All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:55
When The Media Don’t Care About Iranians | Ep. 930
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Iranians protest the Ayatollahs and the Democrats cannot stand it.
Bernie takes on Biden and Warren as the Iowa caucuses approach.
And Nancy Pelosi finally decides to hand impeachment charges to the Senate.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.com.
Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
What do I got to do here?
Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
I hope you had a wonderful weekend.
If you've been watching world events, you understand that the world is an extraordinarily chaotic place.
We have an election coming up this year that could have a massive impact on where the economy goes.
The economy is strong right now, but there's still a lot of uncertainty out there as to when the economy might start to slow.
It's probably a pretty good time to diversify into an asset like gold.
Fox Business actually just published an article on how the world's richest people are stockpiling precious metals right now as part of their strategy to diversify.
According to Goldman Sachs, gold could surge past $1,600 an ounce within the next year.
So why aren't you looking into diversification, especially into something that is never going to be worth zero?
I'm talking about gold.
If you haven't yet taken the first step of requesting a free information kit on gold, go ahead and do it.
If you haven't converted a portion of your eligible IRA or 401k to an IRA in precious metals, Have that conversation.
Ask all your questions.
Make sure that you feel comfortable before you invest.
And then, when you're ready to invest, talk to my friends over at Birch Gold.
You can ask them your questions, too.
I've been working with them for years at this point.
There's no obligation.
You have nothing to lose to take that first step.
Birch Gold Group has thousands of satisfied customers, countless five-star reviews, an A-plus rating with Better Business Bureau.
Text BEN to 474747.
During the month of January, when you open an IRA in Precious Metals, you do get a free signed copy of my book, The Right Side of History.
Again, you have to text BEN to 474747.
And open an IRA in precious metals to get a signed copy of my book, The Right Side of History.
Don't do it unless you're comfortable, but then if you are comfortable, use my friends over at Birch Gold.
Text Ben to 474747.
Alrighty, so over the weekend, more dividends from President Trump's deterrence strategy in Iran.
And this was a deterrence strategy.
There are reports out today that this has been in the works, the killing of Soleimani, for up to seven months.
That President Trump had given the standing green light to the United States military to kill Soleimani for months.
And months and months and months.
So the idea that Trump sort of just did this on a whim, and one day he woke up and he was like, kill Soleimani, do it, blow him into a thousand pieces.
That apparently is not how any of this went down.
So Trump kills Soleimani in the immediate aftermath of an Iranian-backed militia burning the United States embassy and engaging in months of terror attacks.
Soleimani is killed, and then the Iranians respond by firing off a couple of missiles from Iran into Iraq.
They hit a coalition air base.
It did, in fact, according to CNN, hit the sleeping quarters of troops, which suggests very, very strongly that Iran had called up Iraq and said, get your guys out of there, because what we don't want is to break another one of Trump's red lines, because if we violate another one of Trump's red lines, our rinky-dink navy could be at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz by this time tomorrow.
But in the middle of that little exchange, It wasn't really an exchange because the United States didn't fire anything at Iran, but in the middle of that missile firing by Iran, a plane took off from Tehran.
Within two minutes, it was shot down by anti-aircraft missiles that were based in Iran, which is just a horrific screw-up by the Iranian government.
You'd expect no less from a terror regime.
And now, Iran has finally admitted that it shot down the jetliner by mistake, according to the Associated Press.
In the face of mounting evidence, Iran on Saturday acknowledged that it shot down the Ukrainian jetliner by accident, killing all 176 people aboard.
The admission by Iran's Revolutionary Guard undermined the credibility of information provided by senior officials, who for three days had adamantly dismissed allegations of a missile strike as Western propaganda.
And you did hear from the media when the Trump administration was saying things like, Well, yeah, no, it's pretty obvious the Iranians shut down the plane.
Well, can we really trust the Trump administration on this sort of stuff?
Who are you going to trust instead?
The Iranian administration?
The Iranian regime, which lies repeatedly about its own terrorism?
According to the AP, it also raised a host of new questions, such as why Iran did not shut down its international airport or airspace on Wednesday when it was bracing for the U.S.
to retaliate for a ballistic missile attack on two bases housing U.S.
troops in Iraq.
No one was hurt in that attack carried out in retaliation for the killing of Qasem Soleimani in an American airstrike in Baghdad.
Iran's acknowledgment alters the narrative around its confrontation with the U.S.
in a way that could anger the Iranian public.
Iran had promised harsh revenge after Soleimani's death, but instead of killing American soldiers, its forces downed a civilian plane in which most passengers were Iranian.
On Saturday night, hundreds gathered at universities in Tehran to protest the government's late acknowledgment of the plane being shot down.
They demanded officials involved in the missile attack be removed from their positions and tried.
Police did break up the demonstrations.
But this was the next step.
The Iranian people and their outrage, which has been roiling for a year now, actually four years, I mean going all the way back to like 2009.
There have been Iranians who want to overthrow the regime because the regime is a garbage, horrible, radical Islamist regime that backs terror around the region with dollars that could be used for the goods of its citizens, closes off its own economy so it can pursue this radical Islamic attempt to spread Sharia law across various boundaries.
All of that is opposed by a huge swath of Iranians.
There's no way to know what those numbers look like because polling is not really allowed inside Iran.
Suffice it to say the Iranian regime has been teetering on the brink for quite a long time and mass protests did emerge in the aftermath of the shooting down of the plane.
According to CNN, apologies from Iranian leaders over the downing of an airliner last week have done little to quell mass anti-government protests spreading across the country.
Thousands of demonstrators hit the streets this weekend Condemning Iranian authorities for shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane and killing all 176 people on board.
The airliner disaster came hours after Iran fired missiles at Iraqi military bases housing US troops.
That was retaliation for a drone strike at Baghdad airport that killed Qasem Soleimani.
In Iran, demonstrators are calling for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to step down and for those responsible for downing the plane to be prosecuted.
Khamenei, have shame, leave the country, chanted protesters in the capital Tehran in footage posted on social media.
And it is indeed thousands of people in the streets.
By the way, when they show up in the streets for this, it ain't like when they show up for Soleimani, where the government is urging them to be out there.
In this particular case, they are risking death because we have seen 1,500 protesters killed in the last year alone, thanks to the Iranian government cracking down on roiling anti-regime protests.
Now, the media have covered this.
I would say that they've covered it far less and with far less vigor and enthusiasm than they covered the funeral for Soleimani, which they covered in just gawping terms.
You saw Chris Matthews say, it's just like Elvis Presley.
It's unbelievable.
Have you seen the love?
I do not suspect that you'll hear Chris Matthews tonight talking about the bravery of the Iranian protesters protesting this evil regime that would cut against the narrative that the Trump administration in killing Soleimani had also unleashed ground forces in Iran in terms of actual Iranian population.
I don't think that the media are going to play this up in quite the same way.
The reason I say that is because they have not played up in the last year any of the economic protests that have been rolling across the country and resulted in the death of 1,500 protesters.
1,500 protesters.
That's a lot of people killed by the Iranian military.
Protests have now spread to other cities, including Shiraz, Isfahan, Hamadan, and Urumayyad, according to Reuters.
People are tearing down posters of Soleimani.
They're ripping posters off the walls of Soleimani.
