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July 18, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:59
Stop This Crap | Ep. 820
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The crowd chants, send her back about Ilhan Omar at a Trump rally, Ilhan Omar demonstrates her anti-Semitism, and Nancy Pelosi goes silent.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So the spiral to garbage land continues.
Apparently everyone has decided to light themselves on fire, both morally and politically.
And I gotta tell you, I'm not enjoying it all that much.
I gotta tell you that I don't feel like the country is becoming a better place through any of this.
Now, I know that we are supposed to just...
Join into the tribal beatings.
I know that we are supposed to say that when bad things happen on our own side, it's not actually bad because we're in the middle of a tribal partisan fight.
And I know that that applies to both sides.
I also think that's a bunch of crap.
I think that it is very important that when something bad happens, even if it happens on your own side, that you call it out.
I'm not seeing that from Republicans.
I'm not seeing that from Democrats.
And frankly, I find it upsetting.
And I find it upsetting because if we are going to share a country, if we actually feel that there is a future to this whole we're a republic thing and we share a country, then we are going to have to have some common moral standard where we say, this right here, this is garbage and people shouldn't be doing this.
And brushing it aside or saying, well, you know, if we act like garbage a little in order so that we can win, Doing that sort of routine I don't think is good for the country.
I don't think that it is good for the soul of the country.
I don't think it's good for us.
I think that it is bad if we see each other in such a nature that when we see something that if the other side did it to us we would be completely enraged but we're doing it to the other side or vice versa.
That we are going to be OK with it because it advances our interests.
I just I don't think that that's all right.
I don't think that that's OK.
I think it's dangerous.
In fact, now this goes for both sides.
And today's show is going to be about how both sides have decided to wink and nod at some of the worst forces in their politics, specifically because they think the other side is so evil.
Once you come down to the vision that the other side is so evil that any means necessary are on the table, And also, once you come down on the side that most Americans are so vicious and or vacuous that your viciousness is going to attract voters, I think that you are missing the point of most Americans in the middle.
I think you're missing the point of the other side.
The idea of American politics is to convince people who are in the middle, people who may not be watching politics closely, that your side is correct, that your policy prescriptions are right.
The most dangerous drug in American politics, and it really has crept up in American politics I think over the last 20 years or so, I think particularly since the Iraq war, is this vision that the way you win elections is by castigating your political opponents as, if you're on the left you castigate right-wingers as racist and stupid and bitter clingers who cling to their gods and guns and xenophobia, and if you're on the right then you castigate your political opponents as people who
Hate the country inherently as people who don't deserve to be here as people who want the worst for the country.
Now, you can disagree with all of their policy prescriptions.
You can believe that they're getting it totally wrong.
You can even believe they're getting in the history of America wrong and that that that perception of America's history is dangerous and problematic.
But that is a judgment about the thought.
It is not a judgment about the person.
And what we are starting to see is that the most effective mode of American politics may be character attacks, but character attacks are also the most effective mode of breaking apart the polity.
That if you attack somebody else's character on a routine basis, and by that I mean suggesting that there is no place in America for people like X, If you do that, then you are contributing to something that is really dangerous in American politics.
And on the other side, if you believe that the other side is so bad, this would be the left, if you believe that the right is so bad that we can embrace the worst aspects of our own political program, that we can embrace the most extreme anti-Semitism, we can embrace the most extreme anti-American history ideals, Because we hate Donald Trump so much, you get yourself into trouble.
In other words, I think that we are fighting fire with fire and so everything's on fire.
I think that that's where we are right now.
And it's bad.
It's no good.
We're going to get into all of this in just one second.
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47 47 47 that's text by name ben to 47 47 47 okay so in order to understand where we arrived at last night in sort of the political realm we have to go back to yesterday morning Because this entire unfolding narrative has been a crap show from beginning to end.
So AOC and Nancy Pelosi, we'll go back even further, we'll go back to last Thursday.
All this stuff happens inside a week now, it's insane.
Last Thursday, AOC and Nancy Pelosi were in An utter firefight.
The AOC was suggesting that Nancy Pelosi was a vicious racist.
Nancy Pelosi was correctly suggesting that AOC is a neophyte who doesn't know what she's doing and has radical ideas she doesn't know how to implement.
And both sides were just going at each other hammer and tongs.
And then President Trump on Sunday decided, you know what would be great?
I'm just going to insert myself right here into the middle of this for no reason at all with a dumb, vacuous, xenophobic, possible And it turns out that only one of those people, Ilhan Omar, is actually from a foreign country, and also telling people to go back to the country from which they came is generally not good for American politics.
Telling people that they should go back to their home country, suggesting that they are more loyal to their home country than they are to the United States, that's bad.
Ilhan Omar does it to Jews all the time because she's not a great person.
Because she says terrible things on a routine basis.
I think she's an awful congressperson.
There's no one more anti-Ilhan Omar in the United States on a political level than I am.
So Trump jumps into the middle of that and he makes these comments.
And then we get three, four days of fallout from that.
And then it starts to move on, the news cycle.
And AOC and Pelosi start to go at it again.
And the Democrats file charges of impeachment against President Trump and that fails.
And then Ilhan Omar decides, you know what?
With my newfound fame, with my newfound political capital, I'm going to push out another extraordinarily radical piece of the Democratic agenda, of the far-left agenda.
A piece so radical that my own party believes it's anti-Semitic.
So this is how the news cycle started yesterday.
Nancy Pelosi had just the day before, just on Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi I had rammed through the House of Representatives a resolution condemning President Trump's tweets as racist.
And there was a whole floor fight, big hubbub, about whether Nancy Pelosi was allowed to call the President's comments racist on the floor of the House because it violated House rules.
The Democrats basically overruled the House rules and said, it's fine, she can call the President's tweets racist.
And she went out there and she said, listen, we speak truth to power, right?
This is our thing.
We speak truth to power.
Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the President's racist tweets.
To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people.
I urge a unanimous vote and yield back the balance of my vote.
I was just going to give the General Speaker of the House if she would like to rephrase that comment.
I have cleared my remarks as a parliamentarian before I read them.
Okay, so she's speaking truth to power, so much truth, so much power, and all the rest.
And then she tweeted out, in this house, we speak truth to power.
Now, here is the problem for a lot of folks on the right.
Even if people don't like President Trump's comments, like I didn't like President Trump's tweets, and I criticized them pretty heavily this week.
Even if you don't like those comments, it is a lie that Nancy Pelosi speaks truth to power.
She's a partisan hack who is using racism in order to... the charge of racism in order to forward her political ambitions, but she's more than happy to ignore bigotry inside her own ring.
So if Ayanna Pressley says something racist over the weekend...
If Ayanna Pressley says that black people are not really black people unless they agree with Ayanna Pressley, and gay people are not truly gay unless they agree with Ayanna Pressley, and Muslims are not truly Muslim unless they agree with Ilhan Omar, then Nancy Pelosi has nothing to say.
