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Oct. 30, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:24
The Knowledge Of Good And Evil | Ep. 649
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President Trump says he might want to end birthright citizenship by executive order.
We investigate the nature of anti-Semitism and we talk about the relationship between rhetoric and violence.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So, every day a new news cycle.
There's a lot to talk about today, as well, still more news in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
Plus, the President of the United States has now unleashed a new controversy.
He says that he might want to sign an executive order getting rid of birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants.
We'll talk about the legality of that and the policy considerations and what this has to do with the 2018 elections.
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All right, so the big controversy of the day, because every day a new controversy.
That's the theme of today's America.
The President of the United States has now said in an interview that he is interested in signing an executive order that would end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrant children.
So here is the way the law currently operates.
If you come to the United States for virtually any purpose, unless you are a foreign diplomat, You come to the United States and you have a baby in the United States.
That baby is automatically a citizen of the United States entitled to all rights and privileges conferred upon all citizens of the United States.
The reason that this is a controversial issue is because nothing in the Constitution actually says that this is the case.
Not only does nothing in the Constitution actually say that this is the case, There's pretty good evidence that the framers of the 14th Amendment had no intent to do anything remotely like this.
Suggest that just because you come to the United States and then you have a baby here, your baby is now a United States citizen.
And this does have some pretty significant costs involved.
Right now you have in California, we've seen many stories about this, you've had situations where Legitimate birth tourism is happening.
People are traveling to the United States just to have babies in the United States so that their kids become American citizens.
And there's some pretty significant impacts.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which is very anti-illegal immigration.
They estimate that between 300,000 and 400,000 children are born to illegal immigrants in the United States every single year, meaning one out of every ten births in the United States is to an illegal immigrant mother.
All of those children are considered by the executive branch of the U.S.
government to be U.S.
citizens enjoying the same rights and privileges as the children of U.S.
citizens.
The population of U.S.-born children with illegal alien parents has expanded rapidly From 2.3 million in 2003 to 4 million in 2008.
And that does not include children who are 18 years of age or older, so the actual figure is actually somewhat larger.
All of the benefits that are available to American citizens are obviously available to these American citizens.
There's a lot of talk about illegal immigration not having a tremendous impact on the American economy.
Because illegal immigrants are barred from federal welfare, for example.
Their children, however, are not.
And this does lead to chain migration because children are now U.S.
citizens and they can sponsor their parents for United States citizenship.
The Center for Immigration Studies suggests that many of the welfare costs associated with illegal immigration are due to current birthright citizenship policy.
They say greater efforts at barring illegal aliens from federal welfare programs do not reduce costs because the kids are still American citizens.
Nationwide, 40% of illegal alien-headed households receive some type of welfare.
In some states, the rate is higher.
In New York, 49% receive welfare.
In California, 48%.
Only 19% of households headed by native-born citizens make use of a major welfare program.
In other words, illegal aliens who have American citizen children are taking advantage of welfare at exorbitant rates.
And states offer additional welfare benefits as well.
This is all according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
Again, The L.A.
County supervisor estimates that illegal immigration and birthright citizenship cost taxpayers in L.A.
County over a billion dollars annually, not including education costs.
That's a lot, a lot of money.
59% of illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children live in or near poverty.
And again, then these kids are able to sponsor their parents for residency in the United States.
So there's a lot of talk today about this is racist, this is the Trump administration trying to simply bar people who are differently colored from coming into the United States.
No, there are serious economic costs associated with low-income people and poorly educated folks who are illegally immigrating to the United States, coming here, having babies, their kids become citizens, and now their kids are entitled to all of the benefits that American citizenship confers.
So, President Trump suggested today that he could change all of this by executive order.
Here's what he said.
said.
He said, it was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment.
Guess what?
You don't.
And then he said, you definitely can do it with an act of Congress.
But now they're saying I can do it with just an executive order.
We're the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States with all of those benefits.
It's ridiculous, ridiculous, and it has to end.
So there are a couple of contentions that he makes here.
Contention number one, birthright citizenship is bad policy.
I I tend to agree with this.
I think the birthright citizenship...
is bad policy.
If you're just coming across the border and having a baby in the United States, that does not mean that you have come in through our legal immigration system and your children are going to be much more impacted, obviously, by their parents than they're going to be impacted simply by force and dint of living in the United States.
So, if you're interested in a country that assimilates people to American values, you need people immigrating legally and then having babies here legally.
Now, listen, legal residents of the United States, different story, because legal residents very often are preparing to become immigrants to the United States.
So my in-laws, for example, were legal residents to the United States.
My wife came here as a child.
She came here back and forth until she was 12.
They came here permanently when she was 12.
She did not become an American citizen in the United States until actually after we were married and not because we were married, but because her time of waiting had expired.
That was basically when she was 21, 22 years old.
She got her American citizenship because she had to wait 10 years in order to get American citizenship.
