Buzzfeed has joined the fight against President Trump's immigration executive order, and now it wants to target every other company it can find and give them the Uber treatment. Ben Shapiro explains why companies have a duty to speak out, and why they should not be turned into political footballs for leftist causes. He also talks about a woman who takes care of terminally ill babies who are abandoned by their parents and adopts them until they pass away. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor to the conservative newsletter "The Weekly Standard" and the New York Times. He is also the host and editor in chief of "The Daily Wire" and hosts the radio show "The View From The Top" on SiriusXM's Power 99.7FM in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and has been featured on CNN, CBS Radio, NPR, and many other media outlets. Ben's new book, "American Idiot," is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you haven't already checked it out, you can get a free copy of the book and listen to it on Audible, wherever you get your hard copy of The Huffington Post or subscribe to their newest podcast, "The Huffington Post" wherever you re listening to the internet. It's free, and it's also available on most major directories, including Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, and Stitcher, wherever else you get a good listening device is available. Thank you for listening to The Ben Shapiro's work. You can be reached at bit.ly/TheBenShaperson@thebenshaperson.co/thebenchand.co Thanks to Ben Shapiro for sponsoring the show and we'll be giving you a 14-day free trial! Subscribe to our newest episode on the show? You'll get 14 days of ad-free version of the show, starting on Monday, July 30th, starting July 31st, only $99.99, starting at $99 a month, and a limited edition ad-only version of $99/month, available for full access to all other premium memberships starting July 1st, 7 days, only 3 months, shipping worldwide, shipping nationwide, shipping free, free of a maximum of 4 months, and shipping worldwide. That starts on 7/19th, only 2 weeks from now!
00:00:00.000As the protests surrounding President Trump's immigration refugee executive order grew over the weekend, Uber came under fire for the great crime of having turned off their surge pricing to JFK Airport in New York in order to help travelers get home.
00:00:14.000The New York Taxi Workers Association had participated in a one-hour work stoppage to join the protest against Trump's executive order.
00:00:21.000So Uber was supposedly undermining that protest.
00:00:24.000Even though Uber turned off their surge pricing to avoid making a profit, only initiated that policy half an hour after the stoppage ended, and Uber's executives actually opposed the Trump executive order.
00:00:44.000Just weeks after their idiotic targeting of HGTV couple Chip and Joanna Gaines for destruction because they committed the grave sin of attending a church where the pastor quotes the Bible on homosexuality, BuzzFeed now wants to target every other company it can find and give it the Uber treatment.
00:00:59.000BuzzFeed San Francisco bureau chief Matt Honan tweeted, quote, We're following which companies are speaking out on Muslim ban and which are not.
00:01:07.000BuzzFeed's Tom Guerra then ran a piece in which he suggested
00:01:34.000Is it truly necessary for every company in the United States to take a position on a controversial executive order that is actually not a Muslim ban, that has not yet been fully interpreted, and that is still being adjudicated in the courts?
00:01:45.000Did every company in America have the responsibility to sound off on Obamacare?
00:01:49.000When corporations did sound off on Obamacare, if you recall, the left called them whiners and told them to shut up.
00:01:54.000The left wields the media as a club in its fight to push the country to the left, and simply staying out of the fight, that's no longer tolerated.
00:02:01.000If you do business, you're expected to do the bidding of the left, which means the right will have to respond in kind in order to compensate for the leftist bullying, and every company will be forced into the polarizing political space, rather than merely providing the best good and services at the most competitive prices on behalf of their shareholders.
00:02:21.000If people want to speak out, by all means they should.
00:02:23.000If they don't want to speak out, that's their prerogative too.
00:02:25.000And if they don't want to turn their companies into political footballs over issues that aren't even close to clear-cut, that is certainly justifiable.
00:02:38.000Alrighty, I gotta tell you folks, I mean, under Trump, it just feels like every event in the next ten years has been crammed into one year.
00:02:59.000There's so much going on, and we'll get to all of it.
00:03:01.000But first, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Texture.com.
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00:03:36.000The list is about a hundred magazines long.
00:03:41.000The story that I'm talking about, actually, there's an amazing lady who
00:03:45.000Takes in children who are terminally ill.
