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July 13, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:12
To The Left, Conservative Authoritarians, Not Communist Dictators, Are The Problem | Ep. 1295
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The Biden administration downplays the evil of the communist Cuban regime while simultaneously labeling American conservatives authoritarian racists.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, the Biden administration had a choice.
When faced with the fact that there's this massive movement in Cuba against the regime, the Biden administration could have taken the Obama attack or they could have taken the more traditional Democratic attack.
So you'll recall that the Democratic Party was not pro-Cuba for the vast majority of Cuba's Communist existence.
It was JFK who was the leading sponsor of attempts to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.
And Democrats after that were not big fans of the Castro regime or the communism that it was pushing.
And yet now the Democratic Party seems split.
And this is reflected in the attitude of the Biden White House toward the current Cuban dissident movement.
What we are watching in Cuba right now is perfectly predictable.
We are watching as the As the Cuban regime cracks down on dissidents, there's a dissident named Luis Emanuel Alcantara, who I spoke with just a few weeks ago via phone.
He was in Cuba.
The Cuban security services cut off the call.
He talked about the movement.
He explained what the movement was.
It was not based merely on the economic circumstances in Cuba.
It was not based merely on the lack of vaccines in Cuba.
It was not based, in other words, on things that had arisen in the last five minutes.
It was in fact a movement that was rooted in a lack of liberty.
It was a movement rooted in opposition to the communist regime itself and its unwillingness to allow for basic human freedoms in the state.
Until now, Luis Manuel Alcantara has been detained by the Castro regime.
His family and friends have no idea where he is.
And this is happening to dissidents all over the island, as is perfectly predictable, because as it turns out, communist regimes, authoritarian regimes, the way that they treat dissidents is by picking them up and tossing them in dank cells and leaving them there for as long as humanly possible or outright killing them.
Those are usually the chief available and useful options to these regimes.
And so this does raise the question, what should the United States' position be?
Now, on a moral level, the United States' position should be pretty obvious.
It should be the position of traditional Democrats, which is that the Cuban regime ought to be condemned, and we ought to do everything in our powers to see that regime topple.
And then there is the Obama position.
The Obama position was that the U.S.
embargo on Cuba had created the conditions that allowed for the continuation of the regime.
See, Obama's view on foreign policy was always that the United States was at fault, and the way for the United States to allow other regimes to change is to be warm to them, be cuddly to them, be friendly to them.
This is why he suggested that the way to open up Iran's authoritarian dictatorship was to pass them into the economy of the world, make them part of the family of nations.
It didn't work.
Iran continued to fund terrorism all over the region.
And then Obama tried the same thing with Cuba.
He suggested that if we just opened up Cuba's economy, if we got rid of the travel embargo, if we got rid of many of the sanctions, this would somehow make Cuba thrive.
Cuba would become a better place to live and the regime would be less stable.
Of course, precisely the opposite happened.
The Cuban regime became slightly more stable because when you give dictators more money, it turns out they use that money in order to solidify their rule over the areas in which they have total control.
Hey, so this has led to a bit of a conflict inside the Biden White House.
There are a bunch of old Obama holdovers who seem to continue to have the perspective that the United States is the problem in Cuba and that the Cuban regime ought to be treated with a certain level of respect, with kid gloves, And then there's some old school Democrats who, including Joe Biden, by the way, who seem to be less sanguine about the Cuban regime.
And this is evident from the sort of statements that are being made by the Biden administration, which are in conflict with themselves.
They are not internally consistent.
So, Joe Biden did put out a statement.
Here was Joe Biden's statement.
He said, we stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic.
And from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they've been subjected by Cuba's authoritarian regime.
The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights.
Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected.
Okay, so far that statement is not bad, right?
So far, he's calling the regime authoritarian.
He's talking about its repression and its economic suffering due to the regime.
He's talking about the universal rights of the Cuban people.
And then he gets to the final sentence.
The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment, rather than enriching themselves.
Now, that is not a call for the Cuban regime to respect the human rights of its people.
That is not a call for the Cuban regime to respect the individual ability of Cubans to dissent from the evils of the regime, to use those supposedly universal rights like the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future.
And Cuba's been subverting those rights for six decades at this point, for 62 years, since the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
The last sentence, where the United States calls on Cuba not to allow for free speech, not to allow for freedom of assembly, but to take care of the problem.
That is Obama-speak.
