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April 22, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
42:07
Congress Passes MASSIVE Aid Package For Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan
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Well, folks, there was huge news over the weekend.
Taylor Swift's brand new album dropped.
I'll get to the actual news in just a second.
I just want to mention, I am putting together a full review of Taylor Swift's new album, which is titled The Tortured Poets Department.
The album is 31 songs and 2 hours long.
It's a Wagnerian ring cycle.
Dante's Inferno only had 34 cantos.
I'm not kidding about the length of this.
And after listening to it, my big question was, where is this department where they torture the poets?
And how exactly do I apply?
But just wanted to let you know so that you await the full review, because it is indeed coming.
Now, in actual real news, over the weekend, the House approved the long-stalled aid package That had taken a long time.
The Senate passed a while ago this $95 billion aid package, and there have been a lot of arguments over that aid package.
Originally, it included some border security provisions.
Those were then stripped out after Republicans objected that those particular border provisions
weren't stringent enough.
Then the House, faced with the prospect of complete Ukrainian collapse
in the face of a Russian offensive, faced with the fact that Israel is currently
under significant threat, Taiwan is under significant threat,
the House decided, under Speaker Mike Johnson, to take up each one of these issues separately
and then package them all together as one bill and convey them to the Senate
so that American congresspeople would be put on record about each one of these issues.
And all four elements of this bill passed with flying colors.
So, there are four elements to the bill.
Element number one is the Ukraine aid, which is about 61 billion dollars.
That passed 311 to 112.
Now, a majority of Republicans did vote against this bill.
However, the reality is that the vast majority of Republicans are in favor of Ukraine aid.
How do you know this?
Because there was an attempt by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's an opponent, of course, of the Ukraine aid, to zero out the Ukraine aid.
She introduced an amendment that would have gotten rid of all of the Ukraine aid in the combined package of the bill.
Only 71 Republicans voted in favor of that, so 112 Republicans voted against the Ukraine aid package in total, and that could be for a variety of reasons, ranging from they don't like the size of it to they don't think the safeguards are enough to They kind of knew it was going to pass, but they wanted to get on record with their own districts that they were against it because Ukraine 8 is a very controversial proposition in a lot of red districts, so they figured it's a freebie.
This happens in Congress all the time.
You know a bill is going to pass, and you're kind of in favor of the bill passing, but for your constituents, you want to make it look like you voted against the bill.
That explains that 41 vote differential.
Between Marjorie Taylor Greene's 71 votes in the Republican caucus to zero out Ukraine aid entirely and the 112 votes against the Ukraine aid package in the Republican caucus.
In any case, the Ukraine aid package passes 3-11 to 1-12.
A second package that was aid to Israel, which is about $14 billion in aid to Israel plus a $9 billion Basically stipend for humanitarian relief in Gaza, unclear exactly how that's going to get distributed.
That passed 366 to 58 with 37 Democrats and 21 Republicans against.
A Taiwan aid package passed as well, 385 to 34, so that was the most popular package.
All 34 votes against that package were Republican votes.
So as we'll talk about in a little while, there is this isolationist caucus of the Republican Party that kind of breaks down into a couple of different categories.
And finally, there was a bill that banned TikTok in the United States unless they sell off ByteDance.
The Chinese government sells off ByteDance, which is the company that owns TikTok, because obviously TikTok is in fact a Chinese app.
It also included new sanctions against Iran, considering that Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet.
Those Iran sanctions passed 360 to 58 with 33 Democrats and 25 Republicans voting against.
In other words, all of these bills are fairly popular on a bipartisan basis.
Any bill that's going to garner you over 300 votes out of the 435 that are actually in Congress, that would be a pretty popular bill.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, has been under a lot of fire for being willing to bring forward these bills, even if you brought them up individually and then they passed individually.
He said, listen, I have to do my job and I can't sit around waiting for Marjorie Taylor
Green and Paul Gosar and Matt Gaetz to basically approve me doing my job.
I have to do my job.
We did.
