A (21:22)
Okay, this is the key. It's about eliminating the threat in the future. So this brings us to the question of what we have to do to actually finish this war. So Iran is a moral abomination of a country, but there are moral abominations all over the place. One of the big ones, maybe the biggest one, is of course, abortion. All across America, women are being pushed into making life changing decisions. In moments of fear and confusion, they're being told, you have to decide this moment. As if love, hope or motherhood should ever be rushed. That's not freedom, that's actual pressure. But thanks to organizations like Preborn Network Clinics, there is another way. When a woman walks through their doors. She's not met with judgment or manipulation. She's met with compassion. She's offered a free ultrasound, the chance to see the baby growing inside her, and real support to help her choose life. And here's the incredible part. When a mom sees her baby on that screen, more than 80% of the time, she will choose life not out of fear, but out of love. My wife and I are pregnant for the fifth time. Technically, she's the one doing all the work, so technically she's the pregnant one because men can't be pregnant. But every time we see an ultrasound, we are seeing our baby. And it's an incredible experience that is true for everyone. This March Preborn is working to help save 6,800 babies. To do that, we need 124 people every day to step up. 28 bucks covers one ultrasound. 140 bucks helps five moms. Every buck is a declaration that both mom and child matter. So take a second, pause your day. Choose to stand for life. Because truth, compassion, and courage, that's what really changes the world. To give just a pound 250 or say keyword baby or you can visit preborn.comBen that's preborn.comBen to make an impact on generations to come. Well, first, there are a few things that we could do. The United States could seize control of Iran's oil facilities on Kharga Island. That is cutting off the lifeline of the Iranian regime. So the Iranian government is reliant totally on oil exports to China entirely. Kharg island is kind of the exhaust port in the Iranian Death Star. It's a place of unique vulnerability, subject to very specific and meticulous action. Approximately 90 to 95% of Iran's crude oil exports pass through this tiny coral island 15 miles off the coast of Iran. The island features a massive tank farm with a storage capacity of somewhere between 28 and 30 million barrels of oil. So far, we've left that untouched. The reason we've left that untouched is because we're afraid that if we take action against Kharga island, then the price of crude is going to spike even more because that is where Iran is shipping oil out to China. But if the Iranians keep harassing all the oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, except for that Chinese oil traffic, since again Iran and China are allies, then the United States may grow tired of this game and simply seize control. And the price of Brent crude would spike for a short time and then there would be a long term decline in the price of Oil, because the Iranian regime would basically be toasted. They would basically lose its own end game. The Americans would not be retreating and they would have no economic lifeline. Yes, they could up the ante even more in the Straits of Hormuz and close it temporarily, not for very long, because the Iranian government would have no money, they would have no resources flowing out, and the Americans would be sitting on their most precious resource, which is their capacity for oil export. The Iranian governmental failure might not be immediate, but it would become inevitable, not merely possible. Second, the United States could actively facilitate boots on the ground, even if they're not our boots. Now. This would require helping to relieve the Iranian crackdown on Internet access to facilitate the flow of small weapons to allies on the ground. This is the biggest question. You see an enormous number of Iranians, millions, tens of millions of Iranians who hate the regime. The problem is they don't have the guns, which is why you saw these gigantic protests beginning in December and you saw 32,000 people shot in the streets. I know that we're supposed to forget about all that because opponents of the war, as we will get to, are very, very upset about a girls school that got hit in the war. And then we're supposed to totally pretend that the Iranians don't slaughter innocent Iranians at the rate of tens of thousands the minute they pop their heads out of the ground. In any case, the Israelis have been pummeling IRGC stations in Iran's western regions, particularly the areas that border Azerbaijan and Iraq. Those happen to be areas that are largely comprised of Azeris and Kurds. Remember, Iran is actually less Persian than America is white. There are huge minority populations in Iran and they largely live in the border areas with other countries. The Kurds, for example, live on the eastern side of the border with Iraq. So you have Iraqi Kurds on one side, Iranian Kurds on the other, and some interplay between the two. We could see serious incursions into Iran from both Azerbaijan and from Iraqi Kurdistan by Iranian Kurds. And if that happened, there would be a serious challenge to IRGC forces. Those forces are now isolated from Iran because of the fracturing of the IRGC leadership class. Basically, with the destruction of the top levels of the irgc, the lines of command have now broken down and you have specific IRGC areas governed by specific IRGC commanders. Many of these Brigades are maybe three to 5,000 people. And so the entire structure could begin to collapse piece by piece. And if that happens, then more and more Iranians