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July 12, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:09
Foreigners Who Love The American Flag vs. Americans Who Hate It | Ep. 1294
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Time Text
Massive pro-freedom demonstrations break out in Cuba.
The United States continues its ill-advised withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And Kamala Harris thinks rural people don't have photocopiers.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so at long last, there is an actual on the ground revolution going on in Cuba.
It's being described as unprecedented by nearly everybody who's been watching Cuban politics for the last several decades.
We are talking massive protests in the streets of this totalitarian dictatorship.
I had the opportunity just a couple of weeks ago to go down to Miami and speak with many of the leaders in the Cuban dissident movement who are expatriates here in the United States and speak to some of the dissidents on the island itself, actually during one of the phone calls that I was holding with a dissident in Cuba.
This dissident, he and I were speaking about what exactly this is all about.
Spoiler alert!
It was not just about vaccine shortages, which as we will see as the media spin on this thing, it is about the brutal communist dictatorship that has repressed nearly all personal freedom on the island.
It is a cross-political movement in Cuba.
It is not just a bunch of sort of Reaganite right-wingers.
It is everybody who wants to see personal liberty win.
The people who are leading this movement have deliberately kept it apolitical.
Many of these people are artists who have a leftward bent on politics, but they understand the difference between being left with regard to some economic matters and also recognizing that you have to have human freedom.
In any case, I was speaking with this dissident on the phone and the Cuban security services cut off the call with a pre-recorded message explaining, That the call had been cut off because it violated security protocols in Cuba.
That is what kind of a country Cuba is.
That's what that regime is.
And that's why it was so evil, frankly, for the United States under Barack Obama to try to make nice with Raul Castro.
Those pictures of Barack Obama holding hands with Raul Castro, going to baseball games with Raul Castro, standing in front of giant buildings with emblems of Che Guevara, one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century behind him.
It was a disgrace to the United States.
And unbecoming of any president of the United States to participate in.
So far, the Biden administration has been completely silent on all of this.
I've yet to see a statement, at least as of Monday morning, from the Biden administration on protests that have been rocking the island of Cuba since Saturday, according to the New York Times, shouting freedom and other anti-government slogans.
Which, by the way, should tell you all you need to know about Cuba.
If freedom is an anti-government slogan in Cuba, that says something about the nature of the government.
Shouting freedom and other anti-government slogans, thousands of Cubans took to the streets and cities around the country on Sunday to protest food and medicine shortages in a remarkable eruption of discontent not seen in nearly 30 years.
Again, this is a deliberate misconstruction by the New York Times.
It is not just about food and medicine shortages.
Cuba has had food and medicine shortages for quite a while.
And by the way, I was reliably informed by all of the international community's most trusted sources that Cuba has one of the best medical systems on the planet.
Why should they have medicine shortages?
I was told that their nationalized healthcare system by Michael Moore, no less, no less a source than Michael Moore made an entire movie talking about the wonders of the Cuban healthcare system.
There shouldn't be.
I mean, it's a communist paradise.
There shouldn't be any food or medicine shortages over there.
That's not really what it's about.
It's the fact that they have been imprisoning dissidents.
They've been imprisoning young artists.
They've been imprisoning college students over there.
Thousands of people.
March through San Antonio de los Paños, southwest of Havana, with videos streaming live on Facebook for nearly an hour before they suddenly disappeared.
Why would they disappear?
This is a beautiful left-wing communist dictatorship.
What is the problem?
As the afternoon wore on, other videos appeared from demonstrations elsewhere, including Palma Soriano in the country's southeast.
Hundreds of people also gathered in Havana itself.
Where a heavy police presence preceded their arrival.
People are dying of hunger, one woman shouted during a protest filmed in the province of Artemisa in the islands west.
Our children are dying of hunger.
One clip circulating on Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles east of Havana.
Another video showed people looting from one of the much-detested government-run stores, which sell wildly overpriced items and currencies most Cubans do not possess.
Because as it turns out, communism just sucks.
It's just terrible.
And I know that Bernie Sanders has this sort of warm feeling about bread lines.
And I know that the Democratic Socialists of America, the folks like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who have never spent an instant living under communist repression, have a very soft spot for communist dictatorship.
I get it.
But let's be real, living under communist dictatorship absolutely sucks.
There is a reason that since the rise of the Castro regime in the late 50s, Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have fled the island of Cuba.
There's a reason why people will take the risk of putting their children on floating cars and attempting to float the 90 miles from Cuba to the south tip of Florida.
There's a reason for that.
As the New York Times reports, in a country known for repressive crackdowns on dissent, the rallies were widely viewed as astonishing.
Activists and analysts called it the first time so many people had openly protested against the communist government since the so-called Malaconazo uprising, which exploded in the summer of 1994 into a huge wave of Cubans leaving the country by sea.
