Ben Shapiro (0:00)

So it seems that there was an attempt at a military dictatorship in South Korea over the course of the last 24 hours. I'll give you the updates in a minute and try to explain what the hell is going on. But if you haven't heard, Daily Wire plus is 50% off right now. It's our best deal of the year. That's one full year of uncensored Cho's exclusive series, documentaries and more. Don't wait. This deal ends soon. Head on over to dailywire.com cyberweek and join the fight today. Okay, so I want to begin with the situation in South Korea. So basically, yesterday, sometime yesterday morning, the President of South Korea issued a command for martial law. And it read like this quote. To safeguard liberal democracy and protect the safety of the people against anti state forces threatening to overthrow the Republic of Korea, the following measures are declared nationwide effective December 3, 2024. 1. All political activities, including the operations of the national assembly, local councils, political parties, political associations, assemblies and demonstrations are strictly prohibited. 2. Any act that denies or seeks to overthrow the liberal democratic system, including the dissemination of fake news, manipulation of public opinion and false propaganda, is prohibited. 3. All media and publications will be subject to the control of the martial law command. 4. Strikes, work slowdowns and gatherings that incite social disorder are forbidden. 5. All medical professionals, including resident doctors currently on strike or absent from medical duties, must return to their work and perform their responsibilities within 48 hours. Violators will be dealt with under martial law. 6. Measures will be implemented to minimize inconvenience for ordinary citizens, except for anti state forces and those attempting to overthrow the system. And the President of South Korea invoked his powers under Article 9 of the Martial Law act and says that violators will be punished under Article 14 of the Martial Law Act. Okay, so what exactly is going on here? Because that is a pretty extraordinary move. Well, the President of South Korea is a person, and forgive the pronunciation here, named Yoon Suk Yeo. Yoon Suk Yeo is a member of a party that controls the presidency, but is in the minority in the actual parliament of the country. And the claim that he is making is that the majority in the parliament, which is a party called the Democratic Party over in South Korea, that they're basically tools of the North Koreans, that they're crypto communists, and that they are preventing the functioning of the government. So he put out a statement, and the statement says this quote, Honorable citizens, as President, I appeal to you with a feeling of spitting blood. Okay then. Since the inauguration of our government, the National assembly has initiated 22 impeachment motions against government officials. Since the inauguration of the 22nd National assembly in June, it is pushing for the impeachment of 10 more. This is a situation that is not only unprecedented in any country in the world, but has never been seen since the founding of our country. It is paralyzing the judiciary by intimidating judges and impeaching a number of prosecutors. And it is paralyzing the executive branch by trying to impeach the Minister of the Interior, the Chairman of the Communications Commission, the Chair of the Board of Audit, and the Defense Minister. The handling of the national budget also undermined the essential functions of the state and turned Korea into a drug paradise. In a public order panic. By completely cutting off all major budgets for cracking down on drug crimes and maintaining public security, the Democratic Party cut 4.1 trillion won from next year's budget, including 1 trillion won for disaster preparedness relief, 38.4 billion won for childcare support allowances, and a project to develop a gas field in the city for youth jobs. They even put the brakes on funding to improve the treatment of military officers, et cetera, et cetera. The legislative dictatorship of the Democratic Party, which uses even the budget as a means of political struggle, did not hesitate to impeach the budget. The government is paralyzed. The people's size are growing. The trampling of the constitutional order of the Free Republic of Korea and the disruption of legitimate state institutions established by the constitutions and laws is as an obvious anti state act that plots insurrection. The lives of the people are of no concern. The government is in a state of paralysis due to impeachment, special investigation, and the defense of the opposition leader. Our national assembly has become a den of criminals. The national assembly has become a monster that collapses the liberal democratic system. Dear citizens, I declare emergency martial law to defend the Free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro North Korean anti state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and and to protect the free constitutional order. So the President again is a member of a more right wing party in South Korea. The opposition party, the Democratic Party is a significantly more left wing party in South Korea. And essentially what is happening here is that the Democratic Party, which again represents a large majority in the national assembly, has been threatening and attempting to impeach all of the state prosecutors who are looking into the Democratic Party leadership. So the prosecutors were supposed to be looking into the family of the President of South Korea. And they had apparently decided to exonerate the wife of the President of South Korea. Meanwhile, those same prosecutors were looking into the leadership of the Democratic Party of South Korea for corruption charges. And so the Democratic Party of South Korea then attempted to impeach these prosecutors. According to the Korean Herald. This would have been just yesterday. The main opposition Democratic Party of Korea on Monday submitted motions to the national assembly to impeach the head of the State Audit Agency and three prosecutors involved in two different scandals surrounding First Lady Kim Kyung Hee. The assembly will put the motions to a vote during a plenary meeting scheduled for Wednesday in