Ben Weingarten argues Joe Biden’s presidency has weakened U.S. global leadership, citing Hamas’ October 7 attack (4,000 terrorists), blocked $14B Israeli aid, and China’s fentanyl sanctions deal with Xi Jinping. Biden’s restraint on Israel and support for a two-state solution despite Palestinian Authority’s endorsement of Hamas violence emboldens adversaries like Iran and China, which now align with Russia and the PA. Meanwhile, legal attacks on Trump—including gag orders and asset seizures—risk undermining democracy before the 2024 election, mirroring Western elites’ selective solidarity for Ukraine over existential threats to Israel or Taiwan. [Automatically generated summary]
A special full episode interview with Ben Weingarten.
One of the most depressing guys I know because he's one of the smartest guys I know and he observes things and he just calls it like he sees it.
We're going to talk about Joe Biden today.
Joe Biden and his visit with Xi Jinping, Joe Biden and his deal with Iran.
Joe Biden and his plan to derail Donald Trump's candidacy.
That's why I'm so depressed.
That's ahead, but first let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
I do the show every weekday and my friend Sheila Gunn Reed does a show every week and we call that Rebel News Plus.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month for our shows.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
World Burns, Biden Stumbles00:12:50
Tonight, from Russia to Israel to Taiwan, the world burns as Joe Biden staggers his way through his presidency.
It's November 20th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
I don't know if it's true, I don't know if it's wishful thinking, but I hear a lot of people in conservative circles, and I suppose in America that would be in Republican circles, saying that if Donald Trump were president, none of this would be happening.
And by none of this, I mean all of it.
I mean the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I mean the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas having such an audacious invasion of Israel.
They called it the Alexa flood.
I understand that 4,000 terrorists and actually civilian hangers on invaded Israel.
It was truly tantamount to a war.
So many crises around the world.
I see that Yemeni Houthis released a video of them hijacking a civilian cargo ship because it was apparently in some way connected to Israel.
The world is on fire.
And a lot of Republicans wistfully say it wasn't that way under Donald Trump.
It was four years of peace, no new wars, the ending of old wars.
Is that just comforting thoughts by supporters of Donald Trump?
Is that just Republicans being wistful?
Or is it true?
And is Joe Biden as bad as he seems?
Or are there people in the background sort of puppeteering things?
Will America be okay?
Well, I know one guy who can help us sort through this, and his name is Benjamin Weingarten.
He's with the Federalists.
And my favorite thing about him is a columnist at Newsweek magazine.
And he's going to join us now to tackle these big questions.
Ben, great to see you again.
Is it too easy for Republicans to say, oh, this would never happen under Trump?
Would this have happened under Trump?
Well, we had the real world experiment in real time, 40 years of peace through strength prudently applied.
For example, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the strike in Syria on the eve of a meeting with Xi Jinping and President Trump.
We cultivated relationships with our allies and partners.
We threatened our adversaries.
That led to a world in which America did not start new wars.
It ended wars.
It put the Middle East on what should have been a firmer footing with an Israeli Sunni-Arab bulwark sort of defense condominium against Iran, with China not on the march and challenged by America, really for the first time since the opening, going back to Richard Nixon.
In almost every single dimension, our borders were not overrun.
In almost every dimension, U.S. national security and foreign policy was well served.
That redounded to the benefit of the world.
And predictably, the Biden administration, whose personnel are essentially the leftovers of the Obama Biden administration, has executed a policy that is diametrically opposite.
And consequently, the world is a flame.
And the reason I don't say it's just wishful.
And obviously, we can look at the four years that we had under Donald Trump.
This was all very predictable.
I wrote a column at Newsweek, several columns on the contrast in the foreign policy of Donald Trump versus what we could expect under Joe Biden.
And I wrote a column prior to the election pointing out the clear chasms that would exist and the clear flip-flopping that would exist on virtually every single significant national security and foreign policy issue.
It's happened in spades.
Most, I guess, salient today is the notion that the Trump administration imposed a maximum pressure campaign on Iran.
In contrast, the Biden administration has imposed a maximum pressure campaign on Israel.
That flies in the face of the rhetoric of the Biden administration today about how it has Israel's back.
But if you look at the substance of the policies, it has been all about aiding, abetting, and enabling Iran and its proxies and putting the screws to Israel.
