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Jan. 2, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:03:31

Welcome To 2020! | Ep. 923

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Time	Text
	Iranian forces attack the American embassy in Iraq.
	Anti-Semitic attacks become commonplace in New York City.
	And Democrats continue to push impeachment.
	Happy New Year!
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com.
	Slash Ben, great thing to do in the new year.
	Well, happy new year to y'all.
	Hope that you had a wonderful vacation, if you were able to take a vacation.
	I hope that you had a wonderful Christmas, great Hanukkah, happy new year, and we're back.
	And you know what that means?
	It's time for an international emergency!
	So, over in Iraq, things have been degrading and degrading fairly quickly.
	That is because the government of Iraq has always been torn between the sectarian divide, Sunni and Shia.
	This has been true for a very long time.
	In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's fall and the disbanding of the Iraqi military, sectarian violence obviously started to take root in Iraq.
	In recent years, there was an attempt by the United States to help bring together a government that would both fight off ISIS and that would resist Iran.
	That has proved to be harder than expected, simply because Iran's influence in the region has tremendously, tremendously grown.
	And that is in large part thanks to the fact that the Obama administration decided to basically make room for the Iranians.
	And now you're seeing all these members of the media, all these members of the left, who are suggesting that it's President Trump's fault that Iranian terrorists attempted to storm the U.S.
	embassy over the last three or four days.
	They're trying to suggest that this is because of Trump's harsh policy on Iran.
	No, this is because when you appease a power like Iran, their power grows and they are able to stage events like this one.
	And this is two very different views of foreign policy and it's something that we ought to take note of because there is this tendency inside the right to be isolationist as well.
	And these views of foreign policy, one suggests that the role of the United States in the world should be basically we stay within our own borders, we wait to be hit, if we are hit, then we lash out in sort of quick fashion, and then we retreat back inside our own borders, and that the outside world has nothing to do with us.
	And this was America's foreign policy for large swaths of time, up until the beginning of the 20th century, essentially.
	And then there's the other view, which is that the world has become a very, very small place.
	And what that means is that when things happen abroad, eventually they are going to end up as being threats to the United States.
	And so one of the goals of the U.S.
	military, one of the goals of American foreign policy is to quash threats before they occur.
	It's to make sure that we can minimize the possibility of risk growing.
	And so to take an example, There were two views that were prevalent in the United States in the 1930s in the lead up to World War II, and none of this is meant to suggest that we're about to go to war with Iran, which we are not.
	Okay, but there were two views in the 1930s in the lead up to World War II.
	View number one was the old sort of isolationist view, and this was predominant in the United States.
	It was the view of the Republican Party.
	It was the view of populists like Father Coughlin.
	It was the view of many people who suggested that the United States basically had no role in the world.
	If there was chaos over in Europe, well, that was the Europe problem.
	If there is chaos over between Japan and China, that was really a Japan and China problem.
	It wasn't really a U.S.
	problem.
	And then that problem started to arrive on America's front doorstep and back doorstep, as it turns out.
	And then Pearl Harbor happened.
	Now, what's interesting about the reaction of the United States to Pearl Harbor is that we immediately got our back up and we recognized that our role in the world had to change.
	Because the fact is this, the United States pretty easily could have come to some sort of accommodation with the Japanese that would have allowed them to maximize their regional power even after Pearl Harbor.
	In fact, it's possible that's what the Japanese government thought was going to happen, is that the United States was not going to go to full-scale war with Japan, even after Pearl Harbor, because isolationist sentiment was so strong.
	And so they felt like, okay, well, if we hit them, then maybe they'll back off.
	Okay, that's not what happened.
	The United States got its back up, and instead, the United States ends up defeating Japan and occupying Japan for the next 80 years.
	The United States does the same thing with regard to Germany.
	America's role in the world fundamentally changes because we recognize after World War II that there is no more of this We can retreat within our own borders and everybody will leave us alone.
	Well, that has only become worse over time.
	And every so often, we're reminded of this.
	In 9-11, we were reminded that we can leave the Middle East alone.
	We can basically have a light footprint in the Middle East.
	We can say that that region of the world has not much to do with us.
	And that will not stop terrorists from hating us and wanting to attack us and wanting to kill American citizens.
	And again, there are two ways of viewing America's military response to events like this.
	One is that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, which killed On the order of 2,000 Americans, that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, America then entered a war in which 200,000 Americans were killed, right, in World War II.
	Was that a disproportionate response?
	In some ways, I think there are some isolationists who would argue yes.
	Pat Buchanan, for example, has sort of argued yes.
	The same thing has happened in the aftermath of 9-11.
	There's the argument that was made that, yes, they killed 3,000 of our citizens, but then we've been involved in wars that have killed more American troops than that.
	More American troops have died in those wars.
	But this fundamentally misstates the role of the American military and the role of America in the world.
	And that is the American military people sign up.
	Particularly now, it's a volunteer military.
	These are heroes who are signing up to defend America's freedom.
	They're not signing up.
	in order to be paid to sit at a base in Georgia.
	That is not why they sign up.
	And to treat them as children, to treat our soldiers, as the left likes to do, as sort of pawns in political games, where anytime somebody says we need to use troops to defend our embassy in Baghdad, for example, then the left says, well, how many troops are you willing to put at risk?
	Listen, that's a fine question, but it's not a fine question if you do it every single time we talk about using military force in defense of American assets abroad.
	So we have to decide is what we want America's role in the world to be, and also we have to be realistic about the fact that if America retreats from certain areas of the world, other forces take over.
	If Iran takes over Iraq, if Iran takes over Syria, if Iran takes over Lebanon, if Iran takes over Yemen, that has significant ramifications for America's foreign policy, not just in terms of the economy and shutting down the Straits of Hormuz, but in terms of actual Security policy.
	The fact is the Iranian government is the chief sponsor of worldwide terror on planet Earth right now.
	If the Iranians take over the region, that maximizes Russian aggression, Russian power, which has ramifications for Europe.
	If the Chinese are working with the Russians and with the Iranians, then it maximizes Chinese power at the expense of American power in the world.
	Economics is not a zero-sum game, but foreign policy, to a certain extent, is, in fact, a zero-sum game.
	And when America pulls back, it is not that this becomes a vacuum, it's that that vacuum is very quickly filled.
	So there are going to be people who today, tomorrow, as we come back into the new year, argue that all of this is happening in Iraq because the United States ought to take a more isolationist view toward the world, that all this is happening with regard to China and Russia.
	If we just leave them alone, they'll leave us alone.
	But that is not the reality.
	The reality is that if we leave all this stuff alone, all we are doing is emboldening America's enemies to grow stronger.
	And then when conflict does occur, we are facing down a much stronger enemy.
	Right now, one of the things that is occurring from sort of the old Obama acolytes, they're saying, well, if we had just left Iran alone, if we just continued to pay off Iran, well, then Iran wouldn't be as violent right now with America.
	Now, first of all, that's not true.
	I mean, Iran is responsible for the deaths of literally thousands of American service people in Iraq.
	So the Iranians have not been our friend for quite a while, going all the way back to the mullahs in 1979.
	But there's this case that's being made by the Obama contention that if we had just paid them off, everything would have been fine, and it's Trump's harsh stand against the Iranians that is causing them to get violent.
