Ep. 2097 - WTF Just Happened In SOUTH KOREA?
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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 shows, exclusive series, documentaries, and more. Don't wait. This deal ends soon. Head on over to dailywire.com slash cyberweek and join the fight today. Okay, so I'm going to begin with

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 3rd, 2024. One,

1.

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. Six 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.

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 and 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, etc., etc. 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 sighs 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 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...

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 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 residence relocation, an alleged violation of the act on testimony and 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

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. News.

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. We'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. Things used to 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. 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 martial law declaration. They did that unanimously. Not everybody made it in. It was like a 190 to zero 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 U.S. 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 U.S. government is in a transition from the Biden administration to the second Trump won 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 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,

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'll 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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That's helixsleep.com slash Ben. With Helix, Better Sleep starts right now. So why exactly is all of this happening right now? To understand that, I think we need to understand the role of sort of the prosecutorial system in Democratic Republics because that has changed over time.

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 No. 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 confident 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 you have 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 believed 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

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 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, it's 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'd be the state prosecutor's office.

In Brazil, the prosecutors, the police, the judiciary, in Israel, the attorney general, etc. 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. They're unelected. It's not a matter of 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.

A constitutional crisis 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 Jair 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. And 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 Paolo 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.

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This deal is going to go fast. Shop Legacy Box's lowest prices of the year now at LegacyBox.com slash Shapiro. Again, buy that Legacy Box today. Send it when you're ready. LegacyBox.com slash Shapiro. Meanwhile, by the way, Lula da Silva is openly consolidating power in the executive branch in wildly anti-democratic ways. Lula, of course, has always been fond of left-wing authoritarians. 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's 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 Kash Patel. They're freaking out over Kash Patel because Kash Patel has openly suggested that he's gonna come into the FBI and clean out all the dead wood, gonna look into the investigations, gonna 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 Enten points out, Americans do not trust the FBI. Here he was yesterday. If you look here, FBI is doing an excellent or good job. Look at this time trend line. You go back to 2014, right? It was 59 percent of Americans, then 57 percent in 2019, 50 percent in 2022. Look at where we are today. My goodness gracious, just

41% of Americans think the FBI is doing an excellent or good job. That is by far the lowest number this century. Take a look at Republicans. Here we go. Look at this drop. Oh, geez. Yeah. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. That's a very good word, Kate Baldwin. Two words. It's two words. The geez is what I was going for. Geez Louise. There's two words right there.

Among Republicans, is the FBI doing an excellent or good job? This is where you really see the drop off. You go back to 2014. I'm going to come to your side of screen. The 62 percent. 2019. Look at that. Forty six percent. Twenty twenty two. Twenty nine percent. Now we're tied for the lowest point at this century among Republicans at 26 percent. Why do you think that is? That's because of the weaponization of the FBI against Donald Trump.

And the response to that will be a cleaning out of the FBI, which will lead the left to believe that the FBI has been weaponized. At which point you have a bit of a constitutional crisis. Because once the impeachment power has basically been done away with, how do you get rid of corrupt politicians at all? No one trusts the law enforcement mechanisms of the United States to do a proper job. And now nobody trusts the elected government to do the proper job because they haven't done the proper job on this sort of stuff for several generations at this point.

And so every election becomes a sort of blood sport election. This is why you're going to get pardons from here till the end of time. And this is why, for example, Joe Biden has suggested he had to pardon Hunter Biden. Because after having politicized the FBI and after having politicized the DOJ, the Democrats know full well it can be politicized on the other end. That is why Joe Biden is doing that. You know, the sort of destruction of norms, the destruction of institutions, you know,

that has happened over the course of the last 20 years. The willingness to abuse these institutions and just use them for your own maximization of power, that has significant downstream effects. It turns every election into a life or death scenario for pretty much everybody. And that is a massive problem. South Korea is just ahead of the curve.