That created the conditions for this Intifada in a single day, this worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
And it potentially may have unweased jihadist forces globally because they've never seen a potentially better time than under a compromised, weak Joe Biden overseeing a party where the progressive wing, which in large part is the pro-Hamas and pro-Hamas and sympathetic to the Islamic supremacist wing of the Democrat Party, has the power that it has.
So why is the world in such chaos?
Because this administration has created the opportunity for our worst adversaries, the worst adversaries of Western civilization to rise up.
And in an election year now coming up, there's the political pressure as well.
And the political pressure, most disturbingly and disastrously from those elements that I mentioned in the Democrat Party, who are pushing Joe Biden to pursue policies that the vast majority of Americans disagree with because he needs the marginal voter in Dearborn, Michigan, or on college campuses across the United States, not to withhold their vote.
You know, it's funny.
We started talking about foreign affairs and other countries and other militaries, but we came back to the home front.
And, you know, there was a TV drama a few years back called The Americans, and it was about the premise was a young man and a young woman were sent over during the Cold War by the Soviet Union.
They were taught English perfectly.
They were top English pop culture, American pop culture, and they were embedded in the United States in the Washington, D.C. area.
They were like a sleeper cell to the public.
They held themselves out as, you know, Joe and Jane average American, but they were working for the KGB.
It was an exciting fictional, like it wasn't superhero movies.
didn't have to have an enormous suspension of disbelief to enjoy it.
And I can't help but think that we have had sleeper cells in the West who were anti-American and in some cases, anti-Semitic.
And I think they were sort of holding their tongue in a way during the Trump years.
I mean, listen, campuses were always a little bit radical and woke-ism, but I think since October 7th, those sleeper cells have dropped the pretense and they have gone full, you know, I mean, they say it into fight a revolution.
There's it's across the United States.
It's even worse in Canada and the United Kingdom.
They've been granted some sort of moral permission, I think, to go fully anti-Semitic and full decolonize, by which they mean tear down America, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
So I think it's not just foreign leaders who realize they can get away with anything.
I think on the home front, you see people just drop the facade.
The sleeper cells aren't just the KGB agents in the 80s.
It's universities, and I hate to say it, it's large swaths of immigration from countries where anti-Semitism is endemic.
They had to keep it quiet in recent years, but now no one is scolding them.
They're in Congress.
They're in parliament.
What do you make of all that?
Well, it's a great point.
And I appreciate the Americans analogy, a show that I enjoyed as well.
And maybe what's most disturbing is there didn't have to be sleepers who were seeded in the country from the Soviet Union.
There are native-born Americans and Canadians and others across the West who have absorbed this worldview.
They've imbibed the toxic ideology, really a Marxian ideology of the West as the oppressor and the rest of the world as the oppressed, and that we somehow are the imperialists and the colonializers, et cetera.
And therefore, we're getting our just comeuppance right now.
And there needs to be essentially affirmative action for the world's most evil regimes and organizations, which, by the way, I think this manifests itself, for example, in let's have a resupply of Hamas for X number of days.
Let's give them every single advantage when they ought to be destroyed, when they have declared war on Israel, by the way, have killed Americans and people from many other nations as well.
But to your point, it does appear that there's been a safe space in the West now created for all the anti-Western forces, and they've never been as overt and open about it as they are now.
Why is that the case?
It may well be that you have cowed Western leaders that we did not have, certainly in America for the last four years.
Perhaps most disturbingly of all, from my vantage point in America, is that you have the upper rungs of an administration that essentially subscribe to the same worldview.
That's maybe the most disturbing thing of all.
It's not just campus radicals, that those campus radicals have matriculated to the heights of political power, to the heights of cultural power, certainly corporate power in certain instances as well.
But if you look, the National Security Council in America, which is the chief national security advisory arm to the president, the head of intelligence at NSC here was a pro-BDS activist in college.
We've probably talked about Rob Maui in the past before, but Rob Maui was the senior State Department envoy to Iran trying to execute an Irandio 2.0.
It appears Rob Maui led an Iranian spy ring.
One of the people we brought in to that spy ring still works in a senior position at the Department of Defense.
So more disturbing is that the campus radicals have all graduated in or been brought into the heights of political power.
