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June 21, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:00
The Great Reversal | Ep. 565
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I have for you the worst example of media bias I have seen in recent memory.
President Trump signs an executive order that may or may not end family separation at the border, and President Trump rallies in Minnesota.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So in case you missed the news, this August I am taking the Ben Shapiro show live to audiences in Dallas and Phoenix.
You'll be able to see me in person and join in an audience Q&A.
Tickets are going really fast.
They're almost sold out in Dallas and they're nearing sold out in Phoenix.
Go to dailywire.com slash events to get your seats and additional info.
It's going to be a blast.
I'm going to get to the news in just a second.
First, I want to talk to you about why you should have some of your money in precious metals.
first crack at those, but we still have a few seats left in Dallas and Phoenix.
So please, if you're in those cities or you want to travel to those cities for the events, I think they're going to be a blast and I look forward to seeing you there.
All right, I'm going to get to the news in just a second.
First, I want to talk to you about why you should have some of your money in precious metals.
So if you look at the trade situation right now, President Trump obviously wants to raise tariffs on countries like China.
China is raising tariffs on the United States in response.
And you could easily see a trade war.
Well, this is going to have some pretty significant ramifications for the currency, considering that China actually could retaliate against the United States by selling off American bonds, for example.
Well, what that really means is that you ought to have at least some of your assets in a hard asset like gold, right?
You should have some of your assets, not all, You should have a lot of your assets in stocks and bonds.
All that stuff's great.
I have a lot of that stuff in stocks and bonds, too.
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All right.
So we have heard nonstop over the last two weeks that President Trump is Hitler!
Right?
President Trump is a Nazi.
And the reason President Trump is a Nazi is because of his policy of separating children from their parents at the border.
When people enter illegally into the United States, not at ports of entry, when they enter across the border in Arizona, for example, or Texas, and they're picked up by ICE, then they are immediately criminally prosecuted.
And that means that by law, their kids have to be separated from them.
And this means that Trump is evil.
Right?
Trump is totally evil.
Now, You might ask yourself, did this policy begin with Trump?
And as I've been saying for well on two weeks now, no, this policy did not begin with Trump.
This policy began with Barack Obama, whose policy in 2014-2015 was that he would arrest entire families and keep the kids unified with the parents.
And as I have said also, That there was a 2016 ruling, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, that says you're not allowed to do that anymore, you have to release the kids.
That's what leads to the parental separation.
I've also been saying that if Trump backed down on this, that if Trump said we're going to reunify the families but keep them in custody, immediately there would be a bunch of Democrats who signaled that this was unacceptable as well.
So separating families was like the Nazis.
And keeping families together in custody is also like the Nazis.
The only solution left, of course, is to release everybody into the general population.
And that's exactly what Democrats have been pushing for.
Well, one of the things that is truly maddening about this entire situation is the lack of intellectual honesty on virtually all sides on it, but particularly from the left.
Tammy Baldwin is a senator from, I believe, Wisconsin.
Is that correct?
And Tammy Baldwin was on CNN yesterday, and she was specifically asked about whether She felt the same way when young migrant children were being imprisoned by Barack Obama.
Brooke Baldwin actually asked her a solid question on CNN, so good for Brooke Baldwin.
Watch Tammy Baldwin's struggle to come up with an answer as to why she wasn't angry when Barack Obama was imprisoning children.
Did you raise your voice under the Obama administration?
You know, in numbers of cases, usually I remember a constituent who was in detention at the border, arguably very inappropriately, and we, you know, we raised our voice in that instance and many others, but that's, we've got to do this now in unison.
It's not enough to do it case by case or senator or house member by house member.
We've got to resolve to fix this issue.
Okay, so, that's a no.
Okay, that's a no, I didn't care when Obama was president.
Yes, I do care when Donald Trump is president.
The best evidence that the media seriously don't care about this issue until Trump is president comes today, courtesy of the Associated Press.
So, there's a story from the Associated Press.
Here's the title.
Now, you can imagine, just from reading that title, that the allegations of abuse are taking place because of stuff that is happening today.
Right?
Allegations of abuse that are happening today in the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center.
It's all about Trump.
Now, this story mentions Donald Trump seven separate times in the course of this very long story from the Associated Press.
It mentions Barack Obama zero times in this very long story about abuses at detention centers of illegal immigrant minors.
And now, there's only one problem.
All of the abuses alleged in the story happened under Barack Obama's watch.
All of them happened in 2015, 2016.
That is buried in paragraph 19 of this story.
Paragraph 19.
So paragraph 19, they finally mention, oh, by the way, all these illegal immigrant minors who were abused or allegedly abused, they were abused under Obama.
They mentioned that in paragraph 19, and they mentioned Donald Trump seven times, and they mentioned Barack Obama by name zero times.
And then you wonder why when Donald Trump goes to his rallies and he shouts about fake news and people cheer and chant fake news, you wonder why people take Donald Trump seriously when he says fake news?
Because you bury the lead, and then you don't report that Obama had anything to do with it.
And how bad were these abuses?
The answer is pretty damn bad.
Here's the Associated Press.
Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at a juvenile detention center in Virginia say they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells.
The abuse claims against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Stoughton, Virginia are detailed in federal court filings that include a half dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years.
Multiple detainees say the guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.
Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me, said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15.
Strapped me down all the way from your feet all the way to your chest.
