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Nov. 30, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:43
Musk Is Right: Kill DEI To Fight Anti-Semitism
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Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York took to the floor of the Senate to decry anti-Semitism.
Schumer is not an amazing source on this particular topic, given his consistent support of the Middle East policies of the most anti-Semitic president in modern American history, Barack Obama.
Nonetheless, he spoke about the threat of anti-Semitism and, in a rare moment of quasi-honesty, he actually mentioned the problem of anti-Semitism among liberals.
Here's what he had to say.
I feel compelled to speak.
Because I'm the highest ranking Jewish elected official in America.
In fact, the highest ranking Jewish elected official ever in American history.
And I have noticed a significant disparity between how Jewish people regard the rise of anti-Semitism and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it.
Anti-Semites are taking advantage of the pro-Palestinian movement to espouse hatred and bigotry towards
Jewish people.
But rather than call out this dangerous behavior for what it is, we see so many of our friends
and fellow citizens, particularly young people who yearn for justice, unknowingly aiding
and abetting their cause.
There are people hijacking the pro-Palestinian movement.
They're hijacking it.
The young people, they're so good-hearted, they just don't know what they do.
Schumer actually explained that the phrase, from the river to the sea, a genocidal call to destroy all Jews, was actually just ignorance.
Plenty of people, Schumer actually said, chant that phrase, quote, not because they hate Jewish people, but because they support a better future for Palestinians.
Of course, that is a lie.
And it's a particularly egregious lie when Schumer himself has had zero to say about anti-Semis Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar inside his own caucus.
For example, there were some people last night chanting from the river to the sea in New York City while they attempted to stop the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center last night.
Do these look like good-hearted but slightly misinformed people to you?
There are people attacking police officers right outside Rockefeller Center.
Don't worry.
According to Chuck Schumer, they're just too passionate about the pro-Palestinian cause.
They're not anti-Semitic.
They're not radical in any way.
They're just ignorant, you know?
Liberals, they're never the bad guys, according to Chuck Schumer.
What we're watching is precisely the mentality created by the world of leftist ideology, and Schumer knows that.
But he has to lie about it, because to recognize the roots of left-wing antisemitism would be to destroy the progressive ideology wholesale.
That leftist ideology is based on a matrix of oppressor versus oppressed.
That in any given situation, the powerless are oppressed, and the powerful are the oppressors.
That oppressor-oppressed matrix maps directly onto anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish power.
Jews are pseudo-white because Jews are financially well-off and Israel is disproportionately successful in a really unsuccessful region of the world.
The oppressor-oppressed matrix simply doesn't fit the Jews, who are actually being victimized by widespread Jew-hatred in the Middle East and abroad, but who also are very successful.
So the left keeps pushing the lie.
That's also true of the Anti-Defamation League, which put out a poll yesterday with Hillel International, which is a college group, asking college students if diversity, equity, and inclusion should cover anti-Jewish prejudice.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, is the rubric under which the left pushes the idea that unequal group outcomes are the result of systemic discrimination.
So, by that math, Jews are the beneficiaries of systemic discrimination because, of course, they're disproportionately successful.
DEI simply cannot include Jews because DEI's basic logic forbids it.
DEI opposes meritocracy.
It opposes performance.
It opposes success.
Nonetheless, the 84% of Jewish students and 75% of non-Jewish college students said Jews should be included in DEI training.
That Jews should be somehow included in the oppressor-oppressed matrix on the side of the oppressed.
Of course these students say that.
What else exactly would they say?
The premise of the question is so deeply flawed, only one answer is possible.
To say that Jews shouldn't be included in DEI would be to discriminate against Jews, which violates the supposed basis of DEI itself.
But to include Jews explodes the entire DEI superstructure.
Because again, DEI is based on the idea of oppressor versus oppressed.
And if Jews are included on the side of the oppressed, how are they so successful?
So these students are saying what they're expected to say.
Sure, the Jews can be included in the victim class without recognizing the central truth of DEI.
It is a scam.
Victimhood is not inherently connected to level of success.
Sometimes the powerless are evil.
Sometimes the powerful are good.
Sometimes the powerless are actually victimizers.
Sometimes the powerful are the victims.
You can't fight antisemitism with DEI.
You can only increase antisemitism with DEI because the entire framework is a conspiracy theory.
The only way to truly fight anti-Semitism is to recognize what the Bible says in Deuteronomy.
Quote, You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great,
but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.
But that's the one thing Chuck Schumer and the ADL will never say, because again, it would violate their ideology.
Instead, people on the left will pretend the true anti-Semitism doesn't lie in oppressor-oppressed matrices, but in people like Elon Musk.
And they'll target him specifically because he doesn't like DEI.
They will claim that DEI is the way to fight anti-Semitism, so if Elon Musk fights DEI, that means he's bad.
They'll slander him as an anti-Semite, even as he goes to Israel to express solidarity with the families of murdered Jews.
They'll try to activate advertisers to pull their money from Twitter, supposedly because Elon Musk is the root of all anti-Semitic evil.
Elon Musk, to his credit, is fighting back against this.
Here's a clip yesterday of Elon Musk.
It's an absolute classic.
He's being asked about advertisers canceling because they don't like his politics.