I've done here what I believe to be the right thing, and that is to allow the House to work its will.
And as I've said, you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may.
Naturally, this is leading the Rum Caucus, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, to go apoplectic over all of this.
The idea is that America has greatly sinned against the American taxpayer, for example, by giving all of this foreign aid.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Now again, as I pointed out last week, foreign aid represents well under 1% of the American budget.
The EU actually is spending more money on Ukraine than the United States currently is.
When you have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are perfectly willing to vote for $7 trillion budgets so long as President Trump is in office, who are now complaining when 1% of our budget is spent on foreign aid in the middle of two hot wars.
I've got questions as to what exactly is the ideology undergirding that because I really don't think fiscal responsibility is the number one issue.
And when people suggest, for example, that why aren't we spending this money on our border?
We should do both.
We should spend money on the border.
We should spend more money on the border.
By the way, the reality is that the biggest issue on the border is not, in fact, the amount of money being spent on the border.
It's the unwillingness of Joe Biden to close the border.
I know this because I've talked to the Border Patrol Union.
I went down to the border myself.
In any case, here is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She's demanding Mike Johnson resign, but she actually has no plan.
Mike Johnson has betrayed America.
He's betrayed Republican voters.
Under his leadership, he's passed the Democrat agenda, passed the Biden administration's policies, and fully funded them.
We're going to fight in Congress to do everything we can to stop this type of uniparty leadership.
Mike Johnson's speakership is over.
He needs to do the right thing to resign and allow us to move forward in a controlled process.
If he doesn't do so, he will be vacated.
Hey, Congresswoman, you wanted Mike Johnson out.
What is your alternative plan?
Our plan is this.
We have to give the American people a reason to trust us and fight for us.
The American people are supporting President Trump to be the next president of the United States because they've seen him in action.
He fought against the Democrat agenda.
He put America first.
They desperately want him to lead this country again because they trust him and they know he will do that.
Well, with all due respect, you didn't give me a plan for the Speaker's role.
And again, does this mean you are going to file that motion at some point?
It's coming regardless of what Mike Johnson decides to do.
And we have three more Republicans joining us from special elections coming up very soon.
Okay, so she does not have a plan.
And by the way, Donald Trump, there's this assumption out there that Donald Trump wanted to zero out Ukraine aid.
Donald Trump has never even implied he wanted to zero out Ukraine aid.
In fact, what he has said publicly, the former president of the United States and possible future president of the United States, what he has actually said, By the way, you know what Donald Trump actually does not want to run on?
He does not want to run on Ukraine losing because Republicans held up aid to Ukraine.
the funding to Ukraine. That is what President Trump has said publicly
despite all the protestations of complete isolationism by people like
Marjorie Taylor Greene. By the way you know what Donald Trump actually does not
want to run on? He does not want to run on Ukraine losing because Republicans
held up aid to Ukraine. It turns out that's not an amazingly strong electoral
strategy for Republicans. By the way not even an amazingly strong electoral
It was Democrats in Congress, for example, who completely defunded the Vietnam War.
And a few years later, Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States.
Vladimir Zelensky, for his part, the president of Ukraine, he says that they need the shells and they need the equipment.
And by the way, that is what's going on.
This is not only for offensive actions by Ukraine against Russia.
Right now, on the lines, they literally don't have ammo.
To be frank, in Ukraine, You really have a lot of people who are ready to protect their motherland.
But, of course, the motivation, the morale can go down, especially when they go to the front line and they see that, well, there are no shells, there are no equipment.
That's why the aid from the States is so important.
And people who were trained They need to be trained by professional people and they need to have the equipment to be used so that they have this equipment not only on the training field but also on the actual battlefield.
Okay, so here is the bizarre part of our politics right now.
So there is a bipartisan coalition that supports continued aid to Ukraine.
As I say, only 71 Republicans totally wanted to zero out the aid to Ukraine, and there are currently 218 Republicans in the caucus, which means the vast majority, about two-thirds of the Republican caucus, does not want to zero out aid to Ukraine.