accordance with plans announced by the main opposition, which holds the majority in a 300 seat parliament. So again, the opposition party which controls the national assembly is attempting to fire these prosecutors who are not going to be prosecuting the President's wife and are instead apparently investigating some of the leadership of the Democratic Party. Again, this is the Korean Times reporting. This would have been a couple of days ago. Quote, the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea's attempt to impeach the State auditor chief and prosecutors is drawing backlash from ruling party lawmakers and political commentators who say the DPK is exploiting its majority to play party politics. The grounds for impeachment include controversy over the audit of the presidential resident's relocation and alleged violation of the act on Testimony Appraisal before the national assembly, according to a spokesperson for the dpk. But the People's Party, the People Power Party, which is the ruling party in South Korea, is saying the real reason that they keep trying to get rid of these prosecutors is because the prosecutors are looking into them instead. And in fact, the Democratic Party in South Korea was attempting to unilaterally downsize the budget bill in order to effectively defund this prosecutorial office entirely. So what exactly is happening here? Basically, the South Korean President is looking at the opposition party which controls the national assembly and says you are attempting to clean out the prosecutorial part of the government in order to protect yourselves or weaponize it against me. And so therefore, I'm going to dissolve Parliament and I'm going to basically declare dictatorial control of the country. So all of this resulted yesterday in some pretty extraordinary images. The military of South Korea entering the Parliament, for example. Here's what that looked like. You can see there are members of the military who are coming through the bushes en masse and they are getting ready to enter the Parliament. You're talking about armed members of the military. Members of the assembly then attempted to enter the Parliament in order to vote because there is a provision of Martial law that overrules the declaration of martial law by a vote in the National Assembly. And so here is some video of members of the assembly attempting to enter, but being obstructed by the police in the process. Think it's a scrum outside the Parliament. Members of the assembly trying to push past the soldiers. That would include, by the way, members of the President of South Korea's own party, the People Power Party. Okay, so again, chaos outside. Eventually, members of the assembly would make it in and the South Korean Parliament voted to defy the country's president and lift his, his martial law declaration. They did that unanimously. Not everybody made it in. It was like a 190 to 0 vote. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has so far been very tepid about all of this. According to the New York Times, the White House responded, quote, the administration is in contact with the Republic of Korea government and is monitoring the situation closely as we work to learn more. The US Was not notified in advance of this announcement. We are seriously concerned by the developments we are seeing on the ground in the Republic of Korea. The New York Times, of course, tried to blame Donald Trump for all of this. Hilariously enough, the New York Times says, quote, there is speculation in Washington that Mr. Yoon, that's the president of South Korea, might have chosen this moment because the US Government is in a transition from the Biden administration to the second Trump one and because Biden is overseas. Mr. Yoon, a first term president who barely won the 2022 election, has a low approval rating among South Korean citizens. And his move against the opposition party and legislature has echoes of the effort by Donald Trump to prevent Mr. Biden from taking office after he won the the 2020 election. Well, actually it doesn't, since Donald Trump did not in fact activate the military or attempt to declare martial law. But the New York Times can connect anything bad in the universe to Donald Trump in some way, shape or form. So what exactly is happening here? There's something deeper happening here because this sort of constitutional crisis is now taking place in a variety of countries, truly a variety of countries. It's happening, for example, not just in South Korea, but it's happening in Israel where there are fights between the prosecutorial wing of the government and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. It's happening in Hungary where there have been fights over state prosecutors. It's obviously happening in Brazil where Lula da Silva, the authoritarian left wing leader of the country, is now attempting to militarize the justice system against Yair Bolsonaro, his predecessor and of course, there are shades of this in the United States, folks. These sorts of constitutional crises seem to be happening more and more often. But you know what there's no shortage of? That'd be flashy ads from the big wireless carriers offering the latest iPhone for free. Look a little deeper, you'll quickly realize what that means. 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I mean, this has implications, by the way, for everything up to and including the Hunter Biden pardon or the DOJ weaponizing itself against Donald Trump. So democratic republics typically rely on checks and balances to prevent the government from engaging in authoritarianism. And this is the basis of the United States Constitution. We have the House and the Senate, which check one another. We have both of them checked by the presidency. We have all three of those bodies that are checked by the judiciary and vice versa. Well, one of the checks and balances traditionally to avoid tyranny was impeachment. If you didn't like members of the government or you suspected that members of the government were corrupt, a bipartisan majority would work to oust those corrupt officials. Now, this was obviously problematic because when it comes to getting rid of corrupt officials, if the corrupt official happens to be a member of your party, then you are very unlikely to vote for their impeachment. Now, in the United States, our founding fathers understood this. So for example, in federalist number 65, Alexander Hamilton discussed this at length. He wrote, quote, the subjects of its jurisdiction, meaning the impeachment jurisdiction, are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them for this reason will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre existing factions and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other. In such cases, says Alexander Hamilton, there will always be the greatest danger. The decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt. The Convention, it appears, thought the Senate the most fit depository of this important trust. Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation to preserve unawed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and the representatives of the people his accuser? So this is the argument Alexander Hamilton is making for the fact that there is a impeachment trial that takes place in the United States Senate. Because again, in democratic republics, the question of how you police corruption is a very real question, let's say, of a corrupt public official. The United States Constitution says that person is impeached in the House and then there is a full trial in the Senate. Why? Well, Hamilton and the rest of the founding fathers believe the Senate would be the most objective body. Back when the Constitution was designed, United States Senators were not appointed by party or by public approval. They were appointed by the state legislatures and they served six year terms. And so the goal was that they would be more independent of sort of the public passions than the House. So you couldn't have the judiciary do it because the judiciary could be hijacked. But Senate was sort of half political, answerable to the public, but also indirectly answerable and thus more insulated from public pressures. So Alexander Hamilton says that this sort of model in terms of impeachment was based on the British model. He said, quote, the model from which the idea of this institution has been borrowed, pointed out that course to the convention in Great Britain. It is the province of the House of Commons to prefer the impeachment and of the House of Lords to decide upon it. Which makes again some sense. The House of Lords was passed down paternalistically from parents to kids. It was an accepted aristocracy and thus was not pressurable by the public. So Alexander Hamilton pointed out that if you tried to set up a separate impeachment court, which we might now call the doj, that wouldn't actually solve the problem because that too could be politicized. So he writes in Federalist 65, quote, Though this latter supposition may seem harsh and might not be likely often to be verified, it ought not be forgotten that the demon of faction will at certain seasons extend his scepter over all numerous bodies of men. Okay, so again, the original solution for corruption in democratic republics was checks and balances of impeachment, particularly in a body that was going to be somewhat removed and insulated from public pressure. Well, the problem is that over time, in a wide variety of countries as democratic republics and their checks and balances have transitioned into administrative bureaucracies in which enormous power is centralized in the executive branch. Checks and balances have atrophied. Until Donald Trump was impeached twice. The impeachment power was almost never used by the Congress of the United States, for example. Instead, we made a decision at the outset of the 20th century. This is true in the United States, it's true in other burgeoning democracies as well, that law enforcement checking corruption was not to be done by the elected bodies of government. Instead, it was outsourced to so called independent branches of government. So in the United States, that would be, for example, the Department of Justice in South Korea, that would be the state prosecutor's office in Brazil, the prosecutors, the police, the judiciary in Israel, the Attorney General, et cetera. Now, there is a problem that happens here, and this is a problem with the administrative state. The problem is state prosecutors can also be corrupted by politics, as we have seen in the United States. And then the solution isn't to change the people in government anymore, because these are independent branches, right? They're unelected. It's not a matter of just replacing some people with other people. So if you fire some people now, that's considered interference with the magical objective branch. And if you leave people in place and they target your political opponents, it's weaponization. That's what leads to constitutional crises. Once you have outsourced the job of policing corruption from the elected branches of government, like the Senate of the United States or like the national assembly in South Korea, to state prosecutors, Sooner or later, there will be an attempt either by the state prosecutors to go after the wrong people, or by the legislature to go after the state prosecutors or the president to go after the state prosecutors in order to prevent weaponization. This is the problem with setting up fake, quote, unquote, objective legal enforcement bodies. It creates constitutional crises because the only solution to a politicized law enforcement branch is to either overthrow the government for, quote, interfering with the system, which is what the President of South Korea is now attempting to do, or to call for the overthrow of the government for weaponizing the system. Constitutional crises are the result of being supposedly untouchable, nonpartisan institutions that either can be weaponized or interfered with. And you are seeing this happen across the West. It's a major, major problem. It's the problem with administrative government. It's a major problem with this idea that there are these impartial legal bodies whose job it is to police corruption. And so you are seeing democracies throwing themselves into crisis specifically over this. Let's say that you are in the United States, and let's say that you're really, really angry that Donald Trump became president in 2016. What do you do? Well, you could try to impeach