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Nov. 1, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:10
CARAVAN DOWN BY THE RIVER | Ep. 651
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President Trump makes his closing argument, Democrats play the racism card, and we talk about Halloween costumes.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Uh, we draw ever nearer to the midterm elections.
Suffice it to say, right now, the House looking worse for Republicans, the Senate still looking decent for Republicans.
We'll break all of this down.
Plus, President Trump makes his closing argument, but we begin today by reminding you that if you are going to die, which means you will.
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All right, so as we approach the midterm elections, we are just days away at this point.
Republican spirits are low in the House and high in the Senate.
It looks like Republicans are going to retain the Senate.
They might even pick up a seat or two.
The polls from across the country in the House are not looking nearly as rosy for Republicans, particularly in places like Pennsylvania.
There are several districts in Pennsylvania where Republicans ought to be running well ahead.
They simply are not.
This suggests that a lot of the And there are a couple of reasons for that.
One reason is because off-year elections typically cut against the president in power.
Reason number two is because Hillary Clinton isn't on the ballot to depress Democratic turnout.
So there's that as well.
That means that Republicans are not gonna turn out in quite as great numbers as they turned out in 2016, and Democrats are gonna turn out maybe in greater numbers than they turned out in 2016.
That may make all the difference.
While President Trump is deciding on his closing argument.
And his closing argument is going to be the same as his argument was in 2016, and that is immigration and Democrats not taking the safety of the country seriously enough.
Now, there are a lot of folks on the left who are saying, well, why doesn't the president of the United States just focus on the economy?
Why doesn't he just point out that the economy is great?
And if you want the economy to keep being great, then you ought to vote for his party.
And the answer is because the dirty little secret of American politics is that people don't actually vote based on the economy unless there is a massive catastrophic downturn.
People instead vote on Who they actually think is a good person.
What policies they like in terms of safety and security.
Economy, like healthcare, is not really an issue that drives voters to the polls.
The issues that drive voters to the polls are the ones that trigger the amygdala, that trigger the fear part of your brain.
The hope part of your brain is a secondary activation of the fear part of your brain when it comes to politics.
And President Trump knows that better than anybody.
So when people say that President Trump is engaged in the politics of fear, yes, so has every other politician in the history of mankind who has been even remotely successful.
That is just the way this works.
Even Ronald Reagan, a very optimistic politician, campaigned on the basis that Jimmy Carter was wrecking the country.
So, you do have to have an issue that is polarizing to drive your voters to the polls.
Well, President Trump has picked the caravan in immigration.
This has been a constant theme with President Trump.
Really, since 2015, 2016.
And folks who are moderate on immigration, libertarian on immigration, liberal on immigration, they don't seem to understand.
They don't seem to understand that they play into Trump's hands when they say there is no problem.
Because here's how this game works.
President Trump comes forward and he says, we have a serious problem with illegal immigration.
And folks say, well, is that really a serious problem with illegal immigration?
And he says, no, no, no, it's a serious problem.
And these folks say, no, there's no problem at all.
Everything's cool.
And Trump says, no, it's a crisis.
So now you have two choices.
Is illegal immigration a crisis or is it no problem at all?
And the problem is, for folks who say it's no problem at all, that it is somewhat of a problem.
The truth is, illegal immigration is not going to destroy the country.
Illegal immigration is not the end of the United States.
Illegal immigration is not flooding the country with criminals or any of this sort of thing.
But it is a problem.
It's an economic problem.
It's a cultural problem.
And in some cases, it's a criminal problem.
And if the two polls that Americans have to choose from are illegal immigration is a non-problem and illegal immigration is a crisis, people are automatically going to resonate to illegal immigration is a crisis because they can tell that it's not a non-problem.
If you have to pick between the two, and you know it's not a non-problem, that means there's only one option left on the ballot.
President Trump knows this, and the left makes a mistake when they downplay the problems with illegal immigration.
What they should do instead is they should say, yes, you're right, illegal immigration is a problem.
It's not a crisis.
Here's a proposal that we can put forward to help curb illegal immigration while ensuring human rights.
But the left doesn't want to do that.
The left doesn't want to do that because they believe that they can win this election based on a sort of opposite fear-mongering, where if you are anti-illegal immigration, this means that you are a racist, this means that you are a bigot, this means that you don't care about people who are in dire need of asylum.
So instead what you have is the two sides that sort of staked out their turf.
President Trump saying this whole thing is a crisis, and the left saying not only is it not a crisis, President Trump is only fear-mongering in order to achieve a certain desired political result on the back of brown people.
Those are the two positions that have now been staked out.
Now, is either of those positions really reflective of reality?
Not really.
Again, illegal immigration, a problem.
Is it a crisis?
No, it's not a crisis.
If it were a crisis, then how have we been dealing with it for the past several decades?
And as for the idea that it's not a problem at all, I live in the state of California.
Illegal immigration is a problem.
Illegal immigration is a problem for the economy of California.
It's a problem for the safety and security in the state of California.
It's a problem with the homelessness in California.
It is a problem.
It is a problem.
That is the actual middle ground.
And as I've said for my entire career, the actual solution on illegal immigration is actually fairly simple and everyone basically agrees on it.
