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April 9, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:53
The Immigration Conflagration | Ep. 755
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The media and the Democrats rip President Trump on illegal immigration, an NBA player talks about his white privilege, and Bernie Sanders acts like a frontrunner.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Man, it is such a disparate news cycle.
I mean, it's just all over the place.
And we will get to all of the various headlines.
We will pick the apples from the tree of news in just a moment.
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Okay, so the big story today is that President Trump continues to be stymied on his immigration plans.
A federal court has now blocked the Trump administration from forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting court hearings.
Now, this is not really within the purview of the federal courts.
The president does have enormous power over border policy.
This is stuff within the executive branch's purview.
This is really not stuff within the judicial branch's purview.
When it comes to the border, that is a foreign policy matter, and that means that the president does have exorbitant and near-plenary power over what to do with America's border situation.
And the court doesn't just get to grant rights to people who are coming across the border without the president enforcing those rights.
Nonetheless, a federal judge, again, we have a bunch of rogue courts across the country who are slapping national injunctions on the federal government, which really is an act of judicial supremacy, not judicial review.
There's a difference.
Judicial review is the idea that the courts get to look at the interpretation of the Constitution, and then they get to determine whether a law is constitutional or not.
But judicial supremacy is the idea that the court is the last, best hope of the Constitution of the United States, and that the president doesn't basically get to fight with the courts and fight with the legislature.
that the court is the repository of all wisdom when it comes to the Constitution.
And that is something that was largely opposed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78.
He said that if the courts were disposed to exercise will instead of judgment, it would defeat the purpose for them existing.
Their purpose is simply to interpret the law It is not to go above and beyond that.
And if they do go above and beyond that, their opinion is of no more matter than the president's opinion or legislator's opinion.
This is why the president and legislators both take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution.
If it were really just kick everything over to the Supreme Court, you wouldn't need them to swear those oaths.
Nonetheless, judges across the country have decided that they are actually legislators.
And now a federal judge on Monday has blocked an experimental Trump administration policy requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases make their way through the U.S. immigration court system.
A major blow to President Trump's efforts to stem the surge of crossings at the southern border.
This is according to The Washington Post.
U.S. District Judge Richard Seaborg in San Francisco enjoined the migrant protection protocols policy days after outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Christian Nielsen pledged to expand the program.
The policy began in January at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in California.
It has been extended to Calexico and to the entry in El Paso.
Seaborg wrote that the approach would have been further extended if the court had not stepped in.
Several hundred migrants were returned to Mexico under the program.
After seeking asylum at the border.
Why?
Because once people enter the country, then very often they don't show up for their court dates or they show up for their original court dates, which merely is just a way for them to kind of check that box.
And then they figure that if they show up for the original court date and they wait six months, they get an automatic work visa and they can stay in the country pretty much as long as they want.
The percentage of people who are actually deported after showing up for court the first time is exorbitantly low.
We had a Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies yesterday on the radio show.
He explained all of this in detail.
There's a reason that people are trying to get into the country and not be held pending the judgment of their asylum on the other side of the border, because if they get here...
There's a good shot that they are going to be caught and then released into the general population.
Many of them will show up for their first court hearing.
That first court hearing is just to determine whether or not they are criminals or whether they are sane.
And then they are released back into society.
At that point, all they have to do is wait out that ticking clock.
If they wait for six months, they get an automatic work visa.
And then they're off and running.
They just overstayed the work visa and they stick around in the United States.
This, by the way, is the vast majority of illegal immigrants, both across the Mexican border as well as into America from other countries, not across the Mexican border.
The overstaying of work visas is the number one way that illegal immigrants stay in the United States.
The ruling is a preliminary injunction, at least temporarily stopping the program, and it paralyzes one of the Trump administration's last remaining tools to stem the flow of Central American families trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump took out some of that frustration on the Department of Homeland Security firing nearly everyone.
In his 27-page ruling, Seaborg said that the legal question before him was not whether the MPP is a wise, intelligent, or humane policy, or whether it is the best approach for addressing the circumstances the executive branch contends constitutes a crisis.
Rather, he wrote, the program probably violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, and other legal protections to ensure that immigrants are not returned to unduly dangerous circumstances.
But there is no actual evidence that returning immigrants who are crossing over from Mexico to Mexico to wait is putting them in an unduly dangerous circumstance.
Mexico is not Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador.
Justice Department officials declined to comment on the ruling on Monday.
The U.S.
government could appeal the ruling to the Ninth Circuit.
They have not indicated whether they will do so or not.
This is a serious problem for the Trump administration, is the courts routinely stepping in and overstepping their authority.
Now, the Obama administration used to ignore court orders on a fairly regular basis with regard to, for example, the Dreamers.
So a federal court in Texas struck down President Obama's Dreamers program.
Obama just ignored it and continued handing out the papers to people who are Dreamers.
Trump could theoretically do the same thing here, and he probably should, because the fact is there are a series of conflicting lower court rulings.
None of them fit with each other.
They're all over the place.
And this has basically left the Trump administration with no options.
Advocates for immigrants say the migrants are fleeing poverty and violence in Central America and should be allowed to wait in the United States until their cases are decided.
In the ruling, this judge, Seaborg, wrote that DHS will still have the authority to detain migrants when they return to the United States.
