data, the Chinese have a backdoor to grab data.
5G, according to CNBC, is designed to bring faster speeds and lower lag times than previous wireless networks like 4G and 3G.
While much has been said about how the networks will give consumers faster downloads of videos or games, 5G is perhaps more importantly a potential game changer for functions such as driverless cars or remote surgery that require quick, reliable internet connections.
Mobile operators like Verizon and AT&T have started trying their own 5G.
China is taking a centralized approach.
They're pumping money into the technology as a government initiative.
U.S.
officials say that Chinese companies, like Huawei, should not be allowed to build out the critical infrastructure, such as radio networking equipment and software, that would enable 5G.
They warn that Huawei equipment could create a backdoor for the Chinese government to spy on American networks.
Intelligence experts have been skeptical about Huawei's assurances that they aren't a security risk.
And you've seen the Trump administration crack down on Huawei specifically because of all of this.
China has the ability and the desire to weaponize technologies like 5G.
Not only that, once they have their own 5G network and all of America's ISPs are expected to operate off of Huawei's 5G network, well then it's going to be very easy to control information that is going into and out of countries.
Google is, as Peter Thiel has pointed out, Google is already cutting deals with the Chinese to restrict the flow of information into China if they hope to operate in-country.
Well, what happens when China expands its 5G across Africa, into Latin America, across Asia?
And suddenly, information cannot penetrate there.
When it comes to information warfare, 5G is actually extraordinarily important.
So if President Trump wants to talk about infrastructure building, then what we actually should be talking about, if we want a moon project, we should be developing an American 5G network that is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than the Chinese network.
And then we should make that technology available to American private companies.
China is in fact dangerous.
They're stealing by some estimates up to five or six hundred billion dollars of American intellectual property every single year.
So yes, China is a threat.
All that lies as the background to what President Trump is doing with China.
And they are an ideological threat.
You have to understand that China is a communist country.
China is a country that wishes to see a centralized government dominate every aspect of life.
China has rolled out in-country A system of social ranking that allows people to be barred from certain professions.
It allows people to be treated in a certain way because the government gathers information about you and then ranks you as a citizen.
If that sounds creepy and big brother, that's because it is creepy and big brother.
China has a million people in gulags basically right now for the crime of being Muslim.
Rather than talk about America and the West being Islamophobic, nobody seems to talk about the Uyghurs in China, if that's how it's pronounced, who are being held, a million of them, in internment camps because of their religion.
China is an ideological opponent.
When I said earlier that America needs an ideological opponent to contrast, China would be it.
Now would be a pretty good time for President Trump to lay that out.
I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second.
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And we'll get to more about China and the burgeoning trade war in just a second.
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So as I say, China is in fact a real geopolitical rival to the United States.
They're trying to run roughshod over Hong Kong.
They're trying to run roughshod over Taiwan.
They've already run roughshod over Tibet.
They're trying currently to run roughshod over India.
They are a dangerous, powerful force in the world.
They have a long-term vision.
They don't care if their own citizens have to suffer.
Hey, this all would be a pretty good predicate for the United States taking some pretty harsh action against the Chinese.
Now, President Trump has taken this dual tactic.
One tactic is to suggest to the American people that tariffs on China benefit the American economy.
False.
And the other has been to suggest that China is a real threat to the globe on a security level.
True.
Now, really, what he should be doing is if he's gonna call for Americans to make a sacrifice, he should be making a speech laying out all the stuff I just explained to you.
Laying out China's philosophy, laying out the government's philosophy, what they're trying to do, why Xi just decided that he would make himself dictator for life, what his actual vision for the world is, and that vision includes a centralized Chinese-dominated government sphere that ranges all the way from China and across Asia, even down to Africa and Latin America, where they're trying to push into the 5G network area.
They're trying to use their Belt and Road Initiative all across the world.
All of this is incredibly dangerous.
And Trump could lay this out.
He could lay this out.
And frankly, he should lay this out because the American people have been lied to by policymakers on both sides.
The Bush administration treated the Chinese with kid gloves.
The Clinton administration certainly treated the Chinese with kid gloves.
They went so far as to basically allow the transfer of technology to China that violated national security precepts.
The Obama administration was incredibly soft on China, except for maybe the TPP.
Well, Trump has not been soft on China, but he's not been clear about why he's not being soft on China.
Instead, he has suggested that China is screwing us on trade, which in some ways they are.