But her younger brother was born in the United States and he was an American citizen as he should have been.
His parents were legal residents of the United States.
The 14th Amendment essentially guarantees that if you are a legal resident of the United States or a citizen of the United States, your children are American citizens.
Which, again, makes a fair bit of sense.
Because if you want to make sure that kids are ensconced in the American way of life, you want to make sure that their parents are loyal to the United States government and are loyal to the American Constitution.
The same is not true for the children of illegal immigrants.
If you just come across the border, have a baby, never go through the legal process, we didn't want you, right?
I mean, there's no evidence that we wanted you.
Maybe we do want you, but we don't know.
There's no evidence of this.
Then suggesting that this inherently is a good idea is kind of foolhardy.
President Trump says that we're the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby's a citizen of the United States.
That's not true.
There are 30 countries across the world that have birthright citizenship.
Most of those happen to be in Central and South America.
Cuba, Haiti, these are places with birthright citizenship.
He is not wrong, however, that in the developed world, we are...
Almost unique.
And when I say almost, I mean the only other country that has anything remotely like a birthright citizenship category is Canada.
So Canada has sort of a birthright citizenship category as well.
No country in Europe does.
So for all the talk about Europe being open and welcoming to immigrants, the United States' birthright citizenship policy is significantly more open than the European policy.
If you come in from Morocco to France, you have a baby in France that does not make your citizen an actual citizen of France.
You have to apply for legal citizenship In France.
So, the key phrase here in the 14th Amendment is subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
Here's what the 14th Amendment says.
And you're seeing a lot of folks in the media who don't know anything about constitutional law opine on these issues, suggest that the 14th Amendment dictates that children of illegal immigrants are, by necessity, under the Constitution, citizens of the United States.
That is not clear.
Nor is it correct, I think, under the text of the 14th Amendment.
So the 14th Amendment says this.
That key phrase is subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
Again, I'll read it again.
the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
That key phrase is subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
Again, I'll read it again.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
Why is that phrase necessary?
If you're just reading that, why do you need the phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof?
Why not just all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States?
Obviously, the phrase comes to add something.
What does the phrase come to add?
What does the phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof come to add?
Well, the people who framed this amendment knew what it came to add.
It was to prevent a situation where a foreign diplomat comes to the United States, the ambassador from France comes to the United States, and his wife has a baby, and now the baby is an American citizen.
Not only that, it was meant to prevent citizenship for Native American tribes because we were trying to ensure that Native American babies born to Native American tribes were not automatically American citizens because that would be taking sovereignty from the Native American tribes.
The same thing was true of soldiers who were fighting from abroad in the United States.
Let's say there was a mercenary force that came to the United States.
Some of them brought along their wives.
They were fighting the United States government.
Their wives had babies in the United States.
It was meant to exclude that.
Why?
Because they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government.
Meaning, that if you were subject to the jurisdiction of another government, you were not subject to the jurisdiction of the American government.
Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute points out, again, the phrase was originally written to exclude the children of Native American tribes from American citizenship, as well as the children of foreign diplomats and soldiers from abroad fighting on American land.
The amendment itself, the 14th Amendment, was specifically designed to reverse Dred Scott.
There's an awful, evil Supreme Court case in which an escaped slave named Dred Scott sued for his American citizenship.
He said, I'm an American citizen, I was born in the United States, I was freed, I escaped my masters, I'm now in the North, and now I'm free.
I'm not going to be returned to slavery.
And it abrogates my rights to be returned to slavery.
In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court, in evil fashion, found that the Constitution of the United States did not apply to black people born in the United States because they were not covered by the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment was designed to reverse that and say that if you're a freed slave, if you're a black person born in the United States, then you are a citizen of the United States.
Senator Jacob Hauer, Republican of Michigan, explained the purpose of the subject to the jurisdiction thereof provision back when it was written.
He said, This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.
It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States.
Well, in just a second, we'll get to the Supreme Court jurisprudence on this, which kind of muddies the issue more than the amendment actually does from the very outset.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so the Supreme Court has weighed in on birthright citizenship.
Kind of, but not really.
What I mean by this is there's a line of cases with regard to citizenship that don't actually clarify the issue with regard to children of illegal immigrants.
So here's the line of cases.
In 1884, there was a Supreme Court case.
It's called Elk v. Watkins, I believe?
In which the Supreme Court ruled that a Native American born under the jurisdiction of a Native American tribe could not unilaterally make himself a citizen of the United States.
So what happened is there was a baby who was born to a Native American family under Native American tribal sovereignty.
He said, listen, I don't want to be subject to Native American tribal sovereignty.
And I was born in the United States.
I'm a United States citizen.
And the court said, no, you don't get to make yourself a United States citizen just because you were born in the United States if your parents were subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign body, namely Native American tribes.
This seems to cut against birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants are, in fact, citizens of another country.
And they're subject to the jurisdiction of those other countries.
How do we know this?
