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Aug. 28, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:04
Trump’s First Crisis | Ep. 371
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Hurricane Harvey hits Houston and the fallout is pretty devastating.
We'll talk about that.
Plus Antifa goes back to Berkeley and we'll talk about that as well.
Plus the VMAs decide to hit Trump because of course they do.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, so lots of news breaking over the weekend.
Most of it from Houston, where Hurricane Harvey has hit incredibly hard Apparently there's 50 inches of rain in Houston, which is just an astonishing amount of rain.
And these pictures are just amazing.
I'm going to show you some pictures in just a second of what the hurricane actually looks like, what the conditions on the ground have been.
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Okay, so...
Over in Houston, it is a full-scale disaster area.
I want to show you some of the pictures of what's happening in Houston.
Really incredible.
So this is what certain parts of Texas now look like.
You can see the entire town is covered in water.
There are a few cars on the street.
But you can see that the cars are covered all the way up to the windshield.
So this water is 3-4 feet deep.
You're seeing boats with the fan motors on the back just going around in the streets in this particular photo.
Really shocking and incredible photo.
You can see some more of it.
So here's another picture.
This is downtown Houston.
It's a lake.
It's a lake.
I mean, downtown Houston is entirely underwater.
Houston is built in an area that is about 35 to 40 feet above sea level, but it is incredibly flat and there are a few marshes, what they call bayous, that are over there where all the water was designed to flow.
One of the things that's happened, people are looking at the streets and saying, why are the streets underwater?
Well, that's because the streets were actually designed as a secondary spillway.
In case of situations like this, the idea was that the water would go into the streets so that it wouldn't go into your homes, but it's been completely overwhelmed.
Here's another picture of what it looks like in Houston today.
This, of course, is a small child in his home.
And this kid was rescued, by the way.
The kid is sitting on the counter, and you can see this yellow brine just rising in the kitchen.
Gotta be two feet high in the kitchen.
There was tape of people who are actually fishing inside their home because there's so much water.
They're legitimately just standing in thigh-deep water and pulling fish out of their house.
I mean, totally crazy stuff.
You can see water, what it looks like when it pours into an office building.
This was happening in downtown Houston as well.
I can see the doors are shut.
It's not stopping the water.
Here it goes.
This is at the news headquarters.
I think it's the New York Times News headquarters, I believe.
Just unbelievable stuff. .
So some of the questions that people were asking is they were asking, why is it that Houston was not evacuated?
So the governor, Greg Abbott, wanted to evacuate Houston about three days in advance.
The mayor said no.
It's not quite as simple as the mayor's an idiot.
The fact is that during Hurricane Rita, there was an attempt to evacuate and like a hundred people died, I believe, during Hurricane Rita in the evacuation because people were stuck on the roads.
It was crowded.
It was overheated.
People were dying in their cars.
And so what would have happened if everybody had been on the road and then the flood hits?
You can actually look at what the video looks like of the streets themselves.
Look at these boats maneuvering down the street.
Okay, this is actually in Dickinson, Texas.
This is what the streets look like right now.
You can see there are cars that are completely submerged, and people are moving around in their boats trying to save people from their homes.
There's an old age home, actually, where they had to save, I think, 15 people, where the old age home was completely underwater.
Just incredible stuff.
So, one of the questions that's been asked is, how is Trump doing on all this, right?
How's the federal government doing on all this?
So Trump, as is Trump's want, tweets out a lot of stupid things, right?
He tweets out a lot of dumb things.
He tweeted out a bunch of things about the hurricane that are really kind of silly.
He tweeted, it sounds like a game show host tweeting about the hurricane.
You know, he tweeted out, for example, wow, exclamation point, right?
About the size of the hurricane.
I mean, it almost as though, like this, this 17 hours ago, All caps.
Historic rainfall in Houston and all over Texas.
Flood are unprecedented and more rain coming.
Spirit of the people is incredible.
Thanks!
And then he tweeted also, he tweeted a bunch of things about Mexico.
Now he tweeted, he tweeted this, this was yesterday.
Wow!
Now experts are calling Harvey a once in a 500 year flood!
We have an all out effort going and going well.
And he also tweeted out, many people are now saying this is the worst storm hurricane they have ever seen.
Good news is that we have great talent on the ground.
So, I mean, this sort of wonderment from Trump is not, is not good tactics.
I mean, it's just not great politics.
You don't really want to spend A lot of time when, in the middle of a storm, I'm talking about, wow, this is historic.
Like, we can all observe this, but we're not in control of it.
Like, theoretically, you should actually be projecting a sense of calm when you do this.
Not, wow, look at that rain.
Isn't that amazing?
Also, we're here.
But, that's really been the only criticism of Trump, which demonstrates that Trump actually is doing a pretty good job with all of this.
Right, Trump has not done anything wrong.
So the media, can you imagine if Trump were doing a bad job?
Remember how the media was about Hurricane Katrina, where it wasn't even the federal government's responsibility to be there?
And they responded in relatively prompt fashion and the media ripped them up and down because the Democratic governor of the state, Kathleen...
Mary Landrieu, I think it was.
Kathleen Blanco was the governor of the state at the time.
She was garbage.
She was a terrible governor at the time.
And Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans had told people not to evacuate, and then a lot of people died because of that, and then they blamed Bush for it.
