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June 20, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:59
The Time Of Feelings | Ep. 564
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Rachel Maddow cries, Corey Lewandowski laughs, and the illegal immigration fallout continues.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So many feelings, so many emotions, so much happening.
We'll go through all of it in just one second.
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Alrighty, so...
A lot to get to today.
Apparently, the Trump administration policy with regard to separating children from parents, which is mandated by law, if you're going to arrest people criminally for crossing the border, you cannot keep their kids in custody.
We discussed this at length over the last several days.
There is a court ruling from 2016 in which the court declared that you cannot keep kids together with their parents.
In fact, the Obama administration used to keep kids together with their parents in detention proceedings, and then they were sued.
They were sued on the basis that this was being used as a deterrent to illegal immigration, because how dare you keep children in prisons?
These are innocent kids.
Why would you keep them with their parents in prison?
Okay, so, the left sort of wants it both ways.
They don't want you to be able to keep the kids in prison with the parents, but they also don't want you to separate the parents from the kids, which leaves only one solution, of course, which is to release the parents, which is really what they want out of this entire thing.
Now, how do I know that this is what they want from the entire spiel here?
Well, because Well, the Democrats are out there saying Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi about all of this policy.
And let's be real, I did not see that coming.
While they're saying all of this about Nazi policy from the right, the right is actually attempting to solve this.
So Republicans came forward yesterday.
Ted Cruz came forward yesterday with a bill that would fix all of this and say that children can stay with their parents in detention centers until all of the proceedings have gone forward.
So what did Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer do?
He dismissed the legislative proposal.
He said, And then asked if that meant Democrats would not support a bill backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to keep immigrant families together while seeking asylum on the U.S.
border, Schumer said they want to keep the focus on Trump.
Again, quote, Unacceptable additions have bogged down every piece of legislation we've done.
So in other words, it's Nazi policy, but if the Republicans try to fix it, they're also Nazis.
Which is pretty convenient for the Democrats.
And as I said, the media coverage of this particular issue has led Democrats to believe that the issue doesn't need to be solved, it instead should be used as a club to wield against everybody that you don't like.
This is the plan by people like Chuck Schumer on the left.
You can't have it both ways.
Either the policy is straight from Japanese internment camps in Nazi Germany, in which case you should be for anything that would alleviate the policy, or the policy is not that bad, in which case maybe we should argue over the policy.
But the Democrats want to say that the policy is awful, it's evil, it's Nazi-esque, it's Japanese internment in 1942.
It's all of those things.
But we're not going to work to solve it because it's all on Trump.
All of which suggests that a lot of the Democratic tiers on this are crocodile tiers for political gain.
Now, I'm not going to say that everybody who's upset over this policy is faking it because I don't think that's right.
I think a lot of people are upset over this policy.
Listen, I don't think it's a great policy.
I think it's a bad policy.
But I also think that keeping kids interned with parents is not a great policy either.
There is no great policy when it comes to illegal immigration.
In the end, as with war games, the only winning move is not to play.
If you don't want illegal immigrants separated from their families or, alternatively, kept with their families in detention, don't illegally immigrate.
You're going to have to deter illegal immigration.
That is the only solution because, again, you can't say that you want kids to stay with the families, but you also want kids released.
It's either one or the other.
You can't have it both ways.
But it seems that the left is more interested in promulgating a particular feeling about this policy than they are about solving it.
It's just like gun control.
Every time there's a mass shooting, the left decides that it's necessary to have these vast displays of emotion, these vast displays of empathy, and then they don't actually get anything done.
Because the policies they call for have nothing to do with actually stopping the crime at issue.
Well, the same thing is happening here.
The Republicans have proposed a legislative fix.
The Democrats are running away from that legislative fix.
Now they're urging President Trump to go ahead and make an executive decision to simply overrule the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Flores and keep the kids together with their parents.
How long do you think it will take for another lawsuit to be filed saying that it's unconstitutional for the kids to remain together with their parents or that it's a violation of the 1997 Flores Agreement with the federal government?
It'll take exactly five seconds because we just had those lawsuits.
Again, the Obama administration kept children with parents.
They were sued not to do that.
They changed their policy.
Not only did they change their policy, they had said that they were keeping the kids together with their parents as a deterrent.
And the court said you're not allowed to do that.
And now they're saying you can't release the kids.
So you can't keep the kids and you can't release the kids because all the left really wants is everyone released.
Well, all the emotion that's coming out from this is, you know, on one level understandable, on another level irritating if you're not going to propose any solution.
So Rachel Maddow last night on MSNBC, she broke down on air talking about migrant babies being detained.
Now look, nobody is happy with the idea of 12-month-old babies.
I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old.
No one likes the idea of a 2-year-old being removed from their parents and crying for mommy and daddy.
Nobody likes this, which is why I've been saying legislative fix from literally the first day that this controversy broke onto the scene.
But I will just point out that Rachel Maddow has no such sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of babies who are killed in the womb every year.
She has no such sympathy for kids who are removed from their parents when parents are arrested for domestic crimes.
Rachel Maddow seems to me to be using emotion as a sort of baton in order to try and drive a particular narrative.
And that narrative, by the way, is not creating solutions.
Again, that narrative is designed to let Democrats prevent solutions.
That narrative is designed to allow Democrats to emotionally manipulate the American public without working to fix the problem in the first place.