But because we live in such a reactionary moment, the left has decided that the war in Ukraine is specifically the most moral war.
Why is it the most moral war?
Because Russia backed Trump is their going theory since 2016.
That is the only reason you can explain why Democrats were literally waving the Ukraine flag on the floor of the House of Representatives, which is totally inappropriate.
They're waving Ukraine flags on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The reason Democrats are doing that is specifically because, since 2016, They perceived Russia as the font of all evil.
That, of course, is a big difference from 2012 when Barack Obama was running on the idea that Russia was not, in fact, a geopolitical threat.
And the 1980s had called and they wanted their foreign policy back from Mitt Romney.
And Barack Obama was actually pledging some form of flexibility to Vladimir Putin in 2012.
By 2016, they'd flipped because they decided that Russia was pro-Trump.
And so that means the Ukraine is therefore the ultimate good, which is why they were flying the flag of Ukraine on the floor.
You can't even say that they were doing this in honor of the various allies that the United States was funding because they didn't wave the Taiwanese flag on the floor of the House.
They didn't wave the Israeli flag on the floor of the House.
It was only Ukraine.
And it is democratic extremism in their rhetoric with regard to Ukraine that has then caused a reaction among Republicans who say, okay, well, even if I agree with the general American interest in the preservation of Ukraine in the face of Russian invasion and atrocity, even if I agree with that, Your bizarre enthusiasm for Ukraine itself in the face of Russia as opposed to other allies is weird from you guys.
It's not as though like five years ago you cared about Ukraine.
This is super weird.
Some say, well, we have to deal with our border first.
when you see people like Jerry Connolly.
So Jerry Connolly is a congressman from New York.
And he said, Ukraine's border is our border.
Well, no, Ukraine's border is important.
It is also not our border, as you may have noticed.
Actually, our border is the one with Mexico that Joe Biden is leaving wide open.
Some say, well, we have to deal with our border first.
The Ukrainian-Russian border is our border.
It's the border between depraved autocracy and freedom-loving people
seeking our democratic way of life.
Do we have a stake in that outcome?
Yes.
Undeniably yes.
The United States certainly has a stake in the outcome in Ukraine, but the Ukrainian border is not, in fact, the United States border, which is why you can talk about something like a negotiated settlement where the pre-2014 borders are actually not restored, as opposed to if the Mexican government, for example, invaded the southern United States.
We would not be talking about giving away El Paso in some sort of land for peace swap.
In any case, Ukraine required the aid.
Russia should not be able to defeat Ukraine and simply walk into Kiev, which seemed to be the slow rolling disaster that we were watching.
Because again, this is one of the habits of the West is get involved in wars quickly and then gradually withdraw slowly.
So you lose.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Meanwhile, the Israel aid also passed by a wide margin.
In fact, even a wider margin than the Ukraine aid.
The Israel aid passed with 37 Democrats opposing and 21 Republicans opposing as well.
Now again, that does symbolize that the Democratic Party has not been completely owned by the radical left with regard to Israel.
That a lot of the radicals on the left wing are driving the rhetoric with regard to Israel.
But it turns out that the vast majority of Democratic representatives are still pro-Israel and understand the math here.
That large-scale bipartisan support for the Israel aid undoubtedly was helped along by the fact that Iran had launched a massive cruise missile drone attack, ballistic missile attack on the state of Israel just a week ago, which I think cleared everybody's mind.
And there are a lot of people who are very worried about Hamas and about the Gaza Strip.
And Israel had been saying for a while, the real war in the Middle East is between Iran and everybody else.
And I think everybody's mind cleared long enough for this aid to get passed.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to try to split the baby in the Middle East.
Which is the worst possible policy, by the way.
The United States should be, throughout, showing strong, stalwart support for our allies.
That should be true in Ukraine, it should be true in Taiwan, it should be true in Israel as well.