Because under the Vienna Conventions, If an illegal immigrant in the United States from Mexico, say, commits a crime, we have an obligation under the Vienna Convention to let him know about his consular rights.
We have to let him know that he can go to his local consulate and that the consulate will provide him services.
This was adjudicated in a case called Midian v. Texas.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court, in which this guy who murdered someone on American soil Or raped someone?
It may have been a rape and murder.
In any case, he was not informed of his right to consular access, and this was considered a violation of his rights because he was an illegal immigrant in the United States.
So this seems very much in line with that, right?
This 1884 case that says, just because you're born in the United States, if you are subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign power, you are not a United States citizen.
In 1898, there was another case, and this is the one that proponents of birthright citizenship like to cite.
The Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark, who was a child born in the United States to a legal resident Chinese immigrant couple, was included in birthright citizenship.
But again, that was to legal residents.
That's more like the case of my parents-in-law and my brother-in-law.
He was born in the United States to legal resident parents, and therefore he's an American citizen.
Fine.
This was not adjudicated.
The question of illegal immigrant children was not adjudicated all the way until 1982.
We're going to talk about this ruling, which is really the only ruling on record with regard to birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants in just one second.
So, the case in 1982 is a very famous case called Plyler v. Doe.
It is a wrongly decided case.
This case, made famous by a very left Supreme Court, This case basically was about whether the state of Texas could deny educational benefits to children of illegal immigrants.
So, kids were born in the United States.
They were the children of illegal immigrants.
And the question was, do they actually have to be given free public education at the cost of the state?
The state of Texas said no.
The Supreme Court said yes.
That's because it was a leftist Supreme Court.
There's no evidence that this is really accurate or this is a good ruling.
Justice William Brennan, a very leftist judge, wrote in a footnote, quote, No plausible distinction with respect to 14th Amendment jurisdiction can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.
Well, that obviously is bullcrap, okay?
We make distinctions along those lines all the time.
All the time.
We are constantly making legal distinctions between resident aliens who came here lawfully and resident aliens who came here unlawfully.
Like, for example, if you're a resident alien and you came here unlawfully, we can deport you, right, under American law.
If you're a resident alien and you came here lawfully, we cannot deport you under American law.
At least not without some sort of violation.
So this is simply a nonsense opinion.
Now, just because it's a nonsense opinion does not mean that it does not have some sort of legal standing.
It does.
And the fact is that there is legal standing for Plyler versus Doe.
What that means is that when President Trump says that he can simply issue an executive order and overrule that Supreme Court ruling or overrule the federal laws that have taken precedent in order to ensure the quote-unquote rights of children of illegal immigrants, that's not correct.
Inactive Congress might be able to do it, maybe not.
In any case, it was going to go to the Supreme Court, and that's really what this is all about.
President Trump was going to sign an executive order, and then this was going to be litigated all the way to the top of the Supreme Court, at which point the Supreme Court would rule on all this.
Now, is Trump really going to do all of this?
Who knows?
And when I see folks on the left who are very, very upset about Trump talking about executive orders this way, I don't like executive orders this way either.
I don't think this is what the executive branch should be doing.
The executive branch does not have the power, nor does it have the capacity, to rewrite laws or rewrite the Constitution.
I felt that way about Barack Obama rewriting the laws to simply suggest he was not going to prosecute illegal immigrants, and I don't like it when President Trump says he can rewrite the laws with regard to birthright citizenship from the office of the presidency.
The president is not a king.
The executive branch is not a monarchy.
With that said, the same folks who cheered when President Obama said he could unilaterally rewrite law to prevent the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, without any change from Congress, Those same people are suddenly finding refuge in the Constitution and in the balance of powers and checks and balances of the American constitutional system.
I find that somewhat ironic.
Now, what is this really about?
Well, the truth is, the President, if he wants to pursue something like this, he does have a Republican Congress.
He could push his Congress for a law.
He does have a Republican Senate.
He could push the Senate for a law.
This is really about ginning up the base in advance of the 2018 election.
And it ties into what President Trump's key argument has always been with regard to immigration, going all the way back to 2015-2016, which is that we are far too nice about illegal immigration in this country.
And that we have to start taking measures and steps to prevent illegal immigration from draining the United States of economic benefit, right?
That's been President Trump's contention for legitimately years at this point.
It's also connected with his rhetoric with regard to the caravan that is coming up through Mexico.
Now, there are a lot of folks who are suggesting that his rhetoric with regard to the caravan is over the top, that his rhetoric with regard to the caravan is not accurate.
In some ways it's accurate and in some ways it's not.
I want to be as fair as I can to both the president and his critics when it comes to his treatment of this migrant caravan.
The migrant caravan is indeed a publicity stunt.
I mean, there's just no question that that's what it is.
It's being promulgated and pushed by Central American, Latin American governments.
It's being pushed by the government of Mexico, which is allowing migrant caravans to travel toward the United States border.
