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Aug. 31, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:39
The Deep State Targets Musk
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Well, another day, another lawsuit, this time looking into Elon Musk.
So, it appears that if you are an enemy of the prevailing regime, they will come after you with all of the elements at their disposal.
If you are Donald Trump, they will come after you.
With the federal government, with various state and local governments, they will come after you because you have become an enemy of the regime.
I mean, Donald Trump said, and he is not incorrect, that for 30, 40 years, he was in the American public eye, one of the most famous people on earth.
There were no prosecutions.
And then he leaves the presidency and boom, within three years, there are four prosecutions all to be hitting within an election year.
And that leaves aside the civil suits that have all arisen in the last two years.
That does not seem like a coincidence.
Now you can always attribute that to his behavior on January 6th, or between November and January, but the reality remains that Donald Trump was a pretty wild and crazy character well before that.
And when it comes to some of the supposed financial crimes that he is now being accused of...
Those financial issues were well known for a very long time, yet he never found himself in the dock.
He never found himself in front of the public this way.
Well, Elon Musk is in the same boat now.
So in the last month, there have been two investigations by the federal government launched into companies related to Elon Musk.
Just last week, the Justice Department sued SpaceX for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring, claiming that SpaceX had to hire more people who had claimed asylum, people who claimed refuge status in the United States, despite the fact that, as Elon Musk claims, SpaceX has national security contracts.
That means that they have very high standards for security.
And so they were sort of damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
If they started hiring people who are claiming asylum or refugee status, And then it turns out some of those people were security risk.
They could lose their security clearance and presumably hundreds of millions of dollars in contract.
And if they didn't hire those people, then the DOJ would sue them.
And that's exactly what happened last week.
According to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clark of the DOJ Civil Rights Division, our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification in violation of federal law.
Our investigation also found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company.
Asylees and refugees have overcome many obstacles in their lives, and unlawful employment discrimination based on their citizenship status should not be one of them.
So, this looks like a put-up job.
Just from the outset, it looked like a put-up job directed at Elon Musk.
And now, one week later, we are learning that prosecutors are now investigating Tesla for use of funds on a project described internally as a house for Elon Musk.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Manhattan federal prosecutors are investigating Tesla's use of company funds on a secret project that had been described internally as a house for Elon Musk.
The U.S.
Attorney's Office for SDNY has sought information about personal benefits paid to Musk, how much Tesla spent on the project, which called for a spacious glass structure to be built in Austin, Texas, and what it was for.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report in July that Tesla board members had investigated whether company resources were misused on the secret effort, known internally as Project 42, and whether Musk was personally involved.
The outcome of Tesla's internal investigation cannot be learned.
The SEC has also opened a civil investigation into Project 42 and is seeking similar information from the company, according to one of those peoples.
Well, here's the thing.
The SENY and SEC investigations, they're still in their early stages.
They might not lead to formal allegations of wrongdoing, and yet, magically, all this found its way into the newspaper.
Why, look at that!
All of it is on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comments on the story.
Spokesmen for the SEC and Manhattan U.S.
Attorney's Office declined to comment.
Employees were working on Project 42 last year.
Plans called for a glass building to be erected near the automaker's Austin-area headquarters.
At one point, the building was envisioned in the shape of a twisted hexagon.
Other images showed an expansive glass box that appeared to include a residential area.
The status of the project and whether the glass was ever delivered to Tesla could not be learned.
So, federal prosecutors are now seeking information also about the driving range of Tesla's electric vehicles.
Reuters is reporting that Tesla had inflated the projected distance its vehicles could travel on a single battery charge.
So, it just seems like all of the resources of the federal investigative authorities are being unleashed at Elon Musk.
Now, why is that?
Just a few years ago, Elon Musk was everybody's darling.
Elon Musk had early Mark Zuckerberg status.
Elon Musk was the most creative man in the world, one of the great innovators.
And then he bought Twitter.
And then it turns out that he has sort of rightish libertarian political leanings.
And this cannot be allowed.
Elon Musk stepped into the hornet's nest, and the hornet's nest is now stinging him.
That's what it appears like to anyone from the outside.
Because again, nothing for years with regard to Elon Musk.
And then magically, the year before the election, two separate investigations into Elon Musk's companies, one at SpaceX, one at Tesla.
So either you believe that Elon Musk suddenly started being corrupt and terrible, or you believe that there are people who actually would like to see Elon Musk taken out, or at least minimized in terms of his public abilities.
When people on the right are worried about lawfare, when they are worried about the militarization of law enforcement resources, the DOJ, local attorney's offices, against right-wingers, this is one of the reasons why.
I mean, I've said on the program publicly for years, I overpay my taxes.
I overpay my taxes specifically because I suspect that this has always been the case and that it will always be the case.
That if there's someone in power who doesn't like you, there's absolutely the possibility that they end up coming after you.
The problem, of course, is that it's exactly this sort of activity that destroys all faith in our institutions.
And if we don't have our institutions in common, then we cannot have a functioning system here in the United States.
Now, this is bleeding its way over, not just from the private sector to the public sector, like Elon Musk to Donald Trump, but all the way down to how you vote.
Like actual election interference.
I'll get to that momentarily.