	Okay, go back to 1940 and the Munich Accords, and think to yourself, or 1939 and the Munich Accords, 38, the Munich Accords, and think to yourself, What would have happened if after the Munich Accords, but before Hitler violates the Munich Accords, Churchill is elected?
	And then Churchill takes a very strong stand, and then Hitler starts attacking the countries surrounding him.
	Isn't it true that people on the left would then have blamed Churchill and his strong stand against the Germans for provoking?
	Appeasement looks good until the point at which the appeaser is stepped on.
	The problem is if people foresee that and they elect somebody who's no longer going to appease, it's easy for people on the left and for isolationists too to suggest that it's the intransigence of strong-willed people standing up against evil that is the cause of the evil being evil.
	And that's never true.
	The Iranian government has been evil for 40 years.
	The German government was evil before Churchill was elected and before Churchill took over and the Chamberlain government collapsed.
	Evil doesn't need an excuse to be evil.
	We'll get into what's actually occurring here and why President Trump is doing the right thing in Iran and what foreign policy ought to look like there.
	Nobody is calling for overt war.
	I will say this 1,000 times today.
	No one wants war with Iran.
	No one wants an open conflict with Iran.
	There are things we can do short of that open conflict to stop them from Pursuing this aggressive policy in the region and putting more Americans at risk and creating a stronger Iran to be used against their own citizens and more importantly against America's other allies around the Middle East and America herself.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so here is the actual latest from what is happening over in Baghdad.
	This is according to the New York Times as of last night.
	After a second day of tense protests at the American embassy in Baghdad, thousands of pro-Iranian demonstrators dispersed on Wednesday.
	Demonstrators is code for many of these people are terrorists that literally a terrorist group called Hezbollah which has outlets.
	This is sort of the Iraqi outlet.
	There's the Iraqi outlet of Hezbollah.
	It's sponsored by the Iranian Quds Force, which is a wing of their Revolutionary Guard.
	Hezbollah Has thousands of rockets pointed at Israel and Lebanon.
	Hezbollah has a significant role in the conflict in Syria.
	Hezbollah is one of the worst terrorist groups on the planet.
	It is labeled as such by the American State Department and by an increasing number of European countries.
	And if the Europeans label somebody from the Middle East a terrorist, then it's a fairly good shot that they're an actual terrorist group.
	After a second day of tense protests at the American embassy in Baghdad, thousands of pro-Iranian demonstrators dispersed on Wednesday, ending a siege that had trapped American diplomats in the embassy compound overnight, winding down a potentially explosive crisis for the Trump administration.
	The demonstrators had swarmed outside the embassy, chanting "death to America." The New York Times, by the way, originally termed these people mourners, which shows you where their heads are at.
	What exactly were they supposedly mourning?
	They were mourning the fact that the United States had attacked Hezbollah encampments in Syria and Iraq, because these are places from which Hezbollah fighters have been going out and trying to kill Americans and American allies.
	In contrast to Tuesday, when some demonstrators forced their way into the compound and set some of the outbuildings on fire.
	They're not demonstrators.
	Demonstrators don't break into embassies and set things on fire.
	Those are called terrorists.
	The crowd on Wednesday was smaller.
	No protesters breached the compound's gates.
	Women demonstrators, largely members of Iranian-backed militias, angered by deadly American airstrikes over the weekend.
	I do love it when they suggest that they are angered by deadly American airstrikes.
	Until then, they were nice guys.
	But then it was that the United States attacked some terror bases, and then they were like, oh man, I'm so pissed off.
	Until this, I was just like your nice normal terrorist.
	I wasn't gonna like go burn an embassy or something, but now that you killed my terrorist friends, now I'm like a super, really giant angry terrorist, and I'm gonna go burn crap.
	Alternatively, these were terrorists who were looking for an excuse to go and do something bad.
	And so they stormed the embassy, the outer walls of the embassy, and this forced Americans inside the embassy, the American military, to fire tear gas into the crowd.
	When the demonstrators reached the roof of the Bernd Reception building on Wednesday, American security forces, including Marine reinforcements sent by the Pentagon the day before, fired tear gas to drive them back.
	And you can see from the video, I mean, these are people who are arriving with battering rams and weapons.
	Where are all the females?
	I mean, if these are demonstrators, have you seen a single female?
	Why is it that these are all military-aged males who are carrying Hezbollah flags?
	Could it be that they are actually terrorists?
	I'm so sick of the media covering for terrorists and pretending they're just demonstrators.
	It's insane.
	The full withdrawal came after leaders of the Iranian-backed militias who had organized the demonstration called on the crowd to leave and most gradually drifted away on foot or drove off in trucks.
	The leaders later announced that their agreement to withdraw was conditioned on a commitment from Iraq's Prime Minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, to move ahead with legislation to force American troops to withdraw from Iraq.
	So Mahdi had been protested by thousands of Iraqi citizens who said that he's in thrall to the Iranians.
	Now Mahdi's caught between Iraq and a hard place, basically.
	A large part of his country is Shia.
	A huge percentage of the parliament is Shia.
	Many members of the government are Shia.
	Many of them are enthralled to Iran.
	Meanwhile, he has a vast Sunni population as well.
	The Shia want the Americans to leave so that Iran can help overrun Iraq.
	The Sunnis want the Americans to stay so that America can help protect them against the Iranians.
	Now, if you're American, you're going, what role do we have in all of this?
	Well, the role is to basically keep the peace, and the reason you need to keep the peace is because if the Iranians overrun Iraq, then they now run all territory between Afghanistan and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
	They now run everything, basically, ranging all the way as far east as parts of Afghanistan, and then all the way as far west as Lebanon, and as far south as Yemen.
	And by the way, working in coordination with the Russians and the Chinese.
	So if you worry about America's place in the world, about our foreign policy, about the possibility of a major war breaking out, here's the thing.
	War breaks out for a variety of reasons, but one of those reasons is when your enemies think they are stronger than you, and they take advantage of that strength.
	Right now, America's enemies recognize that America does not want to go to war with anybody, and so they are pushing at the borders.
	They're pushing.
	This is what Putin has been doing.
	He did it in Crimea.
	He did it in Georgia.
	He's been pushing consistently.
	The Iranians are pushing consistently.
	The Chinese are pushing consistently.
	They're basically using the old Stalin-esque tactic of push where it's mush.
	You push until the mush stops, basically.
	Well, the question is, when is America's back going to get up with all this?
	President Trump is saying right now.
	This bleep ends right now.
	Iran's ability to deploy militias to blockade American diplomats inside the embassy for most of two days made clear how much power they wield within the Iraqi government.
	According to the American government, the Iraqi government didn't do enough at the very beginning to defend America's embassy in Iraq, that sovereign American territory.
	According to the New York Times, despite a 16-year American effort to establish a government friendlier to Western interests, at a cost of more than $1 trillion and 5,000 American lives, Iraq's leaders lined up in opposition to the American airstrikes, and its security forces allowed the militias to reach the American diplomatic compound.
	Okay, that is not because the government is anti-American.
	It's because the government is in thrall to the Iranians, and that is because America has lessened its footprint in Iraq.
	And so if you're in Iraq, and you're betting on the future of the country, who do you think has more staying power, the Iranians or the Americans?