President Trump, for his part, tweeted his support for the demonstrators, saying his administration will continue to stand by you.
Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his support for the protesters and called on European powers to increase pressure on the Iranian regime.
President Trump tweeted out, To the leaders of Iran, DO NOT KILL YOUR PROTESTERS.
All capital letters.
Thousands have already been killed or imprisoned by you, and the world is watching.
More importantly, the USA is watching.
I do enjoy that President Trump is not somebody who's going to do the, the world matters more than the United States.
Bottom line is he understands that the United States is the global hegemon.
You piss off the U.S.
The U.S.
has been leading the way here.
He says, turn your internet back on and let reporters roam free.
Stop the killing of your great Iranian people.
This prompted, by the way, let reporters roam free.
It prompted people like Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, who generally is a fairly good reporter, but she actually tweeted out, why won't we let reporters roam free in the United States?
Something to that effect.
Not the same thing, Maggie.
Like you're tweeting that out.
On the internet, in a free country, where the New York Times is the largest circulation paper in the United States, other than the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
So, um, I don't think that's quite the same.
President Trump also tweeted out, national security adviser suggested today that sanctions and protests have Iran, quote, choked off will force them to negotiate.
Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate will be totally up to them, but no nuclear weapons and don't kill your protesters, which seems like a fairly strong stance from the president of the United States.
Apparently, the UK Ambassador to Iran was also arrested.
They temporarily arrested British Ambassador Rob McHare.
He was summoned to the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
McHare was then arrested while in the middle of a crowd of protesters in front of Tehran's Amir Kabir University.
He was accused of instigating and directing radical and destructive demonstrations.
He was later released.
And he said he was not taking part in any of the demonstrations.
He just went to an event advertised as a vigil for victims of the tragedy.
The fact is that the Iranian regime has been cracking down on all of this because the Iranian regime recognizes that it simply is not popular with a huge percentage of its own population.
In fact, there was video emerging from the BBC.
This is pretty incredible video.
There's video that emerged from the BBC of Iranian citizens refusing to stomp on American and Israeli flags.
So for all the talk about death to America, death to Israel, I mean, I mean, there was actually, earlier this year, I think we reported on the show, there were Iranian protests where people were chanting, I believe it was death to Palestine, because they were so angry that the Iranian government was sending hundreds of millions of dollars in terror support to Palestinian terrorists as opposed to helping to rebuild the economy.
In other words, there's a huge number of secular Muslim, secularized Muslims, or moderate-leaning Muslims in Iran who are not happy with the regime turning the entire country of Iran, which has a long, by the way, long pre-Islamic history in Persia, Turning that country, which has a long storied history, into just a tool of Islamic theocracy.
They're not up for it.
Now, you would imagine this would be like a pretty good time for everybody to be on the same page, right?
I mean, this is a good thing that the Iranian population are calling out their own regime.
This is an excellent development that the Iranian regime has been exposed for what it is.
This is an excellent development that the Iranians backed down.
The Democrats cannot bring themselves to say this.
They cannot bring themselves to simply back the protesters.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, it would be unbelievable, except for the fact that Barack Obama couldn't bring himself to really back the protesters in 2009, leading to the Iranian regime cracking down on the protesters, even as Obama tried to negotiate some sort of nuclear deal with the people shooting the protesters.
Well, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, she was on this week on Sunday on ABC.
And she was asked about the protests and instead of her just saying, you know, I'm fully with the protesters, they are standing up to a blatantly theocratic evil regime.
Instead of her saying that, instead she said, well, they could be out there for any number of reasons because she just can't credit Trump for anything.
She can't.
If anything, even remotely smacks of any sort of praise for President Trump, she must immediately shut it down.
So here's Nancy Pelosi undercutting the protest.
I mean, really, this is Nancy Pelosi undercutting Iranian protesters who are taking their lives in their hands to go out in the street and protest against a regime that just shot down a civilian airliner because it's violent and evil.
There were protesters in the streets before against the regime.
After the taking out of Soleimani, there were protesters in the street joined together, as you know, against us.
That wasn't good.
Taking down this plane is a terrible, terrible tragedy.
And they should be held accountable for letting commercial flights go at a time that was so dangerous.
But there are different reasons why people are in the street.
Oh, there are different reasons why people are in the street.
Thank you for analyzing all the reasons and never at any point suggesting that maybe the reason people are in the streets is because this is an evil regime that's been spreading terrorism for years.
See, the problem is, again, this is what I've been saying for the last several weeks, Democrats and members of the media, they are caught between a rock and a hard place.
The narrative of the Obama administration is that this regime had moderated in the aftermath of the Iran agreement, that this regime was now contained, that this regime was now being integrated into the family of nations.
So, if there are actual protesters being shot in the streets because they are protesting an evil dictatorial regime, Nancy Pelosi doesn't have a narrative anymore.
And if it turns out that those protests have been exacerbated by the fact that President Trump stood up to the Iranians and the Iranian people are beginning to see light at the end of this tunnel, She can't allow that either.
Because again, Barack Obama helped strengthen this regime.
End of story, period.
This is what he did.
He did not weaken the regime in any way.
He strengthened the regime in a number of ways, including trying to open its economy and allowing them to pursue regional terror and ballistic missile testing with American-allowed dollars into Iran.
So Nancy Pelosi, the hashtag on Twitter today was trending that Nancy Pelosi was basically standing up for the Iranians.
It was hashtag Nancy Pelosi fake news.
President Trump, for his part, was going on Twitter and retweeting everything that he possibly could.
He was retweeting Iranians who are complaining about all of this.
There's a journalist named Mohammad Mozaffari, who Trump retweeted, who said, the Iranian people are being killed in the streets by the Islamic Republic, but Nancy Pelosi and the USA supports those who kill the Iranian people.
Why?
And then he retweeted a man named Farhad Khalifi, who's apparently also a journalist, I guess in London.
He says, while the Iranian people are being killed by the mullahs in the protests, you're lying to the American people.
The real people of Iran don't want the Democrats back terrorists.
Shame on you for playing with the blood of Iranian people.
President Trump was retreating all of this and you know people in the media of course are very upset about the most egregious thing that he retweeted was a picture of Nancy Pelosi wearing effectively a burqa and Chuck Schumer wearing some form of Islamic headgear.
With the Iranian flag in the background.
So people are all over Trump for all of this, obviously, because this is what Trump does.
I mean, President Trump, this is where the commenter on websites of him comes out, right?
The caller into talk radio for President Trump comes out.
But the bottom line is that Trump's perspective on Iran is correct, and the Democrats' perspective on this is wrong.
And it's not just wrong, it's highly damaging to people who are protesting at the risk of their lives in all of this.
President Trump tweeted out, the Democrats in the fake news are trying to make terrorist Soleimani into a wonderful guy only because I did what should have been done for 20 years.
Anything I do, whether it's the economy, military or anything else, will be scorned by the radical left.
Do nothing, Democrats.
And he says, wow, the wonderful Iranian protesters refuse to step on or in any way denigrate our great American flag.
It was put on the street in order for them to trample it and they walked around it instead.
Big progress.
I don't understand why that's a bad thing.
And I don't understand why this is supposed to be supremely controversial that President Trump is standing up for the rights of Americans.