Can you imagine if things went wrong in Texas how much blame Trump would get?
It would be insane, right?
The media would never stop.
The media would never stop.
But Trump hasn't done a bad job with this because he allowed his administrators to do what they had to do.
He told them to get down.
The federal government learned its job from Hurricane Katrina.
They're never going to be caught off guard on this sort of stuff again.
And the federal government is doing what it's supposed to do here.
Greg Abbott said, Trump has already told us whatever we need we're gonna get.
By the way, it's all locals and state that's really doing most of this work.
The National Guard is down there helping out too.
But this is the difference between Greg Abbott doing a good job at the state level and the mayor of Houston apparently doing a good job with local law enforcement.
He's a Democrat, so this is a bipartisan thing.
Now here's Greg Abbott talking about the federal government's response.
What can you tell us about President Trump's personal engagement in this problem and in managing the response to it?
It's been extremely professional, very helpful.
He called and said, Governor, whatever you need, you've got.
And this is the quickest turnaround I've ever seen from the time that a governor made a disaster declaration to getting that granted.
Okay, so Trump is doing what he's supposed to do.
He's checking all the boxes.
The FEMA administrator, right, works for Trump, says, listen, we're going to be there for years and that's okay.
We're going to fix all this stuff.
The National Weather Service says that parts of Texas might be uninhabitable for weeks, even potentially months, after the hurricane.
Are you prepared?
Is FEMA prepared to be there for months on end?
FEMA's going to be there for years, sir.
This disaster is going to be a landmark event, and we're already in the stages.
While we're focused on response right now and helping Texas respond, we're already pushing forward recovery housing teams.
We're already pushing forward forces to be on the ground to implement the National Flood Insurance Program.
Okay, again, the point here is that the media would be all up in Trump's business if Trump were doing a bad job on this.
And that's how you can tell when Trump is doing something okay.
When the media are all up in Trump's business over something ancillary, that means that the main job that he's doing is basically okay.
When Trump does something terrible, the media are all over him.
When he does something mediocre, the media are all over him.
When they're focusing on his tweets about the hurricane as opposed to the actual federal government response, that means the federal government is doing what it needs to do and I promise you the people in Houston don't give two dams about what Trump tweets about this stuff.
All they care about right now is, is there going to be somebody who's going to help me get out of my house?
I mean, it was getting so bad that people were tweeting their home address over Twitter to the emergency response teams because the 911 call center was jammed.
There have been over a hundred, sorry, a thousand rescue attempts.
I think five people dead in the flooding so far in Houston.
The local PD was telling people, if you're going to take shelter in your attic, make sure that you have an axe.
Because if the water rises, you may have to bust your way through the roof.
Okay, that's how bad things have gotten in Houston.
Good for the local administrators, and good for the police, and good for the citizens.
There have been a lot of citizens.
Great stories.
Citizens out there, in their boats, going around saving people.
Just normal people.
I mean, just going around Really, it shows the American spirit.
It is amazing how the media covers this, by the way.
There was one guy who was driving around, and he was sailing around in his boat, picking people up, and he happened to have a Confederate flag on the back of his boat.
And the media had coverage of this, and they refused to cover it because he had a Confederate flag.
Because clearly, this guy was a brutal, vicious racist, even though he was saving black people from their houses, too.
Clearly, the Confederate flag trumps the fact that he's out there saving people.
Anyone with a Confederate flag must be evil and nasty.
I know there was a story like that today, where there was tape of, it was kind of funny tape, of a fellow who had a hawk land in the middle of his car.
And the hawk came in and landed in the middle of his truck because it had no other place to land.
And naturally, the internet went nuts because this guy had a Confederate flag in his car.
So obviously, that's something terrible.
And we can never, ever, ever say nice things about anyone who has a Confederate flag in their car.
The reason that I bring that up is because there's a lot of talk, as this hurricane is happening, about why can't America just be that?
Why can't America just be that?
Why can't America just be the place where we all help each other out?
Where disasters happen, and it doesn't matter our political creeds, it doesn't matter our ethnicities, it doesn't matter our culture, all that matters is that we know each other and we try to help each other out because this is America where we're all Americans.
Why can't we be like that all the time?
Well, I'm going to explain to you why we can't be like that all the time because we're going to shift focus to Berkeley in just a second.
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So, why can't everything be like Houston?
Why can't we all just get along, as Rodney King might put it?
The answer is, because it's one thing to look at existential threats, like the rain, and say, okay, we all better get together against it.
We better get together against this.
Yeah, I don't talk Game of Thrones on the show too much, because I know that a lot of people don't watch Game of Thrones.
But this is sort of the general tenor of Game of Thrones, is that there's a threat that comes from the North that's not giving anything away.
It's in the first episode.
There's a threat coming from the North, and it's these zombies basically coming from the North of the country.
And then in the South of the country, everybody is fighting over domination.
And so half of the series is about how do you get all of these people together to stop fighting in petty fashion with each other in order to fight the White Walkers who are coming from the North.
Ronald Reagan used to say this all the time about the Soviet Union.
He used to say, you know, we're fighting the Soviet Union right now, they're fighting us.
But what if aliens were to come from outer space and attack the Earth?
Well, then we'd all be on the same side, wouldn't we?
We're all human.