You couldn't really move.
They have total control over you.
They also put a bag over your head.
It has little holes you can see through, but you feel suffocated with the bag on.
In addition to the children's firsthand translated accounts and court filings, a former child development specialist who worked inside the facility independently told the AP this week she saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards.
She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children's cases.
Now, normally, when I lead a story and when I write a story, I usually say on Wednesday or in 2015.
The date is the first thing you say because it sort of matters to the story.
You don't get any dates here until paragraph 19.
First, you get this paragraph.
Many of the children were sent there after U.S.
immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs, including MS-13.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration.
So that sounds like Donald Trump has been saying everybody's MS-13, so ICE is out there arresting a bunch of innocent kids, throwing them in prison and torturing them because they say they're MS-13, right?
That's what you would get from that AP story.
And the AP continues like this, right?
Trump said Wednesday that our Border Patrol agents and our ICE agents have done one great job cracking down on MS-13 measures, on MS-13 gang members.
We're throwing them out by the thousands, he said.
But a top manager at the Shenandoah Center said during a recent congressional hearing that the children did not appear to be gang members and were suffering from mental health issues resulting from trauma that happened in their home countries, problems the detention facility is ill-equipped to treat.
And then this is the best part.
Okay, so finally.
This is now in, let's see, paragraph 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, paragraph 10.
Okay, paragraph 10, we finally get to a point here.
Most children held in the Shenandoah facility who are the focus of the abuse lawsuit were caught crossing the border illegally alone.
They were not the children who have been separated from their families under the Trump administration's recent policy and are now in the government's care.
Okay, so in other words, this has nothing to do with the current issues that are being debated about family separation.
And then, all the way down in paragraph 19, all the way down in paragraph 19, we get this.
The complaint, filed by the non-profit Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, recounts the story of an unnamed 17-year-old Mexican citizen apprehended at the southern border.
The teen fled an abusive father and violence fueled by drug cartels to seek asylum in the United States in 2015.
Let me recall, when was the election of 2016?
Oh, that's right, it was after 2015, it turns out.
It turns out 2016, after 2015.
After stops at facilities in Texas and New York, he was transferred to Shenandoah in April 2016.
But wait, Donald Trump wasn't president then, right?
If I recall, he wasn't even the nominee for the Republicans at that point in April 2016.
But you don't find that out until paragraph 20.
Of a 1,000 word article.
I mean, this article is not 1,000 words, this article is probably 3,000 words.
Yeah, I love this.
Wait a second, there was a separate 2016 lawsuit?
Meaning it was publicly available in 2016?
What year is it now?
Oh yeah, it's 2018.
What happened in the intervening two years?
denying all wrongdoing information contained in a separate 2016 lawsuit appears to support some of the information contained in the recent abuse complaints.
Wait a second.
There was a separate 2016 lawsuit, meaning it was publicly available in 2016.
What year is it now?
Oh yeah, it's 2018.
What happened in the intervening two years?
Did somebody, was there a presidential change?
That's right!
Donald Trump became president, and only then did the media start reporting on lawsuits alleging horrible abuses happening under Barack Obama.
But remember, Obama's administration was scandal-free.
Barack Obama says so, and that means that it's true.
We also know that there was an ACLU report in 2015 talking about detaining abuses between 2009 and 2014.
Did you ever hear about that?
Of course you didn't hear about that.
Because nobody cared.
Because Barack Obama was president.
And Barack Obama was the bringer of light.
Barack Obama loved immigrants.
How do we know?
We know because he said so.
And the media said so.
Hey, here's a story, another story like this.
From the Drudge Report, the tragic case of Roberto Aguilar Batista, 38, whose family sued Barack Obama and multiple federal agencies after Batista died from complications of diabetes while being held in one of the administration's ill-equipped detention centers.
In a report published August 29, 2014, CBS2 Los Angeles says, quote, at a news conference Friday attended by CBS2's Amy Johnson, Nancy Luna said her husband had type 2 diabetes and his care was neglected.
He was held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, among other places.
Last March, 2014, Roberto Aguilar Batista died from complications of diabetes at the Dalby Correctional Facility.
In other words, there were lots and lots and lots of detaining abuses.
It was considered a detaining abuse to keep children together with their parents.
And yet the media are only interested in a crime.
Rachel Maddow is crying openly on air about the separation of children from parents.
Now, in a second, I'm going to show you why the Trump administration's response to this has been so foolish.
Because the reality is Trump should have stuck to his guns here.
He should have said, listen, we have a zero tolerance policy.
You cross the border, you're getting arrested.
And it is not up to me to change the law.
I cannot unilaterally change the law.
The job of the executive branch is to execute the law.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has already ruled that a settlement between the Clinton administration government in 1997 and illegal immigrants in 1997, the Flores Settlement, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that settlement means I cannot keep children together with parents, but I am not going to release everybody into the interior of the country.
Trump should have maintained that line because that is the correct legal line.
Instead, President Trump decided that he was going to announce an executive order under pressure.
That's because the polling numbers were really not good on this stuff.
The media attention on it, obviously, has been incredibly biased.
But here was President Trump yesterday announcing that he was going to sign an executive order, and then we'll go through the text of the executive order in just a second.
We want to keep families together.
It's very important.
I'll be signing something in a little while that's going to do that.
