The left ardently desires to paint all Republicans as racist, none more so than Trump Attorney General Appointment Senator Jeff Sessions.
Sessions has been hit with allegations of racism over and over.
He's got actual racist Al Sharpton protesting him.
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, is scheduled to testify against Sessions, presumably on the basis of race, and also because Booker is preparing to run for president in 2020.
But the left's desire for the racism charge doesn't stop with Sessions.
It affects even his grandchildren.
Here is MTV News culture writer Ira Madison III.
Not the second or the first.
He wrote, And it's a picture of Jeff Sessions with a small Asian child on his lap.
Toys R Us You Stole Her From.
And it's a picture of Jeff Sessions with a small Asian child on his lap.
And he says, The girl on Sessions' lap is not adopted.
It's his granddaughter, which is not surprising.
There's no reason for that child to be in his lap in a hearing other than to send an I'm not racist message.
Why is she a prop?
Sessions argued for policy that in the 1880s was used to discriminate against Asian Americans.
In fact, Americans have long used Asian Americans as model minorities since the rise of the Civil Rights Act, etc., etc., etc.
So basically what he is suggesting is that this Asian child is just a prop.
So, you know, what's the point of all of this?
The point of all of this is that Sessions' granddaughter is Asian, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't secretly hate Asians and everyone else who isn't white, which is disgusting.
Sessions has always been tough on illegal immigration and in favor of heavy restrictions on legal immigration.
That's not race-specific or race-centric.
As for the aesthetic of a granddaughter sitting on Sessions' lap during the hearing, is that supposed to be off-putting or politically gauche?
I mean, Nancy Pelosi did it.
We saw Bill and Hillary Clinton do it.
This isn't the first time leftists have attacked a Republican for the sin of cross-racial grandchildren.
In December 2013, an entire MSNBC panel mocked the Romney family for having a black grandchild.
Melissa Harris Perry was actually forced to apologize on air for it, but this is how many on the left feel.
Republicans aren't allowed to have cross-racial relatives or friends because they're obviously terrible racists.
Or perhaps they're not the terrible racists.
Maybe the actual terrible racists are the people who think that anyone who disagrees with them has to be incapable of racial acceptance.
The people who connect race and politics inextricably.
People who make jokes about Asian dolls from Toys R Us, for example.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so here we are.
It's a brand new day and lots to talk about.
First, in breaking news, apparently the Trump administration is not going to be putting the U.S.
embassy in Israel in Jerusalem.
They're going to be leaving it in Tel Aviv.
That's not a tremendous shock, except for the fact that it had been promised a bunch of times, but not a huge surprise.
We'll talk about that A little bit more tomorrow in detail.
But the big story of the day is obviously the Jeff Sessions hearing.
The Attorney General of the United States, Trump's appointment to the Attorney Generalship, is being ripped apart by the left.
And we'll get to all of that in just one second, as well as the innate leftism, the innate racism of the left, in one second.
But first we have to say hello to our advertisers at Bull and Branch, and thank you to them, obviously, for helping to sponsor the program.
Bull and Branch, fantastic company.
I've now ordered three pairs of sheets from Bowl & Branch because they are so good.
These are the most comfortable sheets I have ever slept on.
They are first-rate.
I'm somebody who doesn't sleep well, normally.
I sleep very lightly, and sheet quality, I never knew.
Until you have great sheets, you actually don't know what you're missing.
You don't know what it's like to sleep on a good sheet until you've actually slept on a good sheet.
And so I've been sleeping on, you know, tarps that I get from the local gas station.
But then I got Bowl & Branch, and I gotta say that the quality of the sheets is fantastic.
I sleep better, they breathe, they're very comfortable.
And they make everything from bedding to blankets.
It's made from pure 100% organic cotton, which means they start out super soft and then they get actually softer over time.
I can attest, I love them.
Apparently three ex-presidents sleep on bull and branch sheets, which means that a lot of other people who are not married to those presidents, if you're Bill Clinton, presumably also have slept and enjoyed bull and branch sheets.
But the sheets themselves are fantastic.
Right now, you go there, and you get $50 off your first order from Bull & Branch.
$50 off your first set of sheets at BullAndBranch.com.
Promo code BEN.
Luxury sheets, like really, really nice sheets, can cost like $1,000.
Bull & Branch sheets run a couple hundred bucks.
It sounds expensive until you realize that you sleep on those sheets, like, all the time, right?
Every night, and you can wash them once a week, and that's it.
The same pair of sheets.
It's fantastic.
So, $50 off your first set of sheets from Bull & Branch at bullandbranch.com, promo code Ben.
