All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 10, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:23
The World’s Most Amusing Game Of Chicken | Ep. 692
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
President Trump plays chicken with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, President Trump heads to the border, and he considers declaring a national emergency.
We'll talk about all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So perhaps you're watching and you're wondering, what is that magnificent mane?
Let me just tell you.
Yesterday, on this very show, we talked a little bit about the fact that back in the day, I had gone a few days without shaving before my show.
Someone tweeted out that picture.
I took a poll yesterday asking how many people wanted to see bearded Shapiro versus no beard versus paper bag overhead.
Well, fortunately, beard came out first.
And so overnight, because I have to shave like five times a day, overnight, I just didn't shave.
And the next morning, this magnificent mane was present.
Here it was.
It was just great.
We're going to get to all the actual news in just one second.
First, I need to tell you about market volatility.
A great article just came out in the L.A.
Times about market volatility driving investors back to traditional havens, a.k.a.
golden bonds.
They quote an economist out of Capital Economics in London, quote, safe havens should continue to outperform this year as a slowdown in the U.S.
prompts the Fed to end its tightening cycle in the middle of the year and China's economy continues to lose momentum.
So if you haven't reviewed your retirement accounts lately, it's time to take a look at some alternatives.
What's your plan?
Can you afford another hit to your retirement like the last downturn when the S&P dropped 50%?
Hedge against inflation and hedge against uncertainty and instability with some precious metals.
Now, I'm diversified.
You should be, too.
Gold is a safe haven against uncertainty.
The company I trust with precious metal purchases, as you know, Birch Gold Group.
And right now, thanks to a little-known IRS tax law, you can even move your IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by physical gold and silver, if that's something You choose to do.
Look back historically.
When the bottom falls out of everything else, gold tends to safeguard savings.
Birch Gold Group has thousands of satisfied customers, countless five-star reviews, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Contact Birch Gold Group.
Get a free information kit on physical precious metals.
See if diversifying into gold and silver makes sense for you.
It's a comprehensive 16-page kit.
It shows you how gold and silver can help you.
So go check it out right now.
Birchgold.com slash Ben.
Ask all your questions.
And when you're ready to invest, talk to my friends at Birchgold.
Birchgold.com slash Ben.
We'll have a lot to get to today.
The President of the United States traveling down to the southern border to discuss, I guess, the issue of necessity for a border wall.
It's more of a photo op than anything else, as he continues to consider the possibility of doing some sort of national emergency declaration yesterday.
Yesterday.
I have to say.
Yesterday, the President of the United States met with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, both of whom were less than pleased with how the meeting went.
Here were their reactions to the meeting.
Federal workers will not be receiving their paychecks, and what that means in their lives is tragic in terms of their credit rating, paying their mortgage, paying their rent, paying their car payment, paying their children's tuition, and the rest.
The president seems to be insensitive to that.
He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money, but they can't.
The president just got up and walked out.
He asked Speaker Pelosi, will you agree to my wall?
She said no.
And he just got up and said, then we have nothing to discuss.
And he just walked out.
Again, we saw a temper tantrum because he couldn't get his way and he just walked out of the meeting.
Well, Democrats were super pissed about this.
President Trump met with both Pelosi and Schumer.
And apparently, according to President Trump, it went something like what Pelosi and Schumer said, although without the temper tantrum.
Here is what President Trump tweeted out yesterday.
He tweeted out.
Just after meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time, I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up.
Are you going to approve border security, which includes a wall or steel barrier?
Nancy said, no.
I said, bye bye.
Nothing else works.
And it turns out, he actually did say bye-bye.
No joke, he actually turned to them and said bye-bye.
And then he just left.
This was after, apparently, he had handed out candy.
According to the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, President Trump wasn't upset during the meeting.
He just was not surprised that Democrats were not willing to negotiate.
And so he opened the meeting by handing out candy, and then when he didn't get what he wanted, he walked out.
Walked into the room, passed out candy.
It was true.
I don't recall him ever raising his voice or slamming his hand.
But this is a president who feels very strongly about his commitment to see to the security of the American people.
Okay, so, you know, this whole thing is bound for ruin.
There's no deal that is on the table and the only deals that are being considered, as we'll discuss in a little while, are not going to be great for the sort of border hawk side of the Republican caucus.
I will say that the idea of President Trump offering Nancy Pelosi a snicker, it's him just going up to her and saying, you're not you and you're hungry.
And then just handing her a Snickers bar, then she takes a bite, and she turns into Ben Roethlisberger or something.
That would have been very amusing.
Or, he could have gone with the Donald Jr.
routine, and he could have actually handed Nancy Pelosi a bowl of Skittles, and then told her that one of them was poisoned, and said, well, one of these is poisoned.
And she would say, well, I don't want to eat any of these.
Like, that's just like illegal immigration.
You don't know which one is poisoned.
You know, solid stuff happening in the Oval Office with the Democrats.
President Trump this morning was headed down to the border and he was very, very upset with Democrats for not offering him anything.
He said that China is more honorable than Chuck and Nancy.
Everything's happening.
The economy is incredible.
We're negotiating and having tremendous success with China.
And I find China, frankly, in many ways, to be far more honorable than Brian, Chuck, and Nancy.
I really do.
I think that China is actually much easier to deal with than the opposition party.
Okay, that's ridiculous.
And the president of the United States should not be saying things like that.
If Obama had said it about Republicans, I would have said that's insane.
Okay, China is a communist repressive tyranny.
The idea that we're negotiating with China...
Better than Trump can negotiate with Americans, who may not share his political priorities, but at least are not attempting to impose, you know, a restrictive communist regime that kills dissidents.
That seems like an overstep by the President of the United States, but President Trump not one who is known for understatement.
Deeply immoral statement there by President Trump.
He's on more solid ground when he says the Democrats don't obviously give a damn about illegal immigration.
Here he is not wrong, and this is the point he actually should be hammering.
No reason why we can't come to a deal.
