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May 28, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
42:14
Will The West Ever Win Another War?
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Well, folks, there's a big question that arises in the aftermath of Memorial Day, which, of course, is a day when we pay tribute to the Americans who have fallen on behalf of America, on behalf of our defense, on behalf of freedom.
And that question is, is America, is the West more generally geared toward winning wars anymore?
Will we ever win another war?
Because let's be real about this.
When it comes to military conflict, The chief goal, in fact the only thing that justifies an evil as great as war, is victory.
If you fight a war and you lose, then all of the sacrifices that are made on behalf of that war are treated as disposable and dispensable.
If you fight a war and you fight a war not to win, then you have spent blood, you have spent treasure, you have made human beings sacrifice their lives for a thing that has not actually been effectuated.
Where is the virtue in that?
The first rule of war is win.
The first rule of war is win.
So, if you're the West, the question is, can we win wars anymore?
Because it's been an awful long time since the West actually won a war.
You can't really say that the West won the Afghanistan war.
We didn't.
America didn't win that war.
We didn't win the Iraq war.
That place is now a sectarian hellhole.
The United States didn't win the Vietnam War, obviously.
The United States won Gulf War No.
1 in the sense that Kuwait is no longer dominated by Iraq, but obviously that did not end with the deposition of Saddam Hussein.
He retained his power, and that led to Gulf War No. 2.
The United States really has not won a war in any serious fashion since the Korean War.
We've had little conflicts here and there where we've been able to maintain the peace.
The last big war that we quote-unquote won is the Korean War.
Even that ended with an armistice.
With that said, at least South Korea exists as a thriving independent state in the modern world.
But that is fully three generations ago.
So why is it the West?
Why America?
Why don't we win wars anymore?
Well, there are three conditions to winning wars.
Three preconditions that have to be fulfilled if you want to win a war.
One, an actual end goal.
What is the goal of the war?
What is the goal?
And we have not really defined our goals in any war that we have entered other than generalized victory without specifying what exactly that victory looks like and what we seek to achieve in attaining that victory.
The sole war that you could say that we sort of won since the Korean War was the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, because the end goal there was push Iraq out of Kuwait.
The problem there, of course, is that there were sort of bifurcated goals because half the government wanted to simply go on and depose Saddam Hussein and end the threat from Saddam Hussein at the time.
But you can at least say that that was a victorious war in the sense that its original goal was attained.
So an end goal that is realizable.
Second, military ability to achieve that end goal.
And that means building a military that is capable of actually attaining that goal.
It doesn't always work that way.
Sometimes, for example, the United States military is stretched too thin.
Virtually all Western militaries have spent an extraordinary amount of time and money in the past Post-Cold War era, really, in trying to shrink the size of the military, light footprint militaries.
And that means sometimes your military ability is not up to what is necessary in order to achieve the end goal.
But the biggest obstacle to winning a war that currently exists for the West is not lack of end goals or even lack of military ability to achieve the end goals.
The real failing is the political willingness to take the measures necessary to obtain the end goal.
Again, as we've said, there are some military means that a country is unwilling to undertake in favor of victory.
So, for example, you're not going to just drop a nuke on a country to get them to decrease oil prices, for example.
But the real problem here is that the West is no longer in favor of victory because political leadership and public support for victory in war is totally and utterly lacking.
By the way, even in places where the West isn't directly involved, meaning America and Europe aren't directly involved, where we're just funding other people to fight wars, Public support can no longer be maintained, even for the most anodyne political issues.
That's a result of the public, first, not understanding why we fight particular wars, and second, not understanding the nature of war itself.
That combination is absolutely toxic.
When it comes to not understanding why we fight particular wars, that's because we've emptied the rhetorical barrel over and over and over again without actually explaining America's interests in particular conflicts.
Politicians cite bumper stickers like democracy or our way of life.
We'll get to more on that in just one moment.
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Now, again, the American people want to feel ideologically motivated if they're going to go to war, obviously.
But that's... it is necessary, but not sufficient.