And there is another sort of wave coming is sort of the widely expected response by the government because the government either is going to imprison everyone or beat up everyone or expel everyone.
And so the United States should be ready to take in Cuban patriots.
Who are attempting to overthrow the repressive regime that has condemned their country to living in the 1950s under zero freedom for literally three generations at this point.
Carolina Barrero, a Cuban activist, went even further.
She said, it is the most massive popular demonstration to protest the government we've experienced in Cuba since 1959.
She called the public outpouring on Sunday spontaneous, frontal, and forceful.
She said, what has happened is enormous.
So what exactly is the New York Times' take on this?
It's absolutely predictable.
It's not because of the Cuban government, you see.
It's because of the West.
It's because the West has been so mean to Cuba.
Yes, we have had an embargo on Cuba for 60 years, but it really is just because we're embargoing them now.
It's Donald Trump's fault that all this is happening.
Otherwise, everybody would be super happy with the Cuban regime.
So terrible that people have been living in abject poverty for three generations and are still driving around 1955 Chevys.
The protests were set off by a dire economic crisis in Cuba, where the coronavirus pandemic has cut off crucial tourism dollars.
People now spend hours in line each day to buy basic food items.
Many have been unable to work because restaurants and other businesses have remained on lockdown for months.
Now, what's so weird about that, you may have noticed, is that all we heard from the American press is how horrible America's response to the coronavirus was because we were a capitalist country.
Oh, our capitalist institutions are failing.
Oh, we need more state intervention.
Cuba is a completely state-run system, and it's a giant fail when it comes to COVID.
The desperate conditions have triggered an uptick in migration by both land and sea.
Since the start of the fiscal year last October, the U.S.
Coast Guard has intercepted more than 512 Cubans at sea, compared with 49 for the entire previous year.
On Saturday, the Coast Guard suspended the search for nine Cuban migrants whose vessel overturned at sea off Key West, Florida.
Again, the enormous risk that people take simply attempting to, they literally take like buoys and then just try to float themselves 90 miles.
You know how horrific your living conditions have to be in order for you to try that?
Would you try that?
With your kids?
Would you try that?
That's how bad things are in Cuba.
And we have allowed that communist dictatorship to stand for nigh on 60 years.
More than 60 years at this point.
Which is a disgrace to the United States and a disgrace to the Western world.
Period.
That regime is a disgrace to the Western world.
And the fact the United States has allowed a tin pot dictatorship to flourish off its coast Threatening America, by the way, in the middle of the Cold War for 60 years, it just demonstrates how little willing the United States actually is to project power.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so...
The American left has had a tough time condemning what's been going on in Cuba.
This has been true for decades.
And the American left has always had a bit of a soft spot for Cuba.
It's just an experimental regime.
You see American leftists on college campuses wearing t-shirts of Che Guevara, who, as I mentioned, is a mass murderer and an evil piece of human scum.
I was honored to meet one of the men who helped capture him just last month here in Florida.
It was a pretty amazing experience over at a museum for the brigade that fought in the Bay of Pigs.
It is amazing the contrast between the Cuban protesters and the Americans who don't like the American flag.
So this just struck me forcibly last night.
One of the videos that was coming out of Cuba was protesters.
And you'll notice that one of the flags that they are carrying around is the American flag.
You can see it in this photo.
There they are carrying around the American flag.
And this, this is not a shock.
Okay, this is it.
They're shouting libertad de Cuba.
They're talking about freedom.
And they're carrying around American flags!
Because everywhere on earth that you go, where you find people who want freedom, they are not carrying the flag of the Russians, or the Chinese, or the Swedes, or the Brits, or the French, or the Germans.
They are carrying the American flag, and it is not true merely in Cuba.
It is true in places like Hong Kong.
Here's footage from Hong Kong.
You'll remember just before the Chinese crushed the Hong Kong dissident movement.
You'll recall that there were members of the Hong Kong dissident movement, and they were carrying the American flag.
That is not a shock.
Again, the rule is that if you are a dissident who seeks freedom, America is your beacon.
The American flag is your symbol.
Again, here is the footage from just about a year ago when Hong Kong dissidents were marching in the streets carrying the American flag.
There is a reason they are pushing the American flag.
There's a reason they're flying the American flag.
Again, no other country has its flag flown as a symbol of freedom around the planet.
None.
Zero zip zilch.
Again, from Cuba to Hong Kong, wherever communist tyranny reigns, those who stand up to it carry the American flag.
Not just communist tyranny, by the way.
In Iran, when you have dissidents who are standing up to Islamic dictatorship, you will see that protesters, dissidents, refuse to step on the American flag.
This is an amazing video from just a couple of years ago, where dissidents were protesting against the Iranian regime, and they were stepping around the American flag.