And the people in this room want to do that.
And they're working on various pieces of legislation to get it done.
But I'll be doing something that's somewhat preemptive, but ultimately will be matched by legislation, I'm sure.
Okay, so he says that he's going to sign an executive agreement.
Now, we have the executive order.
Now, I have the text of the executive order, and all I can say is that it's either really stupid or it is really clever.
One of the two.
And I'll explain what I mean by that in just a second.
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Okay, so let's go through President Trump's executive order.
As I have said, the Trump administration does not have the legal ability to keep children together with their parents in detention.
That is a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling based on the Obama administration's policy of keeping children together with parents in detention.
At the time, this was considered inhumane.
Folks on the left suggested that it was inhumane to keep children in detention with their parents.
Now they are suggesting it is inhumane to separate children from their parents in detention.
So here is what Trump actually put in the executive order.
The executive order is one of two things, just as a preliminary note.
Either it reinstates catch and release, meaning that all of these parents have to be released into the general population, or it does nothing.
Those are the only two choices.
It doesn't actually say that kids can now be kept with their parents in facilities.
Instead, what it basically says is, to the fullest extent of law, parents should be kept together with their kids.
It's kind of meaningless.
So here's what it says.
It says, By the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and by the laws of the United States of America, including the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is hereby ordered as follows.
It is the policy of this administration to rigorously enforce our immigration laws.
Under our laws, the only legal way for an alien to enter this country is it is at a designated port of entry at an appropriate time.
When an alien enters or attempts to enter the country anywhere else, that alien has committed at least the crime of improper entry and is subject to a fine or imprisonment under Section 1325A of Title VIII United States Code.
This administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the INA until and unless Congress directs otherwise.
It is also the policy of this administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.
It is unfortunate that Congress's failure to act and quarreers have put the administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.
OK, so so far, this has not said anything.
So far, this has just reinstated the Trump administration's policy, which is, we're going to arrest everybody, and we'd like to keep the families together, but we can't, legally speaking.
Okay, then, they get into the actual operative portion of this.
Okay.
Temporary detention policy for families entering the country illegally.
The Secretary of Homeland Security shall, to the extent permitted by law, and subject to the availability of appropriations, maintain custody of alien families during the pendency of any criminally improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members.
The Secretary shall not, however, detain an alien family together when there is a concern that detention of an alien family with each child's alien parent would pose a risk to the child's welfare.
The Secretary of Defense shall take all legally available means to provide for the Secretary any existing facilities available for housing or care of alien families.
Now, as you'll note, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall, to the extent permitted by law, the law does not permit them to keep these kids together with their parents in the facilities.
That means that they're either going to have to release the parents or they're going to have to separate the parents.
So either nothing changed or everything changed.
OK, this executive order doesn't actually do much.
Nonetheless, we're going to talk about the media response to it because the media response to it is so bifurcated.
It's so crazy.
So let's talk a little bit about about the media response to this.
Actually, you know, first, let me point something out.
Here's a chart on catch and release.
OK, so catch and release is the policy that preexisted Trump, where instead of arresting everybody across the border illegally, instead they would just arrest a bunch of people and then they would release them into the society and then they would hope that they showed back up in court for their day in court.
Well, in absentia rates for released aliens, initial case completions, fiscal year 2016, 39% of people in 2016 who were arrested and then released, 39% of them never showed up again.
So nearly 40%, 4 in 10.
Frankly, I'm shocked that it's only 4 in 10.
I'm shocked it's not 7 in 10.
That's a huge number of people.
That means that there were 9,722 in absentia orders that were declared in 2016.
So there were almost 10,000 people who went missing, basically, in 2016 alone, after they were arrested and then released into society.
That's the reason why Trump wants to keep them in custody, because the idea is if you release them, they're just going to run away, which is, of course, perfectly right.
Well, President Trump signs this executive order.
And as I say, legally speaking, because he cannot keep the families together, he has two choices.
He can separate the families, or he can release the entire family.
So either the executive order reinstates catch and release, or the executive order does nothing.
And now my inclination is going to be the executive order does a lot of nothing, but...
Here's the problem with what Trump just did.
Trump has maintained for two weeks that he can't actually do anything by executive order.
And then he actually didn't do much by this executive order.
The executive order doesn't actually do anything.
So why did he do it?
And the answer is he didn't like the headline.
President Trump has a bad habit of he gets himself into hot water and then all of the people around him stand up and defend what he's done.
They defend at least the policy.
They say this is legally defensible.
And then President Trump doesn't like the blowback.
And then he undercuts his own side by going and saying, you know what?
I'm gonna sign an executive order and fix all of this.
And well, you can't sign this executive order.
This executive order doesn't do anything, right?
It is ineffective.
But it does hand a headline to the left, which is Trump folded, Trump caves.
So Stephen Colbert last night on his ex-Gribble show, he said that President Trump folded by issuing this executive order.
Make no mistake, Trump folded.
He folded like an origami Trump casino.
This is the first time I have seen President Trump fold, right?
He's never done this before.
He folded for the first time.
So how did we get here?
Okay, and then he talks about, we got here through public pressure.
We got here because you spoke out, right?
Trump folded like a house of cheap cards, right?
That's what he did.
Here's the problem.
The same media that is saying that he folded.
So that should mean problem over, right?
I mean, if he folded, then the problem is over.