We have to feel that we're right in a conflict, but there actually have to be a real interest at stake.
If there are no real interests at stake, the American people quickly tire of these things.
Like, very, very fast.
That is why it was so overwhelmingly damaging to American foreign policy when the originally expressed motivation for the Iraq war, which was to end the threat of WMD in Iraq, at least one of the main motivations, when that turned out to be false.
It totally undercut Americans' sense of why we are there in the first place.
And when we say things like we are fighting for democracy, the problem is that obviously the United States, when we say we're fighting for democracy, it can mean that in a couple of senses.
One, we can mean that America's interest as the world's largest and oldest democracy That America's interest is in preserving itself and our interests.
But the way that we generally use it is that we're supporting quote-unquote democracies against dictatorships.
But the problem is that's inconsistent because we, the United States, uphold a lot of dictatorships.
For example, we actually don't want the vote in Saudi Arabia because it turns out the population of Saudi Arabia would likely vote for a terrorist government as the Palestinian population did in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank.
It's very easy for critics to point out that many of the flaws that we sense in other countries are also present in watered-down form here at home.
So when we say democracy, it's democracy against dictatorship.
You'll hear critics on both the far right and the far left say, yes, but those things exist in the United States also.
Now, very often that's not honest.
They're comparing, for example, the gulagging of opponents.
To political prosecution of Donald Trump, for example.
That's really bad what's happening here at home.
That is not the same as somebody being forcibly jailed and gulagged and then dying in mysterious circumstances in Russia.
But that is an argument that is brought to bear when you use empty bumper sticker slogans like democracy or our way of life without filling in the gaps.
When it comes to our way of life, that's too vague.
America is uniquely placed in the world, which means that very typically, overall threat to our way of life is pretty distant.
As people pointed out, even in the aftermath of 9-11, our way of life in any real sense was not threatened.
Nobody was worried that America was going to become a sharia law dictatorship.
Nobody was truly worried that the United States was going to start mandating that everyone go to mosque.
American lives were threatened.
American interests were threatened.
But America's quote-unquote way of life was not truly threatened in that way.
Which means that if you wish to uphold public support for a war, then real American interests must be defended and explained.
Yes, you have to have an ideological interest in any sort of conflict.
But those interests can't be purely ideological.
They are, in fact, material and practical.
They involve things that require explanation, like supply chains, freedom of the seas, spheres of influence, resource allocation.
These things are complex, and they require people to explain them to the American public.
They involve free markets and powerful allies to protect those free markets.
There's a really good book out by Dale Copeland of Princeton titled, A World Made Safe for Commerce, in which he makes the case that American foreign policy, while we constantly talk about values this and values that, that really American foreign policy has always been geared toward ensuring our economic and financial interests abroad.
He says that's true for every single state.
Countries have, quote, a natural predisposition to expand the size of their economic power spheres and to protect their trade routes with naval power.
All of which is true.
And all that can be explained.
And the reality is that in America, that is very powerful, particularly when it comes to freedom of the seas, freedom of trade and all that makes the world a better place.
But in order to defend American interests in a muscular world, we actually have to defend America's place in the world.
And that means that we have to understand that America is an awesome place that ought to be defended.
We used to understand on a general level that America's place in the world was not only morally defensible, it was good, particularly in the context of the Cold War binary between the Soviet Union, which was in fact a truly evil empire, and the United States and its allies.
That was an easy case to make in the post-Cold War era that has been radically undermined by several generations now of indoctrination from a Marxist-laden educational system to believe that America is actually a nefarious force in the world.
So if, again, there are a couple of factors that are necessary in order to maintain public support for a victorious war, one would be understanding why we fight a particular war.
Then we're missing the elements of why we fight a particular war.
One, no explanation as to why we do it.
And two, a belief that America is actually fundamentally good and that our interests are worth preserving.
And then there's the second question, which is not understanding war itself.
We in the United States, we are the luckiest people in history.
Virtually none of us have served in the military of the United States.
