Fear of radical Islam is not irrational, plus Ben talks about his magical journey to Otay Ranch High School and the fascism of the education system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| We're here on a Wednesday, and there's tons going on in the world. | |
| I will explain to you what happened to me yesterday when I spoke at a high school. | |
| We'll talk about Donald Trump, plus a combined episode of Things I Hate and Deconstructing the Culture. | |
| So it's a two-for-one. | |
| You have so much in store for you. | |
| I'm Ben Shapiro. | |
| This is The Bench Pro. | |
| You tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings. | |
| Okay, so here we are, and it is indeed a Wednesday, and we have a lot to get to today. | |
| First of all, you should know, folks, that if you're just listening to this on audio, you're missing out on all the fantastic Technicolor action. | |
| We have a brand new set that looks like I'm hanging out at, like, the Arrow Cave. | |
| It's pretty awesome, and we have multiple cameras, and I look stunning, as always, but you didn't know that before, because it just wasn't that level of sophistication. | |
| See, look at all the angles! | |
| It's unbelievable! | |
| You're missing all of this unless you're subscribing, so you need to subscribe so that you can see not only all of the things that I talk about, but also so that you can see this. | |
| Beautiful visage. | |
| I mean, come on. | |
| My wife gets it every day, but you can pay for it. | |
| So, make sure that you go to dailywire.com and check that out. | |
| Alright, so yesterday, it's become a big news story now. | |
| I spoke over at Otay Ranch High School near San Diego, and as I rode down there for a couple and a half hours, and I get to this school, Man, this had been scheduled by the Young America's Foundation, and Young America's Foundation is a wonderful organization. | |
| They had a local chapter at this high school, and it's a very left high school. | |
| A lot of the teachers are leftists, the administrators are leftists, and so the students wanted me to come and talk to all of their fellow high school students about the differences between conservatism And leftism, just like I do on the show every day. | |
| And I got a call about a week in advance from one of the administrators, and this administrator, who is also the Title IX applicator. | |
| There are all sorts of stupid titles at public schools, and this guy has one of them. | |
| I think his name is Dean Neferret, something like that. | |
| And Dean Neferret, he calls me up, and he wants to find out what I'm talking about. | |
| I said, well, it's not going to be Happy, dappy, I'm good, you're okay, everybody's great, be a leader speeches. | |
| I'm going to actually talk about politics. | |
| We're going to talk about right versus left, and the differences in political ideology, and why Bernie Sanders is wrong, and why Ted Cruz is right, and all of this. | |
| We'll get into all of this. | |
| And he says, well, you know, you're not going to violate our standards and protocols. | |
| I said, no, I've read your standards and protocols. | |
| I'm not going to use offensive language, and I'm not going to... | |
| Say anything terrible. | |
| I'm not going to get up there and talk about sex. | |
| I'm not going to do anything that is going to violate your standards and protocols, the ones that you've sent me. | |
| He says, okay, well, you know, the reason I'm calling and asking is because we've had to basically quash this event a couple of times because a bunch of teachers, and this time they found out a bunch of teachers were very upset about this. | |
| Not the students. | |
| The teachers were very upset that somebody would come in and talk to the students about ideas that the teachers did not agree with. | |
| Because in the state of California, there's a monopoly on truth held by the left, and thus, anybody of the right has to be shut up. | |
| Okay, so we end up going forward with the event. | |
| I get there. | |
| The place is packed. | |
| It's 450 students. | |
| When I start talking about the differences between the left and the right, and basically the speech is about how the left's belief is that fairness of outcome is the only thing that matters in life. | |
| It doesn't matter where you start. | |
| It doesn't matter what decisions that you make. | |
| The only thing that matters is that the outcome should always be equal. | |
| If I make a bunch of terrible decisions, and I don't get an education, and I'm a loser for most of my life, I should make the same amount of money as Bill Gates, no matter that I've never produced anything like Bill Gates produced. | |
| I should have the same amount of money. | |
| That's the left's idea of a just and good universe, and I explained why that's a bad idea, and why the left's idea is wrong, and the right's idea of equality of opportunity is correct, and that micromanaging people's lives in the name of equality is actually evil. | |
| So I do this for about half an hour, and then we start to go into Q&A. | |
| And one of the questions that I'm asked, in the Q&A, there should be a tape of it coming out pretty soon of the full speech, and it was pretty amusing. | |
| One of the teachers got up, clearly a very left guy, and he starts going into a diatribe, this is always the mistake, whenever you're in a vet gang, And somebody hands you the microphone. | |
| That is not a license for you to be the speaker. | |
| The speaker is the speaker, and you're the questioner. | |
| So this teacher starts speaking. | |
| After about two and a half minutes, I said to him, is there a question mark at the end of this? | |
| And it's a high school, so all the kids go, ooooh. | |
| And it goes like this for about ten minutes. | |
