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Feb. 23, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:17
Ep. 258 - Is The Enemy Of Our Enemy Our Friend?
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In November, students at a historically black university in New Orleans led a massive protest against a speaker heavily supportive of Donald Trump.
Socially engaged Dillard University students, the group organizing against the speaker, wrote an open letter.
They said, quote, His presence on our campus is not welcome and overtly subjects the entire student body to safety risks and social ridicule.
This is simply outrageous.
The speaker's safety was guaranteed by the university and he proceeded to explain, quote, I will be Donald Trump's most loyal advocate.
The protesters were of the political left.
They chanted, no KKK, no fascist USA.
Protesters were hit with pepper spray and two of them were arrested.
So, here is the question for you.
Did this make inviting the speaker worthwhile?
The answer should be obvious.
From this account of events, you don't have enough information to say.
The speaker could have been Sheriff David Clark, or Rudy Giuliani, or Newt Gingrich, or Milo Yiannopoulos.
It wasn't.
It was David Duke, who also said at the same event, quote, If you did not answer that the story provided too little information for you to judge, it's time for you to check your biases.
Did you decide that the speaker was on the right because the protesters were on the left?
Did you decide the Speaker had something valuable to say if he ticked off the left enough?
If he melted enough snowflakes?
Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort of binary thinking.
If it pisses off the left, it must be virtuous.
Undoubtedly, that is a crude shorthand for political thinking.
It means you never have to check the ideas of the Speaker, you merely have to check how people respond to him.
Which is dangerous.
It leads to people supporting bad policies and bad men.
The enemy of your enemy isn't always your friend.
Sometimes, he's your enemy.
Sometimes he's just a dude sitting there minding his own business.
You don't have enough information to know.
The logic of if he melts snowflakes, he's one of us actually hands power to the left by allowing leftists to define our friends.
It gets to choose whom we support.
This isn't speculative.
It actually happened during the 2016 primaries when the media attacked Donald Trump incessantly, driving Republicans into his outstretched arms.
The media's obvious hatred for Trump was one of the chief arguments for Trump from his advocates.
They said, if, as his detractors claimed, he wasn't conservative, why would the leftist media hate him so much?
Now, to be fair, after Mitt Romney was bludgeoned at the hands of the media, there was at least a shred of justification for this logic.
Romney wasn't a hardcore conservative.
He wasn't a personal shambles.
He got savaged by the media anyway simply for the sin of having an R after his name.
The same thing happened to John McCain, a maverick Republican the leftist media had openly praised for years.
If the media opposed Trump with all their heart and all their soul, that must have been some sort of reaction to Trump himself.
It wasn't really, though.
It was a combination of factors, including the fact Trump was amazing press, and the press thought Trump was really weak.
More honest leftist commentators openly preferred Trump to more conservative candidates like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, but Trump's war with the media carried him to the nomination, and from there to the presidency.
In fact, Trump continues to live off of this backward logic.
His press conference last week, it wasn't a ballet of informational expertise and policy knowledge, nor was it a brilliant recasting of his policy successes.
It was a blunderbuss attack on the media, and it was extremely entertaining, it was occasionally daft, it was occasionally ridiculous, but a lot of people on the right immediately concluded it was the most successful press conference in the history of the world.
Not because it was actually successful with Americans, there was not a lot of evidence of that, but because it was successfully assaulting the media who had it coming.
Never mind if Trump lied to the media, the media were angry, which meant it worked.
Watching Chuck Todd fulminate, and Chris Wallace rage, and Don Lemon bemusedly tut-tut, it scratched conservatives where they itch, and it made Trump a hero.
None of which is to argue that Trump is lefty, or that conservatives are wrong to support a lot of his policies.
We'll talk about his policies in a second.
But if your standard of right and wrong is whether the left hates it, you're making a category error.
It is not good enough to just be opposed by the left.
You actually have to oppose the left.
We must ask what someone is fighting against, not merely whom.