The percentage of Americans who currently serve in the military in the United States is vanishingly small, which means the vast majority of Americans don't know people currently serving in the American military.
And even the vast majority of people in the military have not fought in a major combat operation.
Only about 15% of people who are actually members of the military have been in active combat.
All of which means that for the American public, our vision of war is typically like World War II movies or video games in which there are no costs.
Plus, for Americans, because we're so powerful, because we are so overwhelmingly hegemonic, there's very little cost to Americans in losing wars.
That's also true on a personal level, because it turns out that if your friends or family members are serving in the line of duty, if it turns out that you have friends or family members who've been killed in a war, Most people are very much invested in winning that war then.
But most Americans haven't sunk costs into a war other than money.
So it's much easier to say, get out of a war.
It's also easier to say, by the way, get into a war when no one you know has actually spilled blood on behalf of that war.
You add to that our legacy media, which are hell bent on that left-wing perspective that our enemies are justified.
And then they add to that broadcasting the nature of war.
And now we're geared to lose wars, truly geared to lose wars.
So if you look at how media in the West cover wars, they always start off as justified quest for democracy.
And then within months, within months, the entire media have swiveled, and now they start talking about Vietnam like quagmires, in which the truly morally righteous are the anti-war left, who are seeking to pull the West out of the death spiral of war.
Right?
This is within months.
So basically they keep replaying the Vietnam narrative, but instead of stretching it out over like 12 years, they stretch it out over maybe 12 months.
So, when Ukraine defends itself, that is democracy defending itself.
And then, within months, this is a quagmire, the West needs an exit plan, how do we get out of this?
And then, the media start pumping out images of war, which are always hideous, because war is truly hideous.
Again, this is why the first priority in war is winning.
Because literally nothing else on Earth could justify the evil of war.
So the media start doing is then they start pumping out images of war.
And it turns out that wars are always ugly.
And then the public support collapses because we don't like ugly pictures on our TV.
So the result of that for America and for the West more generally is bloody little wars that stay under the radar.
Right?
Those ones are the easy ones.
Like small, bloody, ugly little wars that stay under the radar or are done like Barack Obama did from 30,000 feet with drones.
You can fight those sorts of wars because they're anodyne and they don't require justification and we don't even know about them.
And then suddenly they explode onto the radar, at which point the media go into there.
Oh my God, it's a quagmire.
Why are we even there?
Here's an ugly picture on your TV.
And at that point, the West cuts and runs, leaving billions in equipment to our enemies.
There's great irony to the fact that the United States did not surrender to the Taliban when the Taliban was actually at its most powerful.
And when they were doing the most damage to American troops.
The United States surrendered to the Taliban when we were losing zero soldiers a year.
It's just that it exploded on our TV.
And suddenly it was like, okay, well, why are we still there?
Or Joe Biden makes a decision.
Why are we still there?
Do we have interest there?
Why are we there?
Which leaves a couple of options.
Again, small wars that stay kind of under the radar with American troops in far-flung places at bases that we fund.
And then something ugly happens when we run.
Or we attempt to conciliate to evil so as to forestall war entirely.
Which means that right now America is not in position to win another war.
The best that we can hope for is status quo.
That is a dangerous thing.
And that's not because of the members of our military.
The members of our military are amazing and heroic and they kick ass at their jobs.
They are the finest fighting force in the history of humanity.
You literally would not pick another fighting force in the history of humanity and put them up against the members of the U.S.
military with the technology and with the support that they have.
Which means that we're not losing wars because of those guys.
We are losing wars because of our politicians, and because of a media that hates the country, and because of our educational system, which also is training people to hate the country, and in the end, because we, the American public, don't have the stomach for this stuff.
We don't like the idea of losing wars, but apparently we like the idea of winning ugly wars even less.
But this actually has even further problems because our inability to win a war at home is symptomatic of something even more serious at home.
If we can't win a war, that says something about what we think of ourselves.
We are unable to justify ourselves at home.
The real reason America can't win a war is because America, in its bones, does not think that we should win a war.
Because to win a war would mean that we're imperialistic.