| And finally, one of the students says, I just want you to explain why it is that Bernie Sanders' idea, isn't Bernie Sanders' idea right that you'll have a better economy and you'll help poor people if you take money from rich people and give it to poor people? | |
| Basically communism. | |
| If you want poor people not to be poor, you take money away from them, from the rich, and you give it to the poor people. | |
| Robin Hood, redistributionism, it'll be fantastic. | |
| If you've spread the wealth around, everybody's better off, as President Obama said. | |
| And so I gave my answer, and my answer was basically, no, that's not how it works. | |
| It turns out that in order for you to rise from poverty, you actually have to take correct action. | |
| And we have to train you to take correct action. | |
| This is why when you have poor people who win the lottery, a disproportionate share of those people end up going back to being poor afterwards because they blow through all of their money. | |
| And here is the tape of what happened next. | |
| And this is what's causing all the controversy. | |
| This is why if you have a bunch of people who win the lottery, disproportionately people who aren't poor and win the lottery end up poor again. | |
| The reason people are permanently poor in the United States is not because they don't have money. | |
| It's because they suck with money. | |
| You can pause it right there for one second. | |
| So what I'm saying there, it's hard to hear a little bit because the audio quality is bad, but what I'm saying is exactly what I just said to you. | |
| Alright, what I said is lottery winners who are poor go back to being poor because they're bad with money. | |
| People who are permanently poor in the country, and I use the phrase permanently poor. | |
| If you're poor forever, if you're poor for 40 years in America, not temporarily, permanently. | |
| If you're permanently poor in America, unless you are disabled in some way and you can't work, Unless you're mentally diseased, you have a mental illness of some sort. | |
| The only reason you are permanently poor in the United States is because you suck with money. | |
| Okay, this is inherently true. | |
| There is no one in the United States who is fabulous, 100% fabulous with money, and has been poor for 50 years in the United States. | |
| There's not one of these people. | |
| They do not exist. | |
| And then I say, you know, if you're temporarily poor, there are a variety of reasons for that. | |
| You could lose your job, you could be unhealthy, or you could have a medical bill. | |
| Like, there are lots of reasons to be temporarily poor. | |
| Pretty much everybody in the United States, at one point or another, goes To temporarily poor. | |
| If you lose your job, your income goes from something to nothing. | |
| At that point, your income level is temporarily poor. | |
| Pretty much everybody has experienced this at some point. | |
| So I'm saying all this, and I was not even aware this is controversial. | |
| I know when I'm saying controversial things. | |
| I do it for a living. | |
| So I'm fairly certain when I'm about to drop a rhetorical A-bomb. | |
| This was not a rhetorical A-bomb. | |
| This wasn't even a rhetorical cluster bomb. | |
| This wasn't even a rhetorical smart bomb, right? | |
| This was like a rhetorical pinprick. | |
| I mean, what I said here is so eminently true and so obvious to everyone that it really should not be offensive in any way. | |
| But here is what happens next. | |
| You're about to see Dean Neferedi appear and basically try to dismiss all the kids. | |
| I'm sorry for being rude. | |
| You are not greatly funny by definition. | |
| Okay, if you are, name me one person in America who nominates me. | |
| Anybody? | |
| Anyone? | |
| Are you not kidding yourself? | |
| Okay, tell me to your veterans. | |
| Okay, tell me to your veterans. | |
| I'm sorry for your crew. | |
| I'm at a point right now, quite frankly, where I'm gonna dismiss the students. | |
| I have a number of questions that would like to be asked. | |
| With all due respect, Mr. Spiro, Mr. Spiro represents a narrative that he provided to all of you guys based off of His opinions, what he believes, and what he wants to share with all of you. | |
| I know that the education was there for all of you to understand, left side, right side, whatnot. | |
| But also, the opportunity was allowed for him to impress upon you some of his opinions about certain things. | |
| And I think the lesson was there for you to understand and also for all of you to understand. | |
| I think what this is getting into now is it's starting to cross the line. | |
| And... | |
| What would that line be? | |
| Let me ask this question. | |
| Let me ask this question. | |
| If, for those of you who would like to be dismissed, I would like to be dismissed. | |
| I want to see you next time. | |
| If those of you would like to continue to listen, take your hand. | |
| And there we go. | |
| He gets up there and he says this is all, you know, he's impressing his opinion on you. | |
| And after all these kids left, and you can see half the kids leave. | |
| For people who can't hear, he gets up there and he says that I've been expressing my opinion, which is what I do for a living. | |
| I mean, I'm not sure what he thought I was going to do. | |
| Was he going to go there and read out of the phone book? | |
| I mean, it was a speech about politics. | |
| And he says that a line had been crossed, and you hear me say, what line was that? | |
| And he has no answer. | |
| He just dismisses the kids. | |
| So the reason he dismisses the kids is because there are 450 kids there, about 250 of the kids signed up specifically to come to this, and then apparently about 200 of the kids, I found out afterward, there were teachers who wanted their kids to come here an opposing point of view. | |