	If America really showed, listen, we're not going anywhere, we're going to stay here until this thing is locked down, we're at least going to provide you the help you need until this thing is locked down against Iran, then the Iraqi government would probably be a lot more forthcoming in terms of the resources they provide to the American government.
	That's what the American government is saying, by the way.
	It is also true that consistent American unwillingness to confront the Iranian aggression over the past year and a half The Iranians firing on ships in the Straits of Hormuz.
	The Iranians shooting down an American drone.
	America basically doing very little except passing a few sanctions.
	The Iranians are pushing where they think that it's mush.
	Well, the mush has now ended.
	We'll get to President Trump's response to all of this, which is the correct response.
	The media know it's the correct response, which is why they are frustrated by it.
	We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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	That's not a threat.
	It's a brand new year.
	It's not a warning.
	It's mostly just a note of caution.
	Okay, so we'll get to more of that in just one second.
	Well, probably less of that in just one second.
	But first, President Trump has now responded to the situation over in Iraq.
	He says, listen, this ain't Benghazi.
	So the media immediately starts saying, well, this is Trump's Benghazi.
	What's ironic about this is that the same media declared that Benghazi was not a problem in the first place.
	And they kept saying the Obama administration handled it brilliantly while Barack Obama was off partying and people were dying at the Benghazi embassy in Libya in 2012.
	And Hillary Clinton was lying that this was completely unexpected and was a protest that went awry in response to a YouTube video when it was in fact a terror assault and that her state department had turned down security requests.
	Right, then the media kept saying there was no scandal in Benghazi, like none at all.
	There was no cover-up, there was no scandal.
	It wasn't Susan Rice and the Obama administration repeatedly lying to the American people, which they did.
	Well, now you got MSNBC's Joy Reid, who says, this is Trump's Benghazi!
	Well, but I thought that Obama's Benghazi wasn't really a big deal.
	I mean, we had journalists literally making fun of quote-unquote, Benghazi conspiracy theories.
	Anyway, Joy Reid tweeted out, as Trump's Benghazi unfolds in Iraq, Okay, well, I'm glad to see that you guys came around on Benghazi was a bad thing, so that's exciting.
	President Trump came out, he said, uh, guys, this ain't gonna be a Benghazi, because guess what?
	I'm not Obama.
	I think it's been handled very well.
	The Marines came in.
	We had some great warriors come in and do a fantastic job, and they were there instantaneously, as soon as we heard.
	I used the word immediately.
	They came immediately, and it's in great shape.
	As you know, this will not be a Benghazi.
	Benghazi should never have happened.
	This will never, ever be a Benghazi, but we have some of our greatest warriors there.
	They got in there very quickly.
	Okay, peace through strength, and President Trump embodying it here.
	He's apparently thinking about deploying 4,000 troops to the Middle East in order to protect America's assets abroad.
	This is, in fact, the right move.
	A precipitous withdrawal would drive terrorism.
	It would drive the rise of our enemies.
	Again, you will hear calls on the isolationist right for exactly that sort of withdrawal, suggesting that now would be a great time to get out.
	Well, again, that is a short-term view.
	See, the nice thing about being an isolationist is the counterfactual is always very useful to you.
	Because the fact is, most presidents are not willing to let America's assets wither on the vine.
	They're not willing to let America's enemies run roughshod over swaths of the globe and then strengthen themselves.
	So it's easy to point to costs that have already occurred and say, those costs didn't have to occur.
	But the counterfactual, which is, okay, what if America just withdrew?
	And all of these countries got stronger and then started launching terror attacks?
	And started launching economic attacks?
	Because that doesn't occur, because of actions like President Trump's.
	Well, then that leaves the isolationist with the argument that the costs that actually were incurred were bad.
	The counterfactual is always a lot easier than the actual real-time costs of things that are being done right now.
	According to Fox News, the U.S.
	Army's 82nd Airborne Division's Alert Brigade has been issued orders to deploy rapidly to Kuwait amid the unrest in Baghdad, three U.S.
	defense officials told Fox News on Tuesday.
	At least 750 paratroopers are set to deploy to the region immediately, according to Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
	The alert brigade of roughly 4,000 paratroopers known as the Division Ready Brigade has been told to prepare for a possible deployment in the days ahead after hundreds of Iranian-backed militiamen tried to storm the U.S.
	Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday.
	We actually have video of the U.S.
	helicopters arriving, the attack helicopters arriving in Baghdad.
	Suffice it to say, it was shortly thereafter that the Iranian militia said, guys, I think maybe we should pull back.
	Yeah, no kidding.
	You should pull back.
	Because it turns out that America, our firepower, is pretty extraordinary.
	That is an American helicopter arriving and saying, hey guys, we're here.
	Just want to let you know.
	Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, he says, we're not backing down.
	We're not going to give in to terrorist demands.
	Any plans to evacuate the embassy in Baghdad, sir?
	None.
	Okay.
	Any plans to pull some of the 5,000 U.S.
	troops in Iraq out?
	None.
	We put real pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
	We will continue to do so.
	And as you saw the president say today, we will continue to hold the Islamic Republic of Iran accountable wherever we find their malign activity, and we'll make sure we have the resources to do so.
	Okay, now if you're the Iranians, all you want to do is maintain the pressure.
	Long enough that a Democrat is elected, at which point the United States presumably would go back to trying to bribe the Iranians into, what, peace?
	Into decency?
	That is a thing that's not going to happen.
	By the way, there are protests against the Iranian influence on the Iraqi government.
	They're just not being covered by the media.
	That's another point that Mike Pompeo was making.
	Meanwhile, Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense, says that Iran or its proxy forces may be planning further strikes on American interests in the Middle East, and the U.S.
	is prepared to take preemptive military action if it gets sufficient warning.
	According to Esper, He said the game has changed.
	We're prepared to do what is necessary to defend our personnel and our interests and our partners in the region.
	Now listen, no one wants a full-scale war with the Iranians.
	But you know who doesn't want a full-scale war the most?
	The Iranians.
	Because if there's a full-scale war, the first people to die are the mullahs.
	If this thing goes to full-scale war, the first people who have their heads come right off their bodies are the mullahs in Iran, and they know it.
	So what they're doing right now is they're pushing, and they're pushing, and they're pushing, and they're oppressing their own population, and they're launching low-level terror assaults, and they're doing all of this in the hopes that they will drive America out of the Middle East in the same way that the North Vietnamese, that the Viet Cong drove the United States out of Vietnam, and that allowed for a spread of communist tyranny in that region.
	They're looking for the same thing to happen here.
	The difference is that President Trump is president right now, and the chances that he's going to pull out precipitously are extremely, extremely low, as well they should be.
	There are things the United States can do beyond economic sanctions, by the way, and striking terror bases is one of those things.
	Hitting at Hezbollah is one of those things, and that can be done with pretty much zero cost from the air, which is one of the reasons you saw these demonstrators, quote unquote, from the New York Times.
	These demonstrators descending on the embassy is because America did strike a series of terrorist encampments and it was very successful.
	The United States does have an interest in ensuring safety and security for America and her allies and her interests in the region.
	It'll be interesting to see how these arguments play out because Trump does have this sort of isolationist streak, but he is also not somebody who's going to run away from all of this.