He made clear his ruling does not preclude Congress from creating an MPP-style program under federal law.
Trump and top administration officials have implored Congress to stop the flow of tens of thousands of migrants every month.
Seaborg said, to be clear, the issue in this case is not whether it would be permissible for Congress to authorize DHS to return aliens to Mexico pending final determination as to their admissibility.
So he is kicking it over to Congress, saying that Congress has to pass a law specifically on this, and there can't be a regulation that does all of this.
But that seems, I think, like an overly narrow misreading of the Administrative Procedures Act, for one.
The President does have tremendous, tremendous executive power in generating regulations on all of these matters.
One of the reasons that Christian Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, was ousted from her job was presumably because she did not promulgate regulations quickly enough for President Trump.
Meanwhile, it is important to note the level of conflict inside the federal courts over all of this.
It is important to really, I think that when people do not note that the federal courts are all over the place on these issues and legitimately have not given any sort of comprehensive opinion on what exactly the executive branch can and cannot do, that leaves the executive branch without any way of actually doing anything at all.
David Horowitz, Daniel Horowitz, rather, over at Conservative Review, has an excellent piece on this today, talking about exactly how all of these courts are overstepping their boundaries.
Here's what he says, rather than categorically suspending immigration requests at the border, the DHS issued a regulation in December to continue claims but to have some of the illegal aliens wait in Mexico pending the outcome of the proceedings.
Statute is clear that the same way the president can suspend all entry, he can place partial restrictions or conditions on such entry.
This has been made clear from, for example, President Trump's travel ban, in which the president simply suspended immigration from particular countries.
The judicial power vested in a judge allows him to grant injunctive relief to an American seeking protection from a regulatory burden or criminal prosecution.
A judge can say he will not agree to punish a winning plaintiff, even if an executive policy or legislative statute required it.
That is judicial review.
A judge, however, has no such power to issue an injunction to enable foreign nationals to come into our country without the permission of the President of the United States.
The fact is that long-standing judicial history suggests that the judiciary does not have the power to make immigration policy this way.
Daniel Horowitz points out that there are a bunch of California judges who have ruled on immigration.
All of these rulings are in conflict with one another.
Dolly G. of the Central District of California, among many other radical opinions overturned by the Supreme Court, said that the administration must release all children after 20 days, even though the Flores settlement is outdated and the statute downright requires the opposite.
It is unclear whether the president is allowed to keep children together with parents or whether the president has to separate the children from the parents.
What Democrats want is for the Flores Settlement to be held in place.
The Flores Settlement was a settlement between the federal government and plaintiffs led by the ACLU in which federal courts basically green-lighted a settlement during the Clinton administration that said that children have to be held in the most Free possible circumstances for a limited period.
After that, you have to separate them from their parents and release them into the general population.
This was done with an eye toward releasing the parents into the general population as well.
Dana Sabra of the Southern District of California has said that parents must be released with children too.
Which is not... I mean, that's fully insane.
So she's saying that under American law, you must release parents with children.
So if you cross the border with kids, then you will, under this particular ruling, be released into the general population.
We can't hold you with the kids, and we can't separate you from the kids.
The only way we can unify you with the kids is to release you into the general population.
That's not an immigration policy.
That's a judge simply deciding what they want to be the law.
Judge William Alsop of the Northern District of California has ruled that Obama's amnesty must remain in place for now, which is crazy considering that Obama's amnesty was never greenlit by Congress.
Judge John Tiger of the Northern District of California, just like Judge Seaborg, ruled that the administration cannot make a simple common-sense regulation of driving credible fear claims to points of entry, even though the Immigration and Naturalization Act states openly that it's unlawful for any alien to depart from or enter or attempt to depart from or enter the United States except under reasonable rules, regulations, and orders and subject to limitations and exceptions as the President may prescribe.
Judge Edward Chen of the Northern District of California has ruled that temporary protected status, rather than being temporary and discretionary, is permanent and mandatory for Trump.
He said that Trump could not reject the so-called DREAM Act because the fact is that President Trump has quote-unquote animus against non-white people.
None of this has anything to do with the Constitution.
None of this has anything to do with the law.
And these judges are really overstepping their boundaries and providing Trump with not a lot of options.
So you're seeing Democrats come out and rip President Trump supposedly for being intolerant on the immigration issue or being terrible on the immigration issue.
Dude has no options if you listen to these courts.
He can't keep the kids with the parents together because that violates the rights of the kids.
He can't separate the parents from the kids because that violates the rights of the kids.
And he can't even take the parents and kids and say, stay on the Mexican side of the border.
So what's he supposed to do?
That only leaves one option, release everybody.
Which, by the way, is a violation of American law.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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And meanwhile, President Trump being bashed about, clubbed about the head by the media and folks in the Democratic Party for his temerity in suggesting that perhaps...
He'll leave it up to illegal immigrant parents what they want to do with their children.
The president is supposedly considering something that is being called binary choice, is according to the Washington Post.
DHS officials are now looking for a way to satisfy the president's demand for tough measures, including a plan called binary choice that would give migrant parents the option of remaining detained as a family or agreeing to separation so their children would not remain in immigration custody.
So in other words, Trump is saying, you know, you want there to be only one option, which is I release you and your kids.
Instead, I'm going to offer you the option.