And in fact, Nancy Pelosi has shown her cowardice on these issues time and time again, which is how you ended up in a position where the AOC wing was in a fight with the Nancy Pelosi wing.
Because remember, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, they're not hiding any of what they feel.
There's a piece over at Daily Wire from a few weeks ago by Ryan Saavedra listing out all of the things Ilhan Omar has said.
In 2012, she tweeted, Israel has hypnotized the world.
May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.
The Jewish state is hypnotizing the world.
Base anti-Semitic trope.
She also, in a January interview this year, defended those tweets saying, they were the only words I could think about expressing at the moment.
Then she said in an interview on CNN, she didn't understand why Jews would find her anti-Semitism to be offensive.
She said, that's a really regrettable way of expressing that.
I don't know how my comments would be offensive to Jewish Americans.
And then after winning her congressional election, she switched her position on BDS.
She suggested that Israel should not be allowed to exist as a Jewish state.
This is a direct quote.
Israel should not be allowed to exist as a Jewish state.
Israel is not a democracy.
And then she compared Israel to Iran.
And she then continued along these lines.
She embraced Linda Sarsour, who is a radical anti-Semite, obviously.
And then there's Rashida Tlaib, another member of the squad.
Tlaib has promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Back late last year, she suggested that her congressional colleagues only supported a bill opposing BDS because, quote, this is the United States.
So basically, they're in league with the Jews.
Everybody has divided loyalty, according to Rashida Tlaib, if you oppose BDS.
And then, of course, she came out in favor of BDS boycott, divest, and sanctions.
She said that she did not support a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, which would presumably mean the destruction of the state of Israel.
She's been photographed with supporters of Islamic terror organizations.
The Washington Examiner has reported that over and over and over.
She was photographed with a Palestinian activist who praised the terrorist group Hezbollah, said Israel did not have the right to exist, and has called for Israeli Jews to return to Poland.
Oh, go back home, look at that.
Where roughly three million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
He was welcomed and offered, and he offered her a piece of art at her swearing-in.
She belongs to a group that frequently demonizes Jews and its Palestinian founder, Maher Abdelkader, raised substantial funds for Tlaib for her congressional campaign.
This is Rashida Tlaib.
So there's tremendous amounts of bigotry inside the Democratic caucus.
Nancy Pelosi has said nothing about any of that.
Nancy Pelosi has run away and she is hidden with regard to all of this stuff.
And we'll see how this plays out for her in just one second.
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Okay, so Nancy Pelosi, as we say, she does not speak truth to power when it comes to the bigotry inside her own caucus.
So when Ilhan Omar said openly anti-Semitic stuff over and over and over, Pelosi's immediate response was, well, you know, she just uses English differently, like the language of English.
The incident that happened with, I don't think our colleague is anti-semitic, I think she has a different experience in the use of words, doesn't understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that she didn't realize.
But nonetheless, Okay, but you didn't address it.
You then passed a resolution that did not name any of Ilhan Omar's comments and instead condemned hate more generally.
So how did this play out?
Well, here's how it played out.
A month ago, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, spoke at the American-Israel Public Affairs Conference.
Which is pretty common.
There's a bipartisan organization, a lot of leadership is Democrat over at AIPAC, and Pelosi appears, and she talks about the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement.
Now, BDS is, in fact, an anti-Semitic movement.
Not everybody who expresses support for BDS can be said to be anti-Semitic, but the movement was founded by anti-Semites, and the movement itself is anti-Semitic, meaning that the attempt to boycott every Israeli product on the basis of you don't like Israeli policy with regard to the Palestinians.
is singling out Israel in a way you would single out no other country.
Not only that, it is targeting Jews collectively, which is the goal.
It damages Arabs who live inside Israel and who are citizens.
And originally, the BDS movement was launched by a bunch of people who openly stated they wanted to destroy the state of Israel.
Nancy Pelosi acknowledged as much at AIPAC.
Here's Nancy Pelosi a month ago declaring that BDS is anti-Semitic policy.
We must also be vigilant against bigoted or dangerous ideologies masquerading as policy.
And that includes BDS.
applause applause - Thank you.
Last week, we introduced the Schneider, that would be Brad Schneider of Illinois, and Nadler, that would be Jerry Nadler of New York, the Schneider-Nadler resolution in the House that explicitly opposes the BDS movement.
Okay, so, there we are, Nancy Pelosi saying BDS is anti-Semitic, and of course, she is correct about that.
According to the Jerusalem Post, there are more than 100 links between the internationally designated terrorist organizations Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine with non-governmental organizations promoting the anti-Israel boycott, divest, and sanctions movement, some of which receive funding from European states and philanthropic funds, according to a new report by the Strategic Affairs Ministry.
More than 30 members of Hamas and PFLP hold senior positions in BDS promoting non-governmental organizations.
And that's not all.
BDS proponents are pretty obvious about what exactly they believe about Israel.
Omar Barghouti, who is the founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, says Israel was Palestine.
There's no reason why it should not be renamed Palestine, meaning Israel should disappear and presumably all the Jews should be killed or deported.
Ronnie Kasriel says BDS represents three words that will help bring about the defeat of Zionist Israel and victory for Palestine.
Michael Warshawski, who's a BDS activist, he said peace or better yet justice cannot be achieved without a total decolonization, one can say de-Zionization, of the Israeli state.
Get rid of all the Jews.
So the folks who created BDS were not shy about all of this.
Norman Finkelstein, who is a Holocaust minimizer at best and BDS activist, he says there's no Israel, that's what it's really about.
Everyone knows what BDS is.
Nancy Pelosi knows what BDS is.
And even Ilhan Omar knew what BDS was when she was running for Congress because she went out of her way to say to her constituents that she would not support BDS.
This is going back just a couple of years.
I support a two-state solution.
I think it is going to be important for us to recognize Israel's place in the Middle East and the Jewish people's rightful place within that region.
It's also important for us to make sure that we are going through a process that we're guaranteeing that to the Palestinians.
I believe right now with the PBS movement, it's not helpful in getting that two-state solution.
And so I look forward to making sure that we are utilizing and being part of a conversation that gets us closer so that we can have peace.
So you'll notice that Ilhan Omar there is basically saying BDS is not effective, and that's why I won't support it.
But she never said that it's immoral or anti-Semitic.
Nancy Pelosi did.
So Nancy Pelosi knows full well that BDS is anti-Semitic.
And she has made room for Ilhan Omar to be as anti-semitic as she wants to be.
The natural consequence?
Yesterday, Ilhan Omar's first resolution since the whole squad fight broke out was promoting BDS.
Shocker.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so yesterday, after a month, after Nancy Pelosi said BDS is anti-Semitic, Ilhan Omar sponsored a resolution that compares Israel to Nazi Germany and the Japanese Imperial Empire in 1937 when they were busy raping Nanking.