Obviously, you mentioned, of course, the likes of the squad.
And we've talked about Elon Omar before.
And my book on Elon Omar, American Ingrid, foretold all of this.
It suggested that this was the future, if not the presence, of the Democrat Party.
It certainly played out that way.
But to your point, when you take already the virulent Jew hatred and anti-Western views that prevailed on college campuses, and then you have mass immigration from Islamic countries to the West, and all you have to do is look at the polling in those countries to show that the Jew hatred is disproportionate in virtually every country in the Middle East and beyond.
And we can talk about what the roots of the Jew hatred are and is it based in the Islamic canon or not?
It doesn't really matter.
We don't have to have that academic argument.
The fact of the matter is, disproportionately among in the Muslim world, there is Jew hatred.
And if you were going to import wide swathes of the Muslim world, while you would hope that a decent percentage of those people would be those trying to flee the maladies and the pathologies of that world, of course, enemies are going to take advantage of our liberalism when it comes to immigration.
And people are going to come over with the beliefs that they held there.
There's a reason why the Middle East looks the way the Middle East does.
And there's a reason that Switzerland looks the way Switzerland does or Mexico looks the way it does.
Different peoples are different.
We hold deep and dear different ideas.
We're animated by different drives.
And so consequently, you add it all up and it's a very poisonous and toxic mix here in the West.
The U.S. and probably to an extent as well, Canada, we're blessed by our geography that we haven't necessarily had as big mass immigration from the Islamic world as you've had wars throughout the Middle East.
But certainly Western Europe is not the Western Europe that it was.
It is a different place today.
And in some cases, the irony here is that we hear about occupation, occupation.
Well, in some ways, it's the West that's really increasingly occupied.
U.S. Policy in Gaza00:08:14
Yeah, well, I mean, if you look at the map of Islam itself by decade, by century, Islam is a colonizing, I mean, it's a religion, it's a political way of life, but it's also a military doctrine.
The Quran is a military document as well as other things.
Let me just ask you one question.
You mentioned Joe Biden.
In some ways, he said the right things.
I remember his first visit to Israel shortly after the October 7th attacks.
And I was extremely nervous because you could see he was wobbly and sleepy.
And who knows how much, but he managed to get through it without saying something disastrous, I think.
On the one hand, I look at the two aircraft carrier groups in the region and I think, okay, that's to make sure Turkey or Iran don't start something, I guess.
But I also thought, well, maybe that's there to keep Israel tamped down.
I don't know.
Can you help me understand?
You say that Joe Biden has said one thing and done another thing.
What has Joe Biden done that has been, other than his support for Iran?
I understand they released billions of dollars more for Iran, actually, in recent weeks.
What has Joe Biden done that has undermined Israel?
Because at least rhetorically, there have been some moments that I thought, well, that's better than I thought it would be.
What has he done to undermine Israel in actions?
Yeah, so I've long suggested that there is something of a bear hug going on, which was something that Barack Obama tried to do.
He said, well, we have military relations with Israel and we're going to provide Israel aid and we're going to basically suffocate Israel with that aid to force it into accepting an Iran deal.
We're going to leak information to undermine Israel's military operations to try and neutralize Iran, but we're going to cover it up by saying we're best friends and we have massive aid and the Iron Dome, you can see as a testament to it, et cetera.
There's a similar ruse that's being played with Joe Biden.
As you note, the rhetoric at times suggests stalwart support.
On the other hand, there was a $14 billion military aid bill, which Republicans passed through the House to de-link spending associated with the war in Israel, military spending, from Ukrainian spending and a whole amalgam of other appropriations.
Biden said he would veto it outright.
They said it was a political, the Republicans were being political by trying to do this $14 billion, which would be taken away from IRS agents harassing Americans, essentially.
Democrats shot it down in the Senate, wouldn't vote on it.
Joe Biden won't even have a chance to veto it.
But if you want to talk broad strokes, here are the real distinctive items in my view.
I agree, by the way, that carriers being brought in is actually made to deter Israel, not to deter Iran and other powers in the region.
And by the way, you can see that because Iran and its proxies have executed dozens of attacks on U.S. military facilities and personnel in the region with barely a response from this administration.
But the micromanaging of Israel's response is really the proof in the pudding, as I see it.