It would mean that we're dominating.
It would mean that we are spreading our values elsewhere, which is bad.
And here's the problem.
Once you, as a country, make the decision that your values are so bad it cannot justify winning a war, then the brain worms come home.
Because the brain worms are already there.
Then it starts eating you.
Once you start believing that you as a country are so corrupt, you are so vile, that you are a negative force on the world stage, it is a really short road.
In fact, it's not even a road, it just exists.
The feeling inside the United States that the United States itself is the problem.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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I bring up all of this because you can see this happening in real time.
The fight inside the Democratic Party between the far left and the sort of moderate liberals continues apace.
And that is a fight that has been characterizing the Democratic Party really since the era of Barack Obama when Barack Obama was feeding the alligator.
Pretending that he was actually the alligator while he was actually a member of the elite coterie at the top echelon of the Democratic Party.
That battle has been going on.
Yet the boomer Democrats who basically believe that they can channel the revolutionary rage of a younger generation they have bred to hate the country into gradualistic change to America's systems where they still get to hold the reins of power.
That's what they believe.
It's a battle between them and the revolutionaries who sit beneath them.
But one thing that you never hear is a defense, a muscular defense, of what America is, its role abroad, and what our real interests are and why those are good.
You never hear that.
Instead, even when members of the Biden administration are paying homage on Memorial Day, it becomes much more about the suffering of the soldiers than about what they died to protect.
And that seems to me a fundamental betrayal of what Memorial Day is.
Because if the soldiers who spent their lives at Normandy had died in service of a bad cause or a useless cause, that is a disservice to them.
And yet that seems to be sort of the take.
So yesterday, Joe Biden was speaking on Memorial Day, and he brought up his son Beau.
Now, his son Beau served in the military.
His son Beau served in Iraq, actually.
Instead of talking about the cause for which he served, Joe Biden talked about his suffering.
Now again, Memorial Day, we're paying homage to people who fell.
But the reality is that any eulogy of somebody who sacrificed their life for something, it's the sacrifice that matters.
What makes Memorial Day such an astonishing event, such an incredible This week marks nine years since I lost my son, Beau.
Our losses are not the same.
These are people who chose in the post draft era to go into the military and sacrifice
their lives for something higher.
But that's not the approach that Joe Biden really kind of takes here.
This week marks nine years since I lost my son, Bo.
Our losses are not the same.
He didn't perish in the battlefield.
He was a cancer victim from a consequence of being in the army in Iraq for a year next
burn pit.
Major of the U.S.
Army National Guard, living and working like too many besides that toxic burn pit.
And as it is for so many of you, the pain of his loss is with me every day as it is with you.
Still sharp, still clear.
But so is the pride I feel in this service, as if I can still hear him saying, it's my duty, dad.
It's my duty.
And a huge percentage of the speech, he did play, he did do the sort of platitudinous stuff that he likes to do about democracy and freedom that no one takes seriously from Joe Biden.
But a huge percentage of the speech was about him attempting to put himself in sort of the coterie of people who have lost people in battle.
It helps explain, you know, this sort of hesitancy to explain why America is a muscular force for the good.
Helps explain why the Democratic Party is utterly unable to dissociate from its most radical base.
And that radical base really does not like the country very much.
They also don't know much about the country.
So yesterday, both Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush were members of the anti-American Hamas squad in Congress.
Both of them had to delete Memorial Day tweets.
Why?
Because they literally did not understand the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
So, Representative Ilhan Omar, she tweeted out, On Memorial Day, we honor the heroic men and women who
served our country.
We owe them more than our gratitude.
They have more than earned access to quality mental health services,
job opportunities, housing assistance, and the benefits they were promised.
And then you had something similar from Cori Bush, the BLM Congresswoman from St.
Louis, Missouri.
They both had to delete these because they literally don't understand what Memorial Day is.
And there's a reason for that.
And that is because these people truly do not believe that America is a good force in the world, that the West is a good force in the world.
They believe that America is inherently corrupt.