But you have another side that doesn't care about border security.
The Democrats, which I've been saying all along, they don't give a damn about crime.
They don't care about crime.
They don't care about gang members coming in and stabbing people and cutting people up.
They don't care about crime.
And if they're not going to care about crime, then I agree.
They shouldn't do anything at the border, but I care about crime.
It is, you know, not a horrible argument that Democrats don't care about crime, especially when they make some of the worst arguments in the world.
Nancy Pelosi, apparently in this meeting with President Trump, Trump was talking about a wall and Nancy Pelosi kept saying to him, but people will just build tunnels underneath the wall.
Oh my god.
You're right.
It's much easier to just build tunnels underneath the wall than to walk across where there is no wall.
The long history of people walking across things where there's no wall demonstrates it's a little easier to walk across things than to build a tunnel underneath them, as Dan Crenshaw points out.
I can't imagine how this conversation went.
Trump goes, This is how these conversations must have gone.
We are now living in the stupidest timeline, in which people make the most inane arguments.
he's like why don't i bring rafts and trump be like well we'll sink the rafts well they have scuba gear like that what this is how these conversations must have gone we are now living in the stupidest timeline in which people make the most inane arguments and when democrats say that a wall doesn't make things more difficult of course a wall makes things more difficult just by definition honestly i i only wish that the conversation had been about using trebuchets to throw drugs over the wall right they'd They could have said that the wall was a medieval implement, and Trump would have said, right, that's because it works.
And then Pelosi would have said, well, people will bring catapults.
And Trump would be like, and that's why I brought this dragon.
All this is dumb, all right?
It's 5.7 billion dollars.
The Democrats just signed the money.
We should be done, but we're not going to be done, because Democrats think that they can exact some sort of bargain out of Trump, and they figure the American people, at the behest of the media, are going to fall exactly where they want them to fall, which is blaming Trump for the shutdown.
However, it's not going completely according to plan.
Some Democrats are urging people like Pelosi and Schumer to just cave and sign over the money because we are now about to enter an actual non-pay period for members of the federal government starting January 11th.
People start missing paychecks.
That great political mind Cher was tweeting out today, you know, she was wondering if there is life after love and also why Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would not actually just sign over the money.
She has the weirdest capitalization habits on Twitter, like much weirder than President Trump's.
She says Trump said Mexico will pay for it.
Wall will pay for itself.
How about billions in maintenance every year?
Trump will lie and say it's new self-cleaning wall, fence, hedge, bamboo curtain, iron curtain, chintz curtain, venetian blind.
Stop lying and stop the bleep shutdown now.
Start snap.
Okay, and then she continued.
People will starve, lose their homes, be unable to see doors?
Doctors.
Unable to see doctors.
Where was the bleep crisis one month ago, one year ago?
Where has it been for the last two years?
Having said that, Nancy, you are a hero.
Let him have his blanking money.
People will starve, lose their homes, be unable to see doors, doctors, unable to see doctors, so share, I think may actually represent a certain contingent of the democratic base that is annoyed that the Democrats continue to play politics with a lot of democratic constituents, Because the media, every time they focus in on the impact of the shutdown, it's not just hitting Trump, it's hitting Democrats as well.
USA Today has a long piece today about how the shutdown is impacting Americans.
They talk about the fact that It's kind of businesses that are ancillary to government areas are suffering.
You talk about the guy, Mike Yohannes has run a food stand in downtown Washington for the past 20 years, surviving economic downturns while selling hot dogs, candy bars, and an assortment of other edible items.
But the latest government shutdown could be the death knell for his business.
Foot traffic is markedly down at the corner of Penn Ave and 11th Street, where he operates.
And Johanneson sales have fallen about 60% during the closure, which has affected nearby federal offices, museums, and other tourist spots.
And you're getting all these sorts of stories from the media day after day.
This idea, the idea being, of course, that there's actual suffering that happens during a government shutdown.
Apparently, the federal government loses about a billion dollars a week during a government shutdown, thanks to back pay.
They're going to have to pay people and other failures to take in revenue and all the rest.
So, Democrats are going to feel that pressure too.
And this is why Trump should stand tall.
Unfortunately, it looks like President Trump is looking more and more at declaring a national emergency.
And that's something that he really should not do at this point.
Declaring a national emergency, as I said yesterday, would be both fruitless It would also be just bad constitutional politics.
The executive branch does not have the capacity to randomly declare a national emergency and then seize land along the border in violation of eminent domain and then just start building walls because there's been an intractable long-term problem that Democrats refuse to solve.
Trump needs to keep the pressure on Democrats.
And again, The folks on the left don't have a good excuse as to why they don't seem to care very much about this issue.
They don't have a good excuse.
And I hate Trump is not an actual solution.
I hate Trump doesn't help you at all in this debate, which is why Trump should keep pushing it and pushing and pushing it.
I'm going to get to just how bad Democrats and folks on the left are when it comes to this issue in just one second, because if Trump wanted, he could have a series of commercials like today that would be devastating to Democrats on this particular issue.
We'll get to that in just one second.
Let me tell you something about my shaving habits.
Did you see earlier in this show that I actually had a beard?
Did you see that?
It was not a figment of your imagination.
During one of the clips, all I had to do to get rid of that beard was grab my Dollar Shave Club products and go to town and boom, clean shaven.
Beautiful.
Magnificent.
That's what Dollar Shave Club can do for you.
Because Dollar Shave Club delivers everything I need right to my door.
And they keep me fully stocked on what I use so I don't run out.
I mean, the fact is, I used an awful lot of shaving cream during that 20 second period.
I need a new supply.
Well, Dollar Shave Club will provide that to me on a regularly scheduled basis.
They've got you covered head to toe for your hair, your skin, your face.
They have a new program where they automatically keep you stocked up on the products you use.
You determine what you want, when you want it.
It shows up right at your door from once a month to once every six months.