That was the resolution that she sponsored yesterday.
And Nancy Pelosi, who stands up truth to power, nowhere to be seen.
She's got nothing.
She's got nothing.
This resolution says, quote, Americans of conscience have a proud history of participating in boycotts to advocate for human rights abroad, including boycotting Nazi Germany from March 1933 to October 1941 in response to the dehumanization of Jewish people in the lead up to the Holocaust.
So, Ilhan Omar, who has nary a word to say about the Iranian nuclear program, who has nary a word to say when it comes to, I mean, she literally was asked yesterday or two days ago to condemn Al-Qaeda on the basis of an old clip of her that was going around in which she was jokingly referring to Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and saying, well, why was everyone taking them with different seriousness than the U.S.
Army?
And she's kind of laughing about it.
She refused to answer that particular question.
She said that it was beneath her dignity to answer that particular.
There's a woman who wrote a letter just a few years ago advocating for lenient sentences for people who are trying to join ISIS.
And who routinely engages in anti-Semitic language and ideas.
This same Ilhan Omar is now saying that Israel should be boycotted because it is like Nazi Germany.
And Nancy Pelosi is nowhere to be found.
So this resolution compares Israel, not only to Nazi Germany, but also to the Soviet Empire, to the Soviet Union, and also to, as I say, the Japanese Empire from 1937 to 1938, when the Japanese Imperial Army was busy conquering foreign lands and subjecting its population to supreme human rights depredations, including mass murder and mass rape.
It's just, it's unbelievable.
And Nancy Pelosi, of course, has nothing to say about it.
There's your truth to power.
Here's Ilhan Omar, yesterday, comparing BDS to the Tea Party.
We must support Evers to end the occupation and achieve two-state solution.
I believe firmly that the path to peace does not lie in a violent means.
This week I introduced a resolution with civil rights leader, our colleague, John Lewis, and Rashida Tlaib.
Who know the importance of non-violence movements.
It recognizes the proud history of boycott movements in this country dating back to the Boston Tea Party.
We should honor these movements and that history.
And then of course over this weekend, she proclaimed that Hamas was a non-violent group, effectively.
She said that Israel was fighting non-violent resistors.
You know, like the terrorist group Hamas that is firing rockets into the center of Israel.
Again, not a word from Nancy Pelosi.
So no truth to power from Nancy Pelosi.
No shock there.
And of course, the Justice Democrats are promoting this.
The squad is promoting their first initiative in the aftermath of this whole Trump is a bigot fight.
Their first move.
Is to sponsor a bigoted resolution that Nancy Pelosi herself suggested was anti-semitic and Pelosi is nowhere to be found.
Is it any wonder that folks think that Omar and Tlaib and AOC and Ayanna Pressley are running the show over there in the Democratic House?
Is that any wonder?
Because it appears they are.
Nancy Pelosi's got nothing to say about this and neither do the Democrats.
Have you heard a single Democrat, mainstream Democrat comment on Ilhan Omar?
Anyone?
You can't even get a mainstream Democrat to comment on an actual terror attack on an ICE facility by Antifa, let alone criticizing Ilhan Omar for her bigotry and anti-Semitism.
None of them are going to do that.
Now, here's the thing.
There are Democrats who know that this is bad stuff, obviously.
They're just being shunted off to the side.
So, Jake Tapper on CNN reported yesterday that Democrats are feeling squeezed by the fact that Ilhan Omar and the Squad are being given this much prominence because they're too radical, because they engage in overt bigotry on a fairly regular basis, and there are Democrats in the House going, uh, what is all of this?
I have been spending the day talking to a lot of Democratic House members.
They are very frustrated with the squad.
They are very frustrated with them for any number of reasons you heard in the introduction.
One House Democrat saying we need to be talking about bread and butter issues, not the president's tweets.
But others say they don't want to be in the position of defending things that they disagree with from, say, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
Right.
I mean, this is exactly what the this is the position that the president and the Republican Party, who has backed him up on this, has forced Democrats into.
They are painting the entire Democratic Party with the same brush.
OK, so again, the the moderate Democrats are feeling that they are being forced to embrace the radicalism of Ilhan Omar.
So by yesterday, we are back to Ilhan Omar being so radical that there's an infight inside the Democratic Party.
And President Trump seems as though he has moved away from his ugly statements of earlier this week about everybody going back to their home countries and that nastiness.
It seems like he has moved beyond that and he has shifted his argument to instead, if you don't love the country, you can leave it, which is hackneyed and old and it's an emotional argument, but at least that is voluntary, you can leave if you want, right?
That's an emotional appeal.
That is not, send her back, right?
That is not, go back to your home country, get out, right?
That's not the same argument quite, right?
So he had shifted that argument, and he was spending his day attacking Ilhan Omar for her record.
And he basically said exactly this, right?
Yesterday he said, if people want to leave the country, they're free to go anytime they please.
No, if people want to leave our country, they can.
If they don't want to love our country, if they don't want to fight for our country, they can.
I'll never change on that.
No.
Okay.
And then Trump made pretty clear who he was talking about.
He specifically was talking about Omar and her comments about the United States and the fact that she said some people did something about 9-11.
Trump went after Omar on a variety of issues.
The RNC released a campaign ad about the squad's extreme rhetoric.
This has morphed now into a tripartite battle between AOC and the Squad for supremacy in the House and Nancy Pelosi, and then versus Donald Trump, who has created an alliance between Pelosi and AOC for purposes of opposing Trump, right?
That was the battle as of most of yesterday.
The RNC released an ad highlighting how radical the Squad are.
So this features AOC and Tlaib and Omar and Ayanna Pressley.
The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.
Never again in something.
If this organization is as fascist as you have called it, and you have said it's fascist, then why don't you adopt the stance to eliminate it?
Your colleague who was at the border with you compared the facilities to a concentration camp.
Do you agree with that comparison?
Absolutely.
You will see the light!
And if you don't, we will bring it!
We are learning new details about the man who threw explosive devices at an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington.
Will you condemn Antifa for attacking an ICE facility?
Will you condemn the Antifa attack in Washington over the weekend?
Walking right past the questioning.
OK, so this is a much more cohesive and coherent attack on the squad, right?
This is attacking them on their policy.
This is attacking them on the things that they have said.
And then President Trump launched an attack on Ilhan Omar that the media really couldn't stand.
He mentioned the fact that she may have engaged in immigration fraud with her brother.
Now, the actual accusation is not that she engaged in immigration fraud, but that she was trying to engage in immigration fraud so that her brother could illegally immigrate to the United States.
Here was President Trump sort of throwing off the cuff.
Well, there's a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother.
I know nothing about it.
I hear she was married to her brother.
You're asking me a question about it.
I don't know, but I'm sure that somebody would be looking at that.
Literally, there was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is as mainstream a newspaper as it gets, talking about Ilhan Omar's marriage and exactly who she was married to and why she filed taxes as married to one person when she was legally married to another person.