Here's Rachel Maddow slash Michael Molls last night.
Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children to at least three three tender age shelters in South Texas.
Lawyers and medical providers just I think I'm going to have to hand this off.
OK, the tender age shelters, by the way, have existed since 2010 under the Obama administration.
I'll say this, as somebody who covers the news every day, I'm not a big fan of histrionics on air.
Again, I'm sure that this is legit from Rachel Maddow.
OK, I'm not going to say that I don't think that she feels this way.
I'm sure she does feel this way.
But all of us who are in the television business, all of us who are on camera on a regular basis, I would suggest that it is not a good look for us to get so emotional about issues that we can't discuss them rationally.
Emotional investment in issues actually prevents rational discussion of those issues.
But I think the emotional investment is the entire point at this point.
I think it's become all about feelings and very little about policy.
For example, here's an NPR anchor.
Her last name is Hinojosa.
And she says that this is just like the Nazis.
It's exactly like the Nazis on MSNBC.
Elie Wiesel, may he rest in peace, what he said to me was, he said, you know, the Nazis had it perfectly correct.
They declared us an illegal people.
That's how it began.
We were declared an illegal people as Jews?
Right.
And that follows that, and it's a very horrible thing to make these comparisons, but if you think about the level of dehumanization where we have arrived, where children are being taken, There's an art there.
Okay, no, there isn't.
You're an idiot.
You're an idiot.
Okay, first, I would like to point out that everybody in America seems to have read Harry Potter and once heard of people called the Nazis, and every single issue must fit into one of these two frameworks, into these two idiotic frameworks.
Either everything is a Harry Potter do-over or everybody's a Nazi.
Not everything you dislike is Nazi policy, gang.
Read a fricking book.
If you really believe that Nazi policy was to have a process of law whereby people who were illegally attempting to enter Nazi Germany were temporarily separated from their children for the protection of the children because we didn't want to hold the children in incarcerated custody, and then they were reunited with those children when people were deported, if you really think that was Nazi policy, it's because you're and then they were reunited with those children when people were deported, As far as the notion of dehumanization, it is not dehumanizing.
The whole point here is that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most liberal court in America, held that it is a better policy to force parents and children to be separated than to leave children with parents in custody in the first place.
Again, this was not Trump coming up with, you know what would be a nefarious evil idea if we took those kids away from those parents.
That is an effectuation of law.
Once you arrest people, the kids have to be removed by force of law.
Now, it seems that today Trump wants to change that by executive order.
We'll see if he's even allowed to get away with that.
It'll go straight to court.
It'll probably be overturned.
Because in the end, there is really an agenda here.
But it drives me nuts when people start invoking the Nazis when the policy that is being discussed has nothing to do with the Nazis.
Nazi is not just shorthand for stuff I don't like.
Crying Nazi is like crying wolf now.
There are actual Nazis.
There are actually people in the world who believe the same thing the Nazis did.
The Iranian regime believes the same thing the Nazis did when it comes to extermination of the Jews.
There are lots of people across the world who believe in Nazi-esque policy with regards to eugenic abortion, for example.
There are lots of people across the world who believe Nazi-esque fiscal policy.
But in order for you to make a comparison, you can't just say, look at that Trump.
He probably has a swastika in his basement.
The only thing separating Trump from Hitler is the mustache.
You actually have to explain why the policy that you say you oppose is truly Nazi-esque.
And to say that it's all about dehumanization?
It's too vague.
It's not about dehumanization.
We're not saying that these people should be taken out and gassed.
We're not saying that these people should be taken out and shot.
I'm not happy with the treatment here.
But to suggest that there is anything remotely resembling Nazi policy happening here is insulting to Americans, it's insulting to the Trump administration, it's insulting to the people who carry it out.
It really is insulting to the ICE agents, I'd like to point out, because we've been brought up on the notion that you don't get to follow a bad order, you don't get to follow an evil order, that if somebody tells you to go out in public and shoot some innocent bystander, that you have to refuse that order, right?
Or the Nuremberg defense, I was only following orders, doesn't apply morally.
Are we really now suggesting that ICE agents are the equivalent of Nazis?
That the ICE agents who are carrying out these orders to separate the kids, as per policy promulgated by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that those people are exactly the same as the Brownshirts or the Auschwitz guards?
Is that really what we are saying here now?
And it's constant, right?
Soledad O'Brien tweeted the same thing out.
Soledad O'Brien tweeted out, quote, Well, I guess we put to rest the question Nazi Germany.
Could it happen here in America?
I'll discuss in a second why this is so idiotic.
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Okay, so Soledad O'Brien tweets out that this is just like Nazi Germany.
She tweets out that Nazi Germany could happen here.
Now, I've always believed that the rise of fascism in Germany is an inexplicable phenomenon.
People tend to treat it as though the entire country just went crazy all of a sudden.
The entire country just suddenly decided that they were going to start exterminating Jews and going to war with all the surrounding countries.
And when you actually spend a fair bit of time studying the rise of Nazi Germany, as I have, then what you will see is that there was an organic process by which the Nazis ended up taking over Germany.
And actually, the dictatorship pre-existed the Nazis.
The existence of a dictatorial power in the center of German government pre-existed the Nazis.
It began about 1930, culminated in 1932.