Okay, but the thing is that the conflicts that we have with each other still matter.
So I know that everybody wants to do this kumbaya moment over Houston.
Oh, look how everybody's getting along.
But I promise you, as soon as the waters recede, we're going right back to politics as usual because these issues matter.
The question is, how do we all get on the same page about the issues that matter, not just about opposing the rain, not just about opposing the zombies, not just about opposing the aliens, but on the issues that matter, how do we all get on the same page?
Well, I would suggest that the first place to start is we should all be on the same page about you don't get to hit people who disagree with you.
This is the first rule of being a civilized human being.
You don't get to hit people who disagree with you.
This is what I'm trying to teach my three-and-a-half-year-old right now.
You don't get to hit people who disagree with you.
She's gonna get that message now when she's three-and-a-half, not when she's twenty-five.
But the left refuses to get this message.
So over in Berkeley, there was a, I guess they call it Patriot Pride, so it's just a right-wing march.
No evidence that this is a Nazi march or an alt-right march, as far as I'm aware of.
This seems like, I think it's patriot prayer is what they call themselves.
This is a normal right-wing conservative group, and they were just marching for free speech, and Antifa showed up in force.
And apparently it was pretty horrifying, not just because of what happened, but also because of the police response.
So, this rally was supposed to happen in a park, Antifa showed up, thousands of them showed up.
And the police were supposed to be guarding the park, and the police themselves said, we backed off.
That all these people showed up, and we thought that it would facilitate conflict, it would create more conflict, if we were to try and get in the way of these Antifa people, so we decided to back off instead.
They left vulnerable citizens vulnerable.
Here's what some of the Santifa march looked like in Berkeley yesterday.
So you can see the red flags and the black flags.
You can see everybody's got their face covered.
Good indicator, by the way, that if you have to cover your face, you're a criminal.
Or would be a criminal.
Okay, so you can see that they're carrying, basically, the red and black is communism and anarchism.
That's what that combination is.
They're all wearing black.
They're all covering their faces.
Just like a bank robber, if you cover your face, it's not because you're about to do something good.
When was the last time, aside from Batman, no one covers their face to do something good?
Everyone who does good things wants credit for it.
Everyone who does bad things is robbing a bank.
So all these people are there not to do something good, but to march in solidarity with people who hurt people.
There was a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and this just goes to show you how insane the press are.
So she's tweeting from this rally about the violent things that are going on, and afterwards she said it was mostly peaceful.
I love how this works.
So, when white supremacists have a rally in Charlottesville, and a white supremacist kills one person and injures 19 others with a car, and a few fights happen, but there are like a thousand of them, then it's a totally violent rally.
But, when a bunch of people get violent in an Antifa rally, it's mostly peaceful.
That's the way that it works.
When there's a Tea Party rally, which no violence occurs, they are called terrorists by Barack Obama and members of the federal government.
Here is my view.
If a large percentage of your crowd, or even a relatively small percentage of your crowd, is engaging in violence and everyone else is not disassociating, it is not unfair to say that this is a violent movement.
If I were to rally and people there started getting violent, you know what I would do?
I would leave.
Or I would tell the cops to stop the violence immediately.
But that's not what happened.
Here's Antifa actually attacking a journalist.
That guy's a journalist.
Because they grabbed his camera and they started going after him.
And there's a journalist who's been pushed down on the ground.
And you can see what was hilarious about this is people holding up shields that say no hate on them as they're basically running people over.
That was not the only situation like this.
Here's Antifa at this rally in Berkeley attacking a father and a son.
What are you guys beating us up for?
Damn!
He's amazing!
They're hopping on this guy and beating the crap out of him.
Just grand, folks.
These are, it's just like It's just like World War II.
Remember, we were told, like, two weeks ago that these people were basically just like the World War II soldiers, right?
I mean, this is Normandy.
This is what Normandy was like.
Normandy was a bunch of schmucks beating up a bunch of randos who were walking around.
That's exactly what Normandy was.
I don't know why you guys don't know your history.
Here's another one.
This guy was walking along the street.
There are people who are saying... The left was saying he's an apparent alt-righter.
Again, no evidence of who this guy is.
We have no clue who he is.
Somebody else was saying he was a guy walking home from the grocery store who was attacked because he was mistaken for an alt-righter.
We just don't know the answer.
But regardless, unless he initiated the violence, does this look like appropriate behavior?
You can see there's a guy on the ground.
To this guy's credit, there's a black guy who jumped on top of him.
And he's trying to prevent people from hitting him.
But the guy goes down and people are beating him up.
You can see the folks in the black masks trying to get violent with him.
Okay, the worst one is this one.
You're about to see a guy legitimately get beat.
Pretty senseless.
Here's a fellow who got jumped on and pummeled.
This is Eleven.
You can see there's that guy on the ground.
They're dragging him.
They're kicking him.
They're punching him.
Pretty astonishing.
So all this stuff was happening.
Where were the cops for any of this?
You see any cops?
So here's the deal, Berkeley.
Okay, let's start with this.
I'm coming September 14th.
We just paid $15,000 security fee so that you guys would be protecting.
If this goes down, it's all on you.
I've already openly called and I will continue to call for no one Who's a supporter of mine to engage in violence, even defensive violence.