The UK Daily Mail has a piece today called, I am legally married to one and culturally to another.
How Ilhan Omar desperately tried to shut down accusations of bigamy amid claims she was briefly married to her brother to commit immigration fraud while she was still with her current husband.
See, I'm not legally married to two people, but I am legally married to one and culturally married to another.
That's how Ilhan Omar's campaign spokesman, Ben Goldfarb, summarized Omar's conjugal arrangements in an email in August 2016, when Omar was running for Congress and her advisors were trying to stifle allegations of double marriage with a man alleged to be her brother.
Omar supplied this email to the Minnesota Campaign and Public Disclosure Board investigation into her campaign financing.
That investigation concluded on June 6th.
It revealed that in 2014 and 2015, Omar may have broken federal and state law by filing a joint tax return with her husband, Ahmed Abdelas Abdessalon Hersey, when she was married to another man.
Conservative journalists in Minnesota raised the bigamy allegations in 2016.
And in fact, there's another story that is out today from Pajamas Media.
David Steinberg has been the reporter who's all over this over at PJ Media.
Pointing out that the marriage is a mess.
That all this marital stuff is a mess.
It says, immediately after being elected to her current seat in 2016, Omar faced allegations, soon backed by a remarkable amount of evidence, that she had married her own brother in 2009 and was still legally his wife.
They officially divorced in December 2017.
The motivation for the marriage remains unclear.
However, the totality of the evidence points to possible immigration fraud and student loan fraud.
Representative Omar had stated that she did marry British citizen Ahmed Noor Saeed Elmi in 2009.
She has said the allegation he is her brother is absurd and offensive.
They say below, exclusive new evidence from official archived high school records and corroborating sources strongly support the claim that Ahmed Noor Saeed Elmi is indeed her brother.
As this implicates Representative Omar in multiple state and federal felonies, I have contacted the U.S.
Attorney's Office in Minnesota to submit All other information uncovered during our investigation.
According to official student enrollment records archived by St.
Paul Public Schools in the state of Minnesota, an Ahmed N. Elmi was enrolled as a senior in the class of 2003 at Arlington Senior High School in St.
Paul, Minnesota.
From 2002 until 2003, he graduated and received a diploma.
The enrollment record gives his birthday.
Both Ilhan Omar's 2009 marriage document and her 2017 divorce proceedings say that her husband was born the same day as this person registered Ahmed N. Elmi.
There was no other person named Ahmed Noor Saeed Elmi, Ahmed and Elmi, or even Ahmed Elmi with the birth date, April 4th, 1985 in Minnesota.
The man Ilhan Omar married and the 17 to 18 year olds who attended Arlington Senior High School are one and the same.
This person was a minor for most of the school year.
His parents and legal guardian were listed on his enrollment records along with his home address and telephone number.
He shared that address, telephone number, and parental Authority with Ilhan Omar.
So that is the evidence that is being put out there.
So the media say, well, Ilhan Omar's denied it.
Isn't that enough?
No, that's not enough.
You actually have to go and investigate and do the journalism that you guys are supposedly supposed to do.
So suffice it to say, there's a lot in Ilhan Omar's background that is worthy of scrutiny.
And her comments on a day-to-day basis are egregious.
Her policies are awful.
The things she says about the country are garbage.
She is the worst member of American Congress.
And it isn't Even all that close.
I mean, Rashida Tlaib is pretty terrible.
AOC is pretty awful.
Ayanna Pressley is bad.
There are lots of bad members of Congress.
Ilhan Omar is in a class by herself when it comes to being a bad member of Congress, but she is a duly elected member of Congress.
And this is where we get to the other side of the aisle.
So the Democrats are happy to defend bigotry and nastiness and ugliness and stupidity and virulent anti-Semitism from members of their own party.
They will not stand strong as Nancy Pelosi has not stood strong.
On the Republican side of the aisle, this does not justify the behavior of people who are saying things to duly elected members of Congress and American citizens like, send her back.
I'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, in just a second.
We'll talk about President Trump's rally last night.
The good, the bad, and the very ugly.
And I do think that there's a moment that was very, very ugly.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, this Saturday marks the 50th anniversary since we first put a man on the moon.
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Okay.
So all of this hubbub inside the Democratic Party, this back and forth, the AOC versus Pelosi, then Trump jumping in in a terrible fashion, and then the Democrats returning to attacking each other and moving incredibly fast to the radical left.
All of this leads up to President Trump's rally last night.
President Trump's rally last night is an opportunity for him to make the case for his own presidency and to, yes, to point out the radicalism of the left without reiterating the stupidity of his original Tweet on Sunday in which he said that women who were born in the United States or who are legal immigrants to the United States with citizenship and duly elected in their districts should go back to their home countries.
Right.
He doesn't have to do any of that.
And he shouldn't do any of that because it's bad.
And it was bad when he tweeted it.
And it would be bad for him to reiterate it here.
And Trump knows that, by the way, which is why he shifted the argument into if they don't love it, they can leave.
Right.
Which is the same argument that people have been making forever in America.
Love it or leave it.
It may not be a good argument, but it is a certainly frequently common argument in the United States.
And it is important to note that that is well within the realm of traditional political discourse, given the fact that Barack Obama's administration called members of the Tea Party terrorists.
And we are routinely on the right called Nazis by members of the media as mainstream conservatives, routinely called Nazis and bigots.
And we are constantly, it's constantly suggested that we are un-American and awful.
It's a saying to people, if you don't love it, you can always leave.
That's not quite the same thing as go back to your home country to people who were born in the United States and also to people who are legal immigrants from places like Somalia, which really is one of the worst places on Earth.
OK, so Trump gets to make his case last night.
And as I've said about President Trump before.
President Trump is a stand-up comedian.
And what that means is that he reacts to the crowd that's in the room.
If you've ever seen a Trump rally in its entirety, basically it is a stand-up comedy act punctuated by politics for an hour.
He goes out there, people say things in the crowd, he reacts to the crowd, he's playing with the crowd.
Trump really likes when the crowd likes him, and so I've never seen him, under any circumstances, rebuke a crowd.
It's never happened.
He's much more likely to egg on a crowd than rebuke a crowd.
I've never seen a situation where a crowd says something and he says, guys, guys, guys, guys, stop that.
He's never done that.
Which, by the way, is something that is useful in politics.
I've done it many times, where a crowd will do something, and I'll say, guys, you got, like, stop.
Right?
This happens at my college speeches fairly frequently, where a couple thousand people will be there, somebody will get up to ask a question, and people will start booing the questioner, and I'll say, guys, you need, like, stop.
Let's actually hear the question.
Let's treat each other civilly here.
Now, I know that there are a lot of folks on the right who are hearkening back to the days of John McCain, when John McCain was at a rally and somebody suggested that Obama was a Muslim and John McCain correctly said, no, Barack Obama is an American and he is not a Muslim.