Here is what he had to say to Andrew Ross Sorkin over a deal book at the New York Times.
Apology tour, if you will.
This had been said online.
There was all of the criticism.
There was advertisers leaving.
We talked to Bob Iger today.
I hope they stop.
You hope?
Don't advertise.
You don't want them to advertise?
No.
What do you mean?
If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising?
Blackmail me with money?
Go f*** yourself.
But... Go f*** yourself.
Is that clear?
I hope it is.
Hey, Bob.
Hey Bob is a reference to Bob Iger who's in the audience, the head of Disney.
All the people pushing DEI are the exact same people seeking to boycott Musk are the exact same people who are seeking to pussyfoot around Hamas's feelings like right now.
The Venn diagram of that group is a circle.
That circle is the true threat to Jews in Israel and in the West.
In just one second we'll get to the latest from Israel where the tenuous Ceasefire, the break, seems to be on the rocks, specifically because Hamas is, you know, murdering Jews again.
We'll get to that momentarily first.
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Okay, now speaking of the latest in Israel, so, Anthony Blinken, who's the Secretary of State, has traveled over to Israel in an attempt to extend this ceasefire.
Here he was yesterday explaining that he'd like to see the pause that has been created by negotiations between Israel and Hamas via Qatar.
They want to see that extended so more hostages are released.
The big question here is whether this is a prelude to Western pressure for Israel to end its offensive against Hamas completely, which is insane, as we'll talk about momentarily.
Here was Blinken yesterday.
We'd like to see the pause extended because what it has enabled, first and foremost, is hostages being released.
It's also enabled us to surge humanitarian assistance into the people of Gaza who so desperately need it.
Okay, so again, the idea here is, is that just a pause?
Does the United States suddenly expect that Israel is going to stop what it's doing?
Israel cannot stop what it's doing.
And in fact, they came very close to ending the ceasefire last night because Hamas literally waited until five minutes before the deadline to come up with new hostages.
And what Hamas is doing right now is so unbelievably evil.
It's as evil as what they did on October 7th.
It's just in slow motion.
So on October 7th, they murdered 1,200 people and they kidnapped another 240.
And now they're separating families out.
They're saying that some people are dead who are still alive.
They're saying some people who are alive are actually dead.
And meanwhile, they are pursuing terror attacks.
So literally this morning in Israel, Israel time, There was a terror attack in a major, highly-trafficked street corner in Jerusalem at a bus stop.
And you can see, these are two brothers from East Jerusalem who identify with Hamas.
Hamas took credit for this attack.
They get out of their car and they just start mowing down a bunch of people who are at a bus stop.
They ended up killing three people, including a pregnant 24-year-old woman.
They were shot by people who are on the scene.
Reserves who showed up with their guns.
A civilian who was off duty and who ended up shooting them.
Three dead, six injured.
Supposedly, this is in the middle of a ceasefire.
Hamas took full credit for this.
Hamas says this is a good thing.
And yet Israel is supposed to keep going with some sort of pause to get the hostages out.
I gotta say, there is a moral question as to whether Israel should or can continue to do this sort of routine.
Because again, What's happened to the hostages is horrible and evil and continues to be horrible and evil.
At the same time, is the life of a hostage any more valuable than the life of that 24-year-old pregnant woman who was just murdered on a street corner in Jerusalem, which presumably would not have happened if Israel were continuing its military operations to defenestrate Hamas?
Speaking of the treatment of the hostages, it's amazing to watch as world and international organizations pretend that the hostages were treated well in some way.
Elon Levy, who's the spokesperson for the Israeli government, he says, no, the hostages were not in fact held in reasonable conditions.
As the survivors of Hamas captivity return home over the last week, we're beginning to discover new chilling details about life as Hamas hostages.
I'm of course not at liberty to share information from the official investigations, but the Evidence that the families have been sharing with the media is chilling.
The hostages were not held in reasonable conditions.
As some have cynically claimed, our children were serially abused.
Just like Hamas recorded its own crimes against humanity on October 7th, it continues to document its own atrocities ...releasing footage of crowds terrorizing the hostages in their final moments of captivity.
Those scenes bringing to mind that scene from Game of Thrones and fans of the series will of course know which scene I'm talking about.
Of course the hostages were not held in reasonable condition.
What else do you expect from, you know, a terrorist group?
The simple fact of the matter is that the hostages were treated precisely as you would expect Hamas to treat the hostages.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So meanwhile, as we're discussing, Those who oppose Israel destroying Hamas, they continue to make a variety of arguments.
Again, Israel's considering going back in.
They're going to have to.
The only question is when.
And so there are a bunch of people, predominantly on the left, who are attempting to make the claim that Israel should stop.
They are complaining that after Hamas, no one knows what comes next.
That's a weird accusation, because pretty much everybody knows what comes next.
An Israeli-led reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, hopefully with some input from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE to help fund this, and to establish a peaceful regime that will eventually break the back of the PA and Hamas notification efforts over the past four generations to indoctrinate literally two million people in the idea that the Jews must be destroyed.
But the media pretend they don't understand.
I gotta say, the faux ignorance of members of the media is truly an amazing thing to watch.