South Korea is what it looks like when you have full-scale, open weaponization of law enforcement by one particular party. Now, again, that may be well within the legal structure, and the answer may be worse than the actual question. But this is what happens. You cannot delegate powers that are inherently political to a supposedly objective, nonpartisan branch of the government. You can't do it. This is true in a wide variety of situations in the United States. You've seen this, for example, with regard to gerrymandering.

So every so often there'll be a big controversy in the United States over state legislatures drawing various congressional maps. And the party that's out of power will complain that the gerrymander is unfair to them. And then they will suggest some sort of nonpartisan commission to fix congressional boundaries. And as it turns out, those nonpartisan commissions end up not being nonpartisan at all. They always end up being partisan. And then whoever fills those roles ends up being treated as either an authoritarian or as a hero.

The bureaucracy by claiming objectivity, the bureaucracy by claiming non-partisanship, the bureaucracy by claiming that it is in fact expert and absolutely apolitical opens itself up wide to charges of precisely the opposite and creates massive constitutional problems. If that's what's happening in South Korea, it's happening across the West. The only solution for it is to minimize the power of these prosecutorial offices to go after corrupt politicians and instead return the question to the people themselves.

This, by the way, is a case that Donald Trump actually made in this election cycle. Donald Trump said in the United States, listen, the question of whether you think I'm corrupt or whether January 6th was a presumptive bar to the presidency, that is not a question for Jack Smith or for the DOJ. That is a question for the American people. And guess what? In a democratic republic, these are always questions for the American people. They always are.

But too many Democratic republics have abdicated on that question and have decided that instead they're going to appoint a bunch of special prosecutors to somehow police the boundaries of politics. It doesn't work out, and it makes things much, much worse in the end as a general institutional rule. Okay, meanwhile, President Trump is doing a good thing, and he's doing a not-so-good thing. So the good thing that President Trump is doing is he says that he's going to attend the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris on Saturday.

which is his first major outing since winning the election, according to Politico. This is pretty great, actually. I think it's quite wonderful. As I mentioned, Notre Dame is a wonderful symbol of Western civilization. Obviously, Western civilization was born in the church. Western civilization is a creation, as I write in my book, The Right Side of History, of Jerusalem and Athens. And churches like Notre Dame are an amazing part of that story. The fact that President Trump is going to do that, I think, is a tribute to the history of our civilization.

Trump said Monday in a post on Truth Social, quote, President Emmanuel Macron has done a wonderful job ensuring that Notre Dame has been restored to its full level of glory and even more so it will be a very special day for all. So that's it. I think that's a great move by President Trump. I think that it is well worthwhile. And then there's something that he is doing that I don't particularly love.

It's something that actually he agrees with Joe Biden on, and I think both of them happen to be wrong. We'll get to that in just one moment. First, let me tell you about the holidays, the heart of family traditions. You know, those precious moments of being together, whether you're lighting the menorah, decorating the tree, or just sharing a meal. The traditions matter. But have you thought about what happens to your family's traditions if you die? Yeah, that got dark

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Thank you.

unlimited access to our kids app, BentKey. You already remember? Well, good news. It's the holiday season, so you can give the gift of DailyWire Plus and save 50% on a gift membership. There's literally never been a better time to join. Head on over to dailywireplus.com slash cyberweek right now. No code necessary, just 50% off, but hurry, this deal ends soon. Don't wait, join the fight today. Well, now to a thing that I don't like either the Biden administration or actually the Trump administration doing the agree on it.

And frankly, I think that they are both wrong. To understand why I think they're both wrong, we have to understand what China is doing on the world stage. So China is flooding the world with cheap goods subsidized by debt right now. According to the Wall Street Journal, a deluge of cheap Chinese goods washing over the developing world is jacking up tensions between China and the global south, complicating Beijing's plans to build alliances as it confronts escalating train tensions with the United States.