| Which, last I checked, is allowed. | |
| You're allowed to do that. | |
| You're actually allowed to have an opposing point of view in America's public schools. | |
| And it just demonstrates the tyranny of thought that happens, folks. | |
| At America's public schools. | |
| It truly is incredible, right? | |
| The way that this works is that if you are of a certain political bent, then you have an advantage. | |
| And so after all of these kids left, after all these kids left, I went ahead and I said, you know, sarcastically, I wish that I were a California state employee being paid by the taxpayer because then I could force you to stay here and listen to everything I say for the rest of the year. | |
| Because that's basically what happens on these campuses. | |
| So that's what went down here. | |
| I have to say that it was a bit of an eye-opener for me. | |
| Not because I thought the administration would be cool with any of this. | |
| I was kind of surprised they let me speak in the first place. | |
| But because some of the ways a lot of the students reacted was kind of shocking. | |
| First of all, I will say this. | |
| A lot of the students who get up and leave, they get up and leave not because they hate what I'm saying or they think it's so terrible. | |
| It's because they have a free period now. | |
| They can leave. | |
| When I was in high school, If somebody said you don't have to come to this auditorium anymore, I'm out, right? | |
| And that's probably a lot of these students. | |
| After all, I'm sure that there's some place on campus they can go to smoke their pot and doodle about Bernie Sanders. | |
| So there's a lot going on in their lives. | |
| But beyond that, one of the things that I thought was kind of shocking about all of this is that there was a point in the speech where I was talking about The phantom wage gap. | |
| I was talking about the fact that women are not paid less than men in American society. | |
| When you get rid of all of the conflating factors, when you get rid of the fact that women work less than men, less hours, less years, different positions, choose to take time off for their kids, when you remove all those factors, women are paid exactly the same as men. | |
| And when you're talking about single women fresh out of school who are not married and don't have kids, those women in all of America's major cities are paid more than men. | |
| They're actually paid more than men. | |
| So I said all of this, and what was amazing, this was kind of amazing to me, is that you can see all of the girls in the room, There's a contingent of girls in the room. | |
| And there's a ripple that ran through the crowd. | |
| When you're speaking in public, you can feel when there's unease in the crowd. | |
| And there was unease in the crowd. | |
| And girls started hissing. | |
| And I thought to myself, this is why we are doomed as a country. | |
| None of these girls have ever held a job. | |
| None of them. | |
| They're 14, 15, 16 years old. | |
| They've never held a job. | |
| They're living off mommy and daddy's paycheck. | |
| Right? | |
| That's what they're doing. | |
| They're living off Mommy and Daddy's paycheck, and yet they think that there are obstacles to them ever succeeding. | |
| And what really ticked off the administrator here, and what ticked off the students, is that I was saying to them, there are no obstacles to your success except for you. | |
| If you want to succeed in America, take control of your life. | |
| I actually said this in the speech, but what this administrator said, after he dismissed all these students, I said, so why is this happening? | |
| And he said, it's my job to protect the students. | |
| I said, from what? | |
| And he said, well, a lot of them in the back are children of low-income families, and they're offended. | |
| I said, well, you're not doing them any favors by coddling them from reality. | |
| And that is certainly true, because it turns out... But here's the deal. | |
| They're not doing the kids any favors, but they're doing the Democratic Party a lot of favors. | |
| Because when you tell poor people that the reason they're poor is not through bad decision-making, or because they need to keep their nose to the grindstone and work harder, when you tell them it's through exploitation and injustice in the American system, what you're saying is, vote Democrats so you can steal people's money. | |
| That's why Democrats win. | |
| Democrats win by turning everybody into a victim of the system, as opposed to telling people, get out there and work your ass off and everything will basically be okay if you do that. | |
| And by the way, everything basically will be okay. | |
| It's so funny. | |
| I got a lot of tweets after this from folks on the left. | |
| Oh, you're a silver spoon, baby. | |
| You're a silver spoon, baby. | |
| I don't like talking about my childhood because I don't think there's any virtue in poverty. | |
| I just don't. | |
| I don't think that it's important if you grew up poor. | |
| I don't think it's important if you grew up rich. | |
| I know people who grew up rich who are jerks. | |
| I know people who grew up poor who are jerks. | |
| The idea that you're a better person because you grew up poor, and we get it from all the presidential candidates now, right? | |
| I grew up poor. | |
| One of the things I actually like about Donald Trump is that he doesn't do this routine. | |
| There's no virtue to poverty. | |
| There is virtue to virtue. | |
| But for me personally, I grew up in a small house in Burbank, California, a two-bedroom house with three siblings. | |
| So I was sharing a room until I was 11 years old with three of my sisters. | |
| We had one bathroom for six people. | |