When the president says these are not folks who are eligible for asylum, he is basically correct.
Asylum is for people who are being targeted by a government.
It is not for economic migrants who simply want to cross over into the United States in order to take advantage of the economic benefit of living in a rich and powerful country.
That said, is it an invasion?
It's not an invasion when you walk up to a point of entry and ask for asylum.
That does not count as an invasion.
An invasion is when you cross the border with a gun, right?
That's an invasion.
This is not an invasion.
And the overwrought rhetoric with regard to illegal immigration is not useful.
You can be against illegal immigration.
You can point out the demerits of illegal immigration.
You can point out that the system is being abused, which it surely is.
You can even oppose birthright citizenship on constitutional and Moral grounds.
But what you shouldn't do is suggest that the United States is in imminent doom and peril from a thousand people who are walking up to points of entry at the southern border because that does raise hackles in a way that seems inaccurate.
You know, alarmism is not something I'm very much in favor of on either side of the political aisle.
I'm not going to pretend I haven't engaged in it from time to time, but We need to be at least somewhat circumspect in how we approach these issues, even though I'm generally on President Trump's side of the illegal immigration issue.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
Plus, I wanna talk about the latest fallout from the Pittsburgh shooting and all of the rest.
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Okay, so let's talk about President Trump's rhetoric with regard to illegal immigration and the caravan.
Because here's where the news really meets its sort of nexus right now.
The left is contending that President Trump's language about illegal immigration and about the migrant caravan is what led to the shooting at a Pennsylvania synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
The case that they're making is basically a white supremacist got all riled up about illegal immigration because of President Trump railing against migrants, and then he went and shot up a synagogue.
Now, suffice it to say, white supremacists have been shooting up Jewish places of worship and Jewish sites for as long as I can remember.
As I mentioned yesterday on the show, in 1991, in my community, a synagogue was firebombed.
In 1999, the West Valley JCC was shot up by a white supremacist.
That same year, there was a shooting of Orthodox Jews in Chicago by a white supremacist.
This sort of stuff is not infrequent.
It's not infrequent, and it is a real threat in the United States.
But I guess the case is that he wouldn't have shot up this particular synagogue or gone after this particular group, except that he was very angry at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which is a group that welcomes refugees into the United States.
And so if President Trump weren't using such inflammatory rhetoric, then this shul wouldn't have been targeted.
This raises a couple of questions.
One, Whether, in fact, his rhetoric, whether inflammatory rhetoric, is connected with violence.
And number two, whether it's accurate.
So, as far as it's accuracy, Shep Smith was on Fox News last night saying there is no invasion.
He was getting all sorts of plaudits from folks on the left for saying this.
Here was Shep sort of railing against the language being used with regard to the migrant caravan.
Tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is what all of this is about.
There is no invasion.
No one's coming to get you.
There's nothing at all to worry about.
When they did this... Okay, now the question is whether people really believe, whether people really believe that when Trump says there's an invasion taking place, whether he means this in sort of generalized fashion, meaning that waves of illegal immigrants are coming across the border.
Thousands at a time, and that this is having an impact on our culture, it's having an impact on our economics, it's having an impact on our labor force, or whether they actually believe the most inflammatory version of this, which is that there are legitimately people who are coming in to destroy the United States with ill intent.
I'm not a fan of this sort of rhetoric of invasion because I don't actually think that illegal immigrants are invading the country.
I think they're people who are coming here for the most part to work.
That doesn't mean we have to accept them.
It doesn't mean that it's in the United States' interest to simply allow people to cross the border illegally.
I don't, I'm not fond of the sort of rhetoric, you know, the sort of scare tactics that people are bringing in criminality and disease.
Like we actually have to look at the statistics and see whether that is true or not.
With that said, with that said, I am deeply worried that people are connecting rhetoric to violence in a way that actually risks censorship.
So, let's be frank about the connection between rhetoric and violence.
It is true that speech is related to action.
It is.
You listen to my show.
Presumably, if you agree with me, you are now more likely to get involved in politics in a way that I would agree with.
That's why I do the show every day.
I'm trying to get people to think in a different way or to examine the issues a little bit differently.
And that's normal.
That's the way politics works.
We do it every day with our children.
We do it every day with our friends, with our co-workers, with our spouses.
Speech is related to action.
With that said, the attempt by folks on the left to connect every action of speech with violence, and to suggest that speech is connected with violence, is a way of shutting down speech.
Of course, more nasty rhetoric is more likely to create more nasty action.
That is a question really of us being circumspect, but I really don't think that that's what we ought to be debating in the how we speak question.
First of all, I will note that the left's utter refusal to acknowledge that the left hasn't been in any way responsible for the heightening of rhetoric over the past 10 years, That's irresponsible.
That's irresponsible.
Not only is it irresponsible, it's polarizing and it actually leads to radicalization.
Radical rhetoric leads to radicalization.