Either you get to sign off on staying with your kids in custody or you sign off on your kids being separated from you.
But there's no more of this crap where we just release you into the general population.
The goal of the plan, according to the Washington Post, would be to end the catch and release model that has allowed most migrant families to go free within the United States while they wait to appear before an immigration judge.
Implementing binary choice without lawmakers approval risks another court injunction.
Stuart Baker, a top DHS advisor to George W. Bush, says the president doesn't like the news he's getting on immigration.
He's blamed leadership at DHS.
This is not something leadership at the department can fix.
This needs to be fixed in Congress.
There doesn't seem to be any appetite for that.
Well, perhaps that's true and perhaps that is not.
But the fact is that the president of the United States does have an enormous amount of power, again, over immigration regulations.
And the courts keep striking down every immigration regulation when they spent years basically OK Barack Obama not doing anything about illegal immigration and actively seeking to incentivize illegal immigration.
It's pretty incredible.
Trump has suggested to aides in recent weeks that the administration's previous policy of separating families at the border could be used to deter crossings and that a version of the policy could be reinstated.
According to two people with knowledge of the discussions, some aides have resisted the idea of family separations, citing the public backlash last summer and noting that Trump himself reversed it, which is true.
President Trump was so intimidated by the public backlash that he signed an executive order saying that parents and kids would have to be kept together, which generally resulted in the release of the parents and the kids into the general population of the United States.
But with that said, you know, it is amazing.
So it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Like, legitimately reasonable.
To say to illegal immigrant parents, listen, you're not getting released into the general population.
Many of you will show up for your first time back to court and then you'll disappear again.
We're not going to do that.
You stay in custody until we've decided whether your asylum claim is true or fraudulent.
And it's your option.
Either your kids stay with your relatives while you wait for your court date, or they can stay with you.
I don't see why that is in any way inhumane or terrible.
The only thing inhumane and terrible is Democrats not providing the funding to allow some sort of comfortable stay for the illegal immigrants crossing the border with their kids.
That's the only thing that seems inhumane to me.
And the reason Democrats are not doing that is because they want to force the president to release all of these people into the interior of the United States.
They're literally busing people into places like San Antonio and dropping them off at food... at food banks.
I mean, it's craziness.
It's craziness.
Nonetheless, this has been taken as evidence that the President of the United States is a brutal, horrible, terrible man.
Now, again, Barack Obama kept kids in cages in 2014.
All of the original pictures that were brought up a couple of years ago were from the Obama administration, not from the Trump administration.
Nonetheless, it is now considered something deeply horrible to say to people crossing the border and claiming asylum, we need to adjudicate your claim, and now you have the option.
You can stay with your kids in custody, or you can make sure that your kids are taken care of with a family relation while you wait for your turn.
But we are not going to simply just say you get to go free into the interior of the United States.
How that is unreasonable is absolutely beyond me.
But according to the left, this is the equivalent of white supremacy.
So Jonathan Chait, who sometimes is an intelligent human but is not in this particular tweet, He tweeted out binary, as in like the binary choice that Trump is providing.
Binary is so grating.
What about something softer, like Sophie's?
Like Sophie's choice?
How in the world is it Sophie's choice to give people the option of staying with their kids or give them the option of putting their kids with the government or with a family member while they await their turn to be adjudicated for asylum?
How's that like Sophie's choice in any way?
Sophie's choice?
For those who have not read the book or seen the movie, it's about a mother in the Holocaust who is given the choice as to which of her two children she wants the Nazis to murder.
That is not this.
That is not this.
And to compare this to the Holocaust is obviously silly.
And to make the comparison in any way to the Holocaust is obviously silly.
Nobody is being killed.
Nobody is being told they have to choose evil things happening to their kids.
They're being told they can stay with their kids.
I mean, also, it is worth noting that Jews in Germany were citizens of Europe.
These are people who are crossing a border illegally to get into the United States.
I do not remember the Jews trying to get into the concentration camps, do you?
I remember the Jews clamoring to get on the trains.
These are people deliberately trying to get into the United States and violating American law in doing so.
I understand the motivation.
I'd probably want a better life, too.
If I were living in Honduras or El Salvador, and my only option were to try and cross through to the United States illegally, I'd probably do the same thing.
That doesn't mean I get to violate the laws of the country.
And I would expect that the government would want to process me.
And the government would want to make sure that I'm not released into the interior without them actually adjudicating whether I'm full of it when I claim political asylum.
But the overblown reaction to this is really quite astonishing.
Morgan Freedman is even worse.
So he is going after Stephen Miller.
So Stephen Miller is, of course, the president's very tough on immigration advisor.
And I disagree with Stephen Miller on a fair bit of his immigration policy, particularly his view on the economics of immigration.
He suggests that we should cut down legal immigration, too, because it's a threat to American jobs and all of this.
I generally disagree with that policy.
I disagree with Stephen Miller's approach to his kind of presentation in public and all of that.
But the new play by the left is to suggest that Stephen Miller is a white supremacist.
So Morgan Freeman He says, We are witnessing the deliberate reincarnation of Adolf Hitler right before our eyes, and Stephen Miller, who will stop at nothing to preserve some BS pure white bloodline.
We should be very scared and must stop Trump from empowering this evil and hatful man.
I don't know how many hats Stephen Miller has, but I know that I'm deeply worried about people who have too many hats.