It was essentially a non-elected government, or at least if it was elected, it was running not along the basis of a legislature for a long time in Germany before the Nazis even took power.
I've always believed that human beings can slide into evil a lot more easily than we like to think that we could.
But what Soledad O'Brien is saying, which is that we are now like Nazi Germany or becoming like Nazi Germany when we separate kids from parents at the border, OK, what's your alternative?
I'm fine with not separating kids from parents at the border.
So is Ted Cruz.
So is Donald Trump.
But the Democrats don't want any sort of policy that will fix this, which demonstrates full scale that all of this is really just emotional manipulation by the left.
If you're not going to solve the problem, if you're not going to propose any solution other than yelling at Trump, And then suggesting that he release everybody en masse or not criminally prosecute illegal immigration?
Then you're not contributing to a solution to the problem, you're just using this as a political club to wield.
And you can see the extent to which the media have gone overboard.
So for example, the New Yorker decided that they were going to target a particular ICE agent.
So they showed a picture of an ICE agent, and they said, this man has a Nazi tattoo.
So the New Yorker put out a picture of a Marine veteran accusing him of having a Nazi tattoo because he works for ICE.
And the picture shows a guy with a series of tattoos on his arm, like a lot of guys who are military or ex-military.
Well, now it turns out that all of that is nonsense.
Okay, the guy who she took a picture of, this particular reporter, she tweeted about a guy named Justin Gertner.
And Gertner is a combat-wounded veteran and ICE forensic analyst.
And she said they had a Nazi iron cross inked on his elbow.
But it turns out that it's a Maltese cross, a symbol associated with firefighters.
The tattoo, according to Gertner, is actually a Titan II symbol for his platoon when he served in Afghanistan.
According to ICE, the writing on his right arm is the Spartan Creed, which is about protecting family and children.
Anyone attempting to advance their personal political opinions by baselessly slandering an American hero should be issuing public apologies to Mr. Gertner and the retractions.
This includes Levin and the New Yorker.
Well, in just a second, I want to talk about how the Trump administration is responding to all of this, plus some more of the fallout from the left.
So, it's not just members of the government, members of the press who are doing this.
IEDs, but he works for ICE.
That means he's evil.
That means that he's akin to Nazis.
Well, in just a second, I want to talk about how the Trump administration is responding to all of this, plus some more of the fallout from the left.
So it's not just members of the government, members of the press who are doing this.
It's also virtue signaling on the part of people in Hollywood.
So now there's been a lot of talk in Hollywood about various members of Fox television studios disassociating from Fox generally because they don't like Fox News' cover, so they're So Steve Levitan, who's the co-creator of Modern Family, he says, Fox Studio has been a wonderful home for most of my career.
So many amazing people there who share the concerns about Fox News but aren't in the position to speak out.
I have no problem with fact-based conservatism, such as The Wall Street Journal, but Fox News' 23-hour-a-day support of the NRA conspiracy theories and Trump lies get harder to swallow every day as I drive onto that lot to make a show about inclusion.
I look forward to seeing Modern Family through to the end and then, sale or no sale, setting up shop elsewhere.
Well, first of all, important to note, 21st Century Fox is made up of several key assets.
Fox Television Studios has nothing to do with Fox News.
They are completely separate branches of Fox.
And in fact, after Fox is sold, there's a good likelihood that Fox News doesn't even end up going along with the rest of Fox being sold to Disney.
So it's possible it ends up as a completely separate company.
But all of this virtue signaling makes perfect sense.
Steve Levitin's contract is up in.
2019, right?
It's coming up for renewal next year.
Anyway, Seth MacFarlane also tweeted that he was embarrassed to work for Fox.
Not embarrassed to clear those checks, by the way.
He added, quote, in other words, don't think critically, don't consult multiple news sources.
And in general, don't use your brain.
Just blindly obey Fox News.
This is fringe bleep.
And it's business like this that makes me embarrassed to work for this company.
And there's Paul Feig, who made Lady Ghostbusters.
You can do whatever you want.
You don't want to work with Fox?
By all means, don't work with Fox.
of people in the movie and TV divisions, but I too cannot condone the support their news division promotes toward the immoral and abusive policies and actions taken by this current administration toward immigrant children.
Ellison, it's a free country.
You can do whatever you want.
You don't want to work with Fox?
By all means, don't work with Fox.
But if you truly believe that you're going to impact the coverage of Fox News by leaving a Fox television studio, it's one of the things that toxifies politics.
That we can't have free and open discussion about politics without people threatening to boycott one another is not the world's best element.
It's not the world's best thing.
And we're seeing that increasingly.
This is most obvious last night.
So, Christian Nielsen, who is the Secretary for Homeland Security, she was eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and activists decided that it would be worthwhile to get her thrown out of the restaurant, that they would protest and chant until they ruined her dinner.
How dare you spend your evening here eating dinner as you're complicit in the separation and deportation of over 10,000 children separated from their parents?
How can you enjoy a Mexican dinner as you're deporting and imprisoning tens of thousands of people who come here seeking asylum in the United States?
We call on you to end family separation.
Stay.
Stay.
End family separation.
End family separation.
Okay, so great to mess up everybody's dinner over the policy.
Now listen, I understand the passion.
I understand you don't like the policy.