The Biden administration has really, from the start, whispered about ceasefires, continues to try and push so-called ceasefires, and for Israel to permit quote-unquote humanitarian aid, which in reality, of course, means resupplying and refueling Hamas, providing it cover and time to recuperate, to strengthen so that it can withstand Israel's attack.
Let's not forget, Israel was not allowed, not permitted essentially by the U.S. to engage in any sort of ground offensive for weeks.
It gave Hamas time to prepare.
The Biden administration has said explicitly: Israel, you are not to ultimately annex parts of or otherwise control Gaza.
There needs to be an international force the day after the war ends.
The Biden administration has been very tough on Israel in terms of you ought not to strike Hezbollah or other Iranian proxies in the region outside of Gaza.
Also, the Biden administration continues to talk about the imperative for a two-state solution, which should be a laughable and a laughably offensive proposition.
After you're talking about the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, then you want to give the Palestinian authority control over Gaza, a Palestinian authority, by the way, which itself has excused the attacks and denies essentially the attacks that Hamas committed.
And then, if you look at the polling of Palestinian Arabs, overwhelmingly, three-quarters plus were overjoyed by Hamas's disgusting raping, jihadism, massacring of people, et cetera, hostage taking, et cetera.
So, you add these points up: the micromanaging of the effort, the seeking to restrain Israel and force it to comport itself the way the U.S. wants, constantly invoking the fact that Israel has to abide by the laws of war.
We're talking about a force that provides its enemies with more protections, the civilians around enemies, with more protections than any fighting force probably in the history of mankind.
And has done so, by the way, in Gaza in trying to allow the Palestinian Arabs to leave northern Gaza and go south before the offensive really took off.
In every single dimension, there's been pressure.
Last but not least, and obviously we can talk about the fact that the U.S. continues to cultivate these friendly relations with Qatar when Qatar is harboring Hamas's leaders.
We can talk about the unfreezing of the billions of dollars to Iran.
We can talk about the Biden administration's delinking explicitly of Iran from Hamas's attacks, essentially serving as mouthpieces for Iran, protecting it and its public relations image.
Beyond all that, there's a whispering campaign, and it's come out, of course, in major publications, major U.S. publications of the Biden administration talking about how they're really looking towards the next Israeli leader to execute this effort.
And maybe Bibi isn't long for this effort.
In the middle of wartime, after an existential crisis, you're going to have a whispering campaign where you're going to try to shove aside Benjamin Nanyahu, the wartime leader there.
Is that something that an ally and a friend does?
Then we could talk on the home front about the fact that the Biden administration, when you have the biggest rise in anti-Semitism, in Jew hatred that we've seen probably in modern era in America.
And what's the focus of the administration?
They call for a working group or something even more formal than that on Islamophobia.
That's the real issue at hand in America.
So you put all of these pieces together.
Last but not least, just before we came to record this, over the weekend, the Biden administration put out a memo to its cabinet talking about how they would like to impose sanctions on quote unquote Seddlers in the West Bank, i.e. Judea and Samaria.
Part of those sanctions on quote unquote the violent Israeli extremists there is that sanctions can be slapped on you and no visa permitted for an individual to the extent they are an impediment essentially to a quote unquote two-state solution.
So if you're an Israeli wrongthinker now, essentially the Biden administration wants to criminalize your wrongthink.
Add all of these pieces up and the notion that this administration has Israel's back falls by the wayside.
We will see what kinds of strings become attached when it comes to weapons sales and other military support as Israel's operation goes on.
But there's already been word that there are serious strings attached.
All of this points to not a friend, but someone seeking to restrain Israel to maintain the status quo of making Iran the strong course in the Middle East to the detriment of the Western world.
Gavin Newsom's China Trip00:14:32
Yeah, it's so bizarre.
I don't understand it.
So you've disabused me of the notion that things are better than they appear.
I suppose perhaps I'm too focused on public statements or gestures.
I mean, at least Biden went there.
So did Rishi Sunak of the UK, Emmanuel Macron of France, Georgia Maloney of Italy, Germany's Chancellor Schultz.
I noticed that Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not gone to Israel.
I think he's gone the furthest of any G7 leader to actually parrot Hamas' talking points.