That's what I do, whether it is for shaving or whether it is for using the Amber and Lavender Body Cleanser, which is soothing and calming, which I desperately need.
And right now, I've got a bunch of starter sets you can try for just $5 like their Oral Care Kit.
After that, the restock box ships regular-sized products at regular price.
So, what are you waiting for?
Get your starter set for just $5 right now at dollarshaveclub.com slash ben.
That is dollarshaveclub.com slash Ben.
Again, dollarshaveclub.com slash Ben for the special deal.
You can try the starter set for just five bucks, like their oral care kit.
Again, go check that out, dollarshaveclub.com slash Ben.
Okay, so, President Trump, when he says that the Democrats don't care about crime, that they don't care about illegal immigration, He has a leg to stand on, and it's amazing how blind many folks on the left, or at least in the anti-Trump contingents, are to this kind of hole in their resume.
So I give you an example.
Anna Navarro is a Republican, right?
She's voted Republican in a bunch of other elections, although she said she was going to vote for Andrew Gillum in the last Florida gubernatorial race because she disliked Trump so much.
Which is a pretty insane contention.
Well, last night on CNN, Chris Cuomo, actual physical block of wood, Chris Cuomo, had on a couple of guests.
One was Ana Navarro and one was a Republican who was talking about the cost of illegal immigration and the problem of crime that is linked to illegal immigrants who are not vetted.
And Ana Navarro, in the middle of this clip, actually takes out a nail file and begins filing her nails because she doesn't care about what happens to people who are victims of illegal immigrant crime.
Here's the clip.
Even if I were to grant you that, okay?
The point is, the illegal alien crime rate should be zero.
You can do your nails.
You know who can't do their nails?
Are people who've been killed, Anna, by dangerous, known illegal aliens who've been allowed to stay in this country because of the leftist policies that people like you promote in so-called sanctuary cities.
I'm so tired of you calling me leftists already.
Okay, so there she is filing her nails as he talks about illegal immigrant crime.
Now, I'm old enough to remember when Corey Lewandowski, who is indeed a bag of tools, Corey Lewandowski was also on CNN.
And I believe it was Democrats talking about victims of a particular type of crime or government shutdown.
I'm trying to remember what the context was.
And Corey Lewandowski just said, womp, womp.
And everybody mocked him and suggested that he never be allowed on CNN again.
And of ours, they're filing her nails while they talk about victims of illegal immigrant crime.
No problem at all.
And this just demonstrates that there is a blind spot when it comes to the emotional nature of this issue for a lot of Democrats who believe that there's no reason to worry about illegal immigration in any context.
In a second, I'm going to show you more of the reaction to President Trump's negotiation strategy.
So President Trump It was negotiating with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and the media are very angry that Trump didn't stay in the room, that he walked out of the room with Pelosi and Schumer.
Now, quick flashback.
Barack Obama did this, right?
Obama actually did this back in 2011.
According to Jonathan Allen and Jake Sherman, July 13, 2011 in Politico, President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of a stormy debt limit meeting with congressional leaders on Wednesday, a dramatic setback to the already shaky negotiations.
He shoved back and said, I'll see you tomorrow, and walked out.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told reporters in the Capitol after the meeting, the White House talks blew up amid a new round of sniping between Obama and Cantor, who are fast becoming bitter enemies.
Apparently, the president told Cantor, don't call my bluff.
And then he said that no other president would sit through such negotiations.
And then he just walked out.
Apparently Obama was impassioned, but he just walked out.
And the Democrats claimed that Cantor was exaggerating the story.
So exactly the same thing as what just happened with Trump and Pelosi.
Was there this kind of media coverage?
Did Erin Burnett get on the air and talk about how a president can't walk out of negotiations while she did last night on CNN?
Is it the person at the center of a negotiation when the outcome is whether his government reopens?
Can't just say bye-bye.
Trump has to lead.
Well, no, actually, he can say bye-bye.
That's one of the tactics of negotiation.
In any negotiation, there comes a point where you have to say to the other side, listen, I'm getting up and I'm walking out because there's nothing more for us to discuss here.
Now, the problem is that Trump's fallback position is a bad position.
Trump's fallback position is that he is going to declare a national emergency and that the national emergency is going to allow him to build a wall on the border.
That is not what's going to happen.
If he declares a national emergency and tries to activate the military, a judge will put forward an injunction in about five minutes flat.
The wall will not be built.
He will sign the Democratic funding bill into law.
Everything will be funded.
No wall will be built.
He will yell about the Democrats.
He will yell about the judiciary.
Some contingent of the base will suggest that Trump has done his part, but Congress blew it.
And then we'll all move on with our lives while Trump gets credit with his base.
It will be a cynical political move.
Either the president is committed to this or he's not committed to this.
Either he's committed to go all the way on this issue, or he's not committed to go all the way on this issue.
I don't think there's a lot of in-between here.
With that said, they're trying to find an in-between now.
So according to CNN, there's deal-making in the works.
Some of these deals are not very good.
Now recall, just a few months back, the White House had actually offered the Democrats that they would essentially give amnesty to over a million illegal immigrants.
Dreamers.
People who were brought here when they were young.
They would offer all that amnesty to illegal immigrants in response to a border wall, and the Democrats walked away from that deal.
But now, the White House is coming back and they're saying, well, maybe we can make another sort of deal that'll be along those same lines.
Here's Mercedes Schlapp from the White House comms office on CNN last night.
Part of the exchange that Democrats and many Republicans appeared open to would be money for the wall, more money for the wall, in exchange perhaps for a deal on DACA.
Let me ask you on DACA, because Republicans have raised this too, Newt Gingrich among them, would the president be willing to exchange protection for DREAMers for more money for the wall?
We have been open for discussion, open for negotiations for the Democrats.
Okay, and the fact is that Trump was open to those negotiations a while ago.
President Trump, back in October of 2017, had suggested that he would push DACA even without a wall.
And then he said, OK, well, you know, we'll do DACA for the wall, and then Democrats balked at it.