I want everybody to come and be entirely peaceful, okay?
This is an act of non-violent resistance.
We're going there with the approval of the Berkeley administration.
We have every right to be there.
You have every right to be there.
You have every right to attend.
Okay, don't act violent because I want the world to know.
I want America to see whether the police are going to do their jobs.
They charged us an arm and a leg to ensure security.
Let's see if they run away and allow Antifa to have its way.
I'm not blaming the individual cops.
I think the cops want to do their job.
But whoever the higher-ups here are, they're doing a garbage job.
And if Governor Jerry Brown won't call out the National Guard to stop this sort of material, then he is a horrible governor.
He is a horrible governor, by the way.
But if he won't do that, then it's just demonstrative of the fact that the left uses the rioters' veto to try and establish these fascist safe spaces in places like Berkeley.
So you wonder, you look at Houston, which is the best that we have to offer, and then you look at Antifa, which is the worst that we have to offer, and you wonder, what's the difference?
The difference is that when there is no existential crisis, people sometimes get worse.
When there's no existential crisis, people find something to believe in.
And when you have a country where people have been told for two generations now that America is not a thing to believe in, that free speech is not a thing to believe in because hey, who knows?
You may be a Nazi.
Who say that the regime is a white supremacist regime.
America is a white supremacist country.
There's nothing to defend.
There's nothing to stand up for.
Our history is replete with racism and sexism and bigotry.
When you teach people that, what's the existential threat?
The existential threat is the system itself.
When you look at Houston, the existential threat is not the system.
The existential threat is the rain.
For Game of Thrones fans, the existential threat is death, right?
And even if you're gonna lose, you still have to fight.
But there's the existential threat.
But what happens when that existential threat no longer exists?
I think there's a very strong case to be made that one of the great ills that happened to the soul of America, it's a great thing for the world, one of the great ills that happened to the soul of Americans is the fall of the Soviet Union.
Not because the Soviet Union was a great place.
It was an evil, evil place.
It was an amazing thing for the world.
The Soviet Union fell.
Amazing thing.
Millions of people were freed and were lifted out of poverty by capitalism.
But for the soul of Americans, the idea that there's this existential threat in the form of an evil ideology Once that goes away we begin to eat our own.
What's the new existential threat that you are going to devote your life to fighting?
Religious people.
We devote our life to fighting the existential threat of the darkness, right?
The idea of being a religious human being in Western civilization is that you devote yourself to fighting off The threat of people who are intent on ripping away the notion of a God-filled universe where your actions matter, right?
That's what religion is all about, is you spreading the word that your actions matter, that your soul matters, that God cares about you, and that the universe has a mission for you, right?
That's what religion is about.
So religious people spend their life fighting that.
Sometimes it gets violent in terrible ways, but that's at least their goal, right?
What is the goal of Antifa?
Presumably they would say their goal is to fight racism.
But where do they turn their ire?
They turn their ire against the common man walking down the street in favor of free speech.
Because free speech is just part of the strata, the stratification of American society.
It's part of a power structure.
It's legitimately what the left says.
The left will say that free speech is just the revivification of the power structure.
It's just the reinstatement of the power structure.
The only people who care about free speech are the powerful.
That powerless people don't really have power of free speech because they're poor.
So we have to silence people.
So here's what I suggest.
If we all want to get together again, we have to understand that the existential threat is not without, it is within.
It is not people so much as it is ideology.
The existential threat that we now face in the United States is a nihilistic view of the universe that says that the new wars we have to fight are wars against liberalism itself.
I mean classical liberalism, against freedom.
Freedom itself is a threat.
That is the existential threat to the United States.
What you're seeing in Antifa is an existential threat to the future of the country.
Because what you're looking at right now are people who are willing to use violence.
Even the Washington Post got this right.
Even the Washington Post said, Antifa rioters beat up non-violent protesters.
Peaceful protesters.
At least the Washington Post got that right.
They've been blabbing wrongly about this for weeks and months.
The existential threat to the country lies within.
It's not just the rain in Houston.
It's the darkness in the human heart that says, if you disagree with me, I get to shut you down.
That is a serious problem.
Again, the tradition of liberty rises out of a Judeo-Christian value system that must be reinforced at every turn for children particularly, but we're fighting that too.
The existential threat comes from our own hearts, and that's a much harder thing to fight.
It's a much harder thing to fight, and that's why conflicts like this are going to continue to rage, and we won't all just be Houston, because we're not all going to have to deal with a hurricane every day, but we have to deal with the darkness inherent in the human heart, and that's much harder to deal with.
It means looking at ourselves, it means fighting ourselves when we think that we're doing the wrong thing, it means contemplating whether we're living up to our own ideals, and it means fighting people who are willing to twist those ideals into unrecognizable forms.
Okay, so I want to talk about a couple of things that happened over the weekend in the Trump administration.
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So the hurricane coverage and the Antifa coverage has really swamped some pretty big news that happened over the weekend.
A couple of big things happened over the weekend.
Late Friday afternoon, President Trump decided that it was definitely necessary for him to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
This was obviously a political move.
We can talk about the ramifications of it, why I think some people are overstating the case against the pardon.
But, you know, it's obviously a political move.
You know, Juan Williams sums up sort of the left view of why Sheriff Joe was pardoned.