Beijing is hoping to unload more of its excess factory production to developing world countries from Indonesia to Pakistan to Brazil. There are a lot of countries that are worried about China undercutting their manufacturing base right now. China also is retaliating against the United States by banning rare mineral exports to the United States. They're apparently going to begin banning that export as an escalation of the trade war between the world's two biggest powers, according to The New York Times.

That move comes a day after the Biden administration tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology. The ban signals Beijing's willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products like weaponry and semiconductors. Sales of gallium, germanium, antimony, and so-called super hard materials to the United States would be halted immediately on the grounds they have a dual military and civilian use. The export of graphite would also be subject to stricter review.

So again, China is attempting to cut down on the ability of the United States to obtain materials that are necessary in manufacturing. China has been supplying 54% of the germanium used by the United States that is typically used in infrared technology as well as fiber optics. We also have not mined our own gallium used in semiconductors since 1987. Japan supplies 26% of our imports of gallium. China supplies 21%.

So why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because the one thing the United States cannot afford is to be economically inefficient at this point. When we're in competition with China, we need to out-compete them. And to out-compete China requires that we actually allow the free flow of goods and services with our allies. So this has taken the form of investments by foreign countries and foreign companies in American products, for example. And that's not a bad thing. It creates American jobs.

One of the most obvious examples of this is Nippon Steel, which is a Japanese company attempting to buy U.S. steel. So Joe Biden has been against that. Joe Biden has already said that he doesn't want that deal going through. It's a $14 billion steel deal.

Now Donald Trump has said he doesn't want it either. He put out a statement yesterday saying, quote, I am totally against the once great and powerful U.S. steel being bought by a foreign company, in this case, Nippon Steel of Japan. Through a series of tax incentives and tariffs, we will make U.S. steel strong and great again, and it will happen fast. As president, I will block this deal from happening. Buyer beware.

Okay, now why do I oppose this? Well, first of all, U.S. Steel, just because it's called U.S. Steel doesn't mean it's owned by the U.S. government or something. It's not like the government is selling a vital American industry to Japan and that it's now all going to be outsourced to Japan. In fact, precisely the opposite.

U.S. steel has been run wildly inefficiently. It's grown really poorly. It's running at a deficit right now. And in fact, if Nippon Steel is unable to buy U.S. steel, a bunch of plants in the United States are going to simply close because Nippon Steel is going to invest a bunch of new resources that are simply not available right now. And tariffs are not going to solve that problem because it turns out that the United States is a massive net importer of steel.

In fact, U.S. Steel is not one of the contracting entities, for example, for the United States military when it comes to the use of steel. As the Foundation for Economic Education points out, when U.S. Steel was formed through a merger in 1901, the United States was the global leader in steel. In recent decades, however, U.S. Steel has fallen behind its competitors, including foreign companies and even domestic companies like Nucor. U.S. Steel faces a number of problems. Its technology is outdated. Capital investment is sorely lacking. Its workforce has shrunk. Several projects have been canceled.

Those issues arguably have been exacerbated by our nation's long history of steel protectionism. Protectionism tends in the short term to benefit an industry and in the long term to make it wildly inefficient. U.S. Steel is not one of the most, the 500 top companies in the United States as far as value. It only employs about 20,000 people. It ranks 27th in the world in crude steel output.

So, Nippon Steel, first of all, Japan is an ally of the United States. Second of all, Nippon Steel was going to introduce technology to U.S. Steel that allows the company to produce the highest quality products for automotive construction and other industries. And the sort of bizarre attempt to block Japan from owning assets in the United States in order to make those assets more efficient to create more American jobs is strange. We're not talking about China owning U.S. Steel here. The Defense Department doesn't even contract with U.S. Steel.