Okay, the Obama-speak there is, well, if the Cuban regime would just give its people a little bit more medicine, if the Cuban regime would just take care of the social welfare of its people, well, then the communist regime could stay and the human rights are completely secondary.
This is a perverse view of the Cuban regime, and it's a perverse view of what exactly is going on in the first place.
Because the reality, once again, is that the Cuban regime is the problem.
It is not that the current problems in Cuba are a result of any sort of extraneous force.
They are not.
They are the deepest effect of the underlying problems.
It's so funny.
The left in the United States will suggest that everything that happens in the United States is the result of underlying structural racism.
This is their big shtick.
But when it comes to Cuba, the left in the United States wants to separate off the current economic circumstances, the current inability to pass out vaccines from supposedly this incredible national healthcare system.
They don't want to attribute any of that to the obvious underlying structural problem, which is not something vague like structural racism that has been alleviated in the United States over the course of the past six decades.
No, this is absolutely clear.
This is a country that has repressed the ability of its own citizens to hold private property, The way that you go to the supermarket in Cuba is the government hands you this script that you can only use at the supermarket, and then they give you the products at prices that Cuba's regime thinks you ought to pay.
It is an unfree society, which is again why tens of thousands of human beings have attempted to float their way from an island 90 miles off the coast of Florida through shark-infested waters, all the way to places like Miami.
In just one second, we'll get to the continued conflict inside the Biden regime, because once again, there's this internal division in Biden's own mind, I think, between the old Biden, who is the quote-unquote moderate Biden, and the new Biden, who is woke and Bernie Sanders-esque on all of this.
By the way, we are now talking about 72 hours of this going on without any comment from Bernie Sanders, who's busily tweeting about the evils of Jeff Bezos from his lake house.
It's very convenient to be a communist in the United States.
It's not nearly as convenient to be a communist subject of authoritarian regimes in Cuba or Hong Kong, for example.
We'll get to more in a second.
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So part of what drives the sort of Obama-esque view of how Cuba ought to be treated is a particular view of the United States and its values.
There's a view that Obama made mainstream on the left, and had been mainstream back in the 70s, but kind of fell out of favor with the rise of the Reagan era.
Which is that America was inherently bad.
America's involvement in Vietnam was bad.
America's involvement in Iraq was bad.
And America's involvement in Cuba is bad.
America is the nefarious force in the world.
And the real problems that Americans need to face down are the problems here at home.
America doesn't have anything to say about what happens in the rest of the world.
Because after all, America is just too perverse.
Cuba people demanding their freedom from an authoritarian regime.
America's just too much of a problem.
So this has led, as I say, to this conflict inside the Biden administration.
On the one hand, you have Joe Biden, who is speaking sort of classical Democrat language from the JFK days, talking about how the people of the United States stand firmly with the people of Cuba.
Here was the president of the United States saying the right thing with regard to Cuba yesterday.
Cuban people demanding their freedom from an authoritarian regime.
And I don't think we've seen anything like this protest in a long, long time.
quite frankly ever.
The United States stands firmly with the people of Cuba as they assert their universal rights.
And we call on the government, the government of Cuba, to refrain from violence or attempts to silence the voice of the people of Cuba.
Okay, this is the right statement.
Credit where credit is due.
Joe Biden is saying the right thing.
The problem is His administration immediately started trying to walk a lot of this stuff back.
So first, they said that the statement that he put out was written for him, right?
Not by him, for him.
Then, Jen Psaki tried to downplay what was happening in Cuba as merely a sort of spontaneous eruption at the lack of economic opportunity and the problems with regard to vaccine distribution in Cuba.
This is not true.
It is not true.
I've been talking to Cuban dissidents for the last several weeks.
They were planning this sort of stuff for weeks on end.
There was a burgeoning democratic movement in Cuba.
I knew weeks ago that people were going to get out in the streets.
People in Cuba knew weeks ago that they were going to get out into the streets.
This is not just about the way the Cuban regime is handling its problems right now.
And this, again, is a sort of pattern in the way the Democrats view the world.
When a bad thing happens out there, they like to say not that it's a pattern that springs from the nefarious evil of underlying institutions.
Right.
When it was Benghazi, it wasn't the nefarious evil of ISIS that was to blame.
Or America's soft stance with regard to security in places like Libya that was to blame.
No, it was just a spontaneous eruption of upset over a random YouTube video.