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Okay, so when we talk about legal apparatuses being activated against particular sides
of the political aisle, take a look at what is now being contemplated
with regard to primary and general elections and Donald Trump.
I According to the New York Times, New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary is quickly becoming the leading edge for an unproven legal theory that Donald Trump is disqualified from appearing on the ballot under the 14th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution.
A longshot presidential candidate has filed a lawsuit in state court seeking an injunction to keep Trump off the ballot.
A former Republican candidate for Senate is urging the Secretary of State to bring a case that could put the issue before the U.S.
Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, Free Speech for the People, a liberal-leaning group that unsuccessfully tried to strike House Republicans from the ballot in 2022, sent a letter to Secretaries of State in New Hampshire as well as Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, and Wisconsin urging them to bar Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.
Those efforts are employing a theory that has been gaining traction among liberals and anti-Trump conservatives that Trump's actions on January 6, 2021 disqualify him under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars people from holding office if they took an oath to support the Constitution and then later, quote, engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.
Well, normally, you'd have to have, like, a conviction for something like that.
Or, say, you swore an oath to a foreign power, like the Confederate States of America.
Right?
That might be good evidence that you should be barred from a ballot.
That's literally why the law was written.
That's why Section 3 of the 14th Amendment exists.
You know what it doesn't exist to do?
Allow Secretaries of State to simply declare somebody an enemy of the Republic and then bar him from the ballot.
According to the New York Times, the theory has been getting momentum since two prominent conservative law professors published an article this month concluding Trump is constitutionally disqualified from running for office.
Well, the left wishes to appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court.
Why?
Because if the Supreme Court rules in Trump's favor, then they will just claim that the Supreme Court is stacked on behalf of Donald Trump, undermining the credibility of that institution.
And again, this is now being considered by multiple secretaries of state, not just in the primaries, but in the general election as well.
According to National Review, a recent article published in the Pennsylvania Law Review from the Federalist Society's William Boud and Michael Stokes Paulson argues that Trump has been disqualified from access to the presidential ballot based on their reading of the 14th Amendment.
The authors believe their theory is self-executing, by which they mean U.S.
election officials don't need to seek permission or special authority to bar Trump from the ballot.
Indeed, their oaths oblige them not to.
So Donald Trump made the case that Mike Pence could unilaterally disqualify states' certified state votes in the 2020 election.
And that was a specious theory.
This theory is that secretaries of state can simply decide, without any reference point, without any legal case, without any actual conviction, without any charges being filed, theoretically, that somebody has violated this element of the Constitution and therefore can be barred constitutionally from appearing on the ballot.
This is pretty crazy stuff, obviously.
And you want to talk about undermining faith in elections?
This would do it.
You want a constitutional crisis?
How about when a Secretary of State in, say, Arizona decides that Donald Trump cannot be on the ballot?
And then that goes to the Supreme Court.
And then the Supreme Court strikes that down.
That is a constitutional crisis.
Because at that point, you have a state acting within its own purview, but violating basic precepts of constitutional order, being struck down by a Supreme Court on which three members were appointed by the person who's at issue.
The left will claim that it's lawfare.
The right will claim that it's lawfare.
I mean, this is where we are headed.
It's really, really ugly.
And so what we now have is a bizarre situation in which the left claims that because the right is quote-unquote insurrectionary, they can use the law in extra legal ways.
That's what's effectively happening right here.
This is why the use of the law to go after Trump over a bunch of nonsense in say Manhattan is so devastating to rule of law.
Politico today has the New York AG claiming that Donald Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth by as much as 2.2 billion dollars per year.
The new estimates came in filings from the New York State Attorney General's Office, which is suing Trump, some of his adult children, and his business empire for falsifying his net worth in an effort to obtain favorable terms from banks and insurance companies.
That trial is set to begin on October 2nd.
Now, one of the things that is pretty obvious here is that none of those companies are actually suing Trump.
This is a criminal prosecution or a civil trial that is being brought to bear by the state on behalf of insurance companies who aren't suing him.
Again, lawfare being used to go after Donald Trump.
And what you're getting here is a self-perpetuating cycle where the left sees the right as so inherently evil and dangerous and insurrectionist that we must use the legal abilities at our disposal to go after them.
We must use the DOJ to go after Elon Musk.
That's a dangerous character.
That guy might allow things on Twitter that we don't like.
And if those things are allowed on Twitter, then Donald Trump might win an election or Joe Biden might lose an election.
So we better use whatever legal methods we have at our disposal to go after that guy.
Donald Trump, super dangerous.
That means that we have to activate secretaries of state to do things that are pretty illegal, but they have sort of the patina of legality to them in order to accomplish what we want.
I mean, we really, really hate Donald Trump.
So one of the things we have to do is we have to go after him on specious bullcrap charges in New York.
It's morally mandated because the right is so dangerous and so reactionary and so insurrectionist.
And the natural response from the right is, well, okay, so you're doing extra legal things with the law, which means they are acting illegally, which justifies us in going outside the law to do things.
I mean, every revolution starts with a claim that the powers that be are engaging in extra-legal activity under color of law.
Right?
That's every revolution.
Now, I'm not calling for that revolution.
I think there is a weapons down here, but this is what we are quickly spiraling towards.