And in fact, the Department of Defense is not like a defense industry. The Department of Defense needs apparently, according to Scott Lincecum and Alfredo Carrillo Obrego of the Cato Institute, the Department of Defense needs just 3% of domestic steel production to meet its procurement obligations. So again, it's a bizarre move. A lot of this is political. It's a sop to some of the unions, presumably. But it is not, in fact, a...

a smart economic play, and it makes these industries significantly more inefficient at cost to American taxpayers and consumers. And as I say, it will cost jobs. The CEO of U.S. Steel himself, David Burrett, has said that. Nipon Steel is pledging to invest $3 billion in the Pittsburgh company's older mills to revamp them. And if that doesn't happen, they're just going to shut those steel mills down.

So you can see, again, for political reasons, why there would be so much focus on U.S. Steel because it is a company called U.S. Steel with a historic pedigree. But the pedigree don't pay the bills in the morning. Again, steel represents just about 1% of total goods imported into the United States, according to the U.S. Trade Representative. So, yeah, I don't think it's a particularly smart move. I think that making the West less economically efficient in the face of Chinese predations is not a smart move. You can see the same thing happening, by the way, in the EU. The EU is destroying its own car industry. According to the Wall Street Journal,

Europe's carmakers used to rule the world. Now they're fighting battles on every single front. At home, tougher emissions rules are forcing them to sell more electric vehicles, which are less profitable. The turmoil is leading to thousands of job losses and risks inflicting further damage on Europe's economy. The automotive industry accounts for 7% of GDP in the EU, which is a very, very large chunk. Volkswagen is getting shellacked. Stellantis is getting shellacked.

An enormous number of these industries in Europe are getting hurt by domestic regulation and unwillingness to recognize economic efficiencies. Bringing that to the United States for political reasons would be a rather large-scale mistake. And meanwhile, the Supreme Court has been hearing this week a case in which the Daily Wire is sort of tangentially involved. So there's a 2023 Tennessee law that has forbidden the prescription of puberty blockers to minors.

In the state of Tennessee, that was probably in reaction in large part to Matt Walsh's hit movie, What is a Woman? Because it exposed the predations of the transgender medical industry, which is the Dr. Mengele of medicine. Well, the state of Tennessee was like, well, we don't want this happening inside our home state, as we discussed with Chloe Cole yesterday on the show. Well, now the Supreme Court is having to determine whether this somehow violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.

That somehow the 14th Amendment was meant to ensure that the federal government could step in and stop states from preventing doctors from chopping healthy body parts off young boys and girls in the name of bizarre gender ideology. But according to the Wall Street Journal, the trans advocates have already won a symbolic victory when Chief Justice Roberts calls the lawyer on behalf of the trans industry to the podium. Mr. Strangio, the chief justice presumably will say,

marking the first time an openly transgender man has argued before the court his preferred pronouns and courtesy title honored as a matter of course. But that, of course, is not what should happen here. It is just another reason why you should never use the pronouns, because the minute you do, you concede the argument. If the pronouns are biologically inaccurate, you shouldn't use them, especially not while you're arguing that a man cannot be a woman and vice versa. The case pits arguments for trans rights against states' traditional powers to regulate the practice of medicine. It is a potential blockbuster, supposedly,

Now, Strangio is a woman who believes that she is a man. Presumably, there could be some federal legislation on this issue with Republicans in charge, and there should be, because this is one of the gravest threats to America's children. It is not just wrong. It is torturously wrong. It is evil to boot. I think it's likely that the Supreme Court is going to avoid the issue entirely.

And it'll be interesting to see because Justice Gorsuch, of course, wrote the opinion in Bostock, which suggested that transgenderism was sort of recognized by the protections of the Civil Rights Act, a very strange extension of the Civil Rights Act to suggest that a man saying that he was a woman

was somehow a protected activity under the Civil Rights Act. So it'll be interesting to see where Gorsuch comes down on this, but I have a feeling that the justices are going to have a very difficult time with the proposition that states have no ability to restrict pseudo-practice of medicine involving hormonal and surgical mutilation of minors.