And that was right.
That was the morally correct thing to do.
He did not lose the election because of that.
He lost the election because the economy tanked two months before the election.
And he lost the election because Barack Obama was given better media treatment than any candidate in the history of the United States.
And he lost the election because Barack Obama was a uniquely talented candidate.
He did not lose John McCain because he didn't stand there and nod as the person called Obama a Muslim.
That is not why John McCain lost, but there is this mythos that has been built up around the sort of Trump-McCain comparison, where it's the reason that McCain and Romney lost is because they didn't fight, because they didn't fight.
OK, well, there is truth, I think, to the idea that McCain and Romney did not pull out the hatchet and go after Barack Obama with enough alacrity.
I think there is truth to that.
But that does not extend to everything that they did.
That was moral was them was them wimping out.
Like I don't think that's what but I think that there's a part of the Republican Party right now, a part of the conservative base.
I was like, well, John McCain lost because he because he tamped down that sort of stuff.
No, that's not why he lost again.
That's how I OK.
So Donald Trump is is not the kind of guy who is going to tell a crowd to pipe down.
He starts off and he's revving up the crowd.
Right.
I mean, it's it's a campaign rally.
He's revving up the crowd.
And he starts with some of his greatest hits.
He starts kind of hilariously by thanking Democrats who voted against impeachment because highlighting the Democratic split is obviously smart politics.
The Democrats are so split over Trump that yesterday there was a vote in the House of Representatives To impeach President Trump or to force a vote on impeachment on President Trump.
And it went down in flames.
95 Democrats voted in favor, despite the fact that the impeachment resolution did not even include a rationale for impeaching Trump.
It didn't include a legal rationale, any high crimes, any misdemeanors.
It was basically that he was just divisive.
The grounds for the impeachment were that he was a meanie.
That he had retweeted certain videos and that he had banned transgender people from serving in the military and that he criticized NFL players who knelt during the national anthem.
None of this stuff is illegal.
None of it's a high crime or a misdemeanor.
You may not like it, but it's not illegal.
So 95 Democrats voted in favor because any excuse to impeach Trump felt they'll use.
And then most of the Democrats voted no.
So Trump thanked the Democrats last night at this rally.
But again, I have to tell you, this vote was so big.
I have to thank many of the Democrats.
I mean, that was amazing.
No, no, I really do.
I respect it.
I really do.
That was a that was a slaughter.
But many of those people that voted for us this afternoon in somewhat of a sneak attack, a real sneak attack.
Many of those people that voted for us were Democrats.
And I want to thank them because they did the right thing for our country.
OK, so again, the crowd and then the crowd laps it up because, listen, Trump plays the crowd, but the crowd also plays Trump.
And that's part of the dynamic here.
Trump is very, very good.
And the crowd will do whatever he wants, which is why Trump really should step in when the crowd does something he doesn't like.
So Trump continues his rally.
And again, Trump does have the ability to step in and say to the rally crowd, guys, come on, you're like, just cut it out.
Right?
He does have the abilities.
I remember a couple of years ago, I spoke at CPAC.
In the middle of my speech at CPAC, a bunch of people started chanting about Hillary Clinton to lock her up.
And I said, no, don't lock her up.
Leave her alone.
She's she's gotten all the punishment she deserves.
She's wandering around in the woods of Chappaqua.
You can do this, right?
And Trump could have played anything the crowd did as a joke.
Instead, he's playing this dynamic where he makes a joke, the crowd laughs, he makes a joke, the crowd laughs, the crowd starts chanting, and he kind of goes along with it.
That was the dynamic at the rally last night.
So Trump then went on to highlight all of Ilhan Omar's record, which again, is fine.
Ilhan Omar is a key member of Congress.
For people saying, well, she's just one of 435.
Yeah, really?
Is that why she was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine?
Is that why the entire mainstream media are mirroring her comments every week for the last several?
Is that why the New York Times, when she said something openly anti-Semitic, suggested that she was just reopening debate about the role of AIPAC in American public life?
Because she's unimportant?
Don't gaslight us.
We know that she's important.
The media have made her important.
So Trump highlighting her record is totally within bounds.
So Trump goes off on Ilhan Omar's record.
And everything he says here, correct.
Here he is.
She smeared U.S.
service members involved in Black Hawk Down.
Omar minimized the September 11th attacks on our homeland, saying some people did something.
I don't think so.
Some people did something.
Yeah, some people did something.
All right.
She pleaded for compassion for ISIS recruits attempting to join the terrorist organization.
She was looking for compassion.
Okay, everything he says there is true.
100% of the things he says there is true.
Now, people are angry about it, but all of that is true.
All of that is fine.
And again, he is not incorrect to highlight her record.
She is a leading member of the Democratic Congress and Nancy Pelosi is bowing before her and allowing her to run roughshod over the rest of the Congress.
And she's doing the same with the squad.
And when she tried to stand up, the squad basically shouted her down.
And Trump sort of helped them by highlighting them and forcing Nancy Pelosi to back their play.
So that's what led up to the most controversial moment of the last week.
In the middle of this rally, Trump is speaking about Ilhan Omar, and the crowd starts chanting, send her back.
I'll play the clip and then I'll explain why this is so wrong, why this is un-American, why this is bad.
Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screeds.
OK, now this is where we have gone across the line.
So this is where Trump should say, no, not send her back, vote her out.
Right?
That's where he should step in and say something, and he doesn't, and it's wrong of him not to do so.
Here is why we've gotten into this situation.
Trump and the crowd are one-upping each other.
So Trump, back earlier this week, said that all these people should go back to where they came from.
Which is, on a logical level, voluntary self-deportation, right?
If you don't like it, you can leave it.
Also, go back where you came from.
I don't want you here.
Go back where you came from.
And this has now morphed into the crowd chanting, send her back.
Ilhan Omar, as I've illustrated throughout this episode, and I think over the last year total, I think Ilhan Omar is just awful.
I think she is awful.
I think she's a terrible congressperson.
I think that virtually every word that emanates from her mouth is toxic.
I think that she says things about America and says things about terrorism and says things about Israel that are just garbage in every possible way.
I think she's an anti-Semite.
I think she hates Jews.
I think that she is a discredit to the Congress of the United States.
She's a, at the same time, She is a duly elected member of the Congress of the United States.
If you don't like her, you know what you could do?
You could run somebody against her and defeat her.
You can defeat her agenda in Congress.
You can point out that what she says is terrible.
You can do all of those things.
If you don't like what she says, there are plenty of ways to fight what she says, including the use of the First Amendment.
Maybe you don't like the fact that she's an American.
She is an American.
She's as American as you are, or as I am.
Her ideas may not be as good.
Her ideas may not be moral or decent.
But that does not mean that she is not an American.
She's a legal immigrant American citizen who is elected to Congress by the constituents of her district.