To be safe and standing up against Iranian terrorism.
And why the protesters are being denigrated by Nancy Pelosi.
Trump also tweeted out a few minutes ago, the fake news media and their Democrat partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was imminent or not and was my team in agreement.
The answer to both is a strong yes.
But it doesn't really matter because of his horrible past.
That brings us to the next narrative that's being attempted by the Democrats because it turns out that their narrative that Soleimani's death was going to lead to World War III didn't materialize.
It turns out that the evidence is very solid that the Iranian regime is a terror regime that just shot down a civilian airliner and is now being riven by protests by its own citizens.
And so they have to turn to a second narrative.
We're going to get to the Democrats and the media's second narrative over the weekend, which is a truly egregious narrative.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, One of the questions in the aftermath of the Iranian attack was whether the Iranians would engage in some sort of cyberterrorism, whether they were engaged in hacking.
And there are a lot of reports all around the media ecosystem that there were attempted hacks all throughout the days in the aftermath of the Soleimani attack.
And we've seen this before.
We've seen the Chinese government attempting to hack private citizens.
We've seen hackers, just plain hackers, who attempt to hack major institutions and grab data.
Well, you may think that people aren't targeting your data.
That is untrue.
You have data, that means people are targeting it.
It's that simple.
And John Zillinger once said that the reason that you rob banks is because that's where the money was.
The reason that hackers are after your data is because that's where the data is.
And this was why you need a VPN.
I can say with full confidence, ExpressVPN is the best VPN on the market for me.
This is why I use ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN does not log your data.
Lots of really cheap or free VPNs will make money by selling your data to ad companies.
ExpressVPN instead developed a technology called Trusted Server.
That makes it impossible for their servers to log any of your info.
Many other VPNs actually slow your connection down, make your device more sluggish.
I've been using ExpressVPN for years.
It is the fastest VPN I know of.
The last thing that really sets ExpressVPN apart from the other VPNs is that it's really easy to use.
You install it on your computer, one click, and you are ready to go.
You're putting yourself at risk if you're not using ExpressVPN, so go ahead and use ExpressVPN.
Protect yourself with the VPN I use and trust.
Use my link, expressvpn.com slash bentoday.
Get an extra three months for free on a one-year package.
That's expressvpn.com slash Ben.
Again, expressvpn.com slash Ben to learn more.
Okay, so one of the Democrat narratives over the weekend was the Nancy Pelosi narrative that apparently these protests have many reasons and Trump being doing the right thing apparently has nothing to do with it.
And then the second narrative is that Trump is, of course, a crazy person and that the only reason he attacked Soleimani is because he's precipitous.
Now, as I say, there was a report that came out over the weekend suggesting that for months in advance, Trump had greenlit the kill of Soleimani because Soleimani was, in fact, the world's leading sponsor of terrorism around the world.
But this narrative of the Democrats that Trump was doing this based on bad info, bad intel, this was exacerbated by President Trump because President Trump very often will get over his skis in the sorts of information that he chooses to divulge to the public.
Now, here's the truth.
What President Trump tweeted this morning, which is that whether the attack was imminent or not, Soleimani needed to go, that is 100% true.
And as I've been saying on this program for, again, weeks at this point, since the Democrats decided to make imminent the standard, The question as to whether there was any imminent attack by Osama Bin Laden or Anwar al-Awlaki is basically irrelevant.
If you're a terrorist for a living, what you do is pursue terror attacks.
And so this bizarre notion that you have to have the date, time, and place of a terror attack on a list in order to kill a terrorist is just silly towns.
But this is the attack that the Democrats are choosing to pursue, which is that Trump didn't actually have an excuse to kill Soleimani, despite the fact that Soleimani, again, was in Iraq, not Iran.
He was in Iraq the day after a burning of a U.S.
embassy in Baghdad.
He was in the same car as the leader of the PMF, which was an Iranian-backed Terrorist group that was responsible for the burn he was in that car with that guy by the way that terrorist happened to have a Death sentence in absentia placed on his head by the Kuwaiti government for his terror activities in the past But apparently according to the Democrats that's not strong enough So Laura Ingram asked Trump about it and Trump instead of just saying listen I'm not gonna divulge all the information that we have at our disposal because a lot of that is classified Suffices to say this man was a lifelong terrorist.
I'm confused as to why it is that the Democrats What exactly are they demanding?
Like, when his next terror attack was going to occur?
Because, again, we know that with Bin Laden, he was basically cut off from everybody on Earth.
He wasn't even in electronic communication with anybody.
They were hand-delivering handwritten notes to him because they were afraid that people would locate him.
Was he a grave threat?
Like, Obama killed him anyway, and he did the right thing.
Soleimani was a grave active threat.
That would be the right answer.
Instead, President Trump says that Soleimani was planning attacks on four embassies, and this of course leads to a bit of a disconnect between Trump and his own intelligence community and defense department.
I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies, and I think that probably Baghdad already started.
They were really amazed that we came in with that kind of a force.
We came in with very powerful force, and drove them out.
You know, that ended almost immediately.
But Baghdad certainly would have been the lead, but I think it would have been four embassies, could have been military bases, could have been a lot of other things too.
But it was imminent, and then all of a sudden, he was gone.
Okay, so Trump obviously is happy that Soleimani is gone, but the fact that he suggests that there were imminent attacks on four embassies, this does not meet with the intel that has been presented either to the American public or to Congress apparently.
So Secretary of Defense Mark Esper appeared on Face the Nation.
He was asked specifically about this notion that there were four pending embassy attacks.
Now, here's the very obvious possibility.
You know, we're not allowed to talk about obvious possibilities when it comes to Trump's interpretation.
We're supposed to instead take him supremely literally that there were imminent attacks on four U.S.
embassies.
In all likelihood, what happened is that the Department of Defense and the State Department went to Trump and they said, the Iranians are fond of attacking embassies.
They just attacked U.S.
embassy in Baghdad.
We need to up security, particularly at these four embassies.
And Trump took that as there were imminent attacks on those four embassies.
That's the likeliest explanation for the mix-up.
But the way the media play it is Trump is exaggerating it.
It's just like WMD in Iraq, guys.
Soleimani wasn't actually a threat.
Soleimani actually was out there petting kittens and adopting puppies.
That guy was all rainbows and flowers.
And then Trump made this up from his crazy head about Soleimani attacking embassies.
And now for no reason, a respected member of the Iranian military is dead.
So Mark Esper is like, yeah, I didn't see any evidence pending of the attacks, but I think it's likely that Iran probably planned to attack U.S.
embassies considering they've done this like a thousand times.
What the president said was he believed that it probably could have been attacks against additional embassies.
I shared that view.
I know other members of national security team share that view.
That's why I deployed thousands of American paratroopers to the Middle East to reinforce our embassy in Baghdad and other sites throughout the region.
Probably and could have been.
That is, that sounds more like an assessment than a specific, tangible threat with a decisive piece of intelligence.
Well, the president didn't say it was a tangible, he didn't cite a specific piece of evidence.
What he said is he probably, he believed- Are you saying there wasn't one?
I didn't see one with regard to four embassies.
What I'm saying is I share the president's view that probably my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies.
Okay, so he was saying, again, what I'm saying, which is that there's an expectation, like some broad-based expectation.