Bullandbranch.com, promo code Ben.
I really cannot recommend this product highly enough.
I really do love my Bull & Branch sheets, and as I say, I have gone out and bought three pairs of them myself because I like them so much.
So, beyond the advertiser discount that I get, I actually went out and bought the product because it's that good.
Okay, so, lots to get to.
We begin today.
With the hubbub over Jeff Sessions.
So the senator from Alabama, who I know a little bit personally, he's always been very cordial to me, very nice guy, he's also been slammed as a racist by people on the left without real evidence.
So here is what they say to call him a racist, and we can just implode these myths right now.
Apparently, back in the 1980s, the Democrats smeared him with accusations of racism, which included calling a black attorney boy, quipping about the KKK, Joking that a white attorney was a traitor to his race because he was collaborating with a civil rights group, calling the NAACP and ACLU un-American, and prosecuting a civil rights organization for voter fraud.
Except that pretty much all of those remarks were made in front of a black lawyer, and even the lawyer who accused Sessions of racism acknowledged that Sessions was clearly joking.
So he just didn't like the jokes, and then he accused Sessions of being a real-life racist.
Well, Honest to goodness, if every joke that anybody ever made that has a racial undertone were taken seriously, then I'm pretty certain that almost 100% of the population would be labeled a racist in these sorts of hearings.
And that's what Democrats do.
They can't find any evidence in Sessions' record of actual racism.
Instead, what they seek to do is dredge up old conversations in which he told a joke that somebody didn't like.
That must mean that he's a racist.
That's really gross.
The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway has written about this.
He says the U.S.
attorney Sessions filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama.
He prosecuted the head of the state clan, Henry Francis Hayes, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random.
He insisted on the death penalty.
When he was elected the state attorney general, Sessions followed through.
He made sure Hayes was executed.
The successful prosecution of Hayes led to a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan, which effectively destroyed the KKK in Alabama.
The left doesn't like Sessions because Sessions is a very hardcore law and order guy.
He's not going to be cracking down on police for stupid reasons like the Holder Justice Department and the Lynch Justice Department have done.
He's very strong on illegal immigration.
He was asked at the hearings this morning about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under Barack Obama.
He said, look, we're going to enforce the law.
It's Congress's job to make the law.
It's my job to enforce the law.
This is exactly right.
This is how government is supposed to work.
The executive branch is the executive branch.
They execute.
It is not their job to individually rewrite law.
Good for Sessions.
Well, the left must declare him a liar.
That's what they have to do.
They have to declare him a liar and a racist.
And so they are now trotting out all sorts of people saying this.
The Democratic Party has released a video about Jeff Sessions suggesting that he is, of course, a racist.
When Donald Trump needed to find an attorney general, all he had to do was look to his alt-right.
Republican Senator Jeff Sessions was a U.S.
attorney in Alabama when then-President Ronald Reagan nominated him for the federal court.
But the appointment broke down at Sessions' 1986 confirmation hearing when allegations over his alleged racial remarks took center stage.
Jeff Sessions is a man ahead of his time.
He was alt-right when it was still just called racism.
Thomas Figures, a black former assistant U.S.
attorney in Alabama, testified Sessions called him, boy, and joked about the Ku Klux Klan.
And warned him about the way he spoke to white people.
That was then.
But who is Jeff Sessions now?
Session?
They still are racist.
Jeff Session has shown, both in his career as a U.S.
attorney, but also in his career as a United States senator, has been a hostility to the enforcement of civil rights, particularly in the area of voting rights.
He's also opposed to same-sex marriage, Roe v. Wade, equal pay, the Violence Against Women Act, and universal background checks for gun purchases.
So they're saying that he's against same-sex marriage.
That doesn't make you a bad nominee for Attorney General.
Lots of people are.
Roe v. Wade is the worst legal decision in American history outside of Dred Scott.
Equal pay.
He's not against equal pay.
He's against the federal government making it easy to sue people based on no evidence.
Of wage discrimination.
The Violence Against Women Act.
He's not against prosecuting violence against women.
The Violence Against Women Act contains some provisions that were not good in actual application.
Universal background checks on guns he's opposed because they're useless and stupid.
So, the idea here is they don't like his agenda, therefore Jeff Sessions must be a racist.
And this is how the left always acts.
And then they wonder why this card just doesn't have any weight anymore.
There are actual racists in the United States.
There are actually alt-right people.
Not all people who call themselves alt-right are actually alt-right.
There are actual Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor type alt-right people who are actual honest-to-goodness racists.