These are people who pretend that they know everything, but suddenly they turn into simple-minded
village idiots when confronted with bare facts.
So here's Chris Hayes of MSNBC picking up Rachel Maddow's glasses, putting them on,
and then playing the village idiot.
There's a question of what comes after.
People say Hamas must be destroyed.
Yes, it must.
But then, okay, well then what?
There's some who said maybe the Palestinian Authority can be the governing entity.
No, they can't.
Okay, so I know that you repulse them.
They can't because they're educated for hate, you know?
But they're not Hamas, right?
They are not Hamas, but they are educated for hate.
But then who?
And they are paid for slave, so they can't.
Who?
Okay, so what we want to do first is to eliminate Hamas.
And then to have a buffer zone, you know, in order to keep our villages safe.
And then there should be, like, maybe international allies from, you know, countries like Egypt, like the UAE, that will come and manage their lives there for a few years.
We need to do, you know, denatification, In order to... What does that mean?
Denazification?
Yeah, denazification, yeah.
Because right now, the children from the age... Since they're born, from the age of 2 or 3, we saw it in the kindergartens, we saw it in the school.
They are being educated to slaughtered Jews.
This is how they are being educated.
With all due respect, let me just say this.
Whether that is true or not.
It is true.
You can't argue on the facts.
We saw it in their schools.
We saw rockets in their schools.
10,000 or 15,000 people have died.
There have been children who have died.
We didn't start this war.
I know you didn't, but my question to you is, what I hear from you Is not Joe Biden says we have to restart the two-state solution.
What I hear from you and what I hear from most of Israeli political leaders in the center right in the coalition government is no Hamas, no PA, maybe an international coalition and we will manage the occupation in perpetuity and we will sell the West Bank and that's it and you will have to deal with that.
Okay, and you'll have to deal with it.
Chris Hayes then goes on to suggest, well, you're denying self-determination to these people.
It is worth pointing out at this point that Chris Hayes' ridiculous assumption that self-determination is somehow owed to every single group, regardless of the evils of their belief system, is extraordinarily dangerous.
Did ISIS deserve self-determination?
How about Hezbollah?
How about the white supremacists Hayes sees around every corner?
Do they deserve self-determination?
But in order to back Hayes' point, the left continues to push the idea that the Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are somehow, magically, a moderate group, simply dominated by a few terror masters.
I know this is a very flattering myth that the West, particularly, we love to tell ourselves this myth, right?
This is the, we will be greeted as liberators in Iraq myth.
It's the same thing from the Bush administration.
Here is the Pentagon spokesperson saying just that.
Of course, the Israelis are taking into account innocent civilians.
That's why, again, in all of our calls that the Secretary has with his counterpart, Minister Galant, we continue to urge, of course, for the protection of innocent civilians wherever they are in Gaza.
And again, we have to remember, Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people, and they shouldn't.
The Palestinian people deserve true leadership, and again, Hamas really should be rooted out from within Gaza.
Okay, so the idea that they don't represent the Palestinian people is a lie.
There's precisely zero evidence that Hamas does not represent the Palestinians.
Like, zero.
No evidence of that fact.
Doesn't mean they're all terrorists.
It means they do support a terrorist group.
Period.
They elected Hamas.
And then by every available poll since then, they support Hamas, including in the West Bank where Hamas is not governed.
So for all the people who are saying you can't trust the poll results in Gaza, fine.
Don't trust those poll results.
Trust the poll results in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is the governing entity.
Then there's the complaint that the left is lodging that Israel must stop its campaign against Hamas in order to minimize civilian casualties.
As we've repeatedly discussed, Israel tries to do that, but to focus on this question gives total leverage to Hamas because Hamas doesn't care at all.
Like, they care zero about that topic.
Finally, The left complains that international institutions are being hampered in their efforts to help.
Well, let's talk a little bit about these so-called international institutions.
They are a sick joke.
They are broken.
They are broken because there is no such thing as an international community.
There can be no community with tyrannical hellholes and people who support terrorism.
And yet, apparently, so long as you say the magic words, international humanitarian institution, everybody is supposed to bow and scrape before you, as though you are, in fact, a good-hearted saint doing wondrous healing work.
More often than that.
More often than not.
The term international humanitarian organization is a tremendous lie.
Take, for example, the United Nations.
The utter disgrace that is the UN is nothing new, of course.
The UN came into being in the aftermath of World War II, when the West was seeking to end all conflict via international diplomacy.
As literally all of history since that has shown, that plan was a giant failure.
It turns out the best guarantor of international safety and security is a strong hegemonic Western power, namely the United States.
Whenever the UN has been entrusted to guarantee safety and security, it has failed.
In Korea.
In Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, in the Sinai Desert, in Lebanon, literally everywhere.
Whenever UN peacekeepers are put in a place and then a tyrannical regime demands they be removed, they just leave.
UN agencies have sometimes been helpful in distributing aid, but just as often, they've stolen that aid or worked on behalf of nefarious powers.
Nowhere has all of this been truer than in the Gaza Strip.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so as the world clamors for Israel to stop its operations in the Gaza Strip, even as Israel prepares to go back in, they're again claiming that international agencies must be allowed to do their work.
These international agencies are by and large garbage and or tools of Hamas.