Except for that was never the agenda.
The actual agenda of the left is full release of anyone coming across the border.
There's a feeling on the left that ICE itself is inappropriate, that there is something deeply wrong with even arresting people at the border.
So, Samantha Bee.
The least funny person in America.
She won that title a couple of weeks ago outright.
She'd been in a running gun battle with Trevor Noah and Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham.
But she actually took the cake after her rant against Ivanka Trump.
She actually took the gold medal.
She ran away like Secretariat.
It was pretty amazing.
Well, now she comes forward and she says, listen, Trump retreats on separating families and then he signs an order to detain them together.
But for Samantha Bee, this is not enough.
Why?
Because she wants them all released into general society.
That's the whole point.
Yay!
No more baby internment camps, just regular internment camps.
Cool!
That's what we call a win in 2018.
To be clear, I am happy that at least these kids are theoretically going to stay with their parents, but mommy and me jails are not a solution.
They're not new, and they're also not legal.
Man, is she unfunny.
My goodness.
I mean, being in her audience must be like being in a comedy internment camp.
My goodness.
That's just, she is the worst.
Wow.
But, the point that she's making is the point that Democrats were always going to make.
And I have been saying this for weeks.
For weeks, for weeks, for weeks.
Not to say I told you so, but I, period, told, period, you, period, so.
I told you so.
I told you that as soon as Trump said he's going to hold the families together, Democrats were immediately going to claim that something egregious had gone on.
Something egregious was now going on.
We're back to the policy that Obama embraced, but that was bad enough.
All we want is full release.
So, you have Bernie Sanders saying, that's it, here's Bernie Sanders saying that President Trump's executive order, it did not go far enough.
It did not include pudding funding for me and my friends, and also, I will not share my pudding with actual illegal immigrants, but I will rant about it until I get my pudding from one of my aides.
So, please, talk Anderson Cooper to Bernie Sanders, and then later, Bernie Sanders will eat his pudding.
The idea of tearing little children from the arms of their parents, putting them into detention cages, and then making a big deal about an executive order, which may do absolutely nothing.
It was a crisis that he created and attempted to address today, but he didn't go anywhere near far enough.
OK, the only way the Democrats are going to feel that President Trump went far enough is if he does an en masse release.
He gets an en masse release of all of these people.
And that, of course, is the whole point here.
That's what the media is pushing for, as well as what the media are pushing for.
Here was Time magazine's new cover.
Time magazine has a brand new cover out.
And what exactly is their cover?
Well, it's this obnoxious thing.
So it's a cover of a crying child.
supposedly being separated from the parents, staring up at President Trump, who is grinning down at the kid, right?
Because, and then it says, "Welcome to America," Time Magazine, right?
I don't remember this sort of cover with Barack Obama and his giant camps full of children who are wrapped in aluminum foil, but I am seeing this cover.
The whole point here is that no matter what Trump does, he loses, according to the media.
So if that's the case, why not just enforce the law and then put it back on Congress?
Well, in just a second, I'm going to explain to you why it is that the Democrats are pushing all of this and what they think that the policy actually should be.
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Okay, so.
This has become very obvious.
The Democrats never cared about the policy of separation.
They never cared about it.
This was all a ruse.
The Democrats were fully concerned only and explicitly with destroying Donald Trump.
How do we know this?
Number one, Chuck Schumer refused the opportunity to put a legislative fix on this boo-boo.
Ted Cruz wanted a legislative fix.
Chuck Schumer said, no, we're going to put Trump's feet to the fire instead.
You cannot simultaneously argue that the policy is Nazi-esque and then turn down the opportunity to change the policy.
That's not how this works.
Hell else do we know?
Well, now Trump has supposedly changed the policy.
Now, as I explained, I don't think the policy actually changed, legally speaking, but supposedly Trump changed the policy.
And how did Democrats respond?
Did they respond by saying, well, good for President Trump.
It's about time that we change this.
Or, you know, we pressured Trump into this.
Good for us.
We finally did it.
We've won a big victory.
Yay!
That is not how they responded.
How did they respond?
Well, they responded by saying, We need more.
Release everyone!
Here's Kamala Harris' tweet.
So Kamala Harris, my awful, awful senator from the state of California, she tweeted out, this executive order doesn't fix the crisis.
Indefinitely detaining children with their families in camps is inhumane and will not make us safe.
So again, if you separate the kids from the families, that's inhumane.
But if you keep the kids with the parents, that's also inhumane.
So the only solution left, by process of elimination, is to release everyone.
Which, of course, is the entire goal.
And, by the way, justifies everything Trump has been saying about Democrats who don't like borders.
That Democrats just want illegal immigrants released into the general population.
That that actually is their priority.
If that's not their priority, they need to propose a policy solution that allows us to arrest illegal immigrants who come in here with kids.
Otherwise, they're not providing us a policy solution.
They just want people released generally.
This could lead to family internment camps, Wolf, and that is what we do not want to see.
a congressperson.
He comes forward, he says, this Trump executive order is going to lead to internment camps.
Democrat from California.
This could lead to family internment camps, Wolf, and that is what we do not want to see.
And the way to avoid that is to still follow that Flores decision, which is a humane decision that does not want people in camps like this indefinitely.
Okay, this is my favorite part.
Okay, so my favorite part of this is that that was the policy.
