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Sept. 12, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:42
How America Forgot 9/11 | Ep. 1572
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Time Text
One generation after 9-11, the Taliban are in control of Afghanistan, and American leaders are labeling their fellow Americans their enemies.
Kamala Harris pledges to overthrow the filibuster and rips the Supreme Court, and Ukraine turns the tables on Russia.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, it has been 21 years since 9-11, and it seems like all of the lessons of 9-11 have been forgotten.
And this is not a rarity in human history.
Obviously, the distance between, for example, World War I and World War II was about 21 years.
It ended in 1918, World War II began in 1939.
And so the space of a generation is enough time for people to forget all of the key lessons that they learn from life-changing international events.
And 21 years, especially in the modern age, is an extraordinarily long time when it feels like every news cycle is about five and a half minutes long.
But for those of us who are defined by 9-11, for those of us who actually lived through 9-11, for those who remember the planes crashing into the towers, it was supposed supposed to be a redefining moment for the United States.
It was supposed to refocus us on some important lessons and that's why it's really important on 9-11 to actually remember the footage of it because if you don't remember where you were when 9-11 happened, if you don't remember how stunning it was to watch not one but two passenger airliners fly directly into the World Trade Centers and collapse the two most populous towers in New York City, then it really did not define you in the same way as it did for other people who watched it happen.
What truly is amazing is that a huge percentage of people who actually watched this happen in real time on national television or in person, God forbid in New York City, all those people, a lot of them have forgotten the lessons of 9-11 because as it turns out, politics is not stable.
Lessons that you learn have to be relearned over and over again.
So I want to go through some of the lessons of 9-11 and then demonstrate how we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them by the year 2022, which is a depressing thought because what it really does suggest is that we are inviting more aggression from our enemies.
So it was 846 in the morning when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
Here's what that sounded and looked like.
There's a firefighter, and you can see the plane just flying directly into the tower.
I mean, it was legitimately the most stunning thing I think anyone alive had ever seen.
And then, a few minutes later, obviously, the second plane hits the second World Trade Center tower.
I mean, it was just horrific and shocking.
It was something out of a horror movie, obviously.
The reason I show this is it's important to be reminded of what our enemies did.
And of course, you saw the towers collapsing.
One of the most frightening scenes in all of American history.
It's easy to forget this, which is amazing, considering it was unforgettable.
And this is not even the most brutal footage, obviously.
You see the towers collapsing, nearly 3,000 Americans dead.
Just horrific, horrific stuff, obviously.
We cut out, we didn't include some of the even more brutal footage of people leaping to their deaths.
From the 85th story of the World Trade Center.
It was unbelievable.
I mean, unbelievable was the word to use, because I think everybody in the nation was in a state of absolute shock over it.
And this was supposed to change how Americans thought about themselves, because after all, there was a feeling that had set in after the end of the Cold War, that basically all conflict was done, that international conflict was over, that the world was safe.
That international diplomacy was going to rule the roost from here on in.
That violence against Americans was absolutely unthinkable.
And then 9-11 happened and it really taught us a bunch of lessons that we were supposed to remember.
And so I want to talk about five of those lessons right now.
And we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them.
First, the world is smaller than you think.
Things that happen far away in lands that we do not know.
Those things impact the United States.
Economically.
In terms of military power, in terms of safety of Americans, these things really affect us.
Because after 9-11, after the end of the Cold War, the idea was, OK, well, we can sort of retrench, go back to a certain level of isolationism.
We cut our military spending.
We started treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than as an international policy problem.
We suggested that if the United States sort of withdrew within its own boundaries, that the world will police itself.
And that's not the way the world worked.
And that is a lesson that we learned on 9-11.
Is that the world is a very small place.
And so when you hear politicians on both sides of the aisle doing, and there's a traditional strain of American foreign policy thinking that says this, right?
That basically says, if the United States withdraws inside of its borders and doesn't get itself involved in world politics, then we'll be safe.
9-11 was a ringing rebuttal of that because that's pretty much what Bill Clinton had tried to do during the 1990s.
So much so that when apparently the American military had Osama bin Laden in its crosshairs, it was essentially called off during the Clinton administration.
The second lesson was that weakness, and mostly perceived weakness, in any form, economic, military, ideological, invites aggression.
If you read the manifesto of Osama Bin Laden after 9-11, his manifesto was all talk about how the United States was basically a paper tiger, had made a bunch of promises, had not fulfilled those promises, the United States would run from conflict.