When you lump in Jeff Sessions with those people, all you're doing is making those people appear legitimate, not making Sessions appear illegitimate.
And that's really stupid of the left, but they can't help themselves.
They've gone off the rails.
They've been off the rails for a long time.
It's just that Trump, I think, has sent them finally over that last cliff.
So, all the protesters showed up at this Sessions hearing.
Again, if these people think that this is going to stop Sessions or do anything except make Americans think that radical leftists are out of their damn minds, they have to be joking.
Here's Code Pink at the event.
This is what they were doing.
Why am I being taken out of here?
This man is evil!
Pure evil!
Do not vote for Jim Sessions!
Do not vote for Jim Sessions.
Yes, we should take you—his name is Jeff Sessions.
You got the crazy code pink, ladies.
They're saying he's evil.
Don't vote for Bobbo Sessions.
Don't vote for Demetrius Sessions.
If you can't get his name right, I'm not going to take you very seriously on whether you think that he's a real threat to the republic.
I don't remember, you know, back in 1939, people going, I can't believe that we're going to have to fight this evil, evil dictator, Hans Hitler.
If you'd said that, then people might have said, well, his name's A- I'm not gonna- No.
No.
She wasn't the only one.
A bunch of people dressed up in KKK outfits showed up as well.
Those definitely look like people with day jobs.
Right there.
wonder why leftists go to protest.
It's because a lot of them don't have jobs.
Also, if you're going to really go through the effort of dressing up as a KKK member and shouting, Go, Jeffy, go.
Wouldn't you actually get something that looks a little more like a KKK outfit and not like you just went in the bathroom, ripped off a couple of pieces of paper towel and wrapped them around your head?
That's pretty weak tea right there.
I mean, like, really go full out.
If you're really gonna protest in this fashion, let me just suggest that you really, you know, go out for the costumes.
It ain't that hard.
I mean, goodness gracious.
So, these people show up, and they make asses of themselves, and this is supposed to convince Americans that Sessions is a racist.
Or does it just convince you that people on the left have lost their damn minds?
I'm gonna go with the latter.
Meanwhile, Sessions came out and he immediately gives a statement.
He says, of course, I abhor the Klan.
This should go without saying, but here is Senator Sessions on this.
Let me address another issue straight on.
I was accused in 1986 of failing to protect the voting rights of African-Americans by presenting the Perry County case, the voter fraud case.
and of condemning civil rights advocates and organizations and even harboring, amazingly, sympathies for the KKK.
These are damnably false charges.
I abhor the Klan and what it represents and its hateful ideology.
I insisted on Marsh Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center and his lawsuit that led to the successful collapse of the Klan, at least in Alabama, the seizure of their building, at least for that period of time.
As Civil Rights Division attorneys have testified before the committee, I supported fully their historic cases that the Justice Department filed to advance civil rights and that I supported, including cases to desegregate schools, abolish at-large elections for cities, county commissions, and school boards.
These at-large elections were a mechanism used to block African-American candidates from being able to be elected to boards and commissions.
It was a deliberate and part of a systemic plan to reduce the ability of African-Americans to have influence in the election and governing process.
Okay, so look, Sessions knows how to defend himself.
He's going to do fine.
He's going to sail through confirmation.
But that's not going to stop the left from trying to pillory all Republicans as racist, horrible people.
Again, the left can't just stick to charges that actually work.
Instead, they have to go to their ultimate extreme, which is calling people racist.
Cory Booker is the senator from New Jersey.
He obviously wants to run for president in 2020.
And he apparently is going to testify against Sessions today, and everybody is very much expecting him to go out there and basically call Sessions a racist, which is not only a breach of senate decorum, it's also not true.
But let's just recall, Cory Booker from 2013 talking about how wondrous it is, well actually it was earlier this year I guess, it was February 2016, talking about how wondrous it was to work with Jeff Sessions on honoring civil rights heroes.
And so this is truly one of my life's greatest moments.
I am humbled to be able to participate here in paying tribute to some of the extraordinary Americans whose footsteps paved the way for me and my generation.
I feel blessed and honored to have partnered with Senator Sessions in being the Senate sponsors of this important award.
This is right now.
Now he's racist.
Now he's going to come out and he's going to say Sessions is racist.
This is the only card the Democrats have and it doesn't work.
And what's even more amusing is that the real racists here are the Democrats because all they see is race.
All they see is race.
And it's it's amusing to watch them just tear themselves apart.
They're so blind to their own racism, they can't even see it.
So, for example, Hillary Clinton is just released who Hillary Clinton would have appointed to her cabinet.
