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Nov. 28, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:00
Is China On The Brink Of Revolution? | Ep. 1618
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A white paper revolution breaks out in China.
Elon Musk says he'd back Ron DeSantis for president, and the narrative shifts from inflammatory rhetoric to gun control after Colorado's mass shooting.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, we could be in the middle of a world-shaking moment.
There's not just one, but two authoritarian regimes that seem to be teetering at least a little bit.
And here's the thing to remember about authoritarian regimes.
They don't just fall.
In order for an authoritarian regime to fall, typically what you have to have are society-wide strikes.
You have to have all of civil society basically decide they are not going to participate any longer.
In the game of going out and doing their business, going out doing their jobs, going and teaching at school.
They have to shut down all of society in order to topple an authoritarian dictator because that is the only way, presumably, to get the military on their side.
Because in the end, authoritarianism relies on the power of a military in order to prop it up.
If you look at the history of authoritarian countries that have fallen, the reason authoritarian countries fall, typically speaking, is because there comes an impasse where civil society and the military are directly at odds and the military has to decide whether to open fire on civil society and just start slaughtering tens of thousands of people, or whether they're going to topple the person in power and put in place somebody else.
This is true whether you're talking about Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011 or whether you're talking about Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.
Whenever an authoritarian dictator falls, that has to happen because there is such society-wide civil strife that the military is called into action.
The military looks at it and they say, you know, we can't do this.
Either we actually agree with the citizenry and we are not going to fire on our own citizens, or there are just too many people out there who oppose us for us to actually overcome them in the bloodshed would just be too much.
And that's always a possibility in a very, very large country, because the fact is, no matter how powerful the military, unless you're willing to nuke your own citizenry, the fact is the military always represents a very small percentage of the general population.
So when you look at civil unrest in places like China, the question is how big it will become.
Now, obviously, we've seen civil unrest in China before under the authoritarian Maoist regime.
We have seen before in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which ended with the slaughter of more than 10,000 people, presumably, and many, many people were murdered, including so-called Tank Man, right?
The report, they've never found out who Tank Man was, but the famous picture of the man standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square.
They don't know who he was.
The assumption is that he was either imprisoned for the rest of his life or that he was killed by the Chinese regime.
And it required full-scale military crackdown in the middle of China in order to bring the regime back into control in 1989.
What we're watching in China right now is something that could, could theoretically, flourish into a broader movement in China.
And if that happens, You could be looking at the beginning of the end.
He's very optimistic, obviously.
The beginning of the end of the Xi Jinping regime.
And that would presumably be because not only of the COVID crackdowns, which we'll talk about in a moment, but the fact that Xi Jinping has basically thrown away the one promise that his predecessors made.
His predecessors essentially made a promise.
Yes, we will be authoritarian.
Yes, we will be quote-unquote communist.
But our communism will really be authoritarianism laid over in infrastructure that is more private property based.
We're not going to go back to Mao actually collectivizing all the farms and forcing you to melt down all of your machinery into lumps of metal to create steel.
We're not going to do that sort of thing.
We're going to allow you to have your own family plot.
We're going to allow you to have a job.
Yeah, you'll have to be a loyal member of a communist party.
Regime, you're going to have to be an apparatchik, but there's always the possibility that you're going to become part of the burgeoning Chinese middle class.
And that was the promise of capitalism or really state sponsored mercantilism, because the way that China works is they steal a bunch of technology from abroad and then they sponsor a bunch of quote unquote private industries at home.
And then they have those industries manufacture up the wazoo, for example, in order to create comparative advantage.
And in doing so, they broaden the financial base for some of the country.
So at least China has been able to say since 1980 that they've gotten half a billion people out of poverty.
But Xi Jinping has moved in precisely the opposite direction.
So he's re-authoritarianizing the entire Chinese economy.
He's now grabbing more centralized control.
He's cracking down on companies.
He's creating harsher trade policy.
He's also burdened with an extraordinary debt level because basically when Xi came into office, he decided that he was going to prop up a Chinese real estate scam where they would build empty cities using the savings of their own people in order to quote unquote create jobs.
And in doing so, they had to borrow a ton of money.
And so China's economy is entirely upside down.
So you have economic turmoil in China.
You have COVID turmoil in China.
You have Xi, who has declared himself president for life.
And now you're starting to see unrest break out in the street.
So according to the United Press International, protests continued across China over the weekend in a show of defiance as anger over President Xi Jinping's draconian COVID-19 policies boiled over into calls for greater freedom.
Images on social media and international news outlets showed citizens holding up blank sheets of paper Symbolizing the heavy-handed censorship the government imposes to stifle any dissent.
This has been called already the white paper revolution because basically everybody in China is now saying, or at least the people who are protesting are saying, we can't even get our information out to you.
So this is actually quite clever.
We know that you can't really censor a white piece of paper.
There's nothing for you to censor right there.
And so we will just hold up this blank piece of paper demonstrating that you know what we would say if we could say it, but we can't say it.
So you know what we're saying.
Hundreds of people in the financial hub of Shanghai continued to protest into Monday as police made arrests and placed a long row of blue barriers to block off one of the main demonstration sites, according to the BBC.
The BBC said that one of its reporters covering the protest was beaten and arrested by police in Shanghai on Sunday, and we'll see if that occasion is the same kind of Western alarm as it did when a reporter was accidentally shot in the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas in Israel.