| And we weren't poor by any stretch of the imagination, but we certainly weren't rich. | |
| And we were probably middle-middle class at best when I was growing up. | |
| Okay, so that... and there's nothing wrong with that. | |
| It doesn't make me a better person, doesn't make me a worse person. | |
| Income level has nothing to say about who you are as a human being. | |
| Your decisions have something to say about who you are as a human being, and your wealth status tells you something about the kind of decisions that you made on the economic front. | |
| Which very often correlates with your decisions on the responsibility front. | |
| The more responsible you are in your life, the better the chance you're not going to be in permanent poverty. | |
| But we can't tell that to students. | |
| It might make them feel bad. | |
| They have to be told that they're victims of evil, evil America. | |
| So, that's what happened at the high school yesterday. | |
| Okay, moving from that to the big topic of the day, and that of course continues to be Donald Trump's proposal on Muslim immigration. | |
| For those who missed it, yesterday I talked about racial profiling because I thought that it was important to lay the groundwork For what a good policy would look like. | |
| I don't think Trump's policy is a good policy. | |
| I've written about this at Daily Wire. | |
| I don't think that banning all Muslim immigration to the country is the proper answer to the danger of radical Islam. | |
| The reason I say that is because there are some Muslims who I think that we can vet. | |
| You know, if you have a Kurdish fighter who's in Iraq, And needs to escape for human rights reasons and is vouched for by members of the U.S. | |
| military who fought alongside him and killed bad guys alongside him, that I can live with. | |
| If we're talking about unvetted Muslim refugees from Syria, different story. | |
| I don't think it's completely impossible to vet people, in other words, for security background, whereas Trump apparently thinks that it is. | |
| That's an honest difference of opinion. | |
| I think that his policy of banning all Muslim immigration also doesn't answer what you do with the three million Muslims who are already here, right? | |
| Once you say no more Muslims come in, What Muslim in the United States is going to help you, in terms of intelligence, gathering both domestically and on foreign affairs. | |
| That's my take on Trump's actual policy. | |
| But, as I said yesterday, religious profiling, religious behavior profiling, certain ideologies are more likely to breed terrorism than others. | |
| Any denial of that is a politically correct nonsense language. | |
| But this is where Trump is going to win on this issue. | |
| And the reason Trump is going to win on this issue in the public mind is not because he's right in his policy. | |
| It's because his enemies, as always, can't just restrict their criticism to the policy. | |
| They can't just restrict their criticism to, Trump is wrong on this. | |
| They can't just say, yeah, Donald Trump, he goes too far, but yeah, there's a threat of radical Islam that's better handled this way. | |
| No, it turns into everyone who could possibly support Donald Trump's proposal hates Muslims and is a bigot. | |
| Okay, let me explain something. | |
| Bigotry is saying that no Muslim is capable of being westernized. | |
| Okay, that's bigotry to say that no Muslim biologically for some brain reason is capable of being westernized or living in peace and harmony in the West. | |
| That's bigotry. | |
| It is not bigotry. | |
| It is actually reasonable to say many Muslims are not westernized or capable of westernization. | |
| That is a fact. | |
| It's not bigotry. | |
| And to say that it's hard to screen for these folks is also fact. | |
| That's not bigotry. | |
| So the media goes too far, and you'll see them go too far. | |
| So here is Trump announcing his Muslim immigration ban the other night in South Carolina. | |
| This is what's caused the entire hubbub. | |
| As I've said before, I think the reason Trump did this is not necessarily because he deeply believes it, although I'm sure right now he does. | |
| As I've said, I think that every time Trump says anything, he believes it at the time he says it. | |
| But the reason that Trump is pushing it out now is because he started to lose to Ted Cruz in Iowa. | |
| So now he has to get back in the headlines, and obviously he's done that, because every headline is now Donald Trump. | |
| Here is Trump announcing his policy the other night in South Carolina. | |
| Donald J. Trump is calling for — now, listen, you've got to listen to this one, because this is pretty — pretty heavy stuff, and it's common sense, and we have to do it. | |
| Remember the poll numbers — 25 percent, 51 percent. | |
| Remember the poll numbers. | |
| Okay? | |
| So remember this. | |
| So listen. | |
| Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. | |
| Okay, that's perfect. | |
| We'll stop it there. | |
| We have no choice. | |
| And you can see everybody is very enthused about all of this because they feel rightly that the government is incompetent and they feel rightly that radical Islam is a threat. | |
| And they don't believe all this stuff about Islam not having to do with radical Islam. | |
| They don't believe that. | |
| And they're right not to believe that because clearly there is a relationship. | |
| How significant that relationship is, we can argue about. | |
| I think it's actually fairly significant if you look at the percentages. | |
| Of Muslims globally who believe in things we would consider radical here in the West. | |
| It's a very high percentage. | |
| It's not 2%. | |
| It's not 10%. | |
| It's not 20%. | |
| It's much closer to at least 50% who believe all these things. | |
