So massive protests have now broken out in Iran. President Trump is doing the right thing.

Democrats are not doing the right thing. And CNN turns to pot on New Year's Eve.

Yes, really, we're back. It's a new year. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is the Ben Shapiro show.

So 2017 wasn't as bad as people thought it was going to be. Everybody's all worried that the world was going to end and everything, and it didn't. Everything was pretty much okay? Yeah, there was turmoil. Yes, it had substance downs like The Last Jedi, but did it, but was it okay in the end? Yeah, it was okay in the end, sort of like The Last Jedi and sort of not. So we will get to all of the late breaking news that happened over the break, most of it coming from abroad. We'll get to all of the media's insane coverage of the situation in Iran. We'll also get to some guy named Logan Paul, who I hadn't heard of until the last five minutes and him walking into the Japanese suicide forest. There's lots to talk about. But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold. So, right now, the stock market is doing really well, and the economy is very healthy. There are a lot of economists, however, who are worried about some sort of stock market plunge, the possibility of a stock market kind of implosion, or at the very least a bit of a drawback. They're worried about the possibilities of inflation, even though the Fed

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All righty. So over the last week and a half, while we have been gone, massive protests

have broken out in Iran. Those protests are ongoing. They've resulted in the death of apparently

15 people. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is shooting people in the streets. They are now

arresting hundreds of dissidents.

The protests apparently started originally when people who did not like Hassan Rouhani, who is the

radical leader of the political arm of the Ayatollahs in Iran, they didn't like Rouhani because

the economy has been bad and they started protesting him. Just like all the other protests in the Muslim world that took place during the Arab Spring, the original purpose of the protest very often has nothing to do with where the protest goes, right? The original protest against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt ended up with the Muslim Brotherhood taking power. In this particular case, it looks like there were some radical fundamentalists who started some of the protests, and then the moderates turned out in force. And now you have thousands of people marching through the streets of Iran. It's so bad over there that the Iranian government has shut down Twitter. They've shut down Facebook. They've shut down social media. I don't know whether these companies, by the way, are engaging in that process, whether they are allowing Iran to do that or not. If they are, they should stop, they should stop allowing Iran to do so immediately. In any case, the Europeans have been

utterly silent, as the Europeans often are when it comes to moral atrocities throughout history.

President Trump, however, has not been silent. President Trump has been speaking out,

and this is driving the left up a wall. It's driving the left up a wall for two reasons.

One, President Obama was awful on the issue of Iranian freedom. He routinely quashed any sort of capacity for Iranian revolution and resistance. During 2009, you recall,

a woman named Netta was shot to death on camera. It was a major worldwide story. And she was

a protester. President Obama really did nothing about it. In fact, we have a named Netta was shot to death on camera. It was a major worldwide story, and she was a

protester. President Obama really did nothing about it. In fact, we have a clip of President Obama

in 2009. While he's protesting how Iran was treating dissidents, he also said, we respect Iran's

sovereignty. Basically, they can do what they want. We're not going to do anything about it.

I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic

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