The UN Relief and Works Agency, for example, the only agency in the UN dedicated to one specific group of people, Palestinian Arab refugees, and I put refugees in quotes there because we are now talking about the great-grandchildren of people who moved like three miles down the road into the Gaza Strip.
has funneled billions of dollars to Palestinians, including terror groups.
In fact, since 1994, the United States has sent over $10 billion to the Palestinians.
The United States supplies nearly 30% of the UNRWA budget historically.
The UNRWA workforce, it consists of tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, including many terrorists and terror supporters, as we've talked about on the show.
When the Trump administration cut aid to the UNRWA, the State Department said,
quote, The fundamental business model and fiscal practices that
have marked UNRWA for years, tied to UNRWA's endlessly and exponentially expanding
community of entitled beneficiaries, is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for
many years.
The Biden administration quickly restored aid to the UNRWA, but now the UNRWA is giving Western powers heartburn again.
That's because of reports that one of the child hostages held by Hamas was actually being held by a UNRWA teacher, barely given any food and no medicine.
By the way, that would be the kind of person teaching at the schools that Chris Hayes denies are actually teaching at the schools.
When I yell at Shaquade in that clip, it tells Chris Hayes that people are being indoctrinated by teachers from the UNRWA.
And he says, well, even if that's true, literally one of those teachers was holding a hostage, a child hostage in his attic.
No wonder the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee's Frank Müller-Rosenstritt in Germany actually called on the German government to cut aid to the UNRWA.
And it's not just the UNRWA that's the problem.
Here is Sarah Hendricks, Deputy Executive Director for UN Women.
That's a Western organization that has not bothered to condemn Hamas's mass rape of Israeli women on October 7th.
Here she was being questioned by Biana Galadraiga of CNN.
Is there a reason though, Sarah, that you can't specifically call out Hamas and the mounting evidence now over seven weeks that Israeli investigators have collected that we've shown our viewers about the atrocities they committed specifically on October 7th?
Because I think that's the crux of the issue here.
It's not just condemning sexual violence against women and in any war in general.
It's specifically what occurred on October 7th, perpetrated by Hamas.
Indeed, UN Women always supports impartial, independent investigations into any serious allegations of gender-based or sexual violence.
And within the UN family, these investigations are led by the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights.
And just to provide a little bit of context in terms of UN Women's role, UN Women specifically provides and has extensive knowledge on gender-based violence and provides and supports investigations as we do with all UN investigations.
So it's going to be a no on condemning Hamas.
That is an awful lot of word salad to avoid condemning Hamas.
But what else would you expect from our humanitarian organizations?
Take as another example the International Red Cross.
Because the International Committee of the Red Cross requires the help of groups like Hamas to even work in the Gaza Strip, they end up as tools of Hamas.
The ICRC has spent little or no time condemning Hamas for its October 7th atrocities.
Instead, they've focused on Israel's action in Gaza.
The ICRC also failed to report the facts which they knew about Israeli hostages being held at Gazan hospitals, even as the international media lied that those hospitals were civilian sites.
Meanwhile, the ICRC has not fulfilled one of the key components of Israel's original hostage deal with Hamas.
Verification of life and health of the hostages being held by Hamas.
That failure has had particularly tragic consequences in the case of the Bebas family.
They were kidnapped from a village called Nir Oz.
The father, Yarden, mother, Shiri, 4-year-old Ariel, and 10-month-old Kfir were taken to Gaza.
Here's the footage of them being abducted.
You can see there's the mom carrying these two red-headed kids as Hamas kidnaps them.
They are physically healthy.
They were obviously healthy when taken, but nobody knows if they are alive.
Earlier this week, it was reported that the family was traded to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another terrorist group, by Hamas.
And then yesterday, Hamas claimed the family had been killed by Israeli bombs.
So where is the ICRC to testify to any of this?
Deny it.
Verify it.
They're absolutely missing.
Instead, the ICRC, the wonderful humanitarian organization, has become a shuttle service For Israeli hostages.
Helping Hamas release the hostages as Gazan crowds cheer in bloodthirsty fashion.
There was more of that last night.
Don't worry folks, the Palestinian Arab population, they hate Hamas.
Which is why they are literally jeering, mocking, cheering, filming the release of Israeli hostages.
Mostly women and children.
These are wonderful moderates who deserve self-determination, obviously.
The world would be a better place if they had a state.
The international humanitarian institutions have beclowned themselves in the current Israel-Hamas war, but they were a suspect long before that.
It's just that radical Muslims and the left-wing press have laundered lies into public view by adding the imprimatur of the magical international community to corrupt institutions riddled with political radicals and corrupt functionaries.
In just one second, I'm going to talk about international institutions and international politics because A lot of what you are seeing today in the obits about Henry Kissinger is predicated on people's views about, particularly, this subject.
So, last night, Henry Kissinger died.
He was 100 years old.
I'd met him very briefly once, and I had interviewed him once.
It didn't end up being taped.
He is a fascinating character, obviously.
Very checkered character.
A lot of the decisions he made were extremely cold-eyed.
Extremely cold-eyed.
A lot of people, ranging from Anthony Bourdain to Christopher Hitchens, condemned him as a war criminal for his decision-making during the Nixon administration with regards to, for example, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor or the American intervention on behalf of Pinochet in Chile in 1973.
Or the bombing of Cambodia?
By the same token, how you view Kissinger is very much a reflection of how you view international politics as a whole.
And the reason that this is broken down into sort of a left-right divide, despite the fact that Kissinger's history was very checkered in terms of left-right decision-making.
So, for example, the right doesn't like the fact that Kissinger quote-unquote opened China.
It was Kissinger who really led to the opening of China.
At the time, it was a real politic decision because he saw a gap emerging between China and Russia, and he was attempting to exploit that gap by wooing China away from Russia, right?
That was the goal.
The goal was woo China away from Russia, remove them as a source of trade and resources for Russia, and you will end up weakening the Russian regime, which is why the trip to China was initiated with Nixon speaking with Mao.
So in retrospect, we can say, and I would say, that's a bad mistake.
At the time, it's a choice between two bad decisions.
And this was the sort of guiding light of Kissinger's foreign policy.
So Henry Kissinger, for those who don't know much about Kissinger himself, he was a massive celebrity in the 1970s.
He was a Secretary of State during the Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations.
According to the Wall Street Journal, no U.S.
Secretary of State ever achieved such celebrity while in office as Henry Kissinger.
A 1974 Newsweek cover depicted him as Super K, a comic book hero.
Time called him the world's most indispensable man.
Gallup ranked him America's most admired man.
A 1972 Life magazine spread pictured him with a bevy of actresses, including Jill St.
John.
Yet no former Secretary of State has been more vehemently criticized.
Of the many anti-Kissinger books, the most influential was Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which explicitly accused Kissinger of responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places.
Although the book mentioned only one other supposed crime scene, Bangladesh, and mentioned the Soviet Union only three times.
This is Neil Ferguson, who wrote a biography of Henry Kissinger, talking about Henry Kissinger.
He said those accusations stuck like mud.
Late in life, Kissinger regularly faced protests at his public appearances, yet they are at odds with the historical record.
And Ferguson points out that Kissinger was both the White House National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State.
His accomplishments included the negotiation of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union, the opening to China, the ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the end of U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War for which both he and North Vietnamese counterpart Ly Duc Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.
But here is the problem.
If you see foreign policy as a family of nations, a lot of good-hearted people out there, they all just want the same thing, but they're having different ways of achieving that, then hardcore foreign policy looks nasty to you.
Because the easiest thing is just wash your hands of everything.
If the United States just goes hands off, why were we even involved in these places?
From the right, what you hear, and I think this critique is correct of Henry Kissinger, is that Henry Kissinger was so focused on the sort of Metternichian balance of power that he forgot that the United States is a global hegemon.
And from the left, what you hear of Henry Kissinger is he was engaged in the dirty game of politics and that meant that the United States was constantly engaged in dirty little wars all around the world we shouldn't have been engaged in.
And the reality is somewhere in between.
The reason that the left thinks that is because the left believes that if a communist regime were to arise in Latin America with the help of the Soviet Union, that's not a bad thing.
I think a Marxist regime in Latin America, or many Marxist regimes in Latin America, what's the big deal?
Why is that a problem?
Why does it matter if Vietnam turns communist?
Why does it matter if Cambodia and Laos turn communist?
Why does it matter if East Timor turns communist?
Why does any of that matter?
First of all, that demonstrates a complete misreading of how foreign policy works.
Foreign policy is a dirty, terrible business in which, as I say, Kissinger had one central foreign policy message.
His overriding message was, avoid the worst outcome.
Which means sometimes embracing the second worst outcome.
If you read any of his books, this was Kissinger's main thing was avoid the worst outcome.
This, by the way, was his recommendation in Ukraine.
So when it came to Ukraine during this war that is currently ongoing, very early on, he suggested that there should be an off-ramp in Ukraine because everybody knew that Ukraine was not going to take the Donbass or Crimea.
In which, Ukraine was given security guarantees, did not formally enter NATO, but was given enough armaments to defend itself against a predatory Russian invasion, and Russia was basically given dominion over the territories it was very likely to hold anyway.
And this pleased no one in the early days of the war, and it turns out it was rather prescient, because what he was attempting to avoid was a straight-up face-to-face confrontation between NATO and Russia.
That's what he was attempting to avoid, and he knew there weren't the stones for it in the West.
And so, realize what is happening on the ground, and adjust to it.
So when people rip on Kissinger, there are two rips.
One is that he misread particular situations.
He should have done things differently.
All of that's legitimate.
The second rip, which is just wrong, is the rip that you don't have to make these sort of considerations when you make American foreign policy.
That American foreign policy is either the most sinful foreign policy on planet Earth.
Every ill can be ascribed to it.
You see this in the critique of Kissinger with regard to Cambodia and Laos, for example.
The basic idea that is promoted by the left with Cambodia is that Kissinger, when he took over as Secretary of State in the aftermath of the LBJ completely botching the Vietnam War, When he came in, he said, we need to start bombing the communist supply lines in Cambodia.
And he authorized mass huge bombing raids into Cambodia without the approval of Congress.
Now you can talk about whether it needed congressional approval and all the rest, that's fine.
But as a foreign policy matter, did bombing Cambodia cause, for example, the left now claims that that caused the rise of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
That Khmer Rouge would never have happened if we had not bombed Cambodia.
That assumes that there's no such thing as agency in the world.
It's a lie.
It's not true.
The minute the United States got out of Vietnam, Cambodia fell to Pol Pot.
So, again, it's a bunch of considerations.
This is the overriding message of Kissinger's life, and it's the thing we should take away from it, while still quibbling, or arguing, or strenuously hating many of his foreign policy decisions.
Foreign policy is a dangerous and dirty business.
It is not possible to engage in foreign policy and keep your hands totally clean.
That is not something that you can do, because there are, in fact, nefarious powers who hate you, and who wish the worst for you, and who will have an impact on your life, whether you're talking about them controlling Choke points in international trade, as we've talked about on the show, from the Straits of Hormuz to the Straits of Taiwan, or whether you're talking about active military operations against the United States in far-flung places, and yes, indeed, at home.
You have to recognize that the world is a complex place that requires complex choices, and very often those choices are the choices of the least bad scenario, And having to actually engage with the second worst scenario.
And that really is the story of Henry Kissinger's foreign policy.
Again, I agree with many of the critiques from the right that sometimes who's engaging in the second worst scenario when say like a better scenario is available.
And again, that's a good critique.
What I don't agree with is the total isolationist or libertarian position which is that America should go hands-off in the world and somehow the world will be a better place for it.
That is a very difficult position to maintain in face of the fact that, again, there are countries all over the world that hate us, that do not agree with our values, that seek to maximize their own power at the expense of the American people.
There's this weird notion that has taken root on the right and the left.
It's this horseshoe theory thing, which is that everybody who acts badly in the world was somehow driven to it by the United States.
This is why you're seeing the left embrace TikToks of Osama bin Laden circa 2002.
Because, oh, he would never have done that if we hadn't been so mean in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, sure.
You see, the right do the same thing with regard to Russia.
Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if it had not been for our attempts to extend a helping hand to Ukraine and make overtures toward NATO.
Or maybe Russia has a long history under Vladimir Putin of territorial invasions of neighboring countries.
Maybe it turns out that other people except for the West have agency.
And once you realize other people except for the West have agency, it changes your decision-making dramatically.
This is true all over the world.
The fundamental foreign policy mistake is the assumption that only the West has agency.
This sort of ethnocentricity This political arrogance leads to, ironically, more death than a humility that acknowledges that other people have interests adverse to our own, and that you have to respect those interests, even if that means fighting those interests.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the 2024 campaign, which...
Again, this is going to be the weirdest campaign in American history.
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Well, meanwhile, the 2024 election continues apace right now in the RealClearPolitics average.
Donald Trump is up about two points.
There are two recent polls that have Biden back up a couple of points, but he is never above 44, 43% in these polls.
And in fact, in the polls where he's at 49 or 47 or 46, Trump is up on him in those polls.
So in other words, Joe Biden is stuck.
His ceiling is like 44, 45 percent.
And when people are forced to the decision, Matt, right now they're breaking in favor of Trump.
In fact, what the polls are showing is not right now actually increase or decrease support for Biden.
Actually, over the course of the last couple of months, his support is slightly up Biden in these polls.
The problem for him is that all the independents are breaking in favor of Trump.
Why is that happening?
It's because, again, all the focus is on Joe Biden.
And so the question is going to be, can Donald Trump keep the focus on Joe Biden as this election moves forward?
In order for that to happen, Trump cannot run a revenge campaign.
He cannot.
His campaign can be a political, a policy revenge campaign.
He can say, listen, Here are my policies.
Joe Biden got rid of all of them, and the world is now on fire.
I closed the border.
Joe Biden opened the border.
I was a negotiating piece in the Middle East.
Joe Biden has blown up all of that by legitimizing the Houthis in Yemen, by funding Iran, by restoring aid to the Palestinians.
He can say all of that.
He can say that the economy was going great guns before COVID, and then even in the middle of COVID, the economy was recovering at a steeper pace than it did subsequently under Joe Biden.
Dubai has broken all of the economic levers, which is why right now the economy is running extremely hot, but also we are in danger of continued baked-in inflation.
He can say all those things.
That would be a great campaign.
Making that campaign about, were you better off in 2019 or are you better off in 2024?
That is a good winning campaign for Donald Trump.
You know what's not a great winning campaign for Donald Trump?
I'm coming in, I'm going to break all the people who came after me.
That is not something I think the American people are up for.
Again, because the best of Donald Trump Always and forever was the version of Donald Trump who said, I am your tool.
You wield me in order to achieve certain objectives.
I am the shield for you.
But when he starts to make it about the voters being a shield for him, people tend to object to that.
They don't want to buy into his personal issues.
Even if they think, like I do, that many of those issues are being created by the left and are false.
If the answer to Donald Trump is being unjustly persecuted is election, I don't buy that.
I think the answer to Donald Trump being unjustly persecuted is fund his legal defense fund.
But!
Again, he has an independent case to make that is way better than that, which is why, again, he's been soaring in the polls the less you see of him.
You have not seen him.