What we are quickly spiraling towards is a belief on the part of the right that the left has militarized the entire Justice Department of the United States, as well as a lot of local Justice Departments.
Secretaries of State's office and all the rest, against the right.
And therefore, the right is justified in doing whatever it can to stop that.
And then the left looks at that and they say, what are you guys doing?
You're doing all this stuff that's extra legal.
Well, that justifies us in stopping you, no matter what it takes, with or without the law.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle.
And there's something even worse about this, which is that the positions reverse themselves depending on the circumstance.
I'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so when I say the situations can reverse, I mean that the natural dynamic right now
is that the left, because it's in control of the law, is using the law as a weapon.
And the right, because it is not in control of the law, is bucking the law.
Right?
That seems to be the generalized perception.
These two feet on each other.
The right is bucking the law, so the left says we have to use the law.
And then the right says the left is using the law, so we have to buck the law.
So it's a complete cycle.
But here is the thing.
Here's how you know that it's not just a battle over institutional Credibility.
So what the left wants to say is the right, they're not, they're not being extra legal because we're misusing the law.
They're being extra legal because they don't care about the law.
They're being extra legal because the law doesn't matter to them at all.
The laws, the institutions, they want to tear down the institutions.
They are the ones who are destructive forces in American life.
We are here standing for the institutions, but we know that's not true.
Because when the left is not in control of a legal body, they attack the legal body with just as much alacrity as they were defending it literally one second ago.
So, for example, Donald Trump, yesterday, he was on with, I believe, Glenn Beck, and he was asked about prosecuting Democrats as president.
And he said, well, yeah, I mean, they're prosecuting me.
Here's what it sounded like.
You said in 2016, you know, uh, lock her up.
And then when you became president, you said, we don't do that in America.
That's just not the right thing to do.
That's what they're doing.
Do you regret not locking her up?
And if you're president again, will you lock people up?
Well, I'll give you an example.
Uh, the answer is you have no choice because they're doing a test.
I always had such great respect for the office of the president, the presidency, And but the office of the president and I never hit Biden as hard as I could have.
And then I heard he was trying to indict me and it was him that was doing it.
You know, I don't think he's sharp enough to think about much.
OK, so the entire left went insane.
Donald Trump pledging to lock up his political opponents.
I mean, that would be crazy if he wins the office and then he uses the DOJ as a weaponized DOJ against his political opponents.
That's just terrible.
That's unthinkable.
And we'd have to resort to extra legal means to stop all of that.
We would have to do something out in the streets, man.
Riots.
We'd have to stop that thing because the tyrant would be taking over.
What exactly do you think that the right is arguing right now about Joe Biden and Merrick Garland's DOJ?
They're cutting sweetheart deals with Joe Biden's son.
Sweetheart deals that are so sweetheartish that a judge literally saw it, blanched, and was like, nope, not interested.
And they had to go back to the drawing board.
Meanwhile, they're going after Trump for every jot and tittle.
Including charges that don't even fit when it comes to the January 6th case.
They're letting Hillary Clinton off scot-free, but they're going after Donald Trump.
And so, law enforcement is good right now for the left, but if Donald Trump takes over, law enforcement immediately becomes bad.
The DOJ turns into a weaponized, evil law enforcement that must be bucked at every opportunity.
And then the position's reversed.
Then it's the left that's insurrectionist against the institutions, and the right that's defending the institutions as viable and durable and necessary.
You can see it today in Politico.
Entire opinion piece from Aaron Tang, a law professor at UC Davis and a former law clerk to Sonia Sotomayor.
He has a piece titled, The Supreme Court is infected with the most damaging human bias.
He says the biggest problem with the partisanship diagnosis is that the Supreme Court has always been part of politics, not above it.
The most important chief justice in our history, John Marshall, was a Federalist Party operative.
These historical periods suggest that if partisanship alone were enough to torpedo public legitimacy, the Supreme Court never would have risen to its prominent place in American society.
What really is different and dangerous about today's justice is not partisanship, but rather a cognitive trap.
And Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called the most damaging of all human biases overconfidence.
Put simply, today's justices possess a frightening degree of certainty.
They alone can answer society's most pressing problems with just the right lawyerly argument.
So now you have the left making an argument that the right always made for generations.
The argument the right made was, who gave the Supreme Court the power to simply declare abortion on demand the law of the land?
Who gave them the power to do that?
Who gave the Supreme Court the power to simply declare that gay marriage was the law of the land enshrined in the American Constitution?
Who gave them the power to do that?
They were never given that power.
Now the left is making exactly the same argument about the people who are on the Supreme Court now.
Now, Left claimed that this was undermining the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, that if you said Roe v. Wade is an illegitimate decision, because it is, if you said that, based not on your disrespect for the court, but on your respect for the rule of law, if you said that, they claimed you were basically an insurrectionist.
You're trying to overthrow the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and undermine its credibility.
Then the constituency of the court shifts, and the positions entirely flip.
They entirely flip.
So what does that mean?
It means that basically the only thing that matters is who controls the various institutions.
It's all just a power game.
It's all just a power game.
Now this is really dangerous territory.
It's really dangerous territory, because what it suggests is that if you lose an election, and if the only thing that matters is who controls the government, and that you automatically believe the institution is illegitimate if the other party controls the government, for example, We don't have any institutions in common and it's only a question of how badly someone's ox gets gored before things start to get really bloody and ugly and violent.