I mean, they've cheated on trade, but that free trade is really the problem and that there's not going to be any blowback economically if we are to cut off the Chinese at the knees.
That obviously is untrue.
Here's President Trump talking about China hurting us for 30 years.
On a security level, this is true.
It's true also with regard to intellectual property theft.
It may be true with regard to subsidies, although when another country subsidizes a particular business, sometimes that's actually good for the United States' economy.
Nonetheless, the real case against China is a security case.
It is not an economic case.
Here's Trump making the economic case, however.
We're having a little spat with China, and we'll win it.
China's been hurting our country for 30 years with the money they've been taking out.
Other presidents should have done something about it, and they should have done it a long time ago.
I'm doing it, and I have no choice, because we're not going to lose.
Close to a trillion dollars a year to China.
And China understands that.
We have helped rebuild China like nobody else.
And they've done a great job.
And I don't blame China.
I blame our presidents, our representatives, past administrations for allowing that to happen.
It's a disgrace.
Okay, what Trump says there is 100% true.
Okay, the fact is that the United States treated China with kid gloves because they were trying to separate off China from the Soviet Union.
This is why Nixon opened China back in the 1970s.
And since then, the Russians have gone down, the USSR has gone down the tubes, but the Chinese government has become a world threat, a serious international power.
Trump said yesterday, I could declare a national emergency if I really wanted to get American businesses to stop doing business with China, I could just declare a national emergency.
I mean, he could.
That would not be the best way to do it.
But the fact is, he needs to lay out for the American public why China is a threat, not just because they're, quote-unquote, screwing us on trade, but because they are an international threat to the international system, representing what socialism actually looks like when a top-down government controls every aspect of life.
Here's Trump.
Are you going to declare a national emergency on China?
Well, I have the right to, if I want.
I could declare a national emergency.
When they steal and take out and intellectual property theft, anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion a year, and when we have a total loss of almost a trillion dollars a year, for many years this has been going on.
In many ways, it's an emergency.
I have no plan right now.
Actually, we're getting along very well with China right now.
We're talking.
I think they want to make a deal much more than I do.
Okay, again, this is where you get the mixed signal.
So on the one hand, it's China stealing intellectual property from us.
China is an enemy of the United States.
On the other hand, it's, I want to cut a deal with them.
Maybe we'll cut a deal with them.
Maybe it'll be all better.
We need some sort of cohesion.
If Trump wants leverage against the Chinese, he has to motivate the American people to be behind him in his adversarial action against the Chinese, because the media obviously are going to play this game where they suggest that Trump should just cut a deal with the Chinese and that it's Trump's fault the economy is sinking.
And that's what's going on right now, because there is a third player in U.S.
versus China, and that is public perception, American public perception.
Xi does not have to worry about that.
Xi can simply kill anybody he doesn't like, right?
I mean, he's a communist dictator.
He can at least imprison them or ruin their lives.
But Trump has to worry about public opinion.
So if you want to negotiate with the Chinese and you want to present a strong face to the Chinese, you have to make the American people aware of what it is the Chinese are doing.
And it can't simply be offhanded remarks about intellectual property theft.
That's too much for people.
Or too little, rather.
You actually have to lay out what China's ambitions are on the world stage.
President Trump, again, has been sending these mixed signals.
And I think that Trump is the only president in my lifetime who's actually been taking the proper adversarial view of China, but he's not laid forth exactly why he is doing that.
And that's what I'm calling on him to do.
I think President Trump can make a very strong stand here against the Chinese government and explain to the American people why he is doing what he is doing.
He started to do this last Friday.
Last Friday, he tweeted out a bunch of stuff about China.
He started off by saying, by ripping into the Fed, suggesting that this is all the Fed's fault.
He said the Fed did nothing.
He said that he will work brilliantly with the Fed in order to make the United States economy better, etc, etc, etc.
But then he got to his real target of ire.
And that's Chinese.
As our country has lost stupidly trillions of dollars with China over many years, they've stolen our intellectual property at the rate of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
They wanna continue.
I won't let that happen.
We don't need China and frankly, would be far better off without them.
The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States year after year for decades will and must stop.
Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies home and making your products in the USA.
I will be responding to China's tariffs this afternoon because China levied some tariffs
He says,
because you have a weird view on trade that is not economically correct.
Spell out, Mr. President, to the American people.
Spell out to the American people why this needs to be done.
Why we need this war.
Not an overt war.
Nobody wants an overt war with China.
Why we need to fight an economic war with China.