After the United States withdrew from Somalia, after the Black Hawk Down incident, After the United States did essentially nothing after the Al Qaeda bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
After the United States did nothing in the aftermath of the bombing of the USS Cole by Al Qaeda.
The impression that was taken away by Osama Bin Laden and a lot of other people is that the United States is a paper tiger.
And that impression, again, was driven by the fact that we had decided to cut our military spending, that ideologically we were talking a lot about how global liberalism was naturally going to take precedence, it was going to take the fore, that this wasn't an oppositional world anymore, that we had reached the end of history, and the infusion of liberal democratic ideals was going to just be natural throughout the world.
And 9-11 rejected all of that.
The idea was, if you actually want to protect America, you're going to have to be strong militarily and strong ideologically.
You're going to have to have the wherewithal and the ideological strength to withstand things like long-term commitments.
Which brings us to the third point here, which is that culture and institutions can't be imposed except with extraordinary levels of investment in time.
This is the lesson that we mostly learn in the aftermath of 9-11 when we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.
And there the lesson was, okay, well, if you're going to do it, you're going to have to actually do it.
You can go in, you can put a dictator in there.
That dictator can clean up some of the mess.
Eventually, that dictator will turn against you.
You'll have to replace him.
That is one way to do American foreign policy.
And traditionally speaking, that is the way that most regimes across the world have done their foreign policy.
The British Empire, for example, either directly administered its colonies or it found sort of friendly dictators to administer its colonies.
And then when those dictators went rogue, they killed them and replaced them.
That is not unique to the British Empire.
That was true of virtually every empire.
It's been true since ancient times.
This is how you control it.
Go back to the Roman Empire.
This is how they controlled their empires.
That is one way of doing it.
The other way of doing it is the sort of idealistic way that the so-called neocon way of doing foreign policy, which is we're going to go into Afghanistan.
We're going to go into Iraq.
And naturally, democracy will take root and bloom because there is a deep desire for human freedom in the human heart.
And not just human freedom, the sort of freedom that the West likes.
Individualistic, authentic, authentic human freedom.
Sort of atomistic human freedom.
The sort of freedom where the things that matter most in your life are how much property you can own or what kind of sex life you can have.
Things that the West holds very, very dear in terms of individual rights.
For a lot of the world, that's not how they view freedom.
Both, I think, unfortunately.
But those sorts of institutions don't just magically take root.
You actually have to sit there for In the case of Japan, generations.
You have to sit there, in the case of South Korea, for generations.
And you have to be willing to actually expend the money and keep the soldiers over there.
And that was the lesson of Afghanistan and Iraq, was that if you seem halfway about this thing, if the idea is you want to transform these countries into footprints for liberal democracy, and you're talking about some of the most backwards regions of the world, You're talking about places with barbaric tribalism as the governing philosophy for entire swaths of these countries?
These countries are new creations, by the way.
I mean, Afghanistan was never a unified polity.
Iraq was not a unified polity for an extraordinary period of time.
People tend to forget that the nations of the Middle East We're not talking about Israel here.
The left likes to talk about how Israel was established 1947-1948, so it's new.
India and Pakistan were not established until 1947-1948 as separate polities.
The separation of India and Pakistan wasn't until 1948.
The idea of a Saudi Arabian government didn't exist until the 1920s.
So these are, in terms of human history, relatively new polities.
In fact, most nations seem to be somewhat new.
The nation of Italy, for example.
The idea of Italy as a unified country is something that crops up in the 19th century, so I think that we forget sort of historical context for how most people lived for most of time, which was in these tribal, small, autonomous regions.
But if you're going to implant the idea of sort of a national government that presides in democratic fashion, that is a long-term thing you have to do.
And the West didn't take that seriously.
It thought it had taken it seriously, but as Neil Ferguson pointed out in his book, American Colossus, about the idea of American empire, he said that he was in favor of the war in Iraq, but he said he didn't think the American people would have the stomach to actually do the thing.
That was the third lesson.
The fourth lesson was that you have a lot in common with your fellow Americans, more than you think you do, and a lot more than you do with your enemies.
And this is something that the American people, as we will see in a second, seem to have forgotten.
We tend to talk a lot in the United States about the gaps between Florida and New York, between Texas and California.
And those gaps absolutely exist.
These are serious ideological gaps.