It's a serious problem.
It's happening, by the way, all across the West.
It's not unique to the United States.
In Western countries all over the world, there is now a feeling that's arising that because the institutions have failed, Or because the institutions are weaponized by your political opposition, that you can do whatever you want.
And by the way, this is not a right-left thing, because the left will do the same thing as the right if they are out of power.
When the right is in power in Brazil, it's tyranny afoot, and insurrection in the streets is the only thing that can stop the Ira Bolsonaro.
And when it is Lula da Silva in power, and he's actively using the Supreme Court as his tool, and breaking the rule of law there, Then it's the reverse.
The right is saying it's an insurrection, that we have to be in the streets and we don't have a choice.
Once every election becomes a matter of tyranny versus liberty, and there's no clear definition of these things, things are about to get very, very ugly.
The fight over institutions, as it turns out, is not about institutional credibility.
No one respects the institutions.
Right?
Once the institution is only good, if you're the one in control of it, it's not a good institution anymore.
If the police are only good if your friends are in the police, and if it's somebody you don't know in the police, the police are bad now, then you don't respect the police qua police, you just respect your friends.
If your respect for the American government is reliant on it being staffed by people who agree with you, what that really means is that the people who disagree with you are so dangerous and so out of bounds that the institution becomes fundamentally illegitimate because it is staffed by those people.
Which means we don't have a problem with institutions in the United States, we have a problem with each other.
Now, I don't actually believe that Americans writ large have a problem with each other.
I think the elites really have a problem with each other, and I think they're weaponizing institutions against each other for fun and profit.
I think you go to everyday America, and most Americans, they don't care about this stuff.
They just want to, like, go about their daily business, be left alone, raise their families, go to church, go to their work.
That's about it.
But there are people at the top who have a real interest In essentially saying that if your side loses, the country is irrevocably broken and there will not be, for example, another election.
And by the way, it's both the right and left saying this.
I mean, going into the next election cycle, you have the right saying that if Joe Biden wins re-election, the country is over.
And you have the left saying that if Donald Trump wins re-election, the country is over.
That is not a good place to be.
In a second, I want to get into what this sort of means.
How can we get out of this conundrum, this sort of puzzle we've created for ourselves.
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Okay, so what does this mean?
What's the future of the United States look like?
First, we have to fix the social fabric.
If we don't fix the social fabric, the institutions are irrelevant.
So, institutions are usually only effective if they govern with a light hand.
When the social fabric fails, institutions have to come in with a heavier hand.
And then they're not good at it.
And then people get angry at each other and they blame the institutions for the actual failure of the social fabric.
Generally, institutions get tyranny grows as social fabric fails.
To take an example, the place where social fabric is the most durable, the tightest, is between you and the other members of your family.
You generally don't need a third party arbiter coming in and adjudicating fights between you and members.
In fact, you resent it if a third party arbiter comes in and starts messing around in your family's business.
Why?
Because the social fabric is tight.
Well, if things start to fall apart, that's when you have to have child protective services show up or a divorce lawyer show up and things start to get really ugly.
And the more they're involved, the uglier they get.
Well, that's true on a societal level as well.
As we fail to get along with each other or as we fail to respect each other as human beings, we start calling in the big guys to come in and enforce our opinion with the gun.
This is why as societies fail, institutions have to get more and more tyrannical.
They don't really have a choice.
There are two ways that societies go south with regard to societies and institutions and their interrelationship.
One is the way that I just described.
The social fabric decays.
And then the institutions follow.
You can make an argument that that's effectively what's happened in the United States.
That since the 1960s, with the rise of a radical left that overthrew the social compact, that instead of saying, we require change within the boundaries of the social compact, said the entire social compact is corrupt and evil and nasty and a guise for power, we have to throw it out, that it was no longer a fight between JFK liberals and Nixonian conservatives, that now the fight was between revolutionaries who thought the entire system was corrupt, the Herbert Marcuse argument.
The basic idea that all institutions, including freedom of speech, were actually guises for power, that once that corrupted our institutions, and it took a couple generations to do it, once that was infused throughout our institutions, then the failures of the social fabric were made manifest.
People stopped going to church, which was a social fabric builder.
People stopped believing one another.
And their arguments.
Their arguments, they started to think, were actually just an excuse for you to do the thing you want to do anyway.
And when you'd have a good faith argument, there was no such thing as good faith argument anymore.
It was basically just accusations.
Once that stuff made its way up to the institutions, of course the institutions failed.
That's one way that societies fail.
That institutions fail after societies.
There is one other way.
And it's possible this also happened in the United States.
And that is that institutions can cause social fabric to decay.
How do institutions cause social fabric to decay?
Well, what happens, the elites in a society gain control of an institution, and they decide it is time for world-breaking change.
They have to centralize power.
That power is now going to be used in top-down fashion in order to crowd out the social fabric, because people need to change.
And the current social fabric has created flawed people.
Get rid of that social fabric, create new circumstances, and the people will flourish and flower anew.
That's sort of the case that Marxism makes.
Is that people are petty and nasty to one another, but if we lived in a Marxist utopia, people would be awesome.