It seems like pretty baseline state legislative activity, especially when it comes to practices as egregious as this one. Joining us on the line is Mary Margaret Olihan. She's senior reporter for The Daily Wire and the author of D-Trans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cultures Outside the Supreme Court. Mary Margaret, really appreciate the time. Ben, it's so great to be here. So obviously the oral arguments have begun in the Supreme Court case of United States versus Scrumete. What are we expecting from the oral arguments?

Well, what I've been hearing from people on the right is that they're very hopeful about how these arguments are going to go. And not just in light of the recent election in which we saw so many Americans come out and support Donald Trump because of the transgender culture wars, but also based on the case itself. You know, Ben, I'm sure you know that this case centers around a Tennessee law protecting kids from irreversible transgender interventions.

The merits of this case, the justices are going to be evaluating specifically whether it counts as sex discrimination to allow some kids to get testosterone if they're boys or estrogen if they're girls and not to allow kids to get these hormones if they're undergoing transgender interventions. What I'm hearing from pro-family advocates on the right is that it's looking really good as far as these cases are concerned.

So obviously there are a bunch of votes that are sort of up for grabs. Chief Justice John Roberts is always a little bit squirrely. Justice Neil Gorsuch famously wrote the Bostock Opinion, which suggested that sex discrimination might apply to men who behave in traditionally female ways or vice versa. Is there any trepidation about, for example, Justice Gorsuch on this one?

Right. Well, I've been asking some legal experts around here. And the common refrain that you hear is, well, we can't predict what the justices will say. But again, the sentiment is very positive when it comes to this case. And I think when you look, Ben, at the people on the left here, specifically the ACLU, the Biden DOJ, there's a lot of fear and trepidation about how this case will go. The ACLU is sending their trans-identifying lawyer to argue this case before the court.

And there's been a lot of background and backlash among the ACLU lawyers specifically about this woman who identifies as a man because they're afraid that she's more interested in protecting and furthering transgender rights than protecting legal precedent as it pertains, as they say, as it pertains to gay rights themselves. So there's a lot of drama going on here, and I'm excited to see how it goes.

So obviously, one of the big questions here is just how large this decision will be. It could theoretically be rather restrictive, but could also be a pretty broad decision. What do you think is at stake here?

So much is at stake here. I mean, we're talking about trans-identifying children all over the country. We know that they're not actually trans-identifying children. They're actually children who are really mentally distressed and in need of help, in need of loving families to help and guide them to adulthood where they can make decisions for themselves. And we hope they'll choose decisions that will protect the dignity of all life.

But these are families that are coming to the court and they're asking the court to decide that all over the country, parents can transition their children before they reach the age of consent. And we know, Ben, across the board, these are kids suffering with mental illness. This is not a decision that they should be making on their own. And so I was speaking with Chloe Cole. She's a detransitioner, one of the most outspoken. She told me that this case means everything to her. She did not get the help that she needed when she was

attempting a gender transition. No one warned her. And she wants this case to defend kids all over the country and to make a line in the sand, draw a line in the sand and show American families this is how you protect your children. Don't be duped by these activists, doctors and lawmakers. So, Mary Margaret, what exactly is the timeline here? You have oral arguments, then there could be a delay before the decision, obviously.

Yes, there could be a delay. So we're not expecting a decision immediately. But, you know, we're hopefully getting one, of course, by the end of the term. And like I was saying earlier, Ben, there's a lot of legal experts on the right that are telling me they're really hopeful and they're really excited. So if...

You know, we can't guess what the justices are going to rule. But I can tell you that this is going to be a very impactful decision. It's going to impact children all over the country. And the ACLU, I think, is banking a lot on this decision because they know that it will impact their organization and their narrative and their rhetoric about hateful Republicans, about hateful Republicans.

laws, what they call anti-trans legislation. It's harming trans youth, so-called banning care. It's going to be narrative shifting. So please, God, we will see a ruling in favor of our children. Well, Mary Margaret, really appreciate your time. That is Mary Margaret Ohan. She's outside the Supreme Court right now. Go check out her book, Detrans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. Mary Margaret, thanks so much.

Thank you.