| Okay, so that's why people are cheering. | |
| But what the media have done is they've decided that Trump personally is a bigot. | |
| And more importantly, all of his supporters are bigots. | |
| So, I think Trump is a loudmouth, right? | |
| I mean, I think it would be impossible not to think that Trump is a loudmouth at this point. | |
| But, the urge by the media is always to call him a bigot. | |
| It is always to suggest that there is something wrong with Trump's intent. | |
| It's not that he's just wrong on policy. | |
| He must be a xenophobic, racist jerk. | |
| Although, I don't know how you're racist with Muslims because Islam is not a race. | |
| So, you actually, Barbara Walters actually asked Donald Trump this. | |
| Here's Barbara Walters with Donald Trump asking him if he is a bigot. | |
| Are you a bigot? | |
| Not at all. | |
| Probably the least of anybody you've ever met. | |
| Because? | |
| Because I'm not. | |
| I'm a person that has common sense. | |
| I'm a smart person. | |
| I know how to run things. | |
| I know how to make America great again. | |
| This is about making America great again. | |
| Okay, so first of all, the reason I'm laughing is because when he says, are you a bigot? | |
| And he says, not only am I not a bigot, I'm the least bigoted person you've ever met in your entire life. | |
| Mother Teresa had nothing on Donald Trump. | |
| Martin Luther King, nothing on Donald Trump. | |
| He is the least bigoted person you've ever even heard of, you've ever conceived of. | |
| If you could imagine a not bigoted person, he would look exactly like Donald Trump and his funny head and his weird hair and the whole deal. | |
| And, you know, again, I don't have evidence that Donald Trump is a bigot based on him saying that radical Islam is a problem and he doesn't trust the government to vet people. | |
| I mean, the fact is that Ted Cruz and Rand Paul say the same thing. | |
| They just have a limited level of trust in vetting Muslim immigrants. | |
| They say it's going to be easier to vet Muslim immigrants from Canada or Britain or France than it is to vet Muslim immigrants from Syria or Libya or terror-linked countries. | |
| Okay, I tend to agree with that. | |
| I in fact would suggest that there are certain countries where we should be careful of immigration from those countries, including France. | |
| I think that France has shown that Muslim immigrants to France, a significant percentage of them are in support of terrorism. | |
| But I disagree with the total Muslim ban for the reasons that I've just explained. | |
| And what I would say instead of a total Muslim ban is I would say that we have a basic ideological ban that spans all religions. | |
| And spans all philosophies, and the basic ideological ban is do you agree with freedom of speech? | |
| Do you believe that the government should prosecute people for drawing religious figures, for example? | |
| Do you believe that violence is justified if somebody says something to you? | |
| This, by the way, would probably get rid of half the leftists in America if we actually applied this ideological ban, but I believe that you should have to have a certain ideology That agrees with America's founding principles in order to enter the country. | |
| I don't think everyone has a right to enter America. | |
| America gets to choose who it lets in, and Muslim, not Muslim, makes less of a difference to me than what you believe. | |
| And so we should screen along ideological lines. | |
| Whether you believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven on a horse from Jerusalem, or whether you believe that, you know, that God came down and gave the Torah on Mount Sinai, Your specific religious beliefs make no difference to me. | |
| It's your ideological, philosophical beliefs about the nature of man and the nature of government that matter a lot more to me than your specific ritualistic beliefs about the nature of revelation. | |
| Now, is it true that disproportionately Islam is going to produce people who are not in line with Western values? | |
| Yeah, because Islam is not a Western religion. | |
| Because Westernism springs from a Judeo-Christian heritage. | |
| It didn't come from nowhere. | |
| I know the left likes to assume that all of this came from nowhere, but it didn't. | |
| It came from Judeo-Christianity. | |
| Judeo-Christianity is a different thing than Islam. | |
| End of story. | |
| That's not bigotry. | |
| That's fact. | |
| Ideas are different. | |
| There are distinctions between ideas. | |
| I know the left wants to suggest there are not, but there are. | |
| Okay, so, meanwhile, I will say that there is one aspect of the Trump campaign that sounded a lot more like bigotry, and that was this thing that happened on CNN. | |
| Katrina Pearson is the spokesperson for Donald Trump, and she was on CNN, and she was asked about Donald Trump's Muslim ban, and here's what it sounded like. | |
| We need Republicans to win again. | |
| There have been people in the Congress pushing for a pause long before Donald Trump said anything, Essie. | |
| And yes, this country has done it before. | |
| Never in United States history have we ever allowed insurgents to come across these borders. | |
| And it's worse now today, Essie. | |
| No one's talking about allowing insurgents. | |
| The administration is leading it. | |
| Regular Muslims, that's what you're talking about. | |
| No one's talking about insurgents. | |
| Who wants insurgents to come over? | |
| Yes, from Arab nations. | |
| You know what? | |
| So what? | |
| They're Muslim! | |
| So what? | |
| That's not the America we live in, Katrina! | |
| No, it is! | |
| But it is, Essie, simply because you have people coming across through the refugee system and the visa system, including the woman that came in San Bernardino on a visa system, as well as some of the 9-11 hijackers. | |