Calls for Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party to step down were mixed into protests at various locations, including in Beijing, according to CNN and social media video, which UPI is not able to verify independently.
Anger over Xi's zero-COVID policy of strict lockdowns, forced testing, and digital tracking sparked into protests after a fire on Thursday in Urumqi, capital of the far western region of Xinjiang, killed 10 people who had been quarantined.
The blaze and deaths sparked accusations that the lockdowns, which had been in place in much of Xinjiang for more than three months, hampered rescue efforts, A viral video making the rounds on Chinese social media on Saturday claimed to show a woman at Communication University in Nanjing holding up a blank piece of paper before an unidentified figure took it away.
The gesture spread to other students at the university and quickly became a symbol of the protests around the country, with netizens calling it the White Paper Revolution or A4 revolution that refers to the common page size that you put in your printer.
Government officials and state-run media have not officially commented on the protests.
China on Monday announced 40,000 new COVID-19 cases.
That's a record high.
The country faces its largest outbreak since the pandemic began.
And again, Because they've decided to treat zero COVID as the goal of policy, they've also shut down their economy again.
So all the bad COVID policy is feeding the bad economic policy, which is feeding the unrest.
It's creating a real serious possibility of boiling over in China.
According to NPR, police using pepper spray drove away demonstrators in Shanghai who called for Xi Jinping to step down and an end to one-party rule.
Hours later, people rallied again in the same exact spot.
Police again broke up the demonstration.
Reporters saw protesters under arrest being driven away in a bus.
The protests are the most widespread show of opposition to the ruling party in fully decades.
In video of a protest in Shanghai verified by the AP, chants against Xi, the most powerful leader since at least the 1980s, and the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, Sounded loud and clear.
Xi Jinping stepped down.
CCP stepped down.
China is still the only major country trying to stop transmission of COVID-19.
Its zero COVID strategy has suspended access to neighborhoods for weeks at a time.
Some cities carry out daily virus tests on millions of residents.
And you gotta love how NPR covers this quote.
Okay, well, you're accepting their numbers.
Why would you accept their numbers?
The one thing that we know about the Wuhan virus, beyond the fact that it started in Wuhan, which is why we're calling it the Wuhan virus, is the Chinese government knew full well that there was human-to-human transmission of this virus as early as November of 2019.
Again, Scott Gottlieb, who is no hawk when it comes to anti-China policy with regard to COVID.
Scott Gottlieb was very, very moderate.
Friendly toward masks.
Friendly toward vax.
Friendly toward some forms of preventing people from traveling.
Scott Gottlieb, in his book, talks explicitly about the fact that there's good evidence that this thing was spreading in Wuhan in October of 2019.
And the Chinese government knew it was spreading in October.
And they waited to tell the world that there was human-to-human transmission until late January, which means they unleashed this thing.
They unleashed this thing on the world.
And still, you have the media credulously reporting false Chinese numbers about how many people have been infected.
I guarantee you, whatever China is telling you, it's 10 times worse.
People who are quarantined at home in some areas, according to NPR, say they lack food and medicine.
Chinese rule doing amazing job. The ruling party faced public anger following the deaths of two children whose parents said anti-virus controls hampered efforts to get medical help. So apparently again some kids got sick and they couldn't get them to the hospital because they had corona which again for children is not deadly statistically speaking.
The number of kids who have died of COVID in the United States is lower during the same period than the number of kids who died of pneumonia.
So this is a disease that, thank God, has not predominantly affected the very young.
And yet kids are dying in Wuhan because they won't allow people to actually leave their homes to get medical care.
The current protest erupted after a fire broke out Thursday and killed the 10 people in that apartment building in Urumqi.
That prompted an outpouring of angry questions online about whether firefighters or people trying to escape were blocked by locked doors or other restrictions.
About 300 demonstrators gathered late Saturday in Shanghai, most of whose 25 million people were confined to their homes for almost two months, starting in late March.
On a street named for Urumqi, one group of protesters brought candles, flowers, and signs honoring those who died in the blaze.
Another group, according to a protester who insisted on anonymity, was more active shouting slogans and singing the national anthem as well.
That protester and another confirmed the chants against Egy, who has awarded himself a third five-year term as leader of the ruling party and who will try to now stay in power for life.
The atmosphere of the protest encouraged people to talk about topics considered taboo Including the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Some called for an official apology for the deaths in the fire.
One member of the of Zhenjiang's Uyghur ethnic group, which has been the target of a security crackdown that includes mass detentions, shared his experiences of discrimination and political violence as well.
The scene did turn violent early on Sunday when hundreds of police broke up the more active group before they came for a second for the second as they tried to move people off the main street.
The protesters said he saw people taken away forced by police in advance but could not identify them.
Now again, sporadic protesting is not going to do it.
It's going to have to be presumably hundreds of thousands of people in the streets if you're talking about a country with as large a military as China's in order to shut down the economy.
But what is happening right now is shocking and sudden.
The New York Times reporting that the outpouring has created new pressures on Xi only a month after he secured a third term as party head. Now again, one of the possible outcomes here is that there's a rival inside the CCP for leadership inside the Chinese Communist Party and they use this as an opportunity to basically go to the Politburo and try to oust Xi. Now that's a really dangerous move because if you fail then probably Xi kills you. So it's, the Chinese government is a bit of a black box.