So all we have to do is change the superstructure and suddenly the people themselves change.
So institutions captured by elites start to try to cram down change on people at the top level.
And in doing so, they must break down the social fabric.
It is necessary.
Because the social fabric are little platoons against that, as Edmund Burke described them.
Now, a good functioning society uses the social fabric and the little platoons within that social fabric as the building blocks for a broader society.
A terrible society must, in utopian fashion, destroy all those building blocks, level the earth, and then build with whatever is left.
And that's effectively what, you can make the argument, happened with American institutions, particularly in the 60s.
The growth of government effectively crowded out religion.
It effectively crowded out the social fabric.
It crowded out all the connections that you have with your friends, and now it's all been filled by the government.
And so then the social fabric fails, and then the call from the government is, well, the social fabric's failing, we need more government.
And the government fails at that, but it's still crowded out the social fabric, and now all faith in institutions is lost.
Well, whichever of those arguments you accept, one thing is for sure true.
If what we have here is not a failure of institutions predominantly, but a failure of the social fabric, this can only be fixed at the local level through the rebuilding of the social fabric.
And what that really means is what we ought to be fighting for.
And it's funny because when you discuss this with rational members of the opposite political party, many of them will agree.
I had this conversation openly with Anna Kasparian from the Young Turks, for example, and I got her to agree in sort of broad strokes that what we really need to do with the federal government is minimize it.
And when you have a federal government that institutionally is incredibly powerful and everybody's just fighting over the power in order to use it against their political opponents, this exacerbates the collapse of the social fabric.
What you really need is local communities to be able to be local communities.
Though what you can't do is make the argument that the best form of American institution-making is going to be done at the top level, because it isn't.
It isn't.
By the way, the founders understood this, which is why they made the federal government really weak.
Comparatively speaking, the federal government was very, very weak.
Even after the transformation from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, that is a weak federal government.
And the truth is that it's only weak, top-down structures that have been able to preside over large populations.
One of the great lies about empires, for example, is that empires tend to be incredibly onerous.
They tend to be tyrannical.
They're like in your business all the time at the lowest level.
Not durable ones, they aren't.
If you look at the history of empires, and the United States is an empire.
Now, I'm not even talking about an international empire.
Just by any stretch of the imagination, a government that governs 340 million people over the course of 3,000 horizontal miles and, like, another 1,500 vertical miles.
I mean, you're talking about a land area in the United States that is continental in nature.
I mean, it's enormous.
That would be, by any stretch of the imagination, an empire.
Just domestically, an empire.
All the states would be countries, theoretically, and the United States would effectively be a domestic empire.
Because it's just so big.
You're not governing a tiny space like Great Britain or something.
And you're not governing a homogenous space either.
The United States is incredibly diverse.
Okay, so, the only way that that succeeds is if the top level is relatively light-handed.
And every durable empire ever has actually had a relatively light hand at the top level.
The great lie about the Roman Empire, for example, is that the Roman Empire was unbelievably onerous to people on the outskirts of the empire.
It's not true.
The Roman Empire could be onerous if you rebelled against them.
They would come in and they'll crush you with an iron heel.
But if you're not rebelling against them, they were actually relatively decentralized.
The great lie about the Roman Empire, again, is there was a highly centralized empire.
It was not.
If you're living In the Middle East, for much of the time of the Roman Empire, you were basically living under kind of a local potentate.
Very often, the Romans were negotiating with you to appoint somebody who might be, like, slightly friendlier to you.
And that's why the Roman Empire could last for hundreds of years.
If you look at other less powerful empires, like, for example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which started off as the Habsburg Monarchy and was an empire that dominated an incredible amount of Europe.
The Habsburg Monarchy, which launches in like the 16th century and then lasts via the Austro-Hungarian Empire all the way up to World War I, the reason that it was able to govern this amount of territory with this diverse population is because it actually had a very, very light hand.
It was actually more visible by its absence than by its presence.
They had kind of unified military uniforms, and that's kind of it.
I mean, there are a lot of people inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ranging from Jews to Muslims to Orthodox Christians to Catholics to Protestants, and they're all living under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, because the Austro-Hungarian Empire actually had a fairly decentralized approach to governance.
The same thing was true, actually, for a lot of the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire was kind of a lazy empire.
It's why by the time it died in World War I, and just after World War I, it was called the sick old man, because it wasn't even capable of governing its own territory.
Now, a lot of people see that as a flaw, but the reality is that the only way that you can retain any sort of centralization at all in a very, very large space is either like oppressive tyranny at high levels, which can't be done for long, is what the USSR learned, or you're going to have to have relative decentralization.
Well, the problem is the United States right now is not a decentralized empire.
The United States right now domestically is a very, very centralized empire.
I mean, we are spending $7 trillion a year.
We are engaged at the federal level in everything from how much water you have in your toilet to which individuals should be put in jail.
I mean, this is a very non-decentralized, and so what that's doing is exacerbating all of the social conflict that already roils under the surface.
It used to be that people in California didn't really care about what people in Florida were doing, and those people in Florida didn't really care about what people in New York were doing.
We can blame that on social media, or we can blame it on the fact that virtually all policymaking has now been elevated to the federal level, and not only that, a huge percentage of that policymaking is made by unelected bureaucrats who are staffed through unofficial political patronage networks.