Trump didn't say that the attacks on the embassies were imminent, even in that quote with Laura Ingraham, but this led to the media suggesting that Trump was embellishing, don't you see?
So that means that I guess Soleimani...
Shouldn't have been killed, I guess.
Now, listen, I think that you can ask whether Trump embellishes things.
The man embellishes things.
End of story.
He does.
When it came to the evidence, for example, that al-Baghdadi was in a cave and he was crying and whimpering and all of this stuff, members of the Defense Department were like, yeah, we didn't see a lot of evidence for that.
But that's what Trump does.
OK, just take it.
Take everything he says with a grain of salt.
But instead, the media, in order to try and debunk the idea that Soleimani should have been killed, they're like, well, I guess it wasn't imminent because Trump says that it was the embassies, but we've seen no evidence of the embassies, and that means he shouldn't have been killed.
Okay, two things can be true at once.
One, maybe there were no imminent attacks on the embassies, or maybe there were imminent attacks on the embassies that we just don't know about.
We don't know the answer to that.
But Soleimani should have been killed anyway because, again, a terrorist does what he does, like, for a living.
He's a terrorist for a living and now for a dying.
Here was Jake Tapper, though, going after Esper, suggesting the president was embellishing.
Again, I think that's a relevant question to ask for Tapper.
I just don't know what the relevance is to whether Soleimani should have been killed.
When President Trump lies or embellishes on a topic this sensitive and administration officials then parrot his claims to avoid drawing his ire, the situation becomes extremely dangerous for our troops and the American people.
Is President Trump embellishing?
I don't believe so.
Look, the bottom line is we had exquisite intelligence that can only be shared with a gang of eight.
So I understand the frustration of many members of Congress, but was shared with that gang of eight.
I spoke to one of the briefers.
One of the briefers told me, He's not embellishing.
nearly all the members of that gang of eight believed that the intelligence was persuasive as well and that it should not be shared with a broader membership because of the concerns that it could be released reveal our sources and methods.
As per says, he's not embellishing.
It's just that I can't lock down which four embassies were going to happen or any of that.
But this contributes to a different narrative for the Democrats.
And that narrative, as we will see, is that Trump shouldn't have killed Soleimani because it was based on uncertain intelligence.
This is just like the Iraq War.
Yeah, except for the fact that it's not like the Iraq War because, again, if the case in the Iraq War had been Saddam Hussein, if this had been the only case, Saddam Hussein is a human rights violator who murders his own citizens on a regular basis and is aggressive on foreign borders.
Wouldn't take a lot of proof to prove that.
I mean, the man literally did that pretty much every day.
And the same thing is true of Soleimani.
There was nothing new that had to be proved with regard to who Soleimani was.
The man pursued terror every single day.
It was his job with the Iranian government.
But according to Democrats, this completely undercuts the case that President Trump has for killing Soleimani in the first place.
They will do anything they can to turn, again, a win into a loss on foreign policy.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
President Trump's favorite pencil neck, Adam Schiff, sounds off.
We'll get to that in just one second first.
Have you ever been in a situation where something in your car breaks down and then you have to go to an auto parts store, but really you go to auto parts, they don't have the right part, so you go to a second auto parts store, and now you're driving around in somebody else's car because your car is at home, and then you go to a third auto parts store, and all these parts are overpriced, And you can't find the exact right part?
You know what's a great tool?
The Interwebs.
You know who knows that the Interwebs is a great tool?
The folks over at RockAuto.com.
It's a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to RockAuto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
They've got everything from engine control modules and brake parts to tail lamps, motor oil, even new carpet.
Whether it's for your classic or daily driver, you can get everything you need in a few easy clicks delivered directly to your door.
The rockauto.com catalog is super easy to navigate.
You can quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle, and you can filter by brands, specifications, and prices.
I don't happen to be a car guy, and rockauto.com works great for me.
If you are a car person, I can't imagine how good it'll be for you, because they've got pretty much everything you could possibly need.
Best of all, prices at rockauto.com are always reliably low and the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
They've got amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car is going to need.
rockauto.com.
Go to rockauto.com right now.
See all the parts available for your car or truck, write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box, so they know that we sent you again.
Go check them out, rockauto.com, and write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box, that helps the show, and it helps them, and helps you, because obviously, you're now checking out rockauto.com, getting the best parts at the best prices.
Okay, so, hey Democrats, Jump on the President Trump is embellishing bandwagon to try and suggest that President Trump did something wrong in killing Soleimani, despite the fact that he backed the Iranians off their overt aggression, despite the fact that the Iranians are now protesting in the streets the Iranian regime.
Apparently that's very bad.
Here's Adam Schiff, pens and make Adam Schiff, talking about Trump fudging the intelligence, trying to make this an intelligence mistake as opposed to a giant foreign policy win.
They didn't have specificity.
And so when you hear the president out there on Fox, he is fudging the intelligence.
And when you hear the secretary say, well, that wasn't what the intelligence said, but that's my personal belief, he is fudging.
When Secretary Pompeo was on your show last week and made the claim that the intelligence analysis was that taking Soleimani out would improve our security and leaving him in would make us less safe, that is also fudging.
That's not an intelligence conclusion.
So again, it's just all fudging, and why do we do this?
Trump's point this morning on Twitter is basically correct, which is, yeah, I believed it was four embassies, but guess what?
This is what Soleimani did.
In the struggles of Democrats, Nancy Pelosi suggesting that the protests are for various reasons, and Adam Schiff going off on the intelligence.
How about at some point, somebody just says, Soleimani deserved to die, Trump did the right thing in killing him, this is a good act of deterrence, and we're gonna have to take precautions against future Iranian aggression, but that's been true for decades.
End of story.
And we stand with the Iranian people, and we stand with the president standing against the Iranian people.
Would that be so hard?
Honestly, like, is it that hard?
Apparently, the answer is yes, it is indeed that hard.
Okay, now, we move on to the 2020 Democratic presidential race.
So, there's a big debate coming up this week, and that debate really is featuring a three-way face-off.
Now, Elizabeth Warren is barely making it into the conversation these days, so really, it's about Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but Sanders is clocking Warren as well.
I'll tell you who's not in the conversation anymore, and that, of course, is Cory McBooker.
Cory McBooker, this morning, dropped out of the presidential race in the saddest story since Toy Story 4, when he finally parted ways with Mr. Potato Head, the real Mr. Potato Head.
Candidate Potato Head is now gone.
He's replaced his angry eyes.
I'm so angry.
Cory Booker, so angry.
Very deliberate blinking.
He's replaced his angry eyes with his sad eyes.
And then he came out on Monday and sent an email to his supporters.
Now, he's been sending emails to his supporters for the last several weeks since Kamala Harris dropped out, being like, I'm black!
Do you see me?
Kamala's out!
Only black guy right here!
Look, right here, me, black.
Everybody else there?
White.
Except for Andrew Yang.
He doesn't count.
Everybody else is white.
And let me just tell you, you need a black person on that stage or you're all a bunch of racist angry highs.
I'm so angry.
I'm so disappointed with the Democratic Party.
We started off.
Yeah, it wasn't his time.
It turns out he was a garbage candidate, just like Kamala Harris was a garbage candidate, and now he has put on his sad eyes.