in the center of the country will understand that the moment has come for action. And this is being facilitated pretty actively by the Israeli government. Right now we are reading astonishing reports of Israeli drones that are so specific. These are suicide drones. They are targeting specific IRGC checkpoints in Iran. So when we say checkpoints, we mean like areas on a street where IRGC soldiers are standing, waiting for people to emerge so they can shoot them. And Israel has been, from a thousand miles away, directing suicide drones to take out specific IRG soldiers, IRGC soldiers at specific intersections, essentially killing the suppression forces necessary to kill protesters en masse in the streets if there should be some sort of popular uprising. And finally, the United States could simply bomb until the bombing is done. Now, again, that might not entail the immediate fall of the regime. It could entail going after nuclear facilities at Pickaxe Mountain with its facilities that are buried under rock 80 meters deep. Now, last year, you'll remember that the President of the United States authorized Operation Midnight Hammer, which was designed to hit the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordo. There are multiple nuclear facilities in Iran, Isfahan, Fordo, Pickax Mountain. The entryways to some of those facilities were destroyed. Many of those facilities were heavily damaged. The President said obliterated. Obliterated was language that was, I would say, overdone. Heavily damaged was right. It's difficult to get 300ft underground just with bombs. So you might require the work of a special operations unit or Mossad. The same is true when it comes to locating and destroying any remaining stockpiles of nuclear material. Now, none of these options are mutually exclusive. In fact, all of them could theoretically happen at the same time. But all of them depend on the willpower of the President to carry this operation to a successful conclusion. Which is why the President should know, I'm sure he does, that 90% of Republicans support him, despite the nonsense that you hear online from the caterwauling, chattering class, the people who keep complaining that it's all about Epstein or that it's an endless war or that Israel forced him into it. The vast, vast, vast majority of Republicans support the President here. They do. And if we want America to defeat Iran, which I think we all should, regardless of political affiliation, the American people are going to have to recognize the realities of war and the evils of our enemies. All of this brings us to the tremendous media focus on what appears to be the accidental bombing of a girls school in Iran in the early hours of the war. This has been the chief point of pushback by the legacy media and again, members of the Grievance party, meaning Democrats and the horseshoe theory. Right. Many of whom are just openly rooting at this point for Iran. Openly rooting and by the way, lying people suggesting seriously that the United States is going to launch some sort of false flag operation in California in order to initiate further action against Iran. That is a suggestion literally made yesterday by some of the top Grievance party podcasters in the space. And these are the same people who are apparently very, very concerned about this bombing of a girls school by accident in Iran. On February 28, ordinance fell on the Shajara Tayeba Elementary School in Iran. According to the Iranian government, 175 people died, most of them children. First off, we should definitely verify how many people died and who they were. Trusting the Iranian regime on casualty numbers is about as trustworthy as the Hamas health Ministry. But we are getting new information as to what actually happened here. Was it a misfire by the Iranians or was it American ordinance? According to the New York Times, the February 28th strike on the Shara Tayeba elementary school building was the result of a targeting mistake by the US Military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian base of which the school building was formerly a part. The preliminary investigation found officers at US CENTCOM created the target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency. People briefed on the investigation said, obviously this is a tragedy, a very serious tragedy. As you can see on this map, the elementary school was located directly next to, directly next to the Iranian compound, the IRGC military base, which again, you have to ask yourself, why does the IRGC locate its military bases directly next to large girls schools? In any case, this terrible incident is being used as an excuse by opponents of Iranian action to castigate the United States and President Trump for the intervention itself. Jon Favreau, one of the Obama bros from Pontiff America, lit into President Trump while lamenting, quote, A U.S. missile strike killed more than 100 little girls at an Iranian elementary school. Nearly 1,400 civilians have been killed. Hundreds of thousands have had to flee their homes. Do any of these people really believe that the US Military wanted to kill a bunch of schoolgirls? Well, I mean, some of them probably do because they've been indoctrinated into this idiotic system of belief for generations by our crappy public school system. The Howard Zinification of American Education There are a lot of people in the United States who are imported from other countries who hate America in the first place and lied when they were asked to take that oath of citizenship. There are a bunch of people who are cynically pretending, I think that's the biggest group here. The people who are cynically pretending that we did this on purpose, that the American military is blunderbussing around in Iran, just