	Meanwhile, watching the, watching the Obama administration sycophants like Ben Rhodes come out and talk about how terrible Trump is is just a reminder how awful Obama was.
	The fact is Iran has been emboldened in the region because of the Obama administration.
	Trump tweeted out, this is not a warning, it is a threat.
	Happy New Year.
	Well, the bottom line is that what he's doing is going to mean a lot more than what he is saying, right?
	Deploying those troops, making sure that our assets are safe and secure over there.
	All of that makes a lot of sense.
	It is worth noting that Barack Obama welcomed the leader of the U.S.
	embassy attack to the White House back in 2000.
	11, and he was criticized for it at the time because the person was seen as an Iranian proxy even then.
	Okay, so that is foreign policy crisis number one that is facing the Trump administration.
	But it is not the only foreign policy crisis facing the Trump administration as we start a new year.
	Meanwhile, North Korea says that it has a new strategic weapon.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Okay, meanwhile, North Korea is upping the ante as well.
	No president goes through their first term without being tested a little bit.
	President Trump's strategy on North Korea has been almost precisely the opposite of his strategy on Iran.
	His strategy on Iran has been to push the mullahs, to box them in, to cut off their economic lifelines, to weaken them from within.
	That's largely been successful, which is why you are seeing the Iranian government lash out in every direction as they desperately attempt to fend off the protests that have been rolling throughout their country for the last, what, six to nine months?
	In North Korea, the United States has taken the opposite, the sort of opposite tack, and that has been to try and woo Kim Jong-un personally.
	I've been very critical of that tack.
	I've thought that it's been a waste of time.
	North Korea is showing each and every day that they're not a trustworthy partner.
	According to Emily Zanotti writing over at Daily Wire, North Korea now says it has a new strategic weapon and Kim Jong-un plans to deploy it soon.
	According to the Associated Press, North Korea says it has a new strategic weapon that will stun the world with shocking action.
	North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un plans to deploy the weapon soon as a way of challenging the U.S.' 's nuclear weapons superiority.
	Kim Jong-un appears to be using this as a bargaining chip in stalled trade talks with the Trump administration.
	This is always the tactic of the North Koreans, which is to threaten action, fire missiles, basically fuss until you get what you want, create a situation, and then suggest that it can be resolved only by America cutting a check.
	It has not worked to the benefit of the United States or to the benefit of the people of North Korea for decades at this point.
	Why it would work with Iran is beyond me.
	The left wants to see the North Korean model applied to Iran.
	It's funny to watch the media on all this.
	Because Trump is taking this really bifurcated approach to Iran versus North Korea, They won't endorse either strategy.
	So when Trump takes this very soft tack with North Korea...
	Which at least is mildly more justified than it would be with Iran, simply because Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons yet, and North Korea already does, which means that you have to treat them with a little bit more care than you would with regard to Iran.
	But when it comes to North Korea, the media's like, oh, look at this Trump, he's sycophantically kissing ass with North Korea.
	And then when it comes to Iran, where President Trump is taking a very harsh line, they're like, why isn't he sycophantically kissing ass of the Mullahs, like Barack Obama did?
	Guys, you gotta pick one.
	Either you treat America's enemies with harshness, and it's peace through strength, and it's you set up barriers and rules, or it's none of the above.
	You gotta pick.
	You can't just randomly suggest that it's good when Barack Obama does it, but bad when Trump does it.
	That's not the way any of this works.
	The AP reports that that Unn says he will soon reveal a new strategic weapon to the world as it bolsters its nuclear deterrent in the face of quote-unquote gangster-like U.S.
	pressure.
	The Trump administration has been trying to negotiate with North Korea for years.
	President Trump sees an inked deal with the rogue communist nation as a potential hallmark of his term.
	Just a few short years ago, Trump did manage to secure an anti-proliferation treaty with North Korea, halting, at the time, North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons and development of ICBMs, but North Korea has not actually abided by any of those agreements.
	President Trump dismissed the threat in North Korea.
	He said, no, no, no, we're getting along great, which of course is not true.
	Here's President Trump saying it.
	I have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.
	I know he's sending out certain messages about Christmas presents.
	And I hope his Christmas present is a beautiful vase.
	That's what I'd like.
	A vase.
	As opposed to something else.
	I don't know.
	Look.
	He likes me.
	I like him.
	We get along.
	He's representing his country.
	I'm representing my country.
	We have to do what we have to do.
	By the way, I just want to know, okay, if Kim Jong-un sent Trump a vase, he'd be like, what's this vase?
	Why is there a vase here?
	You think I need another stupid vase?
	I've got a thousand vases.
	With that said, is the policy with regard to North Korea the smartest?
	No.
	But is there a really great policy available with North Korea?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	I mean, at the very least, North Korea doesn't have regional aspirations.
	North Korea is at least somewhat contained.
	The same is not true of Iran.
	Okay, meanwhile, over in New York City, attacks on Jews continue apace.
	We saw over the Christmas vacation, over the Hanukkah, the winter vacation, we saw an attack during Hanukkah at a house that was next to a shul in Brooklyn.
	It was an attack on... a machete attack by a guy who'd been let out of jail early.
	He had a criminal history.
	And it injured five people, including the rabbi of this particular show.
	This was only the latest in a spate of attacks.
	There have been a bunch of attacks over the last month, over the last several weeks.
	And, I mean, you can see that we have a mashup of a bunch of videos of the attacks from closed-circuit TV.
	Pretty frightening stuff.
	You can see that here's a Jew just being chased down in the middle of the street and beaten up, held to the ground and punched.
	You can see that, I mean, this sort of stuff is happening pretty much every day.
	And it's overtly religious Jews that are being targeted disproportionately by people who happen to be minority.
	It doesn't mean that they're doing it because they're minority, but it is worthwhile noting this is one of the reasons the media is not covering it.
	There's a Jewish boy walking down the street, a Jewish man walking down the street getting clocked from behind by a young person of color, it appears.
	The only reason that race is relevant in this conversation is because the media specifically only talk about anti-Semitic attacks when they are white supremacists.
	The reason they're not talking about these anti-Semitic attacks is because they're not against secularized Jews with left-wing values.
	They're against religious Orthodox Jews in New York City and they are being perpetrated by members of the intersectional hierarchy.
	That is the reason why the media refuses to cover all of this.
	The New York Times admitted as much back in 2018 when they said that even though there was a massive spike in anti-Semitic attacks in the city, it's been ongoing for years at this point, they said that they had failed to cover it because it, quote, refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy.
	The fact is the media refused to take this stuff seriously, specifically because of the nature of the victims, religious Jews who do not hold left-wing values, and the nature of the victimizers, disproportionately young minority males.
	Jake Tapper got this one right.
	Jake Tapper was on CNN.
	He was talking with Barry Weiss and Jane Koston.
	And here's Jake explaining correctly that the media response definitely would have been different if white supremacists had committed this Hanukkah attack.
	This is kind of a sensitive question, but do you think the reaction by politicians and the media would be any different if these recent anti-Semitic attacks had been committed by white supremacists instead of who they were committed by?
	I do.
	And the reason for that is because it took a man walking in with a machete the size of a broomstick for there to be any public outrage during the holiday of Hanukkah.