So while Joe Biden is greenlighting a billion dollars in arms shipments to Israel so that they can continue to fight the war against Hamas and fight against Hezbollah in their north, While he is pushing forward and he will sign this combined aid package that includes a bunch of aid to Israel, the Biden administration is simultaneously attempting to sanction particular battalions of the Israeli Defense Force.
There's one battalion called the Netzach Yehuda Battalion, which is active in the West Bank.
And the Biden administration is now considering the possibility of sanctions against a full military unit, which is weird because that's not the way military units work.
A military unit is typically not a group of people who stay in the same unit, and that unit is not always stationed in the same place.
Right now, the Netzach Yehuda unit, for example, is stationed up north on the border with Hezbollah.
And it turns out membership in various army units changes over time.
So some people who commit atrocities, for example, might shift out of the unit, And some new people might shift in.
So sanctioning a quote-unquote battalion is a very weird thing to do.
And it serves as the predicate for future Democrats to claim that Israel is violating human rights and therefore all aid has to end.
This is what Israel is worried about.
And by the way, that's not just Bibi Netanyahu worried about that.
That's the entire spectrum of the entire Israeli political establishment.
That includes Yair Lapid all the way on the left and includes Bibi Netanyahu all the way on the right.
It includes Yoav Galant, who's the defense minister.
It includes Gadi Eisenkot and Benny Gantz, who are the chief opposition to the current government.
Again, the Biden administration continues to try to win over those voters in Dearborn, Michigan by splitting the baby, even though they completely understand at this point that Iran is the real threat and all of its proxies are the real threat as well.
The Walla News site, which broke the story on the impending U.S.
sanctions, according to the Times of Israel, noticed that this was not an issue of Israel being singled out by the Biden administration.
Around the same time the U.S.
began probing Netanyahu, it also started investigating a special forces unit in the Australian army over allegations it carried out human rights abuses in Afghanistan.
But unlike the IDF, supposedly the Australian army took significant steps against the unit.
However, the reality is that Israel does prosecute soldiers who violate human rights law.
If there are members of the police in the West Bank who commit atrocities, they will be tried in military court or they will be tried by Israeli courts.
In any case, it's a very weird thing to do to an ally in the middle of a war, and that's why the entire Israeli establishment is upset.
But again, this goes to the fact that the Biden administration has a lot of dyspepsia and heartburn over their left flank, despite the fact that, again, it represents a fairly small minority of the congressional coalition.
We'll get to more on that in just one moment.
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Okay, meanwhile, There's a weird horseshoe theory thing that's happening here.
We've talked about it before on the program, that you have this constellation of far leftists who are rather friendly toward Hamas, who generally are isolationist on foreign policy, but they're isolationist on foreign policy mainly because they believe that the United States is a nefarious force in the world.
They're sort of Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky with regard to American foreign policy.
America is actually bad.
That horseshoe theory has now swung all the way around and includes some people on the right.
Now, as we'll talk about in a moment, when it comes to isolationism, as we've discussed, there are a bunch of different perspectives within the isolationist perspective.
There is the, we should not get involved in foreign conflicts, no matter what perspective, because we need the money here at home.
Which means that you're also in favor of cutting spending by the government on a wide variety of other subjects.
There's also an isolationism that suggests that whenever America gets involved in foreign conflicts, that tends to taint the United States, not it's about the United States tainting the rest of the world.
But there is a theory that has now risen on the right, that there is something deeply malign about the United States, something deeply wrong with the United States.
This was made apparent over the weekend.
Tucker Carlson was on Joe Rogan's show.
Obviously, I'm very friendly with Joe.
I think Joe does a great job during his interviews.
And there was a clip from this interview that went particularly viral.
This is a clip in which Tucker Carlson calls the United States evil for having dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, ending World War II, and then suggests that anyone who would justify that is also evil.
Which is a very traditionally left-wing perspective.
It is not traditionally a particularly right-wing perspective, because most people on the conservative side of the aisle tend to believe that America is a force for good in the world, and as we'll discuss, it turns out that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was necessary for ending World War II, and likely saved millions of lives, both American and Japanese.
But here is Tucker.