And now, according to Jen Psaki, what's going on in Cuba is a spontaneous eruption thanks to economic dislocation.
That is untrue.
It is not true.
The Cuban people do not wish to live under the boot heel of this regime any longer.
And downplaying what is happening in Cuba as some sort of like spontaneous reaction to current economic circumstance ignores the fact that a huge percentage of South Florida's population are Cuban expatriates who fled from the country specifically because it is an oppressive hell hole.
Hey, here's Jen Psaki sort of downplaying the cause that people are fighting and now being imprisoned and probably dying for in Cuba.
There's every indication that yesterday's protests were spontaneous expressions of people who are exhausted with the Cuban government's economic mismanagement and repression.
And these are protests inspired by the harsh reality of everyday life in Cuba, not people in another country.
I'm saying that because I think there have been a range of accusations out there, as you well know.
OK, and then she says, well, you know, it was really the lack of vaccines that caused all of this.
Trying to downplay this as lack of vaccines or spontaneous eruptions over the economy ignores the fact there have been people on the ground planning this sort of stuff for decades, fighting this sort of stuff for decades, not just in Cuba, but also outside of Cuba.
We've talked to them on the program.
Here is Jen Psaki again, taking the sort of Obama-esque approach here.
Obviously, one of the issues that Okay, now here's the problem.
that protesters are justifiably out there in the streets protesting about is hunger, is lack of access to vaccines, et cetera.
But we are continuing to provide a range of assistance, which we will continue to do.
Okay, now here's the problem.
One of the big problems is not just the moral problem with sort of making light of the underlying evil of the Cuban regime.
The bigger problem is that the solution that would seem to be called for by diagnosis of the problem as just COVID vaccines or lack of economic opportunity is you ship some money and some vaccines over there.
Just throw them some cash, throw them some vaccines, and then call it a day.
That would seem to be the dictated solution.
But that, of course, is not a solution.
The solution is the fall of the regime.
The United States can't necessarily effectuate that from the outside, but we certainly can do a whole hell of a lot more than simply talk about how, you know, they may have botched this one.
Peter Doocy from Fox News was back in the White House press room and asking the tough questions.
So he said, yeah, so you guys keep saying it's about vaccines and the economy. I've noticed that they are not shouting vaccines and the economy. They are shouting freedom and enough. Here's Peter Doocy grilling Jen Psaki. When these protesters are yelling freedom and enough, there are people within the administration who think they're saying freedom from rising COVID cases. Again, I would say that when people are out there in the streets protesting and complaining about the lack
of access to economic prosperity, to the medical supplies they need, to a life they deserve to live, that can take on a range of meanings.
There's a global pandemic right now.
Most people in that country don't have access to vaccines.
That certainly is something we'd love to help with.
It could take on a range of meanings.
No, they're being very, very, they're marching with the American flag.
And this is the point.
This is where it gets very uncomfortable for Jen Psaki and the Biden administration.
Again, they're of divided mind.
On the one hand, Joe Biden wants to say that he's a patriot who loves the American flag.
On the other hand, Joe Biden refuses to say to his left flank that they are doing something wrong in burning the American flag or stomping on the American flag or kneeling for the American flag.
And this makes for a very uncomfortable situation for them when Cuba breaks out like this.
Because when people of Cuba are flying the American flag and saying we want our freedom, And people on Joe Biden's left are saying America shouldn't get involved because America is the problem.
America is bad.
The true authoritarian threat is not from actual authoritarians.
The true authoritarian threat is here at home.
It puts Joe Biden in the middle of a vice.
He's not willing to stand up to his left, and he's not willing to stand up for his own principles.
Here was Jen Psaki having a tough time explaining why dissenters in Cuba are even flying the American flag.
Now, for any normal person, any normal American, this is a very easy answer.
The reason that Cuban dissenters, Cuban patriots are flying the American flag, and not just the Cuban flag, is because America stands for liberty.
Because the Declaration of Independence promulgates principles that are universal in nature.
Because the United States has been a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world for centuries at this point.
That is a very simple answer.
And yes, it is wrong for Americans to disdain their own flag.
There's something deeply ungrateful and wrong with it.
Yes, they have a right to do it, but you have a right to do lots of stuff in America that's incredibly dumb and wrongheaded.
You have a right in the United States of America to write moron on your own forehead.
That would be a stupid thing to do.
Just because you have a right to do something doesn't mean you ought to do it or that you are right to do it.
