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Sept. 15, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:27
The Actual Deep State Coup | Ep. 1338
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Bob Woodward reports that General Mark Milley contemplated handing over American security to the Chinese to thwart Trump, and the California recall effort against Gavin Newsom is a dud.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, a couple of preliminary notes.
First, the greatest comic of our generation, Norm Macdonald, died yesterday.
He had been battling cancer, apparently, quietly and secretly without making that public, and he passed away.
If you just want a day filled with laughs, go to YouTube and just watch old clips of Norm Macdonald.
He's an underappreciated genius.
And as Jeremy Boring, my business partner, put it, the great genius of Norm Macdonald is that every single Norm Macdonald fan feels like they're the only Norm Macdonald fan, when in fact, pretty much everybody was a Norm Macdonald fan.
His stuff is just hysterically funny.
His memoir is one of the funniest books ever written.
Go check out some Norm Macdonald today.
News. The California recall effort was a complete and total dud. Newsom won with an extraordinary percentage of the vote. He survived the recall effort by a margin of 64 to That's with 70% of the vote in.
And in the question of who was going to replace him, Larry Elder was leading with 47% of the vote.
The California governor recall exit polls via NBC News show that the desire to recall Newsom was not Was not held by a majority of Californians anywhere in the bowl, right?
Only 47% of males, only 46% of males wanted to recall him.
Only 38% of women wanted to recall him.
Only 44% of white voters wanted to recall him.
Only 19% of black voters wanted to recall him.
So this is just a textbook blowout and that is because California is a completely blue state.
So the bad news for California is that California is apparently irredeemable and now in an inevitable state of complete collapse and decline.
Because there is no desire to actually reverse any of that.
That's been true for a while.
The good news is I don't have to think about moving back, so I guess that's good news.
That is pretty much what the recall effort shows.
They did ask folks about some of the issues that had come up in the recall effort, particularly COVID policy.
And what they found is that a large percentage of Californians are very comfortable with COVID policies that were put forward by Gavin Newsom.
Something like 46% of Californians said that they thought that they were about right, that this is all pretty good.
It all worked just fine.
In fact, a significant percentage of Californians thought that the COVID policies were actually not strict enough.
They should have been stricter.
Apparently only 32% of Californians thought that the policies were too strict.
So they're getting what they deserve, right?
Good and hard.
This is the HL Mencken line about democracy being the theory that the voters ought to get what they want, good and hard.
This is what they are getting, good and hard.
26% of the people who voted in the recall strongly approved of Gavin Newsom's performance as governor, another 28% somewhat approved, so about 54%.
And, you know, not a huge percentage of people actually Disapproved of him.
It's like 43% disapproved.
So it's a pretty heavy win for Gavin Newsom.
For his part, Gavin Newsom said that this was a referendum on Trumpism, which is kind of wild.
Donald Trump, number one, was not on the ballot.
But number two, you shouldn't be this triumphal about surviving a recall effort in California, which is a heavily Democratic state.
This is like saying that Ben Shapiro survived a recall effort at the Daily Wire.
I own the place.
The Democrats own the place.
The shock would have been if Gavin Newsom had actually been recalled.
And let's not be ridiculous about this.
The recall effort here was significantly less likely to succeed than the recall effort of Gray Davis back in 2001, 2002.
Back when Gray Davis was recalled during that period, we were like four years removed from a Republican governor.
The last time California had a truly Republican governor was Pete Wilson in the late 1990s.
So a full generation.
Anyway, here is Gavin Newsom trying to suggest that this was his triumphant return.
He had triumphed over Trumpism.
This is what Democrats are going to try and do, by the way.
It's a good...
Reminder, this is the Democratic plan for 2022 and 2024.
They want to run against Trump.
They want Trump on the ballot.
They want to make it all about Trump.
Which is why, if you're a Republican, even if you like Trump a lot, you might want to think a little bit seriously about whether you want Trump back on the ballot, because it does get Democrats out to the ballot box, for sure.
Trump is good at Republican turnout, and he's even better at Democratic turnout.
In any case, here is Gavin Newsom trying to push that point.
I said this many, many times on the campaign trail.
You know, We may have defeated Trump, but Trumpism is not dead in this country.
The big lie, January 6th insurrection, all the voting suppression efforts that are happening all across this country, what's happening, the assault on fundamental rights, constitutionally protected rights of women and girls.
It's a remarkable moment in our nation's history.
It's not a remarkable moment in our nation's history.
It would have been remarkable if you'd been dumped.
Again, this would be the equivalent of the governor of Alabama surviving a recall election against a Democrat.
That is not a particular shock.
And the media portraying it as a shock is kind of shocking in and of itself.
The real shock is that it went this far.
Nonetheless, according to DNYNews, they say California basks in its clairvoyance.
The future happens here first, says Governor Gavin Newsom, calling his state America's coming attraction.
Well, that's why I left.
By emphatically turning back the effort to recall him from office, however, Mr. Newsom made clear California's cherished role Presaging the politics of tomorrow was not as significant as another, larger factor in Tuesday's results, the tribal politics of today.
The first-term Democratic governor will remain in office because, in a deeply liberal state, he effectively nationalized the recall effort as a Republican plot, making a flamethrowing radio host the Trump-like face of the opposition to polarize the electorate along red and blue lines.
So the suggestion here, and this has been the suggestion of the media, is that if Larry Elder had not been the candidate for the Republican Party most likely to replace Gavin Newsom, then Newsom would have done worse in the recall effort.
Now, that may be true in the sense that Larry is a very strong political personality with very strong views.
But again, this is a heavily Democrat state.
The notion that he was going to get recalled at all was probably a bit of a pipe dream.
And even when the polls narrowed significantly and got to the point where it was really, really narrow, that was when they were not talking about any of the people running against him.
If it had not been Larry, they probably would have done this to Kevin Falconer, for example.
So again, the media are treating this as a referendum on sort of conservatism more generally.
And they're attempting to make it a referendum on Trumpism.
And it really had nothing to do with either.
It had to do with the fact that this is a heavy, I can't say it enough, it's a heavy blue state.
They have a super majority in the legislature, the Democrats do.
So if they'd replaced Newsom with any Republican, that would have been a grave shock.
Mr. Newsom found success not because of what makes California different, but because of how it's like everywhere else.
He dominated in California's heavily populated Democratic cities, the key to victory in a state where his party outnumbers Republicans by 5 million voters.
By the way, this should be a reminder.
If you are a Republican in California, things are going to get worse, not better.
I've been saying this since I left.
Follow me.
Get out while the getting is good.
Move to a purple state.
Turn that state red.
California is a lost cause.
I know there are a bunch of people who are hanging on over there.
I was one of them until a year ago.
I'm much happier now that I have left the state.
The state is, again, in an inexorable state of decline.
The voters there are not interested in turning away from the path that they are now trotting.
They're not turning away from higher taxes.
They're not turning away from more regulation.
They're not turning away from terrible records on crime and horrible records on education.
They're not turning away from any of that stuff.
They're embracing it.
They're embracing the suck.
So get out while the getting is good.
There's plenty of opportunity in other states.
So that is the takeaway from the California election is that the continued sorting effect is going to continue.
And that we are going to be a country where the red states become redder and the blue states become bluer and the purple states will either shift over into red or blue and then follow that path inevitably.
As Virginia has, right?
Virginia went from purple to blue and now it seems like it's going to continue moving blue.
Seems to be the trend over in Virginia.
On the other hand, Ohio went from purple to red and seems like it is going to get more red over time.
Florida moved from purple to red and seems like it's getting more red over time.
California is going to move from blue to deep blue to like dark night blue.
That's what's going to happen in the country.
And the predictable result of that is going to be further polarization at the federal level.
So on a national level, why should we care about California?
Because what it actually presages is not just politics in California.
What it presages is a question.
Whether we actually do want to remain part of the same body politic.
If we do want to remain part of the same body politic, we're going to have to construct a system of a federal governance in which Texas can be Texas and California can be California.
However, California has to let Texas be Texas.
And herein lies the rub, because the federal government has no interest, when run by Democrats, in allowing Texas to be Texas.
They would like Texas to be California.
And if that's the case, what you're going to end up with is a fairly ugly split between states that wish to be left alone, and states that wish to run their business from the top level of the federal government.
I think this is why you're hearing so much talk these days about a quote-unquote civil war, or talk about secession, or talk about the country breaking apart.
It's a serious question.
Whenever you form a body politic, which is what happened at the founding and what happened again in the aftermath of the Civil War, if you form a body politic, you have to decide whether you wish to remain part of the same country.
And if so, what common rules can you hold at the top level that everybody can agree to?
Well, if the basic notion of American government is that the federal government is going to make all the rules and it's just going to be a struggle for the power of the one ring, then this country is not going to last this way.
It is just not.
And maybe then the best hope for a lot of conservatives and maybe for a lot of liberals, depending on who's in control of that federal government, is a friendly separation.
That is what that force H is.
Not that California is the wave of the future, but that California And it's polarization is the wave of the future.
And that we're gonna get, I promise you, in the aftermath of this, real estate values in Florida are gonna go up.
Real estate values in Arizona, in Texas, in Nevada, they're gonna go up because Republicans are going to continue leaving.
And maybe that's what the California politicians want.
So be it.
Alrighty, in just a second, we'll get to the other big news of the day.
The coup attempt by General Mark Milley.
It's hard to call it anything other than that.
Really, it's kind of an astonishing story from Bob Woodward's new book.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so as we discuss, you know, the role of the federal government, I think at this point There are two possibilities for the federal government and the continuation thereof.
One is, as I mentioned, the possibility that the rules at the top level are agreed upon, they're fairly light, and then we get to live locally the way we want to live locally.
San Francisco gets to live like San Francisco, and Texas gets to live like Texas.
Right, that seems like a fairly good way of doing things.
In fact, that's kind of what the founders proposed.
And then there's system number two, which is a competition over the vast power of the federal government.
And every four years we switch our elected dictator.
Now, the problem is this, that really only works if you think, number one, the downsides of the other guys gaining control is still worth the upside of remaining part of the union.
And two, that you have enough of a shot of gaining control of the levers of power that you can reverse a lot of the bad stuff if you just stick in long enough.
Those are the two conditions for sticking in a very centralized power regime.
One is that the people who operate the centralized power on the other side aren't actually going to ruin your life in the time that they are in control.
And two is that even if they attempt to ruin your life, there's still the shot that your guy can take office in two, three years and then reverse all of that.
Republicans have bought into that, right?
The idea is, okay, yeah, well, Biden's administration will suck, but maybe in two, three years, Trump comes back or you get Ron DeSantis or somebody else.
Now, there's one factor that can militate against that possibility and exacerbates the possibility of a general crackup in the American political system.
What if that possibility goes away?
Not through election fraud and not through rigging of the rules or anything, but what if the federal government has essentially been reduced from a system of checks and balances In which the downsides are mitigated and the upsides are still available.
What if those checks and balances have been completely replaced by an administrative state that effectively runs on its own?
In opposition to conservatives when they're in power, but in support of Democrats when they're in power.
This was the talk about the quote-unquote permanent deep state when Donald Trump was president.
There was this idea that there were career staffers in the bureaucracy and they spent pretty much every waking moment attempting to thwart what the Trump administration was attempting to do.
And this, of course, was true in large measure.
And the fact is that there were career Democrats in the State Department who really didn't like what, for example, Mike Pompeo was trying to do at the State Department.
There were career Democrats in the Department of Defense who didn't like what Donald Trump was trying to do.
And Trump didn't clear out those administrative agencies.
He fired a few people, but he really didn't clear them top to bottom.
And so those administrative agencies were able to thwart a lot of his desires.
And this goes all the way back to the Reagan administration when Ronald Reagan suggested he was going to dump the Department of Education and then proceeded to fund it.
So Republicans, if like the quote-unquote deep state, it's not a conspiracy.
It's just the idea that you have a bunch of staffers who are in positions of power who feel that they have an overall allegiance to the institution for which they work and they interpret that allegiance as we have a mission in this particular institution and no president is allowed to override that allegiance.
So you effectively have an independent body of actors who just happen to align pretty heavily with people inside the Democratic Party.
So if, as I say, the two possibilities for maintaining the union are one, a light touch at the federal level, which is not really a possibility anymore.
Or two, that the federal level has a lot of power, but the downsides are mitigated because there is no kind of freewheeling, everything just gets done the way we want to do it, checks and balances.
There's a check and balance to just ramming through things, right?
That is mitigating factor number one.
And mitigating factor number two is your guy could take control and reverse everything.