	That, of course, is true.
	It is also true that the Jersey City attack disappeared from mainstream newspapers.
	And not only that, it was covered by mainstream newspapers as a response to gentrification, with Jews coming in and offering to buy apartments from black folks in Jersey City.
	And the fact is, the media only cover anti-Semitism when it is convenient to their narrative.
	But anti-Semitism comes from a wide variety of sources, including, disproportionately, in terms of opinion, Black Americans are disproportionately anti-Semitic compared to other racial subgroups of Americans according to the Anti-Defamation League.
	Again, only relevant because what you are seeing in New York City is disproportionately the attacks taking place from members of minority communities.
	If this were a white supremacist thing, the media would be covering it because it is uncomfortable to talk about the fact that there is disproportionate anti-Semitism among African Americans in the United States.
	The media simply refused to cover it.
	Armin Rosen wrote for Tablet Magazine back in July 2019 about the Jew hatred in New York, correctly noted, quote, that the victims are most outwardly identifiable, i.e.
	religious rather than secularized Jews.
	The perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.
	The media, therefore, does not want to cover all of this because this cuts directly against the supposed alliance of intersectionality in which all minority groups are allied against the white superstructure.
	The left just ignores the wrong type of anti-Semitism.
	And so the same media that will derive great joy from suggesting that President Trump, the most pro-Israel president in the history of the United States, is actually an anti-Semite.
	The same media that will pretend that President Trump's executive order for campus, designed to protect Jews in the same way that it protects blacks on American campuses, are actually anti-Semitic.
	Well, we'll suggest that it is perfectly wrong to cover the fact that Barack Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years while Jeremiah Wright spewed anti-Semitism.
	He did for two decades.
	We know this.
	A Democratic candidate who suggests that Trump has emboldened anti-Semites will now make pilgrimage.
	They have been doing this, right?
	You've seen this from Pete Buttigieg.
	He made pilgrimage to Al Sharpton, an actual anti-Semite.
	Who's involved in the incitement, allegedly involved in the incitement, of two separate anti-Semitic riots in New York City, and who now has a show on MSNBC.
	So yes, the identity of the victims matters, and so does the identity of the victimizers.
	The same commentators who will police Republicans for mentioning George Soros.
	So if you say George Soros is a nefarious force in American politics, which by the way, he is.
	He does some very bad things in American politics.
	Then they'll say, oh, that's anti-semitism if you mention George Soros.
	If, by the way, you mention anything about right-wing Jewish donors, if you mention something about Sheldon Adelson, then obviously that's not anti-semitic.
	That's just you critiquing money in politics.
	But if you do it about George Soros, it's anti-semitic.
	And then they'll just excuse open anti-semitism from Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
	By the way, the statement that I made about disproportionate anti-semitism inside the black community that's supported by a consistent polling done by the Anti-Defamation League every single year.
	If you're not going to call out anti-semitism whenever you see it, you're doing it wrong.
	But the media are not interested in doing it because for them it's just a tool.
	And this latest spate of anti-semitic attacks in New York is a perfect example of this.
	I'll get to more of that in just a second.
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	Okay, we can get to more of the anti-Semitism in New York City.
	We'll also get to impeachment and the 2020 race where Bernie Sanders is showing some life despite the fact That he basically been declared dead just a couple of months ago.
	We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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	Okay, so the issue of anti-Semitism, again, being treated as a political football by the left because this is what the political left enjoys doing, apparently.
	CNN's Sam Vinegrad blamed President Trump for the situation in New York.
	She tried to excuse Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, and Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York.
	And she blamed President Trump in the process for the fact that Bill de Blasio, who claimed that there was no anti-Semitic problem, like five weeks ago, after that Jersey City attack, he suggested, well, now anti-Semitism has reached the doorstep of New York City.
	No, it's been there for a very long time.
	You just don't care about it because it's coming in a form that you wish not to recognize.
	Andrew Cuomo, who came out and said, well, this is just, it has to do with the general tone and tenor of politics in our country, trying to blame Trump for something happening in his own state.
	Here's CNN's Sam Vinograd doing the same thing.
	We have not seen the U.S.
	government address the lessons of countering extremism in really a strategic way, and I do not understand why.
	President Trump has the authority and the ability to call together a whole-of-government approach on this issue, and he has failed to do so while concurrently, unfortunately, really propagating some anti-Semitic narratives.
	Oh, so you see, somehow, I guess the people who are beating up Jews in Williamsburg are actually Trump supporters.
	Shocker!
	Didn't see that one coming.
	I'll be honest with you, really did not see that coming.
	Probably the pair of goons who flashed a knife, according to the New York Post, as they yelled, hey, Jew boy, at a Brooklyn teen over the weekend, spewing that hate at a 17-year-old victim walking on Avenue O near 8th Street.
	Apparently, that was probably a bunch of white supremacists.
	By the way, not a single incident in New York City has been linked to white supremacy, but obviously this has to do with President Trump.
	Demonstrating, once again, that the left doesn't care about antisemitism, depending on the source.
	Jay Michelson wrote a piece over at the Daily Beast, where he tried to explain that left-wing antisemitism is basically fine, because the reality is that left-wing antisemitism is rooted in reality, where right-wing white supremacist antisemitism is rooted in mere conspiracy theorizing.
	Really, this is what this idiot wrote.
	It's unbelievable.
	He says, this combination of baseless hatred, he's talking about the conspiracy theorizing in the Jersey City community among some people about Jews selling organs and gentrification.
	He says, this combination of baseless hatred and socioeconomic grievance stands in stark contrast to the wordy theoretical manifestos of white supremacist anti-semitism.
	And while some attackers cite conspiracy theories similar to the ones on the nationalist right, such as the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrines noted above, the social context and relationships to power are utterly different.
	While conspiracy mongering exists on the left and the right, there is no left-wing or African-American equivalent of President Trump, who is freely traded in anti-Semitic stereotypes, sometimes in a joking way.
	After all, the notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan may be the leader of the Nation of Islam, but Trump is the leader of the free world.
	And then he just blames Trump for all of this.
	Literally, the Democratic Party, this year, or last year rather, excused the anti-Semitism of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and made them part of the squad and elevated them.
	Literally, last year, Pete Buttigieg made pilgrimage to Al Sharpton.
	But don't worry, guys.
	There's no anti-Semitic problem inside the Democratic Party.
	By the way, speaking of things that New York City could do to stop all this, how about you get rid of your idiotic bail policy?
	They've now pushed bail reform in New York City.
	And it turns out that when you don't hold criminals on bail, they go commit crimes.
	Who could have predicted such a thing?
	Who?
	Except for every functional, sentient human being with a prefrontal cortex.
	According to the New York Post, suspects arrested in last week's spree of eight anti-Semitic attacks are quickly being released right back into the neighborhoods they terrorized thanks to bail reform legislation, which doesn't even take effect until January 1st.
	The most recent case of revolving-door justice came Saturday morning with the release, with no bail, of a woman charged with punching and cursing at three Orthodox women ages 22, 26, and 31 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at dawn the day before.
	The accused assailant, Tiffany Harris, was hauled in handcuffs before a Brooklyn judge on 21 menacing harassment and attempted assault charges.
	F.U.
	Jews, Harris allegedly shouted during the attack.