He opened his back, took out the sad eyes, Rosario Dawson popped those in for him, and he said, Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win.
Money we don't have and money that is harder to raise because I won't be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington.
So Booker is using the impeachment as an excuse for ending his campaign.
In his letter to supporters, Booker writes, I believe to my core that the answer to the common pain Americans are feeling right now The answer to Donald Trump's hatred and division is to reignite our spirit of common purpose, to take on our biggest challenges, and build a more just and fair country for everyone.
I've always believed that.
I still believe that.
I'm proud I never compromised my faith in these principles during this campaign to score political points or tear down others.
Actually, very early on in the campaign, he sort of implied that Joe Biden was a racist.
He was incredibly divisive throughout the campaign, but pretended that he was a unifier throughout the campaign.
He couldn't decide whether he was campaigning on righteous indignation or whether he was campaigning on hopey, changey Barack Obama kind of stuff.
And so he was just a giant fail.
He intends to run for reelection to the Senate.
He'll probably win because he's in New Jersey and whatever.
But this means, you know, hashtag Oscar so white, hashtag Democrats so white.
And I'm really looking forward to the latest rounds of recrimination.
I also look forward to the retrospective pieces in the New York Times op-ed page about why we all should take Cory Booker more seriously.
Basically, every time a Democrat of color drops out, we get a round of think pieces about why that candidate was actually awesome, even though they had no support.
You didn't get that for Beto, because Beto was a white dude.
But you did get that for Kamala Harris.
Tons of think pieces about, we're all going to miss Kamala.
She was so important.
Nope.
And then you got it with Julián Castro, right?
Castro dropped out and everybody's like, oh man, that Julián Castro, what a guy, what a wonderful, wonderful dude.
It is funny how the treatment of candidates of color in the Democratic Party is they are ignored while they are alive, and then at their funeral, everybody gets up and eulogizes like Marc Anthony over Julius Caesar's body.
Oh, this Julian Castro, what a great candidate he was!
I come not to praise Julian Castro, but to bury him.
They're going to do the same thing with Cory Booker.
We're gonna see all these people now come out of the woodwork.
Cory Booker, isn't it sad that he's gone?
It just shows the endemic racism of American society.
It's like Barack Obama never existed in the Democratic Party.
They do the same thing at the Oscars, by the way.
The Oscar nominations came out today, and already you're getting the, there aren't enough people of color in the Oscar nominations.
Where is Lupita Nyong'o?
Didn't she win an Oscar like two years ago for, or five years ago for 12 Years a Slave?
Is it like every year that you have to do this?
Like every single year?
Also, didn't, what's her face, Cynthia Erivo, didn't she just get an Oscar nomination for Harriet?
So, I'm confused.
In any case, the Democrats are the same way.
Barack Obama never existed, and so every election cycle they're supposed to prove they're not racist by nominating a black person, or nominating a Hispanic person, and then if they don't, then it's because they're racist, and then we lament all those candidates who couldn't pick up any support because they were garbage candidates.
Okay, so what does this leave us with?
It leaves us with a bunch of old white people!
Yes, it's the old white people primary inside the Democratic Party.
So in just one second, we'll get to the old white people primary, where the oldest, not the whitest, but the oldest person on the Democratic debate stage is gaining momentum in the betting odds.
He's now drawing even with Joe Biden.
We'll get We'll get to Bernard McSanders in just one second.
First, if you're not already a subscriber, you are indeed missing out.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe for as little as $10 a month.
You get our articles ad-free, access to all of our live broadcasts, our full show library, select bonus content, our exclusive Daily Wire app, which is indeed a phenomenal feature if you haven't checked it out yet.
If you choose the new all-access plan, you get all of that, plus the legendary Leftist Tears Tumblr and our brand new Ask Me Anything style discussion feature that allows you to engage our hosts, writers, and special guests on a weekly basis.
Stop depriving yourself.
Come join the fun!
It actually is fun.
No, like really.
Come do it.
Check us out at dailywire.com.
Go subscribe.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
All righty.
So if you look at the betting odds today, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are basically even.
In the betting odds, Joe Biden is up by less than a point.
Now, those betting odds don't really mean a lot, considering that back in November, Elizabeth Warren was at like 50% in the betting odds to be the nominee.
It just shows that Sanders does have momentum going into Iowa.
And that is particularly true because Donald Trump did a foreign policy thing that is good, and it was interventionist.
And Democrats aren't allowed to say that it was good, and they aren't allowed to say that the intervention was useful.
So instead, they're going to swing toward the isolationism that Bernie Sanders has been promoting idiotically his entire career because he's always been wrong about everything.
Right now, in the polling data, the latest poll has Bernie Sanders up in Iowa.
Buttigieg has been fading pretty strongly in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
According to the latest Des Moines Register CNN poll, this just came out.
On January 8th, Bernie Sanders is up at 20%, followed by Elizabeth Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden, all between 15 and 17%.
The margin of error in that poll is 3.7%.
So that means that Sanders is indeed leading.
It would be sort of surprising if Sanders does not win Iowa, given the fact that it is a caucus state, which means that enthusiasm really counts.
Remember, in the caucus states, it's not that everybody goes and casts a ballot.
It's that you actually gather at a caucus place and then there's shows of hands and all of this.
Social pressure matters a lot.
Turning out the vote matters a lot.
That does benefit Sanders.
And then they move on to New Hampshire, a state that Sanders won 49% of the vote just the last election cycle.
According to the latest Monmouth poll that came out on January 7th, Buttigieg Buttigieg is still leading there, although it is basically a group of three right at the top.
Buttigieg 20, Biden 19, Sanders 18.
If Sanders were to win Iowa, assuredly you would see a boost in New Hampshire as well.
CBS YouGov poll that came out on January 3rd actually has Sanders in the lead at 27% over Biden at 25%.
The real question is whether you're going to see some movement for Sanders in Nevada and if he can win a big victory in either of these two states.
What you would need for Bernie Sanders to take the nomination is for Bernie Sanders to win big over Joe Biden in either Iowa or New Hampshire and then to run the table and take Nevada as well.
The Nevada polling Again, it's been incredibly sporadic.
There's only one poll in Nevada in the last two months, and that is a poll that just came out January 8th from Fox News.
It shows Biden up by only six points over Bernie Sanders.
That six point lead is not a large lead when you consider the fact that Joe Biden could lose the first couple of states and then the media would turn to Bernie Sanders Might be the guy.
Bernie, for his part, is getting more and more aggressive, which is, of course, the smart play.
He's been sort of withholding his fire until now.
He's going after Joe Biden and going after Joe Biden incredibly hard.
In fact, he expects in the debates this week for Joe Biden to be attacked on his foreign policy record early and often.
And the question is going to be whether Democrats really believe in the sort of full-on isolationist kookiness of Bernie Sanders, the pro-communist isolationism of Bernie Sanders, who has never met a communist tyranny he wasn't willing to bow before, nor has he met a Democratic ally he was willing to stand up for.
Are they going to prefer that, or are they going to prefer the sort of finger-in-the-wind foreign policy of Joe Biden?
Because here's the problem with Joe Biden.
He is sort of a muddle-through guy.
Muddling through is, in fact, America's actual foreign policy.