The actual solution is you shut the border, You make sure that people aren't illegally immigrating.
You ensure that people who would make good Americans can legally immigrate.
And then you go through on a one-to-one basis and you see whether illegal immigrants who are in the country, people who are in the country illegally, whether those people are of benefit or of detriment to the United States.
And if they are of benefit, then they go to the back of the immigration line.
And if they are a detriment to the United States, they are deported and they can't come back.
Right?
I think most people would agree on these basic principles of immigration.
Democrat and Republican.
But instead, we've decided to stake out opposite sides of the turf so that we can fearmonger.
Republicans, President Trump can claim it's a crisis.
Democrats don't care about that crisis.
Millions will die.
And then...
On the other side, you have folks saying, well, the Republicans are evil, terrible, horrible racists for even caring about this issue.
And obviously, we can't trust them with power.
So that's how this election has broken down.
President Trump has decided to make his closing pitch the caravan.
So the caravan, again, to just be straight about what the caravan is, this is An annual thing, every year, there are thousands of migrants who go into Mexico from Central and Latin America, and they move up through Mexico toward the United States border.
In past years, they've approached generally ports of entry.
There are some of them, apparently, who have not approached ports of entry.
If they go to a port of entry and they claim asylum, well then, the United States processes them through normal means.
Now, herein lies a problem, and there's a problem with the United States and our immigration system.
We have a policy of catch and release, which suggests that we release a lot of folks on their own recognizance.
We say, OK, we caught you.
Now we're going to release you.
And you have a court date in three months.
How many people show up for the court date in three months?
Not all that many people show up for the court date in three months.
That's an actual systemic problem.
But is it an invasion?
Are migrants crossing the deserts in order to break down the barrier with the United States, rush in with guns and start shooting people?
No, of course not.
The vast majority of people in this caravan presumably are coming to the United States for economic opportunity, not political asylum.
And That is what it is.
That doesn't mean we have to let them in, but it's also an exaggeration to suggest that it's a serious, serious border crisis when you're talking about people arriving at a port of entry.
If you need the military in order to ensure people are not breaking into the United States between ports of entry, that's fine.
But if the suggestion is that we need sort of a Berlin Wall on the southern border with regard to all of this because we have to shoot people who approach the border or something, I don't think anyone's suggesting that, nor should anybody suggest that.
In any case, President Trump, He wants to portray the caravan as a serious threat to American security because it ties into his broader argument that illegal immigration must be checked and that folks on the other side are not taking this seriously.
So here's President Trump going off on the caravans.
We have to have a wall of people, very highly trained people, terrific, dedicated patriots, that's what they are.
You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it's reported, actually.
I mean, I'm pretty good at estimating crowd size, and I will tell you, they look a lot bigger than people would think.
Okay, well, the truth is the president, unfortunately, is not all that great at estimating crowd size by his record.
I mean, number one, we all remember the controversy over the inaugural crowd size.
He routinely tweets out crowd sizes that are not really in keeping with the actual crowd size.
But in any case, the problem with the president doing this, you know, just from an objective truth point of view, is that if you stick to the facts, you don't actually have to make overbroad Inflammatory arguments, you can still win on the facts, but the president understands that people take him seriously, not literally.
And that means that they take his overall point, which is that a bunch of people are trying to come into the country illegally, and he's not in favor of that.
And then President Trump doubles down on another theory.
And this is where, again, I don't like the president's rhetoric on this.
I think that when the president suggests that George Soros is behind the caravan without any evidence.
That's conspiratorial thinking and it's not pleasant and it's unnecessary and he shouldn't do it.
Here's the president doing it anyway.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I don't know who, but I wouldn't be surprised.
A lot of people say yes.
And now this trolls Democrats and the media into saying, well, the president is crazy on illegal immigration.
Again, the president's game here, if there's a strategy to it, then the president's game is to, as Scott Adams likes to say, sell beyond the sale.
So he will say, okay, George Soros is behind this.
And the Democrats will say, you have no evidence George Soros is behind it.
And the American public go, wait, is somebody behind the caravan?
Maybe somebody's behind the caravan.
Trump has now shifted the window of the conversation.
The same argument can be made about the caravan itself and the size of it when President Trump says, there are a bajillion people in the caravan, not 7,000, not 10,000, one bajillion people.
And then the media say, that's not true.
There aren't one bajillion people.
He said, then Americans say, well, but there are a lot of people in the caravan.
And that's not great.
So people are talking about the caravan now, right?
So that is the sort of strategery, if there is some, to what Trump is doing here.
I think mostly it's just President Trump speaking off the cuff.
And I don't think he has to do that in order to make a compelling argument about illegal immigration.
In a second, we're going to get to an ad that is very controversial.
And you'll see how, because both sides have broken down into their sort of partisan turf war, One side saying illegal immigration is a massive crisis and the caravan is just another indicator of that crisis.
And the other side saying illegal immigration is not only a crisis, it's a wonderful thing and anybody who says differently is a racist.
We'll see how that breaks down in an ad that in many ways is sort of in the eyes of the beholder.
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Okay, so all of this debate culminates in President Trump putting out an ad on his Twitter account.
This ad is certainly effective.