He's been gone.
All the focus has been on Joe Biden.
It needs to stay that way, which is why I think it's particularly foolish for Donald Trump to go out there and start warning people about the weaponization of the DOJ.
Trump put out a giant statement on Truth Social yesterday.
He said, I'm 12 points up on crooked Joe Biden.
I don't know what poll he's looking at where he's 12 points up on.
I wish, I wish he's not.
There are no polls where he's up 12 points on Biden.
But he's got the Justice Department and others suing me wherever and whenever possible.
Weaponization, it's called, and maybe that can make a difference.
This has never been done on this scale before, not in our country.
It opens up a very big and dangerous Pandora's box.
Joe Biden should stop his election interfering thugs before it is too late for him and the rest of the country.
Again, I don't think he's wrong about any of this.
I just don't see why that should be the centerpiece of the campaign.
It can certainly be a part of the campaign.
Him saying, listen, Joe Biden's a very bad president.
He's going to lose.
That's the reason he's targeting me.
to work if they file these and then he just goes on along these lines. Again, I don't think he's
wrong about any of this. I just don't see why that should be the centerpiece of the campaign.
It can certainly be a part of the campaign. Him saying, listen, Joe Biden's a very bad president.
He's going to lose. That's the reason he's targeting me.
But back to why Joe Biden is a bad president. That is totally worthwhile. But if his
campaign is in fact about his sort of personal venge taking, I think that's going to be a problem for him.
That's a thought expressed by his, by the way, erstwhile ally, Kevin McCarthy, former Speaker of the House, he said this yesterday, he said, if Trump's campaign is about revenge, he'll lose.
I don't think that's wrong.
And like or hate McCarthy, this is not bad political analysis.
I'm trying to square in my brain how you have those feelings about him at that time and say, I think he would be a great president today.
I didn't say a great president.
I said he'd be a better president than what we're having.
I said the country would be in a better place.
If his campaign is about renew, rebuild and restore, he'll win.
If it's about revenge, he'll lose.
That's the only person that's going to determine that is not his campaign ad is him.
And he's right about that.
McCarthy is right about that, which is why Trump needs to be careful.
Now, I will say Trump did something absolutely kind of ridiculous that is worth noting yesterday, because frankly, if any other candidate did this, Trump, I understand that Trump has a hall pass from the entire Republican Party for pretty much anything he does at this point, because it's all baked into the cake at this point, but Donald Trump did, in fact, endorse BLM yesterday, which is like an insane thing to do.
So what happened is that there's a person named Mark Fisher who billed himself as a co-founder of BLM in Rhode Island.
He said he was very honored to have his and BLM's support.
BLM is a garbage organization.
You don't want BLM support.
I mean, I understand, again, that everything Trump says has to be taken not just with a grain of salt, but like a giant iceberg of salt.
Like a giant salt block from the Dead Sea.
I get it.
But, can we just point out that BLM is a horrifying organization?
It's a giant grift.
Not only is it a giant grift, it's a giant anti-Semitic grift, and a giant anti-white grift, and it's really, really bad.
So, you know, this is... In terms of his record, by the way, this is the part of his record I think that's the worst, is the criminal justice reform kind of stuff, the idea that he's gonna jailbreak a bunch of people who are criminals.
But, in any case, if Donald Trump wants to win, he is going to have to focus in on the failures of Joe Biden, of which there are many.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Well, there is a rule in presidential politics, particularly campaign politics, that when something goes wrong, sort of everything goes wrong.
My friend Jon Podhoretz over at the Commentary Magazine podcast is the editor of Commentary Magazine, who wrote a book in the early 1990s about the Bush doomed reelect effort in 1991-1992.
And one of his basic theses was that when a campaign is failing, everything starts to go wrong all at once.
And that seems to be happening to Joe Biden right now, whether it is him just wandering around on stage as a comedian, Shane Gillis puts it like a Roomba when he's sort of confused at the end of his speeches, just bumping into things, or whether it's what happened last night.
So the Biden Christmas tree just fell over.
They're trying to put it up and it fell over.
Again, these sorts of images, they don't mean anything on their own, but they do.
And there's a generalized sort of feeling of instability.
And when the Christmas tree represents the actual President of the United States, and it falls over, again, is he in charge of the weather?
No, the Jews are in charge of the weather, as we all know.
But, when it falls over, everybody is immediately flashing to Joe Biden falling up the stairs.
I mean, here's what it looked like last night.
And you put the screws like Uncle Fester on his head, and you make sure it's equal, and you stand that tree up, and you should be able to walk out of that room and know it won't fall down.
Sadly, no one listened to me yesterday.
Down goes the Frasier fur.
Well, he's... Okay, Brian.
I don't know that you've read all the details about the National Christmas Tree which blew over in a... We'll make excuses for him.
Well, here's the thing.
They didn't put it in a stand.
They planted it.
That's a big problem.
Well, that's the problem, right?
They don't listen to me.
They don't listen to Brian.
There they are trying to pull it back up again.
Again, are these major things?
They're not major things, obviously.
They're silly things.
But when all the silly things seem to fall in one direction, that is a bad sign for the incumbent president of the United States.
Like Jimmy Carter being attacked while he was on a boat in 1979 by a rabbit.