00:03:48.000She takes in babies who are terminally ill and have sort of been abandoned, and she adopts them until they pass away, which is an amazing story.
00:03:54.000I read that in Reader's Digest, again, not through Reader's Digest, but through texture.com, and it's the best reading aggregation material you can find.
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00:04:40.000A couple of notes that we have to make before anything else.
00:04:43.000Everybody on both sides is constantly attempting to attribute genius to their side and the other side.
00:04:50.000There's this broad, widespread public perception that people in politics generally know what they're doing, they generally know what they're talking about, that there must be a big plan.
00:04:57.000So if Trump appears to have screwed something up, no, it must be part of a conspiratorial, shadowy plan.
00:05:05.000And if the left screws something up, then there's, on the right, this tendency to attribute it to some evil, shadowy conspiracy.
00:05:11.000Maybe it's just that they're incompetent.
00:05:12.000As Adam Carolla is fond of saying, you know, one of the most disappointing facts about life is when you're a child, you think the adults know what they're doing, and then you become an adult and you realize that adults are idiots?
00:05:57.000Was it rolled out like a bunch of monkeys having to
00:06:02.000Trying to have intercourse with a basketball?
00:06:04.000Yeah, it was basically rolled out about as badly as you could.
00:06:06.000So, here's what was actually in the executive order.
00:06:08.000We'll start with what's in it, then we'll talk about whether it's useful and legal, and then we'll get to the left's insane response, because it is totally over-the-top, it is totally crazy, and that's only the beginning of the stuff that was happening over the weekend.
00:06:27.000So Trump says, because of 9-11, because of attacks by people who have come into the United States on student visas, we really have to crack down on the visa system.
00:06:36.000And that means that we're going to crack down on the visa system, we're going to crack down on both immigrants and non-immigrants, meaning people who visit the country as well as people who are attempting
00:07:04.000All entering into the United States is suspended as immigrants and non-immigrants of such persons for 90 days from the date of such order.
00:07:11.000So these are the countries, this is where everybody's saying you're not able to get in if you're from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and a couple of other countries.
00:07:18.000Not Afghanistan, not Saudi Arabia, not Pakistan.
00:07:21.000That's one of the flaws in this, and we'll get to that in a second.
00:07:24.000The order also states that there may be more countries that are added to this ban list.
00:07:28.000So again, it's seven countries they're talking about.
00:07:57.000Priority is given to victims of religious based persecution.
00:08:00.000So what it says is that the Secretary of State is directed to make changes to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious based persecution provided the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual's country of nationality.
00:08:19.000Muslims who are refugees from Syria are going to have a harder time.
00:08:23.000Now that isn't actually a major shift from current refugee law.
00:08:26.000Current refugee law defines a refugee as any person who is outside the country of such person's nationality and who is unable to return to the country because of persecution or well-founded fear of persecution on account of religion.
00:08:38.000So that obviously encompasses Christians.
00:08:40.000The fact is that the Obama administration
00:08:42.000really cracked down on Christian immigration from Syria, which is truly an awful, awful thing.
00:08:48.000They took in, I think, single-digit numbers of Syrian refugees who were Christian in the last year, but they took in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who are not.
00:09:49.000So the way that you normally would roll this thing out, let's say that you did this in a normal fashion.
00:09:52.000First, you'd run it by the Office of Legal Counsel to make sure that the thing is well written legally.
00:09:57.000Second, you'd probably want to pair it with some sort of executive order regarding how to help refugees, right?
00:10:03.000So you don't look like you're inhumane.
00:10:04.000So what you would do is you'd say, we're signing an executive order.
00:10:07.000To help fund the creation of safe zones in Syria and in the Muslim Middle East for Syrian refugees, so that they're not just getting slaughtered in Aleppo.
00:10:14.000Instead, they have a place to go, but they're not going to come here.
00:10:31.000And you give them draft, you say, we're going to sign this thing.
00:10:33.000And when we sign it, it's going to go into effect.
00:10:35.000But, you all have advance warning, you know how this is going to work.
00:10:38.000Instead, the way this was rolled out, is Trump signed it, nobody in any of the agencies knew what was going on, DHS didn't know what was going on, the Border Patrol didn't know what was going on, and so they called the White House and they said, okay, well, you know, this order doesn't make clear what happens to people who already have visas.