She does not get that opportunity.
Thank God.
And what's hilarious about this list is that she has a list of people, the ghost cabinet, right?
And it's people like John Podesta for Secretary of State.
But the one that sticks out is Environmental Protection Agency.
There's a quote, okay?
Environmental Protection Agency, quote, likely an African-American and or an education.
So you name all these people and then you say, also the black person to be named later.
There's like a baseball trade where you trade a star and you get back a bunch of minor leaguers and it says plus a player to be named later.
So you've got a bunch of cabinet members plus a black person to be named later, according to Hillary Clinton.
Which, again, is just an incredible thing.
I mean, that is obvious racism.
It doesn't matter who the black person is, it just matters that it's a black person.
We must have a black person at the EPA.
But they don't even see their own racism.
This is the lady who, during the campaign, lectured Americans about their own unconscious bias.
She said we all have to be worried about our implicit bias, and I, as president, will go forth and explain to white Americans all of the unconscious bias that they harbor inside those puny little racist minds.
And here's Hillary, with her ghost cabinet, and the phantom black person.
Random black person to be named later.
I'm not a racist!
It's just amazing.
My favorite story of the day actually is this story from the New York Times, courtesy of a woman named Farrah Stockman.
I believe it's a female reporter.
And here is the piece.
It's just fantastic.
I have to read it, at least a large chunk of it.
Women's March on Washington opens contentious dialogues about race.
Many thousands of women are expected to converge on the nation's capital for the Women's March on Washington, the day after Donald J. Trump's inauguration.
Jennifer Willis no longer plans to be one of them.
Ms.
Willis, a 50-year-old wedding minister from South Carolina, had looked forward to taking her daughters to the march.
Then she read a post on the Facebook page for the march that made her feel unwelcome, because she is white.
The post, written by a black activist from Brooklyn who was a march volunteer, advised, quote, white allies to listen more and talk less.
It also chided those who had said, we're only now waking up to racism because of the election.
You don't just get to join because now you're scared too, read the post.
I was born scared.
Stung by the tone, Ms.
Willis canceled her trip.
This is a women's march, she said.
We're supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage adoption.
Why is it now about white women don't understand black women?
And then the article goes on about all of the conflict inside this group and it's pretty amazing.
I love this line.
A debate ensued about whether white women were just now experiencing what minority women experience daily or having a hard time yielding control.
A young white woman from Baltimore wrote with bitterness that white women who have been victims of rape and abuse were being, quote, asked to check their privilege.
A catchphrase that refers to people acknowledging their advantages, but which even some liberal women find unduly confrontational.
No one involved with the march fears the rancor will dampen turnout.
Even many of those who expressed dismay at the tone of the discussion said they still intended to join what is sure to be the largest demonstration yet against the Trump presidency.
But the debates over race reflect deeper questions about the future of progressivism in the age of Trump.
Should the march highlight what divides women or what unites them?
Is there room for women who have never heard of white privilege?
And at a time when a presidential candidate ran against political correctness and won, with half of white female voters supporting him, is this the time to tone down talk about race, or to double down?
It's amazing.
I love it.
The left is just ripping itself apart.
They're ripping themselves apart.
Because for the left, it's all about hierarchies of group victimhood.
Right?
So the left has this march and it's supposed to be women.
And women are the big victims, right?
This is the women's victim march.
We're all victims because we have vajunas, right?
That means that we gotta go and we gotta march together because we have uteri.
Except that there's other victim groups that actually outrank women on the wondrous scale of victimhood.
In the hierarchy of victimhood, gays outrank women, blacks outrank women, Hispanics outrank women, and so you can have what feminists like to call intersectionality.
Intersectionality.
And that means that if you are a member of one of these other hierarchical groups, and it's a higher group than the women group, then that means that we treat you as a member of that higher group.
And if you're not, then we treat you as a member of a lower group.
So the white women are now victimizers.
They can't be the people who lead this thing because they don't have highest status.
Somewhere, there is the unicorn of intersectionality.
And the unicorn of intersectionality is a pansexual, transgender, black, Hispanic, Native American woman.
Right?
If you get all those, then you're the unicorn of intersectionality, and you have ultimate moral authority to say everything, and no one can ever say anything to you, or about you.
No one can ever say anything that differs from you.
We all just have to anoint you dictator, under intersectionality.
And then you get to be the person in charge of the rest of the world, because you are the ultimate victim.
You have fallen prey to every form of victimhood there ever was, and everyone else must bow down before your cherished victimhood status.
And the left is tearing itself apart over this, and it's delicious because No one in the real world cares about this stuff.