But I suppose on the plus side, no one cares about Justin Trudeau anymore.
Here he is the other day meeting with Gavin Newsom, two men who are trying to out-peacock each other.
I could imagine a quarrel if there was only one hand mirror between the two of them.
It would just be like such a scratching fight.
Take a look at the two of them when they sat down together.
And I don't know if you know this, Ben, but Justin Trudeau is a bit of a hollow man, but he had this shtick, this gag.
When he was first elected, he would wear socks with different pictures on them, like sort of funny socks, Star Wars socks.
He has some halal Islam socks or something that a Muslim cabinet minister gave him.
So apparently, like when he first met Gavin Newsome years and years ago, he made a sock joke, and apparently Gavin Newsom staff sent him some California socks because they thought, oh, okay, this guy's into funny socks.
So here he is.
He's in office eight years.
The sock thing is a little bit tired, but he sits down with Gavin Newsom.
And the first thing out of his mouth is showing off his socks.
And Gavin Newsome, who's a clothes horse, a hair gel aficionado, and a mirror lover, too.
Even he thought it's getting a bit old.
Here, take a look at this back and forth.
It's good to see you.
Good to see you.
When'd you get in, bro?
I got in a few hours ago.
Literally.
Yeah.
I was in Vancouver last night.
Well, let me be the first to welcome you.
You are the first to welcome me.
What a pleasure to be back.
It's always so good to see you.
We got a lot to talk about.
Obviously, I speaking of Golden Gate, I think you gave me these socks last night.
Maybe someone's still doing those socks.
Well, you know what?
What have you ever been caught with black socks on?
I mean, is that just too embarrassing?
Listen, so much to talk about on climate.
That's Justin Trudeau.
Like, he's a hollow man.
He's an empty suit.
And his jokes from 2015 and 2016 are a little bit stale.
But I just wanted to show the two of them together because I think that Gavin Newsom as president would be very similar to Justin Trudeau.
Nothing but messaging, disastrous all around, and a friend of China.
Help me understand what's going on with Gavin Newsome.
He went to China.
He had a one-on-one meeting with Xi Jinping.
That's got to be arranged with the assistance of the State Department.
And then Xi Ji Jinping and Joe Biden get together.
Tell me, I want to talk more about Gavin Newsome in a minute, but tell me about what looks like a warm spring this fall for the Chinese dictatorship in the eyes of Joe Biden.
What's going on with Xi Jinping?
Don't mind me on my Gavin McInnes and Trudeau sock story.
I just wanted to wedge that in there.
But what's going on with Xi Jinping?
Is he being welcomed back into America's good books or something?
Well, it certainly appears that way.
The Gavin Newsom trip to China, and then, of course, Xi Jinping coming to the Bay Area, Gavin Newsom's territory, the China trip itself to me smacks of a shadow campaign.
And the fact that Gavin Newsom also met with Prime Minister Trudeau, I think, is further indicative of the fact that beyond, you know, he would argue, well, look, California is a massive state.
It's a powerful state.
So, of course, I'm going to meet with heads of other nations.
The reality is that Gavin Newsom is positioning himself as one of the alternates to Joe Biden.
I also think Governor Gretchen Whitmer thinks of herself probably as another potential fill in.
I've long held that I believe that a compromise, cognitively compromised as well, Joe Biden is potentially not long for this race.
It doesn't mean that this switcheroo is going to happen necessarily now.
I've seen those reports and indicating that in the DNC's rules, essentially, that in smoke-filled rooms, effectively the party can replace the leader.
Should he step aside, you could have a brokered Democrat convention.
Certainly wouldn't put it past it.
The Democrat wouldn't put it past the Democrats to do that.
Who the figure is, we'll have to see.
There's some identity politics issues to be worked out.
How are they going to sidestep Kamala Harris, for example, another California figure there?
That's ought to be worked out, and we'll see what happens with the Palace intrigue in the months ahead.
But as for China, Xi Jinping himself, by all accounts, communist China's economy is struggling.
They have real issues.
So, naturally, what are America's leaders doing?
Well, they're trying to potentially provide China a lifeboat.
You had many members of major corporations come and speak with Xi Jinping and impress upon him that American business leaders are souring on China.
We need to reopen this relationship.