For all the talk about America's principled foreign policy, since the end of the Cold War, muddling through has sort of been the rule rather than the exception.
And the leader in muddling through has been Joe Biden, who has taken every stance on every possible issue.
For example, this week, Joe Biden and John Kerry, his surrogate, The worst secretary of state in American history.
They were going around saying that Joe Biden didn't actually vote for the war in Iraq.
He voted to authorize Bush to go through the process with regard to Iraq at the United Nations.
But that is nonsense.
Bernie Sanders released a video from 2003 in which Joe Biden was praising George W. Bush with regard to the Iraq war.
The cost of not acting against Saddam, I think, would have been much greater.
And so is the cost, and so will be the cost of not finishing this job.
The President of the United States is a bold leader and he is popular.
The stakes are high and the need for leadership is great.
I wish he'd use some of his stored up popularity to make what I admit is not a very popular case, but I and many others will support him.
Okay, so that was Joe Biden back in 2003, strongly standing by George W. Bush and the Iraq War.
Now, of course, he runs screaming from the Iraq War because it has become Sort of the popular wisdom, the conventional wisdom that the Iraq War is the biggest mistake in American foreign policy history and all of this sort of nonsense.
Bernie Sanders, by contrast.
So the Democrats have to choose between Joe Biden, who takes every position on every issue, but at least understands at root that America can't run away from the world, or Bernie Sanders, who has the ability, and this is one of the things that's nice about isolationism.
Isolationism is always popular until precisely the moment that it isn't.
This is true throughout American history.
Isolationism was popular in the run-up to World War I until precisely the moment the Lusitania got sunk, at which point the American public was like, no, screw this, we're gonna bang on the hun.
And then we got to World War II, and isolationism was extremely popular in the United States all the way up to Really, the German invasion of France and even beyond.
It took a year beyond the German invasion of France for the United States to get involved in the war.
And that was only after a revert attack at Pearl Harbor.
Isolationism is always popular until it isn't.
So Bernie Sanders always gets, especially in the last several decades, when the United States has never been on the verge of being militarily overpowered.
Right, at least with World War I and World War II, you could say that the United States had actual rivals for global hegemony.
That has not been true in the past several decades, and certainly not since the fall of the Soviet Union.
And so, Bernie Sanders' foreign policy, which is basically, what if we just sit here?
What if we just sit here and let bad guys do whatever they want to all over the world?
Is that gonna hurt us?
What if we just support communists all over?
Whatever!
Who cares?
That is a fairly popular position given the fact that America's power is not truly threatened on an existential level by any of these other countries.
Maybe with the exception of China?
Maybe?
And even that is more of a long-term threat rather than a short-term military threat.
So Bernie Sanders has sort of an inherent advantage, but Democrats are also going to have to face up to the fact that Bernie Sanders is a guy who thinks that the Squad has great foreign policy ideas.
Bernie Sanders is on the trail this weekend, and he is stumping for the Squad, thanking them for what they do every day.
This would be AOC, who's making common cause with Jeremy Corbyn, the open anti-Semite in Great Britain.
This is Ilhan Omar.
who signs letters to judges asking for mercy on people recruited to ISIS and suggests that we should sanction Israel but not Iran, and then suggests that we should basically back off of Maduro in Venezuela.
Here's Bernie Sanders thanking all of those people.
So what you have a choice between is an isolationist old commie and Joe Biden, who has the principles of a jellyfish.
I wanted to thank Rashida Tlaib for doing that exactly.
What she and other members of the so-called squad And she's really, she's really standing against the Jews.
The Jews.
What Rashida is doing every day is standing up for the working families of this country and day after day having the courage to take on powerful special interests.
And she's really she's really standing against the Jews.
The Jews.
Now, again, Bernie Sanders.
He let's just put it this way.
His group is rife with anti-Semites.
Bernie Sanders?
is not an anti-Semite, as far as I know.
Man's Jewish, at least by birth.
But the fact is that Bernie Sanders surrounds himself with the worst sort of anti-Semites.
I mean, he campaigns with Linda Sarsour, and Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
But put aside the anti-Semitism, his actual foreign policy is extraordinarily radical.
And so Democrats may cheer all the sloganeering, but Barack Obama did this too, right?
Barack Obama was into the isolationist sloganeering, and then he became president, launched a war in Libya, launched a drone war, increased troop presence in Iraq, in Afghanistan, had to reverse himself and increase troop presence in Iraq in order to fight ISIS.
It turns out that that presidential seat tends to make you more interventionist because when threats around the world materialize, well, you gotta do something about it.
But Bernie might not do that.
And so Democrats might have to come to grips with the fact that all of their sloganeering is generally stupid, and that a man who puts that into practice is actually dangerous.
There's an article in the Washington Post today by Sean Sullivan talking about Bernie Sanders' foreign policy.
It says, when Bolivia's leftist president was pressured to resign by his country's military after an audit found signs of a tainted election two months ago, many American leaders showed little interest in condemning the ouster.
Some said it was a potentially positive step for democracy, a sign, as President Trump put it, that the will of the people will always prevail.
A sharply different response came from Bernie Sanders, who immediately condemned, quote, what appears to be a coup.
The ousted leader, Evo Morales, who had challenged term limits to remain in power, later thanked the senator from Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate, referring to him affectionately as brother.
Most of Sanders' rivals paid little attention to the incident in a faraway place, but for Sanders, the episode offers a glimpse into an unorthodox foreign policy worldview.
Basically, he has the same foreign policy worldview as Noam Chomsky.
He's a radical, radical leftist who believes that America's role in the world is based in racism, imperialism, colonialism.
It's like he read V.I.
Lenin's Imperialism back in college and he never got over it.
A garbage book, by the way.
With the Iran crisis thrusting foreign affairs to the forefront of the campaign, just as Sanders rises in early state polls, Democrats who previously waved off the Senators' views as fringe now must contemplate the possibility of a Democratic Socialist becoming Commander-in-Chief of the United States.
Trump has already upended the world order with an America First approach that tests Western alliances.
Sanders would deliver another jolt, echoing some of Trump's criticisms of military action and free train, but realigning the country's priorities even more strongly.
Well, what that actually means is that he would presumably try to make alliances with actual terror groups, right?
He suggested that the United States withdraw military aid from Israel and give it to an actual terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, Hamas.
Beyond his objection to Morales' removal, Sanders has poignantly declined to label Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro a dictator because he is a commie.
He called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a racist for the great sin of noting that the Arab parties in Israel stand for the destruction of the State of Israel.
He has campaigned with Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, both of whom favor sanctions against the State of Israel.
He said that China has done more to address extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization, neglecting the forced abortion of some 350 million children minimum, and the forced sterilization of presumably tens of millions of women, and also neglecting the fact the only thing that allowed China to rise from poverty at all was their engagement in the free market and free trade.
Also, Sanders opposed the 2000 invasion of Iraq.
That's going to be his bumper sticker against Joe Biden this week.
Aaron David Miller, former advisor to six secretaries of state, now senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He says, I think it would be a fundamental shift, assuming his principles hold in the transition from campaigning to governing.
Even some Democrats note Sanders has put much more emphasis on domestic policies than global ones.
That's right, because domestic socialism is more popular than international alliances with some of the worst people on the face of the planet.