Sheriff Joe had been a longtime Trump supporter.
No question that that had something to do with all of this.
Here is Juan Williams suggesting why he was pardoned.
This was not an act of mercy for someone who had been denied justice.
Sheriff Arpaio has not been sentenced yet.
He's been convicted but not sentenced.
So this was a preemptive act by President Trump that I think then sets a precedent going in that he can act in terms of pardons with a little review from the Justice Department to help out someone who's a family member, Someone who's a political ally?
You remember, Arpaio was not only an early supporter of Donald Trump, he was an early birther, and he is the face of hostility towards immigrants, specifically Mexicans and Latinos in this country.
So it was a political act that he promised his base on Tuesday night at that rally in Phoenix, and he has delivered on that promise in such a way as to say that in the future, such acts of pardon are not more normal.
Okay, so what the left is afraid of is that Arpaio is going to lead to a series of pardons for family members or Trump pardoning himself.
You know, again, I think that's overstated.
I don't think there's a lot of evidence of that.
I think that Trump just likes Arpaio and wanted to pardon him.
I think it's that simple.
And the reason he likes Arpaio is because Arpaio says that he likes Trump.
Here's Sheriff Joe talking about how he's going to be with Trump until the very end.
I love that president.
He supports law enforcement.
And I'm very humble.
If you recall two years ago, I supported him and I said publicly, recently, pardon or no pardon.
I will be with him to the end.
Okay, so that's really, I think, a reason behind this.
So let me give you sort of the background of facts about Sheriff Joe so you know what you're talking about.
So a lot of people are pointing out that Sheriff Joe has acted in corrupt fashion, that he's gone after journalists.
He had to pay out, I think, a $3.5 million payout.
The Sheriff's Department had to pay out a payout to journalists who was wrongly Arrested or harassed by the police.
They've had to pay tens of millions of dollars in various fees for racial profiling in civil suits.
So Sheriff Joe has not been, I think, a wonderful sheriff.
He's popular because for many years there was a lot of publicity around things like him forcing inmates to wear pink underwear because he wanted to emasculate them, which is funny, right?
Or Sheriff Joe wanting them to work on chain gangs because he didn't want them lazing around all day and forcing them to live in tents to be very uncomfortable instead of being in positions where they were in prisons, watching TV.
So he was popular on the right for a lot of those things.
He was also popular on the right because he would do immigration enforcement that a lot of people on the right felt the federal government was not doing, that he would police immigration, that he would do sort of these immigration sweeps and then check people.
The courts came in.
When they said what you're doing is illegal, it's racial profiling, he defied the court and he said, I am not going to pay attention to your court orders, at which point he was arrested and convicted for criminal contempt.
So there's a couple issues that are wrapped up here.
A lot of people are saying he deserves to be in jail because of all the things that he did that he wasn't convicted for.
That's not how the system works.
If you're going to be convicted for those things, then he should be convicted for those things.
You cannot like him for those things.
I think that's perfectly fine and fair.
But if we're going to talk about what he's being pardoned of, you have to talk about the crime that he actually committed, which is criminal contempt of court.
So let's start with the basic idea of criminal contempt of court.
We'll talk about the politics and why it's, you know, why Trump did what he did and whether it's smart or not in a second.
Criminal Contempt of Court is essentially a political offense.
I say that it's a political offense because the fact is that it is the court basically declaring that you are not acting in accordance with its rulings, and therefore it's going to throw you into jail.
A lot of people say that this is perfectly appropriate, that if you pardon somebody like Garpario, what you're really saying is that the executive branch has priority over the judicial branch.
But when it comes to pardons, the executive branch does have priority over the judicial branch.
I mean, that's in the Constitution.
Trump didn't do anything extra constitutional here.
And if you were to change the situation, let's say that there was a court in 1960s Alabama that ruled that Martin Luther King had to go to jail.
And so Martin Luther King goes to jail.
And then he says, you know what?
I'm not showing up for jail.
I'd rather be held in criminal contempt.
Or they convict him of something and they say, you have to pay a fine because you are disturbing the peace, right?
I'm making this situation up.
And Martin Luther King says, I'm not paying a fine.
The law is unfair.
Go screw yourselves.
And then they throw him in jail for criminal contempt.
And then he's pardoned by LBJ.
Is that illegitimate?
It's not illegitimate under those circumstances.
So simply saying that any attempt to overthrow a criminal contempt conviction with a pardon is illegitimate, I think, is overbroad.
So the question becomes, was this a political conviction of Sheriff Joe?
So there's a guy named Warren Henry over at the Federalist who has a very, very good column about this today, explaining all of the background to this.
He talks about, I should really just read some of it because it gives you the factual background you need.
In 2007, Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendrez and other plaintiffs brought a class action against Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, and other defendants, alleging the defendants violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution by racially profiling Latino motorists and passengers.
The Melendrez lawsuit, which the Justice Department joined—that was Bush's Justice Department—focused primarily on saturation patrols.
In 2009, ICE modified its agreement with Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office Revoking their authority to enforce civil immigration laws, except in jails.
In 2011, during pretrial proceedings, the district court judge, a guy named Murray Snow, a Bush appointee, ruled in favor of the Melendrez plaintiffs on some of their constitutional claims.
He entered a preliminary injunction barring the defendants from detaining people solely based on reasonable suspicion they were unlawfully present in the country.