randomly hitting targets they don't care about or that they actually want dead schoolgirls. Listen, if you, here's the bottom line. If you believe for any of these reasons that the United States military is deliberately seeking to kill schoolgirls, leave the country. Leave the country. You hate the country, Period. Seriously, you believe the men and women of the United States military know that that's a girl's school with a bunch of second graders and they're like, go and hit the tomahawk. If that's what you believe about the American military, get the hell out. Seriously, you hate our military. You hate the country. If you believe that. Again, I'm not saying that if you oppose the war or if you're critical of the war, this means you hate the country. I'm saying if you believe that the United States military and the Trump administration, or any other administration, by the way, Democrat or Republican, is deliberately trying, trying to kill civilians with no military purpose, then you really believe such horrible things about the country that you should leave. But if in reality you know that this was just a bad accident, a terrible, horrible, tragic accident, then why are you treating it as the dispositive critique of the American military? Why are you using it to discredit an entire military operation? You want to make an argument against the military operation. You want to say that it's going to lead to long term oil shocks and that there'll be no way to topple the regime. Make that argument. That's a fair argument. I think it's wrong, but it's at least a fair argument. And maybe in the end you'll be right and we'll find out. But focusing in on one tragic and horrifying accident to discredit the entire effort is asinine and immoral. I see no such upset from the same exact people over the fact that the Iranian government has been holding hostage tens of millions of Iranians for 50 years. That the Iranian government is so incompetent that Tehran was going to be evacuated because of lack of water five minutes ago. That the Iranian government is so bad at this that all civilians in Iran have been suffering from inflation that makes Weimar Germany look like Fort Knox. And very few of these people had anything of merit to say about the fact that the Iranian government on purpose not accidentally, not through mistargeting on purpose, murdered 32,000 innocent people a few weeks ago. None of these people had anything to say. None of them. Not even one of these. False, not nothing, zip, zilch. But when the United States mistargets a former military target, they jump to the conclusion that the US has engaged in a unique evil, an evil so grave that we have to cancel everything here on out. And the Iranian government, which is the most evil government on the planet, must somehow be maintained. I just have a simple question for these people. Do any of them really believe the US Military wanted to kill a bunch of schoolgirls? Do they really believe that? Or are they lying to you? Are they liars? The answer is they don't believe that. Or by the way, if they do, they truly hate the country. If you believe that the U.S. military, that CENTCOM is sitting there and they're saying, hey bunch of little girls, let's go for it. If you truly believe that you should leave the country because you clearly think that you live in a place of tremendous evil, like true, unbridled evil. But if, realistically speaking, these people understand that this was in fact a terrible accident, then why treat it as a dispositive critique of the American military which is delivering some of the most targeted strikes in. In the history of warfare. In the history of warfare. We are using next gen technology to target specific individuals in Iran. Not just specific buildings or specific streets, specific humans in Iran. But if there's a tragic accident because of bad intel, then suddenly that is the thing that Cancel it. Let's all go home. Let's leave Iran in control. Let them build up those ballistic missile facilities, let them build up their drones, let them build up their nuke program and then talk to them while they do that until, you know, they become essentially untouchable. That is your case. It's a bad faith attack. But that's all opponents of the Iran action seem to be pursuing these days. Well, meanwhile, if you haven't noticed online things are happening. If you've been browsing social media the past few days, you may have stumbled upon me or even tripped upon one of my most striking features. Let's be honest, you could have seen these babies coming from seven posts away. It's time to address the caterpillars in the room. The Internet is clearly asking for it. So behold. The Brow Shapiro T shirt is now available at the Daily Wire Shop Dailywire.com Shop emblazoned with the most discerning eye umbrellas this side of sanity. The optical awnings on this comfy tee strike fear in the heart of every talking head too scared to say what they actually mean. Open your browser right now, head on over to dailywire.com shop and get yours. Keep your eyebrows strong and your principles stronger. Also, every weekday here on the Ben Shapiro show, we take the news, try to make it all make sense. Sometimes it's more fun to argue about it. So we have Friendly Fire. Join me, Michael Knowles, Andrew Clavin for a completely live conversation about the biggest stories in the headlines. And of course, the Oscars are coming up, so we will do a big Oscars preview. Yeah, I watched all the movies for you so you don't have to watch Friendly fire live tomorrow, 2:00pm Eastern on DailyWire.com and the Daily Wire plus app. And meanwhile, on the home front, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz just announced that he is leaving Seattle. In a LinkedIn