So it's not really a shock that they are now bringing this up again.
This has ticked off some of the real immigration hardliners, like Ann Coulter, who say that the DREAMers should never be given amnesty.
It would, in my opinion, be a mistake to give the DREAMers amnesty without actually having the physical barrier in place, because now you're creating a new magnet.
Are you saying to folks that if you get in, if you cross that border, if you lie about when you got here, or if you just cross the border and then hope for the next round of these sorts of negotiations, then you will be able to get citizenship as well?
The way this really should go is that if Trump wants to make a dreamers for wall deal, what he really should do is he should say, here's the deal.
I build the wall, and then when the Department of Homeland Security declares that the border is secure, then all these folks get in the back of the line for citizenship.
It's always been my perspective, by the way, that treating illegal immigrants as a full class is a mistake.
What we actually should be doing is treating illegal immigrants on a one-to-one basis, meaning the same way that we would legal immigrants.
If you seek to immigrate to the United States as an individual, then we are going to run you through the rigors of having to pass an immigration test.
We're going to have to look at your background.
We are going to have to decide whether you are of net benefit or of net detriment to the United States.
And then we decide whether you can come or whether your family can come and all the rest.
Why that wouldn't apply to people who are already here is beyond me.
Just because you crossed the border illegally 10 years ago, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to make the same assessment as to whether you are of cost or benefit.
In fact, that assessment should be a lot easier.
We've had 10 years to learn whether you're going to be on welfare, or whether you're going to have a kid who's in a gang, or whether you are going to assimilate into American culture in a fulsome way.
We should be analyzing people on an individual one-to-one level.
That's really how we should handle all of this, but the truth is that immigration is actually susceptible to some pretty common-sense solutions.
It's just that Democrats don't want the common-sense border solutions, and Republicans are hesitant to cave on any of the other solutions until they have a border solution, a position that I think is ultimately rational.
With that said, it's pretty obvious that Lindsey Graham and some of the border doves in the Republican caucus are now trying to get Trump's commitment to a wall to push him into a more liberal position on immigration.
And this is where the danger comes in for the Trump administration.
They basically have three options at this point.
Option number one, stick to their guns, say we're not going to fund the government unless you give us the border security funding we need.
Option number two, declare a national emergency, sign the funding, wait for a court to strike it down, whine about it, and hope that Republicans aren't too pissed.
Option number three, go back to Democrats and give away the store in exchange for the wall.
And option number three, unfortunately, seems to be gaining a fair amount of steam.
According to CNN today, After President Trump stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders, GOP senators privately gathered in Senator Lindsey Graham's office on Wednesday to discuss a way out of the logjam, the long-shot idea proposed immigration deal that would include $5.7 billion for Trump's border wall, along with several provisions that could entice Democrats.
Those items include changes to help those who are a part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, as well as immigrants from El Salvador and other countries impacted by the Temporary Protected Status program, along with modifications to H-2B visas.
H-1B visas are high-skilled immigrants.
H-2B visas are unskilled immigrants.
The plan is in its very early stages.
Its chances of success are still very uncertain.
At best, Republicans caution.
GOP senators pitched the idea to senior White House advisor Jared Kushner, who said if they came up with a proposal that got Trump his border wall money and could pass the Senate, the White House would be open to more discussions on the matter.
He did not say that Trump would actually endorse such a plan.
I think it's unlikely that President Trump would endorse such a plan, given the fact that he'd get a lot of pressure, rightly so, from his right on the issue.
Well, I want to talk about this a little bit more.
But first, let's talk about your cell phone bills.
Well, the big and big wireless provider stands for a lot of things.
Big contracts, big bills, big fees.
AT&T has a new $800 million administrative fee increase.
What big wireless does not want you to know is that there is a way to cut your wireless bill down to just 15 bucks a month.
Introducing Mint Mobile, the game changing company that's taken everything wrong with big wireless and made it right.
You can save like a thousand bucks a year with Mint Mobile without sacrificing quality of service because Mint Mobile makes it really easy.
You can pay like 15 bucks a month.
Use your own phone along with any Mint Mobile plan.
You can keep your old number along with all your existing contacts.
You can choose the amount of data you want.
You know, the unlimited data, you're really not using it.
Choose between 2, 5 or 10 gigabyte 4G LTE plans.
No more paying for that unlimited data.
And if you are not 100% satisfied, Mint Mobile has you covered with their 7-day money-back guarantee.
So try it for a few days, see if it works for you.
If not, get your money back.
Ditch that old wireless bill.
Start saving right now with Mint Mobile.
To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, plus free shipping on your new Mint Mobile SIM card, go to mintmobile.com slash ben.
That is M-I-N-T mobile dot com slash ben.
Again, cut your wireless bill to $15 a month.
Get free shipping on your Mint Mobile SIM card at mintmobile.com slash ben.
That's mintmobile.com slash ben.
Go check it out right now.
So, the negotiations seem to be ongoing.
President Trump heads down to the border today.
He does so amidst new media reports that the steel wall won't even work.
So again, Democrats, media, they're struggling to explain why there shouldn't be any sort of barrier, particularly because even people who are members of the Obama administration say that walls work.
Everyone knows that walls work.
For example, President Obama's former border patrol chief He came out earlier yesterday and he said, yeah, of course walls work.
Like, why are we being stupid about this?
President Trump attended a national press conference along with the president of the Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd.
And Brandon got up and he said something that was very succinct and very true.
The wall works.
I'm here today breaking my silence to tell American people that the president is correct.
And what he's doing, the wall works 100%.
And I'm here today to support his efforts and what he's doing to get what he needs to improve border security for this great nation.
You know, I think that you would be I think you would be hard pressed, like really hard pressed to find a Border Patrol agent who thinks that the wall would not be effective in any way.
And when Democrats keep claiming that it wouldn't be effective in any way, they have no evidence to back all this.
In fact, whenever they try to suggest that a wall is unnecessary, they end up shooting themselves in the foot.