The Iranian regime had painted the American flag On the pavement.
And the dissidents, instead of disrespecting and walking on the American flag, decided to walk around the American flag to demonstrate that they were not anti-America, they were actually pro-America.
I mean, that's amazing stuff right there.
The contrast between that and the number of Americans who hate and spit on the American flag is truly astonishing.
And so I have a proposal.
One for one trade.
Every single dissident who wants to fly the American flag and believes in American freedom, for all of the Americans who spit on the American flag and see it as a symbol of repression and evil.
How about that?
Will we make that trade right now?
Now, in reality, American citizens can't be expelled simply because they don't like the flag, because we do have freedom of speech.
But in principle, the folks who are marching in Cuba for liberty right now and flying the American flag are better Americans than the Americans who stand around spitting on the American flag and pretending that it is a symbol of repression and evil.
You know who those people are?
People who have never lived under true repression and evil.
Seriously.
If you live under the threat of true repression and evil, the American flag is the symbol of liberty.
If you live in America, a place of liberty, we have this ungrateful, rather despicable distaste for our own freedom.
We've gotten so used to being fat and lazy and rich and free that we seem to forget that there are people all over the planet who live like that.
And that for most of human history, none of that was the rule.
And when you see the contrast between people in Cuba who are risking life and limb, I mean, the security services are shooting people right now.
There's video that was emerging from Cuba yesterday of the police in Cuba gunning down, like firing live ammunition, according to these videos, at dissidents, at protesters.
You can see some of the video.
We see people being arrested, people being shot at.
And it's wonderful stuff happening over there.
When you see that sort of activity by actual repressive regimes, and then you have the United States, the left of the United States, mainstream, going completely silent on it while spitting on the American flag, it does tell you something because they have been completely silent on it.
The left simply has nothing to say about the liberty of people in Cuba.
And by the way, the people who are protesting in Cuba would not.
I mean, I met with many of them.
Many of them would not identify as right-wing American Republicans.
They would not.
Many of them would identify, I'm sure, as Democrats.
They believe in large social services.
They're not people who nationally, who oppose naturally, for example, nationalized healthcare.
They might like nationalized healthcare, but what they understand, on a root level, is that a government that represses its people, and abolishes private property, and cuts against profit motive, and decides that human beings ought not have rights that preexist government, We'll inevitably slip into tyranny that they understand at a gut level.
And meanwhile, you have, again, the sickening specter of Americans kneeling for the American flag while living in the richest and freest country in the history of the world.
I promise you Colin Kaepernick would not trade places with any one of these Cuban dissidents.
I promise you Ilhan Omar would not be trading places with any one of the people living in Hong Kong right now.
None of these people ever willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to ripping the United States and talking about how evil it is.
None of these folks actually believe that the United States, like I really doubt the sincerity of many of these folks, or if I don't doubt their sincerity, I doubt their knowledge level.
There's a tremendous level of ignorance.
If you never look outside the borders of the United States, it's very easy to identify the problems of the United States.
If you ever look for five seconds outside the border of the United States, or beyond the time period of today, what you will see is that the vast majority of history, and today, in the vast majority of countries, the kind of liberties that we expect, that we demand from our government, are not available to the vast majority of people.
Which is why those people march with our flag while we, here in the United States, are giving millions of dollars to athletes who disdain the American flag.
And yes, flags stand for something.
You know who knows that?
The people who are marching with our flag in Cuba right now at risk to their own life and limb.
Meanwhile, the way that the Biden administration is downplaying this so far is truly an amazing thing.
It's truly an astonishing thing.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So here is it really is an amazing thing.
Here is what the acting assistant secretary for U.S.
Department of State's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs tweeted out.
And this, so far, is the only statement that I've been able to find from the White House of Joe Biden.
Quote, peaceful protests are growing in Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases, deaths, and medicine shortages.
We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.
Oh, so you're just going to completely miss the point there.
So there are a few things about this tweet that are truly amazing.
Ignorant, backwards, counterproductive, and yes, promoting support for an evil regime.
One, there's no right to peaceful assembly in Cuba.
That's what makes this unprecedented.
People do not have the right to get together and protest the government.
Why?
Because it's a communist dictatorship.
Second, if you are trying to reduce this down to COVID policy, that is just incorrect.
It is wrong.
I talked to many of the leaders of the Cuban dissident movement personally.
Not one of them mentioned COVID policy as the chief rationale for what is going on in Cuba right now.
This is like three weeks ago.
The notion that all of this is happening because of lack of vaccinations in Cuba is nuts.
But trying to boil it down by this is a way for the United States not to have to take a position on the evil of the Cuban government.
Because the truth is that the Biden administration really has no idea what to do with the Cuban government.
I mean, as of March, 80 U.S.