The only way to cure that is to minimize that power at the top level, let people go back to doing exactly what they would like to do in their own local communities.
That can only happen, ironically, if you have enough trust for your fellow American that you're willing to allow them to do that.
And if the answer to that is no, it's hard to see how the country maintains.
That's why all the lawfare that we're seeing right now is incredibly dangerous.
We're in a dangerous moment in the United States, systemically speaking.
It is a dangerous moment for the system of the United States because very few people have any baseline faith in the system itself.
Which, by the way, is again another irony because the fact is the system itself actually, the constitutional system as directed by the founders, actually justified itself in 2020.
For all the talk about how America was on the verge of being overthrown in 2020, by January 6th rioters, it was not even close.
It was not even remotely close.
The system proved itself unbelievably durable and the natural reaction of the left was the system is so fragile that we have to capture all aspects of it and militarize it against us, and militarize it against our opponents.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the Trump of it all.
So, President Trump is on Truth Social.
He is not talking about the campaign.
One of the things he could be talking about would be the topic of abortion, where the left continues to be unbelievably radical.
According to a recent study of hundreds of post-abortive women, 60% of women reported they would have preferred to give birth if they had received more support from others or had more financial security.
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Also, the time is almost here.
The new 10-part original series with Candace Owens, Convicting a Murderer, it comes to DailyWire Plus next week.
We're almost there, guys.
Stephen Avery's murder trial was made famous by making a murderer that portrayed him as an innocent victim of corrupt law enforcement.
Well, Candace blows this narrative just out of the water.
There's no one better to advocate for the truth and against media manipulation in this case than Candace.
She did what she does best.
She got to the bottom of things.
You will see all the evidence that was omitted.
When the case was presented to the public, the evidence you will see revealed in convicting a murderer tells a very different story.
It's a great, great series.
You'll see just how Hollywood and the media select, tailor, craft information to fit pre-set narratives.
You'll see shocking details that were hidden from you, including evidence that was omitted in making a murder.
We are talking edited testimonies and phone calls, portrayals of Stephen Avery that led you to a desired conclusion.
All of this comes out.
If you thought you knew everything there is to know about that Stephen Avery case, you're in for a shock.
Don't take my word for it.
Watch the series yourself.
Draw your own conclusions.
Here's the trailer.
This is a collect call from an inmate at the Calumet County Jail.
The man served 18 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared his name.
The Two Rivers man was convicted of sexual assault in 1985 but exonerated with DNA evidence in 2003.
So this is the infamous Avery lot.
Now, two years later, he again finds himself tied to a police investigation.
Accused of murdering Teresa Hallbuck on the Avery property.
Stephen Avery's 16-year-old nephew admitted his involvement in the rape and murder of Teresa Hallbuck.
The car is discovered just around the bend.
It was just this worldwide phenomenon.
I think they framed this guy.
I think he intended to crush the vehicle, but ran out of time.
Avery thinks the 36 million dollar lawsuit he filed is why he's being targeted in this investigation.
10-21 at 24 Main Street.
Do we have Steve Avery?
Netflix made millions of dollars from making a murderer.
But the filmmakers left out very important details.
Mountains of evidence that you have not yet seen.
The blood vial.
The most egregious manipulation from the movie.
Interrogations.
That's when he started beating me because I told him that he's sick.
Cell phones.
And I saw melted plastic parts of a cell phone.
Interviews.
Her arms were pinned behind her head.
They made Steven Avery look like a victim.
Do you believe your brother's guilty?
I don't know if I'm a suspect.
I got nothing to hide.
I'm getting sick and tired of media deception.
Evidence piling up.
Why would they omit so many different things?
Why are you editing my testimony?
I am not going to make the same mistake that the filmmakers did.
Rearranging the testimony.
They delete a portion of it at the end.
How could they claim to care about the truth?
They all know that Steve and Avery committed this crime.
911, what is your emergency?
The evidence forces me to conclude that you are the most dangerous individual ever to set foot in this courtroom.
you you
Candace is doing a great job here setting the record straight, spearheading the movement to counter false narratives perpetuated by Hollywood.
Daily Wire viewers get exclusive early access on September 7th to view episodes 1 and 2 of Convicting a Murderer.
The series will make its official debut on X, formerly known as Twitter, on September 8th at 9 p.m.
Eastern Time.
Candice will also be hosting a live event on X at 5 p.m.
Eastern Time with some special guests.
Stay tuned for details on that.
The full series is only available at DailyWirePlus.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Get access to watch the full series as new episodes are released every Thursday.
Now, for a limited time, you can save 25% when you use the code TRUTH.
Take advantage of that before the offer runs out on September 7th.
That's code TRUTH for 25% off your subscription at dailywireplus.com slash subscribe.
Everyone is going to be talking about Candice's take on the series.
Don't miss out.
Subscribe today.
Meanwhile, the 2024 election continues to move forward.
President Trump is focusing in on the stuff that he wants to focus in on, which is really his enemies inside the Republican Party.
So yesterday he posted some 31 times on Truth Social, dozens of videos, and he just went hyper with the camera.
And pretty much none of them were about Joe Biden as a president.