Cori Bush believes America is a white supremacist system built on the backs of black people that is consistently keeping minorities under the boot heel of an evil We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Omar believes that, except even worse, she believes it internationally.
And yet the Democratic Party cannot dissociate from these people.
Again, symptomatic of an America that can't win wars is an America that can't even defend itself
to its own people at home, which is why you have representatives
like Rashida Tlaib still in Congress.
We'll get some more on this in just one moment.
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Rashida Tlaib over the weekend spoke at a Detroit conference that was tied to a terror group, the People's Conference for Palestine.
And here she was ripping on Joe Biden as an enabler.
Again, this kind of weird dance that is being done between the elites and the Democratic Party and the revolutionary base.
It's ugly and it is demonstrative of exactly what this party has become, which is a party that is warm toward anti-Americanism and is incapable of winning wars.
It should be noted here that literally the logo for the People's Conference for Palestine shows the entire land of Israel green.
So for those who are claiming that this is just about an independent Palestinian state, it is literally about the complete destruction of the state of Israel.
Here's Rashida Tlaib.
Attacking the authority of the International Criminal Court and interfering in the legal process is nothing more, nothing more than an attempt to prevent the genocidal maniac Netanyahu and his senior Israeli officials from being held accountable for those crimes against humanity.
You are an enabler, President Biden.
This particular conference happened to be linked with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, like an actual Marxist terror group.
And she's speaking there.
Also, the conference was funded by a multi-millionaire Marxist named Neville Roy Singham, who was born and became wealthy in America, according to the Free Press, but now lives in Shanghai, where he funds a number of propaganda sites boosting the Chinese Communist Party.
These are the kinds of people who literally sit in the Congress of the United States.
That's who Rashida Tlaib is.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, we also saw a person now named Fatima Mohammed in New York calling for the increase, the escalation of the intifada inside the United States.
And if you don't fight the wars out there, it's not that it's just that people come and fight the wars interior to the United States.
It's a country that is unable to justify itself to itself, is likely to allow the brain worms to eat it.
Here's Fatima Mohammed.
She's most famous for having given a commencement address at CUNY in which she went full anti-semitic.
Here she was yesterday on behalf of Within Our Lifetime at Palestine, which is her group.
That is a group that calls, again, for the entire extirpation of the state of Israel.
And also suggests, quote, we have a responsibility as those living within the United States to resist the violence of the U.S.
empire at home and abroad.
As internationalists, we believe that all people have the right to self-determination.
We stand in solidarity with all national liberation struggles across the globe resisting U.S.
imperialism.
In other words, she hates the country.
This is all happening inside the United States.
What will it take?
What will it take?
For you to escalate?
For you to escalate?
For you to sacrifice, for you to give it your all, we have failed Gaza.
We have failed Gaza!
It's time to escalate!
It's time to escalate.
It's time to be angry.
It's time to be angry.
What do you think she means by escalate?
And now if you just think, OK, fine, that's the radical wing of the Democratic Party.
Let me bring you the most stunning news of the weekend that everybody is ignoring.
It's an exclusive from The Wall Street Journal.
The Biden administration is pressing European allies to back off plans to rebuke Iran for advances in its nuclear program.
Even as it expands its stockpile of near-weapons-grade fissile material to a record level, according to diplomats involved in discussions.
The U.S.
is currently arguing against an effort by Britain and France to censure Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Member State Board in early June, according to diplomats.
The U.S.
has pressed a number of other countries to abstain in a censure vote, saying that is what Washington will do.
The differences are emerging as Western officials' concerns have deepened about Iran's nuclear activities.
Some U.S.
officials say they fear Iran could be more volatile as the country moves toward election for a new leader after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash earlier this month.
The Biden administration has long said it is seeking a diplomatic solution on Iran's nuclear program.
European diplomats have warned that failure to take action would undermine the authority of the IAEA, which polices non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
They say it also weakens the credibility of Western pressure on Iran.
And they are frustrated over what they see as U.S.
efforts to undermine their approach.