So you can say that this is a political decision by the judge, but it was really the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that had already ruled on this.
He was abiding by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.
So basically, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that he doesn't have the authority, Arpaio does not have the authority to actually enforce immigration law himself.
Arpaio disagreed.
He decided to ignore the injunction.
So in 2013, after a non-jury trial, Snow concluded that Arpaio's policy violated the 4th and 14th amendments by using race as a factor in determining where to conduct patrols, in deciding whom to stop and investigate for civil immigration violations, and in prolonging detention of Latinos while their immigration status was confirmed.
So Arpaio and the NSCO continued to operate, openly acknowledging that they were violating the law at the time.
All of the parties in this particular lawsuit agreed race cannot be considered as a factor for reasonable suspicion.
That goes all the way back to 1975 and a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2000.
But Sheriff Joe is basically saying we're not doing it on a racial basis, we're rounding people up on the basis of where we think all the illegal immigrants are.
In May 2016, and this is the final contempt order, following 21 days of evidentiary hearings, Snow found Arpaio and other defendants in contempt of court.
In a 162-page order, Snow found Arpaio understood but intentionally failed to implement the court's preliminary injunction while publicly asserting that the MCSO, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, had the authority to do what had been enjoined in the belief that such activities would benefit his upcoming re-election campaign.
So in this case, Arpaio basically openly said, I'm ignoring the law, I know I'm ignoring the law, and that was the biggest problem here.
So, I think that Warren Henry's conclusion here is basically right, and I think this is what we should keep in mind.
Clinton appointee.
She rejected Arpaio's argument, and she said that he had to go to jail.
So I think that Warren Henry's conclusion here is basically right, and I think this is what we should keep in mind.
It's a little more complex than Trump had no right to pardon Arpaio, and it's a little more complex than Arpaio was clearly a political victim here.
It says, for viewing the court record and the public record as a whole, it's easy to argue politics were involved in the Arpaio case.
It is less easy to argue politics played a significant role or ran in only one direction.
For example, the Obama administration's termination of Arpaio's authority to enforce civil immigration laws carries at least a whiff of politics.
But a key to Snow's decision, as the judge who made the contempt decision, is that Arpaio's policy of using race as one factor in assessing reasonable suspicion for detaining motorists to check illegal immigration status was largely a continuation of ICE's legal interpretation, a view already rejected by the 9th Circuit.
It could be argued the 9th Circuit's precedent, which declined to follow dicta in the Supreme Court decision, was ideological, but it was a decision of the full court and it wasn't really disputed.
You could say that there were politics involved in the DOJ's decision to pursue Arpaio for criminal contempt.
Maybe.
That's possible.
Or maybe they were looking at his case and they thought that he had openly said that he was violating the law and engaging in some sort of racial profiling.
So here's the bottom line.
If you are sympathetic to what Arpaio was doing, if you think that the locals should be able to enforce immigration law, and that there will be some element that looks like racial profiling if you are involved in detaining illegal immigrants, In Maricopa County, then you are likely to think that this was a political prosecution.
If you think that racial profiling in this case was obvious and that Sheriff Joe's a bad guy and that he was attempting to do all these things in order to help his re-election campaign, then you are likely to think that Trump is the one who's political here.
But I don't think that it's quite as clear as everybody's making it out to be.
Now, politically, is it smart?
Well, it's not smart for the future.
Politically, it's not brilliant to alienate every Latino voter in the country by pardoning a guy who is most famous for saying kind of nasty things about Latinos generally to publications like Rolling Stone.
But obviously, Trump knows where his base is.
That's why Trump treated this as sort of a rallying point, right?
He treated it as an actual rally issue.
He went to Phoenix and spoke openly in front of a crowd about pardoning Sheriff Joe.
So for Trump, it might be a good move.
For the Republican Party in the long run, it probably is a bad move.
Is it unprecedented?
No, obviously not.
President Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning.
President Clinton pardoned Mark Rich for obvious political reasons.
It's not unprecedented in any way.
I've long said I'm an opponent of the president's ability to pardon.
I don't think governors should be able to pardon.
I don't think the president should be able to pardon.
I don't think they were granted any godlike knowledge that is above and beyond what a jury and a judge can do.
Okay, so in other news affecting the Trump administration, Rex Tillerson looks like he's going to be on the way out, the Secretary of State.
I think that's a good thing.
I don't think he's a good Secretary of State.
I think that Rex Tillerson is basically a Democrat.
I don't think that he is right-wing in any serious sense.
He's not hawkish on foreign policy in any serious sense.
He's sort of a State Department lifer.
The talk is that he may be ousted and Nikki Haley would be made Secretary of State.
That would be fantastic.
That'd be a fantastic move.
Good for Trump if he does that.
Rex Tillerson basically signed his own death warrants on the way out.
He went after Trump himself.
He was specifically asked about Trump's take on Charlottesville, and here was Tillerson's answer.
When the president gets into the kind of controversy he does and the UN committee responds the way it does, it seems to say they begin to doubt whether we're living those values.
I don't believe anyone doubts the American people's values or the commitment of the American government or the government's agencies to advancing those values and defending those values.
And the President's values?
The President speaks for himself, Chris.
Okay, that's brutal.