It is certainly inflammatory.
People have been using the term racially charged, which is to say it's sort of subjective as to whether you think it is quote unquote racist or not.
I'll explain why one side is yelling racist and the other side is saying not so much.
And where I come down on that, here is the ad.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'll just directly step out of the hallway.
So it's a picture of a guy named Luis Bracamontes.
And he says, I'm gonna break out soon, and I will kill more.
He killed two cops in 2014.
The text says, Democrats let him into our country.
He says he doesn't regret killing cops.
And says, Democrats let him stay.
And then there are pictures directly of the caravan, people breaking through the borders at the Mexican border, people walking through Mexico toward the United States.
And then it shows migrants attempting again to break through the borders, some wearing masks.
It says, who else would Democrats let in?
And then a picture again of Luis Bracamonte says, President Donald J. Trump and Republicans are making America safe again.
So it's a very inflammatory ad, obviously.
Inflammatory is also a quote for effective, okay?
Effective ads are hard-hitting, they are memorable, and they make you think about issues that you would normally be ignoring.
So a lot of folks are comparing this to the Willie Horton ad.
For folks who don't remember the Willie Horton ad, back in 1988, George H.W.
Bush was running against Michael Dukakis.
Michael Dukakis was a soft on-crime governor of the state of Massachusetts.
He was in favor of weekend furloughs for inmates.
So there was one inmate whose name was William Horton, and William Horton was a black man who was, I believe, in prison for rape.
He, on his weekend furlough, went out and raped and murdered somebody.
And George W. Bush's allies, I think it was Lee Atwater, released this ad.
Bush and Dukakis on crime.
Bush supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers.
Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.
One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times.
Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison.
Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man, and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.
Weekend prison passes.
Dukakis on crime.
Okay, so people went nuts in 1988 over this.
Oh, this is racially charged.
Okay, well, the way that you read that as racially charged is if you actually think that weekend furloughs are not bad, and if you think that Republicans are racist by necessity.
So people are using the same logic with regard to President Trump's ad.
And in just one second, we'll see how the media are treating this.
So CNN actually ran a story, and the story at CNN is Trump shocks with racist new ad days before midterm.
Okay, that's supposedly objective journalism from CNN.
They put that in their analysis section.
He shocks with racist new ad days before midterms.
Okay, and Chris Cuomo then goes on the network and he says this is Willie Horton Redux.
It's obviously ugly and it's racist as well.
Did you see the video the President of the United States just released?
This is no Halloween spoof.
What it is, is a Willie Horton redux.
In fact, much of the footage in this video that we're going to show you comes from Fox, the place started by the man who came up with the Willie Horton ad, Roger Ailes.
Both were grossly distortive, bigoted, but also effective.
Okay, bigoted and grossly distorted.
So let's talk about the Bracamontes ad in a little bit more specificity.
In order to suggest that the ad is racist, you have to suggest that the only common nexus between the story of Luis Bracamontes and the migrant caravan is ethnicity.
That basically what Trump is doing is he's saying, here's a dangerous Hispanic man, and here's a bunch of people you don't know who are Hispanic.
They must be dangerous.
Vote for me.
Right?
That is the way to interpret President Trump's ad in a racist way.
It's to say that you should be afraid of Hispanic people.
President Trump will protect you from these evil Hispanic people.
Look, here's a picture of an evil Hispanic person.
That's the way to read it in the racist way.
There's another way to read the ad, however, and the way to read that ad is that Trump is saying, here is an illegal immigrant who crossed the southern border illegally multiple times.
He then committed a murder on U.S.
soil of two police officers.
Here are a group of people we have not vetted.
Democrats are saying, let them into the country without vetting.
You don't know who is in that caravan.
Thus, you should elect me because I will protect you from people you don't know who may or may not end up being Luis Bracamontes.
And which one of those more closely hews to the content of the ad?
Well, just on the objective surface, I would say the second.
It's an ad about illegal immigration.
But for folks who assume that illegal immigration, number one, is not a problem at all, and number two, assume that President Trump is racist, and number three, assume that President Trump's supporters are racist, Well, they're making the argument that this is a racist ad.
Now, here's the evidence that I think that this ad is really about illegal immigration.
I mean, first of all, it says that it is, but what is the evidence that this is really about illegal immigration?
Well, the reason that I think that is because back in 2014, the New York Times, the left-leaning New York Times, did a complete story on Braco Montes' case.
And the New York Times' story was actually titled, US Immigration Laws Face New Scrutiny After Killings.
Right, that was the title of the New York Times piece.
This is back in October of 2014.
It's by Jennifer Medina and Julia Preston.
In other words, Brockamontis' case had raised serious questions about the Obama administration's handling of immigration.
Here was their story.
It would seem to be a worst case that opponents of the Obama administration on immigration had long forecast.
An illegal immigrant, one who had been deported twice yet returned to the country each time, is accused of killing two Northern California sheriff's officers in a six-hour shooting rampage on Friday.
So, here's the question.
Is the New York Times racist?
They're talking about the problems with illegal immigration and they are linking the problems with illegal immigration over America's southern border with Luis Bracamontes.
So does Trump's ad.
Just because the images that the Trump ad uses are inflammatory and effective does not mean that they are necessarily racist.