I hate hatful people.
Really despise it.
Also, I'm wondering what the deliberate reincarnation of Adolf Hitler Looks like.
I mean, is this like the boys from Brazil?
The deliberate reincarnation of... Not an overstatement at all, Morgan Freeman.
My goodness.
And then Ilhan Omar sounds off, like rabid anti-Semite and Jew hater Ilhan Omar.
She says, Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, is a white nationalist.
The fact that he still has influence on policy and political appointments is an outrage, says the anti-Semite who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee.
And then Jason Johnson on MSNBC.
He says, well, Stephen Miller is alt-right.
He says Stephen Miller is in control of the policy, and it's not that we're trying to Kirby legal immigration.
It's that this is white supremacy.
The news is it's going to get worse.
Well, yeah, because it's gonna be Stephen Miller.
And his sort of white nationalist tendencies are really obvious.
He can't even dress that up as, I was just doing what I was told.
I mean, he goes back to relationships with Richard Spencer and the alt-right in several different areas.
But I think even more disturbing is this idea that Nielsen, it wasn't just, she was under no circumstances fighting against this administration.
She was just trying to find ways to smooth it down and cover it with sugar and make it okay.
And that's what makes it so disgusting.
Okay, so this is...
Such a wild overstatement that this is based on white supremacy as opposed to, hey, we can't just have tens of thousands of people flowing over the border without us doing anything about it.
But everything for the left becomes an issue of racism.
Now, as I've said, I don't like how Stephen Miller has publicly presented.
I think his original travel ban, as written, was stupid and counterproductive.
And then they fixed it.
And then it wasn't as stupid and counterproductive.
But all of this said, the media's rabid approach to illegal immigration is truly telling.
And I'll show you what the actual agenda is in just one second.
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So what is the real agenda here for a lot of folks on the left?
I do not think that it is the humane treatment of people crossing the border.
If it were, they would be calling for more funding, not less funding, for Border Patrol so we could make sure that people who are crossing the border and are taken into Border Patrol custody are then being kept in comfortable conditions along with their children while their cases are being adjudicated.
There'd be more funding.
For the judiciary, for these border courts, so that we could accelerate the process and make sure that everyone is heard more quickly.
Democrats have turned all of this stuff down.
Instead, what they want to do is create a false scarcity in the border patrol system so that they can then claim that Trump is being cruel.
That is the goal here, to claim that cruelty is the goal.
Well, again, the goal would be to enforce the law.
Now, Trump and his people haven't helped themselves because there are all sorts of reports that have been put out by the media that Trump says that he wants to magnify family separation as a deterrent for people who are crossing the border.
And that, of course, I have said over and over and over is wrong.
But if cruelty, if the Democrats and people in the media are claiming that Trump's cruelty is sort of a feature, not a bug of the system, So too is the Democratic program, which is deliberately robbing the CBP of the support that they need in order to make sure that the system is not cruel.
But here's Anderson Cooper calling Trump cruel, not the Democrats who are withdrawing all the funding.
The president, whether he likes it or not, has explicitly embraced the notion of family separation.
The cruelty, it's not a bug of the system.
It's a feature, which may have been a bridge too far for Secretary Nielsen.
But even if it was, it comes at the end of a very, very long road, which she has been traveling for a very, very long time.
Okay, so it's a feature, not a bug, and everybody who's involved is cruel and brutal and terrible and awful and cruel and brutal.
Except for the Democrats who refuse to fund this stuff.
Except for the Democrats who refuse to fund this stuff.
So their line is going to be that Trump is being unethical and terrible.
Juan Williams on Fox News tried to make the same point.
The truth is that Obama was dealing with unaccompanied minors.
Here you have families, so you have moms and children who were separated by Nielsen.
Yes, and why?
Again, I think that not only is it illegal, it's unethical and immoral, but I think that's why.
So you put them in the same compound with strangers?
It's just not true what you said, but I'm going to say something else.
So it was working perfectly?
It wasn't working.
We have a different kind of issue now with so many families and children.
Why?
Okay, so you can hear Greg Gutfeld shouting over and over, why?
Why?
And Juan Williams will not answer the question because here is the why.
Tom Perez, head of the DNC, explains.
That he doesn't want a tough border policy.
He thinks a tough border policy is dumb.
He wants open borders.
That's the real rationale here.
People in the Democratic Party are using this as a wedge issue to try and drive Hispanic voters to the polls.
They want to portray the Trump administration as cruel and inhumane.
They want to increase the number of people who potentially will be given amnesty so that they will vote Democrat.
This is not about the humane treatment of people crossing the border.
I want all those people treated humanely.
So do you.
Everyone wants people who are entering the country and legitimately have asylum claims treated humanely.
I want them kept in comfortable conditions while they await the trial to which they are entitled on their asylum claim.
And I want people who are falsely claiming asylum not to be able to enter the country.
I want those people to go to the back of the line and not cut the line.
And I want those people to apply the normal way.
And I have deep sympathy for people who are trying to get into the country.
I am essentially libertarian on immigration except for two issues.
Welfare use and cultural assimilation.
I think the people who come to the United States should assimilate into traditional American values, meaning a belief in small government, meaning a belief that the government is not the solution to everybody's problems, meaning a belief in free speech, a belief in private property, right?