Send her back, as in deport her.
You can't deport American citizens with whom you disagree.
And I'm just going to ask you for a second to put the shoe on the other foot.
Let's say that Barack Obama in 2010 had said about a Tea Partier that you should, that the crowd at one of his rallies had started chanting, deport him.
How do you think that would have gone?
Would that have been a good thing or a bad thing?
Would that have been a moral thing?
Now, people today are doing the same routine that they always do with President Trump and that they always do with sort of the Trump movement.
And that is, guys, you can't take them totally seriously.
I mean, it's a crowd chanting.
And sure, it's just a crowd chanting.
Sure.
It was probably some dolt in the crowd who starts chanting and then a bunch of people start chanting because this is what happens when you have large crowds of people nearby, right?
There is a mentality that sets in where people just start chanting.
I don't think people thought through.
I don't think it's a bunch of people in that crowd who are sitting there thinking through, yeah, you know, should we or should we not call for the deportation of an American citizen?
I really don't think that's what happened.
I think somebody started chanting, send her back on an emotional level.
And then everybody started chanting, send her back.
And then Trump just stood there and took it.
Regardless, the chant can still be immoral, and the idea that you're supposed to deport people with whom you disagree, no matter how atrocious their ideas, those ideas are not criminal.
We do have a First Amendment.
Ilhan Omar is exercising her First Amendment rights.
You don't believe in or agree with the First Amendment if you believe that people should be deported for their public views that are not incitement to violence.
People don't get punished for speech in the United States.
Not by the government.
They can be punished socially.
They can be punished in the ballot box.
But this is, it's very disturbing and bad stuff.
Now, listen, I understand the frustration of people on the right who are like, well, why are you condemning them?
Why won't you condemn?
I spent the first 45 minutes of the show condemning Pelosi.
I understand people who are like, well, the media are paying outsized attention to a crowd chant.
Why won't they pay attention to the fact that Democrats for years called Republicans Nazis and AOC says it's a concentration camp down on the border and members of ICE are like Nazis.
I share your frustration, obviously, because I've sounded off on it.
I share your frustration too.
But just because the other side is doing a bad thing does not mean that you should do a bad thing.
And yes, it is morally wrong to suggest that Ilhan Omar should be deported.
It is morally wrong to suggest that an American citizen, no matter how much I dislike her, no matter how much I dislike her ideas, should be deported.
This is still a country where disagreement is supposed to be met with disagreement, not with threats of legal action.
And again, if you say, well, oh, well, it's just a crowd, the crowd chants things, it's like shouting at the umpire at a baseball game, everybody's there to have a good time.
All of that is fine to an extent.
But if you start shouting at the umpire to die, you've done something wrong.
And if the president of the United States, who's supposed to represent all Americans, is up there not saying anything, that's wrong too.
The president should have stopped this, and he should have stepped in, and he should have said no.
If she doesn't love it, she can leave it.
Right?
I mean, that's his line, right?
He could have just said that.
He could have said, if she doesn't love it, she can leave it.
And also, people shouldn't vote for her.
Vote her out.
There are a lot of things he could have said.
This is it was a bad moment.
And I certainly hope that Trump pulls back from the brink of all of this because it's bad and it's ugly.
But again, to a certain extent, he's sort of trapped by his own words.
I mean, earlier in the week, he did the whole go back to your home country and then the crowd takes it a step further.
And so now we have everybody taking it a step further, just like in the Democratic Party.
You've got the Democrats saying, Ilhan Omar, she's not anti-Semitic.
She's just unversed in the use of words.
And so she says something more anti-Semitic.
And then they're like, well, is she really anti-Semitic?
And then she does something more anti-Semitic.
Somebody has to put the brakes on this.
Stop this crap.
Somebody has to put the brake on this.
Somebody has to be a responsible adult in the room.
It's not good for the country.
Forget about just the election.
I care about the election too, guys.
I care about 2022.
You think I want Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris to be president?
Do you really think that?
No.
There's little in this world that I dread more than the idea of that happening.
And by the way, I think one of the ways that you make that happen is by alienating every suburban voter in America with the most extreme rhetoric you can possibly imagine on the right.
I think that is probably a mistake, electorally.
But beyond that, you know what I really do dread?
I dread that we are coming to the point in the country where The obvious solution to your opponents opposing you is to suggest that they are the worst human beings who have yet walked the earth.
There can be no debate.
There can be no compromise.
There can be no conversation.
Instead, it's just a matter of who wins and who loses, and everything is on the table.
That is the end of Republican conversation.
I mean, small r, Republican conversation.
So, as much as I care about Republican policies, and I do, as much as I care about conservative policies, and I certainly do, the predicate for all of that is a functioning system, a functioning polity, and I fear that the fraying is growing at an extraordinarily rapid rate.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
Okay, things that I like today.
Let's talk about the formation of this country.
So, James Madison kept Great notes on the formation of the country at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to 1789.
And the notes are quite wonderful.
There is an edition of them that you can get online, edited by Edward Larson and Michael Winship, talking about how the nation was formed.
Do you think that there weren't significant disagreements among the people who were at the Constitutional Convention?
Read the records.
People were raging at each other.
People couldn't stand each other.
People thought that the system could turn into a full-on tyranny.
They just fought a war.
I mean, there were significant arguments, but there was a fundamental recognition that they were all part of the same cause.
And I fear that we are losing that fundamental recognition.
And again, that recognition does not require that you believe that Ilhan Omar believes in the same causes you do.
I don't believe she believes in the same causes that you do.
But I believe that the cause itself, which is that people who disagree should not be deported, is more important than whatever Ilhan Omar thinks.
Agreement to disagree lies at the fundamental root of the country.
And then it's a question of how do you convince people through Conversation and through social measures.
How do you convince people to believe in virtue?
We may be reaching the post-liberal era where the only thing that matters is everybody agreeing with you, but I think that it requires both.
I don't think you can discard liberalism, the idea that people are allowed to disagree, and keep the virtue, and I don't think that you can discard the virtue and keep the liberalism.
I think that the left basically wants to discard the virtue and keep the liberalism, and the right, some on the right, want to discard the liberalism and keep the virtue.
I don't think that these mutually supportive bulwarks can maintain I don't think the country can maintain in the absence of either one of those polls.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so there is a piece in the New York Times Magazine called, I wanted to know what white men thought about their privilege.
So I asked by a Yale professor of poetry named Claudia Rankine.
And the piece is not very good.
It is extraordinarily long.
It's not very good.
And she talks at the beginning about all of the various writers that she's that she's read and recommended to her class.
She's talked about the history of racism in the United States.
Obviously, she says, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created.
How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to any alien being a free white person, develop over the years into our various immigration acts?
What has it taken to cleave citizenship from free white person?
What was the trajectory of the KKK after its formation at the end of the Civil War?
What was his relationship to the Black Codes?
Those laws subsequently passed in southern states.