But this sort of, this sort of young fascist mentality that you're going to go into restaurants and ruin people's lives because you have disagreements over policy.
If you don't like the policy, vote for people who are going to change the policy.
If you don't like the policy, go file a lawsuit.
If you don't like the policy, harassing other Americans and trying to destroy their personal time seems to me ridiculous.
And I understand that you think that she's complicit in a bad policy, but how would the left have treated it if people on the right had gone and ruined Obama administration's officials' dinner over Obamacare?
Would that be decent?
Would that make for a better America?
Of course not.
Of course not.
And then Anna Navarro, who's just completely lost her mind, she tweeted out, Wow, just, you know, how dare she eat Mexican food while also having a particular policy that prevents illegal immigration?
Christian Nielsen was eating Mexican food.
Wow, just, you know, how dare she eat Mexican food while also having a particular policy that prevents illegal immigration?
How dare she?
How dare she?
Well, what you can see is this drives a reactionary response.
And so what we've got now is reactionary policy and propaganda and rhetoric on all sides of the aisle.
None of it is particularly good.
I understand President Trump responding with ire to all of the media coverage, which, as I have said for the last week, I think is completely uncalled for.
I think it is not only undignified, I think it is inaccurate.
And it is promulgating policies that are not actually good for the country.
It's preventing the creation of policy that will actually fix all of this.
But I'm not sure that the media care about all that.
I don't think Hollywood cares about any of this stuff.
With all of that said, the reaction by some people on the right has been reactionary in the extreme as well.
So you've got the left reacting to what is a controversial policy by suggesting that this is now Nazi Germany, and then you have the right responding to that with some of the worst rhetoric that I've seen on the right in quite a while.
I'll get to that in just a second.
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OK, so the Trump administration has responded to all of the media malfeasance here with, I think, a justifiable amount of outrage.
So President Trump has defended Christian Nielsen, his Secretary of Homeland Security, he said that she's done a fabulous job at The Presser.
He tweeted out, Okay.
Well, that's fine.
I don't see a huge problem with any of that.
I think that that's probably exactly right.
at the press conference explaining security at the border and for our country, while at the same time recommending changes to obsolete and nasty laws which force family separation.
We want heart and security in America.
Okay, well, that's fine.
I don't see a huge problem with any of that.
I think that that's probably exactly right.
And I also think that President Trump would like to solve this, right?
President Trump is interested in doing something about this.
The problem, of course, is that the minute that he issues an executive order saying that kids can stay with their families, the left sues and says the kids can't be held in jail.
So we'll see how well that works.
The problem is that the Trump administration has handled this about as badly as you can handle the rollout of anything.
It's the worst rollout for a major policy initiative for the Trump administration since the travel ban happened at the very beginning of the administration, when they were going out there suggesting that they were going to prevent Again, I don't think the policy is inexcusable.
I don't think it's unjustifiable on a legal level.
reentering the country and such.
This is a very, very bad policy rollout.
I mean, just, again, I don't think the policy is inexcusable.
I don't think it's unjustifiable on a legal level.
I think it should be changed.
But do I think that the rollout has been good enough?
No, the rollout has just been absolute garbage.
And it's a mistake because what's happened is that the left has gone so polarized that the right has responded by also going polarized.
Plus, you're going to need some better spokespeople.
I think that Christian Nielsen is just fine.
But here's Trump's ICE director, who was asked whether the policy was humane.
And this did not go well for him on CNN.
Is this new zero tolerance policy that the president has supported, that the attorney general announced, is it humane?
I think I think it's the law as a lawyer.
It may be the law, it's the policy, but is it humane?
I think it's the law and I'm a law enforcer and I must follow the law.
Okay, that is not a good answer.
What he should say is, my personal opinion is that this law should be changed to make it better, but that is not the responsibility of the executive branch.
If you're asking me what's more humane, keeping kids with their parents in prison or not keeping their kids with their parents in prison, well, then I'm not sure of the answer to that.
But I also think that it is inhumane to release vast bevies of illegal immigrants into the interior of the country without any capacity to get them back.
Catch and release is not A decent policy.
But it's not even that sort of media attention that is really the worst.
The worst is Corey Lewandowski.
So Corey Lewandowski is just garbage.
Corey Lewandowski was campaign manager for a certain period of time during the Trump campaign.
He was garbage then, he's garbage now.
He's really bad at his job.
He was on Fox News last night and he was confronted by an illegal immigrant advocate, an advocate for illegal immigration.
And this advocate for illegal immigration talks about a really terrible case of a kid with Down syndrome separated from the kid's parents who had crossed at the border illegally.
And Corey Lewandowski responds to this with all the compassion of a potato.
So here he is.
I read today about a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome who was taken from her mother and put in a cage.
Wow, wow.
I read about a... Did you say want-want to a 10-year-old with Down syndrome being taken from her mother?
What I said is you can pick anything you want, but the bottom line is very clear.
How dare you?
OK, that is nuts.
Forget about the reaction of the guy, which is made for TV.
But Corey Lewandowski, womp womp to a story of a 10-year-old with Down syndrome being removed from her parents?
No.
And then here's the problem.
You can do this policy and still look compassionate.
You can do this policy and still say, I want to change the state of the law, because we have to both enforce our borders and we have to ensure that kids are taken care of.
These are not mutually exclusive.