Now, here is the case that Trump is exaggerating in the ad.
The case that Trump is exaggerating in the ad, because we want to be as straight about the facts as we possibly can, is that when Trump's ad says the Democrats allowed Bracamontes into the country and they allowed him to stay, that's an exaggeration of the case.
Bracamontes entered the country illegally in the early to mid-1990s.
He was deported by the Clinton administration in 1997.
He re-entered.
He was then deported under President Bush in 2001.
He then re-entered again, and he remained in the country all the way until he committed murders despite committing 10 misdemeanor violations between 2003 and 2009.
So in reality, it is a bipartisan failure of immigration policy under both Democrat and Republican presidents that allowed Luis Bracamontes to stay in power, or at least to stay in the country.
But when President Trump draws the broader narrative, again, every ad is a blunderbuss, right?
60-second ads are a blunderbuss.
And the case that Trump is making is, I will protect you in a way that Democrats will not protect you on immigration.
And, you know, his policies are harsher on immigration than Democratic policies on immigration.
There's just no question about that.
So, President Trump, look, he knows what he's doing with the ad.
He's stoking the fear centers in the brain.
Is that completely justified?
I do not think so.
Do I think it's justified to say we're suffering from an illegal immigration crisis?
Again, no, I don't.
But do I think that the ad is racist?
That it's openly racist?
That it's a racial appeal?
I don't think that either.
I don't think that either, because I actually do think that illegal immigration is a problem, regardless of the source of that illegal immigration.
So in just a second, we're going to talk about the continuing hubbub over Pittsburgh, a kind of fascinating story in the New York Times about anti-Semitism, and all the rest of the news of the day.
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Okay, so...
In all the hubbub over President Trump and his divisiveness, there's a new poll out that's kind of telling about where Americans stand in the Trump-media divide.
So first of all, I'd like to note something.
I'm about to say a sentence that I have rarely said before.
Jon Stewart is exactly correct.
So Jon Stewart was speaking with members of the media on CNN about President Trump and how President Trump effectively baits the media.
He is pretty much correct about this.
Here is the comedian, the left-leaning comedian who hates President Trump, basically chiding the media for their willingness to jump in the kiddie pool with President Trump, which is exactly where he wants them to be.
They're personally wounded and offended by this man.
He baits them and they dive in.
And what he's done well, I thought, is appeal to their own narcissism, to their own ego.
Because what he says is these are the journalists stand up and say, we are noble.
We are honorable.
How dare you, sir?
And they take it personally.
And now he's changed the conversation to not that his policies are silly or not working or any of those other things.
It's all about the fight.
He's able to tune out everything else and get people just focused on the fight.
He's going to win that fight.
Okay.
And Stuart is 100% right.
And you can see it reflected in the polls.
The media don't get it.
And so they're losing.
There's a new political morning consult poll.
It's been conducted over the past fractious violent week.
And what it shows is that a majority of voters think President Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it since he took office last year.
But the same poll finds that the national news media are even worse.
See, this is what folks fail to recognize about President Trump.
It was true when he was a candidate, and it's true in his everyday politics as well.
President Trump doesn't need to outrun the public relations bear.
He doesn't need to outrun the public opinion polling bear.
He needs to outrun you.
There's a famous joke, two guys in a forest.
And a bear is coming after them.
And one of them sits down and laces up his running shoes.
And the other guy says to him, listen, we're not gonna be able to outrun that bear.
What the hell are you doing?
The guy says, listen, I don't have to outrun the bear.
I just have to outrun you.
That's President Trump with the media right now.
All he has to do is outrun the media.
And by contrast, he will win.
Every race in America is binary.
President Trump understands that.
He understands Americans think that.
And therefore, he is more than happy to go to battle with the media every day, even though the media are out there screaming bloody murder every time he does it.
And President Trump, when he's in battle, man, that dude has no rules.
That is a dude who will bite and eye gouge.
That is a dude who will crotch punch.
I mean, there are no rules with President Trump.
So here's what the poll shows.
Just 3 in 10 voters, 30%, said Trump has done more to unite the country, compared to 56% who said he's done more to divide it.
Fair enough.
But even more voters, 64%, said the media have done more to divide the country.
Only 17% say they have done more to unite it.
So in other words, when President Trump says the media divide the country, and then the media say, how dare he say this?
It's so terrible.
He's the worst, most divisive president ever.
That guy's Hitler.
He's the worst.
We should burn him at the stake.
People go, Okay, Trump's kind of right about you guys?
Like, you're kind of right about Trump, but he's kind of more right about you?
Because here's the thing.
People expect something different of the media than they expect of their politicians.
And this is where Stewart is exactly correct.
The media are not supposed to have a personal stake in the outcome of the ballgame.
The media are supposed to be objectively... I mean, this is what they pitched to us, was it not?
Now, there are those of us who say we have a personal stake in the outcome of all of these political fights.
I'm an opinion journalist.
That means that I give my opinion and you know where I stand on all of these issues.
But Jim Acosta is not.
But can you distinguish Jim Acosta's political activism from mine?
Except that mine is significantly more intelligent?
No, you can't.
Okay, Jim Acosta is an activist masquerading as an objective journalist.