So in other words, this administration is so pro-Iran They're attempting to shield Iran from the wrath of the French.
That is how far this administration has gone.
And again, that springs from a deep and abiding philosophy that America is, in fact, an imperialistic colonial force in the world.
You wonder why we can't win wars?
You can't win wars when you believe you're the baddie.
You can't win wars when you believe that.
And the Democratic Party has fallen into this Moral morass over the course of my lifetime.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, there was a widespread belief, both Democrat and Republican, that America was a good force in the world.
And it took about a decade for that to fall away.
And it really took two decades for it to fully materialize.
And Barack Obama was the apotheosis of this approach.
All the way back in 2008, suggesting that America was air raiding villages and bombing civilians.
In 2008 in Afghanistan.
And so now the United States in conflicts all over the world is extraordinarily hesitant to even lend the patina of support to allies that are fighting against American enemies.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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So, for example, in Ukraine, Joe Biden has been slow-walking aid to Ukraine the entire time.
While Ukraine is undergoing missile attacks from Russian territory, the United States has placed a ban on Ukrainian ability to use weaponry in order to target Russian missile sites in Russia in retaliation.
That is not a recipe for victory or even for stalemate.
That is a recipe for Russian victory.
When it comes to the Gaza Strip, the Biden administration has been far worse.
At least Joe Biden He gives the platitudinous homages to the Ukrainians.
He sends his Secretary of State over to play Rockin' in the Free World in Kiev.
But when it comes to Israel attempting to extirpate an honest-to-God full-scale genocidal terror group, the United States, while providing aid to Israel in a military sense, is also providing aid to the other side.
It's a complete fail of a policy.
So for example, remember that time that the Biden administration decided it'd be an amazing idea to spend 320 million of your American dollars to build a floating pier in the Mediterranean to bring in aid to Gaza?
And then it turns out that all the aid was being stolen.
Literally none of it reached the Gazans.
None of it reached the civilians in Gaza because Hamas stole all of it.
Well, now it turns out that the Biden pier is sinking.
It's literally sinking.
So I'm glad that we had this photo op of a pier that is now going to be underwater.
The floating pier, pieces of it were breaking off and washing up north of the Gaza Strip in Ashdod.
Here's some video of that.
The second day that the U.S.
landing craft is now stuck on Ashdod Beach, they've finally been able to get a rope out to the Matamoros.
And they've got these two smaller vessels here.
So this dumb idea of bringing American soldiers directly in the line of fire from Hamas has resulted in pieces of this stupid pier washing up on beaches miles north of where the pier is supposed to be.
Just well done, Biden administration.
And again, their foreign policy is underwater.
It's a disaster area.
In a second, we'll get to another party.
That, um, has brain worms.
Alrighty, folks, today is Tuesday.
That means a brand new episode of Judged by Matt Walsh is live streaming exclusively over at DailyWirePlus.
Witness a lease agreement to tear two sisters apart.
Ugh, the tragedy.
And what happens when a magician breaks the sacred magician code of conduct?
If anyone can see past the smoke and mirrors and fix a family feud, it's the most honorable judge in the highest court of the land.
Kind of.
So, my fellow truth seekers, head on over to DailyWirePlus, stream the new episode of Judged by Matt Walsh.
It's where justice meets entertainment and logic prevails over illusion.
Meanwhile, there is a thing that is going on with America's major political parties, which is basically they've atrophied into bizarre versions of themselves.
I would say that right now, the robustness of all parties seems to be at all-time lows.
I mean, really serious, significant problems inside virtually every American political party.
Actually, the problems inside the Republican Party are the least of the concerns.
There seems to be at least some unity around President Trump.
There seems to be some unity around an agenda inside the Republican Party, even if it is a milder agenda than one that I would like.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is torn in half by the radicals and the incompetent liberals at the very top of the heap.
And then there's the Libertarian Party.
Never in human history, I have to say, has a third-party opportunity been blown as strongly as the Libertarian Party is currently blowing its third party opportunity.