And it can't just be they stole our intellectual property.
We've got a World Trade Organization that we can sue them for for that.
It needs to be what their international ambitions are and why we have to stand tall against those international ambitions.
And again, Trump keeps coming back to this idea that they've been cheating us on trade.
Cheating us on intellectual property, correct.
Cheating us on trade, not so much.
He says our country's been losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year to China with no end in sight.
Here's the thing.
If you could substitute Mexico for China, it's not a good argument.
The reason that we should be opposed to what the Chinese government is doing is not merely because they've stolen our intellectual property, although that's a pretty good reason.
We should be opposed to what the Chinese government is doing because socialism is evil.
Centralized government, nationalized government is evil.
It has proved itself so over the last century and a half.
But Trump is focusing on the economics of this in a sort of Peter Navarro way, and that is not economically accurate.
And he's setting up, from a political perspective, he's setting up expectations he won't be able to fulfill.
If he makes this all about how breaking up with China is going to benefit the American economy, no such luck.
Hey, you are asking the American people to undertake a sacrifice.
And during World War II, FDR was not shy about explaining to the American people the sacrifices they would have to undertake.
During the Cold War, JFK was not shy about asking the American people what sacrifices they would have to undertake.
And Trump should not be shy about telling the American people the threat of China, and explaining the threat of China, because China is, in fact, a threat.
China's a threat, and pretending that China's not a threat is a mistake.
And by the way, this would be a good Good, great opportunity to explain the differences between the American system and the Chinese system.
Instead, here's the way this looks like this is gonna go.
It does not look as though the Trump administration is going to take a hard line position on China for the foreseeable future, simply because if Trump is unwilling to explain why Americans should sacrifice to fight Chinese influence around the globe, like Hong Kong, why isn't Trump on TV every night talking about Hong Kong?
Wouldn't this be a perfect example of Chinese Violation of treaties?
I mean, they literally signed a treaty with the British in 97, when the British abdicated in Hong Kong, that they would not violate the human rights of the people of Hong Kong.
They proceeded to do exactly that.
Why wouldn't- I mean, Trump is doing a lot of the right things, but he's not talking about it, right?
He's actually providing the weaponry Taiwan needs to defend itself against Chinese aggression, but then he won't talk about it.
Why won't we just talk about this?
If he's talking about North Korea as a world threat, he used to talk about China placing pressure on the North Koreans.
Well, the fact is that if we're going to face down the Chinese, there will be sacrifices that are necessary.
But I think the most likely scenario here is that the Chinese force Trump back to the table, not because Trump is likely to want to come back to the table, but because if he does not, then the economy is likely going to sink further as we approach the election.
Xi knows this.
And so Xi could easily tank the United States economy simply by selling the trillions of dollars in U.S.
bonds the Chinese government owes on the open market.
Doing so would completely undercut the demand for U.S.
bonds, make it very difficult for us to sell our debt.
Send those interest rates back up.
President Trump claimed on Monday that Chinese officials are now prepared to return to the negotiating table.
This is the most likely scenario.
Signaling there may be a path to a potential detente in his tit-for-tat trade war with Beijing.
Trump told reporters, China called last night our top trade people and said, let's get back to the table.
They've been hurt very badly, but they understand this is the right thing to do and I have great respect for it.
They want to make a deal and that's a great thing.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry, however, is undercutting that.
The spokesperson, Geng Shuang, appeared to dispute the president's claim.
He said, I haven't heard about this.
Apparently, the Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, told reporters that Chinese Vice Premier Liu He had called for talks to resume when Trump pressed him for details during a bilateral meeting later in the afternoon with the Indian Prime Minister.
It was not immediately clear if Mnuchin was referring to a phone call Liu made to the U.S.
officials or his comments at a technology conference earlier that day.
Trump is taking the position that the tariffs are helping the American economy.
They are not, of course, because tariffs don't generally help any economy, including the economy that levies the tariffs.
Again, I think that the leverage right now, because Trump has not made the case to the American people, is on the side of the Chinese, also because, again, he doesn't have to worry about his own people.
If they fuss with him, then he simply imprisons them.
So that means that the Chinese have the leverage, unless Trump makes the case.
So, Mr. President, make the case, get out there, explain to the American people why you are doing what you are doing.
And it is not just because trade wars are good and easy to win, because that is not true.
But China is an imperturbable foe, an imperturbable foe.
They cannot be perturbed.
They are a foe with a long vision.
They're playing a long game.