But Corey Lewandowski is such an idiot that he goes on TV and makes it sound like he doesn't care what happens to Down Syndrome children who are 10 years old and removed from their parents.
And listen, anybody with any iota of sympathy feels terrible for these kids.
You remember when you were left at summer camp?
Imagine that, except that you were forcibly removed to summer camp and your parents didn't know where you were going, okay?
The policy itself is deeply flawed, but again, this is not on the Trump administration.
This is on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the fact that this was never solved at the legislative level for the last 20-odd years.
But to just go out there and say womp womp when you're talking about some of these heartbreaking stories.
Idiotic in the extreme.
Foolish in the extreme.
Because Corey Lewandowski is an idiot.
Corey Lewandowski is a fool.
There's talk about him coming back as chief of staff or bringing him back into the Trump administration.
Trump would be foolish to do that.
Really foolish to do that.
To bring Corey Lewandowski.
The man has the, honest to God, the man has the IQ of a chilled vegetable.
Not even like a room temper, like a cucumber that's been in the fridge for too long and it started to mold.
It's so bad for Trump's policy.
It's bad for the president to have representatives like Corey Lewandowski going womp womp when people are talking about the suffering of children.
It'd be the equivalent of after Parkland, somebody goes on TV and they're talking about the horrors that happened at Parkland, and instead of people saying, yes, that was indeed horrifying and terrible, we need to find a way to stop that.
One of the ways to stop that is not gun control, but better school security.
It'd be like Corey Lewandowski going on TV and somebody's talking about somebody shot to death in a school, and Corey Lewandowski goes womp womp.
He's a moron.
This sort of political polarization, this sort of political conflict where rhetoric on both sides matters much more than workable policy, it really makes me angry.
It's really frustrating and it's really stupid because there is a workable policy solution to all of this.
Ted Cruz proposed it yesterday.
Now, Ted Cruz's bill, which is supposed to be brought up, I guess, today in the House of Representatives with the help of Speaker Ryan, The House is going to vote on a bill that unites illegal immigrant families at the border, and Democrats are expected to vote against the bill.
They're getting a clean, standalone bill to formally prevent child separation, and they're going to vote no en masse, says Guy Benson.
Demonstrating, once again, the bad faith that Democrats have on this entire issue.
Now Republicans have a win if they look compassionate.
But that means you can't send out people who are cretins to represent you on television.
You can't send out Corey Lewandowski.
The last time an object passed through his head was never.
I mean, and I'm talking, I'm including his brain.
I mean, like, there's nothing in there.
There's an old headline about Dizzy Dean.
Dizzy Dean was a famous pitcher for the St.
Louis Cardinals back in the 1940s, and he was famous for being kind of a nutcase.
And he was trying to steal second base, and the catcher tried to throw him out and hit him in the head with the ball.
And the headlines the next day read, Dizzy Dean's head x-rayed, nothing revealed.
And that is pretty much Corey Lewandowski.
X-ray that dude's head and it looks like a balloon.
Sending him out as a representative for the administration is so deeply unhelpful, but it didn't stop there.
Then you have a Trump advisor who goes on CNN and he calls illegal immigrants invaders.
This is just, it is not useful, guys.
The policy that Trump is purporting to push here is not a bad policy in terms of strict enforcement of the border.
I like strict enforcement of law.
It lets us know whether a law is bad or good.
You can't tell whether a law is bad or good until it's fully enforced.
And Trump wants to change the law.
Sending out people to call illegal immigrants invaders while the left is showing pictures of children is not exactly bright.
They're not immigrants.
They're not immigrants.
They're invaders.
They're not immigrants.
Let me finish.
Let me finish.
They're not immigrants.
Let me finish.
I did not interrupt you.
When you come here without permission, you're not an immigrant.
I did not interrupt you.
You're an invader.
They are immigrants.
Invaders?
They are immigrants, okay?
Wow.
Steve, I am an immigrant.
When you come here without permission, you are an immigrant.
Okay, now this is obviously good for America, this sort of political conversation where a guy says invaders and then someone screams for five minutes, just at the top of our lungs.
Yes, very, very good stuff, CNN.
Well played, excellent coverage.
You can't have articulate people on from both sides to actually, you know, act as experts on what applies here.
Instead, you have people, one guy come on to shout invaders so that the base gets all riled up and they're really excited because we're stopping the invasion.
It's like Starship Troopers, okay?
But, and then you have people on the other side who are, Going around shouting, they call them invaders?
It's a bunch of children!
They're children!
And crying on TV.
Yes, this is all good.
I can't imagine why the politics in America is so degraded.
Maybe it's because we're busy calling each other Nazis, invading each other's dinners, and then yelling at each other about invasions and womp womp and all the rest of it.
The level of discourse in this country has become so intensely stupid, I'm not sure they can ever be put back together again.
Okay.
A few more notes on that.
Plus, Peter Strzok.
Some notes that affect him.
The FBI agent who said he would stop Trump.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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So final note on all the hysteria surrounding this illegal immigration controversy.
This all could be solved so easily if people pulled their heads out of their colons and stopped calling each other Nazis.
But that's not going to happen.
Instead, we're going to listen to people like Peter Fonda, who hasn't been relevant in several decades, who's tweeting out, quote, Sounds great.
We don't have to take the agents' kids.
We only need to surround their schools and scare the bleep out of them and worry the F out of the agents from CBE, ICE, and regular Border Patrol agents.
We need to scare the F out of them.
Those are all caps now.
Need to make their children worry now.
We should hack the system.
Get the addresses of the ICE agents, CPB agents, and surround their homes in protest.
We should find out what schools their children go to and surround the schools in protest.
These agents are doing this because they want to do it.
They like doing this.
F. Want to stop this effing monster?
Really want to stop this giant a-hole?
90 million people in the streets on the same weekend.
These Republican a-holes are all in on it.
The chief a-hole is happy.
We are all very upset.
We have to get even more angry with these Republicans.
Yeah, that's going to solve it.
Get more angry.
I'm sure more anger will solve this.
Andrew Klavan, he says some wise things.
And one of the wise things that Andrew Klavan says is that anger is the devil's cocaine.
Well, clearly everybody is high right now.
Somebody got a hold of the crack supply and they've mainstreamed it into the water.
They've just diluted the water with crack because the anger is palpable and none of it is directed toward actually solving things.
If you think that targeting border patrol agents as though they are Nazis is going to solve this problem, you have another thing coming.
You want to alienate the other side?
More?
You want the other side to become more reactionary?
This is the area where I say that when Soledad O'Brien says we could become like Nazi Germany, then she points to the border policy, I say that's idiotic.
But I'll tell you, one of the things that did lead to the rise of the Nazis was reactionary politics.
Because by the time the Nazis were elected in 1933, and they were elected in 1933, by the time they were elected and Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, The only two rising forces in the country were the communists and the Nazis.
The Social Democrats were sort of the center party.
They were sort of holding the country together.
They were the governing party for most of the Weimar Republic.
They had failed to clamp down on the violence between the communists and the Nazis.
And what that had led to was this reactionary politics where the communists were reacting against the Nazis, the Nazis were reacting against the communists, and people felt they had a binary choice between the Nazis and the communists in Germany.
And most people chose the communists, I mean, chose the Nazis, or at least the plurality chose the Nazis.
Well, the more we alienate each other, the more we treat each other not as brothers but as enemies, the more we don't have decent conversations and instead leap to call each other the worst scourges of the earth, the more obvious it's going to become that we can't live together.
And then you're going to get more reactionary politicians on both sides.
It's going to turn into every election is going to turn into Corey Lewandowski shouting womp womp and Peter Fonda shouting that CPB agents should be should have their houses surrounded by illegal immigrant activists.
If you want the country to fray at the edges, this is how you do it.
This is lack of a common culture, it's lack of a civil culture, it's lack of a belief that we are united as Americans in any serious way.
Now, how much of the country really is into this?
I don't think it's as large a percentage as everybody else does, but it doesn't have to be a large percentage in order to destroy our politics.
The most extreme can pull everybody else along.
I've talked on the show before about the phenomenon of renormalization.
Renormalization is the idea that people who exist on the fringes of politics can pull other people along with them.
The example that I've used in, you know, kind of everyday life is an example given by Nicholas Nassim Tlaib, the author of Black Swan, and the book Skin in the Game.
He talks about how it is that you can have an entire party that ends up providing vegetarian food as opposed to meat simply because one person is vegetarian.
The way that it starts is that you have one family of, say, four people and you have a child in that family who's vegetarian.
And mom decides that she doesn't actually want to cook two separate meals for kid and the rest of the family.
So it's just too much hassle.
So everybody's going to eat vegetarian tonight.
And then that party that that family decides to go to a party.
And they go to this party and they say, listen, we're doing vegetarian because we're trying to keep up with our daughter here, Lisa Simpson.
We're trying to be vegetarian just like Lisa.
And now we're going to go to a party.
And there are only four families coming.
And the host of the party has a choice.
They can either cook two meals, one vegetarian, one non-vegetarian, or they can cook one meal, all vegetarian.
And this is how you get 20 people who are all eating vegetarian because one person eats vegetarian.
You can see the same thing happening with regard to our politics.
You see somebody who's extreme, say to the rest of the crowd, listen, I'm not going to go along with your agenda.
I'm going to keep shouting Nazi, Nazi, Nazi over and over and over, unless you placate me.
And a bunch of people who are standing there with them go, oh, what the hell?
You know, I sort of agree with the basic political gist that they are speaking of.
And I don't really want to call them out for the Nazi language.
I agree with them more than I disagree with them.
So I guess that I'll just kind of go silent on the Nazi stuff.
This is how you get extreme rhetoric on both sides, right?
This is how you get one guy who says womp womp and then a huge Twitter following that says, yeah, he's right to say womp womp.
The polarization of the politics is not good for the country, and again, it prevents good policy from getting done.
Here's the best policy!
Strict border enforcement.
Strict border control.
Kids stay with the parents until they are deported.
More funding of ICE.
More funding of the immigration courts.
More funding of the deportation... deportation...
Of holding centers.
More funding of all of this.
This is an actual legitimate function of government.
Unlike a lot of the social safety net that's been created over the last 150 years in this country, there is no reason why we should not be funding actual border enforcement in a proper way.
And that we cannot do so humanely.
We should be doing so humanely.
But all of that's being obfuscated by the crying histrionics on television.
It makes me just nuts.
It's just gross.
Meanwhile, there's been a lot of talk over the last couple of weeks about the Department of Justice Inspector General report in which FBI agent Peter Strzok, you remember him, he was leading the Hillary investigation and the Russia investigation, and he was also stripping a fellow FBI agent, it turns out.
Well, he was texting her in the middle of the election cycle that he was going to stop President Trump.
Well, yesterday, Peter Strzok was actually thrown out of the FBI building.
He was escorted from the FBI building.
According to Mediaite, FBI agent Peter Strzok was revealed to have sent texts showing animosity toward President Trump's campaign.
According to a recent investigator general report, CNN reporter Laura Jarrett tweeted the news Tuesday, noting that Strzok had not been fired, but has been kept in human resources following his dismissal from Robert Mueller's investigative team.
I'm kind of shocked, of course, that Peter Strzok has not been fired.
In a statement tweeted by CBS's Paula Reed, Strzok's lawyer, Eitan Goldman, said his client has steadfastly played by the rules and respected the process, but continues to be the target of unfounded personal attacks, political games, and inappropriate information leaks.
All of that is false.
The inspector general said that this sort of bias was some of the worst that he had ever seen at the FBI.
So it's about time for Peter Strzok to lose his job.
It's long past time for Peter Strzok to lose his job, of course.
Now, in actual good news today, Nikki Haley, along with Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, they've announced that the United States is going to withdraw funding from the UN Human Rights Council.
This is a good thing, because the Human Rights Council is filled with some of the world's worst human rights violators.
There's no reason we should be funding that agency.
The Bush administration also, by the way, pulled out of the Human Rights Council.
It was only the Obama administration, because they wanted to kowtow to the world's worst countries, that decided to refund the HRC.
Well, Nikki Haley, who is indeed my spirit animal at the UN, she announced the United States is pulling out of the HRC.
Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded.
Human rights abusers continue to serve on and be elected to the Council.
The world's most inhumane regimes continue to escape scrutiny.
And the Council continues politicizing and scapegoating of countries with positive human rights records in an attempt to distract from the abusers in their ranks.
Therefore, as we said we would do a year ago, if we did not see any progress, the United States is officially withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council.
Well, this is excellent news.
Literally half of all UN resolutions at the Human Rights Council criticizing a country have not been directed in North Korea or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Egypt or China or Venezuela or Cuba.
Virtually half of them have been directed against Israel.
According to UN Watch, there were 135 critical resolutions from 2006 to 2016.
68 of them, 50% were directed at Israel.
The whole thing has just become a sham and a debacle.
There is no reason the United States should be spending taxpayer dollars funding a garbage institution like the UN as a whole.
Let alone the UN Human Rights Council.
So that is good news.
In other sort of predictable news, Starbucks has now had to cut stores.
So this is hilarious.
So Starbucks, which has been focused... I don't know where the homeless are gonna go now.
I'm not sure where people are gonna pee now.
We've heard that the only place that people are allowed to pee and hang out is Starbucks.
But apparently, the head of Starbucks, Chief Executive Officer Kevin Johnson, has given news to investors, and he said that the company's recent not-acceptable performance is going to cause it to streamline to improve innovation agility and re-accelerate growth.
This means that the company revealed a disappointing 1% sales increase globally in the current quarter, about a third of the expected 3% growth projected by analysts.
Bloomberg explained that some of the streamlining Johnson referred to will come in the form of shutting down about 150 company-operated stores intensely penetrating U.S.
markets next fiscal year, which leaves a serious question.
Where are people going to poop?
We have heard that the only place people can poop is at a Starbucks.
You don't even have to buy coffee there anymore.
You just go there, you hang out, you poop in their bathrooms.
Well, with those bathrooms closed, to the general public, will the streets be piled high with the feces of dispossessed Americans?
How exactly are Americans going to get their garbage coffee, and how exactly are they going to pee anymore?
Will America become urine town?
We don't know the answers to these vital and crucial questions.
This is what happens when you run your company like a social justice warrior idiot center, as opposed to running it like an actual coffee company.
So, Starbucks' abroad growth has been quite strong, but in the United States, it's having some serious problems.
With about 14,000 stores domestically, according to Bloomberg, Starbucks is now pumping the brakes on licensed and company-operated locations with a renewed focus on rural and suburban areas, not over-caffeinated urban neighborhoods where locals already joke the next Starbucks will open inside an existing store, which is basically right.
Every Starbucks is located across the street from another Starbucks because they figure you're too lazy to walk across the street.
Well, they've saturated the markets, but they've also alienated a lot of customers with a lot of the nonsense they've been pursuing for the last little while.
And I can't say I'm completely displeased with Starbucks' poor performance given their politics over the last couple of years.
Okay, time for some things.
By the way, that doesn't mean you should boycott Starbucks.
I don't think you should boycott companies unless their policies affect you.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things I like today.
So my wife got into this show on Amazon, Sneaky Pete, which is, it's all about a con artist, basically.
It gets, I would say, more intense as the first season goes on.
It's kind of cleverly written.
I don't think it's a world-shaking show, but it's enjoyable.
It's an enjoyable kind of fun romp.
And I'm a sucker for movies and shows about con artists.
So the show is Stinky Pete, here's Sneaky Pete.
It is from Amazon.
Here's what it looks like.
Hi, Grandma.
Grandpa.
It's me, Pete.