All of these sort of Anglo-Saxon notions of law.
I think that everyone, including my great-grandparents, had to come and assimilate to those.
I think that is a good thing.
I think that is piece number one.
And piece number two, you shouldn't come here and be dependent on welfare.
Neither of those seem particularly arguable to me.
You fulfill those two conditions, I think not only should we welcome you in, we should encourage you to come.
I think all of that is good.
And I want people who are trying to get in treated well.
This is not about trying to treat people with cruelty.
I don't want kids separated from their parents either.
I don't want any of that stuff.
But the courts have made a standard that is not enforceable other than for the president to do nothing about illegal immigration.
And that's precisely what Democrats want.
Here's Tom Perez from the DNC basically just saying that out loud.
The notion that this secretary who will live in infamy, who is now no longer there, is going to be replaced by someone that he wants to be quote-unquote tougher, they're losing sight of the point here.
The point is to be smarter.
When you're smarter, you're better.
When I keep hearing talk about tough, tough doesn't equal smart.
Tough equals dumb.
And we need to make sure we have smart law enforcement.
That's how we can address the challenges at the border.
Tough equals dumb.
I mean, if that is not a campaign ad for President Trump for 2020, I don't know what is, legitimately.
Tough equals dumb.
So if you are tough on tens of thousands of people entering the border illegally, And then falsely claiming asylum, then that's dumb.
That's the real agenda here.
So you paint Trump as cruel, you use the federal courts to knock down any policy he attempts to pass, you have Democrats stand out front and rip on the cruelty while simultaneously depriving the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization and depriving Immigration and Customs Enforcement from being able to take care of the people crossing the border properly, and then you claim that you are just being compassionate.
What a convenient, convenient thing for members of the Democratic Party.
It is pretty astonishing.
It is also deeply, deeply dishonest.
But I guess we're used to that at this point from folks on the left when it comes to the immigration decision.
They are constantly claiming that there is some sort of secret, there's some sort of secret motivation behind Trump's policy on immigration.
I don't know.
Maybe there is.
But I'll tell you this.
As an American citizen who wants immigrants treated humanely, I also want to make sure that people who come in the country are not criminals, are legitimately claiming asylum under America's laws, are treated humanely, and are not let in willy-nilly and then just sent to the middle of the country.
I don't see why any of these things are mutually exclusive, and they shouldn't be.
Democrats have made them mutually exclusive.
The media have made them mutually exclusive.
It's really bad stuff.
Okay, coming up, we're going to talk about a letter from Kyle Korver, who's an NBA player, all about accepting his white privilege.
And we'll talk about what's right and what's wrong in the letter, because I think there's some actual interesting complexity to the letter.
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All righty.
So, meanwhile, there's this article that is getting all sorts of play by a forward named Kyle Korver, who plays for the Utah Jazz.
Pretty good three-point shooter.
And it's all about how he is privileged.
He wrote it for the Player's Tribune, which is this publication... Is it LeBron James' publication?
I'm trying to remember whose publication it is.
In any case...
Is it Derek Jeter?
I can't remember.
In any case, the Players' Tribune is a place where a lot of professional athletes write about their thoughts.
Kyle Cover has this piece that is being widely distributed and shown as this is an example of how white people should act on the issue of race.
And so I think it's worthwhile going through it because there's some stuff here that's meritorious and there is some stuff here that is really not.
That's an over-read of the situation and creates a standard that is unfulfillable.
So, here's what Kyle Corver writes.
He says, When the police break your teammate's leg, you'd think it would wake you up a little.
When they arrest him on a New York street, throw him in jail for the night, and leave him with a season-ending injury, you'd think it would sink in.
You'd think you'd know there was more to the story.
You'd think.
But nope.
I still remember my reaction when I first heard what had happened to Thabo.
This is his teammate.
I'm trying to remember the teammate's name.
It's Thabo Cephalakis, I can't... I believe?
It was 2015, late in the season.
Thabo and I were teammates on the Hawks, and we'd flown into New York late after a game in Atlanta.
When I woke up the next morning, our team group text was going nuts.
Details were still hazy, but guys were saying Thabo hurt his leg during an arrest.
Wait, he spent the night in jail?
Everyone was pretty upset and confused.
Well, almost everyone.
My response was different.
I'm embarrassed to admit it, which is why I want to share it with you today.
He said that they were friends, and he talked about how they had hung out a lot.
He said that when he found out that Thabo had been arrested, his first reaction was, what was Thabo doing out at a club on a back-to-back?
Not how's he doing, not what happened during the arrest, not something seems off with this story, nothing like that.
Before I knew the full story, before I'd even had a chance to talk to Thabo, I sort of blamed Thabo.
I thought, well, if I'd been in Thabo's shoes out at a club late at night, the police wouldn't have arrested me, not unless I was doing something wrong.
Cringe.
It's not like it was a conscious thought.
It was pure reflex, the first thing to pop into my head.
And I was worried about him, no doubt, but still, cringe.
It turns out that Thabo ended up settling with the city of New York and the NYPD.
He got like a $4 million settlement.
It fell away from the news.
Thabo had surgery and went back through rehab, but he couldn't shake his discomfort because his first reaction was, what was he doing out at a club on a back-to-back?
Well, first of all, that's a legit question.
Like, why was he out at a club?