| We have to put a pause to figure out how we can better vet these people. | |
| Okay, so what they're Muslim is the line that seems to cross the line, right? | |
| I mean that's that's where it's not just so what they're Muslims also are human beings I mean, this is this is where the this is where she crosses over the line, right? | |
| But I haven't seen Trump say anything like that. | |
| I've seen Katrina Pearson say something like that. | |
| So I'll accuse that comment of being a racist comment, not even a racist, a religious-phobe comment, but I'm not going to accuse Trump of it because, maybe the Trump campaign, maybe, but not Trump himself, at least from what he has personally said and not based on the policy that he has suggested. | |
| What's truly irritating to me, and there have been a bunch of people on the left who have suggested that Trump's policy is unconstitutional. | |
| That's not true. | |
| There's nothing in the Constitution that gives rights to foreigners. | |
| If you're born overseas, you do not have a right to enter the United States. | |
| It's not unconstitutional for us to say you don't get to come in based on these criteria that we've listed. | |
| And in the past, those criteria have included place of origin. | |
| We banned all Chinese immigration from 1882 to 1892, for example. | |
| Calvin Coolidge shut down immigration in large part during the 1920s and was actually a problem for the country. | |
| Obviously, FDR shut down immigration. | |
| FDR took American citizens and put them in internment camps, and the Supreme Court gave that the green light. | |
| So the Constitution really has nothing to say about whether it's a good policy or not. | |
| The Constitution is not the answer here. | |
| The answer is whether it's a good policy or not. | |
| But the part that annoys me is the idea that 65, poll today, 64% of Americans on the right, 64% of likely Republican voters agree with Trump's proposal. | |
| They think Trump's proposal is good. | |
| So the left has suggested that this is wildly Islamophobic. | |
| The word Islamophobic I think that we actually have to define because it's a term that doesn't mean anything. | |
| What does it mean to be Islamophobic? | |
| I'm not afraid of Islam. | |
| I'm not afraid of Muslims. | |
| Islamophobia is really just a way to say shut up, in the same way that when people on the left say racist, what they really mean is shut up. | |
| Islamophobia, we have a good reason to be scared of radical Islam, and we have a good reason to ask questions about the relationship between radical Islam and normal Islam, or moderate Islam, if you want to put it that way. | |
| There are good reasons to ask those questions. | |
| I'll give you an example. | |
| What's kind of crazy, so here's how the left defines Islamophobia. | |
| Let's give a definition of the left's view of Islamophobia. | |
| The University of California at Berkeley, Center for Race and Gender Studies, which is about as left as you're going to get, they define Islamophobia There's a rational fear of Islam. | |
| First of all, you can have rational fear of Islam. | |
| It's possible for that to happen, right? | |
| There's a rational fear of radical Islam at the very least, or what relationship there is between Islam and radical Islam. | |
| They say that Islamophobia is based on, quote, prevailing attitudes that incorporate beliefs such as, quote, Islam does not share common values with other major faiths. | |
| That's Islamophobic if you believe that. | |
| That Islam doesn't share common values with other major faiths. | |
| That's not Islamophobic. | |
| That's true. | |
| Okay, that is true. | |
| Because guess what? | |
| Most major faiths don't share values with other major faiths. | |
| Judaism and Christianity share a basic set of values because Christianity hijacked the first book, right? | |
| I mean, the Jews wrote the original and then the Christians added the sequel. | |
| So at least we sort of share the first half, right? | |
| It's just that when we get to the sequel, I classified it in the fiction section, and you guys classified it in the non-fiction section. | |
| But we share that first book. | |
| We agree the first book is good, and Jesus was drawing heavily from the first book, even if you believe that everything that Jesus said was gospel truth, right? | |
| If you believe that, then Jesus came not to change a jot or tittle, gang. | |
| So Judeo-Christianity has a common spring, right? | |
| It comes from the same root. | |
| The same is not true for Islam. | |
| It doesn't come from the same roots. | |
| Islam rewrites the Bible, right? | |
| Islam actually takes the Bible and rewrites it. | |
| In the Quran, for example, the suggestion is that it's not Isaac that sacrificed on or attempted to be sacrificed by Abraham. | |
| It's Ishmael, right? | |
| They actually changed the narrative. | |
| It's not the same. | |
| It's not the same book. | |
| So, Buddhism doesn't have the same set of values as Judeo-Christianity, which is why Buddhism and Buddhist civilization didn't develop the way Judeo-Christian civilization did. | |
| Of course Islam doesn't share common values with other major faiths. | |
| They say it's Islamophobic. | |
| If you say Islam is a religion that is inferior to the West, it is archaic, barbaric, and irrational. | |
| I'm not going to talk about Islam itself, but Islamic civilization is inferior to the West. | |
| It is. | |
| By every available measure, it is inferior to the West. | |
| And if you don't believe that, go live there. | |
| If you think it's better over there, by all means, get a plane ticket. | |
| And if you look at Afghanistan, or Iraq, or hell, even more modernized countries like Indonesia, compare those to the United States, and they are archaic, and barbaric, and irrational in the ways that those countries are governed. | |