Well, you could say the same about the atomic bomb, right?
Yes, you could.
And you could say that we have to develop it like Oppenheimer felt before the Nazis did.
I love that!
How'd that work?
I love, by the way, that people on my side, I'll just say, I'll just admit it, on the right, have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians.
Are you joking?
Right.
That's just like prima facie evil.
If you can't... Well, if we hadn't done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings.
No, it's wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people.
And if you find yourself arguing that it's a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil.
It's not a tough one, right?
Is that a hard call for you?
It's not a hard call for me.
So with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons?
It's just a mindless, childish, intellectual exercise to justify, like, oh no, it's really good because someone else will get it.
How about no?
How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening?
Okay, actually, what would be childish is to assume that there are no other players in the world, for example, trying to develop nuclear weapons.
The fact is, the Nazis were trying to develop nuclear weapons.
There was, in fact, a nuclear arms race that was happening at the time.
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Not only that, as it turns out, the Soviet Union then developed nuclear weapons.
And it is mutually assured destruction and nuclear deterrence that has kept the world largely from sinking into another World War III-like mass casualty morass because of the horror of dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the first place.
By the way, when he says things like, How exactly would you justify?
Why are we talking about how many lives it would save?
It's just wrong to drop the bomb?
Well, no, actually.
If you end up saving more lives than are cost by the dropping of the atomic bomb, then it is morally justified to drop the atomic bomb.
And that happens to be the reality of the situation.
Evan Thomas wrote in the Washington Post fairly recently that commanders of the Japanese Armed Forces were fanatics.
On August 9th, after Washington dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki, Japan's War Minister, General Korichika Anami, asked his fellow members of the Supreme War Council, quote, would not it be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?
The rulers were fatalistic about taking the rest of the nation with them.
The 1 million will die for the Emperor was a common headline in the state-controlled press.
Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed, and after the Russians had even invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, six members of the Supreme War Council deadlocked 3-to-3 on whether to surrender.
After the dropping of the second bomb, When Emperor Hirohito decided that he wanted to end the debate and surrender, he had to run away from members of his own military who were threatening to kidnap him and were trying to find the recording of him surrendering before it could be broadcast on radio to destroy the recording.
So yes, it turns out that it was necessary.
By the way, if we had not dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The alternative was either an amphibious assault that would have cost probably a million American lives, or, more likely, a giant blockade of the island of Japan, including the mass starvation of the civilian population, which would have resulted in millions of dead Japanese.
So why is Tucker just abandoning the moral equation here at all?
What is he doing here?
That's what's sort of fascinating.
Now, I think to understand what Tucker's doing here, you have to understand that this particular interview included a lot of conspiratorial thinking.
So he tries to explain it.
He says that he was actually radicalized by 2017.
That basically, until 2017, he believed a lot of narratives that were told by the government and by the mainstream media.
And then, after 2016-2017, when it appeared that the intelligence community was militarized against Donald Trump, this is what radicalized him into basically becoming uber-critical of everything.
This is his story.
Probably unlike you, I didn't have any opinions like that.
I was like, fluoride, come on.
UFOs, you're f***ing crazy.
You know what I mean?
I just like, I had this reflex.
I'm ashamed of it.
I'm not bragging about it.
But it was 2017 and really it was the Trump campaign.
It wasn't that I was like so in love with Trump, though I've always liked Trump because he was hilarious and charming and all that.
But I wasn't like a Trumper or anything.
But it was watching that campaign And particularly his claim that they were spying on him.
And I was like, really?
The intel services and federal law enforcement, FBI, do not spy on presidential campaigns.
Like, that's so out of the realm.
That's so crazy.
Like, that could never happen because, of course, there's no democracy in a system like that.
And fundamentally, we're a democracy, an imperfect one.
It kind of lumbers along, you know, but like, it's not fake.
And then that turned out to be true.
And I knew it was true.
And that just blew my mind. So I began a process still ongoing of reassessing a lot of other
things like, okay, well, if that was not true, what else is not true? And what else
that they told me was a conspiracy theory might actually have some basis in fact.