Why was your other teammate also out at a club on a back-to-back?
These two things are not mutually exclusive.
You shouldn't be out at a club on a back-to-back, presumably.
Also, there are racist police officers who sometimes do racist things, which it appears is what happened in this case, although the police actually tried to prosecute this player and suggested he resisted arrest, and it is unclear from all the surrounding evidence what exactly happened.
Nonetheless, Kyle Corver talks about this.
He says, That when he heard that Russell Westbrook and a fan exchanged words during a game, his initial reaction was, you know Russell Westbrook, he gets into it with the crowd a lot.
And then the full story came out later.
What happened was that a fan had said some really ugly things at close range to Westbrook.
Westbrook had responded.
After the game, he said he felt the comments were racially charged.
The incident struck a nerve with our team.
is what Kyle Korver writes.
In a closed-door meeting with the president of the Jazz the next day, my teammates shared stories of similar experiences they'd had, a feeling degraded in ways that went beyond acceptable heckling.
One teammate talked about how his mom had called him right after the game, concerned for his safety in Salt Lake City.
One teammate said the night felt like being in a zoo.
One of the guys in the meeting was Thabo.
My teammate in Utah now, I looked over at him and remembered his night in New York City.
Everyone was upset.
I was upset and embarrassed too.
But there was another emotion in the room that day, one that was harder to put a finger on.
It was almost like disappointment mixed with exhaustion.
Guys were just sick and tired of it all.
He said, this wasn't the first time they'd taken part in conversations about race in their NBA careers.
It wasn't the first time they'd had to address the hateful actions of others.
And one big thing that got brought up a lot in the meetings was how incidents like this, they weren't only about the people directly involved.
They weren't about Russ and some heckler.
It was about more than that.
It was about what it means to exist right now as a person of color in a mostly white space.
It was about racism in America.
He says, before the meeting ended, I joined the team's demand for a swift response and a promise from the jazz organization that it would address the concerns we had.
So here is the question.
The first question.
When he says that this was about racism in America.
When there's a racist person who yells something at a player at a basketball game and then is ejected for the rest of the season.
Is that about racism in America?
Or is it about a guy being a jackass?
So, there's a tendency on the left to attribute every individual fault to society at large.
If a person commits a crime, that's because society is brutally unequal.
And if a person is a racist, that's because society is deeply racist.
Society is always responsible for the actions of the individual.
And you can see in this piece, Korver trying to internalize that and saying, well, I am part of society, therefore I am responsible for the actions of this random racist fan, even though I think that the guy is a jackass, and even though I sided with the people who are calling on him to be banned.
And then he talks about how he has a guilt that he simply cannot wash away, really.
I mean, that's really what he gets down to.
He says that there's an elephant in the room I've been thinking about a lot over these last few weeks.
It's the fact that demographically, if we're being honest, I have more in common with the fans and the crowd at your average NBA game than I have with the players on the court.
Which, there's nothing that you can do about that.
I mean, your race is unchangeable.
He says, I'm beginning to understand how that means something.
I'm realizing no matter how passionately I commit to being an ally, no matter how unwavering my support is for NBA and WNBA players of color, I'm still in this conversation from the privileged perspective of opting into it, which of course means that on the flip side, I could just as easily opt out of it.
Every day I'm given that choice.
I'm granted that privilege based on the color of my skin.
I don't even know what that means.
I mean, legitimately, I do not know what that means.
What gives you the privilege of opting out of a conversation on racism?
I mean, it's the duty of every good person to call out racism when they see it, so where exactly do you get to run away from it?
You will not be victimized by racism in the same way a black person will be.
That's true.
But that's not the same thing as saying that you simply get to opt out.
A good person is good or bad, not dependent on the color of their skin.
Here's where you get into really dicey territory.
Korver says, in other words, I can say every right thing in the world.
I can voice my solidarity with Russell Westbrook after what happened in Utah.
I can evolve my position on what happened to Thabo in New York.
I can be that weird dude in Get Out bragging about how he'd have voted for Obama a third term.
I can condemn every racist heckler I've ever known, but I can also fade into the crowd.
And my face can blend in with the faces of those hecklers anytime I want.
Well, no, that's not right.
Why are you the same as they are?
You're an individual.
Why would your face blend in with the faces of the heckler?
What makes the heckler the heckler is the sound coming out of the face, not the face itself.
To attribute the thought to the color is to slander an entire group of people in which you are now claiming membership.
He says, I'm trying to ask myself what I should actually do.
How can I, as a white man, part of the systemic problem, become part of the solution?
Why are you part of the problem?
Did you do something?
He says, I have to listen.
I have to continue to educate myself on the history of racism in America.
Well, we should all do those things.
But this part is where he gets into it.
Basically, I have to kowtow to the politics of people who look different than I do because I am not part of that group.
I have to support leaders.
This is what he writes.
I have to support leaders who see racial justice as fundamental, as something that's at the heart of nearly every major issue in our country today.
And I have to support policies that do the same.
No.
You don't.
It depends on the leaders and whether their ideas are good.
Why do you have to listen to everything Al Sharpton has to say because you happen to be a different color from Al Sharpton and the same color as some people who are racist?
You don't own the actions of other white people just because you happen to be white any more than a Muslim owns the actions of every radical Muslim or a black person owns the actions of every other black person.