He made one video, I think, that's relevant to the 2024 election, and the rest of them were just attacking people on his own side, which is not the way that you actually win an election, as it turns out.
So, for example, Donald Trump spent yesterday fulminating on Truth Social about the evils of Bill Barr on Fox News.
Why does Fox News constantly put on slow-thinking and lethargic Bill Barr, who didn't have the courage or stamina to fight the radical left lunatics?
Well, he was the Attorney General of the United States and who, even more importantly, refused to fight election fraud, of which there was much.
He knew what was going on.
Just look at his past remarks.
Unless Fox News starts putting on the right people, their ratings will continue to erode It's just personal grievance after personal grievance.
So first of all, calling Bill Barr, you can call him a lot of things, calling him slow thinking is a weird one, considering that he went to Columbia and George Washington University Law School.
Okay, then.
But not just that.
Fox News is apparently very cruel and terrible.
He then went after Rupert Murdoch, who was once one of his supporters.
Fox News and the Wall Street Journal fight me because Murdoch is a globalist.
That's right.
Rupert Murdoch is a globalist.
You don't know that.
And I am America first.
It's very simple.
I put America first.
It will always be that way, so get used to it.
De Sanctimonious, by the way, is done.
He was a Murdoch pick.
Just like Jeb Bush was a Murdoch pick.
How did that work out?
Just like Hillary Clinton.
Murdoch liked Hillary Clinton.
Crooked Hillary.
And that was another pick of Murdoch.
No.
We are about America first and some people don't like that.
The Wall Street Journal has totally lost its way.
Can you feel those independent voters flowing into the party?
Can you feel it?
Can you feel those suburban ladies who are now switching their votes back from Biden to Donald Trump because of these videos?
Oh, and also, he had some notes about losing Georgia.
Again, listen, you want to pick this guy for your nominee, so be it.
But I'm just pointing out, this will be the campaign.
So if you think this looks like a successful general election campaign, okay.
I easily won the great state of Georgia in 2016.
Did a fantastic job as president for Georgia and the entire USA.
Received 10 million more votes than I got nationwide in 2016.
Got by far the most votes in history for a sitting president.
But shockingly, lost Georgia.
All this despite winning nearby Alabama and South Carolina in record-setting landslides.
Why did Georgia officials agree to sign that horrible one-sided consent decree?
Nobody to this day has figured that out.
Does anybody really believe I lost Georgia?
Because I don't.
Okay, now I assume that he's also saying that because if he does not claim that he won Georgia, then he also loses his legal case in Georgia.
The entire basis for the legal case in Georgia is that he knew he lost and then manipulated the system to try and essentially steal the state.
If he continues to claim that he absolutely believes that, maybe he does, Donald Trump has a unique capacity to make himself believe nearly anything, Or at the very least doesn't seem to care very much about whether it's true or whether it's not.
OK, fair enough.
He's establishing motive in his legal case there.
But I'm going to keep asking it because I want an answer from somebody.
Now, again, you can hope that Joe Biden just falls down on the job.
It's quite possible he could.
Why not?
But if that's it.
If you are playing a game where your best hope is that the other guy basically dies, that's not like the best move that you could possibly make.
And again, he's focusing all of his ire in the wrong places.
Like, Joe Biden is busy being a terrible president!
How about that?
But no, we're gonna get more.
Here's Donald Trump going after the quote-unquote pretenders to the throne.
The debate on Fox News had a hard time with the proverbial ratings.
You know what television ratings are.
It's all about the ratings.
It was one of the lowest ever rated in terms of debates, if not the lowest.
It showed that many of those participating are second-tier.
They were second-tier people.
People like Christie and people like Ada.
I call them Ada.
Ada Hutchinson.
And merely pretenders to the throne.
They're just pretenders to the throne.
These aren't presidential people.
These aren't presidential talents.
Yes, this will win Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.
Yep, that right there.
By the way, speaking of losing Arizona, I'm old enough to remember because I am more than like Eight years old?
I'm old enough to remember a time when Arizona was completely red.
It had a red governor and two red senators.
Now, you may have thought that the senators were squishes.
That's true.
Jeff Flake and John McCain were squishes.
They were also better than Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly.
Well, apparently the Arizona Republican Party is deciding that the Thelma and Louise method of electioneering is probably the best way to go.
So now, Blake Masters is going to run against Carrie Lake, is the new idea, for the GOP Senate race against Kyrsten Sinema.
Great.
The best that Arizona can come up with for the Senate race is going to be two of the three candidates who lost their last election cycles in Arizona.
That's great.
So in the last election cycle, we had Carrie Lake lose for governor to Katie Hobbs, a wet dish rag.
And we had Blake Masters lose his race to Mark Kelly, who was extremely vulnerable.
And now the two of them are going to face off for the opportunity to run against Kyrsten Sinema.
Oh, goodie, goodie, gumdrops.
This seems like this will go well.
But at least we'll feel good yelling at the wall.
Probably.
And meanwhile, speaking of things that are quite terrible, Mitch McConnell froze up again.
It was actually, it's getting quite frightening at this point.
He's 81 years old.
This is the second time in the past month that he froze up for like 30 solid seconds.
He was speaking to the media and it's really hard to watch.
Here he was.
What are my thoughts about what?