There's not tons of understanding or knowledge from the Western press about who is in power, how the power dynamics works or like the Politburo under the Soviets.
But there's going to have to be some rival center of power in order to topple Xi.
He's not just going to go away because people are in the streets with signs.
According to the New York Times, especially under Xi, the party has limited most means for organizing people to take on the government. Dissidents have been imprisoned. Social media is heavily censored. Independent groups involved in human rights have been banned. The protests that break out in towns and villages often involve workers, farmers, and other locals aggrieved by job losses, land disputes, pollution, or other issues that usually remained contained.
But the pervasiveness of China's COVID restrictions has created a focus for anger that transcends class and geography.
Migrant workers struggling with food shortages and joblessness during weeks-long lockdowns.
University students held on campuses.
Urban professionals chafing at travel restrictions.
The roots of their frustrations are the same.
The Communist Party's greatest fear would be realized if these similar grievances led protesters from disparate backgrounds to cooperate in an echo of 1989, when students, workers, small traders, and residents found common cause in the protests demanding democratic change that took over Tiananmen Square.
So far, that has not occurred.
Yesheng Huang, who is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who heads its China lab, says COVID-0 produced an unintended consequence, which is putting a huge number of people in the same situation.
This is a game changer.
He said the anger has been pent up for a while.
I think the 20th Congress provided an expectation it would wind down.
When that did not happen, the frustration quickly boiled over.
Xi has said nothing about any of this.
The party-run news media remained silent at this point.
And reporting is difficult because, frankly, China's, again, a tyrannical country and it doesn't allow the press in.
The New York Times has two journalists based in mainland China.
Two.
For a country of a billion and a half people.
Two.
Has followed the protests online, reported on the demonstrations through phone interviews, verified videos, and sources inside China who have shared their recordings of the event.
In Wuhan, hundreds of people walked along the streets, some pulling down barriers that have been put up to enforce neighborhood lockdowns.
Some of the video is already emerging into the public sphere.
We have video of people who have been congregating in Beijing.
There's video of store owners who are going to their shops and they're knocking over the barriers in front of their shop.
I mean, here's a picture of some of the video is from Beijing, I believe.
It's a large number of people.
You can see the number of cameras also.
The social media sphere is changing the game a little bit on how this stuff even is able to see the light of day.
We'll get to how China is trying to use tech censorship in order to stop this material from getting out.
If the protests start to get too large, look for wide-scale violence to be unleashed against the protesters.
Again, China has done this in the past.
The beauty of being an authoritarian country is you can murder whomever you like, apparently.
There's also a video of a store owner, as I mentioned, who literally burst out of his shop and just knocked over the barriers and said, like, basically, what is this?
You're wrecking my livelihood.
I can't work.
I can't bring I can't have no food for my family So then why not that Dan's Lisa?
See a gentleman here He's holding his certificate, ability to do business, it looks like.
And he took what looks like a large spoon and knocked over the barrier and basically said, I want to go to work.
Why are you preventing me from working?
And this sort of stuff, which has been happening in the West, which is obviously much freer, but still has limitations.
Like, for example, if you protested lockdowns in Canada, then they might have taken away your bank account.
Over in China, The folks who are doing this are very, very brave because the consequence in the West is bad.
The consequence in China may be death.
The political stakes were made stark in Shanghai on Saturday evening when startout as a vigil escalated into a street protest, according to the New York Times.
For most of the time since COVID spread from Wuhan nearly three months ago, many Chinese have accepted tough controls, including sweeping restrictions, limiting travel to the country as a price for avoiding the widespread illness and death the United States and other countries suffered.
But public patience has eroded this year as other nations increasingly have adapted to living with the virus.
Workers at a vast iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, clashed violently with the cops last week over lockdown measures and delays in the payment of bonuses.
Earlier this month, hundreds of migrants locked down in the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou, tore down barricades and ransacked food provisions.
In October, a lone protester draped banners on a bridge in Beijing just days ahead of the Communist Party Congress, where Xi won his new term in power.
So we are starting to see significant crackdowns on all sorts of social media information.
According to the Washington Post, Twitter's radically reduced anti-propaganda team grappled on Sunday with a flood of nuisance content in China researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news about stunning widespread protests against COVID restrictions.
So basically China has decided that they're going to flood the zone with pornography.
Seriously.
Numerous Chinese language accounts Some dormant for months or years came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.
The result, for hours anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for the Communist Party leadership to resign.
It's not the first time suspected government-connected accounts have used the technique, according to a recently departed Twitter employee.
In the past, it was used to discredit a single account or a small group by naming them in the escort ads.
So they're just flooding the zone.
If you wanted to see what's happening in Shanghai, you'd type in hashtag Shanghai, for example.
Now you just get a bunch of porn that's put out by the Chinese government.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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The Hebrews created history as we know it.
You don't get away with anything.
And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost.
You will pay the piper.
It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert.
And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine.
The highest ethical spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.
Yes, exactly!
I want villains to get punished!
But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price?
That's such a Christian question.
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So what is happening in China?
Again, a result of terrible COVID policy combined with terrible economic policy.
One of the wonderful things about human freedom is that where it fails, so too does the economy.
And when the economy fails, then people tend to get very, very pissed off very, very quickly.
According to the Wall Street Journal, again, China is in serious trouble economically speaking, quote, China's recent steps to adjust COVID-19 controls and revive activity in the beaten down property market stirred hopes that Xi Jinping is putting fresh emphasis on measures to support the economy, potentially leading to a strong rebound in growth next year.