| You say that, if you believe Islam is a religion of violence and supports terrorism, then this is somehow Islamophobic. | |
| As I've said before, I'm not a fan of, we're gonna read verses from the Quran, but there's plenty in there, at the very least, that supports violence. | |
| And they say, Islam is a violent political ideology. | |
| All of Islam may not be a violent political ideology, but there are certainly swaths of Islam that are, are there not? | |
| But all of this is Islamophobic, and this is the problem that I have. | |
| And folks on the left, They feel the need and it's even folks on the right. | |
| Paul Ryan, for example, criticized Donald Trump. | |
| And I want to play this because Paul Ryan's on the right and he gets this completely wrong. | |
| Here's Paul Ryan talking about Donald Trump. | |
| Freedom of religion. | |
| Freedom of religion is a fundamental constitutional principle. | |
| It's a founding principle of this country. | |
| Normally, I do not comment on what's going on in the presidential election. | |
| I will take an exception today. | |
| This is not conservatism. | |
| What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for, and more importantly, it's not what this country stands for. | |
| Not only are there many Muslims serving in our armed forces, dying for this country, there are Muslims serving right here in the House, working every day to uphold and to defend the Constitution. | |
| Some of our best and biggest allies in this struggle and fight against radical Islamic terror are Muslims. | |
| The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of whom are peaceful, who believe in pluralism, freedom, democracy. | |
| Okay, this is where he's off the rails, okay. | |
| I told our members this morning to always drive... We can stop it there because that's the point. | |
| Once you get to Paul Ryan explaining to you Right? | |
| That the vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims globally believe in pluralism, freedom, democracy, and individual rights? | |
| No. | |
| No. | |
| There is no study by which this is true. | |
| There is no possible poll by which this is true. | |
| 99% of the inhabitants of Iraq, according to a Pew Global Research poll in 2013, believe in honor killings. | |
| No, that is not true. | |
| So again, you can say that you don't like Trump's policies. | |
| I don't like Trump's policy either. | |
| I was one of the first people out of the gate to say that I thought his policy was backwards and stupid and irrational. | |
| But the point that the media have tried to make is they've tried to paint Trump as Hitler and all of his followers as Hilarion. | |
| The New York Daily News used this on their cover. | |
| We should grab the cover of the New York Daily News if we can. | |
| And they're just so desperate for attention at this point, it's absurd. | |
| For those who can't see, it's a picture of Donald Trump. | |
| It's a caricature of Donald Trump. | |
| And it's him slicing the head off of the Statue of Liberty, ISIS style. | |
| And it says, when Donald Trump came for the Mexicans, I did not speak out, as I was not a Mexican. | |
| When he came for the Muslims, I did not speak out, I was not a Muslim. | |
| Then he came for me. | |
| Like, Donald Trump's gonna come for you, because he's concerned about radical Islam. | |
| Okay, this is nonsense of the highest order. | |
| And he's not the only person saying this. | |
| Trevor Noah, on Comedy Central, actually, he and his guest, suggested that Donald Trump was white ISIS. | |
| That's what he said. | |
| He's white ISIS. | |
| Really? | |
| How many people has Donald Trump beheaded? | |
| Actually beheaded? | |
| How many babies has Donald Trump actually murdered? | |
| How many women has Donald Trump actually raped over in Yazidi land? | |
| How's that working out? | |
| It's so over the top and absurd. | |
| Again, you can disagree with him to suggest that Donald Trump And more importantly, I don't even care about Trump, that everybody who is worried about the threat of radical Islam must be an Islamophobe, and if you like Donald Trump's policy, that that is not a reflection of irrationality, it's more a reflection of something else. | |
| That's stupid. | |
| People are rationally afraid of radical Islam, and they're buying into an irrational policy because they have a rational fear of radical Islam. | |
| That is not the same as saying that people are bigots and racist and terrible. | |
| Okay, things that I hate. | |
| So, first a thing that I like. | |
| Let me think of something that I like. | |
| I had one in my head earlier, but after all of this I'm running out of things that I like. | |
| So, things that I like. | |
| Let's see. | |
| There was a... I saw the last Hunger Games film and I thought it was okay. | |
| How's that? | |
| It's not even a thing that I love. | |
| It's just a thing that I'm lukewarm on. | |
| Actually, here's something I like. | |
| This show, The Grinder, is terrific. | |
| If you haven't seen it on Fox, it's a really, really good show. | |
| It's a really, really funny, clever, clean show you can watch with your kids. | |
| It's a really, really funny show. | |
| So, The Grinder is terrific. | |
| You should check it out. | |
| Okay. | |
| Things that I hate. | |
| Kendrick Lamar got the most, what is it, the Grammys that they just released the nominations for? | |
| So he got the most Grammy nominations. | |
| Kendrick Lamar, I've never heard of him because I pay attention to real artists, you know, like Beethoven. | |
| But Kendrick Lamar, he got the most nominations. | |
| He and Taylor Swift got the most nominations. | |