And that means that a lot of voters are saying the media are dividing the country too.
Majorities of both Democrats and Independents say President Trump has done more to divide the country.
55% of Republicans say Trump has done more to unite the country, but Nobody thinks the national news media have done anything to unite the country.
28% of Democrats think the media are working to unite the country.
9% of Republicans and 14% of Independents think the media have been working to unite the country.
You know why they say that?
Because it's true!
The media are not working to unite the country.
And that's why when President Trump says this stuff, people kind of nod along.
Here was President Trump yesterday, talking about the media coverage of his Pittsburgh visit.
And the media went nuts over this.
President Trump is correct, and everybody in America knows he's correct by polling data.
After this day of unity and togetherness, I came home and sadly turned on the news and watched as the far-left media once again used tragedy to sow anger and division.
And the media are like, ah, no, he's the one sowing anger and division.
That's what he does, because he's the worst, because white men are the threats.
Here's Don Lemon on CNN doubling down on his white men are the true threats in the United States routine last night, but he's uniting the country.
Remember, the media, according to the media, are great uniters.
Nobody believes this for half a second.
Their analysis shows that for every eight deadly attacks by right-wing extremists, there were one by left-wing extremists.
Those are the facts.
So people who were angered about what I said are missing the entire point.
We don't need to worry about people who are thousands of miles away.
The biggest threats are homegrown.
The facts prove that.
Okay, so he doubles down on his white men are the real threats in America.
You know, again, Don Lemon is not going to talk about the murder rate in the black community because he believes that it would be racist to do so, but he's happy to talk about the terrorism rate in the white community, which is significantly lower.
Again, I don't think that it is relevant to talk about the murder rates in any community other than to talk about the arrest rates in those communities.
But if we are going to start grouping people together, things get really ugly really quickly, and the media know that, but they don't care.
I mean, Alison Camerota on CNN, she suggested yesterday that President Trump uses the same language as the shooter used.
So therefore, he must be exactly like the shooter.
So he seems to be zeroing in on the two pillars of the media, continuing his vitriolic attacks against the media, and migrants continuing to, in fact, ratchet up the language about them.
And frankly, I mean, I have to say it, using some of the same language that the mass murderer at the synagogue used in terms of invaders and invasion.
So who is dividing the country?
Well, I have said many times, I don't think President Trump is doing a good job of uniting the country, but he's certainly uniting the country against the media.
That seems like the only thing where we all agree, and the media are doing a great job of smacking themselves in the face with a club every five seconds.
They're like Sideshow Bob with the rakes.
They're just walking into every rake in sight, and then they proclaim, well, there's no rake that's hit.
I haven't been hit by rakes as they walk around sporting a bevy of welts across their pate.
It's pretty incredible.
New York Times' Mara Gay goes on MSNBC.
She does the same thing.
She says that she doesn't just blame Trump.
She blames every Trump voter.
She says every Trump voter is a white nationalist, basically.
I can't disagree with that, unfortunately, sad as it is, but I'm not willing to let white voters off the hook.
I think that they, like the rest of us, should be treated as adults, and I think that there are a large number, I would say a majority, of white Americans in this country who are not just Democrats, but who are people of conscience, who are good Americans, and I believe that they need to move from saying, well, I don't like his tweets, but, you know, the economy's doing okay.
They need to move from there to reality.
And what's the reality?
That is the reality.
I don't like his tweets, but the economy is doing okay.
Like, that's true.
But then the idea is that if you vote for him or any Republican, then you are part of the dividing of America and the destruction of America.
We all have to unite by electing who?
The identity politicians on the other side of the aisle?
Like, that's a thing?
Pretty incredible.
So it's a constant source of astonishment that the media don't recognize the hole they're digging for themselves, but they continue to dig it deeper and deeper every single day.
Well, in just a second, I'm going to get to Hollywood's response to everything and how Hollywood continues to polarize the country and Do it in the dumbest possible way.
Plus, we'll talk about Halloween and a fascinating study in the New York Times about the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the city of New York.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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All right.
So let's talk a little bit about how Hollywood is playing into all of this.
Again, you know, President Trump understands that the nature of politics right now is completely binary.
Hollywood does not seem to understand that.
They seem to believe that by clubbing President Trump over the head and clubbing everybody associated with President Trump over the head, that they're helping themselves in some way.
And by reading President Trump's comments in the worst possible light, That this is somehow helping them.
That if they can demonize President Trump and everything that he stands for, and demonize his supporters, his people who are okay with all of that stuff, that somehow this is going to win them admirers.
Right?
That's sort of the logic with this immigration ad, for example.
So the idea is, the Democrats think that that ad is racist.
They think that ad is racist because they don't think illegal immigration is an actual serious issue.
They think Trump is just playing it up for racial purposes.
Most of the people watching that ad are not seeing that ad as having anything to do with race.
They're seeing it as having to do with illegal immigration.
But Democrats, by saying that the ad is racist, and then turning to a bunch of people who see the ad completely differently and saying, if you don't see the ad the same way that I do, i.e.
that it's racist, that means you're a racist too, you're alienating an awful lot of folks.