Okay, so in other words, he went all the way from, I believe all the narratives to,
I believe none of the narratives.
In fact, I believe the counter of the set of facts with which I am presented.
Now, first of all, let me just say about 2016-2017.
Yes, it is incredibly disturbing that the intelligence community was militarized against Donald Trump on the basis of a bunch of trumped-up nonsense from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Also, if this exploded your worldview as a conservative, That I find, honestly, I find that surprising.
Because as a conservative, you're supposed to be generally skeptical of government power.
And not only that, if you know anything about presidential history, you know that a wide variety of presidential campaigns have been spied on by the administration in power.
In 1940, for example, the Wendell Willkie campaign was pretty clearly spied on by the FBI at the behest of FDR.
In 1964, LBJ literally bugged Barry Goldwater's headquarters in 1964.
Famously, in 1972, the Richard Nixon campaign spied on the campaign of George McGovern, right?
That's what Watergate was all about.
So, actually, there's a fairly well-predicated history of the instruments of law enforcement being misused, which is why there's been a hot debate about the utility of various law enforcement agencies.
On the right, this has been going on literally my entire lifetime and well before.
Okay, but according to Tucker, that radicalized him, and now he went from supposedly believing everything to believing the reverse of everything.
Now, that is actually not critical thinking.
That's actually not critical thinking.
If what you said is, I took in everything too much, too easily without examining the evidence, and so now I'm gonna take a stronger look at the evidence before I come to a conclusion, that would be critical thinking.
But saying that the evidence that is presented to you Is now of no consequence whatsoever.
That no evidence provided is sufficient.
Because the source cannot be trusted.
That they are lying to you.
That they're always lying to you.
Always.
And that no counter evidence is necessary to support your new thesis.
Because again, they're lying to you and they've hidden all the evidence.
We are now in the world of the unfalsifiable.
Any evidence against your new thesis is discounted by the fact that it's coming from a source that lies to you.
And no evidence for your thesis is available.
Why?
Because they hid it and they are lying to you.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
First, the people of Israel are under attack once again.
The Islamic Republic of Iran recently launched a wave of suicide drones followed by ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel.
The situation in northern Israel has been tense and deadly for months.
The region has been subjected to repeated rocket attacks from Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists operating out of Lebanon.
Now the situation is coming to a head.
Israel needs your prayers and your support now more than ever.
The entry of Iran into the war is a very serious development.
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So then it comes down to, what is the thesis that Tucker is using?
What is the narrative that Tucker is backing?
Well, as he says, he's using the thesis that every single power that exists in the United States is lying to you.
About everything.
Down to the most basic morality of Americanism.
Things like, was America right to involve itself in World War II?
Was America right to drop a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end the war?
Now listen.
As always, when Tucker talks, there's a grain of truth to much of what Tucker says.
There's truth, a lot of truth to the idea that a lot of our powerful institutions have been corrupted and that people inside those institutions have used that power in order to lie and change the narrative.
But there is a difference, again, between healthy skepticism, a demand for evidence.
That's what skepticism is.
Being critical, being a critical thinker is a demand for evidence.
That is not the same thing as just asking questions.
Just asking questions means the search for answers is totally worthless, and all the answers are deemed insufficient anyway.
When you start thinking that being a critical thinker is just the asking of the questions rather than critically evaluating evidence and claims and counterclaims, that's wrong.
If you're the kind of person who just asks questions, that's actually childish.
Because the goal in life is to seek the answers, not just to ask the questions.
A critical thinker might look at the evidence being presented and might evaluate it one way or another and sift through the data.
A quote-unquote, just asking questions is not the end of the story.
Because if it's the end of the story, then the kinds of questions you're asking is in fact the narrative that you're seeking to promulgate.
So what exactly is Tucker's narrative?
Well, his narrative is that there's something deeply wrong in the soul of America.
And what's more, there's been something wrong with the soul of America for generations.