For example, Democratic Representative Juan Vargas.
He says, there's no border crisis.
We don't need a wall.
San Diego, for example, is doing great.
Here he is talking with Don Lemon.
Again, another one of the best and brightest over at CNN.
along the border and about a little over 10 miles from the border.
It's San Diego.
I mean, it's basically paradise.
It's one of the safest places in the country.
And the notion that we have a crisis there, a security crisis, is absolute nonsense.
A fence or a giant wall would absolutely do no good, no good at all.
And that's why I don't think it'll ever be built.
I think it's fantasy.
There is a wall in San Diego.
There's a border wall over there.
It turns out that having a border wall is actually quite useful, and we saw that when there was video of people from the last march on the border, from that last caravan, who actually tried to cross the border illegally, but it turns out there were fences to stop them, and so they started throwing rocks at border police officials.
And so, of course, it's going to be a very difficult argument to make.
Now, the best argument that can be made against the wall is that it's not necessary to build, like, a 2,000-mile wall, which is true, right?
You actually need sections of wall in certain areas.
But the wall itself is not going to stop all illegal immigration.
The real problem of illegal immigration on a more deep-seated level is the problem of employers being able to hire illegal immigrants.
And not only that, the fact that the vast majority of people who are illegal immigrants in the country right now are people who got in legally and then overstayed their visas.
That said, the system is absolutely and obviously broken.
And Democrats are claiming that President Trump is trying to curb the ability to claim asylum.
But the problem is that the vast majority of people claiming asylum are doing so fraudulently.
They're not actually political refugees from their country.
They're just looking for a better job.
Now, I don't blame people who are coming here for a better life.
My great-great-grandparents did.
I don't blame people who are trying to cross the border because they live in a country that's really rough and economically feeble and they decide that they want to move here for a better life.
However, I'm not going to pretend that they're not abusing the laws or that our laws have to allow everybody in.
This is one of the consequences of having a welfare state, a vast welfare state, by the way.
It's really fascinating to watch all the people on the left in the United States who simultaneously want a vast welfare state and also open borders.
The same people who say that they really admire the Nordic states fail to recognize that the reason that the Nordic states are capable of maintaining their giant welfare state is because they're extraordinarily restrictive in terms of their immigration policies.
In fact, the open immigration policies in Sweden led to the election of a center-right government.
The same thing happened in Denmark.
The Nordic states look at their vast bevy of welfare state policies and it turns out a bunch of people coming into their country who then create cultural enclaves and take advantage of the welfare systems are not good for those countries.
And so these democratic socialists, these social democracies of the Nordic part of the globe, Those social democracies are very restrictive in terms of immigration.
Which is why, until five minutes ago, that was even Bernie Sanders' position.
But now the Democrats have decided that they want two things that are not at all comprehensible.
You can't actually have both of them.
They are mutually exclusive.
Massive welfare state, open immigration.
These are not things that you can have at the same time.
For the same reason that you can't have free giveaway, free samples, And no limit.
Right?
If you owned a store and it was free samples, no limit, what do you think would happen?
Everybody would rush in and bankrupt you in a day.
Well, that's what happens in the United States.
Now, it used to be, and this is why I'm libertarian on immigration as a general rule, it used to be that anybody who wanted to come to the United States and work hard without any guarantee of getting ahead was free to do so because there was no welfare state to make sure that they were going to be paid a minimum amount.
What that actually meant is that the type of immigrant coming to the United States was a little bit different.
Now, there's still plenty of great immigrants coming to the United States who just want to get ahead.
They just want to work.
They don't actually want to be on our welfare programs.
But by polling data, the number of immigrants today who are coming to the United States and believe that the government should do more for them is probably a lot higher than it was a hundred years ago.
When people came to the United States having left all their property back in the old country and saying, I've come here for the adventure.
I've come here for the opportunity.
America used to be the land of opportunity, but that opportunity was an opportunity you made yourself.
This is one of my chief areas of angst and disagreement with folks like Tucker Carlson.
The entire promise of America is the promise of adventure.
The entire promise of America always was the idea for immigrants and non-immigrants alike that you were born into a system where the opportunity was available to you, but it was up to you to grab it with both hands.
And you can find a community to support you.
You can find a society of people who were willing to stretch out their hands and give you opportunity.
But you were not coming here with the guarantee that there was going to be some safety net catching you.
That makes walking the tightrope dangerous.
And that means that you end up with a group of people coming here who are risk-seeking, a group of people who are forced to assimilate into the dominant cultural mores, mores, in order for them to succeed in society.
Assimilation is forced by free markets.
Assimilation is forced by capitalism.
The hard work, risk-seeking, that is pushed by capitalism.
If you come to the United States and nothing is handed to you, you learn English.
That's what happened to my great-grandparents.
Yeah, my great-grandparents came here in like 1907, and they came here speaking Yiddish with no money.
And then they learned English, and their kids learned English.
My grandmother doesn't really speak Yiddish because they didn't speak Yiddish in the home, specifically because America, as a land of opportunity, still required you to do certain things in order to take advantage of those opportunities.
That doesn't mean America has always been perfect.
It doesn't mean everybody has been given equal access to those opportunities.
The grand and great moral story of America is those opportunities becoming more and more open to more and more people on a moral level.
At the same time that America was freely welcoming immigrants in the early 20th century, Jim Crow was prevalent in the South.
There have been too many times in American history where people were not welcomed to the opportunities of America.
But that was a problem with the laws preventing access to the opportunity.
It was not a problem with the opportunity itself.
And I think that right now, and this is my general problem with the Nordic states as well as both right populism and left populism in the United States, The only difference between right and left populism in the United States and in Europe, by the way, is basically not the question of whether there should be a massive state, but whether there should be restrictions on immigration.
And the left says, well, you're cruel and nasty because you want restrictions on immigration.
And the right says, well, you can't practically have no restrictions on immigration and welcome tons of people to the United States with a giant welfare state.