Business leaders have always been the preeminent agents of influence, essentially, and mouthpieces for the Chinese Communist Party.
It's how they impact U.S. policy in large part historically.
The Biden administration, desperately, it seems, wants to reopen relations with Communist China and try to find different areas in which we can somehow work together because we need to cool down the temperature, is the rationale.
And so, of course, ironically, the green agenda is probably the most important agenda from the Biden administration's perspective.
Next to, I guess, reopening military to military communications as if those communications won't be exploited by communist China.
The first sort of leg of this new romance between Xi and Biden was this so-called fentanyl deal, whereby supposedly China, which I would argue is engaged in a new opium war, essentially chemical or biological warfare against the West, by being the key producer of the chemicals behind fentanyl, then actually created in Mexico and exported to the U.S. and elsewhere.
China says it's going to clamp down on these essentially death factories that have been killing tens of thousands of Americans a year, in effect.
It's going to shut down those companies, those factories, in exchange for the U.S. pulling off of a commerce department blacklist, an entity of China's domestic national security and intelligence apparatus, which had been blacklisted for its complicity, allegedly, in Xinjiang Uyghur repression.
So, this is a gulag-focused entity of the Chinese Communist Party.
And so, turning off the killing machines, this national security apparatus entity gets the benefit of being able to import U.S. technologies once again, is reportedly the deal.
That shows you that blackmail and extortion works if you're communist China.
And this is being presented as the first step in a thaw in relations, and that this is imperative to end the rockiness between the two powers from the U.S. perspective, and I guess forestall an invasion of Taiwan.
But there's zero sign that Xi Jinping will not invade Taiwan.
There's every sign that, as always, China will use the West's burning desire to want to negotiate and come to some deals to exploit them, lie, cheat, and steal in connection with those deals, and ultimately ruthlessly pursue its perceived interests.
That is where we stand right now.
Maybe there's also an election year element to this: Joe Biden realizes how weak he looks on communist China.
So, he's looking for some kind of out here, but I don't think it's going to be met.
And instead, unfortunately, you're going to have China likely trying to play a much bigger role, for example, in the Middle East and with Iran as well, and maybe try to serve as a quote-unquote mediator.
So, all of this will be disastrous for the West.
And again, you know, if you're in Taiwan, I have to think you're praying that there's no invasion over the next year.
There are many signals to indicate to me that there might never be a better time from the CCP's perspective to do something really provocative and seize Taiwan, which has always been, I think, Xi Jinping's desired crowning achievement.
Yeah.
You know, there's a lot of things you said there.
I mean, I think that Joe Biden, and in particular, when he was vice president and Obama was president, I really think that they were the worst international negotiators in American history.
I mean, they just, the deals that they signed, the things they gave away to Iran and China were astonishing.
And to have them replaced by literally the man who wrote the art of the deal, Donald Trump, who was in one of the most challenging and difficult businesses in America, New York real estate, taking over distressed companies and flipping them around.
I mean, he, and you had to deal with the unions and regulators and bureaucrats and like a very complex thing.
He understood how to make a deal.
And the way you're describing the deal that Biden just cut with China and the deal Biden is forcing Israel to do with Iran and Hamas, it's just so heartbreaking.
And it's incredible how the world takes the measure of a man in the country behind him.
I think you're right.
The United States is so overly, so obviously overstretched with its commitment to Ukraine, whatever its commitment is to the Middle East right now, I don't even understand why.
I mean, America can't do a two-front war, let alone a three-front war.
I think absolutely.
And the scariest thing about the negotiation is, I think if China were to invade Taiwan just on its own right now, I think it would militarily succeed, I regret to say.
I don't think America would trigger World War III over it.
But I think China would have an enormous consequence to it economically, commercially, financially, reputationally, tourism, social exchange.
There would be a soft power disaster for China, I think.
I think made in China would, I think there would be a consumer revolt.
There would be like those industrialists you mentioned before who all do business in China, Apple, which has enormous manufacturing in China.
I think there would be a shock in many ways, except, except, except, except if Biden gave them a form of absolution in advance.
If Biden said to China, well, we're going to, we're not, we're going to, we'll telegraph to you now that we're going to go easy on you and we'll find a way to make sure it's fine.
You can have a two systems, one country situation like Hong Kong was.