House representative Democrats were urging Biden to repeal Trump's quote-unquote cruel sanctions on Cuba and renew engagement.
The idea being that if we establish trade ties and capitalism, that this will somehow moderate Cuba.
Weird, because we've tried that with China and all it's done is strengthen the regime and created a world historical opponent for the United States.
Let's do the same thing with Cuba.
Makes perfect sense.
Let's uphold their regime by ending the sanctions that have made them economically weak and vulnerable to protests like this.
The fact that the United States has remained largely silent or that we'll mouth a few platitudes about the right to free assembly without any sort of comprehensive consequences is pretty astonishing.
Again, this is a tin-pocked dictatorship.
The fact that it's like North Korea on our border without a nuclear weapon.
And we do nothing.
It really is quite wrong.
It is quite despicable in pretty much every way.
But it doesn't matter because in the United States we are too busy beating up on ourselves.
We're too busy talking about how terrible the United States is again.
You can talk about the flaws in the United States and uphold freedom for other places and acknowledge that the United States is a beacon for freedom at the same time.
But that is not what the American left does.
The American left does not give a damn about the freedom of people anywhere else on Earth.
In their perspective, the Noam Chomsky foreign policy perspective, the United States is a colonialist imperialist power.
And if we project freedom in other places on Earth, this makes us the villain.
We are bad.
We should just withdraw.
This is part and parcel of foreign policy isolationism that is present on the left, not out of a drive to preserve American security, and not out of a drive to preserve American resources, but out of a drive to undermine the basic fundamental notion that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which it undoubtedly has.
It undoubtedly has.
The United States' failure to help Batista sufficiently defeat the Cuban regime led to a 60-year dictatorship.
And we're seeing the consequences of it right now.
Again, it's, it is remarkable to me that the Biden administration can't, Joe Biden can't be woken up from his Sunday nap to make a statement about what is going on in Cuba.
But you'll have the same Biden administration talking about how we must teach children in school classrooms critical race theory.
The notion that the United States is not built on freedom the way that Cuban dissidents think it is, or that Hong Kong dissidents think it is, or that Iranians think it is.
No.
Actually, America is built on racism and bigotry and homophobia and cisgender patriarchy and all the rest of this nonsense.
It wasn't five minutes ago, I mean literally the end of the week last week, Jen Psaki was saying to the White House press corps that critical race theory teaching in classrooms was an active good.
There is a connection between these two things.
It is not a coincidence that the same people who promote teaching critical race theory have nothing to say in defense of Cuban dissidents.
That is not a coincidence at all.
It is not a coincidence that the same people who disdain the Iranian dissidents and the Hong Kong dissidents, that those people are the same people who spend all their time talking about how evil and terrible the United States is.
These are not folks who simply want a better America.
These are folks who see America as an active evil and anywhere we put our dirty, grubby little fingers, the world gets worse in their perspective.
Here is Jen Psaki's take on critical race theory being taught in America.
I'm glad that we've put our focus here, as opposed to, you know, projecting the most powerful economic and military force the world has ever seen to even a little bit, like a drop, just to help assure the liberty of freedom-seeking people.
The president believes that in our history, there are many dark moments.
And there is not just slavery and racism in our history.
There are systemic racism that is still impacting society today.
And he believes, as I believe, as a parent of children, that kids should learn about our history.
So as the spouse of an educator and as somebody who continues to believe that children should learn not just the good, but also the challenging in our history.
And that's part of what we're talking about here, even as it's become politically Charged.
Okay, that is not what we are talking about here.
That is a deliberate misreading of the entire controversy over critical race theory, which really is about what America fundamentally is.
People in the United States believe the American flag is fundamentally bad because America is fundamentally bad.
And it is not a coincidence that those people are completely silent today as Cuban dissidents get clubbed in the streets.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Alrighty, so...
Again, what we are watching in Cuba is just a reminder, as Hong Kong was a reminder, that not only are there people who do seek their liberty and see the United States as a symbol of that liberty, but that without some level of American or foreign support, these people just get crushed.
What we saw in Hong Kong was massive protests.
Millions of people in the streets.
And then the Chinese just walked in and decided they were going to make it another principality of China in violation of treaty.
And the West did nothing.
And I have 7 million people who are living under the open tyranny of the Chinese government.
And now you have China threatening Taiwan, as well as Japan by extension, by the way.
The same thing is likely to happen in Cuba unless the United States actually grows some stones at a certain point and provides some sort of credible threat to the Cuban government with regard to protecting these dissidents.
Because the reality is that the Cuban government can go in and break a few heads and then Cuba won't be in the headlines anymore and then everybody in the United States will forget because this is the way the United States does foreign policy.
When it comes to foreign policy, unfortunately, the United States is not a serious country.
We are not interested in foreign policy.