The actual solution to all of this is to have a government that guarantees far less and that welcomes far more.
That's the actual solution.
That's the warm-hearted solution.
That sounds cruel.
It sounds nasty.
It is not.
It is precisely the opposite.
The most generous society is the society that says, come here.
We welcome you with open arms if you're willing to work, if you're willing to risk, if you're willing to join our common journey toward a better future, if you're willing to adventure.
Right?
If you're willing to take that call, if you're willing to pick up that call and go become American, that's what the American dream was all about.
It wasn't that the American dream was you come here and we hand you a welfare check.
And the American dream wasn't you're born in America and we hand you a welfare check and then we protect you from foreign labor.
That was not the American dream either.
The American dream was you come here and you will be left to your own devices to succeed or fall on your own merits.
So go out there and earn.
Right?
That was the American dream.
And build communities capable of instilling the virtue necessary to make all of that happen.
We're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a second.
First, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
When you go over to dailywire.com, then you will get the rest of the show live.
You also get three hours of me a day.
Okay.
I'm like breaking my neck here for you folks.
I'm putting on beards.
I mean, what do you want from me?
And we've got three hours a day of programming.
We can do the podcast, and then later today, I do another two hours of live radio, which is available in a lot of major markets.
But if you actually want to watch it live, you have to be a subscriber.
If you want to watch it later, you have to be a subscriber.
All that available over at dailywire.com.
For $99 a year, you get all of that.
Plus, you get this, the very greatest in beverage vessels, the Leftist Tears, hot or cold tumbler.
Behold its glory.
It is indeed magnificent.
In fact, before I had the beer, and I was like 10 years older, I took one sip.
From this Tumblr.
And the years fell off of me.
It was just unbelievable.
Go check it out right now.
$99 a year.
You get all those things.
Please subscribe over at iTunes.
Please subscribe over at YouTube as well.
When you do, you get the rest of this show live.
Also, you get the Sunday special.
We have a lot of great Sunday specials coming up this week.
It's Heather MacDonald.
We're always providing you great content, so go check it out.
it out.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So just to continue with the theme of where we ought to be on Immigration In an ideal world, what we would have is a country that was built on virtue.
Because virtue is the predicate for freedom.
You need virtue before you can have freedom.
I think that people on all sides of the aisle have forgotten that virtue is necessary before freedom.
Freedom doesn't create virtue.
Freedom does not make you more virtuous.
Freedom offers you the opportunity to either act with virtue or to act as a libertine.
Freedom gives you the opportunity to make a choice for good or for ill.
But in order for freedom to be maintained, you actually need a virtuous society.
So to take an example, all the folks who are big advocates of the welfare state, they say, well, what happens if there were no welfare state?
People just wouldn't care for each other.
And that's why we need the government to step in.
That's why we need the government to use force to take money from John and give it to Jim.
That's why we need to do all of that.
And the proper answer to that, from a conservative point of view, is no.
If you have a virtuous population, we do take care of each other on a voluntary basis.
And as I said before, I'm a member of an Orthodox Jewish community.
There are people in our community who are hurting.
When people are hurting, the rabbi comes to folks like me and says, we have somebody who can't get through a Shabbat.
We need some help.
This family needs some help.
And I sign a check on a voluntary basis.
And this is common across the nation.
400 billion dollars of charity from Americans every year, mostly to other Americans.
That's a lot of money.
And Americans are happy to do it, because common virtue, based in a Judeo-Christian value system, was the basis for the freedom that the Enlightenment eventually brought about, politically speaking.
It seems, though, that we've cast all of that aside, and so now we have these kind of surface-level debates about not the necessity of the welfare state, but about whether we ought to make that welfare state accessible to everybody outside.
The left says it's unkind not to open up that welfare state to everybody on the outside, and the right says it's unkind to American citizens to open up that welfare state to everybody outside.
The real answer should be that the welfare state itself is a problem.
And I've said for years, I've said for years, that immigrants who want to come here and work hard and not rely on welfare And integrate into the greatness of American philosophy?
I'd rather have millions of those people than domestically born Americans who don't believe in any of those values and believe they're owed something by dint of being born inside a certain set of borders.
America was always an idea.
How do you know it was always an idea?
Because it wasn't always a territory.
And America used to be relegated to the original 13 colonies and then it was relegated east of the Mississippi and now it's the entire continent.
But people who are coming to the United States knew that they were in for something.
They knew what they were getting.
And what they were getting was something grand, something magical, something they wouldn't get anywhere else.
The opportunity to do what they wanted to do on the basis of having a community that would also take care of them, but not through governmental means.
The identification of society with government is one of the biggest mistakes that we make.
And it's one of the reasons why we are so at each other's throats over politics all the time.
The reason that we want to strangle each other.
over matters political on a routine basis is specifically because of this, is because when the social fabric decays, when we no longer worry about virtue, when we no longer think about our informal duties to one another outside the role of government, we tend to think that government is, in the words of Barack Obama, the only thing we all share.
It is not.
What we have to do if we wish to fix the country, and it would solve so many of our problems on so many political issues, from single motherhood to illegal immigration, if all we did for the next forever was focused on building up that social fabric once again, if all we did was focus on our communities and our own virtues and stop worrying so much about what government policy should look like, and instead of trying to place all of our hopes in the dunder-headed politicians who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground,
if instead we focused on building up communities of virtue if instead we focused on building up communities of virtue and valor, of decency and strength, so many of these problems would just disappear like magic and And we could go back to a bargain where you woke up in the morning feeling like it was an adventure, and the adventure was not how to twist the system to your own benefit.
If the only argument we're having about government is how to twist the governmental system to our own benefit, then we're no longer arguing about the role of government.
We're arguing about whether virtue ought to exist at all or not.
And I think that that larger question has gone entirely by the wayside.
I'm not doubting the motives of people who are sympathetic to illegal immigrants.