You know what else leads to radicalization?
Being called a radical by the other side unjustifiably.
That also leads to radicalization.
All we've got right now is everybody pointing fingers at everybody else and nobody looking at themselves and saying, OK, what can I do to change the tenor and climate of the political debate?
And what the left has been doing with regard to Trump's talk on caravans and migrants has been saying, well, Trump is causing violence.
I don't actually think that's the biggest problem with what President Trump is doing.
And the same thing is true on the left.
When Bernie Sanders says millions will die because of Republican health care, I don't think that the big problem with that is that somebody is going to go and shoot up a congressional baseball game.
I don't hold Bernie Sanders responsible for that.
I think the problem with the sort of radical polarized rhetoric, the kind of inflamed rhetoric, the problem with that sort of thing is that when something terrible does happen, When somebody does something that is truly evil, when somebody goes and shoots up a synagogue, for example, instead of us unifying and saying, all of that is bad, we are now more likely to see the other side as responsible for a crime that we all agree is evil.
The social fabric relies on us looking at each other as though we are friends and not enemies.
But if our politics is all about how we are enemies, then when something bad happens, the first reaction is to blame it on your enemy.
And when that happens, the social fabric actually decays.
That's the biggest problem that I see here.
You know, when Cass Sunstein, he writes a piece for Bloomberg today in which he says that Trump's hateful speech raises the risk of violence, the one-sided focus on President Trump's speech as opposed to the left's speech is counterproductive.
If we want to say let's all take it down, let's all take it down a notch, this I agree with.
But if you want to say that Trump is uniquely responsible for the tone and tenor of American political debate right now, That's just not accurate.
It's just not accurate.
And you know it's not accurate.
I mean, legitimately, in the last 24 hours, a Republican Party headquarters in Volusia County in Florida, the windows were shot out.
Here's footage from that.
Okay, so the idea that violent rhetoric is only happening on one side is just a lie.
windows and did not have time at that point to look around.
And then I didn't realize there was gunfire, but there's four bullet holes in our windows and there's four bullet holes inside the building.
Okay.
So the idea that violent rhetoric is only happening on one side is just a lie.
There's another problem with suggesting that rhetoric is deeply connected with violence, and that is the compulsion to censorship.
So there is a threat in saying that rhetoric is directly connected with violence.
Here's the threat.
The threat is that people will then say, okay, let's restrict the rhetoric.
Let's restrict the rhetoric.
And that's the move that's being made in, for example, Europe.
It's being made, right now I'm broadcasting from Vancouver.
It's a move that's being made in Canada.
In Europe, and there's a case that's being wildly undercover, in Europe, there's an amazing, amazing case in which a woman was fined for criticizing the Prophet Muhammad.
This is the description of the case from The Atlantic.
Grimwood writes, a few years ago, I appeared on a live Egyptian television show hosted by a conservative Muslim with jihadist sympathies.
He lured me on by offering to answer any question I had about Islam, including, he said, whether the Prophet Muhammad was a child molester.
The host seemed awfully open-minded, I thought, given how humorless jihadists tend to be about the Prophet.
When the lights went up and the program began, I mentioned the child molester issue.
The host remained true to his word, neither bursting into rage nor chiding me for my impertinence.
Around the same time, a woman referred to as E.S.
was convicted in Austria for, in effect, not phrasing her identical curiosity in the form of a question.
On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights upheld her 2011 conviction for disparagement of religious precepts, a crime in Austria.
The facts of what E.S.
did are not in dispute.
She held seminars in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester.
Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad's third wife, Aisha, was six at the time of their marriage and nine at its consummation.
Muhammad was in his early fifties.
The Austrian woman repeated these claims.
The Austrian court ruled she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in jail.
And the ECHR ruled Austria had not violated her rights.
This is the consequence of restricting speech because you believe that speech either leads to violence or is violence.
There are consequences on the other side of this equation.
It's not all about rhetoric and violence are connected, therefore take down the rhetoric.
There is a problem with saying rhetoric and violence are connected and therefore we must restrict the rhetoric.
So let's be very careful about what it is that we are calling for here.
We have to be very careful, because if we're not careful, then the impact of that is going to be a lot worse than the actual disease itself.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about antisemitism, about the media's radical rhetoric.
We're going to get to all of that in just one second.
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Okay, so I do want to talk about the one-sidedness of the media's rhetoric talk.
Because, again, I think that that is actually exacerbating the divisions in our society in an extraordinarily serious way.
I'm going to talk about all of that.
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I want to talk about the polarization and one of the reasons that lying about the level of rancor on the other side while whitewashing yourself is a bad idea.
I have two kids.
I have a kid who's 4 1⁄2 and I have a kid who's 2 1⁄2.
The 4 1⁄2-year-old is just a wonderful, beautiful girl.
She definitely stands up for herself.
The 2 1⁄2-year-old has now decided he's had enough.
And so he's going to harass her every waking minute of every single day.