	Yes, I was there, Harris later admitted to the cops.
	Yes, I slapped them.
	I cursed them out.
	I said F.U.
	Jews.
	As she stood before a judge in Brooklyn criminal court with a hood to a navy blue jacket over her head, Harris was in familiar territory.
	She still has an open harassment and assault case on the Brooklyn docket from November.
	Last month, she was sentenced to no jail time for felony criminal mischief in Manhattan.
	She has completely failed to show up for court appearances.
	But Brooklyn prosecutors didn't even bother requesting bail on Saturday, given that the reform law approved in April technically doesn't take effect until January 1st.
	The de Blasio administration has made it clear we all need to get in compliance with bail reform now.
	So you can't even hold these people on bail who are committing crimes.
	Harris broke into a grin when approached by a reporter.
	Why do you wanna know?
	Goodbye, she said.
	Absolute insanity, absolute insanity.
	But welcome to left-wing governance, which is ruining major American cities across the country.
	Meanwhile, there was another act of violence that took the headlines for five seconds, because once again, it did not fit the media's narrative, and that was this attack At a Texas church that happened over the holidays.
	Apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, a streaming video of the Sunday church service in Texas at which a parishioner gunned down a shooter is rallying those who support making it easier for private citizens to bear arms.
	Gun rights advocates have long argued that if more citizens have guns, they can defend themselves and others in the event of a shooting.
	On Sunday morning, this is that last Sunday, a gunman opened fire at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement near Fort Worth.
	He killed two people before a parishioner who was part of a volunteer security force fatally shot him.
	And you can actually see this happen in the video.
	You can see the shooter who arrives on scene, starts shooting at people, and a bunch of people in the crowd pull out guns, and a security officer puts down the shooter and shoots the shooter.
	It was amazing.
	There are people on the left who are tweeting, yeah, but the real threat was that there were people in the audience who didn't really know what to do with their guns and were unlicensed with their guns.
	That was the real threat, obviously.
	Let's just say this.
	If that Hanukkah party that was attacked by a guy with a machete, if there'd been anyone there with a gun.
	It wouldn't be five people injured.
	It would be one terrorist dead.
	That's what would have been happening there.
	Everyone who wishes to protect themselves and their community should become a responsible gun owner.
	They should know how to use, they should coordinate with the authorities, they should do all appropriate things to defend themselves.
	By the way, speaking of idiocy, again, the U.S.
	criminal justice system is broken, but not in terms of keeping people in jail too long all the time.
	Sometimes it's broken in terms of this revolving door that we have with crime.
	It turns out that the man who fatally shot two people at the White Settlement Church before being killed by church security, ...had a long criminal history and was described by his ex-wife as battling a demon and not nice to anyone.
	The shooter was identified on Monday morning by two law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation.
	NBC5 has learned that his criminal past included charges of assault, theft, arson, and possession of an illegal weapon in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Jersey.
	What a delight.
	I mean, it's just... It's unbelievable.
	You set up a revolving door for criminals and then you're shocked when it turns out that the criminals go and do terrible things.
	Meanwhile, with all of this happening, with all this turmoil internationally and domestically, the Democrats are focused laser-like on impeachment.
	They continue to move forward with impeachment, although Nancy Pelosi still has not set forth a timeline as to when she will convey the impeachment charges to the Senate.
	Remember that impeachment was passed in the House, but she has not actually passed that on to the Senate.
	There's an interesting legal debate going on right now over whether Mitch McConnell actually needs that.
	There's nothing in the Constitution that suggests that Nancy Pelosi Number one is compelled to hand over the impeachment charges to McConnell, but there's nothing also that says that McConnell can't hold a separate trial on the basis of those impeachment charges.
	They're public, after all, and then just acquit.
	So there's a debate over whether McConnell should do that right now or whether he should just point at Pelosi and say the reason she's holding this back is because she knows what's going to happen next.
	Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani continues to militate in favor of his own testimony, which is presumably the worst idea that ever happened.
	He was at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, suggesting that he would love to testify, which would be the worst possible idea because Rudy Giuliani is not his own best witness.
	Here's Rudy.
	I would testify, I would give demonstrations, I'd give lectures, I'd give summations.
	Or, I'd do what I do best, I'd try to get...
	So there he is explaining that he would love to testify, love to testify that Republicans would be fools to do that.
	Meanwhile, everybody in the country has already broken down into lines on this one.
	Everybody knows where they stand.
	And the reason they know where they stand is because this is not about what Trump did or did not do with Ukraine.
	It is a generalized referendum on Trump.
	Guess what?
	We get to have a generalized referendum on Trump in just about 11 months here.
	Okay, it is fast approaching the election.
	Most Americans, in the end, want this to be decided by the American people.
	They do not want this to be decided by Nancy Pelosi and crew.
	They do not think that whatever are the allegations rise to the level of getting rid of a sitting president.
	The only people who are in favor of all of this are people like Linda Ronstadt, who came out on CNN and explained to Anderson Cooper, who is busy getting brutally drunk on New Year's Eve.
	I mean, just going wild on New Year's Eve with Anderson.
	It confuses me as to why CNN thinks that this is good broadcasting or a good idea.
	You're a news network and you have your anchors making absolute mockeries of themselves on national TV.
	Do they think that it makes them seem fun?
	Or does it make it seem like they might be out of touch with their actual jobs?
	You call yourself the most trusted name in news, you get James Earl Jones to do the voiceover, and then you got Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon getting blackout drunk on national TV.
	Anyway, here's Linda Ronstadt over the weekend explaining that President Trump is the new Hitler.
	There were a lot of chances that Hitler rose to power.
	There were a lot of chances to stop him, and they didn't speak out.
	And the industrial complex thought that they could control him once they got him in office, and of course he was not controllable.
	By the time he got established, he put his own people in place and, you know, stacked the courts and did what he had to do to consolidate his power.
	If you read the history, you won't be surprised.
	It's exactly the same.
	The Mexicans are the new Jews?
	an enemy for everybody to hate when I was sure that Trump was going to get elected the day he announced.
	And I said, he's going to, it's going to be like Hitler and the Mexicans are the new Jews.
	And sure enough, that's what he delivered.
	You know, the Mexicans are the new Jews.
	Really?
	Like a huge percentage of the American population is Hispanic.
	Nobody's being rounded up and put in boxcars.
	This is so insulting and so stupid, but if you feel like this is who Trump is, of course you're pushing for impeachment, despite the fact that you don't actually have the evidence for this.
	Meanwhile, the Democrats are basically hoping that they can peel off a couple of Republican senators to cut against McConnell and drive for a quote-unquote more even-handed impeachment effort, impeachment trial in the Senate.
	It's not really going to happen.
	Susan Collins did say that she was open to having witnesses at trial.
	Here was Susan Collins from Maine.
	I am open to witnesses.
	I think it's premature to decide who should be called until we see the evidence that is presented and get the answers to the questions that we senators can submit through the Chief Justice to both sides.
	What I don't understand is why the House, having issued subpoenas to Secretary Pompeo, for example, Did not seek to enforce those subpoenas in court and instead rushed to get the articles of impeachment passed before Christmas and yet have not transmitted them to us in the Senate.
	Okay, so people are reading this as Susan Collins somehow cutting against McConnell.