This is why when Democrats say things like, Trump is dog whistling to his crowd, the implication is that he's dog whistling, that anybody who resonates to Trump is listening to the dog whistle, right?
Because if he's dog whistling, then who are the dogs?
Presumably the dogs are his supporters.
This is the problem with dog whistle language.
If you want to say that you believe President Trump is a racist, and you believe that people are voting for President Trump in spite of that racism, that's one argument.
But that's not actually the argument a lot of folks on the left are making these days.
One of the arguments a lot of folks on the left are making is that Trump is dog whistling to his supporters, that he's sending coded language their way that is designed to elicit racist responses in them.
So the implication is that if you respond to Trump's illegal immigration ad by saying, yeah, illegal immigration is bad, we need someone who can protect our border, that means that you're actually a racist who's responding to his dog whistle.
Samantha Bee did this routine on her awful, unfunny, terrible, no good, very bad, non-comedic show on TBS.
I mean, I've said for a while that by a mile, Samantha Bee is the least funny person on planet Earth.
It used to be a running gun battle between like her and Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer and Trevor Noah.
And she is just, I mean, the woman's secretariat.
She has run out in front.
She's out by lengths.
Nobody else is in camera view.
She's just breaking away at the Kentucky Derby.
So here's Samantha Bee.
Doing something supposedly related to comedy, I guess, somehow?
Talking about all of the vague, coded language.
Vague, coded language that's being used by Trump that's anti-Semitic.
Because I need a lecture.
I, Ben Shapiro, need a lecture from Samantha Bee on anti-Semitism.
Clearly.
Okay, Samantha, tell me all about anti-Semitism, won't you?
Mainstream conservatives would never say anything negative about Jewish people outright, but there are other words they use, like coastal elites, globalists, Hollywood liberals, or John Leibowitz.
And currently, the biggest, loudest dog whistle is George Soros.
Okay, so let's go through those for just one second.
So, coastal elite is not a term for Jew.
Coastal elite is a term for Samantha Bee.
Who is a coastal elite.
How do I know that?
Because she's a coastal elite.
I live on the coasts.
The coastal elites, when people talk about them, are typically highfalutin Hollywood leftists.
Okay, and then she says, but I can't say Hollywood liberals, because that is a term for Jew.
Hollywood liberal is a term for Jew?
Is Samantha Bee Jewish?
I missed it.
When did she convert?
Is Oprah Jewish?
Is Jane Fonda Jewish?
Like, amazing.
I haven't seen them at my shul.
Anytime.
In fact, all of the Hollywood liberals who happen to be Jewish I've never seen at my shul because they don't go to shul because they don't actually have anything to do with Judaism.
So, there's that.
But it's pretty astonishing.
So, all of these terms, again, the implication is that If anybody uses these terms, then this is somehow an indicator that you are secretly an anti-Semite who's resonating to secret anti-Semitic messages.
You've taken out your Red Rider decoder ring, and you're sitting there, and you're decoding all of President Trump's EU messages.
Okay, so, she's used coastal elites and Hollywood liberals.
Those were two.
And she said globalists.
Okay, so, the word globalist It has a relatively checkered history.
So back in the 1920s and 1930s, there were anti-Semites who suggested that there was a global Zionist conspiracy.
And the global Zionist conspiracy was globalist, right?
That was a term that was used by anti-Semites.
However, the modern use of the word globalist really does not date back to the 1930s.
It dates back to the 1999 WTO, the World Trade Organization riots that happened in Seattle, when people were implying that if you were in favor of free trade, this made you a globalist.
That also happens to be precisely the same sort of terminology President Trump uses.
When President Trump says globalist, typically he's talking about people who are for open immigration and open trade.
That doesn't really have anything to do with Jews.
It really doesn't.
There was one speech President Trump gave where I thought that he used language that verged on the coded, right?
When he talked about the international bankers, right?
Then you start to get into dicey territory.
But I'm sorry, globalists is not by necessity an anti-Semitic term.
John Leibovitz, right?
Calling John Stewart John Leibovitz?
No, that's a way of mocking John Stewart.
In fact, if John Stewart is so concerned about anti-Semitism, maybe he should go back to using his original name, John Leibovitz.
It seems to me that it's sort of catering to antisemitism to change her name to Jon Stewart for screen purposes, I guess, right?
And then she says that the current biggest loud dog whistle is George Soros.
Really?
Is David Koch a dog whistle?
How about Sheldon Adelson?
How about Tom Steyer?
Are all of them dog whistles?
So, again, the implication is, and this is where the left loses it, The implication is that it's not just that you support Trump because of his policies, even if you decry his rhetoric.
It's that he is dog whistling to you because you are a dog.
And as a dog, you respond to each and every one of his cues.
He feeds you a racist Scooby snack, and then you go out and you solve crimes.
That's what's polarized.
One of the things, one of the things, many things that it's polarizing the country right now.
Okay, now let's talk a little bit about anti-Semitic attacks.
So there's been a lot of talk in the media about where anti-Semitic attacks are coming from.
And the statement by Don Lemon is that anti-Semitism is largely coming from white supremacists across the country.
As somebody who speaks on campuses on a regular basis, and I speak with Jews a lot more frequently than Don Lemon does, then I can tell you that Jews on campus are not feeling the heat from white supremacists.