We must ask what tools they're using, and we must insist they use the truth.
Ideas and values matter more than identity, but not anymore.
The left's identity politics focuses on race and ethnicity and sexual identity, aspects of identity that place you somewhere in the hierarchy of intersectionality.
The right's identity politics comes with a label, enemy of the left.
So long as you're wearing that button, you're presumptively on our side and you're nearly bulletproof.
Until it turns out that you're not.
Until we jump the wrong way because we substituted political laziness for a philosophy.
Until we embrace somebody nasty because the other side hated him or her and stopped caring about the truth so long as the other side is triggered.
Then we become the bad guys.
And that's a big problem.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so I want to talk a lot more about sort of this enemy of my enemy is my friend routine that we're getting from a lot of folks on the right, why that isn't true, and how we can actually identify enemies.
In a second, we're also going to talk about Donald Trump's policies.
He's rolled out a bunch of policy that's actually pretty good, and I want to talk about a lot of the policy that he's been rolling out.
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Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about Donald Trump's policy.
So, this is fun.
Let's do Good Trump, Bad Trump, because we actually get to do some Good Trump today, which is exciting.
So, Good Trump, Bad Trump.
Good Trump, Bad Trump, which one will we get today?
And as always, thanks to our composer, Brandon Snipes.
Here is Donald Trump.
Good Trump!
Yay!
There it is, good Trump.
So, that whole Mike Flynn debacle with the National Security Advisor, that ended up actually working out pretty well for the country because Mike Flynn is out and the guy who replaced him is a guy named H.R.
McMaster.
Now, H.R.
McMaster is a lieutenant general.
And he is terrific.
I've read his book, Dereliction of Duty.
I read it, must have been now, seven, eight years ago, because there was a point when I think the Army, the War College, they posted online their recommended reading list.
I read everything on the recommended reading list, and one of those books was H.R.
McMaster's book on the Vietnam War called Dereliction of Duty about the strategy that came out of the JFK and LBJ administrations with regard to the Vietnam War, why the strategy was flawed and why the military should have stood up against the strategy instead of simply implementing a really crappy strategy called graduated escalation, which was the idea why the strategy was flawed and why the military should have stood up against the strategy instead of simply implementing a really crappy strategy called graduated escalation, which was the idea that if we would gradually increase the number of troops in Vietnam, we'd squeeze the There's a lot that you should know about H.R. McMaster.
First of all, the guy has an awesome superhero name.
Second of all, his army resume is really, really extensive.
His previous command assignments included the Eagle Troop, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Germany, and then Southwest Asia during the First Gulf War.
He was a commander during Afghanistan, he was a commander during Iraq.
He wrote Dereliction of Duty, which as I say is a really good book.
You should go to Amazon right now and pick it up.
It's really a first rate read.
He's a great writer and he's a really good thinker.
He was critical of both how Afghanistan and Iraq were planned.
So, what he wrote in Survival Magazine, he wrote, gaps between prior visions of future warfare and the nature of the eventual wars themselves complicated efforts to adapt strategy over time.
Minimalist linear plans in place at the outset of both wars were disconnected from the ambition of broader policy objectives and the complexity of the operating environment.
Indeed, recent war plans have at times been essentially narcissistic, failing to account for interactions with determined enemies and other complicating variables.
He was writing this in real time.
He was saying in real time, our strategy is not going to meet your objectives.
If you want a long-term occupation, this ain't going to work.
He used his own strategy in a place called Tal Afar in Iraq, and George W. Bush called it a model of a successful strategy.
He figured that Iraq could not build its own institutions, political or military, until safety was secured, so he devised his own plan in which he and his troops cleared the towns of insurgents and formed alliances, built trust with the local sheikhs and tribal leaders, and the campaign worked for a while, but only because McMaster flooded the area, right?
He actually did what he had suggested in Dereliction of Duty.
He flooded the area, and that was what they called the Clear Hold Build strategy.