We find it to be something unworthy of our time until it sort of pops its head up.
through some sort of deeply disturbing foreign policy headline like the mass slaughter of the Yazidis in Iraq, for example, or more or more obviously a terrorist attack on an American entity.
When that sort of stuff happens, we pay attention to foreign policy for about five seconds, and then we get bored.
And then we're like, OK, well, you know, should we do we really care about this?
Should we really care about this?
Latest evidence of this, of course, is what's going on in Afghanistan, where Boredom, ignorance, and antipathy for America's role in the world have created this vast confluence which is leading to the United States' surrender in Afghanistan, which is effectively what is going on right now.
The United States is pulling out of Afghanistan for no discernible reason.
There really is no discernible reason.
When Joe Biden goes on national television and he says things like, how many more American troops have to die in Afghanistan?
This was a line that may have worked like 10 years ago.
It should not have worked at any time in the past five or six years, considering the number of Americans who are actually dying in Afghanistan was lower than the number of Americans who are dying in Chicago pretty much every weekend, except over the course of a year.
In Afghanistan, we were spending some money to uphold the Afghan government.
Yes, it had corrupt serious corruption problems.
Yes, there is serious tribalism in Afghanistan.
But there was, in fact, a unified government over the country of Afghanistan.
And now, for no apparent reason, to no end, we are pulling out of Afghanistan.
And there are people who are celebrating it.
For the life of me, I can't understand why.
I do not understand why.
We are not at the point in Afghanistan where crisis was upon us.
We are not at the point where tens of thousands of American troops were in harm's way, or hundreds of American troops were dying, or even tens of American troops were dying.
And so the unilateral pullout is meant for only a couple of audiences.
One, the isolationist audience at home that believes the United States really shouldn't be involved anywhere in the world, that we are a deleterious force in the world.
And two, a bunch of people who don't care about foreign policy and anytime they see American troops abroad, get uncomfortable because they don't really understand that foreign policy is not a vacuum.
And we are seeing full-scale foreign policy is not a vacuum.
I mean, the reality is the Taliban is going to retake the country and that is going to have some pretty significant downstream effects.
Yes for the United States and yes for our allies.
There are going to be downstream effects because it turns out that when a regime that you defeated 20 years ago in about three weeks, the Taliban, when you defeat that regime and you drive them to the hills and then you establish a government and then you let that government fall back to the people you drove out, You are demonstrating that America is, in fact, a paper tiger.
Also, you are demonstrating that we are a bad ally.
If you are a freedom-seeking person, how long are you going to keep looking to the United States if the United States no longer backs you?
If you know that the minute the American voter gets bored, There's going to be a pullout and that you are probably going to die and your family is going to be killed along with you.
How many people are going to stand up for freedom then?
How many people are going to be willing to stand up against the predations of the Taliban or against the Iranian regime?
How many times can the United States over the course of the last 10, 15 years screw our allies?
Seriously, I'm just wondering how many times can we screw our allies before people start to say, you know what?
We got to work on our own.
I'm talking about the Kurds in Iraq.
I'm talking about the Yazidis in Iraq.
I'm talking about The anti-Taliban forces amassed in Afghanistan.
I'm talking about the people of Hong Kong.
How many times can the West screw its allies before it has no more allies?
Really serious question.
It's because clearly our willingness to pay any price for freedom, as John F. Kennedy once famously suggested, is no longer there.
At least that is the message from Joe Biden.
The Biden administration is openly acknowledging at this point we're handing the country back to the Taliban, which, by the way, will provide a safe haven once again for terrorism, because this is what they did to begin.
There was the Pentagon spokesperson basically admitting to Chris Wallace, yeah, you know, the Taliban could take over.
It's not the Taliban could take over.
It is only a matter of time until the Taliban take over.
We're certainly watching with deep concern, Chris, the deteriorating security situation and the violence, which is, of course, way too high, and the advances and the momentum that the Taliban seems to have right now.
I mean, we're not unmindful of that, Chris.
We're watching it and monitoring it, which is why we are, again, working with our Afghan partners to encourage them to use the capacity and the capability that we know they have, and we know that they know how to defend their country.
This is a time for them to step up and to do exactly that.
Except that the Taliban has taken back one-third of the country without serious combat.
And everybody in foreign policy circles knows that the Taliban are likely to topple the Afghan government almost immediately upon the exit of the United States.
This has led to a rather uncomfortable reality for the Democrats, who are having to acknowledge that they are, in fact, engaging in the same sort of pullout in Vietnam that led to the imprisonment of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people floating in boats off the coast of Vietnam, and the murder of millions of people in Cambodia.
The Democrats have a long history of doing this sort of stuff, and it is never good.
In fact, here is a Democrat trying to suggest, this is Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senator, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, trying to suggest that, you know what, pulling out is the best of bad options.
Well, actually, it isn't.