Senator Richard Durbin, who is a wild leftist, said it hasn't been his strong suit, but Sanders and company are making the case that Joe Biden is basically on Trump's side, that Biden and Trump are closer together than Biden and Sanders, which of course is true when it comes to foreign policy.
That's a dangerous choice for Democrats to make.
But Bernie is gaining and he is picking up steam also because running this close to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren is still carrying 15 to 20 percent of the vote.
And so Sanders is now reorienting himself.
He's saying, OK, well, I've got sort of my ceiling here, but if I tear down Elizabeth Warren and she drops out, most of her support will go to me.
Now, what the statistics show is that a heavy share of Elizabeth Warren's support will actually go to Biden, too.
But he's not wrong that a plurality of that support will go to him.
This is why Sanders is beginning to try to push Warren out of the race more and more quickly.
By the way, if Warren loses Iowa-New Hampshire, she's done.
At that point, the race is over for her.
She's got to win New Hampshire.
She's got to win either Iowa or New Hampshire because she's got no potential in any of the future states.
Sanders' presidential campaign, according to the Washington Post, has suddenly gone on the attack as he seeks to secure an opening in the early February caucuses, engaging in a rare dispute with Senator Elizabeth Warren, tussling with former VP Joe Biden, drawing an insult from President Trump.
Which, by the way, if you're Trump and you want Sanders as your opponent, that'd be your smart move, would be to insult Sanders.
Because then it makes, it elevates Sanders.
Anybody you want to elevate, you insult.
Although Sanders had mostly resisted comparing himself with other candidates, his surrogates and aides intensified their attacks on Biden, targeting his past positions on racial issues and his vote to sanction the Iraq War.
A script first reported by Politico told Sanders' volunteers to tell voters that they called on Sanders' behalf, who had indicated support for her that Warren's popularity was limited to the rich and educated denigrating her electability.
Elizabeth Warren, for her part, was firing back at Bernie Sanders, suggesting that she was quote-unquote disappointed with Sanders' campaign script painting her as elitist.
She used the opportunity to warn about factionalism.
She says, I hope Bernie reconsiders and turns his campaign in a different direction.
But Bernie's not going to make the same mistake with Elizabeth Warren he made with Hillary Clinton, which was, who cares about her damn emails?
They kept saying that over and over.
And then it turned out, not enough Democrats cared about her damn emails to nominate Sanders.
He's not going to make that mistake with Elizabeth Warren.
At a certain point here, he's going to turn and he's going to clock Warren.
And that is what is happening right now.
Sanders' emergence at the center of the clashes reflected his pivotal position in the race for the Democratic nomination.
A little more than three months after suffering a heart attack, he has moved to the top of the polls in Iowa.
Again, I got that one wrong.
I thought after he had a heart attack, the Democrats would be like, okay, this old one is done.
Apparently not.
Apparently he still has that solid base.
And all of the Democrats who kind of supported Warren and Buttigieg have come back around to Sanders versus Biden.
And that's not as clear cut a debate as people thought that it would be.
Trump, for his part, was tweeting about Bernie sort of cryptically.
Wow!
Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls!
Looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party!
So what does this all mean?
Stay tuned!
Well, let that really, the stay tuned means that Trump's about to unleash a barrage of attack ads on Bernie Sanders.
Bernie tweeted back at Trump, it means they're going to lose.
Well, a little bit early for that there, Bernie.
But suffice it to say that the debates this week should be a lot more fraught than the debates in the past.
Democrats are running out of time to attack each other.
They can't just hug each other until the end of this campaign and hope to win.
Elizabeth Warren is going to have to go after Sanders.
Sanders is going to have to go after Elizabeth Warren.
I think Sanders comes away best in that exchange.
Warren does not have a point of differentiation for Sanders.
She hijacked his Medicare for All plan and then ran away from it.
She's lied about her own policies a thousand times.
She's not as authentic.
As Bernie Sanders is, authenticity counts a lot on that stage.
Joe Biden can just point to the fact that Bernie is kind of a kook.
And when I say kind of a kook, I mean a massive, massive kook.
I would expect Buttigieg to bang on Bernie for that same issue.
But, that does put Bernie at the center of the stage, and Bernie is the one who is seeming to break loose right now.
It is late in the game.
Bernie is a wild card team in the NFL playoffs.
You win your last four games, and suddenly you go into the playoffs riding on a streak, and you're the Tennessee Titans.
Do not count Bernie out at this point.
Again, as I've said, good for Trump, bad for the country.
Good for Trump in the sense that easier for Trump to run against Bernie than to run against Biden.
Very bad for the country in the sense that the possibility of Bernie Sanders as President of the United States is absolutely terrifying.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I like and then we'll get to a quick thing that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Joy Behar met with Nancy Pelosi the other day, so it was a great meeting of brilliant leaders.
They took a picture together.
Joy Behar tweeted out, Nancy and I calculating Trump's lies to date.
I guess on her phone.
Nancy and me, Joy.
What a genius she is.
And it always assures me when Nancy Pelosi meets with a person who hates Trump so much that she applauded Richard Spencer on her show the other day.
But I like it.
At least they are out front about the people of whom they are fond.
So Joy Behar and Nancy Pelosi getting together.
Other things that I like today.
So the Democrats are beginning to realize that Nancy Pelosi's impeachment effort is a giant fail.
The Washington Post's Rachel Bade explained over the weekend This week on ABC, that many Democrats internally are saying that Nancy Pelosi's strategy did not paint Mitch McConnell into a corner on impeachment, that instead, she basically accomplished nothing.
Here's the Washington Post's Rachel Bade.
She's clearly putting a positive spin on what a lot of Democrats have privately said was a failed strategy.
I mean, she and Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, set out to, number one, try to get a commitment from McConnell on witnesses, firsthand witnesses to have him testify in a Senate trial.
She also said she wanted to see a resolution about, you know, how the whole proceedings would be governed.
She got neither of those.
And that, of course, is exactly true.
Nancy Pelosi is basically acknowledging her own irrelevance at this point.
She's protesting against the fact that her strategy was an enormous failure.
So, aside from being on this week and denigrating Iranian protesters, she was also on this week and she suggested that no matter what happens from here, Trump is impeached for life.
Well, yeah, so is Bill Clinton.
Has that hurt his legacy in any real way?
Not much.
Not much.
It turns out that being impeached but not expelled from office does not have any real long-term impact on the way that the American people view you, especially when it turns out that that was done with only Democratic votes.
But Nancy Pelosi's like, we did our part.
We spoke for history.
Blah, blah, blah.
Okay, here's Nancy Pelosi.
Dentures are moving.
We have confidence in our case that it is impeachable, and this president is impeached for life, regardless of any gamesmanship on the part of Mitch McConnell.
However, that could still come to bear.
But we're confident in the impeachment, and we think that it is enough testimony to remove him from office.
However, we want the American people to see the truth.
And why are they afraid of the truth?
Okay, it's going to allow the American people to see that he's impeached forever.
Forever he's impeached.
Yeah, sure.
You really have changed the world, Nancy Pelosi.
Put her on the cover of Time magazine for her brilliant manipulations here.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So there's an article from Arianna Njuncha over at the Washington Post.
It is called, Five years after an abortion, most women say they made the right decision.