Okay, the new Trump policy, keeping these kids together with their parents, that was the Trump policy, the stated Trump policy, the Obama policy, the government policy, up till 2015-2016.
Okay, Obama implemented that policy.
So, Luis Gutierrez, Who is a radical leftist from Illinois.
He was asked about this.
He said, well, hold on.
Hold up a second.
You're ripping on Trump now saying that he's going to keep the families together.
But that's what Obama did.
Why didn't you complain about Obama on any of this?
Here's Luis Gutierrez answering that question.
We did challenge Obama, but you know what?
Obama had a heart.
He had a soul.
He had a heart.
He had a center.
He had convictions, and we could speak to those.
Okay, so in other words, we challenged him, but really we massaged his ass.
Really, our challenge was really mostly us getting out the massage oils and just really going to work on President Obama.
That's basically how we challenged him, because he had a heart.
He had a soul.
I looked into his eyes, and it was romantic.
We had that long-lingering awkward moment before we kissed.
I mean, like, really?
That was the way that you challenged Barack Obama, whose policy was exactly the same as the current reinstated policy of Donald Trump?
The only difference between Trump's policy and Obama's policy is that Trump is doing it more often.
That is literally the only difference.
The only difference is that Trump is actually attempting to strictly enforce border crossings.
He's using criminal court instead of civil convictions in order to enforce the border.
And Obama did that, but not as much.
That's the only difference.
And yet we are told that Obama had a heart.
He had a soul.
How do we know he had a heart and he had a soul?
Because he had a D by his name.
That's the real answer.
We had a D by his name, and that means that he had a heart and he had a soul.
By the way, the Democrats' proposed legislation on border separation would let nearly all parents who commit federal crimes get off scot-free.
Gabriel Malar has an entire column on this where he went through the Senate Democrat co-sponsored bill written carelessly.
It doesn't distinguish between migrant children at the border and U.S.
citizen children already within the United States.
The bill further does not distinguish between federal officers handling the border crisis and federal law enforcement pursuing the ordinary course of their duties.
The bill provides that an agent or officer of a designated agency shall be prohibited from removing a child from his or her parents or legal guardian at or near the port of entry or within 100 miles of the border of the United States.
Okay, well, this is a serious problem, because if you can't remove the kids from the parents, then you can't arrest the parents, according to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
So their bill actually just releases all illegal immigrants who come across the border with kids.
But of course, that's their entire policy.
Now, here's the hilarious part.
Jay Johnson, who you'll recall was the Secretary of Homeland Security under Barack Obama, the exorable DHS Secretary under Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017, who presided over this Obama-era policy.
You know, the Obama-era policy of keeping kids together with parents in detention centers?
He has an entire piece in the Washington Post virtue signaling.
So he did the exact same thing Trump is now saying that he's gonna do, and he has a long piece in the Washington Post talking about what a good dude he is, just like Luis Gutierrez says.
He has a soul.
He has a heart.
And he has really nice calves.
Anyway, here's what he says.
My wife and I spent Mother's Day in 2014 at a U.S.
Border Patrol center in McAllen, Texas.
The facility had been built for single adults, but it looked like a crude daycare center flooded with children.
In the midst of that flood, my eyes were drawn to one little girl sitting alone at a desk and being processed by a border patrol agent.
I was struck by her long black hair, which was beautiful despite the hot and dirty journey from Central America she had just completed.
I asked her, why did you come here?
She replied, I'm looking for my mother in the United States.
She began to try, cry.
The translator began to cry.
I began to cry.
Yeah, really.
This is what he's writing, okay?
This is the guy who's responsible for actual families being held in detention centers in 2014, 2015, and who said openly that this was a deterrent policy.
Designed to keep little girls with beautiful black hair from journeying from Central America.
He says, as I witnessed the Trump administration's current practice of separating children from their parents at the border with Mexico, the image of that little girl and hundreds of other migrant women and children is fixed in my mind.
Not the images of those kids who you're keeping in detention centers, you know, Jay Johnson.
The images, of course, that have to do with Trump.
Now, here's the whole point here.
Democrats don't actually have to act sympathetic.
All they have to do is act as though they are sympathetic.
They don't actually have to pursue policies that are sympathetic to American citizens.
They don't have to pursue good legal policies.
All they have to do is talk about how much they cry, and we're all supposed to pretend that that means that they have the best of intentions.
He says, I hesitate to criticize my successors in office who are burdened with the responsibility of keeping the U.S. homeland and its borders secure.
I hesitate to cast out on the hard work of those who once worked for me in the DHS.
Yeah, he hesitates in the pages of The Washington Post.
He says he doesn't like the zero-tolerance deterrence policy.
Those of us with a public voice and who understand the issue cannot stay silent.
So what exactly is the problem with the policy, according to Jay Johnson?
He says he doesn't like the zero tolerance deterrence policy.
And he doesn't like that everybody who's coming across the border illegally is arrested.
Now, he doesn't have anything to say about the actual separation policy because he engaged in it.
And he doesn't actually have anything to say about keeping families together because he engaged in it.
Instead, he just says that we should get rid of the zero-tolerance policy, which essentially means that we should release all of these people into the center of the United States.
He says the answer to the underlying problem is twofold.
First, Send more aid to Central America.
In 2016, Congress started down this road by appropriating $750 million in assistance for Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
In subsequent years, that level of support has fallen off, so we're supposed to pay off these countries.