post, Howard Schultz explained, quote, for those of you who know us well, we have entered the retirement phase of our lives, a term we are both just getting used to. Last year, we traveled to dozens of places around the world, places we were too busy to see when building Starbucks and raising kids. And we have moved to Miami for our next adventure. Together, we are enjoying the sunshine of South Florida and it's allure to our kids on the east coast as they raise families of their own, says Howard Schultz. Like many other Seattle based companies, Starbucks today stands on the shoulders of the many Pacific Northwesterners who built the company. They helped shape the culture, the benefits and the brand, contributing to the civic, community and public life of the city and state. It is our hope that Washington will remain a place for business and entrepreneurship to thrive, creating a central opportunity for those in Seattle and the surrounding areas sounds, you know, normal and innocent. You know, they're getting older. It's time to retire, head on over to Miami, sunny Miami, and just like grandma used to. Well, there's a little bit more to the story. It turns out that Howard Schultz announced he would be ditching Washington state for Florida. On precisely the same day that Washington state lawmakers advanced a 10% annual tax on all personal earnings over $1 million, idiot. Governor Bob Ferguson announced in December he would love a wealth tax. That wealth tax would amount to for a billion for a billionaire, somewhere between 50 and $100 million. Now, it's not as though all that government money has been going to good use. Homelessness in Seattle's King county has been on an upward trend since 2012. But since they abdicated all basic law and order measures in 2020, homelessness increased 43%. The city's violent crime rate, property crime rate, ODs are all hitting national highs. Its police is notoriously short staffed. And of course they then elected a socialist mayor who has promised a people's paradise. Here's Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson. I want everyone in this great city of ours to have a roof over their head. I want universal child care and free K through 8 summer care. I want world class mass transit. I want great, safe public spaces where kids can run around with abandon. I want stable, affordable housing for renters. I want social housing. I want much more land and wealth to be owned and stewarded by communities instead of corporations. Who's going to pay for all of that? The answer was Howard Schultz. And so he was like, nah, out. So you just bought a $44 million mansion in Florida? Listen, Schultz's business isn't even sticking around. Starbucks operations are expanding radically into the Southeast, including into Tennessee, ditching additional employment in liberal Seattle. So why is this like a national story? Why is it a big story? Lots of billionaires have been fleeing liberal jurisdictions for low tax, conservative ones. Not all of them were quite so vocal about the magic of democratic political rule. Howard Schultz is a longtime donor to Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell in the state of Washington. He supported Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer. He gave, over the course of his giving career in hard money $150,000 to Democrats. In 2020, when he was exploring running for president as an independent, Schultz said, quote, I myself should be paying higher taxes and all wealthy Americans should have to pay their fair share. But when it came time to pony up, Schultz, like every other rational human being, moved to a low tax, zero income tax state, Florida. Listen, welcome. We're always happy to have more great people, but please, Howard, leave your tax policies back in the state you just abandoned after having pushed for many of those same politicians who wrecked the state. We do not need anyone Washington in our Florida. There is a broad scale problem with leftists who wrecked their states and then seeking to avoid the consequences of that failure to move to red states. Okay, well if you're going to do that, then please leave your politics behind. Do not bring your crap politics from California and New York down to Florida or down to Texas or to Arizona or to any other place that is not governed like trash. The reason that you're moving is because the politics of your home state are bad. Do not make the. Don't wreck, don't, don't set your house on fire over there and then immediately move to a house in our neighborhood and start setting things on fire. Please don't do that. All right folks, there is more show but it only continues for our members and I will ask all of your burning questions. I see one of our members is asking about Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson. Yes, I will answer that, but only if you become a member. Become a member. Use code Shapiro at checkout and try it out. 2 months free on all annual plans. Click the link in the description and join us. Legal sent this list of everything we're not allowed to do in season two. We're going to do all of it. We've got games, more celebrity guests, and yes, the mailbag is somehow worse. If you thought season one was extra, season two, we're doubling down. We're not supposed to be doing this. Exactly. Ben After Dark Season 2 streaming on daily Wire Plaza. Taxact knows every small business owner has different tax filing needs. With TaxAct, you can file yourself with the help of an expert, or TaxAct can do it all for you. You're the boss, the head honcho, the top banana. And TaxAct is like your loyal, trusty tax aide, ready to pounce on any tax tax needs you might have. TaxAct is dying to pounce on some small business tax needs Tax Act. Let's get them over with.