him. It'll probably fail if you don't have the votes, because it'll break down along strictly partisan lines. So what do you do instead? You rely on the doj. You rely on the FBI. You weaponize those institutions against Donald Trump, and that prompts Donald Trump to, if he becomes president again, clean out those institutions, in which case he will be accused of weaponizing those institutions. And so the constitutional crisis just continues to roll on, all because the sort of bipartisan consensus around impeaching presidents who are guilty of crimes has gone away in the United States, you could say it died during the Clinton era. And we are now feeling the aftereffects of that in the United States. In Israel, it's the same sort of thing. Just take another example, because it's happening in a wide variety of countries. In Israel, the Attorney General's office has put Benjamin Netanyahu under three separate prosecutions. All of them appear to be somewhat specious. The goal is obviously political. Netanyahu has been in power for something like 14 out of the last 15 years in Israel. He's a masterful, Machiavellian politician, just in pure, raw talent terms. And so the Attorney General's office has been weaponized against him, claims Netanyahu. I think largely, correctly, in a wide variety of cases. But every time he tries to mess with the prosecution, he is accused of tampering with democracy. Once you set up these institutions as the final arbiter of guilt and innocence, then anyone who tampers with them on either side is now considered a threat to democracy, even if the person who is actually militarizing law enforcement is the person who is in power. Okay, this is the case in Brazil, for example. So in Brazil, the law enforcement mechanisms have been weaponized by Lula da Silva against Yair Bolsonaro. And that means that while Lula is cleaning out the judiciary institutions, he is being lauded as someone upholding the norms of democracy while he engages in widespread censorship. Because instead of corruption being seen as a political issue to be answered by the political branches and eventually the people, because it's been outsourced to law enforcement, what that means is that the law enforcement branch can be routinely corrupted. And that's what's happened in Brazil. You'll recall that it was not all that long ago that Lula da Silva himself had been banned from running because of his own corruption convictions. And then in 2021, a left wing Supreme Court judge annulled his corruption convictions and allowed him to run again. And then he ran. And then after he won, you now have the Brazilian police formally accusing former President Bolsonaro and his aides of an alleged 2022 coup attempt that happened just last week. Police said their sealed findings were being delivered to Brazil's Supreme Court, which will refer them to Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet, who decides either to formally charge Bolsonaro and put him on trial or toss the investigation. Apparently the report here is 700 pages long. Bolsonaro said he would fight the case and dismiss the investigation as being the result of what he called creativity, Police said in a brief statement the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were accused to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news. Well, the administrative state doesn't need to be efficient or good at its job, but you do. The future of business is anything but certain. Asinine experts. You'll get 10 different answers. Bull market Bear market rates rising or falling? If only somebody would invent that crystal ball we've all been waiting for. Imagine, though, having your accounting, financial management, inventory and HR all seamlessly integrated into one fluid platform. That's NetSuite. With this unified business management suite, you're not just juggling numbers. You're wielding a powerful tool that actually gives you the visibility and control to make quick, informed decisions. 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He has been praised by so many members of the media as an anti authoritarian politician. But the reality is that Lula has been a close ally of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro. He has been a close ally of the Cuban regime. In fact, it's rare to find some sort of authoritarian regime that Lula doesn't like. From China to Nicaragua, from Iran to Russia, he is cozied up to authoritarians everywhere. But because he's a left wing authoritarian, this means he's not really an authoritarian, even if he engages in widespread censorship. Again, this is what happens when democratic republics delegate the power to check political opposition to a supposedly objective, nonpartisan branch of government. It's not real. It doesn't work. Administrative states do not work for precisely this reason because they're never dispassionate, ever. And again. It's true in a wide variety of countries, from South Korea to Israel to Hungary to Brazil. It's always a problem. Well, the South Korean president has said that as soon as a full quorum is met, he will end this military lockdown. That was the predictable result here. But all of this breakdown is again happening because so many people across so many westernized countries have decided that they no longer trust the mechanisms of checks and balance of the democratic republic and instead they were going to delegate all of that power to these impartial institutions. And then those institutions break down and then the entire country starts to break down. You're seeing that here in the United States with regard to the fight over the FBI. So, for example, the left has now declared that Donald Trump is some sort of authoritarian fascist for attempting to clean the FBI by appointing somebody like Cash Patel. They're freaking out over Cash Patel because Cash Patel has openly suggested that he's going to come into the FBI and clean out all the dead wood, going to look into the investigations, going to take a much more active role in determining what is investigatable and what is not. The specific reason Donald Trump was elected is because there is so little trust in these so called impartial institutions. As Harry Enton points out, Americans do not trust the FBI. Here he was yesterday.