It isn't.
You know what is the best of bad options?
Keeping a skeleton force in Afghanistan to prevent the takeover of the Taliban.
That's actually the best of bad options.
The United States currently has troops in dozens of countries doing just that.
And you know what?
That's alright.
Here's Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, though, basically saying that surrender is the best of bad options.
I think the president was presented with a bad series of choices.
The Trump administration had said we were leaving by May 1st.
The Taliban had no real responsibilities in that agreement, none that they carried out that I can see.
And yet that date, I think, would have prompted an incredible increase of violence and directed against the United States.
I think the president made a difficult, but the best of many poor choices.
Oh really?
He actually wasn't presented with the choices, the reality.
He could have done whatever he wanted, just as presidents have done for decades at this point.
But...
Underlying all of this is a fundamental lack of confidence in what the United States is and what the United States' role in the world is, and that is a serious problem.
Because again, there are people out there who do not lack our confidence.
I'm talking about China.
I'm talking about Russia.
I'm talking about Iran.
There's a reason why there's a headline in the Washington Post today.
Iran cheers U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Yes, I know why.
I've noticed.
Tehran is worried about the Taliban because Afghanistan, returning to civil war, Afghanistan, you'll remember, is on Iran's border.
And so this creates some external effects for Iran.
But Iran has cultivated ties with some Taliban factions and softened its tone toward the extremist group.
That gamble has elicited fierce debate in Iran, supposedly.
Iran's increasingly public overtures to the Taliban continue.
One of the experts over there says Iran believes they are using the Taliban.
Some could argue the Taliban is using Iran to present themselves as more powerful and worthy of ruling a country.
The Taliban, thought to control around a third of Afghanistan, has so far largely gained ground without full-scale fighting, has instead relied on cutting deals with local leaders.
And the reason they can do that is because there is no counterweight in the region.
There is no counterweight.
Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Iranian hardliners aligned with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President-elect Ebrahim Raisi, who himself is a terrorist mass murderer, have gone on the offensive and publicly painted a rose-tinted picture of a changed Taliban.
So it is just wonderful to see how the United States is complicit in all of this.
We've now pulled out of Afghanistan in order to facilitate the rise of the Taliban.
We are openly making overtures to an Iranian regime that rigged an election on behalf of a mass-murdering terrorist.
We have allowed Hong Kong to fall to the Chinese.
If pattern holds, we'll do very little as Cuban dissidents are clubbed into submission on the streets of Cuba, of Havana.
America is going to need to figure out exactly what it is if we wish to be a beacon of liberty in the world.
But given that the United States is own citizenry, at least half of them apparently believe the United States is not even a beacon of liberty inside its own borders, there's a fundamental lack of confidence that is setting in.
And the world is not gonna be better off for that.
Americans aren't gonna be better off for that because there are malign influences in the world at work.
The United States is not going to have a better future if vicious totalitarian powers gain power internationally and inside the United States, Those who seek to tear down the fundamental institutions of freedom are successful here.
None of that is going to be good for American citizens or for human beings the world over.
Because let's face it, the radical increase in prosperity and freedom that has occurred since the end of World War II is almost solely due to the massive power and influence of the United States, a confident United States bestriding the world stage.
When that ends, So does all of the wealth, so does all of the prosperity, and so does all of the freedom.
We can go right back to what things were before the United States was the most prosperous and powerful force on planet Earth.
Alrighty, coming up!
The New York Times apparently has noticed that Joe Biden is in a running gun battle with his teleprompter and Kamala Harris is no substitute for a real candidate.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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All righty.
Whether it is totalitarian lockdown measures that destroyed the middle class while big business thrived or the blatant indoctrination of schoolchildren into critical race theory, there's no denying the freedom of everyday Americans is under assault.
And you can tell it's gone too far when just questioning the mainstream narrative inspires fear of retribution and creates waves of silence where otherwise there would be dissent.
You feel it at your job.
You feel it in kids' school.
You feel it every time you go into a store these days.
We are living through an authoritarian moment, which is why I wrote the book, The Authoritarian Moment, to help people like you learn as much about how we got there as you can, and more importantly, how you can fight back.
Like, we all feel it.
We all feel like we are swimming in a miasma of totalitarian thought right now.
It feels like if you say the wrong thing on Facebook, you're gonna be excised from your social circles.
It feels like if you say the wrong thing in an email, you're gonna get fired.
It feels like if you just express a basic opinion about the goodness of America, you may find yourself on the social outs, and you have all the most powerful institutions of society weaponized against you.
This is what the authoritarian moment is all about.
The left has suggested that people on the right are the totalitarians.
There's certainly totalitarians on the far right, but the great threat to the United States right now is the mainstream left, which has imbibed from the authoritarian well and sees itself as a utopian group capable of cramming down on you all of their own ideas.