I mean, when your own Secretary of State won't say that you speak for America's values, that's basically him saying, sayonara, I will see you later, catch you on the other side.
I think that Tillerson is out by the end of the week.
I think that's a good move by the Trump administration.
I think it's a bad reason to oust him.
You know, I think the reason to oust him is because he's not good at his job.
He's a bad Secretary of State who doesn't actually forward the policies of the United States in any serious way, but if he has to go like this, I'm in favor of it.
Fine.
Get out.
So Tillerson, I think, will be out.
I think Nikki Haley will replace him, and that would be a good move by the Trump administration.
He'll have to use Haley to replace him, because otherwise the Senate's not going to confirm anybody he nominates.
Haley has already gotten through as the young ambassador.
It would be hard for the Senate to turn her down.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
If you ever want a fantastic synopsis of various great philosophers over time, Will Durant has a book called The Story of Philosophy.
That truly is a first-rate book.
It does a great summary of all of the great philosophers over time.
Aristotle, and William James, and Nietzsche, and Herbert Spencer, and Plato, and Spinoza, and Kant.
It's really terrific.
It's a great summary without having to wade through 800 pages of a critique of pure reason, which is almost unreadable anyway.
Reading their summary of Kant is accurate and good.
Will Durant is, of course, a very, very famous historian.
He wrote a much-celebrated history of Western civilization that is well worth reading.
He was very pro-Western civilization, and it comes out in all of his writing.
I believe he's a religious Catholic, so he's a religious thinker as well.
This was written in 1926, so it stops dead before you get to a lot of the later developments in philosophy, but it's such a good book and it's been continuously in print for years.
You can get it for like five bucks on Amazon.
It remains an excellent, lucid reading of various works of philosophy.
After he wrote this and it came out, he wrote The Story of Civilization, which is like an 11-volume set that everybody has on their shelf but nobody has ever read.
Except me.
It's really good.
It's really top-notch.
So go out and check The Story of Civilization as well, which is Will Durant's book on the history of Western civilization.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So let's imagine that we're in the middle of a natural disaster.
And let's imagine that that natural disaster happened while an unpopular President of the United States was President.
And let's imagine there was some sort of cultural event where everybody decided to get up and rip the President in the middle of that.
It would never happen for a Democrat, but imagine if it happened for Obama.
Imagine there was a giant hurricane that put an entire city underwater.
And as the President was attempting to help, there was a giant cultural event broadcast on national TV, almost solely dedicated to ripping the President of the United States up and down.
Would you consider that a problem?
Would you consider that polarizing?
I certainly would.
That's what the Video Music Awards were on MTV last night.
Basically, the entire thing was mocking Trump from beginning to end.
I don't know that these things get any ratings anymore, but they are absolute turd.
They're garbage.
They're most famous for Miley Cyrus doing whatever her latest soft porn schtick is, right?
Whether she's humping a foam finger with Robin Thicke.
Or whether she is doing a puppet show full of sex There's always some it's basically push the boundaries land in VMA land.
This is they became originally I met the first time I remember the VMAs becoming a national issues when Britney Spears was strutting around the stage with a giant boa constrictor About her abdomen, but that is but they've moved on from there now.
They've decided to go full political So Paris Jackson who I don't even know why Paris Jackson is culturally relevant Michael Jackson's I'm seeing a lot of love and light here tonight.
genetically tested, because I think they said it was artificial insemination, correct?
Paris Jackson, I believe, was the case.
In any case, Paris Jackson mocked Trump during the VMAs for no apparent reason.
I'm seeing a lot of love and light here tonight already.
A lot of diversity and a lot of potential power.
You know, if we were to all put our voices together, do you realize the difference we would make?
If we were to all stand up, united as one, our impact?
It would be huge!
Believe me, huge!
And that's not fake news.
So, let's leave here tonight remembering that We must show these Nazi, white supremacist jerks in Charlottesville and all over the country that as a nation, with liberty as our slogan, we have zero tolerance for their violence, their hatred, and their discrimination!
Oh, she's so, she's so righteous.
I'll preach at Paris.
I mean, okay, so she's at, uh, she's at legitimately one of the most useless cultural events in history.
A bunch of people whose music will be forgotten inside of two years, uh, with a bunch of young kids who have nothing better to do than spend their night listening to a bunch of adult celebrities talk to them about things of which they know nothing.
And then she gets to feel real special because we all hate Nazis!
Woo!
Guess what?
I've been hating Nazis my whole life.
We fought a war to kill a bunch of Nazis.
Everybody hates the Nazis.
You're not doing anything special by saying we hate Nazis.
Yay!
We all hate Nazis!
Yay!
How about if she got up?
Imagine if Paris Jackson had gotten up and said, listen, violence is never the answer on any side.
But she didn't say that, right?
She said, we have to stand up to their violence and their hatred and their bigotry.
As people of liberty, we cannot tolerate their hate.
Well, I'm pretty certain that as people of liberty, you have to tolerate their hate so long as it's not violent.
This is one of the principles of liberty.
Because what you consider hate might be somebody else's belief system.
And you can tell that I highly doubt that Paris Hilton or Paris Jackson actually feels the necessity to limit her own hatred for Nazis alone.
Because the left never does.
The left always broadens it out, right?