This is self-imposed racial hierarchy.
It's gross.
This is where you get into a problem.
And Kyle Korver then makes this point.
And this is the point he's being praised far and wide for.
And I don't think that it is a good point.
He says, Two concepts I've been thinking about a lot later are guilt and responsibility.
When it comes to racism in America, I think guilt and responsibility tend to be seen as more or less the same thing.
But I'm beginning to understand how there's a real difference.
As white people, are we guilty of the sins of our forefathers?
No, I don't think so.
But are we responsible for them?
Yes, I believe we are.
Okay.
Explain.
So here's what Korver says.
I guess I've come to realize that when we talk about solutions to systemic racism, police reform, workplace diversity, affirmative action, better access to health care, even reparations, it's not about guilt.
It's not about pointing fingers or passing blame.
It's about responsibility.
It's about understanding that when we've said the word equality for generations, what we've really meant is equality for a certain group of people.
Here's sloppy thinking and sloppy writing.
He says it's about understanding that when we've said the word equality, what we've really meant is equality for a certain group of people.
Who's this we?
When I've said the word equality, I don't mean for a certain group of people, and neither does Kyle Korver.
So now, he's actually merging back in guilt and responsibility.
He is saying that we, like Kyle Korver today, is responsible for 60 years ago, somebody not meaning black people when they talked about equality.
He says it's about understanding that when we've said the word inequality for generations, what we've really meant is slavery and its aftermath.
No, I don't believe that that's true.
When I've said inequality, I don't mean slavery and its aftermath.
So, he basically suggests that the only way to be a woke person, the only way to fight racism, is for white people to shut up, and then listen to black activists, and then suggest that they are right on everything, because we could, after all, recede into the racist background.
And you can see this manifest in Kyle Korver's recommended policy.
So when he says that there's a difference between guilt and responsibility, that of course is correct.
I have a responsibility for my child, And that's not about guilt or innocence.
I have a responsibility for people who live in my community to help them out.
That's why I give charity.
But that is not the suggestion of slavery reparations.
The suggestion of slavery reparations is that I am guilty for a sin of the past and therefore I owe something to this person.
Not as a fellow citizen, but for the sins of the past for which I am somehow guilty.
This is why I don't have any problem with folks on the left talking about rectifying inequality through government policy, except that I think that they are wrong.
I think it is counterproductive.
I don't agree with the principles undergirding their use of government to do this thing, but I don't have a generalized problem with the sort of left-leaning policy that says that economic inequality requires government intervention.
Again, I disagree with the policy, but the underlying motivation, at least I understand, But I am not okay with the slavery reparations conversation that implies guilt for past sins for white people, for example, because now you're not separating people based on wealth or non-wealth.
Now you are separating people specifically based on race and imputing responsibility and guilt for actions to a group of people who legitimately had nothing to do with that thing.
That's why when you see people like Cory Booker pushing an investigation of slavery reparations, he can't explain what he would do with slavery reparations.
No Democrat has.
Because they understand immediately that other than their generalized government policy they'd be pushing anyway, there's no way to do this without imputing guilt to a certain group of people who are actually not guilty for these actions.
So where does Korver go with this?
In the end he says, I believe that what's happening to people of color in this country right now in 2019 is wrong.
Now you can believe that without actually having to accept that you are somehow a privileged member of society in believing that.
By the way, I think it is worthwhile noting that in the NBA, the vast majority of players who are earning millions of dollars are black.
That is not an imputation of black privilege.
That's because the NBA is a meritocracy.
That has nothing to do with racism.
Anyway, Korver says, the fact that black Americans are more than five times as likely to be incarcerated as white Americans is wrong.
No, the fact is not wrong.
The fact is the fact.
Unless you can explain how that is a result of a racist criminal justice system.
And which people are innocent who are being put in prison for no reason, you got no basis for saying that the fact is wrong.
The fact that black Americans are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as white Americans is wrong.
Okay, it's a fact I don't like, but is it wrong?
Well, it depends.
Where is the poverty coming from?
If it is the result of a historic injustice like Jim Crow, yes, that's wrong.
And then we say, okay, what is the best way to solve that?
But if that poverty is coming from you making a decision to have a baby out of wedlock and not finish high school, the fact is the fact.
The fact that black unemployment rates nationally are double that of overall unemployment rates is wrong.
Again, this is Bernie Sanders talk, where basically any inequality is inequity.
Any disparity is discrimination.
And if you don't accept that, then you're not woke enough.
So at least Kyle Corver got woke.
This is the kind of language you see on college campuses a lot, and I don't happen to think that it is a particularly useful form of discourse.
We should all try to understand the experiences of black people in the United States, of course.
We should all try to think of each other as brothers and sisters, of course.
But this basic notion that when you see a racist heckler in the crowd, that you somehow have a shared commonality with the racist heckler more than you do with the person being heckled, that is you breaking yourself down into a person Who is a member of a group by dint of color, as opposed to you being an individual who gets to make your own decisions in life about how you wish to act.
Obviously, Kyle Corver has much more in common with the NBA player who is black standing next to him on the court than the white heckler in the crowd.
Obviously.
And this notion that he could choose to just fade away.
He just, that's true.
And that would be immoral.
That's why morality is not dependent on your group identity.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things I like.