And we as parents have to decide exactly how we're going to treat this.
Now, the easy response is that when he pushes her and she screams in his face, which is basically every hour or two in our house right now, do I simply punish him or do I punish her also?
The answer is what I do is I say to him, you need to go in your crib right now, right?
You get a timeout.
You're not allowed to push your sister.
And I say to her, Leah, when you have a problem, I need you to come and talk to me about it.
I need you to actually talk to me.
I'm standing right here.
You don't need to scream in his face.
There's an authority figure to which you can appeal.
And screaming in his face or pushing him back is not the proper solution to this problem.
Is he more responsible than she is?
You bet.
Of course he is, right?
He's pushing her.
But that doesn't mean that she gets to act like a brat.
She doesn't get to scream in his face.
She doesn't get to push him back.
She doesn't get to do any of those things.
Right now in American politics, here's how things are going.
People on the left see themselves as my daughter.
People on the right see themselves as my daughter.
Everybody feels like they are being pushed by the other side.
And they feel like it's okay to scream back in that person's face.
Nobody is saying, yeah, I'm being pushed by the other side, and that's bad.
But also, I shouldn't scream in anybody's face and push back.
Maybe what I should do instead is appeal to the broader moral authority of the American people and not act like this.
You know, the media have been saying for a long time, President Trump needs to stop saying the press are the enemy of the people.
Now, President Trump, I got a lot of blowback yesterday because I tweeted out that President Trump should not say that the media are the enemy of the people.
A lot of folks on the right say, no, no, no, he means the fake news are the enemy of the people.
I would buy that narrative, except that President Trump has never been very clear about what constitutes the fake news.
Now, there's stuff I think is fake news, right?
People who are quote-unquote journalists, who are actually just opinion makers.
There are actual headlines that are wrong.
That stuff is fake news, but the president has been a blunderbuss in his use of the term fake news.
If there's a poll he doesn't like, it's fake news.
If there's a story that he doesn't like, it's fake news.
He's never actually been very good about objectively saying what is fake news and what is not, so I'm not going to buy that exact excuse.
The press, though, say, you know, the president shouldn't say that Trump... Trump shouldn't say that the press are the enemy of the people.
That's true.
Also true.
The media should not portray President Trump as the enemy of the people, which they have been doing literally since the day he was elected and before.
They say he is a Russian agent.
They say that he's a traitor to the country.
They say that he's doing all of this for his own personal enrichment without any evidence to this point.
They say all of these things, and then they think, okay, well, our hands are clean.
Our hands are clean.
And you can see this sort of attitude.
You want to know why folks are angry at the media on the right?
This is one of the reasons that folks are angry at the media on the right.
Here's Jim Acosta going after Sarah Huckabee Sanders on this basis.
Can you state, for the record, which outlets that you and the President regard as the enemy of the people?
I mean, the President is going to say that fake news media are the enemy of the people, and if you're going to stand there and continue to say that there are some journalists, some news outlets in this country that meet that characterization, shouldn't you have the guts, Sarah, to state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people?
Okay, and really what she should say is, I mean, what Trump thinks is, you, Jim Acosta, right?
I mean, that's what's obviously running through Sarah Huckabee Sanders' head.
She's stuck between a rock and a hard place because, as the press secretary, you don't want to start labeling people enemy of the people.
It's why Trump shouldn't be using the phrase.
But if you're going to talk about fake news, right?
I mean, I think that Jim Acosta is not a good journalist.
I think just as objectively speaking as I can be, I think Jim Acosta loves him some Jim Acosta.
He sees himself as an activist more than as a journalist.
And it's obvious to everyone.
CNN then tweeted out in response to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who said that the, that Sarah Huckabee Sanders went after the media.
She said, you guys are polarizing the debate because you're suggesting that President Trump is responsible for shootings and bombings.
CNN Communications said no, Press Secretary.
CNN did not say Donald Trump was directly responsible for the bombs sent to our office by his ardent and emboldened supporter.
We did say that he and you should understand your words matter, every single one of them.
But so far, you don't seem to get that.
Okay, that's a lie.
CNN has been saying for a week, for a week, that Trump should be taking responsibility for the bombing.
I mean, I read you the chyrons like last week for a full segment.
And CNN then hosts people like Julia Jaffe, who is this radical journalist, quote unquote journalist from GQ, who went on CNN yesterday and then said that Trump radicalizes more people than ISIS does.
This president has radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did.
I mean, the way he talks, the way he... The way he... That is... That's just... It's impossible to say that.
The way he talks, the way that he allows these people... The way he winks and nods to these groups, the way he says, I know I'm not supposed to say it, but I'm...
What she says right there is insane.
It's so insane she actually had to come back and quasi-apologize for it.
But let's not pretend that the heated rhetoric and the escalation of moral calumny on the other side, that that hasn't taken place on both sides because it absolutely has.