My book, The Authoritarian Moment, is about how all of our major institutions from science to tech to Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be in a running gun battle with his teleprompter.
It is not going well.
and again, more importantly, how to fight back with real strategies.
The authoritarian moment is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other major bookseller.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
♪ Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be in a running gun battle with his teleprompter.
It is not going well.
Even the New York Times has now noticed this.
According to the New York Times, even the president labeled a speech boring recently, an emission that highlights a tendency towards delivering minutiae-filled discourse over scaling oratorical heights.
I love how they really have to obscure even their own message.
Voters chose boring over bombast.
They got Biden's penchant for pontificating, according to Michael Scheer.
Even President Biden thought he had been ponderous.
I know it's a boring speech, the 46th president said at the end of 31 minutes and 19 seconds filled with statistics, academic studies, global growth, domestic product, comparisons, and predictions of 7.4% economic growth.
The president's remarks on Wednesday delivered to a friendly and respectful crowd of supporters at McHenry County College in the Chicago suburb even included reconciliation, which Mr. Biden quickly admitted was a fancy Washington word.
As the president travels the country, pitching his plan for spending trillions of dollars to reshape the American economy, he is facing a rhetorical reality that has long plagued many of his predecessors.
There's a vast difference between explaining and inspiring.
And Mr. Biden, who was recently called the explainer-in-chief by his press secretary, often struggles to reach the potential oratorical heights of the office he holds.
Mr. Biden's ambitions are vast.
The substance of his presidency has been dramatic at times.
He sometimes describes his agenda as a way to prove that the very concept of democracy itself can deliver for the people.
The White House is perfectly fine with Mr. Biden's ability to turn down the political heat in Washington after four years of chaotic governance.
But like former President Barack Obama once delivered a 17-minute answer to a healthcare question, and Bill Clinton was forced to apologize to a late-night comic for a dreadful convention speech, Mr. Biden can sometimes get lost in the minutia.
Okay, I love how the New York Times is framing this.
Joe Biden cannot string together a sentence off teleprompter.
When he is on teleprompter, he is in a running battle with the teleprompter.
And the New York Times frames this as he's too much of an expert.
He's just too with it, guys.
It's not that Joe Biden is entering the early stages of dementia.
It is that Joe Biden is just so unbelievably with it.
He is so into all of the minute details of his own policy proposals.
He didn't cite you a chapter and verse.
He'll bore you to teeters with all of the minutiae.
You've noticed, by the way, I love that paragraph.
Barack Obama, that man was just a policy wonk, just so wonky.
Bill Clinton, so unbelievably wonky.
I'm noticing you're leaving out like a few presidents that happened between here.
They all have ours by their names?
Because as it turns out, according to the media, every Republican is an idiot dunderhead who can't speak a sentence and every Democrat is world-beatingly genius.
Just brilliant.
Remember, they made the same excuse about Al Gore.
Al Gore was unbelievably boring, a terrible speaker, no charisma.
And their excuse for why he lost to George W. Bush is, of course, that Al Gore was too smart for the room.
They said the same thing about John Kerry in 2004.
John Kerry has never been in a room where he was too smart for the room.
He has not been in a first grade classroom as an adult where he was too smart for the room.
I mean, John Kerry is one of the stupidest people alive.
And yet, according to the New York Times and according to the rest of the media, the big problem for every Democrat incapable of properly communicating is, of course, that they are just too brilliant for the room.
Well, one of the other people who is obviously too brilliant for the room is Kamala Harris.
The reason that Kamala Harris is having her political struggles right now is clearly because Kamala Harris is just so smart.
She's smarter than you.
That's why.
And you may be looking at her and watching her on TV and thinking to yourself, this lady is not super bright.
Like she says lots of dumb crap routinely.
You might, I know, you might be thinking that to yourself.
And then, you should know, it's you.
It's not her, it's you.
So, like for example, over the weekend, when she did an interview with BET, In which she explained that voter ID is racist because rural people can't get photocopies.
That's just because she's smart.
It's not because she's dumb or out of touch or a time traveler from 1971.
It's because she's actually just so brilliant.
It's your fault.
It's like all the conversations that the media critics now have about Hollywood.
Whenever a crowd doesn't like a particular movie or an aspect of a particular movie that the media want them to like, it's that the crowd is filled with toxic fandom.
Whenever people are like, yeah, you know, wasn't so into that That character from Last Jedi?
I didn't really like that.
And they're like, TOXIC FANDOM.
People weren't into Lady Ghostbusters.
It's the same thing about Democrats.
If you don't like a Democrat, it's you.
It's Principal Skinner from The Simpsons.
It's not me.
It's the children who are the problem.
It's not Kamala Harris.
It's you who are the problem.