Petraeus used McMaster as sort of his brain in devising his strategy with regard to Iraq.
He was not selected for a Brigadier General promotion before he finally received it in 2014.
One of the reasons for that is because there are a bunch of retired generals who said that he was upending the system too much.
They didn't want to reward him.
He is warned about cuts to the army.
He's a really, really good nominee.
He's about the best guy you could have in this particular slot.
And he has also, in short, he says that he would not come in, he said that he would not join, basically, unless he was guaranteed the picking of his own staff.
So this was actually a big issue as Flynn left, was Trump wanted to maintain Flynn's staff, and McMaster came in and said, listen, you want me?
You're going to have to let me pick my own guys, which is great.
You want people like McMaster surrounding himself with really good people and giving Donald Trump really good advice.
So whether Trump takes that advice, we'll find out.
But good for Donald Trump for picking McMaster.
Really, really good pick there.
Other things that are good that Donald Trump is doing.
So, he's getting a lot of flack today because the White House has now stepped away from the transgender bathroom nonsense that Barack Obama foisted on the nation when he suggested that the federal government was going to cram down on local schools all around the country.
The idea that people could go to the bathroom, basically, of their choice.
Or that accommodated the sex with which they identify, not their actual biological sex.
Trump has stepped away from that as well he should.
However you stand on the transgender bathroom debate, which is really a silly debate in my opinion, however you stand on it, this should be a local control issue.
This should not be a federal issue.
The idea that the federal government stepped in there in the first place is idiotic.
And good for Trump for stepping away from it.
Apparently, Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, wanted to maintain that policy.
And the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, did not.
And Trump sided with Sessions.
Right call from Donald Trump.
Other good things that are happening under Trump.
Scott Pruitt, who's the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, he gave a speech at the EPA in which he basically told the regulators, look guys, your job is not to punish businesses.
Your job is to create a stable set of regulations that are predictable Regulations ought to make things regular.
those regulations, which is exactly right.
Here's Scott Pruitt, who is hotly contested, talking to all of his employees at the EPA. - Regulations ought to make things regular.
Regulators exist to give certainty to those that they regulate.
Those that we regulate ought to know what's expected of them so that they can plan and allocate resources to comply.
That's really the job of a regulator.
And the process that we engage in in adopting regulations is very, very important.
Because it sends a message.
It sends a message that we take seriously our role of taking comment and offering response, and then making informed decisions on how it's going to impact those in the marketplace.
This all sounds very vague, but what he's actually saying is that what regulators very often do is they make their own priorities the priority.
They don't care about creating a stable business environment so that people know what the rules are, and they're constantly throwing monkey wrenches into the works.
So good for Scott Pruitt.
Scott Pruitt's a very good pick at EPA.
I think he's really going to reform things over there.
Where things are a little bit more vague remains on the deportation policy, what that's actually going to look like.
So I wanted to talk about an email that I received yesterday, which I thought was really an interesting and good email that is worthy of thought and discussion.
So I got an email yesterday from a person who suggested that yesterday when I said, you know, when we're overrating, you know, the level of change here, Everybody needs to calm down a little bit.
Everybody needs to stop worrying quite so much because not that much has happened yet.
You know, why is everybody really going crazy?
And this immigration lawyer wrote to me, who listens to the program, and he said, well, you know, I think that that's a little bit overstated.
Like, there are people whose lives have actually changed.
There are people whose lives have actually changed.
And he said, particularly in the immigration sphere.
So he's an immigration lawyer.
And what he said is that he is... I'm trying to find the exact email now.
What he basically said was that there's a lot of vagueness as far as how the immigration plans are being implemented.
And that's a problem.
That's a problem.
Because if you're an immigrant, you're an illegal immigrant, you don't know what to expect tomorrow.
You don't know whether you're being deported or whether you're not being deported.
The Obama and the Trump administration has been really vague on this.