When I go to Berkeley in two and a half weeks, they're gonna call me a Nazi.
They will.
Okay?
They'll call me a Nazi.
Because this is what they do.
And then they'll get up and they'll say, we couldn't tolerate him.
It was so great that Antifa shut him down because he was just like a Nazi.
You know why?
Because he says that Black Lives Matter is not a movement that helps the country.
That's like a Nazi.
You know who would say that?
Hitler.
Hitler would say that.
You know, he used to eat with a fork.
Hitler.
Like, this routine is really getting old.
But the level of, let's pat ourselves on the back because we hate Nazis.
Guess what?
You know what?
I don't feel like a better person because I hate Nazis.
That's my basic principle as a human being.
I don't feel like a better human because I dislike You know, alt-right white supremacists.
I don't feel like a better human being because that's just like being a normal human.
I don't spend my time virtue signaling because virtue signaling is not virtue, but this is just virtue signaling because you're not actually doing anything.
You're not actually, like, how many people in the audience are like, you know what?
I was a Nazi one second ago, but now that Paris Jackson said that, I guess I'm gonna give up my hatred and my violence.
I'm not a Nazi anymore because of Paris Jackson.
So ridiculous.
Katy Perry, who looks like the nice, clean-cut daughter who you sent off to school and she came back a lesbian dance theory major, she decided that it was worthwhile to mock Trump as well.
First of all, Katy Perry doesn't get to mock anybody's hair with this getup.
I mean, she looks like she stuck her head in a bowling ball cleaner.
Here's Katy Perry.
So there were five nominees for Best New Artist when this whole night got started.
Now it's just up to the top two.
Congratulations, Julia Michaels and Colleen.
And who wins is up to you.
One artist will join the ranks of other Best New Artist winners like Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and my personal favorite, Hootie and the Blowfish.
Listen guys, this is one election where the popular vote actually matters, so vote online.
But hurry up before some random Russian pop star wins, okay?
Okay, so boring, so stupid.
Katy Perry should not do comedy, but here's my advice to the Democrats.
Please keep using Katy Perry in everything.
You did it at the DNC.
It worked beautifully, ensuring that Hillary Clinton would never be President of the United States.
Okay, this one I thought was, you know, I feel bad for Heather Heyer's mom.
Heather Heyer's mom showed up to the VMAs.
I do not know why Heather Heyer's mom is at the VMAs.
Heather Heyer was, of course, the victim of the white supremacist in Charlottesville.
The woman who was killed was Heather Heyer.
Her mom shows up at the VMAs.
I do not like that, like, I can't speak—Heather Heyer's mom can do whatever she wants, right?
I haven't lost a child, I can't speak to that.
If somebody did that to my child, the chances that I would go on a cultural show to talk about it like this, like a VMA-type show, are nil.
It would not happen.
And the reason it would not happen is because this is obviously just a—it's a stupid show.
And for the VMAs to use the platform as a, let's make it about Charlottesville, Again, 95% of Americans hate white supremacists.
Probably 98% of Americans hate white supremacists.
It's all virtue signaling in an attempt to suggest that anybody who doesn't like the VMA's lifestyle, and VMA is a lot more than just we don't like Nazis, it's an attempt to say anybody who dislikes the VMA's generally must stand against the anti-Nazi Here's Heather Heyer's mom presenting an award to VMAs.
I don't see the purpose of this for the VMAs.
I don't see the purpose of this for Heather Heyer's mom.
Again, she can do what she wants.
I have nothing but sympathy for Heather Heyer's mom.
But this seems to me a mistake in terms of bringing the countries together as opposed to polarizing it.
It is my distinct honor to introduce Susan Brough, Heather Heyer's mother, who is continuing to magnify Heather's work.
*crowd cheers* We all feel terrible.
I have a general objection, and this has been true for years, so it's not specific to Heather Heyersma.
I have a general objection to, in politics, using people who are victims of crime as spokespeople for a particular point of view.
I don't like it very much.
The reason being that if we're going to espouse particular policies, they should be disconnected from emotion.
They shouldn't be connected deeply to emotion.
I understand in politics the easy thing is to always connect it to emotion.
You can't watch this woman and not feel horrible for her.
Obviously, what happened to her daughter was an evil, evil crime, and the person who did it should get the death penalty.
But, I don't understand what it has to do with video music awards.
I think that the more we meld our culture and our politics, the more polarizing both culture and politics become.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow.
We'll bring you all of the latest updates, including Antifa updates, of which I'm sure there will be many.
Plus, just want to mention before I go here, that Berkeley still has not released tickets for my event on September 14th, but if you go to yaf.org, then we've set up a link where you can sign up for a list, so you'll be the first to be notified about the availability of tickets.
I think that there are 2,000 tickets available.
We already have like 1,600 signups in just About 48 hours here, so the tickets are going really fast in terms of people who are signing up to be notified.
So go over to YAF and sign up to be notified.
We want to make sure that we pack the hall.
This is a free speech event, and we are going to be speaking out against tribalism.
All the things we talk about on the show will come up, so it should be a great event, and I look forward to seeing you there.
Obviously, everyone remain nonviolent.
We are paying so that the police will do their jobs.
I'm a taxpayer in the state of California, so the police will do their jobs.
You're a taxpayer in the United States, so the police should do their jobs.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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