What if the mitigating factors go away because you have an enormous administrative state run by the executive and the executive can do whatever the F he wants at any time, right?
He can just use the CDC to cram down an eviction moratorium.
By the way, that happened under Trump, and then was re-upped under Biden.
Or he can use the Justice Department to simply stop enforcing immigration law, as happened under Barack Obama.
Or, OSHA can be used, of all places, to cram down vaccine mandates on 100 million Americans.
What if the checks and balances go away, so the downsides are now not only not mitigated, they are actually exacerbated, right?
The downsides of the bad guys, in your view, whatever your view is, running the government, the downsides are unlimited.
And not only that, what if, if you're on the right, you look at the federal government, you're like, okay, well, even if the downsides are unlimited, the upsides are also unlimited, because if our guy takes power, then he can undo it.
What if he can't?
What if he can't?
What if the administrative state is a bulwark against conservatives, but is a tool for people on the left?
That happens to be kind of the case.
The administrative bureaucracy is staffed by career professionals, most of whom graduated from colleges with degrees in government, and who have spent most of their working lives working on behalf of institutions that are thoroughly entrenched in liberal groupthink.
If you walk into the regulatory agencies of the federal government and you actually polled the regulatory agencies to exactly how those folks vote, my guess is that it looks a lot like 80-20 Democrat.
And those people have an enormous amount of power since they're writing the actual regulations.
You think Donald Trump is sitting there reading the regulations, binders of regulations?
You think even if Ron DeSantis were president, he'd have the ability to read through the thousands and tens of thousands of pages of the Federal Register generated by the bureaucracy every year?
The administrative threat is a threat to liberty, but it's also a threat to the stability of the government.
Because the more rigid it becomes, the more self-sustaining it becomes, the less the American people feel like they have a bargain here, the less they feel like their voices are heard, like they can push back against a one-way ratchet in terms of the federal government.
And that's where things kind of stand.
Now, the greatest indicator of this that maybe I've seen in my lifetime is the brand new story, courtesy of Bob Woodward in his new book.
So Bob Woodward and Robert Costa have a new book titled Peril.
And in this book, there's a bit of a shocking revelation.
The shocking revelation is that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, General Li Xiuquan, of the People's Liberation Army that the United States would not strike.
Apparently, he did this twice.
Apparently he was so fearful twice in the final months of the Trump administration that the president's action might spark a war with China, he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.
I guess at number one, you have to ask yourself, where did this story come from?
And where did the story come from?
Because apparently there's only two people on that phone call.
One is Mark Milley and the other is General Li Zhuoqiang of the People's Liberation Army.
Presumably Woodward didn't get this from the Chinese, which means that Mark Milley is bragging about this, which is not a shock because Mark Milley has a greatly inflated sense of both his own importance and of the historical moment.
Mark Milley was the one who was comparing January 6th to an actual Reichstag fire and suggesting the entire democracy was in danger, which of course wasn't true.
He has this kind of bizarre, Blown up sense of himself as the man standing in the gap, standing in the breach.
But even if you believe that, there are ways to resist presidential illegal orders.
And number one, you don't carry them out.
Number two, you can threaten to quit.
We actually have precedent for this during the Trump administration.
Even if it's not illegal, you can threaten to quit.
James Mattis did it several times before he actually quit.
The Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, You'll recall that Donald Trump wanted him to do particular things that he didn't want to do in Syria and Mattis just went to him and was like, I'm not doing that.
And then Trump backed down.
Well, Milley could have done the same thing.
He didn't.
He didn't even go to Congress.
Milley apparently went directly to the enemy.
He went directly to the Chinese government.
And he said to them, you know, this crazy guy in the White House, man, that guy's crazy.
And if he orders us to do anything militarily, even if it's illegal, I'm just not going to do it.
In fact, I will call you first.
I will call you first.
And then you wonder why so many conservatives worry about the quote-unquote deep state coup?
Because that sounds an awful lot like a deep state coup.
I mean, even Alexander Vindman, right?
The guy who is phoning in the Ukraine phone call, very anti-Trump.
Even he was like, this is insane.
Because it is.
Civilian control of the military is a bulwark of American republicanism.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so according to Bob Woodward's book, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Trump, General Mark Milley, called up the Head of the Chinese military, General Li Zhuocheng, and told him the United States would not strike.
One call, according to the Washington Post, took place on October 30th, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Trump.
The other took place January 8th, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.
The first call was prompted by Milley's review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack.
That belief, the author's right, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea and deepened by Trump's belligerent rhetoric toward China.
Milley apparently called up General Lee and said, quote, I want to assure you the American government is stable and everything is going to be OK.
We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.
In the book's account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S.
attack, stressing the rapport they'd established through a back channel.
General Lee, you and I have known each other for five years now.
If we're going to attack, I'm going to call you ahead of time.
It's not going to be a surprise.
That's insane.
We're not even talking about post-election at this point.
This is still pre-election.
This is before any of the January 6th stuff.
This is before any of the election fraud stuff.
None of which, by the way, justifies breaking the chain of command in illegal ways, which is apparently what Milley did.
To do this well... But again, this is even before any of that.
This is October 30th.
Now, I recall that period.
I recall October, November, December, January.
It wasn't that long ago.
Was that widespread talk about how the United States was going to enter a full-scale fighting war with the Chinese?
Was that even on the table?
Was anybody even discussing that?
Like, I feel like I would have heard about that given the fact that President Trump is a big devotee to cable news.
And cable news presumably would have been discussing that pretty rabidly if Trump were talking about it.
What were the actual possibilities that the Chinese thought that we were going to start a shooting war with a country with a billion humans in it?
Does anyone actually believe that?
Or is Milley just a delusional, thoroughly self-obsessed human being?
And is it insane?
I mean, that's insane that he called up the Chinese.
Even if you believed that, the element of surprise is a bit of a thing in a war.
Let's say that Trump had issued an actual legal order to fire on a Chinese boat in the South China Sea.
Is Milley actually going to warn the Chinese that we're about to do that?
Losing the fundamental element of surprise in a military conflict?
Also, the notion that Milley would have to call the Chinese is crazy.
Because again, we do have procedures to defy illegal orders in the military.
CNN reported on this back in September of 2018.
Based on another Bob Woodward book, actually.
Because a couple of years ago, there was a Bob Woodward book talking about how James Mattis was mouthing off about Trump and all of the rest of this.
But CNN reported at the time that all of the top U.S.
commanders would push back against an order from Trump for a nuclear strike if it were quote-unquote illegal.
General John Hyten, who is the top US nuclear commander, said, quote, I provide advice to the President.
He'll tell me what to do.
If it's illegal, guess what's going to happen?
I'm going to say, Mr. President, that's illegal.
Guess what he's going to do?
He's going to say, what would be legal?
And we'll come up with options of a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is.
That's the way it works.
It's not that complicated.
Hyten emphasized the US military has the obligation to follow only legal orders, including those entailing the launch of nuclear weapons.
Also, Air Force General Robert Keillor, who served as commander of U.S.
U.S. Strategic Command under Obama said there are layers of safeguards within the system designed to ensure any order is legal and proportionally appropriate.
Quote, U.S. nuclear forces operate under strict civilian control.
Only the president of the United States can order the employment of U.S. nuclear weapons.
This is a system controlled by human beings.
Nothing happens automatically.
CNN military analyst John Kirby right now, he's the spokesperson for the Pentagon.
But at that point, he was a military analyst for CNN.
He said that military judge advocates and general counsel are active participants in the decision-making process at virtually every level from the tactical to the strategic.
He said they help ensure political appointees and uniformed commanders fully understand and consider law of war principles as well as the dictates of congressional legislation before any final decision is reached regarding the use of armed force in defense of the nation, particularly during the planning of combat operations.
So in other words, is there any circumstance under which it would have been necessary for an American general to go to the Chinese and say, we're going to give you a heads up on a military attack?
How is that not borderline treason?
I mean, no matter how much I hate Trump, Let's say you're a Democrat.
Do you want that same logic being applied to Joe Biden?
Do you want the generals to start calling up targets of American military ire and being like, yeah, guys, you know, we're not going to obey any of those orders.
And if Biden threatens you, it's an empty threat.
In the second call, placed to assuage Chinese fears about the events of January 6th, Lee wasn't as easily assuaged.
Even after Milley promised him, quote, we are 100% steady, everything's fine, but democracy can be sloppy sometimes, Lee remained rattled.
Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, understood why.
The chairman, 62 at the time, chosen by Trump in 2018, believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election, the authors write, a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a phone call January 8th.
He agreed with her evaluation Trump was unstable according to a call transcript obtained by the authors.
Now, again, that's not illegal, right?
Milley is allowed to talk to Nancy Pelosi.
What he's not allowed to do is call up the Chinese and start conveying this stuff.
Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action.
The same day, he called the admiral overseeing U.S.
Indo-Pacific Command, the military responsible for Asia and Pacific, and recommended postponing military exercises, and the admiral complied.
Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order, but also that he, Milley, had to be involved.
which is a bit of a violation of the chain of command.
Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood in what he considered an oath. Milley went furthest in seeking to stave off a national security crisis, but his alarm was shared throughout the highest ranks of the administration, including CIA Director Gina Haspel, who told Milley, quote, we are on the way to a right-wing coup, a right-wing coup.
Okay.
Again, there was no institutional support for the January 6th rioters.
And in fact, it was a bunch of Republicans who signed off on the election in the states and in the federal government as well.
Now, all of this is deeply dangerous stuff.
As I'm suggesting, if you have an administrative bureaucracy, unelected officials who are actually making the policy of the United States in opposition to the elected leaders of the United States, you have on your hands a real threat to democracy, an actual coup.
The threat to democracy lies in unelected bureaucrats, not a part of the judicial branch or at least appointed and voted on, unelected bureaucrats making policy in defiance of their democratically elected bosses.
That's a serious problem.
And we have procedures for people saying they don't want to follow illegal orders.
What we don't have are procedures for you calling up a foreign power and trying to define foreign policy on your own as an appointee of the President of the United States in defiance of statute.
Millie needs to go, and he needs to go forthwith.
Maybe he needs to be prosecuted.
I mean, that's insane stuff.
And that would hold true regardless of who the President of the United States is.
Nonetheless, the hatred for Trump means, and this is where we are in our politics, hatred for Trump means that the Democratic left expects quote-unquote deep state actors to do this sort of stuff.
They expect people in the administrative bureaucracy to thwart Republicans.
This is why the ratchet only works one way.
And again, it's not only true when it comes to the military infrastructure.
It's true when it comes to OSHA.
It's true when it comes to the EPA.
It's true when it comes to the IRS.
The ratchet only works one way.
Because when a Republican is in office, an entire executive branch exists to thwart him.
And when a Democrat is in office, an entire executive branch exists to placate, assuage, and forward all of his policy proposals.
Here's Democratic Representative John Garamendi from California defending Milley's reported actions.
I'm talking about what General Milley did.
You think that that's legitimate?
That he would call a secret meeting and say, don't listen to the commander-in-chief, basically?
I believe that Milley would do that.
Now, did he do it?
Well, that remains to be seen.
But what I know of that general and his role as chief of staff is that he would call a meeting given the concerns of an unhinged president at that period of time.
Okay, so there they are.
Apparently this is all okay.
MSNBC's Barry McCaffrey, who of course is a general himself, he said, well, you know, it's fine.
He was just trying to stop World War III.
I think what General Milley was doing, and by the way, routinely, the chairman, the service chiefs, the joint combatant commanders routinely are in contact with their counterparts globally.
Part of the deterrence of unwanted combat I think he felt it important to not end up with a World War I start of a war through miscalculation on the part of the Chinese.
So again, I think we ought to be fortunate.
We got this Princeton grad, tremendous combat officer, extremely intelligent, law-based, trying to safeguard the transition to a duly elected President Biden administration.
Now, we do have diplomats.
We have diplomats who are available.
Why didn't he walk across the office, Milley, to folks in the State Department and say to the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, you know, there might be a miscalculation here.
You might want to call up the Chinese and assure them that there is no imminent military action.
The idea here is that Milley was working.
He was the man on the inside.
CNN's Lieutenant General Mark Hertling also defended Milley.
And I'm not sure how you defend the general who is calling up the enemy and trying to inform them about how he is going to essentially create the military policy on his own in defiance of the civilian leadership.
I think General Milley took some very prudent measures.
General Milley isn't going to call the head of the People's Liberation Army in China and say, hey, don't worry about it, everything's going on.
He's getting signals that other countries are concerned as well they should have been during this period of time.
They were all watching what was going on in the insurrection on the 5th of January.
So I think General Milley Didn't limit the president's power.
I think if he did, that would be certainly a civil military action of the highest measure and should be condemned.
But what he did was ensure the guardrails were in place.
So I give him high marks for this based on what's described in the book.
High marks.
OK, again, him going to members of the military brass and saying, OK, there's still a chain and here's how legalities work.
That's fine.
I really don't have a huge problem with that.
Whether it's called for or not, right?
That's that's within his purview.
I'm going to keep focusing on he called up the Chinese government.
Right after they'd unleashed, by the way, worldwide virus, he called up the Chinese government and told them about what America's military plans would or would not be.
This, of course, led President Trump to fire back.
Here was President Trump yesterday.
First of all, if it is actually true, which is hard to believe, that he would have called China and done these things and was willing to advise them of an attack or in advance of an attack, that's treason.
For him to say that I would even think about attacking China, I think he's trying to just get out of his incompetent withdrawal out of Afghanistan.
Okay, so Trump is not wrong about this.
And it does speak to the fact that once the bureaucracy is entrenched, it stays entrenched.
Which brings us to Afghanistan.
We'll get to that in just one moment because Americans are still trapped there.
We're now in like day 16, day 17 of Americans being trapped in Afghanistan with nobody on the ground over there.
We'll get to that in a second.
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That's www.magbreakthrough.com slash Shapiro for that 10% discount and use code Shapiro10 to save that 10%. Alrighty, we'll get to Afghanistan and the lack of accountability that is throughout the administrative state.
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So General Mark Milley, remember, he's part of a bureaucracy that no one will ever get fired.
No one is going to lose their job for incompetence so long as they carry out the wishes of a democratic president.
So, we have watched an extraordinarily botched operation in Afghanistan.
General Mark Milley, it is kind of amazing that Mark Milley called up The Chinese to assure them that we wouldn't do anything that offended their tender sensibilities while Trump was president.
Meanwhile, General Mark Milley and the entire Pentagon was working with the Biden administration to make nice with the Taliban.
That's that's really just wonderful and apparently droning randos.
That's exciting as well.
Rand Paul asked Secretary of State Tony Blinken yesterday about this because on the way out of Afghanistan, after the ISIS-K attack, which is like the special K of ISIS attack on American troops in Afghanistan while they were trying to evacuate folks, you'll recall that after that on the way out, there was a drone attack by the American military.
And according to the New York Times, we basically killed an Afghan translator and many members of his family, including children.
Rand Paul asked Secretary of State Tony Blinken, do you have any idea who he droned?
And Blinken's like, nope.
So, question, is anyone getting fired for that?
Like, what does it take to get fired in the Pentagon?
And if you can't get fired, who's actually in control?
That's the real question.
Maybe when a Democratic president, the answer is the Democratic president is in control, but when a Republican president is president, then the bureaucracy is in control.
Here is Senator Rand Paul with Tony Blinken.
The guy the Biden administration droned, was he an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?
The administration is, of course, reviewing that strike, and I'm sure that a full assessment will be forthcoming.
So you don't know if it was an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?
I can't speak to that, and I can't speak to that in this setting in any event.
So you don't know or won't tell us?
I don't know, because we're reviewing it.
Well, see, you'd think you'd kind of know before you off somebody with a Predator drone.
Yes.
I mean, sure.
Like, yeah.
I mean, that's kind of hard to argue with.
Meanwhile, Tony Blinken keeps saying, we didn't see this coming.
So then why are you still working?
Why are you still in office?
And the answer is, because if you are part of the Democratic blob, you can't lose your job for pretty much any reasons other than just kind of offending the president.
But other than that, you're going to stay there forever, no matter how incompetent you are.
And then when a Republican enters office, he's not going to fire any of these career staffers.
He's going to keep them there.
Because if he doesn't keep them there, then who's going to fill those gaps?
The answer is, whoever is elected the next Republican president needs to clean house.
And I mean mass firings.
I mean everybody goes.
I mean this place gets shut down top to bottom.
Here is Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
We had no idea.
By the way, everybody knew who was watching this for five seconds this was going to happen if you did this the way you did it.
And you didn't take a genius to figure this out.
I wrote a novel like five years ago in which the first chapter is this happening.
It wasn't because I was watching Afghanistan closely.
It's because it was patently obvious to anybody that if you withdraw all support for the Afghan military and hand the country back to the Taliban, bad crap was going to follow.
Here's Tony Blinken being an idiot.
We, the intelligence community, did not say that the countrywide collapse of all meaningful resistance would be likely to occur in a matter of days.
And you referenced Chairman Milley, as I did earlier.
Nothing that he saw, that I saw, that we saw, suggested that this government and security force would collapse in a matter of 11 days.
And you're right that I think we need to look back at all of this.
Oh, you need to look back at all of this, but has anybody been fired?
Will anybody be fired?
Senator Josh Hawley is asking that question.
Yesterday, he said that he's going to slow walk Joe Biden's foreign policy nominees until the top officials who oversaw all of this lose their jobs.
He says he's going to object to confirming nominees for state and defense by unanimous consent unless Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, and NSA Jake Sullivan all resign.
He says they should take responsibility for their failures.
But here's the thing.
None of them are going to resign because their failures are not their own.
They're Joe Biden's failures.
And if they'd happened under President Trump, they would have obstructing Trump's policy.
And then Trump had fired them.
There would have been a hue and cry that Trump was getting rid of career officials.
See, when Democrats get rid of career officials or termed officials, it's no big deal.
In fact, Joe Biden recently attempted to fire a bunch of Trump appointees to sort of non-partisan boards in the very end of his administration.
It included some folks like Kayleigh McEnany, but it also included some people like Lieutenant General, like General McMaster.
And Biden was like, I just don't like you, so I'm gonna try and fire you, even though you actually have terms, right?
These are not fireable positions.
And nobody in the media seemed to care very much about that.
Norms only exist when they can be used as a club against Republicans.
All of this is going to break the country.
It really is.
By the way, our intelligence folks, are they going to get fired?
Because apparently, intelligence experts are now saying Al Qaeda could reform inside Afghanistan.
They originally said it could reform within one to two years.
But apparently, Al Qaeda is already there, which we already knew.
So well done, everybody.
The reason that I keep coming back to this centralizing point about the administrative bureaucracy is because if the country breaks, it is going to be because people, there is no incentive structure for people to stay within the structure.
You have to give people something if you want them to remain inside a structure that takes 40% of their money, 30% of their money, and restricts every area of their life.
There has to be some guarantee on the other end.
And the guarantee on the other end cannot simply be that people you disagree with are going to govern every aspect of your life.
It is why people are seeing movement to red states as an escape.
They are seeing it as a way of avoiding blue state governance.
They're moving for a reason.
The sorting is happening.
And if the response by the Democrats and their friends in the bureaucracy is to tighten their grip, to harden their defenses, to become more sclerotic, to become less responsive, to cut off all the feedback loops, You're gonna break the thing.
You are.
And that is the direction that we are moving right now.
On everything from defense, to Afghanistan, to COVID.
The attempts to grip everything incredibly tightly are going to lead to the... Tommy Lasorda once said that coaching a baseball team was sort of like holding a dove.
You want to hold it tight enough that the dove doesn't escape, but you don't want to hold it so tight that you crush the dove.
You could say the federal government is sort of the same thing.
The goal of the federal government should be to be strong enough to maintain the union, but not strong enough to actually destroy the union.
And it seems as though we are moving very rapidly in the direction of strong enough to destroy the union.
And they'd rather crush the dove than allow the dove to breathe a little bit.
And the predictable result of that is not gonna, the tighter you grip, the more things are gonna break.
You're not creating stability, you're actually creating radical instability in this entire process.
And that radical instability is going to lead to a lot of very bad things.
It's not going to lead to an amicable breakup.
It's just not gonna be an amicable divorce.
The high likelihood is that things get uglier as time goes on.
Because in a desire for top-down dominance, you are alienating everybody, and when they have no place left to go, because you are using the federal government as the cram-down power, through the power of an unelected administrative bureaucracy, the only check apparently being the Supreme Court.
I mean, really, we now have two branches of the American government.
The administrative state and the Supreme Court, and that's it.
And if the Democrats simply pack the Supreme Court, that check goes away too.
Then I will say that the end of the American Republican experiment would then be at an end.
On that depressing note, we'll have an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show a little bit later on.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Nolsen Show.
That is available right now.
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The California recall effort fails, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley flirts with treason, and the funniest man in the world dies unexpectedly.
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