And those gaps seem to be getting wider in the United States.
Whatever those gaps are, those gaps are not nearly as wide as the gap between, say, Texas and Afghanistan, or California and Afghanistan.
And 9-11 was a reminder that the enemies of the American people do not think like Americans, that whatever disagreements we have with each other in the West, and they are very serious and they have real consequences, The gaps between the disagreements in the West and disagreements between people in the West and places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
Or Iran.
These are disagreements in kind, okay?
These are not disagreements of degree.
I mean, these are differences in kind.
Over time, it may be that the disagreements in the West come to resemble the sort of tribalistic differences that we see elsewhere.
But, at least on 9-11, you know, people in Texas didn't look at what was happening in New York and think to themselves, that's a foreign country, I don't really care.
They thought to themselves, that's my fellow Americans who are dying in those towers.
Which is why you saw a mass upswing in the number of people who joined the military, for example.
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The final lesson that we learned in the aftermath of 9-11 was that our enemies do not think like we do.
That we think that when we are spreading liberal democracy or economic progress, that our enemies are going to be happy.
That when we bring additional material benefit to people around the world, that this is something they are going to appreciate.
And what we learned on 9-11 is that that's not actually the case.
Our enemies don't think like we do.
Our enemies don't have the same priorities that we do.
And when you read, for example, there's this weird thing that just happened where if you read Osama bin Laden's actual manifesto on 9-11, he talks in terms that sort of appeal to some religious conservatives and some terms that definitely appeal to the left.
And he leads off by saying, why did 9-11 happen?
Well, because Israel is bad and because the left funds Israel, which sounds very much like a left-wing talking point.
Sounds like Noam Chomsky.
And then, when it comes to domestic policy, he says, why do we hate you guys?
We hate you guys because of your sexual libertinism.
So a lot of people on the SoCon right were like, okay, well, he agrees with us on that.
Well, but he doesn't agree with any of you on any of this.
His holistic worldview is a replacement of all of the West with Islam, with a Sharia hardcore version of Islam.
He says this clearly in the manifesto.
What was amazing to watch in the aftermath of 9-11 is that people actually understood this.
Regardless if they agreed with Osama Bin Laden about Israel, or regardless of whether they agreed with Osama Bin Laden about, say, gay marriage, Osama Bin Laden was preaching a form of life that was radically opposed to the generalized worldview of the West, and now that seems to have broken down here in the West.
And that's a real problem.
Okay, so, fast forward 21 years.
It's been a full generation.
And we've learned these lessons, we thought, right?
The world's a very small place.
You can't just surrender.
You can't just run away from it.
Weakness, economic, military, ideological, invites aggression.
And particularly the appearance of weakness invites aggression.
You have a lot more in common with your fellow Americans than you do with enemies of the United States.
Culture and institutions cannot be imposed except with extraordinary levels of investment and time.
And your enemies do not think like you do.
All these were lessons of 9-11 and we seem to have forgotten nearly all of them.
So for example, Joe Biden, there's something particularly galling about Joe Biden.
The President of the United States gave an address, we do this every year, we have these ceremonies commemorating 9-11.
But when the person who is speaking apparently does not remember any of the lessons of 9-11, and in fact has effectuated policy to make another 9-11 significantly more possible, when he speaks, it just rings hollow.
Here was Joe Biden on 9-11 yesterday.
21 years ago, 21 years and we still kept our promise.
Never forget.
We'll keep the memory of all those precious lives stolen from us.
2,977 at Ground Zero in New York and Shanksville where my wife is speaking now in Pennsylvania.
184 of them here at the Pentagon.
And I know for all those of you who've lost someone, 21 years is both a lifetime and no time at all.
And when he says this sort of stuff, I would take it a lot more seriously if he had not presided over giving the country of Afghanistan back to the very people who presided over 9-11, including Al Qaeda.
It's an amazing thing.
You want to talk about a full-scale forgetting of 9-11?
How about we then fought a war legitimately directed against the people who attacked the United States and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, and Joe Biden just gave the country back to them?
There was an incident over the weekend in which a Blackhawk helicopter went down in Afghanistan, an American Blackhawk helicopter, in a Taliban training exercise, because the Taliban took over all of our materiel when we left.
And lest we forget, it was only about a year ago that Joe Biden was trying to triumphantly champion his pullout from Afghanistan.
Well, the pullout from Afghanistan was a full-scale disaster area.
People attempting to jump on wheel wells to escape the Taliban who had been rushing into the cities.
Joe Biden's decision to withdraw all air support from Afghanistan, to withdraw all military advisors from Afghanistan.
That was Joe Biden's decision.
It's that first lesson that the world is a very small place.
And when you do this sort of thing, it has real spillover ramifications.
I mean, it had immediate ramifications in Afghanistan where 13 American service members were immediately murdered.
But it's not.
You don't get to run away from the world.
The very first lesson of 9-11, the world is a very small place.
Forgotten by Joe Biden nearly immediately.
How about weakness in any form invites aggression?
Well, I mean, it wasn't long between the pullout from Afghanistan and Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
He was obviously in the belief that the United States was not going to defend its allies.
After all, we had poured billions, tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan.
And then we just decided we were going to pull out.
And that made them the latest American ally for us to essentially abandon.
Weakness breeds aggression.
Joe Biden apparently doesn't see that, doesn't care about it.
Well, it wasn't something that made any sense to him.
He's forgotten about it.
It doesn't matter.
We've gone back to a time before 9-11.
And so, unfortunately, when people forget lessons of life, they tend to have to relearn those the hard way.
Meanwhile, you have people like Pramila Jayapal who are tweeting out about 9-11.
Quote, today we remember the 2,996 people who were killed on 9-11 and all those who lost their lives while serving our country in the forever wars that followed.
And this is the language of the Democrats.
Okay, so when Pramila Jayapal tweets that, number one, this is the second straight year where she said 2,996.
What you will remember is that 2,977 Americans were killed, 19 hijackers died committing suicide while attempting to murder Americans.
This is the second straight year she's included the hijackers and the number of dead from 9-11.
I'll assume that's unintentional and that all she's doing is just Wikipedia-ing the number of people who died in 9-11.
But, you know, that is something that she should absolutely correct.
But it's the broader point that she's making that is telling.
She says that 9-11 is when we remember people who died in the forever wars, these quote-unquote useless wars.
Well, it's easy to say.
And one of the great ironies of history, when you read enough history, is no one ever gets credit for the prevention.
You only get credit for the cure.
And what I mean by that is that in the health care field, people will say an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure, meaning that the idea is if you can prevent somebody from getting the disease, that's significantly better than a person getting the disease and then you having to cure the disease.
If you never become obese and you don't have diabetes, that's a lot better.
Exercising now is a lot better than getting the diabetes and then having to deal and treat the diabetes.
But when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to politics, preventing the bad thing from happening is the thing that nobody sees.
So if you spend 20 years fighting wars, that there's not another 9-11 and then there isn't another 9-11, people tend to forget that 9-11 is a possibility.
And instead what they do is they say, oh, well, look at what we're doing over here.
Look at all the resources we're spending over here.
Look at all the wasteful resources we're spending over here.
Well, because we don't have the counterfactual because the counterfactual didn't take place.
There wasn't.
I mean, I don't know.
Again, people don't remember 9-11.
The assumption in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 is that it was only the beginning.
There was talk about the possibility of, for example, a suitcase bomb being brought into New York City, right?
A nuke.
There was talk about the possibility of a large-scale biological attack.
Remember, right after this, there were a bunch of anthrax attacks in the United States.
There was a lot of concern about further terror attempts.
And the assumption now is that, oh, well, it's just a one-off.
They never had the capacity, that this was sort of unique.
But that was not the assumption in the wake of 9-11.
In the wake of 9-11, the assumption was we're going to get one of these every year.
Minimum.
That'd be very easy for the terrorists to actually kill an enormous number of Americans.
We spent extraordinary resources to prevent that.
And then it was largely prevented.
So does that mean that the threat never existed?
Or that we overestimated the threat?
Or does it mean that we actually did some stuff in our own blundering way that prevented more attacks from occurring?
But we've decided that it was the former, that it was really, we just miss, we underestimate, basically we should have just gone to sleep after 9-11 and pretended that it was one-off and if a few thousand Americans get killed every 20 years, well I guess that's no big deal.
Because after all, you know, the world is a big place.
It's not a small place, it's a big place.
And stuff that happens far away doesn't affect us.
And after all, we can be as weak as we want and nobody's going to bother us.
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Okay, one of the other lessons of 9-11, obviously, is that we are supposed to be part of the same polity, right?
We are the same people.
Everyone who's live on 9-11 remembers that people got the American flags.
They started waving them for the first time in my lifetime.
Everybody sort of in unified fashion started waving the American flag.
They started putting American flag decals on their cars and they started getting the window flags to put on their own cars.
And then if you lived in L.A.
as I did, over the course of time, you saw gradually as this happened, it was kind of a unique visual reminder that people had forgotten the lessons of 9-11.
The American flag was then gradually replaced in L.A.
by the Lakers flag.
A few years in, people started taking down the American flag and they replaced the car window American flag with other flags and other priorities.
And that happened pretty quickly.
So now there's a sort of revisionist history that you're seeing presented by, I would say, the Democrats and the left in the media, which is that American unity is being undermined by the Republicans.
It is worthwhile remembering that this thing got very political very quickly.
It was only about a year after 9-11, I think it was within the year, that Hillary Clinton was on the floor of the Senate holding up a newspaper and shouting, what did Bush know and when did he know it?
This is after the revelation that there had been a national security document that had been shown to Consolita Rice that essentially said that bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States and that he wanted to hijack an airplane.
Now, what that memo never said is that they were planning on actually hijacking airplanes and flying them into American towers.
What it said is that they thought it was going to be a hijacking just like any other terrorist hijacking.
There was a plan to hijack these airplanes and then use them in order to free other terrorists who were being held in American custody.
But the media and the Democrats immediately decided to jump on this because Bush's approval rating was in the 80s at the time.
And so Hillary Clinton got up on the floor of the Senate and suggested that essentially Bush knew what was going on.
DNC Chairman Howard Dean said on local radio that Bush was, quote, warned ahead of time by the Saudis.
The New York Times did admit that the briefing didn't point to any specific time and place, but printed in like big block letters across the front page of the New York Times that basically the Bush administration had known and they had blown it.
So the unity around this blew up pretty much immediately.
There was never a ton of unity around 9-11.
It lasted for about five seconds.
But now, of course, you have the Democratic Party essentially saying that if 9-11 happened now, that it would all fall apart.
Now, again, that's a bit of revisionist history.
We really didn't stick together very, very long at all.
But one of the key factors in us not sticking together very long was politicians like Hillary Clinton, who again was senator from New York at the time.
Here is Hillary Clinton over the weekend, asked about whether elected officials would sort of unify in the wake of a 9-11 today.
And she's saying she's not sure.
I mean, she forgets that they didn't unify for very long in the wake of 9-11 the first time.
The United States is resolute, and we are going to support the president.
Just listening to that, it is such a striking reminder of how all of America's elected officials really genuinely put party aside and came together after those attacks.
Would that be possible today?
Well, I hope that it will be.
And I give President Biden a lot of credit for trying to continue to reach out to people while still sounding the alarm about the threats to our democracy.
Okay, it's just nonsense.
I'm sorry, it's just nonsense.
First of all, American policy has always been pretty fractious.
But beyond that, if we're talking about, you know, the splitting apart of the American polity, if we're talking about labeling your fellow Americans the enemies, the simple fact is that the Democratic Party is doing that a lot these days.
I mean, Joe Biden gave an entire blood-red Independence Hall speech in which he essentially suggested that half the country were enemies of the Republic.
Hillary Clinton used 9-11 as a prop over the weekend to talk about the quote-unquote extremism of any kind in the United States.
Whatever you think of the rioters of January 6th, the notion that these people were on the level of what happened on 9-11 is just historically benighted.
It's insipid.
The terrorists of 9-11 sought to not only overthrow the democracy of the United States, but to replace it with a sharia law state in which women would be pushed into absolute subjugation.
They wished to kill as many Western Americans as possible.
I mean, there's no comp.
I mean, these are just not comparable.
But here was Hillary Clinton making that comparison over the weekend at the same time decrying the divisions in American politics.
You can't do both.
We rebuilt New York.
We have done our best to take care of the families that lost so much on that terrible day.
And we have also, I think, been reminded about How important it is to try to deal with extremism of any kind, especially when it uses violence to try to achieve political and ideological goals.
I mean, the comparison between what happened on January 6th and 9-11 is wild.
That is a wild comparison.
January 6th is something that I decried because I thought that, frankly, it was an act of despicable Nastiness to invade the United States Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election results.
That was crazy criminal behavior by a select few people who by the way Participated in the kind of violence that landed them in jail en masse.
Also, they didn't actually kill anyone that day.
It was not 9-11.
Pretending it was 9-11 is just... I mean, it was far closer to the riots of 2020 than it was to 9-11.
These are not remotely comparable.
But the Democrats decided to do that yesterday.
So this idea that you hold more in common with your fellow American than you do with America's enemies, apparently that's been completely forgotten in the United States.
Apparently the idea is that your real enemy is the person who lives next door to you.
And when we look at 9-11, we're not supposed to see the reflection of radical Islam, which, by the way, is still a threat to Western ideals all over the world, including in Iran, where Joe Biden is attempting to now cut a deal with the Mullahs, the greatest terror spreaders on planet Earth.
The real enemy is the guy who lives next door to you who flies the Trump flag.
Here's Mark Warner comparing Republican protesters from January 6th to 9-11 terrorists.
I was in the middle of a political campaign and suddenly the differences with my opponent seemed very small in comparison.
And our country came together.
In many ways, we defeated the terrorists because of the resilience of the American public, because of our intelligence community.
And we are safer, better prepared.
The stunning thing to me is here we are 20 years later, and the attack on the symbol of our democracy was not coming from terrorists, but it came from literally insurgents attacking the Capitol on January 6th.
Again, that is a clear and overt attempt to compare 9-11 to 1-6, and those are not the same thing.
They are just not.
Especially because the democratic idea here is to broaden out January 6th to include all Republicans.
If you voted for Trump in 2020, if you'd consider voting for Trump again in 2024, if you're somebody who believes that Roe versus Wade was wrongly decided, if you're somebody who believes that the United States should allow for religious freedom, That counters prevailing left-wing social orthodoxy.
If you're one of those people, then you're a MAGA extremist in league with 1-6.
And 1-6 is just like 9-11.
So that lesson that we learned immediately after 9-11, which is that Americans are not your enemies.
Americans are your friends against the real enemies out there.
That's gone.
I mean, that is long gone at this point.
Here is Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the United States over the weekend, talking about letting extremists undermine.
Again, they talk about their fellow Americans the same way that Bush talked about Al Qaeda after 9-11.
As the President and our President made clear in Philadelphia last week, the threats we face as a nation are great.
Threats to our freedom.
Threats to our very democracy.
And we need to speak truth about that.
And so today, we all, by coming together, reaffirm that we refuse to let extremist so-called leaders dismantle our democracy.
She sounds like she's talking about Osama Bin Laden.
Is she not?
I mean, that is rhetoric that is identical to the rhetoric that was used by politicians of both parties in the aftermath of 9-11.
Which is truly wild.
So that lesson has been completely lost, right?
That we have to at least have a unified front against the bad guys out there.
Apparently the bad guys are the people who just go into the voting booth next door and vote the way that is other than yours.
By the way, I think it is worthwhile at this point to debunking the idea that opposition to democracy exists on only one side of the aisle.
There's a poll out from Axios today.
It's kind of a fascinating poll with a bunch of interesting implications talking about how many people generally are warm toward What we would say are anti-institutional democratic tendencies in the United States.
And this is true nearly everywhere.
Most people see politics as an extension of war by other means.
We do politics.
You draw, draw so you don't have to fight, fight.
In the words of Winston Churchill.
Except domestically.
That basically politics is a way that we avoid actual armed conflict with one another.
But because people view it that way, as opposed to, we have a shared set of broader ideals that require us to vote on them, and we have to have checks and balance to protect fundamental rights, which is the way the founders saw it, which is how you should see it in a unified polity.
If you see politics as merely war by other means, then what if you lose?
If you lose, then you start to look at the institutions and say, those institutions are my enemy.
And unfortunately, a broad swath of people, I think this is exist.
I don't think this is unique to America in 2022.
I think this exists across nearly every democracy, but it is very striking.
poll statistics showing how many people in the United States would rather win than sort of preserve the institutions.
And again, this is a bipartisan problem in the United States.
So for example, in this poll, people were asked, are strong unelected leaders better than weak elected ones?
Now there are a couple ways to read that question, right?
One is, is democracy better than dictatorship in all cases?
And honestly, it would be, you'd be hard pressed to say that democracy is better than dictatorship in literally every case.
I mean, there have been democracies in which Hamas is elected, right?
There's a democratic election in the Gaza Strip and a terrorist group got elected.
There have been democracies where truly evil people get elected.
And there have been dictatorships in which certain human rights were actually upheld, for example, Singapore.
So, to pretend that this is like an easy, universal thing, that democracy always, every time, is better than dictatorship, it wasn't better during the Arab Spring.
They tried some democracy in Egypt and it ended with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge.
So, again, that is not saying that, broadly speaking, democracy is not better than dictatorship.
Broadly speaking, democracy is, of course, better than dictatorship, as Winston Churchill said.
Democracy is the worst system except for all of the others.
But, there are a couple ways to read this.
So, way one to read this is, would you prefer a dictator who agrees with you to a democratically elected leader In your own system, who disagrees with you, right?
That's one way to read it, which is a real threat to democracy.
The other way to read it is, is it always true that a democratically elected leader, even if he is weak and terrible, is better than a strong, powerful, centralized figure?
And unsurprisingly, an enormous number of Americans on both sides of the aisle actually are warm toward the idea of a strong centralized power.
That is not a shock.
And Woodrow Wilson was very close to a dictator in the United States.
FDR was very close to a dictator in the United States.
Like people are very warm for dictatorial figures, just generally speaking.
Demagoguery will get you a long way in any country.
That's true in the United States right now.
Unsurprisingly, that favor, that poll, 42% of Republicans say that strong unelected leaders are better than weak elected ones.
And some people on the left are going to say, well, that means people are talking about Trump.
They'd rather have Trump as a dictator than Joe Biden as an elected leader.
It's also quite possible that what they mean by this is that Joe Biden is so weak that he's endangering the Republic and he's being out-competed by dictators abroad.
That, again, is not a unique thought in human history.
33% of Democrats agree, by the way.
So if you if you are a believer that democratic institutions are more important than the character and quality of an individual leader.
No matter where you are, there will always be a significant percentage of people in a democracy who disagree with that.
But is that a threat to democracy?
Well, it's certainly something we ought to take into consideration when we actually elect leaders.
We ought to elect leaders who are capable of doing the job and are strong in performance of their constitutional duties.
It turns out the best leader is a strong elected leader, not either a strong dictator or a weak elected leader.
The best is a strong elected leader, not in the sense of centralizing power, but in the sense of doing his duty.
OK, another question on the poll, and it just shows the flip side.
Presidents should be able to remove judges whose decisions go against the national interest.
This this question, frankly, seems to me a lot more specific than strong and elected leaders are better than weak elected ones.
Right, but.
Let's let's pretend that the questions are adjacent or equivalent.
42% of Democrats say that a president should simply be able to remove a judge she doesn't like, which is that's a really insane step.
By the way, 35% of Republicans agree.
Sorry, 35% total agree.
29% of Republicans agree.
Sorry, 35% total agree, 29% of Republicans agree.
So those are big numbers.
Basically, now you're getting into the water where at least one third of Americans just kind of like dictatorship.
And that's scary.
38% total of Americans say the government should side with the majority over ethnic or religious minority rights.
So the idea of rights should just not exist.
You should have a French Revolution style mobocracy, according to at least 38% of Americans.
So when people say that democracy is in danger from just the right side of the aisle, understand that that's not actually true.
It's always, you know, on a knife's edge, which is why you have to have people who act within the confines of institutions.
And so when you talk about the undermining of democracy, as the left has been doing so much lately, they should remember that when they undermine institutional trust, They are undermining the system under which we live.
And it's that system that preserves the idea of democracy.
Well, if it feels like America is on the verge of something bad, that's kind of economically true.
Inflation has a long way to go to get back to pre-pandemic levels.
Interest rates are going to continue to rise.
The Federal Reserve is trying to contain that inflation.
That means the economy is probably going to enter a fairly Significant recession?
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Okay, so we are talking about the undermining of institutional trust in the United States.
And again, the lessons of 9-11.
If you are talking about American unity in the face of an aggressive, bad world, and the idea that you have something in common with your fellow Americans, what you shouldn't do is spend your time actually undermining the institutions.
Everybody, when it comes to Trump on the left, the suggestion is always that Donald Trump is the killer, when in reality Donald Trump seems to be more of a symptom than the disease.
That's not to say that Donald Trump hasn't done damage to our institutions.
He certainly has.
But the idea that Donald Trump is the chief threat to American institutions is just silliness.
It's just not real.
I mean, Donald Trump as the chief threat to America's institutions is not a reality.
Not when you have the Democrats who proclaim that they are all in favor of democratic institutions fundamentally undermining American institutions.
So, for example, How much confidence do you have in the Supreme Court?
I think this is an activist court.
What does that mean?
activist Supreme Court for overturning Roe versus Wade. Boy is she terrible at this.
How much confidence do you have in the Supreme Court?
I think this is an activist court.
What does that mean?
It means that we had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body as an extension of what we have decided to be the privacy rights to which all people are entitled.
And this court took that constitutional right away.
Okay, for 50 years in this country, there was a right established in Plessy v. Ferguson for railroad cars to segregate.
Then it was taken away in Brown v. Board.
I'm sorry, but the establishment of a fake right by the Supreme Court does not mean the Supreme Court cannot later overrule the establishment of that fake right.
There is no right to abortion in the Constitution of the United States.
But again, you want to talk about the undermining of the American judicial system?
That would be it right there from Kamala Harris.
And that poll shows 42% of Democrats believe the president should simply be able to remove judges who disagree with him.
Meanwhile, you have Kamala Harris, who is a friend of democracy, saying that we have to ditch the filibuster entirely.
We need to make sure that you're able to ram through whatever you want with 51 votes in the Senate.
Our president has said he will not let the filibuster get in the way.
If the Senate, through a majority vote, votes to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, You know what that means?
In the midterms, we need to hold on to the Senate and get two more.
And then we can put into law the protections of Roe v. Wade.
Everything is on the line when you think about the millions of women and people in America who care about them, who understand the significance of protecting a woman's right to make decisions about her own body instead of her government telling her what to do.
52 Senate seats or more.
Legislative filibuster gone or just on this issue?
The president has been clear on this issue and on a very important issue in addition to that important issue, which is voting rights.
Okay, so basically everything they want to ram through, they're just going to kill the filibuster.
If they declare an issue important enough, they're going to say they can ram it through with a simple majority and Kamala Harris being the deciding vote, right?
50 plus 1.
I mean, she's openly bragging about the fact that she's not doing anything in bipartisan fashion.
She says that she's the vice president who's been the deciding vote the most times and she's bragging about this as though this is a bipartisan presidency that cares deeply about democratic institutions.
Uh, no.
In our first year in office, some of the historians here may know I broke John Adams' record of casting the most tie-breaking votes in a single term.
So funny!
How about that?
I, with a bare majority, rammed things through bipartisanship.
Meanwhile, I got Al Franken, who's openly doubting the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
Don't worry, guys, democracy is in safe hands with the Democrats.
The legitimacy of the court was undermined when they wouldn't take up Merrick Garland.
And you'll remember that McConnell said it was because it was during election year.
And you remember Lindsey Graham pledging that if a vacancy came open during election year in 20 that he wouldn't vote for, they wouldn't take up a nominee.
They've stolen two seats.
The one that Merrick Garland Uh, wasn't given a hearing for and the one that Coney Barrett was, uh, where she was seated a week before the election.
That destroyed the legitimacy of the court.
There is no legitimacy to the court, according to Al Franken.
Don't worry, these are the great defenders of democracy.
By the way, Kamala Harris was actually asked about, you know, you guys keep saying that the right and people who disagree with you are threatening democracy.
So why do you keep your party, why do they keep backing election deniers in elections on the Republican side of the aisle to run against Democrats?
What's the deal?
And so she has to dodge.
Here's Kamala Harris trying to bob and weave as though she has any capacity to do so and meet the press over the weekend.
When you see the Democratic Party and some parts of the party funding ads to promote some of these election deniers in primaries, whether it's Michigan, the high profile race there, Illinois, Colorado, New Hampshire, it looks like a cynical, a little bit cynical.
Would you have done this?
Is this something you'd be comfortable with?
I'm not gonna tell people how to run their campaigns, Chuck.
I ran statewide for Attorney General, re-election, won both times for Senate.
won that race and I know that it is best to let a candidate along with their advisors, let them make the decision based on what they believe is in the best interest of their state.
Oh, okay, so she's not going to deny propping up people she says are an actual threat to the Republic of the United States. Again, the lessons of 9-11 are way in the rearview mirror, which means that we are setting ourselves up for a bruising.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Ukraine actually pushing Russia back, what that means globally speaking.
Plus, we are going to get to Hillary talking about her love for Megan Thee Stallion.
Yes, you are Thee Stallion.
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