Like you just, I can just feel into my bones now that I think maybe the one thing that was holding China back wasn't a military reason, but was it would lose its place in the in the pantheon of nations.
It would lose its place as a first-rank superpower that is getting its respect through the Olympics, through trade deals, through, because it would be seen as a belligerent rogue violent place.
But if Biden pre-excuses them, if Biden says, no, no, we'll smooth it over.
Don't you worry about it, that maybe removes the last obstacle to China invading Taiwan.
I don't know.
I'm just freelancing here.
But I think that with Biden's approval, Taiwan would be absorbed and China would win it.
I think that that would certainly be an accelerant to the extent the Biden administration gives any signals, direct or indirect, that such an accommodation, so-called, would be acceptable.
However, I will say I am skeptical about the West's response, even absent any sort of green light, tacit or overt and strong.
I mean, I've done the thought experiment before of, for example, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, if you drove around elite enclaves in America, everyone had their Ukraine flags out.
Many of them probably couldn't even identify where it lands on a map, but they had their flags out and they changed their social media profile, bios, et cetera.
You certainly don't see that today when it comes to Israel, with the exception of maybe a small percentage of our elites here in the West.
Would that happen with an invasion of Taiwan?
Or would we in the West be cowed?
I'm not sure at this point.
The fact that you had CEO after CEO out in California kissing the ring, essentially, to sit at a dinner with Xi Jinping, to me, speaks volumes.
So I hope you're right.
I hope that if China did try such an operation, that it would make the Chinese Communist Party an absolute pariah, that there would be total decoupling.
I certainly agree that from a strategic perspective, this is the calculus that communist China is weighing.
If we think that if China thinks it has military superiority to execute such an attack successfully, what does the world look like the day after?
And do they end up weaker than they would otherwise be?
But I am sure they're also looking at the war weariness in the West.
They're looking at our elites.
Supreme Court Pressure Points00:08:19
They're looking at, as you note, an overstretched U.S. government that doesn't have its priorities right, that in many of these instances appears to be on the side of the adversaries.
And Xi Jinping's not getting any younger.
And to me, my view has always been that this has sort of been his ultimate legacy move.
And so the question is, when would he do it if not now?
And that's a question that I think the world ought to be considering very closely.
Let's not forget, by the way, of course, that Russia is the junior partner to China as the senior partner in a strategic relationship.
China and Iran, and obviously Russia as well, are also incredibly closely linked.
China has relations, I believe, a strategic partnership as well, with the Palestinian Authority.
So they are involved here in all of these other proxy engagements, essentially.
They have their quote-unquote equities in them, and they are causing the West great harm, great costs in blood and treasure.
And despite whatever issues China has economically, despite whatever fallout, and there was significant fallout from the pandemic that they foisted on the world, still you have to ask yourself, if not now, when from the Chinese Communist Party perspective.
And maybe that's maybe that's alarmist.
Maybe that's too aggressive a view.
But I think we ought to be preparing for worst case scenario and hoping to achieve the best rather than expecting the best and then having catastrophe befall us.
Well, let me end as I began, which is this hope that I feel, or not hope is the wrong word, this feeling that had Trump been around, America's enemies would not have taken liberties.
They would have been afraid.
The very things that upset the liberal media elite, his whimsicalness, his meanness, the fact that he was such a bully, the fact that he was somehow unpredictable, the fact that he would lash out, the fact that he took insults and disrespect personally.
All of those personality traits that made him impolite company to the New Yorker or the Atlantic were precisely what got through to Vladimir Putin, King Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and the Ayatollahs.
The very things that made polite company despise him in New York and LA is what made him stop the hostility, not stop, check the hostility around the world.
And we are less than one year away from the U.S. elections.
Less than a year.
It's incredible how fast time flies.
And Donald Trump, according to the last poll I saw, would win in an election today, would win in a two-way race against Joe Biden and would win in a three-way race if Biden and RFK Jr. were on the ballot.
And I mean, listen, they're not done with him yet.
For all we know, he might be campaigning from jail with the number of lawfare prosecutions against him.
And there's many of them.
Do you think Donald Trump will be on the ballot in 2024?
Sometimes I think that they might even assassinate him.
And that's not a conspiracy theory.
That's just me looking at the enormous lengths they're going to to stop him by any other means they can.