So they've issued an executive order that basically does say that you don't have to have committed a crime beyond being an illegal immigrant in order to be deported.
But then they've also said that they're not going to be in favor of mass deportations.
But then they've also arrested people who have come in to to report their their immigration compliance to check in with the court.
And then these people have been arrested and deported, which has been a problem.
I think that's a fair critique.
I do think that that's a fair critique.
Sean Spicer didn't help when he added to the confusion a little bit yesterday.
Here is Sean Spicer talking about mass deportations.
Is one of the goals here mass deportation?
No.
Look, I think what we have to get back to is understanding a couple things.
There's a law in place that says, you know, if you're in this country illegally, that we have an obligation to make sure that the people who are in our country are here legally.
What the order sets out today is ensures that the million or so people that have been adjudicated already That there's a, that ICE prioritizes, creates a system of prioritization, and make sure that we walk through that system in a way that protects this country.
This is consistent with everything the President has talked about, which is prioritizing the people who are here who represent a threat to public safety or have a criminal record.
And all this does is lay out the exact procedures to make sure that that subgroup of people who pose a threat to our nation because of a conviction or a violation of public safety or have a criminal record are adjudicated first and foremost.
That's it, plain and simple.
Okay, so that's fine, except for the fact that the executive order does a little bit more than that.
So what you're getting from the Trump administration is we're not going to mass deport, we're not knocking down doors, and then what you're getting in terms of the actual policy that's written out is that they have the capacity to do that.
A little bit of clarity would be good.
I think that it would be good for Ann Coulter's heart rate if we could get a little clarity on what this policy actually looks like because it's still a little bit vague.
We don't know what it looks like.
So when I say don't panic yet, I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep an eye on it.
I'm saying that we need better definition before we panic.
We need a little bit of a better definition before we panic on any of that.
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Okay, so with all of this said, with all of the stuff that Trump is doing, a lot of which is really good.
Now we have to discuss how we define and how we determine whether conservatives, when conservatives should stick with Trump and when they shouldn't stick with Trump.
And this is not a, it's very weird.
I think that we fell, as I said at the beginning, we've fallen into this binary thinking with regard to politicians.
If the left hates someone, they must be our friend.
The left hates Trump.
Therefore, everything Trump does is good.
And that's really silly.
And at the same time, there are a lot of people who oppose Trump and they feel like if you oppose Trump, then that must make you good.
That must be a good thing.
As I've said before, I don't think it's important whether you oppose Trump or support Trump.
I don't think Trump is important.
I think that his policies are important.
I think the things he says are important because he's president of the United States and so it's a big mistake to identify your friends and enemies by simply defining a friend who you will always follow no matter what or defining an enemy you will always go against no matter what and you'll always assume they're wrong no matter what.
That's a big mistake and I want to talk a little bit more about that but you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com to hear all of that.
Do we have a trailer for it?
$8 a month over at dailywire.com.
We have a lot of goodies coming.
If you become a subscriber right now, the goodie we're giving away is a, is a fictional film called the Arroyo, which you can check out.
I think we're doing a live stream of the Arroyo actually on Friday on Facebook.
So you can check out the Arroyo there.
Do we have a trailer for it?
Actually, We're supposed to grab a trailer.
If not, then we'll have the trailer for it tomorrow and we'll play that on Daily Wire so you can check out what it is that you're getting if you become a subscriber at dailywire.com.
We're going to play the whole movie on Friday on our Facebook page, so check that out.
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I keep saying this, but it will open in the very, very near future and there will be all sorts of new things that are wonderful.
Including, I really want to get those buttons.
I had a button at my speech last night.
There were a bunch of people who wore stickers that said, UCSB against hate.
UC Santa Barbara against hate.
So I wore a button that said, me against you sucking.
So I think that we'll make some goods like that available to you as well, because you should let all your friends know that you are against them sucking.
So we'll definitely make that available.
But check that out.
Also, you can listen later, obviously, at iTunes or SoundCloud.
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