Okay, in just one second I want to talk about anti-Semitism because I think that there's a deeper debate to be had right now in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting about what anti-Semitism is and what's driving anti-Semitism on the far right and on the mainstream left.
Because it really is this, right?
Okay, it's not the mainstream right that has embraced anti-Semitism.
It is the mainstream left, which has embraced Keith Ellison and Linda Sarsour, has embraced BDS, has embraced an anti-Israel position that amounts to anti-Semitism.
Not every opposition to Israeli policy is anti-Semitism.
I've opposed many Israeli policies, but that does not amount to anti-Semitism.
What does, is if you are embracing policies that lead to the destruction of the Jewish state.
And you don't care about that.
That is embracing the boycott-divest-sanctions regime, for example.
That is anti-Semitism.
If you want the Jewish state to be destroyed by treating it like unlike any other state on planet Earth, then this means that you're engaged in anti-Semitism.
But the left and the right see anti-Semitism as two very different things.
And I'm not even sure it's a left-right divide.
I think that it's a correctly understanding anti-Semitism versus not correctly understanding anti-Semitism divide.
Here are the two ways of seeing antisemitism.
One, antisemitism is a unique evil in world history.
It is not like any other form of bigotry.
Antisemitism is based on a generalized conspiracy theory whereby anything that happens in the world that is bad is the responsibility of the Jews.
So, if you are a capitalist and you don't like the communists, it's because the communists are Jews that you really have a problem.
And if you're a communist and you don't like the capitalists, the real problem is Goldman Sachs and all those Jews who are at the top of the heap.
And if you are an internationalist and you don't like nationalism, well, it's those evil Jews in Israel who are responsible for the breakdown of the global order.
And if you're a nationalist who doesn't like internationalism, it's the globalist cuck Jews who are responsible for everything in the world.
In other words, Antisemitism is a solution to every problem for the conspiracy-minded person.
The Jews are responsible for everything.
Antisemitism is based on the idea that there is this powerful nefarious group that is running things, undermining your society.
And that is why antisemitism is so chameleonic.
It's so changeable.
Racism against black folks has basically taken one form in the United States, saying that black folks are inferior.
That's really what racism in the United States has been about against black folks.
And it's evil.
It's evil.
But a conspiracy theory about folks running the world is a different sort of evil than an evil that says that people are genetically inferior.
And not the same thing.
So, theory number one is that anti-semitism is a unique evil in world history where you attribute everything bad happening in the universe to the Jews.
And, in essence, anti-semitism is sort of an anti-God position because if you're a God-based person, what you believe is that the world is the way that God made it.
And the Jews are not responsible for the world the way that God made it.
If you are anti-God, then you say, okay, I have to look for some nefarious force behind world events.
That will be the Jews.
And this is the thread that holds true, whether you're talking about Christian antisemitism during the Crusades, it's the Jews who are undermining our society because they killed Christ, or you're talking about Islamic antisemitism today, it's the Jews who are behind the state of Israel, and who are the sons of dogs and pigs and monkeys, and they're manipulating world events against us, it's behind Nazi antisemitism and communist antisemitism, this generalized conspiracy theory.
And it gets violent, because if you believe the Jews have power, then that means the Jews must be stopped.
That's what drove this white supremacist in Pittsburgh.
If you look at his feed, it was all about the Jews have too much power, the Jews must be stopped.
So anti-Semitism is a difference in kind, not just a difference in degree.
The second theory of anti-Semitism is that all anti-Semitism is just basically a small version of generalized bigotry.
Bigotry comes in all forms.
Anti-Semitism is just bigotry against Jews.
That's sort of the perspective that Barack Obama was pushing in the aftermath of the shooting in Pittsburgh.
He said, we grieve for the Americans murdered in Pittsburgh.
All of us have to fight the rise of antisemitism and hateful rhetoric against those who look, love, or pray differently.
Okay, so the idea is here that antisemitism is just another iteration of intersectional racism.
That basically there's this dominant society that hates minority groups.
Jews are a minority group and that's why the dominant society hates them.
The first version of anti-semitism suggests that America is a success story.
Because America is the most tolerant country for Jews in history, in world history, except for the state of Israel itself.
It is the most tolerant country For Jews ever, right?
So that means that America is a success story specifically because America does not see this grave ill that is plaguing the world as the Jews or anything like that, that speaks to America's bastion of liberty.
The version of antisemitism as a sort of subset of generalized bigotry That version of anti-semitism, that really suggests that America is a bad place.
Because even if the United States is different, it's only different because the Jews are white.
The reason that anti-semitism isn't bad in the United States is because Jews are more powerful and they are higher on the intersectional hierarchy of power than other groups.
Now, what this leads to on the left is a belief that anti-Semitism is actually less important than other forms of bigotry, specifically because the left sees all bigotry as rooted in hierarchies of power.
So if Jews are powerful, if Jews are rich, if Jews are tolerated in the United States, that means anti-Semitism is less important than other forms of bigotry.