No one in the real world cares whether you're a woman or whether you're black or whether you're Hispanic.
There are racists, there are sexists, but that's not the way America works, folks, okay?
Most Americans don't care enough about you to be racist or sexist.
Most Americans are not sitting around going, how do we stop these particular women?
We must stop that black woman because she's black.
Most people don't have time for that.
People have jobs, people have families, and mostly people just are apathetic about other people.
The great lie about society is that we all care deeply about one another.
It's not really true.
You care deeply about your family, you care deeply about your friends, and the person who lives 100 miles away from you, yeah, you care somewhat about them, but when you read that a flood washed away the guy's home, did you really run to your wallet?
Not really.
That's human nature, okay?
That's just how it works.
Now, the bad side means you didn't rush to your wallet when the guy's home washed away.
The good news means you're not going to go burn down that guy's home because you don't know him and don't care about him.
So the fact is that, according to the left, this sort of group identity stuff is what politics is supposed to be all about.
And so they've tried to voice that on the right, you're racist, you're sexist, you're bigots, but they're the ones who are excising members of their own groups.
You can be a member of their group, but if you don't hit that cherished high status, if you're not the unicorn, then you may actually be targeted.
We have to stop for a second and say thank you to another one of our advertisers, Legacy Box.
If you haven't checked out Legacy Box, I highly recommend it.
I'm somebody who truly believes, I really do, that it's important to preserve the memories of your childhood and preserve memories from your parents.
I used to run a company in which I actually helped people write their memoirs because I think it's that important to preserve memory because it's the only record a lot of us have of people who have passed on or just people who you or just memories that you want to keep.
Legacy Box helps you do that in a unique and wonderful way.
What they do is they send you a box to your house and you send back all your old tapes and your film and your pictures and your audio recordings and you load up that box and they send them back to you In a couple of weeks on a thumb drive or on a DVD so you preserve all your memories.
You don't have to worry about the moths getting to it.
You don't have to worry about the film degrading.
It's ready to watch and share and relive and enjoy.
Fantastic Father's Day, Mother's Day gift.
Fantastic Valentine's Day gift.
It's a really, really good product.
Legacy Box.
My parents have used it actually.
250,000 families across the country have used it.
My parents are ecstatic about it.
My dad dug out the tapes of his father and he's now sent those to Legacy Box and is looking forward to receiving back the DVD.
Right now, if you go to LegacyBox.com slash Ben, you get a 40% discount on your orders.
That's a pretty heavy slash on the price, and that's a pretty great price to begin with.
So LegacyBox.com slash Ben, you get that 40% discount, and they guarantee that all of your stuff comes back to you.
You get to slap a little label on it to make sure that they can track it through the process, tell you where it is.
Terrific, terrific stuff.
Legacybox.com slash Ben to get that 40% discount on your legacy box.
Okay, so the Democratic Party is falling apart because they're tearing each other apart.
They're tearing themselves apart.
They're more interested in the genius of intersectionality than they are in building an actual coalition, which is why they're falling apart and losing white voters.
I promise you, this lady, this Willis woman who is going to go and march with this Women's March and isn't going to anymore, next time around, if she doesn't vote Republican, her kids will think about it, because at a certain point, they're going to realize, I don't want to be seen.
It's funny.
They say, we all just want to be seen as women.
Why don't you just want to be seen as a human?
Why don't you just get rid of all the categories?
You want to be seen as an individual human being with qualities and attributes.
And eventually, when people get tired of being portrayed as just a member of a group, no more than your group, you want to be seen as an individual.
And that's when you become prey to me, right?
That's when you become prey to conservatism and conservative ideology, which is all about judging people as individuals based on their actions, not based on their intentions, and not based on their group identity.
We have to break here on Facebook.
If you want to watch the rest of the show, we have a lot coming up.
Go to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.
Eight bucks a month will buy you a subscription to dailywire.com.
We have a bunch of new goodies coming out in the next six weeks or so.
I think right now if you get an annual subscription you still get a free copy, a free signed copy.
My book, True Allegiance, my novel, True Allegiance, and that has been flying off the shelves.
Go to dailywire.com for that.
Also, you get the rest of the show on video.
If you're listening right now, you get to watch me on video.
The show's much better on video than it is even orally, which is saying a lot since it's a fantastic show, even if you're just listening to it.
But if you're watching it, it's even better.
You get Andrew Klavan's show.
You get to be part of the mailbag, which we do in a couple of days.
I think in the near future, we're going to add a Friday show.
We're going to add some extra goodies behind the scenes for dailywire.com.