Now listen, I'm all for knowing American history and for looking at the ugly parts of American history and for recognizing the role of the KKK and the role of white supremacy and all of this.
I think that's very important.
I think that reading that into modern American history and suggesting there is innately A relationship between the Naturalization Act of 1790 and becoming a citizen in 2019 is a massive, massive stretch.
But that's not what is, I think, silly about the piece.
The part that is silly about the piece is that this lady just tells a bunch of stories.
About her confrontations in airport lines.
That's really all the piece is.
It's just she saw a white guy in a line and he did something she didn't like and then she either had a conversation or didn't.
And this is supposed to tell us something deep about white privilege.
So she says, I hesitated when I stood in line for a flight across the country and a white man stepped in front of me.
He was with another white man.
Excuse me, I said, I'm in this line.
He stepped behind me, but not before first saying to his flight mate, you never know who they're letting into first class these days.
She says, was his statement a defensive move meant to cover his rudeness and embarrassment?
Or were we sharing a joke?
Perhaps he too had heard about the recent anecdote in which a black woman recalled a white woman stepping in front of her at the gate.
When the black woman told her she was in line, the white woman responded that it was the line for first class.
Was the man's comments a slight reference?
But he wasn't laughing, not even a little, not even a smile.
Deadpan.
Later, when I discussed this moment with my therapist, she told me she thought the man's statement was in response to his flight mate, not me.
I didn't matter to him, she said.
That's why he could step in front of me in the first place.
His embarrassment, if it was embarrassment, had everything to do with how he was seen by a person who did matter, his white male companion.
I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his imagination, she said.
Should this be a comfort?
Was my total invisibility preferable to a targeted insult?
If you want to look for instances of American racism and people who are racist in America, there are instances.
If you are talking to your therapist about that time a guy said something mean to you in an airport line, it's called welcome to being at an airport.
I have very little doubt that this person would have said the same thing if this were a white lady.
Because he was called out for being a jerk, and then he was embarrassed at being called out for being a jerk.
But let's assume that he's a racist.
What does that say about deep-seated American racism?
Not much.
It says that this guy's a racist.
Maybe.
Says that he's a jerk, but this article is an exercise in navel-gazing and trying to discern American history and the role of American history by looking at your belly button.
That really is what this article is.
It's not a systematic review of evidence.
It's not an examination of data.
It is all narrative stories that can be interpreted in several different ways, and then we're supposed to take away from this that her particular perspective on American racism is the correct one.
And she talks about, and she talks about all of this.
She says, how angry could I be at the white man on the plane?
The one who glanced at me each time he stood up on the way, he stood up, the way you look at a stone you had tripped on.
I understood that the man's behavior was also his socialization.
So now, it's not that the guy is responsible for being a racist.
It's that all of society is responsible for this guy being a racist.
But don't worry, she has other stories from the airplane.
Really, it's thousands of words long, all about this woman's, this Yale professor's stories from being treated nastily on an airplane.
Although I will say some of these stories don't look great for her.
She says, I was waiting in another line for access to another plane in another city as another group of white men approached.
When they realized they would have to get behind a dozen or so people already in line, they simply formed their own line next to us.
I said to the white man standing in front of me, now that is the height of white male privilege.
He laughed and remained smiling all the way to his seat.
He wished me a good flight.
We had shared something.
I don't know if it was the same thing for each of us, the same recognition of racialized privilege, but I could live with that polite form of unintelligibility.
No, probably he was laughing and he thought that you were joking because he thought, you've got to be kidding me.
No one would be that self-serious.
Again, have you ever been in an airport?
People are insanely rude at airports.
It is what they do.
People are constantly forming lines to the side at airports and doing rude things.
And so if somebody turned to me and there was like a separate line forming and I was in it, they're like, that's the height of white male privilege.
I'd be like, like, really?
Seriously?
This is an airport where people are rude.
But apparently, this is the old Adam Carolla line, that if you are black and you're pulled over by a cop unfairly, your immediate response is probably to think, because of the narrative and because of American history, it's because law enforcement is racist.
If you're white and you're pulled over by a cop wrongly, your first instinct is to say it's because the guy's a jerk.
Now, there are many more jerks than racists in American life.
So statistically speaking, It is more likely the person's jerk.
That's the same thing in this particular case.
She says, I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing as well as obnoxious.
Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play about white male privilege in one act.
I appreciated the drama.
One or two of them chuckled at their own audacity.
She said, the people in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and accepting sex.
So hold on a second.
They formed a separate line that was largely white and male.
And it was next to another line that was basically white and male, except for the one black lady.
And the other line was the white supremacist line?
How do we know it wasn't your line that you were standing?
Like, how do we know this?
She said, after I watched this scene play out, I filed it away to use as an example in my class.
How would my students read this moment?
Some would no doubt be enraged by the white female gate agent who let it happen.
I would ask why it was easier to be angry with her than with the group of men.
Because she didn't recognize or utilize her institutional power.
My goodness.
My goodness.
And then, good news, there are more airport stories.
This continues.
As I became more and more frustrated with myself, writes this Yale professor, for avoiding asking my question, I wondered if presumed segregation in business or first class should have been number 47 on Macintosh's list.
Macintosh is the creator of white privilege.
Just do it, I told myself.
Just ask a random white guy how he feels about his privilege.
On my next flight, I came close.
I was a black woman in the company of mostly white men, in seats that allowed for both proximity and separate spaces.
The flight attendant brought drinks to everyone around me, but repeatedly forgot my orange juice.
Telling myself orange juice is sugar and she might be doing the post-cancer body a favor, I just nodded when she apologized the second time.
The third time, she walked by without the juice.
The white man sitting next to me said to her, This is incredible.
You have brought me two drinks in the time you have forgotten to bring her one.
She immediately returned with the juice.
I thanked him.
He said she isn't suited to her job.
I didn't respond.
She didn't forget your drinks.
She didn't forget you.
You are just seated next to no one in this no place.
Instead, I just said, she likes you more.
So what she wanted to respond was that she was being ignored by the stewardess because she was black.
Right?
She didn't forget you.
It's because I'm no one in her eyes.
How do you know she's not just a bad flight attendant?
When you're trying to mind-read people, you very often end up in the worst places.
So instead, she says, I said she just likes you more.
He perhaps thought I was speaking about him in particular and blushed.
Did he understand I was joking about white male privilege?
It didn't seem so.
Right, because who jokes about white male privilege?
Like, is this all this lady jokes about?
Her comedic repertoire needs some work.
He brought both hands up to his cheeks as if to hold in the heat of this embarrassing pleasure.
Coming or going, he asked, changing the subject.
I'm returning from Johannesburg.
Really, he said, I was just in Cape Town.
Hence your advocacy, I thought ungenerously.
Why was that thought in my head?
I myself am overdetermined by my race.
Is that avoidable?
Is that a problem?