I'm sympathetic to illegal immigrants too.
And I'm not doubting the motives of people who say that we ought to have more protections against illegal immigration because I agree with them.
I am suggesting that the real solution in the end is not going to be had even with a border wall or with stricter immigration enforcement.
The real solution is going to be had when we decide as a society it's time to return to that original founding bargain.
Freedom of labor.
Freedom of movement, freedom to alienate that labor, and freedom within the context of a virtuous society where we all feel that we are brothers in arms and not enemies seeking to steal things from one another.
Okay, speaking of this, controversy has now broken out today again over Steve King of Iowa.
Now, I know Representative King a little bit.
He asked me to speak at an economic opportunity forum in Congress like a year ago.
I'd met him a couple of other times at David Horwitz Freedom Center events.
Always seemed like a fairly nice guy.
He'd been caught in all sorts of sort of controversies surrounding his comments about race.
And I'll be honest with you, I thought that Steve King was a dunderhead, right?
I mean, I thought that Steve King said dumb things, but they weren't necessarily racist things, but then people would attribute racist motives to the dumb things that he said.
So, for example, back in 2017, he had tweeted something out about Geert Wilders, who is a popular right-wing Dutch politician.
He had tweeted out, Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny.
We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies.
And I said at the time, there are two ways to read that tweet.
The first is obvious.
As a racist tweet, the idea is that babies from abroad cannot be civilized to Western values.
That we can't actually bring in babies from other civilizations and then civilize them and then they can't be part of the American bargain.
That would be actual racism and it would be incredibly stupid.
So stupid and evil, right?
It would be those two things because America is indeed built on other people's babies, whether those babies are born abroad or born here in the United States, it's built on other people's babies, right?
I mean, all of civilization, all of humanity is built on other people's babies as well as your own babies.
So that was one way of reading the tweet.
The other way of reading the tweet is that King was basically saying that multiculturalism combined with high levels of immigration from non-Western cultures shapes destiny.
That basically, if you bring in a bunch of people who are not willing to assimilate and not interested in assimilating, that undercuts Western civilization.
So if those babies are not actually babies, They're being brought up in a culture different from that of the United States and being told that that is decent and fine and they don't have to assimilate at all, that that undermines your culture.
Obviously, that's true, right?
I mean, if you were to bring in a billion citizens of China right now without any assimilation, it would change America pretty quickly.
So obviously, there's truth to that.
And a lot of King's statements were sort of like this, where you could interpret them one of two ways.
Well, the problem is that now he's making statements that are not interpretable one of two ways.
They are only interpretable as racism.
So, he made a comment, apparently, just within the last day or so, where he said this, quote, If you identify white nationalist and white supremacist with Western civilization, that's actually racist.
did that language become offensive why did i sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization if you identify white nationalist and white supremacist with western civilization that's actually racist that's doing it wrong that that is that is the entire problem - Again, if the question of Western civilization is a question of us and them, not based on ideology, but based on race, this does make you a racist.
The greatness of Western civilization, the greatness of the Judeo-Christian construct, is that it does offer an open door to anybody who wants to join.
In America, what makes America fantastic is the fact that that idea is applicable to broad swaths of people from a wide variety of countries, regardless of place of origin.
And every single immigrant group that has ever come to the United States has been hit with the hammer of, they're not willing to assimilate enough, and then after 20 years, they assimilate.
This happened to the Germans, it happened to the Irish, it happened to the Italians, it happened to the Jews.
It happened to the Asians, right?
It's happened to legitimately everyone who's come to the United States.
And America's idea was always capable of integrating people.
Well, when Steve King identifies Western civilization, With white nationalism, the idea you have to be a certain color in order to be inculcated in Western civilization, that's actual racism.
At this point, Congress should censure Congressman King.
And this is just insane.
This is just insane.
There is a primary candidate against Congressman King right now.
Challenger's name is a guy named Randy Feenstra in Iowa, and I plan on donating to him today because the Republican Party cannot stand for this sort of commentary that identifies color with civilization.
The left does it, by the way, also, right?
When they do this whole routine, this intersectional routine where you don't get to speak unless you're of a particular color or order, or we're going to grant you certain points in the debate based on your place of origin or ethnicity or sexual orientation.
That's garbage.
It is even more dangerous garbage when you're talking about white nationalism and white supremacism, which have a long, horrifying, disgusting history in the United States.
So, I'd recommend everybody go over to Randy Feenstra for Congress.
It's FeenstraForCongress.com and give some money to Randy Feenstra if you're a good conservative and Republican.
Enough is enough.
This cannot hold.
I mean, it's pathetic.
And getting Western civilization this wrong is frankly unjustifiable.
It's unjustifiable.
We have some really deep-seated problems here in the United States, and it seems like everybody is solving them the wrong way.
I'm not here to push my book a little bit early, but I think that if you want to look at the problems of Western civilization, how Western civilization grew, and how those problems can be cured, my book, The Right Side of History, which comes out in March, is all about these specific problems.
We have so little in common that people are rushing to tribalism, people are rushing to political partisanship, people are rushing to woke rage in order to solve a problem of the soul.
A problem that we no longer see each other as friends and compatriots in a common cause.
We now see each other as enemies seeking to tear apart the nation.
And that means that a lot of our political debates, too, should be boiled down to something beyond what is politically expedient.
One of the big problems we have right now for both Democratic politicians and Republican politicians is that the most effective mode of politics is to question your opponent's motives.
That is the most effective, right?
when president trump goes after pelosi and schumer and says they don't care about crime that's a very effective mode of politicking and pelosi and schumer lend credence to it when they look like they don't care about crime pelosi and schumer consequently go the other way they say trump doesn't care about people who are being hurt in a government shutdown and trump lends credence to that when he sort of shrugs at it the reality is do i think that pelosi and schumer actually don't care about crime from illegal immigrants probably not but i think that it's convenient for them to pander to their base instead
what we really our politicians are are a bunch of losers in the sense that what a good politician does is has the capacity to tell their own constituents - Right.