First off, we should just acknowledge that when people make a decision in life, it is extraordinarily rare that they look back and they say publicly, that was a mistake.
It's a rare thing.
It's a rare thing for people to feel shame or guilt about things they have done, especially something as morally deplorable as killing an unborn child.
Because in order for you to look back with regret, you have to acknowledge the enormity of what it is that you just did.
In order for you to look back with regret, you have to acknowledge that you committed about as grave a sin as it is possible to commit on this earth.
To go along with, to choose to kill your own child is an extraordinary, extraordinary sin.
And to acknowledge that is obviously going to lead to some significant cognitive dissonance.
Feelings of shame and regret.
The fact that any women do it is a sign of moral courage, seriously.
And you see this throughout the world.
I've spoken about this documentary that came out this year.
It was not nominated for Best Oscar Documentary.
This is the biggest oversight, actually.
One Child Nation, which I think is the best documentary of the last 10 years.
Even there, it was amazing.
The filmmaker at the very end of the film tries to make the case for the sort of pro-abortion case in the United States because there, in China, women were forced into abortions, but here they get to choose abortion and that makes all the difference.
No, I mean, either that's a life or it's not a life.
Either you mourn the life or you don't mourn the life.
They're two separate issues.
One is the invasion of women's choice, and the other is what the woman is choosing to do.
Now forced sterilization, for example, is a very different evil from allowing abortion.
These are two very different issues.
In any case, That film, which is all about the evils of forced abortion, it has an entire section in One Child Nation, it's really unbelievable, about how many Chinese women, because they wanted a boy, if they had a girl, and the girl is completely born, okay, this is in the fetus, the girl is completely born, would take the baby to the market, drop the baby off in a wicker basket at the market, and just leave the baby there.
And if no one took the baby, the baby would die of heat exposure, would die of exposure to Insects or starve to death.
And what was amazing about the documentary is that the documentarian then went back and talked to all these women and asked, did you dislike the one child policy?
Was it wrong?
And women say no.
Do you feel you did anything wrong?
No is what we had to do at the time.
That's just what the policy was.
The human capacity to go along with evil in order to justify our own actions is nearly endless.
It's why what good people have to spend time doing every day is what we in Hebrew call teshuvah, right?
We have to spend an enormous amount of time examining our own actions, trying to examine our own actions for the sins that we may have committed.
In Judaism, this is a big thing.
In Christianity, obviously, this is quite a big thing.
It should be a big thing for any good person, whether you're religious or not religious.
But the point being made here is that the fact that there are any women at all who have an abortion and then feel bad about it later is a sign of the human capacity for repentance, and that's good.
But the way this study is done, if women don't regret it, that means that women should have the right to do it, which is an insane standard, right?
I mean, obviously, OJ Simpson, I don't think regrets killing Nicole Brown Simpson.
That doesn't mean that he had a right to do it.
The Washington Post, though, reports, there's been quite a lot of research about women's emotions immediately following an abortion.
Some experience sadness, guilt, and anger.
Others feel relief.
For many, it's a mix of all of these and more.
But what about in the long term?
Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco delved into this question in an analysis of 667 women recruited from 30 sites across the country as part of the Turnaway Study, a landmark body of research about how abortion affects women physically, socially, emotionally, and economically.
Starting one week after their abortions and then twice yearly after that, the women were asked about their feelings.
The authors said they wondered about stigma and how the women would reflect on their decisions as time passed.
What they found was a surprise.
Over time, all emotions, good and bad, faded.
Well, that makes sense.
I mean, as time goes on, people rarely feel the same way as they do in the heat of the moment.
A really interesting finding is how the intensity of all emotions is so low, said Corinne Rocha, lead author of the study and UCSF Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences.
A week after their abortions, about 51% of women expressed mostly positive emotions, 17% expressed negative emotions, and 20% said they had few or none.
As time went by, the number who felt few or none emotions rose sharply.
At the five-year mark, 84% reported either primarily positive emotions or none at all, while 6% had primarily negative feelings.
There was no evidence of new negative or positive emotions, the authors said.
Immediately after their abortions, 95% of those who agreed to interviews said they had made the right decision.
First of all, that makes sense.
Again, that is a real subsection.
Agreed to interviews.
What are you going to agree to an interview and be like, yeah, I really effed that one up.
That was my child and I killed it.
What do you think?
It's a self-selected group, in other words.
At five years, that percentage increased to 99%.
Roca was careful to point out that a woman's feelings of regret and her judgment that an abortion was the correct decision for her under the circumstances are different things.
You can feel the emotion of regret, yet feel what you did was right for you.
So in other words, she thinks that it's 100% of women who should not feel any regret about what they did.
The study authors wrote that their findings challenged the rationale for state-mandated counseling protocols and other policies regulating access to abortion premised on emotional harm claims, e.g.
waiting periods.
Well, no, actually, because those waiting periods are based on the idea that women have not, in many cases, fully considered the possibility of what it is they are doing, that a lot of the state-mandated regulations with regard to, like, seeing 40 ultrasounds are designed to give the woman more information before she just goes in there on the vague promise that that fetus is actually just a cluster of cells.
But according to Rocha, what the study is showing is that there is a small minority who do regret their abortions.
I know I want to reduce the struggles of those who regret their abortions, but it is misguided to take away options for everyone based on this minority.
Well, no, usually the attempt to take away abortion has very little to do with the emotional status of the women affected.
It has a lot more to do with trying to grant women more information so they can make a morally proper decision with regard to whether or not to dispose of their own child.
But again, The study itself is incredibly foolish in the sense that most people have an incredible capacity, as I've said, for overlooking their own sins, for not regretting their own sins, and the fact that anybody regrets what they've done in the past is a sign that the human being is capable of change.
And so it is the job of good-hearted people who care about the unborn to make the case to women that your feelings of regret should not be a barrier.
to you or you're feeling that you don't want to feel guilty should not be a barrier to you changing your mind it's a sign of you being a better person right when you repent to sin that makes you a better person not a worse person in in sort of jewish thought there's a whole school of thought in the talmud that suggests that if you have sinned and you repent to sin in some ways this makes you greater than the person who has never sinned at all Because you've now had to go from the depths to the heights, as opposed to having been in the heights the entire time.
There's a whole school of thought in the Talmud that says that your sins actually turn to merit when you fully repent those sins and recognize that what you did was wrong.
That's how difficult it is to do repentance.
And this is true in every school, not just abortion.
We should all be examining our actions every day to determine what it is that we did that was wrong, how we can do better in the future.
But this is why the pro-abort movement tends to push the shout-your-abortion idea, because once you've shouted your abortion, it's very difficult for you to then climb down from that perspective and suggest, wait a second, I never should have shouted that abortion, that abortion was wrong.
Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow in preparation for the big Democratic debate.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz.
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 Carmina.
Hair and Makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production Assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
Iranians take to the streets to protest their dirtbag terrorist leaders in exactly the way conservatives predicted they would in direct opposition to two weeks of leftist howling.
We will examine how Trump got it so right and why reality contradicts the left's international worldview.
Then, Bernie takes the lead in Iowa.
Democratic party elites are furious, I couldn't be happier.
Then Brexit.
Nexit.
And the passing of one of the great conservative thinkers of our age.
▲
Export Selection