Had I made the problem or was I given the problem?
Well, you're making a problem now.
So far the guy said nothing offensive and he's defended you from a stewardess who's not giving you a drink.
She says, on the long flight, I didn't bring up white male privilege, jokes, or otherwise again.
Instead, we wandered around our recent memories of South Africa and discussed the resort where he stayed and the safari I took.
She says, back home when I mentioned these encounters to my white husband, he was amused.
He said, they're just defensive.
White fragility, he added with.
So the guy's white fragility.
He's what he was defending you.
And he's still somebody who's suffering from white fragility.
OK, so then we come to the culminating story of this asinine piece in The New York Times magazine from a Yale professor.
Again, quote, I finally got up my nerve to ask a stranger directly about white privilege as I was sitting next to him at the gate.
He had initiated our conversation because he was frustrated about yet another delay.
We shared that frustration together.
Eventually, he asked what I did.
I told him I write and teach.
Where do you teach, he asked.
Yale, I answered.
He told me his son wanted to go there but hadn't been accepted during the early application process.
It's tough when you can't play the diversity card, he added.
Was he thinking out loud?
Were the words just slipping out before he could catch them?
Was this the innocence of white privilege?
Was he yanking my chain?
Was he snapping the white privilege flag in my face?
Should I have asked him why he had an expectation his son should be admitted early, without delay, without pause, without waiting?
Should I have asked how he knew a person of color took his son's seat and not another white son of one of these many white men sitting around us?
Well, Yale has an affirmative action program.
That's what he's talking about.
There's legalized racism at many institutions of higher learning.
You want to talk about institutional racism?
It is endemic institutional racism to favor people of one race over another race solely on the basis of that race.
That is what he is talking about.
And he is correct that when you go to Ivy League schools, there is a determined attempt to bring in people of particular races by race.
By the administrators at these schools.
That is what he is talking about.
That does not make him a racist.
That means that he is pointing out an obvious fact that has been true since Bakke in the United States.
It's been true for literally decades that if colleges are admitting people on the basis of race, then that means that other peoples are being excluded on the basis of race.
Then the guy tried to walk it back.
Right, he said the Asians are flooding the Ivy League.
So he tried to walk it back.
So he's not talking about affirmative action.
Now, this is where he gets to be racist.
Okay, it's not racist to say my son isn't playing the diversity card because he can't.
Right, it is racist to say the Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues.
That's racist because Asians aren't flooding the Ivy Leagues.
Qualified people are flooding the Ivy Leagues and many of those people happen to be disproportionately Asian.
Right, it's actually racist of the administration at Harvard to say we have too many Asians here, we can't allow enough in.
That's racist.
So it's racist when the guy says the Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues.
But she's happy with this.
with this?
She goes, "Perhaps the clarification was intended to make it clear that he wasn't speaking right now about black people and their forms of affirmative action.
He had remembered something.
He had recalled who was sitting next to him.
That did it.
I asked, "I've been thinking about white male privilege, and I wonder if you think about yours or your son's." It almost seemed to be a non sequitur to be rolled with it.
He said, "Not me.
I've worked hard for everything I have." And then she goes on to talk about how no white man has actually worked hard for everything that he has.
He says, "Was it...
What was it that Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing?
I got into Yale Law School.
That's the number one law school in the country.
I had no connections there.
I got there by busting my tail in college.
He apparently believed this despite the fact that his grandfather went to Yale.
I couldn't tell by looking at the man I was sitting next to, but I wondered if he was an ethnic white rather than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Do you understand how dumb it is to think like this and how ugly it is to think like this in the United States?
That if you say, I worked really hard to get where I've gone, That somebody looks at you and they say, really?
What color are you?
That's how this works?
Demonstrate how my Jewish family is benefiting from white privilege.
Now, if you want to say that there is systemic racism that has existed in the United States against black folks, And you also want to say that that has outsized impact over time.
I think that's an argument that can be made, although I think that you'd have to argue about the outsized impact.
Like, what is the actual impact?
How much of it is personal decision-making, differentials in personal decision-making post-1965?
How much of it is the legacy of slavery or Jim Crow?
Like, those are all good, open arguments.
But you know what is not a good argument to people?
You accomplish something in your life, that's because you're white.
That is a very, very bad argument, and it's a very ugly and untrue argument, generally.
Because white people don't just hand other things to white people on the basis of white people being white.
If they do, then that's racism, and you can call out the racism for the racism.
But I guess the idea is that Brett Kavanaugh, what, didn't work hard?
That this guy did not work hard?
She said, I said to the man, what if I said I wasn't referring to generations of economic wealth, to Mayflower Wealth and Connection?
She said, I asked him if he gets flagged when he passes through TSA.
Not usually.
He said, I have global entry.
So do I, I said, but I still get stopped.
And then this apparently, he's supposed to what?
Acknowledge that racial profiling at TSA is a true and obvious phenomenon on the basis of her personal experiences?
If your argument boils down to my personal experience, your truth, it's not a very good argument.
You need some data for all of this.
And finally, she concludes, not long after this, I was on another flight.
So all she does is take flights and talks and talk to white people about white privilege.
Seems like a pretty terrible job.
She says, not long after this, I was on another flight and sitting next to a white man who felt as if he could already be a friend.
Our conversation had the ease of kicking a ball around on a fall afternoon.
We were just having a great time.
He asked who my favorite musician was.
I told him the Commodores because of one song, Night Shift, which is basically an elegy.
He loved Bruce Springsteen, but Night Shift was also one of his favorite songs.
Eventually, he told me he had been working on diversity inside his company.
We still have a long way to go, he said.
Then he repeated himself.
We still have a long way to go, adding, I don't see color.
And then she says, the phrase, I don't see color, pulled an emergency brake in my mind.
Why would you be bringing up diversity if you didn't see color, I wondered?
Would you tell your wife you had a nice talk with a woman or a black woman?
Help.
All I could think to say was, ain't I a black woman?
Okay, like, I don't know how you have a conversation with a person like this.
I really don't, Claudia Rankine, the professor at Yale.
Because everything you do is going to be psychoanalyzed for a thousand reasons.
And without any truth to it, it's her projecting her own vision of what you should be onto you or what you are truly saying onto you.
This is one of the things that separates Americans from Americans is the determination to attribute motives to people without proper evidence for those motives.
That's a good example.
If I want to say that Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semite, I think it's pretty obvious from all of her behavior and all of her statements.
Like all of them.
Consistently.
For years.
If you want to say that the guy's probably a beneficiary of white privilege and racism because he says he doesn't see color, I'm going to suggest that that's way worse for the country and an actual problem for the country.
Okay, well, we will be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, or we will see you tomorrow here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Trump's crowds are angry about Ilhan Omar and their chanting, send her back!
Should we clutch our pearls?
Thump our chests?
Thump our pearls?
Clutch our chests?
Sounds like a porn film, but we'll figure it out.
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