But economists warn the moves so far haven't amounted to a broad shift in Xi's policies.
And the messaging out of the recent Communist Party Congress only reinforced that the Chinese leader planned to stick to his goals of achieving economic self-sufficiency and common prosperity, even at the cost of lower growth rates.
And again, you've seen this from authoritarian countries before.
They don't want to engage in trade with other countries because they are aware that trade with other countries in some ways makes them vulnerable to the impact of other countries.
And so they've sought autarky as a word that Hitler used with regard to Germany.
It was the idea we need to have all of the modes and mechanisms for manufacturing inside the territory that we control, which was one of the reasons that he went to territorial war.
China obviously could be moving in a very similar direction with regard to Taiwan.
We'll get to that in just one second.
Most economists doubt that China is going to return to the heady expansion of pre-pandemic days soon, if ever.
In the short run, demand for Chinese exports is falling as Western consumers cut spending.
Some cities are restoring strict COVID control measures as COVID cases spike, suggesting China's path toward living with the virus will be absolutely bumpy.
And home sales, dismal for months, continue to slump despite mortgage rate cuts and other measures to revive sentiment.
On Friday, China's central bank said it would lower the amount of reserves bank have to hold against their deposits to boost lending to households and businesses.
But economists say the move would likely have limited impact because there's no appetite for the new loans.
They keep trying to inject money into a system that doesn't have any place to spend the money.
In the longer term, as the Wall Street Journal reports, China faces other challenges, including an aging population, high debt levels, and pressure from the United States, which is trying to restrict China's access to semiconductors and other technologies.
So China may be boxed in.
It is quite possible.
That they have no prospect for significant economic growth in the near future, that all the economic policies sought by Xi are actually making the country significantly weaker, and that may make them more aggressive on the foreign front.
They may have to get more aggressive on the foreign front because failure internally breeds external aggression.
This is one of the things the United States is going to have to face down.
Now the question is going to be whether the United States has the capacity to face that down.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the U.S.
government and congressional officials fear the conflict in Ukraine is currently exacerbating a nearly $19 billion backlog of weapons bound for Taiwan, further delaying efforts to arm the island as tensions with China escalate.
Ukraine is important, and resisting the Russian invasion is important, and giving the Ukrainians the weaponry they need in order to repel Vladimir Putin's invasion is very important.
You know what's more important?
What's more important is repelling a Chinese possibility of invasion or blockade of Taiwan.
Because we're trying to do that.
The semiconductor market, which basically controls everything you own, your computer, your phone, your TV, everything.
The semiconductor market is almost entirely located in Taiwan.
The manufacturing base in Taiwan, TSMC, That is essentially a joint venture between private industry in Taiwan and the Taiwanese government.
And right now they have rules that prevent the export of sophisticated semiconductors into China, which means that China's military is second rate in terms of its tech.
The United States has high tech military because all the stuff that we design here, we design the design for the microchips and then basically we send it to this manufacturing Foundry over in Taiwan and they make these microchips.
Very, very expensive process.
It's a diversified supply chain except for the bottleneck that happens at TSMC.
92% of all advanced semiconductors are being developed in Taiwan right now.
Another 4% being developed in South Korea.
All of these countries obviously are right around China.
What that means is that if China wants more advanced weaponry, it's going to need advanced semiconductors.
The way it can do that is by putting a lot of pressure on Taiwan.
Everybody is worried about a full scale Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
As in a shooting war with Taiwan, just as likely is the possibility that China attempts to set up some sort of military blockade of Taiwan and put its boats around Taiwan and basically dare anybody to enter.
And they shut down all trade in an outflow of traffic until Taiwan agrees to produce the semiconductors that it wants it to produce.
Does the United States actually have the willingness to break such a blockade to risk the possibility of a shooting war with China in order to get into Taiwan?
That is a very serious question.
The only way that that's going to be a possibility is if we continue to arm up Taiwan to the teeth to repel the possibility of that sort of thing happening.
The Taiwan actually says, no, you're not going to blockade us and we will break the blockade coming the other way out of the island.
And the only way to do that is if Taiwan has pretty sophisticated weaponry of its own.
The U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal, has pumped billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February, taxing the capacity of the government and defense industry to keep up with the sudden demand to arm Kiev in a conflict that isn't expected to end soon.
The flow of weapons to Ukraine is now running up against the longer-term demands of the U.S.
strategy to arm Taiwan to help it defend itself against a possible invasion by China, according to congressional and government officials familiar with the matter.
The backlog of deliveries, which was more than $14 billion last December, has now grown to almost $19 billion, according to congressional officials and others familiar with the matter.
Included in that backlog are an order made in December 2015 for 208 Javelin anti-tank weapons and a separate one at the same time for 215 surface-to-air Stinger missiles.
None of them have arrived on the island, according to congressional sources and people familiar with the matter.
The weaponry is part of Washington's porcupine strategy to arm Taiwan in a way that raises the cost to China should it decide to invade.
U.S.
military officials said two years ago Beijing could be poised to reunify with Taiwan forcibly as early as 2026.
Well, looking at the conflict in China right now and the internal dissension in China, you got to move that timeline up.
Because again, necessity may be the mother of invasion here for the Chinese government.