They're expanding their reach, not just in their immediate region, but in outside regions as well.
They're forming alliances with America's enemies.
They're forming alliances with the Iranians and with the Russians.
The president has a strong case against China.
It's time for him to prosecute it.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, my, uh, yesterday was a bad day.
We wanted to go to Disneyland.
There was kind of a screw-up at Disneyland, and so I couldn't take my kids, which was too bad.
But, we decided instead that we would take them to their first in-theater movie, which is always a risky proposition, because I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old.
She is fully capable of sitting through a movie in a theater My son, not so much.
He's up and down, he's bouncing around.
But, we went and saw Toy Story 4, and it's pretty great.
Okay, the Toy Story series, I have to admit, when I saw the first Toy Story, I was not a huge fan.
Toy Story 2 is fantastic.
Toy Story 3 is similarly fantastic.
Toy Story 4 is probably not as good as 2 or 3, but it's still very, very good.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Everyone, Bonnie made a friend in class.
Oh, she's already making friends.
No, no, she literally made a new friend.
I want you to meet Forky!
He's a spook.
Yes, yeah, I know.
Forky is the most important toy to Bonnie right now.
We all have to make sure nothing happens to it.
So one of the things that Pixar has done so well over the years, of course, is they've really placed adult messages in children's films.
This movie is basically about baby boomers retiring.
That really is what the movie is about.
And deciding to get out there and have fun with your life and not dwell on the past, that's really what this movie is about.
What's interesting about the Toy Story series is it starts off as a series about children and childhood, and then it moves through adolescence, and then it moves to adulthood, and now it's moving to retirement.
It sort of dealt with death last time around in Toy Story 3.
The movie is entertaining.
It's very good.
Tony Hale, who plays Forky, is kind of fantastic.
My kids loved it.
And again, one of the great things about Pixar is that you can really enjoy the film as an adult, even as your kids are laughing at it while they completely miss the deeper messages of the film.
So you can go check out Toy Story 4.
Totally worth the watch.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
All righty, so Andrew Luck is this terrific quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, or should I say ex-quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts.
He won comeback player of the year last year.
He was seen as sort of the great hope to replace Peyton Manning in Indianapolis, and he was great.
I mean, last year he threw for 39 touchdowns.
He was excellent.
Well, he decided that he was going to retire from the NFL.
He is 29 years old.
And he decided he was going to retire because he just keeps getting injured.
He doesn't want to be battered and bruised and ruined anymore.
He's sick of it.
He did a post-game press conference.
In which he explained that the injuries he's undergone have taken too big a toll on his psyche.
He said, I felt stuck, and the only way out of it is to no longer play football.
It's taken my joy away from the game.
People were enraged at him.
How dare he?
And so as he made his way off the field, following a 27-17 pregame loss, fans at Lucas Oil Stadium started to boo him.
And fans were very upset with him.
Okay, it's his body.
It's his life.
Frankly, good for him.
Good for him!
Okay, in seven seasons with the team, he led them to the playoffs four times.
In the three years he didn't, it was because he missed games due to injury.
You know, the fact that he was booed off the field, I understand as a fan being upset that the quarterback on whom your team had staked its future is leaving.
But the fact is, he's gonna have to live with his body for the next 60 years, and you are not.
And good for him, good for him.
I really have serious doubts, frankly, about the future viability of the NFL, simply because it's an inherently dangerous sport.
The NFL continues to market itself as a not-dangerous sport.
It is clearly a dangerous sport.
There's something to be said for the idea that the NFL really should have taken a different tack on all of this, which is, yes, we're a dangerous sport.
Get over it.
That's the tack that UFC has taken.
Yeah, you're gonna see people beat the crap out of each other, and it's not safe, and people are gonna get hurt.
And that's the way it is.
But because the NFL wants to be a youth sport and a mainstream sport and not sort of an underground violent sport, because of that, they have moved into this weird area where they proclaim that they are safe, while they are not, in fact, safe.
Well, the retirement of Andrew Luck is going to be another blow to that sort of press for the NFL.
But frankly, good for Andrew Luck.
I hope he lives a happier, healthier life because he's made this decision.
He doesn't owe anything to the fans.
He is a man doing a job.
And if he decides to no longer do the job, that is not his obligation.
And if fans don't like it, well, frankly, they can stick it because they're not the ones who are going to have to live with concussions and broken ankles and inability to walk around without pain the next morning.
I say that as a big sports fan.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with a couple more additional hours of content.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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