Second, encourage the neighboring countries in the region—Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Belize—to develop their own systems for accepting Central American refugees and asylum seekers.
OK, this is the hilarious part.
So his two solutions don't involve separation or keeping kids together with their parents.
The only solutions he's actually suggesting, Jeh Johnson, the former DHS secretary under kind, caring, generous Barack Obama, is cut a check to Honduras and try to ask the Mexicans to take care of the problem.
Those are really his only two solutions.
That's it.
Nothing about parental separation.
Nothing about keeping kids together with their parents.
All of which suggests this is just politically driven crap.
It's just politically driven nonsense.
Which, of course it is.
I mean, that's all this is.
It's just deliberately stupid.
It's so irritating to watch as the media falls prey to this, and they're doing it on purpose.
I'm going to give you the worst of all of these people's responses in just one second, but for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
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We have a big Sunday special coming up this week with Jason Whitlock, the Fox Sports 1 anchor.
We talked about the NFL, we talked about the NBA, we talked about the intersection of culture and politics.
It was great, and you're gonna wanna listen to it.
So check that out.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
All righty, so the stupidest of all possible responses to this whole border scenario, which feels ginned up.
It's not to say that there's not a problem with the policy.
There is a problem with the policy.
There has been a problem with the policy.
There will continue to be a problem with the policy until Congress does something about it.
Congress is not going to do anything about it because Democrats are far more interested in yelling and screaming and doing stompy foot than they are in actually solving things.
The proof of this comes courtesy of Joe Kennedy III.
Nothing I like better than a guy who's only famous because he had a grandpa who was president.
That's my favorite thing.
As you know, I'm big into the nepotism.
I just, I love it.
And Joe Kennedy III, a man who dumped his face into a vat of chapstick before speaking in his response to the State of the Union address, is now tweeting.
And we're supposed to take him seriously because his grandpa was president of the United States and also banged around a lot.
Here's Representative Joe Kennedy III.
He said, you might not know this about me, but I'm a white guy.
No, we knew, dude.
He says, as a white guy, I would encourage Donald Trump and his fellow GOP white guys to consult a not white guy in their efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform in less than 24 hours.
Oh.
My.
God.
It's worth noting here that 50% of all INS agents, 50% of all ICE agents are Hispanic, are non-white.
So it might be worth noting that.
So if you consult the people over at ICE, my guess is that they have some ideas, but they might not actually agree with Joe Kennedy.
I love the assumption that all black people and brown people agree with Joe Kennedy on his preferred policy of releasing all illegal immigrants into the United States en masse.
It's really just because of whiteness.
It's just because of toxic whiteness.
I'm surprised they haven't gone with that yet.
We've got white supremacy, we have white power, we have all these terms of art.
I'm surprised they haven't gone with toxic whiteness.
Our whiteness is making us toxic.
I love that Joe Kennedy, a white man, is lecturing other people on all this stuff.
I'm less white than Joe Kennedy, presumably, because it depends.
I'm Jewish, so I guess that Jewish is less white, maybe?
Depends.
Then he tweeted out, Might be my cautious side.
But it seems like there could be unforeseen consequences, like entire families being indefinitely locked in cages.
Just my two cents.
Again, the Democrats are unified in their approach here.
They're going to bash Trump for separating families, and then they're going to bash Trump for bringing families back together.
They don't want anyone arrested.
They want everyone released into the interior of the United States.
This is their end goal.
It's really, it's astonishing that they're this clear about it and that the media seem not to care at all.
But, you know, Shocker.
That's what the media do.
Now, meanwhile, this is an amazing, amazing story about the ACLU.
It turns out that the ACLU is now about to change its policies.
For a long time, the ACLU was a free speech organization, right?
They were the kind of people who would defend Nazis marching in Skokie, right?
They famously defended a Nazi march in Skokie because the idea was that they had to.
It was deeply important that they defend the free speech rights of people with whom they disagree.
And for that, I give the ACLU credit.
Well, now there's an internal memo from the American Civil Liberties Union, and they say that they are going to weigh their interest in protecting the First Amendment against other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women's rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals.
In other words, the ACLU, which was supposed to be the premier civil liberties union in the United States, is now changing its policy.
They're going to balance free speech concerns, like you should be able to say what you want in the United States of America, like the First Amendment, they're going to balance that with, does it offend black people?
That's really what this is.
Does it offend LGBT people?
So in other words, if, for example, the state of California cracks down on this show, because I broadcast from the state of California, and I say that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and you can't magically change from one to the other.
If the state of California were to crack down on me and attempt to fine me, and I went to the ACLU and I said, listen guys, you may disagree with me, but this is a basic First Amendment issue.
The ACLU, you would have 20 years ago defended me.
Now the ACLU says, listen, We may agree with you on First Amendment grounds, but that's really offensive to transgender people.
So we're not going to defend you anymore.
So here is the confidential memo obtained by a former board member.
It's amazing.
They say, our defensive speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.
So they're now going to do a balancing act.
And they're now going to do a balancing act.
They say the ACLU is a premier defender of the Bill of Rights and works on multiple civil liberties and civil rights issues using an integrated advocacy approach that includes litigation, communications, grassroots activism and policy advocacy.
Our position in one area can sometimes present a conflict with our work and goals in another area.