We make money by knowing who we can trust and who we can't trust.
You're a con man.
I'm a confidence man.
I make people feel confident.
They give me their money.
You stole from me.
I can't have that.
You think you're gonna talk your way out of this when you talk your way into this one?
I'm a very reasonable man.
I'm trying to help you.
Okay, so Bryan Cranston is the best part of the show because Bryan Cranston is the best part of every show.
He's a producer on the show and he plays this gangster mob villain and it's a fun show.
It's definitely worth the watch and it's enjoyable.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So every movie, it is now indicated by Hollywood that every single movie that is made must have some sort of LGBT reference.
It doesn't matter if it's involved in the plot at all.
It doesn't matter if it has anything to do with the characters.
We have to throw in some oblique reference to somebody being gay or lesbian.
It's very, very important this happen.
And then right before release, we'll cut all those references, right?
This is what Hollywood does.
So they did it in Black Panther.
There's apparently a lesbian reference that happened in the middle of the film.
And then it was just sort of cut because they realized, oh, wait a second, a bunch of 10-year-olds are going to watch this film.
And maybe we don't want 10-year-olds thinking about lesbianism in the middle of a film about Black Panther.
Maybe that's silly.
Maybe we shouldn't actually do that because that's really political.
Well, they're now doing the same thing with Jurassic World Fallen Kingdoms.
So apparently there was a scene where there's a star named Daniella Panetta, and a line of dialogue was cut from the film that would have revealed that her character, Zia Rodriguez, was a lesbian.
He says, I understood why they cut it for the sake of time.
It's me and Chris Pratt, and we're in a military vehicle with all these mercenaries.
I look at Chris, and I'm like, yeah, square jaw, good bone structure, tall muscles.
I don't date men, but if I did, it would be you.
It would gross me out, but I would do it.
Okay, now, question.
Why was that in the film in the first place?
Was it deeply important to know that this character who probably will be eaten by a dinosaur is a lesbian?
Is that really, really important?
Like, is that something that we definitely needed to know?
Did we need to know Jeff Goldblum's sexuality?
He's just a weirdo, right?
We didn't need to know Jeff Goldblum's sexuality in the original Jurassic Park.
This whole idea that we have to insert social justice messaging into films in the most obvious and clunky possible ways is really stupid.
Now, there are plenty of shows, there are plenty of movies where a character's homosexuality is integral to the plot.
So, for example, a couple of days ago, I recommended a show called Animal Kingdom.
One of the sons is gay.
It's actually somewhat integral to the plot.
It actually goes to character.
But just randomly suggesting that somebody is gay or lesbian and that this somehow magically changes the entire fabric of the movie is really stupid.
Right?
It's something that people feel, something that people do.
It's an orientation, but it's also an activity.
But it has nothing to do with hunting dinosaurs.
Like, what exactly makes it have anything to do with hunting dinosaurs?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But then, GLAAD is going to complain about it.
Right?
So, this is my favorite part.
So, virtually every film, virtually every TV show is pre-screened for GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, so that GLAAD can vet it first.
Which is a little bit Orwellian, right?
We don't have that among conservatives, right?
We don't get to actually pre-screen all the movies to say, hey, that's really insulting to Christians.
If we did, then half the movies that exist would not actually be able to come out in their current form.
But GLAAD does these long reports about exactly what percentage of studio films include LGBTQ characters.
So they say that 12.8% of studio films from last year included LGBTQ characters, the lowest percentage since the organization began keeping tabs in 2012.
The organization's report notes that this year, films such as Gay Teen Romance, Love, Simon and Deadpool 2, which featured a lesbian X-Men couple, have raised the bar for representation, but other projects that have drawn upon source material featuring LGBTQ characters opted not to depict them on screen in that way.
Tessa Thompson noted that her Thor Ragnarok character, Valkyrie, is bisexual in the comics, and though that isn't addressed in the film, the actress was faithful to that in her depiction.
It's very important that we make sure that there are bisexual characters in all of our comic book movies.
Deeply, deeply important.
You wouldn't want to alienate gays and lesbians who wouldn't otherwise watch a comic book movie if there's not a gay, fake, fictional character living in an off-world scenario.
But I'd just like to point one thing out.
If 12.8% of studio films included LGBTQ characters, which presumably means that a major percentage of these films...
About 2% of the American population is actually LGBTQ, like openly identifies as LGBTQ.
Not 12.8%.
Now you might say, well, there are lots of characters in these films.
That's true.
But if only about 2% of the American population identifies as openly LGBTQ, that means that very few people are actually associating in many places in the country with people who are LGBTQ.
So if you're just representing stories, then not all of those stories are going to include gay characters.
Right, not everybody has a gay friend or a gay person who is integral to the plot of their character, integral to the plot of their life, and even if they are gay, what does that have to do with most movies?
Most movies don't reveal the sexuality of random characters.
So it's all very weird, it's all very useless, but again, it is designed to appease a particular social justice crowd in film.
You want to put gay characters in film?
Go for it, so long as it's actually relevant to the plot and the character.
But the suggestion that every character has to have their sexual orientation revealed, because even in the most oblique way it's relevant to character, is really stupid.
There are a lot of gay people, a lot of straight people, who don't identify their sexual orientation as the key component of their life, what makes them a good or bad person, or relevant to any particular story.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest news.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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