	You listen to that whole quote?
	Not really.
	She's basically saying, yeah, sure, I'd like to see a trial, but the House didn't do its job.
	So this is going nowhere.
	Everybody knows it's going nowhere.
	It's all a sham.
	We can move on with our lives.
	By early February, this thing will be over and we'll be in primary season full swing.
	By the way, Bernie Sanders raised a boatload of money.
	That dude is on the move.
	Watch out, Democrats, you may nominate an actual open octogenarian socialist.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then a thing that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	Okay, this isn't gonna be so quick, because as you all know, I'm a large-scale Star Wars fan.
	I'm a big Star Wars geek.
	My kids are now super into Star Wars.
	Like, we got them nothing but Star Wars gifts for Hanukkah, and they could not be happier.
	Honestly, I wish that the world were not such a terrible place, particularly in social media, so I could post videos of my kids, because it is adorable.
	I have the best video of my three-year-old son, who's very into Empire Strikes Back.
	I know, maybe a little old for him, but he gets it, he likes it.
	And there are many videos of me turning to him now and saying, no, I am your father.
	And him saying, that's not true, that's impossible.
	And me saying, search your feelings, you know it to be true.
	And him going, no!
	My kids are very into it.
	Okay, so I finally got a chance a couple nights ago to see Rise of Skywalker.
	We were out of the country for a bit of a vacation.
	And when we got back, like first move, my wife and I go to see Rise of Skywalker.
	Now, if you've been familiar with the show at all, you know I've been incredibly critical of the new trilogy.
	I don't like the new trilogy.
	I think it was unnecessary.
	I think they were fools.
	I think they tried to split the baby.
	So there were two things they could have done originally.
	I have to preface my take on Rise of Skywalker with the other two movies because it doesn't work as a standalone film, nor is it really meant to.
	This film, Rise of Skywalker, was designed specifically to retcon, meaning to go back in time and change the fact that Force Awakens and Last Jedi ever happened.
	It basically revises the entire story in a much more satisfying way.
	So here was my original take on this new trilogy.
	There are two ways that Disney could have gone.
	Disney, number one, could have recast the entire Original Return of the Jedi, they could have recast somebody as Luke, recast somebody as Leia, recast somebody as Han.
	Which, by the way, they did.
	They recast somebody as Han, right?
	They did Solo.
	They could have recast the entire cast, and then they could have just picked up where Return of the Jedi left off with the Admiral Thrawn series, which if you've read any of the Star Wars books, yes I have, then that's actually a really good storyline.
	And they could have just picked up where they left off and moved on into the future that way.
	And you would have gotten all of their new adventures.
	Alternatively, they could have landed the Star Wars universe in like a different place.
	And they're actually doing this on Disney Plus with The Mandalorian, which is kind of great, right?
	The Mandalorian is really fun.
	Jon Favreau directed it.
	They could have gone back and they could have used some of these characters and put them somewhere else in the Star Wars universe.
	So Disney actually has done this with a couple of their other series, right?
	Star Wars Clone Wars they did this with and also Star Wars Rebels.
	And some of that stuff is really pretty fantastic.
	They could have done any of those things.
	Instead, what they chose to do was split the baby.
	We'll introduce new characters, but we will live off the nostalgia for the first films.
	And the reason you can't do that is because if you're nostalgic for the first films, you don't want to see bad things happen to your favorite childhood characters.
	No one wa- Spoiler alert.
	No one wants to see Han Solo die at the hands of his son like a loser divorced dad after leaving Leia alone for 20 years and flying around the galaxy smoking pot with Chewie and the Millennium Falcon.
	No one wants to see that.
	And that's what happens in Force Awakens.
	No one wants to see Luke, who is this hero who goes from being a whiny teenager to being this mature Jedi, who is able to control himself to save his father.
	Nobody wants to see Luke become a misanthrope who milks aliens on a foreign planet while whining about his life and disparaging the Jedi tradition.
	No one wants to see that.
	So the new series basically took all of your favorite characters, your favorite old characters, and proceeded to ruin them except for Leia because Kathleen Kennedy has this feminist streak where the only characters who are allowed to be competent or good are apparently the female characters.
	Okay, so that was the critique of this trilogy.
	They basically took all of my favorite characters from my childhood and they wrecked them so that they could promote a bunch of characters who sucked.
	Okay, Rey was a terrible character because you didn't know, not only you didn't know where she came from, but she was amazing at everything right off the bat, right?
	This was the biggest critique of the first part of this trilogy.
	The biggest critique was that Rey, who had not trained in the Force for half a second, was suddenly unbelievably good at it.
	And Ben Solo, right, Kylo Ren, who is Leia's kid with Han, Who's been training with the force since childhood can be overtaken in a lightsaber battle by somebody who picked up a lightsaber half a second ago.
	Okay, that's not a thing.
	It's stupid.
	And everybody who watched the series knew it was stupid.
	Meanwhile, you had Poe, who was utterly incompetent.
	They tried to create kind of a new Han Solo character.
	The difference is that Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back, the entire story of Empire Strikes Back, is Han Solo demonstrating that he is wildly competent at a lot of things.
	The entire Poe Dameron story is the dude is wildly incompetent until he's suddenly promoted to the head of the Rebel Alliance.
	Right?
	Finn has no story arc at all.
	His entire story arc is that he was a stormtrooper.
	End of story arc.
	Nothing happens to him for the next three movies.
	So all of the new characters are completely boring, random.
	They should have killed Finn in Last Jedi.
	When he makes that heroic run, they should have killed him off.
	They probably should have killed Poe in Last Jedi.
	They should have had him pull the Admiral Holdo maneuver.
	Instead, they bring in Laura Dern to wear weird hair and do a lightspeed trick.
	That, by the way, if anybody could have figured that one out, they could have blown up the Death Star that way, like in Star Wars New Hope as well as Return of the Jedi.
	Okay, so.
	All of this is preface to say I hated Force Awakens and I hated Last Jedi.
	Rise of Skywalker is an attempt to buy all of that back.
	And understanding that this trilogy never should have happened, and understanding all the flaws of Force Awakens and Last Jedi, now you understand why I liked Rise of Skywalker.
	Because they attempt to correct as many of these problems as they can while apologizing for the series ever existing.
	Which is basically what this was.
	So all of the stuff with Finn and Poe, no one cares about.
	All that stuff was dumb.
	No one cares about it.
	It's a waste of time.
	You have to do it.
	It's like the worst of J.J.
	Abrams.
	Like the film, it's not a spoiler to say, the film opens with the Millennium Falcon lightspeed jumping, which just turns it into like a silly prop.
	It's ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous.
	The entire Empire Strikes Back, which is the best Star Wars film.
	Unquestionably, this is fact.
	This is known.
	Empire Strikes Back is all about basically Maybe four topics.
	One is the Millennium Falcon.
	It's the entire thing in Empire Strikes Back is that the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive is broken.
	Okay, that is the central plot device.
	In this movie, in the new movie, in Rise of Skywalker, the Millennium Falcon is fully on fire and they fix it inside of five seconds flat.
	All of it.
	Also, Empire Strikes Back is about Luke growing and realizing that he is insufficient.
	Okay, so that's the other topic.