Jews on campus are feeling the heat from mainstream leftists and their allies in the Muslim Student Association, for example.
That's where they are actually feeling the heat.
And there's a fascinating report in the New York Times today that's actually rather telling.
It's called, Is it safe to be Jewish in New York?
New York, obviously, is very heavily Jewish, has over a million Jewish folks living there.
It's just past midnight on May 1st.
A young rabbinical student was walking home on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn when he thought he was being followed.
A moment after that intuition struck, two men grabbed him, threw him against a car and started punching him.
The victim had dropped a box containing 200 bucks meant for charity.
The money went untouched.
The student, it seemed, was attacked because he was overheard speaking Hebrew on his cell phone.
His two assailants were indicted on assault and hate crime charges.
No other American city is more closely associated with Jewish identity than New York.
And yet, at the same time, New York has become an increasingly unsettling place to be Jewish.
The first inkling of this emerged several days after the 2016 presidential election, when swastikas and the phrase, Go Trump, showed up on playground equipment in the Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights.
But in fact, antisemitism was already quietly on the rise.
For several years now, expressions of anti-Jewish sentiments have made up the preponderance of hate crime complaints in the city.
And here's the interesting part, okay?
Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the police department.
Jews have been targeted.
We are the leaders in hate crimes and Nobel Prizes.
That's our thing.
To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews, 142 in all, as there have been against blacks.
Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.
A factor of 20, right?
This is all stuff that the leftists at the New York Times are only discovering now that Jews just got shot.
Those of us in the Jewish community have known this for a little while, but it was uncomfortable for the left to talk about anti-Semitism because Jews don't rank high enough on the intersectional hierarchy.
They're not victimized enough in the United States to be treated as actual victims.
But here's where it gets even more interesting.
If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy.
During the past 22 months, not one person, not one, caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group.
Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department's hate crimes task force told me.
He says, I almost wish it was sometimes more clear cut.
It's every identity targeting every identity.
He says, of course not everyone is caught, and obviously white supremacists are driving anti-semitic rhetoric online, but it is the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-semitism in New York much harder.
No, it's not that.
It's hard to talk about it.
It's not that it's hard to talk about.
It's that the New York Times doesn't have a solid anti-right-wing narrative that they can pin anti-semitism on, so they haven't been talking about hate crimes against Jews in their own city for years upon years.
And again, those of us who have deep friendships inside the New York Jewish community have known about this for years and years and years and years.
It was not all that long ago when Al Sharpton was involved in helping to incite riots against Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights.
Now he's a host on MSNBC.
The reason that folks don't want to talk about anti-Semitism until a white supremacist does it is because it doesn't fit the narrative.
A lot of anti-Semitic hate crimes are committed by people who are not right-wing, who are not even white supremacists, and are committed by people who are openly left-wing or are members of minority groups.
And nobody on the left wants to talk about that because it's uncomfortable.
So when folks on the left say, you know, President Trump won't talk about anti-Semitism, where was the New York Times for years reporting on this?
I love that they even make that, I mean, it's reported in the article.
They say if anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative.
That is the New York Times admitting to you that the narrative was more important than the reporting.
That is the New York Times admitting to you openly that the only thing that mattered to them was reporting on a particular kind of people attacking a particular kind of people.
I love this.
Sympathies are distributed unevenly.
Few are extended toward religious fundamentalists of any kind who reach the radar of the urbane Podsafe America class only when stories appear confirming existing impressions of backwardness.
The hordes of children delivered into the world whom families refuse to vaccinate and keep semi-literate.
The Anti-Defamation League maintains its own statistics.
And last year, it reported that nine of the 12 physical assaults against Jews categorized as hate crimes in New York State were committed in Brooklyn and involved victims who were easily marked as members of traditionally Orthodox communities.
So, in other words, Pod Save America crowd doesn't actually care about any of this stuff because it doesn't fit the narrative.
And that's the reality.
Only when it fits the narrative is anti-Semitism a thing.
And when it's a Muslim shooting up LAX at the El Al counter and killing a member of my community, then it's not a big thing.
When it's people being targeted for hate crimes by folks of minority bent, then it's not a big thing.
When it's a white supremacist, then it's a big thing because we can link that to Republicans and try and proclaim that this is the big problem across the country.
Now, again, I have never underestimated the impact of white supremacists to anti-Semitism.
It is a serious problem for Jews.
It is not the only serious problem for Jews or even the predominant problem for Jews in the country when it comes to anti-Semitism.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I like and then a thing that I hate.
So, a couple of things that I like.
I've been doing Jewish nigunim, which are sort of prayer tunes.
Yesterday I did one for my friend Eitan Katz.
This is, in my opinion, the most beautiful of all Jewish prayer tunes.
This is from a prayer that we do on fast days and also on Yom Kippur and also the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
The prayer is called the Binu Malkenu.
Which literally means my father, my king.
And it's a beautiful prayer, you know, begging God for particular things.
Here is a little bit of this tune that's sung in shul on all the days that I just mentioned.
CHOIR SINGS
CHOIR SINGS
and kindly and save us.
And that's the Hoshino is in Save Us.