Now, again, a lot of conservatives do believe there's something wrong with the soul of the country.
I believe, for example, there's been something wrong with the soul of the country since, for example, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which undermined marriage, since the decline of religion in the United States, particularly in mainline Protestant churches, but across the spectrum.
And that's been going on for generations.
And more people need to go back to church.
That we do have a soul sickness in this country.
And that's largely mirrored the declining religiosity of the American population.
But Tucker doesn't just go that far.
He thinks that it goes deeper.
Tucker has another critique.
America— Tucker literally says this, okay?
So I'm not attributing to Tucker a view he doesn't hold.
And if I am, I'm happy for him to correct me.
We've invited him on the show multiple times.
Tucker has another critique.
America lost its moral credibility during World War II.
Now again, this is the same argument that he makes with Joe that everybody is now latching onto, but he made this argument months ago when he was on with Russell Brand.
And I do think there are war crimes that the United States committed during the Second World War, the firebombing of Tokyo, famously Dresden, that were collective punishment.
And I would also say, by the way, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that's collective punishment.
And I think that rotted the soul of the West.
I do.
I think that's so immoral that it did two things.
One, you know, you carry the burden of sin at scale like that.
You just do.
You can't help it.
And two, that level of power in the hands of human beings convinced them that they were gods.
Yes, it's curious because you would hear a comparable argument offered for slavery, for example, that this burden is borne by American culture.
And yet I've never heard anyone advance it around the acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I wanted to... We dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.
I'm not endorsing Imperial Japan.
Yes.
And it was an imperial power in the worst sense.
Horrible, horrible, horrible government.
However, you can't annihilate a civilian population and call yourself the good guy.
I don't care.
I love America.
I will defend America almost under any circumstances.
You can't defend that.
Well, I mean, at this point, I kind of want to know which circumstances, because I feel like the defense of America Especially on the foreign policy sphere, just for Tucker, does not exist, particularly a lot.
Again, I have the same views as Tucker does when it comes to closing the southern border.
I have many of the same views that Tucker does about the decreasing religiosity of the West.
In fact, I think I've been saying it longer than Tucker has probably.
But what's weird here is that when Tucker is criticizing the United States as embodying some sort of original sin that sprang from World War II, is that Tucker actually doesn't believe this about foreign leaders killing people.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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So when it comes to the moral calculus of leaders killing people, that's the realm of normal politics.
So for example, he will downplay Vladimir Putin's evil In killing his political opponents and invading sovereign countries and killing civilian populations in those sovereign countries by basically saying all leaders kill people.
When it comes to ending World War II by dropping the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which did bring an end to the war, that is a moral stain, a moral blight that America simply has been corrupted by.
So here he was talking about Vladimir Putin killing people.
Again, this is just a couple of months ago.
You should challenge some ideas.
For instance, you didn't talk about freedom of speech in Russia.
You did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about the restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.
Elections.
I didn't talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about.
Why?
Because those are covered and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following.
That every leader kills people.
Including my leader.
Every leader kills people.
Some kill more than others.
Leadership requires killing people.
Sorry.
That's why I wouldn't want to be a leader.
That's very blasé about leaders killing people, but when it comes to ending World War II, then all of a sudden the United States bears the stain of a giant blood guilt that can never be alleviated.
Or if it can be, he's not really spelled out.
So this isn't actually America first, ironically.
This is actually kind of fascinating.
It's something else.
So the America First Movement, which is the isolationist movement that was very well-trafficked and very popular in 1939-1940 before it took a late turn into overt anti-Semitism, it actually had a lot of prominent Americans early on because in 1939-1940 it was very unclear whether the United States needed to get involved in the war.
The case that was being made by interventionists was that Britain was about to fall.
If Britain fell, then Germany would dominate the entire continent of Europe.
And then it could take its time.
It could build up its naval resources.
It would take control, for example, of the British Navy.
And then it could threaten the United States.
That was the case interventionists were making.
Isolationists were saying, we are very far away from Europe.
There is no reason for us to be involved.