So listen to the world-breaking genius of our Vice President of the United States, who was selected Largely and almost solely on the basis of her intersectional qualifications.
Here she was demonstrating her full-scale genius.
In some people's mind, that means, well, you're gonna have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove you are who you are.
Well, there are a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don't, there's no Kinko's, there's no Office Max near them.
People have to understand that when we're talking about voter ID laws, Be clear about who you have in mind and what would be required of them to prove who they are.
Um... What?
So here's the thing.
Photocopiers were invented in the United States in the 1930s.
They were widely available pretty much everywhere by the 1970s.
So unless she's a time traveler from 1971, I don't know what the hell she is talking about.
Also, when is the last time you actually used a photocopier?
You have a printer at your house, I assume, because most people have printers at their house, rural or urban.
Also, you don't even have to print crap now.
All you have to do is take a picture of something and you can email to somebody to print it out for you.
Or you could just do a scan directly from your phone.
If you got an iPhone, all you gotta do is go to your notes section.
I don't mean to guide you through how to actually scan a PDF on your phone, but you can just do it.
Okay, but apparently, world-breaking genius.
It's all world-breaking genius.
You know, it is this sort of coverage that I think leads people to a radical level of institutional distrust.
A radical level of distrust of media.
And this has some predictable effect.
Andrew Sullivan has a really good and interesting piece over at his Substack about how he has been disconnected from the left.
How the institutional left has basically moved beyond the populace.
His piece, Andrew Sullivan again, is a center-left figure.
He's sort of right-wing on foreign policy a little bit during the Bush years, in the early years of Bush.
But aside from that, Andrew Sullivan is a very openly gay man.
He was a very early advocate of gay marriage.
Andrew Sullivan is also the guy who suggested that Trig Palin was not, in fact, Sarah Palin's child, right?
Andrew Sullivan's left-wing bona fides were pretty much in order until the last five minutes.
There's a piece on Substack called What Happened to You?
He says, What happened to you?
That's a question I get a lot on Twitter.
When did you become so far right?
Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenist?
Or a eugenicist?
Or, of course, see, I told you who he really was.
Just take off the hood, Sully.
It's trolling mainly, and it's a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the emotional kind of blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses.
But it's worth answering a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics because it seems to me that the dynamic really should be the other way around.
The real question is, what happened to you?
The critical race theory debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so.
And yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News-hyped campaign are well taken.
Is this a wedge issue for the GOP?
Of course it is.
Are they using the term critical race theory as a cynical marketing boogeyman?
Of course they are.
Are some dog whistles involved?
A few.
Are crude bans on public servants' speech dangerous?
Absolutely.
But does that mean there isn't a real issue here?
Of course it doesn't.
Take a big step back.
Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015.
Forget CRT for a moment.
Ask yourself, is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile?
Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting?
Reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?
What is it?
It is, says Andrew Sullivan, I'd argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites.
It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation.
It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of white supremacy, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
We all know what's happened.
The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools, that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a, quote, social justice reckoning these past few years.
And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.
Take it from a woke New York Times star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that, quote, the country's social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.
She's right, and certainly about the New York Times and all mainstream journalism.
This is the media hub of the social justice movement, and the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough.
Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate white supremacy, designed to oppress, harm, and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling.
That's a huge deal, and it explains a lot.
A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable systems and structures and internal biases arrived to hover around the world.
Some of this critique was specific and helpful, the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap, but much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.
The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent gut-wrenching memoir Between the World and Me.
He combined the worldview and vocabulary of critical race theory with the vivid lived experience of his own biography.
He's a beautifully gifted writer.
I'm not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to in what many of his blog readers called his blue period.
The movement is much broader than race, as anyone who's dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you.
The best moniker I've read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang's coinage, the successor ideology.
The structural oppression is white supremacy, but it can be also expressed more broadly to describe a hegemony that is saturated with anti-blackness, misogyny, transphobia, and a miasma of social, cis-heteronormative, patriarchal white supremacy.
And the term successor ideology works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes first and foremost to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.
In this successor ideology, there's no escape, no refuge from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence.
You're either fighting this and on the right side of history, or you're against it and abating evil.
There is no neutrality.
That is the world the left is building for you.
And that is why you are right to lie about Kamala Harris's wild qualifications and Joe Biden fighting his teleprompter.
It is why you are correct to ignore dissidents in Hong Kong and Cuba as they fly the American flag and instead rip on the American flag because it represents systems and structures of oppression.
This is, in fact, the great ideological battle of our time, and it's going to continue.
It is not slowing down anytime soon.
All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Mould Show today.
He discusses Chicago's decision to provide free condoms to all students ages 10 and up.
Oh, goody.
You can hear more details about this story over on Michael's Show.
That's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Prominent leftists label all whites racist.
The feds harass more conservatives.
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