Running for re-election in 2026.
Oh, that's right.
Did you hear the question, Senator?
Running for re-election in 2026?
Yes.
All right, I'm sorry, you all.
We're going to need a minute.
Okay, that is awful to watch.
A lot of senators are worried about his personal health as they should be. He then held calls with
allies, including Minority Whip John Thune, Conference Chair John Barrasso, and Senator
John Cornyn of Texas. All of them are potential successors to McConnell. This has led to a spate
of speculation over his health. A lot of talk about whether these are some sort of brain problem,
or whether this is Parkinson's. That's one of these speculations that's being put out because
nobody seems particularly alarmed about this, which means maybe he already has a prior diagnosis.
Ironically, Joe Biden is out there saying, I'll get in touch with him. Honestly, I wish that the
media dedicated one-tenth the amount of true worry they have about McConnell to Joe Biden. But we're
told that Joe Biden is virile and with it.
Anyway, I...
I just heard, literally, coming out, and Mitch is a friend, as you know, not a joke.
I know people don't believe that's the case, but we have disagreements politically, but he's a good friend, and so I'm gonna try to get in touch with him later this afternoon.
I don't know enough to know.
Okay, so, again, the media basically suggesting McConnell has to step down.
They think that that guy ought to keep running for president.
McConnell's 81, that guy's 80.
By the way, Donald Trump is 78.
At a certain point, maybe we ought to get somebody who is below retirement age to run for the presidency.
Okay, meanwhile...
It turns out there's still people in this country who are somewhat capable at their jobs.
So, Ron DeSantis has been presiding over Florida during Hurricane Idalia.
Thank God, Hurricane Idalia seems to have done less human damage than many of the prior hurricanes of its magnitude.
It's already passed on to Georgia.
It's turned into a tropical storm.
So, DeSantis, yesterday, he was warning the looters.
He said, basically, guys, you're in Florida.
You try looting after a hurricane and do so at your own peril.
There are reports of people trying to loot down in Steenhachie.
And I've told all of our personnel at the state level, you know, you protect people's property and we are not going to tolerate any looting in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
I mean, it's just ridiculous that you would try to do something like that on the heels of an almost Category 4 hurricane.
Hitting this community.
I'd also just remind potential looters that people you never know what you're walking into people have a right to defend their property This part of Florida you got a lot of advocates and some proponents of the Second Amendment And I've seen signs in different people's yards in the past after these disasters, and I would say it's probably here You loot we shoot This is the best of Ron DeSantis, right?
When he's being governor, this is, again, why he would make a good president.
He's actually good at the actual job.
He was asked by a reporter about Donald Trump and the fact that Trump has spent effectively little brainpower on the hurricane in Florida.
He was tweeting a lot, putting out a lot of truth socials or whatever.
DeSantis, however, gives the proper answer, which is, why are you asking me about this?
I'm busy being governor.
What do you think about Trump?
You know, he's a resident here in Florida, and he hasn't commented on retaliation at all yet.
It's not my concern.
My concern is protecting the people of Florida, being ready to go.
And we've done that.
And look, in Florida, you just have to do this.
I mean, this is something we put a lot of time and effort into throughout the course of each year, knowing that there's going to be time where you're going to have to activate it.
Okay, that happens to be an excellent response to all of this.
Meanwhile, the left, of course, is using this as an excuse to talk about climate change, because what isn't an excuse about climate change?
I mean, honestly, these people have one note and they're just going to keep singing it over and over.
Here was Joe Biden yesterday claiming that because there is a hurricane, no one can deny the climate crisis anymore, which is weird since there have been hurricanes for literally all of documented history.
I let each governor I spoke with know, if there's anything, anything the states need right now, I'm ready to mobilize that support of what they need.
I don't think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore.
Just look around.
Historic floods.
I mean, historic floods.
More intense droughts.
Extreme heat.
Significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we've never seen before, not only throughout the Hawaiian Islands and the United States, but in Canada and other parts of the world.
By the way, it's so bad, he said, that one time his kitchen got set on fire.
I'm not kidding, he did it again.
In that same exact press conference, he was talking about Lahaina, and he mentioned again that his kitchen got set on fire one time.
He's just, he's the best.
Okay, time for some things I like.
As I mentioned earlier, the rare Ben Shapiro show reference to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
If you are interested in learning about any of that sort of stuff, I highly recommend Jacob Michanowski's new book, Goodbye Eastern Europe, An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
It's really worth the read.
Excellent book.
Basically traces the history of Eastern Europe, what used to be called Eastern Europe.
From essentially the dark ages, so-called dark ages, up until modern times, and looks at the fact that a lot of the borders were sort of drawn post facto, changed a lot.
If you look at a map of Europe in like 1200, it looks completely different than the map of Europe today.
It's shifted, it's moved a lot of times, populations have shifted and moved.
And there's some valuable lessons to be learned in the history of Eastern Europe about how empires fall apart, about how nationalism rises, about the costs of population transitions, and all the rest of it.
Definitely worth the read.
Jacob Michanowski's Goodbye Eastern Europe.
Alrighty, guys.
The rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be speaking with a former U.S.
Army Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann about the two-year anniversary of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.
If you're not a member, become a member.
He's Coach Shapiro.
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