It's not unthinkable.
I mean, American presidents, may it never happen again, but it has happened.
American presidents have been assassinated and there've been attempts on others.
And I don't want to put too much faith in one man, but I think that Donald Trump was an indispensable man as president.
He was a man who achieved historic things, even if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee doesn't recognize it.
By God, that guy made peace between Israel and half a dozen Arab states, and Saudi Arabia was going to be next.
Do you think Donald Trump will be on the ballot?
Do you think they will let him win?
I do believe he will be on the ballot.
The rhetoric and the actions from the left suggest obviously they will do anything and everything they can to eliminate him from the ballot.
And that word eliminate, by the way, that was a word used by Congressman Dan Goldman from New York, a prominent Democrat who was, I believe, the chief lawyer, chief counsel in the first impeachment effort of Donald Trump.
He's now a Democrat, congressman from New York.
He said that Trump had to be eliminated.
But his rhetoric is really getting dangerous, more and more dangerous.
And we saw what happened on January 6th when he uses inflammatory rhetoric now.
And his recent true social post is incredibly, incredibly scary for anyone that might be trying to work in government.
And it is just unquestionable at this point that that man cannot see public office again.
He is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be eliminated.
There is an effort to get Trump off the ballots and ineligible to run.
So far, those efforts have failed in the courts, thankfully.
However, as you note, he's literally being gagged in courts of law.
They are trying to eviscerate his business empire and obviously the financing that comes from that.
They ultimately want him to be convicted in one or several cases or at minimum be dealing with the headaches, the time constraints, the resources, and the massive diversion essentially of energy and effort to combating the law affair instead of campaigning.
Could he be campaigning from a jail cell?
Certainly not out of the question at all.
Do they want to convict him before the election?
Absolutely, they do.
Then does that hit an appeals process?
How long does the appeals process take?
Does it end up at the Supreme Court?
What is the pressure like on the Supreme Court?
I've long theorized that this was actually the strategy.
Savage him with a lawfare effort.
At the same time, seek to delegitimize and impose maximum pressure on the Supreme Court so that a case comes before the Supreme Court where by all rights, Donald Trump should be absolved of any wrongdoing, malfeasance,
but the court itself will be pressured into either one or several members recusing or members otherwise going wobbly or sending it back to a lower court and that leading to a catastrophe for the rule of law in this country and a nuclear bomb essentially to our political system as well.
So who knows what kind of chaos is going to come over the next year?
I can only imagine that there are going to be unimaginable things, stratagems employed to try and destroy Donald Trump.
About winning the election or how the election goes, I won't make any predictions on it, except to say that Democrats have done everything possible they can to undermine the integrity of the election system and create the conditions that they are best prepared to maximally exploit.
And I'm not confident that on the Republican side, there's the same legal apparatus ready.
There's the same ballot harvesting.
When an election becomes about collecting the most ballots, not winning the most votes, that favors the Democrats.
Democrats are made to win a machine election like that.
So it's in God's hands how this ultimately plays out.
I do think there will be every effort to try and destroy Donald Trump.
I do believe he will be on the ballot and hopefully the American people are able to speak freely.
And I should also add, of course, that I imagine the censorship regime is going to ratchet up between now and election day as well, beyond the gag order on Donald Trump himself.
So all bets are off in terms of how this plays out, but we've never seen the kind of assault that is going to befall and has already started, obviously, to befall Trump.
But that's really a proxy for the ruling elites' desire to do anything and everything possible to crush their political opposition in the name of defending, quote unquote, our democracy.
Thank You For Joining Us00:01:02
Ben, you always depress me because you have a clear vision of the facts.
And I'm sure I quote this poem every time you're on because I think of it every time.
It's W.B. Yates, The Second Coming.
He said, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
And that, I fear, is the state of the world right now.
But we'll know soon enough as we enter the final stretch in the American election.
And God willing, an election soon in Canada, too, where the prospects, according to the polls, are actually more favorable.
But of course, our media party gets up to dirty tricks too.
Ben, great to see you again.
Thank you so much for your time and wisdom and keep fighting for freedom.
I know you always do.
Thanks so much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
There you have it, Ben Weingarten from newsweek.com, as well as the Federalists.
That's our show for today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.