So it's a beautiful tune.
We sing it, as I say, on all of those aforementioned days.
You know, somebody should actually put together a nice recording of all the different Negunim, because there really are a lot of beautiful Jewish tunes that nobody knows unless you go to Shul.
So, yeah, worth checking out.
Some of these things are available on YouTube to listen to.
Okay, let's do a thing that I hate.
So the thing that I hate today, so yesterday was Halloween.
I didn't dress up because I didn't want to culturally appropriate.
I was thinking of dressing up as Elizabeth Warren, but I didn't want to culturally appropriate her.
I'm just not white enough for that.
But there's a whole article, every Halloween, we now have a spate of articles about racist Halloween costumes.
Racist Halloween costumes!
There's one in the Atlantic saying, America can't seem to kick its racist costume habit.
Now, I think that we ought to say that there are certain Halloween costumes that are racist.
If you are dressing up as a group member in order to mock the group, Then this would be the definition of racism, right?
That's what blackface is.
When people, you know, don quote-unquote Asian eyes in order to mock Asian people, that's obviously racist.
But when somebody wears a funny Mexican hat because they're wearing a funny Mexican hat, and it's not designed to mock Mexican people, then I don't think that just a white person wearing a sombrero means that you're mocking Mexican people.
I don't think that that's the case.
I don't think that it's the case that if you were to dress up and wear a kippah because you're dressing up as me for For Halloween.
There were people who dressed up as me for Halloween.
I don't know why in God's name you would do that, but there were some people who did that.
I don't think that that makes you an anti-Semite because you dressed up as me for Halloween and you put on a kippah because I wear a kippah every day, right?
But there's all this talk always about how many people are deeply worried about Halloween costumes.
Now, again, I'm not against people being offended by Halloween costumes that mock you, but it seems to me that people are always on edge.
The number of articles about this means that people are a lot more touchy about it than they used to be when I was a kid.
Maybe that's a good thing.
I think it's kind of a bad thing.
I think that mostly we should be attributing to people decent motivations.
I think most of us should be saying, well, maybe the guy's an idiot.
Maybe he was just dressing up because he thought the costume was funny, not because he means to mock my particular race.
65% according to Cato Institute.
65% of college students think they should be able to discuss offensive costumes without administrator involvement, though they were sharply divided when the data were broken down by race.
71% of white students said students should be allowed to discuss and resolve on their own.
56% of Latino students agreed.
43% of African American students responded in the same way.
The Atlantic says if student conversations alone could solve the issue, a fresh crop of offensive costumes would not likely make headlines every October.
Well, no.
I mean, I think that they would make headlines every October because the media has an interest in stupid topics.
This came up last night in my speech in University of British Columbia.
Somebody asked, you know, as a country, we seem to be focused on more and more minor issues.
And I said, right, because we're wealthy and bored.
And I think there's some truth to that.
I think that we are wealthy and bored.
And so we are willing to get upset about nearly anything.
Again, Megyn Kelly just lost her job based on a discussion of these issues, for which she apologized.
So, I'm annoyed with a culture that seems determined to reinforce all of our frailties as opposed to a culture that takes our complaints seriously and then also tries to think about whether we ought to get some thicker skin.
Okay, other things that I hate.
This is a pretty amazing tweet.
There's a guy named Scott Heshinger.
This is my friend flying to be with her family after synagogue killings gave this note to a man on her flight with a MAGA hat.
He read it all.
Okay, so apparently there's a guy on her flight who's wearing a MAGA hat.
And the note says, Dear Sir in the pretty red hat, my name is Marissa.
I'm sitting a few rows behind you.
I'm in Los Angeles because my family lives here.
We are Jewish.
We survived the Holocaust.
My family members were murdered in gas chambers, all of them except the five that lived.
So here I am on a plane with you.
As my father says, we were born with anguish.
I flew to Los Angeles because 11 Jews over 55 years old were shot and killed during prayer.
After they were shot, I couldn't stop crying.
I was afraid.
I didn't want to be alone.
Our president blamed Saturday's killing spree on the synagogue.
He said if they had an armed guard, it would have been fine.
Do you have an armed guard where you pray God should be safe to convene with you, right?
God should be safe to convene with, right?
A lot of people were upset, angry, and scared on the plane when they saw your hat.
For you, I want to assume it's about politics, economics, and support of a charismatic man.
I wonder if you mean to scare black people, Jews, and immigrants.
To us, your hat sanctions our death, our murder, our evisceration, because your hat supports a man who does little to help us and so much to fuel hatred, violence, and cruelty.
I love you.
I hope that your good America doesn't include flushing me and my people out.
The guy was just wearing a hat.
And I'm sorry, ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
Like, just because somebody's wearing a MAGA hat doesn't mean that they want to kill all the Jews.
That's absurd.
It's absurd.
But this is the media environment.
The media environment has really created this.
Trump doesn't help, but the media environment has certainly created this, and the American people know it.
And if Trump keeps picking fights with the media, he's going to keep winning so long as they continue to push this narrative.
Alrighty, we'll be back here tomorrow from our home studios in Los Angeles, and we'll be doing the mailbags.
So now's a good time to subscribe at dailywire.com.
Go check that out.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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