00:12:04.000And it is worth noting that Donald Trump over the weekend also changed the constituency of the National Security Council to add Steve Bannon, who really is not qualified to sit on that thing, and get rid of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which just makes no sense at all.
00:12:15.000If you want Bannon in there, at least don't get rid of the Joint Chiefs.
00:12:31.000And two, this could be just a botched abortion of a rollout, and it really was.
00:12:35.000It's just an awful, awful rollout of a really not-that-big-a-deal program, but everybody is making it into the end of the world, because now you've got all these pictures...
00:12:44.000Of all of these people, kids, old people, trying to get into the country, and they have visas, and they've been here for five years on a green card, and now they're stuck at the airport, and then you have the reunion pictures with all the people cheering around like Trump is trying to ban Muslims from the country, and the hashtag Muslim ban trending, even though it is not a Muslim ban.
00:13:03.000Let's go through a couple of quick questions about this thing first.
00:13:06.000Actually, before we get to going through a couple of quick questions, first we have to say thank you to our other advertiser for today, and that is dstld.com.
00:13:14.000So, if you love jeans, and I do, I wear jeans pretty much every day.
00:13:18.000You would know that if you could see my pants, but you can't.
00:13:19.000But I wear jeans pretty much every day, and the jeans that I wear
00:15:14.000He put a moratorium on new Iranian visas, with an exception for humanitarian purposes, so he didn't ban refugees, and a cancellation of then-current Iranian-American visas.
00:15:24.000The purpose of that policy was to get the Iranians to give up the American hostages.
00:15:28.000It wasn't meant as a broad-based indefinite policy.
00:15:30.000So it's sort of like those cases and it's sort of not like those cases.
00:15:33.000I want to be as honest as possible in how we analyze the actual law.
00:15:40.000And this is what people are asking because courts have issued stays on parts of this executive order.
00:15:45.000There's a really interesting kind of legal argument for people who like the specifics between Andy McCarthy of National Review on one side and David Beyer of the Cato Institute on the other.
00:15:53.000It really comes down to two provisions of immigration law.
00:15:57.000One provision says no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person's race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.
00:16:07.000So that would seem to prevent these sort of bans on certain areas of the world.
00:16:13.000It's discrimination on the base of place of birth or place of residence.
00:16:18.000Provision two says the president has the capacity to suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants on the basis of saying that they are detrimental to the interests of the United States.
00:16:29.000So the question is, which one of these legal provisions is the more powerful?
00:16:33.000Is it the one that gives the president, gives Trump, lots and lots of power?
00:16:38.000Or is it the one that limits that power?
00:16:40.000So, Beyer argues that it's the non-discrimination provision that's more powerful, and McCarthy argues that it's the presidential provision that's more powerful.
00:17:20.000Now, this sort of mirrors on the one side, to be intellectually honest, this sort of mirrors on the one side the arguments that have been had over birth control.
00:17:28.000The idea that they'll put a blanket ban on assault weapons and people like me will say, yeah, but assault weapons don't kill that many people.
00:17:34.000They aren't used in that many shootings.
00:17:35.000And they'll have to say, right, but it's common sense.
00:17:50.000Just as there's a background check, a federal background check that happens when you get a gun, the same for mental illness and for criminal background check.
00:17:57.000The same thing is true when it comes to, if you're a federally licensed firearm dealer, that's true.
00:18:01.000The same thing should be true when it comes to coming into the country, immigrating into the country.
00:18:06.000So it's not really about Syrian refugees per se, it should be applied to everyone.
00:18:09.000It should be creating a new standard for visas, and it applies to everyone.
00:18:12.000And the reason for that is that it's actually under-broad, right?
00:18:38.000So if you're going to cite 9-11 as your rationale, you should actually calibrate a policy that would have stopped 9-11, otherwise you fall into the same trap as folks on the left when they say that their policy wouldn't have stopped Sandy Hook, but it's good anyway.
00:19:29.000And for that, for us talking about what the left has responded, you're going to have to actually subscribe at dailywire.com and you can watch the rest of the show there.