And that means that you can attribute Jewish success not to freedom, not to the good of the United States, not to the good of the world.
Instead, you can attribute lack of anti-Semitism to Jews gaining power themselves.
Because Jews can actually be outstripped in the intersectional hierarchy by other forms of racism.
And so the intersectional version of what antisemitism is actually can lead to more antisemitism.
Because what it suggests is if the Jews escape antisemitism, if the Jews succeed in Israel, if the Jews succeed in the United States, that is an effect of them climbing that intersectional power hierarchy and thus leaving behind their membership in the group victimhood clan.
Right?
In the group victimhood clique.
And this is why the left-wing version of antisemitism is not only wrong, it is actually counterproductive and leads to more antisemitism and has been mainstreamed into the Democratic Party today.
It's actually a grave, grave problem.
Understanding antisemitism is the key to fighting it, and I fear that a lot of folks don't actually understand what antisemitism is, or if they do, they're ignoring it.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then a thing that I hate, and then we'll be out of here.
So, Things that I like.
I sort of pine for a Dane American when our ideals were the same.
Our ideals used to be that if you came to the United States to engage in the freedoms and liberties provided by the United States Constitution, if you came here and you embraced what we were, then you were part of our country.
And this has always been sort of my guiding light.
I've said a thousand times, really a thousand times, that people who are born in the United States, who don't believe in the foundational ideals of the United States, I would trade those folks for people who live outside the United States and who want to come in and join those ideals in a heartbeat.
Because ideals matter to me a lot more than where you were born.
Ideals matter to me.
Race doesn't matter to me.
Ethnicity doesn't matter to me.
Ideals matter to me.
This used to be what everyone agreed on, left and right.
And now it seems like it's being abandoned on the left.
And in response, some on the right are abandoning it too.
And that's really gross and terrible.
When I say that folks on the left used to embrace this, You know, Frank Sinatra was a mainstream member of Hollywood.
He was a JFK supporter, obviously.
He was a Roosevelt supporter.
Well, during World War II, very end of World War II, the studios cut a 10-minute little movie.
With a very, very young Frank Sinatra called The House I Live In.
And it was basically an ode to what America should be.
And the plot of this little 10-minute movie is basically there's a Jewish kid in a neighborhood and kids start taunting him and chasing him.
And Frank Sinatra stops them from taunting and chasing the Jewish kid and then he sings a song called The House I Live In.
This was the closing number for Sinatra for years.
He believed that this was what America was all about.
Here's a little bit of The House I Live In, which was written by real leftists, real leftists in the United States who still believed in the at least aspirational ideal that America's people could all live together if we abided by certain notions of freedom and liberty.
What is America to me?
A name?
A map?
Or a flag I see?
A certain word?
Democracy, what is America to me?
A house I live in, a plot of earth, a street, a grocer and a butcher, And the people that I meet, the children in the playground, the faces that I see, all races and religions,
that's America that's America to me.
The place I work in.
I played the whole thing, but it's worth listening to again.
There was a time in America where we all sort of agreed on this stuff, but apparently that time is long gone in favor of intersectional identity politics on one end and then a sort of responsive reactionary identity politics on the other.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so thing number one that I hate.
So I don't know what Hollywood is doing.
I really don't know.
So apparently there is a new movie that's going to come out about a story of a refugee from Syria who is trying to, or I guess she was fleeing Egypt, and she was trying to flee Egypt for Sweden, and she was shipwrecked along the way, and she basically held her two small children as she was shipwrecked.
So Steven Spielberg and J.J.
Abrams are co-producing this movie, and they have tapped Lena Dunham to write this.
Lena Dunham.
Even folks on the left are going, um, what?
Like, why is Lena Dunham doing this?
Like, why did they tap Lena Dunham for it?
It just shows you that if you're on the left, there's no such thing as an actual talent judgment.
It's pretty amazing.
I mean, you're pretty much able to get away with virtually anything on the left.
I mean, Lena Dunham has a very, very poor track record in public, from allegedly abandoning dogs to the stuff that she wrote in her autobiography about molesting her sister.
You know, she's still getting shots in Hollywood because everyone gets a shot in Hollywood so long as you are of the proper...
As long as you're of the proper political persuasion.
So, that's pretty bad stuff.
And people wonder why Hollywood is out of touch.
Hollywood is deeply, deeply out of touch, obviously.
Okay, well, you know, I've talked a lot about things that I dislike today, so I think I'm gonna stop it there.
We're in Vancouver tonight.
I'm speaking at a Jewish community event tonight.
I'm speaking at the University of British Columbia tomorrow, so we have a lot of big events coming up.
I'm really looking forward to talking here and hopefully not getting arrested.
So that'll be my goal here is to say as many true things as I can without getting arrested because, hey, this is Canada.
It's like the upside down out here.
It's weird.
But we'll be back tomorrow with all the updates.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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