Well, no, it shouldn't because you're talking about government policy, right?
When you're talking about government policy, your dislike of a particular Nazi statement does not mean that you think that the government should be able to ban that Nazi statement.
Two things can be true at once.
I hate Nazis.
I also think Nazis have a right to speak in the United States of America.
Bottom line, free speech applies to people with whom I disagree.
And then their internal memo says, work to protect free speech may raise tensions with racial justice, reproductive freedom, or a myriad of other rights, where the content of the speech we seek to protect conflicts with our policies on those matters and or otherwise is directed at menacing vulnerable groups or individuals.
At the same time, work to advance equality may create tensions with speech and religious liberty.
Privacy safeguards may create tensions with protections for women in the domestic sphere.
As a multi-issue organization, these conflicts are inevitable.
We cannot eliminate them, but we can ensure that we consider them carefully and thoroughly.
Why is this coming up?
They say the ACLU's involvement in the protests and subsequent tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 brought these issues to the floor once again and prompted these guidelines, first proposed on a nationwide call of the ACLU's affiliate legal directors.
These guidelines are designed to assist in consideration of the competing interests that may arise when such conflicts arise.
In other words, they defended the right of the Charlottesville protesters, who are white supremacists, to do their rally, and then they didn't like what emerged, and now they don't want to defend those rights anymore.
This is the death of the First Amendment.
This is the end of the First Amendment.
So this is a full, this is a full surrender to the forces of intersectionality.
So, in the Wall Street Journal, this former board member talks about this entire situation.
The former board member who revealed this memo was a person named Wendy Kaminer.
I'm going to go through her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in just a second.
So here's what she says.
What she says is, the speech case guidelines reflect a demotion of free speech in the ACLU's hierarchy of values.
Their vague references to the serious harm to marginalized people occasioned by speech can easily include the presumed psychological effects of racist or otherwise hateful speech, which is constitutionally protected, but contrary to ACLU values.
Faced with perceived conflicts between freedom of speech and progress toward equality, the ACLU is likely to choose equality.
If the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU's balancing test, it would greatly expand government power to restrict speech.
And this is exactly right, of course.
This is why there are a lot of folks on the right who are deeply concerned that all of the hate speech legislation that you see in Canada is going to come to the United States forthwith.
That very soon what you're going to see is legislation pursued by Democrats and upheld by courts that says that you cannot say things that offend other people.
And if you offend other people, then you will be fully responsible in a court of law for offending other people.
The end of the First Amendment is at hand.
What we are watching right now is deeply scary and deeply troubling, and the fact the ACLU is caving to it is demonstrative of the collapse of liberalism into leftism.
I've always said there's a difference between people who are liberal and people who are of the left.
People who are liberal are people who may disagree with me on policies like the amount of government involvement in the economy, but they believe I have a right to speak.
They believe that I have a right to live my life as I see fit, for the most part, with certain government regulations that would restrict interactions between people in the business sphere, right?
Or they believe in redistributive economics, but they believe that I should be able to talk as I see fit.
Leftists, by contrast, believe that my very speech is a threat to their safety.
It's a destruction of the... It's a bolstering of institutions of privilege.
And therefore, my speech has to be shut down.
Well, leftists are the people who are protesting me on campus.
Leftists are the ones who are protesting me.
Liberals are the ones who are debating me.
Leftists are the ones who are protesting me and asking that I be shut down on campus.
These leftists used to be at odds with the ACLU.
The ACLU used to say, people on the left who are trying to shut down free speech, these are part of the problem.
These are the bad guys.
But instead, they've decided that they are going to collapse full scale into the foolishness of the hard left.
That now they are going to give up on free speech entirely, and instead they are going to just jump full scale into an embrace of intersectional politics in which race and gender matter a lot more than basic principles like freedom of speech.
Now, with all that said, you wonder why Trump is drawing big numbers at rallies?
It's because of stuff like this.
It's because of the ACLU, it's because of media malfeasance.
So Trump yesterday was in northern Minnesota.
Minnesota went very narrowly for Hillary Clinton in the last election cycle.
She only won it by, I think it was under 2%.
And so Trump actually has some momentum in Minnesota.
And he is not wrong when he says that Democrats are putting illegal immigrants before American citizens.
I can't say that he's wrong when he says this, when Democrats are openly saying that all illegal immigrants who cross the border with kids should be released into the center of the country.
Democrats put illegal immigrants before they put American citizens.
What the hell is going on?
Okay, so I can't argue with him.
I'd like to say that he's wrong, but I'm having a problem saying that he's wrong when, again, Democrats are making very clear that this is how they feel about this stuff.
And by the way, the media malfeasance continues full scale.
Here's President Trump yesterday saying that he wanted to send MS-13 back.
He said that it was necessary to send MS-13 back.
And ABC News said that he said all illegal immigrants, including children.
We have liberated towns out in Long Island.
MS-13.
Gangs.
We have taken them out of our country by the thousands.
They're not sending their finest, that I can tell you.
And we're sending them to hell back.
He's specifically talking about MS-13.
ABC News headlined that he was talking about all illegal immigrants.
I love it.
I love it.
It's just it's just spectacular.
So this is you wonder why President Trump continues to gain momentum.
It's because the left cannot just make factual critiques of President Trump.
They gin up false narratives and use them against him.