But the Biden administration does not have the stones to simply tell its own left, you guys are wrong on this sort of stuff.
So this leads to the uncomfortable realization that Jen Psaki can't even just acknowledge the realities, which is that the Cuban dissenters are right and a lot of Americans are wrong.
Does the administration support international protesters flying the American flag and what message do you have to Americans who are wary of flying it here in the U.S.?
Well, I would say first, the president certainly values and respects the symbol of the American flag. He's someone who certainly waves it outside of his house or does in Delaware and other places where he's lived throughout his time. But he also believes that people have the right to peaceful protest and he thinks both can be true.
Well, both are true. You have the right to peaceful protest and also the people who are protesting by disdaining the American flag are morons.
They're world historical idiots.
Both of those things can be true, but she won't say that.
She won't say that.
Instead, she'll downplay the Cuban protest as sort of a situational problem.
She will ignore the fact that it is idiotic to protest the beacon that is the United States.
And by the way, the more that the United States refuses to stand up for itself as a beacon of freedom, the less that American flag actually means to people around the world.
You want to see dissenters stop flying the American flag?
Please keep promulgating policy like this.
In just one second, we'll get to the folks that Democrats are really threatened by, the folks that they really are worried about.
It's not Cuban authoritarians.
It is not the Chinese regime that just stomped all over Hong Kong.
It's not the Iranian terrorists who run the country.
No, they're worried about you.
Really, they are worried about you.
Anybody who is conservative, anybody who's center, right?
Anybody who's center.
All of you people are the people who they are worried about.
You're the true authoritarian threat.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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So, while the Biden administration seems of, at best, a split mind over how to handle the problems in Cuba, and again, Joe Biden gets personal credit for being mostly right, but then his administration, as so often happens, tends to walk this stuff back.
Meanwhile, the language with regard to the supposed voting crackdown by Republicans is far harsher from Democrats than anything they have to say about the Cuban authoritarian regime.
You got a regime 90 miles off the coast of the United States that is currently taking dissidents and throwing them in prison and or shooting them.
And the language Democrats use with regard to that particular regime is significantly nicer, significantly more measured than the kind of language that this White House uses with regard to people who disagree on voter ID.
For example, Chensaki, I mean, there's a certain, there's got to be an irony here to the fact that the administration calls, uses the same exact term to refer to a Cuban regime that has not held an honest vote in 62 years and Texas legislators who want voter ID.
It's an astonishing thing.
It really is.
Here's Jen Psaki yesterday saying that voter suppression laws being pushed right now.
Suppression laws.
They're not suppression laws.
There's yet to be any evidence that these suppress the vote in any meaningful way or even designed to suppress the vote.
But Jen Psaki says, we are now watching voter suppression laws so authoritarian that they are the worst threat to democracy since the Civil War.
Now, I can think of a few threats to democracy since the Civil War.
I can think there was a hundred years of Jim Crow.
That's pretty big threat to democracy.
It turns out, you know, actual overt laws designed to stop black people from voting in the South.
That seems like a threat to democracy.
Seems like a threat to democracy under these terms that women couldn't vote until there was an actual amendment to the Constitution in the 1910s.
I mean, we're talking since the Civil War here.
You know what seems like an awful threat to the democracy?
Woodrow Wilson's willingness to imprison dissidents.
Or FDR's crackdown on a federal level on people who wouldn't fly the Blue Eagle.
Or for that matter, the Nazi attempts to destroy the United States during World War II.
Or for that matter, the 1960s attempts to wreck America's institutions from within.
Like, all of these seem like pretty significant threats to democracy.
You're not talking about threats to democracy.
How about the fact that we had riots in major cities across the United States last year and the media didn't seem to care?
And frankly, it seems like kind of a threat to democracy that the intelligence apparatus was activated against a presidential campaign last time around.
But according to Jen Psaki, what we are watching right now is an authoritarian threat from Republicans.
Remember, they are using the exact same words to describe the Cuban regime that they are using to describe Republicans.
That's unreal.
It's unreal, okay?
Using the exact same terminology to describe the... In fact, they're nicer about the Cuban regime.
After all, the people who are protesting the Cuban regime, they're really just fighting, you know, economic discontent and vaccine shortages.
I mean, really, I mean, like, do we really know what they're fighting for?
But we perfectly well know why people are angry at Republicans.
And it's because they're an authoritarian threat to the United States, worse than any threat since an attempt by an armed band of rebels to break away from the country in 1860.
That's a hell of a contention.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so, Jen Psaki literally said yesterday, on the same day that Cuban dissidents were in the streets attempting to overthrow an actual authoritarian regime, she used that word not to describe the authoritarian regime so much of Cuba, but to describe Republicans who want to do things like make you apply for an absentee ballot.
Kind of the same as, you know, rigging an election for 62 years.
Feels the same.
Or they want you to use voter ID.
Or they're getting rid of, wait for it, drive-by balloting.
Feels exactly the same as, you know, shooting people in the streets over in Havana.
Here is Jen Psaki using the same word.
He'll also decry efforts to strip the right to vote as authoritarian and anti-American and stand up against the notion that politicians should be allowed to choose their voters or to subvert our system by replacing independent election authorities with partisan ones.
And he will highlight the work of the administration against this, the necessity of passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and how we need to work together with civil rights organizations to build as broad a turnout and voter education system to overcome The worst challenge to our democracy since the Civil War.
The worst challenge to our democracy since the Civil War?
Are you out of your damn mind?
By the way, if you're talking about the authoritarian threats of the country right now, the culturally authoritarian threats of the country, that is coming from institutions that will unperson you if you happen to cross their preferred politics.
That is the Democratic Party that is hoping to seize control of the voting apparatuses of all 50 states and bring them up to the federal level so they can then skew elections through things like mandatory ballot harvesting.
If you want to talk about like actual authoritarian threats, it is not coming from states that have their own voting laws, many of which are more liberal than blue states.
But the unbelievable contrast between the language that the Democrats use with regard to Cuba and the language they use with regard to Republicans, it is an astonishing thing.
And it also allows Democrats to be just as undemocratic as they want to be.
The same people who are saying it's an authoritarian threat to our democracy to call for voter ID say it is not an authoritarian threat to our democracy for the entire Texas Democratic delegation to literally abscond from the state.
So this is what happened yesterday in Texas, according to the New York Times, quote, Texas Democrats fled the state on Monday in a last-ditch effort to prevent the passage of restrictive new voting law by the Republican-controlled legislature, heading to Washington to draw national attention to their cause.
Nothing, by the way, is going to speak to the common Texan quite like Texas Democrats absconding to Washington, D.C., the center of all federal power, to suggest that they are being put upon.
By the way, in a private jet.
Unmasked, I should note.
These are real representatives of the people.
These are dirt under the fingernails, gritty, hard-working lawyers who take private jets to Washington, D.C.
while talking about how courageous they are.
The group left Austin in mid-afternoon on a pair of chartered flights that were scheduled to arrive by early evening.
An official involved with the effort said more than 51 of the 67 statehouse Democrats had signed on, enough to prevent Texas Republicans from attaining a quorum, which is required to conduct state business.
The hastily arranged departure added a cinematic element to the partisan wrangling in a state with a colorful political history.
I love how the New York Times treats this.
Like, oh, well, isn't this just colorful fun?
Isn't this wonderful?
Just like they treated it as colorful fun when the Wisconsin State Legislature, just a few years back, in the middle of some anti-union and free labor bills, Was invaded by a bunch of union members and taken over Wisconsin Capitol and when a bunch of Wisconsin Democrats fled to Illinois in order to deny a quorum.
Whenever Democrats do this sort of stuff, it's not undemocratic.
So just to get this straight, the filibuster is undemocratic because Republicans won't give Democrats enough votes to kill the filibuster.
But it is not only Democratic, it is colorful fun when Democrats who don't have a majority, let alone, they certainly don't have a super majority, they don't have enough to deny Republicans the ability to do their business.
Instead, they literally pick up and leave the state to deny a quorum.
You want to talk about thwarting the democratic process?
It seems like, you know, not going to the legislature just to deny the quorum.
That's probably not something that was originally intended by the people who wanted there to be a quorum.
What if an entire party just decides they're not going to go to work that day and they call out sick?
By the way, the reason they're fleeing the state is because they can be compelled to show up at the Texas State Legislature.
You can actually send the cops to go and bring them so you have a quorum.
You can actually do that in most states.
The hastily arranged departure says the New York Times added a cinematic element to the partisan wrangling in a state with a colorful political history.
Democrats have fled to neighboring states in the past to try to block legislation, including in 2003 when they traveled to New Mexico and Oklahoma in an effort to avoid Republican attempts to redraw congressional districts.
The move could paralyze the legislature for weeks if Democrats remain out of the state until the special session ends in August.
Still, it lays bare their limited options long-term in a legislature where the Republicans hold the majority in both chambers.
Parliamentary procedures and efforts to add amendments can delay the process but not derail it.
Republicans said on Monday the Democrats' gambit would ultimately fail.
State Representative Briscoe Cain, a Houston-area Republican who chairs the House Elections Committee, said the Democrats' departure, quote, slows things down, but would not prevent Republicans from prevailing.
It's just denying the inevitable.
Mr. Cain said describing the move as political theater will eventually get it done, one way or another.
Nevertheless, by traveling en masse to Washington, the Texas Democrats were hoping to apply pressure to Democrats in the U.S.
Senate, who so far have been unable to pass federal legislation to address the issue.
So, we now have the specter of Texas Democrats leaving the state where they have a legal duty to show up, showing up in Washington, D.C., and asking Senate Democrats to kill the filibuster in order to pass federalizing legislation that violates the Constitution of the United States.
But don't worry, it's the Texas Republicans who are an authoritarian threat worse than anything we've seen since the Civil War.
Fairly incredible.
Now, I know, you may be asking yourself, what exactly is in this awful, awful Texas Republican bill?
Like, what's so bad about this Texas voting bill?
I will tell you.
Nothing.
The latest bill in Texas, according to NPR, not a warm-tort Republican source, includes new ID requirements for people voting by mail.
And also, local election officials are not allowed to send vote-by-mail applications to people who haven't requested one.
Why?
Well, because very often you are sending vote-by-mail applications to people who no longer live at those addresses.
We moved to Florida.
Apparently one of these things showed up in our mailbox in California because they have these sorts of stupid rules in California.
Also, Texas was going to ban drive-thru voting and extending hours during early voting.
Republicans in the state say that these innovations opened the door to voter fraud.
Again, these were mostly procedures that were put in place temporarily thanks to the pandemic.
And then Democrats said it's the new normal, just like everything else in government.
The ratchet only works one way.
Once you ratchet in these emergency options, then they become the de facto new normal.
And once you push back on them, then Democrats claim that you are undermining the system that was implemented like 37 seconds ago, thanks to, you know, a global pandemic.
I will say the funniest specter in all of this is Democrats declaring themselves heroes for all of this.
This is really funny.
So there's a guy named James Tallarico.
He's a Texas state representative.
And here is what he tweeted.
He's a Democrat.
Quote.
Just landed in Memphis on our way to DC.
Thank y'all for your well wishes.
We left behind our families, our livelihoods, and our beloved Texas.
But our sacrifice is nothing compared to the sacrifices brave Americans have made throughout history to protect the sacred right to vote.
Oh, the heartbreaking beauty.
Okay, so here's the thing.
Your sacrifice, you say that your sacrifice is nothing compared to sacrifice?
No, your sacrifice is nothing.
The sentence should have ended after the word nothing.
You're not sacrificing anything.
You got in a private jet, you went to Washington, D.C., you're gonna stay at a five-star hotel, you're gonna have whiskey with a bunch of your Democratic colleagues, the media are going to treat you as though you're a wonderful hero, and then you will go back to Texas and nothing will have changed.
So really, slow clap, golf clap, before all of you yell.
Really, really impressive stuff.
We left behind our families.
You're not fleeing from Cuba, gang!
You know how I know?
Because if you were fleeing from Cuba, Democrats would probably oppose you.
Oh my god, the sort of pathetic, self-indulgent nonsense of our politics.
It's so blech.
It's so just gross.
Fighting authoritarianism in Texas because of voter ID.
So, folks like me, when I say that the left is engaged in authoritarianism, my proposed solution is more liberty.
Right, it's leave me the hell alone.
Generally leave people alone.
When the left suggests that they are against authoritarianism, their rule is we need more top-down control.
Which means they're really not anti-authoritarian.
They're just kind of anti their political opponents.
There's a reason I wrote, I have a brand new book.
It's coming out called The Authoritarian Moment.
It comes out July 27th.
You should go pre-order it right now because it is all about this.
It's about the militarization and weaponization of every institution in major American society and how we can reverse that course.
But again, the left is so fond of declaring things authoritarian unless they're actually authoritarian apparently.
It's very, very troubling.
Speaking of authoritarianism, we'll get some cultural authoritarianism on the trans issue in just one second.
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Okay, we will get to The authoritarianism, the cultural authoritarianism of the trans movement in just one second because it is growing.
First, again a reminder, whether we're talking totalitarian lockdown measures that destroyed the middle class while telling you that it was wonderful to go out and protest for George Floyd, or whether we are talking about the indoctrination of school children, whether we are talking about the attempts by Hollywood to cram down a particular point of view and fire everyone who disagrees, The freedom of everyday Americans is under assault.
You can feel it.
You talk to conservatives, even moderates across the spectrum.
They feel like they are being silenced because they are.
This is the reason I wrote The Authoritarian Moment to help people like you learn as much about how we got here and how you can fight back as you possibly can.
The big thing here is how to fight back.
There are a couple of different types of authoritarianism.
There's governmental authoritarianism, like you see in Cuba, and then there's the social authoritarianism that suggests you must be excised from polite society for disagreeing and the weaponization of institutions on behalf of that perverse notion.
This is why you need the authoritarian moment.
My new book is available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other major bookseller.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Now, speaking of cultural authoritarianism, there is a fascinating piece that has been being presented now by the Journal of Medical Ethics, the June 2021 issue, declaring that LGBT children should be allowed to get whatever treatment they seek.
We're talking about minors.
Without parental veto power.
And the reason for this, of course, is because we have declared that parents are an obstacle to the new utopia.
We have declared that you are wrong and immoral and bad if you so much as stand up for science.
If you so much as stand up for the notion that male and female are categories that exist, then you are the bad one.
There's a reason why the ACLU is declaring people authoritarian for suggesting that boys and girls play in separate leagues.
There's a reason why Jen Psaki is doing the same thing.
There's a reason why Texas Democrats are declaring Texas Republicans authoritarian for making the suggestion that biological men should not compete with biological women in college sports.
And the reason is because they have a totalitarian view of right and wrong and a totalitarian view that is completely contrary to science.
So you're now saying, I promise you, within five years, there will be active measures taken in states like California to remove children from homes where children have exhibited any level of gender confusion and parents refuse to go along with the program.
It's already happening in places like Seattle.
So you're going to see it happen in California and more broadly across America.
That's authoritarianism.
You call CPS on somebody because little Bobby shows up to school and says that he's Janice.
And instead of the teachers setting him straight or allowing parents to set him straight, the teachers immediately start mainlining him into the entire gender industry and telling parents they have no right to parent their own children.
That is the next move.
It's going to lead to some pretty wild side effects.
And again, it's the mainstreaming of delusion, obviously.
You want to see mainstreaming of delusion?
There is apparently a series that is called Nine Months with Courtney Cox.
It's a docu-series about various couples having children.
This went viral yesterday.
It is a video from, apparently, Season 3, Episode 8 of Nine Months with Courtney Cox.
And it features a transgender man, meaning a biological woman, Who pushed, is a biological woman who had a baby.
There's not a man who had a baby because that's not possible.
There's a biological woman who used her uterus to create a baby and then pushed the baby out through her vagina because she's a biological woman once more.
And no amount of testosterone that produces facial hair or growing the hair out or mastectomies changes the fact that this is a biological woman as evidenced by the fact that biological men cannot give birth.
I promise you, babies can't fit through the urethra.
I think a kidney stone is bad.
Try fitting a watermelon through there.
In any case, this particular episode of this bizarre show features a transgender man, meaning a biological woman, who is married to a transgender woman, meaning a biological man.
So, this means a man who is married to a woman, but they believe they are members of the opposite gender.
So, in this particular scenario, the quote-unquote husband, the faux husband, meaning a biological woman, gave birth.
And the faux woman, meaning a biological man, is the quote-unquote mother in this scenario.
And this leads to the bizarre situation that apparently the parents have now refused to accept ID for their newborn baby because that would require the birth mother, you know, like the actual woman, to identify as a mother and not the male.
Hey, by the way, you're a bigot if you disagree.
Not only are you a bigot, if you bring up your children to disagree, the left will sick.
The authoritarian regime on you.
I mean, this is the way this is going to go over the next few years.
You watch.
And here is the bizarre new world we have created for ourselves.
The counter-reality new world we have created for ourselves.
Not only are we not assigning a sex to the baby, DC is forcing me to label myself as the mother.
And that's not the case, but Drona is the mother.
This whole birth certificate thing is really, it's really causing me a lot of hurt.
Trans women can be mothers.
Oh, I have to put it on here.
Okay, this is perverse.
Pause it for a second to understand what just happened, okay, if you're not watching this.
The video then cuts to the quote-unquote mother, a biological male, attempting to feed a human child with his chest.
Now, this is not going to work because it turns out that biological males do not have Milk ducts.
So it's gonna be rather difficult for the baby to get any sort of nutrition from all of this, of course.
But it doesn't matter, so long as these people feel better about themselves.
Sure, the baby's gonna starve to death, but at least the delusional parents feel better about themselves, and this is being championed.
These are civil rights heroes.
Civil rights heroes is a man who's sticking his nipple in the mouth of a child, in the mouth of a small baby, in a bizarre attempt to nourish the baby with literally nothing, And you're a bigot if you disagree.
Don't you see?
Don't worry.
You're the authoritarian for suggesting there is a problem here.
Or that perhaps it is not in the best interest of a child to grow up under these circumstances.
In fact, if you suggest that, maybe the CPS should come for your kids if you suggest that sort of thing.
And we can continue with this.
Does anyone give a damn about the kid?
Apparently not.
Kids are just a purse.
They're just a tool for people to use for their own personal enjoyment, apparently.
You're not supplementing.
That's not supplementing.
it to produce any milk.
Because you're a dude.
Because we're going to supplement the feeding with formula so that my baby is still getting the nutrients that they need.
But I'm still feeling hopeful.
You're not supplementing.
That's not supplementing.
Supplementing assumes that there is a baseline of nutrition that is being provided.
My wife nursed all of our children, and then at a certain point, because she was working and she didn't have time to pump, you had to supplement with formula.
Supplementation means not the whole thing.
What kind of perverse damage are you doing to a baby?
You're having the baby latch to a male nipple, and then you're like, oh yeah, I'm supplementing with formula.
Yeah, we've created a hell of a society for ourselves, haven't we?
We're a society of science, by the way.
We are a society that is dedicated, foursquare, to science.
It's all we care about.
In fact, we are so dedicated to science right now, like so unbelievably dedicated to science, Then apparently, California has now declared that all children K through 12 next year will be mandated to wear masks in the classroom.
That's how dedicated to science the left is.
They are so dedicated to science, man.
Really well done, everybody.
And if you disagree, if you disagree, you should be shut down.
If you disagree, then you should be banned from social media.
If you disagree, the weapons of government should be used against you.
If you disagree, and if you elect people who disagree, then the minority party should abscond and deny them a quorum.
All of this in the name of democracy, don't you see?
And you're the authoritarian for suggesting that objective things like science, biology, logic, that these sorts of things should apply.
You are the brutal, vicious authoritarian.
This country...
You know, I guess that we got so fat and happy that we no longer had to engage in the world of reality.
And that is really the end of it.
Because I'll tell you what, the folks who are protesting in Cuba right now, the people who are marching in Cuba at risk to their own lives, I highly doubt that these sorts of idiocies are the things that they worry about on a day-to-day level.
At a certain point, a country gets so fat and so rich and so bored and so stupid because the country hasn't been challenged, that we start to just imbibe from the well of idiocy.
And then we become more and more idiotic.
And as we become more and more idiotic, we declare anybody who disagrees the real threat to the country.
Yes, the American flag remains a beacon of liberty so long as the truly authoritarian left loses.
If the authoritarian left wins, then we have a bigger problem, and so do people all over the world.
Wow.
Things are going great, guys.
Things are just going spectacularly well.
One additional note.
Apparently, there's a representative in Arizona who is also making sure that we have the proper representation on our nation's high courts.
There's another element of the stupid authoritarian notions that we're not pushing for.
There is a representative, Greg Stanton, from Arizona.
He says that we have to make sure that all of our courts are represented by sexual orientation.
He says it's a problem.
There's only one gay member of the Ninth Circuit.
My home state of Arizona is part of the Ninth Circuit.
Currently there is only one openly gay member of the bench in the Ninth Circuit.
So I want to hear from Admiral Cruz and Ms.
Diaz-Jaeger on this one.
Lack of diversity in the federal judiciary hurts our justice system.
How do we go about making a plan to address such vast disparities in making up our federal bench?
Yes, we definitely need to focus in as a high priority on how many gay judges sit on a particular judicial bench.
Things are, ah, how depressing.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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