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April 16, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:32
Will Israel STRIKE Iran?
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So, Joe Biden, the President of the United States, he keeps saying one word over and over and over.
That word is don't.
He said it to the Taliban with regard to attacks on American troops.
And then, of course, they did.
He said it to the Russians with regard to going into Ukraine.
Then, of course, they did.
And he said it to the Iranians with regard to directly attacking Israel.
He said don't.
And then, of course, they did.
All of which means that Joe Biden is not a credible player on the world stage.
Now, there is something in foreign policy called deterrence.
It's the single most important concept of the post-war era.
Deterrence is the idea, according to the Defense Department, that you can prevent action by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction and or a belief that the cost of action outweighs the perceived benefits.
In other words, You do not attack me because I am threatening you.
If you attack me, I will clock you into next week.
You know who is an expert at deterrence, oddly enough?
President Donald Trump.
He was excellent at deterrence because every threat that he uttered was perfectly credible.
He kept everybody off balance.
It's sort of a madman theory of foreign policy.
You never knew when he meant it, and you never knew when he didn't.
It didn't matter whether you understood it.
It only mattered whether he understood it.
He could push you off the ball simply by saying, if you cross that line, you don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be a really bad big league bat.
And other nations took that seriously.
The Taliban took that seriously.
Russia took that seriously.
China took that seriously.
And Iran took that seriously.
But when Joe Biden over and over and over again keeps saying don't, And then, other parties do.
And the United States does not respond.
And not only does the United States not respond, it slow walks aid to America's allies, so even America's allies cannot respond.
The United States intervenes to tell America's allies not to do too much.
Then it turns out that the party that is deterred is not, in fact, the opponents, the enemies of the United States.
The party that is deterred is the United States herself.
Now it is one thing to suggest that the United States should be deterred from forward action by the presence of, say, the Soviet Union.
But to suggest that the United States should be deterred from providing full aid to Ukraine, for example, such that Ukraine is not overrun, And that we should be deterred by the possibility that Vladimir Putin is going to unleash nuclear weapons, which of course is not a credible threat when it comes to simply maintaining the current battle lines in Ukraine.
That's stupid.
When the suggestion is that the United States should be deterred by Iran, and that's what's happening right now, Iran is saying, We fired 300-odd missiles, drones at Israel.
Most of those got knocked down, virtually all of them got knocked down, but don't go further or we are going to go further.
And Iran is openly saying that right now.
Iran is saying if Israel were to counter-attack, then they would unleash 1,500 cruise missiles, for example, and ballistic missiles.
And the United States is then putting pressure on Israel.
The United States is the deterred party.
Being deterred is a sign that you are the weaker party in any conflict.
Because, of course, the stronger party typically is not deterred.
Typically, again, it is the weaker party who is worried that the cost of action will outweigh the perceived benefit.
Typically, if you're on the playground, it is not the bully who's being deterred by the weakling, it's the weakling who's being deterred by the bully.
When it comes to foreign policy, the United States has the world's largest and most powerful military presence, spanning the globe, in terms of technology far more advanced than anything, on the table.
By a factor of probably five.
And yet it is the United States that is over and over being deterred by significantly smaller powers, which of course is why smaller powers are feeling their oats right now.
So the question is why?
Why exactly has it become sort of rote point of course for other smaller parties to deter the United States?
The answer obviously is not insufficiency of American materiel.
The answer obviously is not insufficiency of America's military might.
America is so far beyond, for example, the Chinese military in terms of advancement, that the idea that China would go to full-scale war with the United States, that'd be the biggest mistake China ever made.
And if that's true of China, which has nuclear weapons, think about Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons and whose ballistic missile system is so bad that half of the rockets it just fired at Israel fell in its own territory or the territory of other countries before they even hit Israeli airspace.
So why is America being deterred?
And the answer is simple moral cowardice.
The United States under Joe Biden has become a morally cowardly force.
The United States under Joe Biden has basically decided that any engagement in the world's fear is some sort of act of aggression.
And even so much as funding our allies so those allies can defend themselves with forward action to deter, for example, Iran from doing this again.
That would be some sort of American aggression that would escalate things.
The reality is that when it comes to the Middle East, every single conflict is a game of chicken.
The Game of Chicken, as we all know, is a game wherein two sides both drive toward a cliff, and whoever stops closest to the cliff without driving over, wins the Game of Chicken.
The worst case scenario is you're the one who goes off the cliff.
But, when it comes to the United States versus other countries, we have both the best gas and the best brakes.
The reality is that if there were to be a cliff, and if we were to hit that cliff, the significant impact would be on Iran and not on the United States.
The United States is already engaged in wartime activity against Iran.
It was American forces striking down drones directly from Iranian territory.
And yet again, it is Joe Biden who is acting the weakling, not just with regard to Iran directly, but with regard to Hezbollah, with regard to Hamas, which is a basically defunct terror group at this point.
The only reason that is happening is because Joe Biden does not have the courage of American convictions.
This is not an argument for America to be involved in war.
This is an argument that American deterrence relies on credible threat of force.
And that in a world where America's deterrence is gone, everybody gets a lot more aggressive.
The world becomes a lot more violent.
There's this theory out there from both the sort of far libertarian right and from the far left Noam Chomsky crew.
that the way that world wars start is through a series of escalating steps that no one can stop.
The other way, there are two ways the world wars start.
That can be one of them when you have a relative balance of power, but when you have one full on
dominant power, the way the world war starts is by simply mistaking your way into it by failure
of credibility. The reality is that the United States owes it to the West to be an iron wall
and to provide enough support to its allies that those allies can be an iron wall against forces
of say Iran.
And yet that is not what the Biden administration is pursuing, and that is a moral shortcoming.
That is a question of will, and it is a question of common sense.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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So, the Biden administration continues to put pressure on Israel not to actually take any sort of aggressive action against Iran, believing that this will lead to some sort of escalation.
Now, it seems to me that when you fire, again, 300 drones and missiles at a sovereign state, that is the escalation.
And the big problem for Israel is if they don't do anything with regard to Iran going forward, well then Iran is going to feel like they got away with something.
Yes, they failed this time militarily.
But what happens when they have a nuclear weapon?
Right now, the United States is being deterred in Ukraine by a nuclear Russia.
If you're Iran, aren't you moving forward as fast as possible with a nuclear weapon?
Because that way, if the United States starts attempting to strike down cruise missiles on the way to Israel next time, Iran will say, well, we have nukes and we will use those on you.
We will use those on your friends.
In other words, you deter and you hamstring your enemies now before they become more powerful because otherwise they are simply going to continue to flex their muscles and push the envelope.
And yet again, the Biden administration is seeking de-escalation.
There's only one reason that they are seeking de-escalation.
Because again, you know how this de-escalates?
Iran getting punched in the teeth.
That's how this gets de-escalated.
The way this de-escalates is Israel takes Hamas off the board as a power player.
Then Israel signs a peace agreement with the Saudis.
And now you have a Sunni-Israeli access.
that is oriented against Iran. Then that axis eventually takes out Hezbollah and now Iran is
completely surrounded and completely isolated. And that axis is also capable of taking out Iran's
nuclear facilities such that Iran can no longer pose a nuclear threat. That is the way that you
de-escalate the situation. You don't de-escalate the situation by telling Iran, well, you know,
sure you attacked a sovereign state with a massive cache of arms from your own sovereign territory.
But, you know, we'll call this one just, yeah, well, this one doesn't count.
Oh, no biggie.
No biggie.
As former State Department spokesperson Valley Nasser said, Iran has actually achieved deterrence against both Israel and the United States because of the U.S.' 's cowardice.
Well, it did create a dilemma for Iran.
Iran could not just roll over and be seen by its own population and in the region to essentially taking such a provocative escalation from Israel without responding.
On the other hand, they did not want to throw Prime Minister Netanyahu a lifeline of basically shifting the attention from Gaza to Iran and Syria and even drawing the United States into a war with Iran.
So they had to react, but they had to react in a way where the emphasis was not really on retaliation, but on deterrence.
And I think the deterrence was achieved not just by the military act they carried out yesterday, but essentially by the very effective psychological campaign that they managed through this escalation, both in Israel and also in Western capital.
So the real question is, why is the West being intimidated by a third-rate power like Iran?
Why is that happening?
And the answer, of course, is because Joe Biden is beholden to his left-wing base and he is scared of them.
This is why John Kirby, national security spokesperson yesterday, suggested that it is in the chief interest of the United States to stop Israel from taking the sort of action that would stop Iran from taking future action.
That de-escalation is top of the priority list.
Again, that's a decision that only Prime Minister Netanyahu in the War Cabinet can make.
I mean, again, we respect their sovereign decision-making process.
What we want to see is de-escalation of the tensions.
We don't want to see a wider war.
And everything the President's been doing, including putting U.S.
forces in the fight Saturday night to defend Israel, which I think is the first time it's ever been done, has been to de-escalate, to take the tensions down, to put resources in the region, to send a strong signal to anybody who might Okay, but it's not de-escalating if you're wearing a bulletproof vest and someone fires a gun at you and it happens to hit the bulletproof vest.
The de-escalation comes when you then clock that person directly in the face and take their gun away from them.
Now the situation is de-escalated.
It is not, in fact, a victory or a de-escalation simply to survive an attack from Iran.
Iran, presumably, will change its M.O.
going forward.
That is the idea here.
And yet the Biden administration continues to push forward with restrictions, not on Iran.
They're not pushing sanctions on Iran.
They're not pushing significant ramifications for Iran after all of this.
Instead, they're putting all sorts of pressure on Israel not to do anything.
It's more on this in just one moment.
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And again, the question is why?
And the answer is because Joe Biden believes that his reelect efforts depend on a bunch of crazy people who really, really like Hamas.
People who have already been protesting in the streets.
It's truly amazing.
So remember, Saturday night, Iran hit Israel with 300 drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles.
That's how many they fired.
Israel was able to knock down 99% of those along with Jordan, the UK, France, and the United States.
Protesters have decided now is an opportune moment to protest Israel.
So remember, Israel hasn't struck back yet.
This is very reminiscent of right after October 7th, when immediately the pro-Hamas protesters took to the street in a bizarre attempt to assault Israel for having committed the great crime of not allowing themselves to be slaughtered wholesale.
Here were anti-Israel protesters blocking roads near O'Hare Airport in Chicago.
They're literally just blocking the road.
Where are the cops?
Where are the cops?
Take these jackasses away.
This is not difficult.
People were literally getting out of their cars and walking to O'Hare to try to make their flight.
What are the cop cars doing?
Just remove them.
Just remove them.
But the Democrats who run Chicago won't.
They will allow them to run the show on a freeway.
And shut down an entire freeway outside an airport.
Meanwhile, anti-Israel protesters also blocked the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
You can see they literally shut down the Golden Egg Bridge with signs that say things like, stop the world for Gaza.
And there are cop cars right there.
Just drag them off and put them in the back of the car and put them in jail for a fairly lengthy period of time and all this crap stops immediately.
And by the way, if they don't, something terrible is going to happen.
Because it turns out that if you allow radical jack**** to shut down traffic, sooner or later somebody is going to go nuts and do something truly terrible to one of these protesters.
Meanwhile, anti-Israel protesters actively cheered the news of the Iranian missile attack over the weekend.
Here were some of them.
I would like to make a quick announcement in terms of the protest to bring in this announcement.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has just sent tens of drones towards Israel!
There's a pro-Khamos protesters literally cheering Iran firing on Israel.
Khabib!
Oh, fuck!
These are the people that Joe Biden wants the votes of.
That's why he is doing this right now.
He needs a de-escalation right now to make sure that there aren't protests by these pieces of debris over at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in a couple of months.
As the New York Times points out, support for Palestinians, a cause once largely championed on college campuses and in communities with ties to the region, has transformed into a defining issue of the Democratic left, galvanizing a broad swath of groups into the most significant protest movement of the Biden era.
Labor activists are calling for a ceasefire.
Black clergy leaders have appealed directly to the White House.
Young Americans are using online tools to mobilize voters and send millions of missives to Congress.
An emerging coalition of advocacy groups is discussing how to press its case at the DNC this summer.
And that is who Joe Biden is afraid of.
That is who Joe Biden's afraid of.
And that is why he is being deterred by a third-rate power like Iran.
Now, what exactly will Israel do?
That's an open question at this point.
Yesterday, Israeli government spokesperson Avi Hyman said that Israel will make the decisions necessary to protect the country, which is what you would expect from any sovereign state.
Again, if the United States were hit with 300 drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles, the country that fired those things at the United States literally would not exist the next day.
But if you're Israel, then the United States tells you to, that you're being, you guys, you're getting a little bit uppity with your whole self-defense thing.
I can't stress the nature of the relationship, of the friendship, of the shared values that we have with the American people and with the administration.
And we thank the administration for everything that they've done for us and continue to do for us.
But at the same time, we will have to, as a sovereign state, make the decisions to defend our country in the best possible way.
Now, in the beginning of the war, we were told, don't rush into Gaza.
So, it is still unclear exactly what Israel is going to do.
Israel obviously wants to retain the friendship of the United States.
They still have to work with Joe Biden and they still have to finish the job in the Gaza Strip.
According to the Times of Israel, the War Cabinet Monday afternoon, Wrapped up a discussion on Israel's response to Iran's massive missile and drone barrage amid calls for Jerusalem to exercise caution so as not to spark a regional war, reports that a retaliatory move could come as soon as Monday.
According to Channel 12, which is the biggest news station in Israel, they claim the war cabinet decided to hit back clearly and forcefully against Iran with a response designed to send the message that Israel, quote, will not allow an act of that magnitude against it to pass without reaction.
The response would also be designed to make plain that Israel will not allow the Iranians to establish the equation they have sought to assert in recent days.
This was an apparent reference to Iran's warning that future Israeli strikes on Iranian territory will henceforth again be met by Iranian retaliatory strikes on Israel.
However, Israel wants to coordinate its actions with the United States.
Again, what this means, in all likelihood, is that Israel is first going to move forward with the finishing of Rafa, which is exactly what needs to happen.
The reality is that Israel has plenty of time to strike back against Iran, just on a tactical and strategic level.
Israel should wait until a more surprising moment to strike back against Iran.
The history of Israel's military action suggests that when Israel launches surprise attacks, as in 56, or 1967, or in Tebiraid, they're very successful.
When they telegraph their punches, as they have been doing for the last 30 years, most of my lifetime, then they are significantly less successful.
Because the world starts to get on their back before the thing is even done.
Well, the defense minister in Israel, Galant, he has suggested that they are already making efforts to evacuate Rafa before they go in, of course, that is in coordination with the United States again.
He held an assessment on the necessary civilian operations that need to be taken ahead of the IDF offensive in Rafa.
Meanwhile, John Kirby is starting to make more conciliatory signs toward the Israelis on finishing off Rafa.
Here he was saying that Israel has been increasing the humanitarian aid and is now doing more of what the United States would like to see in the Gaza Strip.
The aid has increased, and quite dramatically.
In just the last few days, more than 2,000 trucks have been able to get in.
I think I might be wrong on this number, but I think it's nearly 100 or so over the last 24 hours alone.
So the aid is getting in.
That's important, but it has to be sustained.
And what we also said was our policy with respect to Gaza will have to change if we don't see changes over time and have them sustained.
So, so far, yes.
They have been meeting the commitments they made to President Biden.
They have been doing the things that the President asked them to do, but we really need to see it sustained over time.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Meanwhile in the House, the House Republicans are pushing forward a series of measures designed to target Iran.
One of those would be additional sanctions against Iran.
Furthermore, the House Speaker is now planning to separate out Israel aid in order to pass that separately from Ukraine.
Right now the whole thing is being held up because a lot of Republicans are not fond of the The Ukraine aid.
A lot of Democrats are not fond of the Israel aid.
Either one separately would pass in the House of Representatives.
Both together would pass in the House of Representatives.
But the Speaker doesn't want to bring up both at the same time.
He's afraid, presumably, that if they pass as a package group, then Marjorie Taylor Greene will launch her idiotic motion to vacate and suddenly his job will be on the line.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Johnson plans to bring separate bills funding Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to the House floor in a maneuver aimed at breaking a month-long deadlock Over a $95 billion foreign aid package the Senate passed earlier this year.
President Biden and Senate Democrats have been urging Johnson to take up the Senate bill.
Instead, Johnson is splitting the aid up in an effort to work around that large bloc of Republicans who are opposing sending more aid to Ukraine.
Speaking to reporters late on Monday, Johnson said his phone melted over the weekend with calls from GOP members about how to proceed.
He said it was the will of my colleagues to vote on these measures independently and not have them all sandwiched together as the Senate had done.
He says that he hopes to finish the votes on them this week.
This could presumably complicate efforts to get the aid packages to Biden's desk by forcing new action by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The question is whether Joe Biden is literally going to veto aid to Israel in the middle of a war against Iran simply in order to get the Ukraine aid.
He might.
He is threatening to do just that.
Now, again, the reality is that the United States should pass some level of Ukraine aid.
What that Ukraine aid is to look like?
I can countenance arguments about anti-corruption, about the amount that's being sent, and all the rest.
But the reality is that it's in nobody's interest, particularly that of the United States, for Russia to simply overcome Ukraine's military capacity and walk into Kiev.
With that said, separating this out does put pressure on the Democrats to simply pass the aid for Israel in the moment.
Meanwhile, America's enemies continue to be on the move.
China continues to support Russia.
The Biden administration has this weird game where they sort of become a lawyer for America's opposition.
So the United States will say, well, you know, Israel really should come to the table with Hamas.
And then Hamas will reject literally every deal that is proposed.
And then the United States will say, well, maybe Israel should concede some more.
And Israel will do that.
And then Hamas will reject the deal.
The United States is now acting as a sort of bizarre lawyer for China as well.
So Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, who is truly terrible at her job, she has some meetings with the Chinese and she says that China heard our concerns about their support for Russia.
Well, that isn't really the question.
The question is, are they going to stop supporting Russia?
Because given your level of lack of deterrence, I have doubts.
Well, we've been extremely clear and I was clear at the highest levels in my meetings that the United States will not tolerate violations of our sanctions by Chinese banks or firms that are aiding Russia in its war against Ukraine and that if that's done that there will be consequences.
But did the Chinese seem responsive?
Do you expect Chinese policy to change?
I think they clearly heard our concerns and will consider them very carefully.
Well, that's a no.
This is one of my favorite aspects of diplomacy.
Well, they did hear our concerns.
Okay, well, who gives a crap whether they heard our concerns?
I would imagine they did.
They have ears and you expressed them.
The stupidity where we say a thing to our enemies and our enemies listen and then dismiss all of our concerns.
Nothing got done there.
China, by the way, is in fact ratcheting up its building of nuclear weapons.
They continue to increase their military spending.
According to the New York Times, the Pentagon says Beijing is on track to double the number of its nuclear warheads by the decade's end to 1,000 from 500, a development senior U.S.
officials have publicly called unprecedented and breathtaking.
China has drastically expanded its nuclear testing facility and continued work on three new missile fields in the country's north, where more than 300 intercontinental ballistic missile silos have recently been constructed.
China's transformation from a small nuclear power into an exponentially large one is a historic shift, upending the delicate two-peer balance of the world's nuclear weapons for the entirety of the atomic age.
So now there are three major nuclear players out there, and of course Taiwan remains a flashpoint.
W.J.
Hennigan, a columnist for the New York Times, he says that in February, China openly invited the United States and other nuclear powers to negotiate a treaty in which all sides would pledge never to use nuclear weapons first against one another.
I mean, that's a completely useless agreement.
No first use of nuclear weapons.
I promise and you promise.
Like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, that was an actual agreement that was signed by major powers in 1928 in Paris, and it outlawed war.
So well done everybody, because as we know, the 1930s ended up being unbelievably peaceful.
These sorts of moves in international diplomacy mean absolutely nothing.
The reality is China's building up their nuclear arsenal.
Get to more on this in a moment.
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Meanwhile, by the way, China continues to pour money into American research facilities.
According to the Wall Street Journal, American universities signed contracts around the world to sell their research and training expertise.
Some of their most lucrative agreements have been with companies based in China.
Nearly 200 U.S.
colleges and universities held contracts with Chinese businesses valued at $2.32 billion between 2012 and 2014, according to a review of the Wall Street Journal.
The journal tallied roughly 2,900 contracts.
According to Daniel Kirill, a Trump administration educational department official, By the way, when it comes to countries pouring money into the U.S.
universities, they're getting a capability they can't get anywhere else.
The big question is what contracts should be legal?
What should be legal and disclosable?
What should be illegal?
By the way, when it comes to countries pouring money into the US universities,
you're talking in the main about Qatar.
Qatar spends over $4 billion a year pouring money into American universities.
You wonder why so many American universities are oriented against Israel and seem to have a real soft spot for Iran.
Maybe it's the fact that Qatar has poured billions of dollars into American universities.
That is followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, and then China clocking in at number four.
After that is Saudi Arabia.
I think there should be a basic rule that unless a country is an open ally of the United States, it should not be funding American research institutions, specifically in order to garner the results of that research.
Meanwhile, China continues to be incredibly militant.
According to The Sun, China is now bragging about its merciless execution of an alleged U.S.
spy in an unprecedentedly detailed admission.
The man's death sentence and execution were disclosed in a chilling propaganda documentary by the country's top counterespionage agency, the Ministry of State Security.
Monday marked the first time China indicated that a man named Kuan Yew, executed for spying in 2016, had sold secrets to the United States.
So now China is bragging about executing a person that they call a United States spy.
And America's enemies are on the move there.
On the move because Joe Biden is a weakling.
And the more weakness Joe Biden shows, the more those enemies are going to be on the move.
More than that, America's allies are going to quickly begin to triangulate.
Under Joe Biden, it is very dangerous to be an American ally.
Whether you are our Afghan allies in Afghanistan, who of course ended up under the tender mercy of the Taliban.
Whether it's the people of Hong Kong, who have really done poorly.
Whether it is the Kurds in Iraq.
The list goes on and on of American allies who have been abandoned over the past several decades.
Joe Biden has been particularly bad in this respect.
And meanwhile, the other big news of the day, of course, is that Donald Trump was in court yesterday.
This is all part and parcel of a broader attempt to finish Trump off.
Because after all, Democrats perceive Donald Trump as the chief threat to the Republic.
Joe Biden is such a bad president, the only way to keep him as president is to label Joe Biden's opponent the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to the United States of America, despite the fact that we know precisely what a Trump presidency would look like since we already did it.
We'll get to all that in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile...
Because Joe Biden has set the world completely on fire, both domestically and mostly internationally, this means that Democrats have to come up with a narrative.
The narrative, of course, as you know it would be, is that Donald Trump is the biggest threat to the Republic ever.
Now, the problem with that particular narrative is that is going to create real unease among the half of the American population that is very likely to vote for Donald Trump.
If you wish people to believe that the election is going to be legitimate, you cannot say things like, we are justified in doing whatever we have to do to stop the other guy from winning.
That provides you with the motive for doing things that are untoward.
Like, for example, dragging the ex-president of the United States into court on a bunch of bullcrap charges with regard to him stooping a former porn star and then paying her money.
That was determined by the federal authorities, not to a violated campaign finance law on the federal level.
In any case, here is NBC's Jon Meacham.
I gotta say, the left-wing historians, they need to take a chill pill.
They have been completely untethered from reality.
Here's Jon Meacham suggesting that Donald Trump is a tyrant and America will fall if he wins.
In one of his first public speeches, Abraham Lincoln said that if the American Republic were ever to fall, it would not fall to a foreign foe.
It would fall to a tyrant who rose among us.
And I think that's essentially where we are.
You're exactly right.
What's unfolding in Manhattan today is part of a larger story about Donald Trump, his behavior, His view of whether or not American democracy exists for the good of the country or for the good of Donald Trump.
Well, I mean, he's obviously the threat to democracy is Donald Trump.
I mean, he was the president already, and this would be his last term in office, legally speaking.
But probably he'll be a tyrant or something.
Meanwhile, the president of the United States, the current one, who has run roughshod over the law, who openly brags about defying the Supreme Court of the United States on things like student loans, who intends to use his occupational safety and health administration to cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans.
That guy, he is the true democracy defender.
MSNBC's Michael Beschloss, another one of our bizarrely high historians.
I mean, honestly, I don't know where they're getting these historians these days, but they need a better class of historians.
Here he was, suggesting our founders would be appalled by Donald Trump.
Oh, you mean as opposed to the great centralizer of power in the executive branch, Joe Biden?
Like, seriously, name the things that Joe Biden and the founders agreed on.
Go.
Like, please, I'm waiting.
Here's Michael Beschloss.
So, Michael, first to you, what do you see at stake, in terms of history, in the way this trial is conducted and the way it turns out?
Well, let's have a very brief, and I promise, brief visit to our founders in 1787, writing the Constitution.
I think they felt that they had created a political system that would choose people as presidents who were not too likely to have been to be accused of criminal conduct.
I think that's safe.
So if they came back in 2024, the first thing they would say, I think, is, you know, our system did not work.
What happened?
I mean, honestly, I think if they came back in 2024, Donald Trump would be the least of their of their squabbles.
Honestly, they might look at the fact that pretty much everything they rebelled against the British Empire with regard to like, for example, taxation without representation, they might look at the administrative branch of the American government and go, uh, what is this?
We didn't put like, what is all of this?
Like this giant executive power that you've created?
What is this enormous federal government?
That we literally wrote a constitution in order to subvert.
What is this?
I think they probably start there.
Donald Trump might be a little lower on their list.
In any case, Donald Trump did, in fact, end up in court yesterday.
There were a series of rulings, some good for him, some bad.
Here he was prior to entering court, suggesting that his trial is an assault on the country.
And to be fair to him, it kinda is.
This is a very stupid case.
Remember, this is a case where he's being charged with 34 counts Those 34 counts are felony counts related to the fact that he wrote some 34 separate checks to Michael Cohen to reimburse his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for having paid off Stormy Daniels to keep her yap shut about the fact that she shtooped the president many moons ago.
That's what we're talking about here.
Now you ask yourself, wait a second, if that's a federal campaign finance violation, why isn't he being tried on the federal level?
And the answer is, he was never tried on the federal level.
The federal prosecutors decided that the case wasn't worth their time, that there was not a violation of law sufficient to justify a prosecution.
That didn't stop Manhattan D.A.
Alvin Bragg, who then decided that he was going to somehow jerry-rig this thing into a felony trial.
That he was going to suggest that Donald Trump had committed financial fraud by somehow labeling the payments to Michael Cohen as non-campaign related expenses.
This is an assault on America.
violation of federal campaign finance law. The whole case makes no sense
whatsoever from a legal level. So when Donald Trump says this is a violation of
Americans perception about how elections should work he's not wrong about that.
This is an assault on America. Nothing like this has ever happened before. There's never been anything like it.
Every legal scholar said this case is nonsense.
It should never have been brought.
It doesn't deserve anything like this.
There is no case, and they've said it, people that don't necessarily follow or like Donald Trump.
So this is an outrage that this case was brought.
This is political persecution.
This is a persecution like never before.
Nobody's ever seen anything like it.
And again, it's a case that should have never been brought.
It's an assault on America.
And that's why I'm very proud to be here.
This is an assault on our country.
So, this is a Manhattan jury.
That means that the jury is almost certain to be stacked against President Trump.
The judge in this case, Judge Merchant, made a couple of rulings yesterday in court.
One was that prosecutors cannot elicit testimony to the effect that Donald Trump's wife, Melania, was pregnant when another playboy model was stripping President Trump, allegedly.
So the jury won't hear that.
But prosecutors can still tell jurors about alleged efforts to suppress McDougal's story.
Karen McDougal.
That is because they're trying to set the precedent that Donald Trump was trying to shut up all the women he had stooped during the 2016 election.
They're trying to set a predicate for the idea that what Donald Trump was doing in paying hush money was not an attempt to shield his wife from the bad news.
It was instead an attempt to shield the American public from the bad news in advance of the election.
With that said, prosecutors will not be able to play the infamous Access Hollywood tape for jurors, but the judge said the prosecutors will be able to present internal campaign emails that Assistant District Attorney Steinglass said contained powerful evidence of the campaign's reaction to the incendiary language contained in the Access Hollywood video.
And they're trying to draw out the relationship between Donald Trump and the National Enquirer, which Donald Trump was allegedly using as a cutout in order to pay to kill stories.
That is what this case is all about.
With all that said, are Americans really that engaged with a story about Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal?
Is that what people are seriously caring about right now?
I think most of us are mostly concerned about what's happening in the Middle East.
You know, the fact that there might be a world war because of Joe Biden's weakness.
Many of us are concerned about the fact that Russia is on the move in Ukraine.
Many of us are concerned about the fact that inflation continues to be nearly 50% too high.
Like that seems more problematic.
But the media are focused like a laser beam on Donald Trump being in court because they love this.
Again, anything that stops Trump is, in fact, their priority.
With that said, apparently Donald Trump went to sleep in court today.
So Maggie Haberman said that.
Forty minutes ago, you wrote an observation that I was very surprised.
Trump appears to be sleeping.
His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.
Tell us about that.
Well, Jake, he appeared to be asleep.
Repeatedly, his head would fall down.
There have been other moments in other trials, like the Agent Carroll trial, which was around the corner in January, where he appeared very still and seemed as if he might be sleeping, but then he would move.
This time, he didn't pay attention to a note that his lawyer, Todd Blanche, passed him.
His jaw kept falling on his chest, and his mouth kept going slack.
Now, sometimes people do fall asleep during court proceedings, but it's notable, given Okay, or maybe Donald Trump is just like, whatever.
I mean, that would certainly fit the personality.
With all of that said, prosecutors are now trying to push for Donald Trump to be held in contempt.
According to Mediaite, MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, who's inside the New York courthouse, tweeted, quote, while arguing for the admission of tweets and social media posts evocative of Trump's pressure campaign on witnesses, the DA's office drops this, shortly, we'll be asking an order to show cause why defendants should not be held in contempt for violating a gag order on him.
Again, the more the courts crack down on Trump on idiocy like this, I think the less it's going to hurt him.
And again, what it does set the predicate for, and this is all very dangerous stuff, because what it sets the predicate for, again, is the fact that if Donald Trump does not win the election in November, Republicans are rightly going to look at the processes that have been used, and they're going to ask a lot of questions.
One of the questions they might ask, for example, is why Democrats have been so stringent in attempting to fight, say, voter ID.
This is a very commonsensical idea, that you should have to show ID before you vote.
And yet here was the MSNBC panel over the weekend suggesting that that was just a terrible, no good, very bad thing.
Now, apparently, House Republicans are going to pursue legislation requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
My question is, so we're going to show proof to Ms.
Suzy at the polling place?
How is Ms.
Suzy going to verify?
Are we asking people to bring their papers?
This is America.
So I just want to know, is this what all of the House Republicans want to prove?
Lay their chips on?
Even the 18 that sit in districts that Joe Biden won in 2020?
What strikes me is this is the long tail of a long time Republican effort to make it harder to vote because they know that some of those requirements, you know, having to show a license, they disproportionately impact communities of color.
And they just what's interesting to me is they also disproportionately impact older Americans.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
So that's the part that you would think that Republicans would be more attuned to strategically.
But I think the bigger, broader, scarier point, Alicia, is this is all to breed distrust in our elections process.
Okay, you know what you could do if you wish to fight that distrust?
Make people show ID when they vote.
You make them do it and they buy alcohol.
You make them do it every time they fly in a plane.
Why precisely should you not show ID to vote?
By the way, every single demographic in the United States is in favor of voter ID.
By polling data.
There is no, like, vast minority resistance to voter ID.
That's why when Republicans look at this sort of resistance, they're like, what are you even talking about?
Why are you...
And the answer that many people come to is maybe you're in favor of not having voter ID because you kind of like the idea of the voting being a little bit squirrely.
Okay, meanwhile, NPR continues to just be a complete and utter crap show.
So NPR has a brand new head.
That brand new head is a person named Catherine Marr.
So Chris Rufo, who just is the best in the business at finding receipts, he has now gone through the receipts of Catherine Meyer's Twitter.
And what he finds is that, of course, NPR's new head is a wild, insane person of the left.
Quote, I know that hysteric white woman voice.
I was taught to do it.
I've done it.
It's a disturbing recognition.
While I don't ever recall using it to deliberately expose another person to immediate physical harm on my own cognizance, it's not impossible.
That is whiteness.
He's writing about hysterical white woman voice in May, 2020.
She said that America is addicted to white supremacy.
She said in 2021, quote, never underestimate the ability of white people to center ourselves.
She says about Trump, quote, what is that deranged racist sociopath ranting about today?
In 2017, she celebrated, quote, rejecting binary gender frameworks.
In 2018, she said, just learned about the term incel.
Holy toxic masculinity.
She complained in 2016 about airline business class demographics being too white and too male.
So, um, yeah, this is the lady who is going to be leading all the efforts over at NPR.
I can't imagine why Republicans want to defund NPR.
This seems like a pretty easy one.
By the way, she even called Bill Maher a racist bigot in 2018.
Bill Maher is just a typical old-school Democrat.
Also, 2011, quote, I missed it.
Who was it that declared a fetus was genetically human from the point of conception?
Well, I should hope so.
I mean, I'm confused.
Of course it's genetically human from point of conception.
What are you talking about?
This is the person who had to be the head of it.
By the way, this person was also the head of Wikimedia.
So if you ever worry about the politics on Wikipedia, that would be the reason why.
Truly amazing stuff from the brand new head of NPR.
This is directly in the aftermath of a free press piece that we talked about last week in which a high-ranking former member of NPR staff pointed out that NPR has basically just become a propaganda outlet on behalf of the wild left.
So, great way of rebutting that accusation by hiring a person who appears to be directly from the fever dreams of Bernie Sanders.
Really, really well done stuff.
Okay, I have a quick thing that I like and that I have to play for you.
So, there is a UFC fighter.
I've never seen anything like this.
The UFC fighter's name is Renato Moicano.
And he had just won a fight.
He's from Brazil.
He had just won a fight at UFC 300.
And he proceeded to launch into an economic disquisition.
And, gotta say, loving it.
Here we go.
Yeah!
Love it!
That's amazing!
Man, talk about using the opportunity.
You win a UFC fight.
Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian Economic School, mother******!
Yeah!
Love it! That's amazing! Man, talk about using the opportunity. You win a UFC fight, I mean,
like, this is me doing rap but in reverse. Right, there's a UFC fighter who just beat
the hell out of somebody and he's like, and now I want you to read Ludwig von Mises
and the six lessons of the Austrian School.
So first of all, that's my jam, people.
I mean, go watch the Sunday special that we just did with Javier Mille, who's also a devotee of the Austrian School of Economics.
Yeah, baby, read yourself some Ludwig von Mises and then read yourself some Friedrich von Hayek.
Really, read some Baum-Baerwerk.
Like, do it, man.
This is the good stuff.
Austrian School of Economics getting cited at UFC.
You know, I gotta say, I started off as not a UFC fan because I'm not in favor of brutal violence, and now I gotta say, kind of a fan.
Kind of there.
First of all, I like Dana White.
I'm friendly with Dana White.
But second of all, like, that's awesome.
The world would be a better place if more people read Ludwig von Mises.
At some point, I'm gonna have to explain who Ludwig von Mises is.
Suffice it to say, the Austrian School of Economics, those are the founders of what is called the Marginal Revolution in Economics.
The Marginal Revolution in Economics, to give you a very brief exposition.
So, their key discovery and their key finding is that there was a basic idea in classical economics that was then picked up by Karl Marx, that value in any good product or service is to be found in labor.
That the amount of labor, capital, and Land, for example, that go into the making of a product, create the price of the product.
That's where the value of a product comes from that.
There are a bunch of problems with that particular theory, the labor theory of value.
The biggest problem with the labor theory of value is that it's obviously not true.
If I'm walking along on the beach and I find a pearl, that pearl is more valuable than something that I worked a lot on.
Why?
And the answer comes courtesy of the Austrian School of Economics and Ludwig von Mises.
And that answer is that the value of an object is in what you are willing to pay for it.
So it is not that you actually calculate the price of an object, a good or a service, with reference to how much is labor inherently worth, or land inherently worth, or capital inherently worth, or a combination thereof.
That's not how you've bought any product in your entire life.
The way that you buy a product is you go to the store and you decide, what is it worth to me?
That is the Marginal Revolution.
It's called the Marginal Revolution because the idea is that prices are set at the margin.
And one of the big problems in classical economics is what's called the Water Diamonds Problem.
Here is the Water Diamonds Problem.
It is going pretty deep on a UFC quote here, but this is what he's talking about.
The Water Diamonds Problem goes like this.
Why is a glass of water less expensive than a diamond?
A glass of water is significantly more valuable just in terms of pure utility than a diamond.
You can't really use a diamond for anything.
Most of us aren't gonna buy diamonds and then use them in order to craft things
in terms of engineering.
So why exactly is a glass of water less valuable than a diamond?
And the answer that classical economics had a tough time with,
but that the marginal economists were able to answer very easily,
is you're not paying for all the water in the entire world.
If you're paying for all the water in the entire world, that would indeed be more valuable
than all the diamonds in the entire world.
You are paying for what the glass of water is worth to you right now.
And the glass of water is not worth very much to you because you can just go and find the sink
and get yourself another glass of water right now.
Whereas you cannot find yourself a diamond right now.
So the marginal utility of the diamond is significantly higher than the glass of water.
And there may be circumstances where the glass of water is significantly more valuable to you than the diamond.
You're dying of thirst in the desert.
Now you don't care about the diamond, you care about the glass of water.
In other words, value is in the eye of the beholder.
That is a very crucial finding in economics.
Because once you understand the subjective theory of value, you can no longer say that there is such a thing as an exploitative profit margin.
That there's the real value of the thing, and then there's an exploitative profit that's put on top, right?
This is the basic theory of Marxism, is that workers create a certain baseline level of value, and then the evil capitalist comes along and creates profit and makes them work extra.
That's not how that works.
The way that labor is actually valued is by the person who's purchasing the labor.
And then profit is the additional value that is placed on the final product as produced by the capitalists who had to invest in the machinery and the marketing and the organization and all the rest.
Okay, so there is a quick disposition on the Marginal School of Economics, the Austrian School of Economics and the Marginal Revolution.
And thanks to our friend over at the UFC for citing Ludwig von Mises because I never get an opportunity to talk about that kind of stuff.
Alrighty, coming up.
We are going to talk about RFK Jr.
He claims that Donald Trump offered him the VP slot.
We'll get into it.
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