What is important and what is not.
They shouldn't be taking their lead from their constituents in terms of what is important when they think the constituents are wrong.
That's a recipe for disaster.
And unfortunately, I think too many politicians on both sides are doing exactly that.
Okay.
And time for a couple of things I like and then a bevy of things that I hate.
I'm in a hateful mood today.
So, things that I like.
So, this show Has its moment.
I'm not going to say that I love this show overall because I don't, but I think that it is that the first season particularly is kind of well written.
Now, what's funny about the show Mr. Robot, which is on USA Network, is that the show started off as this kind of critique of capitalism and capitalism is really terrible.
And then within a couple of seasons, it morphed into, well, really, really, capitalism is kind of OK, but what we need to do is curb it.
So it's funny to watch.
As over the course of the seasons, this show went from Bernie Sanders to Barack Obama.
That's really what happened with this show, Mr. Robot.
The show is about this social derelict There's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world.
who is concerned with tearing down the system of capitalism at its roots by hacking major corporate institutions.
And the best performance in this is not Rami Malek, who is very Rami Malek.
The best performance in this is Christian Slater, who is really good.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
There's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world.
I'm talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys that are invisible.
The top 1% of the top 1%, the guys that play God without permission. - Thank you.
And now I think they're following me.
Employee number UR-280652.
Just a regular cyber security engineer, but I'm a vigilante hacker by night.
I usually do this kind of thing from my computer, but this time I wanted to do it in person.
I started intercepting all the traffic on your network.
That's when I noticed something strange.
That's when I decided to hack you.
Okay, so the show is pretty good.
I will say that the least interesting character is the main character, which is always a problem for shows like this.
But it is fascinating to watch as the writers of the show went from really almost being communists to saying, well, what we really need to do is blame.
In season three of the show, not to spoil anything, but in season three of the show, it turns out that the people who have been backing this play to tear down capitalism are backed by the Chinese government.
and the Chinese government for some odd reason wants Trump to be president.
So it's that kind of show.
That's what's irritating about it.
But what's hilarious about it is the fact that there are all these people who really more agree with the Chinese government than they do with the American government, and yet they want to pretend that the Chinese government is backing the Republicans.
It's kind of a thing I like, it's also kind of a thing that I hate, but it's a good window into the mind of a lot of people on the left who write for Hollywood.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
The woke scolds are here.
The woke scolds have come.
The woke scolds are here for a Green Book director, or writer.
So this movie, Green Book, just won a Golden Globe.
I haven't seen it yet, so I'm not really going to critique it, but the screenwriter, whose name is Nick Vallelonga, has now deleted his Twitter account.
Because there was a tweet from November 2015 talking about President Trump.
President Trump had talked about people cheering during 9-11.
The tweet said, Donald Trump is 100% correct.
Muslims in New Jersey cheering when towers went down.
I saw it as you did possibly on local CBS News.
And he was ripped up and down for all of this.
So now all of these left-wing journalists have decided it's necessary to go through all of his old tweets and make sure, make sure that he agrees with all of their points on everything.
He then had to delete his Twitter account because we're not allowed to say things anymore.
Now, maybe he, maybe it's, So let's say that he's wrong.
Let's say that what he said is incorrect because there's not a lot of evidence that tons of Muslims, as Trump had said, were celebrating on 9-11.
The footage that you saw was from the Palestinian Authority where Palestinians were cheering in the streets and handing out candy.
Whatever it is, this new practice where we wait till someone has a moment of success and then we go back in their history, dig something up and try to destroy them with it, is really quite disgusting.
It's really gross.
You say something new, Well then, you're fair game.
But this notion that we're going to go back 15 years, find something that you said like Kevin Hart, and then try and wreck you over it?
It's going to make an unlivable world, because there's no such thing as forgiveness.
There's, like, if Val Longa came out and said, I was wrong to say that and I never should have said it, that wouldn't make his critics more quiet, it would make them more loud.
Then they would suggest, well, what sort of penance does he have to do?
Does he have to give money to care?
Like, this would be the routine that they push.
Now, it is amazing that bigotry in certain circumstances, according to the left, is okay.
So they'll call Val Longa a bigot for that tweet, but there will be actual sitting Democratic senators who will be religious bigots altogether.
Tulsi Gabbard, representative from Hawaii, who is pretty far left, particularly on foreign policy.
I mean, like, she is Bashar Assad's favorite representative.
She went and visited Syria a while back.
But she's not wrong about this.
She called out U.S.
Senator Mazie Hirono, who is the senator from Hawaii, because Hirono questioned a judicial nominee and asked specifically about this judicial nominee's membership in the Knights of Columbus.
And Knights of Columbus is just a Catholic group that has lunches, basically.
But if you're a member of a Catholic group, this means that you must be destroyed now, according to a lot of Democrats.
We saw Bernie Sanders do this with another Christian pretty recently with regard to a nomination for the Office of Management and Budget.
So, Hirono questioned Brian Busher, and apparently, during that line of questioning, Senator Hirono asked specifically whether the guy could be fair because he was Catholic, because he was taking part in the Knights of Columbus.
Dr. Keone Dudley, a member of the Knights of Columbus, said that although they participate in things like the March for Life, there are knights with all different kinds of personal views, and there are knights in elected office.
By the way, JFK was a member of the Knights of Columbus.
Vice President Biden is a Catholic.
There are a lot of different members of the Knights of Columbus who are not on the right.
But this new sort of religious test that's being trotted out by Democrats is pretty astonishing and demonstrates once again that bigotry is not restricted to any one political side.
And so that's pretty gross stuff.
OK, so we will be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
We'll bring you all the updates from President Trump's visit to the border wall.
Also, we'll be here a little bit later today.
So if you subscribe for 9.99 a month, you don't have to wait till tomorrow.
Get the updates later today.
We'll bring you all the drama, all the action and all the fascination.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection