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Jan. 29, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

54:35

The First Real Peace Plan | Ep. 942

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	President Trump unveils his Middle East peace plan, Team Trump concludes its impeachment defense, and panic sets in for Democrats as Bernie closes in on Iowa.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.com.
	Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Well, you may have noticed this is a chaotic year already, right?
	We are not even at the end of January.
	We've already had a confrontation with Iran.
	We've already had the stock market bumping up and down thanks to coronavirus.
	And now we have a big election coming up and impeachment going on.
	Now might be a great time for you to think about diversifying into something solid, something like precious metals.
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	It's something that you should be doing.
	If you haven't yet taken the first step of requesting a free information kit on gold, go ahead and do it.
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	Okay.
	So we'll get to everything impeachment related in a little bit.
	We'll also get to everything 2020 related because Bernie Sanders continues to surge and the media continue to pretend that Bernie Sanders is like a normal Democrat as opposed to a flaming communist, a flaming geriatric communist.
	It's unbelievable that Bernie has never been asked a single question about something as simple as, do you believe that private property is a right?
	Right now, normally you wouldn't have to ask a candidate that question, but when you're Bernie Sanders and you have spent your entire career calling for the nationalization of all product and the destruction of the profit motive, at a certain point, it seems like it would be worthwhile to ask him whether he believes healthcare is a right, so does he believe private property ownership is a right?
	Does he believe that it's a right?
	Seriously, very simple question.
	Does Bernie Sanders believe?
	He has said so before.
	He has said that before.
	He has said so before.
	Does he believe that the banks should be nationalized?
	He has said that before.
	Does he believe that real estate should be nationalized?
	He just called for national rent control.
	National rent control effectively means that if you want new public units built, you're going to have to do it through public funding, which means public housing.
	So what doesn't he want to nationalize?
	Like, these would be very simple questions, and you would figure that a guy who came in a very narrow second to Hillary Clinton last time around would have been asked some simple questions, but nobody asked him any simple questions, and so instead you have this pie-in-the-sky nonsense he's been preaching for literally decades, and everybody acting as though this is normal stuff, as though they can pick and choose from his communist poo-poo platter, and that he will then be a normal Democrat
	Moving forward, don't worry, we'll get to Bernie Sanders in a little while and his surge because that should be frightening both Democrats who are looking straight in the face of radicalization and Republicans because the fact is that yes, Bernie Sanders would be an easier to beat candidate than somebody like Joe Biden, who's basically just a corpse at this point.
	But with that said, is it a good thing that 45% of the American population would then be radicalized around an openly communist agenda?
	Probably not.
	And we'll get to all of that in just a little while.
	First, we got to talk about this Trump peace plan.
	So Trump brings out this peace plan yesterday.
	And his peace plan is effectively very simple.
	Basically, he acknowledges realities on the ground.
	That's what this Trump Middle East peace plan is.
	Now, what you're hearing from the media today is that Trump has changed the game in the Middle East.
	That Trump has abandoned prospects for peace.
	Now, what's hilarious about this is that prospects for peace have sucked always.
	The reason they have sucked always in the Middle East is because you have one side that would like to wipe the other side off of the map.
	Not a lot of prospects for peace over there.
	See, in order to understand the Middle East conflict, what you have to understand is one very simple truth.
	Israel has accepted every peace offer that has ever been put in front of it.
	And every single peace offer has been rejected by the Palestinians and the Arab world generally.
	Back in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was first promulgated, that said that there would be a Jewish national home in Palestine, meaning now what would be Jordan as well as Israel.
	When that was first put out there, the Jews immediately accepted it.
	The Arabs turned it down.
	And when people talk about this vast territory for the Jews, let's be real about this.
	There are some 58 Arab and Muslim countries on planet Earth.
	Arab or Muslim countries on planet Earth.
	All the Arab countries are also Muslim countries.
	There is one Jewish state on planet Earth.
	It is tiny.
	Israel is something like 15,000 square miles.
	It is extraordinarily small.
	Israel is half the size of New Jersey in a region that is extraordinarily large.
	So the idea of a Jewish national home there not only is not any sort of giant Cram down on the Arab population.
	It is a tiny percentage of the total landmass in the area.
	And of course, Jews have never stopped living there.
	There's a historic Jewish tie to the land of Israel.
	But the reason I'm going back in the history is you need to understand why it is that peace has never happened there.
	And it ain't because of the Jews.
	OK, so the Jews were originally told by the British mandate, by the British, that they were going to get Jordan as well as Israel.
	OK, then the British sliced off Jordan.
	Then they sliced off half of Israel.
	They sliced away most of Judea and Samaria.
	They sliced away half of Jerusalem.
	They sliced away the Gaza Strip.
	And then the Jews accepted that.
	The Jews were like, okay, the UN says that Israel can be a state.
	Jerusalem will be an open international city, right?
	Under the tutelage of the West, right?
	It will not be, in fact, owned by the Jews or owned by the Arabs.
	It'll be under the tutelage of the United Nations or whatever.
	Israel accepts that deal.
	Accepts it.
	Granted an indefensible rump state.
	The borders in 1947 that Israel accepted and that the Arabs rejected has been termed by people living in Israel the Auschwitz borders because they're completely indefensible.
	Completely.
	To understand how small Israel is, you have to understand that the borders before 1967 included an area of Israel that is nine miles wide.
	The distance from our office to the Santa Monica beach.
	That is the distance.
	And without traffic.
	Without traffic you can travel the width of Israel.
	The width of the state of Israel.
	You can travel that without traffic in the 47-48 borders.
	You can travel that in under 15 minutes.
	That is the width of the entire country in that particular area.
	If you've never been to Israel, you don't understand the geography, you don't actually understand what's going on, you don't understand how closely everything is packed together.
	Okay, so Israel accepts that, and the Arabs reject it, and they declare war.
	The Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, they all declare war on this new state The British, who are very much afraid of ticking off the Arabs because they didn't want to drive the Arabs into the arms of the Soviet Union, they refuse to allow Jews to immigrate to British Mandate Palestine.
	So during World War II, as the Holocaust is happening, the British Mandate is preventing Jews from moving in, specifically because they don't want to tick off the Arabs in the area.
	The Jews largely go along with that.
	Ben-Gurion largely goes along with that in the interest of eventually getting a state.
	The state is finally granted by the United Nations.
	And once that happens, the Jews are like, OK, fine, I guess we'll just accept this.
	OK, fine.
	Like, OK, good.
	At least we have a place to go.
	At least now there is a Jewish national home.
	And the Arabs say no.
	OK, this is when all of Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem's international control and the Gaza Strip, all of that is delegated to the Arabs who had pre-67 borders.
	And the Arabs say no.
	And then they launch an annihilation attack on the state of Israel and Israel fights back.
	Now, in the early stages of that of that war, Arabs are urged by the Arab leadership to flee the area specifically because they're supposed to get out of the way of the onrushing Arab armies that are going to come in and crush the Jews.
	So 100,000 Palestinian Arabs, Arabs who are living in the British Mandate Palestine and in the Jewish area of what will be the Israeli state of Palestine.
	The Israeli area of Palestine.
	100,000 100,000 Arabs flee.
	Then, as the war progresses, it turns out that a lot of the Arab villages are actually fifth columns operating on behalf of the Arab armies, which is exactly what you would expect because this is an ethnic conflict.
	The Arabs are using these as bases of attack against the Jews.
	They're cutting off supply lines, supply rolls, and the Israelis put into place something called Operation Dalet, which says, we are not going to lock down our tiny army in guarding these villages that are effectively In many cases, a fifth column.
	Instead, we're going to tell people that they need to leave these villages and move over to the Arab side.
	Remember, when the State of Israel is declared, the State of Israel's Declaration of Independence urges the Arab citizens to stay.
	It says, stay here.
	Be part of the work that we are doing.
	Be part of the state.
	Ben-Gurion didn't understand why the Arabs are fleeing.
	He's saying, you can live here.
	What's the problem?
	Jews lived as a minority in Arab countries for thousands of years.
	Why exactly should there not be one Jewish state where Arabs are a minority?
	And the assumption on the part of the Israeli leadership is that as all the Jews flowed into Israel from the other Arab countries and from Europe, that that would become a minority population, more of a minority population, the Arab population.
	People flee, and then the Israeli army in the second wave is fighting these battles, and in the middle of war, there's always population turmoil.
	People always leave to get out of the way of onrushing battles.
	And the Israeli army can't afford to be locked down, pinned down, trying to defend insurgent campaigns in certain villages, and so they clear the population out.
	Okay, so after the war ends, there are now something like anywhere from 400 to 700,000 Palestinian refugees.
	At the same exact time, Nearly the same number of Jews are expelled from Arab countries around the region.
	Nobody ever talks about this, right?
	Like the reason that there are so many Moroccan Jews who live in Israel, the reason there are so many Iranian Jews living in Israel, the reason there are so many Syrian Jews living in Israel is because at the time of the Israeli founding, 700,000 Jews were expelled from the surrounding Arab countries and Israel took all of them in.
	All of them.
	Israel took all of them in with no international help.
	Normally, the UN had helped fund the placement of refugees in new places.
	No help at all.
	Israel takes all of them in.
	The Arab states, instead of absorbing these populations into the general population, decides that they are going to keep these populations as refugees.
	So the first move is we are not going to actually allow them to return to the state of Israel.
	We're not going to allow them to move back to the state of Israel because that would be acknowledging that we lost the war and that they would have to then be Israeli citizens.
	Then very quickly, within about a year, the Arab leadership says, you know what would be great?
	Is if we could infiltrate the state of Israel with a bunch of people who are on our side and want to see the state of Israel destroyed.
	And at that point, the Israelis are like, well, guess what?
	We are not letting people back into the state where they fled their homes.
	We're not letting them back in just to...
	Stand in favor of the destruction of the state of Israel.
	Now, never in human history has it been the obligation of a state that was declared war on by its surrounding population to take in large numbers of members of people who are trying to destroy the state from within.
	That has never been a thing.
	And in the aftermath of every war, there are refugees.
	The idea of resettlement of the refugees back in their original homes has never really been a thing either.
	The fact is, in the aftermath of World War II, there were huge population transfers all over Europe.
	In the aftermath of the declaration of the division of Pakistan and India, there were tens of millions of people who were refugees and they were taken in by their new countries.
	The idea is that Indians would live in India, and Muslims would live in Pakistan, and the specific area where there is no separation, Kashmir, has been a hotspot ever since.
	But there's never been any call for the last 60 years for all of the Indians who were expelled from Pakistan and left Pakistan to have their original homes back in Pakistan, right?
	This has never been a negotiation point.
	The Palestinians then are used as a tool by the Arab world to club Israel into submission, and they're used as an excuse to claim that Israel ought to be destroyed.
	This is the so-called Right of Return.
	There's a great book on this, I recommended it yesterday, called The War of Return by a couple of leftist Israelis, one who is a former Labor MK, a member of Knesset, and one of whom is a journalist for Haaretz.
	Okay, so, I'm just explaining the history because you're not going to understand Trump's peace plan until you understand this.
	Okay, so, there's never been anything internationally that says that Jews cannot live in Judea and Samaria.
	It's a ridiculous suggestion.
	The notion that it is somehow a violation of international law for the Jews who won a defensive war in 1948 to settle in the areas that they want is absurd.
	Okay, in 1964, the Arabs still have Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.
	Egypt is in the Gaza Strip, but has not annexed it, specifically because it does not actually want the Palestinian population absorbed into the Egyptian population.
	Judea and Samaria have not been annexed by Jordan, right?
	They have not been technically annexed by Jordan for the exact same reason, but Jordan is ruling Judea and Samaria.
	Okay, this is a- So, the notion That Israel was always ruling all of these Arabs?
	It's just not historically true.
	The Palestine Liberation Organization, which is Yasser Arafat's organization, now the Palestinian Authority, which rules the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Area A. The Palestinian Authority, effectively, is founded in 1964.
	Now you might notice something with the timeline here.
	1964 is before 1967.
	In 1964, the Arabs are talking about the liberation of Palestine.
	At that point, Jerusalem is split.
	The Jordanians are in control of the Old City of Jerusalem.
	They've banned all Jews from entering the Old City of Jerusalem.
	They've discriminated against Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem.
	They've built barbed wire fences throughout Jerusalem.
	Hey, they already control Judea and Samaria, Egypt controls the Gaza Strip, and yet there's something called the Palestine Liberation Organization.
	Weird!
	What exactly are they seeking to liberate?
	Well, they make very clear in their charter what exactly they are seeking to liberate.
	Every square inch of territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
	In other words, the murder of every Jew in that region and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from that region, a second Holocaust.
	Okay, they've made this clear since 1964.
	Then the 1967 war happens, and all of the Arab countries, under the leadership of Nasser and Egypt, decide to mobilize against the Israelis.
	They decide that they're going to launch a second war of redemption against the Israelis.
	And the Israelis get wind of this, and the Israelis...
	Then kick back and launch a preemptive strike downing the Egyptian Air Force and in the famous Six Day War, taking over Judea and Samaria in a defensive action and taking over the Negev Desert as well.
	Well, they've already taken the Negev, but taking over the Sinai as well, radically expanding their boundaries.
	Israel's first move after the 67 war is to hand back the Sinai to the Egyptians, And to make peace overtures to the rest of the Arab countries who naturally enough reject that out of hand.
	Because again, Israel has never rejected a peace offer, a serious peace offer, and the Arabs have never accepted a peace offer.
	So they still refuse to accept the existence of the state of Israel.
	The 1973 war happens.
	Israel again is hit with a widespread Arab attack.
	Syrians, Jordanians, the Saudis are involved, the Egyptians are involved.
	They launched the war on Yom Kippur.
	So for all the talk about religious tolerance, they launched a war on the holiest day of the Jewish year, when everybody is fasting and in shul.
	They launched that attack.
	Several thousand Israelis die.
	And the Israelis fight back.
	It is an existential threat for them.
	Remember, every war for the Israelis is an existential war.
	Okay, it's not like these are border disputes.
	These are existential wars because their enemies are not seeking to liberate or to make Muslim certain small slices of territory.
	They are seeking Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jaffa and all of it.
	They want all of it.
	Okay, so, 1973 happens.
	Israel fights back.
	Israel, once again, fights all the way to the Suez Canal.
	By the way, it's worth noting that there was a 1956 war in here, too, in which the Egyptians and the Saudis closed off the Suez Canal to all Israeli shipping, they closed the Straits of Hormuz to all Israeli shipping, and Israel launched a preemptive war.
	By the way, in conjunction with the French and the British.
	It was only the Eisenhower administration, which was Arabist, which stopped the Israelis from liberating the Suez Canal.
	In any case, Israel is constantly fighting for its survival.
	1973 war happens.
	Israel, again, saves itself from utter destruction and annihilation at the hands of the Arabs.
	They thought, literally, this was going to be the second Holocaust happening in real time.
	This is 1973, because not long ago.
	Hey, and they end up expanding their territory into the Golan Heights, they end up expanding their territory again into the Sinai, and then they end up giving back the Sinai, right, in the 80- in the, uh, they actually won the Sinai, not in 67, but in 73.
	They end up giving the Sinai back, very promptly, to the Egyptians, and then they seek peace, right?
	The Israelis are constantly seeking peace.
	Then the Oslo Accords happen.
	The Oslo Accords are Israel's attempt to bring back some form of leadership for the Palestinians and say, we don't want to control you people, please.
	Like, anybody who wants to control these folks can.
	Now, important to note, none of the Arab countries still, for 50 years at this point, right, by the 1990s, for 50 years, none of the Arab countries have actually taken in the Palestinians, except that the Palestinians have been living and working in all these Arab countries.
	So, the Palestinians are living and working in Jordan.
	The Palestinians are living and working in Lebanon.
	These are refugee camps 50 years after the fact.
	This has never existed in human history.
	A refugee camp 50 years after the fact.
	Funded by the UNRWA, one of the most despicable organizations on planet Earth.
	There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in Kuwait.
	In fact, during the 1991 Gulf War, 200,000 Kuwaiti Palestinians are expelled because they were siding with Saddam Hussein.
	Nobody ever talks about that because that's Arabs expelling other Arabs, so nobody cares.
	Okay, so Israel then moves forward with Oslo.
	The innate promise of Oslo is that Israel will grant sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, a terrorist.
	They'll grant sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority in return for them acknowledging that Israel has a right to exist and leaving Israel alone.
	So it's a blackmail deal.
	Israel says, okay, fine, we're willing to be blackmailed if you leave us alone.
	Immediately, there's a wave of suicide bombings.
	There's a wave of homicide bombings.
	Immediately, there's a wave of violence after Oslo that nobody ever talks about.
	Then, in 2000, Israel comes back to the table with Bill Clinton brokering.
	And Ehud Barak, then the Prime Minister of Israel, offers an enormous deal to the Palestinians.
	Offers them half of Jerusalem, including control of the Temple Mount.
	Offers them 98% of the West Bank, the so-called West Bank, offers them control of the Gaza Strip, and Yasser Arafat walks away without a counteroffer and launches the second intifada.
	And then, 2008, fast forward.
	Okay, so actually, fast forward to 2005.
	2005, Israel says, listen, we don't even want control of the Gaza Strip, right?
	We've got thousands of Jews living in Gush Katif.
	We don't want control of this.
	We don't want anything to do with this, right?
	We want out.
	That would be nice.
	Like, we don't want this.
	We don't want our young men and women being drafted into the army to go and have to defend territory that really the Palestinians are living in anyway.
	Yes, we have a legit claim on it, both by the laws of war and by the laws of history.
	But we're not going to, we don't want it.
	We want out.
	Ariel Sharon then initiates so-called disengagement from Gaza, pulls out, and the Palestinians immediately burn down every single greenhouse that the Jews leave behind, all these beautiful greenhouses and agricultural resources.
	The Palestinians go in and burn it, like, to the ground.
	And then they elect Hamas, a terrorist group, that uses the Gaza Strip as a staging area for rocket attacks and suicide attacks, which they've been doing ever since 2005, after Israeli disengagement.
	So there are no Jews in the Gaza Strip.
	Doesn't matter.
	That is completely run by Hamas.
	Hey, meanwhile, the Israelis are still trying to cut a deal.
	So Ehud Olmert, who's the prime minister in 2008, this is right before Bibi is elected, and he's sort of the reason Bibi is elected.
	Ehud Olmert, in 2008, offers the Palestinians an even better deal than Ehud Barak offered.
	Again, 98, 99% of Judea and Samaria, plus control over portions of the old city of Jerusalem, plus a land bridge to the Gaza Strip, all of it, right?
	He offers everything.
	And Mahmoud Abbas, who is a holocaust denying piece of human debris, who supports terrorism, immediately rejects it, out of hand, without a counteroffer.
	Right, okay, so the reason I tell you this whole history is because this is the backdrop to Trump's peace deal.
	Trump's peace deal is in recognition of reality.
	The obstacle to peace in the Middle East is not and has never been the Israelis.
	The obstacle to peace in the Middle East is not Israel's willingness to give up territory, which Israel has shown willingness every single time this has been brought to the table.
	The obstacle to peace is not the quote-unquote Israeli settlements, which are just a recognition that Jews should be allowed to live in areas.
	Okay, the fact is, 20% of Israel is Arab.
	0% of the Palestine Authority is Jewish.
	0%.
	There are signs on the roads in Israel that say, if you drive off this area of the road, right, you're driving along the road, there's a red sign off the side of the road.
	I mean, my producer Colton can testify to this because he's seen it.
	You're driving along the highway, okay, and it will say, if you stay on this road, there's a green sign, it's all fine, you drive off this road, the Israeli army is not in control of this area and cannot protect you, you are risking your life.
	Right, because if you're a Jew and you take a wrong turn into a Palestinian area, there is a solid shot they will pull you out of your car and you will be murdered.
	If a Palestinian mistakenly drives into Israeli territory, right, not violates the law and drives over the border and runs over a soldier or something, but mistakenly is let in, they go and have a nice cup of coffee and tell if you didn't go home.
	Okay, that's how all of this works.
	So you have to understand the internal dynamics.
	What the Trump administration did in this peace deal is they recognized a simple reality.
	And the simple reality is that unless the Palestinians get it through their skulls, and I'm talking about the Palestinian leadership because I think that a lot of Palestinians themselves would like to see this thing end.
	If the Palestinian leadership ever got it through their skulls, That Israel ain't going anywhere?
	Then you would have peace.
	So long as they believe that there is the prospect of a gradualistic destruction of the state of Israel, there will never be peace, there will be consistent violence, it will be continued forever.
	Israel would love no- My friend Dennis Prager says this all the time.
	If the Israelis put down their guns, the next day, there would be no Jews.
	If the Palestinians put down their guns, the next day there will be a Palestinian state.
	It is that simple.
	The Trump administration acknowledges this, the rest of the world refuses to, either because of complete ignorance and foolishness, or because of base, disgusting anti-Semitism.
	Because any objective observer of the situation would say that a militarily superior power willing to give up land, specifically in order to guarantee That there being less terrorism against its people is not the aggressor in the situation.
	Especially not when they've had to fight one, two, three, four, if you count the Gaza war, five, at least five defensive wars against the same folks and waves of terrorism throughout.
	Okay, we'll get to the actual plan in a second because there is something that the Trump peace plan does.
	It's not gonna be successful because the Palestinians will never accept the peace plan because Aba Eban, the former foreign minister for Israel once said, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
	In a second, I'll explain what actually did change on the ground thanks to Trump's peace proposal.
	Again, a recognition of reality.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so Trump makes his proposal.
	His proposal is very simple.
	The reality on the ground is the reality on the ground.
	The Palestinians can either take it or leave it.
	That seems like a real answer to the situation, right?
	No pie-in-the-sky crap about how Israel is going to take in 5 million Palestinians because what the Palestinians want at this point is they want everybody who's been registered by the UNRWA as a Palestinian refugee over the last 70 years absorbed into Israel, which is an insanity.
	I mean, it's a pure insanity.
	And the West has been humoring this garbage for years.
	It's absolute ridiculousness.
	The UNRWA registers anybody as a Palestinian refugee who is the child or grandchild of a person who has claimed at any point, with or without evidence, to have lived inside of Israel.
	Hey, first of all, even if you believe that there is a right to live in quote-unquote Palestine, that would be inside the negotiated borders of Palestine, not in your quote-unquote old home.
	Right?
	The right to go back to where it was that your house was.
	That's absurd.
	It ignores the fact that the responsibility for the refugees lies entirely with the Arab world that declared war on a state that was willing to accept its original borders as given by the United Nations.
	In any case, that's not going to happen.
	Everybody knows that's not going to happen.
	Even leftist negotiators who've been trying to work out this deal understand they always thought the right of return for the Palestinians was simply a bargaining chip.
	In reality, the right of return is the simple basis for everything the Palestinians want, which is the destruction of the state of Israel, which is why they've been teaching it with billions of American taxpayer dollars over the years in those UNRWA schools.
	OK, so this plan says there's no right of return.
	This is silly.
	If Israel takes in a symbolic number of Palestinian refugees, they're willing to do that, but they're not absorbing millions of Palestinians who have been born over the years, not when they're being granted a state that's absurd.
	It's like it really it's ridiculous on every level.
	Also, Israel is not going to dismantle major Jewish centers.
	Now, again, people are like, oh, my God, how dare Trump suggest such a thing?
	Well, let's be real about this.
	Even the Clinton and Obama administrations recognized that Israel was never going to withdraw from areas like Efrat, which has, I think, what, 20,000, 30,000 people living there?
	They were never going to simply withdraw from that area.
	Instead, there would be land swaps or something.
	Trump says, listen, These are disputed areas.
	These are not quote-unquote Palestinian areas.
	These are disputed areas because, number one, Israel won these areas in a defensive war.
	Two, Israelis have a historic connection to the land.
	In fact, the most historic areas of Israel are not Tel Aviv and Haifa.
	The most historic areas of Israel are places that are in the West Bank, all right, or in Judea and Samaria.
	Places like Hebron.
	That's just a simple truth.
	And also, Trump is recognizing, listen, the Palestinians can either take this thing or the situation on the ground is moving away from them because they refuse to accept a state.
	Because the truth is, Israel would be much more willing to deal with a state that was not trying to murder them at every turn than they are willing to deal with a terrorist state that is going to use its base as a launch point for attack.
	They're not going to go back to the Auschwitz borders of pre-67.
	So Trump makes this announcement, that is the basic announcement, you know, there will be foreign aid to the Palestinians, that they are going to open their economy, that economic aid will flow.
	Again, the Israelis accepted a horrible deal in 1940, a much worse deal than this one, in 1947.
	The Palestinians have rejected deals much better than this one at every turn.
	So what Trump is really doing here, what this really does show, is that the Palestinians are intransigent, again, because they're always intransigent, because their goal was never any sort of peace deal.
	It was the full-scale destruction of the state of Israel.
	Simple as that.
	So under the peace vision, the quote-unquote settlers would remain in place.
	Again, amazing.
	Israel is expected to have a 20% Arab population.
	The Palestinian Authority is expected to have a completely Judenrein state.
	All Jews expelled.
	But don't worry, it's Israel that's the apartheid state gang.
	It's pretty incredible.
	Israel will retain sovereignty in areas that it would need to retain sovereignty in order to guarantee its own security.
	No Palestinians will be forced to leave their homes.
	No Jews will be forced to leave their homes.
	There will be a highway between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank that will allow free transportation.
	And the Palestinians will be reintegrated into the world economy.
	Now, what is this really?
	The Palestinian Authority immediately rejected this.
	Out of hand.
	They immediately rejected this.
	This is not any surprise.
	Of course they did.
	And in fact, the Palestinians went out on the street and burned crap.
	Which is called Tuesday in the Gaza Strip.
	They went out and they burned stuff.
	Because, you mean, in response to a peace offer?
	The Palestinians got violent?
	That is only the history of the entire Middle East situation every single time ever in history.
	So here is a little bit of video from, I believe this one is from the West Bank, where Palestinians are burning things and rioting, which is not a giant surprise.
	Again, when you're indoctrinated for 70 years in the belief that if you just hold out long enough the Jews will disappear, then of course this is exactly what happens as soon as you are offered a state of your own.
	Remember, Israelis were offered a state of their own in 1947, a rump state that was indefensible without any arms to defend it, and they took it.
	Because they wanted the state.
	The Palestinians don't want a state.
	They just want the annihilation of the state of Israel.
	End of story.
	Okay, so, this happens, then Mahmoud Abbas comes out, and he says a thousand no's.
	A thousand no's to the deal of the century, according to Mahmoud Abbas.
	And so, this is what he had to say, this terror, this terrorist piece of garbage, as I'll explain in a second.
	Abbas, sends money to the families of terrorists, he names streets after terrorists, he celebrates them as martyrs, and yet he is purported to be the great peace partner for the Israelis.
	It's a joke, and it's a savage joke against Jews.
	The same week that the world celebrates, well, celebrates, commemorates the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and you got all these people tagging Never Again on Twitter, the same people are like, oh, Mahmoud Mahmoud Bas, what a wonderful guy, literally wrote his thesis in grad school on Holocaust denial, And also happens to be a rabid anti-Semite who supports the murders of Jews pretty much anywhere it happens.
	Here is Mahmoud Abbas saying a thousand no's to the Trump peace deal.
	We describe it as a slap of the century, not a deal of the century, and by God, we are going to return it in several slaps to our adversaries.
	Up to this day, our situation never wavered and never changed.
	And today, after we have heard all this nonsense from the beginning to the end, we will say 1,000 times, no, no and no.
	So the media are playing this as if Trump had made a better offer, he wouldn't be saying a thousand times no.
	He was literally offered everything he could possibly want in 2008 by Ehud Olmert, and he rejected it.
	He rejected it outright.
	Okay, the fact is, until the Palestinian people oust their leadership and put people in place who want to make a peace deal, there will be no peace deal.
	It is that simple.
	Because the people, like, here's the truth.
	The reason Abbas walked away from the peace deal in 2008 is because Abbas knew that he would likely be killed by the terrorist groups he was making deals with if he made a deal.
	That's what actually happened in 2008.
	It also happened in 2000.
	So the media are playing this again as Trump's shortcoming.
	But weirdly enough, weirdly enough, the actual story here has nothing to do with the left wing.
	It has nothing to do with the Europeans.
	Because you know who is okay with this.
	Here's the real story.
	The real story that matters in the Trump peace deal.
	Here's what matters.
	Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and the UAE issued statement welcoming the peace plan.
	I mean, now that is a shocker.
	The reason that is a shocker is because Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and the UAE, not so much.
	But Saudi Arabia and Egypt were directly involved in the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars.
	They've stood directly against the existence of the state of Israel.
	They were still calling it the Zionist entity until five minutes ago.
	So they've dramatically shifted their position on this.
	This is a recognition that Israel will continue to exist by the Arab world.
	That's the part of this that matters.
	Because the lie that's been told by the left, and it is an absolute outright lie, is that at the center of all conflict in the Middle East lies the Israelis and the Palestinians.
	And if only we could solve this canker, then that would solve everything.
	Or if we could just fix this thing, if the Israelis would just be less intransigent and less mean and less cruel, and if they would just give the Palestinians what they want, then everyone would get along and the world would sing as one.
	And it's absolute garbage.
	Not only was it not true 50 years ago, it is certainly not true now.
	The Saudis, the Egyptians, Qatar, the UAE, Jordanians, they do not want the Palestinians overrunning the state of Israel.
	They do not want the Palestinians in control of Jerusalem.
	They don't care about the Palestinians in control of Jerusalem.
	Because they think that the Palestinians are run by violent terrorist groups.
	Because they are run by violent terrorist groups.
	So this is their acknowledgement, and this is the part that matters.
	This is, we're five minutes, really.
	This is historic, and everybody's gonna ignore it.
	They're gonna pretend that Trump's an idiot.
	He is not.
	This is a smart plan.
	The reason it's a smart plan is because the possibility of normalization of relations between a bunch of the Arab countries and Israel is very, very possible.
	It is definitely possible.
	Which, by the way, would have been the sought outcome of a peace deal, right?
	What exactly was everyone seeking to solve in the region?
	What everyone is seeking to solve is the recognition by the Arabs that Israel exists.
	And that gets solved!
	Okay, that's being solved right now because this is just a recognition of what happens on the ground.
	And Trump says, listen, this is a realistic endpoint.
	And what you guys are, you know, what you guys are complaining about, I don't understand.
	Like, if you wanted to make a deal, you could have made a deal a thousand times before.
	Here's another opportunity to make a deal.
	If you keep rejecting deals, there will be no deal.
	Our proposal provides precise technical solutions to make Israelis, Palestinians, and the region safer and much more prosperous.
	My vision presents a win-win opportunity for both sides, a realistic two-state solution that resolves the risk of Palestinian statehood to Israel's security.
	Today, Israel has taken a giant step toward peace.
	Okay, so the media are just lying to you about this.
	The reason the media are lying, they say, a muted Arab response to Trump's Mideast peace plan.
	Well, you would expect that it would be somewhat muted, considering that Trump is basically saying the Israelis get to stay where they are, they get to continue to have a unified Jerusalem, and they continue to exist.
	That is running counter 180 degrees to everything that the Arab states have been saying for two genera- three generations at this point, and a thousand generations before that.
	Okay, this run- the fact that there was a muted response in favor of the plan is not a muted response, that's a massive success!
	That's a massive success!
	You understand?
	I mean, that's like saying that somebody who wanted to murder somebody the other day now says, well, you know, I guess we can go to coffee.
	Is that a muted response or not?
	We're not going to be best friends.
	We're not going to hang out all the time.
	We're not going to, like, go to watch the Super Bowl together.
	But that's a pretty large shift from I want to murder you and your family to, OK, I guess that we can have coffee together.
	Like, that's a massive shift.
	And the media are treating that as though that is a loss for Trump.
	Like, what in the actual F?
	What are they actually?
	Again, it takes tremendous amounts of ignorance to cover the Middle East the way that the media do.
	Good news, the media are up to the challenge.
	They are tremendously, tremendously ignorant.
	I love this.
	The editorial board of the Washington Post says, the Middle East peace plan amounts to another one-sided gift So the right wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they're trying to make it about Netanyahu.
	It ain't about Netanyahu.
	You know who else was celebrating this?
	The supposed left winger, Benny Gantz, who is the direct opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu in this.
	And they say it's a radical shift in a half century old American policy.
	Hmm.
	Could it be that that policy has been a giant ass failure?
	Could it be that the policy for the last 50 years has been garbage?
	Because last I checked, Was there peace, like, anywhere in here?
	Like, I just gave you a timeline.
	Was there peace in 48, 56, 67, 73, 82, 91, 2000, 2005, 2000?
	Like, was there peace anywhere in here?
	Anywhere?
	Because what I'm hearing is, if only Trump had kept banging his head against the wall, yelling at the Israelis, then things would have changed.
	I love this.
	U.S.
	sanctions for the annexation of settlements will, meanwhile, deliver a devastating blow to the prospects for a two-state resolution between Israelis and Palestinians.
	This, of course, misses the entire point.
	The idea here from the Washington Post continues to be the complete and ugly and stupid myth that all that's happening is a territorial dispute as opposed to a war of annihilation, a 60- to 70-year war of annihilation fought by Israel's enemies against the state of Israel.
	And doing that on the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz is pretty telling, is it not?
	The same people who are hashtagging Never Again, people like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, are supporting Hamas, which openly speaks of genocidal anti-Jewish hatred.
	So, I will take everything they have to say on this with a grain of salt.
	Again, if you believe that the real intransigent party in the Middle East has been the Israelis, it's because you don't know a damn thing, like zero things about the Middle East.
	It's truly incredible.
	Okay.
	In a second, we're going to get to everything impeachment-related, and we'll get to a little bit of 2020.
	But I wanted to give you the full-on analysis of everything that's happening with the peace plan because the media are lying to you.
	They are lying to you outright, just like they always do.
	They lied to you about Iran, and then Trump uses deterrence, and it works because the media don't know what they're talking about, and or they actively promulgate agendas that are counter to the interests of the West.
	I mean, really, there's no other way to read this.
	Anyway, we'll get to more of this in one sec.
	We'll get to impeachment and everything else.
	First, a quick note.
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	Okay, so on to impeachment.
	So, the Republicans are in the middle of an internal battle over whether or not to allow witnesses.
	It appears that Mitch McConnell does not have the votes to stop witnesses from happening.
	This was as of last night.
	He says Republican leaders said they don't currently have enough votes to block witnesses in President Trump's Senate impeachment trial, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	People familiar with the matter said, after his legal team concluded its efforts, to counter Democrats' charges that the president abused power and obstructed Congress.
	On the third and final day of presentations, lawyers tried to cast doubts on the importance and credibility of allegations by former National Security Advisor John Bolton about the president's motives for freezing aid to Ukraine.
	Pat Cipollone, who is the attorney for the president, he says, listen, this should end now.
	We should know more witnesses.
	We've already heard everything that we need to hear.
	Here is Pat Cipollone making Trump's case for him.
	Overturning the last election and massively interfering with the upcoming one, would cause serious and lasting damage to the people of the United States and to our great country.
	The Senate cannot allow this to happen.
	It is time for this to end, here and now.
	So, we urge the Senate to reject these articles of impeachment for all of the reasons we have given you.
	Okay, there's only one problem with this, of course, and that is that President Trump has gotten into a firefight with one of the prospective chief witnesses.
	Now, the reason that's a problem is because then it looks like a Republican cover-up if they don't actually hear from the witness.
	That would be John Bolton.
	So, a lot of folks on the right have opened up their guns on Bolton.
	They're suggesting that Bolton is a traitor, that Bolton is doing something wrong here.
	Here is the reality.
	Again, this was only forced by the fact that the President of the United States constantly craps all over his subordinates, and also the fact that the President of the United States has a bad habit Of immediately claiming that nothing has ever gone wrong, when in fact, if you just said, yeah, I had conversations with the Ukrainians, I talked to them about linking military aid to investigations, and you know what?
	That was completely legit.
	That would be the end of the story, would it not?
	But instead, he has to say no quid pro quo, perfect phone call, and all the rest.
	And that forces him into a factual conflict with a key witness.
	And this is why you are seeing Republicans who are a little bit dicey on all of this.
	Now, there's a conflict in the Republican caucus about all this.
	Susan Collins, who is in Maine and is more moderate and is struggling for a seat right now.
	Again, remember, you know, everybody wants to make this about Trump.
	Trump's not getting impeached.
	Okay, let's be clear about this.
	You need two-thirds of the Senate to impeach.
	They do not have it.
	It's not going to happen.
	He's not getting impeached.
	There's another issue on the table here.
	The other issue on the table is that if senators look like they're obstructing, they could lose the Senate.
	That is a problem for Republicans.
	If you're in favor of conservatism, if you want to see Trump reelected, and you would also like to see a Republican Senate, which seems like kind of a big thing, then what you would like here is for all the information to get out as early as possible.
	We'll hear all of it.
	In all likelihood, and I said like 99.9% likelihood, there's nothing there that is impeachable.
	And then we move forward to the election.
	Okay, but people who are ripping on Collins and Romney, who are ripping on Murkowski, who are ripping on the Republicans in purple states who could lose their seats, all because Trump decided to make his stand on a dumb defense.
	It's really ridiculous.
	Here's what Trump tweeted about John Bolton today.
	Okay, John Bolton is his former national security advisor.
	So Trump tweeted today.
	today for a guy who couldn't get approved for the ambassador to the un years ago couldn't get approved for anything since begged me for a non-senate approved job which i gave him despite many saying don't do it sir takes the job mistakenly says libyan model on tv and many more mistakes of judgment gets fired because frankly if i listened to him we would be in world war six by now i don't know what happened to three four and five but and goes out and immediately writes a nasty and untrue All classified national security.
	Who would do this?
	This is such a dumb strategy, okay?
	Put aside the fact that Trump has never met a subordinate he will not crap on, which is why it's very difficult for him to get people to work for him, which is just bad policy generally.
	Hey, I run a company.
	You know what I don't do at this company?
	Except in the zip recruiter ads, okay?
	The only thing I don't do at this company is crap on my subordinates.
	Seriously, we treat people very well at this company because that's what a smart CEO does.
	Trump brings people in, and then he just dumps on them, and then he is surprised when they come at him.
	Okay, now that's bad, right?
	They shouldn't come at him, but at the same time, Why is he?
	He's now escalating a conflict with a chief witness, which puts Republicans in the position of either having to say that John Bolton is an outright liar and also we don't need to hear from him or John Bolton is telling the truth and the president is fibbing and we don't need to hear from him.
	Neither of those is a supremely tenable position.
	Here is Susan Collins, who again, I don't think is being supremely unreasonable.
	I know this is an unpopular view on the right.
	I do not think she's being unreasonable when she says that she is likely to support witnesses.
	I do know that but for the efforts that four of us made to ensure that that vote would occur, that it's unlikely that we would have had that opportunity.
	So I'm pleased that every senator will have the opportunity to vote on whether or not additional witnesses and documents are necessary.
	It is very likely that I'm going to conclude that, yes, we do need to hear from witnesses.
	OK, well, again, so the Republicans who are saying, well, it'll drag this thing out.
	OK, so then accelerate it.
	Accelerate it.
	Like, just say we're going to do all the witnesses.
	We're going to have two hours of hearings for all the witnesses.
	The Democrats accelerated it.
	The Democrats did their entire impeachment hearings in two weeks.
	The notion this has to take months on end, I don't see why.
	Really.
	I don't see it.
	Now, on the other hand, there are Republicans who are saying this isn't going to be helpful, it's going to drag out.
	Here's a worst-case scenario for Republicans.
	They don't call witnesses.
	Two weeks before the election, a bunch of witnesses come out and say a bunch of damaging things to Trump.
	Trump loses and the Republicans lose the Senate.
	That is the worst-case scenario for Republicans.
	The worst-case scenario is not that this thing drags out in the middle of primaries and people are bored with it, which is really what is happening right now.
	Nonetheless, here's Roger Wicker from Mississippi.
	Saying, I don't think that the testimony would be helpful at this point, so this is the battle inside the Republican caucus.
	I don't think the testimony of Ambassador Bolton would be helpful, because I basically think, in agreement with the very scholarly approach that Mr. Dershowitz gave, that there's no article there that is pronounced for impeachment Now, people are saying, like, why are you so sanguine about the possibility of having witnesses?
	Aren't you worried about it?
	And the answer is no.
	The reason I'm not worried about having witnesses is because I don't actually think Trump did anything impeachable.
	I don't actually think he did.
	Now, you can say that Republicans should just stonewall it on principle because the Democrats are bad and badly motivated.
	That's true.
	But don't worry about the Democrats.
	Worry about the swing voters.
	Worry about the fact that in the polls, over 50 percent of Americans say they want Trump removed from office.
	Which is not exactly where you want to be going into a re-elect effort.
	Okay, and that's certainly not where you want to be in some of these swing states if you're a senator.
	Okay, so this bizarre notion that it's John Bolton's fault that all of this is happening, if only he'd kept his mouth shut.
	Fiona Hill already testified to all of this.
	The problem is that Trump decided to double down on a dumb defense he didn't need to do, simply because of a personal fit of pique.
	So it's we got some excellent Trump in the Trump peace deal.
	OK, that's good Trump.
	And then we got some bad Trump.
	The bad Trump here is Trump's plan for his own defense, which of course is very, very foolish.
	Meanwhile.
	Bernie Sanders continues to gain ground.
	He is now leading in all of the betting markets for the Democratic nomination, which is incredible.
	Democrats are panicking over Bernie Sanders' rise.
	They should be panicked over Bernie Sanders' rise.
	The man is far too radical for the American public.
	And Bernie Sanders supporters are some of the... I mean, this is the McGovern campaign, 72.
	It really is.
	Bernie Sanders' people invaded Joe Biden's campaign office in Iowa singing civil rights songs because apparently Joe Biden is now a segregationist.
	I'm gonna let it shine in Joe Biden's office.
	I'm gonna let it shine in Joe Biden's office.
	I'm gonna let it shine.
	You want these people in charge of the country?
	How's that sound to you?
	Does it sound fantastic?
	People who, like, think that Joe Biden is the root of all evil?
	Now listen, I'll admit that I'm enjoying the internecine warfare inside the Democratic Party because, hell, you know, karma is a hell of a drug, but at the same time, These people?
	You want these people in charge?
	I mean, they're nuts.
	They're nuts.
	OK, people for Bernie released an ad promoting Bernie Sanders as a perfume, which is weird because Bernie Sanders himself has said that he doesn't... I don't understand why the market should allow 16 different types of deodorant.
	I personally do not like any of that.
	Do not like any deodorant.
	I think people should experience the manly scent of Bernie Sanders.
	People for Bernie cut an ad with Bernie as a perfume bottle, which is like the worst perfume you could possibly imagine.
	It's the mix of old man and socialism.
	Do we have a clip of the, uh, this is, this would be clip 20?
	Introducing Bernay.
	The people's perfume.
	It's a bottle of perfume with Bernie Sanders's head.
	Yeah, that smell of prunes and pudding.
	Really doing it for folks.
	They're tearing up their healthcare bills 1%.
	They're tearing up their Stafford loan accounts because Bernie's going to make everything free.
	This isn't creepy, or weird, or anything.
	Like, at all.
	Yeah, let's put these people in charge of the country.
	Like, how is this not a parody?
	How?
	How?
	How does that look not a parody?
	This was put out by the People for Bernie account.
	It's an actual account.
	Okay, so...
	Well done.
	If it is a parody, if I'm getting all this wrong, it is a parody, well done on the parody.
	If it's not, like, wow.
	Wow.
	No wonder Democrats are a little bit worried about Bernie as the nominee.
	They should be.
	By the way, I'm worried about Bernie as the nominee because there are only two possible outcomes.
	He runs and he loses, but he wins 45% of the vote for a full-on commie agenda, or two, he runs and he wins, in which case we have our first communist president.
	Thanks, everybody.
	Well done.
	Well done all around.
	Okay, time for, well, we'll just do some things that I hate today.
	So I am perfectly amazed at the controversy that is now broken out over a book called American Dirt.
	It is a left-wing book.
	It's a left-wing propaganda piece about the evils of America's immigration system.
	And the entire tale is supposed to be, it's written by a woman named Janine Cummings.
	Okay, the author has one, I guess, Puerto Rican grandparent.
	She is not Hispanic.
	She has declared herself white in previous interviews.
	American Dirt, according to Vox, is the fictional account of a woman forced to travel with illegal immigrants after escaping from drug lords in Mexico.
	It tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, Fleeing their home in Acapulco, Mexico for the U.S.
	after the rest of their family is murdered by a drug cartel.
	Lydia is a bookstore owner who never thought of herself as having anything in common with the migrants she sees on the news.
	But after she comes up with the plan of disguising herself by posing as a migrant, she realizes that it won't really be a disguise.
	It's who she is now.
	The book's author earned a seven-figure advance, according to Emily Zanotti, writing for Daily Wire.
	And publishers were so convinced it would be a bestseller, they ordered a first printing of more than half a million copies.
	It was endorsed by a bevy of celebrities.
	Oprah Winfrey made it her book club pick for the month of January, thus ensuring that it would be a massive bestseller.
	Because as soon as Oprah says it's a book of the month club pick, it's going to sell a ginormous number of copies.
	And the entire narrative of the book was supposed to be about how Trump is evil, right?
	That was the entire narrative of the book.
	Cummings writes in a note about this.
	There's an author's note at the beginning of the book.
	It says, at worst, we perceive illegal immigrants as an invading mob of resource draining criminals and at best a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mask clamoring for help at our doorstep.
	We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.
	But now, now it turns out, and this is something I both like and hate.
	I like it because, again, karma is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
	At the same time, this is so disgusting and it's so stupid.
	She's a bad lady, Cummings.
	You know why Cummings is bad?
	Because she's not Hispanic.
	She's not Hispanic and she wrote a book about illegal immigrants who are Hispanic, and now she's been accused of trauma porn and a form of cultural appropriation because she's telling the story of illegal immigrants while being white.
	This apparently is very bad.
	She said in an interview, I worried that as a non-migrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants.
	I wish someone slightly browner than me would write it.
	But then I thought, if you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?
	That doesn't seem unreasonable.
	Why does the color of the skin, the person pushing for a particular political agenda, have to match the color of the skin of the characters in the book?
	That's patently silly.
	She claims she has spent hundreds of hours traveling with migrants and studying them.
	Apparently the woke critics are not okay with this.
	Also, Cummings portrays the United States as a great place to be, and woke progressives are upset about this.
	A critic said, American dirt fails to convey any Mexican sensibility.
	It aspires to be Dia de las Muertas, but instead embodies Halloween.
	And Mexicanas get raped in the U.S.
	too.
	Okay, let's just be clear about this.
	The rate of rape on these caravan trains and by coyotes is not close to the rape of women in the United States.
	Those are not comparable in any way.
	The critic says, you know better.
	You know how dangerous the U.S.
	is.
	You still chose to frame this place as a sanctuary.
	It's not.
	Okay, so question.
	If it's not a sanctuary, then why are millions of people trying to get in?
	Seriously, why are the caravans going this way and not that way?
	If this is not a sanctuary, why are people trying to cross the border?
	Weird.
	People don't typically try to get into places that are less safe than the places they came from.
	And people are very upset about this, because they say that there was border-chic barbed wire at the centerpieces at America Dirt's book release party.
	There was concern that writers of color would never be offered a seven-figure advance.
	Selma Hayek originally endorsed the book, and then she backed off her endorsement.
	She said, oh, I didn't read it.
	She was forced to correct her endorsement.
	No joke.
	No joke.
	And this was promoted by the idiots writing these critiques.
	So happy Salma Hayek reflected and corrected her support of the book.
	Corrected her support of the book.
	And Oprah is saying we have to rethink this and have a deeper conversation.
	Which again is sort of wonderfully delicious in terms of the karmic justice in all of this.
	Hey, Raffaella Zachariah has a piece over at CNN today criticizing American Dirt.
	It says, in part fueled by the book's breakout success, bitter controversy has sprung up around American Dirt.
	An increasing number of Mexican-Americans and Latinx writers and readers, by the way, the number of Latinos and Latinas in the United States who prefer to be referred to as Latinx is approaching zero, have objected to what they see as Cummins' appropriation and marketing of a story that isn't hers to a mainstream, largely white audience.
	Because obviously, if you're talking about an issue that affects brown people to a white audience, and you're a white person, that's supes racist.
	Super terrible.
	Amazing.
	By the way, I wonder what they would have made of the Civil Rights Movement, wherein many white people were talking about the plight of black people to other white people.
	I wonder what- You know, there were zero black people who were sitting in the United States Senate, as far as I'm aware, at the time of the Civil Rights Act.
	So there were a lot of white people talking to a lot of other white people, and it was a really good thing, because that's how you got the Civil Rights Act.
	Many have denounced the book or taken to social media and other platforms to appeal to readers to, as Miriam Gerba put it on Twitter, read something told in our own voices.
	New York Times reviewer Parul Sehgal called the book enviably easy to read and determinably apolitical.
	And Oprah said, from the first sentence I was in, this helps explain why the book is such a problem, says the CNN writer.
	Again, this is a left-wing book about how evil America's immigration system is.
	What Sehgal and Oprah are describing is a book that is utterly absorbing to a passive reader, which is bad.
	You don't want books that people like.
	You want books that people hate.
	Typically, books that generate empathy in the absence of politics run into trouble, according to many critics, because the empathy feels empty.
	following two sentences.
	Get ready for it.
	This is amazing.
	Typically, books that generate empathy in the absence of politics run into trouble, according to many critics, because the empathy feels empty.
	Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin stands as perhaps the best example of this phenomenon.
	Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the leading drivers of abolitionist sentiment in the United States by virtually every historical account and maybe led to the election So if you're going to talk about books that are bad, you should not put Uncle Tom's Cabin on the list of books that are bad.
	Yes, it was written by a white lady about the plight of slaves and how evil slavery was, and it was written as a third-hand account.
	And slaveholders said that it was an exaggeration and all of this.
	And it was one of the great feats of American literature of the 19th century, and maybe in American history, specifically because it drove support for abolitionism.
	And here this person is saying that's not good enough.
	Should have been a black person.
	Unbelievable.
	Unbelievable.
	But this is how crazy the left is.
	They're undercutting their own causes, so long as the person who's pushing the cause is not sufficiently, is not sufficiently leveled up in melanin.
	This is where we have come.
	So that's why it's a thing I hate, because it's just another evidence that while I enjoy the woke left eating itself, and that's fun, while I enjoy watching these snowflakes devour one another, at the same time it is very bad for the country when identity politics is so strong that even if you push the left-wing agenda, if you don't have the right skin color, this is somehow cultural appropriation and very, very bad.
	This is the polarization and the destruction of the country in real time.
	Again, I don't even know the book.
	I haven't read the book.
	I probably, from the reviews, probably wouldn't enjoy the book very much, but I will say that a white lady writing a book about the plight of illegal immigrants is not inherently a bad thing, and anyone who says it is is either an idiot or has a badly motivated view of what the United States ought to be.
	Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content, all your impeachment updates and all the rest.
	We'll see you a little bit later, or we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
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