And then they use those false narratives in order to push liberal organizations like the ACLU into hard leftism by saying the priority here has to be fighting the bad guy.
And the bad guy is the Hitlerian Trump.
And if we can fight Trump, if we can fight the Hitlerian right by violating First Amendment principles, by violating the Constitution, well, then we will have made the world a much, much better place.
The left's drive for utopia means that they're going to run roughshod over your right.
And this is driving people to a reactionary support of anyone who promises to be anti-left.
That's what's happening in the country right now.
And that's a dangerous phenomenon because now we have reactionary politics on both sides and very little principled opposition to specific violations of liberty.
OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things I like.
Well, I think we need some relaxing music after all this because it's been a frustrating day.
So, Dvořák's Piano Quintet No.
2.
So, Dvořák is a Czech composer and he lived about the time of Brahms.
Brahms was a big fan of Dvořák.
If you know Dvořák's music, it's because you've heard his music from the New World Symphony.
The New World Symphony was written when he traveled through the United States.
It's his ninth symphony, I believe.
And the New World is used very frequently in film, particularly the second movement of the New World Symphony.
Which is used in Clear and Present Danger.
They use it at military funerals sometimes.
But this is his piano quintet.
I'm very into the piano quintet as a form.
So there are lots of different forms of chamber music.
A piano quintet is quite wonderful because instead of the full booming sound of the orchestra, piano quintet is two violins, violist, cellist, and pianist.
And so you get a wide variety of sound in sort of the minimal number of people.
Here's the beginning of Dvorak's Quintet in A Major, Op. 81.
����
���� ���� Okay, I think we've relaxed enough.
So that's good stuff from Dvorak.
Go check that out.
This is also great writing music, okay?
It's great writing and great study music.
Chamber music is great for that.
And it's a hell of a lot better than Ape Bleep, okay?
I mean, like that terrible new Beyonce song.
First of all, kudos to the multiple people who have now taken my lyric read of Ape Bleep and put it on YouTube to the actual soundtrack from Ape Poop.
By Beyonce and Jay-Z.
Kudos to you.
You've made great art.
Apparently, my version... First of all, you've never heard me spit fire.
Is that how we say it?
Spit fire?
Okay, you've never heard me spit fire.
But if I chose to do so, let me tell you, I would rap like Cardi B. Okay?
Maybe?
Who's Cardi B?
I don't know.
Anyway!
Okay, time for a thing I hate.
Okay, so this is a great piece from Jesse Daniels, an opinion columnist for the Huffington Post.
So you know this is going to be awesome, right?
It's from the Huffington Post, so you just know it's going to be great.
Here is the piece.
The piece is titled, Why the Face of Family Separation is a White Woman.
Wow.
The face of family separation is a white woman.
Again, it's race that drives family separation because you see, white people are the worst.
They're just the worst.
Who's writing this?
Why?
A white lady!
Indeed.
But here's what she writes.
When President Donald Trump referred to some immigrants as animals, Homeland Security Secretary Christian Nielsen was quick to defend him.
If anyone wants to quibble about whether or not we should call those people animals, perhaps the quibble should be whether we call them something worse.
Well, again, he was talking about MS-13, people whose literal slogan is, what is it, shoot, rape, kill?
It's something like that.
It's insane.
That's not the zero-tolerance policy.
The zero-tolerance policy is arresting everyone who crosses the border.
That's not the zero tolerance policy.
The zero tolerance policy is arresting everyone who crosses the border.
The separation is a necessary legal byproduct of the arrest.
A family separation has been portrayed as a women's issue in the media with all four former first living first ladies opposing it.
The administration has deployed Nielsen, along with White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to defend it.
Both women appeared at a press briefing on Monday and performed that job with gusto.
White women, like Nielsen and Sanders, have always been part of making white supremacy seem more palatable and less like the brutal, repressive ideology it is.
Historical examples abound from white women who worked alongside male colonizers to the wives of slaveholders who punished the people their husbands owned to the white women who packed the picnic lunches for and took the photos of the lynching purportedly committed in their defense.
White women have played active roles in advancing and protecting white supremacy.
And then she says their counterparts today are women like Laura Ingraham and Coulter.
Right.
Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter are both women who I'm sure would have involved themselves in lynching of black people for no reason and taking pictures of it.
I just I love the idea that race and sex define the evil.
And the woman who's writing is of that race and sex.
But this is the point of intersectionality.
Intersectionality is the suggestion that we can define you purely by the various groups to which you belong unless you do penance, unless you come forward and achieve the grace of the left.
By claiming that you have moved beyond your own parochial interests as a white woman writing for the Huffington Post.
Now you have given up all of your own opinions and you have embraced the collective because you no longer are an individual, obviously.
You've moved beyond your whiteness and your woman-ness and instead you are going to say exactly what the left wants you to say.
This sort of silliness obviously leads the country to become a much worse place.
Christian Nielsen and Sarah Huckabee Sanders are not doing what they're doing because they're white women.
They're doing what they're doing because they are conservatives and work for the Trump administration.
And that is why they're doing what they're doing.
End of story.
But I guess if we're going to reduce everybody down to racial categories, you can't be particularly surprised when the country tears itself apart.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest, plus the mailbag, because tomorrow's a Friday.
Wow, we've made it to the end of the week.
Almost.
We're almost there, guys.
See you here then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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