Remember the last time we got involved, a lot of Americans died.
Many prominent Americans were members very early on of the America First movement, including, for example, JFK and Gerald Ford when they were young men.
Charles Lindbergh, who's most associated with America First, was not formally associated with America First until about 1941.
That's when he formally joined the America First movement.
But there's something that should be said here about American isolationists prior to World War II.
Those American isolationists, generally, their worry was not that America's involvement would be bad for the world.
Their worry was that Europe's wars would harm America, that America was a pristine place we needed to build up at home, that America had to focus in on itself and keeping itself pristine from the old world politics.
We didn't want to get involved in the balance of power jousting that happened in Europe all the time.
Instead, we needed to keep ourselves safe because America is better, not because America is worse.
But Tucker is saying something else.
He's saying that America is and has historically been a nefarious force.
In foreign policy, which is actually a left-wing argument from the 1960s, that America bears blood guilt.
In fact, it sounds a lot more like radical protesters on today's college campuses than like a traditional conservative.
You hear that when Russell Brand says to him, it sounds like what you are saying about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is what the left is saying about the history of race in the United States, that America bears blood guilt, that America is in its essence guilty and corrupt and sinful.
That's a very strange perspective, and it's not traditionally conservative.
Again, you can believe it, but it's not traditionally conservative.
Tucker's narrative does have one important utility.
It makes him the go-to source for everything.
So to get back to his just asking questions, in this unfalsifiable world, where you can't trust anything, you can't believe what you see, you can't believe evidence provided because everybody's lying to you, and counter evidence is unnecessary because they hid all of it, this means the only person you can trust is the person who promulgates the reverse of any traditional narrative you've been hearing in America.
It's a pure reaction against whatever is the story of the day.
Whether it's true or whether it's false is irrelevant.
It's just whatever is the story has to be false because I don't like the people who are telling the story.
So they're hiding 9-11, and America's evil Hiroshima, and Alex Jones is just as solid an informational source as anyone else, which is, Tucker actually suggested he was prophetic on Joe Rogan's show.
All our members of Congress, again, something that Tucker said on the show, every single one, effectively, are subject to blackmail by the intelligence agencies.
According to Tucker, you have to believe Tucker.
And if you don't, it's probably because you're part of the conspiracy or the cover-up.
Because you're owned.
Because you become the establishment.
Because you're weak.
And you can be taken over by nefarious forces.
The only man of courage in this routine is apparently the truth seeker, Tucker, who asks questions but doesn't actually examine the evidence on these particular issues.
Because why do you need to know things when you can just ask questions?
And what's the point of trying to find things out when all the sources are themselves corrupted?
Now once upon a time, there was a young man who set fire to this exact narrative.
His name was Tucker Carlson.
Here he was discussing another isolationist politician with an attraction to some rather ugly conspiracies and some questions about World War II.
Well, I mean, I think everyone would agree with America First in lower case.
I mean, the idea that we're all Americans here and American interests are paramount, at least to Americans.
But I think it's America First in capitals, the America First movement of the 30s and 40s that Buchanan's comments remind a lot of people of, and that's what people find creepy.
I mean, I think that, you know, the sovereignty of the American military, etc.
I mean, these are not just crank issues.
But unfortunately, Pat Buchanan raises them in a way that I think is discredited.
When it's hacked, he can always fall back on the line, well, the tiny cabal that controls American politics doesn't like me because I speak truth to power.
This is actually, incidentally, almost verbatim what he said the other day, that I offend the plutocracy, that I'm a wanted man by the inside, the Beltway people, and in every sense cast himself As a victim who is sort of a Karen Silkwood of politics.
Someone who's so truthful that he's being hunted down by the conspiracy that runs Washington.
I mean, it's all a bit much.
Maybe Pat Buchanan just says things that are kind of kooky.
And that's why he's being criticized.
Tucker Carlson might want to take a note from Tucker Carlson.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
We will be joined on the line by award-winning scholar, professor, author, and combat veteran John Spencer.
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