You have two wildly unpopular lead candidates for the two major parties.
And the Libertarian Party is just a clown show.
It is just every four years, it is an absolute ridiculous clown show.
And the best meme that I saw over the weekend was how it started for the Libertarian Party.
It's a picture of Mel Gibson from the Patriot.
How it ends for the Libertarian Party.
It's like shirtless morons dancing around with rainbow tattoos on one arm And Iron Cross is on the other.
The Libertarian Party is a mockery of itself, which means that basically it's a scam party.
It exists in order to raise money for its leadership every four years, because they certainly have no intention of ever winning anything.
With that said, this is a very close election, and so that meant...
The Libertarian Party invited the three major candidates who are out there, Trump, Biden, and RFK Jr.
to go and speak at the Libertarian Party Convention.
RFK Jr.
went there and spoke and then was put in a nomination.
He didn't get the nomination.
We'll discuss the person who got the nomination in a second.
Biden didn't even bother to show up.
Trump showed up.
And the Libertarians, because, again, it is a complete circus over there filled with clowns, they decided they were going to loudly boo Trump.
Which, of course, the left-wing media then turned into, Trump booed by Libertarians.
Okay, name a thing Libertarians won't boo.
They're like Philadelphia Phillies fans booing Santa Claus.
Libertarians are never for anything.
They're against everything.
You know, they boo like Vivek Ramaswamy.
Like, they'll boo literally anyone.
And so, like, libertarians boo a thing is just called a day.
That's not even an event.
So Trump showed up, they started booing him.
They should have been flattered that he showed up to the clown show anyway.
That he was out there, you know, trying to make waves with a crowd of useless doofy in their basements.
And again, on economics, I'm pretty damn libertarian.
The Libertarian Party is a full-scale disaster area clown show filled with idiots.
And they're booing Donald Trump.
And I gotta say, you know, the media tried to play this as big L for Trump.
I don't think so.
Here is Trump going after the libertarians.
Trump will address the Libertarian Party at his national convention on Saturday.
The Libertarian Party should nominate Trump for President of the United States!
Whoa!
That's nice.
Can you hear the loud boos in the crowd?
Only if you want to win.
Only if you want to win.
Maybe you don't want to win.
Maybe you don't want to win.
They don't.
Thank you, D. Roy.
Thank you.
No, only do that if you want to win.
If you want to lose, don't do that.
Keep getting your 3% every four years.
Well, he's right.
They'll be lucky if they get 3% with their actual chosen pick, a person named Chase Oliver.
Chase Oliver is a far left person when it comes to libertarian social policies.
He supported the employer vax mandates, which is the least libertarian policy in human history.
That is so non-libertarian.
He is in support of the transing of the kids.
He talks openly about sending kids to drag queen story hour.
This is what's going to save the Libertarian Party?
There are actual pictures of him, like, with drag queens.
He says the best way to export liberty is with an open border.
With an open border.
He was talking about dismantling border control.
He says he should abolish ICE.
He's in favor of Obamacare.
He fundraised for Obamacare.
This is the person Libertarians decide upon, which means that something fishy is happening with the Libertarian Party.
Libertarians out there, stop giving your money and your time to a party that does not care about any of your principles and that is raising money to pay its own bills every four years.
All they do is put useless candidates on the ballot every four years.
The last even relatively interesting Libertarian candidate was Gary Johnson.
That was a long time ago.
Chase Oliver?
Seriously?
You're better off nominating no one than Chase Oliver.
But this is, this is where we are.
This is where we are.
Even the Libertarians, like, it's the greatest opportunity any third party has ever been given.
There's such an open race right now that RFK Jr., who until just recently was considered a pretty fringe political figure, is pulling 15 to 20% in many polls at this point.
And the Libertarians, who have ballot access in virtually all states, are nominating a dude who isn't gonna win even 2% of the vote.
Genius-level, mind-exploding thoughts from the Libertarian Party and the insane clown posse of politics.
It's more on this momentarily.