| Taylor Swift does this routine, by the way, where she praises everybody who ought to be praised so that she can be seen as forward-looking and forward-leaning. | |
| And we ripped on Taylor Swift yesterday, so we won't rip on Taylor Swift today. | |
| She gets off scot-free. | |
| But, Kendrick Lamar, I'll be honest with you, I'd never really heard anything that Kendrick Lamar had ever done, or if I'd heard it, I hadn't identified it as his. | |
| There's one video that's now been nominated for Best Music Video, and it's called All Right. | |
| And we need to play some of this, because this just shows you where the head of the left is, and it's... | |
| Pretty sickening. | |
| So, here we go. | |
| All right, from Kendrick Lamar. | |
| And I'll describe what's happening in the music video to folks who can't actually see it. | |
| Okay, so they're just showing the port of Oakland. | |
| And now we're cutting interior to Oakland. | |
| And it's a Dust Room Street. | |
| And we see shoes hanging on a wire, so this is obviously a high-crime area is the implication. | |
| Right, deserted houses. | |
| Guy screaming nonsensically. | |
| I remember you was conflicted. | |
| Misusing your influence. | |
| Sometimes I did the same. | |
| Abusing my power full of resentment. | |
| Resentment that turned into a deep depression. | |
| Found myself screaming in a hotel room. | |
| Lucifer was all around me. | |
| So I kept running. | |
| Until I found my safe haven. | |
| I was trying to convince myself the stripes I got. | |
| And then there are people rioting because... | |
| There are people rioting because things are so terrible in Oakland. | |
| And burning things and throwing them. | |
| Making myself realize where my foundation was. | |
| But while my loved ones was fighting a continuous war back in the city, I was entering the norm. | |
| A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination. | |
| Okay, so we've got a black guy or a person of color who is put down on the floor, and then he breaks away from a cop who's trying to contain him, and he runs. | |
| Okay, so, what's gonna happen in this music video, eventually, is that Kendrick Lamar, at one point, he starts floating into the sky, and he ends up being shot by a cop. | |
| So this whole video... | |
| Okay, and this video continues along these lines. | |
| That's all just the intro, right? | |
| It's a person of color being shot by the cops, and then the actual lyric is about how he has to fight N-Word all his life. | |
| It's bad times, and he talks about N-Word. | |
| And it's with Pharrell Williams, who of course is now in every song that has been produced for the last five years. | |
| And he says, N-Word, we gonna be alright. | |
| N-Word, we gonna be alright. | |
| We gonna be alright. | |
| Do you hear me? | |
| Do you feel me? | |
| We gonna be alright. | |
| N-Word, we're gonna be alright. | |
| And it continues along these lines. | |
| He talks about Uh, how he is going to shoot guns, and he's going to go after women's lady parts, but that's not the words that he used, and it just continues along this line. | |
| He talks, and then he talks about how, uh, what do you want? | |
| A house or a car, 40 acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar, anything. | |
| See, my name is Lucy, I'm a dog, MF-er, you can live at the mall, I can see the evil, I can tell it, I know when it's illegal. | |
| I don't think about it, I deposit every other zero. | |
| Thinking of my partner, put the candy, paint it on the regal. | |
| I don't even know what he's talking about here. | |
| This is all nonsensical rhyming, but what you get from the video, and if you actually watch the entire video, which we don't have time to do here, but if you actually watch the entire video, the entire thing is, as a black man in America, you are put down, and that's why people riot, and that's why people are unsatisfied, and white cops shoot black people, that is the premise of this video. | |
| This is the most nominated video at the Grammys. | |
| By a bunch of white people, by the way, because the people who vote for the Grammys are disproportionately white. | |
| It's a bunch of upper-class white people living in Hollywood who vote for the Grammys. | |
| And this makes them feel special, because it makes them feel like they're doing something for the impoverished inner-city youths. | |
| Okay, they're not. | |
| You know what they need more of in the inner city? | |
| They need less of this garbage, and what they need more of is cops in the inner city who actually protect private property rights, which makes it safe for investment, which makes it safe for jobs, which makes it safe for money to be invested in the crappy public schools, which makes it safe to raise your kids. | |
| That's what they actually need. | |
| But that's not what our culture pushes, because if you're seen as someone who fights the man, if you're seen as someone who fights the prevailing culture, then that makes you a hero, like Kendrick Lamar. | |
| Even though the stuff—I mean, it's just, first of all, the music is garbage, the message is garbage, but it makes you a special human being if you fight the prevailing wisdom. | |
| And this is the whole point, right? | |
| This is the message the kids are hearing in the high schools. | |
| Any contrary message, any message from the other side, has to be immediately quieted. | |
| It can't be allowed in. | |
| Because the minute the kids actually realize, hey, wait a second, I'm in control of my own life, they don't need the government anymore. | |
| And suddenly, they're actual individuals with the capacity for agency and free will. | |
| And that doesn't fit the leftist model. | |
| So instead, we'll just get more videos like this, and we'll get more culture like this created by the left for the purpose of creating more leftists. | |
| I'm Ben Shapiro. |