Like a rabid rabbit.
It was an actual thing that happened, apparently.
Well, here's the thing.
It's not just that Joe Biden, things are going wrong for him.
It's that of course things are going wrong for him because he's not good at the president thing.
According to Axios, evidence is stacking up showing Americans are saving less and drawing down their existing savings cushions.
Of course they are, because the more you save in an inflationary economy, the less your money is worth.
I put a hundred bucks in the bank today, and then my dollar is worth 50% of what it was worth six months from now.
I've lost money by keeping my money parked.
Instead, you're better off buying things.
This is why you're seeing an accelerating rate of growth.
So Q3 showed a 5.2% increase in GDP.
That sounds amazing, right?
That's great.
Except that what's actually happening is everybody is pre-buying all the materials for Q4 in anticipation of the fact that prices are probably going to continue to rise as we hit the holidays.
According to Axios, the share of adults who say they can cover six months of expenses using their savings is considerably lower than it was last year, according to polling from Morning Consult.
The share that simply doesn't know how long their savings will carry them has grown from about 15.5% in July 2022 to 21%.
The spending right now is booing the economy, but it's likely to crash on the other end, and nobody's going to have savings because they already spent their savings because of the inflation.
So that is really bad news.
Again, the economic news here is so mixed.
This is why people are feeling on tenterhooks.
Inflation eats everything.
And Joe Biden has not been able to tame inflation in such a way that people feel secure in the economy.
Now, all the financial experts are expecting that the Federal Reserve is going to actually decrease the interest rates in the near future.
Which, of course, there are a lot of people like, wait, isn't inflation still running hot right now?
And the answer is yes, it is still running hot right now.
And if you decrease those inflation, those interest rates, then presumably you're going to get new spending, new investment, and all of the rest of it.
The bond markets jumped at this, obviously, because your bond is worth more now than it was yesterday if the interest rates start to drop.
With that said, is any of this good news for Joe Biden's economy?
Again, they're stuck between a rock and a hard place on the actual policy.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are starting to go after Joe Biden again on the impeachment inquiry.
Republicans are apparently considering holding an official House vote next month to authorize the impeachment inquiry into Biden.
McCarthy initiated it when he was Speaker of the House without an actual vote because he didn't think he had the votes.
Now GOP leaders are talking about the possibility of the vote during a closed-door meeting with Republican lawmakers.
Republican leaders have long said a vote on the impeachment investigation was unnecessary.
They're now reconsidering because White House lawyers are using the lack of a formal House authorization to argue that the investigation lacks constitutional legitimacy.
The problem, of course, is that it's not clear they've got the votes for that.
I've yet to see the evidence that Mike Johnson is significantly better at whipping votes than Kevin McCarthy was.
McCarthy was pretty good at that.
He was pretty good at counting the heads.
Johnson may be good at it.
We just don't know as of yet.
No matter.
The impeachment inquiry on top of Joe Biden's failing presidency is not going to help him.
It isn't.
And the White House doesn't have a great rebuttal to it.
Here is Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday trying to go after Republicans for pursuing the impeachment inquiry.
House Republicans should really focus on American families instead of the president's family.
That's what Americans want to see.
That's not gonna cut it.
Nobody buys the focus on American families, not on Joe Biden's family.
First of all, Joe Biden's family is an American family and a rather key American family.
I will say again, I think that Hunter Biden's new tactic is actually somewhat intelligent.
Calling on the House GOP to open up the meetings, I think is actually pretty smart because it's basically calling their bluff.
He's saying, listen, whatever you have to come after me about, let's do this all in front of everybody.
The House has denied that request.
James Comer, the head of the House Oversight Committee, he said our lawfully issued subpoena to Hunter Biden requires him to appear for a deposition on December 13th.
We expect full cooperation with our subpoena for a deposition.
We also agree Hunter Biden should have the opportunity to testify in a public setting at a future date.
Typically, House panels insist on a private deposition before allowing a public appearance.
The January 6th Select Committee denied several requests to testify publicly, including one from Rudy Giuliani.
Jim Jordan, for his part, said, sure, we'd love to have Hunter in for an open hearing.
First, we need to have him testify behind closed doors so we can ask him all the questions we want to ask him.
And those facts are confirmed by some of the evidence we've uncovered already, this 1023
form where the confidential human source told the FBI and it was recorded in this form.
Those are the key facts.
And now it's important, we got a lot of those key facts when we interviewed one of Hunter
Biden's business partners, Mr. Archer.
It's important we talk to the others.
We need to talk to Eric Schwerin.
We need to talk to Rob Walker.
We need to talk to Tony Bobulinski.
And we're in conversations with their lawyers and we think those are going to happen.
And we need to talk to Jim Biden, who was also in business with Hunter Biden.
Those things need to happen.
And then, as the chairman just said, as Chairman Comer just said, we will have Hunter Biden
in a deposition.
And frankly, I think in an open hearing, I think that would be great.
That's what needs to happen so the American people get the facts, get the truth.
Okay, so again, Republicans are going to keep pushing here.
None of it is going to be particularly good for Joe Biden.
Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to get to the dumbest excuse for the American national debt that I've seen recently.
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