	And also it's about Han Solo being wildly competent.
	Poe and Finn, they're wildly incompetent.
	The Millennium Falcon is made into a prop.
	Like, all that stuff is sort of the worst of J.J.
	Abrams.
	The stuff that's really good, okay, the stuff that's really good is actually quite good.
	The stuff that's good is that they buy back Han Solo's death.
	They give him sort of a new exit scene where he's not being killed by his son, where they cheat.
	He can't be a force ghost because he didn't have the force, but he basically is a force ghost.
	He comes back.
	All these are spoilers, okay?
	Spoilers.
	You've been warned 1,000 times.
	You don't want to hear about it.
	You haven't seen the movie yet.
	Don't listen.
	So Han Solo comes back and he talks with Kylo and he basically woos Kylo back to the light side of the force.
	You find out that Leia, who uses the force in new and bizarre ways in Last Jedi that Like, she literally pulls herself back into a ship after being blasted out into space.
	And you're like, where the hell did that come from?
	Luke hasn't even done that.
	You're told, in this movie, that Leia was trained as a Jedi by Luke.
	Which makes sense, right?
	In the books, she actually is.
	In the books, she actually is trained as a Jedi by Luke.
	And that she decided not to become a Jedi at the last minute because she foresaw, using the Force, that if she became a Jedi, then her lightsaber would be used to kill Ben.
	Okay, so that all makes sense.
	So they retconned that.
	And then the biggest retcon of all, the one that actually matters, and that answers why Rey is cool.
	Right, it answers the biggest question, why is Rey even a thing?
	And the answer is, because she's Palpatine's granddaughter.
	Which is fantastic, okay, that's a great reveal.
	That's great, because the most underrated force ability person in the Star Wars series, because everyone's focused on Anakin Skywalker, on Vader, on Luke, on Leia, on Yoda, on Obi-Wan, Nobody's focused on the fact that Palpatine's an unbelievable badass with the Force, right?
	Palpatine is so strong in the Force that he basically defeats Yoda.
	He is able to conceal his identity as the emperor for three movies.
	He's able to turn Anakin to the dark side.
	Like, Palpatine's an utter badass.
	And so they bring Palpatine back from the dead, which they sort of had to do.
	Palpatine's a great character.
	They bring in all the old musical cues.
	They bring in all of the old stuff, which is the stuff that I like.
	So if you're a nostalgia person, right, if you're pissed at this series because you feel like it ruined your childhood, then this movie was an attempt to restore that.
	It was an attempt to make Han cool again.
	Fairly successful.
	It was an attempt to make Leia cool.
	Again, successful.
	It was an attempt to make Luke cool.
	There's a great scene where Luke does, even though he's dead, right?
	Luke does this thing that Yoda does while he's alive in Empire.
	Remember in Empire, there's this scene where Yoda raises the X-Wing from the swamp because Luke fails to do so.
	Here, Luke is able to do that as a force ghost to hand over the X-Wing to Rey.
	That's great.
	The callback scene where they find the old Death Star from Return of the Jedi, and Rey has to confront herself, which is another callback to Empire.
	And then when they're playing the old musical cues, all that stuff is great.
	What they do with Kylo Ren, bringing him back to the light side is pretty great.
	J.J. Abrams does a great job in setting up a good reveal.
	So for several movies, you've been seeing basically Kylo and Rey force Skyping one another.
	They can talk over long distances.
	In this movie, they can actually sword fight sort of telepathically, but it has real world ramifications.
	One is in one place, one is in the other place, and they're having these lightsaber battles, but it actually has physical ramifications in the places where they're having the lightsaber battles.
	And so that ends with a really fantastic reveal.
	All that stuff is great.
	So everything with Kylo, everything with Rey, everything with Palpatine is great, everything with Leia and Han is really good.
	Like, all that stuff is good.
	Finn and Poe continue to be disposable.
	All the other fringe characters end up being disposable.
	There is this lesbian moment that's been much talked about, because at the very end of the movie, they show a lesbian couple kissing, and it's obviously Disney trying to shoehorn in the, okay, glad we know you're there.
	It's very silly, and it's very- it's sort of like that moment at the end of- of The Avengers, Infinity War, where all the females land in one part of the battlefield, and you're like, okay, really?
	Was that- like, come on.
	Okay, that's- that's sort of the same thing here.
	None of the couples are kissing except this one lesbian couple.
	Like, alright, I get it, Disney.
	I get your- I- Fine, you fulfilled your PC quota for the day.
	Whatever, man.
	But it's pretty shoehorned in.
	It's not a big deal.
	It's just silly.
	But overall, the critics are savaging this film.
	All it tells you about critics, all you need to know is they gave The Last Jedi like 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and they gave this one like 53%.
	They didn't understand Star Wars.
	They didn't understand it.
	This movie understands better how the Force works.
	This movie understands better how the weapons work.
	This movie understands better the dynamics between the light and the dark side.
	It understands Palpatine.
	I've heard a lot of objections that this film basically makes the Skywalker-Vader interaction completely irrelevant.
	But that's true the minute that Palpatine lives, right?
	I mean, and by the way, that's true the minute that the Rebel Alliance fails.
	Once the Republic falls again to the First Order, then that whole thing became irrelevant.
	The new trilogy made that irrelevant, which is why they should have fast-forwarded and taken it to some other part of the universe.
	But, once you're in the trilogy, this was the best way to end it.
	Here's a little bit of the trailer if you haven't already seen it.
	What are you doing there, 3PO?
	Taking one last look, sir.
	At my friends.
	Confronting fear.
	It's the destiny of a Jedi.
	Your destiny. - Okay, so this is, it's sort of like Return of the Jedi, this one.
	Specifically because the part that you care about is all the stuff with the Emperor and all the stuff on Endor.
	Doesn't matter as much.
	That's pretty much this movie.
	Everything between Rey and Kylo and the Emperor and all the old characters is great.
	And everything else is disposable.
	But, good for J.J.
	Abrams for at least trying to go back and un-ruin everything that he ruined in Force Awakens that Rian Johnson then proceeded to wreck in Last Jedi.
	Okay, I know I went on a long time about Star Wars, but guess what, Toph?
	It's a new year.
	It's my show.
	I get to say what I want.
	So you know what?
	We're going to start the new year on an upbeat note.
	We're not going to do things I hate because I just took forever talking about Star Wars.
	But suffice to say, if you like the old Star Wars, you should totally, you should totally see this one.
	It is definitely better than the last two in the series and everybody who's ripping on it didn't understand why the last two sucked.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, including all of your election updates, Bernie Sanders raising tons of money, where we are in the polls, Joe Biden stepping in it again.
	We'll get to all that two hours later today.
	That's why you should subscribe.
	You get 20% off today when you go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	So go make that happen.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Rebecca Dabkowitz.
	Directed by Mike Joyner.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
	Senior Producer Jonathan Hay.
	Supervising Producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Technical Producer Austin Stevens.
	Associate Producer Colton Haas.
	Assistant Director Pavel Wydowski.
	Edited by Adam Sijewicz.
	Audio is Mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
	Production Assistant Nick Sheehan.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Iran-backed terrorists attacked the U.S.
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	We will examine why Baghdad didn't turn into Benghazi, and what it means as we look forward to the coming decade.

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