My wife has been staying up extraordinarily late watching this show on Amazon called The Widow with Kate Beckinsale.
The show is really good.
It's sort of an action drama mystery thriller thing.
Kate Beckinsale plays this woman whose husband allegedly dies in a plane crash.
He didn't actually die in the plane crash and she finds out a few years later he did not die.
So where has he been all the time?
Why didn't he call her?
That's the premise of the show.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Where is my husband?
Georgia, people don't just walk away from a plane crash.
They don't just fall out of the sky and carry on with their lives.
You're chasing a ghost.
Hey!
I left you something in the glove compartment.
Did you?
Happy anniversary.
Georgia.
Georgia.
Georgia, you really need to forget about...
Okay, so the show is good.
It's got a bunch of good...
Kate Beckinsale is actually quite good in the show.
Almost good enough to make me forgive her for dating Pete Davidson.
Okay, okay.
It's just a joke, guys.
She can date whoever she wants, obviously, even if the person happens to be a generation younger than her and...
It's a weird pairing.
In any case, it is a puzzling, puzzling thing to every human who is watching.
In any case, the show is really good and worth checking out, so go check that out right now.
Okay, now a bunch of things that I hate.
Okay, so thing that I hate, number one, there's a restaurant that is now being raked over the coals by Yelp reviewers.
There's a woman who is white, and she opened a Chinese food restaurant called Lucky Lee's in New York City.
And she is, and this was tweeted out by some activist named Lanya Olmsted, who tweeted, wow, wow, wow.
This white woman pictured just opened a clean Chinese food restaurant in New York City called Bucky Lee's.
Not only is she using Chinese food stereotypes, naming, she is shaming traditional Chinese food cooking with MSG, grease, and starch.
She is not woke enough, you see, because she called her restaurant a Chinese name because it is a Chinese restaurant.
What's she gonna call it?
Bob's?
Bob's the Chinese food restaurant?
Of course she is using a Chinese name to demonstrate that it is- Like, if somebody opened a deli, if somebody opened a deli, and their last name happened to be Smith, I wouldn't expect them to call it Smith's Deli.
If they called it Stein's, I wouldn't be like, oh, cultural appropriation, that's so terrible, oh my go- They're trying to convey that it's a Jewish-style deli, like wha- So this lady has now been hit by crazy Yelp reviews.
Hashtag Asian stereotype.
First, close the doors.
This is offensive on so many levels.
So everybody is going after this woman.
They're saying, love to watch Becky go bankrupt for racist appropriation.
So also, I'm confused.
Are we supposed to be in favor of MSG or against MSG?
So I guess when Chinese people use MSG in their cooking, then it's good and traditional.
When white people don't use MSG, then that becomes cultural stereotyping.
This is all nonsense.
We are not going to be able to live in a society like this.
So gross, guys.
I mean, honestly, get a life.
So gross, guys.
I mean, honestly, get a life.
Get a life.
And meanwhile, other things that I hate.
So Bernie Sanders is ripping on Fox News again.
He says that Fox News is a propaganda outlet.
I will give it to Bernie.
I mean, Bernie is obviously acting like a frontrunner here.
He actually he is the only Nixon can go to China and only Bernie can go to Fox News.
So he's going to do a town hall on Fox News, which honestly is kind of It's kind of awesome.
Like, good for him.
I've offered to have a discussion or debate with Bernie Sanders many, many times.
He's never done anything like this.
But going into hostile territory, he's right.
He figures that if he gets shellacked by the Fox News host, he can go and complain to his base and they'll be happy with him.
And if he does a great job, then he ends up with a big win.
He's acting like the frontrunner.
If Biden had gone on Fox News, he'd be hit by the online left for presumably Here's Bernie Sanders, though, slandering Fox News as a propaganda outlet while proclaiming he will appear on it nonetheless.
For better or for worse, and it is for worse, for whatever reason, you know, Fox has a huge viewing audience.
And to simply say that we're not going to talk to millions of people who watch that network, I don't think is smart.
When I go on Fox, what I will say is, look, many of you voted for Donald Trump, but he lied to you.
How do you explain that to people who voted for Trump, if you don't talk to people who voted for Trump?
Working people need to know the truth, and that is that Donald Trump betrayed them, lied to them.
And I intend to do that.
Okay, so he is wrong about all of these things.
But, you know, it is amazing how he and many members of the left will call Fox News a propaganda outlet while appearing on a place like MSNBC.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
So New York has now had to declare a health emergency over a measles outbreak because there are too many people getting the measles.
They've ordered mandatory vaccinations for people exposed to the virus because measles does, in fact, kill people.
And it had been basically eliminated in the United States thanks to vaccination.
And then thanks to people who are... Sometimes it's religious people.
Sometimes it is secular leftists who like essential oils and have bought into all this nonsense about vaccinations.
Vaccinate your kids, guys.
I mean, legitimately.
Vaccinate your kids.
The supposed evidence linking vaccinations to autism is a bunch of hooey.
And the fact that we have gotten rid of diseases that have plagued humanity for legitimately thousands of years and that we are now seeing those diseases rise again is a pretty terrible thing.
Vaccinate your kids.
Please.
All right, so we'll be back here a little bit later today with a couple more hours of content for you.
If you're a subscriber, you get it.
If you don't, then, well, tough.
And then we'll see you back here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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