A spokeswoman for the Taiwan government in Washington declined to comment on arms sales.
Officials from the island have expressed concern about delays.
Vice Minister for Armaments of Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, General Wang Yishun Long says Taiwan would like to request the weapons to the US, that the weapons, the weapons the US sells to Taiwan be delivered as scheduled.
Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon is providing any update on all of this.
If this is all about misallocation of resources, if the Ukraine war is the aggravating factor, then that is a serious problem.
Because again, geopolitically speaking, Ukraine, which has now successfully defended itself against a Russian invasion and is not on the verge of collapse.
If we continue to fund Ukraine at the expense of Taiwan, maybe we can walk into government at the same time.
But if we cannot, we need to reprioritize immediately because again, The near future for China is going to look very, very aggressive given all of the internal problems that China is suffering.
Meanwhile, another regime that could theoretically be on the brink is Iran.
These widespread protests have not stopped for weeks and weeks and weeks.
CNN is now reporting that Iran's Supreme Leader is praising the country's Basij paramilitary force for its role in a deadly crackdown on anti-regime protesters.
Again, we don't know if there's anybody inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or inside the government over there who is willing to topple the regime.
And that's going to be the big question in Iran.
Iran is a brutal military regime.
It imprisons or kills people who dissent on a fairly regular basis.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the popular protest movement as rioters and thugs backed by foreign forces and praised innocent Bazish fighters for protecting the nation.
The Bazish is a wing of Iran's Revolutionary Guard deployed to the streets as protests have swelled since September.
I mean, check your calendar, guys.
It's now November.
So these things have been going on for about three months at this point.
The protest movement was initially sparked by the murder of a 22-year-old woman, Masa Amini, in custody of Iran's morality police.
Amnesty International says the Basij have been ordered to mercilessly confront protesters.
The Supreme Leader said on Saturday, quote, When facing the enemy on the field of battle, the Basij has always shown itself to be courageous, not afraid of the enemy.
You saw in the most recent events, our innocent and oppressed Basijis became the targets of oppression.
So they wouldn't even allow the nation to become the target of rioters and thugs.
And those on the enemy payroll, whether willingly or unwittingly, they gave them themselves to free others.
By free others, they mean repress everyone.
Meanwhile, the U.N.
High Commissioner for Human Rights, the U.N.' 's most useless organization on the face of the earth, the human rights chief, his name is Volker Turk, he warned Iran is in a quote, full-fledged human rights crisis.
Well, and what are you going to do about it?
The member states of the U.N.
Human Rights Council passed a motion titled quote, the deteriorating situation of human rights in Iran, especially in respect to women and children.
And they formed a fact-finding mission.
Ooh, a fact-finding mission.
By the way, the Iranians immediately rejected it.
At least 14,000 people, including children, have now been arrested in connection with the protests.
At least 21 of them currently face the death penalty, and six have already received death sentences.
Among those arrested are two well-known Iranian actors, Hengama Khaziani and Qatayoun Riahi, who were taken into custody on separate occasions for publicly backing the nationwide protests.
The unprecedented national uprising has taken hold in more than 150 cities and 140 universities in all 31 provinces of Iran.
Because this is a religious theocracy, the possibility of a widespread public uprising that is not quashed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the thing they have done Very efficiently in Iran is purged the IRGC, which is a terrorist group of pretty much any moderate elements.
And so the question is going to be, are you going to need actual bloodshed in the streets, a full scale military uprising against the current military regime in Tehran in order to overturn things?
As I say, you know, typically speaking, when you have revolutions, you either need a revolution in which the military switches sides or leading figures in political power switch sides and depose somebody, or it comes to bloodshed.
In Iran, it may well come to bloodshed.
Masih Al-Nijhad has a good piece over at the Washington Post.
She's an Iranian journalist, author, and women's rights campaigner.
And she points out that basically the West is only waking up right now to the fact that Iran is a horrible state.
Which, again, some of us have been saying this for literally decades at this point.
But apparently it took people being shot in the streets en masse in order for the West to abandon its hopes of trying to negotiate with the Ayatollahs.
Masih Al-Nashad writes that the unrest continues.
It's itself a remarkable tribute to those overwhelmingly young Iranians who refuse to back down in the face of brutal violence from the regime.
Western leaders have been slow to acknowledge the full significance and depth of what has been happening inside Iran, not least because of their fixation on persuading the regime to agree to a deal on Tehran's nuclear program.
Now, at last, there are welcome signs of change.
She says that she met with Emmanuel Macron.
And she says that, um, Macron finally realized that the situation in Iran is really, really bad, which is kind of incredible.
And what exactly was the, it just shows you that when the West preaches about democracy and diversity and tolerance and all this, you want to write so many people around the world, look at the West with a, shall we say a skeptical eye.
Maybe one of the reasons is because the West has been openly attempting to negotiate a deal with one of the most brutally repressive regimes on planet earth.
While they crack down on citizens who are significantly more moderate.
By the way, the citizenry in Iran is not predominantly religiously extreme.
The citizenry in Iran wants no part of this regime.
Meanwhile, Iran's top paramilitary commander is warning protesters in eastern provinces against unrest.
Major General Hossein Nassalami praised the Balak minority while also alleging protesters were being manipulated by foreign powers.
This is the lie that they keep telling.
They keep saying the protests are not homegrown, that it's the CIA doing it or something.
The question is going to be whether the allied powers of the West are willing to stand up to Iran and provide whatever support they can.
According to a columnist for The Hill, Laura Kelly, she says, Iran's leaders have attempted to brutally suppress demonstrations that originally took to the streets.
Since then, protests have grown to include calls for the downfall of the country's Islamic rulers.
U.S.
Special Envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, reacted to a recent CNN investigation, saying it documented unspeakable acts of sexual violence by Iranian officials in detention centers, saying, quote, It's a reminder of what is at stake for the Iranian people and of the lengths to which the regime will go in its futile attempt to silence dissent.
The US, European Union, and UK have all imposed sanctions on individuals and entities they've identified as responsible for the violent crackdown on protesters.
They've sought to ease restrictions on internet access to aid protesters who have had their services cut off.
But...
All powers of the West, save military power at this point, should be brought to bear on the Iranian government at this point.
That includes full-scale restoration of serious sanctions on the Iranian regime or deepening of current sanctions that already exist in Iran.
And we could be living in a really revolutionary time.
And it could be, theoretically, an amazing time if the Chinese government were to somehow fall, if the Iranian government were to somehow help the world become a hell of a lot more free and a hell of a lot more safe.
In the meantime, things could get very dangerous very quickly.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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We do have one quick update.
The White House has just released a statement about the protests in China.
And here is the Biden administration statement.
This is some weak tea right here.
You ready?
Quote, we've said that zero COVID is not a policy we are pursuing here in the United States.
And as we've said, we think it's going to be very difficult for the People's Republic of China to be able to contain this virus through their zero COVID strategy.
For us, we are focused on what works.
And that means using public health tools like continuing to enhance vaccination rates, including boosters and making testing and treatment easily accessible.
We've long said everyone has the right to peacefully protest here in the United States and around the world.
This includes in the PRC.
Slow clap for the weakest statement this side of the Rockies.
My goodness, that is some weak stuff right there.
Okay, well.
Meanwhile, the media are desperately trying to spin away from a story they created for themselves in Colorado.
A deranged individual shot up a gay nightclub last week.
And the entire media decided that was because of Tucker Carlson, Libs of TikTok, Matt Walsh, and me.
Because people who oppose same-sex marriage and or bizarre drag shows that target children and the transing of the children.
If you oppose those things, apparently you're responsible for a deranged person shooting up a gay club.
Then it turns out that the person who shot up the gay club Identifies as non-binary.
And so this has become very awkward for the media.
It led to this particularly awkward exchange on CNN, when a CNN contributor named Natalie Bingham, who is a dude, says that you can tell that the person claiming non-binary identity is not non-binary just by looking at a picture of him.
Which I'm not aware is a standard that we are supposed to be using.
Are we supposed to be able to just look at people now and tell what sex they are?
Because then I have some questions for Natalie.
The attorneys for the shooter are now saying that the shooter is non-binary and the shooter would like to use the pronouns they them and this is for the court in all court papers.
I think that's complete ludicrous.
I believe they're just saying that because they want to have the easy way out on this.
That's really, really offending, especially being a transgender woman myself, that a male, which it was obvious with the mugshot, that's a man, that's not a non-binary person because in no way, shape, or form could they appear as a woman the next day.
Is that the standard now?
Do we get to apply that standard?
That if I can look at this picture and tell that Natalie Bingham is a dude, that Natalie Bingham's a dude?
That sounds like Natalie is now on my side of the argument, which means that Natalie is a dude.
Because Natalie's a dude.
Again, that's not a mean, horrible thing to say.
This person is a biological male.
His standard, if you can look at a mugshot and tell whether a person is male or female, then this means you know whether they should or should not identify as non-binary or a member of the opposite gender.
Or is the argument that you're only to be considered female if you grow out your hair and wear makeup and do stereotypically female cosplaying movements?
Is that the way?
I was told that that's all judgmental.
In fact, that would be taking on stereotypical characteristics of women that are sexist in nature.
None of this makes any sense.
In any case, because of the shooter coming out as non-binary in court documents, It's amazing how fast the media swiveled on this particular story.
So the entire media decided over the weekend that this is now a story about gun control.
It was amazing how that went.
It went straight from one narrative of the left, and then when that narrative collapsed, boom!
Secondary backup narrative is gun control.
And so you have J. Johnson, former Homeland Security Secretary, saying the real problem is the prevalence of guns in the United States.
It's a handgun in Chesapeake, Virginia.
It was an AR-15 style in Colorado Springs.
So is it a gun crisis?
Is it a mental health crisis?
Which is it?
Well, first and foremost, Margaret, I believe that the problem, the central problem, the common thread through all of these incidents is the prevalence of guns in America.
The individual circumstances of each episode tend to be a little different.
The motive tends to be different.
The location is different.
The weapon is different.
But the problem we have in this country, nationwide, is the prevalence of guns in America.
Oh, it's guns now.
Okay, so I see how you went from one narrative to the other.
That was amusing, how you went just directly straight from one narrative to the other when your first narrative collapsed.
You have Chris Murphy on national TV, the senator from Connecticut, saying that assault weapons bans are wildly popular.
Let's ban assault weapons.
Again, the fluidity by which they move from one story to another when their first story just implodes.
The facts are of no use to these folks.
Just the narrative.
Only the narrative.
Forever and always the narrative.
This is a choice to allow this to continue to happen.
The laws that we're talking about passing, red flag laws, assault weapons bans, they're wildly popular.
I mean, they're not actually that controversial outside of Washington and I hope that this year or next year we'll finally be able to do something.
Okay, so very exciting stuff.
And now I guess we're going to have an assault weapons ban talk again, which Joe Biden brings up every other year and it always fails.
So it's going to go nowhere because it was not designed to go anywhere.
None of this is designed to go anywhere, except it's designed to essentially blame your political opponents for terrible things that happen because there are deranged individuals in a country of 340 million people.
We can keep playing this game forever, literally forever.
And I assume that the Democrats keep planning to play this game forever.
I'm just, I'll never stop being amazed by the simple ability of a bunch of people to move from one story, one narrative to the other narrative as soon as the first narrative just falls apart on them, caves in on them like a collapsing building in the Hollywood Hills during a mudslide.
It really is pretty impressive stuff.
Meanwhile, I would be remiss if I did not comment, at least in a minor way, on the President of the United States having a meeting with Ye, the anti-Semitic rapper.
Apparently, Ye brought along Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes is, of course, a terrible human being and white supremacist.
It would be, I think, unnecessary to go through all the horrible things that he said over the course of his brief and troubled career.
But maybe one clip will suffice.
He's the kind of person who suggests that the Holocaust didn't happen because you can't bake cookies in your oven or enough cookies in your oven or something.
We'll play like one clip of this schmuck just so you understand who he is.
This is the person that Ye has chosen to work with.
He's brought on two people.
He's brought on Milo Yiannopoulos, the disgraced former quasi-conservative who famously suggested in an interview That when men have sex with boys, it may be beneficial for the boys.
And then he was basically thrown out of all halls of a polite conversation for that.
And then he reinvigorated himself, did Milo Yiannopoulos, as an insane white supremacist Christian radical.
I say that advisedly because I'm very much in favor of strong Christians in positions of public power in the United States.
Milo, however, is the kind of person who puts out statements like this.
Okay, there's a direct quote.
Nick and Ye didn't discredit Trump's 2024 campaign with that dinner meeting.
Trump did that himself by having the most boring low energy announcement speech in history.
He did it by continuing to suck the boots of the Jewish powers that be who hate Jesus Christ, hate our country, and see us all as disposable cattle according to their holy book.
So that's Milo Yiannopoulos, the guy who, again, formerly an extremely gay person, who now says he is not gay and has seen the error of his ways and also is a deep enough Christian that he believes that Donald Trump sucks the boots of the Jewish powers.
So that's one person that, yay, who said he was not anti-Semitic but is anti-Semitic.
that Ye is associating with. The other one is Fuentes. And again, we'll play like one clip of Fuentes, just so that people know who we are talking about, one of the most despicable voices in American public life.
If I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has 15 ovens, working 24 hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies? I don't know. That's a good question. It's certainly a... Oh no, no.
It doesn't really sound correct to me, wait a second.
It takes one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and you have 15 ovens, probably in four different kitchens, right?
Doing 24 hours a day every day for five years, how long would it take you to make six million?
Hmm, I don't know, it certainly wouldn't be five years, right?
The math doesn't seem to add up there.
The math doesn't quite seem to add up there.
I don't think you'd... So he's a Holocaust denier and he's a white supremacist and he's talked about, for example, how much segregated fountains were not bad for black people, segregation was better for American society.
He has suggested that he wants a full Catholic theocracy in the United States.
Now, he's half troll.
When I say half troll, I mean like three quarters troll.
That's what Fuentes does.
That's his game here.
But, bottom line is that That Ye shows up to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and he brings with him Nick Fuentes.
And then Ye reported on this meeting on his Twitter feed in a debrief with aforementioned Yiannopoulos who's standing there listening to him, we'll put it that way.
Most perturbed about me asking him to be my vice president.
I think that was like lower on the list of things that caught him off guard.
It was the fact that I walked in with intelligence.
So Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes.
And Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he's actually a loyalist.
When he didn't know where the lawyers is, You'll still have your lawyer list.
And when all the lawyers said, forget it, Trump's done, there are loyalists running up in the White House, right?
And my question would be, why, when you had the chance, did you not free the January Sixers?
Okay, so, this is obviously nutty stuff.
And what's happening here is that a bipolar manic depressive, Kanye West, who is experiencing a manic high right now, and has been spewing antisemitism for weeks, open antisemitism for weeks, went to meet with Trump. And Trump put out a statement in which he essentially said, I was meeting with my friend, Ye, and he brought along this person who I didn't know. He said, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was asking me for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular, having to do with his business. We also discussed to a lesser extent politics, where I told him he should definitely not run for president.
Any voters you may have should vote for Trump.
Anyway, we got along great.
He expressed no antisemitism, and I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on Tucker Carlson.
Why wouldn't I agree to meet?
Also, I didn't know Nick Fuentes.
So, first of all, the reason you wouldn't agree to meet, presumably, is because unless you're going to have a real sit-down with Ye, and you will inform him that perhaps you should not be spewing The Violist Antisemitism, the side of Louis Farrakhan, that perhaps you shouldn't sit down with the vile white, the vile antisemite you do know because you might bring along the vile antisemite you don't know.
And so, Trump shouldn't have this dinner, obviously.
It's gross that he did.
It's gross that he was sitting with Fuentes.
That's bad betting work by his team, presumably, to even have Fuentes in the building with the former president of the United States.
And Trump is taking it on the chin politically, as he should be taking it on the chin politically, when you sit down at dinner with Ye West, who's in the middle of a mental breakdown, and his buddy, the white supremacist Fuentes, right?
Trump's taking heat for that.
And Trump correctly is saying, I didn't know Fuentes, I didn't want any piece of Fuentes, I didn't know who this guy was, I don't want any part of him.
All right, fair enough.
So that's essentially the controversy over the weekend.
Now I will say, so then Ye decided for some odd reason that he was going to go on Twitter and come after me.
Because I pointed out that probably you shouldn't have dinner with the vile anti-Semite that you do know.
In this case, Yay, who's been putting together the Avengers of Eagle's Nest over here with Milo and Fuentes.
That when I point that out, apparently this made Yay angry enough to... It looks like he handed over his Twitter account to Fuentes.
When I say it looks like that, I mean he openly admits it in one of the tweets that he hands over his Twitter account to Fuentes.
Fine.
Whatever.
And he suggested that the reason that I have been criticizing him for anti-Semitism is because the email list that we have here at Daily Wire is rented out by his political opponents, like Ron DeSantis.
Okay, well, Trump has rented the email list over here.
The RNC has rented the email list.
This is how email lists work in politics.
But, bottom line is, then he suggested that I'm trashing him.
And as I say, I have not trashed Ye, Ye has trashed himself.
He has decided it's not the fault of the Jews, it's not the space laser, it's not the shadowy evil cabal of Zionists on Friday nights.
The person who trashed Ye was Ye.
And when you surround yourself with Milo, and when you surround yourself with Nick Fuentes, it's going to be hard to avoid the perception that you are creating the Avengers of antisemitism over here.
With the full, like, Thanos glove.
He's picking up all the jewels in the Thanos glove.
So that is where things currently stand.
Now, I will say this.
The left, of course, is acting extraordinarily exercised over this, and some of that is called for, obviously.
But I'm not going to hear that from Al Sharpton.
So Al Sharpton went on the air and was ripping into Trump for associating with Fuentes.
Al Sharpton does not get to talk about any of this stuff.
Al Sharpton is a vile anti-Semite.
Al Sharpton was heavily involved in anti-Semitism surrounding the actual riots in Crown Heights in 1991 that ended with the murder of an Orthodox Jew.
Al Sharpton was involved in inciting actual violence against a place called Freddy's Fashion Mart in the 90s that ended with an arson that killed a couple of people.
Like, Al Sharpton is a horrible anti-Semitic force in American public life.
He's one of the worst people in American public life.
The fact that the left trots him out to talk about anti-Semitism is absurd.
It's almost as absurd as when Mehdi Hassan decided to trot out Ilhan Omar to talk about anti-Semitism, but the left has no standards at all on this sort of stuff.
It's really amazing.
Are you saying that this man's running for president again and doesn't screen who he allows to come to the dinner table?
That is against all protocol of Secret Service.
But with nothing other than security, they know who's coming.
He knew who he was meeting with.
He knew the background.
And now he's trying to, in many ways, do the Michael Jackson moonwalk when it does not apply.
He has secret service.
Are they saying secret service did not have a list of who was coming to dinner?
Really, so now Al Sharpton is very upset with people associating with anti-Semites, which is very difficult for Al Sharpton because he presumably has a mirror in his house.
So that is a little bit awkward.
Bottom line on all of this is the willingness to traffic with the anti-Semites is apparently great on a lot of sides of the aisle.
And that is really ugly right now.
And just on a political level, put aside all of the actual morality of this for just a moment, if you can.
On a political level, if you are a Republican and you're looking at a man who has just declared that he wishes to run for the presidency again in 2024 in Donald Trump, and you do not have a staff capable of surrounding you with people who are not white supremacists, Is this where the Republican base wants to fight its battles going into 2024?
Just on a political level, does it seem like somebody who's exercising common sense and any level of forethought in regard to his activities?
Because Trump's truth social feed today has been entirely consumed by two things.
One, the special prosecutor has been appointed to go after him, which we've talked about and I think is ridiculous.
And two, this.
Is that where Republicans wish to fight their battles for the next couple of years?
It's not working out well for them.
And meanwhile, we have some news over in that Georgia Senate race.
Listen, we need Herschel Walker in the Senate if you're a Republican because that changes the margin of minority from one vote to two votes if Herschel Walker is not in the Senate.
And that is a real problem because what you want to be able to do is peel off, say, Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin to prevent the worst excesses of the Democrats in the Senate.
With that said, the early voting in Georgia is really ugly right now.
And again, that is the result of bad candidate picking.
President Trump endorsed Hershel Walker in the primaries, and right now, because so many Republican candidates who should have won lost, basically a lot of Republicans are not showing up to vote, at least in the early voting.
Right now, the early voting results are not particularly good.
According to John Colon, who reports on this sort of stuff, there have been 182,000 total early votes, and the black-white split is 46% to 38%.
Now, on a population level, black voters tend to vote Democrat more often than white voters due to the fact that a plurality of the vote in Georgia is the black vote and the early vote.
Obviously, it does not bode well for the Republican candidate in that particular race.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Justin Trudeau becoming the first world leader to appear on Drag Race.
Plus, things are weird in Canada.
There's an actual company that is now promoting assisted suicide to sell fashion.
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