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Meanwhile, President Trump, I thought, was fine at the Libertarian Party Convention because, frankly, people who look like refugees from a Mardi Gras parade forming a party, I'm not sure how much respect they deserve from a guy who's very likely to win another presidential term.
But that doesn't mean that Trump had himself a perfect weekend.
So the closing arguments in Trump's trial are supposed to happen coming up this week.
And there are a bunch of possible outcomes in that Trump trial.
He could theoretically be convicted on all of the counts.
In order to do that, according to Politico, they have to find beyond a reasonable doubt not only that Trump falsified or caused the falsification of business records with intent to defraud, but also that he did so with the intent to commit or conceal another crime.
It's that second element, the intent to commit or conceal another crime, that elevates the charges to felonies.
But what's weird is that they've never really alleged what that other crime was.
They've suggested a tax crime, maybe, or violation of state or federal election.
It doesn't matter.
They could theoretically just convict him on everything.
They can convict on some and acquit on others.
Or they could acquit on all accounts.
There could be a hung jury.
All you need there is one juror who says this is all BS and doesn't vote in favor of it.
It's also possible that the judge, Merchant, who hates Trump, could theoretically just take it out of the jury's hands entirely.
He could issue a directed verdict for acquittal.
That is unlikely.
Really, really unlikely.
So, most plausible outcome, he's convicted on some, he's not convicted on others.
That's the most likely outcome at this point.
It's not gonna make any difference in this election, which is why the Democrats are in a state of absolute, sheer, panicked meltdown.
According to Politico, the Democratic Party is starting to sink in that their candidate stinks.
Their top headline today, Dems in full-blown freakout over Biden.
A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over presidential Biden's reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.
All year, Democrats have been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election.
But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives.
The gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print and what they will text their friends has only grown as worries have surged about Biden's prospects.
You don't want to be that bad guy who's on the record saying we're doomed or the campaign's bad or Biden's making mistakes.
Nobody wants to be that guy, according to an anonymous Democratic operative.
But Biden's stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election are, quote, creating the freakout.
This isn't, oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.
It's, oh my God, democracy might end.
So all Donald Trump has to do, literally all he has to do, is not be super crazy.
That's it.
Just go silent and be not super crazy.
Well, you know, we'll find out.
Because again, good Trump, bad Trump is in full effect.
So he put in a post for Memorial Day, Here is his post from Memorial Day on Truth Social.
He said, That's a take.
Memorial Day to all, including the human scum that is working so hard to destroy our once
great country.
That is, that's a take.
That's definitely a take.
And to the radical left, Trump hating federal judge in New York that presided over Get This
Two separate trials that awarded a woman who I never met before a quick handshake at a
celebrity event 25 years ago doesn't count.
$91 million for defamation.
She didn't know when the so-called event took place, sometime in the 1990s, never filed a police report, didn't have to produce the dress that she threatened me with, and it showed negative, and sung my praises in the first half of her CNN interview with Alison Cooper, but changed her tune in the second half.
Gee, I wonder why.
Under appeal?
So, that is the weird Memorial Day post.
by a jury or Arthur Engron, the New York State WACO judge who fined me almost $500 million under
appeal for doing nothing wrong, used a statute that has never been used before, gave me no jury,
Mar-a-Lago, at $18 million. Now for Merchant. So that is the weird Memorial Day post. His other
Memorial Day post is a picture of him saluting at Arlington.
It said, we can never replace them, we can never repay them, but we can always remember, today
that is what we are doing, we remember, which is a fine Memorial Day post. So I mean,
the two sides of Donald Trump.
By the way, Donald Trump really likes the American military.
Like, he really likes those guys.
I know, because I met President Trump, I followed him, and I know members of the military.
So, you know, that feeling is mutual, by the way.
Why would you spend your Memorial Day post with, like, a festivist airing of grievances?
I don't know, but that's not the kind of thing that's gonna win you an election.
So I highly recommend that Donald Trump not do that for the rest of the campaign.
Arty, coming up, Lizzo is very angry at a South Park episode.
Oh man.
We'll get into it.
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